While it has already been confirmed that Motorola will be launching the dual-SIM version of the Moto G in India in early-January 2014, and that the smartphone would be receiving a 'guaranteed' Android 4.4 KitKat the same month, a new report says the model that will ship in India will come pre-loaded with Google's latest iteration of Android.
Omio News Blog in a report has revealed Motorola's plans for the rollout of Moto G with the latest Android iteration in various countries.
The report quotes Mark Randal, Senior Vice President, Supply Chain & Operations, Motorola who while replying about Android 4.4 KitKat rollout plans for Moto G said that the company will be shipping the smartphone with Android 4.4 KitKat after Christmas. Considering that in India, the Moto G will be launched next year, in early January, it is quite evident that the device will be running Android 4.4 KitKat out-of-the-box.
Further, the report notes that the Motorola Moto G will release in two waves (as we confirmed during the press conference) , the first wave includes countries namely Brazil, France, Germany, Mexico and UK, while the second wave includes US, South East Asia and other countries. Randal also revealed that the Motorola Moto G will be launched with Android 4.3 Jelly Bean in first wave countries, though they will also receive the Android 4.4 KitKat update by the end of January.
On Thursday, a tweet by Guy Kawasaki confirmed that the Motorola Moto G dual-SIM variant would be making it to the Indian market, as well as Brazil. While Motorola has already confirmed that the Moto G will be arriving in India, it has yet to reveal the precise plans for the type of retail availability.
The Motorola Moto G features a 4.5-inch HD 'edge-to-edge' display with a resolution of 720x1280 pixels (translating to a pixel density of 329ppi) and boasts a Corning Gorilla Glass 3 screen. Powered by a quad-core 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor coupled with an Adreno 305 GPU, the Moto G features 1GB of RAM. On the optics front, the Moto G sports a 5-megapixel rear camera along with an LED flash and also includes a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera. The rear camera supports HD (720p) video recording.
The Motorola Moto G also features water-resistant nano-coating on the inside and outside. The Moto G packs a 2070mAh battery, which Motorola claims can deliver up to 30 percent more talktime than the Apple iPhone 5s.
Google boss Eric Schmidt said Monday that the tech giant had developed new technology that makes it harder to find child sexual abuse images on the web.
Writing in British newspaper the Daily Mail, Google's executive chairman said more than 100,000 searches would no longer feature such material in their results.
The restrictions will initially apply to English-speaking countries but will be expanded to the rest of the world and 158 other languages within six months.
The announcement comes ahead of Monday's Internet Safety Summit at Prime Minister David Cameron's Downing Street office, where Google and Microsoft will be joined by other Internet firms.
In July, Cameron urged search engines to go further in blocking surfers from accessing illegal images.
Schmidt wrote: "While society will never wholly eliminate such depravity, we should do everything in our power to protect children from harm."
He said that in the last three months, Google had put more than 200 staff working on developing new technology to tackle the problem.
"We've fine tuned Google Search to prevent links to child sexual abuse material from appearing in our results," he wrote.
"While no algorithm is perfect and Google cannot prevent paedophiles adding new images to the web these changes have cleaned up the results for over 100,000 queries that might be related to the sexual abuse of kids.
"We will soon roll out these changes in more than 150 languages, so the impact will be truly global."
Schmidt said warnings from the California-based Internet giant were now showing at the top of results for more than 13,000 searches. The alerts also make clear that child sexual abuse is illegal and give advice on where to get help.
He also said Google had developed technology that allowed illegal videos to be 'tagged' so all duplicate copies can be removed across the web.
"We welcome the lead taken by the British government, and hope that the technologies developed (and shared) by our industry will make a real difference in the fight against this terrible crime," said Schmidt.
The SmartWatch 2 is also 33 percent cheaper, at about $200, and works with a variety of Android phones, not just Sony's. Samsung's Galaxy Gear sells for $300 and is compatible only with a handful of high-end Samsung phones.
(Also see: Sony SmartWatch 2 launched in India for Rs. 14,990)
That said, neither company has made a compelling case of why people need a smartwatch this holiday season.
These wrist-bound gadgets are supposed to free you from constantly pulling out your phone to check for messages. But I found myself checking the watch more often than I would pull out a phone. That proved more distracting - and less private - over dinner, for instance.
