Take the edge off of a full work week with a bit of Super Mario 64, available for download or playable right in your browser thanks to ingenious Unity developer Roystan Ross. He calls it Super Mario 64 HD,
and it features the original game's first level, "Bob-Omb Battlefield."
Ross promises that everything is just as players of the 1996 game will
remember, with a few exceptions, including no red coins and no Big
Bob-Omb. But, it's still Super Mario 64 in your browser (not your Bowser). Happy Friday, indeed!
The folks over at Oppo sure know how to tease. Well, that's my guess,
anyway, based on the fact that several Chinese tech writers received
the above photos from "anonymous" sources yesterday. This mysterious
smartphone -- running on Oppo's ColorOS Android ROM -- features an
almost edge-to-edge screen that's similar to what we've seen on the Sharp AQUOS Crystal series, except for the earpiece that Oppo decided to keep. This is backed up by an Oppo patent (dug up by GSM Arena)
which shows the use of light refraction to give the illusion of a
bezel-free screen. Yes, it's very much the same method as Sharp's. For
those who are still skeptical, there's now a short video showing the
same device in action, and you can check it out after the break. As for
the price and availability, we're just as eager as you are to find out.
Huawei
made a splash in the market with its mid-range phone, Honor 6, which it
exclusively sold online. Now, the Chinese giant returns with the Honor 6
Plus, a bigger and better version of the phone. Priced at Rs 26,499,
the Honor 6 Plus comes with good hardware specifications and a special
dual-lens camera. Does it offer good value for money? We try to find out
in our review...
Build & design
The Honor 6 Plus essentially features the same design as that of the
Honor 6. It is a bigger version of the phone with improvements in a
number of areas. The phone's design features straight lines, rounded
corners, almost flat edges and glass finish back. There is a design
pattern on the back but it's not easily visible unless you see it under
light.
The phone looks solid thanks to its unibody design but
the glass back felt slippery making the phone susceptible to drops. It
is also prone to smudges and scratches. It would be ideal to use a back
case with the phone to enhance grip.
The front is dominated by a 5.5-inch display, part of a glass panel
that also houses an earpiece, sensor array and the front camera. There
are no physical buttons at the front.
The three edges of the
phone (top, right and left) sport a metal frame while the rounded bottom
edge is made of plastic. The right edge features the volume rocker key,
power key and two trays - one for the micro sim card slot and the other
one that can house a nano sim or a microSD card. The 3.5mm headset port
sits at the top along with an Infrared port, while the micro-USB port
is at the bottom.
The glass back has holds the dual-lens rear camera and dual-LED flash,
along with a speaker grill. There's some minimalist 'Honor' branding at
the back as well.
Display Huawei Honor 6
Plus sports a 5.5-inch Full HD (1080p) in-cell display. The display is
protected with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and a fingerprint resistant
coating. We did observe that the phone's display was less prone to
smudging.
Text and pictures appeared crisp and sharp and the
viewing angles were pretty good. Sunlight legibility was also decent.
Touch sensitivity was also great and the screen was extremely
responsive. You can turn on the glove mode for increased sensitivity.
The phone has a 73.2% screen to body ratio which makes it good for one hand use.
We were impressed with the display's brightness and colour rendering.
The phone offers a control for colour temperature in addition to
brightness.
Software
Huawei Honor 6 Plus runs Android 4.4 with the company's Emotion UI skin
version 3.0. The software looks totally different from stock version of
Android. The UI also includes on-screen navigation buttons.
The phone's default UI is devoid of an app drawer and app icons and
widgets are spread across the home screens. The unified home screen-app
launcher style may come across as user-friendly to people who have not
used an Android phone before. But it will take some time to get used to
if you have already been using an Android smartphone. You can of course
download and install an alternate launcher.
The phone also
comes with six themes each of which comes with a different set of icons,
wallpapers, font style, sounds, and lock screen styles. You can also
download or install new themes and customize them.
The software
does not include any stock Android app and everything including the
Gallery, Music, Calculator, Calendar and Email apps are built by
Huawei's software team. The apps look beautiful and offer additional
value added features.
In addition to the regular UI, the phone
also offers a 'simple' Home screen style that features a minimalist
tiles-like interface with bigger app icons and menus. This mode is
useful for senior citizens and users who don't like the default
navigation structure.
The Honor 6 Plus also offers motion
gestures such as flip to mute, pick up to reduce ringer volume, and
shake to arrange icons, among others. It features a suspend button,
which, when enabled can float anywhere on the screen. It houses
navigation buttons, a button to lock the screen, and another one to
clear the cache.
Overall, Huawei Honor 6 Plus offers value
added features through the customised Android software allowing a
greater level of customization and control.
Camera Huawei Honor 6 sports a bionic, dual parallel 8MP rear camera that can capture pictures of up to 4160x3120p (13MP) resolution.
According to the company, the dual-lens setup helps in capturing depth
especially in panoramic images. The phone also offers wider aperture of
f/0.95 for images with bokeh effect. It's pretty similar to the HTC One
M8's duo camera setup but the app offers more control over the depth of
field via a software slider.
The phone features Huawei's own camera app that offers settings for all
optical attributes, HDR, Panorama and Timer modes, among others.
Images captured by the camera in daylight turned out well with decent
level of detail, accurate colour reproduction and good contrast. Images
shot in low-light were also good albeit slightly grainy.
The front camera also shoots good quality selfies and the phone offers
all the tools to make you look as good looking as possible.
The
phone is capable of recording 1080p videos and we found the videos shot
with the phone to be decent, especially for casual use. Don't expect
high-quality videos as the phone lacks optical image stabilization
resulting in shake being apparent.
It does include electronic image stabilization but turning that on reduces the quality of videos. Hardware & performance
Huawei Honor 6 Plus is powered by a powered by a 1.8 GHz quad-core +
1.3 GHz quad-core Huawei Hisilicon Kirin 925 chip and 3GB RAM. The chip
uses big.LITTLE architecture to optimize power usage by efficiently
distributing tasks among low power and high power cores. The phone has
32GB of internal storage and you can use microSD cards of up to 64GB to
store multimedia.
Thanks to all the power under the hood, the
phone is extremely responsive and snappy even though the Emotion UI
software can get heavy on animations and transition effects.
We
did not experience any lag whatsoever while navigating through the home
screen and menus, launching apps and switching between them. Scrolling
was smooth and the phone was able to play full HD video files without
any problems.
In synthetic benchmarks, the phone scored 40,274 in Antutu, 11,938 in
Quadrant and 59.9 in Nenamark 2 benchmark tests. Some of these scores
are much better than the Nexus 5 and Xiaomi Mi3 but lag behind Xiaomi Mi
4 and OnePlus One. However, we do not recommend a phone based solely on
benchmarks as real world performance is different at times.
Of the 32GB internal storage, about 25.7GB is available to the user.
The phone offers Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS connectivity options in
addition to NFC and support for Band 40 and Band 3 4G LTE bands which
have been deployed in India. Interestingly, the phone has an Infrared
blaster and the phone bundles a Controller app. We were able to use it
as a remote with a Sony TV. However, it doesn't support Indian DTH set
top boxes.
Huawei Honor 6 Plus offers good call quality and
signal reception and we did not encounter issues while making calls even
in areas where cell signal is relatively weaker. The phone was able to
lock to GPS without any hiccups. Unfortunately, we were not able to test
the 4G capability of the phone.
It also offers FM radio. We were able to play most popular video and audio file formats.
The external speaker outlet on the phone, located at the back, offers
loud sound output but is not stereo. Also, sound gets muffled when the
phone is placed on a soft surface.
The phone is backed by a
3,600mAh battery (non-removable) and will last you more than a full
working day (15-16 hours) with 3 to 4 hours of screen on time, if you
put the screen brightness at the highest level and use 3G data all the
time. You'll be able to make about 1-2 hours of phone calls, play some
casual games and browse the web in this time period. Your mileage may
vary with different usage pattern.
Gaming
We were able to play games like Looney Tunes Dash, Monument Valley,
Asphalt 8 and Dead Trigger without encountering frame drops or freezes.
The phone got a little warm after playing games for longer durations.
Verdict
Huawei Honor 6 Plus is a premium 'value for money' phablet that comes
with good hardware and performance, improved camera features and
enhanced software capabilities. Just like the Honor 6, the design is a
bit underwhelming but doesn't come in the way of easy access and use.
However, at a price of Rs 26,499, it's difficult to recommend the phone over the likes of the OnePlus OneSource: Times of India
Well, Well, Well Apple is back with its insanely thin new MacBook which is just 13.1mm thick, 12 inch Retina Display with Resolution of 2304 x 1440 and 16:10 Aspect Ratio which weights just 2lb(around 900g). They have used just a 480p camera and it provides battery Upto 9Hrs. The price coated for this device is $1299. You guys should really have a look at it. Apple has to make some sacrifices to get that thickness such as now it has just logo on the front side which doesn't glow. And more importantly it has just one USB-C port and one Audio jack and that's it really. So the C port is used for charging and transferring data and if you intend to connect a mouse or something you have to use connecters.
Samsung's new flagship mobiles have been released in Barcelona. The two mobiles are Samsung Galaxy S6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 edge, well there are not many differences between the two mobiles except for the curved edges on the new edge it does gives some new features like if you swipe from the top-right side on edge you will get the mostly used contact list of nearly 5 members and other thing is that when you get a call from the members who are listed on the edge list the edges of the Samsung S6 edge will glow according to the DP color of the contact. Samsung Galaxy S6 comes in four colors that is White, Black, Blue and Gold. Samsung Galaxy S6 edge comes in White, Black, Green and Gold. The mobiles will be released in India in coming months and will be priced above Rs.40,000. Specs:
It has a Corning Gorilla Glass 4 display & back panel.
It supports a Nano sim
It has Finger print sensor(Paypal certified)
Samsung Pay(visa, MasterCard certified)
5.1 inch Display, super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen.
Samsung's flagship mobile Samsung Galaxy S4 that was released in 2013 is now priced at Rs.18000 and it is going to get the Android Lollipop update. so if you are looking for a mobile under 20k you can reasonably consider this as it offers very high performance.
