If you have been waiting for the Android 4.0, Google and Samsung just finished it’s press event in Hong Kong minutes ago.

At the event, Samsung was first to speak about it’s new Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the first phone powered by the new Android 4.0 operating system.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus

The new phone is based is a HSPA+ 21Mbps / HSUPA 5.76Mbps phone supporting 850/900/1900/1700/2100. EDGE/GPRS 850900/1800/1900. It has a 1.2GHz dual core processor with a large 4.65″ 1280×720 HD Super AMOLED Screen powered by by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Samsung Galaxy Nexus will be offered in HSPA+ in NOV 2011 and LTE versions in different regions later. It has a Super AMOLED HD 1280×720 display with contrast ratio of 100,000:1. The screen is 4.65inch. it has a Contour display, sleek and curve 8.94mm and a bezel of 4.29mm.

It has a 5 megapixel full HD recording camera with 0 shutter lag for low light shooting. It will come with Barometer, NFC – payment options, contacts sharing, POGO pin – docking for sharing videos.

The camera is a 5 mega pixel camera with LED. Front camera is a 1.3 mega pixel for video conferencing.

The camera is also capable of doing vido recording in MPEG4/H.263/H.264 ni 1080p@30fps HD. Music playback is in Mp3/AAC/AAC+/eAAC+

The phone has BT ver 3.0, USB 2.0, WiFi 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4GHz/5GHz) and NFC. It also has Accelerometer, Compass, Gyro, Promimity and Barometer.

The memory capacity is 1GB (RAM) + 16GB/32GB (ROM). It has a dimension of 135.5×67.94×8.44mm and weighs 135g and comes with a 1750mAh battery.

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich

Android 4.0 will have a new font type – Roboto which gives the phone a magazine layout font type that is easy to the eyes. There is a new lock screen for it and Android has also update the animations and Live wall papers.

Buttons are gone, replaced with touch screen virtual buttons which are part of the OS. With the new OS you can now group apps into folder just like Apple’s iOS. You can also place your favourite apps or contacts on the taskbar.

Other improvements over the previous versions include a new pull down notification screen, more accurate and responsive keyboard, in line spell checker, improved cut and paste.

Something different is that Android 4.0 now offer voice recognition in real time, it does not need to ‘think’ for a few seconds, it just show you word for word when you speak into the phone.

ANother new idea they have is the face unlock feature. By capturing your face, the phone will be able to recognise the owner of the phone and unlock it. It did not mention what will happen if it recognises the person wrongly for more than 3 times, does it destory all the data intact ? Unfortunately, we are unable to witness it as the demo failed probably due to beta ware.

Other improvements include web browser. It now allows you to do inprivate browsing, offline reading, gmail offline search for 30 days, a revamped calendar.

For those on limited HSPA traffic, Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich now offers you a way to check your data usage. It can also detect which are the applications that are choking up data for the month. Of course you can set alert when your data usage is reaching say 5 GB.

You can now take pictures without entering the phone by dragging the lock bar to the left to access the camera feature. with the immediate access, you can now send pictures almost instantly to social networks. enhance it with filters to change angle of shot etc. There is also panorama shooting which stiches photos for a wider viewing angle. Video recording is 1080P HD. It can zoom and focus continuously. it can also do time lapse video recording.

ANdroid 4.0 also introduce PEOPLE APP, a central application that keeps you updated with your contacts social network profiles and contact information.

Lastly, Android 4.0 comes with NFC. A new program Android Beam is introduced that is capable ot sharing any content between android devices by placing two phones back to back

Users can now share photos, contacts, even share the game (on marketplace) by just bumpping the two phones back to back.

At the closing of the media conference, Google reiterate that the developer tools are ready and the first Android 4.0 phone will go on sale in November.

Which mobile phones and tablets to see at CommunicAsia 2011 ?

CommunicAsia 2011 will be held in Singapore from 21 to 24 June in Singapore. This year, we will see less mobile phone manufacturers participating in this event.

Samsung is out as it has it’s own trade show held annually. LG also pulled out since 2010.

Sony Ericsson will not be participating at the CommunicAsia as usual. Instead it will have it’s own media event on the 2nd day of CommunicAsia. They have invited regional media and there are already rumours that they will be launching a dual core Android powerhouse. So, far details are sketchy but we will soon know in the coming days.

Nokia which held Nokia Connections event yearly is back in a big way at the event though. Will Nokia be announcing showcasing their phones based on Windows Phone 7.

As usual the two biggest Chinese players, Huawei and ZTE should be there and they might be showing more tablets based on Android as that is in the in thing right now.

