Apple iPhone 6 concept shows off wraparound screen

Posted on 23rd,nov,2013 by Alan F on Phone Arena

 

 

With speculation that Samsung will be offering a phone employing a three-sided wraparound screen next year, designer Iskander Utebayev thought that Apple might want to follow suit and designed a concept version of the Apple iPhone 6. Using the wraparound screen, virtual controls replace real physical ones, and allow for them to be placed on either side of the screen.

The rest of the phone keeps the current form factor and design of the Apple iPhone 5s. While amazing as this looks, even if Samsung pulls this out of its hat in 2014, Apple is apparently more concerned with increasing the size of the glass on the next iPhone. Just the other day, word leaked out that Apple was working on a 4.9 inch version of its iconic Smartphone, for next year. That isn't the first report that we've seen about a larger screened iPhone heading for consumers in 2014.

While a larger iPhone display seems like a good bet for next year, a three-sided wraparound panel doesn't appear to be imminent from Apple. Still, it doesn't hurt to look at the slideshow below and dream.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Google Nexus 5 review

Review recreated as done by NDTV gadgets
 

It caught everyone's fancy from the time it was first leaked in a video, and since then, all Android enthusiasts, and especially the ones who swear by the pure stock user interface of the operating system, have been eyeing this smartphone. No prizes for guessing, we're talking about the Nexus 5, Google's new platform showcase device which has been manufactured by Korean electronics giant, LG. It's also the first time that Google has launched its flagship device in the Indian market just weeks after its international launch. The pricing of the phone and the promise of priority software updates makes it an irresistible proposition. So, how does it perform in real world conditions? We put it to test and find out in our review.

Build/ Design
The Nexus 5 sports a very understated look and there's nothing really striking in the phone's design that will shout for your attention. The phone is made of plastic and doesn't feel very premium.

However, when you place the phone in your hand, you'll feel that it's very pleasant to hold thanks to the soft touch matte finish. Also, despite its large 4.95-inch screen, we didn't face any issues operating it with one hand. This is also due to the phone being quite lightweight at 130 grams.

The Nexus 5's edges are less curved and its corners less rounded compared to other phones, including the Nexus 4. The phone is available in Black and White colour variants and we got a Black one as our review unit.

The 4.95-inch full-HD display dominates the front of the Nexus 5, and there are no hardware buttons. A round LED notification light is placed below the display, while the sensor array and the front camera sits above it.

The right edge of the Nexus 5 features the Power/ Screen lock and the Micro-SIM card tray, and the left edge features the volume rocker key. All the keys are made of plastic and offer decent tactile feedback.

The 3.5-mm headset jack sits at the top edge of the Nexus 5, while the Micro-USB port and speaker grill sits at the bottom edge.

As we mentioned, the back of the Nexus 5 sports a matte soft touch finish giving it a good grip. It is a bit susceptible to smudges, though. The rear features an 8-megapixel ring shaped camera lens and the LED flash, apart from LG and Nexus branding.

Display
The Nexus 5 comes with an IPS LCD display with a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels and pixel density of 445 ppi. The display comes with Corning's Gorilla Glass 3 protection making it resistant to scratches.

In our use, we found the Nexus 5's screen to be very bright, with text and images looking crisp and sharp. Colours looked vivid and not oversaturated like they look on AMOLED display though blacks don't look very deep.

The screen delivers great viewing angles, though it was a little reflective. Sunlight legibility was good though the screen brightness levels could be better.

Overall, the Nexus 5's display is one of the best in its class.

Software/ User Interface
The Nexus 5 is the first smartphone to ship with Android 4.4 KitKat, the latest release of the operating system. As with all Nexus devices, the phone includes the stock build of the operating system, without any additional UI skinning.

Android 4.4 KitKat on the Nexus 5 features a number of visual changes including a new launcher, making the interface even more minimalistic. It sports flatter design elements, muted colours in status icons, transparency, and smoother transition animations.

The first change that you'll notice is the transparent status and navigation key bars at the top and bottom, making the Nexus 5's screen look bigger and brighter. The Android 4.4 KitKat lock screen also features a small camera button, which helps in opening the camera app via the lock screen widget directly from the lock screen.

With Android 4.4 KitKat, you can now have as many home screens as you want by simply dragging an icon or placing a widget on a new one. After enabling Google Now, Google's smart assistant that fetches information and offers updates based on your data and usage behaviour, you'll see that the left most home screen would be Google Now pane with information cards and a search bar. The screen can also be invoked by swiping up the screen from the Home button. The Google search bar with the voice search icon is present on all home screens and cannot be removed.

