5 viable alternates to Canvas HD : The smartphone on-demand

Leading smartphone manufacturer Micromax has been making rounds in the tech headlines since quite a long time for its Canvas HD. With the hype created on the phablet, consumers have now started asking "Where is Canvas HD?" As of now, there is no clear information on the specific date of the arrival of Canvas HD even for those who booked it.

Just to revive, Micromax Canvas HD packs a 5 inch HD IPS capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, 1.2GHz quad core MediaTek MT6589 processor, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system, 8MP rear camera, VGA front camera for video calling, 4GB internal storage, 1GB RAM, micro SD card slot supporting up to 32GB additional storage, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS/A-GPS and a 2,100 mAh battery.

Canvas HD was announced on the eve of Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos release in India. With superior specifications and lesser price tag, the Micromax offering created a great impact on the Samsung phablet, however, it could not stay for a long time as Canvas HD went out of stock since the day of its release, while Galaxy Grand Duos is making scorching sales in the nation. For those who are eagerly waiting for their Canvas HD, it will take around another two weeks to get their hands on it.

For those who can not wait this long, Micromax is not the only budget phablet with high-end specs. Following the launch of Canvas HD, several India based vendors have also started coming up with their multi-core Jelly Bean offerings in order to counteract it. Few of these smartphones  with their specifications in brief are :

1. Karbonn Titanium S5 : Titanium S5, from another Indian smartphone manufacturer Karbonn, boasts a 5 inch qHD multi-touch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels, 1.2GHz quad core processor, 1GB RAM, 4GB internal storage, micro SD card slot, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, 8MP rear camera, 2MP front camera, Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth and a 2,000 mAh battery. Karbonn has priced Titanium S5 at Rs 11,990 making it even cheaper than Canvas HD.

2. Wickedleak Wammy Titan 2 : Wickedleak, the growing gadget manufacturer, launched Wammy Titan 2 boasting a 5.3 inch HD IPS multi-touch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 960 x 540 pixels, 1.2GHz quad core MT6589 processor with Power VR SGX544MP GPU, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, 12MP rear camera with LED flash and support to Panoramic Shot, 5MP front camera for video calling, 4GB internal storage, 1GB RAM, micro SD card slot supporting up to 32GB additional storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS with A-GPS, 3G and a 2,300 mAh Li-Ion battery offering a decent backup.

3. Samsung Galaxy Grand Duos : Galaxy Grand Duos packs a 5 inch multi-touch LCD capacitive touchscreen display with a very low resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, dual core 1.2GHz processor, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, 8MP rear camera, 2MP front camera for video calling, 8GB internal storage capacity, 1GB RAM, micro SD card slot supporting up to 64GB additional storage, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, HDMI, A-GPS, DLNA and a 2,100 mAh Li-ion battery. The phablet is priced at Rs 21,500 and has received a plethora of minor software updates. Price being comparatively higher and specification being a bit low compared to others, but the title Samsung itself adds enough recipe to bring the race on.

4. Lava Xolo A1000 : Lava Xolo A1000 packs a 5 inch HD IPS OGC capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 1280 x 720 pixels, 1GHz dual core processor, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, 8MP rear camera, 1.2MP front camera, 4GB internal storage, 1GB RAM, micro SD card slot supporting up to 32GB expandable storage support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 3G, micro USB 2.0 and a 2,100 mAh battery of undisclosed backup. Xolo A1000 is priced at Rs 13,999 being a reasonable offering.

5. Swipe MTV Volt : Pune based startup, Swipe also launched a Jelly Bean phablet with in partnership with MTV. The phablet dubbed MTV Volt that carries a 6 inch 5 point multi-touch capacitive touchscreen display with a resolution of 854 x 480 pixels, 1GHz dual core MediaTek MTK 6577 processor for blazing performance, 8MP rear camera, 1.3MP front camera for video calling, 4GB internal storage, 512MB RAM, micro SD card slot supporting up to 32GB additional storage, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, micro USB 2.0, 3G and a 3,200 mAh Li-Po battery. Further, MTC Volt is priced at Rs 12,999.

News app from All India Radio(AIR) launched for Android

India's 83-year-old radio station just got a little tech-savvy with the launch of an Android app.

The official AIR News app will bring users stories from AIR News network in India. Users get the latest news, national as well as regional from Prasar Bharati, India's Public Service Broadcaster. The official AIR News Android app also brings users India’s regional news bulletins along with special news-based programs. Your Android device needs to be Android version 2.2 or higher to be able to run the app and is a mere 1.9 MB to download.

With the launch of the AIR Android app, the content will be available to people globally. All that is required are an Android device and the ability to connect to the Internet.

Manish Tewari, Minister for Information and Broadcasting said, “This is a landmark step in the history of AIR broadcasting as live webcasting would give the public broadcaster a new profile as far as news dissemination in real time is concerned. This initiative would also enable the listeners of AIR to access the archives at one click of a button. With the use of social media, people can now access the content of AIR in any part of the globe. It would also enable AIR to keep pace with contemporary trends in the social media space.”

