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Interest begins to build around BlackBerry PlayBook

prasoon-kumar
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With Playbook launch round the corner, all eyes have now been shifted to the Research in Motion (RIM) which is under pressure from the rise of iPhone and phones.

“I don’t fully understand why there’s this negative sentiment, and I just don’t have the time to battle it. Because in the end, what I’ve learned is you’ve just got to prove it over and over and over,” RIM co-chief executive officer Mike Lazaridis has said while talking to the New York Times.

Dismissing the theories that RIM is under pressure, he said that the company has presence in 170 countries with 500 carriers, and is growing consistently, but that people don’t appreciate it.

RIM is going to launch its PlayBook tablet on April 19.

Balsillie agreed that it would have been better if RIM had moved faster to produce a tablet. But he also notes that the transition process is extremely tough and most companies do not manage to get it right and die in the process.

The PlayBook comes with a dual core which means it can run several applications at the same time, and it can play Flash videos at good (even on bigger screens). The problem is, PlayBook doesn’t have many applications which users can run, so they won’t have much option to use this facility.

RIM still has a strong base of customers as it has access to governments and big businesses, who buy this device for its high security data network.

With PlayBook, RIM has taken a big step outside its comfort zone. It runs Flash and Adobe AIR over the QNX platform. The earlier BlackBerry handsets used to run Java-based platforms only.

RIM has also been wooing developers for some time but we don’t yet know how successful the company has been in its endeavour.

RCom launches Music Mania service

anil-satapathy
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Reliance Communications has introduced two services, Music Mania and Full2Music, that allow the users to listen, share and download full songs.

Music Mania offers music across genres of 21 Indian languages. Subscribers can choose among Bollywood, Bhajans, International Hits, Ghazals, Bhojpuri, Tamil, Gujarati, Bengali, Marathi, Telugu along with latest and old full songs.

To subscribe, users need to press “#” button on the mobile phone keypad during the playback of any song and consumer’s Social Networks automatically pop-up the recommendation to all friends. The service is available at Rs 10 per week for an unlimited access to music. To activate the service one needs to dial 543219.

Full2Music is subscription based full song download service available for Rs 1 per song. It includes a huge catalogue of 75000+ full length songs across varied genres. Customers can download files once, songs in excess of 3-5 minutes or longer, and listen anytime on any MP3 device and download songs again for free from My Songs section.

One can start the service by sending F2M to 54646 from his phone. Full song download subscription packs are also available at Rs 100 and Rs 30 per week.

Free BlackBerry mobile conferencing app unveiled

nilabh-jha
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Research In Motion (RIM), makers of Blackberry smartphones, has launched a new conferencing application, BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing. Available on BlackBerry platform, the easily facilitates organising conferences among a small group of people.

The application is aimed at small businesses having BlackBerry who could use it to schedule conference calls between participants with invites. The app could then automatically dial in participants, and re-connects dropped calls back to the conference through a notifications interface.

The application integrates with native BlackBerry apps, including the Calendar app, and could also sync with other services like both Google Apps and Microsoft Office, with little help from your company’s IT team.

The software, available in the BlackBerry Beta Zone, will be offered for free. It integrates with the calendar of consumer phones, and provides ‘one click join’ to allow one to dial into the conference call without needing the users to remember lengthy phone numbers, extensions and calling codes.

Although the application works well for its intended purpose, other third party applications offer the same and more features with support for different mobile platforms like and Android.

RIM recently created various apps internally in a bid to increase available apps for its platform and made them available free of charge in BlackBerry App World as developers are adopting fast growing and iOS instead of Balckberry.

Nokia X7 announced

rahul-gupta
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As reported by The Mobile Indian earlier, Nokia has announced the launch of its latest, the Nokia X7, in London.

With its four inch offering 16 million colours and a of 640 x 360 pixels and quality sound output, Nokia has positioned the X7 as an entertainment smartphone.

The X7 will also feature the latest update of the Symbian operating system, the Symbian Anna. It features a brand new look and feel along with an improved interface for a fluid gesture movement which is very responsive. The new Symbian has a new also which is expected to be three times faster than the existing browser.

The X7 will feature a preinstalled 8 memory card which can be upgraded till 32 GB and a 320 MB of functioning as its RAM/ROM as well. The display is protected by Croning’s Gorilla glass to protect it from minor scratches and breakage during accidental falls. To add more strength to the phone, Nokia has designed this phone in a stainless steel shell, which will enhance its longevity too.

