Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in the final CES keynote that “the Nokia Lumia 800 will eventually find its way into the United States via Microsoft’s stores without carrier support.” With the launch of bundle, Microsoft is trying to bag all the valentine day’s gift shopping costumers but with the $899 price tag, they might prefer gifting a diamond to their love.

It is a dual-band GSM phone designed for sponsorship, hotel-use , emergencies, transmitting its location alongside its call ID, or as a loaner phone for big corporate events.

“SpareOne’s breakthrough technology presents an unprecedented lifeline during dire situations that require a burst response,” said Alan Cymberknoh, SpareOne Project Director at XPAL Power.

“By performing operations on one AA battery, SpareOne solves a great number of daily issues, serving as a targeted back-up phone you will be able to carry without worrying whether it’s charged or not. It could be left inside of a car for emergencies, utilized by hotels who are wanting to pre-program concierge numbers for guests, passed on your children or parents to sustain a wide open type of communication – it’s essentially designed to make and receive the most crucial calls, it doesn t matter what. pareOne has limitless potential and we’re pretty excited to first announce it at CES 2012,”Alan Cymberknoh added.

The package includes an Energizer AA battery and a microSIM for just $49.99 and it will be available from march 2011.You can order it from here.

Onlive desktop delivers a seamless and innovative Windows desktop experience with instant-response multi-touch gestures, together with a full on-screen Windows keyboard and handwriting recognition, enabling complete and convenient viewing and editing of even the most complex documents. This comes in handy as Microsoft hasn’t yet released a version of their popular Office for the iPad and iPad users still rely on iWork for their presentations. Rich media, such as video, animation, slide transitions and even PC games, never before practical via remote desktop delivery, run fluidly and dynamically with instant-action interactivity which makes us feel in love with this app.

Onlive.com has further promised that they would extend this service to iPhone , android and Mac users too. Onlive.com has made this app a free offering and it is irresistible. The free version comes with 2GB cloud storage and access to Microsoft Office, several other Windows applications and games. This will soon be followed by the pro variant of the app which will provide 50 GB of storage to users.

The app will be available worldwide on Thursday via the Apple App Store.

Several there exciting products will be unveiled at the CES 2012. Keep checking out the blog for more interesting updates.

For all those who do not know what an LTE network means, LTE (Long-Term Evolution) provides a major speed boost and enhancement in the way different types of data are transmitted. LTE network is faster than the current HSPA+ networks which are currently being referred as 4G. HSPA+ connection tops out at 21 (practically 14.4) Mbps for downloads. On the other hand LTE networks are capable of delivering rocket speeds upto 40 Mbps.

This is a photograph taken with a Samsung Galaxy S2. It is a LTE enabled device and as you can see by the headline image, “the 4G LTE symbol” is active and the speeds are amazingly fast. Using the speedtest.net app for android, an anonymous Galaxy S2 user performed and posted this speed test and the results he got are pretty amazing, aren’t they?? . Speeds ranging from 15-20 Mbps are being reported and such a big increase in speed is welcome news.

If you want to know whether your smartphone is LTE 4G capable, you can check it for yourself on the AT&T website. Sadly the iPhone 4S users are going to miss out on this and it will surely be a big blow to Apple. These speeds show how promising the LTE network is and that our smartphones can now easily do things beyond our imagination. Verizon released its version of LTE network months back, but it is much slower than that of AT&T’s.  In this point AT&T is one step ahead of its rivals. Now, this keeps us wondering about the WiMAX networks which theoretically can deliver speeds upto 1 Gbps !!!

speeds comparision

We would like to remind you that the term 4G is actually being misused here. The correct term is LTE, and mobile phone operators are using “4G” indiscriminately.The term “4G” should be used when the network is capable of 1Gbps for pedestrians and stationary users, and 100Mbps from trains and cars.

Ubuntu UK Podcast

URL: http://podcast.ubuntu-uk.org/

The Ubuntu UK Podcast, fondly called “uupc”, is an obvious choice for this list. Presenters Laura Cowen, Mark Johnson, Alan Pope, and Tony Whitmore keep discussions funny and extremely “family friendly” (which is extremely difficult to do in an opensource world podcast !!). Segments like “So what were you upto last two weeks” (which officially might not be a segment), “Command Line Love”, “Bit About Ubuntu” and occasional quizzes makes uupc  a fun show. It airs live fortnightly and is made available for download in a variety of audio formats.

