Galaxy S4 Launch: Samsung‘s Time To Shed Copycat Tag

Samsung's latest flagship Galaxy smartphone goes on sale this week, as the South Korean giant seeks to cement its lead over faltering rival Apple in an increasingly saturated market.

The Galaxy S4, armed with eye motion control technology that will pause a video when the user looks away, comes with a faster chip and is thinner and lighter than the Galaxy S III.

Unveiled last month at New York's Radio City Music Hall, the touchscreen device goes on sale in South Korea on Friday and will roll out globally over the weekend.

The release of the Galaxy S4 comes as Samsung finds itself at something of a crossroads in a market that was once dominated by Apple's iPhone.

After years of following and refining the iPhone's pioneering innovations -- a strategy that resulted in bitter patent battles with Apple -- Samsung has dethroned its California-based rival to become the world's top smartphone maker.

With that title has come increasing pressure for Samsung to shed its copycat label and come up with its own game-changing innovations.

"Samsung has entered territory that it hasn't been in before, and sales of the S4 will show if can sustain its newfound status in the market," James Song, analyst at KDB Daewoo Securities, told AFP.

Recent smartphone launches have lost something of the glamour and excitement that surrounded the early iPhone releases, in part because they are seen as offering incremental technology upgrades rather than breaking new ground.

The S4's features include a high-definition, five-inch (12.7-centimeter) screen, enhanced picture-taking capabilities and the capacity to translate to and from nine languages.

Its release has been preceded by a massive promotional campaign -- from the glitzy launch in New York to lighting up the sails of Sydney's iconic opera house on Tuesday night with images shot by ordinary Australians.

Samsung -- the world's largest technology firm by value and also the top handset maker -- has boasted stellar sales growth, setting new records for operating profit in every single quarter of last year.

First quarter results, due on Friday, are expected to show a 53% surge in operating profit from a year ago to 8.7 trillion won ($7.7 billion), largely fuelled by smartphone sales.

Samsung is estimated to have shipped 65 million smartphones globally in the first three months of 2013, for a market share of around 30%, according to Taiwanese analyst firm DRAMeXchange.

Apple by contrast, reported on Tuesday that its quarterly profit had dipped for the first time in nearly a decade, with DRAMeXchange estimating its iPhone shipments at 37.5 million units for a 15.3% market share.

But Apple's iPhone commands a profit margin double that of Samsung's smartphone stable which holds a much wider range of devices for both low- and high-end buyers.

"Samsung still has a very long way to establish itself as a leader, not a chaser, considering it has never had a genius in innovation like Steve Jobs," said Song.

"But Jobs is no longer at Apple either and the company is struggling. That may help Samsung earn some time to come up with ways to become a market leader in every sense," he added.

JK Shin, the head of Samsung's mobile unit, said verdicts from global wireless operators to the Galaxy S4 had been "far more positive" than with previous models and predicted of a "good result" ahead.

More than 41 million units of the Galaxy SIII have been sold globally since its release last May, while the first and second editions racked up sales of 25 million and 40 million respectively.

Song said the S4 had the potential to reach the 80 million sales mark by taking advantage of Apple's recent problems with supply chain disruption.

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HP India Unveils World‘s Fastest Desktop Printer

PC maker Hewlett-Packard India unveiled its latest range of Officejet Pro X 500 series printers, which the company claims is the world's fastest desktop printer.

"HP's Officejet Pro X 500 series is recognised as the world's fastest desktop printer by Guinness World Records," HP Printing Systems PPS Director Nitin Hiranandani told reporters here.

Powered by HP PageWide Technology, the company said HP's Officejet Pro X Series can deliver professional documents at up to 70 pages per minute in General Office mode. They deliver high-quality documents at up to twice the speed and half the cost of colour lasers, he added.

The HP Officejet Pro X series and the HP Officejet Pro 3610/3620 Black and White series broaden the firm's Inkjet portfolio for businesses in India, he said.

"In 2012, India witnessed shipments of about 3 million printers as per IDC data, which included 1.2 million inkjet printers and 1.8 million laser printers. HP controls more than half of the market for both types of printers in India, he said."

HP Officejet Pro 3610/3620 Black and White series offers laser-like quality and performance at very low running costs, comparable to laser toner refills, he said.

"Enterprise workgroups and SMBs have told us they require technologies to improve efficiency and reduce costs and that's exactly what these devices do," Hiranandani added.

HP Officejet Pro X will address the needs of work-teams with up to 15 users printing up to about 4,200 pages a month and the users can also print from virtually anywhere with the latest mobile printing technologies such as HP ePrint.

HP Officejet Pro 3610 Black and White uses up to 50 per cent less energy than mono lasers and saves up to 40 per cent energy with the schedule-on and schedule-off feature. They come with a 2-inch mono graphic display and can print at ISO speed up to 19 pages per minute.

