PC manufacturers can’t wait for Windows 8 to come out and they’ll be competing to be the first to offer a tablet running Microsoft’s new OS. Rumor has it that Lenovo will try to launch a W8 tablet as soon as the OS hits the shelves.
But they’ll have competition – Dell’s head honcho has already said “We’ll be there right on the very first day that Windows 8 is available”.
Remember the Indian government’s project to put a tablet in the hands of every student? Well it seems to be progressing rather well and what we are seeing here is the second version of the ultra-cheap slate. The new Aakash slate is based on the Ubislate 7+ and brings a healthy improvement in specs without upping the price and represents a huge leap forward, just three months after the first version.
Most importantly, the 7″ resistive screen has been replaced by a capacitive one and the tablet got a proper CPU architecture – Cortex-A8. Okay, it’s an old proper architecture and at 700 MHz frequency it will hardly be blazing fast, but that’s more than you can demand from a $40 device.
The Nokia Lumia 800 has one of the most solid cameras in the Windows Phone realm (or at least until the HTC Titan II comes out). However, this doesn’t mean Nokia is done improving it or has already moved on – in fact, the company just confirmed that there’s a cool new feature coming up for it.
The news came from the personal Twitter account of Damian Dinning – the head of the Nokia camera division. Apparently, the native panorama app is already on its way and we can probably count on it coming with the next software update.
It’s been just a week since Apple announced the new iPad and already we are seeing a decent number of apps optimized for the Retina resolution. In fact, Apple has even created a new category within iTunes that highlight these new apps optimized for the new iPad.
Now these aren’t new apps but just ones that have been spruced up to run at a higher resolution. In some cases, such as the Kindle App, it was basically making the text look sharper and in cases of 3D games like Infinity Blade II, the developers would have had to go through a lot more trouble to pour in enough detail to make the game look good enough at that resolution.
It is yet to be decided whether there will be a second PlayBook or not, but one thing is certain for the current generation – it will be updated with the BlackBerry 10 OS once the OS is out eventually.
RIM has still to reveal the first BB10-based smartphones this year and eventually release one of them until the end of 2012.
Amazon are today celebrating their Android Appstore’s first birthday and in light of this fact, they’ve come over all generous. As well as a number of discounts on popular paid apps, they’re also giving away eight Kindle Fire’s between now and the end of March.
As well as the week-long app discounts, the company also revealed a number of stats which they’ve been able to pull over the course of the year. For one, there are now some 31,000+ applications available to download from the Appstore up from 4000 last year, but lets talk more about those deals.
To coincide with Archos now shipping Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich on their current G9 tablet family, two new models have emerged to join lineup, the Archos 80 G9 Turbo and the Archos 101 G9 Turbo.
These two new devices come similarly specced with 1.5GHz CPUs and ICS, the 80 utilizes an 8-inch display, whilst the 101 a, you guessed it, 10.1 inch display. Depending on the device and storage capacity you opt for prices range from $310 to $425. These two tablets have little time to bask in the limelight however as Archos’ next tablets under the banner of the G10 xs Series, ready themselves for deployment.
The HTC One S has joined the One X in the elite ranks of devices which have been rooted before actually being available for purchase on the market!
Both devices can be rooted fairly easily, save for one little caveat: they require an unlocked bootloader to do so.
So that’s that, then. Goodbye social life, goodbye hygiene and hello fizzy drinks, fast food and sleepless nights! For Diablo 3 will soon be in my possession.
After years and years of waiting Blizzard finally announced the release date of the long awaited game. Diablo 3 will become available exactly two months from now, on May 15.
Initially Mozilla took a firm stance when it came to HTML5′s video tag – only open-source video codecs are welcome, proprietary stuff like h.264 will not be supported. Now however, their position has softened – Firefox will support whatever media codecs the host OS has in addition to Theora (which was there from the start).
The change will first be implemented in their experimental Boot 2 Gecko mobile OS (which we saw in action at the MWC) and later added to the Android version of Firefox. Desktop Firefox might prove a bigger challenge, however.
The Formula 1 season is just about the start and there will be a surprising new presence on the grid this year. We are talking the title that became a synonym for mobile gaming, Angry Birds, which will appear on the helmet of Heikki Kovalainen.
Rovio managed to strike a deal with their compatriot and Caterham driver and his helmet was branded with the immensely popular game. It’s unclear if the deal will only last for a few races or the whole season, as the submitted official image of Kovailainen’s helmet has no Angry birds on it.
We may think of the term ‘social network’ as a relatively new creation, but it turns out the legacy of sites like Facebook, Google+ and Pinterest have a history dating as far back as the 1960s.
The team at Citizen Brando have traveled through time (sort of) to find which sites and services have tried to become the people’s social network over the years; turns out, there have been quite a few, see how many you remember.
FaceTime caused a lot of “oohs” and “aahs” but there are still problems with it – like needing a Wi-Fi connection for it to work. Even if you have blazing fast LTE connection on your shiny new iPad, you still can’t do a FaceTime call.
It has already been pointed out that using the iPad as a Wi-Fi hotspot and connecting an iPhone 4/4S to it to do a FaceTime is one way to get around this restriction, but that’s hardly an ideal solution and it certainly won’t work for everyone.
Prepare to act surprised. The Nokia head designer Marko Ahtisaari reportedly confirmed that his company is working on a tablet. What’s more, Mr. Ahtisaari says that he has dedicated no less than a third of his working time to the project in order to make the device stand out in the crowd.
Reuters reports that Nokia still hasn’t joined the tablet party due to the company’s wish to offer a product that’s easy to differentiate.
The highly anticipated iOS version of the popular Mac email client Sparrow has finally arrived. Sparrow is now available for download on the App Store and costs $2.99.
The reason everyone was waiting for this app is because anyone who has used the built-in Mail app on iOS can tell you that it is quite mediocre. Although Apple has spruced it up a few times over the years it still lags far behind the official Gmail app on Android or the email app in Windows Phone.
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