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Get discounts with Foursquare app

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Groupon, which delivers deals and coupons to its users through emails, is mulling its options to offer daily deals to Foursquare users.

Foursquare is a mobile application that helps its users explore new hangouts and other interesting places. Participating merchants usually offer deals to first-time visitors or Foursquare groups visiting their businesses.

It has about 10 million registered users worldwide, of which three million check in to various locations on the every day.

People can either be befriended on Foursquare or they can import their Facebook friends. In version 1.3 of the iPhone app of Foursquare, push notifications are also enabled, so whenever a friend checks in somewhere exciting, users will know about it right away.

Daily deals and discount coupons promise to be an important part of our lives and Foursquare aims to exploit just that. Foursquare does not have many users in India as of now though some big names such as Cafe Coffee Day and Blue Frog have started rewarding customers who come through Foursquare.

When the location based app started, other than for games, there seemed not much point in it. Now that user numbers are rising, businesses realise that Foursquare users spend more time in their stores , and spend more money. And so companies try to garner more customer attention. With Foursquare, businesses can also find out which of their stores is doing well.

With 85 million users and numerous business associations, Groupon may turn out to be just the right kind of ally for Foursquare to grow into a bigger business entity.

Five best free audio players on Android

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Five best free audio players on Android

The stock media player in your smartphone offers basic functionality, which is good for a basic music listener but it will never satisfy a music enthusiast. Today smartphone manufacturers are trying to add better and better audio related hardware in their smartphones in order to turn them into perfect all in one devices.

Smartphones offer much more functionality compared to feature phones, and with networks spreading across India at a faster pace, data accessibility using smartphones has increased multi fold: 3G networks have given way to extremely fast data transfer speeds for video and audio streaming etc.

In terms of multimedia and entertainment, smartphones are preferred to media players because they offer more functionality than the average media player does, but as mentioned earlier, the stock players on Android are good enough for a basic job. For more fussy listeners there are better apps available from the Android store. Here we have the five best free audio player applications available on Android Market that will definitely amplify your music listening experience:

Double Twist player

Ever wonder how much time an average person spends syncing his playlists and songs on his PC, phone and other devices? Double Twist helps save that time by allowing users to sync their mobile phones or Android devices with the music stored on their computer over the air without any wires.

This application recognizes the audio files on your computer, from among which the user can select the sync list for the device and once the application is started on the smartphone, all data is synced using wireless connections or WiFi. The application also allows Mac users to sync Android devices using iTunes.

TuneWiki

It often happens that we do not understand the lyrics of a song while listening to it, especially when the song is not in our mother tongue. There are also times when we want to quote from a song we like. Here’s where TuneWiki comes to the rescue. Apart from being just a media player TuneWiki also displays live lyrics with the song being played.

With lyrics translated in over 40 languages, the TuneWiki player can search for lyrics to over 2.5 million songs. All the user needs is an active internet connection along with an updated song library. Now just go ahead and listen to your tune and sing along with it.

Mort Player

What is the use of putting songs in different folders when your audio player cannot understand the way you have segregated the music and still plays it on the basis of the artist or album? If you are also suffering from the same problem then shift to Mort Player, which remembers folders and displays songs based on their location regardless of the artist tag.

Now there’s no need to struggle through the playlist for finding that favourite song, which you forgot and are now unable to locate. Just go to the folder you saved it in and start jamming.

Mood Agent

The Mood Agent application is a smart audio player that identifies different types of music and recommends songs based on the listener’s mood. Users do not need to tag music to any particular mood. This the does automatically. The user does need to choose his mood from among a list of options though.

Users are free to use this application to play selected tracks if they do not want to use the song suggestion feature. First-time users will need to have both patience and an active internet connection as Mood Agent will catalog the music library and will share info with its online servers, which in turn tag the songs for different moods.

btunes

The btunes application is unique due to its simple design, which is based on the iTunes player on iPhone with bigger, easy to access buttons for almost every function.

