Latest Mobile Reviews

The monitor you're using right now might have come bundled with your desktop PC or maybe you bought it back when 1,024 by 768 was considered "high resolution." Since you spend a huge part of every day looking at your screen, it pays to be picky when buying a new one—this is technology you buy that you'll stay with for years to come. https://www.pcmag.com/picks/the-best-computer-monitors?taid=60b8ee9c6551f3000167ef0e

The investor has around 3,671 crore Dogecoins; the account's holdings had touched a whopping $22 billion before the crash two weeks ago https://gadgets.ndtv.com/internet/news/mysterious-whale-account-holds-12-billion-worth-of-dogecoins-2448414#rss-gadgets-all

Refreshing flat user interfaceFaster and responsive on new hardwareQuick access of essential controls, notificationsMotions and Animation overloadIcons don't look that greatMost app remain the same, mere cosmetic facelift

Apple released iOS 7 software version on September 18 for all iOS users across the globe. After hammering the Apple download servers for hours, finally millions got to enjoy the totally new refreshed look bearing iOS 7. The comparison of the iOS 7 with Google Android had sparked way before the former was officially released for the public.

Apple has redesigned the user interface and added over 200 new features to the iOS 7 software update.

We also managed to get our hands on the software update and had a closer look to the iOS 7 software update on iPad Mini tablet. Here is our experience so far with the Apple iOS 7 update.

Complete aesthetic overhaul of the iOS 7 update is indeed the biggest change in the iOS so far. Meanwhile the rival Google Android mobile operating system underwent several face lifts and changes in last six years. We could write endlessly about the new iOS 7 user interface and new features but it would get really tedious to write as well as read. We thus here tried to cover major improvements and changes in the iOS 7.

Look and Feel

The new iOS 7 software looks nothing like any of its predecessors. Apple has loaded the iOS 7 with 'parallax motion effects' so when the user turns or moves the device, the background image along with icons move on the screen to match the movement of the device. It may cause several people to freak out with over responsive user interface. Thankfully Apple has offered an option to reduce the motion throughout the system. The text by default seems slimmer and many might find it difficult to read. Thankfully the text can be made larger and bolder.

Apple has packed plethora of customisation capabilities in the Accessibility section of the Settings app. Fiddling around with that will help the user to make visual changes in appearance of text, effects and much more on the user interface. Right from lockscreen to every button in the system, everything has been flattened and decorated with the Helvetica Neue font. Most of the applications and menus will have a white background with chrome borders. The new font and white background makes the screen appear rich and clean. Right form dialer to keyboard, every aspect of the user interface appears flattened.

Since this is a full overhaul, even the icons have been redesigned and flattened. The design and colour of the icons are different than all previous icons so it may take a while for users to get familiar with them. The animations at times slow down the performance on the iPad Mini which thus becomes sluggish several times. However, changing the wallpaper from dynamic to deep did help a bit. Only those who are accustomed with the iOS user interface would totally feel like home and won't take much time to get used to the user the options.

Getting started with iOS

The most glaring change in the new iOS version is the placement of Spotlight. Now you have to swipe down from the center of the homescreen to find the Spotlight search box. Similarly the Multi-tasking interface has been changed from wiggling icons at the bottom to rich card-based access. Long pressing the Home button brings the list of open apps with icon and snapshot card of the relevant app on top of it. Users can simply tap and push the app card upwards to stop the app.

Control Center is one of the most talked about feature of iOS 7 as well. Swiping upwards from the bottom of the screen reveals a new translucent menu tray - Control Center. All the major controls that require simple toggle or scrolling are available in this tray including Airplane Mode, WiFi, Bluetooth, Rotation Lock, Volume Control, Brightness Control, Music Control, Torchlight, Timer, Calculator, Camera and Air Drop. Apple has introduced a new method of sharing apps and other content between iOS device using AirDrop that provides a secure and fast way to share information. In a way, Control Center will remind you of the inverted Notifications Tray of the Android devices with Settings included.

