DigiMantra » News

iPhone 4 to be released today

nitish — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 05:11:51 +0000

Long ago when introduction of mobile phones revolutionized the communication industry, nobody dreamed that the power of computing can be packed in this small device. With the cumulative efforts of dedicated engineers and emerging technology, we made a giant leap in the direction of Smartphones. A Smartphone is a mobile phone that offers advanced computing features and connectivity. It can be considered as a portable computer integrated within a mobile phone. The virtuoso of industry analyzed the growth in demand for more powerful smartphone devices that can provide hi-speed processors, abundant memory, stable operating systems and larger screens. Keeping this need in mind, the key player of consumer electronics- Apple launched iPhone.

iPhone 4 is a 4th generation of iPhone and a successor to the iPhone 3GS. The gizmo is said to hit the US Market on 24^th June, 2010 at a price of $199 USD for the 16GB (white) model and $299 USD for 32GB (black) model. You can purchase this gadget from Apple Store. At present, AT & T holds the exclusive rights. Though it will be also available as SIM-Free in some countries. Even before its launch, 600,000 units are already pre-ordered. This shows that people are really dying to try their hand on the new incarnation of the iPhone.

Features of iPhone 4 –

Physical Dimension – 110 * 59 * 9.3 (mm); the new industrial design makes it the slimmest phone in the world.

The core technology is chipped in-between two glossy panels of aluminosilicate glass. It is chemically manipulated for our needs – It is 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic, claims to be scratch resistant and ultra durable. The new iPhone 4 respects Mother Nature and the panels used are completely recyclable.

The primary structure is built using Stainless Steel and the build quality is really impressive. The components are tightly packed maintaining structural rigidity but it is not heavy at all- It weighs 136.08 gram. The side buttons are classic in look and contains both the antennas for transmission and reception.

Apple A4 Processor – The name speaks for itself. It is an efficient mobile processor which is capable of multi-tasking. Multi-tasking refers to running various applications (including third party applications) and instantaneously switching between them without consuming much from battery Multi-tasking is done with the help of 512Mb of RAM. A Micro-SIM is used for storing the data. A bigger battery comes with a promise of 7 hours of talk time, 6 hours of 3G browsing, 10 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, and 300 hours of standby.

Retina Display – The screen is truly magnificent. It is next to impossible to locate the pixels. The screen is full of life. It would be difficult to get your eyes off the screen. The screen size is 960 by 264 with LCD display. With such a large screen to work on, the APPLE team provided an extra feature of ‘Multi-Touch’. Multi-touch is basically a technique of transmitting information in an innovative way. It registers a set of ‘hand gestures’ and thus executes corresponding actions linked with it.

Dual-Side Camera – It comes with a high quality 5.0 Mega Pixel camera with built-in LED flash. Even in low-light conditions, it yields great images. It has a VGA camera in the front and a 5.0 Mp camera at the rear panel. The rear camera records High-Definition video in 720p @ 30frames/sec. Optical Zoom of 5x can come in handy for many users. The videos can be edited by introducing themes and transitions. The dual camera supports the ‘FaceTime’, which is basically an integrated video conferencing tool which connects two or more iPhone 4 models via WI-FI network.

Audacity – It comes with 2 Mic- systems. The main mic is located at the bottom and the auxiliary mic is given next to the headphone jack. Dual-Mic suppresses the noise and enhances better communication.

Gyroscope – It is a digital compass. What’s new in this gyroscope is that it provides precise accuracy of 3-axis coordinates. Accelerometer – This device helps in detecting acceleration, shake, vibration shock, or fall by detecting linear acceleration along one of three axes (X, Y and Z). Together they enable the user to determine how fast and far the object can reach with accuracy.

We can create folders and organize applications for fast access with ease. iPhone 4 will be a style statement for those who believe in flaunting technology with style.

Stay Digified !!
Nitish Jha

Google revealed top 1000 websites

Sachin Khosla — Sun, 30 May 2010 05:10:43 +0000

Google has revealed top 1000 websites worldwide. The list is based upon Unique visitors to these websites. For the April 2010, Facebook.com tops the list followed by yahoo.com. This list will be published every month.