So if you also love the way this app looks, or want to jazz up your audio player iTunes style, look no further.

Opera Mini 6 browser now available for iOS devices

anil-satapathy
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Opera Software has launched the Opera Mini 6 for iOS and is available to download for free from the Apple Store for iPhone and iPad.

“We have put in a lot of rehearsal and clever thought behind the new experience. The Opera Mini browser has always kicked up the tempo when downloading pages; now the browsing flows along to a smooth, easy beat,” said Opera’s chief executive officer Lars Boilesen on the launch of the browser on the App Store.

The Opera Mini mobile browser provides a different kind of browsing experience to complement the default iPad and iPhone browser. It features up to 90 per cent compression of data traffic for speed and cost savings.

The browser adapts to the high and changes the user interface to accommodate the screen size, hence is suitable for iPhone4. Also, the Opera Mini 6 browser will switch to a more convenient view for tablet handling, claims the company.

The iOS version of the Opera Mini 6 features a much faster and smoother panning and zooming that lets the user get all the way into the details of every page, in one smooth motion.

You can also share buttons to share the love for a site to your friends on My Opera, Facebook, Twitter or vKontakte right from the Opera Mini 6 browser.

The company has also redesigned menus of the browser. Scrolling and panning are ultra fast, even on the largest webpages, for instant access.

On iOS, the Opera Mini 6 browser is submitted as a single download for all iOS devices.

The Opera Mini 5 browser for iOS was launched in April 2010.

Letsbuy.com launches Acer Iconia Tab W500

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LetsBuy.com, an online retailer of digital lifestyle and IT products, has announced the availability of Acer Iconia Tab W500. The device is being offered along with a Keyboard Docking Station and is priced at Rs 31,999.

If you don’t have a credit card or don’t want to pay through it, you have Cash on Delivery option as well.

The Tab W500 runs on Windows 7 operating system and has a 10.1 inch 1280×800 wide-screen multi-touch display.

Acer Iconia offers WiFi, Bluetooth, dual 2.0 ports for quick data transfers, 3.5 mm mini-jack line out for headphone/speaker connection, and an HDMI port with High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP), allowing quick and easy output to a HDTV for viewing files and web pages on a large HDTV screen.

With the full-size dockable keyboard, complete with Ethernet port for fast Internet connections, a USB port for external devices and the integrated Acer FineTrack pointing device with two buttons for effortless navigation, the Acer ICONIA TAB W500 creates a seamless bridge between portability and productivity. Just click here to watch the device in the video.

Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone debuts in India

rahul-gupta
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Samsung Mobiles India today unveiled its latest creation, the Samsung Galaxy S2 smartphone, which is the upgrade of Samsung Galaxy S announced last year. The phone will be hitting the markets next month and is priced at Rs 32,890 for the 16 version.

Although there are both 16GB and 32GB versions available internationally, but for reasons untold, the Galaxy S 2 will only be available in 16GB capacity in India. There is no official word from Samsung on the future availability of the 32 GB version.

The Galaxy S2 is based on 2.3 Gingerbread operating system and has a 4.3 inch (Active-Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode) Plus display, which is better than the conventional AMOLED displays in terms of contrast ratio and colour reproduction.

The S2 also features an ARM cortex A9 based 1.2 GHz dual core and a dedicated graphics chip from ARM MALI. A 1 GB has been included for better functioning. The phone comes with HDMI and for on the go connectivity as well (Separate accessories needed to be purchased to use these features as they do not come as a part of the handset bundle).

It features an 8 back camera which is capable of full 1080 video recording, and a 2 megapixel front facing camera. S2 will have support for Near Field Communications or as well for mobile transactions.

The Galaxy S2 will be up for prebooking form tomorrow (Thursday) onwards through the Samsung online store for a token amount of Rs 1,000.

