Nokia Lumia Phones Launched in India:TI

Nokia has announced the launch of its top end Lumia 800 and budget oriented Lumia 710 phones. These devices are Nokia's first Windows Phone powered devices, and will be available in India by mid-December. The Finish Mobile giant has not yet announced the pricing for both these devices.

Both the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 devices run on a 1.4-GHz processor. Also both phones also support HD video playback.
The Nokia Lumia 800 comes in a uni-body design, sports a 3.7-inch AMOLED display and weighs around 142 g. It will also have 512 MB of RAM, 16GB of internal user memory, and will feature an 8 MP camera with 28 mm wide angle lens.

The Nokia Lumia 710, while featuring the same processor as its costlier cousin, the Lumia 800, has a plastic construction. It also features a WVGA LCD display, a 5 MP camera, 8 GB of internal user memory and weighs around 125.5 g.

Nokia has bundled apps such as Nokia Drive, Nokia Music, into both the devices. It remains to be seen how well these Windows phone powered devices will do in a smartphone market that is pretty much dominated by Apple and Google.

TI:Google Releases Ice Cream Sandwich Source Codes

Google has just released the source code for the latest build of Android, deliciously titled "Ice Cream Sandwich." In a Google Groups post, Google engineer Jean-Baptiste Queru says "this is actually the source code for version 4.0.1 of Android, which is the specific version that will ship on the Galaxy Nexus."

The source code is available for download right now from the Android Open-Source Project git servers, though Queru warns that it is a rather hefty file and can take some time to download. If you plan on checking out the source code yourself, I recommend waiting a bit for the servers to calm down.
Clicking on the link from the original post sent me straight to a 404 page so it might be a while before people can actually get their hands on the full file.
Interestingly, the code includes the previously unreleased source for Android 3.0 (Honeycomb). Queru admits that Honeycomb was unfinished and urges all developers to ignore it in favor of Ice Cream Sandwich.
With another Google event happening on November 16th of this week, we can only hope that this source code release signals the imminent arrival of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. We still have no official release date or price for the Galaxy Nexus, but with the source code out in the wild it's only a matter of time before the phone arrives as well.

Nokia Lumia 800:TI

Nokia recently launched their first Windows Phone powered smartphones in India- the Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710. Both the Lumia 800 and Lumia 710 run on a 1.4GHz processor and support HD video playback.

I managed to get my hands on the Lumia 800 during the Nokia Developer Conference 2011 in Bangalore and tried it out for some time. Here are some of my initial impressions:
1. Beautiful Display: The Lumia 800 sports a large 3.7-in AMOLED display with a resolution of 800x480 pixels. The specs sound pretty good but they don't do justice to how the display looks like in real life. In the little time that I had the device, the display looked like it could stand tall among the best. Colors (especially blacks) looked very rich and made the tile-based Windows Phone UI look even prettier. The only issue was that the display was very glossy which means that it would be a fingerprint magnet.

2. Great Build & Looks: The Lumia 800 felt like one of the best phones I had ever handled. The phone has a polycarbonate body which was unlike anything I have seen on any other phone. The phone's body felt really solid and very smooth to the touch, similar to the aluminum casing on the Nokia N8 and the HTC Legend without compromising on slimness or weight.
3. Windows Phone: The Lumia 800 comes with Windows Phone 7.5 Mango and if you've seen how it looks and handles earlier, there's not much new here. One great addition though is that the always-excellent free Nokia Maps comes pre-installed on the Lumia which means that you don't need to use the default Bing Maps.
4. Touchscreen: The one issue that mostly hounded Nokia's earlier Symbian phones was that touch accuracy was inconsistent. Fortunately, with the Lumia 800 this problem seems to have been dealt with well. Scrolling through the various menus and screens was smooth and the keyboard was also accurate.
The Nokia Lumia 800 and the Lumia 710 are expected to hit Indian markets by mid-December. Expect a more in-depth review by then.

ARM Mali-T658 Eight-core Graphics Chip Introduced Tech Infection

The Mali-T658 graphics processor announced by ARM on Wednesday can be equipped with up to eight cores to help it deliver ten times the graphics performance of the company's existing GPU (Mali-400 MP).

The superior graphics performance is compared to the Mali-400 MP, which is used on a number of smartphones from Samsung Electronics, including the Galaxy S II and the new Galaxy Note. The chip also has four times the computing power of the Mali-T604 GPU, which has yet to appear in any available products.
The performance boost will result in better HD gaming and help usher in new compute-intensive applications, such as augmented reality, according to ARM. Besides smartphones, the GPU will also be used in tablets, smart TVs and automotive entertainment systems.
But don't expect products based on the Mali-T658 GPU anytime soon. Smartphones based on the Mali-T604 GPU will arrive next year, while products that use a Mali-T658 chip with four cores will arrive in 2013. Products powered by a version with the maximum eight cores are expected to be introduced in 2015, according to a chart from ARM detailing the evolution of its mobile processors.
Samsung, Fujitsu Semiconductor and LG Electronics are among the companies that will partner with ARM on products, ARM said.

The chip is compatible with a number of different of graphics and compute APIs, including DirectX 11 and DirectCompute from Microsoft; Khronos OpenGL ES and OpenCL; Google's Renderscript and OpenVG.
Besides the new Mali GPU, this week also saw the introduction of Asus's 10-inch Eee Pad Transformer Prime tablet. It is powered by the ARM-based Tegra 3 processor, which has four cores, and will start shipping worldwide in December.

Download FirstCloud OS

Oracle has updated its Unix-based operating system Solaris, adding some features that would make the OS more suitable for running cloud deployments, as well as integrating it more tightly with other Oracle products, the company announced Wednesday.

"We looked at some of the big challenges that people were having in deploying cloud infrastructure, either in a private cloud or public cloud," said Charlie Boyle, senior director of product marketing. "In the release, we engineered out some of the complexity in managing a cloud infrastructure, and made it possible to run any Solaris application in a cloud environment."
Cloud deployments require even greater levels of automation and streamlining than a standard IT infrastructure would, noted Markus Flierl, Oracle vice president of software development. While an organization may run hundreds of Solaris servers, as it moves its applications to a cloud infrastructure, it may run them across thousands of virtual Solaris instances.
Solaris, a Unix implementation, was originally developed by Sun Microsystems, which Oracle acquired last year. While not as widely known for its cloud software, Oracle has been marketing Solaris as a cloud-friendly OS. In Oracle's architecture, users can set up different partitions, called Zones, inside a Solaris implementation, which would allow different workloads to run simultaneously, each within their own environment, on a single machine.
Oracle Solaris Zones has 15 times less overhead than a VMware implementation, Oracle asserted in its marketing literature. The company also touted that Zones had no artificial limitations set on memory, network, CPU or storage resources.
Many of the new features were designed to ease the administrative overhead of running a cloud-like infrastructure, Flierl said. One new feature, called Fast Reboot, will allow the system to boot up without doing the routine set of hardware checks, a move that can make system boot times up to two-and-a-half times faster, Oracle claimed. This feature can be handy in that an administrator applying a patch or software update across thousands of Solaris deployments can reboot them all the more quickly. "It allows you safely to upgrade your entire environment," Flierl said.

Targus iPad 2 Cases Now Available in India

US based Targus recently announced the launch of Targus 9.7” 360 degrees rotating case and stand for the iPad 2 in India.
"Targus believes in innovation and develops products in line with latest trends in fashion and technology. Targus 9.7" 360 degrees rotating case,is developed using a patent-pending design that will not only protect the users precious iPad2 but also enhance its viewing experience," ­­­says Arun Goenka, Senior Manager - Business Development, Targus India Pvt. Ltd

A patent-pending mechanism that frames the Apple logo rotates all the way around, allowing the iPad 2 to recline in either landscape to portrait mode. The hard-shell outer layer measures 9.84"L x 7.68"W x 0.71"H made to fit the slim iPad 2.


Targus 9.7" 360 degrees rotating case and stand (Black) is now available at leading retail outlets in India and Apple outlets at Rs. 3099.

No Further Development On Flash Player Mobile Version

It has been reported that Adobe will be discontinuing any further development of Flash Player on the Mobile platform. ZDNet provided the following announcement from sources who are abreast of these developments at Adobe:

"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."
While nothing has yet been announced on official channels, Adobe will henceforth be reportedly only focusing on Flash on Desktop and Adobe AIR and HTML5 for mobile platforms.  An official announcement from Adobe is expected soon.

Steam Servers Hacked On 6 NOV

On Sunday November 6, Steam servers got hacked, and the hackers gained access to the user database. Initially the attack appeared to be against the Steam forums, but Valve later discovered the attack had run deeper than the online community. If you're a gamer who plays titles that use the Steam platform from Valve, you may want to keep a close eye on your personal data.