This list will help advertisers to choose the publisher based on their interest and can also scale on the websites performance.

For each site on the list, you’ll be able to see:

The site category
Unique Visitors (users)
Page Views
Whether the site has ads

However, as a privacy policy the list does not include sites which have private content.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Twitter acquires Tweetie

Sachin Khosla — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 02:52:27 +0000

Twitter has been buzzing around for a while now. It is a major social media network which has already spread deep down inside and still going on. Twitter CEO Evan Williams (@Ev) announced about acquiring Tweetie in a blog post today.

Ev signed an agreement with Atebits to acquire Tweetie and have decided to rechristened it as “Twitter for iPhone”. Undoubtedly, Tweetie was the leading iPhone client among all other. Tweetie will be made free in the future and can be download from the iTunes AppStore.

It is worth mentioning that Tweetie won the “Apple best design” award in year 2009. And in the blog post Evan mentioned that they are certainly planning to launch an application for iPad. With this acquisition of Tweetie, it is clear that Twitter has miles to go and lot to uncover.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Nokia E71 and E66 gets free navigation for life

Sachin Khosla — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 16:23:23 +0000

Hey Folks,

Earlier this year Nokia announced OVI maps free for life and it brought smile to many Nokia users. But for users like me who had purchased Nokia long before and had handsets like Nokia E71 were little put off.

But today Nokia announced free navigation for Nokia E71 and Nokia E66. That is going to bring joy to many Nokia users. To get start using free navigation follow the steps below :

1. Download the new Ovi Maps application from nokia.com/maps to your PC
2. Install the application using Ovi Suite to your device
3. Go to applications folder and start using Ovi Maps

Enjoy navigating your city !!

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Micromax G4 Gamolution

Sachin Khosla — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:21:03 +0000

From the makers of some of the lowest priced mobiles comes another sensation, the Micromax G4 Gamolution! Micromax has been the first to bring to life handsets with 30 days battery backup, dual sim facilities, dual standby facilities..and the list does not end here, numerous other mind boggling features.

Now, for all those who cannot leave their play stations alone at home, for those who hate taking their hands off their game, here it is- the Micromax G4 Gamolution or the Gaming Revolution. This phone gives an all new gaming experience. It does not need controls to play games like other mobiles. It is a gaming console in itself. Its motion sensors have been compared to Nintendo’s Wii. What more can one ask for? Also, it comes with a CD of four motion controlled games and game manuals. Take a breath all you gaming freaks, that’s not all.

The G4 offers more:

Dual band GSM phone
Dimensions 112*49.6*12.8mm
2.4 inch display
Bluetooth
A music player supporting multiple formats
A Wap browser with a maximum speed of 14.4 kbps
Expandable memory up to 4 GB
2 MP camera
The camera can function as a web camera when connected to a PC
Video player
Li-ion 850 mAh
FM Radio

Apart from these, it offers up to 5 hours talk time and 8 days stand by time. This phone has everything one can ask for, and more. The main attraction being the wireless motion controller like Wii. This is enough for all the hands which never stop playing. It is almost like carrying your Wii along. Is there anything better than this?

The newest addition to the mobile world, G4 has been given a good start. The ongoing IPL (Indian Premier League) in India, has been chosen by the G4 makers. Advertisements can be seen during the commercial breaks. The ambassador is Akshay Kumar making it all the more interesting.

Now the most unbelievable part the price . The G4 will be available in INDIA at Dealer price of 4750 INR so its market price will range from 5000 to 5500.

But, the only drawback is that the Motion Controller is the only main feature and hence, will only be in favor of the Gaming freaks. I suggest all others should definitely not miss out on G4 and its Revolution!

Twitter disables flash widget temporarily

Sachin Khosla — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 04:12:04 +0000

Twitter being the brightest star in the social networking arena is vulnerable many threats. In the recent threat sensed by the company they had to disable the twitter flash widget which is used to display user updates on their web site or blog etc. This decision was taken on 23rd jan, 2010 in an interest to save credentials of the users which are using the flash widget.

