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What to expect from Toshiba Thrive

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Any company which thinks of launching an tablet at a time when already there are many jostling in the market, is definitely in a mood to fight hard with other tablet manufacturing companies. That’s what Toshiba is going to do with its Thrive as well.

The Japanese company announced the tablet last week, which will hit the stores in next few months.

Being a laptop maker, Toshiba has tried to include a lot many features of the laptop such as Android 3.1 Honeycomb, 10.1 inch screen, a 5 back facing and a 2.1 megapixel front facing camera, rotation lock, and gyroscope.

If the users intend to play high definition videos continuously, the battery is going to last up to 7 to 8 hours, claims the company further.

The thickness is on the higher side, but that’s because Toshiba thought users would like to have mini USB, card slot, and built-in HDMI out port&#151 in simpler terms, all the ports users are already familiar with on their laptops. Compared to other companies, who manufacture mobile phones and then increase the size to make a tablet, Toshiba has done it the other way round, they have a reduced a laptop into the tablet form factor.

But then, to include all these additional features, Toshiba has decided to sacrifice some of the sleekness of the device. The Android operating system which runs the Toshiba Thrive has also been modified to include the File Manager which was purposely not included by Android earlier. Some apps come preloaded on Thrive so the users can connect with their personal computers and printers remotely.

The only problem is, the company sees it as a transition device, for consumers who find it difficult to make the transition from laptops to tablets. This line of thinking does not hold ground when the device category has already been created by other manufacturers and tablets are selling in hordes in the market. It also comes equipped with quick charge technology which means the replaceable battery can be charged up to 90 per cent of the capacity within one hour.

The delayed Nokia fight back

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During the recent ‘All Things D’ conference in California, the Nokia chief executive officer, Stephen Elop was on the stage talking about the future of Nokia. He had said then that Symbian was a “slow moving platform” and that to keep up with and Android, Nokia chose to go with Windows Phone 7.

Nokia had, in fact, earlier planned to go with MeeGo but it soon figured out that Windows Phone 7 would be more change friendly. Another important announcement was they would not do anything on Windows Phone 7 that other WP7 users wouldn’t be able to get. The hardware business will continue with Nokia.

Apart from the global level fire fighting, the company is making sure to fight back well on the Indian turf as well, where it has lost significant market share to some Chinese and Indian companies. In a bid to wrestle back its lost markets share, Nokia has recently launched two dual phones, which constitutes about 40 per cent of the Indian market.

The new Nokia C2-00 has some innovative features such as booting in 30 seconds, option to insert the second SIM without switching off the phone, and 32GB expandable memory &#151 all this, priced at less than Rs 3,000.

Nokia’s attempt to rebuild itself has solid reasons, the company used to virtually own the Indian market only some time ago. The problem, however, is not just the lack of multi SIM phones in their portfolio. Entry level users are asking for all the features at reduced prices, and they are easily getting it from Chinese and Indian handset providers as well.

Besides, the Finnish handset maker is also coming up with varied services, such as the recently launched Nokia Money service, to gain customers loyalty back.

The service will allow users to make payments through their Nokia phones. The e-wallet services from Nokia is available in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Chandigarh, Nasik and Pune and the other cities where operations will soon begin include Lucknow, Kanpur, Surat, Baroda, Rajkot, Kochi and Kozhikode.

Government recommends stricter norms for mobile radiation

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On the back of World Health Organisation cautioning that radiation from mobile phones could cause cancer in humans, an Inter Ministerial Group, set up by the Department of Telecommunications, has recommended reduction in the radiation levels of mobiles in the country.

The committee was set up in August 2010 to evaluate the evidence, revisit radiation guidelines for mobile towers and adopt guidelines for radiation emission by cell phones.
This group had experts from Department of Telecom, Ministry of Health, Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Environment & Forests and Indian Council of Medical Research.

