Nokia N9 Meego Slider & X5 Square Slider Phones

Nokia’s first MeeGo slider smartphone will be the Nokia N9? A slider phone that seems like an upgraded version of N8 with the addition of a QWERTY keyboard. This QWERTY keyboard is too flat & having a tilting display.

Another newly launched Nokia QWERTY CellPhone is the X5, a square slider phone, which has been officially announced in Singapore. The new X5 is quite different from the Nokia X5 announced in China a few months ago, and specifically targeted to young generation. Features include Symbian S60, social networking integration (Facebook, MySpace, YouTube) with notification feature, a small QVGA screen, and a 5MP camera.

The Nokia X5-01 will cost approx. $195. Coming in lots of colors including pink, blue & green

Remotely controlling your computer from your Android phone,

At Last My Awaiting App Come To Market  . Now You can Access your PC from Android with LogMeIn and  you can remotely control you computer from Android Phone.

It generally require a bit of technical know-how to get up and running, with little obstacles like dynamic IPs and router firewalls gunking things up.

Back in 2008, LogMeIn launched an iPhone app called LogMeIn Ignition, which promised to do away with the chunkified setup process, support Macs/PCs, and offer a smoother experience than that found through alternatives like VNC. Today, LogMeIn is announced that they’ve successfully ported that app to the lil’ green bot, pulled it out of Beta, and launched it into the Android Market. At $30 bucks, it doesn’t come cheap


But It Worth Having it.

iPhone 4 may be Apple’s Vista – perhaps, but show me Microsoft’s iPhone

I try not to take sides on these little skirmishes between Mac and PC. In matters of taste, there is no dispute. And I’m fine with a little railing on both sides — to a point. But when Microsoft’s COO decides to tease Apple, saying “It looks like the iPhone 4 might be their Vista, and I’m okay with that,” I have to step in. This kind of attitude seems a bit out-of-place from a company that just had to retire a years-in-development project that they spent a billion on — due to rumored triple-digit sales.

I’ll tell you what, Microsoft. I’m going to give you this one. The criticism is deserved, after all — the iPhone 4 may in fact be Apple’s Vista in a way. But you don’t get to say that. Because if you do, someone might point out that Microsoft has neverput out a single product that has so completely fascinated the consumer world as the iPhone. And chances are you never will. It’s better to have a Vista of an iPhone than to never have an iPhone to begin with.

if you try to mod it, Droid X actually self-destructs

But I’m afraid that hackers may avoid this phone on principle. And I wouldn’t blame them, why help out such a company?

Amazing phone and be done with it enjoying all that it has to offer. You overclock your computer and all that other buzz.

Droid X first run sells out; next batch goes out July 23rd

It seems like a whole bunch of you went and bought a Droid X despite my “don’t buy” rating on account of Motorola’s draconian OS lockdown tactics. I guess I’m not as influential as I thought.

Well, if you insist on being held down by the Man, I won’t stop you. If you’re still looking to buy, the next piping hot batch of units should be shipping on the 23rd.

Logitech Z506: 5.1 audio for Just $99

Logitch has a new 5.1 audio system that may interest you, particularly if you’re not looking to spend too much money. It’s the called the Z506, and it’ll only set you back $99. Throw in a couple of cheap stands and you’re good to go.

Much like with headphones, speakers are damn near impossible to write about unless you’ve listened to them for some time. Have I listened to the Z506? Nope. So all I have are raw stats: 75W RMS power; two 8W front and two 8W rear speakers; 16W center speaker; and a 27W subwoofer—hope you don’t live above somebody.

And of course, the Z506 will work with whatever you plug it into, be it your Xbox 360, Blu-ray player, PC, PS3, etc.

Again, there’s only two bits of information that you need: 5.1 and $99. It should be available in August.

If you’re still watching Blu-ray movies or playing Cal of Warfare 87 with your TV’s built-in speakers well, don’t.

New Gaint G-Shock from Casio - Perfect for Sportsmen

, Casio is launching a bigger G-Shock, a massive, wristband-like addition to the G-Shock line that is, in Casio’s own words, designed for “sports players .”


G-Shock has made their living on selling their brand of ironic nostalgia to hip-hop-loving teens everywhere and this new model is no exception. It looks like a watch no on would wear and so millions will wear it.

Brammo Launches Empulse electric motorbike - Amazing look

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New Vaio Z to sport “Quad” SSD in RAID 0?