Interestingly, you can also initiate voice search from the Nexus 5 when it's in the unlocked state by simply saying, 'Ok Google.' The option is only available when you choose US English as the default language option in the Google Now app's settings, though. With this change, Google search is integrated deeply with the phone.

The status bar icons and and UI elements in the notifications tray have been stripped off the blue colour in Android 4.4 KitKat, and now sport a muted white-grey shade.

The launcher has been revamped with icons looking bigger than their Jelly Bean avatars and dots are used to indicate the pagination in the home screen and app launcher, similar to iOS.

When you launch the KitKat app launcher or go back to the home screen, you'll notice a smooth fly away animation.

The app launcher now only features app icons and gets rid of widgets. Due to the larger icons, you'll see a 4x5 grid instead of a 5x5 grid.

Long pressing on the home screen brings up the menu to change the Wallpapers, Widgets and Google Now settings. The choice of default still wallpapers, live wallpaper and custom wallpapers are now available under a single menu.

The KitKat notifications tray features notifications that can be expanded by using two finger pull. It also features buttons for clearing all notifications and for displaying toggles for Brightness, Settings, Wi-Fi, Network, Battery, Aeroplane Mode, Bluetooth, Location settings and Alarm clock.

 

Android 4.4 KitKat also includes an immersive mode that hides the status and navigation bars offering a full screen experience in apps. Apps like Google Play Books already support this mode and developers can choose to enable it for their apps. The OS also allows developers to display semi-transparent navigation and status bars. We've not seen any apps that take advantage of this feature, however.

Android 4.4 also includes a revamped Phone app that now automatically prioritises your contacts based on the people you talk to the most. When you first launch the app, you'll see a screen that displays a search bar, a place where most frequently called contacts and favourites are displayed and shortcuts to launch all contacts, the dialling pad, call history and settings.

You can also search for nearby places and businesses, contacts, or people in their Google Apps domain directly from the search bar.

If you receive a call from a phone number that is not saved in your contacts, the Android 4.4 KitKat-based Nexus 5 will look for matches from businesses with a local listing on Google Maps.

We felt that the new Phone app could be a little overwhelming for some as it's not very intuitive when it comes to describing what the shortcut keys do. However, the search feature packs in an online phone directory in the app. It will even fetch numbers for users who've registered their phone numbers with Google. The number identification feature also works for incoming calls eliminating the need for apps like Trucaller.

 

Google has also combined its chat service and the Messaging (SMS) app into one app, Hangouts. The app lets you chat with your friends who use the Hangouts (erstwhile Google Talk) service and send messages to contacts. For people who don't actively use Google's instant messaging service or Google+, there's no value add that the unified app offers. It could also confuse these users if they've got unkempt Google+ profiles as it lists Google contacts on top when you want to compose a new message.

The Nexus 5 also includes the new Photos app that allows you to view and edit local and Google+ images. The new Photos app features deeper integration with Google+ and can be used to enable tagging in photos. The old Gallery app is still included in the app, though.

The Email app has also received an overhaul with KitKat, and the app displays the pictures of contacts for emails. Navigation has been made similar to the Gmail app and it also offers the swipe to delete gesture.

Google also includes its other apps including Drive, Keep, Play Games, Play Movies, Play Movies, Play Books, Play Newsstand and Quickoffice for creating and editing documents, spreadsheets and presentations. The new OS also supports printing through Google Cloud Print plugin or apps made by printer manufacturers.
Overall, KitKat on the Nexus 5 is an improvement when it comes to the overall experience of using the phone, though there's till some scope for improvement, especially in apps like Hangouts. The status icons are also inferior at offering feedback compared to the ones seen in previous versions of the OS.

Camera
The Nexus 5 sports an 8-megapixel rear camera with Optical Image Stabilisation, and a 1.3-megapixel front facing camera. The phone features the stock Android 4.4 Camera app with 4 default shooting modes - Still, Video, Panorama and Photo sphere (360-degree).

In the Still mode the app features settings for turning on HDR+, tinkering with Exposure, turning the LED flash on or off, switching between the front and back lenses and revealing more settings that include Geotagging toggle, Countdown timer, changing the picture size, White balance and the scene mode (Night, Action, Sunset, and Party).

Similarly, in the Video mode, you can change video quality settings (1080p, 720p or 480p), Time lapse, Exposure settings and Flash. We have to say that we're no fans of the nested arc shaped settings toggles and find the app a bit unintuitive.

Putting the camera of the Nexus 5 to test, we observed that images taken outdoors during daylight came out a tad brighter.

However, there are a number of issues with the phone's camera that we encountered in our use. We observed that auto-focus is not consistent, and focusing manually takes time resulting in images being different from what we desired. We also observed that there was a slight lag between the time we fired the shutter and when the phone captured the image.

