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  • Nokia Lumia 625 Coming Early September, Features LTE and 4.7-inch Screen


    The leaked news of Nokia Lumia 625 turned out to be true. The 4.7-inch-screened Windows Phone will be released to O2, Vodafone, Phones4U, EE, and Carphone Warehouse early in September for £200 in the UK. Continental Europeans will get it for 220 Euros. It joins a growing series that saw Lumia 620 launched earlier in the year.

    Lumia 625 has retained the resolution of its predecessor of 800 x 480 but the processing power has been bumped up to dual-core Snapdragon S4. Even though it has a hulking LCD screen, its 0.36 inches (9.15mm) make it much thinner than Lumia 920. The camera is a 5-megapixel module featuring Lumia 925's Smart Camera app and the animated gif-making Cinemagraph. The storage is average with 8GB of internal memory, and behind the removable back is a microSD slot.

    Being a Nokia smartphone, Lumia 625 comes with plenty of HSPA radio gadgetry, as well as LTE. The customization options include green, black, orange, and yellow cases, though Lumia 620's turquoise shade is missing.

  • Stream Nation Takes Private Video Streaming Global and with No Playback Limits


    Stream Nation     users in the US, UK, and elsewhere now have access to private video sharing that has no limit to the file size or length of video clip streamed to another browser, quite unlike Dropbox and Flickr Pro.

    Cloud storage platforms have vast differences in their specializations and Stream Nation focuses on private video streaming. Jonathan Benassaya, the service founder and co-founder of Deezer, says the concept was born out of the desire to share vacation videos with his family.

    The only hold-ups expected are that an uploader application has to be installed for storage of the photos and videos unless they are being brought over from Dropbox or another web platform. You may find this process a bit slow as a 90MB clip grabbed from Dropbox may take up to 20 minutes to be encoded. Also, videos can only be shared with registered Stream Nation users. Furthermore, anything exceeding 2GB has a price that can only be avoided when you stoop low enough to invite all your Google contacts, in which case you get a bonus 8GB.

    So this may not be exactly what someone who needs unlimited space might want, but it can come in handy if your family and friends are savvy enough to know how to respond to a Dropbox link.

  • iOS 7 Beta 4 Featuring Long List of Bug Fixes and Improvements

    The beta version of the upcoming iOS 7 release contains several improvements and bug fixes, and is set to be deployed only on dedicated iOS 7 beta software development devices.

    Apple Inc is constantly hitting the market with its innovations and updates and it has done it again with the iOS 7. It's only a few days after the massive security overhaul of the developer center and three weeks following the last beta release, and now the company has made iOS 7 beta 4 available for downloads.

    The biggest update since the original SDK's debut, Cupertino's upcoming release has already hit the airwaves featuring an extremely long list of improvements and fixes. Registered developers are receiving alerts of the update on their handsets but not the entire list of changes. To check everything out and prep yourself for the new experience, you can hit up the company's website.

  • Tracklander: the Must-Have App for Adventure Seekers

    App developers seem to have already made apps for all kinds of people. Some of these apps become an instant hit and rock the entire industry for months while others create a short-lived stir and then fade into oblivion. Tracklander is the app that's tailor-made for iPhone users with a bit of wanderlust, and it appears to be holding its own in a marketplace brimming with all sorts of apps for active travelers and adventurers.

    If you were to get a couple of days off work to relax, trekking or a road trip would be a perfect choice of recreational activity. However, a week is hardly enough time to properly plan a track. With Tracklander on your phone your entire trip planning will be taken care of and without blowing your budget. You are spared the hassle of using GPS, looking for tracks, and the like when preparing for the trip, as well as the prohibitive expenses of hiring a local guide.

    Tracklander has re-invented travel apps by offering a digital platform based on a new concept of "independent but guided" adventurers. It comes packed with a full range of unique tracks that are customizable depending on the user's preferred terrain difficulty and time at hand. Therefore, your iPhone becomes your easy yet absolutely safe guide.

