There are few things that can render a smartphone more useless than stepping outside on a bright, sunny day; sunlight is not the friend of any modern display type, and is particularly disruptive to AMOLED screens.

Which is why it’s such a surprise that DisplayMate found in its tests that the Lumia 900 Windows Phone is the best sunlight performer; Nokia’s flagship Windows Phone has an AMOLED display. 

But the Lumia 900’s AMOLED screen also uses a special technology Nokia calls ClearBlack, which employs filters that limit the amount of light reflected back to the user’s eyes. 

Samsung’s Galaxy S (which one?) and Apple’s iPhone 4 tied for second in the DisplayMate tests.  It should be noted that not all smartphones were included in the test, which limits its utility, but you can find all of the results here.

via TheVerge.com

We wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas and a happy holiday season.  We hope you stay warm, enjoy your family and friends, and have some fun!

Site updates will be suspended for the Christmas holiday and will resume on Monday, December 27, 2010.

Mac users were told at the Windows Phone 7 launch earlier this month that a software tool would be made available to allow syncing between WP7 handsets and the Mac OS; now, a beta version of that tool – called Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac – is available for download.

Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac allows Windows Phones to sync “music, videos, photos and podcasts from iTunes and iPhoto.”  It is best understood and categorized as a media syncing tool rather than a full-featured sync solution.  Windows Phone 7 does most of its Personal Information Management (PIM) syncing via the Cloud.

You must be running Mac OS X 10.5 or above to use the Connector for Mac software.

Celebrate Independence Day – at least in part – by downloading The United States Constitution for Android or Windows Mobile. The Windows Mobile version requires Microsoft Reader. 

Read the words that make our lives as Americans possible – even more than two centuries after they were written – on July 4th or any day of the year.

Adobe AIR is a runtime environment that’s brought us a few pretty interesting (and visually impressive) applications over the past couple of years.  Perhaps the most attractive aspect of AIR is that it’s cross-platform, so developers can write apps for AIR that users running Windows, the Mac OS, or Linux can download and enjoy.

Now Adobe is working on getting AIR on mobile devices. And this could be important since such an environment running on multiple device types (Android, Windows Phone, etc.) could make cross-platform software design and distribution a simpler process.

It’s easy to imagine AIR coming to Windows Mobile (or Windows Phone 7) smartphones, and to Android devices (as shown below), but Apple allowing Adobe AIR – an application that could conceivably allow users to bypass the App Store – on the iPhone or iPad just doesn’t seem like a safe bet at this point.

Take a look at the video below to see AIR apps running on the Android-powered Motorola Droid, or for more information on Adobe AIR, visit the Adobe AIR web page.

via Download Squad