Though BlackBerry Priv is marked at a price of $630, latest rumours suggest the smartphone would cost around $780 (over Rs. 50,000) in the country.
Zauba informs us that four BlackBerry Privs have been recently imported to the country for testing and evaluation purposes. The site shows them marked at a price of $780. Though this doesn’t necessarily mean that this will be the final price of the device in India, we can assume it to be a rough estimate.
Priv will be BlackBerry’s first phone to run on the Android OS and is viewed by many as a comeback for the company in the tech world. It would be sad to see a price tag which discourages eagerly awaiting customers from getting to lay their hands on the phone.
Priv will have a slide-out keyboard feature and a curved display that is reminiscent of Samsung’s Galaxy S6 Edge. Registration for the device has already begun on the official website, along with a few officially confirmed specs put up as description. They include a 5.4 inch screen, 3410 mAh battery and Schneider-Kreuznach certified camera. Watch this space for more updates on the BlackBerry Priv.
Apple drops a not-so-subtle reminder once again and says it cannot and will not reveal personal details of iPhone users to cops. It started with iOS 8 when Apple made it clear to law enforcement that it’s incapable of retrieving data from locked iPhones.
It was at the invitation of the U.S. Magistrate Judge James Orenstein and the Justice Department that Apple was asked to help extract information from a seized iPhone. The invitation led to the filing of the following brief by Apple:
In most cases now and in the future, the government’s requested order would be substantially burdensome, as it would be impossible to perform. For devices running iOS 8 or higher, Apple would not have the technical ability to do what the government requests—take possession of a password protected device from the government and extract unencrypted user data from that device for the government. Among the security features in iOS 8 is a feature that prevents anyone without the device’s passcode from accessing the device’s encrypted data. This includes Apple.
Apple is essentially confirming what we already know: there’s no backdoor built into iOS, meaning that in theory no-one can pull data off an iPhone running iOS 8 or later—the information is protected by encryption that is tied to the user’s PIN.
However it should be made clear at this juncture that because Apple refuses to dirty its hands with the deep, dark secrets of your phones, this in no way means that others can’t. When iOS first came out with its ‘improved’ security, security researcher Jonathan Zdziarski did a blog post revealing how some user information can still be grasped by the government.
Apple is being the knight in tin foil for iPhone users, promising security as well as discretion, which is a comforting gesture, needless to say. However, let it not mislead you into believing that your iPhone is beyond security breaches and access to personal data.
With rumours of Samsung Galaxy S7 coming out in January doing the rounds, there are speculations about the specs as well that have been going around for a while now. While it’s expected to have ClearForce technology, similar to 3D Touch, Type-C USB port is another feature expected to be part of the phone.
The latest rumour to develop regarding S7 is a magnesium alloy body made of glass. This is expected to make the device sturdy and improve the over-all touch and feel of the phone. The smartphone is also rumoured to come equipped with better sound quality because of SABRE 9018AQ2M chip by ESS Technology, and a 129 dB signal-to-noise ratio. S7 will probably also support formats like DSD and PCM p to 32-bit and 384 KHz. This will allow users to have the same sound experience streaming music on the phone as they do from its analog counterpart.
These rumours have surfaced at a time when Samsung is possibly working on an acquisition of Tidal, Jay-Z’s music streaming service. Therefore the in-built chip of Galaxy S7 will only serve as a complementary feature and help the flagship fare well in the market. Watch this space as we bring to you more latest updates on Samsung Galaxy S7.
It has been confirmed that OnePlus X is coming to India on 29th October. Leaked specs of the device had been doing the rounds for a while now until Oppomart finally confirmed some of them in a brief listing. The confirmed specs include a 5-inch full HD screen and 1920×1080 pixels display. The chipset is Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, along with a 2.5 GHz processor.
On the camera front, the phone is equipped with a 13 MP rear camera and an 8 MP selfie camera. OnePlus X will have 3 GB RAM and 16 GB of internal storage as well. The phone is marked at a price of $249 which is about Rs. 16,000. The phone is also rumoured to feature Force Touch technology, something quite similar to the 3D Touch of iPhone 6s and 6s Plus.
Watch this space for more updates about the OnePlus X, and sit tight until the 29th of this month when the Chinese company finally makes its newest device official in the country.
According to reports that have emerged from South Korea itself, Samsung is expected to launch its new Galaxy S7 in January. Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge had been unveiled in March this year. Therefore it’s assumed that the next Samsung flagship would hit the markets at least an entire month before March next year.
This news comes in the wake of other companies having released their own flagships over the past couple of weeks. Samsung is likely to be facing the pressure of the competition, especially by the likes of the new iPhones, launched last month.
Furthermore, it is rumoured that there will be two variants of S7 -premium and sub-premium -designs which had already been finalised in September. The processor and modem is expected to be on a single chip for the premium model’s Exynos chipset, while on different ones for the sub-premium model.
Leaked information have also mentioned three different chipset variations used in the Galaxy S7, along with 3D Touch-like features and a USB Type C port. Sit tight until we get more updates on Samsung’s newest smartphone.
In an attempt to up its security, Apple got rid of over 250 apps from its App Store. These apps were using a software developed by a Chinese firm called Youmi which allowed them access to the user’s personal details like email address and the serial number of their smartphone. According to sources, the apps received a total of 1 million downloads.
The apps which relied on Youmi’s SDK, mostly made by companies and firms based in China, may not have willingly or knowingly violated Apple’s secutrity. As is backed by SourceDNA’s blog post:
“We believe the developers of these apps aren’t aware of this since the SDK is delivered in binary form, obfuscated, and user info is uploaded to Youmi’s server, not the app’s. We recommend developers stop using this SDK until this code is removed.”
This security issue was brought to light by SourceDNA when they were updating their own product called Searchlight. Searchlight inspects the security and checks apps for security violations. SourceDNA later on went ahead to comment in their blog post, “We’re concerned other published apps may be using different but related approaches to hide their malicious behavior.”
Apple on the other hand, issued the following statement:
“We’ve identified a group of apps that are using a third-party advertising SDK, developed by Youmi, a mobile advertising provider, that uses private APIs to gather private information, such as user email addresses and device identifiers, and route data to its company server. This is a violation of our security and privacy guidelines. The apps using Youmi’s SDK will be removed from the App Store and any new apps submitted to the App Store using this SDK will be rejected. We are working closely with developers to help them get updated versions of their apps that are safe for customers and in compliance with our guidelines back in the App Store quickly.”
Canon’s second generation Cinema EOS 4K camera system for cinema, documentary, event and commercial videography has been launched in the country today. The camera includes a range of 15 stops, improved Dual Pixel CMOS Autofocus, focus assist engineering and CFast recording technology. The EOS C300 Mark II is redesigned with user input that helps it to deliver flexibility for professional studio motion picture production applications, as well as independent productions, TV dramas, commercials, news features and sports among other things.
Mr. Andrew Koh, Vice President of Consumer Imaging and Information Center, Canon India said:
“As a technology innovator, it is important for Canon to add valuable assets to the portfolio and create an industry benchmark. After extensive research and user inputs, we developed the EOS C300 Mark II Digital Cinema Camera that promises to deliver improved image-expression capabilities as well as operability, ruggedness and expandability”
Key features of the device include Canon EF or PL mount versions which supports a variety of autofocus modes, including continuous AF and Face Recognition when used with compatible Canon EF lenses. Further, the device integrates an 8.85 Megapixel Super 35mm 16:9 CMOS sensor that supports 4K (DCI) recording with a maximum resolution of 4096 x 2160 pixels. It is also compatible with new and existing EF-mount lenses.
Canon EOS C300 Mark is priced at a not-so-less Rs. 12,99,000. For more information, click here.
The recent lawsuit between Apple and Wisconsin Alumnae Research Foundation (WARF) ended in a penalty of $234 million for Apple. Wisconsin University had sued the tech-giant over the use of patented chips in iPhones and iPads. You can find the whole story here.
The Wisconsin University team which sued Apple has two Indian engineers as part of it. Professor Gurindar Sohi and Terani Vijaykumar are members of the group which pursued legal action against Apple for the infringement of a patent they had developed.
It was ruled out by a jury court on Tuesday, that Apple had used technology in the processors of its devices which had originally been developed by Professor Sohi and Vijaykumar and two others. While WARF had asked for a penalty as high as about $862 million, it was brought down to $234 million.
Both Indian-origin professors are pass-outs from the Birla Institution of Technology and Science in Pilani, Rajasthan and currently teach at the University of Wisconsin Madison and Purdue University in Indiana, respectively. Mr. Sohi is a professor of computer sciences while Mr. Vijaykumar teaches electrical and computer engineering.
“This work has been recognized as a major milestone in the field of computer microprocessor architecture/design,” said Sohi.
The legal case against Apple had begun in April last year. Another such case has happened last month where WARF sued the company once again over patent infringement. The latter case is yet to reach a conclusion.
Oppo has revealed it’s newest R7 phone at the GITEX event in Dubai. The phablet is called R7s and boasts of features like 4GB RAM and a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED display covered by 2.5D glass.
The chipset is Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 and the internal storage is marked at 32 GB with a microSD card slot. The two cameras of the phone include a 13 MP for the main camera and an 8 MP for the selfie camera. R7s runs on Android 5.1 Lollipop with ColorOS 2.1.
Physical measurements of the phone are as follows -151.8 x 75.4 x 6.95 mm, along with a battery of 3,070 mAh. The phone is expected to arrive in Australia and in a handful of Asian countries next month. In December, it will be made available in Europe and the United States. Availability and pricing for India is currently unknown. We’ll update you as soon as we have more details.
Microsoft is all set to ship over a 1000 Lumia dummy devices in the country. The company will be holding a technology conference, ‘Future Unleashed’, for the same in Mumbai on the 5th of November, and it will be attended by CEO, Satya Nadella.The company is shipping 500 Lumia 950 and 500 Lumia 950 XL dummies to India, according to Zauba, a website that records imports to the country. These devices will be available at retail stores for potential buyers to take a look at. The current price tags they come with are $587 (about Rs. 38,000) USD for the Lumia 950, and $665 (about Rs. 43,000) for the Lumia 950 XL. We had expected the two devices to come out at IFA Berlin this year. Even though this was not to be so, around late September, leaked images with specs of the two Lumia phones appeared on the internet.
According to the slides, here are the specs for the Lumia 950 and the Lumia 950 XL. These specs also matched the earlier leaks that had been around for a while.
Lumia 950:
Display: 5.2 inches, QuadHD
Processor: Qualcomm 6-core Snapdragon 808
Camera: 20MP PureView rear camera with optical image stabilization (OIS) and dual flash; 5MP HD front camera
Storage: 3GB RAM, 32GB internal storage
Battery: 3,000 mAh, with rapid charging via USB-C
Lumia 950 XL:
Display: 5.7 inches, QuadHD
Processor: Qualcomm 8-core Snapdragon 810
Camera: 20MP PureViw rear camera with OIS and triple LED flash; 5 MP front camera
Storage: 3GB RAM, 32GB internal storage
Battery: 3,300 mAh, with rapid charging via USB-C
These devices would perhaps be available just in time for Diwali for customers. For more information about the conference and other details, click here.
Source: Zauba via [tw-button size=”medium” background=”#07ABE2″ color=”” target=”_blank” link=”http://wmpoweruser.com/microsoft-prepares-for-wide-distribution-of-the-lumia-950-range-in-india-imports-1000-display-dummies/”]WM Power User[/tw-button]
AT&T and Verizon devices have been revealed to be open to a security threat which can lead to data spoofing, eavesdropping and incorrect billing for millions of users. Implementations of LTE by these networks have left Android devices open to these security flaws.
T-Mobile was facing the same issues until a spokesperson revealed in an official statement that the problem has been ‘resolved’. However, T-Mobile and Verizon are two companies which are both susceptible to peer-to-peer attack. Apple users don’t have anything to worry about when it comes to this.
When contacted, Google did not confirm which Android versions were affected but it did go ahead to assure Nexus users that their devices will be free of the risk with the November Monthly Security Update of the company. As per the current update, researchers have revealed that every version of Android is at risk, while at the same time attacks are also dependent on the users’ network.
Consequently, because the security trouble is carrier-dependent, it is unclear when other gadgets running on Android OS will cease to be at risk. Both AT&T as well as Verizon have refused to comment on this so far.
It all started with a desire to capture a moment, to freeze it in time and space -to get back to when the heart thus desired once again. And that is how, ladies and gentlemen, the thought of the first photograph, even though that’s not what it was called yet, came to be. The thought led to efforts which led to results and one fine day, humans had discovered a way to record memories, which they eventually chose to call photography.
However, cameras came into existence much before photography. It all started with the camera obscura -a Latin term which translates into ‘dark room’.
Camera Obscura:
It was the very first device that led to photography and the innovation of the camera. Optical in nature, it would allow light to pass in a dark box or room through a hole on one side and then use it to capture photographs, as they existed back then. This device dates back to 470 to 390 BC, its earliest extant written record found in the writing of Mozi, the Chinese philosopher.
The Very First Photograph:
The first ever successful photograph of a camera image was developed by Nicéphore Niépce in 1816 using a camera he had made himself. However, the photograph was not permanent and eventually ended up getting darkened due to repeated exposure to light necessary for viewing it.
The Daguerreotype Camera:
Next came Louis Daguerre, a French artist who found a way to store the finished image on a shiny mirror finished copper plate treated with chemicals. Daguerre shared his technique with the public in exchange for a life long pension. It was later used in the film cameras of the past as well. By 1850s, there were over seventy daguerreotype studios in just New York, and the face of photography had changed forever.
A daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe in the nineteenth century.
Birth of Photography:
There were several significant developments in the realm of photography starting with negative to positive processing by a contemporary of Daguerre. This was followed by tintypes -a thin sheet of iron used for light sensitive materials, and therefore helped in obtaining positives, wet plate negatives, dry plate negatives and finally, hand held cameras. Cameras now became less bulky and a little more convenient to carry around. By the second half of the nineteenth century, a flexible roll film had also been invented by George Eastman which finally allowed for a mass-produced box camera.
Coloured Photography and Twentieth Century:
The second quarter of the twentieth century brought with it coloured photographs within the reach of users when coloured films became commercially available. Twentieth century also marked the confluence of different art forms in a more significant way than before. Overlaps between photography and painting were no longer unheard of. One form drew from another.
Photography meets painting: The photographer threw around objects for hours to get the perfect Surrealist shot with Salvador Dali.
The first coloured photographs were so unstable because of organic dyes which were used to colour them, that the image would literally disappear after a while, leaving a blank film behind. Not so cool after-all. Kodachrome was the first colour film to produce photographs that could last for over fifty years. You know times have changed when instead of performing vanishing acts, images can be stored for eternity.
Digital Photography:
The first breakthrough in this field was made by Canon in 1984 with its first digital camera for still photography, and there was no looking back post that. At the same time, on the turn of the new century, possibilities of mobile phone cameras began to be explored. Photography became a separate, fully-formed realm of art in itself. Debates between its position in the hierarchy of art, especially when pitted against painting continued, but there came a zeal and fervour to be intrinsically associated with photography.
First digital camera by Canon 1984.
When photography was first introduced to people by and large, it took several seconds to a minute to click a single photograph. That explains why people would never smile for portraits. One wonders what their views on the contemporary selfie parades would be.
The first important development in cellphone-photography is owed to Apple and its very first iPhone with its pedestrian 2 megapixel camera in 2007. Other tech giants too became part of the race, perfecting their own technology in terms of cell-phone photography until another breakthrough was made in the form of front, or more aptly termed, ‘selfie’ cameras. Next came selfie sticks, with social media not doing much to help the obsession, and voila! Now photography blogs and Facebook pages have declared everyone a photographer.
The whole idea behind technological developments is to make things simpler, easier, more consolidated. But on the contrary, there seems to be an endless deluge of photography paraphernalia in contemporary times. When a bunch of kids were handed over a camera from the previous century, this was their reaction. You might want to sit down for this.
Cameras have covered an incredibly long journey to be where there are today. It is an art form that continues to evolve and surpass itself. Let’s see where it lands itself next.
A US jury has passed its verdict and it’s definitely not going to please Apple. The tech giant has been ordered to pay Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF) a sum of over $234 million as penalty for patent infringement. WARF is in-charge of all the patent licensing of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The jury had previously reached a decision that Apple had used a patented microchip technology in its iPads and iPhones to which Apple had appealed. After about three hours of deliberation, the amount was set at over a hundred million dollars less than what the University had demanded of Apple. We did a story on this lawsuit which you can read here.
Though Apple is at least free of one lawsuit, more legal trouble awaits the company courtesy of WARF again which is suing the company on the same lines for using patented technology in its latest iPhones -6s and 6s Plus. However, legal trouble is not a territory unknown to Apple which has been waging copyright, infringement and patent related battles with other tech giants as well, Samsung being one of them. Such penalties are not likely to be more than a puny amount for a company which reported its annual revenue for 2014 to be around $182 billion.
BlackBerry has come out with its first official promo of BlackBerry Priv. The video showcases the slide-out QWERTY keyboard of the phone which is definitely going to be the highlight of the device.
This video shows you all that you need to know about BlacBerry Priv as a user. With the pre-registration of the phone begun just two days ago, some of the specs of the phone have also been revealed.
https://youtu.be/5nO8EdLtJj0
The revealed specs tell confirm that Priv will have a 5.4 inch Quad HD display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 808 SoC and an 18 MP camera. The phone comes with a price tag of $630, which is about Rs. 40,000. This seems like an interesting move -BlackBerry making its comeback in the tech-world with such an exorbitant price tag.
Let us know if you’d be willing to put your trust in BlackBerry and Priv in the comments below.
If you’re a frequent flyer who never seems to get over travel anxiety because of your luggage, Kickstarter might just have the answer for you. G-RO, the first carry-on luggage of its kind is flying off the charts on the website. It has already reached the mark of $360,000 in pledges. The goal fixed by the G-RO team was $125,000 which was reached within a day of the product being put up on the website. There are another 58 days to go before the campaign ends.
The suitcase comes with especial features to make the whole travel experience much more convenient and hassle free. It has huge all-terrain wheels that allows G-RO to be taken anywhere comfortably irrespective of the surface. There are distinct, neat compartments for personal belongings as well as for gadgets and stationery, along with a separate section for keeping liquids.
The G-RO Team
G-RO has been designed keeping in mind international travel regulations, along with compliance with TSA and FAA. Just when you thought this suitcase is too cool to be true, it gets better. The carry on luggage also comes in an electronic module which offers a 23,000 mAh battery that can charge phones, tablets and laptops, a universal power outlet, a location tracker and a wireless proximity tracker. Check out the video below to find out how this beauty was put together and everything that it’s capable of.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwO_li6aNi4
The cheapest G-RO model is priced at a $279 (having an expected $499 retail price) while the optional electronic module cost an extra $99. It will be ready for shipping in August next year.
