Author: Devin Coldewey

I know, it’s all in fun. But it’s kind of funny that Apple is now the one being hammered.

The technology associated with 3D content is getting better, and the dark screens and headaches plaguing the more sensitive viewers may soon be a thing of the past. Personally, I hope these expensive, complicated LCD shutter glasses go the way of the dodo, but until then, they may as well be as good as they can get.

These new Toshiba screens, made specifically for shutter glasses, have improved switchover time between open and shut, and block more light when shut to boot. It cuts down on 3D field “crosstalk,” in which your left eye sees partially the image meant to be seen by the right. Causes headaches and such.

Yet this will not be the end of the improvements. Like TVs and cameras, they’re taking their time perfecting the art. Another few months will bring another improvement… and this is something theater owners and projectionists need to be aware of. What a pain! If you’re using dual projectors and polarized light, this isn’t an issue; that’s why I think that technology will win out in the end. Simplicity is a powerful thing on a mass market, and so is low cost. Active shutter glasses will be gone in… I’m going to say two years. It’s like a VHS-beta thing.

We have to give concept designers points for trying, but I don’t think this resizable battery is going to fly. For one thing, the actual core is tiny, and batteries derive their power from packing as many volatile chemicals into their little bodies as possible. Imagine putting six of these, at D size, into a boom box — the thing would die in like 15 minutes.

There’s also a question of heat. That memory foam is, I’m guessing, rather a good insulator. Batteries generate heat when they’re in use and rechargeables really hot up when they’re plugged in. I’d be concerned that these suckers would catch fire.

That said, though, it’s good to see thought being applied to battery design. Unlike wall outlets, which are surprisingly hard to improve on, batteries are pretty much a blank slate. Sure, we’ve got AAs and stuff, but there’s a lot of room to play in as a designer. This particular concept just doesn’t seem to have legs.

[via Gajitz and Treehugger]

Luxury storage masters LaCie have introduced a new drive (well, drives) intended for maximum data protection and connectivity. Inside that forbidding black box are two hard drives, and every bit that’s written to one is written to the other in true RAID 1 fashion. It has built-in server and torrent download functions, which could be nice, and if it’s connected to your router, you should be able to access your files from pretty much anywhere.

It’s also got a USB 2.0 interface, so you can use it as a normal hard drive as well. Capacity is either 2TB or 4TB, though if I’m not mistaken, effective capacity is half that. After all, there are only two drives in there and they’re mirroring each other exactly. 4TB of space would require two 4TB hard drives… and those don’t exist yet. $480 for a total of 2TB of space is a bit insane if you ask me.

You might remember the Drobo FS that debuted a month or so back that shares many of these features. The LaCie is cheaper, but the limited capacity really kind of sinks it if you need a versatile or professional solution. For a little light storage and torrenting, the Network Space MAX will be fine, but if you need expandability and more options on the accessibility front, the Drobo is a necessary buy — though it’s significantly more expensive.

I’ve been thinking of writing up a post detailing the different viewing methods for 3D TV/gaming/cinema and their various strengths and weaknesses, but it looks like that won’t really be necessary. Cyberlink has put together a really nice and very detailed guide to pretty much everything the end user needs to know about 3D.

If anything, they err on the side of objectivity. Whether one method or another is better isn’t really the point — and as I mentioned in my reply to Roger Ebert’s issues with 3D, these technologies are maturing quickly and to pick a winner (or declare them all losers) would be shortsighted. And as a commenter points out (I noticed this as well), polarized solutions are given a sort of lowballing, though higher resolutions and/or dual projectors in cinemas can easily circumvent the resolution issue Cyberlink cites. Might Cyberlink be in the business of selling active shutter glasses, perhaps?

At any rate, if you’re in the market or just want to be informed, this is a great (though rather long) article. You can download the whole thing as a PDF or read it over at Tom’s Hardware.

I think it must be hard to feel like a one-man army when you’re wearing such a dorky piece of headwear. The new COMBATREDI (yes, it’s all caps; no, it’s not an acronym) training system pairs a helmet-mounted VR visor with a backpack processing unit to create a rich and immersive “virtual battle space.” Sure, just like a Virtual Boy!

Although they claim realistic graphics and “endless” maneuvering, I’d be concerned about how realistic the movement actually is. I found the gun-shaped projector from Microvision to be pretty engrossing, but I wonder if their little stereo setup (powered by a Core2 Duo and 2GB of DDR2) is as instantaneously responsive? The military thinks so; they’ve sunk quite a chunk of change into the project. You’d think for this many million dollars, they’d get more than 2GB of RAM.

