Release date for Galaxy SIII launch was been touted to be mid-May by South Korea’s Electronic Times News. Galaxy SII is the best selling Andorid smartphone, soon the trend would shift Galaxy SIII. Samsung has been doing really well with Android smartphones, selling millions of each galaxy Note, Galaxy SII, every month. They are betting big with smartphones and tablets ranging devices with 20 different form factors from screen sizes 3″ all the way to 10.1″, with all those options, they can’t really go wrong.

Galaxy SIII Full specs

• CPU: 1.5 Ghz Quad core Cortex A9 (or dual core 1.8Ghz Cortex A15) processor (Exynos 4412 not Tegra 3)
• GPU: Mali T604 GPU (atleast 4x times powerful than current Mali 400 of Galaxy SII, Galaxy Note)
• RAM: 2GB of RAM.
• Camera: 12 Megapixel Rear, 1080p video recording @30fps, 3MP front.
• OS: Android ICS 4.0.3 and soon Android 4.1 with TouchWiz 5?
• Storage: 16GB internal, external SD card expandable upto 32gb.
• Screen: 1280×800 HD (or 1280×720) screen on 4.6″ Super AMOLED Plus with Corning Gorilla glass.
• Battery: 2000 mAh
• Connectivity: Wifi, 802.11abgn, Wifi Direct, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC
• Data / Network: 4G LTE and 3.5G HSDPA.
• Sensors: Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Proximity senors.

Mali T604 GPU Performance [video]

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The core & features

All modern smartphone OS like iOS 5 & Android ICS 4.0.x support Multicore processors ground up. However, WIndows Phone 7.x is still lying in dark with no support for dual ormulticore processors. Windows Phone 8 will change this, by endorsing a same kernel as Windows 8. Windows Phone 8 would also support NFC, and full device encryption. Microsoft will also implement a “tap to share” capability, to enable easy sharing of content between phones, desktops, laptops, and tablets.

Windows Phone 8 is codenamed “Apollo” and will support processors with up to four cores, four different (and unspecified) screen resolutions, NFC for contactless payment, and removable microSD storage.

Data Management

Coming on-par with iOS & Android, Windows Phone 8 will now include full device encryption, based on the same technology as desktop Windows’ BitLocker encryption. WP8 Apollo will sport richer support for Exchange ActiveSync policies, and Systems Center inventorying and management. There will also be greater support for private deployment of custom line-of-business applications.

Inheriting Windows 8

Under the bonnet, lot of features would be inherited from Windows 8 desktop OS: networking stacks, security subsystems, and multimedia support, web browser i.e. Internet Explorer 10. To further improve web experience on WP8 devices,  Microsoft plans to use server-side compression and proxying to reduce the amount of data needed to load webpages by a claimed 30 percent.

Apps & compatibility

WP8 would provide full backward compatibility for apps designed for WP7. The “most” code will be portable between the desktop and the phone. We would expect this to mean that Metro-style applications written using Windows 8′s WinRT will be readily portable to WP8 with minor modifications.

Windows 8 copies Android’s Intent based sharing to communicate with other apps, nicely renaming the concept to “contracts” that enables applications to communicate with each other in certain standard ways. Of course, it comes to Windows Phone 8 too.

WP8 also include a monitor for per app data metrics, similar to that of Android ICS & Windows 8 “Data Smart”.

Music, VoIP, Cloud Integration

You will also get the latest Microsoft’s acquisition, Skype integrated well into the WP8. Skype would be integrated directly to phone’s dialer, like Google Voice on Android. Hardware OEMs will have more control over the camera application, enabling features such as smile detection and burst shooting.

As of today, Windows Phone 7 uses the desktop Zune client to sync music and video; this will be dropped in favor of cloud by using SkyDrive, just like iCloud on iOS5, or Google cloud on Android.

You will be  able to listen to your music collection on a new Windows Phone 8 handset without ever having to pair it to the PC, over the SkyDrive. This syncing will also extend to the Xbox.

WP8 would finally bring Windows Phones upto the level of iOS 5, Android 4.0 ICS, only year later. Lets hope Microsoft doesn’t get there late, this time.

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The traditional first-person shooter genre finally looks to have matured on the mobile platforms and Modern Combat 3, among the best we’ve ever seen on any mobile platform.

(click on images for fullsize screenshot from 720p HD Android phone)

Modern Combat 3 Fallen Nation and Frontline Commando arrived on Android, after being released on iOS. Definitely these games raise the bar for smartphone shooters.

Gameloft’s Modern Combat 3 Fallen Nation ($6.99) brings the Call of Duty experience to Android phones with nearly a GB of game data download post-apk installation.

Storyline
The storyline, thin as it is, follows that splinter extremist groups from North Korea, Pakistan and Russia have banded together to form the “KPR,” and somehow managed to take over a large swath of the United States. As a member of Phantom Squad, the player undertakes a variety of high-risk covert missions to help turn the tide.

