Nokia may unveil 6 devices on October 22

NEW DELHI: It seems Nokia is making a desperate attempt to salvage lost ground in the mobile market. The company is reported to be launching as many as six devices at an upcoming event in Abu Dhabi. 

The media has been abuzz with reports of the company launching its biggest phone Lumia 1520 at the event. The 6-inch phablet is said to be the first Windows Phone device to come preloaded with the new GDR3 update that brings support for quad-core CPUs and full HD displays on Microsoft's mobile platform. This upcoming smartphone is said to have a 20MP rear camera and run on the Snapdragon 800 chipset that powers most top-end Android phones. 

Another device speculated to be announced at the event is a Windows RT running tablet Lumia 2520 (codenamed Sirius). This tablet is rumoured to have a 10.1-inch screen, Windows RT operating system and two batteries. 

There is not much information about the other four devices. However, since alleged press shots ofAsha 500 have leaked on the internet, its announcement too is expected. 

The Nokia's Innovation Reinvented event is scheduled for October 22.
Credits: www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Cosmos Rays Visits Earth From Mars Tonight By 12:30am To 3:30 - Health - Nairaland

Cosmos rays are entering earth tonight from mars.pls switch off your mobile at night, don't keep your phone with you. The rays are dangerous. NASA BBC NEWS
Credits:http://www.nairaland.com/907443/breaking-news-cosmos-rays-visits#10531543

Upgrading your android os

Cupcake, Donut, Éclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean. Either we're talking about a stash of confiscated food items from a Weight Watchers group picnic, or we're about to spend some time discussing Android operating system(OS) upgrades. Thank goodness it's the latter of the two.

Whereas Apple computer OSes get named for man-eating felines (Mountain Lion, Snow Leopard) and Microsoft chooses a seemingly incoherent assortment of letters, numbers and words (XP, 7, Vista), Google's Android line goes for a subtler, tastier approach. But don't let the friendly naming distract you; the company's schedule of releases is as aggressive as it gets. Those eight versions were released between 2009 and 2012.

That speed causes a common problem for tablet users who are prone to comments like this: "My hardware is running on Honeycomb (version 3.0). Can I upgrade to Ice Cream Sandwich (version 4.0), or can I leapfrog right to Jelly Bean (version 4.1)? Can my tablet even handle it?"

Those are all great, common questions. But before we even talk about upgrading anything, take a few minutes to back up your entire tablet using Android's built-in tools. It's easy enough. Just go to Settings, then Privacy and check the boxes for "Back Up My Data" and "Automatic Restore." This way, if the upgrade goes badly and you have to reset your OS, at least everything from photos to apps and settings will be saved off your tablet.

Now that we have that formality out of the way, we're ready to talk about upgrading your Android software.

Upgrading Your Android OS by the Book

Before we get into upgrades, it's important to know that some manufacturers are in the habit of adding different "skins," or user interfaces, to whichever stock version of Android they've selected for a device. As a result, Ice Cream Sandwich, say, isn't going to look or act the same across the assorted technologies you and your friends are packing. A manufacturer may tweak the operating system to work with a tablet's cameras or interface with a cellular digital service. That's what you get with an open source system. (But let it be said that there's spirited debate among the Android community about whether all this customization is necessary or just plain ridiculous.)

In short, when Google releases a new version of Android, it's a very basic platform. By the time it gets installed on your new tablet, it becomes an extremely proprietary operating system.

If you want to see which operating system you're running, go to the settings menu and tap on "About Tablet." It should display the current version of Android on your tablet.

You'll discover three common ways to update your Android OS:

1. From the settings menu: Tap on the "update" option. Your tablet will check in with its manufacturer to see if there are any newer OS versions available and then run the appropriate installation.
2. Visit the manufacturer's site: Every reputable tablet manufacturer (there are some no-name brands on the market) will have a technical support site that offers the latest updates and drivers for your particular model. Visit that site from your device's Web browser, and you'll be able to update other drivers as well.
3. Connect to your computer: Most manufacturers sell their tablets with a way of allowing them to interface with other computers. Connect your tablet to your computer, launch its proprietary software and grab your owners manual. You can probably reload your entire OS from scratch in a few minutes.

Using manufacturer-approved OS upgrades will also help you keep your warranty intact. This is the smart, safe way to go. Now, let's look at some of the other options for upgrading your tablet.

