BlackBerry on Monday launched its much-awaited smartphone Z10, powered by its latest operating system 'BlackBerry 10', in India at a price of Rs 43,490, taking rivals Apple and Samsung head on in the world's second largest telecom market.

The Canadian smartphone maker has launched its latest model in India nearly a month after the global launch of new operating system 'BlackBerry 10' and two devices Z10 and Q10 on this platform on January 30. With BlackBerry 10, the company has "re-designed, re-engineered and re-invented" BlackBerry to create a new and unique mobile computing experience, he added.

Blackberry Z10 Specifications : 

- The new device is powered by a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, and has 2GB RAM. It comes with 16GB onboard memory, which can be expanded up to 64GB using a microSD card.

- It has 8 megapixel rear camera with LED flash, a 2MP HD camera in front and its connectivity options include Wi-Fi, 2G, 3G, 4G, Bluetooth 4.0, microUSB 2.0 and NFC.

- The device supports content in eight Indian languages — Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Devanagiri (Hindi), Gurmukhi (Punjabi), Gujarati, and Bengali — as well as support for third-party solutions for Indian language input.

- The BlackBerry 10-powered phones also boast of faster browser, larger app library and new features like BlackBerry Hub, BlackBerry Flow, BlackBerry Balance and Time Shift.

- The struggling smartphone maker, which re-christened itself as 'BlackBerry' from Research in Motion in January, is betting on the new platform to turn around its fortunes.

The Z10 competes with Apple's iPhone and those based on Google's Android operating system, which have gained popularity across the world.  BlackBerry, which faced strong criticism for lack of content on its application store, has also revamped it to take on Android's Play Store and Apple's App Store. The BlackBerry World storefront now includes over 70,000 BlackBerry 10 apps.

- On the features of the new Z10, out of the over 70,000 applications it sports, ranging from Facebook to Twitter to What'sUp to PVR Cinemas (PVR Wallet) to HDFC Mobile Banking, 8,000 have been developed in the country, BlackBerry's software portfolio head Vivek Bharadwaj said.

Recently it was reported that Apple became the second largest smartphone player in the domestic market in value terms after Samsung which controls nearly half the market, while the share of BlackBerry is below top six brands, trailing even Mircomax. However, the domestic market is huge as smartphone penetration is only about 4 percent.

The Z10 will be available in over 2,000 retail outlets across 50 cities in India and has partnered telecom operators like Aircel, Idea Cellular and BSNL for various offers. Have you pre-booked your BlackBerry Z10 smartphone yet? Click here- http://bit.ly/Z10prebook to pre-book and join us in the celebrations!

WhatsApp has confirmed that the native application of its very popular instant messaging app will arrive on the BB10 platform in March 2013. The news comes via the Twitter account of WhatsApp’s Neeraj Arora, who responded to a couple of user queries by saying “WhatsApp is coming to BB10 sometime in March.” Though no particular date has been confirmed, March is just a week away.

- ZTE Open sports a 3.5-inch touchscreen with a resolution of 480×320 pixels
- Powered by a 1GHz Cortex A5 processor
- 256MB RAM.
- 512MB of internal storage and a 2GB microSD card
- Supports Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth
- Alcatel One Touch Fire also has the same specs except that it offers 256MB of RAM.

 Huawei and LG are also expected to soon announce their handsets running Firefox OS. Mozilla will partnering with the likes of Deutsche Telekom in Germany, China Unicom in China, Etisalat in the Middle East and Telefónica in South America. Mozilla have also announced that the Firefox OS phones will be first launched in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela followed by other markets.

The Korean company Samsung announced on Sunday in Barcelona that the Galaxy Note 8.0 will have an 8-inch screen, putting it very close in size to the Apple's tablet, which launched in November with a 7.9-inch screen. It's not the first time Samsung has made a tablet that's in the Mini's size range: it's very first iPad competitor had a 7-inch screen, and it still makes a tablet of that size, but without a pen.

Samsung will start selling the new tablet in the April to June period, at an as yet undetermined price. It made the announcement ahead of Mobile World Congress, the wireless industry's annual trade show, which starts Monday in Barcelona, Spain.

The Note 8.0 fills a gap in Samsung's line-up of pen-equipped devices between the Galaxy Note II smartphone, with its 5.5-inch screen, and the Galaxy Note 10.1, a full-size tablet. Samsung has made the pen, or more properly the stylus, one of the tools it uses to chip away at Apple's dominance in both tablets and high-end smartphones. Apple doesn't make any devices that work with styluses, preferring to optimize its interfaces for fingers, mice and touchpads.

On Samsung's Note line, the pens can be used to write, highlight and draw. The screens also sense when the mouse hovers over the screen, providing an equivalent to the hovering mouse cursor on the PC. However, few third-party applications have been modified to take full advantage of the pens.