Gameplay, Controls
Playing a FPS on mobile screen can be challenging. You would really need a large display like the one we used here was 5.3″ to make more room for controls and display. Overall, the controls are very sensitive but there is a lag that can make playing game a challenge in fast-aim-shooting scenarios. I think Gameloft understands this problem well, Touchscreens (~50-100ms) are not as fast as your joysticks or keyboards (~5ms) on desktops, and that’s why guns can auto-aim when your gun points close to the target.
We didn’t play much with controller settings, but we did get better results by reducing the sensitivity of controls. That way, we avoided overshooting the orientation.

Graphics
What the game lacks in originality it makes up for in sheer quality. But make no mistake, MC3 is extremely derivative and offers up virtually nothing FPS fans haven’t seen before. The game runs off a proprietary Gameloft engine and looks absolutely fantastic. More importantly, on dual core phones, and tablets, the action remains fast and silky smooth throughout. When playing on an Hummingbird processor or equivalent single-core 1ghz, experience is distracting.

I’ve to admit, this game has the best Physics, motion graphics ever delivered to a game on a smartphone. For our tests, Galaxy Note gave us a good framerate with high detail. We presume game doesn’t run on phone’s native resolution (~ 1280×800) but the graphics were Rich and detailed to the degree we can expect it to deliver a Rich FPS experience.

Audio
We tested the audio with out AudioTechnica M50 headphones. Audio effects in the game are realistic, the gun shots, the explosions, foot steps, everything was detailed to a level we can appreciate. The music and dialogues are clear and easy to distinguish. Audio did seem to use some sort of surround effect, like EAX that we’ve on desktops, but we can be wrong.

Official MC3 Trailer

Video: Modern Combat 3 Android Gameplay on Galaxy Note (1.4Ghz dual core, 1280×800 display)
Note: The video quality is no where near the actual quality of the game. Sorry for the injustice.

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There was time  when Desktop PC was considered to be the major part of the Computers segment. Times have changed, thanks to new powerful Clouds and computing grids, servers now form a big part of the computers.

On Desktop PCs, Windows is still holds the majority, followed by OSX which forms around 10% of the desktop market. But 2011 and 2012 are the years of smartphones and tablets, a domain where Windows has failed to compete with Linux based OS: Android.

In this article, we will cover the Linux Growth rate, Trends, Infographics for recent years.

Best metrics for popularity of an OS are Virus and the Games. Both of them are on the rise for Linux. Lets look at how Linux is doing in each computing segment.

Linux in Desktop PCs

Windows wins here, Linux loses by a large margin. Linux Desktop market share is nearly 0.83%  where as Microsoft Windows 7 claims the major share of 42.65% while the other releases of Windows XP and Vista claim 36.44% and 10.88%. However, beyond these numbers, the trend is somewhat bright for Linux. In the beginning of 2011, Linux was only 0.74% which rose to 0.83% by the end of the year. Its slow, but its going up. Same goes for OSX, but windows share is gradually falling.

Linux in Servers

Windows servers lead in the market share over Linux Servers but the trend is shifting towards Linux flavors. First quarter of 2010 in terms of units sold, Windows had a 75.3% market share, (1,379,487 units) compared to 20.8% for Linux (380,429 units) and 3.6% (65,451 units) for Unix.

When it comes to revenue, as you would expect, Windows Server-based systems have an even bigger lead. In the fourth quarter, Windows servers accounted for 48.9% of the market ($5.1 billion), compared to 16.2% ($1.7 billion) for Linux, and 22.2% ($2.3 billion) for Unix.

The truth is, both Windows and Linux will continue to thrive in the server market, and Windows will continue to dominate. Linux fans may like to think they’ll dethrone Windows, but this latest report is one more piece of evidence that’s not likely to happen.

Linux in Mobile devices: Smartphones, Tablets

2011 & 2012 are years of Mobile. People use smartphones more than they use desktops, so it s the most important OS of all.

In nutshell, Smartphone market is divided into Android, iOS or Blackberry. Android is based on the Linux Kernel and is by far the most popular smartphone OS in the world, with Symbian on the steep fall. According to the Global Stat Counter, Android took off with a 13.6% market share in December 2010 and rose to market share of 21.83% by the end of 2011. The numbers speaks for itself, Google is activating 700,000 new devices everyday, this doesn’t include unofficial, non-market android devices.

For iOS its started with 23.57%  and went down to 22% of mobile OS share in 2011. Windows is no where to be seen.

Linux has already won over Windows, smartphones alone take Linux market share to be higher than no. of windows PCs. Android is growing with over millions of apps for the OS already available in the appMarket, with 400,000 apps already.

