Compact Shadow Of The X10
The recently concluded 2010 Mobile World Congress had Sony Ericsson showcasing its latest Android smartphones starting with the miniaturized XPERIA X10 handsets. One of them, the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini Pro, sports a QWERTY slider form factor that should live up to its "pro" designation albeit with a diminished feature seat we've known from the delayed X10.
Miniature Features
Nothing best exemplifies what a Mini is than the watered-down features of its Android derivatives.
Your 1 GHz Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon used in the X10 is now just 600 MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 running the same Android Cupcake version with the UX user interface.
Sony could have done its markets a favour by using the later Android 2.0/2.1 Éclair.
Imaging resolution gets axed from a defining 8 megapixel camera to a plebeian 5 megapixel snapper with no image stabilization and touchfocus features on the X10. You still get autofocus, LED flash, geo tagging and video light. Its press release it is silent on the video recording details but it can't possibly be of the same WVGA resolution as that in the X10.
That's because you only get a QVGA 2.55-inch display, down from the X10's glorious 4-inch Wide-VGA display. At least you now get 16 million colors against the 64k colors on the X10, a gravity accelerometer and scratch resistant surface.
Phone memory almost disappears from a generous 1GB to just 128 MB in the Mini Pro but you still have microSD expandability of up to 16 GB.
Apart from those grossly diminished X10 features, the Mini Pro shares many other hardware and software goodies with the X10.
It's the same quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on the 2G network and a 3G with dual band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA. Data connectivity gets WiFi 82.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR and A2DP and microUSB 2,0. There's a built-in A-GPS, stereo FM receiver with RDS, Bluetooth A2DP and 3.5mm headphone jack for either wireless or wired headset listening.
On the software front, the Mini Pro has Timescape that aggregates all your communications and SNS updates on Facebook and Twitter in one location as well as Mediascape that draws together all your handset media content and those from the PlayNow music store and YouTube.
Conclusion
Sony Ericsson may have started a product strategy trend to affix the "pro" to create models with QWERTY sliders. The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 Mini Pro is just the first with the Vivaz Pro as second. Admittedly, its unabashed pretense to being a pro with a simple "pro" appended to the X10 Mini name is more of a caricature with a next to useless QWERTY keyboard.
Good of Sony to retain the virtual on screen QWERTY using a stylus for a faster keying of data. But admittedly, even a diminished X10 feature set makes the Minis a capable smartphone by any definition. It should attract a younger crowd who prefer smaller and more pocket-friendly.
Be A Rider With Affordable Slider
Samsung B3310 has come to relieve the people who have a desire to carry a gadget with stylish slider casing and QWERTY keypad. It has been launched by other name Samsung B3313 Corby Mate also and it has brought beautiful choices of Black, Pink, Blue & Green attires.
Let's know something more about this:
17 mm is the thickness of this pocket friendly tool in casing dimensions 91 x 54 mm and weight 101 grams. Slide out keypad is covered by the upper casing having 2.0 inches TFT display. Samsung B3310 is comfortable with the contents of 256K colors and can resolve them at 240 x 320 pixels to show you. This is a nice source for bringing happiness to the home and miles long smile through 2 MP camera with the functionality of video and image capturing. The camera is good for diversifying the objects at 1600x1200 pixels resolution efficiency.
More music more fun will be always in your pocket so enjoy the music on MP3 player and stereo FM radio that will keep you away from all problems. MP4, H.263 & H.264 videos on your Samsung B3310 will become live and you can have fun with games too.This affordable companion is really nice to other compatible sources and become more social by sharing data through GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth and USB resources. SMS, MMS and Email trio will be always there to transport your message with care. Moreover, Samsung B3310 is an intelligent tool as it can serve you the information of the world through WAP 2.0/xHTML web Browser.
Users will be glad to know that Samsung B3310 supports microSD so they can expand the memory according to the requirement while 40 MB internal memory is enough for the built-in applications. Li-Ion 800 mAh standard battery has been made to provide required power up to 5 hours for communication and for almost 380 hours on standby mode.
Noah's Ark Found in Turkey? 