It's a competitive world and academia is not without its own challenges. With annual exams around the corner, here are a few online educational tools to help students augment and revise their curriculum, help them find the right career path; and even pick the perfect college.

 Merit Nation  : www.meritnation.com

Of all the websites mentioned here, Merit Nation has the most exhaustive collection of online academic content. It caters to all the grades across CBSE/ISC, ICSE and state boards of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Additionally, it also covers junior college for Science, Commerce and Humanities, and even has material for the IIT-JEE and NEET examinations.

Sign up at the site, and you are provided with a fairly large amount of free content. Subjects are listed on the left as icons, each with four sections: Study, Test, Revise and Ask & Answer.

The 'Study' section is formatted like a text book, with lots of text and diagrams; but it should be noted that several lessons also come with an additional video made by a teacher. The Test and Revise sections will let you assess how much you have learnt. The free material here is limited though.

Whatever course you are in, you can pay to upgrade to a basic or all-inclusive online course, which gives you everything you'd need. For school and junior college, the discounted price as of writing is 3,800 per grade. IIT-JEE courses range from 5,999 to 15,999, while NEET rates are between 4,999 and 11,999.

iPerform : iperform.classteacher.com

For those enrolled in a CBSE school, iPerform is a great way to augment classroom learning. Unfortunately, the site doesn't cater to other boards of education. Sign up for a free account for a few lessons that serve as a preview of the paid site; to unlock the full curriculum for any one grade, it costs 4,000 annually.

The site itself is divided into three parts: Learning Zone, e-Testing Zone and Interactive Zone. The Learning Zone is where all the lessons are imparted. Choose a subject (English, History, Physics, Maths, etc) and the lesson in it that you want to learn. Instead of a standard textbook format, iPerform has turned the chapters into slideshows, annotating each lesson with images. The e-Testing Zone offers three modes: revise, exercise or smart assessment. iPerform will analyze the student's performance and track progress, along with other parameters such as the student's focus, learning and present it all in the Performance Report tab.

India College Search : www.indiacollegesearch.com
 
India College Search is the only resource you will need to make up your mind. Fantastically designed, it streamlines the whole process. First, choose the field - engineering, management, medical, law, architecture, computers, hotel management and pharmacy.

Next, pick the course (for example, B Tech/BE or M Tech/ME) and the geographic location, where you can choose from multiple choices between states and cities. Hit 'Search' and you're ready to go. The results are a list of colleges with basic information such as whether it's a public or private institution, course duration, annual fees, and small icons to denote facilities such as hostel, gym, library, laboratory, auditorium, etc.

Once you know what you want, click that college and you will be taken to its landing page, which has photos, location map, overview and description, faculty, events, admission procedure, eligibility, and recent cut-offs. If you like what you see, hit the 'Add to Shortlist' button - a list you can access through your profile. India College Search claims to have over 7,000 colleges listed, of which 1,187 accept applications via the website.

Mera Career Guide : www.meracareerguide.com

If you already know what career path you are interested in, try searching for it; otherwise, go through the list of 1,374 topics to see something that catches your fancy. You'll be taken to a Q&A forum with questions from other students, and which have been answered by career counsellors, letting you learn a bit more about the subject.

The 'psychometric assessments' will let you measure your aptitude and fine-tune your interests. Choose your current academic level or go in for the all-age 'ideal career test'. Once you are done, Mera Career Guide will show you a preview of the full report that displays the education stream that's least recommended for you. For the complete report, you will have to pay 500 to access information on the best course for you, supplemented with a graph of your interests and aptitudes, your strengths and weaknesses, etc.

 
 INTERNATIONAL EDUCATORS:

Coursera: Regarded as the best website for online education, four of Coursera's courses have been deemed worthy of college credit. The material, spanning across subjects such as humanities, medicine, mathematics, social sciences, business, etc, are all designed by world-class professors. Learn at your own pace, test your knowledge and reinforce concepts with exercises.
www.coursera.org

Khan Academy: With almost 4,000 videos that will teach you about any subject you want to learn, the sheer number of topics covered here is Khan Academy's biggest selling point - and hey, it's all free. It has gotten plaudits from education experts across the world. Students are advised to make good use of the dashboard feature that lets them track their academic progress. www.khanacademy.org

TED-Ed I TED: The idea sharing platform, has an offshoot dedicated to education that is choc-a-block full of videos to help in learning. TED-Ed is not really academic or adhering to curriculum. The videos are meant to augment what you learn in a classroom. The best part is that each video comes with links to dig deeper into the topic, as well as multiple choice and short answer questions. ed.ted.com

MIT Open CourseWare: The world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has put a large amount of its under-graduate and graduate courseware online for anyone in the world to use, from lecture notes to full videos of classes. ocw.mit.edu

YouTube Edu: From Khan Academy to Stanford University, most online academic providers use YouTube as a partner; and the video-sharing service has put them all together under one roof, hosting over 7,00,000 highquality educational videos. YouTube Edu has short lessons from top teachers across the world, full courses, and videos from global thought-leaders. And yup, it's all free. www.youtube.com/education

Teachers go through these websites to support what they teach, but in no way can these replace the teaching that takes place in classrooms. None of these keep up with new teaching methods, especially since the CBSE board introduces many innovative methods regularly.

