TechCrunch
App Infrastructure Startup Firebase Raises $5.6M From Union Square And Flybridge
Firebase, a Y Combinator-backed startup that offers infrastructure for real-time apps, is taking the stage today at GigaOm’s Structure conference, where it’s announcing that it has raised a $5.6 million Series A from Union Square Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners.
As CEO and co-founder James Tamplin first explained a year ago, Firebase aims to enable developers to create web and mobile apps “really, really fast without worrying about servers or writing server code” — you just write front end code and let Firebase handle the back end. In the past few months, the company has opened the platform to all developers, released a software development kit for iOS, and launched its first module, Firepad (a real-time text editor).
In his blog post announcing the funding, Tamplin said that the new funding will be spent on three main things — improving support for the Firebase community, expanding the team, and launching Firebase’s paid product. (The basic idea is to charge based on bandwidth, storage, and number of users.)
Flybridge previously led Firebase’s $1.1 million seed round. The firm’s general partner Chip Hazard and Union Square’s Albert Wenger joining Firebase’s board of directors — Tamplin noted that “both have deep experience helping to build companies with developer-facing products” and both sit on the board of database company 10gen. He also said that Wenger was “the only investor we pitched who immediately made a Firebase app.”
In an email, Hazard said, “It’s clear from the metrics that the company has a product developers love and the team and vision to provide companies with a world-class solution for building real-time web applications.” Wenger, meanwhile, has a blog post saying that Firebase makes him think of science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke’s famous declaration that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic:
I remember first looking at Twilio and thinking it can’t really be that easy to receive a phone call using a program. A couple lines of code? Really? More recently I had the same reaction looking at Firebase. Javascript objects that are local but are synchronized over the network? Set values with a single call and receive a callback when a value changes? That’s really it? In a trial a few weeks ago it took me less than an hour to turn a single player game into a two player game (and that includes signing up for Firebase and reading the documentation). Both of these are examples of a kind of magic for engineers: access to a much more powerful spell that let’s you do new and amazing things.
Instagram, Technology's Window To The Soul
Today Instagram revealed a new mission statement that reflects its true purpose. At our best, we don’t share photos or videos to brag or get ‘Likes’. We share to let others see through our eyes. Facebook has “To make the world more open and connected”. Now, alongside the launch of video, Instagram has its own guiding words. “To capture and share the world’s moments”
The phrase may be new but it was always the point.
I remember when Facebook launched status updates. With an audience of my close friends, it became a place for my feelings. One of my first status updates, just a few months after the feature debuted, was “Josh Constine is asleep to dream”. Those words captured my feeling of the possibilities that lay ahead for an excitable college senior. I only wanted to sleep if it let my mind splash in a sea of fancy and the impossible. Otherwise there was just too much life to live. The words would mean nothing to someone who didn’t know me.
I failed to really get Twitter until years after I started. For a while I blindly posted links to sites full of “social media tips”. I rambled about my current activities. But one day it struck me. My internal monologue of wild musings didn’t have to stay internal any more. While the norm on Facebook was to post maybe once a day, I didn’t have to ration out my tweets. I could share my thoughts with the world, raw and uncut. People didn’t need to know me. We just needed to be learning, together
But my most vivid “eureka” moment with social media happened while I was walking in Golden Gate Park at sunset. Before me, creamy cloudflare reflected off a pond. It was so beautiful it felt selfish to keep it to myself. I wanted all my friends to see what I saw.
But I was no photographer, and held just a crummy early-generation iPhone. The shot lacked the vibrance and emotion of being there. Yet with Instagram’s filters I could return the essence of the moment to what I captured with my camera. And with time, a community grew around the ability to be transported.
This is why Instagram deserves to be mentioned alongside Facebook and Twitter. It may not be an identity provider or the backbone of the real-time web. But it’s the most vivid way to let someone, no matter how far away, feel like they’re standing right beside you. If Facebook is the heart, and Twitter is the head, then Instagram is the eyes, and the eyes are the window to the soul.
