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What did we tell you about Siri having problems with the way Asians speak English? Check out this video showing the usually articulate Siri struggling to understand an English-speaking Japanese guy.

Siri is awesome but probably not so in other countries. How would think Siri will fair with the way we Malaysians speak English?

If you’ve spent any time with Siri, you may have noticed that you can actually ask it to search the web for pretty much anything. At this point, Siri fires up a Google search and populates the search field with whatever it thinks you asked. The degree of accuracy here very much depends on your accent and whether it’s a full moon or not, but on the whole, it does the job fairly well.

But did you know that you can also have Siri work its magic with both the Microsoft Bing and Yahoo search engines? Well, you can…

In a post on Search Engine Land, Danny Sullivan reminds us that, should Google not be your search engine of choice, you can always tell Siri which flavor of search you wish to use.

The key is adding the word “Bing” or “Yahoo” to your query, such as, “search Bing for weather” or “search yahoo for Apple earnings.” Siri heads off to the relevant search engine, and you’re golden.

If you prefer to use any one search engine as a default, you can always set that in the iPhone’s Settings, in which case you’d need to say “search Google” to use Google.com. Either way, there’s a little more flexibility here than we first thought.

Google have just bolted on some extra functionality to their rather clever Google Translate app for Android, with their experimental Conversation Mode feature now supporting more languages.

To start yacking away to a Johnny Foreigner, it’s simply a case of speaking into your phone’s microphone and waiting for the Translate app to translate your words of wisdom and read out the translation in the language of your choice.

The person you’re chatting to can then reply into the phone in their own language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you. Google adds:

We’ve also added some other features to make it easier to speak and read as you translate. For example, if you wanted to say “Where is the train?” but Google Translate recognizes your speech as “Where is the rain?”, you can now correct the text before you translate it. You can also add unrecognized words to your personal dictionary.

When viewing written translation results, you can tap the magnifying glass icon to view the translated text in full screen mode so you can easily show it to someone nearby, or just pinch to zoom in for a close-up view.

Multi language support

With English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish now supported, this app could be a real boon for globe-trotting travellers.

However, Google points out that the technology is still in alpha, so factors like background noise and regional accents may affect accuracy, but the more people use it the more accurate it becomes – hence the alpha release.

Google adds that while it is striving to expand full Conversation Mode to even more languages, the Google Translate for Android still supports text translation among 63 languages, voice input in 17 of those languages, and text-to-speech in 24 of them.

You can download the Google Translate app in Android Market — it’s available for tablets and mobile phones running Android 2.2 and up

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Google and Samsung have officially high-fived each other and unviled the result of their collaboration: the Samsung Galaxy Nexus handset which is the first Android Ice Cream Sandwich powered phone on the planet.

It’s a slim creation with a super slender form factor, sporting a hefty 4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED, 1280 x 720 (720p) display backed by a 1.2GHz dual-core processor and a generous 1GB RAM onboard.

Measuring 8.94mm thick and weighing 135g, the Nexus has a 5-megapixel rear camera with an LED flash (capable of shooting 1080p video), with a front-facing 1.3 megapixel snapper.

Samsung says that there is no shutter lag on their new creation, and there’s also a new single motion panorama mode onboard.

Other specs include NFC tech, Bluetooth 3.0, 802.11n Wi-Fi and HSPA+, a proximity sensor and, rather curiously, a barometer.

Best of all, the Nexus comes with the next generation of the Android OS, which regales under the daft name of ‘Ice Cream Sandwich’ – or Android 4.0 if you prefer.

The Galaxy Nexus will be available in 16GB and 32GB flavours, with a November UK launch scheduled.

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We’re received an update from Brightstar confirming that the sleek looking Motorola RAZR will be coming to Malaysia, and that’s all we know for now as Brightstar did not say when the device will be launch and how much it will cost.

Looking at how things are panning out, a November launch date is very possible and looking at the trend of smartphone pricing currently, the RAZR shouldn’t cost more than RM2,200 or thereabouts.

So, are you waiting for this?

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