Arun Tadanki, managing director of Yahoo India & Southeast Asia, will leave Yahoo in July. He had joined Yahoo India as MD in 2009.

Tadanki's exit comes at a time when Yahoo is doing a major makeover under its latest CEO, Marissa Mayer, a Google veteran who took over in July last year.   A statement from Yahoo quoted Tadanki as saying that he had worked for 11 years in CEO roles for Apac/ emerging markets regions at multinational internet companies, and he was looking forward to playing a very different role within the internet ecosystem, beyond this region. No further details were provided about his plans, or who would replace him at Yahoo. The gain was marginal though, and Yahoo still is not keeping pace with the overall growth of the internet ad market. Mayer is Yahoo's fifth permanent or interim CEO since 2008.

A Yahoo spokesperson said about Takanki: "Under Arun's leadership, Yahoo India has seen impressive growth both in terms of users and advertising, outpacing the market. During the last 3 years, Arun also secured strong partnerships that drove 6-fold growth in Yahoo's mobile users in India. He led the formation of the editorial operation, delivering 15-fold traffic growth in Yahoo India's content properties. He played a key role in localizing the Yahoo experience with extensive local content partnerships across categories such as cricket, Bollywood, entertainment & news, in English and six local languages."

Prior to Yahoo, Tadanki was president of Monster.com's Apac & Middle East operations for seven years. He became part of Monster in April 2002 when it acquired JobsAhead.com, where he was head of sales and marketing. Prior to this, he worked as head of the culinary business at Nestle India,  where he spent eight years. He holds an MBA from IIM-Ahmedabad and an engineering degree from IIT-Madras.

Device	Codename	Factory firmware from Google
Galaxy Nexus	maguro	takjuoryakju
Nexus 4	mako	occam
Nexus 7	grouper	nakasiornakasig
Nexus 10	manta	mantaray

The PS4 has been announced by Sony! At long last we've had our first look at the new PlayStation and so far it looks very... next-geny.  With TechRadar in attendance at the event on the 20th Feb, Sony revealed some tantalising details about the hardware specs, along with some amazing software features that the new console will have.

PS4: Hardware Specifications

AMD, as we guessed all along, is coursing through this new system's veins.
Post-event, Sony revealed the system runs on a single-chip custom processor and utilizes eight x86-64 AMD Jaguar CPU cores, with a next-gen AMD Radeon based graphics engine powering the way.

The "highly enhanced PC GPU" packs 18 GCN units - that may sound a like a lot of techy mumbo jumbo but what it essentially means is that the GPU packs 18 processing clusters, each packing up to 64 cores. That provides a lot of parallel processing power, and will thus handle the majority of the PS4's grunt work. It hits 1.84 TFLOPS of processing mojo. Sony announced at the NYC event that the console will use GPU compute features to take advantage of this components raw power - it'll be used for general computation tasks as well as building graphics.

Memory

The PS4 will ship packing 8GB of GDDR5 memory. That's some super-fast stuff right there and should enable lightning fast performance. Indeed, Sony has revealed that you will be able to power down the PS4 mid-game and then switch it on again in seconds and pick up right where you left off. That's the sort of loading power that this memory enables.

Other Specifications

We're also looking at Blu-ray disk support plus good ol' DVD, plus HDMI output support as well as Analog-AV out and an optical digital output.

Despite the PS4's unveiling, and stiff competition from mobile devices, Sony is still actively marketing the Playstation 3. The company last week released the console in two different colours.
The new limited edition Garnet Red and Azurite Blue 500GB 'super-slim' units seem to represent one last push of their current generation hardware.

Source >> PS4 Live Coverage

• NEW: Built-in PDF viewer.
• CHANGED: Canvas elements can export their content as an image blob using canvas.toBlob().
• CHANGED: Startup performance improvements (bugs 715402 and 756313).
• DEVELOPER: Debugger now supports pausing on exceptions and hiding non-enumerable properties.
• DEVELOPER: Remote Web Console is available for connecting to Firefox on Android or Firefox OS (experimental, set devtools.debugger.remote-enabled to true).
• DEVELOPER: There is now a Browser Debugger available for add-on and browser developers (experimental, set devtools.chrome.enabled to true).
• DEVELOPER: Web Console CSS links now open in the Style Editor.
• HTML5: CSS @page is now supported.
• HTML5: CSS viewport-percentage length units implemented (vh, vw, vmin and vmax).
• HTML5: CSS text-transform now supports full-width.
• FIXED: Starting Firefox with -private flag incorrectly claims you are not in Private Browsing mode (802274).