Video Ad Buying Platform TubeMogul Hires Google Media Platforms Head Chip Scovic As CRO
TubeMogul has come a long way since being founded in 2006. The company, which originally provided an analytics service for video distributors, moved into advertising a couple of years ago. With a platform that brand advertisers can use to systematically purchase online video inventory, it’s gotten pretty big since then — and it keeps getting bigger.
To help it boost revenue and expand into new markets, the company has hired Chip Scovic, former head of Google’s Media Platforms business for brands, as its new chief revenue officer. Scovic comes with more than a decade of experience in the digital ads world, beginning at DoubleClick in 2000. He also led ad sales for Yahoo Video before ending up at Google, where he helped build the programmatic side of the media platforms business for brands and agencies.
In a phone interview, Scovic said he was drawn to TubeMogul thanks to its fast growth and focus on being a technology-first business. With TV marketers realizing that they should start investing heavily in online video, he believes TubeMogul has a huge opportunity for more growth over the coming years.
With Scovic taking over the position, TubeMogul has promoted former CRO Paul Joachim to chief financial officer and chief operating officer. The company has also made a couple of other executive appointments to help round out the team. It added Eric Deeds as its general counsel, and Daniel Schotland as its new VP of operations. Deeds joins TubeMogul after more than a decade serving startups and investors as an attorney at law firm DLA Piper. Meanwhile, Schotland came from Cheetahmail, where he was VP of business development.
The appointments have been announced, as TubeMogul has raised a bunch of money in an effort to accelerate its business. Last December, it raised a $20 million Series C round led by Northgate Capital, with existing investors Trinity Ventures and Foundation Capital participating. And it added another $10 million on top of that in May, taking money from SingTel Innov8 to open an office in Beijing and expand its presence in Asia.
International expansion will be one of TubeMogul’s key objectives, Scovic told me, along with growing its platform sales business for publishers and brand advertisers. With a platform for understanding the effectiveness of campaigns across multiple screens and devices, the company ultimately hopes that it can bring more brand video advertising online.
Given its recent funding and expansion, TubeMogul has been growing fast. The startup has hired more than 75 employees since the start of the year, to bring total headcount to 180 employees. It expects to be around 250 by the end of the year. The company, based in Emeryville, Calif., has raised a total of $46 million since being founded in 2006.
Photoful Improves On iOS 7′s Photo Gallery With A More Open, Gesture-Based App
Photoful, a new mobile application which is the rebranding and relaunch of the earlier app known as PhotoSocial, is hoping to attract iPhone users who want the Photos experience the new iOS 7 mobile operating system will offer…and then some. As with iOS 7′s re-imagined Photos app, Photoful will also sort your photo collection into smart groupings like iOS 7′s “Moments,” but it will allow users to do more, too, including photo tagging and advanced editing, printing, and sharing with several third-party services, as well as navigating through, selecting, and discarding photos using gestures.
As with PhotoSocial, which somewhat mimicked the original Apple Photos app, but then added capabilities on top, Photoful takes its inspiration from the redesigned version of iOS. It has the iOS 7 look-and-feel, making it one of the first to transition to the new mobile experience Apple recently debuted at WWDC.
Often, it’s apps like this that eventually blaze the trail for Apple’s own native applications, which is a precarious position for a startup. For this model to work, the company has to continually stay ahead of whatever Apple is building itself. (Case in point: the new iOS 7 Photos app has taken its own “inspiration” from a number of photo app makers, including Everpix, Moment.me, flayvr, Tracks, Cluster, Story, Flock and more.)
That being said, Photoful establishes itself as a fairly robust alternative to the native Photos app. And with some of the options it will add in the near future – like support for other third-party services such as Flickr and Tumblr and photo printing – it will get even better.
“You need to start with beating what they have today and rounding out the corners,” explains Photoful founder Jeff Bargmann. “[Apple's Photos app] is a closed ecosystem – that’s the big problem I see here. No other application can rope into this, and that’s a position that Apple isn’t really going to move from…That’s an opportunity for us.”
