SONY ERICSSION MIX WALKMAN

Design

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman is having an identity crisis. It's part MP3 player, part smartphone-wannabe and part budget feature phone, cutting out features to shed pounds. The result is an ill-conceived, often-overpriced and deceptively underequipped phone that would need to lower its price significantly to be in with a chance of winning a half-hearted recommendation.

Once upon a time, when the world was sepia-coloured and men walked around in bowler hats, doffing it at every passer-by, the term "Walkman" held significant power. Although used by many as a generic term for portable audio players, it was actually a Sony brand. Now, in the time of the iPod - when the ubiquity of Apple's iDevices all-but makes the iPod brand a generic term in itself, a Walkman seems like a quaint throwback to days of yore.

The brand is still used in Sony's rather great dedicated MP3 players like the NWZ-A845 and NWZ-A866, but it is rarely seen as prominently in phones as it is in the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman mobile. Could it be because this phone is grasping for a reason, an excuse, to exist?


From a casual glance, it looks a lot like a budget smartphone. It has a 3in touchscreen, a single Home button on the front, but it's chubbier and a bit gaudier than most budget Android or Symbian phones. Between the glossy black front and the matt soft-touch plastic battery cover is a band of bright rubbery plastic. Our review model had a lime green one attached and a silver one stashed in the box, but bright pink and more subdued bronze editions also exist.

You can pull this strip away from the body, altering the look just by quickly popping off the battery cover and switching these bands around. With the silver band on, it's a much classier-looking handset, but the Sony Ericsson Mix still looks and feels more like a £50 phone than one that sells for just under £100. The back is lumbered with too many cluttering bits including speaker ports and logos while the 14mm thickness is chunky and the style lacks coherence. The colourful strip may make the phone look a "bit different", but that doesn't equate to the phone looking good. It's uninspiring stuff at best.

We reckon the silver looks a lot nicer. What do you think?

The body does offer some unusual buttons, though. There's a shutter button on the right edge, pretty unusual at this budget level, and there are two Walkman buttons up top. They take you to the media player and the Zappin function, which we'll cover later. It's enough to just-about justify the phone's Walkman status, but note that there aren't actually any direct playback buttons - no play/pause, no fast forward and rewind.


The internal memory also limits the Mix Walkman's potential as a music player. Fresh out of the box there's just over 100MB of free internal memory, barely enough for an album encoded at a decent bit-rate. Yes, the memory is expandable and microSD cards are very cheap, but it's no way for a "music player" phone to make a good impression.    

Any phone function can be put into these four corner shortcut spots, and the shortcuts appear on both of the two home screens. Before you get excited at the mention of home screens, hold back. They don't do much. One houses a clock while the other displays the favourite contacts list. It looks like a cover flow system, but is static. Like so much of the Mix Walkman, early promise falls apart like a talcum power statue as soon as you look beyond the surface detail.

Delve into the favourite contacts "widget" and there's a bit more to it than just phone numbers, as it collates their Facebook and Twitter updates as well as text messages and call logs - but using it is hopelessly clumsy and, at times, broken. Contacts have to be manually linked to each of their social network accounts, and the Mix Walkman continually refused to link with Twitter, even while signed-into the built-in Twitter app.

The dedicated Twitter and Facebook apps are less problematic - at least they work - but are in reality little more than web links to the services' mobile sites. The giveaways are the browser navigation bar at the bottom and the URL bar at the top. This, along with limited connectivity features ensure this isn't a particularly good social networking phone. There's no 3G connectivity, so tweeting a picture taken with the phone's camera when when out of the house is a slow process. So is looking at other people's pics, although the built-in EDGE connectivity is just about quick enough to make downloading text tweets and updates bearable.


At home, this situation improves. The Sony Ericsson Walkman Mix has Wi-Fi, letting the phone suck data off your home broadband, or the Wi-Fi hotspots of cafes and restaurants. At the best of times, though, this phone is no match for a budget Android phone like the Huawei Blaze or Orange San Francisco. Every time you run one of the phone's connected apps, you're asked whether or not to allow mobile internet access - a question that seems rather redundant when you're accessing Facebook, and one that quickly becomes annoying.

