WWDC 2014 FIRST IMPRESSIONS: Ios8 aka Android 4.X.X

It's wwdc2014 where apple gives it's fans a sneak peak of what they've got underneath their sleeves. As every year passes all i can see is android dolls deeply integrated as a custom skin called ios. Though apple fans would cold heartedly disagree, that's the jaw dropping truth.

My fist impression on Ios8 was "meh". Second was "what the fish". Well one thing is for sure. Apple dropped all its trails on Google to thin air and I regret for not guessing out the obvious about ios. "It's not what Steve Jobs would have done" may claim some fans but this is not the time for hypothetical situations. Copying isn't wrong as long as you claim it to be. We call it sharing and apple calls it copying. When they bring in new features I don't understand how one can blindly and proudly say it's an unique feature. Apple you do know that you're still on plant earth don't you?. Accept who inspires you and follow them. Ego kills every good think that can happen. An outstanding example is apple maps which apple replaced it for Google maps and removed Google maps from its app store and we all know what happened.

I understand bringing new features aka android features or freedom to an ecosystem is important so is keeping quiet about childish patents when the claimer actually copies.

My words for ios8 is "WELCOME TO ANDROID B**CHES". "Ok Google = hello siri"

IOS(8)=》IOS (GOOGLE)

Google announces a new Nexus 7, much better than the original

Today at a special event in California, Google announced Android 4.3 and a revised Nexus 7 tablet. Android boss Sundar Pichai mentioned that one out of two tablets run Android. With the new Nexus 7, its apparent Google is taking the tablet market seriously. The original Nexus 7 was launched last year with mediocre specs. It ran a NVIDIA Tetra 3 processor and had a horribly low resolution display of 1280 x 800. It originally was only offered in 8 GB and 16 GB storage configurations but was later bumped up to 16 and 32 GB configurations.

Fast Forward to 2013 and along comes the New Nexus 7 or Nexus 7 II as some are calling it. The tablet features a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, 2 GB of RAM and has a much, much better screen resolution of 1920 x 1280 pixels. This works out to a PPI rating of about 320, the highest ever on a seven inch tablet.

Powering this amazing tablet is Android 4.3 which yes is still called Jelly Bean. Android 4.3 brings support for Bluetooth 4.0 low energy, which will allow better support for wearable devices like smart watches for example. 4.3 brings support for OpenGL ES 3.0 which should improve graphics performance and Android 4.3 also improves the dialer app to include auto- complete for phone numbers (something Samsung and HTC have had been supporting for years but was omitted from stock Android.) 4.3 also brings added functionality to user accounts on tablets and even improved battery life.

The new Nexus 7 will go on sale in the United States first on July 30th for $229 for the 16 GB model (WiFi) $269 for the 32 GB (WiFi) and $349 for the 32 GB ) LTE model (which will support T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon). The device will launch in additional markets in the coming weeks after that. It will be available directly from the Google Play Store as well as several retailers.

App review:

Ever been worried about your smartphone or tablet getting stolen or ending up in the wrong hands? I know I have and I'm sure everyone else has as well. Its so easy to misplace a smartphone and if it ends up in the wrong hands, your security and safety could be at risk. To counter this there are several solutions available to remotely manage your device. One of the best ones is called 3CX Mobile Device Manager. They offer apps for both Android and iOS  http://www.mobiledevicemanager.com/blog/ and the app let's you remotely control your device from another smartphone, tablet or PC provided you have a data connection. You can remotely send texts from your device, while its contents as well as lock it and more with just a click of a button. Its a solid built security solution that just works. Its available for free from the Google Play store just search 3CX.

SAMAUNG GALAXY S4 AND THE big.LITTLE technology. A story untold

INTRODUCTION:

CPUs are one of the essential parts of any electronic gadgets we find today. They are sometimes clocked from even 50Mhz to 2.3 Ghz in the mobile industry and on the pc market we all heard the AMD announcing the new processors having a maximum clock speed of 5 Ghz which is mind blowing.

The mobile processing is quickly covering up the gap between pc performance and in no time phones will be capable of what an average laptop or pc can do and its not gonna surprise me if its gonna happen next year as we know ARM's A-50 A-57 is on works that supports 64-bit processing. Well lets hold our horses and get back to a not too old iteration and a brand new leap into mobile computing. Yes right from the heading you obviously know am gonna talk about the exynos 5 octa. Whats so special about it that we are looking on to it again? there's a lot happening on it and here i am to discuss a lil more deep about it.

EXYNOS 5 OCTA:

ISSUES:

So far we know exynos octa was the very first processor that has adopted ARM's revolutionary big.LITTLE technology which too far complicated to make it, it has 8 cores of which 4 will be A-7 and the other 4 will be A-15.