The SmartWatch 2 is worth considering primarily if you want to be among the first with the latest technology.
What Sony's watch does
Think of the watch as a companion to your phone. The phone needs to be within Bluetooth wireless range, or about 30 feet (9 meters).
You install a free Smart Connect app on the phone to manage what gets sent to the watch, be it messages or call notifications. You give the watch functionality by adding watch apps to Smart Connect one by one. Smart Connect fetches the watch apps from Google's online Play store.
For example, I installed Sony's Messaging app to get texts on the watch. I get full texts and can reply with emoticons or pre-written responses such as "I'll get back to you." There's no keyboard on the watch to type individual replies, given that its screen measures just 1.6 inches (4 centimeters) diagonally.
The Facebook watch app lets me check the latest posts and endorse some with "likes" right from the watch. With Twitter, I can read the latest updates, retweet them or mark some as favorites. But I'm limited to text on the watch. I can't access photos and other links that are often embedded into tweets.
Getting too much? Through the phone, I can choose specific friends and accounts to get notifications for, though I can't simply add "family" and other groups I had already created on Facebook.
The watch can act as a remote control for your phone, but calls themselves are made through the phone. For the watch to be useful, you need a Bluetooth wireless headset linked to the phone.
When calls come in, you can reject the call, with or without a canned text reply. If you have a Sony phone, you can answer calls from the watch as well. With any phone running at least Android 4.0, you can initiate calls from the watch using its dialpad or your Android contacts list. But again, the calls go through your phone. You can control volume, but it took me a while to figure out how.
There are nearly 250 other apps you can add, many coming from outside app developers.
I particularly like a 99-cent app called Fake Call. Tap on the watch to make your phone ring with a phantom call. Use that to get you out of whatever sketchy situation you might find yourself in.
A free app called GPS Maps sends a map to your watch with surrounding blocks. The map moves as you move, though I don't get directions.
Samsung's Galaxy Gear wins on style: The watch has a metal frame and straps in six colors. It can work as a fashion accessory, at least for men. It's on the larger side, with a 1.6-inch screen matching Sony's. The SmartWatch 2 from Sony feels cheap, by comparison, though the straps are replaceable with other 24-millimeter watch straps if you're really buying this for fashion.
The Gear also wins on features: Sony's watch doesn't have a speaker or a microphone. It doesn't have a camera. The Gear has all that, which means you can make phone calls through the watch itself, without a Bluetooth headset. The camera produces low-resolution images, but it beats missing the shot because your phone is in the pocket.
But I don't believe these features are worth an extra $100. The speakerphone doesn't offer much privacy or work well in noisy environments. The speaker allows you to reply to text messages using voice dictation, but the transcriptions are slow and error-prone.
Where the SmartWatch 2 outperforms the Gear is in delivering messages.
The Gear gives you full texts, but that's about it. Get a Facebook or Gmail notification? You have to return to the phone to read the message. The watch is supposed to reduce the need to pull out your phone, but not if you keep getting notifications urging you to check.
And while I got about 2.5 days on the SmartWatch 2 on a single charge, the Gear dies in a day. You can charge Sony's watch with a standard micro-USB charger, while the Gear needs its own. The Gear's watch face also goes dark so it could last just a day. With Sony's watch, you can see the time even in a low-power mode.
Sony's SmartWatch 2 also has many more apps to choose from - more than three times as many.
Do you need it?
Maybe one day, smartwatches will truly be smart. They need to be better at filtering the important notifications from the noise, and they need to do more than tell you to go back to the phone to complete a task.
For now, we're in an era of experimentation. Sony's SmartWatch 2 advances the field with a just-the-basics smartwatch, but I'll wait at least a year or two for even more advances before buying one myself.
Samsung recently launched the Galaxy Round with a curved display, but a new report reveals that the South Korean maker has more screen experiments up its sleeve.
Bloomberg reports that Samsung is working on a Galaxy smartphone that would sport three-sided display that would wrap around the edges of the smartphone. Further, the report quotes two people familiar with the Samsung plans and notes that each side of the display would operate separately and that the alleged wraparound display would work with company's Youm flexible display technology, first used for the curved display on the Galaxy Round.
