Intel-powered Android notebooks coming soon, will cost $200

If this piece of news is to be believed, then very soon we will see Intel-powered Android notebooks for as low as $200 (Rs 10,880 approx). Dadi Perlmutter, Intel’s executive vice president and chief product officer, told Cnet that notebooks carrying a price tag around $200 will predominantly be Android devices equipped with Intel’s Atom mobile processors.

Intel to power Android notebooks?

However, there is no further information about these Android notebooks. It is unclear how they’d look like. Seemingly, they are expected to be convertible type devices, the hybrid trend that we saw at the popular tech shows earlier this year. Perlmutter expects the PC market to pick pace during the second half of the year as it heads into the year 2014.

Last week, Intel CEO Paul Otellini had disclosed that touchscreen PCs could make a debut at prices as low as $200. And this is expected to happen in the coming months. However, he hadn’t specified which operating system these devices would carry, so one could have easily assumed Windows 8. Whether Windows 8 PCs will carry such a low price largely depends on Microsoft, disclosed Perlmutter. He further added, "We have a good technology that enables a very cost-effective price point. The price of Windows 8 laptops depends on how Microsoft prices Windows 8. It may be a slightly higher price point."

The cheaper laptops are expected to run on Intel's Atom chips, and the ones which will run on Intel’s Core line will supposedly sell as low as $399 to $499. One can expect the higher-end laptops to be priced more. Reportedly, Intel will ship data-only multimode LTE processors by the mid of 2013 and multimode voice over LTE and data processors later during the year. Presently, the company offers only single-mode LTE chip. On the other hand, its rival Qualcomm dominates the mobile market and offers multimode LTE chips.

Intel has been a late entrant in the mobile segment. It will be introducing a mobile chip that integrates LTE on the same piece of silicon as the application processor in 2014. It has gained some traction in smartphones, but the figures are still low. Intel dominates the PC market by making chips that power computers/laptops and servers. However, the PC market has been witnessing a slow down due to the overwhelming response for mobile devices.

Nokia launches Asha 210 QWERTY phone with a dedicated WhatsApp button

Nokia unveiled the latest device in its Asha family, the Asha 210. The phone sports a QWERTY keyboard and is available in both Single SIM and Dual-SIM variants with the dual-SIM allowing for SIM swapping on-the-go. The phone also supports Wi-Fi. The most distinctive feature of the phone is a dedicated WhatsApp button. This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen a social network tie up with a device manufacturer to create a dedicated phone. HTC and Facebook have done it twice with the QWERTY HTC Chacha, which had a dedicated Facebook button and more recently with the HTC First.

Nokia and WhatsApp have entered into a partnership and WhatsApp is offering their service for free on all Nokia Asha 210 devices. Some versions of the Asha 210 will have a dedicated Facebook button instead of the WhatsApp one. It is assumed that this will depend on where the phone is being sold. Nokia is touting this device as a full-fledged social device and is clearly targeted at users who are looking to buy their first smartphone. Nokia claims that the Asha 210 is “designed to ensure that people are never more than a few clicks away from their friends and family.”

Asha 210 borrows Lumia's colourful language

The Nokia Asha 210 comes with a single back-facing 2MP camera that can be accessed through a dedicated hardkey even when the keypad is locked. The smart camera also offers a few image capturing, editing, and sharing options. Users can also share photos and other content quickly by using Nokia's Slam feature, which comes built-into the Nokia Asha 210. Slam essentially enables people to transfer images, video etc to another Bluetooth-enabled phone without the need to pair devices. What is impressive is that the phone also has Nokia Nearby, a web app that lets people discover restaurants, shops and ATM machines in their vicinity.

In terms of hardware the Asha 210 is fairly rudimentary as you would expect any ‘smart’ feature phone to be. It has a 2.4-inch QVGA screen and has 64 MB of on-board memory. The storage can be expanded to 32 GB by using a microSD card. Those expecting the phone to have 3G are in for a disappointment - the Asha 210 will only support 2G.

The Nokia Asha 210 is going to be available in yellow, cyan, black, magenta, and white when it goes on sale in the next couple of months. The phone is expected to be priced around $72, which is approximately Rs 3,900. No dates or region-wise roll out schedule has been released.

7-inch Asus FonePad launched in India for Rs 15,999

Asus has launched its new tablet – the FonePad – and has priced it at Rs 15,999. The tablet will be hitting store shelves in the next couple of days. The special thing about the tablet is that Asus has teamed up with Intel to bring the world’s first Android-based tablet with x86 architecture.

The tablet has a 7-inch IPS display with a resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels. Under the hood, it’s powered by a  1.2GHz Intel Atom Z2420 processor, with a PowerVR GC540 GPU handling the graphics side of things. It has 1GB of RAM, so multi-tasking won’t be that big of an issue.