Linux Action Show

URL: http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/tag/linux-action-show/

Linux Action Show (formerly Computer Action Show) aka LAS comes from American online broadcasting group Jupiter Broadcasting. LAS is currently hosted by Chris Fisher and Alan Jude. Chris Fisher takes care of the rants and the news and the soft spoken geek Alan Jude is the in house GEEK. LAS turns out to be extremely entertaining and opinated show not to mention informative. “Runs Linux”, “Android Pick”, “Universal/Linux Pick” segments spices up the show that circles around the featured content of the week, generally reviews or rants. It airs every Sunday and available for download in audio and video formats.

Linux Outlaws

URL: http://linuxoutlaws.com

Linux Outlaws, produced by Sixgun Productions, has a speciality that the hosts are in two different countries. Fabian Scherschel joins in from Germany and Dan Lynch from England. As the name suggests, the show turns out to be quite a bit ranty. But they do cover a lot of news and tips that the value of the show never really drains out because of all the rants. An interesting segment concentrating on Microsoft news is quite popular too. The two contrasting accents weirdly ties me to the show. Do not ask me why!

TuxRadar

URL: http://tuxradar.com/podcast

TuxRadar also comes from England. The show comes from the Linux Format guys. Andrew Gregory, Efrain Hernandez-Mendoza, Graham Morrison, Jonathan Roberts and Mike Saunders form the presenters group. Much like uupc, discussions are funny and informative at the same time. The show features segments like Discovery of the Week where presenters share one new thing they “discovered”, open ballot, and “Rants and Raves”.

FLOSS Weekly

URL: http://twit.tv/show/floss-weekly

FLOSS Weekly comes from the TWiT network. The show is hosted by Randal Schwartz who is joined by a gues host. The show focusses on an opensource project in each episode and turns out to be extremely informative.

Hope the round up helps !

MGSE and MATE

MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions) and MATE  (a gnome 2 fork compatible with gtk3 applications) are the highlights of this Mint release. MATE is available only on the DVD version.

MGSE sets up a more conventional panel based desktop on top of Gnome Shell. It adds a bottom panel with a Mint menu, window switcher, and workspace switcher. All the features of Gnome Shell are maintained and MGSE components can be switched off individually to obtain a vanilla Gnome 3 desktop.  This is exactly how to exploit the ability to extend Gnome shell using javascript.  Well done Mint team.

The desktop with MSGE

MATE is a Gnome 2 fork that is in it’s infancy. It maintains a classic Gnome 2 desktop (yes, with applets and all !!) compliant with Gnome 3 applications. Mint is the first distribution (that I am aware of) to ship MATE (although only on DVD). Regular Mint users could upgrade with no worries and continue using a Gnome 2 environment they are so used to. MATE can be setup by installing mint-meta-mate package.

Needless to say Mint has shipped with some awesome themes and icons. The artworks team can be proud too.

The Activities view

MSGE neither here nor there ?

Critics feel MGSE is in a wilderness in between gnome 3 and legacy. But in all fairness, it felt extremely intuitive to use the desktop with MGSE. I know you must be thinking “Having the Mint Menu and the gnome shell Activities view is redundant”. But I found myself using the panel and menu more often when involved in more focused activities like writing an article or scripting something and the Activities view when I am relaxed watching a movie alongside occasionally checking my twitter feed. Quoting Linux Mint website, MSGE lets you have a task-centric desktop. That is spot on.

MSGE a Unity killer ?

There are quite a few users who left Ubuntu because of Unity. For many of them Mint must have been the obvious choice. This was because they preferred a window centric desktop over an application/activity centric one. Mint have served those users right with MSGE.  But I do not see people who love Unity as an application/activity centric interface moving to Mint. There is a fundamental difference between the two UIs. It is a matter of taste.

Applications

Linux Mint ships Linux kernel 3.0.0 and Gnome 3.2. Default applications are more or less Ubuntu 11.10 like except for Pidgin for IM. Some additional applications would include X-Chat for IRC, mintNanny parental control, mintUpload client etc. The DVD version would include codecs and much more. Synaptic and GDebi are present for package management.It even ships ndiswrapper on the CD (whoever uses that !).