Credits: compute.howstuffworks.com

Panasonic to quit smartphone market

NEW DELHI: Japanese electronic giantPanasonic said on Thursday it will abandon research into new smartphones for retail consumers at home as it struggles to make inroads in a sector dominated by Apple andSamsung.

The move comes two months after competitorNEC said it was pulling out of the market citingtough competition.

"We will suspend developing new smartphones for the business-to-consumer market in Japan, and instead will pour our business resources into smartphones for the business-to-business market that is expected to grow," Panasonic said in a statement.

Corporate smartphones are devices used in businesses such as warehouses and hospitals where a number of people have to share up-to-date information across a large area.

Japanese electronics makers have struggled to compete since the rise of smartphones, and have been left behind by US giant Apple and South Korea's Samsung. The two companies' flagship phones have a large share of Japan's smartphone market.

NEC said in July it plans to exit its smartphone business, with chief financial officer Isamu Kawashima saying "we were late to enter the smartphone market, and we were unable to develop attractive products".

In the three months to June, Panasonic booked a net profit of 107.8 billion yen ($1.08 billion), up 742% from a year earlier. Operating profit stood at 64.2 billion yen, up 66.3%.

However its mobile phone unit Panasonic Mobile Communications booked an operating loss of 5.4 billion yen, despite a 86% rise in sales.

Panasonic and its domestic rivals, including Sony and Sharp, have been undergoing painful restructuring aimed at stemming years of record losses largely tied to their electronics units.
Credits: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Gtalk glitch sends chats to wrong recipients

NEW DELHI: Sent a message to someone onGtalk and it got delivered to someone else? Wondering what happened? Hold, you are not the only one experiencing this bug. Many other users of Google's free instant messaging serviceGoogle Talk too have reported that messages are being delivered to unintended recipients on Gtalk.

In some cases the unintended recipients are multiple. Also, some Gtalk users have also complained of messages being delivered to people outside their contact lists.

Microblogging site Twitter is flooded with user comments on the same, says ?@SamreenSamad, "My Gtalk is randomly sending messages to multiple contacts. Can someone help please? I've changed my password and all that."

"Avoid gtalk. There's something wrong with it today. Seriously," reads another tweet from @devgoswami. Some tweets, like this one from @Monelle_b, also have an interesting warning, "Google's GTalk is sending chat messages to the wrong recipients. So be careful with office gossip."

So far, there seems no pattern to whom the message is wrongly getting delivered to. Also, it is not clear how many users have been affected affected by the bug.

Google is currently looking into the glitch. "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Talk. We will provide more information shortly," reads the update on Google App dashboard.

Earlier this week, Google's Gmail service apologized to users who were affected by email delivery delays on September 23. Wrote Sabrina Farmer, senior site reliability engineering manager for Gmail, in post on the Google Gmail Blog," On September 23rd, many Gmail users received an unwelcome surprise: some of their messages were arriving slowly, and some of their attachments were unavailable. We'd like to start by apologizing—we realize that our users rely on Gmail to be always available and always fast, and for several hours we didn't deliver."

Regarding the reason for delay, Sabrina added, "The message delivery delays were triggered by a dual network failure. This is a very rare event in which two separate, redundant network paths both stop working at the same time."
Credits: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Nokia launches 41MP camera smartphone in India

A few weeks after launching the top-end Lumia 925 in India, Nokia has rolled out the Lumia 1020 in the country. This smartphone has a 41MP camera, making it the smartphone with the highest megapixel count in the market today.

The company has not revealed the price of this device in the market. The company said that the phone will hit the shelves on October 11 and the price will be announced on October 10. It cited currency fluctuation as the reason for not revealing the same. 

The 41MP camera of Lumia 1020 has a Carl Zeiss lens and Nokia's proprietary PureView imaging technology. This camera also has optical image stabilization as well as six element lens and uses oversampling technology to process images, says Nokia. 

At the launch event, Nokia showcased Lumia 1020's lossless zooming technology, where the phone captures images first and then allows users to zoom into it later without losing clarity. Photos taken by most smartphones get pixilated upon zooming and cropping. 

The company also showcased a camera grip (Rs 7,500) and wireless charging back cover (Rs 3,200) compatible with the Lumia 1020 at the event. 