All of the Mix's apps and games are java-based, making them largely incapable of the kind of behind-the-scenes activity that smartphone alternatives are all about. It's not a good way to keep up with emails, requiring manual updates and using a rather basic look. Games tend to look very basic and dated too.
Java gaming - fun, but all a bit 2004

Additional apps and games for the phone are sparse too. There's no proper app store here, just a link to Sony Ericsson's PlayNow WAP portal. This offers no real apps as such, but does have a bunch of additional games, plus wallpapers, music and ringtones. The price of each is much higher than the smartphone norm though, games usually costing £3 a pop.

The one positive thing to say about the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman's low-rent interface is that it's all operated using a fairly responsive capacitive touchscreen. This is the same kind of technology used in the iPhone 4, and means you don't have to press down on the screen to get it to respond - contact alone is enough. However, if it had used a resistive screen, at its price it would deserve to be paraded through the streets while being pelted with tomatoes.


With a 3in widescreen, Sony Ericsson has sensibly left you with T9 numerical keypad input rather than a full Qwerty. This keyboard is used when typing out text messages and in the default web browser. The predictive dictionary is pretty limited, though, and typing-out words manually to get them added to its library feels clumsy and slow. We also wished an option to use a full Qwerty in landscape mode had been included - as there's enough space when held like this. Instead, you're stuck with the T9 pad.    

Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman - Music, Video and Browsing

A "dumb" phone selling for smartphone money, the Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman's one defence is that it's all about the music, not apps and Angry Birds. However, this line of argument doesn't get it very far.

There's no bundled microSD card and the internal memory only offers enough storage for one album. Memory is expandable - there's a microSD slot under the battery - but fresh out of its packaging, it's pretty much useless as a music player.

Undeterred, we loaded up a microSD card with tunes to see if its software is much cop. Press the Walkman button on the phone's top and you're taken directly to the media player. It uses the corner shortcut layout seen throughout the interface. These take you to your library, show the current playlist (or album), and give you access to the Zap and Karaoke functions.

Zappin is Sony's own take on a song preview mode. This plays you either a clip of each song lasting just a few seconds or around 15 seconds, skipping to the next afterwards unless you press the Zappin button up top. It's a neat enough idea, but the execution completely puts us off using it. "Zapping in", "Zapping out" and moving between tracks are all accompanied by whoosing or spoken sound effects. Maybe the kids will enjoy it, but we find it utterly tasteless and a bit embarrassing.

The Karaoke feature is sure to appeal to a similarly niche audience, but at least it doesn't limit its appeal through its technique. It effectively removes the central channel, where lead vocals tend to be mixed, in order to turn normal tracks into backing tracks. It'll also display lyrics if they've been added to your MP3s. Basic ID3 tagging won't do this. It works pretty well.

These secondary features are ones you'll find in Sony's dedicated MP3 players, but these are richer in those dedicated players. There's no pitch altering, no speed changing here - hardly essential but handy if you do want to get your Karaoke on. Our personal highlight of Sony Walkman's partly-superfluous features is SenseMe. This scans through your music and splits it into moods, effectively making playlists for you. There's an option for this within the Mix's music player, but it doesn't split up tracks for you like the NWZ-A866 will. Instead you have to get your computer to do that for you, before syncing the music to your phone. Who would have thought an MP3 player would have more power than a phone these days?

Once stocked with albums, the Mix offers a perfectly decent music experience. Navigation's fine, cover art displays and the audio output quality is solid if unremarkable. However, when its extra features aren't worth shouting about, and there's not a full complement of playback buttons, its musical ability won't trounce any other half-decent £80-100 phone with a 3.5mm headphone jack. The supplied MH140 earphones are well above average for a bundled pair, though, offering decent bass and clarity. But they leak sound, offer no isolation and aren't as comfortable as an IEM-style pair - in our opinion.

 
Whatever way you look at it - not a web browsing star

The browsing experience is more notable, but not for a good reason. There are two separate web browsers pre-installed - Sony Ericsson's own stab and Opera Mini, probably the most popular "third party" phone browser. The interface of each is good enough, but hampered by a number of technical limitations. The screen, at 240x400 pixels and 155dpi, is very low-res, there's no multi-touch support and without 3G connectivity, it's too slow to load full web pages unless you're on a Wi-Fi connection.

Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman - Camera, Call Quality, Battery Life and Verdict

The Sony Ericsson Mix has a basic 3.2-megapixel camera. There's no flash and it's fixed focus, but there are a few features missing from most affordable alternatives, most notably the dedicated camera button.