However the javascript widget is working like it always does. The good part is that no account has been affected reportedly. But if you think you are having some problem accessing your account , twitter staff can be contacted at accountsafe [at] twitter.com.

Tip : If you have/had flash widget installed on your website or blog, as a precautionary step you should change your password to make sure your account stays safe.

Stay Safe !!
Sachin Khosla

Twitter Retweet (beta) finally here

Sachin Khosla — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:00:22 +0000

Hey Folks,

There was a post on Digimantra few months back when one of my friend claimed that she had a RT button in her twitter account. Few people agreed and quite a few disagree. But twitter has started showing retweet (rt) buttons as beta, the notification is like :

The retweet can be seen by your followers for now and the fancy arrows can only be seen by people who are offered this beta re-tweet feature. Re-tweet is widely used action on twitter today and all other twitter applications/API/browser plugins have supported this since long. This feature was missing in the core twitter web based application which has now been introduced using this beta program.

You can see the retweet button from my timeline. After clicking the button it asks for user’s confirmation before retweeting. For the users who are not part of this beta program, RT gets prefixed with the tweet, rest all can see the fancy icon shown in the first picture.

Hope this satisfies your curiosity to know about twitter’s retweet(RT) button.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Google Dashboard – Launchpad for Google services

Sachin Khosla — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:11:23 +0000

We all use lot of Google products, or in short its part of our Internet odyssey. Let it be youtube, orkut, blogger, Gmail, Google Reader, but have you ever wish to keep track of all these products you use. To keep them in one place and see their stats like which service do you use the most?

Google Dashboard is answer to such requirement. It provides you a launchpad from where you can see all the Google services which you are using. It also provides the related data to that service. For example I did not know i have 1974 contacts in my Google Contacts, I had subscribed to 6 Google Alerts, and I have joined 5 sites on Google Friend Connect. All the data right at one place and what else, you can administer the respective accounts and make the relevant changes.

The best part of Google Dashboard is that it re-arranges the services according to an intelligent algorithm which records your usage. The data stored is only the usage data which is recorded when you are logged in .

To see your dashboard you have to visit http://google.com/dashboard . It will ask you to sign-in with your Google account credentials. Once signed in you can access all your data at one central location. You can delete services from there, can change their settings and do a lot more. So go ahead and checkout your Google Dashboard now.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Tagging friends in Facebook is now available

Sachin Khosla — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:45:23 +0000

Facebook announced introduction of @replies like feature in its status updates. This announcement was made 3-4 days back. World was going crazy to give it a try and start using it, but nothing worked on the day when they announced adding this feature.

However when I check Digimantra’s Fan page just now, I was able to tag the fans in the status updates. You can not only tag friends, fans, but also the pages. So that way it helps if you are referencing to some event on the page etc.

All you have to do is type @ and start typing the name of the person. As shown in the image below i type @d and all everyone who’s name starts from ‘d‘ gets listed. Choose one to tag that person in your status message. He will be notified on his wall, about getting tagged in your wall-post.

Hope you enjoy this feature of facebook which is more like twitter. But twitter does not provide an autocomplete list for its followers, which is nicely done by facebook.

Its is worth noticing that tagging friends/pages inside the replies is not functional. You are only allowed to tag people while you post a new status message on your wall-post. Now logon to facebook tag a few friends and poke them, have fun !!

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

And we’re back !

Sachin Khosla — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 09:43:13 +0000

Today morning our Database servers went down which are hosted with Godaddy. The hosting provider ( Godaddy ) did not specify any reasons for this downtime and it took around 5hrs for their engineers to recover. We apologize for the inconvenience caused to our visitors. Some of you might not even sensed the outage of servers due to different timezones.

We are planning to shift servers from Godaddy to some better and consistent hosting provider. The plan to shift servers is pretty soon so that these sort of breakdowns can be avoided in the coming future.

Godaddy in return gave us nothing but a lame excuse called Sorry and were unable to give us a timeline as to when their engineers might be able to recover from the downtime. Anyhow we are Up & Running now. Thanks for your patience.