The next update of the Android OS is out, going up to version number 4.2.2, while retaining the “Jelly Bean” moniker. Google has been slowly pushing out updates for their Jelly Bean OS, but their own Nexus phones are the only ones to get these updates instantly and we happen to have one in our labs.

For starters, once you’ve updated to Android 4.2.2, you will find that your downloads from the Play store will display an ETA. Computer users have had this functionality for a while now, so seeing it make it into a mobile OS is nice. We didn’t appreciate the mystery surrounding the time to complete a particular download.

Second change in the new OS is a tweak to the Quick Settings option. Long pressing Wi-Fi and Bluetooth now toggles them in the Quick Settings bar in the notifications instead of taking you to a settings page. This could of course be a little confusing, given that the Airplane Mode is still a single press toggle. So in total, some settings end up being single press toggles (airplane mode only), some are long press toggles and some options will still take you to the settings page.

Lastly, Google’s introduced a pair of new sounds, one for wireless charging and another for when the battery is low. Earlier, if the phone was being charged wirelessly, it did not make any audible notification, but 4.2.2 rectifies that. The sound for “low battery” has also been changed, which might come as a relief to some who found the older sound somewhat questionable.

Anonymous, a hacker collective, attacked the website of Indian Institute of Planning and Management -- www.iipm.in -- on Saturday morning, forcing it offline.

"#TangoDown iipm.in #IIPMScam. Reason: Got court order to block URLs criticizing them including the UGC (Govt Body) notice," noted a tweet made from @opindia_revenge, a Twitter account used by Indian hackers who claimed to be part of Anonymous. The hackers claimed they brought down 16 websites belonging to IIPM.

The attack on www.iipm.in left www.iipm.edu crippled as this website internally links to the content hosted on www.iipm.in. After the attack, the website was offline for nearly nine hours.

On Thursday the department of telecommunications had asked internet service providers (ISPs) to block 78 URLs (web addresses), of which 73 were linked to articles and blogs about the IIPM and its director, Arindam Chaudhuri. The directive was issued after an order by a Gwalior district court.  The list of blocked URLs included a public notice of July 2012 issued by the University Grants Commission saying that "IIPM is not a university within the meaning of section 2(f) of the UGC Act, 1956".

The web users also shared the text of blocked articles and created new URLs to host them. They talked about 'The Streisand Effect', a web phenomenon which notes that harder someone tries to suppress information on the web, the faster it spreads. On Twitter, UGC and IIMP were among the topics that trended in India on Saturday.

After 23 years of its launch, Adobe has finally released the source code for the original version of Photoshop. As unbelievable as it may sound, it’s true. The only catch is that this version of Photoshop was released in 1990 and was the first ever Photoshop to see the light of the day.

The Computer History Museum further announced that all the 128,000 lines of code, except the MacApp applications library for the Photoshop Version 1.0.1 are available for download. The release contains 179 files in a zipped folder, comprising of mostly uncommented but well-structured lines of code. Out of the entire collection, about 75% of the code is in Pascal and 15% is in 68000 assembler language.

The major part of the original source code was written by Thomas Knoll (Photoshop co-founder). The aim of the first version of Photoshop was personal use but later on the product went on to be a commercial success and is now one of the most widely used graphics editing software in the world. You can download the Photoshop version 1.0.1 source code and user guides from here and read its license agreement here.

Nielsen has released the findings of the Indian Smartphone User study conducted late last year, and the numbers thrown up are very interesting. The country currently has 900 million mobile phones in use, out of which 40 million are smartphones. Deeper into those numbers, the survey reveals that 50% of those 40 million smartphones are with people under the age of 25.

“Nielsen Informate Mobile Insights, an alliance between Nielsen and Informate Mobile Intelligence, polled more than 10,000 consumers in September and October 2012 across 46 cities in India to assess overall usage and device preferences”

In fact, 93% smartphone owners own only one smartphone. The study also found that smartphone users in India overwhelmingly prefer smartphones on the Android operating system. One of the reasons for this is the availability of Android handsets across various price points, starting Rs. 5,000 onwards Only half of the smartphone users polled did have an active data connection. Interestingly, the youth are leading the growth here as well, with more than half of all data users being younger than 25 years. Tablets is one device category that still has a long way to go before it catches the fancy of the consumers. Also, this highlights a huge opportunity for tablet makers, ready to be tapped. Of all the users polled and numbers captured by the survey, only 3% said they owned a tablet.