Apple Brings the iPad 2 to India Starting at Rs. 29,500

It’s raining Apple news today. The Cupertino giant officially unveiled the White iPhone 4 earlier, and there are rumours of an upcoming iMac lineup refresh. Eclipsing that is a majorly relevant announcement for us Indians though – one that confirms that Apple will be launching the iPad 2 in India (and eleven other countries) on April 29.

India's got iPad 2!

The iPad sequel didn’t include the Retina Display but it did come with FaceTime video calling and a bunch of other technical improvements, including being a whole lot slimmer than the original. Check the specs out:

• 9.7-inch LED backlit IPS Panel display running at 1024x768
• Dual-core 1GHz A5 processor
• WiFi a/b/g/n and 3G (optional)
• Available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB variants
• 720p Video Recording at 30fps
• Front-facing VGA camera from FaceTime video calling

The iPad 2 will go on sale at 0900 on April 29 and will be priced at Rs. 29,500 (16GB), Rs. 34,500 (32GB) and Rs. 39,500 (64GB) for the WiFi only models, and at Rs. 36,900 (16GB), Rs. 41,900 (32GB) and Rs. 46,900 (64GB) for the WiFi + 3G versions. The Smart Covers are also being made available, and will cost Rs. 2,100 and Rs. 3,800 for the Polyurethene and Rich Leather variants respectively.

The announcement comes as a bit of a surprise considering the original iPad only released here three months ago but hey, we're not complaining.

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Gmail Takes Personalization to The Next Level

Google, very recently, added a volley of themes in its mail service, Gmail. With the look of the mail pages looking cool with the humongous array of colors and characters, the theme gained instant popularity.

Now, Google hands over the makeover power in your hands! Taking personalization to a new level, Gmail now allows you to make your picture as the theme of your mail account, and have the color co-ordination redone, too.

To begin with, one would have to go to 'mail settings' option made available in the Options tab. Once there, users will have to select the option 'Themes'. Scrolling down that long list, users will find the coveted option of 'creating your own theme'. From there on, users can use their albums in Picasa to create the themes they like, or choose any random picture and use it to customize the main area and the footer of their Gmail pages.

A certain limitation found in this feature was that using one’s photo might not seem such a good idea since that would get sliced as it gets separated in the mail body and footer, probably, a beautiful sunset picture would work best.

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7,000 mobile phones hacked in Britain( The Economic Times )

LONDON: Nearly 7,000 mobile phones, including those of actress Sienna Miller and former culture secretary Tessa Jowell, were hacked by a British tabloid, a lawyer has claimed. Without accepting the numbers, the newspaper has since apologised.
Lawyer Charlotte Harris, who is representing several of the celebrities involved, said 7,000 people may have had their mobile phone voicemail messages intercepted by The News of the World.
The daily has now apologised to the victims, saying: "We publicly and un-reservedly apologise to all such individuals. What happened to them should not have happened. It was and remains unacceptable."
The hacking took place between 2004 and 2006, the Daily Express reported.
Harris said her clients will not accept a settlement from the newspaper until they have received full disclosure.
"What we have at the moment is an apology and an admission. We haven't even got near the truth yet," she said.
"If you hack into one person's phone, you have access to everyone who has left a message for them. And then if you go into the person who has left a message, you get all of theirs.
"You have got to be running into several thousand, just from that methodology. It is certainly not a handful - maybe 4,000, 6,000, 7,000, a huge amount of people," Harris said.
Cabinet minister Danny Alexander described the phone hacking as "outrageous", while London Mayor Boris Johnson called on all newspaper editors to declare any hacking carried out by their staff.

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Microsoft Might be Distributing Pre-Beta Windows 8 Releases

Microsoft has done pretty well with their latest Operating System – Windows 7. Rumours now doing the rounds speak about Microsoft doling out pre-release builds to various OEMs including HP.