Mobile OS usage:

Though 2011 was another year for iPad, the tech world witnessed some very fine Android Honeycomb devices; namely Samsung Galaxy Tab, ASUS Transformer, ASUS Transformer Prime, Motorola Xoom and ASUS Slider. And in the horde of tablets (about 45 notable tablets) there were only 5 tablets to have Windows OS, and unfortunately all of them failed to find any place in market. Tablets in 2011 aided with Windows OS were HP Slate 500, ASUS Eee Slate, Fujitsu Stylistic, MSI WindPad 110W and Acer Iconia W500.

Here’s an Infographic for Growth of Linux in last 20 years, every milestone detailed:

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Features Of Stealthgenie

StealthGenie has multipurpose features like:

• It can help you trace call records, call logs and does SMS monitoring.
• You can also keep an eye on all the email exchanging and internet browsing that is done on the target device.
• It allows geo fencing and geo location monitoring.
• It allows live call intercept.

Key Features:

• It allows you live call intercept, i.e. you may be able to get connected to an ongoing call and conversation without being detected.
• Another important feature of this software is that of SMS monitoring. The SMS feature of StealthGenie enables you to read all the SMS received on and sent from your target’s phone, including the trigger numbers.
• It also enables you to receive instant alerts on messages containing trigger words and phrases that you have set. You are instantly notified when these words are mentioned in an SMS.
• SMS redirect feature enables you to send an SMS from your member’s area to any contact saved on the targets phone or any other mobile number. The recipient of the phone will get the impression that the SMS was sent from the monitored phone.
• Geo tracking is one of the best features of StealthGenie. It enables you to view your target smartphone’s geographical location on the map, and as the location changes, you’re updated. Then there’s geo fencing which enables you to define the boundaries which you would not like your target to cross and in case they do, you’re instantly notified of that.
• Other features include recording the live surroundings of your target and monitoring the emails and contact list of your target. The information relating to photos, videos, internet browsing history and bookmarks, blackberry chat messaging and stored music history is also provided.

StealthGenie is a very efficient and unique low-cost mobile spy software application with features that very clearly makes it worth buying as compared to others in market. In today’s fast-moving world where everyone is busy earning a living, the existence of doubts and insecurities is inevitable. In such cases, this software may prove very beneficial for the buyers of the product who might be in any kind of doubt regarding their relations. So, to remove all your doubts and live a peaceful life, one must make StealthGenie a regular part of their life!

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2012 would be all about:

• Quad core Tablets, Mobile Phones
• 3D TVs with 4k resolution (4096x)
• Mobile payments
• Rise of NextGen Social networking
• Hacktivism
• 4G LTE

1. Tablets & Mobile Phones:

Until just a few months ago, buying a tablet usually meant buying an iPad. Amazon.com is already on the record as selling “millions” of its $199 Kindle Fire entry-level tablets, and it’s making “millions” more. Asus’ Transformer Prime, first quad core tablet, is gaining traction with its ability to dock into a full-featured keyboard that almost turns it into a full-fledged laptop.

Each hardware vendor and chip manufacturer would be releasing their quad-core chips, leading the race would be Nvidia Tegra 3 followed by Qualcomm and others. It would bring near-pc level performance to palm of your hand.

On Phones, Samsung would continue to grow and capture markets in every phone segment. Their upcoming Galaxy SIII could be the biggest seller ever. Apple’s iPhone 5 would sport all new design & A6 SoC, a quad core processor which would revolutionize mobile gaming.

2. Mobile Payments:

Google Wallet is currently only available on a few models of phones, But some analysts predict that 2012 is the year that mobile payments will proliferate as more devices are outfitted with the crucial Near Field Communication (NFC) chip that makes these transactions possible. Mobile commerce would be a $31 billion business by 2016. Given that potential for growth, it’s likely other tech firms will attempt to challenge Google with their own mobile payment apps. In fact, telecom giants Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile have announced a joint venture digital wallet program called Isis, which is slated to debut in 2012.

3. NextGen Social Networking:

Facebook & Google+ will continue to redefine we interact with people online. Google+ has grown at a pace no one has grown before, and 2012 would be even better as Google works hard to deliver the Google experience to the already shipped “plus”.

Many analysts suggest that Facebook would finally go from public in 2012 in what would likely be the largest initial public offering ever for a technology company. Valued at $100 billion, it could redefine the powers of the company.

4. ‘Hacktivism’ and other cybersecurity threats will get more sophisticated.

Thanks to groups like Anonymous, Lulzsec and others, hackers are now more public than ever. They are now fearless, powerful and more Ethical. These groups would fight against corruption and other government decisions that censor internet, in any manner. SOPA has already let hackers begin the Hacker space program.

Both McAfee and Cisco say in their annual forecasts that they expect “hacktivism” to be a prominent cybersecurity issue in 2012. These newly emergining groups would continue to use hacking as a means of sending a message or targeting polarizing public figures. McAfee also warns that malware for mobile devices, GPS systems and even medical equipment will get more effective in 2012.