Stay tuned at OCWORKBENCH in the coming days for more.

- Google TV to launch in US this autumn, worldwide in 2011

- CEO says new Chrome OS to run tablet computers

- Tablet partnerships to be announced later this year

According to Reuters news, Google will launch its service to bring the Web to TV screens in the United States this autumn and worldwide next year, said it’s CEO Eric Schmidt.

Google TV will allow full internet browsing via the TV and it will be free. Google will work with a variety of programme makers and electronics manufacturers to bring it to consumers.

Sony last week had agreed to have Google TV on it’s TV sets and Samsung is looking into it. This come as a challenge to Apple TV which was announced just earlier.

On the tablet front, the Galaxy Tab is powered by Android 2.2. Google on the other hand is pushing Google’s Chrome OS (due to be launched soon) for the tablets.

Seagate and Samsung, the two major makers of hard drives and system memory, announced Thursday that they have entered into a joint development and licensing agreement.

 Under this agreement, the two companies will develop and cross-license related controller technologies for solid state drives.

This is interesting; Samsung has released many consumer-grade SSDs, whereas Seagate has recently taken the route of hybrid drive with the release of the Seagate Momentus XT (500GB). The company’s first attempt into the SSD market with the Pulsar drive didn’t make much of a splash.

According to Seagate, however, the two companies aim to develop new SSDs for the enterprise storage market, of which Seagate has been a strong player with traditional platter-based hard drives.

Steve Luczo, Seagate’s chairman, president, and CEO said, “Today’s agreement with Samsung will help us bring a compelling set of SSD innovations to the enterprise storage market, with benefits that range from enhanced performance, endurance, and reliability to cost and capacity improvements.”

Seagate says that the joint development will build on the existing SSD capabilities of each company while combining Seagate’s enterprise storage technology with Samsung’s 30 nanometer-class MLC NAND flash memory technology. Seagate will then use the jointly developed controller for its enterprise-class SSDs.

The first SSDs based on this joint development is expected to be available by the middle of 2012.

Source CNET

The annaul CommunicAsia 2010 trade show is about to begin in 2 days time in Singapore. This annual event has attracted trade visitors and media from around the globe to check out the latest wireless technology and most importantly mobile phones.

As usual, the major brands will be missing from the show. Sony Ericsson and Nokia will be holding their own private events at hotel ballrooms on two seperate days.  Koeran companies LG will have no presense at the exhibition as well.  Japanese giant NTT Docomo will have a more significant presense this year, showcasing it’s LTE technology and Xperia series of Sony Ericsson phones at the show.

In conjunction with the event, the local telcos won’t be sitting back. It is said that one of them will be announcing more exclusive phones to their stable of Android phones. Perhaps, one of the three might just announce the availability of iPhone 4 and iPad for the local market during this period of time.

So, stay tuned while we bring you more this coming week.

Samsung Galaxy was revealed at CITA Wireless 2010 and the full specification of the phone was never released till now.
Today the spec has leak via FRAndroid A French Tech/Android Blog.

• CPU : ARM Cortex A8 1GHz – Hummingbird
• GPU: PowerVR SGX540
• ROM : 8 GB / 16 GB
• RAM : 512 MB
• Size: 122 x 64 x 10 mm
• Weight: 118g (with battery)
• Networks: QuadBand (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM, GPRS, EDGE, 3G tri-band (900/1900/2100 MHz), 3G HSDPA 7.2 MBps (3G +) HSUPA
• GPS
• Wi-Fi: 802.11 (b / g / n)
• Bluetooth 3.0
• Battery: 1500mAh
• microSD (2.0 compatible)
• Camera: 5MP, 720p 30fps
• Resolution: 800×480 pixels (WQVGA)
• Android 2.1

Galaxy S screen hardware also comes with a 16 point multitouch Atmel maXTouch that can handle up to 16 input simultaneously (theoretically sound but we are not sure if Samsung has fully implemented it into the phone. With such high end parts comes higher production cost for the screen. So are we paying more for something that we might not use? We will have to wait till Android OS get ironed out to realize if Galaxy S can prove itself as a powerhouse smartphone to be reckon with) Something we do notice is that the phone multitouch is more accurate than the HTC Desire.

Aside from this piece of good news. We recently came across Gameloft dropping a surprise for Android users. We saw 10 games via their own pay site which was pull down after the initial launch (Some nexus users complained that some of the game offered did not work, OCWorkbench suspect that these 10 games was actually build for and aimed at Galaxy S as the launch platform thus the pull out till further notice.) FRAndroid manage to get their hand busy playing  NOVA on Galaxy S.

More pictures of the phone in action can be found here