Jumping to the next level: Windows 8 rolls out third update for phones

Windows is gearing up for the next round of challenge as it announced the third update some hours ago. “A bigger Start screen for more Live Tiles. A new, customizable Driving Mode. Better accessibility options” quoted Darren Laybourn, Corporate Vice President for Windows Phones, in his blog. Update 3 is going to be a series of new features as well as upgrade for the existing ones. As the company launches this update for Developers, hardware manufacturers for Windows phones are likely to feel excited with the new release enabling support for larger screens, 5 and 6 inch displays. There was a buzz for quite some time now about windows venturing into the ‘phablet’ arena, well, this could likely be it. The larger displays with 1080 HD resolution will surely be applauded by the users.

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As the screen size increases, the engineering team has ensured that the overall screen area is utilized in a better and efficient way. Hence, the number of live tiles on your windows phone has now increased to six from four. The scaling of built in apps like email, photos, videos, people, etc. will be done accordingly. The performance of current OS is likely to go up with the introduction of support for Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor. 

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This update has an additional feature called ‘Driving Mode’. Driving Mode enable a user to limit the notifications regarding text messages, calls, alerts, etc. on the home screen, so that, one is not distracted while driving. The phone needs to be connected to a Bluetooth device and shall not disturb you until you are off the wheels.

The blogger boasted of new accessibility features that can enable even a visually impaired person to make calls, send texts, email, etc. To witness how it actually works we will have to wait for a while. Internet sharing and creating hot-spots has been made easy with the new improvements as the users are simply required to connect the windows 8.1 PC with their phone over the Bluetooth and labels for the shared Wifi will show up. Tap and get started.

Newer ringtones, easily close-able apps, screen rotation locks, better Bluetooth are other feature enhancements that Windows phone users had demanded and have been granted with the third update. People at Windows feel that this should place the company in better position against the competitors like Android.

Now it’ll be interesting to see if Windows can actually take on the sheer mass of Android in the phone segment. Will it?

Ready for 100 Gbps wireless Internet? [PS: It's world's first!]

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute Of Technology in Baden-Württemberg have managed to achieve the unthinkable : 100 Gbps data transfer rate over wireless connection. The achievement ensures their entry into the book of world records. So far 100 Gbps has been achieved over fiber cables but we had not seen those speeds with wireless connections. The research engineers at the KIT used sub-terahertz waves at 237.5 GHz to transfer data at the rate of 100 Gb/s over a distance of about 20 meters. The experiment was a single-input and single-output one but promises multiple data streams at a higher bandwidth. With this advancement, researchers have paved a way towards a wireless feature, totally eliminating the need of fiber lines and copper wires for Internet connections and networks. 

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The research team had earlier achieved data transfer rates of about 40 Gbps over a distance of 1 Km, as a part of their Millilink project funded by BMBF. In the latest experiment, they relied on a photonic method to transmit radio waves. Professor Ingmar Kallfass says that their project aimed at integrating broadband relay link into FiOS since the beginning of this year. 

100 Gbps wireless links would mean you'll be able to transfer all the data stored on about 5 DVDs or 2 Blu-Ray discs to another storage media in just about 2 flat seconds! 

It's not clear what would be the obstacles in mass adoption of this technology. We believe the weather conditions would definitely have an effect on the data transmission rates; but we'd leave that to all the telecommunications engineers on CE to discuss. 

Tata Sky's Live TV Streaming 'Everywhere TV' App Coming Soon For iOS & Android

India’s leading direct satellite television provider Tata Sky has announced its live TV streaming service titled ‘Everywhere TV’. On its official website it mentions about apps for iPhone and iPad and gives a couple of screenshots of these apps but it does not mention an Android app. However reports from NDTV suggest that an Android app is in the making and will arrive by the end of the festive season. The Everywhere TV service will only be available for existing Tata Sky subscribers and initially offer fifty channels for subscription package of Rs. 60 per month. Tata Sky has not given a tentative launch date for the service but interested users can leave their contact details on its website by which the company can notify them about its availability. Similar to Dish TV’s DishOnline service, ‘Everywhere TV’ lets you catch up episodes of your favorite TV soaps from the last five days and offers video on demand feature which lets you stream movies and videos.