5. 4G LTE

We would finally see the real 4G data speeds on our mobile networks all around the world. US, with its leading telecom providers like Verizon, AT&T and Sprint would show maturity in delivering reliable 4g / LTE speeds over the air. It would soon be adopted by telecom providers in UK, europe and other countries in Asia. With China and Japan already ahead of the curve in LTE, other asian countries would grow.

6. 3D 4K TVs

LG, Samsung and several others would showcase their 2012 range of products at CES 2012. The major buzz this year would be about the 3D 4K TVs. Not only these TVs would be large (~60″), they would deliver super high definition content with a smooth picture (~200hz and above).

We would some standardization in 3D technologies and would see 3D technologies that are inter-operable across different TV brands.

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TeleNav’s native apps have been doing this for a while but the HTML 5 browser based webapp uses HTML5 location APIs along with Offline caching. The service would be free and is known to run on iOS, Android and WP7.

At the time of writing, its available to a group of developers, who can add TeleNav’s voice-guided GPS by plugging in a single line of code into their websites or apps. It would soon be released to commercial users.

We’ll let you know when its available, in the meantime you check the best Navigation app ever.

“This is an enormous amount of added value for any mobile, location-based website or app focused on travel, shopping, local search, deals and more,” said Sal Dhanani, co-founder and vice president of products for TeleNav. “With one line of code, you can give your customers one-click access to premium, voice-guided turn-by-turn directions to any location, including hotels, restaurants, merchants or deal locations. Customers never need to leave your app.”

TeleNav would like to partner with select developers to test the service. Interested mobile website publishers and app developers can apply for early access by visiting TeleNav’s website at www.telenav.com/developer/HTML5.

TeleNav expects to publicly launch its HTML5 service in early 2012. Consumers will not need to be current TeleNav customers but will need to have an HTML5-compatible feature phone or smartphone.

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Adobe is shifting the focus to develop Native Flash (AIR) based apps on mobile, which exist vastly on Android and even on iOS. Other than that, Adobe would focus on HTML5 tools that would reshape the future of web for desktop and mobile browsers, alike.

Our future work with Flash on mobile devices will be focused on enabling Flash developers to package native apps with Adobe AIR for all the major app stores. We will no longer adapt Flash Player for mobile devices to new browser, OS version or device configurations. Some of our source code licensees may opt to continue working on and releasing their own implementations. We will continue to support the current Android and PlayBook configurations with critical bug fixes and security updates.

These changes will allow Adobe increase investment in HTML5 and innovate with Flash where it can have most impact for the industry, including advanced gaming and premium video. Flash Player 11 for PC browsers just introduced dozens of new features, including hardware accelerated 3D graphics for console-quality gaming and premium HD video with content protection. Future is all about native apps with AIR that run on hundreds of millions of mobile devices through all the popular app stores, including the iTunes App Store, Android Market, Amazon Appstore for Android and BlackBerry App World.

via adobe.com

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The video begins with a business woman visiting Johannesburg and having the audio around her translated in real time thanks to some futuristic glasses. Then she pulls out her PDA / smartphone, which is nothing but a flexible card what appears to be all OLED. Video walks us through some vivid personalized experiences and touch computing on every surface.

Microsoft believes that most of the technology in the video exists in some form or another today. “All of the ideas in the video are based on real technology, Some of the capabilities, such as speech recognition, real time collaboration and data visualization already exist today. Others are not yet available in specific products, but represent active research and development happening at Microsoft and other companies.”

See the concept as we gear up for the future:

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Galaxy Nexus sports a 4.65-inch screen, but still doesn’t feel too big to be a smartphone. It has the same concave screen curve as the previous Android flagship smartphone, Nexus S. While its rear is very much inspired by the Galaxy S II, including the feather-light plastic back cover and gentle protrusion in the lower half.

Display: Galaxy Nexus is the first smartphone to spec a HD display with resolution of 1280 x 720, and we’ve got to say that the experience of using such a device is well worth the price of admission. The screen with that resolution, gives you a large real-estate. The display is Super AMOLED Plus and is incredibly bright with extremely vibrant colors.

Other Galaxy Nexus Specs

CPU: 1.2Ghz Dual core OMAP processor
RAM: 1GB of RAM
Flash: 32GB
Connectivity: Wifi 802.11bgn, NFC, 4G LTE

Checkout all the features of Android ICeCream Sandwich 4.0.

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Michigan police was already found to do that last month, but if sources are to be trusted, they are going nationwide in US and soon in several other countries. The device used is the CelleBrite UFED, which is able to copy most of the data on over 2500 different mobile devices. It does all that in under 2 minutes. UFED brochure claims:

The UFED system extracts vital information from 95% of all cellular phones on the market today, including smartphones and PDA devices (Palm OS, Microsoft, Blackberry, Symbian, iPhone, and Google Android). Simple to use even in the field with no PC required, the UFED can easily store hundreds of phonebooks and content items onto an SD card or USB flash drive.