So far, on the Google Play store, the app has received an average of 4.7 out of 5 rating and has seen 64 user reviews.

The Android market is flooded with a bunch of radio apps that offer both local as well as international stations, and it is nice to see AIR take the initiative to make a place for itself in the radio app world. In the dawn of the smartphone era, access to radio was considered as a given feature, but today it is a rarity, especially in high-end smartphones.

Those interested can download the AIR app from the Google Play store.

The farthest Galaxy of our universe...

Making it a breakthrough the astronomers, powered with NASA’s Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and one of nature’s own natural “zoom lenses” in space, have discovered the most distant Galaxy ever seen in the Universe.

The galaxy appears as a diminutive blob that is only a tiny fraction of the size of our Milky Way Galaxy. It offers a peek back into a time when the universe was 3 per cent of its present age of 13.7 billion years.

This galaxy named as MACS0647-JD, was observed 420 million years after the big bang, the theorized beginning of the universe. Its light has traveled 13.3 billion years to reach Earth. This finding is the latest from a program that uses natural zoom lenses to reveal distant Galaxies in the early Universe.

Along the way, 8 billion years into its journey, light from MACS0647-JD took a detour along multiple paths around the massive Galaxy cluster. Without the cluster’s magnification powers, astronomers would not have seen this remote Galaxy. Because of gravitational lensing, The Cluster Lensing and Supernova Survey with Hubble (CLASH) research team was able to observe three magnified images of MACS0647-JD with the Hubble telescope. The cluster’s gravity boosted the light from the faraway galaxy, making the images appear about eight, seven, and two times brighter than they otherwise would that enabled Astronomers to detect the galaxy more efficiently and with greater confidence. As per Marc Postman of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore,“This cluster does what no man-made telescope can do. Without the magnification, it would require a Herculean effort to observe this galaxy,”

MACS0647-JD is so small it may be in the first steps of forming a larger galaxy. An analysis shows the galaxy is less than 600 light-years wide. Based on observations of somewhat closer galaxies, astronomers estimate that a typical galaxy of a similar age should be about 2,000 light-years wide. For comparison, the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf galaxy companion to the Milky Way, is 14,000 light-years wide. Our Milky Way is 150,000 light-years across.

Matured Android now occupies 3 out of 4 smartphones in market

Ever since the inception of this revolutionary mobile platform, Android have always been on the peak of buyer's mind. Now after a few years, when Android has become a matured platform across the markets, the total market occupancy has increased even further making it almost 75%.

As per the latest report, almost three out of four of smart phones around the world are now running the Android mobile operating system. Here are the detailed analysis of this report.

According to IT market research firm Gartner, Google's mobile OS now has a 72.4% share of the market for mobile operating systems, a massive increase from the 52.5% it held a year ago. Samsung's wildly popular smartphones accounted for a big portion of that gain, with the South Korean tech giant shipping 55 million units, the majority of which run on Android.

According to the survey, Apple, whose devices run on its own proprietary iOS software, sold around 23.5 million phones over the same period, the third quarter of 2012. That was up from 17.3 million a year ago, but the rise was not enough to stop the market share of the Silicon Valley company's operating system slipping from 15% to 13.9%. The survey also said that the fall in Apple's market share could have been a result of users around the world waiting for the release of the iPhone 5 in their countries.

Though, with the recent launch of iPhone 5, Gartner analysts expect iOS share will grow strongly in the fourth quarter of 2012 because users held on to their replacements in many markets ahead of the iPhone 5 wider roll out.

Think before you do, you are being Googled!

Google, the search giant introduced its first transparency report in 2009 and since then the number of inquiries across the globe has risen by around 37 percent. Governments all around the world are increasingly using Google as a key surveillance tool.

According to Google :

Government surveillance is on the rise... Government demands for user data have increased steadily since we first launched the Transparency Report. In the first half of 2012, there were 20,938 inquiries from government entities around the world. Those requests were for information about 34,614 accounts.

Google surveillance is definitely a global issue, but even here the US government is in the forefront. Brazil, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom each generated more than 1,000 government-related requests for user data. India was more inquisitive, with 2,319 requests. The US issued almost as many requests as those countries put together: 7,969.

With the introduction of transparency, the charge is also on when it came to requesting the removal of content from Google, with a total of 273 removal requests, including a number of being court orders.

Before completely despairing of user privacy, it's worth putting these figures in context. Google claims to have more than 400 million Gmail users alone. If the total number of Google accounts is, say, half a billion, then your chances of being subject to a request for user data is still only 25,000 to one.

Of course, most of us lead lives of much less interest to government authorities. For enterprises, the concern should probably be less about spying, and more about negligence. If Google, Microsoft, or Amazon complies with an agency's request to hand over enterprise data, what becomes of it? Is it securely protected in the hands of law enforcement? Is it securely disposed of once the investigation is over? If it's obtained without a warrant, will you even know that your data is being examined?

These are just further questions for individuals and organizations to consider before committing sensitive and confidential information to what is, in effect, the cloud. The government across the globe might be having an eye on all you commit.