DuckDuckGo Partnership

Linux Mint also shakes hand with the tracking free, search engine DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo is the default search engine in Firefox shipped with Mint. Mint and DuckDuckGo would share the search revenue. Good for both the cool projects.

Verdict

Mint did more than just fine. Certainly establishes as one of the front running Linux distributions out there. Solid release.

There is fine line between the processing power of laptops of previous generation and smartphones of this era and it is diminishing slowly. And completing the task is none other than the much anticipated Tegra 3, first commercially released quad core processor mobile CPU. And to get a quick impression of its sheer power has a look at the graph below.

It is apparent that Tegra 3(codename Kal-El) is much ahead of Core 2 Duo processors released few years ago.

Based on ARM Cortex A9 architecture, it houses 4 cores clocked at max 1.5 GHz, it is the first one to be available in commercial devices viz. Asus Transformer Prime and to be released HTC Edge. And the fun doesn’t end here, since Tegra 3 is a SOC(system on chip) it has an integrated GPU(like Intel Sandybridge and AMD APU, but it is nothing new for mobile CPUs so no need feel overwhelmed) which is much beefier than ever since it houses up to 12 cores. This GPU supports WQHD i.e. resolution of 2560×1600, about 4 times 720p resolution.

It might look to be too much and actually it is. This is because there is a limit to the size of a smartphone screen which might limit the number of pixels that it can accommodate till it is useful, something which is apparent with iPhone’s retina display. It might become pointless to add pixels in a smartphone’s screen after some time making such a high resolution processing useless. The case of tablets is however different. Having comparatively bigger size, high resolution screen could be useful but  WQHD resolution still seems a bit too much, but you may never know!

And you can never forget those who want to make every feature work, might even connect it to an external display, I mean who asked you to be limited to your teeny weeny screen estate.

Claiming to be 3 times as powerful as the previous generation Tegra 2, we might wonder what effect would it have on the battery life, but it manages to be efficient. All this is possible due to the presence of 5^th COMPANION core, which is a low powered core used for low power needs. It switches on when the device needs less processing like moving through interface, listening to music or sometimes even watching video. It should be notes that during this time other 4 cores are switched off, so only either the companion core is active or the main cores. So calling it a penta-core chip wouldn’t be entirely correct as at a point at most 4 cores would work. The companion core is powerful enough for a 1080p video to run through it. Thus battery life while watching video massively improves.

Apart from the usual performance boost and flawless navigation through interface and browsers, what Tegra 3 would excel is in games. There are games being developed which would run specifically on Tegra 3 devices meant to use its high power to deliver graphically advanced games. nVIDIA assured that around 40 high end games would be available on Tegra Zone(their own little version of Android Market). A high end game called Shadowgun is already making waves.

So do we really need to get wet dreams about these devices and break you to get one of these? The answer would not be an optimistic one because there are hardly any applications that might use such power. But it could be your thing if you multi-task a LOT and even find your Galaxy S2 slow. But if you are primarily looking for a gaming device, its best you to wait for PSP Vita, the next generation PSP (another quad core device, again based on ARM A9, to be release in February next year in US & Europe may follow to Asia, other than Japan where it would be released in this December, months later) which would have much better games as it is a gaming console in addition to games at Tegra Zone as it is Android based. But since a good amount of mainstream work is getting diverted to tablets, Tegra 3 is a step forward to make them replacements for laptops.

The advantage of an IDE comes in because it is a compilation of four or five different application in one ,thus if you want to get into a hardcore coding an IDE is a must given the multitasking it does.

With IDE being a complicated piece of software by its very nature, higher productivity from it is expected and it is also expected that the IDE should make life easier and not tougher for the programmer.
The top 10 IDEs are:

1.Netbeans

This free Open source IDE from the Sun Microsystems is built on a third party architect. It has a respectable third party vendor support. This IDE has an excellent GUI designer. It include syntax highlighting and supports quite many languagues.

