A year ago most serious tech pundits would have laughed at the idea of a “mini” iPad out of Apple. The late Steve Jobs made it clear that the idea of a seven inch (17.8 cm) iPad was not on as such a “tweener” between the iPhone and the larger iPad was not wanted and would be “DOA”. However the rumors never quite died out and since Jobs passing in October 2011, have taken on new life.  Now, sources as diverse as CNET, Digitimes, Boy Genus Report and Wired are all suggesting that Apple will release a smaller tablet with a smaller screen size (17.8 com), and  less memory (8 GB vs the current minimum of 16 GB) and probably Wi-Fi only.  Interestingly, all sources agree that the rumored Apple tablet would retain the Retina class display. In fact, the new iOS device would have the highest pixel density of any iPad. Pricing has been rumored as low as $200.00 USD or £125.00.  This kind of pricing would be almost break even, or even lose a little per unit for Apple.

Some are saying that this is an attempt to kill off the downmarket Android tablets, especially the Kindle Fire, which accounts for almost half of of Android tablet sales in the United States last quarter. Others are saying that its an attempt by Apple chief operating officer Tim Cook to show that he is  his own man and not tied to the decisions of the late Mr. Jobs. Another view is the unexpected success of the Samsung Note’s huge screened smartphone has caused a reevaluation of what the consumers want.  While the general public may never know what is driving Apple’s product decisions, a review of the more reliable rumor reporting on the Web and a look at recent Apple moves tend to not only confirm that the iPad mini is real, but that Steve Jobs would have not only approved, but may well have set the gears in motion prior to his passing.

Back in January, Apple announced a partnership with American textbook makers and the introduction of the iBook2 format and publishing software. As we pointed out in our analysis of the move, school boards would be stymied by the high cost of supplying iPads to students in lieu of dead tree textbooks.  Unsurprisingly, this is exactly how things have played out over the last few months. Everyone likes the idea, but the iPads cost too much. Even if schools went with the cheapest iPad on offer, its still well beyond the cost of supplying every student with a Windows 7 Basic netbook.  In order to make the idea of iTextbooks viable, Apple has to either deeply discount the lower end of the existing iPad line or come up with a new solution.

Steve Jobs was a major advocate of education. Apple has historically provided deep discounts to academics, students and schools for its hardware and software. Apple has also quietly funded grants to put iPads into the classrooms, often at smaller, rural school districts in the US. Further, Jobs is famous for changing his sails while decrying the very direction he is planning to go. For example, in the early 2000s Jobs publicly stated that Apple was not interested in a smartphone. Jobs also had a real desire to put Apple into every aspect of a consumer’s life, and schools were no exception. When Amazon Kindles proved the world was ready to read off a smaller, hand held form factor, Apple engineers may well have gotten their marching orders to come up with a low cost tablet.

So why was an iPad mini not announced at the January meeting? The best reason is that the new iPad was about to be released and Apple did not want anything to cut into its sales. The fact that the third generation iPad was not called the “iPad 3″ could be a tell that Apple is going to introduce a new, different tablet line.  Further supporting that the iPad mini is squarely aimed at the education market is that the screen will be a retina display. The dense display makes it far easier on the eyes for reading. Because the expectation would be that students would not be downloading The Avengers movies, or an over abundance of apps, the smaller memory is not a problem either. In any case, with all the cloud based solutions, a lot of on board memory is not the need it once was.

If the rumors come to pass, then expect an announcement of the iPad mini as soon as the Apple World Wide Developers Conference in June, with a sale date in late July or early August. Pricing is likely to be sub $200.00 USD for schools and $250.00 USD for consumers. While the consumer price is still higher than the Kindle Fire, when you factor in the greater usability of the iPad line it’ s worth the extra quid. Unless you are seeking a pure media consumption device, which is how Amazon views the Fire and why the UK release appears to be mired in content carriage issues, anyone on the tablet fence is likely to jump to iOS. Apple also neatly avoids any anti-competitive entanglements because this is a school device after all. Any popularity in the general consumer market? Well competition happens.

