December 2012

Sony Announces Their Jelly Bean Update Plans For 2012 Xperia Devices

If you’re a fan of Sony devices, you must have noted that Sony has released a bunch of Xperia devices in 2012. You may also be aware that none of these devices run Android’s latest version, Jelly Bean aka Android OS 4.1 yet. Hopefully, all devices that will be announced in 2013 will come with Jellybean installed meanwhile here’s the road map for the existing devices.

1. Xperia T, Xperia TX and Xperia V- Starting February through March

2. Xperia P, Xperia J and Xperia Go- Towards the end of March

3. Xperia S, Xperia SL, Xperia Ion, Xperia Arco S- Starting April through May or even later.

Some of these phones may get updates a little late depending on the customer variants and region.

Unfortunately, Sony has decided not to upgrade Xperia U, Xperia Miro, Xperia Tipo and Xperia Sola to Jelly Bean.

Nokia Lumia 920: First Impressions

Our urge to always try something new never ends. Nokia’s Lumia series especially the Lumia 920 isn’t just about a Windows Phone experience. It is far beyond that. While you get all the new features in Windows Phone 8 like the resizable tiles, kids corner and many other little new features, you also get the best of Nokia which obviously includes a phone with tough build quality. You know, unlike the phones that sheds their skin even while shipping 😉 Nokia has added a lot of their exciting services to Windows Phone. Now you get Nokia Music with a year long subscription that gives you access to unlimited music downloads, their excellent Maps app that can take you to your favourite destinations with turn by turn voice navigation and it doesn’t end there. Nokia has also developed many other useful apps like Nokia City Lens, Creative studio, Transfer my data app, Photobeamer and more. Finally, Nokia has always been a pioneer in one more thing. That is the Camera. Nokia has included the Pureview technology in the camera for Lumia 920. This means, you get stunning photos and videos everyday from your phone’s camera.

To be honest, when I first got the Lumia 800, I got really bored of it quickly. Within a day or two, I ran out of features and exciting apps to check out. And it just remained as a regular mobile phone to me. However, Lumia 920 with the new Windows Phone 8 OS and the special Nokia apps with this stunning hardware continues to keep me amazed and excited.

The first thing you note about this phone is the huge screen. The phone comes with 4.5″ screen with Puremotion HD display. When I first heard of it, I really took it granted for a fancy name that these manufacturers come up with. However, its more than that. The screen is really crisp and sharp, thanks to the Clear Black Display. And the PureMotion HD+ display delivers a very bright screen with extra high touch sensitivity. This means, your phone can respond to your touch even when you’re wearing gloves. That’s pretty impressive.

And when you’re using the Lumia 920, you sure know there’s something about the camera that makes this phone special. So yeah, I immediately fired up the camera app after I was done checking out the display and home screen. Lumia 920 has a dedicated camera button to launch the camera app. The camera is 8.7MP to be precise and comes with Pureview technology. I took a few pictures and found them good but not blown away to be honest until I took it for a party. The party was at night and oh boy, you wouldn’t believe the results. I usually take iPhone 5 with me everywhere and we all know it takes good pictures. But the phone always fails to take good shots in low light. I usually end up with poor pictures that has more grains and uneven light distribution caused by the flash. But Lumia 920 really delivered great pictures. It has this feature called focus assist and when that’s turned on, you get some really amazing photos. Be sure to read our full review with samples.

Lumia 920 comes with 32GB memory. Yes, let’s say goodbye to the old 16GB base model phones. I think its really high time that we move to 32GB and higher for the base models. Phones these days shoot and play 1080p videos, apps and games always a few hundred megabytes and some even hit gigabytes in size. It would really be foolish of companies to not provide enough storage to fit them all in the device. It only proves how much less they know about their own product. Overall, the phone is really smooth. The Windows Phone OS is butter smooth and the accompanying hardware of the phone really makes the experience lag free. The phone also gave us impressive battery life. After all, its not that easy to use up the entire 2000mAh battery. On a decently high usage, we squeezed up more than 1.5 days where the device used WiFi all the time for internet connectivity. The phone weighs 185g. Some people call it overweight. I felt it decent. Most of all, the weight gives you a solid feel in the hands.

I’m continuously using the phone more and more to discover and experience everything that this phone has to offer. Windows Phone OS may alone won’t be tempting to many of you out there, but a Windows Phone built by Nokia is really worth considering. Nokia really completes the Windows Phone OS to a great extent. Be sure to check out our full detailed review and videos which will be published soon. Got questions ? Give us a shout out below in the comments section.

Apple Sells A Record Breaking 2 Million iPhone 5 In China Within 3 Days

Apple launched the iPhone 5 in China last weekend and has sold a whopping 2 million units in just 3 days. Apple iPhone 5 is currently available from China’s largest mobile service provider Unicom. The company also received 100,000 pre-orders in just one day for the same when it first went live earlier this month. Some analysts did claim that iPhone 5 wouldn’t do well as iPhone 4S sales. However, the new sales figures has broken all analysts expectations. Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “China is a very important market for us and customers there cannot wait to get their hands on Apple products.”

Apple is on an iPhone 5 launch spree to get iPhone 5 to 100 countries before the year end. And they look right on schedule. Have you bought an iPhone 5 ? Or are you getting one for Christmas ?

Google Says No To Windows Phone 8 And Windows 8

Google has been releasing iOS apps for its mail, maps and plenty of other services. It was today that Google released its brand new Maps app for iPhone and iPod Touch which brought voice navigation and better maps experience to the users. However, if you’re on Windows Phone 8 or Windows 8 and is hoping for these apps to hit your platform, then you probably should keep your expectations low. Google may not be interested in these platforms just yet.