Other smartphones with powerful cameras available in India are Samsung Galaxy S4 zoom andSony Xperia Z1.
Credits: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Twitter launches emergency alerts for smartphones

SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter, which is preparing for its initial public offering, said it will help users receive special alerts from government agencies and aid agencies during emergencies. 

Users who sign up will receive smartphone notifications via the Twitter app as well as SMSs- assuming they agree to handover their cell phone numbers - from any of several dozen agencies who have signed on to the program. 

The US Federal Emergency Management Agency, Tokyo's Disaster Prevention service and the World Health Organization are among those participating. 

The alerts program starts a year after Twitter showcased its potential as a lifeline during Hurricane Sandy, when stranded residents on the eastern US seaboard reported the storm's progress and sought help on the mobile network. 

A similar lifeline service played a part in the rescue efforts in Japan following the devastating 2011 tsunami, Twitter said. The program is initially available in the United States, Japan and Korea and will be expanded to other countries. 

Craig Fugate, the FEMA administrator, said the service was at the cutting edge of disaster management in the age of smartphones. 

"Today we have a two-way street — residents are informed about hazards in real-time and emergency managers receive immediate feedback on the consequences of a disaster," Fugate said in a statement. 

The program reflects the evolution of Twitter from its earliest days, when it gained a reputation as a hangout for geeks to share the minute details of their most recent meal or who they encountered at the South by Southwest Festival. 

But the crowd-sourced information of today's Twitter has also proved problematic. 

Even as the New York City Fire Department used Twitter to communicate with residents during Hurricane Sandy, there were pranksters who spread misinformation on the service, including a rumor that the New York Stock Exchange was submerged underwater. 

And in the wake of the Boston Marathon bombing, the name of a missing Brown Universitystudent went viral on Twitter after many users, including journalists, mistakenly identified him as a suspect. 

Twitter, for its part, has maintained a strictly hands-off attitude toward monitoring its content and denied responsibility for ensuring its accuracy. 

Earlier this month, Twitter filed with regulators for an initial public offering. Reuters reported last week that Twitter was in talks looking to add additional banks to its underwriting syndicate.
Credits: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

iPhone 5S production costs $191: Study

NEW YORK: While the iPhone 5S includes a handful of new features that set it apart from Apple's previous model, the actual cost to make the phone hasn't changed very much, according to a new study. 

An IHS teardown of the new smartphone found that the components that make up a 16GBiPhone 5S cost $190.70. Manufacturing costs add another $8, bringing the total production cost to $198.70. 

In comparison, the iPhone 5, which hit the market a year ago, cost $197 to make. 

Andrew Rassweiler, IHS' senior director for cost benchmarking services, noted that the 5S includes features new to the smartphone world, such as a 64-bit apps processor and a fingerprint identification sensor, without a significant jump in costs. 

The research firm also dissected a 16-gigabyte iPhone 5C, a cheaper version of the 5S, and put its total production cost at $173.45, including $7 in manufacturing costs. 

Rassweiler said the 5C is basically an iPhone 5 wrapped in plastic, noting that it has basically the same features, but benefits from typical component price drops, along with its cheaper plastic enclosure. 

The 5C has a starting sticker price of $549, but will sell for $99 with a two-year wireless contract. It's Apple's least-expensive iPhone ever and is an effort to boost sales in China and other areas where people don't have as much money to spend on new gadgets as they do in the US and Europe. But critics have said that the phone is still too expensive to sell well in emerging markets. 

IHS said that while it costs substantially less to produce an iPhone 5C than it did an iPhone 5, those costs are still on the high side. 

It added that in order to merit the low-end smartphone pricing of $400 that many industry observers had expected, while maintaining typical Apple profit margins, the company would need to reduce its 5C production costs to about $130. 

Monday Apple reported that it sold 9 million of the two new models since their launch on Friday - its strongest iPhone launch ever - and that demand was exceeding supply. 

In midday trading, shares of the Cupertino, California, company slipped $5.98 to $483.12.
Credits: timesofindia.indiatimes.com

Mobile phones to drive Sony’s growth in India: Kenichiro Hibi

The market for mobile phones and tablets has been booming in India, and has emerged as one of the fastest-growing and revenue-intensive segment in the consumer electronics space. While companies like Samsung and Apple and homegrown brands such as Micromax and Karbonn dominate the segment, Japan's Sony is also making an aggressive pitch in this category as the company re-orients its mobile business under the 'Xperia' range to make it one of its biggest revenue streams, even ahead of Bravia television division. Kenichiro Hibi, MD of Sony in India, speaks to TOI about the company's future plans on a day it launched its flagship mobile phone, Xperia Z1, priced at Rs 44,990. Excerpts:


You launch Z1 within days of unveiling it at IFA, Berlin. What makes you confident about the brand, considering that it competes with heavyweights like Samsung S4 and Apple's iPhone?

