Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Microsoft Holds Office 365 Blogger's Meet-up

Microsoft Office 365 Microsoft Holds Office 365 Bloggers Meet upMicrosoft Pakistan organized an Office 365 Blogger’s Meet-up exclusively for the blogger community of Pakistan. The event highlighted the distinguishing concept of ‘the complete office in the cloud’ available anywhere and everywhere.
The Meet-up was conducted by Nadine Hadad who is presently the Product Marketing Manager for North Africa, East Mediterranean and Pakistan region. Focusing on the emerging trends in technology, Nadine highlighted how Office 365’s state of the art features provide the users with competitive edge through strength and capability of various applications.
Available in 162 markets in 21 languages, Office 365 enables bloggers to expand and rejuvenate their online community with the assistance of latest and complete set of Office Applications, additional 20 GB of SkyDrive.
“We at Microsoft are always looking forward to encourage the online community especially bloggers. With the help of sessions like these, we not only expose the world’s cutting edge technology but also provide them with hands-on experience on how they can enhance their productivity and efficiency with the help of products like Office 365” said Nadine Hadad; Product Marketing Manager for Microsoft North Africa, Eastern Mediterranean and Pakistan.
After the Office 365 overview, Amin Muhammad Khan who is the CIE Lead Pakistan gave the product demonstration to the bloggers present. The arrangement made on the platform of Customer Immersion Experience (CIE) enabled the bloggers to gain live hands on experience at the event. This enabled to them to not only appreciate the various new dimensions of the product but also gain practical understanding.
“The Blogger Meet-up was a thoroughly informative session with brilliant presentation and demonstration by Nadine Haddad and Amim Muhammad Khan. The Office 365 has opened up portals for data communication, integration, sync and retention is way unimaginable to prior users. It has brought about a fresh, easier and innovative direction for carrying out business and personal activities through a single click,” said Nida Khan an active Pakistani blogger.

Remembering the Lost Hero of Our Times

June is an important month for the mobile industry. And that’s because the most influential phone of recent times was launched in this month some years back.
Being influential doesn’t necessarily mean though that you’ve got to be the successful too. Sometimes, just a single feature of the failed product is enough to revolutionize the whole industry. Which is the case here.
Maybe you’re thinking that I’m talking about the iPhone, released in JUNE 2007. You’re close then but not that much. The IPhone triggered the touchscreen revolution, true that, but the phone we’re discussing in this piece triggered the next big revolution, the revolution of gigantic screens.
I am of course talking about the Dell Streak, which is probably one of the biggest unsung heroes of our times.
Dell Streak was the first phone by a major manufacturer to be manufactured with a 5 inch screen, the first ever phablet.
clip image0011 Remembering the Lost Hero of Our Times
But of course, its 2010 we’re in. The Streak, thus, was deemed too big for a phone, too small for a tablet. GSMArena’s review titled ‘Size does matter’ concluded by saying:
“Of course, it might be just us but 5” does seem stuck in the middle of nowhere: it’s either a huge phone or a tablet too small.
We’ve always thought that tablets are supposed to let you leave your laptop at home. With the Dell Streak however goes the other way – it will let you leave your phone at home.” Fair enough.
Still on paper, the Dell Streak was by no means, a dud. To start off, it was a 5 inch display and had a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels which would’ve led to a modest pixel density, but was the norm at the time (for flagships atleast), it wasn’t bad looking (you may disagree though), it had a beefy hardware and of course, the camera was a 5 megapixel unit with 720p HD video recording.
But everyone who knows even a tiny bit about tech knows that the “paper” doesn’t matter much. The phone was launched with the aging Android 1.6 Donut, which was buggy if anything, its homescreen could only be used in landscape and of course, people weren’t even remotely familiar with its ergonomics.
Dell, thus, ended the Streak’s life pre-maturely for good in August 2011. Some “spin-offs” were later created by Dell as well including the-much-more-natural Streak 7 with a 7 inch display but that too failed to create ripples due to several issues (buggy interface to name one). Both of these products, along with some other bulky, outdated phones sealed the fate of Dell from the smartphone, and eventually the PC industry (to some extent atleast), which I find ironical especially after this quote by Michael Dell.
Phablets finally went mainstream in October 2011 after the release of Samsung’s Galaxy Note. The S-Pen alone gave us a reason to buy the thing. If the Dell Streak started the revolution, Galaxy Note nurtured and flourished it. Phablets started hitting the market even without an S-Pen like feature and were still successful. The market had changed.
Fast forward to 2013 and even the flagships by the major manufacturers have got 5 inch (or even bigger) displays. Even the reluctant (fundamentalist, you may add) Nokia and a stubborn Apple had to follow suit. You may or may not like it but if you want the best phone in the market right now, that’s just the way it is. And the Dell Streak is at blame here.
The Dell Streak is then, the Leonardo the Vinci of our times. Too intelligent, too advanced. If you have any doubts, ask Samsung.

