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HTC Teases Boomsound Improvements for All New HTC One
Reduce The Memory Usage In Chrome With OneTab
Nokia Announces Android Phones, Sort of…

HTC Teases Boomsound Improvements for All New HTC One

Posted: 03 Mar 2014 06:00 AM PST

The leaks regarding the All New HTC One keep coming, but now HTC has released some of their own news about their next flagship phone.

Last year's HTC One represented one of the biggest leaps forward with the inclusion of HTC's new Boomsound speakers. While most phones are competing in the race to the biggest/best screen resolution and highest quality camera, HTC—not that they don't participate in those races—also decided to improve the volume and sound quality of smartphone speaker. The result was Boomsound, which drowns out the sound from all other smartphones, and even some laptops (not that the competition is necessarily the stiffest).

Cisco found that in 2012, the average user consumed over an hour of video and over two hours of streaming music from a mobile device each month. They predict that those numbers will become 10 hours of video and 15 hours of audio per month by the year 2017. Outside of using headphones, this experience is typically abysmal. I'm sure you've tried to show a Youtube video to a friend in public. On most phones it's not possible unless you are in a small quiet room.

Nearly a year after launch, the HTC One still doesn't have any challengers in the realm of audio quality. At Mobile World Congress 2013, the HTC One won the Best in Show award for 2013, only to return a year later to win the Best Smartphone award for 2014. Not only is the phone nearly a year old at this point, but we are on the cusp of its successor being announced.

HTC recently teased the All New HTC One on their Youtube page, with the following video hinting at a significant upgrade to the already dominant Boomsound speakers.

If this improvement is as significant as the existence of this video would suggest, that would effectively put the All New HTC One two entire generations ahead of the competition in the audio category, which is especially significant as smartphone audio and video grow as drastically as Cisco suggests it will.

Several leaked images of the phone show in iterative, yet improved design for the phone, but the speaker grills appear nearly identical, so whatever is going on with Boomsound, it will be entirely under the hood.

This won't be the first audio innovation from HTC since the launch of Boomsound with the HTC, despite the sale of their nearly 25% stake in Beats by Dre. HTC Launched the Boombass, a miniaturized subwoofer for use with the HTC One lineup, at the end of last year.

It would be logical to assume that the only direction HTC could go with audio is louder and fuller, although they may have something crazy up their sleeve, it's not out of line to assume we will be seeing (and hearing) a louder, fuller-sounding HTC One come March 25^th.

Source: HTC, Forbes

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Reduce The Memory Usage In Chrome With OneTab

Posted: 03 Mar 2014 05:00 AM PST

Chrome might be a dream come true and a blessing when it comes to browsing the Internet, but once you get several tabs going, it can get quite taxing for your computer. Luckily, that’s just not a problem anymore, and the fix doesn’t come from the hardware side of things, but just from a neat little app called OneTab.

The idea between OneTab is simple, so simple it took a genius to come up with it: if you happen to find yourself with way too many tabs open on your current session, click the OneTab icon and all of them will be converted into a list in one individual window, on which you can restore them individually or all at once, depending on your needs. This is not just for the sake of organization: this process can reduce the memory usage up to 95%, because God knows Chrome can turn into a behemoth.

The app is completely free to use and download from their official website, and is easy to install and uninstall as any other extension without spyware. If you’re a frequent user of Chrome, you absolutely own OneTab a try, for it might change your browsing experience forever.

Be social! Follow Walyou on Facebook and Twitter, and read more related stories at Google Chrome No Longer Warns You to Beware of Secret Agents and Google to Pay Almost $3 Million for People to Hack Chrome OS.

Nokia Announces Android Phones, Sort of…

Posted: 03 Mar 2014 04:00 AM PST

Android fans have been clamoring for Nokia to release an Android phone for years, but when they finally do, it’s not the one anyone was begging for.

One of the big acquisitions of last year was the purchase of Nokia by Microsoft. Nokia had been a long time partner for Microsoft and produced–what most people would consider–the best Windows Phone devices.

Nokia’s reputation for quality smartphone handsets extends far beyobnd just Windows Phone users, though, as many Android enthusiasts have long since been drooling over Nokia phones wishing they would be available with their own choice operating system instead of exclusively Windows Phone.

Their patience has paid off. Sort of…

During Mobile World Congress, Nokia finally unvieled three Android phones, the X, the X+, and the XL. All phones are low tier devices running a Windows Phone-esque skin over Android 4.1 JellyBean.

The X, X+, and XL are mostly the same, each having a dual core 1 GHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, 4GB of internal storage, and a 4″ 800 x 480 WVGA display. The cameras aren’t much to speak of at 3MP each. The only variances is that the X+ has 768MB of RAM instead of 512MB and the XL has the RAM upgrade plus an upgrade to a 5MP camera and a 5″ screen (still WVGA). The X, X+, and XL are clearly budget phones intended primarily (exclusively?) for emerging markets with prices of 89 EUR, 99 EUR, and 109 EUR, respectively.

Maybe not what people wanted when they clamored for a Nokia Android Phone. Many may not even consider them Android as they forego any Google Services (including the Google Play Store) as they are well ourside of–and have no intention of meeting–Google’s Services Certification standards.

The phones are still compatible with 75% of Android apps, though, they just need to be submitted and approved through the Nokia Store and the remaining 25% just need to be modified to ensure they don’t tie into any incompatible Google Services (such as cloud services or Google Play Games leaderboards and etc).

This is the type of move we could start seeing with increasing frequency, and is in fact very similar to how Android is supposed to be used in the first place. Obviously, most people are more familliar with the Google Services version of Android, but Amazon does something very similar to what Nokia is doing here with their Amazon Kindle Fire series.

The Nokia X phones are unlikely to make their way to the US and since the Microsoft acquisition is due to complete soon, we are unlikely to get any of the high end Nokia Android devices some people have been dreaming of, but at least this gives those dreamers a glimpse of what could have been.

Source: Engadget, AnandTech

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