Mobile Phone News

Filed under: Handsets, HTC, Windows Mobile, GSM, EDGE

Billed as an “affordable touch phone with the benefits of HTC’s TouchFLO,” the Touch Viva picks up where the original Touch left off and move things just a little bit downmarket for the benefit of smartphone lovers in emerging markets. To that end, the screen stays low-end with QVGA resolution, the radio tops out at EDGE speeds, and the camera’s a mere 2-megapixel piece — but by the same token, the Viva hangs onto WiFi, 256MB of ROM, and GPS. It also gets blessed with a tweaked version of TouchFLO that doesn’t Rel. on 3D acceleration found in HTC’s higher-end units. It’ll be available starting next month for what we can only imagine will be a pretty reasonable price; backup smartphone, anyone?

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Tags: Acceleration, Benefit, Champion, Emerging Markets, Gsm Edge, Little Bit, Megapixel, Nbsp, Opal, Radio, Screen Resolution, Token, Tops, Touch Phone, Tweaked Version, Viva, Wifi

Filed under: Software, HTC, Windows Mobile

Though some newer firmware revs for affected HTC devices have touted video performance tweaks, the company’s still not terribly interested in coming out with outright hardware-accelerated binaries to fully support the dormant ATI Imageon circuitry on board, citing a host of technical issues. That’s been an ongoing source of ire for some in the user community who’ve complained of lackluster video playback performance, and after giving up on an official solution, there’s been a grassroots effort for homebrew drivers that’s finally starting to yield some paydirt. 2D (read: video playback, among other things) acceleration still isn’t in the cards, but HTCClassAction.org has released binaries and sample vids showing improved 3D performance thanks to newfound Direct3D and OpenGL ES acceleration. On the issue of whether 2D efforts have been abandoned, the organizers say “we have not [abandoned it], it may still come. The simple fact is, that in this particular case, it was easier to work with the 3D drivers first.” Anyone want to test these out and see if your hair’s getting blown back by the blistering performance? Follow the break for the full video.

[Thanks, Bernard]

Continue reading HTC community well on its way to its own accelerated video drivers

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Tags: 3d Drivers, Acceleration, Ati, Circuitry, Direct3d, Firmware, Grassroots Effort, Hardware Support, Homebrew, Nbsp, Organizers, Performance Thanks, Performance Tweaks, Playback Performance, Revs, Sample Vids, Simple Fact, Video Drivers, Video Performance, Video Playback

Filed under: Software, Apple, OS X

Once again, the time has come for a fresh beta build of the official iPhone SDK — and if you’re lucky enough to be involved in the firmware seeding program, a fresh build of the 2.0 firmware, too. The big change this time around appears to be support for OpenGL ES in the SDK’s emulator, enabling easy, breezy access to 3D acceleration for testing all those spellbinding games we plan on playing the heck out of in a couple months. So yeah, shouldn’t you get cracking on that? Seriously.

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Tags: Acceleration, Apple Os X, Beta, Emulator, Firmware, Games, Heck, iphone, Nbsp, Opengl Sdk, Os X, Software Apple