|
 |
I am certainly not qualified to talk in-depth at the Xperia Play gaming experience but I was certainly quite excited to see the hardware controls and game quality. In the video you hear me talking to a Sony Ericsson representative about the product. We discuss battery life, pricing, availability, get a gaming demo and take a look round the device.
The Xperia play runs Android 2.3 on a Snapdragon 1Ghz CPU (MSM8255with Adreno 205 GPU) with a 4” ‘Reality’ display at a true 16:9, 854 x 480 resolution. Note that Android 2.3 brought in some touch responsiveness extensions and enhancements.
What’s important to me is that another major company is now switching to the ARM/Android chassis for another product category which means Android is now in phones, tablets, media players, cameras, gaming devices, TVs and smartbooks. What’s category do you think Google are looking at for it’s next ‘device-specific ’ branch of Android? Set-top-boxes is something I’ve been keeping an eye on.
Have a look at the awesome Atomic web browser for the iPhone and iPad. The app costs 99 cents in the app store and it’s a universal app, meaning you pay for it once and you get the iPhone and the iPad version. While the browser has a lot of great features, such as easy user agent spoofing, the feature that I like the most is the way that it handles tabs. It’s much faster and much more intuitive than Safari. Atomic web has become my new browser on my iPhone and iPad. Very much worth the 99 cent asking price.
Google somewhat quietly released Google Reader Play early last month. Reader Play is essentially an alternate way to view Google Reader and is designed to present interesting and relevant items in a simple and pleasing way — it seems particularly suited to large screened devices. While several people, upon release, noted that Reader Play would probably work great on large TVs, the first thing that came to my mind was how well it could work with the iPad. Of course, that was only a theory because we didn’t have an iPad at the time for testing. Now that the iPad has been released, we can give it a try.
To my delight, Reader Play works pretty darn well on the iPad. Part of this is because YouTube videos can be played directly inside Reader Play, without having to launch out to the external viewer. Note that this isn’t Flash, it’s simply the iPad recognizing the video as a YouTube video and playing it with it’s own special YouTube player right inside the frame. Have a look at Google Reader Play in action on the iPad in the video below:
