IBLOG SPACE

Nokia’s first Windows Phone will arrive in roughly a year’s time, according to Nokia India MD D Shivakuma. The exec told DNA India that the Finnish company is working on a roughly 12 month timeline, a move which would seemingly bypass Windows Phone 7 and instead see devices run the next version of the platform, codenamed Mango . Mango, we have heard separately, looks to be delayed until 2012 itself , which has likely put the dampeners on Nokia’s 2011 plans. The company had originally hinted at a limited Windows Phone range later this year, with “ a large number of Windows Phone devices over a variety of price points ” in 2012. As for this year, we should expect to see 40-50 new Nokia handsets in 2011 with around 20 of those being Symbian smartphones. In a regulatory filing last week , Nokia confirmed it envisaged a two year migration of its smartphone line to Windows Phone.

AT&T and Verizon both announced today that they will be offering free calls and texts to Japan in the wake of the devastating earthquake and tsunamis that have ravaged the country. Customers can call and text loved ones in Japan without incurring any additional monthly charges. AT&T’s offer is good for calls and texts made until March 31. Postpaid wireless customers will not be charged for international calls or text messages to Japan made from the United States or Puerto Rico. Residential landline service customers can also enjoy up to 60 minutes of adjusted billing relief. Wireless customers can text “redcross” to 90999 to give a $10 donation to help with relief efforts. Verizon’s offer is good until April 20th. And Verizon FIOS customers will now receive TV Japan free until March 18th to keep up with news in the country. The carrier has also set up a program for customers to easily donate money to different charities involved with the Japan relief effort: * ADRA Relief: text

With the Nokia and Microsoft partnership, the once promising MeeGo OS has been relegated to research and development status with very little chance of ever becoming a mainstream platform. However, that doesn’t stop developers from continuing to think up new UI concepts for the OS such as the one shown below, designed by Jozef Kocúr. This MeeGo OS concept was designed with Nokia tablets in mind, and borrows ideas from WebOS and Maemo. It utilizes a side scrolling structure with each panel then having a columns layout. A bottom menu features the main panel headings of Board, Applications, Now, Social, Media, and System. The Board panel appears to be a customizable dashboard type of page where widgets could possibly reside. The Applications panel is self-explanatory showing all available applications ordered by category. The Now panel looks to be a page for customizable news feeds and the Social panel is like a doorway to all your social network channels. The concept seems promising and m

Time Warner Cable has just made a big announcement, launching the first iPad app from a cable or satellite company that plays live TV. The app is free to download and will be available starting March 15. Only subscribers to both video and internet service via Time Warner Cable will be able to use the app. And, the app will only work in the home, when you’re iPad is connected to the company’s cable modem via WiFi router. “For all intents and purposes … this enables you to convert any room in a house into a TV room,” said Rob Marcus, the company’s chief operating officer and president. The app will play 30 basic cable channels in high definition with more channels to come soon. At this moment, competing cable companies only have iPad apps that act like giant remotes or might play video on demand. However, Time Warner Cable’s biggest competitor, Comcast Corp., has promised that its app will get the ability to play live TV before the end of this year.

Early last month, Sprint and Kyocera jointly unveiled the world’s first dual-touchscreen Android phone, the Kyocera Echo , in an event opened with an appearance by magician David Blaine. The device, however, turned out to be less magical but interesting nonetheless. And now its confirmed to ship this April 17 for $199 with a Sprint two-year contract. The Echo was touted as the tablet that can fit in your pocket thanks to its sturdy unique hinge design that allows it to unfold into two 3.5-inch WVGA touchscreens. The two screens running side-by-side creates an overall 4.7-inch display. Although the clunky form factor makes the device less sexy, it is still an interesting direction. Other features include a 5MP camera with flash, autofocus and digital zoom, 720p HD video, Stereo Bluetooth 2.1, external microSD card slot, and WiFi hotspot support for up to five devices. To be released with Android 2.2 Froyo, the Kyocera Echo can be pre-ordered starting March 26.

Previously, the world believed that the yummy chips coming in the iPad 2, those fabulously simple looking A5′s, were going to be TSMC. As Chipworks shows in their full teardown of the chip itself, the Apple A5 processor is fabricated by Samsung. Furthermore, several elements are discerned whilst comparing the chip to the A4 including memory, logic, and analog block areas. These are folks with either microscopes and precision tools or people with very very small hands. Either way, we’re excited to see the insides of chips! The image you see above on the left is the chip as you’d be able to see if you took the device apart using a couple of plastic tools and a hairdryer. The interesting thing you can see in this image (on the right, above,) is the fact that all those little dots are solder balls. What these little dots tell Chipworks is quite interesting – the ones you want to pay attention to are the tinier ones which are the flip-chip solder balls attached to the actual A5 die. As the