This, in tandem with the fixed focus, makes taking pictures pretty quick. With an autofocus sensor, you'd have to wait for the camera to hone-in on its subject. It does limit the kind of photos you can take, though. Try and get a shot of something up close and it'll be blurry, but we've seen worse performance in phones of this spec. As you can see below, while the berry-like bits on the branches aren't entirely sharp, they're not a blurry mess either.

In perfect conditions, the relatively low resolution and budget sensor limit the amount of detail captured, and colours are fairly muted too. It'll do the job for the most basic of applications - for sending MMS messages or posting the odd shot to a social network. But you won't get shots worth printing out, even at standard 6x4in size. If you're desperate to save your shots for posterity, connecting the phone to a computer lets you access the file system directly, for drag 'n' drop transfer.



Unusual even in a budget phone, you're given no control over the camera's settings. The camera app uses the corner shortcut layout adopted throughout, but these only give you access to the gallery, the stills/video switch and a touchscreen shutter button. Manual settings are of limited use in such a low-powered camera anyway, but panorama and burst shot modes would have been appreciated - and the lack of some fun effects seem like an oversight in an arguably youth-oriented device.

Call quality is decent if unspectacular. The earpiece speaker is nice and loud, but there's no noise cancellation to combat noisy environments.


The Mix Walkman is powered by a 1000mAh battery. This is a bog-standard capacity for a small-screen phone like this, but the phone lasts longer than a proper smartphone because it doesn't have 3G and its apps don't secretly pay poker with each other while the phone's in your pocket. Under normal nonintensive use, it can last for a solid 2-3 days off a charge. Set it to more intensive tasks and the battery performance is thoroughly unremarkable.

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman would seem like an OK deal if its price were lowered, but, as is, it competes with fully-fledged smartphones. And it doesn't come off too well. There's no 3G, no GPS (ruling out using the phone to find out where you are) and there are no worthwhile apps here. Its Walkman cred can't make up for these gaps and its generally good-looking UI is all surface and no substance. It falls well short of earning a recommendation. Seek out the Samsung Galaxy Europa or Orange San Francisco for the real smartphone package, or look to spend less.


Verdict
 

The Sony Ericsson Mix Walkman wills buyers to believe it's a smartphone, with an interface that looks snazzy and seems to offer plenty of connected functionality at a quick glance. The problem is that it isn't, and doesn't. There's no 3G connectivity, and while Wi-Fi is on-board the clumsy implementation of built-in apps makes web browsing and social networking feel clunkier than it would with other phones.      

CHINA ANTRACTIC ASTRONOMY BASED IN ACTICE SEARCH FOR ALIEN LIFE

Chinese astronomers are actively searching for Earth-like planets using survey instruments in Antarctica, as they believe efforts to seek an extra-solar planet that harbors

life will soon be rewarded.Chinese astronomers installed the first of three Antarctic Survey Telescopes (AST3-1) at Dome Argus, located at the highest elevation on the Antarctic continent, at the beginning of the year. One of its primary missions is to search for extra-solar planets suitable for life.

Antarctica has the best conditions on Earth for astronomical observation, as it has very flat ground, a transparent atmosphere and little turbulence. The ground-based telescopes here will bring us precious information from the universe.

Chinese astronomers now rely on an Iridium satellite phone to give orders to and receive data from their survey instruments in Antarctica, which only allows them to send and receive a small amount of data at a time.

They search through a wide range of main sequence stars, mainly sun-like stars, and then look for planets within a suitable distance around them. Stars that are smaller and darker than the sun, such as dwarfs, are also in their survey scope.

The second AST3 will be installed in Antarctica between late 2013 and early 2014, while the third one will be installed between late 2014 and early 2015. "These telescopes are expected to help us find at least 100 sun-like stars. We will work with Australian scientists to further study the movement of the stars to calculate their size," Wang said.

Chinese scientists are also planning to set up an Antarctic observatory to further boost their research and broaden the search for habitable planets. If approved and included in the 12th Five-Year Plan, the observatory should go into operation by 2020.

AURIGA WHEEL , A STRANGE GALAXY

The serendipitous discovery of a collision ring galaxy, identified as 2MASX J06470249+4554022, dubbed 'Auriga's Wheel', was found in a SUPRIME-CAM frame as part of a larger Milky Way surv

ey. The ring has a radius of about 10 kpc and a bridge of stars and gas connecting two galaxies.