You will also find an improved Siri which is no more in beta stage. Several new search additions and features have been added to Siri but not even half of those features would be made available in India region. Since Siri takes over the search, Spotlight takes a backseat when it comes to searching content from the web apart from that on the iOS device.

In iOS 7, several native apps have background auto-update feature so that you get the latest weather and stocks information. The Lockscreen now offers access to the Notifications tray along with new Missed for missed calls while the 'Today' feature shows itinerary, weather and other information for that day. Notifications have been improved and appear less intrusively distracting than earlier.

As mentioned earlier, Apple iOS 7 provides several new controls such as Background Application Refresh and customisation options in the Settings app. Apple has attempted to make the iOS 7 more robust and automated in terms of fetching data to show updated information without having the user to refresh an app.

App Refresh

Apple iOS 7 also brings revamped native applications with new look and features in order to raise the standards above the third party apps available in the App Store. Talking about the App Store, Apple has improved this by like about five times. In iOS 7, the App Store can automatically download and update your apps in the background. Of course there is a setting for you to allow that. The App Store is snappier and faster compared to older versions. The iTunes app also is quite responsive when it comes to browsing videos or songs. The download processor on both App Store and iTunes is shown like a Hydrogen Atom model changing itself. At any point of time, the users can share the information with friends over Air Drop.

The Mail and Calendar apps have been updated with the flat style look and responsiveness. The Calendar still has things to learn and adopt from the third party Calendar Apps. Even the Weather app is great looking with the information fetched from Yahoo! Weather.

One of the most important change in the native app occurs in the Camera app. Apple has made this app very fast to load and very easy to use. The Camera app in iOS 7 now offers different formats to choose from - Still, Panorama, Video and Square. The Square format now allows clicking photo in a square dimension by default. Not only that, the new filters can help the user choose the best look for their images. Best part is that the users can choose a filter to see a preview right before clicking an image in both still and square format. Once the photos have been clicked, you can head to the new Photos app that has a smart algorithm to sort all the images by date and location. This classification is tagged as Years, Collections and Moments. Collections are the folders carrying images geo-tagged to specific location. All these photos can be shared using Air Drop and with other users by creating a Shared Stream using iCloud. Clicking pictures is apparently very easy and faster than in previous versions.

Apple Safari mobile browser drops the all grey panels in one single bar at the bottom with back, forward, Air Drop, Reader Mode and Tab view buttons. These buttons are merely depicted using thin lines so one can barely call them buttons. The address bar has been transformed into unified search box so you simply can feed any keyword to search or type out the URL of a website you wish to check out. New Shared links shows list of Twitter updates with URLs shared by the users in your Twitter Timeline. Also, you can add web pages and articles to your Reading List so that you can re-visit them any time. At this moment, iTunes Radio service is limited only to the US region and we hope that it will be available to other regions including India.

The apps did load a wee bit faster than on iOS 6.0 so we see a slight improvement but at times the performance stuttered. Hopefully an update could fix some of the underlying issues and get the iOS 7 fit for everyone. Apple Maps app seems to be little more responsive but that could be over call and we did not dare to venture out using that.

Security of the data is covered with the new Activation Lock feature that requires logging into the iOS device using Apple ID bound to that iPhone in order to unlock it. So if the phone is stolen or lost, the owner can not only lock the device but also make it unusable for anyone.

Final Thoughts

Though we spent just four to five days using the iOS 7 on iPad Mini, it is good enough time to conclude that the update makes the overall experience smooth and interesting. Of course, the lack of buttons and over load of animations as well as motion is disturbing at time but thankfully we can turn them off. Google Android users have seen more makeovers with the operating system than the iOS users. Of course, this is a radical change from the iOS updates of yesteryears to a new, refined, and colourful user interface.

Several changes have happened under the hood which will change things for coming years - for instance, the 64-bit support. That aims to make the iOS platform more fast and robust to handle large data requests and heavy app usage. Apple has realized the growing love of users for the Android's transitions and animations, so the iOS 7 clearly reflects the baby steps to integrate something similar for the iOS 7 platform. Control Center, improved Camera app and better notifications are some of the major improvements that are worth a praise. Like many others, we too have spotted some issues with design and inconsistencies at places but overall iOS experience has been more pleasant.

