Galaxy S4 camera beats the iPhone 5′s in DxOMark benchmark

The camera on the Samsung Galaxy S4 has topped the iPhone 5′s in recent tests by the prestigious camera experts at DxO Labs. The device won the battle against the iPhone 5 on quite a few fronts. For example, in the Autofocus test, it managed a score of 80, compared to 72 for the iPhone 5, with the reviewers noting the good photo detail preservation, auto-exposure even with problematic light settings, as well as rich colors. As for flaws, the Galaxy S4 camera was criticized for the loss of detail in low light and the ringing artifacts shown in some images.

As for video, the Galaxy S4 camera also did quite well, with colors and texture reproduction praised by DxO Labs (a score of 88 in Exposure and Contrast , compared to just 81 for the iPhone 5 camera). However, there was some criticism related to the aliasing and staircase effects, noise levels and focus conditions in low light, as well as video stabilization.

See more in "Galaxy S4 camera beats the iPhone 5′s in DxOMark benchmark" @ androidauthority.com.

iPhone 4S WIFI Greyed Out (not turn on)

Recently my iPhone 4S suddenly lost WiFi after I updated the firmware 6.1.3. I tried a method in Apple forum:


1. turn Airplane mode ON
2. turn phone OFF, wait 10 minutes.
3. power up phone, turn airplane mode OFF

Luckily it worked on the 1st day, but it broke on the second day. Then I restored the 6.1.3 firmware and saw WiFi is back. If I synced lots of emails with a weak WiFi connection, the WiFi function crashed again. It should be a 6.1.3 firmware problem and not related to a hardware failure.

I decided to try a hardware reset (push Home and Power Button together) and restored the firmware again. Let's see what is happening.

Updated: after one more reset of the networking setting, it seems the WiFi has been OK now. 

Updated again (7/9/13): it seems the WiFi chip was broken according to an Apple store staff. Then I got a new 4S from Apple.

TF201 Clockworkmod Recovery Bootloop Easy Fix on Windows

Last year I installed Virtuous ROM on my Asus Transformer Prime (TF201) with "One-click Root for Asus Transformer Prime on Android 4.0.3". Yesterday after I cleaned cache and data, I encountered "Clockworkmod Recovery Bootloop". I could not boot my TF201. Thanks to a hint from mungo10 @ forum.xda-developers.com, I did fix it as follows:

(1) Donwload "Universal Naked Driver 0.72.zip" from forum.xda-developer.com;
(2) When TF201 on recovery mode, connect it to a Windows machine, install the above driver;
(3) Optionally install a new ROM from Asus;
(4) adb shell to TF201 and type "echo boot | dd of=/dev/block/mmcblk0p3 bs=1 seek=0", exit and reboot;
(5) If a unrooted ROM is installed, an updated "One Click Tool" "viperMOD_PrimeTime_v4.6.zip" can be still used.

Q1 2013 Android Shipments Explode, iPhone Stalls, Windows Phone No.3

Research firm IDC found that Android shipments increased from 90.3 million in the first quarter of 2012 to a whopping 162.1 million units in Q1 2013. Google and its vendor partners accounted for 75% of all smartphones shipped in the first quarter, up from 59.1% in Q1 of 2012.

iPhone shipment growth slowed significantly, increasing a mere 6.6% from 35.1 million units to 37.4 million last quarter, as shown in the following IDC vendor estimates comparison  Apple’s operating system accounted for 17.3% of shipments, a decrease from 23% in the same quarter of last year.

Top Five Smartphone Vendors, Shipments, and Market Share, 2013 Q1 (Units in Millions) by IDC

Vendor	1Q13 Unit Shipments	1Q13 Market Share	1Q12 Unit Shipments	1Q12 Market Share	Year-over-year Change
Samsung	70.7	32.7%	44.0	28.8%	60.7%
Apple	37.4	17.3%	35.1	23.0%	6.6%
LG	10.3	4.8%	4.9	3.2%	110.2%
Huawei	9.9	4.6%	5.1	3.3%	94.1%
ZTE	9.1	4.2%	6.1	4.0%	49.2%
Others	78.8	36.4%	57.5	37.7%	37.0%
Total	216.2	100.0%	152.7	100.0%	41.6%

Windows Phone shipped 7 million smartphones, accounting for 3.2% of all shipments in the first quarter of 2013, more than double the year-ago quarter. Microsoft was able to overtake BlackBerry, which despite its new BlackBerry 10 operating system, saw smartphone shipments decline from 9.7 million units to 6.3 million units, accounting for 2.9% of global channel sales.

See more "Android shipments explode in Q1 as iPhone stalls; Windows Phone tops BlackBerry".