Samsung vs Nokia

Samsung and Nokia both are the top class mobile phone brand and there products quality is very good.  But if you wanna know which phone is the best between samsung and nokia? Both are very good but today's world samsung is doing just outstanding.  There smartphone's designs and quality is so good.  Samsung developing their phone on android operating system and nokia using Symbian and windows operating system.  Android is much better than windows and it is so much popular among the world..

So I can tell you that samsung is much better than nokia.

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Not just Windows Blue: The rest of Microsoft is shifting to yearly releases, too

If a source close to Microsoft is to be believed, Windows Blue is a lot more than just annual updates to Windows 8 — it’s a massive shift towards regular updates for almost every Microsoft product, including Windows Phone, Windows Server, and online services such as Hotmail and SkyDrive.
Historically, Microsoft’s major products have usually been on a 3ish-year release cycle. This is a fairly standard timeframe in the software development world, especially when it comes to operating systems and productivity suites that need to be rigorously tested before being deployed on hundreds of millions of computers. Fast forward to today, though, and three years is quite literally a technological lifetime. So much can happen in three years that it’s virtually impossible for Microsoft to release a contemporary OS. In the time that it took Microsoft to fix Vista and release Windows 7, Facebook went from a few thousand users to 300 million users, and Apple released the first — and two more iterations — of the iPhone. Windows 8 began development before the initial release of the iPad — before the tablet market even existed — and wasn’t launched until after the iPad 3, by which point Apple had already won.
In short, it’s no surprise that Microsoft is moving Windows 8, Windows Phone, Windows Server, and its online services to an annual release cycle. Every single one of Microsoft’s competitors in the consumer space — Android, iOS, OS X — is on an annual-or-faster release schedule. The only way that Microsoft can hope to compete in the smartphone and tablet markets is if it can outmaneuver the competition, and that’s virtually impossible without a rapid release schedule. It’s a little unclear what the Blue update to Windows Server will entail, and likewise, web services like SkyDrive and Hotmail are already updated fairly often.

The new Windows logo is blue — coincidence?!?!

Blue, then, represents a huge internal shift for Microsoft, but it’s also a big change for OEMs and the entire PC industry as well. As far as we know, Microsoft is still on schedule to release Windows Blue in mid-2013 (for free or cheap), and it will probably be available through the Windows Store — bad news for OEMs hoping to sell new hardware on the back of a new OS. ZDNet’s source says that the Windows Phone, Server, and online service updates will arrive around the same time, but except for a couple of Metro-related rumors, no one knows what these updates will entail. Presumably they will be small tweaks, though, much like iOS or OS X’s yearly updates. New features might be added, but don’t expect any major interface changes — Microsoft is clearly set on a unified Metro experience across desktop, tablet, phone, and probably the game console too.Moving forward, ZDNet says that Windows 9 is still on the roadmap — though we have no idea when it’ll land — and it isn’t clear if it’s a major update, or something that will be rolled out as part of Windows Blue. Curiously, there hasn’t been a single leak, rumor, or mention of Windows Phone 9 on the internet. Perhaps that’s a good sign that Microsoft’s Blue smartphone efforts are in full swing: If there’s a product that needs to be updated regularly to have any chance of success, it’s Windows Phone. Personally, the bit I’m most excited about is the integration between all of Microsoft’s products and services: Rapid updates should mean that Microsoft can add a new feature to your Xbox 720, and quickly follow up with system-level updates that integrate that feature into Windows 8 and WP8.

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How to bring back the Start menu and button to Windows 8

 

If you’ve just installed Windows 8, or bought a Windows 8 PC, you may have noticed something rather irksome: The Start button and menu have disappeared! After spending almost 20 years at the bottom left corner of your desktop, Microsoft has decided that the Start menu is dead and that the mouse-and-keyboard-hating Metro Start screen is the future.
Despite Microsoft’s best efforts to ensure that the Start button and menu remain banished from Windows 8, a bunch of third-party replacements have emerged. Really, it just goes to show how devoted the Desktop Windows userbase is: Microsoft completely stripped out the underlying Start menu code to quash potential Luddite revolutionaries, and yet months after the release of Windows 8 there are dozens of Start menu and Start button replacements — some of which are far superior to Microsoft’s own Windows 7 STart menu.
Let’s take a look at the best, cheapest, and most authentic apps for bringing back the Windows Start menu and button.