Oh you crafty bunch of re-animators you, Samsung, T-Mobile, and Google with your Android 2.2 Froyo, you’ve done it! You’ve given new life to the classic Sidekick and you’ve made it look… well… the same… but somehow fresh! And now it’s got Android on it instead of its own very limited OS. Let’s do it! This is the 4G way, with a design rolling around with a 3.5-inch touchscreen, a “pop-tilt” hinge, a five-row QWERTY keyboard in the classic Sidekick nature, and an overall messager-aimed telephone feel. Will it be the new king of mid-range? Perhaps! Inside you’ll find Android 2.2 Froyo, a 1GHz Cortex A8 Hummingbird processor, and a single front-facing VGA webcam with a yet-untold quality to it. Inside on the apps side, you’ll find a Sidekick Media Room that’ll play all the movies and music you want, the Samsung Media Hub for everything you could ever want to download, and a fabulous sounding app called DriveSmart. With the premium version of DriveSmart, you’ll get an automatic (non-premium

Google is believed to be readying an NFC payments trial in New York and San Francisco, offering customers the opportunity to make wireless purchases using their smartphone. The project is believed to begin within the next four months, according to Bloomberg ‘s sources, and use custom VeriFone terminals and – we’re presuming – Google’s Nexus S smartphone. The Nexus S was the first Android device to come with NFC functionality at the hardware level, though in its present form it’s locked down to reading tags such as those used in the Google Places rollout . Future iterations will be able to write NFC tags, as well as exchange information between handsets. According to the sources, Google will pay for the installation of “thousands” of NFC-enabled terminals across retail locations in both cities. The report speculates that each user will have not only their purchasing information but coupons, gift-card balances, loyalty cards and other subscriptions loaded onto the phone. The search gi

SSD manufacturer OCZ has announced it is acquiring Indilinx, a solid-state drive controller and software specialist. The roughly $32m deal – paid in common stock – will see OCZ acquire various patents around SSD technologies, including a high-performance smartphone/tablet solid state memory alternative called Tinkerbell. Indilinx has been providing OCZ with its SSD controllers since late 2008, though not exclusively for either company, and OCZ will continue to use other brands of controller after the acquisition is finalized. Similarly, Indilinx will continue to supply third parties with its controllers, and remain operational as a broadly separate business. The acquisition is expected to be finalized within a month’s time, and leave OCZ in a stronger position for developing its own in-house SSDs. Meanwhile, it should also allow the company to push further into smartphone and tablet storage.

Apple is reportedly readying a digital magazine template for inclusion in a future Xcode release, offering content providers a straightforward way to create iPad publications. The template would ensure more UI consistency between digital magazines distributed through the App Store, according to Gadget Daily News ‘ sources, as well as streamlining the implementation of in-app purchases. Until now, publishers have generally been responsible for producing their own digital magazines from scratch, leading to some interesting designs but a lack of uniformity not in keeping with Apple’s generally stringent UI guidelines. Xcode already features various app templates to ensure software is more uniform, and the rumored magazine template would aim to do the same for digital publications. Meanwhile, it would also open up the segment to a broader group of potential users, lowering the barrier to development. “Imagine a guy drawing and writing a comic book” the source suggests, “he can’t sell it to

Unofficial iPad 2 sales figures continue to circulate, in the absence of any official stats from Apple itself. The company’s official spokesperson Trudy Miller would only say that “demand for the next generation iPad 2 has been amazing”; however, a “well connected” source told Business Insider that Apple sold 7,200 iPad 2 units on launch day at its 5th Avenue Manhattan store. Estimates of iPad 2 sales have reached as high as 1m units over the launch weekend , with analysts vying to pinpoint Apple’s exact numbers. Some Best Buy locations reportedly sold out of their entire stock within 10 minutes, along with all accessories, though it’s unclear exactly how many tablets they had in to begin with. Constrained stock looks to be the biggest qualifier of sales success right now. Online orders have slipped once again, now taking 4-5 weeks from point of order; as of yesterday, they were listed as 3-4 weeks . Questions are now being asked as to whether Apple will be able to meet its ambitious

2010 was better for most firms that 2009, but there were still hard times to be had thanks to the slow economy. Those hard times didn’t affect Kingston though; the company posted its best year ever in 2010. The announcement was made this week that Kingston had the best year in its company history for sales in 2010. Kingston posted global revenue of $5.6 billion in 2010, which is as $2.4 billion increase from 2009. Kingston attributes that massive growth in 2010 to an increase in the average selling price and an increase in shipment volume. Kingston is one of the largest makers of all sorts of memory products from flash storage of RAM from computers like the new HyperX T1 kit it introduced this month. Kingston said that the rise in average sales price started in Q1 2010 and continues throughout the year. A lot of the increased profit was thanks to enterprise customers with growth in the Kingston OEM and Flash business divisions.