The deal about the big.LITTLE is that they only allow 4 cores to work at a time but it can be any 4 of the 8 and on any combination which lead to a better performance boost and also makes battery to last loger. In reality linux kernels wasn't mature enough to spot the difference between a power saving A-7 cortex and the high power processing A-15 thus samsung managed only to make it work in a manner where either 4 A-7 cotex core or 4 A-15 cortex processors could work at a time. It was totally different from what they demonstrated at CES 2013 and everyone including me was totally disappointed about it. I must say that this is a problem with android or any linux based os because all the cpu gpu threading and governing is done by them so only if the kernel has a better understanding on the processors is when you get better performance. As the exynos octa used on the galaxy s4 (GT-I9500) is running android they didn't have better coordination between the kernel and processor as the lack of support of architecture by linux resulted in overheating issues and also affects the software till date in some or the other way.

FIX:

Linux foundation so far has done its best to introduce newer architectures to support as they are big time opensource company so far and they have taken another leap forward to prove it again with adding the support for the big.LITTLE architecture after so much of hard-work on the kernel version 3.10 which is at its final stages on release. Thanks to Linux godfather Linus Torvalds has certified that the official Linux kernel 3.10 is now in its final state; and, as far as our audience is concerned, the big addition to the Linux kernel is with enhanced ARM processor support. Specifically, the Linux kernel 3.10 has added support for big.LITTLE.

 Linux kernel 3.10 is now final -- paving the way for its inclusion in a bevy of Linux distributions, and even offshoots such as Android and Chrome OS. The fresh kernel brings a good number of changes, such as timerless multitasking, a new caching implementation and support for the ARM big.LITTLE architecture. In simplistic terms, the new multitasking method should help improve performance and latency by firing the system timer only once per second -- rather than 1,000 times -- when tasks are running. Meanwhile, users with both traditional hard drives and SSDs will find performance benefits from bcache, which brings writeback caching and a filesystem agnostic approach to leveraging the SSD for caching operations. Also of significance, Linux kernel 3.10 enhances ARM support by including the big.LITTLE architecture, which combines multiple cores of different types -- commonly the Cortex-A7 and Cortex-A15 -- that focus on either power savings or performance. 

CONCLUSSION :

I personally feel that we are yet to see the actually power of the exynos 5 octa and the kernel 3.10 is the right thing to do on updating it to all the devices running it. Samsung was all this time helpless to make people happy with the octa core phone as the kernel didn't support it and now its really a great time to make things right and make its customers happy. I wish samsung brings it up as a stability update for the device like it did previously with a 28Mb updates that always tweaked the kernels than getting it as an update with the newer version of android its too long to wait. I feel once the exynos octa get the 3.10 linux kernel we will surely get 20hrs of battery life on heavy performance and more than 2 days of battery life on a average usage and that's one thing we need the most now. Fingers crossed on hoping samsaung will work on it to straightening thing up for the users. Am really looking forward to it!. Just can't wait. how about you?.

Hands on look at Google's new Play Music application

During the Google I/O keynote, Google announced several API updates for its core services. this includes Google Maps, Google+, Play Music and Google Talk. Today I will be giving you a look at the new Play Music app that was announced at I/O. The new app comes with some UI changes but the major new feature is Google now offers a streaming music service. Just like Spotify, Pandora or the other countless music streaming apps, you can create your own music playlists as well as listen to preselected ones. The music streaming service, however, isn't free and requires a monthly subscription fee (although you do get the first 30 days for free if you register before June 30th). Also, the streaming service isn't available in every market unfortunately.

So here is a look at the streaming music service part of the app, you can create your own custom radio stations by typing in the name of a song or artist. The app then builds a station around your search criteria  using similar songs and artists as well.

The streaming service also allows you to search and listen to playlists submitted by other users based on genre  or sub genre. The playlists that are available, however, are limited.

After using the streaming music service for a couple weeks now, I have to say I am quite impressed with it, thanks to this service, you can listen to tracks of new albums that have been released without buying them first which I think is an awesome idea because then you can get a feel for whether or not you want to purchase tracks or the whole album itself. I have noticed though that the music selection is not quite on par with other services, perfect example when I tried to search for Led Zeppelin because they are one of my favorite bands, I couldn't find much content available on that particular artist. I would imagine that in due time, the service will improve as more music is added to the catalog. 