Well, at any rate, it’s better than Halo. If this thing looks interesting, there’s more info over at Danger Room.

Remember the “megapixel myth” that has driven camera specs for the last decade or so? Yeah, it’s still here; it’s called the “HD hoax” now. I just made that up. But seriously. The idea behind the megapixel myth was that simply increasing the size of the output image didn’t usually result in a better picture in any way. In fact, in addition to filling up the memory card faster, this megapixel bloat led to images that were noticeably less sharp and true to life. Similarly, so-called HD cameras and sensors are now being sold strictly on numbers and not on features or performance. But more data for the image is always better, right? Not quite.

What set this post off was that yesterday, Omnivision announced that they were packing 1080p onto a 1/6″ sensor. An admirable feat of miniaturization. But the reality is that this “high definition” is anything but.

First, a quick crash course in digital imaging. Forgive me if I gloss over or miss some of the more technical particulars.

1. Light approaches and hits the “event horizon” of the lens.
It’s not actually called the event horizon, but it’s the very outside of the lens, and the shape and placement of this determines the focal length of the lens — wide angle, portrait, telephoto, and so on. More bulbous, extruded lenses capture more light from a larger field of view. Lenses with physically larger surface areas collect more light, which is why lenses with low F numbers often have large front elements.

2. The light passes through a number of lens elements in order to be straightened and resized.
Light comes into a lens from a number of directions. Wider lenses can have light coming in from very disparate angles, and even telephotos have to deal with light hitting the lens at the “wrong” angle and creating flare and glow. Once the “right” light enters the lens assembly, it passes through a number of optic elements, bending and re-bending the light to produce a projected image on the other side of the lens. Depending on the aperture selected, it will have a certain amount of the scene in focus, but the total light that comes out the interior end of the lens depends on the amount of light that came in the exterior end.

3. The light hits the sensor.
Where there was originally film, there is now a sensor, usually a CMOS in most cameras, though a few still use CCDs. Imagine a vast surface of little buckets made to collect light. The image seen by the lens on the outside is projected onto these, with a small amount of error introduced by flaws in the lens elements (there can be dozens in zoom lenses) or arrangement thereof. This creates things like chromatic aberration, vignetting, and softness at some apertures. The light is meant to be going as straight as possible into these buckets; a bit of light from a red dress must not end up in a bucket which is holding the light from the green grass behind the dress. If there must be overlap, it must be as small as possible — this produces sharpness and contrast. The distance between the buckets and the size of the buckets determines (to an extent) sensitivity and pixel pitch. And the buckets must be able to hold a lot or a little of light and dump it out accurately later; this produces correct exposure and dynamic range.

4. The sensor dumps the data.
Someone has to empty the buckets. The graphics processor or CPU does this by unloading them from the top to the bottom. Looking down on the sensor, the top left bucket gets emptied first, then the next one to the right and so on, until the CPU reaches the end, at which point it starts over at the left on the next row. It does this as fast as it can, but sometimes it’s not fast enough. While it’s unloading the buckets, it’s often the case that they’ve started filling up again. This is called a rolling shutter, and it’s a major problem with digital cameras: it creates (among other things) something called skew, which distorts vertical lines and features. The faster the data is pulled off the sensor, the less skew there is and the more accurate the output image is.

5. The data is processed.
Now the raw data must be encoded into a form that’s compact and readable by devices and programs designed to “play” that content. Pictures are often saved to JPEGs. Video these days is often saved to codecs such as H.264 or AVCHD. The quality of encoding depends largely on the amount of processing power applied to the original data. If you are encoding a movie on your computer and set quality to “draft,” it will search for edges only on a gross scale, only sample color every X pixels instead of Y pixels, and so on. You understand: shortcuts are taken. You trade quality for speed, as in other things. Dedicated processors for this are a big help, as they utilize parallel processing to accelerate the job, and can do more in a second or cycle than an ordinary CPU. The finished file is then stored on whatever medium is available.

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Sorry, that ended up being longer than I expected it to be. But now, if you didn’t before, you know the rudiments of the process. Now, let’s get on with the news. Omnivision, an established creator of image sensors, has created a sensor that is 1/6th of an inch diagonally that records 1080p video. To give you an idea of how large a 1/6″ sensor is, here is a very handy little chart. The largest frame represents the size of a 35mm film frame, considered the referential standard for these things.