Currently, maximum permissible SAR value, as per the Indian guidelines, is 2 Watt per kg (of user’s body mass), and the committee recommends that this be lowered to 1.6 Watt per kg, as prescribed by the Federal Communication Commission of USA.

SA R or specific absorption ratio level, determines the level of radiation that a phone emits and the lower the level the better it is. SAR is a value that corresponds to the rate at which radio waves are absorbed by the body of a person using a wireless handset.

Manufacturers will also have to mandatorily declare radiation level on each mobile handset, which help people compare phones based on their SAR value and therefore induce competition amongst manufacturers to reduce radiation levels.

Although these recommendations came in February, it was placed on the internet for public comments and suggestions, and now the final report is ready and with the government, this was announced by the State minister for Telecom, Sachin Pilot.

WHO (World Health Organisation), though cautioned about mobile radiations’ cancerous effects, said that there is no provable link between human health and mobile, but many organisations have come out recently with studies that have proved adverse effect on mental and physical health of not just humans but also birds and bees.

What all you can do with mobile banking

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Banking on the go through mobile phone in itself is a very attractive preposition, but mobile banking offers more. Here is a look at all the possibilities that are available on your mobile.
There are two ways of banking through mobile – Application based and through SMS.

Applications provide better user interface and you do not have to remember short codes like the medium. SMS medium, which works through short codes for every action is a bit cumbersome but then it has universal handset support.

Application, however, are not supported by very low end handsets. You do not need to have a smartphone either, any phone that supports J2ME application, or provides access, mostly supports these applications.

Almost all the banks in India offer mobile banking facility through both these mediums. While the facilities vary between banks, most of the basic functions such as viewing bank, demat and credit card accounts, transfer of funds to other banks in India are available across all banks.

However, some banks like Standard Chartered and ICICIbank, also offers movie ticket booking mobile banking application. You can also pay utility bills, top up prepaid mobile phone, and book air tickets etc, with applications of banks like ICICI, HDFC, SBI etc.

Other facitilities like opening fixed deposit, finding an ATM or bank branch, list of last transactions are also available with most such applications. The best part is that all these applications are available free to account holders, however you do need to pay for the data it uses.

Mobile banking is also as safe as internet banking with several step verifications, more over till now mobile phones are less prone to attacks compared to laptops or PCs.

Huawei’s Ideos to hit Indian market on June 13

Sandeep Budki
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Huawei’s Ideos to hit Indian market on June 13

Huwawei, which had launched its Ideos range of handsets globally in January this year, has finally decided to launch the smartphone in India.

“Consumers can purchase Ideos X5, X2 and Chat from retail outlets from June 13,” announced Anand Narang, marketing director of Huawei Devices. He further said that Ideos range of smartphones is targeted at youth and people who want to experience the operating system.

Huawei’s Ideos X5, X2 and Chat are powered by the Android operating system and will be available at Rs 14,999, Rs 8,999, and Rs 8,199 respectively.

In the name Ideos, “Id” stands for ‘inspiring industrial design’, the “os” for ‘operating system’ and the “e” symbolises ‘evolution’ of mobile internet.These smartphones are developed in partnership with Google, therefore upgrading the OS is expected to be smooth.

Ideos features a mobile WiFi router that allows users to share internet anywhere with up to eight devices, along with WiFi 802.11 n (the fastest version of WiFi) and at 7.2 Mbps. It comes loaded with a range of social networking, email and Google services such as Google Talk, Google Maps, YouTube and GMail.

Ideos X5 runs on Android 2.2 and features a 3.8 inch capacitive touchscreen, an and a 5.0 megapixel camera with LED flash. It also has a 4GB of internal storage space and a 3.5mm jack.

Ideos X2 has a 3.2 inch capacitive touchscreen and has an entertainment support with an in-built music player, 3.5 mm jack, 3.2 camera and an FM radio. It works on Android 2.2 operating system.