The FonePad doesn’t have any rear camera, but it is equipped with a 1.2 megapixel front facing camera that can record videos at 720p. The tablet is equipped with 16GB of internal memory and sports a microSD card slot with memory being expandable up to 32GB. It runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box.

The connectivity is where the name FonePad comes into play. Unlike other tablets with micro SIM slots that are used only to access 3G, the FonePad lets you use it as a full-fledged phone, much like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 2.

The Asus FonePad uses Intel's x86 architecture

The FonePad was originally shown off back in February at this year's CES. The Asus Fonepad has a metallic design, weighs 340g and is 10.4mm thick.

The Asus Fonepad comes with a number of exclusive Asus productivity apps: Floating App for easy management of running apps and multi-tasking; SuperNote Lite for handwritten notes and drawing; and WebStorage Office Online for Microsoft Office-compatible document editing on the move. Fonepad users also get 5GB of free lifetime Asus WebStorage for syncing and sharing data with other devices.

Two new optional accessories are also available for the Fonepad. VersaSleeve 7 is a wraparound cover with a folding design that both protects the Fonepad and props up the screen in two different positions for typing and watching video. Turn Case is a lightweight, hard-shell case for Fonepad that features a soft interior to keep the screen clean, besides being a built-in stand that places the screen at a perfect angle for watching video.

"It is ideal to have a larger screen with entertainment, social media and other online activities now playing an increasingly important part in our mobile lifestyles," said Jonney Shih, Chairman, Asus, during CES 2013. "The incorporation of 3G mobile data with full telephony support makes the Fonepad a perfect combination of tablet and phone in one single device."

Apple pulls in $43.6 billion in revenue and $9.5 billion in profit in Q2 2013

Apple announced their earnings for the quarter gone by. The quarterly earnings of the Cupertino-based gadget maker added up to $43.6 billion and the company also reported $9.5 billion in profits. This news is bound to provide some relief for the company that has seen huge erosion in share value since September 2012, having lost over $280 billion in market-cap since then.

The investor worries, however, persist as Apple sold 37.4 million iPhones this quarter, which is relatively flat as the company had sold 35.1 million phones in the same quarter last year. The Mac sales, which include desktop as well as the Macbook range, were flat as well, with 4 million units sold and iPod sales were down. Revenues were boosted by an increase in iPad sales which at 19.5 million units sold showed a significant increase from 11.8 million units a year ago.

The insanely profitable company has seen its margins come under pressure as sales of lower margin items like the iPad mini registered higher than expected sales. Due to this the company reported a gross margin of 37.5%, a big drop from the 47.4% it reported last year.
What could spook the investors further are the projections that Apple has offered for the next quarter. The company is estimating revenue to drop to between $33.5 billion - $35.5 billion and its gross margins to reduce further. Another drag on the growth is customers opting for devices from Samsung and other makers that run on Google’s Android operating system.

iPhones sell more than any other Apple device

With iPhones accounting for 42% of all revenue and iPads accounting for 16%, many are expecting Apple to offer newer product categories this year. Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed that the company was indeed working on this. "We've got a lot more surprises in the works," Cook said. "Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software, and services that we can't wait to introduce in the fall and into 2014. We continue to be very confident in our future product plans." Although he didn’t give out any specifics, many are expecting Apple to deliver a ‘smartwatch’ this year. The much-rumoured television by Apple, which Steve Jobs had claimed to have cracked, could also be a reality.

Also announced today was what the company called the biggest share repurchase in history as Apple said that it would have returned $100 billion to investors via buy-backs and dividends thorough 2015. The company will be returning at least $55 billion in cash through dividends to compensate for the battering the company's stock has taken over the last few months

Google buys Wavii for $30 million, mirroring Yahoo's deal

Google Inc has acquired Wavii, the Seattle-based startup behind a news summarization app, for roughly $30 million in cash, a person with knowledge of the matter said Tuesday.

Google's successful bid came after Apple Inc had expressed interest in buying Wavii to incorporate the startup's natural language technology into Siri, Apple's voice-activated personal assistant feature, said the person, who declined to be named because the deal has not been publicly announced.

Google and Wavii declined to comment.

Google's purchase comes several weeks after Yahoo Inc paid a similar amount to acquire Summly, the news reader and Wavii competitor founded by 18-year-old Nick D'Aloisio in London.

The deal is reminiscent of Yahoo's Summly buyout

The deals have taken out of play two small companies that sought to enhance how consumer experience news - a significant concern for Google and Yahoo, which both maintain highly trafficked news sites.

In separate interviews last year, Wavii founder Adrian Aoun and D'Aloisio acknowledged the competition between the two startups.

D'Aloisio touted Summly's superior user interface, which condenses articles into several easy-to-read paragraphs. Aoun played up his app's technology, including a proprietary algorithm that boiled down complex news stories into sentences of just a few words.