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Why we may see an iPad Mini in the UK before we see a Kindle Fire

Computer systems today are often called on to make predictions based on data provided to them. Sales forecasts, power usage, the weather, and even the little lights that come on in posher cars that tell you something is starting to go wonky are all based on software that is in turn based on predictive algorithms. This is how Amazon constantly changes what it thinks you might buy, and Goggle can creep you out by offering to sell you what you are searching about. The crafting of such programs are calls for laborious and highly skilled coding and constant fine tuning of the factors used to make the predictions.  Each system has to be customized for each situation and is very expensive to maintain. We are a long way away from the Star Trek world of telling the computer what you want analysed or having Mr. Spock work it out.

Perhaps we are not that far away after all, OGs (Original Geeks) know that Jeff Hawkins was the mastermind behind the first successful  handheld computer, the Palm Pilot, the grandfather of all Palm PDAs. He then went on to co develop the Treo, the first smartphone. Since 2005, he has been working with Numenta following what was actually his first love, neuroscience. Hawkins has since been seeking a solution that has dogged artificial intelligence developers since day one, how to make computers learn and understand without all the tweaking it takes now.  Grok, a prediction engine, now in private beta seeks to do just that.

Calling the cloud based system “Grok” is both a homage to the late Grand Master of science fiction, Robert A. Heinlein, who coined the phrase as a Martian word in his 1961 classic Stranger in a Strange Land   and as a thumbnail explaination of what Hawkins seeks to do. The Heinlein defines the word thus; ”Grok means to understand so thoroughly that the observer becomes a part of the observed—to merge, blend, intermarry, lose identity in group experience.”

Grok seeks to meet its ambitious name by use of Cortical Learning Algorithms that allow the system to create models on the fly and modify them based on new data in a process called “online learning” Grok can also flag anomalous and unusual data as well, based on what it is fed. It is also far more generalist in its approach, being able to tailor itself to a specific situation. For example, if you are an engineer tasked to create building climate control systems, instead of custom programming a system for every building,  one instance of Grok can be developed for a building and then deployed to all similar buildings and Grok will learn the quirks of the particular building system its managing.

Its still early days yet, but Grok promises to lead to systems that make Siri developmentally delayed by comparison. And understand you all the time.

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Is Grok Jeff Hawkins Third Act?

Ok, our society is always bigger, stronger, faster. Mates compare the size of their respective flat screen televisions like their significant others compare the size of …other things.  The more we demand out of our smart phones, the more features the handset makers cram into the devices. In fact, most leading edge smart phones are more powerful and capable than our desktop computers of not too many years ago.  Once one makes the decision to buy either a Android, Apple, Blackberry or Windows Phone from there features are the only way for one handset carrier to distinguish itself from another. Even Apple and RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, differentiate their respective offerings based on price and capabilities.

There is a price for all of this power in our hands. That price is of course paid by the battery.  The more we demand of smart phones, be it bigger screens faster processors, LTE data (someday Ofcom willing), or better streaming media all extract increasing demands on the battery of a mobile phone. Alas, Moore’s Law has not made it to battery size and power, so the  demand is always outstripping the supply as it were.

The result is either frequent charging, battery swapping; or bigger batteries.  Smartphone makers, and users, on the whole usually dabble in all three. However, with the increasing demands on a smartphone to replace a computer, many carriers are moving to kill two birds with one store and make bigger screens that in turn allow for bigger batteries. Even Apple, whose iconic co-founder the late  Steve Jobs derided over sized smart phones as undersized tablets, is credibly rumored to be coming out with a larger screen with the iPhone 5.

The question remains:how big is too big for a smart phone? Many say that anything over four inches is too big. Much larger than that and the phone no longer easily fit in a shirt or jacket pocket or purse. Not only size but weight is also a factor, past a certain point going over email on a heavy phone is less like being connected and more like working out. That is what people have said about devices  with screens up to 4.7 inches. Then you have the Galaxy Tab, a monster at 5.2 inches and widely held out as the current size champ.

