#Apple policies frustrating users?

Apple's decision to remove a programme used to send and receive Bitcoins from its App Storeprompted Barry Silbert to end a love affair with his iPhone.

"I'm switching," Silbert, chief executive officer of New York-based SecondMarket, said in an e-mail after Apple this week removed his Bitcoin application of choice, Blockchain.info.

"Shopping for a new phone this weekend." From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, technology enthusiasts who used to see the Cupertino, California-based company as a kindred spirit are voicing their frustration over its policies.

Apple requires apps to be legal everywhere they're offered, and some governments including China and India have questioned Bitcoin's legal status. The ouster of Blockchain is causing a backlash, and some are going to extreme measures to show their displeasure.

Several people posted videos online destroying their iPhones. One user shot his iPhone with a sniper rifle, another smashed it with a metal bar and another threw it down a flight of stairs.

Bitcoins exist only as software, and transactions are completed via computing devices. Even though no physical currency exists, merchants from car dealers and Web stores are accepting the digital money.

Ref - TOI

Satya Nadella is #Microsoft CEO

Hyderabad-born Satya Nadella has been named the CEO of the legendary tech giant Microsoft, that has given the world products like Windows, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook Express.

#Sony to stop making PCs, cut 5,000 jobs

Sony, under pressure to shore up profitability in its electronics business, unveiled a restructuring plan on Thursday that will cut 5,000 jobs and trim 100 billion yen ($988 million) a year from fixed costs, while splitting off its loss-making PC and TV units. 

The PC division, as widely expected, will be sold to investment fund Japan Industrial Partners, which will set up a separate company to take over the operations. Sony will initially hold a 5% stake in that company. 

Sony also said it will split its TV division off into a separate company by July 2014. The flagship TV division has lost $7.5 billion over the last 10 years. 

The job cuts, which will include its TV and PC divisions, are to be implemented by March 2015, while the cost savings are to kick in by the following 2015-16 financial year. 

The pullout comes as Japan's electronics firms look for daylight beyond the shadow of industry giants like Apple and Samsung Electronics. Exiting the Vaio PC business Sony, founded 17 years ago, will mark the first time CEO Kazuo Hirai pulls a major consumer product line. 

Still unclear is when Sony can catch up with local peers Panasonic and Sharp on the restructuring track. The pair have swallowed charges, sold off or cured many loss-making businesses, and bounced back to strong profits.

Ref - TOI

#Motorola Moto G launched in India at Rs 12,499

Motorola's much awaited Android smartphone Moto G has been launched in India at a price point of Rs 12,499 for the 8GB variant and Rs 13,999 for the 16GB storage variant.

The phone will be exclusively available on e-commerce website, Flipkart, on launch day. The phone has already been listed on the website, however, there's no information on shipping and availability, yet. It's worth pointing out that the version of the Moto G listed on Flipkart comes with dual-sim capability. Motorola and Flipkart are hosting an event in New Delhi where the phone will be formally unveiled.

Launched in the last months of 2013 in several markets, Moto G sports a 4.5-inch screen with a 720P resolution. It is powered by a middle-of-line quad-core processor running at 1.2GHz. The device comes with 8GB and 16GB storage options and has 1GB RAM. The primary camera can shoot images in 5MP while the secondary camera is 1.3MP. The phone runs Android 4.3 Jelly Bean but will soon receive the Android 4.4 KitKat software update. It doesn't feature major UI customizations. Motorola has promised early access to Android updates on Moto G.

Moto G key specifications
4.5-inch display with a resolution of 720 x 1280 pixels, 329 ppi pixel density
1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor
1GB RAM
8GB/ 16GB internal storage
5MP rear camera with LED flash, 1.3MP front-facing camera
3G, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0,GPS
2070mAh battery
Dual SIM (GSM + GSM)
Android 4.3 (Jelly Bean) upgradable to Android 4.4 (KitKat)

Ref - TOI

#Galaxy Grand 2 review: Unexciting but reliable smartphone

Android is everywhere, especially in India. Here this mobile operating system dominates the smartphone market in almost all price brackets. Yet, in the mainstream market - Rs 10,000 to Rs 25,000 - there is not a single phone that we can recommend without any caveats.

Samsung tried to address this problem with Galaxy Grand last year. It was a decent phone but in our opinion fell short of being a great mainstream device.

Now, we have a successor to Galaxy Grand. You guessed it right: the new device is called Galaxy Grand 2. On paper, it looks much better than Galaxy Grand.

Is this the device you should buy if you are looking to spend somewhere between Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000 on your next phone?

We have an answer today.

Glossy plastic out, faux leather in
Samsung phones and glossy plastic go hand in hand. But last year with Galaxy Note 3, Samsung decided to fix it, even if only partially. Note 3 came with a backcover made of faux leather. Grand 2 uses a similar backcover. We say similar and not the same. Unlike the backcover on the Note 3, which felt closer to leather, this one feels closer to plastic. Still, it is better than the thin glossy plastic that Samsung has used so far on its phones.