The device measures 119.7 x 62.8 x 11.9mm but is comparatively thinner around the edges and weighs 146g.

It offers the next generation Pentaband 2G/3G network connectivity and 802.11 b/g/n WiFi support along with 3.0 and USB connectivity. It offers a 3.5mm audio connector for external audio connectivity. The installed 1200mAH battery is expected to give up to 450 hours of standby and 4.5 hours talk time while being on a network and will be comparatively more on 2G network as well.

The Nokia X7 will start shipping to most countries in Q2 2011 and, before taxes and operator subsidies, it will cost around 380 euros which translates to Rs 25000 approximately.

Samsung SII smartphone debuts in India

The Mobile Indian Network
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Samsung has launched the latest Galaxy S II smartphone in India, which is touted as world’s slimmest handset in its category.

The phone runs on 2.3 Gingerbread, and has a 4.27 inch Super AMOLED Plus display (one of the best in the market), a dual core processor, Touchwiz 4.0 user interface design, an 8 mega camera with the ability to capture 1080p video, and a 2 mega pixel front camera for video chats.

The Super Amoled technology promises almost double the contrast, 18 percent better brightness, 16 per cent more colour compared to the IPS panels (which is currently industry best).

The smartphone also has a 1 RAM, 32 GB slot, Wifi, 3.5 mm audio jack, support, Google Mobile Services, 3D TouchWiz UX and 4 hubs &#151 Social hub, Readers hub, Music hub and Game hub.

The phone comes with HSPA+ capable of 21 MBPS, and 5GHz WiFi which will help you stream live content from your Samsung 3D TV (which was also launched) or internet.

Galaxy SII will be the best successor of Galaxy S, with better readability, better battery, a slimmer design, faster downloads, smoother UI, quicker multi tasking, efficient gaming and snappier streaming. Now there are 5 Galaxy Smart phones in the market namely Galaxy Fit (3.3 inch screen), Ace (3.5 Inch screen), Pop (3.1 inch screen), and Galaxy Pro (Touch screen plus keypad).

Samsung has also launched a range of 3D LED TV with Internet capablity, Galaxy SII can be used as a remote control for these TVs, you can also see the the telecast on your mobile phone as well.

The phone will be available in market after two weeks and will be priced at around Rs 30,000.

Samsung’s Tab 8.9, Tab 10.1 comes to India

The Mobile Indian Network
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Samsung has announced the availability of Galaxy Tab 10.1 and Galaxy Tab 8.9 in India.
The new tablets, as Samsung claims, are the thinnest mobile tablets measuring just 8.6 mm. While Galaxy Tab 10.1 weighs 595 grams, the 8.9 version weighs 470 grams.

Both the tablets have similar features and specification. Based on the 3 or the Honeycomb, the tablets have better Flash support, full HTML web rendering capabilities, better power management, and a neater user interface.

Another welcome inclusion is the adoption of Nvidia’s dual core Tegra 2 clocked at 1 GHz, and DDR2 based RAM. The devices are capable so users will get up to 21 download speeds depending on the operator.

This devices offer better graphics and gaming experiences, and for that it also has a gyroscope and an accelerometer.

For multimedia, the tablets feature stereo speakers and full 1080p playback at 30 frames per second, which can also be played on a big screen TV with the help of HDMI out port.

As compared to the previous version of Galaxy Tab, the new Galaxy Tab 10.1 features a bigger 6860 battery and comes in 32 and 64 GB variants.

There has been no news on the pricing of the tablets so far.

Micromax Bling 2 coming next month

Sandeep Budki
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In a move to win the hearts of female mobile users, Indian handset maker Micromax will release Bling 2, a successor to Bling Q55, in May.

Sources familiar with the development in Micromax, said to The Mobile Indian, “Bling 2 will be launched in the first week of May and it will be priced at around Rs 9,000.”

Bling 2 will have a 2.2 inch capacitive touchscreen and will run on 2.2. It will also have Bluetooth, GPRS, WAP, MMS, and a 3.5 mm audio jack.

Bling Q55, a dual phone, sports Swarovski keys, a compact rear mirror, 2 camera, and preloaded Opera Mini browser. It has a swivel design.

Micromax joined the Android handset bandwagon some time back with the launch of A60 priced at about Rs 7,000. Micromax A60 is one of the most affordable Android handsets available in the market.