My Rebel XSi, the T2i I just reviewed, and many other DSLRs fall under the 1.5 and 1.6x crop factor (APS-C) squares. The new Micro four thirds cameras are there as 4/3″, and a large majority of compact digital cameras and camcorders I’ve seen and reported use a 1/2.3″ sensor, a bit smaller than the 1/2″ one. The rugged cameras I reviewed recently, for example, all had 1/2.3″ sensors or thereabouts. A sensor 1/6″ of an inch across would be approximately half the size of the (already tiny) 1/3″ sensor there.

Now, every camera that I’ve shot with, including the impressive T2i, has problems with HD. Somewhere along the line, in one of those steps I mentioned above, something goes wrong. And with imaging, it only takes one weak link to create a bad photo or video. High definition shouldn’t just be a name for a resolution. It should mean the level of definition in the image is high.

The pocket cams out there, for instance, can barely ape “HD.” Under the correct circumstances, in good lighting and with no motion, you would look at the 720p image and think “yes, that’s high definition.” For the most part, though, motion is blurry, colors are mixed, edges are indistinct, and there’s a weird sort of texture over the whole frame. What the hell? You paid good money for “full HD” (as the pocket cams are now advertising: 1080p in a phone-sized package). Why aren’t you getting images like the ones you see on TV?

The reason is that although the technology in one area or another may have advanced (lately it’s been sensors), the other bits of the camera are torpedoing the image quality all day long. Let’s go through the problems that occur during the process described above, in a $200 camcorder or phone shooting at 1080p.

1. and 2. The lens of the camera is garbage to begin with.
Think about it: devices which need tiny sensors are almost guaranteed to have terrible lenses. First, they’re tiny. You’re not getting a lot of light in one end, which means you don’t get a lot out the other end. Second, they’re cheap. The elements even in the nicest autofocus phone cameras are extremely small and (I’m guessing) are ground down from pieces too flawed to be used for large elements. Even perfectly good medium-sized digital cameras get tons of fringing and CA. Third, you’re losing a lot of detail through the plastic lens protectors and whatever oil and grime is on there. You can often tell a good camera by how well it picks up the flaws in the lens assembly.

3. Not only is the sensor small, but the “buckets” are small
Remember how we imagined a bunch of buckets next to each other? Now imagine those buckets are thimbles, and are expected to do the same job as buckets. This can only be done by using a boosted ISO to guesstimate how much light would have hit the buckets, but it creates a huge amount of error and noise. Not only that, but now that the buckets are thimbles, tiny things packed close together (high pixel pitch) there is even less tolerance for optic error! The tiny amount of error present even in a perfectly good lens is multiplied many times because the targets are so small — think what the shabby optics of a $3 lens assembly will do to the light. Now the red dress and the green grass are overlapping by a huge amount, resulting in a huge drop in sharpness and contrast. Even within stretches of a single color, the “sample size” for determining what color a pixel should be is totally distorted by boosted sensitivity, and color accuracy suffers as a result. These things can be minimized by predicting them and intelligently correcting for them, but only to a certain extent.

4. and 5. The sensor is slow and the CPU is slow
Granted, this issue is something that will only improve; RED One cameras, plagued by slow sensor offloading speeds, worked hard to produce firmware that fixed this, and now rolling shutter artifacts (while still present) are much reduced. Also, hardware encoding chips are getting cheaper and smaller, and will probably be featured in most video-shooting devices within a year or so. But now and for the next generation of imaging devices, you’re looking at a lot of skew (vertical and horizontal). And on the encoding front: 1080p video from the T2i, at 30 frames per second, was about 340MB. It’s a lot of space and takes a fair amount of data bandwidth to handle. It’s pretty much guaranteed that these smaller devices, Snapdragon processor or not, are going to be throttling it in order to make sure there are no missed frames, errors, or that sort of thing. This hurried processing results in a muddy look to the video, high resolution as it is, because edges and details have been rubbed out by a single hasty encoding pass.

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Now, I’m not trying to break Omnivision’s balls here. Creating such a tiny sensor that is capable of producing such a high-res image however many times a second is a serious achievement. Mission accomplished. The thing is, unfortunately, said sensor doesn’t really enable devices to do anything different. You’re just going to magnify the problems that are already there, and fill up your SD card faster to boot. Will it take pictures and video? Sure. High resolution pictures and high definition video… of a low-quality image. It’s a bit like taking a picture of another picture, and expecting the second picture to be better than the first. So if it’s not really high definition, why is it being recorded and stored in high definition? So they have a big number to sell you, of course, like 240Hz and 18 megapixels.