The rest of the body is made of plastic. But it feels durable. The plastic frame with faux chrome finish fits the phone very well. The finishing and build quality is top notch.



Compared to its predecessor, Grand 2 is marginally longer. It packs in a 5.25-inch screen compared to 5-inch one on its predecessor. But it is also narrower by around one millimetre. You won't notice this difference unless you decide the measure the dimensions of the devices with a caliper.

The difference between the thickness of Grand and Grand 2 is, however, noticeable. Grand 2 is thinner by little less than 1mm. It is still chunky at 8.9mm compared to a device like Lenovo Vibe X. But compared to Grand, the lack of extra flab makes Grand 2 look better.

In terms of design, Grand 2 does not differ from the Samsung's recent Galaxy phones. It follows the same pattern - rounded corners, one physical home button, touch-sensitive menu and back buttons, the camera module in the middle of the back cover with LED flash on the left and speaker holes on the right. It is a familiar design and hence a little boring but it works well.



Grand 2 is powered by a quad-core processor made by Qualcomm. It is a Snapdragon 400 chip (MSM8226) running at 1.2GHz with Andreno 305 graphics processor. The phone has 1.5GB RAM, a screen with 720P resolution, 8GB internal storage (around 5.1GB is user accessible), an 8MP primary camera with ability to shoot FullHD videos and a 1.9MP front camera. The battery has a capacity of 2600 mAh. You can add more storage through a microsSD card. The phone supports 2 SIM cards. Both SIM can be active at the same time for calls and messages but for 3G data connection, you can use only one SIM at a time.

Plays high-end games (sort of)
For last one year or so, in mainstream market Samsung is churning out phones that may lack any attention-grabbing features but are usable and dependable. Grand 2 falls in the same category.

This is a fairly fast phone. Apps open quickly and the phone doesn't seem to drop any frames while a user scrolls through the installed apps. Pinch-to-zoom while web browsing is smooth and so is multitasking. GPS works reliably. Most of the video and music formats are handled without need for a third-party app like MX Player. If you have MP4 videos in FullHD, you can play them on Grand 2 with ease. The speaker is loud enough to fill a small room with sound.

Yet, Grand 2 is not a phone that compares well to high-end Android devices, especially Nexus 5 that costs just a few thousands rupees more. There is occasional lag in user interface. The browser doesn't load websites as fast as it does on a high-end phone.

What matters, however, is that compared to other mainstream Android phones, Grand 2 offers better performance and experience. Samsung has optimized the Touchwiz user interface well and it works better than the user interface that companies like Gionee, Lenovo and Huawei are putting in their phones.

Touchwiz will look familiar to anyone who has used a Samsung phone in the last one year. The icons are colourful and not as flat or slick looking as the icons in stock Android user interface. But they are not gaudy or cartoonish. The keyboard remains the same and hence largely frustrating to use (thankfully you can install a different keyboard). Touchwiz comes with a number of unique features. Smart gesture-based features like Smart Stay, which tracks your gaze and keeps the screen on if you are looking at the device, are useless. Half of the time they don't work. Bundled applications like My Magazine and Samsung Hub do not yet have enough content to make them a part of the good user experience. But the multi-window mode, which allows a user to work on two apps simultaneously, is useful.

Mainstream games like Angry Birds and Candy Crush run well on Grand 2. The touchscreen response is fast and there are no noticeable dropped frames. Games like Asphalt 8, which require top-notch hardware to run well, can be played on Grand 2. We enjoyed our sessions of driving through dusty roads in Asphalt 8 on Grand 2, but we did see some lag during gaming.

In terms of hardware, the three most important components are screen, camera and battery life. On all three, Grand 2 is above average.

Screen shows rich and saturated colours. The colours don't change or get dull if you change your viewing angle. The 720P resolution on a 5.25-inch screen is not as sharp as a FullHD (1080P screen) but the difference is not noticeable unless you are reading an ebook. For all practical purposes the screen in Grand 2 is sharp, clear, bright and vibrant.

The performance of the primary camera pleased us. In daylight, the performance is very good. We found the pictures shot with Grand 2 to have good focus, decent amount of detail and good colours. It tends to over-process and add extra bit of sharpening, but overall Grand 2 is a capable shooter. It especially clicks sharply-focused and detailed closeup shots.



But in low light, the performance is not so good. The image quality drops off fast when conditions are not favourable. In low light and indoor shots, Grand 2 captures images that have visible noise/grain. Compared to similarly-priced phones, it is not much worse but it is not better either.



Grand 2 records clear and sharply-focused FullHD videos in good light. You can definitely use it to snap minute-long clips at an outdoor birthday. The images from front camera lack contrast but it is good enough for video chats.