Ideos Chat, which runs on Android 2.1, is a touch and smartphone and is inspired by chocolate-bar design. It has dedicated keys for smileys, Google search and email (with ‘@’ sign). It also comes with preloaded social apps like Facebook and Twitter.

S Tel brings new self-recharge plan

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S Tel has launched a new self-recharge concept for its subscribers, enabling them to choose a plan of their choice to match their budget everyday through a simple product activation code and recharge by themselves anywhere.

Subscribers will now be able enjoy a plethora of S Tel products at lower denominations with validity of 1 day.

The subscriber can simply type *123*# to avail product benefit. The recharge amount would be deducted from core balance and the product benefit would be activated. Customers can log on to www.stel.in for more details.

Commenting on the occasion, Aravind Santhanam, chief operating officer, S Tel said, “With this new offer, user has an easy recharge access, that caters not only to their usage requirements but also gives them the convenience of a recharge option on their fingertips, at all places and all times. S Tel has in the past and going forward will continue to bring unique concepts to the consumer that will be packaged to meet their unaddressed telecom needs. ”

Present on the occasion, VK Rajkumar, chief sales and marketing officer, S Tel, said, “This unique concept was constructed keeping in mind daily and ever changing communication need of our customers where they could get amazing usage options for just Rs 1, Rs 2, Rs 3 and many more easy and attractive recharge options and the power to choose Ghar Baithe.”

“The consumer has choice of recently introduced novel product- FRC 108 which offers daily 10 minutes local call free for 30 days, with a of Rs 20 and lifetime validity to the subscribers,” he added.

For mobile subscribers, especially the youth segment, S Tel has further enhanced its and services across its markets at special price points. S Tel now offers a bouquet of exciting data services customised to each region which includes services like “Hum Tum” voice chat and high speed GPRS services.

Handset Review: Nokia X3-02

rahul-gupta
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The new generation touch and type mobile phones are rightly worthy of being labelled as the new avatars of the Symbian S40 operating system. With the unique and quite intuitive touch and type interface, these are getting a lot of popularity amongst users throughout the country and across the globe.

While touchscreens are better for navigation, keys are definitely good when it comes to typing messages. The freedom it brings to the users, to enjoy the benefits of both a touchscreen and keys of the phone, is probably the biggest reasons behind its growing popularity.

But except the good part there are bits and pieces of bad too with this device which are not grave mistakes but small little things which can be easily looked upon but to make a perfect buying decision all points are to be considered so read on.

Look and feel

The Nokia X3 &#151 02 looks great and gets full marks on this front. It manages to grab maximum eyeballs the moment it comes out from the pocket. The slim profile and sharp but human friendly edges give it a sophisticated and a rich appearance. Even, while holding it in the hand, the phone feels good and gives a good grip to the user.

The placement of the keys and the touchscreen is perfect, letting you to type in one or in two hands quite comfortably. So in a nutshell, the X3-02 looks great and feels great too so full marks here.

Usability

As I mentioned earlier, its new user interface combines the positives of both the touchscreens, which are great for manoeuvring thorough the menus, and keys, which are best for typing.

The keypad is big, nicely laid out and spaced well. Although the placement of the keys might be a little funny as the Hash and Asterisk keys come on the extreme right along with the 0 key. But you get two dedicated buttons for media and and a very comfortable keypad

The 2.4 inch touchscreen, although resistive, gives quite a high degree of accuracy and comfort while using. Even the slightest touch translates into a perfect action. Considering the price of this phone, we would have expected a capacitive touchscreen in place of a resistive one but with the Series 40 OS the screen compliments the user interface.

Symbian S40

This is the first time ever that the Symbian S40 operating system has been optimised for a touch based operation, but sadly the user interface is still not fully optimised for such a touch based operation. The menus are still little longer and take a lot of time in executing commands. Users may also need some more time to get used to the dual input based interface.

Besides, though the OS uses both the inputs at the same time, there is no way in which a user can just make use of the touch or the type (keypad) independently. This is also not the first time that we are seeing touch and type interface based phones here in India, all thanks to the direct Chinese imports.