It is a fact that we have formidable rivals, but the market for mobile phones is also huge. While Apple and Samsung are there in the market, the momentum has been changing. Earlier, we were seen as a mid-tier brand but now we are seen as a premium offering, especially as many features on our phones are unique like their picture and sound quality. We have premium recognition in the market. 
www.timesofindia.com

How cloud computing is changing enterprise tech

SAN FRANCISCO: Over the next few years, what happens to the several trillion dollars businesses spend on technology will be decided by executives like Jeff Allen.

As big business hitches its computer systems to the latest technology wave, Allen and others will have the tricky job of ensuring that old systems work with the many new systems finding their way into his company.

"A lot of normal companies are struggling to stitch together lots of different software" from different technology providers, said Allen, a marketing vice president at Standard Register, a specialty publishing and communications company in Dayton, Ohio. Eventually, he said, he will have to choose from only three or four big suppliers.

Eventually. But not right now.

Corporate technology buyers are looking at a menu of new and old technologies and names both familiar and obscure. Old-guard companies like Microsoft, Oracle, Dell and Hewlett-Packard have been joined by new names like Salesforce.com, Workday and NetSuite. Google and Amazon.com have corporate-computing services. And yet another group of upstarts is nipping at that newer generation's heels, ready to provide easy-to-use apps like the ones consumers download to their smartphones.

It is a confusing number of choices with big stakes: Who will you entrust with your most precious asset - data about you and your customers?

"There is a changing of the guard," said Paul Daugherty, chief technology officer at the consulting firm Accenture. "Some of the new guys will get big, and some of them will get acquired. Customers are trying to structure things to take advantage of the changes, but it's hard."

The biggest driver of this change is cloud computing, where the software is based somewhere else and retrieved over the Internet. With cloud computing, upfront costs are usually much less and new versions of software appear as easily as an update on a smartphone, so the product is never out of date.

Moving a company to cloud-computing services is also typically faster than old corporate software installations, which can take years and require the services of expensive consultants.

But there are risks with this shift. There are fears that the old tech suppliers don't understand the new way of doing things and may be unable to help their customers enjoy the benefits of new technology, while the new companies may not have staying power. And making sense of it all and controlling this upgrade process can be confounding.

"We can do things a lot faster, because we aren't bound by big software upgrades every two years, with lots of consultants," said Douglas Menefee, who runs corporate technology at the Schumacher Group, a Lafayette, La., company that manages 3,000 emergency room physicians across the country. "There are lots of pain points, too, though - too many products from different providers."

This shift to a new generation from the corporate technology suppliers that grew in the '90s has been years in the making, but it has accelerated in recent months as companies like Dell, Hewlett-Packard and even Microsoft have struggled.

Just as consumers are moving away from buying music and movies toward monthly subscriptions, corporate tech buyers are moving away from owning the technology outright and are instead asking others to do it for them in return for a monthly or annual fee.

Amazon and Google have built enormous global clouds to capitalize on this change, and they are angling to pick up the computing loads companies used to do on their own servers, at a fraction of the cost. The most lasting legacy of Steve Ballmer, chief executive of Microsoft, who recently announced his retirement, might be the cloud service built under his watch called Azure, to better compete in this new environment.

The worst hand right now seems to be held by hardware makers. More companies allow employees to bring in whatever smartphone, laptop or tablet they want, since they all connect to a cloud. "We have HP hardware, but it's not a strategic priority," said Allen, who uses a Samsung smartphone and an Apple iPad.

Nokia, which could not compete with Apple and Google in smartphones, sold its handset unit to Microsoft last month for $7.2 billion. On Friday, BlackBerry, another device company in trouble, announced that it would lay off 4,500 employees.

It is unlikely that many of the big companies will go away soon, of course. They still have deep pockets that allow them to buy into the new wave of corporate computing.

Oracle, for example, has spent $4.3 billion just on three cloud-software companies, and it has made other acquisitions and conducted internal research and development that probably add up to much more.