Bargmann’s background is in designing utilities that augment the features and functions available on the native OS. He previously created Windows desktop utilities like Stardock’s Fences and ObjectDock, 1UP Industries’ Bins, and was project lead on Stardock’s Impulse, which later sold to GameStop. Afterwards, he wanted to expand his skill set, and learned iOS development to build PhotoSocial, now Photoful.
Among the new app’s long list of extras, including Aviary-powered filtering and editing tools, a collage builder, a slideshow maker, Postagram export, and more, the best feature is simply how you interact with the app: gestures. Not only do you edit album titles with a tap (which is a fairly common behavior), you can also slide your finger across rows of photos to select or unselect them. Plus, you can pull photos off to one side of your screen to delete them or off to the other side to share them via email, SMS, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.
The gestures are really natural and intuitive, unlike some apps where you struggle to learn the new interactions. Here, you immediately just get it. And as soon as you do it, you realize that Apple’s Photos app is lacking.
Being able to tag photos, too, is another great addition – especially for those who find the tagging paradigm, and the streams of related content that it allows for, to make more sense that having to place photos into folders or manually create albums.
In the future, Bargmann plans to extend the Photoful app to sync and share with other services like Flickr, Tumblr, and messaging clients like WhatsApp, as well as partner with other developers to offer users different photo editing options, whether that’s through in-app integrations or directing users to third-party apps that could be purchased and launched from within Photoful.
Today, however, Photoful is a free download from the Apple App Store here.
Agawi Uses Its Cross-Platform Gaming Tech To Launch A Mobile Ad Unit That You Can Actually Play
Pretty much everyone agrees that mobile advertising isn’t very good (or outright sucks). Here’s an interesting solution from Agawi — an ad unit for mobile games called AppGlimpse, which functions as a playable demo for the game.
The startup, formerly known as iSwifter, has developed technology for virtualizing games and eventually other apps so that they can run on any platform. In this case, Agawi says that it can create a cloud version of any Android game that will run as an ad on both iOS and Android.
Currently, mobile ads for games are limited to banners or, at best, videos. Co-founder Rohan Relan said that doesn’t really convey the experience of playing the game: “It’s like a movie trailer that’s just static pictures and words.”
Advertisers just upload their game to the AppGlimpse dashboard, then they can run ads that access a virtualized version of the game running in Agawi’s cloud. The demo can last for up to two minutes, then it directs users to full, downloadable versions. As stated above, you can use the ad to promote both the iOS and Android versions of a game, but you need to have an Android version to build the ad unit.
“In the long-term there is a strategy for even using iOS versions of a game to create ads. It’s a significant engineering effort, but we’ll get there,” Rohan Relan said. “In the near-term though we’re going to only be creating ads from the Android versions, but given how fast Android is growing and the popularity of cross platform tools like Unity, we think we should still be able to cover a ton of games.”
This could be beneficial for publishers too, said co-founder Peter Relan. After all, they already get paid “a huge premium” for running engaging video ads, so advertisers should pay even more for this. (Publishers can integrate with AppGlimpse by using the company’s software development kit.)
When I visited the Agawi offices a few weeks ago, one of the main points the team made was their intention to go beyond cloud gaming and eventually become the enabling technology for all kinds of cross-platform applications. (And they did showed me tests of some non-gaming apps.) AppGlimpse is the first step in that direction — although Peter Relan said that the initial advertisers and publishers will be gaming companies. Focusing on gaming is “an obvious go-to-market strategy,” but he added, “We could be back in a few months and say that we’re now opening up to all apps.”
Interested developers should should sign up here.
Instagram Video Vs. Vine: What's The Difference?
Instagram just launched video functionality. Glorious, 15-second, editable video functionality. Complete with image stabilization.