And technical description:

The UFED hardware with Physical Extraction module, used to create Physical and/or Logical dumps from mobile devices, which can then be saved to a USB disk drive, SD memory card, or directly to your PC.ƒ The UFED Physical Analyzer (PA) PC application, which provides an in-depth physical memory analysis of the extracted mobile phone data (phonebook contents, SMS messages, call logs, image files, video files, audio files, and more) The Physical Analyzer also serves to generate comprehensive and verified evidence reports of relevant data extracted and analyzed from the mobile device.

The UFED Physical Analyzer software allows the investigator to perform in-depth analysis of the extracted data
and generate reports. The UFED PA application provides the following key features:

• ƒ Analysis of the hex dump with a layered view of memory content
• Provides a detailed view of the hex dump
• Reconstructs the phone file system
• Decodes contact lists, SMS messages, call logs, phone information (IMSI, ICCID, user codes) and more
• Provides a view of data files – images, videos, etc.
• Provides access to both current and deleted data
• Retrieves phone passwords
• Simple viewing and user friendly browsing of information

ƒ Powerful search tools

• Instantly search for project content
• Search the hex dump or file system

Search by various parameters such as strings, bytes, numbers, dates

• Use GREP search (regular expressions) to look for specific data strings
• Bookmarking memory locations for indexing of key areas for later review

The ACLU fears that the next time you get stopped for speeding in Michigan, you’ll be handing over your cell phone, and your entire mobile history, to the nice officers. Of course, you have no idea into what all they can grab. Of course, you don’t have an option.

There’s something thats more scary than being able to extract your information — Being able to inject information into the phone like fake call logs, gps logs, text messages, calendar appointments. It would open your call log SQLLite DB (in the case of an iPhone, Android) and write a new entry. e.g. If my intake information says I received the phone at 15:20:00 but there is a write to phonecalls.sql at 16:22:00 User better have a logical explanation.

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SII HD is huge at 4.65-inches featuring 316 pixels per inch, which beats iPhone 4 Retina display by par.

Galaxy S II HD features a 1.5GHz dual-core processor; 16GB of internal storage; an 8 megapixel camera with autofocus, flash, and 1080p video recording; a 2 megapixel front-facing camera, 1GB of RAM.

It also features Near Field Communication on Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

The  Galaxy S II HD family measures 132.65mm x 68.8mm x 9.5mm (5.22in x 2.7in x 0.37in) and weighs 142g (5oz) and has a decent battery at 1,850mAh battery and supports HSPA+ or EV-DO Rev.

The Galaxy S II HD LTE, as the name implies, comes with support for 4G-LTE networks for hyper-fast downloads and on-the-go HD video streaming.

No official word on the pricing and release date has been given at this point of time.

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Researchers from the University of California Davis, have successfully decoded the keystrokes on an Android on-screen keyboard by measuring the wiggles, jiggles, and vibrations picked up by the device’s accelerometer caused by pressing onscreen keys. Hao Chen and Lian Cai claim that this is a big deal coz almost any app can use the accelerometer without attracting user attention. Accelerometer data can sure be collected in the background, without a clue.

Any script kiddie can do it on windows, but smartphones have a more robust approach to applications and permissions, that makes it even harder.

How Accelerometer is used as Keylogger [PDF whitepaper]

Using the 3-axis of the accelerometer, keylogger can be built with accuracy of upto 71.5%, on an average.

Every key has a unique “pitch, roll and yaw” fingerprint that can be identified absed on the sample data that had been compiled in advance. The data looks like the patterns below.

The accuracy actually depends on the sensitivity of the accelerometer, so it varies from device to device. Newer Android phone’s accelerometer have response times of the order of 30ms vs 110ms on older ones like Original Motorola Droid.

The motion of a smartphone during typing depends on several factors: 1) the striking force of the typing fin- ger; 2) the resistance force of the supporting hand; 3) the landing location of the typing finger; and 4) the location of the supporting hand on the smartphone. The first two factors mainly affect the shift of the phone, while the lat- ter two mainly affects the rotation. We observe that the first two factors likely depend on the user, while the lat- ter two are likely to be user-independent because (1) on each soft keyboard configuration, each key is at a fixed location, and (2) a user typically holds her smartphone in a consistent way. Therefore, we would like to extract the rotation components while filtering out the shift compo- nents from motion sensor data.

Achieving 71.5% accuracy, on average across all devices, for numpad keys is a good number to begin with.

TouchLogger performs even better on larger and newer devices like tablets, given that they have gyroscopes and better cameras.

Possibilities

Although this cannot be considered a bug in Android or any other smartphone, its sure is hardest to get rid of. Even by capturing numbers alone, enough private data about user can be collected.

If someone takes these algorithms and port to javascript, its easy to grab your keystrokes on a random webpage that has asks for say credit card and/or password.  XSS/JS injection can do wonders to it.

The app would be demoed at HotSec in San Francisco next week.