    The app features a trackbook with numerous tracks in all sorts of destinations around the world for travelers to choose from; there are asphalt roads, off-road routes, mountain treks, and cities. Among these tracks are those suitable for SUV, 4X4, road car, trekking, cycling, and MTB, as well as trail, enduro, and road motorcycles. Each track has add-ons that Tracklander has included to create unique challenges graded from 1 to 5, shortcuts back to the main track if lost, escapes, days, and treats such as a waterfall, palm grove, vineyards, and beaches. Helpful features of the trackbook include photos of every upcoming junction, navigation help and area map, cultural info, and safety info.

    Thanks to Tracklander's ingenious technology, the app will work offline without the roaming hassles and frustrations of finding 3G deep in forests or atop mountains. It is able to produce its own offline maps by using Tracklander's graphical models, NASA's topographical contours lines, and OpenStreetMap. These maps are downloaded once when the iPhone user is downloading the track. You say bye bye to data connection fees when travelling abroad.

    See Tracklander in action:

    The tracks selected are the best adventure tracks in any given area. At the time Tracklander was hitting the App Store there were 33,973 miles of roads and tracks, 1,335 miles of cycle routes, and 667 miles of treks offered, which are equivalent to going around a quarter of the world, travelling from Copenhagen to Barcelona, and crossing Spain respectively.  The brave at heart can use the tracks for Morocco, Andalusia, Tuscany, and Transpirenaica while the rest can pick city-based track versions in Barcelona, Florence, and Lisbon. Even with this diversity, language is not a problem as the app supports English, Catalan, Spanish, German, French, and Italian.

    The app also has the Trip Planner, a featured functionality that enables social networking and sharing of experiences via blogs. You get to invite other Tracklander travelers and organize the trips.

    The app comes free. A number of both city and countryside tracks are also available for free. The rest of the track features vary in price depending on the area chosen and difficulty level. Generally it will cost you €2.99 for a half or full day's travel; €9.99 from one to two days; and €34.99 from six to ten days.

    Get Tracklander from the App Store. 

  • Google Upgrades Platform Cloud and Joins Microsoft and Amazon's Cloud Level


    Google has upgraded its platform cloud to include a dedicated memcache, rendering the company's technology characteristically akin to the floating silos operated by Microsoft and Amazon. The open source object caching system, Memcache, is a dedicated serviced for storage of key-value data from multiple servers in pooled RAM. Its adoption by Google App Engine (GAE) comes packaged in the 1.8.2 release of the platform cloud.

    Alongside the dedicated Memcache is support for Git Push-to-Deploy, which allows developers to use the Git code management service. Google has also introduced updates relating to App Engine Modules, which enable developers to break large applications into modular components capable of sharing services. These updates also include Eclipse and PHP support.

    Dedicated memcache will bring developers performance and capacity guarantees for $0.12 cents per gigabyte per hour. They will be able to purchase in-memory data caching capacity leading to more data being cached, and with a higher cache hit rate the applications will be faster and Datastore costs reduced. This is according to a blog post Google cloud product manager Chris Ramsdale wrote.

    Google's service will be competing with Microsofts's Windows Azure Caching with memcache protocol support and Amazon's Amazon ElastiCache. Websites that use Memcache are Craigslist, Twitter, and Wikipedia.

  • The Microsoft-Polar Team on Companion Web Demo via TV App


    Second screen experiences have become the "in" thing on mobile devices, as most TV viewers would attest to thanks to such apps as zeebox. Only problem is — two-way interaction is still unexplored and hence often limited to in-house efforts such as SmartGlass. Microsoft has made a move to spread this kind of integration.

    Microsoft is going into a partnership with Polar on a web app demo of the Companion Web. With this app, pages on two devices control and complement each other. TV viewers using Polar's app are able to register their opinions of a TV show using their phones and then watch as their votes are reflected on a matching site on their TV and tablet, alongside the page ranking.

    The Companion Web demo may not rival Google's Map Dive experiment in terms of details, but with features like Xbox One's Snap Mode in play it does make a good case for a present time where browsers are no longer novelties in the living room.

