Microsoft reveals a 'more accessible' Windows 8

Microsoft's president of the Windows Division, Steve Sinofsky, has revealed a number of new accessibility features in Windows 8, explaining in a blog post that the new range of features will make Windows 8 better for everyone.

Sinfosky points out that there are a number of key features that have been addressed in Windows 8 that should make it easier for people with disabilities to use.

These include improving the assistive technologies within Windows and providing better developer tools that have accessibility built in.

Broad spectrum

"Windows 8 is a product we design for an incredibly broad spectrum of people around the world," said Sinfosky in his blog post.

"One of the areas where we have worked to deliver an even greater level of innovation is in ensuring that Windows 8, particularly the new Metro style experience, is accessible to everyone regardless of their physical abilities."

Some key Windows features have been improved, with the blog explaining that the Narrator element has been updated with user feedback and new languages, as has speech recognition.

Another key feature that has been improved is the screen magnifier. This has been given a touch makeover so users are able to control the feature completely from the edges of the screen they are viewing Windows 8 from.

Head over to the Microsoft blog now for more information on how Windows 8 is shaping up in terms of accessibility – especially if you are a developer looking to get in on the action - and be sure to also check out our hands on Windows 8 review. And if that's not enough for you, you can watch our Windows 8 preview video below too.

brightcove : 1199351091001

Related Stories

• Will Acer's 15-inch Ultrabook spark sales lift?

CES 2012: Lenovo reveals IdeaPad U Series Ultrabooks

Lenovo has unveiled its latest IdeaPad laptops over at CES 2012, with colourful new notebooks it thinks will suit anyone and everyone and a couple of Ultrabooks thrown in for good measure.

The IdeaPad U310 and U410 are the latest Ultrabook notebooks to join the line up – both come with "attractive price points" starting at £599.

Optional specs include a 64GB SSD, 500GB HDD, Windows 7 and Nvidia GeForce 6210M 1GB graphics.

The 13-inch U310 weighs in at 1.7kg with a thickness of f18mm, while the U410 is slightly larger at 1.9kg and 21mm thick.

Y not?

Entertainment is the name of the IdeaPad Y Series' game, with the Y480 and Y580 offering 14- and 15-inch displays, Nvidia GTX660M 2GB GDDR5 graphics and Dolby audio through JBL speakers. The IdeaPad Y Series UK pricing starts at £799.

Tripping down the spec ladder are the IdeaPad S200 and S206 which are meant to sit between the netbook and the notebook – here was us thinking that was what the tablet was for.

Both models have an 11.6-inch HD screen with a waist-size of just under 21mm. Inside you're looking at an Intel Atom dual-core processor on the S200 while the IdeaPad S206 rocks an AMD dual-core affair.

There's a webcam and 5 hours of battery life to play with too, but it's likely its wallet friendly price tag (from £299) and colourful looks will draw the punters in, available in pink, red, blue, grey and white.

Series-ously

Also on the colourful side of things are the Z Series IdeaPads (below) – Nvidia GeForce GT640M graphics, HDMI-out and a range of backlit LED HD displays are topped off with Blu-ray disc drives and HD graphics support for a starting price of £499.

If those are a bit too cheerful for you, the Lenovo G Series laptops start at £349 and come with 14-, 15- and 17-inch HD screens and "basic multimedia functions".

Alongside the IdeaPad range refresh, Lenovo has launched its latest IdeaCentre desktop PCs, with the touchscreen B540 and B340 proving the cream of the crop with large HD touchscreen displays and optional 3D thrown in too. Yours for £549 and up.

iOS 5.1 beta reveals proof of new iPhone, iPad and Apple TV

The beta version iOS 5.1 has been released to developers and there are a number of references to apparent new hardware in the code.

It's been a matter of minutes since the last iPhone 5 and iPad 3 rumour appeared, so we thought it only fitting to wildly speculate that the beta code for iOS 5.1 houses myriad hints that new Apple hardware is indeed in the works.