"We're all going to have to learn new capabilities," said Mark V Hurd, a co-president at Oracle, which is the largest business software company.

On Monday, Oracle will bring 60,000 customers to San Francisco to hear about its cloud strategy, which includes putting all of its apps in the cloud, allowing people to write new software on Oracle's cloud and adding social media features to its products.

Hurd's plan is to bring customers over slowly, offering a bridge from the systems they know to the new world they must learn. "All the customers want to hear how you're going to save them money and time and how you're going to help them innovate," he said.

Up to now, that innovation has largely been happening at smaller companies, and that has given them a beachhead they will not easily give up.

Menefee's company, for example, used to work with products from Microsoft and Oracle, but it now relies on Salesforce, Workday and Amazon. "I went up to Microsoft, and I can see they've got religion now. They are a giant that has awoken," he said. "But now I've got loyalty to Salesforce and Amazon, so they'll have to exceed them."

While the tech choices are daunting right now, some consolidation - or at least a more unified face - may be starting. Last week, Salesforce and Workday announced an alliance aimed at making their products operate better together, with customer data moving between their services.

Workday has announced data-analysis services that make moves toward the kind of "big data" work Oracle does, while also consolidating information it can take from other companies' products.

"Analytics is unifying," said Dan Beck, Workday's vice president for financials and analytics. "We're in the trenches with the customers in a way the incumbents just don't get."

Amazon has introduced a "trusted adviser" program that inspects a company's use of Amazon Web Services, its cloud service, and suggests ways it can be better used. Google has expanded its corporate cloud strategy, enlisting more developers and selling new ways for companies analyze data.

Big data is sold as a way to build efficiency and gain insights. But big data services are also a way to consolidate data for customers. If you control information, you are almost by default the trusted partner, or what is known in the business as "the single throat to choke" if something goes wrong.

Allen says that the app exchanges, where companies can now buy software the way people buy games and videos from an app store, may also help retain customers.

"Once you have a significant amount of data in someone's platform, you lock yourself in pretty quickly," he said. "They want you to use their apps, because they are looking for stickiness.Credits:www.timesofindia.com

Oracle launches 10 new services on cloud

SAN FRANCISCO: Business software and hardware systems major Oracle has launched 10 new cloud services, as well as a cloud marketplace, in a push towards offering cloud based services and solutions.

On the third day of the ongoing Oracle Open World in San Francisco, Thomas Kurian, executive vice-president for product development at Oracle said the new cloud solutions will "change the way customers consume Oracle software".

Oracle has added 10 services to the cloud, including database as a service, Java in the cloud, and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud. With the proliferation of cloud, mobile, and social technologies, organizations want easy access to innovative and trusted business applications. It is to meet this demand from customers and create new opportunities for partners, Oracle introduced the Oracle cloud marketplace. With more than 100 business applications developed by Oracle partners. The Oracle cloud marketplace enables Oracle cloud customers to browse, evaluate, and buy business applications.

Kurian used the Oracle database as a service as an example. He said users can configure the amount of storage they need, while Oracle will manage that cloud database by backing it up at night, dealing with patches, upgrades of the software and related maintenance services if need be.

Adrian Jones, general manager & senior vice president, Oracle Asia Pacific said, "now, customers will be able to buy an umbrella of cloud solutions. Oracle will be hiring more people to drive the cloud model. Among other countries, India is seeing good adoption of cloud."

Besides, Oracle cloud market place, the company launched a platform to develop mobile applications in the cloud. The Oracle Mobile Cloud Service. The paltform enables developers to create mobile application programming interfaces (APIs) so that mobile developers can integrate their applications with enterprise data and services. Other cloud services announced included documents cloud to enable file sharing and collaboration with mobile and desktop sync. Database back-up cloud that enables businesses to back-up Oracle database to Oracle cloud. Billing and revenue management cloud. Oracle claimed its cloud has 21 million users making 19 billion transactions each day. Credits :www.timesofindia.com

Samsung's curved display smartphone coming in October

SEOUL: Samsung Electronics said it will introduce a smartphone with a curved display in October, as the world's top handset maker seeks to set the pace of hardware innovation and maintain its supremacy in a fiercely competitive business.