The collision caused gas to collapse and resulted in a burst of star formation in the ring. In Auriga's Wheel, only 50 million years old, gas flows into the center, pouring fuel onto the central black holes and resulting in the active galaxy.

Institute for Astronomy in Germany noticed the rare galaxy in their image they tentatively dubbed it “Auriga’s Wheel." The redshift of these objects would allow astronomers to explore their distance and confirm that they were likely interacting and not simply a chance alignment. When the data was analyzed, the galaxies were found to lie together at a distance of nearly 1.5 billion lightyears making this a new record holder for furthest ring galaxy.

Auriga's Wheel as seen in the g (left) and r (right) filters from Subaru. But aside from the temporary place in the record books, the pair is interesting in other ways. Modeling of the interaction as well as the spectroscopic data allowed the team to estimate the propagation of the ring to be at ~200 km/sec which would make it 50 million years since the collision occurred.

The image also clearly shows the galaxy that plunged through the center of the more massive, disk galaxy and a distinct trail of gas and dust connects the two. Additionally, both galaxies appear to have Active Galactic Nuclei, which is rare for ring galaxies. However, it is not clear whether the activity was a result of the collision or a property of the individual galaxies prior to the interaction. 

RECORD IS BROKE

To get a grasp on what holds these visible forms of matter together—everything from stars to planets to people—you have to understand how quarks and

gluons interact. That's the essence of quark matter physics—and the Quark Matter 2012 international conference, taking place in Washington, D.C., August 12-18. "We're studying the 99 percent of the mass of the visible universe that isn't explained by the Higgs," says Peter Steinberg, a physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Brookhaven National Laboratory and a participant in the Quark Matter conference.

Visible matter, he explains, is everything made of atoms, which get their mass mainly from the protons and neutrons that make up atomic nuclei. The electrons orbiting around the nucleus contribute practically nothing. But the protons and neutrons, each made of three quarks, are much more massive than the sum of their constituent particles. Where does all the "extra" mass come from?

The answer, physicists believe, lies in how the quarks interact via the exchange of gluons, massless particles that hold the quarks together via nature's strongest force, and interactions among the gluons themselves. To tease apart the features of this force, which gets stronger and stronger if you try to pull the subatomic quarks apart, physicists accelerate atomic nuclei (a.k.a. heavy ions) to near light speed, where the gluons become dominant, and then steer them into head-on collisions at particle accelerators like the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven and the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

FIRST RECORDED HUMAN VOICE FROM EARTH TO ANOTHER PLANET

In historic spoken words radioed to the rover on Mars and back to NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) on Earth, NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

noted the difficulty of landing a rover on Mars, congratulated NASA employees and the agency's commercial and government partners on the successful landing of Curiosity earlier this month, and said curiosity is what drives humans to explore.
"With this voice, another small step is taken in extending human presence beyond Earth, and the experience of exploring remote worlds is brought a little closer to us all," said Dave Lavery, NASA Curiosity program executive. "As Curiosity continues its mission, we hope these words will be an inspiration to someone alive today who will become the first to stand upon the surface of Mars. And like the great Neil Armstrong, they will speak aloud of that next giant leap in human exploration."

"The knowledge we hope to gain from our observation and analysis of Gale Crater will tell us much about the possibility of life on Mars as well as the past and future possibilities for our own planet. Curiosity will bring benefits to Earth and inspire a new generation of scientists and explorers, as it prepares the way for a human mission in the not too distant future," Bolden said in the recorded message.

The telephoto images beamed back to Earth show a scene of eroded knobs and gulches on a mountainside, with geological layering clearly exposed. The new views were taken by the 100-millimeter telephoto lens and the 34-milllimeter wide angle lens of the Mast Camera (Mastcam) instrument. Mastcam has photographed the lower slope of the nearby mountain called Mount Sharp.

"This is an area on Mount Sharp where Curiosity will go," said Mastcam principal investigator Michael Malin, of Malin Space Science Systems in San Diego. "Those layers are our ultimate objective. The dark dune field is between us and those layers. In front of the dark sand you see redder sand, with a different composition suggested by its different color. The rocks in the foreground show diversity -- some rounded, some angular, with different histories. This is a very rich geological site to look at and eventually to drive through."