2.Eclipse

Eclipse is another free open source IDE which specializes in heavy Java development .It has almost all the features that an advance IDE needs. Though being specialized in java it also supports   C, C++,Python, using plug-ins. It is built on its own GUI library. Third-parties have embraced it for its performance while coding in Java but when it comes to other languages because of its heavy and complicated interface it takes a backstep.

3.Komodo IDE

Komodo IDE is a paid IDE from the ActiveState,a famous Mozilla Project. Komodo supports many languages which include  Perl, PHP, Python, C, C++,  Javascript, CSS, HTML, XML,and some more…With improved toolbox and quite fast processing speed this can be a good IDE to work on.

4.Monodevelop

MonoDevelop is an IDE primarily designed for C# and other .NET languages. MonoDevelop enables developers to quickly write desktop and ASP.NET Web applications .With its features like integrated debugger, code completion for C,C# & being easily customizable   this IDE is quite easy to work on.

5.Aptana

Aptana Studio supports JAVA,HTML,CSS etc…It has the features like code completion ,outlining, Javascript Debugging, error and warning notification and integrated documentation .Aptana Studio is based on Eclipse and is available as standalone on Windows ,Mac & linux, or as a plug-in for Eclipse

6.QtCreator

Qt Creator allows developers to create applications for multiple desktop and mobile device platforms. It has  a visual debugger and an integrated GUI layout,forms designer, syntax highlighting and autocompletion.Predominantly used for C and C#.

7.Code::Blocks

Code blocks is a widely used IDE with fully extensible and compatible features. Its users are mostly those who are using C/C++.But additionally, with plug-ins it can be used for Python and other languages as well.It can be extended for other languagues with plug-ins,but its one of the best if you code in C & C#.

8.PSPad

This software is produced by a single  developer Jan Fiala for the Windows platform.It works with the plain text and creates web pages.

The code editor  supports many different languages ,but compatible only for windows.With features like Syntax highlighting and hex editing  present this only is quite comfortable to work on.

9.Geany

It was developed to provide a small and fast IDE, which has only a few dependencies from other packages. It supports many filetypes and has some nice features.

It supports languages like C, Java, PHP, HTML, Python.. and a lot of file types. It is also cross-platform and extensible. It does not have some super-duper feature that you may not even use.

10.Ulzard

It is an online IDE. It is mainly focused on the web application which rely on Java Script.With immediate preview facility this can be fun working with.

NO #1 :  Asus Transformer 101  :

Asus TF101 is a sleek looking Tablet with Android v3.2 (Honeycomb) Operating System .The Asus Transformer has a powerful NVIDIA Tegra2 1.0 GHz dual-core CPU for smooth performance.It has 1 GB RAM and 16/32 GB of storage capacity.The Asus Transformer has 5 megapixels rear facing and 1.2 megapixels front – facing camera.Accelerometer, Light Sensor, Gyro Sensor also adds to its awesome features.It supports cloud Computing.The Asus Eee Pad runs on a 24.4 Wh Li-Po battery which gives you a play time of 9.5 hours (Video).

Price : Rs 30,592 

NO #2: Samsung Galaxy Tab 750 4G :

 Samsung Galaxy Tab 750 is one of the best tablets in the market.It is the thinnest and lightest tablet available  in market.It runs on Android v3.1 (Honeycomb) operating system .The Galaxy Tab is empowered to do multi-tasking seamlessly with split view support.It has a 3 megapixels rear and 2 megapixels front camera and also capable to record HD videos.The Galaxy Tab is also fitted with various sensors such as Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Ambient Light Sensor and Digital Compass . It has 1 GB RAM and 16 GB internal storage memory.This tablet from Samsung uses a 7000 mAh capacity battery that supports video playback of 9 hours and music playback of 72 hours.

Price : 33,000

NO #3 : Notion Ink adam NI3421-A01A9 3G :

Notion Ink adam NI3421-A01A9 is the 3G version of Adam Family.It runs Android v2.2 (Froyo) Operating System upgradable to Ice cream Sandwich.The Adam houses 1 GHz ARM Cortex A-9  and a ULP GeForce 333 MHz GPU . It has 1 GB RAM and 8GB internal storage.It has a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus.The tab has also 3-Axis Accelerometer, Ambient Light Sensor and Digital Compass.Also it has a Sunlight Readable Low-Power Display.