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Qualcomm is claiming that its next generation of Snapdragon chips would beat current generation of processors used in gaming consoles like PS3. That’s a big claim, but noting the facts laid out by Sony PS Vita, these look real.

S4 codenamed ‘Krait’ devices would launched by end of the year. S4 would be first 28nm quad core processors and run Adreno 225 GPU – Quad core cpu + Adreno 225 aim to blow away the fluidity of PS3 graphics.

Qualcomm S

There are four new tiers of processor, named S1 to S4. That “S” stands for “System”, with the number referring to how powerful the chip is.

S1 includes standard handsets such as the HTC Droid Incredible and Sony Ericsson X10i, S2 is featured in more powerful phones like the HTC Thunderbolt and LG Revolution, and S3 powers uberphones and tablets such as the HTC Sensation and HP TouchPad.

Portable Gaming & Future

Portable gaming is going to pave the way to future. Already Android and iPhone has together eaten the major percentage of mobile market and they would start interfering with consoles next year. Imagine this – plug your mobile to a TV and use it like a console or wirelessly stream video. If not in a year, you would see this in practice 2 years from now.

2012 is the year of Quad cores. Nvidia Tegra 3, Snapdragon S4, and Intel is jumping in too. Apple isn’t holding back either, iPad 3 (or iPad 4) and iPhone 4 are going to be A6 quad core too.

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You need not have a developer account in order to proceed with the installation.

How it works: This methodology fakes necessary parameters to make Microsoft’s update service believe that you’re using a developer phone so that the developer-only Build 7712 update gets pushed to you and your phone.

Note: If you are already on WP7.5 Beta1, get zune beta software and check for updates.

Pre-requisites:

• WP7 Phone with NoDo update (copy-paste update)
• Updating tool
• 32bit or 64bit support tools.
• Windows PC (Vista or 7).

How to Install Windows Phone 7.5 Mango on any WP7 Phone

Step 1: Before we begin, make sure Zune software is not running. Extract the “updating tool” you downloaded and run update.bat as an administrator (right click, run as admin).

Step 2: Once finished with fooling stuff, Zune would launch from which you will have to check for updates.

Step 3: Zune might show you Build 7401 download & install, Check for updates again and you will see Windows Phone 7 Build 7661, download and install this too. Once done, your Zune will not recognize your phone, you will need to download and install a beta version of Zune from here.

Step 4: Check for updates the 3rd time and you will get the Windows Phone 7 Build 7712 ( oh yeah that’s how it works)– again, download and install.

That’s all, you now have the latest Mango build running on your phone.

Downgrade to WP7 NoDo

If you run into trouble or don’t like Mango for any reasons, run restore.bat as admin and you should go back to NoDo.

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Asus Padforne is an Android smartphone device that comes with a tablet it can dock into. It swiftly switches so that reading emails or browsing the web on the phone portion expands itself seamlessly once it’s connected into the pad. What you get in addition is the extended battery life. The tablet dock has inbuilt cellular that also cutsdown the stress ont he phone for the battery.

Padfone is 4.3-inch smartphone with a 10.1-inch tablet dock.

The smartphone is actually the only smart aspect of this hardware pair — the slate part acts as a display, a set of speakers, an extended battery, and an I/O extender, but it has no extra cpu/gpu/ram or any other piece of hardware. Compatibility between the display dock and subsequent phone generations is being contemplated but couldn’t be confirmed, and as to the UI, ASUS says it’ll be almost the same as its second-gen Android tablets.

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How Google Wallet works:

Google, along with Citi, MasterCard, First Data and Sprint, have built a new payment system called Google Wallet. Basically, Google Wallet is an app that will make your phone your wallet. You’ll be able to tap, pay and save using your phone and near field communication (NFC).

Right now its just coming to NFC enabled Android phones. With your single android phone, you’ll be able to store your credit cards, offers, loyalty cards and gift cards, and a simple tap you can auto redeem offers and earn loyalty points and pay the due amounts. Google has vision that in the future it can also act as your ticket, boarding pass, and what not.

Google Wallet will support both Citi MasterCard and a Google Prepaid Card. Using Google Wallet you can pay wherever MasterCard PayPass is accepted.
Google is building an open commerce ecosystem, with APIs that will enable integration with numerous partners.

Watch Google Wallet Experience that excites so many merchants:

More at: www.google.com/wallet.

Google is field testing Google Wallet, would be available soon.

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Note: This thread would be updated as the event happens, don’t forget to check back:

• Threads: You can toggle between messages, chat up, and Windows Live Messenger, all in the same conversation

• Groups: Contact groups Tiles custom Live turns to see the latest statuses and quickly send a message to an email or instant message to the entire group, directly from the Start screen

• Better integration with social networks: Twitter and LinkedIn contacts are integrated into the card and can include up Mango check-in, also have available one nine facial detection software that makes it easy tagging your photos or posting them on the Internet

• Linked inbox: More email accounts in a secure inbox, conversations are organized so you can view the most recent mail

• Hands-free messaging: Built-in speech-to-text and text-to-speech, which allows writing messages and chat hands-free

• Connect App: By connecting and integrating applications on their search results in Windows Phone Hubs, including Music and Videos and Pictures, applications are visible when and where needed.

