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Showing posts from October, 2014

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Battle of the displays LCD vs AMOLED

Devices now a days ship with top of the line displays they claim to provide best experience they have massive resolution with PPI more than 500 PPI but there are different manufacturers give different displays in their devices. Like apple has retina display or Htc has super LCD3 Samsung chooses super AMOLED for most of its phones. So how do they work and which one is better. There may be seem like a lot but there are only two true types of display technologies viz LCDs and AMOLEDs First lets consider a standard LCD display, the display is made up of small liquid crystals which are lit by small electrical charge the illumination is very low and that's why needs backlight. So every LCD panel has a backlight. But then what is IPS LCD IPS stands for in-plane switching in this the crystals are electrically excited is different and the orientation of the crystals array is rotated. This improves greatly the viewing angles and color reproduction What is super LCD³ which HTC uses? I

You can now log in to Gmail using a physical usb key

Many people might know the 2 step verification of Google that is whenever you log in it will confirm before logging on using your phone number.  Now to make verification more secure, Google has announced in their blog , a physical USB key so whenever you log into your Google account you'll be asked to insert the key and it will insert the confirmation to it. You still need to insert the password so a thief would not be able to log in to your account using just the key The key is made of the open standards so it is a possible to use this verification using Bluetooth, NFC, or any biometric sensor.

Nexus 5 new camera 2 API

With the launch of android 5.0 lollipop there are many changes in other than the whole material visual treatment The one change is the improved camera APIs , the new API's as rumored to be able to take images in RAW format. Now why RAW format makes a huge difference is that its uncompressed form of photos instead of the .jpeg which compresses images for smaller size. With RAW you can post process the image without loss of detail The new camera API will allow app developers to access all the image information stored in an image. This will be made available with the new update. Till now a taiwanese company has created an app which uses the new camera API The update will give nexus 5 many manual controls and she to capture much more information. You can check the test  images here . Features of the app: True manual focus (adjustable focus distance) Manual exposure time (1/2, 1/4, 1/6, 1/8, 1/15, 1/30, 1/60, 1/100, 1/125, 1/250, 1/500, 1/1000, 1/2000, 1/4000, 1/8000) Manual ISO

Xiaomi plans to enter smart home automation systems

Xiaomi the Chinese company that is making a lot of buzz with its smartphones, which also has successfully sold many powerbanks and headset which has been sold by the flipcart website now recently they have its eyes on home automation system. The company also have smart wifi router. The company has launched four devices these are similar to the products already in the market but xiaomi is known to provide great specifications at lower price. This is their biggest selling point. The first wave of devices include 1. Yeelight Smart light bulb It is similar to philips hue it has different color options that you can set according to your mood 2. Ants smart webcam It can record 720p videos and has 111° wide angle lens with 4x zoom. The webcam has clear two way calling 3. Mi smart power plug Its a smart power plug which you can control remotely or can set timer so that it cuts of power at the preset time it also has a USB interface. 4. Mi smart remote centre Its a smart system t

DPI what PPI do these mean

Nowadays mobiles, tablets, television, etc all have high resolution displays. We can know the number of pixels on display by its resolution. When people watch specs on various devices they often get confused with DPI and PPI of the display Lets first understand the pixel A pixel is the smallest unit from which an image is made on a display. An pixel is made up of 3 sub-pixels red, green, blue. What are dots then These are the smallest unit by which a printer prints image. An printed image is made up of tiny dots PPI (pixels per inch) : defines number of individual pixels present per square inch (2.34cm) of a display DPI (dots per inch) : it is similar to PPI in this case individual dots and it refers to printers Lets take nexus 5 for understanding:- Nexus 5 has a 5.2 inch display with a resolution of 1080×1805. Which means horizontally the phone has 1080 pixels and vertically 1805 which gives nexus 5 a PPI of 445 But sometimes DPI is used to describe the quality of di

Be ready for the xiaomi made android one phone

Oh yes you heard it right xiaomi had told gizchina that their android one is around corner and they are planning to launch it as soon as possible Xiaomi is one of the top phone manufacturers in china. Recently their phones have been a huge success in India. Mi3 and redmi 1s were sold out in less than 10 seconds.The chinese manufacturer has teamed up with google to launch its android one smartphone Micromax, karbonn, spice have completely identical specifications, with the launch of xiaomi's android one it will give a huge competition to all three manufacturers. As xiaomi is known to provide higher specifications at a lower price. Already xiaomi's redmi 1s has better specifications than all the current range of android smartphones. The only difference is the OS. while redmi 1s has MIUI the Android one phone will have stock android with all the services google has for the android one. The phone is said to be look like redmi 1s. But there is no official word from xiaomi about s

Android 5.0 : what's new

Android lollipop The latest version of Google android OS the version number is 5.0 The new OS was teased at the Google i/o and the preview was made available for the developers and OEM's as the guideline so that they can start making or updating their apps earlier to the new so called "material design" this was a change from the "holo" which is existing since many updates The lollipop has now flatter has shadows and is more interactive than ever there are many animations and use of colors in the UI. The whole idea is that the UI to be like a paper and the contents displayed as ink. This is the biggest change in the UI since the froyo. Many apps were updated before the launch with material design which gave an early indication of what the OS might look and feel (like Google chrome or playstand app) Boot animation: First thing you notice that's changed is the boot animation. When you boot up the device you'll see the updated boot animat