Wavii's investors included Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, former Facebook executive Dave Morin, and Fritz Lanman, a former dealmaker at Microsoft Corp.

Most of the startup's employees are expected to relocate to Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California.

News of the acquisition was first reported by Techcrunch.

Yahoo to shut down email service in China

Yahoo's email service in China will close this summer as part of an arrangement worked out with its partner in that country, Alibaba Group.The service is scheduled to close Aug. 19. Yahoo is recommending users of its free email service in China transfer their accounts to another provider such as Aliyun, an email alternative offered by Alibaba.
Yahoo Inc., based in Sunnyvale, California, has been phasing out of China since 2005 when it turned its website, email and other services over to Alibaba. As part of that deal, Yahoo paid $1 billion for a 40 percent stake in Alibaba, one of China's biggest Internet companies.
It has proven to be an astute investment. Yahoo reaped a $7.6 billion by selling half its stake back to Alibaba last year. Yahoo's remaining stake in Alibaba is now worth even more - about $14 billion by one analyst's estimate.
Alibaba is expected to go public within the next two years, giving Yahoo an opportunity to sell more of its holdings.
The closure of Yahoo's email service in China comes at the same time that the company has been shutting down some of its U.S. services, too. The moves are part of an effort to reduce costs and free up more engineers to work on mobile products - a top priority of CEO Marissa Mayer.
Yahoo was among the first U.S. Internet companies to establish operations in China. But its presence in China turned into a public relations nightmare eight years ago when human rights activists began to assail Yahoo for cooperating with the Chinese government's demands for personal emails from two journalists who were later convicted and imprisoned.
Although Yahoo insisted it was merely obeying Chinese law, the company was internationally skewered. In 2007, it settled a lawsuit filed on behalf of the two journalists, Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning, and a family member.

Facebook Home crosses 500,000 downloads on Google Play Store

Looks like the mixed reviews and the privacy scare has not deterred Facebook users from adopting Home, the Android launcher released by the world's largest social network earlier this month.

As per the latest figures from the Play Store, Facebook Home has passed 500,000 downloads on the Android store ten days after it was launched. Though the app continues to have rollercoaster reviews, which bring down its average rating to 2.2, it would seem the novelty of the experience has drawn many users. Of course, just the download count seems like a vague way to gauge consumer interest as the numbers don’t show how many users are still using Home.

Home brings a brand new Facebook experience for Android

Another point to be noted is that the apk for Home has been floating around in the wild with several users forced to sideload it in the initial days when the app was a US-only affair. Between April 12 and 16, when the app was made available to international users, several modified apks cropped up, downloads of which do not count towards the official tally.

While 500,000 downloads might seem too few in comparison to Facebook’s massive 1 billion-plus user base, the app’s progress is also limited by the number of devices it can run on. Hardware requirements rule out most mid-range handsets, leaving only the high-end ones capable of using Home. By comparison, the main Facebook Android app has been downloaded between 100 million and 500 million times.

A look at the graph presented on the Play Store also makes for an interesting reading, which says the number of new downloads for Home has actually dropped since its international launch on April 16. Home is currently available on certain devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, HTC One X and HTC One X+. Besides these phones, Home also runs on the HTC First, which was launched alongside the app on April 4.

Adoption may be great, but reception for that app is altogether a different matter. Out of the 11,073 user ratings at the time of writing, over half i.e. 5,700 are a 1 Star and just over ten percent of the ratings i.e 1,832 are 5 Stars.

$15 million iPhone with black diamond is world’s most expensive smartphone

Stuart Hughes, known for crafting luxury Apple devices covered in precious metals and encrusted with rare stones, has created the most expensive iPhone 5 - embedded with a rare black diamond. News has it that a Chinese businessman, the owner of the black diamond, contacted Stuart Hughes about his gold iPhones, and commissioned the handset. The Black Diamond iPhone 5 is priced at a whopping $15 million.

World's costliest iPhone 5

Apparently, it took nine weeks to re-create the chassis of the iPhone 5 in solid gold, and the complete handset has been finished by hand. The single, flawless, deep cut black diamond weighs in at 26 cts and aptly replaces the home button of the smartphone. The chassis is inlaid with approximately 600 white flawless diamonds with full gold dressing on the back. It has about 135 grams of 24ct gold and a sapphire glass set in the screen. The back also has the Apple logo showing off 53 flawless diamonds. 

This isn’t the first time that the iPhone 5 has got such luxurious treatment. We have seen Hughes create the limited-edition (100 units) iPhone 5 decked in 18-carat gold and gold and diamond finishing. It also boasts of a diamond studded Apple logo. We have seen Apple’s iPad too flaunt not only precious stones and metals but also a T-REX's thigh bone and a 75-million year old rock. It was called the world’s most expensive iPad 2 dubbed History Edition built with 2kgs of gold and several diamonds.