First up is reference to the iPhone 5,1 – which seems to be the internal name for the new iPhone.

The code comes just after the iPhone 4,1, which is the internal code for the iPhone 4S. The jump to 5 means that there will probably be significant hardware changes to the phone, including the likes of a new processor and a new screen.

brightcove : 1212903245001

New iPad

A new iPad is also referenced and has been given the moniker iPad 2,4. As this is a jump in number it is thought that this wouldn't be a massive upgrade but could well be a 3G-only version of the iPad that is soon to be released in the US by telco Sprint.

Finally, a new version of Apple TV is referenced and has been given the codename J33. Rumour has it that this could be the 1080p-toting Apple TV which is said to be in the works.

Related Stories

• OS X Lion stats show just 1.5% OS share
• Apple's 2012 MacBook Air refresh to include 15-inch model?

Samsung Reveals Omnia W and Korea-only Galaxy S II HD LTE

 

Samsung likes to fill a news cycle (expect more from them tonight), and so it's no surprise that on the same day that they reveal the details of the T-mobile SGSII variant, they also reveal a few other devices. First up, we have the Omnia W, which appears to be the international variant of AT&T's Focus Flash. The device sports a 3.7" Super AMOLED WVGA display, and rocks a Qualcomm single-core 1.4 GHz SoC while being the low-cost Windows Phone 7.5 option for non-US customers. The device will spread throughout Latin America, Asia and Europe after a late October launch in Italy. 

Second, we have something truly drool worthy, the Samsung Galaxy S II HD LTE, a Korea-only product whose internals match the previously announced Galaxy S II LTE, marrying a 1.5 GHz SoC (likely Exynos) and LTE, but ups the ante with a 4.65" 1280x720 Super AMOLED screen. This variant yields a delightful 316 ppi pixel density, and joins the ranks of phones that are expected to sport HD resolutions in the coming months. 

Though the SGSIIHDLTE (Ed. note: Mouthful!) was only announced for Korean markets today, we can expect something similar to grace our shores before too long. High resolution screens will be the new dual-core in the smartphone market, and after enduring WVGA across all variety of screens, we will be glad to see it happen. PR below, and stay tuned for more Samsung news as it happens.

Source: Samsung (1), (2)

]]>

TI Reveals OMAP 5: The First ARM Cortex A15 SoC

TI sure does have impeccable timing. Not 12 hours after we published our LG Optimus 2X and NVIDIA Tegra 2 review, complete with a discussion of the 2011 SoC space, did TI announce its OMAP 5 SoC.

OMAP 5 will go into production in the second half of 2011 and ship in phones during the second half of 2012. It’s a 28nm SoC with significant architectural upgrades compared to the OMAP 4.

While the OMAP 4 integrates a pair of ARM Cortex A9 cores, OMAP 5 features two ARM Cortex A15 cores. TI already announced that it was ARM’s first licensee of the Cortex A15, so the OMAP 5 announcement is not too surprising.

The ARM Cortex A15 cores can run at speeds of up to 2GHz, although specific frequencies will depend on the OEM implementation. At 2GHz TI claims the pair of Cortex A15s should be 3x the speed of the 1GHz Cortex A9s in the OMAP 4330. At the same clock speed, TI is boasting a 50% performance advantage from the A15 over the A9. 

With the OMAP 3 TI had a 256KB L2 used by its single Cortex A8. The OMAP 4 quadrupled L2 cache size to 1MB and shared it among both of its Cortex A9s. TI’s OMAP 5 doubles L2 cache size to 2MB, operating at the CPU clock speed, and it’s once again shared by the SoC’s two CPU cores (in this case Cortex A15s). The OMAP 5 retains the same dual-channel LPDDR2 memory interface from the OMAP 4.

Architecturally we still don’t know much about what makes up a Cortex A15, although I suspect we’ll get more of that in the coming months. Update: It looks like ARM has released some info on the A15. It appears to be a wider, deeper, even more OoO architecture. More on this later.