How can you avoid this? Well, just like the megapixel race, you really can’t. Video recording devices are simply going to overdo it the way still cameras overdid it, and now we all have hundreds or thousands of dubious images which despite being 10 or 15 megapixels, if you look closely or print too big, have all kinds of weird artifacts in them. It’ll be the same for video. You can choose to record at a lower resolution; 720p (even VGA sometimes) is just fine, after all, and often will record at the same framerate, meaning better image quality. And actually look at the lenses on the cameras you buy. Lenses that are bigger across are (generally speaking) better, and every lens has its F numbers printed on it or in its spec sheet. If you’re trying to decide between a few cameras, look at their lenses: if one device maker is shirking on the lens, arguably the most important part of the camera, then you can be sure they shirked elsewhere too. Also, don’t buy anything that shoots in 1080i. Interlacing is a monster deserving of its own post.

I’d like to say that my issue with inflated video resolutions (and megapixels) is something that will be alleviated by time, like some of Ebert’s objections to 3D. But the cost of good optics isn’t really coming down, and really, the size of the lens is a physical barrier not likely to be surmounted any time soon. The methods we have for collecting and measuring light aren’t sufficient, and the improvements yet to be made for them will do nothing to help the fact that with bad components, it’s garbage in, garbage out.

There are a lot of augmented reality apps out there, some even worthwhile. Not all, however, are this practical. When you’re shopping for a new watch (which people do, I understand), it’s not always easy to tell how it’s going to look on your own wrist. How big is it, exactly? Does the face look cool upside-down? Will that silver color clash with the blue of my veins? Important questions all. Don’t worry, though. Tissot has your back with this new augmented reality app.

Hmm. I wish I could tell you a little more about how well this app works, but I haven’t had a printer for like five years, and so cannot print out the little paper watch you need in order to interact with the app. Wait, maybe if I….

Yes, it worked! Can’t really tell much about how it would look on my wrist (the G1 kept falling off when I tried to balance it) but that’s pretty funny. You too can do it, if you feel like downloading the 82MB (!) app. Eh, why not?

[via The Awesomer]

I’m torn here. Not literally torn, as I expect to be when the robots take over and my body is used for spare parts, but morally torn. On one hand, here we have a little robot that could venture into dangerous situations via remote control and detonate bombs or flush out enemy dudes. Could save lives. On the other hand, here we have a little robot that, given the spark of strong AI, could rumble by the thousand through the wreckage of our world, checking every cranny for human insurgents. Just blast ‘em and let the EATRs clean up.

So as you can see, I can’t tell whether to cheer on our robot-loving military or cower under my bed, crying.

The Israeli roboticists who have created it (and advanced the machines’ day of ascendancy by who knows how long) call it the Pincher, and it’s really made for finding and detonating IEDs by firing tiny 8-inch-long rockets at them. The rockets, which they call pyrophoric arrows, bury themselves in the explosive and burn it away.

The robot itself is tiny (50 square inches, so probably around 7″x7″ — small enough to carry in a pack or mistake for a toy. I had a TMNT Pizza Van about that size that fired little pizzas from a launcher. I kind of wish I’d had one of these things. No! No, Devin! That’s what the machines want you to think! Be strong!

[via Danger Room]

Can’t wait until you get home to add some novelty effects to your photographs? Have I got a product for you! These Photo Paddles are essentially just bits of transparent plastic with props mounted in them — lips, sunglasses, a nice big mustache, that sort of thing. Cheesy, yes, but possibly entertaining.

http://www.photopaddles.com/index.php

They’ve actually been around for quite a while (they were created for a design show last year) but they’re now available for purchase more easily than by . $6 each seems a bit steep (you could probably make your own for far less), and I can’t figure out how to get any of the sunglasses ones (“Howdy”?), but hey. It’s art, it’s not supposed to make sense.

Keep in mind these won’t work if you have any depth of field at all. The creator instructs you to use them with your camera phone, which seems like sound advice, though if you have a fancy autofocus camera phone, you might have trouble.

[via Notcot and CNET]

In the May 13 issue of this newspaper, it was printed that Acer was planning to debut a Chrome OS-based device in Taipei during June of this year. Acer now states that it has “no short term plans” regarding Chrome OS, despite having previously said that it would be the first to market with a Chrome OS device. We regret the error.