So what does this mean for Vine? In the end, the competition should give users plenty to be excited about, whether you’re a Vine loyalist or an Instagrammaholic. And both apps will likely continue to thrive, as I’ve stated a few times already. Where Instagram’s user base is mostly made up of people documenting their feet, coffees, and pets, Vine has attracted a group of users who are pleased by the challenges set forth in the app.
Instagram’s filters, longer video length, stability technology and already-ingrained user behavior will keep its video offering very similar to its photo offering. People will now just post videos of their feet, coffees, and pets. At the same time, Vine’s growing community of creatives and tinkering designers will likely continue to blossom, as well.
But to end my endless list of predictions, let’s go ahead and take a hard look at how these platforms are different:
Creation
Let’s start with length.
Vine videos are approximately 6.5 seconds long, if we’re getting specific. Twitter and Vine put a lot of science and research into this length, determining that it’s the perfect length for video consumption, and forces the creator to think outside of the box in order to tell a story succinctly. It’s very Twitter-esque.
Instagram video allows for 15 seconds of video, which could feel long for the Instagram video viewer, but roomy and quite comfortable for the creator.
Editability?
Well, both platforms let you shoot multiple, disjointed clips and string them together. However, Instagram will let users delete the last clip that they shot in a series, just in case it was a bad take. You are not allowed to delete the second clip in a series, without deleting the fourth and third first. In other words, you can only remove the most recent clip taken.
Vine, on the other hand, doesn’t let you edit at all. Still, the founders this morning teased the ability to create multiple drafts within the app, which would allow for a little more freedom creatively.
Neither Vine nor Instagram will let you pull video from your camera roll. Both insist that you shoot your Vineable or Instagrammable video within the respective apps. Sorry, folks. However, both apps will instantly save your Vined or Instagrammed clips to the camera roll for later use.
They also have front-facing camera functionality in common. Both Vine and Instagram will let you switch back and forth between front- and rear-facing cameras while shooting.
This feature was originally not available on Vine, but came in an update shortly after the app launched. Both apps also let you mention other users to tag them in a Vine.
In true Instagram style, the Facebook-owned app has indeed provided filters for its new video-sharing function, and they’re brand new filters from the same old photo filters we’re used to. There are 13 new filters in all, and each of them are specifically designed with video in mind.
Vine does not offer filters, and I don’t imagine that the app will do so anytime soon. It appears that Vine is still interested in giving creators tools to make interesting, beautiful moving imagery, but I predict that those tools will be in line with higher quality videos as opposed to more convenient creation. In other words, I expect to see features like voiceover, or perhaps a tool that helps creators make more seamless animation-style Vines, to land on the network.
One feature that got a lot of “Oohs” and “Ahhs” from the press conference crowd was Instagram’s Cinema feature, which helps stabilize video shot within the app. Though image stabilization software is said to sacrifice image quality in other ways, most of the time, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for Instagram’s ever-growing user base. Instagram filters, brightness settings, etc. certainly mess with a photo’s quality enough to begin with, but with the reward of looking tanner, or capturing an unnaturally blue sky.
Vine has no such feature, or at the very least hasn’t mentioned anything like it.
Sharing options haven’t expanded for either app, but Instagram has Vine topped on this front. Where Vine only lets you share to Vine, Facebook, and Twitter, Instagram lets you share videos to Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and foursquare, as well as through email.
However, it’s worth remembering that Twitter’s Vine has full Twitter card support, meaning Vines display right in your Twitter stream. Systrom famously turned off Twitter Card support to push more traffic to Instagram.com back in December.
Both apps let users geo-tag their locations, but only Instagram offers a photo map letting you surf users photos based on location.
Consumption
The Instagram stream remains much unchanged. Videos are still a perfect square, just like photos, but with a cute little camcorder icon adorning the top right corner. Both apps will autoplay videos, but Instagram seems to offer a little two-second buffer waiting for you to pause there in your stream before it plays. Vine is more quick-fire.
Neither app has options for silencing video within the mobile apps, unless you turn sound off on your entire phone.
On desktop, Vines can be muted. Instagram videos can not be muted. Vine has also offered users the ability to embed Vines via desktop, which is a feature Instagram did not include for on Instagram.com.