Price : Rs 23,999

NO #4 :  Motorola Xoom  :

Xoom is  the first device in an expected multitude to ship with Google’s Tablet-optimized Android 3.0 (Honeycomb).As a product of  Google , it has a unified User Interface which features  a new ever-present Google search button on the homescreen along with a voice search button. The Xoom runs Nvidia’s Tegra 2 platform, with a dual-core 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM, and 32GB of on-board user memory. It has a 5 megapixels rear camera and 2 megapixels of front facing camera with a Dual LED flash.It has a Accelerometer, Proximity Sensor, Ambient Light Sensor, Barometer, Gyro Sensor.The Xoom is 3G enabled tablet. Battery backup of Xoom is 9 hrs on 3G networks and 10 hrs when WiFi is connected.

Price: Rs. 35,000

NO #5 : IdeaPad Tablet K1 (Red) :  

The Lenovo IdeaPad Tablet is just like another Tablet available in market.It runs Android v3.1 ( Honeycomb ) Operating System with a 1 GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 T20 Dual Core processor and NVIDIA GeForce graphics.IdeaPad has a 10.1 inch HD LED Multitouch Display with 1280 x 800 pixels.It has 1 GB DDR2 RAM and 32 GB of internal storage memory which is expandable upto 64 GB.The IdeaPad has a 5 megapixels rear camera and a 2 megapixels front facing camera.It is also 3G enabled tablet.The battery backup of lenovo IdeaPad is 10 hours .

Price : Rs. 31,205

What is the above image called? Yeah you guessed it right it’s a GIF image. Now what are GIF images? GIF or Graphic Interchange Format are Bitmap images with some animation put into it. These images are seen quite frequently on the internet these days. Hence I wish to show you the methodology of creating such images yourself. This can be done using a software known as GIF animator. The working principle of a GIF animator is that it integrates different frames of the same image to form a single animated GIF image. The GIF animators are as follows:-

1. Advanced GIF animator: – Considered as one of the best in class by professionals it can be used to create dazzling banners, buttons       and avatars. You don’t need to go on the name though as it is very user-friendly and can be used by both amateurs and professionals. Its versatility is also shown by the fact that it can be run on all the operating systems ever created by Windows till now. It was released in March 2009 and supports all file types like JPEG, BMP, ICO, AVI, TIFF and Windows Meta Files. Some of its features include cropping, resizing, duplicating, merging, flipping and import/export of .avi and .ani files.

             

2. Microsoft GIF animator: -A simple GIF animator that can be used to create eye-catching animated GIF images. As it is completely free software so it offers you all the basic features like cut, paste, copy, save, delete, select all frames, preview etc.

It comes with 3 Tabs (see pic) namely Options, Animation and Image.

•  The Options Tab is useful to import colour palette and dither method.
•  The Animation Tab can be used to adjust height, width, image count, looping and repetition of the animation.
•  The Image Tab helps us to change the image height, width, alignment, duration and transparency and transparent colour.

To make the best use of such a historic software based on GIF89a file format ever created see http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~bats/PDF/Students/WWW/Gifanimator.pdf.

To download it visit http://download.cnet.com/Microsoft-GIF-Animator/3000-18512_4-12053.html .

3. GIFup: -Now here comes an online GIF creator for all those busy guys who feel downloading software is a waste of time. This interactive GIF animation creator on http://gifup.com/ is very user friendly and quick to use. You can upload images from the computer (max size=1024kb), take image from your webcam or get images from Flickr or other websites. The site also offers free avatars and GIF images from the wide gallery collection. You can even register (which will take less than a minute) to make organized GIF albums for future viewing and sharing purposes.

 5.  PhotoScape: – This is not solely a GIF animator but can be used as one. You just need to pick up your photo and drop it on the screen ( see pic) . The different images will then be integrated into a single GIF image separated by specified time intervals.

Many people consider it to be a worthy substitute for Adobe  Photoshop due to its easy to use features. Its key features are as shown in the pic below: -

The only drawback that it suffers from is that it can be used only on Windows operating systems. The best thing about this Korean developed software is that it is completely free of cost and can be downloaded from here.