As per the report, the Samsung's smartphone with wraparound display could be a device in the Galaxy S or Galaxy Note phablet series, or in a new smartphone lineup entirely. The report does not reveal an exact time frame for the release of the alleged Samsung Galaxy phone with wraparound display, but expects the alleged device to be out by the second half of 2014.
Unfortunately, the report did not shed any light on the innards of the alleged Galaxy smartphone with the wraparound display. The alleged Galaxy smartphone with a new display type might be an attempt to gauge consumers' reaction for phones with new form factors, though Samsung's first attempt with new display type, the Galaxy Round has been limited to selective markets only, and not been too popular.
Earlier this month, Samsung at its second analyst meeting in South Korea spilled the beans about its upcoming devices with newer technologies in coming years. Samsung's chief announced that company plans to release devices with folding displays, such as foldable phones - due in 2015.
Samsung also acknowledged room for improvement in its wearable tech device, the Galaxy Gear, and also revealed that the company has not been 100 percent satisfied by the product.
Microsoft has been rumoured to be working on a revamped Windows Phone 8.1, codenamed 'Blue', since long. Now new details of Windows Phone 8.1 have surfaced online that shed some light on some devices that will run the forthcoming operating system update as well as some of its new features.
Popular phone tipster, @evleaks has revealed that two Nokia smartphones, codenamed Goldfinger and Moneypenny, will be the first devices to run Windows Phone Blue. @evleaks' tweet reads, "Nokia Goldfinger and Moneypenny are shaping up to be the first Windows Phone Blue devices." It's worth pointing out that both code names are linked to the James Bond movies.
In addition, The Verge in a report reveals that out of the two Nokia phones, Goldfinger is the flagship device. Further, the report quotes sources familiar with Nokia's plans and notes that the Goldfinger will come with Nokia's '3D Touch' technology, which the company has been working on for long.
The report suggests that the rumoured '3D Touch' feature uses device's sensors to detect interactions that are off-the-glass. The Nokia Goldfinger is said to come hand gesture support which will let users navigate on a phone without touching the display, while other gestures under consideration include flipping and scrolling. However, the report does not mention anything about the gesture support in other Nokia devices that are already available in the market.
The report also speculates that Microsoft might reveal the Windows Phone 8.1 update at MWC 2014.
As of now, no other details of the alleged Nokia Goldfinger and Moneypenny have been revealed. It is not clear whether the two devices are smartphones or tablets.
Reports had suggested that Windows Phone 8.1 would come with large-screen support.
Earlier this week, a report claimed that Nokia would launch its next tablet dubbed Lumia 2020 alongside the Lumia 1820 smartphone, at MWC 2014.
Lenovo has introduced two new Android tablets, the Yoga Tablet 8 (8-inch) and Yoga Tablet 10 (10-inch), priced at Rs. 22,999 and Rs. 28,999 respectively. It's worth pointing out that Lenovo has only released the 16GB Wi-Fi + 3G variants of the Yoga tablets for the Indian market. The 32GB and Wi-Fi only variants will not be introduced for now. The tablets will be available from major retailers across the country, as well as the company's own dostore.com.
Both the Lenovo Yoga tablets were first unveiled in October this year in US. The Yoga Tablet 8 and Tablet 10 feature Lenovo's multimode design, offering three modes to work - hold, tilt and stand. The tablets also feature cylindrical handles at one end for gripping.
The Yoga Tablet 8 and Tablet 10 can be pre-booked from the company's official site; with the online shipping date is November 25. The company is also offering bundled free accessories with Lenovo Yoga tablets, 8-inch and 10-inch models worth Rs. 4,000 and Rs. 5,000 respectively. The free accessories include a sleeve cover, protective film and earphone; although the company notes that the offer is only available until November 24, 2013.
Both the newly announced tablets run on Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean, and sport the same design and specifications, just come in different sizes. The Lenovo Yoga Tablet 8 and Tablet 10 both feature displays with 1280x800 pixels resolution. While both the tablets come with micro-SIM support, only the Yoga Tablet 8 supports voice-calling. The tablets are powered by quad-core 1.2GHz MediaTek MT8389 (Cortex-A7) processor, coupled with 1GB of LP DDR2 RAM. The 16GB built-in eMMC storage can be supplemented via microSD card, up to 64GB.
