USF Pakistan progresses in rural areas under PM Raja Parvez Ashraf

In an ceremony in Sanghar on Saturday 24th February, the Prime Minister, Raja Parvez Ashraf inaugurated a number of telecommunications and health and education projects of worth Rs. 1.7 billion. During his speech on the occassion he said that the social and economic development of the country was linked to the growth in telecom sector and that the government was putting its best efforts  to bring all parts of the country at the same level.

The efforts of Universal Service Fund (USF) are the depiction of the efforts of the government where USF was able to provide basic telephony and data services to 213 villages in Mirpurkhas and 426 villages in Dadu with subsidies of  Rs. 930 million and Rs 250 million respectively under their Rural Telecom Project.Under their Optic Fibre programme, 1038 kilometre optic fibre cable has been laid via a subsidy of Rs. 449 million due to which 17 unserved tehsils of Sindh have been connected. Moreover, 77 cities and towns in Southern Telecom Region-I were connected under the Broad-band programme with the help of a subsidy of Rs. 549 million.

The Prime Minister inaugurated local development projects including rehabilitation of a Basic Health Unit (BHU), a primary school, up-gradation of a middle school of girls to high school, repair of bridge at Chak 11, installation of street lights and electric poles and a water filtration plant.
Prime Minister Raja Parvez Ashraf also inaugurated ten classrooms of Commerce Block at Government Degree College Sanghar and an additional 10 rooms at the Government High School Sanghar, which were constructed for Rs 15.046 million and Rs 9.988 million respectively.

China is Now the World’s Largest Market for Smart Devices

China has now overtaken the United States of America in being the biggest market for smart devices like Android and iOS phones and tablets. The market for smart devices in China started growing a year ago and within one year has taken to the first position. Even though, this is the first time that China has overtaken the American market, but it is just with a slight numbers. However, if the Chinese market growth rate remains consistent as it is now, it will take lead with higher numbers.

The report is based on the study by Flurry, which tracked 2.4 billion anonymous application sessions per day from different parts of the world. Having done so, the company claims that they were able to accurately measure activity of 90 percent of the world’s smart devices. Just about a month ago, both China and the U.S. were head-to-head in the market share, but this month in February, China took the lead for the first time.

In January, the U.S. had 222 million active smart devices and China had 221 million, now China is predicted to have 246 million devices and the U.S. increase will take it to 230 million. The third country with the highest number of smart devices is the United Kingdom with 43 million and South Korea is fourth with 40 million active smart devices. The experts who have a keen eye on the trends of the growing smart devices market say that the U.S. will not be able to take back its top spot.

Based merely on the population, the U.S. cannot exceed more than 310 million smart device users. The only country that is predicted to overtake China is India with a population of 1.2 billion people. But that will take some years before we can see India on the top spot as currently there are only 19 million active smart devices in India.

VIRGIN MOBILE KYOCERA EVENT ENTRY-LEVEL SMARTPHONE

Prepaid mobile network, Virgin Mobile USA adds Kyocera’s Event to its lineup. The entry-level Android smartphone is made for people who are looking get an affordable phone without service contract. Running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the handset comes pre-loaded with Google Maps and Navigation and offers access to Google Play store for thousands of appications.

  

The Event sports a 1GHz SnapDragon processor and 512MB of RAM. The phone has a 3.5-inch HVGA IPS touchscreen display and features MagniFont mode that provides super large font that is easy to read, and Swype text input for typing faster without lifting a finger. Its 3.2 Megapixel camera gets a LED flash and is capable of video recording. The handset supports 3G mobile network, in addition to Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity.

Other than 4GB internal storage, the Event also supports microSD up to 32GB. The phone is available for $79.99. Black version will be available from Virgin Mobile USA and the red version will be an exclusive for RadioShack.

 

ADATA DashDrive Air AE400 Combines Wireless Storage Reader, Hotspot and Portable Battery

If you are looking for a all-in-one companion for your mobile devices, ADATA’s newly launched DashDrive Air AE400 may be a good choice. While the AV200 combines wireless router and SD/USB reader, the new eye-catching multifunctional device goes further to combine wireless storage reader, a wireless hotspot and portable power bank. Its surface has a hexagonal lattice pattern to provide sparkling look and feel.

