Best Android Phones 2013

http://www.android.gs

This will be a very busy year for the Android phones market, with lots of interesting smartphones already launched, but with still more to come. In the beginning of 2013 the biggest players of the Android smartphone market introduced their flagship devices in the January – March time frame. Anyway, there are still a lot of new smartphones to come and some of the ones launched last year are still one of the best on the market.

Last year, the Android segment was dominated by two Samsung releases, the Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note 2, the first one becoming the best selling Android phone ever. LG’s Optimus G was also one of the best of 2012, but it’s delayed launch for the European market didn’t make it a successful device. In fact, the Optimus G was so interesting that Google chose it to underpin its Nexus 4 smartphone. The Mountain View-based giant teamed up with South Korean company and developed the first Nexus device manufactured by LG, which took up the slack from Samsung.

The month of January brought us the first Sony smartphone based on a quad-core processor. The Xperia Z debuted at CES 2013 and, according to analysts it’s already a successful device, with 4.6 million units sold since release.

The Mobile World Congress debuted on February 25, 2013 and we expected both HTC and LG to debut their flagships for 2013 during the Barcelona-based event. The Taiwan-based company surprised us with a special launching event a week ahead of WMC opening, where the HTC One saw the light of day. On the other hand, the LG Optimus G Pro was the star of the Mobile World Congress conference, with tens of journalists waiting in line at LG’s booth just to get their hands on the new phablet.

Samsung didn’t bring their high-end smartphone at neither of the two tech fairs. The Samsung Galaxy S4 was introduced mid March during an Unpacked event in New York.

Anyway, it’s not over yet for the Android phones, because at least for other powerful terminals are expected to debut this year: the Optimus G follow-up, unofficially dubbed LG Optimus G2, the next-gen Galaxy Note phablet, the Samsung Galaxy Note 3, Google’s Nexus 5, and the mysterious Motorola X Phone.

Let’s have a look at the best Android phones of 2013.

The Art of 3-D Printing

As part of our special report on manufacturing, we asked Neri Oxman, a professor at the MIT Media Lab and an internationally recognized artist whose work is part of the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, to create a sculpture that would illustrate the future of manufacturing. (See a gallery of images).

What she produced, in collaboration with MIT materials science professor Craig Carter, is a powerful demonstration of the possibilities of 3-D printing, using techniques that take advantage of the capabilities of 3-D printers in ways that conventional manufacturing techniques cannot.  

3-D printing encompasses a range of technologies—from inkjet heads mounted on gantries that can deposit plastics layer by layer to form intricate models, to more recent laser-based systems that sinter metal powders to make durable parts for airplanes. 3-D printers have mainly been used for prototyping, but they are becoming an option for manufacturing as well, and may eventually even be used to print buildings, Oxman says. But designers and architects haven't yet learned to take advantage of their capabilities.

Oxman, who trained as an architect, says buildings are designed today with an eye toward the components they can be made of—sheets of plywood, panes of glass, steel beams, and concrete columns. As a result, those designs are limited, in much the way Lego bricks constrain the shapes that children can build. There are similar limitations in conventional manufacturing; there are some shapes that simply can't be built with existing molds and machining tools, and designers have had to design with these limits in mind.

Oxman is exploring ways to break with conventional design thinking by looking to patterns and processes found in nature, and using equations that define these processes to generate new designs. The results are often surprising shapes and structures that can be made only with 3-D printers.

To help develop the algorithms needed, Oxman has teamed up with Carter and others. In some cases, the algorithms provide new aesthetics, but they can also have practical applications—such as varying the structure to help bear loads. For one sculpture—a model of a chaise longue reclined chair—Oxman combined algorithms taken from nature with a map of the pressure a body exerts on a chair. The result depends on where the algorithms determine the chair needs to be soft to provide comfort and where it needs to be stiff to provide support.

An Introduction to the Windows Phone 7 Development Platform

On Sep 16th 2010, Microsoft made available the RTW (Released to Web) version of the development platform for Windows Phone 7. In some ways, for many of you, parts of this will be a re-introduction to technologies you already know or with which you have become familiar. This is great news because it means you can become productive very quickly, and that’s no mistake. If you are wondering whether this platform is going to be a success then consider that there are millions of developers out there with existing skills which they can already leverage to build applications for Windows Phone 7. Even for those who have never used tools like Visual Studio before, the barrier for entry is low because the basic toolset has been made available completely free of charge!