Near the top of Mount Ararat (file photo) in Turkey, explorers claim to have found Noah's ark. (Photograph by Martin Gray, National Geographic)
A TEAM of evangelical Christian explorers claim they've found the remains of Noah's ark beneath snow and volcanic debris on Turkey's Mount Ararat.
But some archaeologists and historians are taking the latest claim that Noah's ark has been found about as seriously as they have past ones—which is to say not very.
"I don't know of any expedition that ever went looking for the ark and didn't find it," said Paul Zimansky, an archaeologist specializing in the Middle East at Stony Brook University in New York State.
Turkish and Chinese explorers from a group called Noah's Ark Ministries International made the latest discovery claim Monday in Hong Kong, where the group is based.
"It's not 100 percent that it is Noah's ark, but we think it is 99.9 percent that this is it," Yeung Wing-cheung, a filmmaker accompanying the explorers, told The Daily Mail.
Noah's Ark Location in Turkey a Secret
The team claims to have found in 2007 and 2008 seven large wooden compartments buried at 13,000 feet (4,000 meters) above sea level, near the peak of Mount Ararat. They returned to the site with a film crew in October 2009.
Many Christians believe the mountain in Turkey is the final resting place of Noah's ark, which the Bible says protected Noah, his family, and pairs of every animal species on Earth during a divine deluge that wiped out most of humanity.
"The structure is partitioned into different spaces," said Noah's Ark Ministries International team member Man-fai Yuen in a statement. "We believe that the wooden structure we entered is the same structure recorded in historical accounts. ... "
The team says radiocarbon-dated wood taken from the discovery site—whose location they're keeping secret for now—shows the purported ark is about 4,800 years old, which coincides roughly with the time of Noah's flood implied by the Bible.
Ker Than
for National Geographic News
Dinosaur Feathers Changed With Age 
Newfound fossils of a feathered dinosaur suggest that the extinct reptiles might have possessed a diversity in plumage types that puts modern birds to shame.
Farmers in northeastern China have unearthed two roughly 125-million-year-old specimens of the dinosaur Similicaudipteryx, a member of the group called the oviraptorosaurs, which are believed to be ancestors of birds.
The species, most likely a plant-eater, was first described in 2008. It had robust jaws similar to those of other oviraptorosaurs, but with two unusually large buck teeth.
The two new fossils belong to a pigeon-size juvenile dinosaur thought to be just a year or two old and a three- to four-year-old duck-size youth.
The younger animal's fossil included short ribbonlike feathers. On its tail, each feather was just 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) long, while on its arms a typical feather was less than 0.8 inch (2 centimeters) long.
By contrast, the older dinosaur sported long quills, with each tail feather measuring 13.7 inches (35 centimeters) long and a typical arm feather measuring roughly 9.8 inches (25 centimeters) long.
The findings suggest feathered dinosaurs might have been undergone a flurry of changes as they matured—unlike anything seen in modern birds, said study co-author Xing Xu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
Dinosaur's Ribbonlike Feathers "Really Bizarre"
Modern birds continuously replace old feathers with new ones. But birds completely change the types of feathers in their coats just once their entire lives: when they switch from warm down to their adult plumage.
Very young dinosaurs are thought to have been covered in down, so the new find suggests that dinosuars went through at least three stages of feather types: full down, to a mix of down and "ribbons," to down and quills.
The long quills on the older Similicaudipteryx are much like those seen on modern birds, and they might have served as ornaments or to help the dinosaur balance itself as it ran.
The younger dinosaur's ribbonlike feathers are superficially similar to some specialized plumes seen today, for example, on birds of paradise. But the ancient feathers are actually a type that has been lost in the course of evolution, and the role they played on the younger juvenile remains unknown.
These extinct feathers would not have been useful for warmth, for example, given how flat they are, Xu said.
While the "ribbons" might have served as ornaments, "in modern animals, structures used for display generally develop relatively late, when the animal is mature, for attracting mates," he added. "Their appearance here is at the wrong stage—it's really bizarre."
Similicaudipteryx's odd changes suggest that early birds and feathered dinosaurs experimented with a diversity of feather types and a variety of ways to use them, "which only later stabilized to the more conservative system we see now with modern birds," Xu said.
"There were very, very strange structures in the history of feathers."
(Charles Q. Choi for
National Geographic News)