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Speaking to the media, Tata Sky’s Chief Commercial Officer Vikram Mehra said that the company conducted a survey among their subscribers and found that 88 percent of their subscribers have a smartphone and they spend about 76 minutes every day on commute. This service will help their customers to catch up on their favorite shows while they are on their daily commute. He also said that this service will attract the attention of students who live in hostels as they can get access to live TV at cheaper rates. While the initial packages offer only Hindi and English general entertainment channels the company will be providing regional channels soon and will offer over 200 channels in the future.

India Answers Google Street View With WoNoBo.com Walking Tours - A 360 Degree View Platform

Indian people now have a Google Street View alternative. Launched on 15th October and called WoNoBo.com, it is India's city-by-city travel and local guide that offers a 360 degree view platform. This website is a result of the Ministry of Tourism coming together with Genesys International to create India's first location-based service to offer walkthroughs of streets across 54 Indian cities. Walking Tours is a unique and exciting product of the website that enables users to navigate and route their way through cities based on a number of interesting themes. The website supports user generated content (UGC) and offers unique social media capabilities and facilitates creation of local communities online. It is important to note that Indian Tourism Ministry is the first in the world to launch such a service.

Proving to be of great help to tourists in India, the Walking Tours platform empowers people to effectively plan their tour. The Ministry of Tourism set the target of having one Walking Tour of each State within 2 years and successfully accomplished it. And now, the new service would be available initially about the roads of 5 major Indian cities and will soon be expanded to the top 54 cities within a few weeks. With this facility, what you get is a mapped panoramic imagery of thousands of square kilometres and close to 10 million places of interest across the country. The five cities whose tours were launched included Hyderabad, Delhi, Mumbai, Coastal Goa and Ahmedabad.

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So who is behind this Mumbai-based company - Genesys International? Well, it is a work of two brothers - Sohel and Sajid Malik, who founded the company in 1995. Sajid Malik told TOI that one advantage Genesys had was in having worked with the government for many years for their mapping services. "For street view, the government, including the defence ministry and the Survey of India, threw a lot of regulations at us. We painstakingly fulfilled their requirements, including not taking pictures in sensitive areas," he said. The company has also been in services business, creating map content for others such as Navteq (provider of electronic navigable maps), Nokia and Bing, and was involved recently in creating digital maps of Dubai, Mecca and Medina.

As part of the website, users get full blown 360-degree views of destinations and much more. The tourists can access, tag and review points of interests i.e., locations, hotels, retail outlets, monuments, parks, etc and also view the interiors of several key locations, all powered by a database of millions of places. Wonobo's main street view service provides a satellite map and the street view on your screen. You can then click on any part of the map and get the corresponding street view. Just like Google Street View, you can click or drag on the street view to go down a street. For many of the small businesses tagged, it's their first web presence. "Any merchant can mention his suite of services, show real-time prices or available inventory, and showcase interiors. One of our revenue sources will be based on such hyper-local engagement," Sajid said.

It is good to know that WoNoBo is also soon coming to your smartphone. There's also a lot to explore with guides created by users as well as experts, showing locals where to eat, what to shop for, where to take your children while visiting and a lot more. We would be glad to read what fellow engineers have to say about WoNoBo.com and Walking Tours platform.So share your reviews with us in replies below.

HCL ME Champ Tablet Launched For Kids - Features, Specs & Price In India Listed

HCL has a series of HCL Me products that it launches with a set of target audience in mind. This time around it has come up with the HCL ME Champ tablet that is aimed exclusively at kids of 3 to 12 years age. The tablet features a 7-inch display offering a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels. Coming with a Cortex A9 1 GHz single core processor and Mail 400 GPU, the HCL ME Champ has 1 GB RAM and 4 GB internal which can be further extended up to 32 GB using microSD card. The device runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operating system.

We have previously covered a range of HCL ME products that also came for different kind of age groups. For example there was - HCL ME U1 AND MyEdu tablets, HCL ME Y2 tablet and HCL ME Netbook aimed specially at engineering students. Anyway, coming back to the HCL ME Champ's connectivity options. The tablet includes HDMI port, WiFi, micro USB and 3.5 mm Audio jack. Kids can also use 3G via dongle (data card). The device is equipped with a 2-mega pixel rear camera and a 0.3-mega pixel front camera which enables video chatting. The battery under the hood is 3100 mAh battery.