Another, bigger difference with regards to consumption is the fact that Vine videos loop, while Instagram videos only play once. This gives Vines a more gif-like quality, especially when tethered to that shorter, six-second limit. Instagram videos are more of a story with a beginning and an end.
It’s also worth mentioning that Vine’s stream may look radically different soon, though. Today’s tease of new UI tweaks showed a new, full screen layout for the Vine stream that removes the space normally held by likes and comments.
So…
Vine already has a solid user base of video-sharing addicts. They craved snackable video-sharing before an app like Instagram could give it to them. The limits placed upon them by Twitter’s disposition towards brevity makes Vines that much more creative, and the looping aspect throws a dash of Gif into the mix. And we all know how popular Gifs are.
That said, Instagram video will surely slow Vine’s growth to an extent. Instagram built a video-sharing product for the masses. There’s plenty of time to shoot a video, you can make it pretty with a filter, and they’ll even help you with a steady hand. But Instagram video’s mass market appeal only makes Vine’s niche, creative-focused breed of video-sharing that much more niche, and creative-focused.
Time will tell how the two compete in the market, but in the meantime we should all grab a bowl of popcorn to watch the story unfold. Even if it takes a while, there are plenty of Vines and Instagram videos out there to wade through.
Hands-On With Instagram's New Video Feature
We’ve just made our way out of Facebook’s Headquarters in Menlo Park, where Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom took the stage to debut the app’s new (and not un-Vinelike) video functionality.
Kevin Systrom suggested on stage that they’ve been thinking about how to do video since day one — and if that’s the case, it shows. The new video functionality slips right into Instagram’s UI as if it were meant to be there.
As you scroll through your feed, videos are highlighted with a small play icon in the upper righthand corner. You can stop scrolling and hover over an item for 2 seconds and it’ll auto play, or you can tap it to begin playing it immediately. Even on the cellular connection I’m on right now, videos seem to start playing quickly, without a noticeable amount of time for buffering.
If you’re accustomed to Vine, the process of recording a video on Instagram is very, very similar: put your thumb down (in Instagram’s case, on a record button) to record, lift it to stop. Each time you do this, you create a new “segment” to your video, each of which can be deleted independently in the not-unlikely event that you mess up your video halfway through creating it.
Though clearly quite similar in concept, Instagram and Vine aren’t without their differences: Instagram’s max video length is over twice as long, at 15 seconds as opposed to Vine’s 6. The videos on Instagram don’t loop, which is interesting; while looping is something that may be a bit signature to Vine, I feel like it’s a bit limiting to not at least give the user the option. Oh, and of course, you’ve access to Instagram’s signature feature: filters.
Like with photos, filters must be applied after you shoot a video — you can’t see how a filter would look in a certain environment before filming. Once you’ve got your video shot, though, filters are applied in realtime on top of the video as your preview plays back.
One big catch: while you’ve always been able to import photos from your phone’s camera roll into Instagram, you can’t do that with videos — at least not in this first version. If you want a video in Instagram, you have to shoot it in Instagram. Kevin tells me that this is largely an interface challenge (how do you make it just as simple to edit an imported video?), but issomething that they’re considering changing in future releases.
So, what do you think: will you use this? If you’re a Vine user, would you switch away?
Samsung's Shape-Shifting Ativ Q Isn't Pretty, But Running Windows 8 And Android May Make It A Worthy Workhorse
Samsung just pulled back the curtain on a new line of Ativ Windows notebooks, but perhaps the most interesting of the company’s new Ativs is a 13.3-inch convertible tablet it hopes will appeal those prepping to head back to school. The shape-shifting Ativ Q sports a tablet mode, a video-friendly formfactor with the screen held near vertical, and a more traditional notebook configuration that reveals its built-in QWERTY keyboard, but it’s got an even niftier trick up its sleeve.