Both the Yoga tablets feature 5-megapixel autofocus rear cameras, and also sport 1.6-megapixel front-facing cameras. The Chinese manufacturer claims that both the tablets can deliver up to 18 hours of Wi-Fi browsing, with the Yoga Tablet 8 bearing a 6,000mAh battery, and the Yoga Tablet 10 bearing a 9,000mAh battery.
Commenting on the launch, Shailendra Katyal, Director, Consumer Business, Lenovo India said, "Technology is a part of who we are, therefore it needs to transition constantly to keep pace with our changing lifestyles. With this intent, we have re-engineered the Tablet from ground-up to offer users a better way to experience the Tablet. We are confident that the Yoga Tablet will redefine the category and set the stage for devices that are in sync with the evolving needs of the consumer." Lenovo also roped in Ashton Kutcher as its new brand ambassador for promoting the Yoga tablets.
Lenovo Yoga Tablet 8 and Yoga Tablet 10 key specifications
8-inch display and 10-inch display with 1280x800 pixels resolution
1.2GHz MediaTek MT8389 (Cortex-A7) processor
1GB of RAM
Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean
16GB inbuilt storage, expandable up to 64GB via microSD card
5-megapixel autofocus rear camera
1.6-megapixel front-facing camera
SIM support (8-inch Yoga tablet supports voice-calling)
Up to 18 hours of battery backup
Apple's iconic brand iPhone's latest offering 5c is 'too highly priced' for emerging markets like India, aiding iPhone 4s to be the volume driver, research firm Gartner said Thursday.
However, the firm said, in mature markets like the US and Europe the price difference between the iPhone 5c (Review) and iPhone 5s (Review I Pictures) is not enough.
"In emerging markets, the iPhone 4S will continue to be the volume driver at the low end as the lack of subsidy in most markets leaves the iPhone 5c too highly priced to help drive further penetration," Gartner said.
Apple did not immediately reply to an email seeking comment on the issue.
In India, Apple is selling 16 GB iPhone 5c at Rs. 41,900 and 32 GB variant at Rs. 53,500, while, iPhone 5s is available at Rs. 53,500 (16GB), Rs. 63,500 (32 GB) and Rs. 71,500 (64 GB).
(Also see: iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c now officially available in India)
"Gartner believes the price difference between the iPhone 5c and 5s is not enough in mature markets, where prices are skewed by operator subsidies, to drive users away from the top of the line model," it added.
A contract-free and unlocked 16GB version of the iPhone 5c is available for USD 549 (about Rs. 34,700) in the US, while an unlocked and contract-free iPhone 5s can be bought for USD 649 (about Rs. 41,000).
In the July-September quarter of 2013, Apple's smartphone sales reached 30.3 million units, up 23.2 percent from the same quarter of 2012.
(Also see: Apple revises quarterly forecast after selling new iPhones in record numbers)
"While, the arrival of the new iPhones 5s and 5c had a positive impact on overall sales, such impact could have been greater had they not started shipping late in the quarter," Gartner said.
The firm added that there has been some inventory built up for the iPhone 5c, whereas the demand for 5s has been good leading to its stocks being sold out in many markets.
Besides, the research firm said that worldwide sales of mobile phones are expected to rise by 3.4 percent to touch 1.81 billion units this year compared to the previous year.
The firm, while giving July-September 2013 mobile phone sales data, said globally mobile phone sales touched 455.6 million units in the third quarter, clocking a growth of 5.7 percent from the same period last year with smartphones sales accounting for a record 55 percent of the overall sales.
Worldwide smartphone sales reached 250.2 million units, up 45.8 percent from the same quarter of 2012, it said.
(Also see: Quarterly smartphone shipments top 250 million for the first time)
"Asia/Pacific led the growth in both markets the smartphone segment with 77.3 percent increase and the mobile phone segment with 11.9 percent growth," Gartner added.
The regions to show an increase in the overall mobile phone market were Western Europe, which returned to growth for the first time this year, and the Americas, it said.