When used with a 3G connection and screen brightness on auto mode, which has a tendency to keep the brightness too low, the phone lasts around 15 hours of heavy use. If you set the brightness manually, something we recommend, the phone lasts around 12 to 13 hours. This is above average and we can confidently say that even if you use your smartphone a lot, you will probably be able to go through 10-12 hour long day at work without having to hunt for a charger in afternoon.

Buy it but only at the right price
Grand 2 is a reliable phone. It is definitely a better package than other mainstream phones in the market. It is a safe buy. If you get Grand 2, chances are that it won't leave you disappointed.

Unfortunately, it is slightly overpriced. It has an MRP of Rs 24,890. If you have to pay over Rs 24,000 for Grand 2, it is better that you add Rs 5,000 more and get Nexus 5, which is one of the best smartphones you can buy right now.

But as it happens with Samsung phones, MRP is not the price at which they sell in the market. Samsung says the 'best buy' price of Grand 2 is Rs 22,999. This is a much more sensible price for the device. But in the market, the price of Grand 2 is all over the place. Some retailers are selling it for more than Rs 23,000. Some are selling it for around Rs 22,000.

Our recommendation is that you buy Grand 2 if you get it for around Rs 22,000 or less. In this price, it is a very good deal, especially now when Nexus 4 is not available in market. But if you are planning to spend Rs 25,000 on your next phone, we suggest that you add a little bit more to your budget and get Nexus 5, which is in a different league.

Ref - TOI

Jolla: Taking aim at #Android, after a jilting at #Nokia

Marc Dillon still remembers the sick feeling that overcame him when Nokiaannounced it was scrapping a software project that he and hundreds of other developers had spent years creating. 

It was early 2011, and Nokia, the Finnish cellphone giant, was struggling to compete with the sudden rise of Apple and Samsung in the global smartphone market. In response, Nokia's chief executive, Stephen Elop, ended the company's plans for its own operating system and joined with Microsoft to focus on building Windows-based phones. 

"I almost threw up when I heard the news," said Dillon, an American engineer living in Finland, who was laid off after the company's strategy shift. "Nokia did a lot of great things for a long time. We didn't want to see this part of the story end." 

So Dillon and three other former Nokia executives took it upon themselves to prove their onetime bosses wrong. 

Over the past three years, with the help of around $20 million in outside investment, they have built Jolla, a 100-employee company of mostly former Nokia engineers, to develop the operating system that Nokia discarded. Their goal is to compete with Android, Google's dominant mobile software. Late last year, they finished the first part of the effort, releasing a smartphone powered by its open-source software, Sailfish. 

The ambitions for Jolla - Finnish for dinghy - are twofold. 

By releasing its custom-built handset, the company wants to demonstrate a demand for the device by pitching it to consumers, primarily in Western markets, eager to try the latest gadget. 

Though it is still a small player in the global smartphone market, Jolla's long-term hopes are pinned on talking up its Sailfish software to other cellphone manufacturers, which the Finnish company hopes will lead to licensing agreements. 

"The phone shows the world that we can make a product," said Sami Pienimaki, another Jolla co-founder, at the company's development office in Tampere, a two-hour train ride north of Helsinki, Finland's capital. "But the operating system is where the true value lies." 

To other phone makers, particularly those selling phones in fast-growing markets like China, the pitch is simple: We'll help you stand out from the crowd. 

"Everyone is looking for alternatives because few manufacturers are making money from Android," said Stefano Mosconi, Jolla's Italian co-founder and chief technology officer, at the company's offices in central Helsinki, which previously housed a Nokia research lab. "We know we can't ship 200 million handsets overnight. But phone makers need something new, and we can offer that." 

Despite Jolla's ambitious plans, it faces an uphill challenge. The global smartphone market has become a duopoly of Google's Android and Apple's iOS, which represented almost 95 percent of the 1 billion handsets shipped last year, according to the research company Strategy Analytics. And Microsoft, another technology giant, is doubling down on smartphones, putting the final touches on a $7.4 billion deal to buy Nokia's handset business. 

Several other software makers are also trying to compete for a piece of global smartphone sales. 

They include Mozilla, the nonprofit company behind the Firefox Web browser, which has introduced its own software for low-cost phones. Tizen, a rival open-source operating system backed by Samsung and Intel, is expected to introduce the first handsets powered by its new software this year. 

"It will be very tough for these operating systems to compete," said Roberta Cozza, a research director at the analysis company Gartner in London. "They have to offer a level of smartphone apps that users have come to expect, and most just don't have that." 

Confronted with stiff competition, Jolla is facing some of these challenges head-on. The company has opened its own app store for developers, but its software also allows customers to run popular existing Android programs such as WhatsApp and Twitter. 