• Improved Live Tiles: You can get updated information without requiring applications to be open. Live Tiles are now more dynamic and can store more information.

• Multitasking: Applications can be rotated quickly and at the same time, others may run in the background, while retaining the performance and battery duration

• Internet Explorer 9: The power of a PC browser-based IE9 support for HTML5 and support for hardware acceleration

• Recognize local (Local Scout). Providing local results and recommendations for nearby restaurants, shops and suggested activities, present in a user-friendly guide

• Bing for Windows Phone: More ways to search the Internet, location based searches, including Bing Vision, Voice and Music Search, so that decision making is easier

• Quick Cards: When searching for a product, movie, event or place we provide a summary and relevant applications

Standby for more updates on WP7 as event proceeds.

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AR-driven EyePet can make an adorable gremlin crawl around your living room floor. Sony’s new SmartAR solution loosens the limitations on augmented reality, bringing it a step closer to genuine usefulness, closer to Reality.

Watch SmartAR in action below:

SmartAR, unlike traditional Augemnted reality programs, doesn’t require visual markers, like the 3DS AR cards. Its intelligent enough that it can generate the animation on just another photo. What’s more is that with its high speed object tracking, the photo can then be rotated, moved, or even dropped to the floor without causing a hiccup in the overlay. It handles all the 3-dimensions bringing a 100% seamless 3d experience.

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Till date, world’s thinnest smartphone was crowned to Samsung Galaxy SII, but the days are not far when such smartphones would go even thinner. The new contendor is flexible enough to fold like a paper.

The e-paper prototype PaperPhone sports a 3.75-inch thin-film display. Its s smartphone and hence can do everything you would expect it to do: make calls, Read books, and Play music. The rest of the phone’s hardware is situated alongside the non-bendablepart, which is also surprisingly thin.

Queen’s Human Media Lab director says, “This is the future. Everything is going to look and feel like this within five years”.

However, the prototype is based on e-ink technology, the same technology that powers Amazon’s kindle ebook readers. It can be operated by bending the corners to turn a page, squeezing to make a call, and even written on with a pen. Were you expecting more ?

The research institute, Vertegaal along with MERG claims that the larger versions of the displays could eliminate paper and printers from offices. This is possible because E-ink displays require no power until the information on screen is refreshed.

So this is flexible, but how much would it cost?  It’s a $7,000 prototype, but the final product would be ultra affordable.

And yes, the prototype uses Android. Of course its not ready for the primetime, but we grab a fairly good idea of where we are heading.

Watch the thinnest bendable phone in action:

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So far, tech nonprofit MITRE has made a lot of progress on the project and the prototype is ready under the name ” the Joint Battle Command-Platform”. It is now under some testing in the simulated battelfields, before it steps into the real army battlefields. The SDK used to develop apps for the Joint battle command platform is called the Mobile/Handheld Computing Environment, and army would releasing the sdk in June 2011 for app developers.

There will be lots of different apps that would empower the soldiers in the fields. There would be app that would provide mapping function that displays location and movements of all the soldiers and help them communicate the strategy better (Blue Force Tracker program). There will be some cloud to phone data exchange rebranded as “Critical messaging” to exchange crucial data like medevac requests and on the ground reporting.

“I was just shown a quick, little, five-minute brief on it – that’s all it took and we were ready to use them,” said Spc. Randy Fite, who like Bui experimented with the JBC-P Handheld prototype during a recent training exercise at Fort Bragg, N.C. He said the app’s blue icons indicating the GPS locations of his fellow Soldiers helped them navigate and coordinate actions during the capture.
“We can know where each unit is in our platoon, and how they’re moving,” Fite said. “It makes the job a lot easier.”

The army would face lots of challenges especially for areas with low or no signal coverage, which is something very common for battlefields.  Also, the army has high hopes on designing a phone hardware that is rugged enough to withstand wears and tears of all sorts.

This android based tablet/smartphone platform would help them phase out the current generation communication system: Nett Warrior – a suite of sensors, other functions which smartphones do much more easily. The complete system of Joint battle command platform would weigh less than 2 pounds, making it way better than Nett warrior.

Army’s aim is to build a core framework that can run on a large number of hardwares and form factors, obviously Android is the best (and only?) option they could have thought about. iOS is way too restrictive as per the officials, among which there are several iPhone lovers.

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Android phones are certainly getting sexier and smarter thanks to Samsung, HTC, Sony and Motorola and HTC.

HTC’s Sensation 4g is certainly the best phone from HTC so far. Designed with the Nexus S like contour glass display, 4.3-inch super LCD, sporting qHD resolution of 540 x 960, wrapped in a unibody aluminum body, its among the sexiest phones in the market.