Clay Bavor, a Google Product Manager made it clear that they aren’t interested to invest on Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 at the moment. He said,

We have no plans to build out Windows apps. We are very careful about where we invest and will go where the users are but they are not on Windows Phone or Windows 8. If that changes, we would invest there, of course

So you may have to stick on to default ro third party apps for now until Google debuts their apps.

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Google Maps For iOS Lands On AppStore: Brings Turn By Turn Voice Navigation

Pinch yourself people. It’s true. Google Maps for iOS is out. And its better. Way better than it was before. Previously when Apple licensed Google maps it did not have voice navigation. But now Google has finally released a standalone app after Apple abandoned the Google app in iOS 6. Not to forget, the Apple maps that is currently on iOS is really poor and has been collecting bad press worldwide. Google really used this opportunity to release their own maps app with exciting new features like turn by turn voice navigation and guess what it’s even available in India. The maps app lets you search for location and then route to the location using car or public transport with traffic details in supported countries.

This new Google Maps comes as a lifesaver to many or most iOS users who rely on Maps to get in to different places. If you’re not a big fan of Google Maps, you can alternatively choose Nokia Maps from AppStore. But mind you, it does not have voice navigation and retina display optimisation. But the app is universal.

Download Google Maps From here

iTunes Movies Store Goes Live In 42 Countries

In a surprising move last week, Apple launched iTunes Music store in 56 countries and movies store in 4 countries including India. Today, they launched the music store into 42 another countries. Following are the new list of countries according to MacRumors: – Europe: Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine – Africa, the Middle East and India: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, […]

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Twitter Brings Photo Filters To Its iOS & Android As Instagram Withdraws Twitter Cards Support

Some of you might be heartbroken to know that all your vintage photos taken via Instagram will no longer show up as a thumbnail on the twitter feeds of your friends. Instagram recently announced that they are withdrawing the Twitter card support as they intend to increase the user activity on Instagram web. Instagram web profile was rolled out to users a few weeks back. As of now, photos continue to show up on third party clients while the official ones fails to show a thumbnail.

Call it a coincidence or a planned revenge, Twitter rolled out inbuilt photo filters to its official clients on both Android and iOS earlier today. Users can now add filters to their photos before they are shared on Twitter. I guess many users will now use Instagram a little less than before.

The app brings eight filters to choose from. There’s also an auto enhance option available to quickly fix and enhance your picture. And you can also crop and pinch to zoom as well while editing.

The app is already live on AppStore and PlayStore.

Nokia Introduces Their Most Affordable Windows Phone 8 Smartphone: Lumia 620

Nokia today announced the Nokia Lumia 620, their third Windows Phone 8 device. The Lumia 620 falls to the low end category of Windows Phone 8 devices. Priced at just $249(Rs 13500 approx), the Lumia 620 comes with a 3.8 inch TFT WVGA display with 800×480 resolution, 1Ghz Dual Core Snapdragon S4 processor, 512MB RAM, 8GB of internal storage with MicroSD card slot that supports up to 64GB, a 5MP autofocus camera, a VGA front facing camera, NFC and a 1300mAh battery. The phone will also be equipped with exclusive Nokia services like Nokia Music, Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive.

The phone will start selling in January 2013 in Asia, followed by Europe and Middle East later.

Apple Introduces iTunes Music, Movies and iTunes Match Service In India

It’s December and it’s almost Christmas. We are all waiting for surprises throughout out this month. And just on time, Apple announces the launch of their music store in India and 56 other countries. I can’t tell how much I’ve waited for this. I always wished if Apple stared Music store in India, but deep down I knew they wouldn’t as their focus was always on US and Europe markets. Well, not any more. iTunes music store have almost all the English songs and a lot of Hindi aka Bollywood songs. Songs are priced at Rs 12 and the albums are priced at Rs.110. Although prices for some songs and albums vary by a small amount.

Movie collections on the iTunes store are a bit underwhelming now. Both Hollywood and Bollywood collections are very limited at the moment. But its just getting started, so its a matter of time before we can see some new releases there. Movies are priced at Rs 290 if you intend to buy and at Rs 120 if you are only looking to rent. If you rent a movie, you get 30 days time to watch it. But once you hit play, you should finish watching the movie in less than 24hours. Knowing the condition of internet in India, I would recommend you to buy the movie rather than renting. Movies purchased on iTunes on computer can be watched on all your iOS devices that are registered with the same Apple ID. This also applies for music purchased from iTunes store.

iTunes Match is an interesting service from Apple. It scans your existing music library and replaces the songs with iTunes quality music from their store, the songs also get added to iCloud and then gets pushed to your other iOS devices(Manual sync is also possible). This helps you to avoid paying large amount of money to buy these songs again from iTunes store. Instead, at just Rs 1200 a year, you can have any number(25,000max) of songs added to iCloud. And the songs that you purchase there after from iTunes also gets added to iCloud. iTunes match was launched last year for US and UK stores, it was later introduced to some other markets as well. And yesterday Apple launched it in Indian store as well.

Along with India, 56 other countries also received the iTunes Music Store. They are Belarus, Moldova, Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea-Bissau, India, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Swaziland, United Arab Emirates, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Fiji, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Micronesia, Mongolia, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago. Only four countries got the Movies store. They are India, Indonesia, Russia and Turkey.