For those using latest iPhone, iPod touch, iPad mini and iPad, the iOS 7 will certainly change the way your device's user interface looks but does not change the way you interact with it. Installing the iOS 7 on your device will be like taking a power-up to upgrade and boost your performance over the time.

View the original article here

The latest buzz in the market is the LG G2 that was recently launched and is now available on Infibeam for INR 43,490/- only. This mobile has been built keeping in mind your requirements. It is the latest invention in the technology world that gives great performance.

The all new LG G2 has a 5.2 inch Full HD IPS Display that gives you a display resolution of 1920x1080 pixels. It comes with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and IPS display to give you excellent display quality. It also has a 13MP OIS rear camera that comes with 8x digital zoom. . It also has a secondary 2.1 Mega pixel front camera. The camera comes with LED Flash.

The LG G2 is based on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean Operating System and is powered by a 2.26 GHz Quad Core processor along with 2GB RAM. Experience speed and performance like never before. Carry your world of communication in your palms. It makes life very simple and easy for you. It is one stop for all your communication needs.

This Smartphone also deliver great sound quality as it has a very High Quality Sound that will keep you engrossed in music all the time. It also has some interesting features that will change the definition of your communication world. It has been enabled with GPRS, EDGE, 3G, Wi-Fi, as connectivity features to keep you connected to your friends wherever you go. It also has Bluetooth and USB that let you transfer files to other mobiles and devices.

This phone runs on 3000mAh Si+Li-Polymer battery that gives you longer talk time and standby time. It has internal 32GB memory that lets you store all you want in one single place.

Key Features

View the original article here

In China Apple launched the iPhone 5S & the iPhone 5C amidst huge expectation and coverage over its features and pricing.

Apple iPhone 5S Features

Display & Body : Screen display on the iPhone 5S will be the same at 4.0 inches with a pixel density of 326 ppi. The design is also similar to iPhone 5.

64 bit A7 chip and M7 motion co-processor : The iPhone 5S is with the new A7 chip which Apple claims to be the world’s first 64 bit desktop-class architecture in a smartphone. M7 motion co-processor gathers data from the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass to offload work from the A7 for improved power efficiency. Apple allows developers’ access to the new CoreMotion APIs that take advantage of M7, thus allowing them to create better fitness and activity apps.

Touch ID – Fingerprint Scanner : Built into the home button, Touch ID uses a laser cut sapphire crystal, together with the capacitive touch sensor, to take a high-resolution image at about 550ppi of your fingerprint. Touch ID will allow you to authenticate App Store purchases and app updates besides providing security lock to the iPhone 5S.

8MP iSight Camera with True Tone Flash : The iPhone 5S claims a new 8MP iSight camera, which features a larger f/2.2 aperture and a new, larger sensor with 1.5µ pixels for better sensitivity and low-light performance. The camera has capability to shoot 10 frames-per-second in burst mode, and 120 frames-per-second slow motion video at 720p.

The dual LED Flash : called the True Tone Flash by Apple adjusts colour and intensity for over 1,000 combinations to give better images under dark light conditions.

Colours : The new iPhone 5S is likely to come in three new different colours called Gold, Silver and Space Grey. Apple has also introduced new leather covers for the device with 6 colours to choose from i.e. beige, black, blue, brown, yellow and red.

iOS 7 : The iPhone 5S comes with iOS 7, Apple’s latest redesigned UI along with the option to download the iWorks apps Suite for free which includes iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps that are otherwise paid for apps.

Availability and Pricing : The iPhone 5S will be priced as 16GB at $199, 32GB at $299 and 64GB at $399

you can expect it to be priced at around Rs. 50,000 in India for the 16GB version and upwards for the others.

The iPhone 5S will be available starting Sep 20th in the US, while it is expected to be made available in India sometime during mid-November.