Intel Unveils Silvermont to Empower Smartphones and Tablets

Intel Logo Intel Unveils Silvermont to Empower Smartphones and TabletsIntel Corporation today took the wraps off its brand new, low-power, high-performance microarchitecture named Silvermont.
The technology is aimed at low-power requirements in market segments from smartphones to the data center. Silvermont will be the foundation for a range of products beginning to come to market later this year, and will also be manufactured using the company’s leading-edge, 22nm Tri-Gate SoC manufacturing process, which brings significant performance increases and improved energy efficiency.
“Silvermont is a leap forward and an entirely new technology foundation for the future that will address a broad range of products and market segments,” said Naveed Siraj, Country Manager, Intel Pakistan. “Early sampling of our 22nm SoCs, including “Bay Trail” and “Avoton” is already garnering positive feedback from our customers. Going forward, we will accelerate future generations of this low-power microarchitecture on a yearly cadence.”
The Silvermont microarchitecture delivers industry-leading performance-per-watt efficiency.The highly balanced design brings increased support for a wider dynamic range and seamlessly scales up and down in performance and power efficiency.
Intel’s Silvermont microarchitecture was designed and co-optimized with Intel’s 22nm SoC process using revolutionary 3-D Tri-gate transistors. By taking advantage of this industry-leading technology, Intel is able to provide a significant performance increase and improved energy efficiency.
Additional highlights of the Silvermont microarchitecture include:
  • A new out-of-order execution engine enables best-in-class, single-threaded performance.
  • A new multi-core and system fabric architecture scalable up to eight cores and enabling greater performance for higher bandwidth, lower latency and more efficient out-of-order support for a more balanced and responsive system.
  • New IA instructions and technologies bringing enhanced performance, virtualization and security management capabilities to support a wide range of products. These instructions build on Intel’s existing support for 64-bit and the breadth of the IA software installed base.
  • Enhanced power management capabilities including a new intelligent burst technology, low- power C states and a wider dynamic range of operation taking advantage of Intel’s 3-D transistors. Intel® Burst Technology 2.0 support for single- and multi-core offers great responsiveness scaled for power efficiency.

Architecting Across a Spectrum of Computing

Silvermont will serve as the foundation for a breadth of 22nm products expected in market later this year. The performance-per-watt improvements with the new microarchitecture will enable a significant difference in performance and responsiveness for the compute devices built around these products.
Intel’s quad-core “Bay Trail”SoC is scheduled for holiday 2013 tablets and will more than double the compute performance capability of Intel’s current-generation tablet offering. Due to the flexibility of Silvermont, variants of the “Bay Trail” platform will also be used in market segments including entry laptop and desktop computers in innovative form factors.
Intel’s “Merrifield”is scheduled to ship to customers by the end of this year. It will enable increased performance and battery life over current-generation products1 and brings support for context aware and personal services, ultra-fast connections for Web streaming, and increased data, device and privacy protection.
Intel’s “Avoton” will enable industry-leading energy efficiency and performance-per-watt for microservers2, storage and scale out workloads in the data center. “Avoton” is Intel’s second-generation Intel® Atom™ processor SoC to provide full server product capability that customers require including 64-bit, integrated fabric, error code correction, Intel virtualization technologies and software compatibility.“Rangeley” is aimed at the network and communication infrastructure, specifically for entry-level to mid-range routers, switches and security appliances. Both products are scheduled for the second half of this year.
Concurrently, Intel is delivering industry-leading advancements on its next-generation, 22nm Haswell microarchitecture for Intel® Core™ processors to enable full-PC performance at lower power levels for innovative “2-in-1” form factors, and other mobile devices available later this year. Intel also plans to refresh its line of Intel® Xeon® processor families across the data center on 22nm technology, delivering better performance-per-watt and other features.

Samsung Announces Galaxy Ace 3

GalaxyAce2 04 Press 580 100 thumb Samsung Announces Galaxy Ace 3
Samsung has just announced the third phone in its popular line-up of mid-range devices, Ace. Dubbed the Ace 3, the new phone isn’t poles apart from its predecessor but still includes some fine changes.