In the end, I think its awesome that Google is offering this service but I do wish there were other pricing options available such as offering maybe a free streaming service but include advertising or skip limits like other services offer. As like any application, it will get better in time as new features may be added. ~Mathew

The HTC One

Introduction
What's not to love about it. The single sheet of aluminium built and the ultra pixel camera and the HTC boom sound. Is that it? There is more than that meets the eye. Its just 7.3 mm thick with a 4.7" display with super lcd3 display technology. Due to smaller screen size it was possible for the manufacturer to bring the pixel density or ppi (pixels per square inch) to 468 which is an amazing breakthrough super passing the retina display. It has beats audio backing it up on the sounds and music. HTC managed to being in dual speakers which are pretty wide and will hit you to your face when you take the phone on hand looking at. With 93db its quiet loud enough. The 4up (ultra pixel) sensor seemed to do what it has promised and on the whole the HTC one stands to its name.

Pros
With the Qualcomm snapdragon 600 ticking at 1.7 GHz it functions flawless and thanks to jellybean there are no break frames or glitches while processing anywhere. The adreno 320 serves best when it comes to graphics processing. On the whole the phone really is an wonderful multimedia masterpiece. With 2gb of ram it can have more standby apps or can process high definition programs, applications or games. Now that's one to do them all. On the software part the HTC one comes with the new sense 5 UI which is far simpler compared to the previous iterations. The blink feed is a boon for news lovers. Your news is one touch away to update you. Its never ending and one gets to customize what they want to see or what interests them to see on the blink feed. That's innovation. The app drawer looks more holo thus making look more polished.everything works super smooth on the HTC one. Am not a camera person so am not gonna talk about the Zoe but have to say you have many things you got to do with the HTC one.

Corns
To my disappointment the HTC one comes out of the box with 4.1.2 though 4.2.2 was available right from November. Though everything is amazing and blazing fast to the hardware and the premium built quality the part where HTC never satisfied android lovers is on the UI. HTC always makes a tip to toe customisation on the android versions by thus makes it looks a lot unpleasant. The apps are now customized according to Google's holo theme and when you run them on the HTC one they really do look awkward. It feels as if those apps are ported from another os to the HTC's. The whoe of sense is  a lot disappointing as you can see all the manufacturers are trying to get their custom skins close to Google's stack to give users a uniform experience but that's where Sony and HTC are lacking. In the sense there is no widget drawer. We get to add widgets only from the home screen. You can't move apps from the app drawer to the home screen by continuous hold on the icon as again if you want it in the home screen get it from the home screen. Multitasking look a lot similar to the Nokia's N9 meego running smart phone. I really didn't like the sense 5. That's one thing that's keeping me away from buying that phone as there is no android experience. It may not matter to many but to me when it comes to an os there should be some pure experience of it. Samsung's touch wiz offers a pure yet coloured Google experience which I love to use with the touch wiz nature ux. On to of all that the 2300mah batter can't give enough juice for heavy users. A super phone that need more juice might run out of power so make sure to carry your charger where ever you go.

Conclusion
HTC one is an amazing phone to have around. HTC lovers are up for a treat. For users who don't like the user experience do wait for the next best thing. Well I am waiting.. Are you?

GMAIL app updates for android

An upcoming version 4.2 of the Gmail app has been spotted in the wild and has two new features, one of which was right on top of the most requested features for this app.http://youtu.be/00xUH86sJV0

GOOGLE PLAY UPDATE

Google has released v3.9.16 of the Play Store application for Android and with it come some useful new features. One of the new features is the ability to delete apps from your ‘All’ apps list within ‘My Apps’. Anyone who has been using And

roid for a while will know that this list is cluttered with useless apps that you only downloaded once and then deleted but are now permanently part of that list. Well, not anymore.



Applications in this list that are currently not installed on your device will now have a delete button next to them, so you can instantly remove them from the list. Moreover, you can now press and hold over these items and delete a whole bunch of them simultaneously.

Another useful new change is that the Play Store app finally remembers your position in a list. Before, if you scrolled down a list and clicked on an item and then went back, you’d go at the top of the list. This would be extremely frustrating of you had scrolled down a lot. Now, the app remembers your position, so you can go back and continue scrolling down from where you left off.

Other minor changes include new notification icons that appear when there is an update available, along with expandable notification option. Your phone will now also show the icon for the app that you updated instead of the same generic icon it showed before. The new Play Store app is also smaller in size than previous versions.

The update is rolling out now so you’ll have to wait for it to arrive on your device. Alternatively, you can click on the source link below and head over to Android Police, who have uploaded the APK for your downloading pleasure.

Amazon Appstore now supports in-app purchases for Android devices

A feature that has been in Google Play’s Store for a while now is making its way to the Amazon Appstore, as developers now have the ability to integrate in-app purchases into their apps.
In-app payments can be in the form of additional features or subscriptions, as well as bonuses and upgrades for games. Why is this important when it’s already available for Google Play apps you may ask? For one, it offers developers the ability to target users with custom Android devices able to use only the Amazon Appstore as their app market, such as the Kindle Fire . It also offers the same for Android devices not approved by Google to access the Play Store.