Indian Languages for Smart Phones

Samsung Electronics has introduced nine Indian languages for its smart phones and tablet users in the country. The languages are Hindi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi and Gujarati.

The company plans to enhance the availability of regional language content to its more affordable smart phone range starting with Galaxy Star within this month. The number of languages being offered will also be increased. Initially, the languages will be supported on its Galaxy Grand, Galaxy S4 and Tab 3.

Another four languages will be introduced in the next couple of months in the basket and the company plans to cover all the Indian languages.

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Ativ Book

Electronics manufacturer Samsung is going to launch Ativ Book 9 Plus laptops with highest resolution.

According to Cnet, the Ativ Book 9 Plus has 13.3-inch screen with a resolution of   3200 x 1800 pixels and with the Gorilla Glass, the display is 2.8 times sharper than a full HD screen. The screen is designed to hold its brightness even under sunny outdoor conditions and the display panel can tilt back to 180 degrees and lock in at 110 degrees to provide a more solid touch-screen.

The report added that the tablet has a 10.1-inch five-point touch screen with a resolution of 1366×768 with a 720p camera in the front and a 2-megapixel model in the rear.

Dual Pen Drive

iBall launched a new flash drive named as the hybrid dual pen drive. This pen drive comes with dual connector – a standard USB 2.0 on one side and a micro USB connector on the other side. Both connectivity options in just one device, this hybrid pen drive will allow users to connect it with both PCs as well as with micro USB-only mobile devices that have USB OTG feature without having to carry connecting cables with them.

The iBall hybrid pen drive weighs 10 grams and is available in two variants offering 8GB and 16GB storage space. The company has introduced the 8GB model for Rs 599 and the 16GB model for Rs 799.

Off Pocket

The slip cover is based on the technology behind the electric field-blocking Faraday cage, which protects electrical equipment from lightning strikes. A new program has been reportedly launched by a New York technologist to shield a cell phone’s cellular, Wi-Fi, and GPS signals though a hi-tech slip cover.

Adam Harvey said that developing stealth clothing designed to hide wearers from the spying eyes of drones has come up with the ‘Off Pocket project’ to bring stealth down to a cell phone.

The Off Pocket contains a metal fiber mesh that blocks the wireless signals (frequencies between 800MHz and 2.4 GHz) coming from cell phone towers, Bluetooth and GPS satellites as they attempt to communicate with a phone. The report said that the cover is waterproof and 100 times stronger than conventional signal blocking bags used in law enforcement.

Polar Magnetic Fields

Measurements from NASA-supported observatories suggest that the sun’s vast magnetic field is about to flip. The sun’s magnetic field changes polarity approximately for every 11 years. This change will have ripple effects throughout the solar system. It happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun’s inner magnetic dynamo re-organizes itself.

The coming reversal will mark the midpoint of Solar Cycle 24. Half of “solar max” will be behind us, with half yet to come. Our planet’s polar regions for the signs of climate change. Magnetograms at Wilcox have been tracking the sun’s polar magnetism since 1976, and they have recorded three grand reversals with a fourth in the offing. The sun’s polar magnetic fields weaken, go to zero and then emerge again with the opposite polarity.

 

WhatsApp

Instant messaging service WhatsApp has rolled out send voice texts by just pressing one button. The company announced the availability of this new feature while announcing that it has now hit the 300 million monthly active users. They garnered 50 million new active users in just 2 months.

In this new feature, you can record and send voice clips with one press of the mic icon. There is no time length limit for recorded messages. If you decide not to send the message then you just swipe to the left to delete the recording. The mic icon also turns blue when recipients have listened to the message. Another interesting feature is that the playback of a voice text will automatically switch from handset’s speakers to its earpiece.

According to a report, WhatsApp users now send 11 billion messages and receive 20 billion messages per day – up from 27 billion total in June. WhatsApp has began rolling out voice messaging for all of its apps, on iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia.

 

 

Get Home Safe

A new application for smart phones has been developed which allows to monitoring user’s outdoor activities and to ensure that the person reaches home safe.

A Queenstown entrepreneur has developed the ‘ Get Home Safe’ application  which is used to monitor everyday activities such as walking home from school, mountain biking or working unsupervised.

According to the report, once the app is installed, the application then records the GPS location and if the user does not stop or continue as planned then it sends an alarm to pre-selected personal emergency contacts.

Boyd Peacock who developed the application said that it could save lives and the servers do not need a working cell phone or network coverage to send the alarm and added that it was potentially invaluable for boating, tramping, fishing, kayaking or back country skiing and could be used to complement traditional personal locator beacons.

New Zealand Mountain Safety Council chief executive Darryl Carpenter said that the application will provide a valuable safety service for outdoor activities and there are clearly possibilities for other activities in everyday life.

Anti-abuse Policy

Micro blogging site Twitter has finally implemented new rules to tackle the growing tweet abuse on its site by introducing a one-click button for users to report such messages or posts. Recently in Twitter female users  including journalists were threatened with rape and bomb explosions and the site’s lack of appropriate reporting tools for such cases.

According to Stuff.co.nz, abuse reporting on Twitter will now be easier with the single button as users will not be required to navigate through the site’s help center to fill out an abuse form and the new rules include a stricture against ‘targeted abuse’ which could also mean slamming a single user with messages from multiple accounts or creating an account purely to harass or threat someone.

Twitter’s General Manager Tony Wang himself apologized to the women who faced tweet abuse and assured that the site will do more to tackle the issue and protect the users against abuse through its platform. He said that the new anti-abuse policy will apply worldwide.

Android Device Manager

Google announced that it will be releasing an android device manager for android smart phones that will enable users to track and find their misplaced or lost android smart phones. The utility is similar to Apple’s Find my iPhone feature and will show users the last known location of the smart phone on a map, which can also be tracked in real time.

Users will be able to ring their phones at maximum volume even if it is on silent mode using this utility. In case the user is unable to recover the phone, data residing on the device can be remotely wiped too. Users will have to be logged in to their Google account for the service to work.

Google will launch the Android device manager and it will work on all smart phones running  Android 2.2 or higher. Google will also launch an Android application that will let users manage their devices.

Tablet Market

The tablet market continued on its upward growth in the second quarter of this year with nearly 34 million tablets shipped worldwide. In these, Android dominated the numbers 53 percent of the market.

Android tablets saw a massive growth with over 200 percent increase in the number of tablet shipments from last year. This growth was pushed thanks to devices from OEMs like Samsung, Amazon, Lenovo and Acer among others, who together made up for 53 percent of the market. Apple, on the other hand, saw its growth falter due to no new products in its lineup. Compared to last year, Apple’s shipments dropped 14 percent and its market share dropped to 43 percent.

Consumers preferred smaller display devices since they were more affordable compared to their bigger-screened counterparts. According to the report, nearly 68 percent of the total number of tablets shipped had a display smaller than 9-inches.