AdvanceTC’s MAGIC W3 Windows 7 smartphone grabbed attention last month with its combination of a chunky phone form-factor but full-fat Windows install inside. The company has sent over some videos of the MAGIC W3 in action, and as you might expect it’s a flexible little beastie. Video demos after the cut The 1.6GHz Intel Atom processor – paired with 1GB of RAM and a 32GB SSD – is seemingly good enough for HD video playback or running Photoshop, as shown in the demo videos below. Of course, you might not want to do much graphics editing on a 4.8-inch WVGA touchscreen, so the MAGIC W3 works quite nicely as a desktop replacement (albeit one that’s not going to keep up with your Sandy Bridge tower PC). What we still don’t know is battery life, though AdvanceTC has at least tried to balance Windows 7 and x86 realities with the sort of runtimes we expect from a modern smartphone. The MAGIC W3 supports wake-on-call or wake-on-SMS, allowing you to keep the ultraportable PC in sleep mode but n

A new Asus tablet called the TF101 has landed at the FCC to get the approvals it needs to hit stores in the US. The new tablet runs Windows 7 and its time at the FCC landed the approvals for its WiFi and Bluetooth hardware clearing the way for geeks to lay hands on the tablet. The full specs on the TF101 aren’t offered up, but we know a few things about the tablet. It will have a 10.1-inch screen and scuttlebutt says that the thing will run an Intel CULV processor inside like the TF101′s sibling the EP121. The pic at the FCC shows the tablet has what appears to be a carbon fiber look to the back. That’s all we really know at this point other than it has a rear facing camera onboard that you can see above the Asus logo at the top of the device.

Motorola has really built itself back up on the back of the Android operating system. For a lot of years Motorola was lagging behind competitors in the mobile phone arena but using Android the company has become on one of the more popular smartphone vendors on the market. Pics of three new smartphones that all run Android wearing the Motorola brand have surfaced. The three new smartphones are the Droid X 2, Droid 3, and a smartphone with the codename Targa. The Targa is the most interesting of the three and the pics show that the smartphone will run on the LTE network. Tweaked images of the device show a 13MP autofocus camera and the smartphone has the humpback of the Droid X smartphone. No other details are known at this point. The other two smartphones are the Droid X 2 and the Droid 3. Neither of these smartphones will run on the LTE network. The X 2 is said to sport the qHD screen and a dual core processor. The Droid 3 is supposed to have a new keyboard design. However, that keyboa

When I was a kid, we had an old school arcade pinball machine that my dad picked up somewhere. We played that thing all the time and I remember it has huge and crazy noisy when you played. If you want a pinball machine in your house but you want one that takes up less space than the real thing this DIY machine might be perfect for you. A geek going by tbarklay has constructed his own digital pinball machine using two LCD monitors, a computer, and an old PC table. The dude even posted the instructions for building your own version on Instructables . I really like the name he gave it – Pintendo. The geek says you need a PC with at least 1GB of RAM, but 2GB is better. A decent graphics card with dual output capability and a dual-core processor are ideal inside the computer running the show. The software uses dual cores and XP makes the best OS for the thing. The software it runs is Visual Pinball and hyperpin makes it playable. The playing field the dude uses is a 24-inch screen and a 19-

You can bet now that the iPad 2 is on the market rocking dual cameras that just about every competitive offering that hits stores will also rock dual cameras. HP showed off its TouchPad with a commercial with a dude and his son using the touchpad and a faux augmented reality app to see what his room would look like with wallpaper that has raptors on it. The footage was shown during the HP summit webcast and eagled eyed viewers noticed something in the video. The TouchPad in the footage had a rear-mounted camera on the top left corner. That is all fine and good, but the TouchPad has no rear camera in the real world. The TouchPad will have a gyroscope, but that rear-facing camera is apparently only the dream of the folks that made the video. The TouchPad is currently set for a June launch; perhaps specs will change before then. Three months is an eternity in the tech world.

I bet you have heard the commercials on TV and on the radio for the Progressive Snapshot discount program. Progressive Insurance many will send the driver a Snapshot device that they can plug into their car and the device will gather details on how they drive and then share the details with Progressive. If the insurance company likes what they see likes what they see you can get up to a 30% discount on insurance rates. The snapshot hardware is a little box that you plug into the OBDII port under your steering wheel on your car. It records information automatically and will then share it. Progressive says that the device is looking for things like gentle braking and driving fewer miles than the average driver in your state. The device also looks at how much you drive during peak hours of midnight to 4am. The hardware won’t be used to up your rates according to the company and it takes about 30 days for any earned discounts to show up. Progressive says the device captures no speed data