This is an interesting development. The latest Vaios leaked out a little while ago, and for the most part they were what one would expect: improved performance, better battery life, that sort of thing. But there’s an interesting feature that wasn’t on the leaked spec list (and isn’t confirmed to be, either): a “quad” SSD composed of four SSD drives working together in RAID 0. If the chipset and other hardware are designed with something like this in mind, it really could be extremely fast.
Of course it’d be fast whether they designed for it or not, but if they made sure to have the right motherboard, fast RAM, special storage controllers and so on, it could blow away the competition. Laptop had drives are traditionally low-power 5400RPM HDDs, though SSDs are becoming more common, and this multiple SSD setup could be the next step in luxury mobile computing.
It’s unclear whether the “64GB/128GB x 4″ quoted is, for instance, four 32GB drives making up 128GB or four 128GB drives making up 512GB. I’d lean towards the former, since the latter would be incredibly expensive. Sure, SSDs are already expensive, but four high-capacity drives would put the raw storage cost at over $1500.

Source : http://www.crunchgear.com/

New cameraphone sensor to take terrible, terrible 1080p video

I’m sure this is a very grand advance in miniaturization, but I’m afraid the results may be of questionable quality. Omnivision has announced a new sensor for mobile phone cameras that will take 14MP photos and do 1080p video at 60FPS. As far as I’m concerned, this is bad news. Cameraphone lenses are slow and of very low quality, and the tiny sensor size means both bad low light performance and bad clarity due to insanely small pixel pitch.
And the video will have to be low bitrate to accommodate the lack of storage on most phones. 1080p video at 1Mbps? It’ll be like watching an HDTV smeared with vaseline. Why not make your sensor or phone do something useful, like take good pictures in low light, or do high-speed video?
Phone-camera hybrids like the Idou are still pretty rough. Let’s focus on getting the devices right, then we can add resolution if it’s really necessary, all right?

Source : http://www.mobilecrunch.com

WSJ: Apple Tablet shipping in March

This is not it This just in: the WSJ is reporting that an Apple Tablet device thinger will ship in March after a January announcement. The announcement should come on the 27th or the 28th, according on various sources.

Apple Inc. plans to unveil a new multimedia tablet device later this month, but doesn’t plan on shipping the product until March, people briefed by the company said.

The device should sell for under $1000 and come in multiple finishes and may come with a nationwide Wi-Fi subscription similar to Boingo.

Source : http://www.crunchgear.com

Lenovo’s U1 is a netbook with removable tablet

Everyone’s all excited about that Freescale gizmo, but it looks like it may have competition. The Lenovo U1 has a similar convertible design, though with a slightly more rounded look. It’s also different in function: when docked, it runs Windows 7 on the dock’s low-power Intel processor, but once detached it uses an ARM CPU to run a lightweight Linux distro. Not sure how it’s going to handle the segue if you’ve got work in progress and need to dock it, but I’m sure Lenovo has that handled.

Here are the specs, broken down into tablet and dock portions:
Tablet:

• 1.6 pounds
• 1GHz Snapdragon processor
• 512MB DDR1 RAM
• 16GB SSD

Dock:

• 3.8 pounds (with tablet attached)
• Intel Core2 Duo U4100 processor
• 4GB DDR3 RAM (max)
• 128GB SSD

One other major difference: the U1 starts at a thousand dollars. I get the feeling Freescale might be the more attractive proposition to most people. We’ll see ‘em both at CES, though, so we’ll let you know.

Source : http://www.crunchgear.com

Google launches Nexus One 'superphone'

Google has begun selling mobile phones directly to consumers, taking on hardware makers like Apple in an effort to dominate the burgeoning mobile internet space.
The company had been testing the Nexus One smartphone with employees through a process it dubbed “dogfooding”, but today it announced the device would be available more broadly through its web store.
The Nexus One, based on Google's Android platform, will initially only be available to those in the US, Britain, Singapore and Hong Kong.

Click for more photos Google's Nexus One.