The specs

As is usual with Samsung, the design of the Ace 3 remains the same. It is made of plastic which was expected given Samsung’s tradition and the price bracket.
The screen size is set at 4 inches with WVGA resolution. Under the hood, a 1Ghz processor powers the unit along with 1 GB RAM. At the back sits a 5mp camera with LED Flash and HD video recording but without autofocus, unfortunately.
Here are the specs of the Ace 3:
  • Android Jelly Bean 4.2
  • 9.8 mm thick
  • Weight: 115 grams
  • Optional dual-sim version
  • 4 inch TFT LCD display with WVGA resolution
  • 1Ghz dual-core processor
  • 1 GB RAM with 4 GB expandable internal storage
  • 5 megapixel rear-camera with LED Flash and 720p HD video recording
  • VGA front-facing camera
  • Wifi Hotspot, Bluetooth 4.0, A-GPS, microUSB
  • 1500 mAh battery
There will be an LTE-supporting version of the phone too but that will come with considerably better specs in some categories. The back camera in that does 1080p Full HD video recording, the internal storage is increased to 8 GB, the battery capacity has been maximized to 1800 mAh and the processor overclocked to 1.2 Ghz. The phone will be a bit heavier and thicker though.
The pricing and availability details of the phone are unknown at the moment though but it should be hitting the market in a month or too. Unfortunately for it though, it falls in a price point where a lot of other phones have already got a strong hold of there ground, not only Android ones, but also WIndows phones.
We’ll have to see though how the Samsung brand name will work there.

Apple announces new Macbook Air, Mac Pro for 2013

Apple must’ve been very busy at their famed WWDC event of this year again. And for good reasons. Among the important announcements done by Apple was that of the new Mac laptops and systems for this year.
Apple has updated the MacBook Air with the new Haswell CPUs and improved battery life. The Mac Pro desktop system has been updated with a considerably trimmed down design for the first the first time in its life cycle.

MacBook Air

macbook air Apple announces new Macbook Air, Mac Pro for 2013
The new MacBook air features the same design as its predecessors. As said earlier, it comes with the new 4th generation Intel “Haswell” chips which promise up to 40% faster graphics and power efficiency. They’ll be available in i5 & i7 flavors with 4 GB RAM and Intel HD 5000 graphics.
They also come with the new 802.11ac Wifi which is said to be 3 times faster than normal ones. USB 3.0, Thunderbolt port, Facetime HD camera and dual-microphones are included as well.
Battery life is improved too. The smaller, 11 inch model sees its battery life improve to 9 hours and the larger 13 inch one, to 12 hours. The standby time is also over 30 days now. They also wake up faster from standby mode, in 1 second.
The two models will be available in 128 and 256 GB SSD storage options which will be 45% faster too. The two models of the 11 inch laptop will be available for $999 and $1199 respectively while those of the larger model will be available for $1099 and $1299 respectively. The new MacBook Air will start shipping today.

Mac Pro

Mac Pro   Apple announces new Macbook Air, Mac Pro for 2013
This is the first redesign that the Mac Pro has seen in its lifecycle. The new Mac Pro comes in a new cylindrical design which, according to Apple, is just 1/8th the size of its predecessor. It will now come with an AMD GPU and Intel XEON processors.
The Mac Pro also features 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports and 4 USB 3.0 ports (both of whom have been missing until now), along with HDMI out, Gigabit Ethernet and Motion Sensor. It will be available this fall but its price is still kept in the dark. I for one have some doubts though, that Apple might’ve just redesigned the Mac Pro just like the failed Power Mac Cube again but we’ll see.

Samsung Galaxy Star Hits Pakistani Stores at Rs. 9,999

Samsung Galaxy Star Samsung Galaxy Star Hits Pakistani Stores at Rs. 9,999
Samsung’s Galaxy Star – a budget Android phone – has made its way to Pakistan. Competing at price, Samsung Star is aimed for young aspiring users who want to switch to Android at an affordable price.
Powered by a decent 1 Ghz processor, Samsung Star boosts 3 inch QVGA display. There is 512 MB of RAM, probably not enough for various users – but considering the price one must remain contented with the package. There is another 4 GB of internal memory as well, that can be expanded with card if required.
There is a 2MP camera on the back of Galaxy Star. Users are likely to struggle with Galaxy Star’s battery.
Specifications of Galaxy Star:
  • Android 4.1 Jelly Bean customized with Touchwiz
  • Cortex A5 1GHz Processor
  • 3 inch QVGA display – 320 x 240 with 65K internal colour depth
  • 100.5g heavy and 11.9mm thick
  • Optional dual-sim
  • 2mp rear-facing camera with QVGA video recording
  • 512 MB RAM with 4GB expandable internal storage
  • Bluetooth 4.0, Wifi, Accelerometer, FM Radio
  • 1200 mAh battery
    • Stand-by: 320 hours
    • talk time: 7 hours