Curved displays are an early stage in screen evolution which is shifting to bendable or foldable designs, eventually allowing mobile and wearable gadgets to take on new forms that could radically change the high-end smartphone market.

"We plan to introduce a smartphone with a curved display in South Korea in October," Samsung's mobile business head of strategic marketing DJ Lee said on Wednesday at an event launching theGalaxy Note 3 smartphone in Seoul.

In January Samsung, which has taken over from Apple as the global smartphone leader, showed off prototype products with a flexible screen and a display that extends from the side of a device.

But technology firms have yet to figure out how to mass produce the parts cheaply and come up with display panels that can be as thin as a sheet and highly heat resistant.

Curved display is already commercially available in large-screen televisions. Samsung and its home rival LG Electronics had started selling curved OLED TV sets this year priced at about $9,000.
Credits:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/hardware/Samsungs-curved-display-smartphone-coming-in-October/articleshow/23028443.cms

BlackBerry to pay $157 million if Fairfax offer rejected

NEW YORK: Struggling BlackBerry may have to shell out $157 million to Fairfax Financial if the smartphone maker backs out from the proposed $4.7 billion takeover offer. 

BlackBerry would be liable to pay the break-up fee if the company enters into an alternative transaction within three months from November 4, when Fairfax is set to complete its six-week due diligence for the proposed deal. 

The phone maker would be required to pay "Fairfax a fee of $0.30 for each issued andoutstanding Blackberry share." This would amount to $157.2 million. 

BlackBerry's total outstanding shares stood at 524 million as of June 30, as per data available with Nasdaq. 

According to a US SEC filing, the break-up fee would also come into play even if the handset maker publicly announces an alternative deal during the due diligence period. 

However, the smartphone manufacturer would not be required to pay the fee if Fairfax reduces its offer price from $9 per share. 

The terms of the agreement signed between BlackBerry and the consortium led by Fairfax said that during the six-week diligence period, if the company enters into any letter of intent or definitive agreement providing for an alternative transaction, it shall pay the break-fee "immediately upon entering into such agreement." 

"(Also), if during the diligence period, the company (BlackBerry) ceases to negotiate with the consortium in good faith with a view to entering into definitive agreement by the end of the diligence period," the break-up fee would be applicable immediately upon such cessation, BlackBerry said in the filing. 

The break-up fee would also be applicable if during the three-month period after November 4, 2013, BlackBerry enters into any pact providing for an alternative deal "with a person with whom discussions regarding an alternative transaction were held before or during the diligence period" and finally is consummated. 

The break-off fee would also be applicable if during the diligence period, an alternative transaction other than as contemplated is publicly proposed or publicly announced by a third person and such transaction with the person is consummated within 6 months after November 4, 2013. 

If during the diligence period, BlackBerry proposes to enter into an agreement relating to another transaction, it shall have to give FairFax a 48-hour written notice. 

Following months of speculation of a buyout, BlackBerry last night said it reached a tentative agreement for a $4.7 billion buyout by a group led by Fairfax -- its biggest shareholder. Fairfax owns about 10% of BlackBerry's common shares. 

Once a dominant player in the handset market, BlackBerry has lost its market share to rivals Apple ( iPhone) and Google's Android-powered devices.
Credits:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech/tech-news/hardware/BlackBerry-to-pay-157-million-if-Fairfax-offer-rejected/articleshow/23054582.cms

Phablet lovers, Samsung has big plans for you

SEOUL: Samsung Electronics is seeking to dazzle followers of the phablet with bigger screens, and even possibly with a curved one, in its attempt to fence off a segment of smartphones once mocked for their girth and size. 

Phablets, a cross between a phone and a tablet, have been on a roll since late 2011 as tech-savvy consumers, particularly in Asia, devote more time browsing data-heavy web pages and downloading media content. Even Samsung's flagship Galaxy S4 smartphone, released in April this year, has a 5-inch screen that puts it squarely in the phablet category for some analysts. 

On Wednesday, Samsung kicked off global sales of its latest Galaxy Note 3 smartphone in Seoul. The phablet, which boasts a 5.7-inch screen and costs $990 in South Korea without a carrier contract, will be available in 140 nations by October. 

Analysts say the medium-term outlook for phablets is good, but price points and the lure of their smaller, more portable cousins will keep a lid on consumer enthusiasm. 

Canalys expects smartphones with 5.1-6 inch screens to make up 6% of the market in 2013. The Singapore-based research firm is estimating overall global shipments of 993 million smartphones this year. 