Comparing images with the ones taken with an iPhone 5 in the same settings revealed that the white balance on the Nexus 5 camera (in the default mode) is skewed towards the warmer end of the spectrum. Low-light shots were also not up to the mark and had noise.

The camera does a good job for shooting videos and supports 1080p video capture.

The 1.3-megapixel front shooter does a decent job for video calling and taking self clicks. It supports 720p video capture.

Overall, the Nexus 5's camera is underwhelming at best. We hope Google pushes out a software update to fix the focus issues and shutter lag.

Performance/ Battery Life
The Nexus 5 comes with top of the line hardware (at this point in time), as it is powered by a quad-core 2.26GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor with 2GB of RAM, and an Adreno 330 chip for processing graphics. Our review unit had 32GB of built-in storage (a 16GB variant is also available), out of which 26.7GB is available to the user. The phone doesn't offer a microSD card slot for expandable storage.

The overall experience of navigation through the Nexus 5's interface was extremely impressive, thanks to all the power under the phone's hood and the UI being devoid of unnecessary bells and whistles such as transition effects.

We did not experience any lag at all while launching apps, playing games, scrolling web pages or switching between apps on the Nexus 5.

The gaming experience on the Nexus 5 was pretty good with games like Temple Run 2, Subway Surfers, Shadow Gun: Dead Zone and Asphalt 7 running without encountering any issues.

We were able to run a number of video formats except for full-HD MOV and AVI through the native video player on the Nexus 5. We also experienced some issues with audio while playing an MKV format video. This was easily fixed by downloading a third-party video player. The phone then plays full-HD videos without any issues.

The speaker on the Nexus 5 is another pain point. It delivers below average quality sound at high volume levels and the sound gets distorted. However, the speaker grill is located at the bottom edge so the sound doesn't get muffled when the phone lies on its back.

Notably, the Nexus 5 doesn't include FM radio functionality.

Call quality was good on the Nexus 5, and we were able to receive cellular signals even in low signal areas.

The Nexus 5 comes with a 2300mAh battery, and in our usage, it lasted us just about a day with medium usage, including 1-1.5 hours of phone calls, two e-mail accounts with push notifications, playing some music, clicking a few pictures, Twitter notifications and WhatsApp chats.
It's worth pointing out that we had mostly used 3G data with intermittent use of Wi-Fi and had put the phone's screen brightness at the highest level. Altering these settings might help in running the phone for a longer duration, depending on your usage pattern.

The Nexus 5 also includes NFC capabilities, and we were able to transfer and receive files through Android Beam, which combines Bluetooth and NFC for sharing data. The phone also allows you to transfer files to other devices through Wi-Fi without being on the same Wi-Fi network.

Verdict
The Nexus 5 is one of the best Android smartphones that you can buy for under Rs. 30,000. Powered by a Snapdragon 800 processor, and 2GB RAM, the phone ticks all the right boxes in terms of hardware specifications. Since it's a Google experience device, you're always assured of regular software updates (at least for the 18 months promised period).

These two big factors do partially offset the main disadvantages of the phone, namely its mediocre camera, lack of external storage support and underwhelming battery backup. Google may or may not bring a software fix to resolve the issues (if these are due to the software limitations) but even assuming that this is not the case, the starting price of Rs. 28,999 makes the Nexus 5 a great deal. We can't think of a phone in this price range that delivers the same value.

Price: Rs. 28,999

Nexus 5 in pictures

 

HONDA VEZEL, NEW COMPACT GLOBAL SUV FROM HONDA UNVEILED

 

Honda has unveiled the production version of its compact SUV Vezel at the Tokyo Motor Show. A new vehicle that belongs to a completely new category, the Vezel will go on sales in Japan on 20th December.

The Vezel has been designed by fusing together the dynamic qualities of an SUV and the practicality of a minivan. It belongs to India’s hot-selling compact SUV segment and will certainly outshine the likes of Duster and Ecosport once launched. However, Honda’s next launch in India will be the new Honda City, followed by Jazz and Mobilio, so Vezel won’t make it to India before early 2015.

Design

Vezel has got a striking design, taking cues from its siblings. Front profile is reminiscent of the CR-V and has the sturdy stance of an SUV. In profile, the Vezel flaunts sharp character lines and the sleeker roof profile of a coupe above the window line. The interior is designed to create a high-quality space and overall, it looks great. The steering wheel is similar to the CR-V’s while the centre console resembles that of the Jazz. What’s unique to the Vezel is the AC vent that stretches from the left to the centre console.

 

Sitting inside the Vezel for a few minutes, my first impressions of the Vezel were largely positive, thanks to a spacious, practical and modern cabin.