Apple iPhone 5C Features

Body & Design : The iPhone 5C comes in a new polycarbonate shell design which we feel, resembles the Nokia Lumia 620 a bit. It’s available in five colours viz, blue, green, pink, yellow and white.

Other Features : It sports the same features as the iPhone 5 which include:

4.0 inch Retina display
8MP iSight Camera
The A6 chip
iOS 7

The iPhone 5C comes with iOS 7, Apple’s latest redesigned UI along with the option to download the iWorks apps suite for free which includes iPhoto, iMovie, Pages, Numbers and Keynote apps that are otherwise paid apps.

Pricing & Availability : The iPhone 5C is priced as 16GB at $99, 32 GB at $199. The iPhone 5C is expected to be priced at around Rs. 35,000 in India. While the iPhone 5C will be made available in the US on the 20th of September, it is expected to arrive in India only by the mid week of November.

iPhone 4, iPhone 4S and iPhone 5: Pricing & Availability

The iPhone 4 has been discontinued by Apple and as such won’t be officially available in the market. You can expect the iPhone 4S to get a price drop and become available at Rs. 25,000 for the 8GB version. The iPhone 5 has been discontinued, though the existing users have no reason to worry as the device will keep getting timely updates in the future.

Important Notice : iOS 7 upgrade will be available for the entire Apple devices starting from iPhone 4 & iPad 2 from September 18th. But the iWorks apps are free only for newly bought devices with iOS7 installed on it. The prices mentioned above are from our sources in the market and there is no official confirmation by Apple India yet.

View the original article here

New BlackBerry Z30 Mobile Phone 2013 | Information Technology BlackBerry Z30 Mobile Phone Program 2013 | Latest Gadgets BlackBerry Z30 Mobile Phone Performance, Design, Feature and Specs | Price Of BlackBerry Z30 Mobile Phone Compare Technology | Free Software App Developer BlackBerry Z30 Mobile Phone Emrging Technology RIM mobile company has recently released a hands smartphone namely, BlackBerry Z30. The Z30 expected to hit Indian markets in October or early November as a spokesperson of the company told The Mobile Indian that the phone will be launched in the country pretty soon. BlackBerry Z30 is currently availabel in UAE for 2,499 United Arab Emirates Dirham (Rs. 42,500 approximately).

BlackBerry Z30 coming with a 5-inch Super Amoled full HD display and is powered by a quad-core 1.7 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile processor. It will come pre-loaded with the improved BlackBerry 10.2 OS version with bunch of new features. The new BlackBerry 10.2 OS will equiped its USB host and Miracast support. With USB support, one will be able to plug USB drives like flash drives into the phone and view the files as store data.

View the original article here

Gionee, popular Chinese mobile device design company entered into the Indian market back in March with the Dream D1. Now the company has launched several Android smartphones. The latest flagship smartphone is the Elife E5, that was launched back in July. The Elife E5 is the second phone in the Elife series. We reviewed the Elife E3 recently and the Elife E6 that was announced last month is coming to India next week. Even this phone lies in the 20k price range, similar to most of the latest phones from Indian companies. Let’s jump into the review to find out if it’s worth the price.

Unboxing

We unboxed the phone couple of weeks back and the first impressions were good. Check out the unboxing video below.

Box Contents

Hardware

While there are a lot smartphones that comes with a 5-inch 720p displays, this one has a 4.8-inch HD (1280 x 720 pixels) Super AMOLED display at a pixel density of 306. The display is bright, has great viewing angles and the text is sharp. Blacks are perfectly black, thanks to the AMOLED panel. The sunlight visibility is also good, but the display is shiny, hence it is prone to finger prints. It also has a Corning Gorilla Glass 2 protection that prevents the screen from getting scratched. We were impressed with the screen.

There is a earpiece on above the screen. There is a 5-megapixel front-facing camera with wide-angle lens next to the ear piece. There are the usual proximity and ambient light sensors on the other side.

There are capacitive touch buttons for menu, home and back. These light up when pressed, but these don’t offer haptic feedback.

The phone is sleek at 6.85mm and has curved corners. Even though the bezel on the front is black, the back cover is white. The phone also comes in Yellow and Graphite Black colors, as well as white.