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HCL Me Champ comes with a lot of pre-loaded content for kids like exercise in Math, Science, Geography, History, Art and Language. The tablet also includes interactive books, TV Mornings Cartoons app, Creativity app to create books by adding voice recordings, pictures and texts. It also comes with collection of music and music videos. Other pre-loaded apps include, Hungama, Opera mini, Kingsoft Office, Navigate and more. The device also offers free access to more than 500 Apps under categories - games, books and education, and to all videos under the kids TV segment.

On top of that HCL ME Tablet is also running 'KIDS ARE CHAMP' sponsorship programme, which would give 10 lucky champs a chance to win scholarships totaling Rs 5 lakh. Currently, the HCL ME Champ tablet is priced at Rs. 7,999 and will be soon available in all the stores near you.

Word, Excel & PowerPoint Readers Apps Download For Nokia Asha 501 Available On Ovi Store

Nokia’s Asha series saw a reboot in form of Nokia Asha 501 that came with Nokia’s home grown Nokia Asha Software Platform 1.0. This platform provided a new look and feel to this wannabe smartphone and with these document viewer apps it is sure to inch closer to its smartphone status. The trio of My Pocket Office apps released by Divum give Nokia Asha 501 users the capability of viewing Microsoft Office files like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. All of these three apps are in the beta stage and can be downloaded from the Ovi Store for free. All of these apps can open the latest file formats like docx, xlsx and pptx.

My Pocket Office – docx app start screen comprises of three buttons; Open files, Recent Files and Bookmarks. Since the three inch screen is not suitable for viewing full length word files it comes with two huge zoom in and zoom out buttons. The app also gives you the option of book marking your favourite documents. 

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My Pocket Office – xlsx app opens the Excel files and swipe gestures have been included to go through the file.

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Finally, the My Pocket Office – pptx app opens pptx files in a default landscape mode to occupy the full screen. The loading time of each presentation depends on size of the file. 

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Since the apps are still in the beta stage the apps some formatting errors can be spotted by early users. Despite of these shortcomings which will soon be rectified in the final version, these apps are will surely be useful for Nokia Asha 501 users. If there are any Nokia Asha 501 users out there on CE we would like them to try out these apps and let us know about their experience in the comments section below.

World's largest solar power plant to be built in Rajasthan, India

World's largest ever solar power plant with capacity of generating 4000 MW power will soon be built in Rajasthan in India near the Sambhar lake. The official authorities say that it's the first project of its kind and scale. The project expected to set a trend for construction of very large scale solar power plants all over the world. The plant will be constructed through a JV between BHEL, Powergrid Corporation of India, Solar Energy Corporation of India, Hindustan Salts Limited and Rajasthan Electronics & Instruments Limited. Once completed, the solar plant will sell electricity at about Rs. 5.50 per unit. 

Solar Power Plant [Image Source: Wikipedia]​

The project will be constructed in phases. In the first phase, capacity of about 1000 MW will be reached and it's expected to be completed by 2016. The first phase will also offer insights and learning from the challenges faced during construction. Using this knowledge, further expansion will be carried out. The models on which the plant will be based are being worked out. The project will require about 23,000 acres of land out of which majority of the land (about 18000 acres) will be provided by Hindustan Salts Limited. 

Ashwini Kumar, director of solar energy corporation said that the Government is aiming to keep the tariff at Rs. 5.50 per unit; arguably lowest ever in the country. The project won't reach its full capacity until 2022 to add full 4k MW of power to the national power grid. 

The Rajasthan Solar plant will compete directly with the Solar Energy Generating Systems (SEGS) in California Mojave desert in the United States; which currently is the largest solar power plant in the world. But it's entire capacity is just 354 MW. Once the Rajasthan plant reaches its first phase, its capacity will be more than twice that of the SEGS solar plant. 

We do not have information about the technical details of the plant. Typically, the solar power plants use photovoltaic (PV) cells to convert light energy into electricity. The mirrors and lenses reflect and focus all the sunlight on a small beam at the center of the solar array.

The solar plant will definitely be national pride for India. We promise to keep track of the developments and keep you informed.