20 Smart Android Phone Tips and Tricks : Customize Your Home Screen

For starters: customize your Android phone’s background. Some devices will even let you add a moving, interactive image. Just hit the menu button and select the Wallpaper option. Follow the directions to select images from your phone’s camera, images loaded onto your phone, or a default wallpaper. But images are just the beginning of what you can put on your desktop. Clever programmers have created dozens of widgets that can also be moved to your home screen. Press down on an empty spot of real estate on your home screen, and that will pull up a menu to let you add everything from widgets, to program shortcuts and folders. If you can bear to part with a little over $1, Beautiful Widgets from the Marketplace is a great place to start for finding home screen add-ons.

Apple Mods Intel Chipset for Auto GPU Switching

Instead of Nvidia Optimus, Apple makes its own automatic graphics switching technology.

When Apple announced that its new 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros had both the Intel HD IGP as well as a discrete Nvidia GT 330M GPU and it could switch seamlessly between them automatically, we assumed that it was using the Nvidia Optimus technology – but it isn't. Instead, Apple brewed up its own software solution, which works in a slightly different fashion, Ars Technica reports.

While Nvidia Optimus uses a software-driven list of apps that would trigger a system to switch over to discrete graphics, Apple's solution detects on the OS level whenever OpenGL, Core Graphics, Quartz Composer are in use and calls in the discrete GPU to help.

Another way Apple's method differs from Nvidia's system is that Optimus runs the discrete GPU's display through the IGP's frame buffer. This requires that both the GPU and IGP to be active, as well as taking up a lot of traffic on the bus. Apple's solution deactivates the Intel HD graphics whenever the GT 330M is called upon, helping it be a little more power friendly.

Apple credits its control over software and hardware as the main reason why it is able to offer an arguably better solution to automatically switching graphics. In fact, Apple appears to have modified the baseline HM55 Express Intel chipset to accommodate for this more advanced switching technology, according to ateardown done by iFixit.

Sadly, Apple doesn't offer the user full control over which graphics part run and when. The quoted battery life is 8 hours when running the GT 330M and 9 hours when it's Intel HD IGP only. Although the user can select between auto switching and having the GT 330M run full time, the option to disable the discrete GPU for the sake of prolonging battery life (like being able to switch off Bluetooth or Wi-Fi) doesn't exist.

Mobi2Tweet Challenges Chopaal, Launches Group SMS By

Mobi2Tweet, that offers free SMS notifications from your twitter and Facebook accounts added another feature today, which allow its registered users to create groups and send broadcast SMS to your friends who can join this group – all through SMS based commands.

Users’ created groups can be public or private, communication can be one way or two way broadcast, everything can be setup and configured through SMS.

All this looks so promising, however, customers’ reservations for quality of service (delivery time of SMSes) remains there.

Intel Reports Best First Quarter. Ever

Intel's financials looking lots better as customers ease off the Intel Atom netbook frenzy and go back to bigger chips.

Intel, with its new Nehalem-based CPUs hitting the big time since early this year, has been enjoying success. In fact, the company this week announced that it's had its best financial quarter ever.

Intel Corporation today reported first-quarter revenue of $10.3 billion. The company reported operating income of $3.4 billion, net income of $2.4 billion and EPS of 43 cents.

"The investments we’re making in leading edge technology are delivering the most compelling product line-up in our history," said Paul Otellini, Intel president and CEO. "These leadership products combined with growing worldwide demand and continued outstanding execution resulted in Intel's best first quarter ever. Looking forward, we're optimistic about our business as Intel products are designed into a variety of new and exciting segments."

PayPal in Pakistan – Looks Possible, but it May Take Time!

Talk of PayPal entering Pakistan got buzzed up in previous 2 days, especially after some professionals got involved in discussion on TGP.

As always, Fouad Bajwa was amongst the campaigners, who announced that Mr. Ibrahim Qureshi (Director Raffles Pvt. Ltd) has promised to voice the need of PayPal in Pakistan duringObama’s presidential summit.

Discussion caught further attention when a member revealed that Paypal’s advance team recently visited Pakistan. He further said that PayPal is already engaged with local lawyers and other related institutes to start building their infrastructure to offer Paypal services in Pakistan.

This looked quite fascinating and importantly it made sense, particularly, after a recent announcement by PayPal to aggressively campaign in Asia (to be number one in region like they are in Europe and America) with an evident focus towards the mobile commerce along with traditional e-commerce services.

For the purpose, PayPal announced last month to double its employees from 1000 to over 2000 this year, with 100 new jobs alone for Singapore, company’s regional headquarter.

Though, PayPal has officially not authorized all this. Anuj Nayar, Director, Global Communications at PayPal in a communication with ProPakistani accepted that like always, PayPal is looking at ways to grow the business in Asia. However, he said that he has nothing in hands to announce about PayPal’s specific plans for Pakistan market.

A source at PayPal, who wanted to remain unnamed, told ProPakistani that Pakistan has some serious issues relating to its ecommerce infrastructure, payment gateways, which make it impossible for PayPal to step in to Pakistan. He said, PayPal’s usual feature of linking an email with customers’ bank account will never be possible in given banking infrastructure of Pakistan.

He admitted that PayPal has studied Pakistan, and recognizes the potential, however, stated problem is not in hands of PayPal.

In his opinion, PayPal may start operations while accepting limited banks, probably starting with Citibank (which has payment gateway), and then rolling out solution for other banks of the country.

Regulatory issues with State Bank of Pakistan are considered as hurdles too, but as stated earlier, there is no question of arguing over regulations when there is no infrastructure in place.

This is where our local banks and of course the government has to play some role. Payment gateways are a must have thing. We had reports of PTA working on it, but nothing concrete could be said on it, as of now.

So as a crux, one can safely say that its not PayPal who is not coming in Pakistan, its our banks who are not well equipped.

On a side note, as PayPal has plans to offer mobile banking solutions in the region, companies like EasyPaisa can come in, and join hands with PayPal (given that their banking partner– Tameer Bank, starts offering electronic payment solution).

But only time will tell that EasyPaisa and PayPal will work in hands or will become rivals.