StartIsBack

If you want a Start menu replacement that looks exactly like Windows 7, StartIsBack is for you. You get the same Start menu orb icon, the same search box, the same jump lists, and — for better or worse — even the same Aero transparency! As you can see in the screenshot above, StartIsBack even detects if your system needs to restart to apply some patches; it really is just like the Windows 7 Start menu.
Where StartIsBack diverges from the Windows 7 Start menu, though, is configurability: StartIsBack is fully customizable, and includes a handful of useful Windows 8-specific features, too. You can configure which hot corners are enabled, make your PC jump straight to the Desktop when it first boots up, and configure a key combo to show the Windows 8 Start screen (Win+Ctrl by default). If Start menu and taskbar transparency aren’t your thing, StartIsBack lets you disable it — and you can change the Start button orb icon, too.
Download StartIsBack ($3, free 30-day trial)

Pokki

Where StartIsBack tries to replicate the Windows of yesteryear, Pokki (free) is very much its own beast — and as much as I love the Windows 7 Start menu, I have to admit that Pokki is probably even better. It utilizes a neat “pinning” system that isn’t unlike the home screen of your smartphone or tablet (though I would argue that the Windows taskbar/superbar still does a better job). You can also add widgets to Pokki, such as Gmail or Facebook, which display your latest email or status updates.
By default, Pokki will configure your Windows 8 system to boot straight to the Desktop — and there is an option that will just completely disable the hot corners, if you so desire. (Remember, Win+C pops open the Charms menu, if you need.)
Download Pokki (free)

StartMenu8

If you want the Windows 7 Start menu look-and-feel, but you’re not prepared to fork out a few dollars for StartIsBack or Start8, StartMenu8 is a solid alternative. While the interface won’t win any prizes — it feels a lot like the early Linux apps that ruthlessly ripped off Windows — you get a fair amount of configurability, and a handful of Windows 8-specific toggles that are very useful.
By default, StartMenu8 will skip the Windows 8 Start screen and go straight to the Desktop, and disable Windows 8′s hot corners. There’s also the option to disable the sidebar, if you really don’t ever want to see Windows 8 ever again. The StartMenu8 button icon can be altered, and you can add and remove which links appear up the right side of the Start menu. Overall, StartMenu8 looks and feels a bit clunky — and, incidentally, watch out for some delicious bundleware during the installation process.

 

 

 

 

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How Apple can make the iPhone king again

Shortly after the launch of the original iPhone in 2007, it was clear that Apple had a certifiable hit on its hands. It was the first smartphone that earned the name — the first mobile device that could put a smile on your face just by doing is job. But more recently the news has brought stories of production cuts and muted reactions to new devices. The iPhone is still a great phone, but little by little those smiles from 2007 are going away. Let’s take a look at how Apple can turn that frown upside down.

Hardware

It seems like Apple is adept at setting trends, but not so good at recognizing them when the market is moved by its competitors. The current and ongoing increase in screen size is the most prominent example.
The company used a 3.5-inch display until 2012, when it bumped it up to 3.99-inches on the iPhone 5. It was the right move in spirit, but completely wrong in execution. The screen didn’t get wider at all — just a little taller. This doesn’t make reading or web browsing any better, and the device feels odd because of its stretched proportions. In fact, the software barely takes advantage of it. It almost felt spiteful, like Apple was giving the unwashed masses the larger screen they craved, but refused to do anything useful with it.
It’s time Apple reacts to the trend is toward larger screens that don’t adhere to Cupertino’s strictly-defined ideas about ergonomics. When you look at a device like the Galaxy S III, it’s clear that you can make a phone with a big display that doesn’t end up being unwieldy. A somewhat larger panel needs to happen. A well-designed 4.3-inch LCD with a thin bezel could work perfectly, and if it’s higher resolution to match all the new 1080p Android phones, that’s all the better.
Apple’s proprietary connectors have also become increasingly tiresome as other platforms have standardized on micro USB. You don’t need to worry about buying expensive cabling just to charge your phone with Android or Windows Phone, but Apple just moved from one proprietary standard to another.
The Lightning connector does some stuff well, like video output. The reversible plug is also neat, but it’s kind of silly to force users into this in the first place. Apple would get massive goodwill if the next iPhone at least came with a simple micro USB adapter bundled. Why not just let users charge their phones on the most common type of phone connector. Including the existing 30-pin adapter is also a possible solution (people have plenty of those around). Apple doesn’t have to stop using Lightning, but $29 for every phone charger is ludicrous.
If Apple continues to follow the tick-tock style of incremental change is has thus far, the next iPhone is going to be a 5S instead of an iPhone 6. That would be a serious error. A spec bump isn’t going to bring the iPhone back to the forefront of the smartphone market.

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Samsung Galaxy S4: What to expect from the most anticipated smartphone of 2013

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In an attempt to steal the thunder from Nokia, Asus, Sony, and a slew of other mobile device makers at Mobile World Congress 2013 in Barcelona, Samsung has announced that the Galaxy S4 will be unveiled at its own exclusive event in New York on March 14, with public availability to follow soon after.
With the slow but inexorable waning of the iPhone, both in terms of mind and market share, the Galaxy S4 is probably the most anticipated phone of 2013. The question on everyone’s lips, though, is whether Samsung can push the smartphone (and Android) envelope forward, despite lackluster innovation from Apple — and in the face of strong offerings from HTC. Let’s run through the expected hardware and software specs of the Samsung Galaxy S4, and then analyze the current state of play in the mobile space.