The volume rocker and the power button are present on the left side. Both these buttons have a steel finish.

On the right side there is a micro SIM card slot under the flap and a micro USB slot.

The 3.5mm audio jack is present on the top. The jack is actually present on the back cover instead of top. There is nothing on the bottom.

The non-removable back cover is completely white, except for the camera module. The plastic back has smooth finish, hence it makes the device slippery when holding it. The build quality is quite good.

There is a 8-megapixel auto focus camera on the back with LED flash. It has a steel rim around the camera. It also has a secondary microphone above the camera.

There is a GIONEE branding on the center. You have the loud-speaker grill on the bottom. Since the phone supports DTS audio, there is a DTS branding next to the loudspeaker.

Camera

The phone has a 8-megapixel camera with LED flash. It has a BSI sensor. The UI is quite different from the other phones that are powered by a Mediatek chip. There is a camera switch button on the left side, digital zoom adjustment and a settings button below that. On the right side there is a camera to video toggle, on-screen shutter button and an image preview. The camera UI is a bit laggy and a lot of options such as capture modes (Panorama, Multi Angle View (MAV), Face beauty, Best shot and EV bracket shot), Capture Action (Touch shot, Gesture shot and Smile shot), Color effect (Mono, Sepia, Negative, Aqua, Blackboard and Whiteboard). The Phone booth feature adds a frame to photos. There are a lot of other features such as zero shutter delay, continuous shot (40 or 99) and options to adjust the exposure, saturation, brightness, contrast and ISO.

Coming to the image quality, macro images were decent, but the white balance is not proper. Low-light images were not very good, but can use the LED flash, which is decent. Images lacked color details and has pincushion distortion that causes images to be pinched at their center. The front-facing 5-megapixel camera was decent. It can record videos at 720p HD resolution. Check out some camera samples below.

The phone can record videos at 1080p full HD resolution at 30fps. The audio is good, thanks to the secondary microphone, but the video quality was average and lacked details. Check out the full HD video sample below.

Check out the camera review video to know more about the camera in detail

Software

The phone runs on Android 4.2.1 (Jelly Bean) similar to most of the smartphones in the similar range that brings lockscreen widgets, Quick Settings, and lots more features, but this doesn’t have day dream or photo filters. There are 9 homescreen, you also add or remove the number of home screens by pinching the home screen or from the home screen menu. You can press and hold on the home screen to change the wallpaper and change the desktop settings such as desktop effects, option to enable scroll up and scroll down settings that lets you just just scroll down anywhere in the home screen to bring the notification shade and scroll up to bring the home screen menu.

There are also themes apart from the Android themes. You also get a preview of how the theme would look like, before applying it. Option to add desktop effects, change the wallpaper and Theme is part of built-in Color app.

You can directly launch the camera directly from the lock screen by swiping to the left. There are quick settings in the drop-down notification as a part of Android 4.2. In addition to lot of quick toggles, this also has power saving toggle.

The lock screen lets you add widgets. You can add a range of widgets and also swipe to the right to launch the camera directly from the lock screen. It has Google Now, but you can’t access it from the lock screen, however you can add the Google Now widget on the lock screen.

Out of 1GB of RAM, you get 967MB of usable RAM. About 470MB of RAM is free when the phone is idle. Out of 16GB of internal storage you get about 10.56 GB and 1.79GB user storage for apps. The phone doesn’t have a SD card slot, but there is a separate area that shows where the app is present. If there is a tick next to the app, it is moved, if not, it is present in the phone memory. Even though some apps have been automatically installed in the SD card, we couldn’t find an option to move the apps to the internal memory.

Apps

The phone comes with a lot of pre-loaded apps and games. Apart from the usual set of Google Apps, it also has utility apps including File Explorer, Gionee’s Weather app, Compass, Sound Recorder, Calculator, Calendar, Notes, Torch, Kingsoft Office for viewing and editing office files, Hao123 news app and Gionee Xender . It also comes with NQ Mobile security, Yahoo! Cricket, WhatsApp and du battery saver.