When the Galaxy Note came out, I for one was convinced that it would fail miserably in the market. The specs are pretty good and the screen is first rate abet at the cost of poor battery life. But the size. How many of us want to ride a train or walk down a street looking like we are talking to a copy of National Geographic?  However, if sales numbers are to be believed, talking to copies of National Geographic is an up and coming fad. Samsung reports excellent sell through on the device and the American carrier AT&T is particularly pleased.

iPad, Galaxy Note and Blackberry

Something I found interesting was a post from American Internet curmudgeon Mike Cane. (Note: @mikecane is well worth following on Twitter. He has a take no prisoners attitude in his posts and blog that is more than a bit refreshing) Mr. Cane lives in New York City and in his meanderings about the city notices that the Note was being embraced by the  every man rather than the tech elite and suits. This set me to wondering if people were buying into the Galaxy Note (and by implication other oversized) phones instead of buying a smartphone and a tablet. If that indeed is the case, then the rumored “mini-tablets” may find getting traction in the market to be a hard slog indeed. Why buy a mini tablet when you can buy a slightly smaller Galaxy Note or its like?

Tells us what you think is too big in a smartphone. Or do you want your smartphone super sized?

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Can a smartphone be too big?

Nokia’s new hero phone, the Lumia 900 is up for pre-order in the UK and will be released April 27th . The new Windows Phone has been available for a little over a week in the United States and has hit a bump or two in the road over data problems with its LTE data system.  Of course, UK users need not be concerned about any LTE issues, thanks to Ofcom and the squabbling  wireless carriers we arn’t likely to see the new data standard in this green and pleasant land till 2014. Instead Nokia offers the 900 with the well used DC-HSPA data .  Other than that, the phones have identical specifications Indications are the Lumia 900 will debut at least initially on the O2, Orange and Vodaphone networks and O2 and Orange are offering the phone free as either an upgrade on its £36 and up plans or signing up for twenty four months. The phone can be had SIM free for £486 (inc.VAT).

Early US reviews have been positive for the Lumia 900. Nokia got special notice for aggressively responding to the LTE data glitch by issuing a $100.00 USD credit for all current and future purchasers, effectively making the phone free on contract. The Lumia 900 launched with a $99.99 USD  price with a two year contract with American wireless carrier AT&T. The Nokia largess was not only a shrewd bit of damage control but necessary as the Nokia brand was all but forgotten by the USA cell phone users. The 900 is Nokia’s first major foray into the American market in several years. Even so, the company , along with Microsoft seem to be making similar investments in the UK to gain market share.

The specifications of the Lumia 900 are not spectacular by any means. However, apparently they get the job done, and the industrial design is outstanding according to the review of the leading American tech site, The Verge.

In the US buyers had a choice of blue or blue. The UK has been blessed with a the additional color white as well

The Verge review author,  Joshua Topolsky was one of the few reviewers to call out the phone on its most glaring shortcoming, the lack of Windows Phone apps. The situation with the Windows Phone app ecosystem is the thing that anyone who is considering a jump to the Lumia 900 from another platform should consider long and hard before you leap.  If you have already gone to the new os, the phone is an excellent upgrade from the first generation Windows Phone handsets. New users should consider carefully however.

Whenever you consider changing to a new smartphone operating system, first look at how you use your existing phone. What are your apps that you can not live without? What are the apps you use the most? Then see if those apps are on offer in the Windows Phone app store. If the exact app is not represented, is their an easy work around? The tech media constantly reports that Microsoft is spending a lot of quid to jump-start developers, but the proof is what you see in the store, not what is coming soon. For example, there is currently no Audible audio book app for Windows Phone. Rumors and a YouTube video claim that it is beta and will be released “soon”. However, it has been a month since the video and there is no firm release date.