Hardware

The Samsung Galaxy S4 is expected to have a full-HD 1920×1080 display (up from 1280×720 on the S3) — and the display might even make the jump from 4.8 inches to an edge-to-edge 5 inches. There were some early rumors of a flexible display, but they can be discounted — the tech just isn’t there yet. It remains to be seen whether the underlying tech will be AMOLED or LCD, though reports suggest that Samsung’s AMOLED production line isn’t ready to produce 1920×1080 5-inch displays, while the LCD production line is raring to go. Maybe this will mean that the Galaxy S4 can finally compete with the iPhone in terms of image quality and accuracy.
Under the hood, the Galaxy S4 is expected to use Qualcomm’s quad-core Snapdragon 600 or 800 SoC. The Snapdragon 800 is particularly exciting because it’s the first chip to be built on TSMC’s new 28nm HPM (high performance mobile) process — though, at 2.3GHz, it might be more of a tablet part. There is also the possibility that we’ll see two Galaxy S4 SKUs — a Snapdragon model with integrated LTE for the US market, and an Exynos-powered model for the rest of the world. If the S4 does use Exynos, the most likely option is an eight-core Exynos 5 Octa — four Cortex-A15 and four Cortex-A7 in a big.LITTLE configuration. There are still big questions about whether the power-hungry Cortex-A15 is suitable for smartphone use, so it will be interesting to see how the Galaxy S4 pans out.
Rounding out the hardware, the Galaxy S4 is expected to have a high-res camera (13MP, according to some rumors), up to 64GB of flash storage, and 2GB of LPDDR3 RAM. Following the weak, uncertain, and confusing introduction of wireless charging in the Galaxy S3, we expect the S4 to rectify the situation and provide wireless charging by default. You can also expect all of the usual kitchen sink: WiFi (which should step up to MIMO), Bluetooth, GPS, NFC, and so on.

Software

There are unlikely to be any surprises in the software department: The Galaxy S4 will almost certainly run a TouchWizzified version of Android 4.2 Jelly Bean (sorry, Tizen fans — keep on dreaming). There is also a rumor that the Galaxy S4 will launch with a pad accessory, which, when bonded with S Health, will give your phone the ability to measure your pulse and blood sugar, among other things.

Evolution, not revolution

In short, all indicators point to the Galaxy S4 being a fairly gentle evolution of the Galaxy S3 — a lot like the iPhone 4 and 5. A 5-inch screen would be exciting, but it really isn’t that different from 4.8 inches. An octa-core Exynos would certainly offer a unique selling point — but when you remember that four of those cores are wimpy, and that the Cortex-A15 cores are the reason your smartphone only lasts for six hours, your excitement will be quickly tempered. A laser keyboard, like the one shown in the (fan-made) video below is unlikely.

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How do you make a transparent smartphone?

If you need to ask why you would need a transparent smartphone, you probably don’t really need one. After all, not only would it be hard to find, particularly if transparent when powered down, but others could easily see exactly what you are working on. It is only when you take a step back that you realize that the state of being non-transparent, or opaque, is the weaker condition. If by nature you possess transparency, opacity can be just another option under a menu, while the converse is clearly not true. The real power once you have it, is not just that you get opacity for free, it is that you get everything else in between. A prototype device being developed by Polytron Technologies from Taiwan, pictured above, shows some of the challenges to making the transparent smartphone a reality.

Butterflies and jellyfish (pictured right) have the unique ability to extract pigment-free color directly from the quantum, so to speak, through precisely configured scales or undulating cilia — tiny “hairs” that protrude from a larger cell. They use these bio-antennea to blink out a measured photon whenever the distance between these hairs matches the wavelength of the illumination that strikes them. Other organisms, particularly the smaller and thinner ones, have more direct means to utilize or deal with incoming radiation as the case may be. Often they must spend significant energy just to shield their DNA from the mutagenic rays which penetrate their cells. They also may need to work hard just to be able to be seen by their peers. When creatures are trapped in caves, they quickly turn down their pigment production and lose all ability to express it within a couple of generations. This is for good reason, as light-absorbing melanins and carotenoids are metabolically costly to produce and actuate into position.
For larger creatures, like smartphones, there are a host of effects that arise to oppose transparency. The lens of the eye for example, needs to burn a non-trivial amount of energy just to maintain transparency. To make a large scale device transparent, the first thing you need is transparency of the smaller parts that comprise them. While this appears rather obvious, it is not enough just to put transparent parts together. The more difficult requirement you need is to have a smooth variation in the refractive indexes across the subcomponents. Fireflies, which we have discussed before, can efficiently emit light through their bodies only by optimizing each interphase in the light path as the different tissues are traversed.
Their are many kinds of transparent display options available today, and new methods are being developed all the time. One way to do this is to coat two pieces of glass with transparent but conductive material like indium tin oxide (ITO), and sandwich a gel of polarizable molecules between them. When an electric field is applied, the liquid crystal changes its alignment and becomes transparent or nontransparent, depending on the materials used. The display is not the problem for the Polytron phone which sports an OLED-based liquid crystal device. The problem is several of the smaller components, like the battery and the memory. Transparent lithium-ion batteries have previously been developed based on PDMS. PDMS is a favorite polymer material often used in the life sciences to build transparent microfluidic sensors and Polytron plans to incorporate these kinds of batteries in future versions of the phone. They will also start using transparent speakers and touchscreens on both sides of the final product. (See: MIT startup makes transparent solar panel that will allow your smartphone to power itself.)