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It will sell for $US529 outright and $US179 on a two-year contract from T-Mobile USA.
A Google spokeswoman said the company wanted to roll out the device “gradually” in order to receive feedback and ensure the ordering process was smooth.
“The Nexus One also had to undergo certification in all countries we sell the phone in, and we wanted to ensure that the import regulations didn't make the phone prohibitively expensive,” she said.
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Comment: Google's quest to take on the world
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The spokeswoman said Google hoped to sell the Nexus One, “and future phones from Google”, to people in other countries such as Australia “soon”.
Rather than a money spinner, Google hopes the Nexus One will serve as a Trojan Horse for its vast array of web services, cementing the company as a leader in mobile search and applications.
The fight for control of the mobile space is seen as so important that even hardware makers - such as Samsung with “Bada” - have developed their own mobile phone software platforms.
“The Nexus One belongs in the emerging class of devices which we call 'superphones', with the 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor making it as powerful as your laptop computer of three to four years ago,” said Andy Rubin, Google's VP of engineering.
“It's our way to raise the bar on what's possible when it comes to creating the best mobile experience for consumers
“We look forward to working with handset manufacturer and operators to bring more phones to market through this channel worldwide.”
The timing of the announcement was designed to deliberately overshadow the Consumer Electronics Show, which runs this week in Las Vegas. It comes 24 hours ahead of a keynote speech by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Apple is also expected to expand its portable offerings late this month with the launch of its much-vaunted tablet computer.
The Nexus One was designed in partnership with Taiwanese manufacturer HTC, which made a number of the first Android-based phones to go on sale worldwide.
These have not been a runaway hit with Australian consumers as the early devices, such as the HTC Dream, lacked the stylish design, array of apps and solid marketing campaign of other platforms.
The Nexus One runs a new version of Android that includes built in Google Maps Navigation (with turn-by-turn driving directions), a voice-enabled keyboard, five home screen panels, interactive “live” wallpapers and the ability to operate the phone just by speaking into it.
It supports multiple work and personal email addresses and the ability to easily switch between regular communications and social networking apps such as Facebook.
Over 18,000 apps are available to download from the Android Market.
The name Nexus One was inspired by the film Blade Runner, and the family of author Philip K Dick has threatened to sue Google over the matter.
Specifications
• Display: 3.7" AMOLED 480x800 WVGA display
• Thickness: 11.5mm; Weight: 130g
• Processor/Speed: Qualcomm Snapdragon(TM) 8250 processor, with speeds up to 1GHz
• Camera: 5 megapixel auto focus with flash and geo tagging
• Onboard memory: 512MB Flash, 512MB RAM
• Expandable memory: 4GB removable SD Card (expandable to 32GB)
• Noise Suppression: Dynamic noise suppression from Audience, Inc.
• Ports: 3.5mm stereo headphone jack with four contacts for inline voice and remote control
• Battery: Removable 1400 mAh
• Personalized laser engraving: Up to 50 characters on the back of the phone
• Trackball: Tri-color notification LED, alerts when new emails, chats, text messages arrive

Source : http://www.smh.com.au

Cydle media player coming to America

Cydle is launching their new in-car multimedia system at CES this January. Previously only available in South Korea, the Cydle P29 is a portable multimedia player with HD radio and subscription-free Mobile DTV.
Cydle is known for their media devices in South Korea, but are relatively unknown here in the U.S. The P29 will sport a 2.9-inch touchscreen interface, and runs on an ARM9 CPU. Reportedly available in 4GB or 8GB, expect to start seeing them this coming spring with an MSRP of $199.

Make Free Phone Calls with Google Phone Android

You can do free voice-over-internet phone calling through your cellphone. On an Android phone.

you can use the Gizmo5 service, Google Voice, and a free application to call anyone for free.

A free, open-source, and unofficial Android app, Guava, gives any Android phone the ability to make and take calls over Gizmo5's VoIP service, connected through a Google Voice phone number. It works over Wi-Fi, 3G, or, for the daring, Already HTC Hero, Dream are running on Android seems you can use this service in your existing Android enabled HTC phones.


What all you need to do this

Android-powered phone: P HTC Dream (T-Mobile G1), Magic (T-Mobile myTouch 3G), or Hero should work.
Google Voice and Gizmo5 accounts : You'll have to hope for an invite if you haven't gotten your Google Voice account yet, while Gizmo is much easier to obtain. click the stand-alone Guava link to download the .apk installer.
Wi-Fi or 3G service: At least to test out Guava and make your first test call. You can set Guava to call over EDGE connections, and even specify how many reception bars are required to try a call, but it's likely not worth the hassle.

Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of 'SixthSense' technology

Pranav Mistry: The thrilling potential of 'SixthSense' technology At TEDIndia, Pranav Mistry demos several tools that help the physical world interact with the world of data -- including a deep look at his SixthSense device and a new, paradigm-shifting paper "laptop".  In an onstage Q&A, Mistry says he'll open-source the software behind SixthSense, to open its possibilities to all.

Twitter 360 – Augmented Reality App

The newly released Twitter 360 app is sure to make a big splash. The app allows you to see your friends tweets and also track them through your camera view or map view.

As far as I know, this is the first iPhone app to utilize the geotagging feature of Twitter.

Would be nice to see this integrated into a Twitter client, but I imagine that won’t be far behind.

Digital Life vs Life Digital: Our Inevitable Digital Future

source :http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/digital_life_vs_life_digital.php

Written by Alex Iskold: Life is becoming more digital and the digital is becoming more alive. On one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth.

I was reading a feature about Second Life on the plane and next to me was a man in his late fifties, named John. As it turns out, like me John was a graduate of Lehigh University. He was class of 1967, while I was 1994. He'd never heard about Second Life, but when I explained to him the concept he had a good laugh and then asked: "So is this for those who did not quite make it in the First Life?" No, I replied, this is quite different - it's a whole new world. What happened next was probably even more surprising than the fact that we went to the same school. John said to me:

"You know it would be really cool if the airlines conducted computerized tours of the places that we are flying over. It could be powered by GPS and we could see a mix of maps and videos about all these places."

I thought that was a neat idea. But what struck me even more is the fact that it came from (nearly) 60 year old civil engineer. At that moment I no longer had doubts - our future is digital. Digital Life and Life Digital are going to be two parallel paths that we will take over the next decade. Both of them will mix Life and Digital to challenge and change the way we think about ourselves and our world.

What is Digital Life?

For the purpose of this post, we define Digital Life as a collective of the virtual world technologies that are bringing life to the digital realm. All of them create environments where participants live in a digital form. These worlds mix the real and imaginary, they both follow and break the laws of physics. They have concepts of markets and money. They have cities and islands. Most importantly, they are unique venues for innovation and self-expression.

Second Life - Your Best Digital Life Now

Linden Labs' creation Second Life is currently the leader in the Digital Life space. With close to 8 million inhabitants, Second Life has received much media attention in the blogosphere and mainstream press. It is appealing because of its rich design, which elegantly blends real world-like features with fantasy and game elements. But Second Life is very different from virtual world video games - because it is not a quest. You are not chasing anything and nothing is chasing you. The core of Second Life is social.

As in real life, you can walk around and talk to people. You can drive cars, climb stairs and even purchase things - most importantly, you can buy land. Commerce is one of the secret sauces in Second Life, since (as the song goes) money makes the world go around. The official currency of Second Life is Linden dollars, which is convertible to and from the dollar - so any user can participate. Together these social and commercial aspects of Second Life make the world realistic and engaging.

But the characters in Second Life are unmistakably digital. Since you can fly with a touch of a button, geographical boundaries are inconsequential. You have a complete map of the world; people have tooltips with names above their heads; pointers, posters and advertisements are all based on rich media. There is really nothing like this in our physical world. This collective digital experience is unusual and exciting, stimulating and thought-provoking.

There is little doubt that worlds like Second Life are going to be increasingly more engrossing. At the end of the spectrum of possibilities, we can imagine wearable technologies that enable total submersion into a virtual world. This is not happening anytime soon, because of the complexity involved in mimicking human sensory experience. In the mean time, virtual worlds will take smaller steps - like adding voice communication and trying to scale to the increasing demand.

What is Life Digital?

The second focus of this post is what I will call Life Digital - a set of technologies that aims to put a digital mesh on top of our reality. Futuristically speaking, we are talking about magic glasses that overlay digital information on top of real-world scenes as you walk around. The closest modern version of this technology is Google Earth - a detailed 3D visualization of the Earth.

Even though Google Earth is a simulation, one of its main functions is to augment geographical information with digital information. In a way, you can think of the program as tagging each place on Earth with all sorts of relevant information.

The precursor of this technology was destination software, like Vindigo, which brought restaurant reviews, movie guides and destination reviews first to PDA's and later to cell phones. Using this technology, you could punch in an address and a kind of cuisine - and get a list of restaurants in response. The difference now is that information is tied to exact physical coordinates and there is much more of it - the world wide web!