"We're certainly seeing a shift for large-screen phones, but the vast majority of volumes are sub-5-inch - over 90 percent," said Rachel Lashford, an analyst at Canalys. "We would need to see devices at lower price points and from a much wider range of vendors, including Apple, to go beyond these forecasts." 

The growing popularity of phablets has galvanized Western names into action. 

Google's Motorola unit recently launched a 5-inch Droid Ultra, and even Apple, which has stuck to a 3.5-inch form factor for its iPhone since 2007 debut, is also exploring offering iPhones with larger screens, four people with knowledge of the matter said previously. 

Nokia had originally planned to launch a large-screen phablet in late September. 

"Samsung has been the leader in this trend, helped by its ability to create and drive the segment through significant advertising and marketing," Lashford said. 

Getting even bigger
Driving the phablet's shift to the mainstream is a confluence of trends. Users prefer larger screens because they are consuming more visual content on mobile devices than before, and using them less for voice calls - the phablet's weak spot. 

"When we first introduced the Note in 2011, a lot of people made a mockery of it and some even said it was doomed to fail," Lee Young-hee, executive vice president of mobile marketing at Samsung, recently told reporters. 

"But we noticed that people were carrying more than three devices on average such as phones, music players and gaming machines, and we thought people may want just one device that can do it all." 

Samsung says phablets are largely popular in markets such as China, South Korea, Europe and Southeast Asia. 

To increase the appeal of its phablet devices, the company has introduced accessories such as the Galaxy Gear smartwatch. 

The device allows users to make calls, displays messages, records videos and snaps photos, all while the user's phone stays in the pocket or handbag. 

Samsung is now planning to introduce a smartphone with a curved display next month, potentially another variant of the Galaxy Note 3. 

The Note has since grown in stature every year since its first-generation 5.3-inch screen. The Note 3's screen is nearly two-thirds bigger than Apple's 3.5-inch iPhone, and manufacturers are increasingly adopting immense screens dangerously close to tablet territory. 

Huawei's Ascend Mate has an even bigger 6.1-inch screen, and Sony's Xperia Z Ultra boasts a 6.4-inch screen, making it only less than an inch smaller than Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet. Samsung's Galaxy Mega has a 6.3-inch screen. 

Samsung's domestic rival LG Electronics is planning to launch its 5.2-inch Vu 3 on Friday.

Credits:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech

India still promising for troubled BlackBerry

NEW DELHI: Blackberry may have finally gone down in a near-distress sale to its largest shareholder Fairfax, but its Indian operations are still something to write home about. While the company has been losing market share in smartphones here too — dropping from 16% just a few years back to 2% at the end of the second quarter in 2013 — what is inspiring is the growth that it has been witnessing in the services and software business, which is gradually emerging as a significant portion of its revenues.

The share of services and software in Blackberry's India revenues is expected to go up to 40% in about one year from the 30% now. 

Blackberry, once dominating the corporate and enterprise phone business, has seen its fortunes suffer in India as relatively-stylish phones running on the Google Android operating system (OS) and Apple's iPhone gradually ate into its market. Recent efforts with a new software BB10, and new devices like the Z10, Q10 and Q5, have also not been very fruitful as the phones were seen to be too expensive and lacking features like a good camera or a bigger screen. 

Sunil Lalwani, MD of Blackberry India, however, says that all is not lost. The company has been trying to make a new push with the launch of new devices. "We did lose market share in the transitionary phase, while we worked on the new OS. However, now we are in the phase of building back and the opportunity could not have come at a better time. India is the second fastest-growing smartphone market and under-penetrated. I believe there is enough headroom for all of us — Android, Apple iOS, Windows and BB — to grow as long as we can differentiate," he told TOI recently. 

Lalwani says that the Indian operations are profitable and India is one of the top ten profitable markets for Blackberry globally. A lean manpower, at around 60, is also among the major reasons behind this. 

Just as it fights hard to regain numbers in smartphones, the company has now been focusing on OS-neutral enterprise business wherein it installs secure servers at premises of companies under its Blackberry Enterprise Service 10 (BES10) division. "BES10 helps companies operate in a secure environment and can help regulate internal IT policies," he said, adding that this enables you to manage any type of device like BB, Android, iOS and Windows.
Credits:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/tech