A bit of technology

Today Sony Ericsson launched an official Xperia X10 page and they have a specification info there. Looking through it raised a few questions in my head.

• 16,536 color TFT touchscreen. 16k colours? WTF? 14-bit colour? In XXI century? I hope this is typo, because such screen would be useless.
  
• X10 is supposed to be an Android device, a smartphone, a mobile computer that is. Where are SPECS? I mean hardware specs! Who cares about SMS support? If you sell smartphone then your specs page must start with CPU type, its frequency, RAM type, its capacity and so on. These are essential for such device! Not a messaging capabilities, but hardware specs!
  
• Where is OS info? Which Android version is inside? Is it really Android? Will it support Google products like Market?
  
• WiFi™. What WiFi? G? N?
  
• Etc...
  

Basically there is no useful info except for 8MP camera info. Wow! Everyone buys smartphones because of 8MP cameras! That is why smartphones exist! Yeah, right...

I would like to ask smartphone manufacturers to publish hardware specs because this is the only specs smartphone buyers care for! Everything about CPU, RAM, internal storage, chipset and so on. Imagine you visit HP/Dell/Apple/whatever web site to choose a laptop. There is a shiny one and specs goes: shiny screen, shiny keyboard, shiny 8MP web-cam. And that's it! Would you consider buying it? I think NO! So, don't be stupid and publish hardware specs!

This post is generally made because Acer detuned its Snapdragon to 700Mhz. Which sane person will buy detuned Snapdragon? That's an epic fail for Acer. So if SE will also detune their X10 their smartphone will automatically become a crap.

Actually, you can't really blur web page in any browser except for IE6/7 - there is NO way to blur web page with CSS/JavaScript and even Canvas tag will NOT help. Too bad...

But I've found a workaround which will do the job just fine for some cases. My method adds CSS3 text-shadow property to blurred elements with the same color as text color is. Then text color "blurred" a bit to the background color. The last thing left is to find all IMG tags, replace them with Canvas, draw and blur these images inside canvas. I did not do the last step because there are plenty of code for that in Google.

Oh, and the result! Here it is (: Visit the page with Opera/Chrome/FF/Safari, click on the text, enjoy the sources!

I would like to give a link to a post on OSNews called Review: Seven Days in Haiku. The name says it all! Enjoy the reading (:

Just downloaded the thing and put it in my Sony Ericsson k530i. Well, it works the same way as Opera Mini does - web page is refactored and compressed on a remote proxy, result is sent to small (200k) J2ME client on your phone. This behaviour saves user's traffic and speeds everything up. And this is what Bolt developers talk about when they market their browser as 20-25% being faster then competition. It is worth mentioning, that Bolt is NOT faster then Opera Mini in any way - they work just the same with slight statistical differencies.

What I did like:

• competiton - it is always good!
  
• video playback support;
  
• a lot of quality/traffic options;
  
• alternative fonts;
  
• rendering quality - well, the sites I tried to visit rendered pretty well.
  

But it also has some cons, which make Bolt quite unusable, at least for me in day-to-day scenario. The biggest Bolt problem is its user interface. I did not find "Forward" shortcut, most of actions are done from context menu, but it is a bit cluttered and GUI looks ugly. Also the browser is quite unstable, just like Opera Mini 1.0 was back in the days - it hangs sometimes, becomes unresponsive in other times and so on. Overall experience is choppy. Actually it looks more like a beta (:

So my opinion is that Bolt is a great toy for geeks, but it is too early for it to being installed on a broad user base. Bitstream, continue the work! You have some problematic areas, but if fixed you will have a great product in your portfolio and many users wil be happy!

ZDNet is talking about Windows 8 clues which are starting to emerge all over the internet. Hey, ain't that too early? Windows 7 is not yet retailed! But people love to talk and Microsoft loves to promote Windows (:

ZDNet gives a lot of links to different articles and blog posts, which give us clues about what to expect from Windows 8 from both client and server sides including new filesystem features and improvements in hibernate functionality.