But where these technologies become really interesting is when you combine them with cameras inside cell phones. Imagine going out to your back yard, pointing to a tree and asking: What kind of tree is this? or imagine walking around in a new city, pointing to a building and getting its complete history.

Tagging and annotating our physical world with digital tags and other kind of digital information will make our world much richer. Perhaps the device that is capable of creating this experience today is the much hyped iPhone. It certainly has all the ingredients to make it happen - it is the matter of connecting the dots.

Conclusion

Life is becoming more digital and digital is becoming more alive. On one hand we have the rapid rise of Second Life and other virtual worlds. On the other we are beginning to annotate our planet with digital information, via technologies like Google Earth. In both cases digital information is breaking geographical boundaries and overcoming the limitations imposed by our physical world. Flying in second life has the same affect as linking a Wikipedia entry to the Grand Canyon as rendered in Google Earth.

Information is being unleashed and re-shuffled. We are beginning to look at information from literally a 1000 foot view. And everything is becoming increasingly more connected. This is both very exciting and a bit unnerving. We are accelerating into our digital future from all directions - pushing digital towards life and pushing life towards digital.

Do you agree that this is happening? Please share your experiences with virtual worlds and annotated reality.

Coming Soon: Low Cost iPhone 3G for India sans Wi-Fi

Unlike North America, iPhone in India has been a total failure because of the high price.

Now an analyst report has suggested that Apple could release a new low cost iPhone 3G model in countries like India and China that will run on the 3G network but won’t have support for Wi-Fi.

That could reduce the entry cost for buying an iPhone here but 3G networks aren’t available everywhere in India yet so one may still have to rely on the expensive data plans of Airtel or Vodafone for Internet connectivity so, if you are a heavy web user, it won’t really make a huge difference in the long run.

The same analyst has also predicted that Apple will release a new version of iPhone 3G with 32 GB storage capacity but only for the markets of North America and Europe.

In any case, if you are planning to buy an iPhone somewhere in the near future, it may be a good idea to wait until June because that’s the time when Apple generally announces new models.

Airtel Brings a Google Android Powered Mobile Phone to India

Airtel Brings a Google Android Powered Mobile Phone to India

HTC Magic, a touchscreen mobile phone that runs on Google Android OS, is now available in India through Airtel. And it’s an unlocked phone so you can use the device on other GSM networks in India as well.

Google Android vs Google Phone

If you have never heard of Android before, it’s an Operating System for mobile phones that is developed by Google.

Unlike RIM (BlackBerry), Apple (iPhone), Nokia (Symbian) and other mobile phone companies that develop the mobile OS and the hardware, Google is only developing the OS part while the hardware of mobile device is manufactured by other companies like HTC, Lenovo and Samsung.

So when someone says "Google Phone", it essentially means the that phone runs on the Google Operating system which is known as Android. And since Android internally runs on Linux, some users have even managed to install the Google Android OS on their Nokia phones and Asus notebooks.

Video Tour of Google Android – HTC Touch

Google Phone in India

The HTC Magic is the first Google Android phone that will become available in India through Airtel at around 30k INR. It’s the same phone that’s marketed as Android G2 or myTouch 3G by T-Mobile in America and a unlocked version of this phone was given to all attendees of the Google I/O conference.

The HTC Magic is Wi-Fi enabled and features a 3.2 Megapixel camera (that can record still photos as well as video) but unlike the Nokia N97, it has no physical keyboard. Other models like the HTC Touch and HTC Dream (or G1) feature a keyboard but none of them are in India yet at least through official channels.

The phone features a unique bar coding application so if you are shopping somewhere, you can quickly scan the barcode of any product in the shelf to get more information about that product using your Google phone.

While Airtel is the exclusively selling HTC Magic Android phones in India, the good news is that these are unlocked phones so you can buy a phone from Airtel and use the SIM of other cellular networks like Vodafone, BSNL, Reliance, etc.

Picture Gallery – HTC Touch

Should you buy the HTC Touch

HTC is about to launch a new smartphone called the HTC Hero that is just as big as the HTC Magic but features a 5 megapixel camera and best of all, it will be the first Android smartphone to include a native Flash player. The HTC Magic can only play MP4 (MPEG-4) video format while the Hero has support for Windows Media files as well. I will probably wait.

Video Tour of Google Android – HTC Hero

References:

• HTC Magic – Official Web