Is it time to put a wager on the Windows Phone operating system? What do you think?

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Will the Lumia 900 light the way for Nokia and Windows Phone?

Google released Android 4.0 , also known as Ice Cream Sandwich or ICS  in mid November to the world at large. Assuming that was the earliest date that carriers, mobile makers and developers got their respective hands on it (which is not likely as at least handset OEMs were probably getting release candidate  builds at least) then why has over four months gone by and ICS is at best dripping onto new phones? Just in the last few days are seeing Samsung releasing the Android 4.0 update on the Galaxy S2  on O2, and there are some  Nexus S devices out there reportedly getting the update. Galaxy S users are however high and dry for which you can apparently thank Touch Wiz. While the Nexus S and Galaxy S are essentially identical under the bonnet, the presence of Samsung’s Touch Wiz features means there is not enough memory for Ice Cream Sandwich. HTC is claiming several of its phones will be getting the Android update, only the HTC Sensation on Vodaphone is actually seeing an update at present.

And  it is not just phones. Supposedly the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 was to release in the UK in March, but the release was pushed back to April because of problems with adapting TouchWiz. Motorola rolled out  OTA for ICS for the Xoom tablets starting in late January. Some would say that tablets can release updates far faster because the maker does not have to get the blessings of the respective wireless carriers. First, since many tablets come with wireless data options, that is not really true. Second, as owners of unlocked Galaxy S2s can tell you, not being tied to carrier approval apparently means nothing as they will be the very last group of  phones to get a taste of ICS.

According to recent surveys, less than five percent of Android users are currently running Ice Cream Sandwich  and the vast majority are running Gingerbread or lower. True, if you want the latest and greatest you can root your phone, but not everyone is a power user who fearlessly voids warranties. Further, one must consider the cost of incurring the wrath of the IT gods. Hacking your company issued device is risky at best and may be impossible in any case. Even if you bring your own phone or tablet to work, many corporate systems will not allow access to e-mail and the like with rooted devices by either technical means or threat of being sacked if discovered. So the vast majority is at the mercy of the phone and tablet makers for “official” upgrades. Those upgrades seem to come about as often as Henry VIII paid alimony.

What do you think?

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It’s Spring: where is my Ice Cream Sandwich?

The biggest obstacle to purchasing a Kindle Fire for use as an everyday tablet, OTHER THAN YOU CAN”T GET IT FROM AMAZON.CO.UK (apologies, but I feel much better now)  is the fact that the current Fire lacks any way to connect an external keyboard. Amazon had to keep the cost down somehow, and not adding Bluetooth or an external keyboard was apparently part of the process. Put this firmly in the speculation category, but there are some programs out there already that enable handwriting recognition for the Kindle Fire and some evidence that  Amazon may have to either tout handwriting recognition over an expensive accessory or add features to the Fire to match Apple and other Android products.

Accurate handwriting recognition has been one of the Holy Grails of any hand held device. One of the most famous first attempts was the Apple Newton, but it became more well known for its flubs than its accuracy. The late, great Palm brought handwriting recognition mainstream with its easy to learn Graffiti language that made Palm PDAs the geek standard for keeping track of your personal information.

The advent of the Handspring (later Palm) Treo and RIM Blackberry line and smart phones generally pushed handwriting recognition to the background in favor of keypads and texting. However, the Apple iPhone, ushered in capacitive touchscreens and until the advent of Capacitive stylus products the only way to input into recent smart phones and tablets was your finger, your voice or if truly cold and desperate a meat stick.

As smart phones started losing hardware keyboards in favor of more screen real estate, users were finding the onscreen touch keyboards unsatisfying. In other words, we ham handed people who do not have either the hands of a surgeon or a child had a hard time entering information at any reasonable rate. Further, handset makers were discovering that there was a reason that people wear gloves in the wintertime. Even Apple can’t ignore the market where it gets cold. And meat sticks can be so greasy.  Enter the capacitive stylus.

