Software : Nokia updates its Camera app for RAW image shooting |
- Nokia updates its Camera app for RAW image shooting
- Nook BNTV800 tablet outed by impressive Tegra 4 benchmarks
- Skype pledges not to suck at cross-device messaging and call syncing
- 50 Google Now voice commands shown off in one impressive video
| Nokia updates its Camera app for RAW image shooting Posted:  Nokia's latest slew of Lumia phones has been really great for smartphone photography enthusiasts and now the Finnish company has upgraded its camera app to shoot RAW images natively. Nokia updated its Camera app for its Windows Phone 8.1 handsets, the Lumia 1520 and Lumia 1020 running the Lumia Black software update. The new camera app update lends Purview shooters the added bonus of shooting pictures in lossless the RAW Digital Negative Format (DNG). The Camera app update is free and available to Lumia 1520 and 1020 owners right now. At the moment, it only works on two Lumia devices, but we expect that this functionality will be extended to PureView snappers in the near future. Doing it RAWRAW images are uncompressed digital pictures with a minimal amount of post processing. The files are quite a bit larger than your garden variety JPEGs, but they have the added bonuses of carrying more data for finer details. It's not just a matter of having a higher megapixel count either. Nokia's DNG images can be photoshopped with more natural-looking white balance adjustments and can be modified with a few stops of exposure compensation, which mean a world of difference when saving an overblown or underexposed image. This is the second time we heard that RAW image capabilities were being added onto smartphone cameras. Last week, RAW image support was uncovered in some public Android source code. |
| Nook BNTV800 tablet outed by impressive Tegra 4 benchmarks Posted:  Manufacturers should know by now not to test unannounced hardware in the wild using public benchmarking tools, which traditionally lead to leaks such as Barnes & Noble's forthcoming effort. The Droid Guy reported Monday that Barnes & Noble's next Nook-branded tablet may very well be worth waiting for - at least based on a set of specs that recently showed up via benchmarks. Bearing the model number BNTV800, the unannounced fourth-generation Nook tablet popped up on the radar with some mighty impressive specs courtesy of benchmarking website GFXBench. That particular model number lines up nicely against earlier models such as Nook HD and Nook HD+, which were branded internally as BNTV400 and BNTV600 respectively, suggesting the benchmarked hardware could indeed be the real deal. Sizing it upWhile earlier Nook models were powered by relatively poky Ti OMAP 4470 SoCs, the BNTV800 appears to come equipped with a welcome upgrade to a quad-core 1.8GHz Nvidia Tegra 4 CPU. Barnes & Noble also will apparently infuse a heavily skinned version of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean for the BNTV800 - not the latest and greatest confectionary flavor, but we'll have to take what we can get. Despite this treasure trove of specifications, the BNTV800 is apparently keeping at least one mystery close to the vest: Will it be a seven-inch or a nine-inch model? The specs reveal a 1620 x 1008 display resolution, an odd number that suggests on-screen buttons could be part of the mix, but the actual dimensions of that screen are still anyone's guess.
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| Skype pledges not to suck at cross-device messaging and call syncing Posted:  Don't get us wrong, Skype is awesome, but being signed into the Microsoft-owned VoIP and IM client on multiple devices at the same time can be quite frustrating. You'll often receive constant mobile notifications when typing messages on a PC, it's often difficult to see what you've read and haven't, and when you answer a call, it'll often keep ringing on another device. Well, avid Skype users you'll be glad to know that the company is already planning to resolve these issues with forthcoming updates that'll improve cross-device syncing through the cloud. Skype product manager Jeff Kunins told The Verge: "It's not that we've been trying our best to be amazing at chat for 10 year and sucking at it, it's that we've been doing a great job doing what we were born to do and now people want more out of us and we're making the investments to expand and be great at that (mobile) too. We're not there yet, but we will be." Take it as 'read'Kunins said versions of the apps are in testing which will only see notifications triggered on the active device, while users will soon be able to tell which messages are new and which have been read on other devices. He added: "You'll see us very soon begin rolling that out so users get the benefit of cloud history, synced read state across all of your devices." Of the bug which sees incoming calls continue to ring when they've been answered on other devices, Kunins claimed: "It's one of those that seems like it should be trivial, but it's actually quite hard, especially on some platforms like Windows 8 or on the web." So there you have it, Skype folks. All of those little bugbears that are diminishing your Skype experience should soon be taken care of. |
| 50 Google Now voice commands shown off in one impressive video Posted:  The new Google Now has more voice commands than ever before, but it can be difficult for users to keep track of them all. In walks the latest video from PhoneBuff, which shows off 50 of the voice commands available to Android users with the latest version of Google Now. The video shows off Google Now's capabilities on devices running Android 4.4: KitKat - the phone on display is a Nexus 5 running 4.4. But most of these commands should work on devices with the latest version of Google Now. OK Google, now read my mindThe user from PhoneBuff starts off asking conversational questions like "What's my schedule look like?" and "Where's my package?" He also readies a text to be sent, sets a location-based reminder and prepares an email, all with voice commands. Other questions touch on sports, vocabulary, stocks, movie times, language and number conversions and general trivia. The phone's UI even does a barrel roll when he commands it, and it appears Google Now may also replace Shazam. Google Now seems to be responsive and extremely helpful - much more so than Siri, in fact. |
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