Performance wise, the is pretty swift and during the whole review it never hung or crashed. All the actions were completed without any delays and users will definitely like the new variant of S40 a lot. But still some tweaks in terms of placement and spacing, looks, menus and some more tune ups are required to make it perfect.

Internet and connectivity

Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPRS, – anything you can possibly think of vis-&#224-vis connectivity options are there in this phone. One of the best features of the X3 is the on the go feature that allows the users to connect low power consuming flash drives to this phone and access content directly on the phone similar to the feature that came with the Nokia N8. Although the cable for USB on the go connectivity is not supplied but it is a super feature to use and you won’t mind buying the cable for a few additional bucks.

Wi-Fi connectivity is standard although there is a slight issue which I faced while using it: the phone kept using the phone’s connection as well while using and the interface misses the button to switch to the only-WiFi mode.

Multimedia

The 5 fixed focus camera and a multi format audio video player with FM radio sums up the multimedia segment in this phone.

The camera is mediocre with no flash and doesn’t have the much needed auto focus capability. Video recording also comes at 15 FPS, which is jittery. But on the other hand, this is the first time that Xvid playback is added to S40, so you will enjoy it definitely.

In the audio front also, the X3 fails to impresses unlike other handsets from Nokia in the past. Nokia decided to put the microphone and the loudspeaker both at the bottom of the phone. Although the mic is hidden beneath the 9 key, still loudspeaker causes some trouble while talking on loudspeaker.

Nokia X3 &#151 02 has 16GB of expandable memory but as you go upwards after 4GB, it starts making the phone sluggish. So a maximum of 8GB is what is recommended for this handset.

Finally

The X3-02 turns out to be a nice surprise of S40 interface with charming looks and great features and a super cool battery life of almost 3 days of normal usage between charges. For the price tag of Rs 7,500, it justifies worth for every penny invested if you are happy overseeing the smallish flaws which are there in the handset. Otherwise, the X3-02 is a great handset with nice features that will make the users happy.

RIM promises easy BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing

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Research In Motion has released a new BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing application that aims to simplify the standard conference call process. Initially, only users of North America region can avail the application from the BlackBerry World. ‘The Mobile Indian’ tried to contact RIM’s spokesperson in India to inquire about the app’s availability in the country but he was not available for comment.

Easy Mobile Conferencing is one feature that both Apple and Google platforms have had from day one. Now, that makes us wonder what took RIM so long to add mobile conferencing features in BlackBerry OS.

The beta version of the app was launched by RIM two months ago with a number of features such as one-click-join, calendar integration, reconnection, easy conference scheduling, protecting host codes, and storing dial-in numbers.

The full version of the application has been designed to work out of the box with most existing conferencing services. It requires the device to run 5.0 or higher.

On installing the app you can join or create a conference call right from your calendar itself. Also, you can join a conference call with a single click. That really helps users to save time, in contrast to the conventional method wherein one needs to dial a specific number and then feed in a code to join a conference call.

RIM is out to compete with Android and iOS platforms, both of which are rapidly luring business users through easy-to-use features. However, there are core differences between the implementation of mobile conferencing on all three platforms &#151 BlackBerry, Android and iOS.

All these platforms have an Add Call feature integrated right into the dialer. So when you call someone and want to add another person in a conference call, you simply have to select the Add Participant or Add Call option. However, mobile conferencing is much more complicated when one has to follow several steps to add users to a conference call. That’s where these single-click applications come into the picture.

Services like Google Voice, GroupMe and InstantMeeting have been available for quite a while. Now these applications provide cross-platform solutions and work seamlessly across devices. Apple iOS 4.3 update has brought some changes to conference calling and now users can join or create conference calls with a couple of taps.