Some have speculated that Apple sees a world where we talk to our phones and tablets as evidenced by Siri on the iPhone and voice dictation on the third generation iPad. Android appears to at least be competing in this arena as well. However, unless you live in the world where you have a private office, a car and driver and the like, the rest of us run the risk of suffering the fate of those who appear to be talking to themselves in the Underground. Or at least brassing off our coworkers.

Right now the Kindle Fire, like other Android products have access to several handwriting recognition programs. Unlike many other Android products,  there is no way at present to mate a Kindle Fire to a hardware keyboard of any stripe and thus Amazon has to either provide a way to do some kind of input or be relegated to a media player on steroids and not a viable tablet option for anyone who sees a tablet as a possible notebook replacement or supplement for serious email or note taking. Pushing handwriting recognition may be the most cost effective way to do it.

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Is Amazon going to tout Handwriting Recognition on the Kindle Fire?

While Mighty Gadget doesn’t really blog about fitness products much we recently were given a Polar WearLink Bluetooth Heart Rate Monitor to try out.

Unlike most HRMs the Polar Wearlink appealed to us as it connects to Android phones and is compatible with multiple apps including Endomondo, RunKeeper, Sports Track, Runtastic and many more. The beauty of this is you can easily track you heart rate and calories burned and sync your stats online showing you historical performance data. This may not sound like a big deal but the majority of traditional HRM watches have no ability to sync online or even to your computer, and the ones that do cost a lot of money, for example the Polar RS400 costs approximately £150+, compared to £65 of the Wearlink. You are also restricted to using the Polar software with the RS400.

The initial set up was extremely easy and the device connected to Endomondo and Sports Tracker fine, picking up my heart rate in a reasonable time. In the case of Sports Tracker the app showed current heart rate, average heart rate, maximum heart rate and calories burned, you can also show a graph of your heart rate during the current exercise. All in all the Wearlink was coming across as the perfect HRM.

Unfortunately things started to get worse from here, with 2 problems, the first is relatively minor and that’s the fact the screen times out on an android phone, so you have to unlock your phone again before you can see your heart rate. This is avoidable with other apps and changing the screen time out, but it is still a bit annoying.

The other far more important issue is that after a few minutes my heart rate would apparently spike to 190-254 bpm then shoot back down again, sometimes it would spike up and just stay there permanently, other times it would drop down to 30 or 40. This normally happens after about 7 – 10 minutes of using it, and happens EVERY SINGLE TIME. It is extremely annoying as the only way to fix it is to remove the bluetooth transmitter, wait for 30 seconds for it to switch off, then reconnect it and wait another 30 or so seconds for it to pick up your heart rate. I also have to keep a close eye on my heart rate so I can stop the tracker to avoid inaccurate readings. If you don’t disconnect it then it will either freeze at the spiked reading, or randomly spike throughout the rest of the session. Images are below showing the spikes.

Unfortunately because of this major flaw I could never recommend purchasing the Polar WearLink Bluetooth HRM as the results are highly inaccurate and it is extremely annoying. I am also not the only one experiencing problems with the Wearlink, with many people posting on Polars own forum regarding various problems.

At the moment the only other Bluetooth HRM available is the Zephyr HxM which appears to have less people complaining about it in Google results and some positive reviews, however as we have not tested it we can not guarantee it is a better purchase than the Polar.

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Polar WearLink Bluetooth Heart Rate Monitor Belt for Android Phones Review

The new version of OSX that Apple recently released to developer, Mountain Lion,  has many new additions to the operating system. One thing it wion’t have is “Mac” as part of its name. According to Niliay Patel at the Verge, the official name of the release is OSX Mountain Lion.

This move by Apple is a boost to those who subscribe to the idea that Apple is moving to one OS to rule them all, a blending of iOS and OSX that would allow for developers to write for one OS that spanned across smartphones, tablets, and lorries, I mean Mac desktops and laptops. While its unlikely that  Final Cut Pro will be running on an iPhone any version soon, it is by no means out of the realm of possibility that Final Cut Express won’t show up on the iPhone or more likely the iPad.

Apple and its developers would gain some great economies by being able to develop in a unified environment. (Not that Apple needs any more advantages) A developer could effectively scale a program limited only by the capabilities of the hardware. Of course it does raise the pricing question,  bu considering the past practice I would think users would expect tp pay for every platform. A smart developer might offer an option that if you purchased the MacBook version, you had the iPhone and iPad apps thrown in for free.

Oh wait, Apple and free. Silly me. In any case, it will be interesting to see what Apple has on tap for the rest of the year.

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Apple to Phase out Mac OSX

What could possibly be one of the bigger announcements at CES this year Intel and Lenevo have announced the first Intel Medfield powered smartphone the Lenovo K800. While details of the specification are slim right now we know that the phone has a 4.5-inch 720p display and rear 8 megapixel camera with dual-LED flash. There is also the usual 802.11 b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0 and GPS connectivity. The phone will be running a modified version of Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.

The Medfield platform uses a 32nm fabrication process and the K800 uses the Penwell SoC that has a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z2460 CPU with 512KB L2 cache. On the GPU side it has the tried and tested PowerVR SGX 540 which has been clocked at a slightly higher than usual 400MHz and dual-channel LPDDR2 memory. The CPU in Penwell is only a single-core right now but Intel plans to come up with dual-core versions later, along with a faster GPU.

While a single core CPU does sound a bit poor compared to todays dual core smartphones (and quad core tablets), Intel have released some impressive benchmarks for the CPU

The Lenovo K800 is set to launch in China by Q2 this year, and it is believed Motorola will also be releasing a Medfield powered phone by the end of the year

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First Intel Medfield Smartphone revealed, the Lenovo K800

Recently Three lent us a Sony Ericsson Xperia Play to review, which ironically isn’t even available on Three anymore, but anyway we decided to review it as the phone is excellently priced at around £150 – £200 sim free at the moment.

When his was this was released Sony were asking for iPhone-esque prices so for such a big price drop is fantastic for the end user (unless you paid full price in the first place).

The phone itself is a decent size with a 4-inch capacitive multi-touch LCD touch screen with a 480×854 pixel resolution and 16.7 million colours, and a 5.1-megapixel camera recorder with autofocus, flash, image stabilizer and geotagging. It is obviously rather chubby due to the built in controller (119 x 62 x 16mm) and it weighs 175 grams.

It currently runs Gingerbread 2.3.4 and we found it to be very snappy with no obvious lag at all. There is 400MB of internal memory, but an 8GB microSD card is included and this can be expanded up to 32GB. The internal space is an issue if you want to install a lot of games/applications, but with the microSD you have plenty of space for media.

Obviously the major selling point of this phone is the fact it is the “PlayStation Phone” and comes with a slide out controller, and there is no question about it, this is the best way to control games. It is by no means perfect, but comparing it to controlling games via the screen it is infinitely better.

Where the Xperia truely shines, and makes it well worth the investment, in my opinion, is gaming emulation. Sony have released a few games themselves, which have been good, but they are few and far between. However there is a full range of emulators for most old games systems giving you thousands of games to choose from and a phone that can be used to play them properly!

I was also quite surprised with the battery life of the Xperia. I currently use a Galaxy S2 as my main phone, and the battery has been well reviewed, but I have found it hit and miss, however I found the Xperia would often outlast my S2 on daily tasks. Thinking about it, it is not surprising really the S2 has a 1650mAh batter and the Xperia has a 1500mAh batter, but the Xperia has a smaller screen, and a single core processor. It is still nice for your phone to last a good day though!

Overall I found the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play to be a great phone (at its current pricing) and would make a wonderful Christmas present for someone. It is no iPhone, and 3 don’t even do it anymore with the only Sony on 3 at the moment being the Sony Xperia arc S.

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Sony Ericsson Xperia Play Review