While the Ativ Q boots into Windows 8 there’s also a dual-OS mode that allows the users to switch to stock Android 4.2.2, thereby allowing for Microsoft productivity staples such as Office to live in close proximity to the Google Play Store and the usual gamut of Android apps. It’s a cake-and-eat-it-too tablet. Or a tablet for someone who just can’t decide between Windows or Android.
The Ativ Q also supports the classic Windows desktop mode – and since the tablet includes Samsung’s S Pen stylus (which pulls out from a slot in its side) the tiny menus of classic Windows aren’t as fiddly as they would otherwise be to navigate on such a device.
Samsung said photos and files can be shared between the Windows and Android OS modes. Switching between the different OSes seemed fast during my brief hands on, although it’s relatively easy to accidentally revert to Windows. The Ativ Q is not a native Android device, being as it’s not booting directly to Android, but Samsung made a point of demoing a handful of Android games, including Angry Birds, running on the Ativ Q to show it is capable of handling such apps without a significant dip in performance.
The touchscreen display is QHD with a resolution of 3,200 x 1,800, which works out to a pixel density of about 275 PPI. The aspect ratio of the screen means the device feels quite long and narrow (not unlike plenty of other Windows convertibles). The entire device also feels very hefty – it’s not a tablet you want to hold in your hands for long — and it’s relatively thick, at 13.9mm wide. It is a serious bit of kit to lug about, but if you consider it as a laptop replacement rather than an iPad competitor then that’s perhaps to be expected. It’s certainly not the world’s most elegant slice of portable computing but Samsung is obviously hoping its flexibility is what will make it stand out.
Pulling up on the side of the screen when the device is in tablet mode lifts it out on a built-in hinged stand so it can be angled in a variety of ways, including a so-called “floating” mode suitable for presentations when a standing speaker needs to look down at the screen. The display can also be angled steeply up, with the keyboard entirely out of sight, to view videos. And it can be moved into a typing mode where the display is tucked behind the built-in keyboard.
This keyboard felt unpleasantly plasticky to my fingertips but it was relatively roomy, despite taking up less than half the width of the device. There’s no space for a trackpad but Samsung has added in an optical nav key in the centre of the keyboard if you prefer not to use the touchscreen, plus three physical selection keys at the edge of the keyboard to act as mouse keys.
Samsung has sited the device’s CPU and components inside the flexible stand portion of the device, rather than inside the screen or under the keyboard. It said it wanted to keep the hot parts away from the bits the user touches. Whether that’s a huge advantage remains to be seen, but it does mean the screen is thinner than it might have been otherwise, so probably a little easier to move around.
The screen has a Windows touch-key on the front which returns the user to the Windows 8 homescreen, There’s a tile on that interface for switching to the Android OS (and another for Windows Classic). When using the device in the Android scenario, there are additional nav keys along the bottom of the screen for switching back to Windows. The device being demoed during my hands on was running stock Android 4.2.2, rather than having any TouchWiz overlay.
Samsung said pricing for the Ativ Q will be confirmed later, and the price tag is likely going to be the deciding factor on whether this hybrid beast flies. It’s not what you’d call stylish or elegant, and its weight puts its portability in doubt, but it has the potential to be a bit of a workhorse -– with both Windows and Android, and tablet and QWERTY functionality on tap.
Hands-On With Samsung's Galaxy S4 Zoom, The Smartphone With A 10x Optical Zoom Lens
Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Zoom steers its Galaxy brand into slightly new territory, by creating a hybrid smartphone-cum-pocket-camera. Unlike pretty much every other cameraphone around, the Zoom has a 10x optical zoom lens protruding from its rear.
In short, it’s a phone with two faces: one pure Galaxy smartphone, the second resembling a classic point-and-shoot camera. It’s a curious move that’s likely to grab consumers’ attention, but there’s a bigger question here — what’s it like using it?
