Tech news: Galaxy gets better, Twitter faster!

Here's a quick round up of the latest and hottest happenings in the world of gadgets and gaming this week

Too much happening in the world of gadgets and gaming for you to keep up with? Fear not here's the weekly roundup of all the gadget stories that you need to know about!

Samsung Galaxy S II to release in May, gets dual-core speed bump to 1.2 GHz

The Samsung Galaxy S II was introduced back in February . First expected to arrive by March, it now seems the earliest any retailer will stock the Galaxy S II is 29th April, over in Germany. Samsung Mobile India however, announced a bigger delay, stating a June release date. We don't know who to believe. A lot must be going on backstage, and now Samsung has announced via its official Estonian Facebook page that its flagship Android phone will now ship with its dual-core processor upgraded to a 1.2GHz clockspeed, instead of the original 1GHz specs.

The super-slim 8.49 mm thick Galaxy S II was already pretty powerful, with the Exynos chipset featuring a Samsung-designed dual-core Cortex-A9 CPU and a Mali 400 GPU.
It's evident Samsung intends to give the Galaxy S II some speed to match more powerful competitors over the course of the year, with a nifty BIOS upgrade happily tiding the way until the Galaxy S III comes along.

Congratulations India, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play has finally and officially arrived! The Xperia Arc has also come along for the ride. Sony Ericsson has officially announced the availability of the two Android Gingerbread phones in the country, pricing the Xperia Play at Rs 35,000, and the Xperia Arc at Rs 32,000.

Those who pre-ordered either the Xperia Arc or the Xperia Play from Flipkart or Letsbuy.com will not be regretting their decisions, as the prices that were then quoted were substantially lower than the official MRP, just like with the Samsung Google Nexus S.

The Arc was priced at Rs 28,499, and the Play was priced at Rs 30,999, so you can expect street prices to be at around the same level.

The Xperia Neo is expected soon, another phone that has been available for pre-order in India for Rs 24,990.

So you think Google, Yahoo and Bing are the only search engines around? Well, you aren't entirely wrong, but five-year old Twitter too has a search functionality, and although it may not be comparable to the search giants, it still serves over a billion search queries a day.

On Twitter, a search can be for a particular term, but more often it is for a term which begins with a hashtag.

Twitter recently changed to a Java server called Blender, which has reportedly made its search function upto three times faster.

Seen below is a graph, which Twitter engineer Krishna Gade has used to illustrate the drop in search latencies. The week prior to launching Blender, the search queries around the Japan tsunami and the earthquake resulted in a spike in the latency.

According to the Twitter Engineering blog, the search latency has come down from 800ms to around 250ms and the CPU load on the front-end servers has been cut into half. This essentially means that Twitter can handle more requests per machine, thus requiring investment in fewer servers and a fast response.

Hopefully, now we should expect less encounters with the (in)famous Twitter fail whale.

A new full-touch HP webOS phone has been spotted, with leaked images of a Pre-like keyboard-less device assumed to be the Stingray floating around the web.

Though it does seem to sport a larger than Pre-size display, the leaking party describing the device as "an EVO with webOS" hardly seems right.

Not much else is known about the device, and what seems to be a front-facing camera may just be an ambient light or proximity sensor.

HP's as yet unofficial decision to go full-touch with webOS was inevitable, with a large part of the smartphone market eschewing a physical keyboard.