According to Winrumors, Microsoft is distributing build 7971.0.110324-1900 of Windows 8, which is said to be a really early pre-release build of the OS. Microsoft is using their Connect external testing system to distribute the Milestone 3 build. It is also being said that the program is being advertised as “Windows 8 and Server vNext Pre-Release Program” on Microsoft’s connect site and accessing the program requires a special invite code.
Other news of the latest iteration of the popular operating system speak about Windows 8’s interface being fully 3D compliant. The new OS will supposedly have a faster “hibernate” system which will take a whole of 3-6 seconds and save all open documents and currently running tasks. Plus it’s also being said that there will be a dual-UI option with a tile-based UI codenamed Mosh also included to the current layout.
The last of all is that the Microsoft might be looking to release the beta version of Windows 8 sometime in September this year and while all the rumours listed above look neat, we still advise you to take it with a pinch of salt!

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Now, a Flex Touchscreen Demonstrated

You’ve obviously seen and used the standard touchscreen which can be panned and swiped. However, at Interaction 2011, researchers from the Osaka University showed off a touchscreen that flexes!

The researchers tried out this new flex-ing touchscreen with Google Maps at the conference. The content on the screen acts the way any flexible material would. Therefore, each time you would pan, swipe the screen will flex into a corner making way for the next screen you would open.
The researchers claimed that unlike normal situations wherein it would get cumbersome to keep opening multiple windows and keep going back to the previous windows, with the flex touchscreen the minimized window will still remain pushed in a corner, ready to be maximized again. This touchscreen interface is compatible to use on multiple platforms due to the ease of transferring the software to any device like the iPod, iTouch and on huge screens, too. 
Touchscreen interfaces can now be expected to have better zoom preference, i.e pinch to zoom and flex effect.

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Transcend Launches New Range of Class 10 microSDHC Cards

Transcend has been synonymous with memory products for quite some time now and they aim to further their range with the introduction of a new speedy Class 10 microSDHC cards.

The new cards will be available in 16GB capacities and are of course, designed to play nice with mobile handsets, digicams and even tablet PCs. Transcend’s new microSD cards are capable of reaching maximum transfer rate of 20 MB/s on devices supporting SD 3.0 which means HD recording should be a lot smoother. The cards will each come with a microSDHC card adapter allows the usage of a wider range of SDHC capable devices.

All Transcend's SDHC and microSDHC cards are supplied with a limited lifetime warranty, and are backed by Transcend's technical support and customer service. The Class 10 microSDHC card is now offered in 4GB, 8GB and 16GB capacities and is available for a suggested price of Rs. 800, Rs. 1,300 and Rs. 3,800 respectively.

Just in case you’re wondering, a 16GB microSDHC card can store up to 6552 pictures (based on 5 megapixel JPEG compression format), over 88 hours of standard quality video (MPEG-4 video at 384 Kbps), or 240 minutes of HD video (AVCHD at 9 Mbps).

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Samsung Wave S8530 II hacked to boot Android OS

amsung had launched its ambitious Bada mobile operating system for feature phones and introduced Wave series of smartphones. Polish Forum Bada-world.pl guys have released proof video of Samsung Wave S8530 running Android 2.2.1 Froyo instead of Bada OS. This was bound to happen. While Samsung was convincing many about the Bada OS meant for feature phones with smartphone level hardware, the enthusiasts thought otherwise.

Polish hackers have managed to boot the Samsung Wave S8500 with Android 2.2.1 ROM of Galaxy S - since both have same hardware. Dubbed as the AndroBada Project, the hackers state that it is in early stages as the phone boots and allows using Wi-Fi as well as GSM network. Since their efforts led to burning two bada phones, the further development would continue only when they buy a new handset.

As per the hackers, any app works except the widgets and themes. No other features are functional because the stability of the CPU hasn t been achieved. The Wave S8500 carries the same 1GHz Hummingbird CPU found in the Galaxy S. Running Android on other OS running hardware isn t something new. We already know about the Android ported on iPhone 3G last year and the developments on the same project has been taking place at slow pace. It seems like this AndroBada Project might be just limited to Samsung .

 

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