That arrangement includes a partnership with the Russian Web giant Yandex, which gives Jolla users access to its app store with more than 80,000 Android programs. Jolla, however, has yet to reach a similar deal with Google's larger Play store. 

"If we didn't have access to Android, no one would have bought our device," said Mosconi of Jolla. "We can show people they can use the same apps available on other phones." 

Much like its more established rivals, Jolla is aiming its software at consumers in developing economies who are only now upgrading from their cheap handsets to more sophisticated devices. 

Markets like China and India are expected to report double-digit growth in smartphone sales this year, mostly from low-cost Android devices. 

But analysts say local operators like China Mobile are looking for ways to differentiate their handsets and services from those of their rivals. The use of new operating systems may help to attract customers who have yet to become accustomed to Android or iOS. 

Jolla's software experience is markedly different from those of its bigger rivals. 

The Jolla phone is designed for swiping across the screen to move between apps; the operating system does not use a home button for navigation. Drop-down menus in each program offer short cuts to popular functions like sending a text message or checking email. 

And open programs - displayed as mini icons on the home screen - update automatically. That allows users to change songs on the handset's music player or find a contact's phone number without opening the app itself. The phones also have technology built into interchangeable rear covers that will alter software features. 

"The biggest market for us is China," said Pienimaki, adding that Jolla expects to start licensing its operating system and selling its handsets there by the second quarter of the year. 

"There's an opportunity for a new product-based simple Finnish design." 

In Western markets, the company is pursuing deals with supermarkets and other brands that want to reach mobile customers through more than a downloadable app. 

Tomi Pienimaki, Jolla's chief executive and Sami's brother, said those deals might include handset and software partnerships allowing companies to incorporate their own services directly into Jolla's operating system. 

The company's smartphone includes so-called near-field communication technology, or a small chip that automatically adjusts settings and features when users change the rear cover. The feature could allow retailers to brand their own covers with software updates to include loyalty programs or daily offers, though Pienimaki says Jolla has yet to sign any agreements. 

"We don't want to annoy users," he said. "But consumer brands want to create a closer connection to their mobile customers." 

For the typically stoic Finns, Jolla offers a possibility to regain some pride, because the country is about to lose control of Nokia's once-proud handset business to Microsoft. 

While the cellphone startup has sold fewer than 100,000 handsets worldwide since the model was released late last year, many in Helsinki's technology community say Jolla's operating system and device, which retails for around $550, show that Finland's telecommunications industry can still compete on a global stage. 

When Jolla started selling its phones in November, for instance, a line of expectant customers snaked around the company's pop-up store in central Helsinki despite freezing temperatures. 

And Peter Vesterbacka, part of the management team at the Finnish game maker Rovio, has proudly showed off his Jolla handset complete with a bespoke Angry Birds case. Angry Birds is a Rovio game. 

"A lot of people want them to succeed," said Pekka Koponen, a former Nokia executive who now runs a technology advisory firm in Helsinki. "I want to believe there's still innovation left in Finland."

Ref - TOI

#Apple may focus on health with #iOS 8

iOS 7 ushered in a major revamp of Apple's mobile operating system, bringing features that chief rival Android already had. And it seems that Apple may up the ante withiOS 8. 

The latest word on Apple is that the company is going to focus on health and fitness with the next iteration of iOS. Technology website 9To5Mac has reported that Apple is currently readying a new app called Healthbook, which will be the key feature of the operating system. 

The Apple health app "will be capable of monitoring and storing fitness statistics such as steps taken, calories burned, and miles walked. Furthermore, the app will have the ability to manage and track weight loss." Other features likely to be included are ability to track blood pressure, hydration levels, heart rate etc. 

If users provide information about the medication prescribed to them, the Healthbook app will remind them of taking the same at the scheduled time. 

This report is backed by a New York Times story on Apple's top brass meeting the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the government body charged with the responsibilities for public health. Though the details of the meeting are not yet known, the report said that Apple is either trying to expedite a pending approval or the two parties are working on a new generation of medical devices. 

Michael O'Reilly - the former chief medical officer of patient monitoring device maker Masimo Corp - joined Apple's ranks recently. He is also said to be among the Apple employees who met the FDA executives. 

It actually comes as no surprise that Apple's next generation operating system would focus heavily on health. The company last year launched iPhone 5S with a special M7 co-processor that only tracks the health and fitness of the user. While introducing the M7 core in its A7 chipset, the iPhone maker said that it will create the path for the next generation of health and fitness apps. 

These reports of a health-optimized operating system also give credence to the rumours of an Apple smartwatch that is focussed on health and fitness. The rumoured iWatch will be the company's first wearable device and would be crucial for a firm whose fans and investors are clamouring for a new generation of gadgets. 

According to a Bloomberg report, Google is also in talks with FDA over some medical devices.