With USB port and a SD card slot, the AE400 allows users to access and transfer data between USB storage devices and SD card and their smartphone, tablet, or notebook wirelessly. You can stream media content from USB drive or SD card and the device is able to stream 1080p video to 2 users simultaneously. It works with iOS, Android, Windows XP/7.8, Mac OS X and Linux and there is free DashDrive Air Elite app for iOS and Android devices.

The new DashDrive Air is also a wireless hotspot with support for WiFi 802.11b/g/n. It can connect to an existing wireless network and create an Internet bridge connection for up to 10 devices. Inside the bling bling housing, it packs 5000mAh  Li-Polymer rechargeable battery for rejuicing your mobile devices on the go.

ADATA’s DashDrive Air AE400 will be available in Europe for GBP 52.99.

 

Sony announces the PlayStation 4, arriving this holiday season

As was widely expected, Sony announced their upcoming PlayStation 4 gaming console at the February 20 event. While a lot was said about the console at the event, we still don’t know what it looks like or how much it would cost.

But let’s talk about what we do know, starting with the hardware. For the PS4, Sony is using an x86-64 AMD processor with an integrated 8-core ‘Jaguar’ CPU and GPU. The GPU is capable of delivering 1.84 TFLOPS of performance, which pegs it slightly above AMD’s Radeon HD 7870 desktop GPU announced last year. The PS4 will also have 8GB of GDDR5 memory with around 176GB/s of memory bandwidth.

Other specifications include a built-in hard drive (no mention of SSD or ability to swap the drive), 6x Blu-ray and 8x DVD drive, USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1, HDMI, analog AV-out and optical S/PDIF audio output.

The PS4 will be sold with the new DualShock 4 controller, which looks very similar to the leaked prototype we saw last week. It features a two-point capacitive trackpad above the joystick and a three-color LED light bar on top, which changes color to identify player or even during a game to denote things such as player health.

The PS4 has dual 1280 x 800 resolution 3D cameras with f/2.0 fixed focus lenses, 85-degree field of view, 30cm minimum focusing distance and four-channel microphone array. These track the light bar on the controllers, they way the Move did. The DualShock 4 also has three-axis gyroscope, three-axis accelerometer, vibration, mono speaker, microUSB port, stereo headset port, extension port and a 1000mAh battery.

Moving back to the console, there are quite a lot more new features to talk about, including:

• Ability to stream games, thanks to the Gaikai cloud based service. This could be used in future to stream PS3, PS2 and PSOne games to the PS4.
• Ability to stream PS4 games to the PSVita. Sony is aiming to offer virtually every PS4 game on the PSVita through streaming in the future.
• Ability to play games while they are downloading.
• Ability to try any new game before purchasing.
• Ability to record and upload game videos while playing games. The processing is done by a separate background processor. You can view videos uploaded by other players.
• Ability to download games and updates while the console is switched off using the background processor.
• Brand new interface for the PS4 as well as the PSVita.
• New iOS and Android PlayStation App will let you use your smartphone as a second screen to view game details as well as view videos and other content uploaded by other gamers.

There will be no backward compatibility of PS3 titles on the PS4, a direct result of the new processor architecture used on the latter. The Gaikai streaming feature remains the only hope to play older titles on the PS4, although that feature hasn’t been officially announced yet. You will be able to play used PS4 games on the new console, something a lot of people do.

Speaking of games, we have a handful of confirmed titles, including ‘Killzone: Shadow Fall’, ‘inFAMOUS: Second Son’, ‘Destiny’ by Bungie, ‘Deep Down’ (working title) by Capcom, ‘DriveClub’, ‘Knack’, ‘The Witness’, ‘Diablo III’ and ‘Watch_Dogs’ by Ubisoft.

As mentioned before, we still don’t know what the console looks like or will cost. All we know is that it is expected to be released by the holiday season by the end of this year.