Thankful !!
Sachin Khosla

Facebook introduces Twitter like @reply

Sachin Khosla — Thu, 10 Sep 2009 19:57:18 +0000

“If you cannot acquire them, copy them” is again true when we talk about facebook and twitter. Facebook after copying the twitter like layout has today introduced the twitter’s @reply like feature.

Facebook on its blog, mentioned that its like tagging people. Its more like tagging people in images and they let you tag people in the status messages or updates.

You can not only tag people, friends but also events and pages. When you tag someone he/she will get update on wall linking to your post. The tagged person is allowed to remove the tag, similar to how tagging work in images.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Yahoo meme english – inside preview

Sachin Khosla — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 19:31:51 +0000

“WTH is Yahoo Meme “, this is what @neobluepanther tweeted me today after I talked about Yahoo Meme on twitter. Most of you do not know about this project of Yahoo as it was not available in English language before few days back. But Yahoo is definitely coming up with something bigger to make things tougher for the twitter. Yahoo meme is very much similar to twitter and is another alternative to micro-blogging.

My Yahoo meme page is http://meme.yahoo.com/realin/ and I tried to dissect it for the visitors of Digimantra.

How is it Different than twitter ?

There are lot of differences between twitter and Yahoo meme. Twitter on its homepage only allows you to post text in the form of tweets. On the other hand Yahoo Meme, allows you to post different type of content like text, pictures, video and even music. So that breaks the limit to rely on third-party APIs to post images and other stuff as a part of micro-blogging.

Yahoo meme does not seem to have character limit for posting your text that is unlike twitter which has a character limit of 140 chars. This possibly gave rise to many URL shortening services in the internet today.

Yahoo meme has a Dog as its brand icon instead of a twitter bird - irony ?

Look & Feel

Yahoo meme is still in the alpha version, but from the very first experience it worked without any error messages or crashes – impressive ? The user interface is very neat and looks pretty rigid. When I tried to view the source of the dashboard page, I could find the traces of JQuery code, instead of YUI, that is pretty strange though. However, the Ajax works pretty nice and is decent enough to work seamlessly, its probably because there are few users on the server who are sending requests.

Other than this it comes with few built-in themes which are already present in your settings area. Currently they provide 6 themes all in total and no custom theme support as if now, remember its alpha version. The switching of themes is instant in comparison to twitter theme switching interface.

How do I get invited ?

Yes you guessed it right that Yahoo meme is invite only and I have 10 invites left with me. So if you need Yahoo meme’s instant invite leave a comment here. Please do not type your email address in the comment (to prevent spam), just fill in the email address in the Mail address field. I will definitely send you the invite, if I am left with any.

At the same time you can always get invited directly from yahoo meme. All you have to do is just visit their homepage and leave your email address there. They will send you invite depending upon the request pipeline.

What’s there for the developers ?

Yahoo Meme, has not launched any sort of API for the developers. So think this is the only point where Meme is lagging behind twitter. But as its in alpha version, may be they are planning to launch it when they reach near stability. But whenever it is going to be launched, it will definitely rock the scene.

If you need to know latest about Yahoo meme, you can follow /thememe to know more or at-least view its updates.To know more about Yahoo meme, visit its about page.

Hope you like what Yahoo is building for you. Go and meme about it.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

WP.me- A shorten URL service by wordpress.com

Sachin Khosla — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 05:58:23 +0000

WordPress.com has launched its own URL shortening service with the name wp.me. As discussed in my previous post for creating your own URL shortening service using google App engine, that everyone today is going after this URL shortening services. The early days we used to have is tinyurl, but then with the evolution of twitter, everyone just jumped into this business from digg.com, to stumbleupon. Resulting in many URL shortening services today and the list is endless.

However wp.me is different than the other URL shortening services in the following ways :

WP.me is the only two-letter .me domain in the world.
Every blog and post on WordPress.com has a WP.me URL now.
These are all exposed in the using rel=shortlink.
It doesn’t work for any URL in the world, just WP.com-hosted ones.
The links are permanent, they will work as long as WordPress.com is around.
WP.me is spam-free, because we are constantly monitoring and removing spam from WP.com.