In the meanwhile, here is a quick look at the specifications of the iPhone 5:

• 4-inch, 326ppi Retina display at 1136 x 640 pixels
• GPRS, EDGE, EV-DO, HSPA, HSPA+, DC-HSDPA, LTE and Wi-Fi
• GPS
• Bluetooth
• 8 megapixel camera with 1080p HD recording, 720p front-facing camera
• 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions

While all this looks and sounds fancy, do you think a tech enthusiast with $15 million to throw away would ever buy such a device?

Goodbye QWERTY, hello faster typing with KALQ

Texting just got a lot easier! Researchers claim to have developed a new keyboard for touchscreens that allows superfast thumb-typing, enabling you to type 34 percent faster than on a QWERTY layout. The research team used computational optimisation techniques in conjunction with a model of thumb movement to search among millions of potential layouts before identifying one that yields superior performance.
Typing on today's mobile phones and tablets is needlessly slow. One limitation is that the QWERTY layout is ill-suited for tablets and other touchscreen devices when typing with the thumbs, researchers said.
Thumb typing is also ergonomically very different from typing on a physical keyboard.
Researchers said it has been established that normal users using a QWERTY on a touchscreen device are limited to typing at a rate of around 20 words per minute, which is slow compared to the rates achieved on physical keyboards.
The researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Informatics and colleagues from the University of St Andrews and Montana Tech initiated the process to develop a layout for two-thumb text entry with the goal of improving typing performance and minimising the strain for the thumbs.
"The key to optimising a keyboard for two thumbs is to minimise long sequences with a single thumb," lead researcher Antti Oulasvirta said.
"We also want to place frequently used letters centrally close to each other. Experienced typists move their thumbs simultaneously: While one is typing, the other is approaching its next target. We derived a predictive model of this behaviour for the optimisation method," said Oulasvirta.
The computational optimisation process had two goals: To minimise the moving time of the thumbs and to approximate alternating sides as well as possible.
In the new keyboard KALQ, all vowels, with the exception of the letter "y" are placed in the area for the right thumb, whereas the left thumb gets assigned more keys.
To fully benefit from this layout, the users were trained to move their thumbs simultaneously. While one thumb is typing, the other one can move to its next target.
Finally, researchers developed probabilistic error correction methods that took into account how thumbs move and also statistical knowledge about the texts users type.
With these improvements, users were able to reach 37 words per minute, which is the best ever reported for two-thumb typing on touchscreen devices, significantly more than the approximate 20 words on a split QWERTY for regular users.
Researchers said KALQ will be made available as a free app for Android-based smartphones at the beginning of May.

HTC Desire L launched with 4.3-inch display, 1GHz dual-core processor

HTC has launched another mid-range smartphone in the form of HTC Desire L.Measuring 128 x 66.9 x 8.9mm, HTC Desire L features a 4.3-inch Super LCD2 display with 480x800 pixels resolution. The smartphone weighs in at 118 grams. HTC Desire L is powered by 1GHz dual-core processor along with 1GB of RAM. It comes with 4GB of internal storage, which can be expanded through a microSD card.
For now there is no word on which version of Android will be on-board HTC Desire L but we believe it should have at least Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean). Also HTC will be adding its own Sense skin on top.
HTC Desire L comes with an 1800mAh battery. For camera, there is a 5-megapixel autofocus rear camera with BSI sensor and LED flash that is capable of recording videos in 720p.
There is no word on whether this smartphone will be available in other markets apart from Taiwan and what will be the tentative cost of it.
HTC has recently unveiled HTC Desire Q and Desire P.
HTC Desire Q sports a 4.0-inch WVGA display and comes with Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich). HTC Desire Q is powered by a 1GHz single-core processor alongside 512MB RAM and 4GB internal storage that is expandable by another 32GB via microSD slot. The phone sports dimensions of 118.5 x 62.3 x 9.3 mm and weighs 114 grams. This smartphone is only available in Taiwan as of now and carries a retail tag of NT$6,990 (which is approximately Rs. 12,750 or $235).
Connectivity options on the HTC Desire Q include Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, GPS and 3G. The phone sports a 5-megapixel rear auto-focus camera with LED flash, but lacks a front-camera, which may come as a bit of a downer to some. The phone comes with Beats Audio branding, like several of its compatriots.
The HTC Desire P on the other hand, sports a 4.3-inch display with 480x800 (WVGA) pixels. The smartphone is powered by 1GHz dual-core Cortex-A5 processor and Adreno 203 graphics along with 768MB of RAM. HTC Desire P also comes with an 8-megapixel rear camera and 4GB of internal storage, which can be expanded through microSD card slot. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth.