Tag: microsoft

Nokia knows of Lumia battery issues, it also knows of audio and camera problems, promises fix

Oh dear, Nokia had earlier confessed that it knows of the major battery issues plaguing its new flagship Lumia phones. The latest update (1600.2483.8106.11500) was meant to “enhance standby time as well as to bring an improvement to the issue reported by some customers in December. And indeed the update did bring some relief to our devices, But know Nokia has been hearing complaints about the poor audio quality and Camera related problems being faced by Nokia Loyalists.

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NOKIA:

We’ve seen your comments on the latest update for the Lumia 800 and wanted to take the opportunity to quickly address some points.

First of all, the primary target of the latest Lumia 800 update (1600.2483.8106.11500) was to enhance standby time as well as to bring an improvement to the issue reported by some customers in December, that their phone wasn’t able to access the full battery charge capacity correctly. We can confirm that we have successfully tested that those improvements are working. Additionally, we’ve noted your concerns regarding audio and camera settings and are going to address those in a series of future updates, ie. these will not be included in this specific update. It is also important to understand that only the Nokia Update for Lumia 1600.2483.8106.11500 will introduce the mentioned improvements. If you want to see what update you have installed or what software version you currently have on your Lumia 800, please check Settings>System>About and then tap the box for “More information”. The “Firmware revision number” shows 1600.2483.8106.11500 if you have installed the latest Nokia update for Lumia successfully. To make sure that your Lumia 800 is up to date and always gets the latest features, go to Settings > Phone Update and select “Notify me when updates are found”. Then, as soon as a new update is available for your Lumia 800, your phone will automatically display a notification.

Also always use the original Nokia Fast USB Charger AC-16 or the Nokia Charging and Data Cable CA-185CD that came with your Lumia 800, as they are specifically designed to charge the Lumia 800 as efficiently as possible. Only a charger with an output of 1000mA will fully charge your Lumia 800 battery. If you have several Nokia chargers at home, just check the respective labels or plastic parts as the product name is mentioned there.

Last but not least, the Diagnostic App was designed for internal testing purposes. In general, your battery is fine as long as the full charge capacity is more than 1000mAh. For the future, if you are checking your battery life, more useful information on the Battery status can be found by focusing on Settings>System>Battery saver. It will tell you both your remaining battery life in percent as well as the estimated time remaining, plus the time since you last charged your phone (as soon as you have disconnected your phone from your charger). If you have concerns about your battery capacity, please contact Nokia Care (phone numbers and locations can be found via www.nokia.com/support).”[/box]

January 30, 2012
Samsung Omnia W Review
Samsung has actually reigned supreme in the year 2011, and looks like the year 2012 will be in their hands too. The Omnia W is a representation of what a company like Samsung is capable of. The device is considerably cheaper than its competition but has excellent specs and usability. Here is our review on the Samsung Omnia W ( Wonder).

Build Quality

The Omnia W is well built, not the best build you would find in this price range, but definitely well built. The construction is all plastic and appears flimsy, but is actually quite good. The back panel has some shell/metal elements that have a brushed and painted look , to try and give the device a little more elegance than it actually deserves, that part may not have been achieved. Buttons are well raised and fairly easy to use. The front bezel is a hair higher than the glass front, protecting the display from flat falls. Overall the device should do well in day to day usage.

Specs
- 1.4GHz processor
- 512MB RAM
- 3.7-inch display
- 480×800 resolution
- 8GB storage
- 5MP camera
- 720p HD videos
- 1,500 mAh battery
Camera, Display and Multimedia

The camera on the Omnia is a 5 mega pixel autofocus camera, with impressive light capture, the camera is one of the best cameras in its class of phone. The autofocus is fast, although you have the ability to tap to focus aswell, images can be clicked almost instantly. Video on the other hand is capped at a 720p HD quality, we often wonder why companies do not design the cameras to deliver 1080p, either way, video capture will require a lot of ambient light and indoor video is poor. The front camera is only good enough for low bit video calling , and should solve the purpose unless your friend on the other side is viewing your video on a big screen TV, if so is the case you will look like a character from Minecraft.

The display is a beautiful Super AMOLED display is a Samsung PenTile display which means that two red subpixels, two green subpixels, and one central blue subpixel is placed in each unit cell of the display. In layman words, its an old technology developed by Samsung back in 1990, and is still used in some of their devices. The display matrix arrangement has often received critique, and is not appreciated well. We however, found that the display was able to reproduce color well and had good deep black levels. The display is excellent for viewing video and and playing games. If you have a thing for the “world wide web”, or a bookworm within, then the display is capable of crisp fonts / texts on the screen for easy viewing. Outdoor visibility is low-poor, due to the inherent problems in AMOLED screens.

With limitations to the kind of files that can be played back on the device, it does not compete with an Android device. Bluetooth is locked and file transfer denied, for most of the things. However, whatever Windows can play natively will work on the phone, and you can always sync up using Zune, or Windows Phone Connector. The speaker is loud enough for music and watching movies. The included earphones are above average, but will not satisfy the bassphile.

Phone and Messaging

A capable phone is what the Omnia W turned out to be. The earpiece and mic war loud and clear, and network connectivity was strong. In our standard 3 hour call test the Omnia dropped the call twice exactly at 1 hour 51 mins , both times. No network drop was faced in the overalll testing and we are quite happy with the result.

As we have already stressed enough, the WP7 keyboard is one of the best in the world, we don’t need to say that its really good on the Omnia W. It has predictive text and autocorrect, and it is a super fast keyboard, no complaints. The messaging and email capabilities are good, the OS is connected well to Facebook and Twitter and should serve you well.

Internet, Battery and Operating System

The internet is a domain which is not properly tapped on the Omnia, with limitations of the browser in terms of javascript and flash. That being said it is one of the fastest internet browsers out there. The screen is great for website browsing and even better to read daily news stories from iGyaan. With a host of apps from the marketplace you can actually find your fix for the web.

Battery life is impressive on the Omnia W with upto 2 days of standby and 5 hours of talk time. The battery fares well while gaming and heavy graphic games can be played for a good 2-3 hours. Music playback should last 10 hours while video lasts about 4-5 hours.

The OS is a different playing field in the world of iOS and Android, as we mentioned in our previous Reviews. The interface is one of the cleanest and snappiest out of the lot, and there is no crashing or lagging from the interface even when multiple tasks are running ( Surprising since Windows is the name attached). The marketplace is also ever-growing with a host of applications and games, the future of Windows Phone looks bright. With no access to file sharing over bluetooth and native file compatibility, the closed system may be a let down for some. Samsung has added Video Calling to the OS to make it a little worthwhile. Samsung also offers multiple apps to make the experience a bit better. The included AllShare will allow for you to stream media to other Samsung Devices.

Conclusion

One of the best phones available at the price range, if you are not happy with the Android OS. or the way it looks. Also to consider the OS is as fast and responsive as iOS if not faster. A good smartphone with inbuilt office documentation capabilities and one that supports Microsoft SkyDrive. If you are a true windows junkie, the interconnectivity will impress, the lack of script execution may limit the experience. But overall the phone is a complete mix of Phone, Smartphone and PMP.

We Rate It : 4/5

Price Rs. 17499/-

Video Unboxing

Video Review
January 27, 2012
Ubuntu’s First Bug Report

Let it not be said that the open source community does not have a sense of humor. As many of you may know, all bugs that are found in Ubuntu are reported to launchpad’s bug tracker. We were quite surprised to find this nugget as the first ever Ubuntu bug report:

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Bug Description

Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace.
This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix.

Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world’s population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally. This bug is widely evident in the PC industry.

Steps to repeat:

1. Visit a local PC store.

What happens:
2. Observe that a majority of PCs for sale have non-free software pre-installed.
3. Observe very few PCs with Ubuntu and free software pre-installed.

What should happen:
1. A majority of the PCs for sale should include only free software like Ubuntu.
2. Ubuntu should be marketed in a way such that its amazing features and benefits would be apparent and known by all.
3. The system shall become more and more user friendly as time passes.

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January 19, 2012

Microsoft will replace NTFS with ReFS in Windows Server 8

Windows server 8 will introduce the Resilient File System, or ReFS, as a “next generation file system” built on the foundations of the NTFS. The new gen file system is designed by reusing NTFS’ API / semantics engine to retain a high level of compatibility with NTFS features. The new file system design is aimed to protect against latent disk errors, resist data corruption, uphold metadata integrity, grant large volume, file and directory size. The whole concept is to reduce the massive file corruption and fragmentation users face with NTFS and Windows in general.

The key goals of ReFS are:

Maintain a high degree of compatibility with a subset of NTFS features that are widely adopted while deprecating others that provide limited value at the cost of system complexity and footprint.
Verify and auto-correct data. Data can get corrupted due to a number of reasons and therefore must be verified and, when possible, corrected automatically. Metadata must not be written in place to avoid the possibility of “torn writes,” which we will talk about in more detail below.
Optimize for extreme scale. Use scalable structures for everything. Don’t assume that disk-checking algorithms, in particular, can scale to the size of the entire file system.
Never take the file system offline. Assume that in the event of corruptions, it is advantageous to isolate the fault while allowing access to the rest of the volume. This is done while salvaging the maximum amount of data possible, all done live.
Provide a full end-to-end resiliency architecture when used in conjunction with the Storage Spaces feature, which was co-designed and built in conjunction with ReFS.

The key features of ReFS are as follows (note that some of these features are provided in conjunction with Storage Spaces).

Metadata integrity with checksums
Integrity streams providing optional user data integrity
Allocate on write transactional model for robust disk updates (also known as copy on write)
Large volume, file and directory sizes
Storage pooling and virtualization makes file system creation and management easy
Data striping for performance (bandwidth can be managed) and redundancy for fault tolerance
Disk scrubbing for protection against latent disk errors
Resiliency to corruptions with “salvage” for maximum volume availability in all cases
Shared storage pools across machines for additional failure tolerance and load balancing

What are the capacity limits of ReFS?

The table below shows the capacity limits of the on-disk format. Other concerns may determine some practical limits, such as the system configuration (for example, the amount of memory), limits set by various system components, as well as time taken to populate data sets, backup times, etc.

Attribute	Limit based on the on-disk format
Maximum size of a single file	2^64-1 bytes
Maximum size of a single volume	Format supports 2^78 bytes with 16KB cluster size (2^64 * 16 * 2^10). Windows stack addressing allows 2^64 bytes
Maximum number of files in a directory	2^64
Maximum number of directories in a volume	2^64
Maximum file name length	32K unicode characters
Maximum path length	32K
Maximum size of any storage pool	4 PB
Maximum number of storage pools in a system	No limit
Maximum number of spaces in a storage pool	No limit

[Building Windows 8]

January 18, 2012

Windows 8 Reset and Refresh options shown off!

Windows 8 is becoming more and more like the mobile counterpart. Windows 8 will offer a pair of similar features; ‘Reset your PC’ will allow you to remove all personal data, apps, and settings from the PC, and reinstall Windows, while ‘Refresh your PC’ enables your to keep all personal data, Metro style apps, and important settings from the PC, and reinstall Windows. This seems very convenient, especially for those who have often been bugged by crowded and laggy machines.

[MSDN]

January 6, 2012
Microsoft approved ChevronWP7 unlocker offline

The ChevronWP7 tool that could unlock the functionality of your device for a mere US$ 9 is being discontinued.WPCentral reports that ChevronWP7 made an agreement with Microsoft not to sell more than 10,000 unlock tokens.

Microsoft isn’t involved in our discussion yet. And they can’t provide us with more unlocks because we haven’t asked yet. If we do request more, we’re sure Microsoft will respond positively – as they have in the past.”

-Rafael Rivera ChevronWP7 spokesperson

The developers of the tool claim that they are not going to renegotiate this number. If you are still interested in unleashing the beast in your Windows Phone you must buy Microsoft’s own AppHub which costs eleven times a price of US$ 99.

[WPCentral]

January 3, 2012
Windows Phone Marketplace crosses 50,000 Apps mark

Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace has hit another milestone of 50,000 in just less than a couple of weeks of the 40,000 Apps mark. Over 17,000 apps have been submitted to the Marketplace in the last 90-days from over 13,000 different publishers (265 per day). The iOS AppStore and the Android Market are still way ahead in the lead for the Redmond Mobile OS, but the gap seems to be diminishing soon.

[All About Windows Phone]

December 29, 2011
WindowBreak Project wants a single universal unlock tool for Windows Phone Devices

Windows Phone developer Jaxbot is back, after a long time, to modding and developing for Windows Phone 7.5 Devices. His new Project WindowBreak seeks a universal unlock tool for all / any Windows Phone 7-7.5 devices. This just means a possibility of jailbreak, which can be unlocked using this tool. Jaxbot has already demonstrated this process on Samsung devices in his video below. He wants to get the app running for othe manufacturers including Nokia and HTC.

[xda-developers]

[WindowBreak]

December 28, 2011
Chrome 15 now the worlds most popular browser, IE 8 bites the dust (Report)

According to a new report from StatCounter,Chrome 15 recently reached a total global market share of 23.6% compared to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 market share of 23.5%. IE is still the most popular browser if all versions of the Browser are added. Chrome 14 and 15 are said to be most popular of chrome version and possibly the reason of this overtake. Microsoft and their IE team is banking hard on the push they want to receive from IE9 and IE10, possibly to remain strong. If that does not hold true, chrome may not be far away from global victory. check out the full report below

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Chrome 15 Becomes World’s Most Popular Browser

Boston, USA; Dublin, Ireland; Thursday, 15th December, 2011: Google’s Chrome 15 has become the most popular web browser version worldwide for the first time on a weekly basis, according to StatCounter, the free website analytics company. The firm’s research arm StatCounter Global Stats reports that in the last full week in November, Chrome 15 took 23.6% of the worldwide market compared to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 8 at 23.5%. If one aggregates all versions then IE still leads the global market with Chrome in second position, having overtaken Firefox in November.

