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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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Malaysia’s most up-to-date smartphone store, IMCC, announced that it has dropped the pricing of the Motorola Atrix from RM1,999 previously to RM1,599 currently, save RM400.

Touted as the world’s more powerful smartphone when it was initially launched in January this year, the Atrix was amongst the first smartphones with a dual-core processor. In this case, the Atrix came with a 1GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, a 4.0-inch qHD 960×540 display, a 5MP camera and a massive 1930mAh battery.

IMCC is also throwing a multimedia dock retailing for RM439 for free. The dock allows the Atrix to be connected to a HD TV via HDMI out. It also allows you to connect a USB keyboard and mouse as well.

[Source], [Via]

The video you see here compares the 1080p HD video performance of both the iPhone 4S and the Canon 5D Mark II. The video was shot using a special rig that places the devices side-by-side that allows simultaneous recording as well.

To set the playing field as level as possible, the videographer said that both devices were set up so that the frame rate, picture style, exposure and shutter speed were “as close as possible.”

Here are the settings:
iPhone 4S
– AE.AF locked. That’s all you have!

Canon 5D MKII
– Canon 50mm 1.4
– ISO 160 ~ 640 (varied per shot to match the iPhone)
– F 7~22 (varied per shot to match the iPhone)
– Shutter 1/60th
– Auto WB
– Standard Picture Style
– 1080p 30

The iPhone 4S does give the EOS 5D a run for its money. There’s very little separating the two videos but then again the 5D was set to closely match the iPhone 4S.

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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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