  • LG's Optimus G Successor Officially Named G2


    LG     is not taking the future of its premium smartphone lightly; it's taken its "G" game to a new level by developing a follow up to the original Optimus G and dubbing this new Snapdragon 800-based creation G2. LG G2 Becomes the company's first smartphone launched under the new "G" premium brand.

    The announcement made things clear between the new G2 and its predecessor Optimus. LG is dropping the Optimus name and elevating the G series to the company's flagship lineup. The new G devices are aimed at building upon LG's reputation of excellence that the older G Series products have already established.

    Perhaps this revelation is minor considering the world is already drowning in the so many leaked secrets of the smartphone, but this naming fits into a small piece of the puzzle we're all holding our breaths to see unleashed on August 7th.

    Other changes in LG's products include the rebranding of the premium 4:3 display smartphones as "Vu" and onwards. All series feature the familiar UX and next generation core technologies, but each series will highlight a distinct quality of LG's product expertise.

  • WebRTC Gets Role in the Vonage Mobile Apps Arena

    WebRTC (Real-Time Communications) is stepping outside its comfort zone this year. Already an authority in the browser-to-browser audio and video communications industry, WebRTC has now showed up in Vonage mobile apps.

    In an announcement by Vonage this week, the open source WebRTC has been given a central role in the company's mobile app plans. According to Vonage VP of Technology Research Baruch Sterman, the company was in deep during WebRTC's Native Stack development. This is a lower-level code that is unrelated to the browser stack.

    Vonage plans to use WebRTC apps alongside its existing communications infrastructure because WebRTC is interoperable with a number of technologies that include RTP Real-time Transport Protocol and the SIP signaling protocol.

    A report by Disruptive Analysis issued in February asserts that WebRTC is likely to outperform its press clippings to date. The report says that many underestimate the true scale and impact of the company.

    This is contrary to the less positive range of reactions it has engendered — a case in point is a recent coverage of No Jitter entitled "WebRTC: Who really cares?"

  • Samsung Already Shipping F9000-Series 4K TVs in Korea


    Samsung     made a recent announcement that it has already started shipping its F9000-Series 4K TVs in Korea. This comes as good news for the 100-plus Koreans who pre-ordered Samsung's 55-inch and 65-inch F9000 TV sets in June.

    At the beginning of the year, Samsung released the largest UHD TV in the world, the 85-inch behemoth. In the wake of its popularity, the company has now released the 55-inch and 65-inch UHD TV F9000 series.

    The picture quality of the F9000 series is four times higher than that of a full HD TV, thanks to a Quad Detail Engine, 4-step quality image processing technology, and super-resolution. This series is a similar alternative to the 85-inch in terms of functionality, but it comes at a more affordable price. This means you can expect the popular UHD Evolution kit support and the Ultra HD screen resolution, but at relatively modest prices.

    The 55-inch TV comes at $5,670 (6.4 million won) and its 65-inch cousin comes at $7,913 (8.9 million won).

  • Latest ownCloud Enterprise Edition to be Deployed Fully On-Premises

    The heat in the file sharing and sync space just went a few degrees higher as ownCloud made a move towards reassuring enterprise buyers of the security and reliability of its open source software, and satisfying the simplicity and convenience of end-users' needs.

    ownCloud is set to launch an updated Enterprise Edition next month. According to the software firm, the nearly one million users will be receiving an update they can deploy fully on-premises.

    Among the new additions and capabilities of this latest ownCloud EE are integration of home directory via CIFS/SMB or NFS, provisioning API, LDAP and AD integration, and AES encryption for data at rest. In short, there is integrating into existing governance processes, user directories, storage, monitoring, back-up, and security tools. Users can also get access to file sharing, file versioning, and external file system mounts by acquiring plug-in apps.

    ownCloud stored content can be accessed via mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, desktop syncing apps for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux, as well as through a web browser. As of July, the update is available at the official ownCloud website at a monthly cost of $15 for an annual subscription, the users being a minimum of 50.

    This move comes at a time when the file sync'n'share world is having escalated activity from the likes of Box and EMC. Box is adding glamorous speakers for its September BoxWorks customer event and EMC is revving up Syncplicity.