WordPress people decide to launch this after tr.im declared that they are going to shutdown by end of this year, but at the last moment they got saved. But if that was supposed to get true then all URLs which are bookmarked or being used with tr.im will go 404. That means, you can never reach to the actual pages behind those short URLs. As a result this has shaken the credebility of many URL shortening services. If wordpresss has its own URL shortening service that means you can trust the one and cannot expect it to cease in the near future.

WordPress also supports this service for the self-hosted wordpress installs provided you have installed and activated their inhouse plugin called Stats plugin.

How can you use it?

There is now a “Get Shortlink” button next to your permalink when you edit or write a post, and when you click it you’ll get a popup with the beautiful link already highlighted for your copy and pasting pleasure.

If you’re logged in you can also get the shortlink for any page on WordPress.com, there’s a link under the “Blog Info” menu in your admin bar.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Bhuvan – Indian Google earth by ISRO

Sachin Khosla — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 11:51:55 +0000

India seems to be no longer away to be a fully digital nation with the continuous development in various fields. Latest development includes satellites, Submarines and other research works. India is heading rapidly towards development.

Bhuvan is a major step taken in terms of development over the Internet by India. Bhuvan a Sanskrit word which literally means Earth in english is a geoportal which provides virtual images of entire India over the internet. Yes, currently Bhuvan is able to show images only from India and gradually ISRO is planning to cover the entire earth. It is a project started by government of India and is much similar to Google maps ,Wikimapia etc.

Just like other applications, Bhuvan lets your discover India through images by the means of which you can discover the real India and its regional information. It provides various modes to access, from societal images to interactive 3D environment. Its main aim is to provide a feel of inside India. You can fly around India with the help of Bhuvan and explore the various parts of India and its culture, society through Societal applications.

To experience Bhuvan, you will have to register first. After getting registered and login, you will have to download the Bhuvan plugin which makes it possible to use Bhuvan in your browser. The download link might probably be hard to find due to same color of the text and links, so click here to download bhuvan plugin. You need to have DirectX and .Net framework installed in your system, which should be by default in your system.

The images provided by Bhuvan are not real time, they are images combined with virtual mapping. These images are the ones taken in the last 3 years. Currently you are not allowed to add your location information to its database instead you can just browse the different locations in India. It only supports Windows platform and hence Linux, Mac users will have to wait for sometime, until they launch something more generic which supports all platforms or is platform independent.

You will be able to see the following data on Bhuvan

Satellite imagery (LISS III , LISS IV along with metadata and Multi- temporal Data from OCM & AWiFS)
Value added information (NADAMS – National Agricultural Drought Monitoring System), Output of flood studies for certain areas,
Thematic information (Wastelands, Soils, watershed,water resources related maps)
Base layers ( administrative boundaries, transport layers, water bodies, etc)
Census information
Metadata

In my opinion, this project should have been made open source and they could have asked people to contribute. That way the development goes faster, the bugs get filed and fixed more fast. But its matter of choice that they are keeping it close ended, but it will be good if the development doesn’t cease in the middle of something and they can complete what they have quoted. Good luck to ISRO and its team.

Happy Independence Day.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Friendfeed custom themes goes public

Sachin Khosla — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 18:19:51 +0000

Recently friendfeed got acquired by the facebook, but that wont stop it to continue to add new feautes. Recently it introduced custom themes for the users. But so far so good, these themes can only be seen within the account and hence for your public account it was the same generic theme.

Today FriendFeed took another step to make these themes go public. Other users visiting your profile can see the skin which you have applied for you FriendFeed account.

There is another setting which can be done, so that you do not see themes of other people. If the setting is turned on, you won’t be able to see theme selected by other users.

You can change colors and background image for the custom theme. The custom theme can be selected from the list and its the last one.

Hope you change the way your FriendFeed account looks. For my FriendFeed account, I have chose the Grasslands theme. Make sure if you create your own custom themes, you share them in the themes group.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla