Facetime HD camera's and Skype

Just a quick post, noticed that my video using Skype was stretched on a laptop with a Facetime HD camera.

This blog post was quite useful in getting it sorted out.

Android 4.1 - Jelly Bean

I had written before about the Galaxy Nexus; I've upgraded it to Android Jelly Bean, and so far loving the new notification framework, and the overall smoothness and perceived speed jump in usage.

 

The ability to mass dismiss notifications is also quite cool. Not cool is the auto-resizing / scaling of widgets. Sometimes, you want widgets to stay just where they are dammit, and this sometimes gets in the way. Pity there is no way to "lock" a widget / home screen.

 

Time to go play and discover more :-)

Samsung Galaxy SIII vs HTC One X

So, the big decision; do you buy the Samsung Galaxy S III or the HTC One X ? I'm not a fan of change, and I'd really appreciated the HTC Sense interface; I felt it enhanced, rather than detracted from, stock Android.

 

I ordered both, and played with both (the Samsung for about 10 minutes, and the HTC is now my primary device). Samsung's TouchWiz just seems to get in the way, and over simplifies the phone approach. I can see how this works well if their goal is to convert people from the iPhone to Android. It frankly pisses me off, and I spent most of yesterday helping a friend clean it off and install Cyanogenmod 9. He spent most of yesterday evening telling me how great it was over the stock interface, and based on my extremely limited time with it, I'd agree with him. He's going to love Jelly Bean when it arrives.

 

The One X seems on the surface not dramatically different from previous phones and iterations of their overlay. It just feels polished, smooth and natural. You can see that they've tried very hard to abstract the interface issues away from Android and provide a more consistent interface.

 

It feels good in the hand, and although the non-removable battery and lack of micro-SD (almost standard these days in any phone other than from Apple) is a concern, frankly it feels better and more well constructed than its equally large competitor. No doubt the Samsung will get more sales, but is it a better device than the HTC ? Not convinced. Battery life is sucky on both.

 

Both are still too damn big to be used with one hand, so it will be interesting to see what the iPhone 5 looks like size-wise. Its going to be a touch act to follow though, as the 4S appears positively dated compared to these new giants. Lets see.