stability

Nokia committed a major gaffe in promoting its Lumia 920, and now the company says it's trying to figure out why.

Last week, the company unveiled its new Windows 8 Phone handsets, with the Lumia 920 starring as its flagship device. Touting the phone's optical image stabilization (OIS), Nokia released a promotional clip supposedly comparing video shot by the 920 using OIS with video shot by a phone without OIS.

But after The Verge noticed an odd reflection in the clip, Nokia fessed up that the OIS-flavored video was actually shot by a normal video camera and not … Read more

To IS or not to IS?

That is the question Canon faced when deciding whether to put image stabilization in a trio of new lenses it announced today. Curiously, it reached two different answers.

For a rework of a highly regarded professional-grade staple, the 24-70mm F2.8, Canon decided against image stabilization, evidently discouraged by drawbacks such as weight, complexity, and expense. But for new incarnations of its 24mm and 28mm F2.8 lenses, IS is now an option.

Canon's new EF 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM follows the pattern of several lens upgrades in recent years: spruce … Read more

Want to mount your iPhone on a tripod? There are lots of third-party accessories that can help, but few are as practical or affordable as the Kungl iPhone Tripod Mount.

Lest you think it sounds crazy to connect a smartphone to a tripod, consider this: the iPhone 4 sports a 5-megapixel camera and can capture 720p video, while the 4S raises the bar to 8 megapixels and 1080p--and even brings image stabilization to the table.

The latter might seem to obviate the need for a tripod, but if you want the sharpest photos and smoothest video, nothing beats one.… Read more

Apple released Safari 5.1.2 (Mac or Windows) to users today, adding some fixes and stability improvements to its official Web browser.

A must-download for any Safari user, the update includes various improvements to stability, addresses issues that caused hangs and excessive memory usage, and will now allow PDFs to display within Web content.

The update also addresses an issue that would cause Web sites to flash white while browsing.

The full list of feature enhancements and fixes is not yet available at Apple's Web site at the time of this writing, but we'll update the Safari … Read more

A certain safety feature in cars could cut the number of fatalities in single-vehicle accidents by almost half and by 20 percent in multi-car crashes, studies have shown.

Car crashes cost $300 billion a year, according to a recent AAA study, and the human cost is even greater. Consumer Reports says a technology known as electronic stability control can dramatically lower the number of deaths in car accidents. Not all vehicles are equipped with the safety feature; in the past, it was often offered as an upgrade. But starting with the 2012 model year, all cars must come with ESC. … Read more

The roadmap called for the sixth Firefox beta to freeze the browser's new features so that developers could work on making them stable, but that plan's been pushed back to the seventh Firefox beta as Mozilla hustled out some quick fixes for the browser. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox 4 beta 6 fixes a a critical stability bug affecting all platforms and a major bug related to plug-ins on Macs.

The stability bug at issue was first reported on August 20th, and remained the top-reported crash-causing bug on Windows versions of Firefox 4 beta 5, with … Read more

For a long time, blurred pictures caused by shaky hands were one of the biggest issues for many photographers. Sure, there are optical and sensor-shift image stabilizers (IS) to help shutterbugs get sharper shots, but their effectiveness is limited: Typically, IS won't work well if you're shooting at 1/10 second and slower, and this figure is affected by the focal length of the lens as well.

Instead of working on hardware IS, a team of Microsoft researchers took the software approach and tackled this digital-imaging issue by coming up with a set of algorithms to help sharpen … Read more

It's been a rocky, surely difficult summer at Twitter as the company attempts to iron out longstanding problems and to prepare its servers for continued growth. The situation has led to a series of very public service outages, including a huge one Monday that left many users unable to sign in, update their profiles, or even sign up for the service in the first place.

Twitter released a series of updates on its company blogs Wednesday night about the problems and how they tie into long-term upgrades that the company has been working on. One announcement: Twitter will open … Read more

Ford's upcoming 2011 Explorer SUV will feature the industry's first inflatable rear seat belt, but that's not the only new technology that will be debuted with the new model. Curve Control is a driver aid system that is designed to help a driver to maintain control of a vehicle when entering a curve--such as a freeway off-ramp--with too much speed. Wait. How, exactly, is that different from regular stability control?

Here's how the new system works: as the vehicle enters a turn, Curve Control measures the driver's steering input and the speed of that input. … Read more