Last week we saw a nice little semi-rugged ultraportable (or notelet, as I like to say) introduced by Dell, and although it seemed just a little underpowered for the price, its build quality might make up for it. And here we have another ultraportable, an Inspiron, showing up on Dell Singapore. Powered by the newest mobile AMD chipset and Neo processors and the usual better-than-netbook-but-not-quite-notebook specs, it seems like a perfectly decent little fellow.

Here are the vital statistics for the M301z:

13.3″ “widescreen HD” – implies 1366×768
Athlon II Neo [email protected] GHz or Turion II Neo [email protected] GHz
2GB DDR3 1066MHz RAM (4GB max)
Mobility Radeon HD 4225 (onboard, essentially)
Optional webcam (how can this be optional now?)
2x USB 2.0, 1xeSATA/USB 2.0, multi-card reader, the usual other ports

More importantly for its “ultaportable” status, it’s less than an inch thin and weighs a… well, not exceptionally light 3.9lb. It starts at 999SGD, or about $720. Not a bad buy if you ask me! We’ll probably be seeing a lot more AMD lightweight models coming out, and we’ll keep you informed of the most interesting of them.

[via TechReport]

I heard about this a little while back when they had just wrapped. The director was excited to have shot an episode (the season finale) on the 5D mk II and was answering questions about it, a bit inexpertly I think, no doubt to the chagrin of the DP who actually shot the episode. The episode is airing tonight at 8PM tonight on FOX — watch it with your friends and then say “oh yeah they shot that on… this!” And then you pull out your 5D mk II. It’ll be glorious… in a minor way.

We all wanted to believe that cool swivel-screen render was Nintendo’s new 3D-capable handheld (not in fact called the 3DS), but of course that was kind of ridiculous. Chances are Nintendo is going to stick with what they know, and http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3179334“>a recent FCC filing seems to show just that. The picture shows two screen, the top one in wide format — approximately 16:10 by my measurements. There’s no guarantee that this is the 3DS, but that’s really the only thing that fits the bill.

Others have pointed out that there is what looks to be an analog stick in the bottom center of the motherboard, and also that it’s possible that this could just be an application for updating the wireless in existing handhelds. But the removal of the image from the filing suggests something cooler.

My belief, and you can hold me to this later, is that they’re going to have a single screen for 3D up top, with a secondary display in non-3D below. The 3D technology they’re using can be turned off, as we know, but without knowing whether glasses will be required or not (I’m guessing no, Nintendo wouldn’t like that and parallax barriers have already been rumored anyway), it’s hard to say exactly what the method or mechanism is. Either way, I’m thinking they’re going to retain the dual-screen structure, since that makes it a more compelling handheld to carry around (you still have access to your DS library), and the 3D widescreen top will simply windowbox and add a border when you’re playing DS games, like on Super Game Boy.

Here’s a quick mockup I whipped up to illustrate how it might look. Obviously it’ll actually be different, but you get the idea. I’d say they’ll make the bezels thinner and probably make the speakers better as well. That’s just a guess, though.

Will both screens be touchable? Man, I hope so.

[via Eurogamer and 1up]

Nice. The latest version of Cyanogen’s modded ROM (version 5.0.7) brings Android 2.1 support all the way back to the G1 and MyTouch. Being a G1 owner I can say I’m pretty pumped about this: check out the video above, it seems to work perfectly well. The only thing we’re waiting on is to get the package size down to G1 size — if he can’t trim it, we’ll probably see a holdover release for MyTouch users, though.

Expect a news post over at CyanogenMod when it’s cooked all the way through.

It’s only taken about a billion years, but the Zeemote, your friendly neighborhood analog Bluetooth controller, has finally started supporting Android. Their new SDK for 1.6 and higher will allow developers to enable Zeemote input in “a matter of hours,” though the real question is whether there are enough games worth playing with the thing on Android?

Although I enjoy using the platform, I’ve found the game selection seriously lacking compared to the iPhone’s. It’s younger, of course, and less profitable to develop for at the moment, but it’s growing and with more powerful hardware coming out almost weekly, it really is just a matter of time (we hope) until we get some seriously cool games on the thing.

[via Phandroid]

Some screenshots purporting to show (or, perhaps, some purported screenshots definitely showing) an automatic update toggle on Android apps have shown up over at Phandroid, via 4chan. I see no reason why they shouldn’t be real, and it certainly would be a boon to all users — as long as some basic issues are accounted for.