 

 

 

 

Powertrain

Once launched in India, Vezel should get the 1.5L i-VTEC engine of the City and the 1.5L i-DTEC from the Amaze. No word yet on an all-wheel drive option, however, we’ll have more details once it’s launched on December 20th.

 

 

 

 

 

As far as india is concerned, we can expect Vezel only by 2015, as company is planning to launch New Jazz , Amaze based mobilio by next year . In india we can expect all three to be launched in petrol and diesel variants.

 

 

 

 

NEW HONDA CITY 2014 UNVEILED :- FIRST LOOK AND IMAGES

picture courtesy: indiaautosblog.com

Honda on Monday unveiled the fourth-generation variant of its City sedan with a fresh crisp design. The new City will be available in India from January 2014.

Honda's new City The fourth-generation car is bigger, sleeker and sharper looking than its predecessor but it’s more of an evolution than a revolution. and carries premium features in a move to wrest back its coveted top slot that it had lost to Hyundai Verna. The new Honda City follows its ‘Exciting H’ design language which is to be carried over to other Honda models as well .While the legroom has been improved by 60 mm, the height of the sedan has also been increased by 10 mm. 

Honda claims that the new City has the 'best in class' fuel efficiency. The car will be available in both diesel and petrol variants, boasting of a 1.5 litre iDTEC and 1.5 litre i-Vtec engine respectively. 

The City is based on the Jazz hatchback platform and will have more design lines flowing on the exterior to make it more fluidic styled and appealing for the C-segment customers.
It has bigger wrap around clear lens headlamps with projector lights to give a clean look with a totally reworked integrated LED tail-lights on the rear. The new City, which saw a worldwide launch will be available in 55 countries. 

Honda Motors is currently riding on the success of its Amaze compact sedan, which also offers a diesel option. With over 35,000 Amaze having been sold since April, Honda is aiming for leadership in the mid-size sedan segment. 

Honda has bucked the general trend with sales growing 69% to 59,617 units in April-September period. 

Pre-launch bookings of the model have begun across the country, the company said.

Introduced in India in January 1998 (first generation), the City has 4.3 lakh customers across the country.

 

The front still retains the ‘arrow-head’ shape of the earlier car but has a more prominent grille, twin-barrel headlights and a sharper bumper.

 

The sides of the car have strong character lines running through the doors whilst the rear tail-lamps which extend into the boot lid of the car, accentuates the 1695mm width of the car. In fact, carmaker claims the new Honda City is the widest car in its class which is quite believable when you get into the car. Legroom is particularly spacious thanks to the increased wheelbase (up by 50mm to 2600mm) and the flat floor only adds to the sense of space and comfort. Rear seat passengers are further pampered with a rear air-con vent, a first on a City. The new Honda City is loaded with equipment like never before. You get a large, five inch multi-function screen takes care of all the audio functions but the talking point is a unique touch panel for the all the aircon controls which is easy to use and looks pretty high-tech and upmarket.

 

The 8-speaker sound system is supported with USB, aux-in inputs and unlike the previous City Honda has caved heeded to customer feedback and given a CD player. Another unique feature are four power output sockets to keep to full house of battery munching smart phones topped up. Other features include; a start/stop button, sunroof, cruise control and a rear view camera with different views.

 

The all-new interiors feel much more upmarket than before with richer plastics, a piano black finish on the top bit of the instrument panel and sturdy vents that sit right at the top of the dash. The chunky steering wheel feels great to hold and the mesh finish on one of the spokes is a cue taken from the Honda Civic.

 

The driving position, like most Hondas, is spot on with the stubby, leather clad gearlever falling nicely to hand. The dashboard cowl, however, is higher than before which will make short drivers make full use of the seat height adjust function.

                                                      NEW CITY 5" LCD SCREEN

NEW CITY AC VENT

NEW CITY EXTERNAL SOURCE VENT

NEW HONDA CITY BOOT SPACE

                                            NEW HONDA CITY CENTRAL CONSOLE

NEW HONDA CITY GLOVE BOX

NEW CITY PROVIDES ENGINE START STOP BUTTONS

                                                            NEW CITY ENGINE

NEW CITY FRONT SEAT

NEW CITY 2014

 

 

The new Honda City will be powered by the familiar 1.5 litre i-VTEC engine from the previous City but this latest version has been tuned for further efficiency. The big news, however, is the addition of a diesel engine in the City, which is essentially the same 1.5 i-DTEC motor from the Amaze. Honda has concentrated on fuel efficiency over performance and the Honda City diesel is expected to return best-in-class fuel economy, no doubt aided by the disappointingly skinny 175/65 R15 tyres.

The new Honda City is expected to go on sale in January 2014.