It also has some pre-loaded games including Little Big City, Asphalt 6, Wonder Zoo, Fishing Joy and Texas Poker. There is a Game Zone to download free and paid games.

Music Player and FM Radio

The phone can play different audio formats. Instead of standard equalizer settings, this has DTS effects that you can enable from the music player settings. You can also control the Bass boost and 3D effect manually. The phone has FM Radio with auto search, recording but lacks RDS support. Audio from the loudspeaker is decent and the bundled in-ear earphones offers good bass. The default video player can play videos at full HD 1080p resolution.

Calls and Messaging

The dialer and the messaging features are similar to the smartphones from local OEMs, but the colors are different. It also supports speed dialer and quick search. Since this doesn’t come with Dual SIM support, you don’t have options to switch SIM cards. The keyboard is stock, but it doesn’t come with gesture typing present in the stock Android 4.2.

Connectivity

The settings menu is divided into two parts, common settings and all settings. The common settings has connectivity options that are used often. The connectivity features include, 3G (HSDPA), Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, WiFi Direct, Bluetooth v 4.0 with A2DP and GPS. It has support for wireless display that lets you share content from the phone to a HDTV by connecting a wireless display adapter to a HDMI-enabled TV. It doesn’t come with USB OTG support present in the Micromax Canvas 4. In addition to the scheduled power on & off settings present in the other phones, this also has scheduled airplane mode that lets you turn the airplane mode ON or OFF for a particular time period.

Performance and Benchmarks

The phone is powered by a quad-core MediaTek 6589T processor clocked at 1.5 GHz with PowerVR SGX 544MP2 GPU so the benchmarks would be obviously better than the 1.2 GHz MT6589 chip present in the Elife E3 that we reviewed back in June. We didn’t find any lags while using the phone. Check out some benchmark scores below.

Quadrant Benchmark

The Gionee Elife E5 tops the Quadrant Benchmark when compared to other quad-core smartphones in the similar range.

AnTuTu Benchmark 3.3

Again the Elife E5 tops the AnTuTu Benchmark 3.3 with over 16k points.

Vellamo 2.0 HTML5

The Elife E5 scores over 1600 points in the Vellamo 2 HTML5 browser benchmark.

Check out the complete set of Gionee Elife E5 Benchmarks here.

Gaming

Gaming was decent, but some high-end racing games were not impressive. Asphalt 7 and Riptide GP2 had details and good graphics, but the gameplay was not smooth. Dead trigger, Shadow Gun and Modern Combat 4 had good graphics and the gameplay was smooth. Check out the gaming review of the Elife E5 to find about the gaming performance of the device in detail.

Battery life

Coming to the battery life, the phone packs a 2000 mAh battery. Even though the battery capacity is less than the Xolo Q1000's 2500 mAh battery, the battery life was impressive. Thanks to the CPU power saving mode, you can get a battery life of more than a day with average use. CPU power saving mode limits the CPU performance and lowers the temperature of the device. You can use this when you are not playing games. The System power saving tweaks the display, WiFi, Bluetooth and Auto Sync when the screen is off. You can also enable custom power saving mode that triggers when the battery is down to a certain percent. If you enable the System power saving mode, you can get about 2 days of battery life, which is rare in Android smartphones. Overall we were impressed with the battery life of the smartphone.

Conclusion

Overall, the Elife E5 is definitely a worthy upgrade to the Elife E3. It has good display, has good build quality and a slimmer body. It also offers good battery life and is powered by a faster quad-core processor. The camera could be better and the phone lacks a memory card slot, which are similar constraints that we faced on the Xolo Q1000S that we reviewed recently. At a market price of Rs. 18,999, it is definitely costly compared to other smartphones in this range. If you are looking for a phone with a good display, battery life and build, but can compromise on the camera and the micro SD slot, go for it. You can also consider the Elife E6 wich is all set to launch next week. It is slightly costlier than the E5, but packs a 2GB RAM and a 5-inch full HD display.

Pros

Cons

View the original article here