MTS to launch dongles that work on both CDMA and GSM

nilabh-jha
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MTS plans to launch a CDMA dongle (USB data card) that will also work on GSM networks. However, this will be targeted only at international travelers.

BlackBerry has similar smartphones dubbed as world edition phones that work on both CDMA as well as GSM networks.

The benefits of such dongles cannot be over stated. With this technology, a subscriber can travel anywhere in the world without worrying whether or not he will be within network coverage.

This technology is particularly important for CDMA players as most of the world has GSM coverage while CDMA coverage is somewhat rarer. This leads to people preferring GSM dongles even where GSM network is weaker than CDMA.

Talking to The Mobile Indian, MTS spokesperson Viraj Chouhan said, “We plan to introduce a CDMA + GSM dongle in India targeted specially at frequent international travelers who need seamless data connectivity.”

He, however, did not disclose a timeline or price for this new device.

MTS is a CDMA only operator unlike the two other CDMA operators in India &#151 Tata Communications and Reliance Communications, both of which have GSM operations as well.

Opera Mobile 11 or Mini 6?

prasoon-kumar
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Opera has last month released two versions of its mobile browser, the Opera Mini 6 and Opera Mobile 11 sending the users into a tizzy as which one should they go for?

The biggest difference between the two is that Opera Mobile 11 is only for those smartphones that has Symbian, or Windows Phone operating system. Else, you will have to be content with Opera Mini 6 only.

The core of both the mobile browsers remains the same. The experience and features are also similar in both. The browser engine in Opera Mini 6 is located on Opera servers, whereas Opera Mobile 11 has the browser engine stored in your phone itself.

When the users enter a web address in the address bar of the browser, the Opera Mobile 11 gets the page loaded directly from the web server, whereas in Opera Mini 6, the request first goes to Opera Mini server, which gets the pages for you from the web. The pages are then converted into a lightweight version which is then sent to the smartphones.

In Opera Mini 6, however, some complicated web pages may not appear correctly in your smartphones. The advanced users could get both the browsers installed and browse mobile websites depending on the connection, for example they may use Opera Mobile 11 when they are on WiFi and Opera Mini 6 when they are browsing on mobile service provider network.

There are some superficial changes such as the black navigation bar background and menu bar icon that now appears as “O”. Once users start browsing, they notice the deeper changes. The HTML5 support, better web page rendering, and of course the touchscreen specialist &#151pinch zooming, which is extremely smooth and works well even on phones where (random access memory) is less.

However, the Pinch to Zoom function does not work well on resistive touchscreens or on phones where multi touch doesn’t work.

The Symbian version of Opera Mobile 11 looks good. Zooming in the web pages doesn’t distract from the web pages because the text fits again to adjust with the screen size. Another new feature is zooming in and zooming out by just tapping twice on the touchscreens. In the earlier version, only a single tap allowed users to zoom in.

The demand from users that they be allowed to quickly go up or down the web page has also been answered this time with the on screen arrows.

The sharing feature allowed in Android and Symbian (on these phones, sharing is called “SEND”) phones lets users to share the web page address and title with others. The new tabs are opened in the background, another change from earlier Opera version.

And yes, users can play Flash videos on it without even downloading Flash player in their devices. The navigation bar of the browser goes to the top in tablet version of the browser.

Mobile batteries that charge faster in the offing

prasoon-kumar
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The Lithium-ion batteries that power our laptops and smartphones can be charged up to 90 per cent within minutes if a new battery technology fructifies.
A research team at Colorado State University has come up with the new method of producing battery electrodes with the help of metal foams.

The process has not been commercialised yet, but if and when it does, it may become possible to charge the smartphones within 30 seconds (another source says 12 minutes, which is still faster than usual charging time). These electrodes are compatible with a wide variety of battery chemistries.

The speed with which a battery charges depends upon the movement of electrons to and from the cathodes, also called negative electrode. The research team has come up with metal foams which are covered with battery materials. The metal foam provides with the necessary conductivity, and the battery active material stores electrical energy in it.

The battery consists of nanowires, which are collected together like hairbrush bristles, with an electrolyte (chargeable) coating which in turn covered with a Lithium cathode.

Although the final product itself is not ready yet, the laboratory samples are good enough to create news. Some doubt the commercial viability of the product because the manufacturing process is complicated enough to drive the costs upward.

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