A drive early Monday placed Curiosity directly over a patch where one of the spacecraft's landing engines scoured away a few inches of gravelly soil and exposed underlying rock. Researchers plan to use a neutron-shooting instrument on the rover to check for water molecules bound into minerals at this partially excavated target. * During the news conference, the rover team reported the results of a test on Curiosity's Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument, which can measure the composition of samples of atmosphere, powdered rock or soil. The amount of air from Earth's atmosphere remaining in the instrument after Curiosity's launch was more than expected, so a difference in pressure on either side of tiny pumps led SAM operators to stop pumping out the remaining Earth air as a precaution. The pumps subsequently worked, and a chemical analysis was completed on a sample of Earth air. 

"As a test of the instrument, the results are beautiful confirmation of the sensitivities for identifying the gases present," said SAM principal investigator Paul Mahaffy of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. "We're happy with this test and we're looking forward to the next run in a few days when we can get Mars data."

Curiosity already is returning more data from the Martian surface than have all of NASA's earlier rovers combined.
"We have an international network of telecommunications relay orbiters bringing data back from Curiosity," said JPL's Chad Edwards, chief telecommunications engineer for NASA's Mars Exploration Program. "Curiosity is boosting its data return by using a new capability for adjusting its transmission rate."
Curiosity is 3 weeks into a two-year prime mission on Mars. It will use 10 science instruments to assess whether the selected study area ever has offered environmental conditions favorable for microbial life.

BLUE MOON ON AUGUST 31 , 2012

It’s not at all clear where the term ‘Blue Moon’ comes from. According to modern folklore it dates back at least 400 years. A Blue Moon is the second Full Moon in a calendar month. “Usually months

have only one Full Moon, but occasionally a second one sneaks in, David said. “Ancient cultures around the world considered the second Full Moon to be spiritually significant.”

Full Moons are separated by 29 days, while most months are 30 or 31 days long, so it is possible to fit two Full Moons in a single month. This happens every two and a half years, on average. By the way, February is the only month that can never have a Blue Moon by this definition. We had one Full Moon on August 2 this year and the second will be Friday night.

Does the Blue Moon actually turn blue? No. Physically colored Blue Moons are rare, and that’s where the phrase comes from, “Once in a Blue Moon”. There are occasions though when pollution in the Earth’s atmosphere can make the Moon appear to look blue in color. The extra dust scatters blue light. For example, the Moon appeared bluish green across the entire Earth for about 2 years after the eruption of Krakatoa in 1883.

There were also reports of a blue-green coloured Moon caused by Mt. St. Helens in 1980 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991. “So in a sneaky sort of way, it could be true,” Dave said with a grin. Look up at the night sky on August 31 and see for yourself. Everywhere in the world the full Moon rises in the east just as the Sun is setting in the west.

“Blue Moons don’t have any real significance scientifically but they’re fun to look at,” David said. “Anytime you can get people out to look at the real sky to me is a great plus, enjoy it while you can this Friday night and while you’re looking moonward, think of Neil Armstrong, OK?

EFFECT OF ELUSIVE GRAVITY WAVES DISCOVERED

Locked in a spiraling orbital embrace, the super-dense remains of two dead stars are giving astronomers the evidence needed to confirm one of Einstein’s predictions about the Universe.

A binary system located about 3,000 light-years away, SDSS J065133.338+284423.37 (J0651 for short) contains two white dwarfs orbiting each other rapidly — once every 12.75 minutes. The system was discovered in April 2011, and since then astronomers have had their eyes — and four separate telescopes in locations around the world — on it to see if gravitational effects first predicted by Einstein could be seen.

According to Einstein, space-time is a structure in itself, in which all cosmic objects — planets, stars, galaxies — reside. Every object with mass puts a “dent” in this structure in all dimensions; the more massive an object, the “deeper” the dent. Light energy travels in a straight line, but when it encounters these dents it can dip in and veer off-course, an effect we see from Earth as gravitational lensing.

Einstein also predicted that exceptionally massive, rapidly rotating objects — such as a white dwarf binary pair — would create outwardly-expanding ripples in space-time that would ultimately “steal” kinetic energy from the objects themselves. These gravitational waves would be very subtle, yet in theory, observable.