How many of you guys have been suckered into updating an app, only to find that the only new feature is ads, or a timer? I’m currently using an old version of Klaxon because the new free version only allows for alarms on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I mean, it’s basically a demo, but if my app had been conveniently updated to that version, I would have been pissed. On the other hand, OTA updates would be wonderful for security problems or minor bugfixes.

At the moment all we’ve seen is this single “Allow automatic updates” checkbox, but I’m guessing there will be some sort of authorization when things do update. After all, an automatic update that suddenly allows for paid services would be a major breach of app etiquette — I’m sure Google will have some rules in place to make sure things like that don’t happen. Either way, I’ll be glad to not have to go through the excruciating one-by-one updating process any more.

Interestingly, as a commenter points out, the 2.2 update is running on a MyTouch, which hasn’t even gotten 2.1 yet. Could 2.2 be a big “sync” update that brings some of the older phones into the fold? I’m not holding out much hope for my G1, but it would be nice.

It looks like some internal Dell material has spilled out onto the internet, but am I the only one who finds this stuff suspect? I see lots of spelling errors and some questionable features. The vagueness of some of the specs and the very un-Dell phrasing of a lot of this stuff makes me think this is an outside contractor pitching Dell with some design ideas. If they are real, I’m guessing this is a mockup team inside Dell that’s pitching mobile division higher-ups with their idea of where Dell should be heading in the smartphone world. At any rate, there are pretty pictures, so let’s take a look.

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Here we go:

Lightning

If this thing is real, it falls under the mystery third chassis category. Portrait slider? Sure, why not? To add to the skepticism, though, the listed specs do not have the mandated minimum of 8GB of onboard storage. Could just be a mistake, but in a presentation like this, to ignore one of the basic specs? Shameful.

Flash, Thunder, and Smoke

Here we have three Android-based smartphones. The Flash (left) looks pretty freaky, with “curved glass” sides and Photoshop errors on the top in that last slide – or reflections, its so hard to tell. Its main thing is going to be a huge screen and media editing on-phone. Good luck doing that with any precision using your big ol’ fingers.

The Thunder (middle) is just a gigantic lozenge with an even bigger screen (4.1″) that will also be used for on-device editing and, perhaps, if you’re good, even a Hulu app. Also has that curved glass somewhere about it, though drat me if I can find it.

Do you like tall phones? Like freaky tall? Then the Smoke (right) is for you. I guess they call it that because it has the same form factor as a cigarette. Seems like the weight of the screen would make it uncomfortable to thumb-type on. And if the screen is 2.8″, that means the whole thing is about 3.5″ diagonal total. Kind of small, I’d say.

My fingers are getting cold, so I can’t get into any more detail.

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I don’t know, guys. These just seem a little too freaky, and the writing a little too rough, for them to be any kind of final product if you ask me. My personal vote is “not real,” but we’ll see how the cookie crumbles. Still, if Dell is even tossing these ideas around, they deserve a look, so we’re happy to share the info anyway. We’ll be sure to share any further information as it gets out.

Gizmodo has continued its coverage of the controversial stolen iPhone, breaking it down and looking at all the little bits inside. The thing is, they can’t really tell much: the logic board is smaller, the battery is bigger… but other than that, there isn’t much to conclude. The implementation of the camera will be mostly software, and the screen is likely 960×640 as rumored. More pics over at Giz.

It’s to be expected, really — the magic of the iPhone is not in its guts, but in how it makes those guts into a cohesive user experience. The new screen and front-facing camera imply some serious changes to the UI and functionality, so we’ll just have to wait and find out about all that.

Suppose that in addition to excluding a decade of apps and development, leaving out certain features, and starting out from scratch with a whole new visual theme, your phone is just plain expensive. So expensive, in fact, due to the restrictions you’ve placed on its hardware in order that it might run well, that you’ve priced yourself right out of huge markets like China and India. Which is to say something like a third of the world’s phone-buying population. What do you do? You make Windows Phone 7 Budget Series, of course!

According to Sudeep Bharati, who works on Microsoft India’s Visual Studio team, says that “the low-cost version of the phone will have a different chassis than version 1 to be launched by 2010 end.” Now, it’s not clear whether this is a chassis different from the three already announced. That is to say, it isn’t clear whether it is the third of those chassis or a secret bonus chassis.

If I had to guess, I’d say it would sport the minimum spec, since Sudeep said nothing of a different spec sheet. My guess would be: cheaper materials, candy bar build, 320×480 non-LED screen, and bargain bin graphics.

[via Engadget]