If you only look at the Zoom’s phone half, you’d quickly discover it’s largely standard mid-range Galaxy fare — the usual TouchWiz interface runs atop Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, and there’s a dual-core 1.5GHz chipset powering the show. It felt fast and responsive during my brief hands on, and the 4.3-inch qHD AMOLED screen was bright and plenty big enough for all the typical smartphone uses, without being as huge a pane as Samsung’s flagship high-end smartphones.
The Zoom has a removable battery, accessible via a side door near the camera grip that also covers the SIM slot. Your usual selection of ports is accounted for too, though the microSD card slot, headphone jack, and micro-USB charger port are joined by a tripod mount on the base.
Samsung’s camera-centric chimera has a surprisingly pleasing feel, considering it’s considerably heavier than the company’s usual, plasticy smartphones. Despite the extra heft the overall feel is balanced. You won’t be putting it into the pocket of your skinny jeans as it would certainly drag you down, but the extra weight doesn’t feel too unwieldy. Perhaps because it looks so camera-like that the expectation is of more weight from the get-go.
The look of the device is exactly that of a hybrid. Holding it from the phone side it looks exactly like the Galaxy S4 Mini. Indeed, ignore the camera half and it is basically that phone, says Samsung. Turn it around and it’s a point and shoot digital camera. The only odd moments come when you’re holding it like a camera, so it’s in landscape orientation, but using the phone’s Android homescreen or menus. These stay in portrait orientation. Of course the camera app interface supports both landscape and portrait orientations, as do other apps – such as the web browser – but homescreens remain portrait-only.
Construction feels solid. There’s plenty of plastic on the device but the lens enclosure is metal. The edges of the phone also have the same brushed silver bands as the rest of the S4 range – albeit that appears to be plastic, rather than metal. The camera ergonomics work reasonably well, with a nicely shaped front ridge for gripping with your right hand. This is the same shiny plastic as the rest of the casing, so there’s no rubberised covering to aid grip.
The positioning of the phone power key (on the left of the top edge, when holding the phone in the camera stance) is potentially slightly awkward as it is close to where your left hand rests when you’re using the camera in landscape mode. There’s just about enough room to avoid it but a few accidental strikes are probably inevitable.
Now we’re getting to the fun part. The Galaxy Zoom has a 16MP sensor with optical image stabilisation, 10x optical zoom and a 24mm lens. Photo quality was difficult to assess in the relatively dingy conditions of the press room where the device was being demoed, and with limited hands-on time, but test shots did display a fair amount of noise. Exposure could also be uneven, and lower light shots came off with some noticeable blur, despite the image stabilisation tech inside the device.
Overall photo quality looked fair, but left plenty to be desired. Shooting in brighter outdoor conditions would undoubtedly result in crisper detail but as with many cameraphones the Galaxy Zoom appears to be a middling performer in less ideal lighting conditions (not that the average consumer will immediately realise that). The Zoom’s tactile optical zoom lens and physical camera looks are likely to win over a portion of Samsung’s target user based on their familiarity with the traditional camera form factor. Samsung cited “busy mums” as one target – i.e. people who take a lot of shots, and care about the results, but aren’t as discerning about image quality as camera pros.
Samsung has added an ‘expert’ mode to the Zoom’s camera interface for users who want to play around with a few more controls. This mode allows manual tweaking of setting like EV brightness, colour tone, saturation, sharpness, contrast, shutter speed, aperture, ISO, white balance and metering. However the typical Galaxy Zoom user is likely going to be sticking with its auto mode or consumer friendly ‘smart mode’ which offers a carousel of pre-sets to pick from, such as landscape, dawn, best face (which takes a series of shots and lets you pick the best one) and kids shot. The latter plays a baby-friendly noise to attract the subject’s attention so they’re looking at the camera before it snaps the shot. File that under ‘parent friendly’.
Likewise, the mechanical operation of the zoom lens is likely to take a little getting used to as it’s sited close to the edge of the device which means the lens can push against your fingers if you’re wrapping your hand around the back of the device, causing your grip to slip. It won’t take a user long to get accustomed to the moving protrusion, however. When you’re using the device as a phone, so when the lens is at its most retracted, it does stick out into your palm, feeling a bit lumpy. It’s not actually too bad though — and gives something grippy to tighten your palm around.