Should you buy a nexus 6

This latest nexus phone would be the 6th in the series the nexus 6 aka 'shamu' it was launched on October 16 2014, time place This time it is made by motorola it has very impressive hardware and is available at 649$ Its predecessor nexus 5 aka 'hammerhead' also it was made by LG and had same price now it is available for 349$ for 16gb and 399$ for 16gb The phones looks world apart as they are made by different manufacturers which add their own design to the built both the phones looks great. The volume rocker is located on the left side on nexus 5... And the power button on right... Speaker position is changed the nexus 5 has lower single speaker whereas nexus 6 has stereo speakers which should provide great experience while watching movies, videos or playing games. The phones display is bigger on nexus 5 which can be good for watching movies but not for carrying around so this is a big differentiating point Both the devices have excellent performance. The nexus 6 i

mm-qcamera-daemon to be fixed in the next android update

Since the start of the nexus 5 launch there was a major bug reported by many users the 'mm-qcamera-daemon' bug which drained the battery because of its high CPU usage and caused the device to heat up and when the camera is launched it cant open the camera many forums and sites said that the apps like skype, viber, snapchat are causing this bug but many users who didnt installed these apps also reported this bug. The only solution for the time being is restarting the phone google has released various OTA updates but nothing seems to work for this bug users still have the bug in the 4.4.4 kitkat version. the 4.4.3 did include the tweaks to the camera code but it failed to resolve this problem well th good news now is that this problem will not appear in the android L update Just a few notes on this bug. developer at explains what is the cause of this bug and its solution - mm-qcamera-daemon is a key part of the camera subsystem. It needs to run for the camera to oper

Which Android one phone to buy

After announcing it first back at I/O 2014, Google finally launched the first Android One devices in India.The first three phones to be launched are the Karbonn Sparkle V, Micromax Canvas A1, and Spice Dream UNO. All three phones are being sold exclusively through three different online stores. The Karbonn Sparkle V will be sold on Snapdeal, the Micromax Canvas V1 through Amazon, and the Spice Dream UNO through Flipkart. All the three phones have identical specifications and same price specification of all the three devices:- Display-4.5-inch, 854x480 resolution IPS display, Processor-MediaTek MT6582 SoC with 1.3GHz quad-core Cortex-A7 CPU and Mali 400 MP2 GPU,  1GB RAM, 4GB storage space with microSD card slot, 5 megapixel rear camera, 2 megapixel front camera, FM radio, dual SIM support, and replaceable 1,700mAh battery The best thing about android one is that it Runs the latest version of Android (4.4 KitKat) and automatically gets the new operating system soon aft

Cyanogen to partner with Micromax

CyanogenMod a very well known custom ROM was installed by users on their devices which provided users with a lot of customization which stock rom didn't. After great praise in the community, The company partnered with handset manufacturers Oppo and OnePlus with pre-loaded CyanogenMod. The phones are currently available and made a huge success all over the world Now the company is said to be partnering with the India's biggest phone supplier, Micromax. According to rumors the first Micromax phone with pre-loaded CyanogenMod will be launched at the end of year there is no word about phone's features or in which range the phone will be launched Micromax is partnered with Google for the android one platform which gives complete stock Android out of the box. Which may mean that Micromax may actually launch its top end devices with the CyanogenMod Recently Google offered to buy Cyanogen.Inc but the offer was turned down Cyanogen clearly has great market strategy and h

Cyanogen now available for android one

The android one program created a lot of buzz not only in India but all over the world. The google's partnership with Indian manufacturers has been in the news a lot lately and Google is showing a lot of interest in Indian market. The first devices with the android one program were Spice Dream Uno, Karbonn Sparkle V or Micromax Canvas A1 They all have completely identical specs(as Google had laid down the minimum requirements for android L) and are available to purchase from online stores Soon after android one was announced, Varun chitre15, an India-based XDA forum member announced the root for these phones. Now he has managed to port CyanogenMod, one of the world's most popular custom ROMs on these devices. The ROM is universal and therefore same will work on all three devices Its currently in early development and there are few bugs like -the 2nd sim card is not detected -the wifi and data aren't working These are already been taken care of and will be patche

Here's what you should know about windows 10

Microsoft Corp. on Tuesday unveiled its next Windows operating system, Windows 10 well the first question that will come to your mind is what happened with windows 9 Well 7 (ate) 9 so 10 or something  Some people say that its because people might get confuse 9 with 98 Windows 10 is the perfect mix of windows 7 and the windows 8. It has many features of the windows 7 which they ditched in the windows 8, combined with the some touches from windows 8. They seems to provide more productivity with this version by enabling them to use the OS with variety of input devices. Which windows 8 failed to provide for desktop users There aren't any massive UI changes instead they have worked to improve the core usability for different users.The icons in the file explorer and desktop are changed. Chances are they will revamp the UI more before the final launch The first thing that's you'll see that the start menu is back which was removed from the windows 8 and lot of users complained