“Google announced Chrome for business exactly a year ago and IT administrators appear to have embraced it in a remarkably short time,” commented Aodhan Cullen, CEO, StatCounter. “Looking at the daily stats, Chrome 14 and 15 have been overtaking IE8 at weekends since the beginning of October. However, Chrome 15 overtook IE8 for the first time during the five day working week, in week commencing 5th December. It looks as if people favour Chrome on weekends at home but office commercial use has now caught up.”

In the US Internet Explorer 8 continues to be the most popular browser version with 27.0% for week commencing 5th December compared to 18.1% for Chrome 15. However, in the UK Chrome 15 overtook IE8 in the week commencing November 7th. Last week (commencing 5th December) Chrome 15 had 24.7% in the UK compared to IE8 on 21.1%.

StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the US) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites.

As well as free web research, StatCounter (http://statcounter.com/) provides free web analytics. This allows website owners, developers and bloggers to capture valuable intelligence on their site in real time including number of visitors, visitors by country/region, search terms, popular pages, download stats, exit links and other data.

In September StatCounter announced its new website with added features.

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December 23, 2011
Windows Phone 7.5 SMS bug found, requires a Hard Reset to fix

A new SMS bug has been found in the Windows Phone 7.5 devices, WP devices that receive a text containing a certain string of characters will reboot and return with a non-functional messaging client which can only be restored via a hard reset. The bug does not affect any particular device, but the OS. The funny bit is that the same bug message could be received via Facebook messenger or MSN messenger.

Android and iOS have had their fair list of SMS bugs, But never one that disables the messaging interface all-together.

December 16, 2011
Microsoft Launches Skydrive app for WindowsPhone and iOS, what no Android app?

Microsoft is going the Nokia way, where iOS is not a threat and Android is too much clutter. The company today released the Skydrive app for Windows Phone and iOS leaving out Android out of the picture, for the time being at least. The apps will bring the ability to browse all of your files, share them with others, delete them and create new folders. When sharing links you can even choose whether or not a person can edit a document or simply view it. Check out the videos below.

December 14, 2011
Windows Phone 7 Delayed further in China

It’s almost been a year since Microsoft announced that WP7 devices will be launched in China in 2011 mid, the release was later shifted to the 31st Dec 2011, now the company has expressed that it will not be able to make that deadline. The WP7 devices will now be launched sometimes in the early bits of 2012.

Microsoft mentioned that the delay is at least in part due to trying to ensure that Chinese citizens will have a good experience using the platform (Nokia mentioned that localization is needed in certain aspects of its phones to keep in line with the government’s media censorship policy). Either way a delay of three years may just turn off the population that is already becoming a keen to iOS devices.

[ComputerWorld]

December 6, 2011
Microsoft brings WP emulator to Android and iPhone

[dropcap]M[/dropcap]icrosoft is using a browser based demo of WP7 on Android and iOS to lure users into shifting into their new OS. The HTML5 demonstration showcases Windows Phone’s Metro user-interface and allows you to follow through and experience the operating system’s basic functionality.

The demo goes thorough basic functionality and demos some of the key features like Phone, People, Messaging, Outlook, Calendar, Family, Local Scout and Picture tiles. Just visit the link http://aka.ms/wpdemo on your Android or iOS device and enjoy the demo exploits. Its like owning the phone without owning it, Microsoft is playing those naughty games again. Trying to itch you into buying a WP7 device.

[Microsoft]

November 30, 2011
Internet Explorer 10 Preview 4 out : Windows 7 not supported

Microsoft has just released the 4th preview of the Internet Explorer 10, with feature improvements targeted at creating Rich and creative Web Apps for the Browser. There should be little energy movement for this new preview because most devs will not be able to use the browser, because it can only run on Windows 8 preview release that came during BUILD conference.

The new features include Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS), JavaScript typed arrays and binary file manipulation, and HTML5 video subtitling. Typed arrays and support for binary files enable much better performance for JavaScript applications that handle binary data, such as images and audio. CORS provides a safe way for JavaScript applications to use services offered by different providers. CORS allows one application to expose its data to another application even when the same-origin policy would otherwise deny such access.

Focusing more on Metro Style UI and Apps, looks like Microsoft missed the point of the preview. Since the entire developer community develops on Windows 7, excluding them from the preview will exclude the time and the insights they could have given.

November 30, 2011
Sony to intro PS4 in time for Xbox 720

So we all have heard news that the next version of Microsoft’s gaming console will come next year around E3 time. Sony’s gaming division is also tracking the growing rumours of a new Microsoft console, with the aim being to release its PlayStation4 .

PlayStation Europe president Jim Ryan, said it would be “undesirable” for Sony to launch a new console “significantly later” than the next version of the Xbox, to avoid handing Microsoft another huge lead. This makes Sony’s plans clear to announce the PS4 sooner and not later than the launch of the Xbox 720.

November 28, 2011