Meanwhile, with its new Mobile Conferencing App, RIM aims to provide deeper integration of conferencing facilities for BlackBerry devices users. The BlackBerry Mobile Conferencing App stores several details related to the conference call, such as personal bridge information.

With touch based interfaces being more prominent on smartphones, users do look for no brainer or single-click usage applications instead of tedious features. Hence, we hope that each mobile platform developer comes out with its own version of a mobile conferencing app.

Ultra high speed wireless for mobile devices

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Panasonic technologies has unveiled a new wireless data transfer technology, which enables mobile devices to receive and transmit data at an estimated 20 times higher speed as compared to present day wireless technologies.

Hence, with this technology, one can transfer a 30-minute long compressed high definition (HD) video within 10 seconds!

Dubbed WiGig, the new technology uses 60 GHz waves, which have never been used for mobile devices due to their power requirements. The new technology, however, makes it possible to transfer data in this frequency while keeping power requirements low.

As per the official press release from Panasonic, “This multi-gigabit wireless communication technology consists of a 60 GHz transceiver and a baseband processor, which are integrated individually onto CMOS semiconductor chips through circuit technologies optimised for mobile devices. The technology enables multi-gigabit wireless communication more than 20 times faster than existing wireless LANs by using the 60 GHz frequency band, and through the optimisation of both the transceiver core and peripheral circuits it also enables lower than 1 Watt low-power, multi-gigabit wireless communication in the future.”

The new WiGig wireless technology is compatible with older devices too, so even after the adoption of new technology no hardware overhaul will be required.

In contrast to earlier technologies, the new standard is faster and more reliable as it has the lowest levels of interference noise, and has better Forward Error Correction (FEC) technology to maintain data integrity at high speeds.

The beginning of wireless communications was at 11 offered by WiFi standard B, which was replaced by WiFi standard G offering speeds of up to 54 Mbps. Later, standard N came along, and that actually initiated wireless giga bit data transfers with the use of 5 GHz frequency bands.

This new standard of wireless data transfer between mobile devices is still to be adopted on a large scale but the technology’s future looks positive as the IEEE group has identified it as the next standard for wireless data communication and has developed the draft standard IEEE802.11ad for this.

Motorola CEO blames Android apps for quality issues

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Motorola Mobility chief executive officer Sanjay Jha lashed out at saying its applications have a quality issue. Speaking at the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch Global Technology conference, he said that 70 per cent of smartphones are returned due to untested third party applications.

Jha believes certain applications aren’t tested to match the device’s hardware and hence end up draining its CPU. He added that Motoblur does a better job at not only providing users with real-time widget updates; it also possesses the ability to manage device power.

Android’s battery life issue isn’t unknown. Jha sheds some light on this very crucial issue that is perhaps the true reason for unstable power management on Android devices.

“For power consumption and use, those apps are not tested. We’re beginning to understand the impact that has on the CPU,” Jha said.

Android Market being open for developers and with its crucial “fragmentation” issue, it’s difficult for users to judge whether an Android would be suitable for their phone or not. Here ‘suitable’ means that it won’t eat much of the CPU or GPU’s resources; that it won’t secretly send or receive data; and that it will be stable.

Developers can test the app on the emulator or a finite number of devices. However, a stable application requires rigorous testing on a variety of hardware.

Sanjay Jha believes that the company’s Motoblur user interface could be one solution for the power management issues pertaining to Android devices. Motoblur acts like a widget layer that pulls almost real-time notifications from social networks like Facebook or Twitter. However, there are a number of users who claim to believe otherwise and blame Motoblur itself for being a memory hog.

Notably, Motoblur user interface isn’t available in India and the company has also no evident plans of bringing it here.

Recently, a leaked video threw some light on how this user interface works. In the video, we can see the redesigned Motoblur user interface on a new Motorola handset, Droid 3.

There’s no clarity as to whether the new Motoblur interface would be rolled out to all devices or only to recently launched handsets. Let’s hope the new Motoblur is tweaked and improved.

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