Motorola Droid RAZR review: The new Android king?
01.01.70
The Droid RAZR is equal parts super thin, tough, and elegant. Measuring 0.3 inches at its thinnest point, this 4.5-ounce device has the lowest profile of any handset on the market. The Samsung Galaxy S II and iPhone 4S measure 0.4 inches. The Droid Bionic tapered from 0.4 to 0.5 inches, making that phone look positively bloated in comparison. However, like the Bionic, the Droid RAZR has a bulge that protrudes at the top that houses the speaker and camera. Although the 4.3-inch screen gives the Droid RAZR a fairly large footprint, we barely noticed it in our pocket.
Thanks to a Kevlar Fiber back, a scratch-resistant Corning Gorilla Glass screen, and even a water-repellent coating, Motorola has crafted a very durable device. It felt very solid in our hand and not the least bit slippery. The Droid RAZR is also quite the looker, thanks to diamond-cut accents (such as the Motorola logo above the screen) and angled corners. We especially like the soft-touch finish on the back, which has a cool zig-zag pattern.
Source: msnbc.com
Hough (and some others) play Hough
01.01.70
I began composing around the time I began to play the piano, when I was six years old. Mercifully that large corpus of smudged sketches has disappeared, but until the age of twenty I continued to write quite a lot of music, culminating in a viola sonata – the only early work of mine which has been published. For the next twenty years, owing to a combination of diminishing time and fading compositional self-confidence, I wrote nothing except the odd transcription. Then, after a recital in New York in the late 1990s when I’d played my transcription of Richard Rodgers’s Carousel Waltz, I was chatting with the composer John Corigliano. He said to me: ‘You should compose your own music. The only real difference between a transcription and writing your own pieces is using your themes rather than someone else’s’. The idea lodged at the back of my mind and gradually I started writing again – little pieces for friends based on the letters of their names, a song or two, and a recorder piece requested by John Turner in memory of Douglas Steele, one of my composition teachers. Hearing the latter, the bassoonist from the Hallé Orchestra, Graham Salvage, asked if I’d like to write him a concerto. In a mad moment of reckless courage I agreed to have a go and I started sketching what eventually became 'The Loneliest Wilderness', my first serious piece in two decades. As it evolved, though, the material seemed to take on the voice of a cello rather than a wind instrument, and it was eventually premièred by its dedicatee, Steven Isserlis, in March 2007.
Source: Telegraph.co.uk (blog)