Samsung has also tied up with Vodafone to launch this phone in India. Hence, you can also buy this phone from Vodafone stores from June 3 onwards. Vodafone will be offering a complimentary 1GB per month data usage for the customers of Samsung Galaxy S2 for the next six months as a part of the deal.

Users can also wait a little further as the Galaxy S2 will go for sale through all Samsung stores starting June 9.

500 Windows Phone updates coming today

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The latest upgrade of Windows Phones 7 will bring about 500 updates to the operating system, its creator, Microsoft has announced.

The updates, dubbed as the Mango update, will be announced in New York later today. The company will also provide details on the companies who will be producing Windows Phones and the associated carriers.

“We have a big launch event to talk about the next release of Windows Phone tomorrow (Tuesday) so that information will be, uh, forthcoming, including some of the particulars about who’s going to be building Windows Phones and which carriers will be offering them here in Japan,” said Steve Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive officer, during the Microsoft Developer Forum at Shinagawa Intercity, Japan on Monday.

The latest announcement is in line with The Mobile Indian’s earlier report.

Ballmer also expressed hopes that developers would create fun applications around the live tiles, the widget like appearance that makes the Windows Phone home screens beautiful. The live tiles also allow the users to link to a deeper page of an from the home screen itself, thus enabling easy access to the users.

The number of updates, 500, announced is huge so it may be possible all may not be covered in today’s New York event.

On Skype, he said, “Helping people communicate is an important part of what Microsoft does and Skype will help it achieve that goal.”

Smartphones getting more powerful

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The most common of these processors are Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, Texas Instrument’s OMAP 4 and Samsung’s Hummingbird. The main advantages that smartphone users can expect from multi-core chips include faster web page loading, better performance, a better gaming experience, smooth user interface and better multitasking. Increasingly, smartphones can be used to watch television, and can play and capture full high definition, or 1080p video.

Features such as DLNA media streaming and HDMI output allow users to watch videos from their phones on their televisions. Forget the DVD player, the phone is all set to work as a most versatile media player, and this is just one aspect of what can be done using phones based on multi-core chipsets .

Hard core gamers would love the extra layer of detail in game graphics and the speed with which games are rendered on phones.

Some smartphones such as Motorola’s Atrix fit into a dock that has a keyboard and monitor so that they end up working like computers.

Most high end smartphones run on these chips. All the big manufacturers – from Apple to Motorola to HTC – are making phones using 1GHz processors. In the run up to the transition towards dual core chips, Nvidia is the company which managed to garner most attention by coming up with dual core Tegra 2 chips. In fact, the tablet version of Android, version 3.0 or Honeycomb, has been designed around it, and this operating system is capable of running several applications at once.

This doesn’t mean that other dual core chips are far behind. The TouchPad from HP is likely to use a 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, whereas Acer will use a 1 GHz Snapdragon for its Iconia Smart tablet. HP’s TouchPad will be based on operating system, and Iconia Smart will run on Android. BlackBerry PlayBook from Research In Motion runs on QNX operating system powered by a 1 GHz dual core OMAP 4 processor. The smartphones using dual core Tegra 2 processors include Motorola Atrix and LG Optimus 2X, and Samsung Galaxy S II uses a similar produced by Samsung itself.
Multi-core phones are not going to arrive in the market any time soon, but this technology has been demonstrated at the Mobile World Congress. The actual performance of three or four core processors in phones remains to be seen, and their arrival may take some time. The companies which have announced multi-core processors include Freescale and Marvell. Nvidia is also coming up with a quad core chip known as Kal-El.

So one thing is for sure, mobile hardware is moving ahead at great speed, and to keep up with processing requirements, more and more cores are simultaneously being used in phone processors. Anything is possible on smartphones, and if there is something users can’t do, they just need to wait.

You can be a Radio broadcaster using your phone!

nilabh-jha
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Your mobile has been your phone, calculator, alarm, mini computer and so many other things. However, do you know it can also be your own radio station?