Apple has been accused of undermining web app performance in an attempt to pressure developers into coding for its App Store , selectively enabling JavaScript engines in and out of the mobile Safari browser so that web apps launched from the homescreen are penalized. Web apps run in Safari, The Register discovered, are 2-2.5x faster than those run from the homescreen, as they get to use the new Nitro JavaScript engine included in iOS 4.3 . “Apple is basically using subtle defects to make web apps appear to be low quality” one unnamed developer suggests, “even when they claim HTML5 is a fully supported platform.” Home screen web apps also lack access to the HTML5 Application Cache, and are rendered with the older “synchronous mode” system instead of the newer “asynchronous mode.” Whether Apple has intentionally left web app developers at a disadvantage is unclear; it’s claimed the company’s mobile Safari team is aware of the issues – which also affect some of the company’s own web-cent

There are many gamers looking forward to the launch of the new Nintendo 3DS. Some may think with the popularity of the DS on the market today that the 3DS is a sure fire winner for Nintendo. According to research firm Interpret , the 3DS has a tough fight on its hands to win the dollars of gamers around the country and the world. The 3DS has a lot of competition coming with the likes of the Sony NGP, Xperia Play phone and hoards of Android devices coming to market that will run the PlayStation Suite for gaming. According to data offered by Interpret, 79% of the gamers that say they intend to purchase the 3DS already own a handheld gaming device including offerings from Sony, Nintendo, and Apple. The firm says that the 3DS needs to differentiate in order to make it in the market. The 3DS will also see competition from the iPad 2. “Though the Nintendo 3DS distinguishes itself from the competitive set with its unique 3D entertainment features, it faces the challenge of entering an oversat

Verizon’s much-anticipated HTC Thunderbolt – the first 4G LTE smartphone to hit the carrier – has finally been priced and dated. The 4G handset will arrive on March 17 for $249.99 with a new, two-year agreement; to sweeten the deal, Verizon will throw in complementary mobile hotspot use until May 15. After that, using the Thunderbolt as a hotspot access point will cost $20 per month for 2GB of data. That’s on top of the regular (and mandatory) data and voice packages, which start at $29.99 and $39.99 per month respectively (for unlimited on-device 4G). Verizon reckons the LTE support is good for 5-12Mbps downloads and 2-5Mbps uploads in 4G coverage. As for the phone itself, there’s a 4.3-inch WVGA touchscreen, 1GHz Snapdragon processor and 8GB of onboard storage, together with a pre-loaded 32GB microSD. Twin cameras – 8-megapixels on the back and 1.3-megapixels on the front – along with a built-in kickstand round things out. More details in our hands-on .

Smart TVs and connected TVs are doing pretty well it the market right now. These sets give users access to web content on their TV without needing a new box or other device. Typically, you can stream things like Netflix and other online content with most connected TVs. One thing that the Best Buy Insignia brand is lacking is connected TVs and according to sources cited by Zatz Not Funny a HDTV packing in TiVo tech for Insignia might be in testing right now. TiVo and Best Buy announced last year that they would be working together on TiVo TVs and as of now, nothing has surfaced. The hint that the set might be in testing right now comes from the logs of a networked TiVo game with the string “has-recording-storage = false listed”. Zatz Not Funny reckons it could be a TiVo extender, but the TiVo TV for Insignia is more likely. However, there are some rumors that a powerline or MOCA TiVo extender might be in testing right now. The source on that extender testing also claimed that it will be

Intel may be invested heavily in MeeGo , but the chip company is also a realist; according to the latest reports, it is working with 6-8 notebook manufacturers – including Inventec and Compal – on a number of x86-based Android devices for an unveil next month. According to DigiTimes ‘ sources, Intel is aiming to showcase the new Android devices at IDF Beijing. Like with MeeGo, Android’s absence of licensing fees makes it a popular platform for system developers looking to minimize production costs. Android support for Intel processors isn’t new, but previously Intel has not taken particular interest in the project itself. Meanwhile, the company is also believed to be “working aggressively” with Google on Chrome OS based notebooks. Google has so far pushed out the Cr-48 , based on an Intel Atom CPU, but models from Samsung, Acer and ASUS are all expected in the second half of this year.

VUDU ‘s streaming movie service can now be found on Sony’s latest Blu-ray players, with a choice of 1080p 2D and 3D pay-per-view titles available. Promising 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound and, in many cases, availability on the same day as DVDs go on sale, the VUDU movies can be watched in 3D on Sony’s 3D-enabled hardware. The Sony BDP-S280, BDP-S380, BDP-S480, BDP-S580, BDP-S780, BDV-E280, BDV-E580 and BDV-E780W have all been confirmed as having VUDU support, though Sony’s entire Blu-ray line in 2011 will apparently get the service. VUDU pushed its updated UI to the PS3 earlier this year, with the promise of Move control coming later on .