The future of K series from SonyEricsson?

As you may know, the SonyEricsson company bought software from the french mobile producer Sagem, during 2007.
Read here and here about this.

Although SE had claimed that Sagem products are mature, scalable and flexible, I dare to say NOT!.
As a requirement of my daily job, I had to work on several hundreds of mobile mobile phones devices, and I must confess that Sagem are far from easy to use handsets, regarding normal operations beyond the call/answer tasks (connecting to another provider, web surfing, launching web from java applications, etc).

This said, I wonder if SE company (by the way, I am a really big fan of their mobile phones) made a correct decision to buy Sagem software.

Now I am reading on GSMarena that SE is planning to replace the K series of their phones with the C one. No, not C from the end of the name as "...300c" from China, the "C" stands for CyberShot.

The "G" is "Generation Web" and the "S" will be the "Snapshot" (the old "S" was "Slide/Swivel").

What will be the future of the K series? I hope the new products will have even more success than their predecessors.

>>from GSM Arena

After a week of hard Sony Ericsson previewing here at GSMArena, seems like they are still making the headlines again this week. This time it's all about names. The Unofficial Sony Ericsson Blog revealed the new nomenclature scheme that Sony Ericsson will be using in their latest and future products.

Another reported change is that the "i"-symbol will be dropped from now on. As you can see here in the full Sony Ericsson portfolio there are already 8 handsets without the "i" tag. As it seems, all handsets that come without the tag will be following the new naming nomenclature as depicted on the right.

In the same time the "a" and "c" designations are here to stay - they would still denote model versions for the American and Chinese market.

The fate of the K-series is still unknown. Sony Ericsson fans have grown to love the K-phones over the years and we doubt that they will be dumping it so easily, but who knows.

As you already probably know, the new camera-centric mobiles by the brand will be named as C-series - that stems either from Camera or from Cyber-shot. The G-series, which we previewed last week, is named after the Generation Web platform.

And finally, the last reported change is that from now on, the S-series will mean "Snapshot" instead of "Slider/Swivel". We will see about that, as no new products have been announced with the "S" designation.

The rest of the series we've come to know will be left untouched. And you can bet we are looking forward to the Sony Ericsson P5 announcement this summer.

end quote <<

HDR pictures

First of all, I am not a photographer, nor related to the professional photography, nor even having a digital camera.

I've seen lots of photos in my life. Surfing the web, I even discovered several techniques to improve the visual impact of a photo. Visual impact doesn't mean only to boost the contrast of picture's color, but to send a much "visible" message to the viewer.

Since I am not professionally related to the image processing and not even owning a digital camera, I am more than a stranger to the daily tasks that an amateur to a professionally photographer is currently performing when is processing images.

But sometimes, I was questioning myself if it is possible to get from a picture more than we currently see in it. Some of the photos I've seen were good (as far as I can tell as a common viewer) and most of them were bad: not having the proper exposure, lot of blurring due to the lack of a tripod or anything to keep the camera still, vignetting, noise and other image flaws.

Sometimes I was picturing in my mind that someone could have better results if he will use the same picture, but taken in different conditions: under or overexposed, in order to get the picture to the same visual level as a human eye can do it.

Of course this is not possible with the current cameras in one shot only, but we can make the picture in 3 different exposures: under, normal and overexposed. Then, from each of these, we will extract the details we need.

Today I've found that there is such a technique, and is used to make HDR pictures (highdynamicrange).

Look at these photos:

There is nothing to not like them.

And those picture were made with the same technique I've just dreamed of: taking the same picture with 3 different exposures, and then combining into a image processing software as Photoshop or Photomatix.

More of these picture here: http://flickr.com/groups/bestofhdrpictures/pool/

You can search the net for HDR making techniques, as there are available few good tutorials.

100 ads and their real products

Check this site -> pundo3000 <- to see how good at their job are the advertising folks.

100 products described with photos, comparing the container, the advertised picture and the real product.

Humans! - this ain't funny

Spring flower - crocus (primula)

From Gabriela Drinceanu.
Click on the pictures to view full size.