According to report published in Daily Bhaskar, Prof Kavitha Ranganathan and Prof Ankur Sarin, faculty members at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIMA), have proposed to use mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) to start community radio service where each community member can air his/her own programme.

MANETS are conventionally used in areas like disaster recovery or military operations. It uses various network capabilities of a mobile phone, such as Bluetooth, WiFi and the cell network itself, to form a mess of devices in the near vicinity.

Each device in a MANET is free to move independently in any direction, and will therefore change its links to other devices frequently. Each must forward traffic unrelated to its own use and therefore be a router.

The primary challenge in building a MANET is equipping each device to continuously maintain the information required to properly route traffic. Such networks may operate by themselves or may be connected to the larger Internet.

In a working paper, titled “A Voice for the Voiceless: Peer-to-peer Mobile Phone Networks for a Community Radio Service”, Ranganathan and Sarin propose a decentralised community station in which users will be required to buy a basic low-end mobile phone preloaded with the MANET software.

The software is used for groups of mobile devices without any centralised administration or control which form an ad hoc network among themselves. The paper states that if there are enough such users, the phone will automatically form an exclusive network among them enabling users to talk to one another and exchange other forms of data.

“We envision a true peer service where any participant of the peer-to-peer network can be a source of audio content. This entails each phone in the network to broadcast reliable and efficient voice-based data packets to every other node in the network,” states the paper.

The idea of the MANET based community radio channel is to be completely decentralised. Every community member is equally equipped to air their content on the radio service, without a central authority choosing or filtering the content.

To decide which user will be allowed to broadcast at what time, the paper proposes a weekly in-person meeting of the community members where all users interested in an airslot can participate.

“A weekly schedule can be drawn up in a democratic fashion, a simple table of node identities (phone numbers), start times and end times. This table can then be confidentially broadcast to all nodes and stored in each peer phone’s memory. When a user tries to broadcast content, it is only forwarded to other nodes if the schedule permits it,” states the paper.

To filter content during broadcast, the paper suggests use of a decentralised reputation based scheme where users can keep track of past performance of their peers and regulate participation depending on their reputation.

TouchPad will be better than the No 1 tablet: HP

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Hewlett-Packard’s TouchPad will be better than the number one tablet computer, the company’s European head Eric Cador has said.

While speaking at press conference in Cannes, Cador said that there are ample opportunities for HP to get the top spot and that the company would call its position “number one plus”.

HP has tasted immense success in the personal computer market and wants to emulate the same in the mobile devices market as well.

The iPad from Apple remains the best selling tablet computer so far. HP’s attempt looks audacious considering the huge lead commanded by Apple and Google with their and operating systems respectively.

HP is bringing the TouchPad based on its own WebOS, another operating system entrant in an already crowded market.

HP also prides itself on being the only company which is equally strong in both consumer and enterprise space, and it plans to leverage its strength to deliver a great user experience.

The only problem with what HP is trying to do, it is not bringing its product to the market. Consumers are not likely to wait for a device which will come in the future when they already have two good alternatives available in the market &#151 Android tablets and Apple’s iPad 2.

Toshiba to launch its new Android Tablet shortly

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Toshiba is all set to launch an 3.0 powered tablet which has now been named ‘Thrive’. The tablet boasts off a 1GHz Dual core Tegra 2 processor, WiFi, 3.0 and 10.1 inch capacitive touch screen with 1280 x 800 native resolution.

The camera duty is done by a front 2MP webcam with microphone and 5MP webcam with Auto-focus and with 720p Video capture at the back. The tablet has a 32GB and a full card slot for external storage.

The pricing is also lucrative at $579 (Rs 26,200), and is available for pre-order at jr.com for international buyers with a coming soon tag.

However, Toshiba Japan seems to have delayed the launch to the third quarter of this calendar year, so the date of launch is unclear. When we asked India representative of the company she refused to comment.

However Toshiba having already launched its Prot&#233g&#233 12 inch tablet in India, this tablet should also be launched sooner than later.

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