The Digital Jedi's Words

Is the iPhone 4 the king of modern smartphones? Probably not, Motorola is coming with a solution that would place it in direct competition with HTC EVO 4G, iPhone 4 with the looks iPhone users have been falling for.

Here is a video demonstrating how fast Motorola Droid X is:

I know it’s been a while since I have posted something but today I felt the need to post a finding.  As the iPhone 4 ships I can’t help but wonder why all the hype?  Most Android devices do the same plus more.  With Android now having Flash 10.1 and this player, you have all the tools needed to view 99% of web content unlike Apple iPhone 4.  One of Android’s major shortcomings is its lack of compatibility with many audio and video filetypes. Fortunately, double twist stepped in to fix the audio problem, but what about video playback? That’s where RockPlayerBase comes in!

Compatible with a plethora of video formats, including MKV, AVI and DivX, RockPlayerBase combines great compatibility with a simple interface. Controls are overlaid on the screen, so you can still see the video track whilst using the controls.

When testing on the Motorola DROID, I found playback quality to be predominantly good. I tested a DVD rip encoded in AVI which played back without any problems, although audio

output was sometimes a little pitchy and inconsistent.

I also tested a 720p MKV file, albeit with less successful results. Whether it’s a hardware or software issue is debatable, but video

playback wasn’t even remotely smooth, and I was lucky if I got even a second of audio playback before having it cut off too.

FeelAndroid tested the player with various formats, and found some interesting results… continue reading…

With all the hype surrounding what Apple is doing with the new A4 CPU, no one has heard of a company called Nvidia which produces excellent chips.  Anyone heard of the snapdragon processor which is in the Nexus One, well they are the ones behind the architecture, which in my opinion is pretty damn sweet.

Tegra 2 is official and put simply, it looks awesome. NVIDIA estimates that it is four times faster than the original Tegra chip while staying in the same power and thermal envelope. And looking at the diagram, we can understand why: the chip combines 8 processors: two Arm Cortex A9, one ARM 7, an image processor, an HD video decode processor, an HD video encode processor, and audio processor and a graphics processor (GPU), phew! Thanks to all this power, NVIDIA says that it succeeds in playing local 1080p video and stream HD video (flash) where competitors like Qualcomm and Intel fail. And it does it while using less power. NVIDIA’s battery life estimate is 140+hrs for music playback, 12hrs for 1080p video playback and 6 hours of continuous HD web streaming. According to these numbers, Tegra 2 consumes about 7x less than Snapdragon. The chips will come in different packages to address markets like smartphones, multimedia players, automotive entertainment, but also smartbooks. Developer boards are already available.

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I was all into the hype yesterday for the Steve Jobs Keynote. But after the about 60 minutes into the keynote it was just a regular presentation. Let me explain the iphone software is good on a phone but this device needs to be , no have more. The Apple iPad is a cool device don’t get me wrong but it gets pwned by a netbook which has a full blown operating system. The big problem I had was in trying to understand what the iPad was for: the answer, it seems, is everything. NOT!!!
It attempts to do almost everything that your laptop can, while also offering almost everything your smartphone can do as well. Surfing the web is a breeze, while it plays video smoothly and handles a variety of games pretty well. You can use any of the existing iPhone applications straight away, though it is disappointing when you realise that they become blocky and almost childlike when expanded to fill the larger screen.
Switched into ebook mode, the way the iPad emulates the printed page feels fairly natural, if not entirely on a par with rival ebook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle. The backlit screen doesn’t come anywhere near the clarity of electronic ink, which means it’s going to prove a lot harder on the eyes of bookworms(it’s great for reading in bed, one Apple flunky told me, keen to stress the positive side). But what it loses here, it makes up for with the addition of colour and even video.

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While I have built dedicated machines known as clients for my house , I must say this is by far a better solution for a non techie type person.  My frontend is Mediaportal that I use in all my rooms in my house.  But recently installed this in my daughters room to see if it would work.

The WD TV Live is a full 1080p HD compatible media hub, which adds to the existing WD TV device with a 10/100 Ethernet port and the ability to decode DTS audio.

Designed to connect directly to your TV, the WD TV eschews Wi-Fi, instead plumping for wired Ethernet, and is similar in scope and price to the $129 Netgear EVA2000.

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Today I wanted to talk about a little program that you might not need to use very often, but when you need it it is worth its weight in gold. Did you ever have to fill out forms? Most of the time they come as PDF, but sometimes it is just a plain image. There are a few tools out there that allow you to fill out forms. Some of them cost a bit like PDFpen, PDFClerk or PDF Studio. Other really are costly, like Adobe’s Acrobat. But for people like you and me, that occasionally need to fill out a form these are not really reasonable. Formulate Pro to the rescue! It does a lot of what the pricier tools do, but for free. In fact, it is even open source.

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Chances are if you work on the web, or use it to communicate with friends and family, then there’s data you class as important stored in the cloud somewhere. Maybe it’s a Gmail account for e-mail. Flickr for pictures, or Zoho for documents and spreadsheets. If you use such service do you rely on them to ensure your data is safe, or back it up yourself too?

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