What can you do with a transparent phone?

Part of the power of having control over transparency is that, not only can you block light, but you can control the properties of the light that you might let pass through it. In addition to simple point pixel effects like color or polarization, more complex phenomena like refraction and diffraction might be controlled if the resolution of the device is high enough. Spatial light modulators (SLMs) used in optics can be switched at speeds of several thousand hertz, to create virtually any kind of wavefront that is desired.

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Firefox OS launches in the US in 2014, but users are in for rough times ahead

After losing significant marketshare in the world of browsers, Mozilla has begun shifting gears to focus on competing in the mobile space. Webkit-based browsers are dominant on the desktop, but it’s even worse for Mozilla in the mobile space as it stands now. This year, phones running the new Firefox OS will launch in numerous different countries in Europe and Latin America, and they’ll hit the United States in 2014. Will this

be enough to keep Mozilla relevant?

Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela will be among the first countries to see phones running Firefox OS. Poland will see Alcatel’s One Touch Fire this summer on Deutsche Telekom, and more eastern European countries will soon follow. Spanish telecom Telefónica will be rolling out Firefox OS phones in both Europe and the Americas in 2014. In the US, Sprint has shown interest in the platform, but no specific announcements have been made yet. According to PC Mag, Sprint didn’t even bother to show up to the Firefox OS press event at the Mobile World Congress. Gary Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, came out and said that the US likely won’t see phones running Firefox OS until 2014. Traditional markets are highly saturated, so Mozilla is grabbing some low-hanging fruit in oft-overlooked regions before moving up to the big leagues.
In the early days of Android, much ado was made about how open the platform was. Carriers shipped highly customized versions of Android on phones, and most of it was complete and total garbage. The user interface on any two Android phones was vastly different. It essentially allowed carriers complete control over the phone, and that caused substantial frustration for users. Since then, Google has smartened up, and started taking cues from the way Apple handles smartphones. Android is now much more standardized, less fragmented in terms of UI, and more focused around the direct connection between Google and users. This is a huge benefit for Android as a smartphone platform, but it’s killing what made carriers flock to it in the first place. Enter Firefox OS.
Mozilla is using very similar talking points that Google used when Android was launching: Open, customizable, free of the Man! Except that carriers will be able to bend Firefox OS to their will. Even worse, it appears that OS updates will be handled by the carriers instead of Mozilla itself. While Mozilla talks a good game about its security chops, carrier-pushed updates will eventually lead to heartbreak. It’s only a matter of time before the first major security issue pops up, and at least one carrier doesn’t bother pushing out an update. It seems like Mozilla didn’t learn much from pitfalls that Android ran into, and that is cause for worry. With the carriers calling the shots, users are in for some rough times ahead with Firefox OS.
Now read: Firefox OS doesn’t stand a chance

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Leap Wireless shows the iPhone still can't be popular for low income consumers

Hindsight is 20/20, or so they say. This is important for Leap Wireless as it seems on the surface that their failure to sell a no-contract iPhone was a doomed concept from the start.

Last year, the company became the first pay-as-you-go carrier to offer the Apple iPhone. Now, they’re on pace to sell half of the iPhones they committed to sell by June. This means they could get stuck with around $100 million in hardware with no way to get ride of them easily.
The obvious reason this didn’t work is the target. Pay-as-you-go carriers focus on lower income or poor credit consumers. These consumers are less likely to be interested in the mid- to high-level pricetags associated with leading smartphones like the iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S III. The less obvious reason is the subsidy model. It works. People are willing to pay hundreds for iPhones knowing that much of the price is covered by the term of their contracts, normally two years. With Leap Wireless, consumers had to fork over $500 up front.
“We are not concerned about…meeting the Apple commitment,” Chief Operating Officer Jerry Elliott said in a conference call with analysts last week. “We think that’s going to be fine.”
Analysts are skeptical. The rest of us are, too.

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