Apart from that it has good quality 8 megapixel camera with mind-blowing 1080p HD video capture, 768MB of RAM (uhh no 1GB like Galalxy S2?), 4GB of internal storage.

HTC Sensation also comes with all new Sense UI on Gingerbread  with new support for user customizable lock screens, 3D effects, all new apps for mail, the browser, contacts, weather, and more.

Sensation is coming to T-Mobile this summer for the US residents, worldwide months after. Its also appearing on the Vodafone in UK.

The specs of this device aligns it with Galaxy S2, LG Optimus 2x, and many more to come dual core phones on android.

Video Preview:

Checkout the HTC Sensation 4g Pics below:

image credit

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Nokia diverted its plan towards new Open source mobile OS, MeeGo. The strategy had big backing from Intel but it never paved off, and Nokia nearly ditched the future of its own OS. Now that Nokia has moved to Windows Phone 7, Nokia would no longer support existing Symbian OS devices, but would continue to play tits n bits with the code. ITs of course a good time to Open source the whole of project and let innovators from around the globe pitch in.

Nokia is now announcing that the Symbian code has been fully Open sourced and is available at symbian.nokia.com. The transition phase is pretty much in works, but once done collab.symbian.nokia.com will have full documentation & tools available for developers.

The documentation page shows “coming soon” for all but the GIT repository guide. However, any interested and informed parties can always go and contribue to the Symbian Wiki.

According to Nokia’s head of open source, Petra Soderling:

“We have been working hard to turn most Symbian Foundation era materials into the new framework – for example, checking ownerships and use of rights for masses of documents – and are proud to announce that almost all of the source code is now uploaded to collab.symbian.nokia.com. The few remaining source files, tools and documents will be uploaded over the next few weeks.”

The situation surrounding contributing code back to Symbian’s source code. She responded by stating:

“As we committed when the Symbian Foundation announced its plans to ramp down, Nokia is offering Symbian through an alternative, open and direct model for those who wish to use the platform. We encourage potential collaborators to discuss with the package owners at Nokia if they have enhancements that are really useful and they believe could be incorporated into the platform. Currently they can get in touch with us through the ‘Contact us’ function on the website.

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Google Goggles is a Visual  search engine for mobile phones which allows users to take a picture of anything, such as a landmark, or a celebrity and then run a search for what/who they are.

Google wishes to expands its plans further when they acquired like.com, a visual search engine. Prior to Google’s acquisition, Like.com helped online shoppers search site called Riya which used facial recognition technology to search images that users had uploaded and tagged. The latest patent filed by Google: User Interface for Presenting Search Results for Multiple Regions of a Visual Query suggests that Google’s visual search for smartphones might be evolving into something that’s totally new and powerful.

Another Google patent, Facial Recognition With Social Network Aiding, describes facial recognition searches for “one or more likely names” of the people in the image based upon “communications applications, social networking applications, calendar applications, and collaborative applications” to create a list of possible identities for each person. The patent description also mentions that if the photo is tagged with a person’s name, “that picture might be used in future facial recognition queries to recognize the person.”

After receiving the visual query with one or more facial images, the system identifies images that potentially match the respective facial image in accordance with visual similarity criteria. Then one or more persons associated with the potential images are identified. For each identified person, person-specific data comprising metrics of social connectivity to the requester are retrieved from a plurality of applications such as communications applications, social networking applications, calendar applications, and collaborative applications. An ordered list of persons is then generated by ranking the identified persons in accordance with at least metrics of visual similarity between the respective facial image and the potential image matches and with the social connection metrics. Finally, at least one person identifier from the list is sent to the requester.

Benefits aside, Google could face serious privacy allegations. In regards to privacy, Google has several possible scenarios: to send only one of the “identifiers” to the person searching; to possibly allow only the person identified to make the photo public, or to send a request after a person is positively identified, asking if the image can be a face search result for other people’s visual queries from within their social network, which is kind of tricky as Google would need partnership with Twitter & Facebook for this to work. Its not hard to get the former but latter is what we doubt.

Okay, now that we know Google is serious about social facial recognition, how can we confirm is targetting mobile platforms like Android & iPhone? Coincidently, “David Petrou, Andrew Rabinovich, and Adam Hartwig” who worked on Google Goggles, are the patent filers.

What would make it better is that we would see some competition as well.  Viewdle is also working on mobile facial recognition that works on the fly, and might help “government stalkers.” by allowing users to tag and save “faceprints” of people, and “then share the faceprint of them with other Viewdle users so they can recognize that person too!” The photosharing privacy settings are integrated with Facebook privacy settings.

Viewdle in action:

Viewdle – Photo and Video Face Tagging from Viewdle on Vimeo.

There are many privacy issues which need to be addressed here before they can make a public appearance. But one field where they would work without obligations would be with Dictators and governments who are already identifying people based upon real names and photos posted in social media.

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