In our Tegra 2 review I mentioned that the transition from ARM11, to Cortex A8 and now to Cortex A9 left us with a generational performance improvement each step of the way. The move to A15 will be no different. ARM’s Cortex A8 went mainstream in the performance segment in 2010, Cortex A9 will do the same in 2011 and with any luck we’ll see A15 before the end of 2012. It’s this sort of yearly cadence that ARM and its partners must keep up in order to really catch up and surpass what Intel has been promising with Atom. Atom came out in 2008 and it won’t be until late 2012 that its architecture is truly refreshed. For a company that survived the mistakes of NetBurst, Intel doesn’t seem to have learned much of a lesson there.

In addition to its dual Cortex A15 CPUs, the OMAP 5 will feature two ARM Cortex M4 cores as well. The M4 isn’t very useful as a general purpose microprocessor, it only supports the ARM Thumb/Thumb-2 instruction sets (not the full 32-bit ARMv7-A ISA). The M4 does have a suite of signal processing extensions that can be used to accelerate audio/video encode and decode. One application of the M4s will be still picture enhancement. A goal for the next-generation of SoCs is to begin to bridge the gap between smartphone camera quality and high-end point-and-shoot and DSLR cameras. Obviously we’ll always be bound by the poor optics possible on smartphones, however there’s still a lot that can be done in hardware to improve the quality of what’s captured. 

The OMAP 5 supports up to four cameras. One demo I saw Intel put together a while ago was of a smartphone with two equal resolution/quality cameras on its back. The only difference between the two was the focal length of the lens. Whenever you took a photo with the demo camera you’d actually capture the scene at two (vastly) different focal lengths. The SoC (in this case an Atom) would use the captured data to produce one image where the entire scene was in focus, with improved sharpness/detail over a single camera solution. It’s possible that OMAP 5 based smartphones may feature similar technologies and use its Cortex M4s to merge/interpolate data from the camera sensors. 

As ARM’s CPUs grow in power consumption, the amount of fixed function or specialized silicon set aside to offload various tasks will increase. The Cortex A15s should be used only for those applications that absolutely need them, anything else should be offloaded. 

The OMAP 5 SoC integrates Imagination Technologies’ PowerVR SGX 544 GPU, although it’s unclear how many cores will be present in TI’s implementation. Each SGX 544 core has four USSE2 pipes compared to four USSE pipes in the SGX 540, and two USSE pipes in the SGX 530. Each USSE2 pipe offers an increase in compute power compared to the old USSE pipes, however I don’t have details on specific differences in internal organization.

TI announced two versions of the OMAP 5: the 5430 and 5432. The OMAP 5430 features a 14 x 14mm PoP with LPDDR2 memory support, while the 5432 is a larger 17 x 17mm BGA package with DDR3/DDR3L support. The 5430 will likely be used in smartphones while the 5432’s larger size would be better suited for tablets. 

On paper alone the OMAP 5 looks to be very powerful, but it needs to be. Also shipping in 2012 will be Qualcomm’s MSM8960 and we may see Project Denver as well. The application processor race hasn’t even begun to heat up, but it’s starting to get interesting.

]]>

3M reveals MPro110 pocket projector

Small, lightweight and flexible: With the Micro Professional projector 3M MPro 110 sets projection specialist 3M mainly on the target group of professionals, who often are the presentations but do not take so much technology.

Their German division has recently announced that their prototype will soon become a reality. The MPro110 uses LCoS display technology to display VGA (640 x 480) resolution. It also uses an LED lamp, which means no fan noise. The LED is expected to display images bright enough to be seen in a brightly lit room. This feature is ideal for traveling presenters. The MPro110 weighs only 0.3 lbs and is less than an inch high. It is able to display an image up to 50 inches, diagonally. The connections for this device are few but useful including a VGA connection and a composite video connection. These connections allow the MPro110 to be used in a variety of situations from including office presentations, playing games, or watching movies. You can even connect you iPod to the projector and watch video either on a table or your best friend’s back. The MPro110 is expected to retail for about $359 and will be available worldwide September 30th