On the top right of the device, when holding the phone in the classic camera stance, is its round physical shutter key. This looks like a traditional camera shutter button. It requires a very light touch for the initial focus depression, and more of a squeeze to take the photo as you’d expect. The button felt nice and responsive during my hands on. It can also be used to jump right into camera mode from elsewhere in the OS by holding the button down.
When not in the camera application, turning the lens ring activates a camera shortcut menu where you can choose from a range of camera mode options – either by tapping the touchscreen or turning the dial to move the selection then hitting the shutter to select the mode you want. Modes are also accessible from within the camera app via a touch key at the right hand side of the interface.
When using the lens ring shortcut, modes on offer are night, animated photo, macro, landscape, beauty face (a mode that automatically ‘airbrushes’ portraits), the gallery and an auto mode that pre-selects the mode to take the shot in, based on what the camera calculates is the most appropriate mode for the conditions you’re shooting in.
The zoom ring can also be used to navigate inside the gallery, including to zoom into shots to look at details. The navigation doesn’t seem especially well thought through, however, as you can’t apparently move through photos in sequence. To browse shots you have to resort to using your finger on the screen. The fly-by-wire feel of the lens ring is also slightly too loose to be entirely pleasing. Plus there’s a slight lag between you turning and the camera interface responding by zooming in/out. It’s not a huge lag, but does make it feel slightly unresponsive.
Overall, the Galaxy S4 Zoom feels like a well thought through concept — the combining of the traditional camera form with a smartphone works surprisingly well and doesn’t feel unbalanced. But the let down is not that it looks too ugly or feels too heavy or is just weird to operate. Rather what’s a bit disappointing is that the picture quality isn’t better. For a mid range cameraphone the Galaxy S4 Zoom’s photos are probably about as good as you’d expect. But with such a whopping zoom lens on the back it’s hard not to hope for a little more photographic oomph. Still, this device’s mainstream consumer target may well be perfectly happy with what its lens can turn out — and zoom in on.
Samsung Reveals The Ativ Q, A Convertible Windows 8 Tablet That Runs Android, Too
Samsung has just kicked off its Premiere event at Earls Court in London, and decided to lead with one particularly curious device — in addition to the ability to transform from a 2.8-pound tablet to a notebook with QWERTY keyboard, the company’s shape-shifting Ativ Q convertible also gives users a taste of the Android ecosystem.
As is usually the case though, news of the Q slipped out just a bit ahead of schedule — Italian-langauge site NotebookItalia came through with early press images of the Q hours before the official reveal (though there was no mention of the Q’s dual-OS tendencies). That initial leak pointed to the inclusion of an incredibly high resolution 13.3-inch display and an new Intel Haswell Core i5 processor, as well as 4GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD, details which have now been corroborated.
Samsung’s on-stage banter further confirms that the Q’s display runs at 3200 x 1800, which makes for a pixel density of 275 PPI. That high resolution panel bodes well for the grid-based Windows 8 homescreen, but I have to wonder just how well the traditional Windows desktop works on it — the Ativ Q squeezes more pixels into a 13.3-inch display than even the Toshiba Kirabook, which had some serious visibility issues once you left the homescreen. Curiously, Samsung says the Q is capable of running for about 9 hours before having to recharge, though we’ll have to wait and see just how well those claims hold up in the real world.
Of course, all of that sort of pales in comparison to the notion that your Windows desktop apps are just a touch away from your Angry Birds accomplishments. The Q will let users hop into an unfettered, stock version of Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean without having to reboot their device. Users can also effectively transfer data between the two OSes — Samsung Europe marketing chief Patrick Povel noted that people could pin Android apps to the Windows 8 start screen. A tacit nod to the lack of Windows 8 apps, perhaps?
UPDATE: Natasha Lomas spent some time with the Ativ Q, you can see here impressions of the kooky convertible here.
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