The HP Officejet Pro X Series is priced in the range of Rs 31,499-50,499, while the Officejet Pro Black & White series is priced in the range of Rs 7,999-11,999.

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Sony Xperia Z to hit Indian Stores On 12 March 2013

Sony has announced the Xperia Z and Xperia ZL for India today. The Xperia Z will be available in stores from March 12 onwards and is priced at Rs 38,990. Both phones will ship with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and are already up for pre-order on certain online stores. The two phones will be part of a staggered flagship strategy for the company in India, with the Xperia ZL arriving in stores later this month.

Both phones share many specifications, but we will start with a look at the Xperia Z. One of the biggest selling points for the Xperia Z is its water-proof and dust-proof body. The phone is IP57 certified, which means you can immerse it in up to 1 metre of water for 30 minutes. Despite this rugged heritage, the Xperia Z is incredibly slim at 7.9mm and also features a microSD card slot. Naturally, the back of the Xperia Z is non-removable.

The Z is powered by a Snapdragon S4 Pro SoC, which has four Krait cores ticking at 1.5GHz each. The phone has an Adreno 320 GPU for graphics and 2GB of RAM. All that coupled with Jelly Bean should ensure a very smooth performance. The display on the Xperia Z is said to be a stunner. The 5-inch LCD panel beams out 1920 x 1080 pixels natively, while Sony’s proprietary Mobile Bravia Engine 2 enhances image quality and colour reproduction.

Here's a promo for the Xperia Z, which shows the thinking and engineering that went into designing the phone.

The resolution and the screen size of the phone result in a pixel density of 441 pixels per inch. The display is protected by shatter-proof and scratch-resistant glass. Sony has also baked in niceties like an OptiContrast panel, which is normally reserved for their higher-end Bravia televisions. The technology improves image clarity and boosts the display's contrast ratio while minimising reflections.

The camera on the back is a 13-megapixel one with support for 1080p and HDR video recording. Of course, all of Sony’s camera bangs and whistles like image stabilisation, face detection and 3D Sweep Panorama are present.

Here’s a look at the key specs of the Xperia Z
5-inch TFT LCD with a 1920 x 1080p resolution, 441 PPI

LTE, Cat3, up to 100 Mbps DL, HSPA+, GPRS/EDGE

Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspotGPS with A-GPS support

Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP

GPS with A-GPS support and GLONASS

NFC

13-megapixel camera with HDR video recording, image stabilisation, Sony 3D Sweep Panorama; 2-megapixel front-facing camera with 1080p video recording

16 GB internal storage with microSD card slot

The Xperia Z has a non-removable 2330 mAh battery. Sony’s proprietary Stamina Mode technology should help in increasing battery life by throttling data-hogging apps when in standby mode.

Both the Xperia Z and the ZL will feature some exclusive Sony apps. The company has bundled in a subscription to the new Sony Jive music streaming service, as well as Sony LIV, a video streaming service featuring exclusive Indian content. The Jive service is free for the first six months and users can then opt to subscribe to it after the initial free period.

Here's a quick look at the phone

The Xperia ZL has the same display and processor as its big brother, but loses the water and dust-resilient body. Instead, Sony has managed to fit the 5-inch display in a body smaller than the Galaxy S3. The ZL has a small flap at the back, which houses the SIM and the microSD card slots. The back panel itself is non-removable and houses a 2370 mAh battery, slightly bigger than the Xperia Z.

Another unique design feature is the placement of the front-facing camera, which is housed below the display. The camera on the Xperia ZL is the same 13-megapixel unit as in the Xperia Z and has the same features, including the HDR video mode. The ZL also has an IR blaster and one-touch mirroring features, something that the Xperia Z gives a miss. One other neat inclusion is dual-band Wi-Fi support to play nicely with the 5GHz wireless band.

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Hired by Twitter for 80 Lakhs Per Annum, IITian From Madhya Pradesh Heads to California

It's a dream come true for 22-year-old Swapnil Jain, a computer science graduate from IIT-Delhi. Swapnil, who hails from Vidisha in Madhya Pradesh, has been offered a job by micro-blogging website Twitter - at a whopping package of R

s. 80 lakh per annum.

He is moving to California in October to start his new job.

"Twitter has offered me a software engineer's job during the placement in IIT-Delhi. It was my dream to work for companies like Twitter or Facebook. I have worked very hard and my efforts have paid off," he said.

Swapnil says this is the first time in the last two years that Twitter has hired someone from India. And he is thrilled.

"I want to represent my country and hope that I'm able to make my family and city proud," he said.

Swapnil credits his success to his family, especially his parents. His grandfather, Babu Lal Jain, is a well-known lawyer in Vidisha and his father has a jewellery showroom.

"I am very happy. He made this possible through his hard work and dedication," said Swapnil's father Sanjay Jain.

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Google Deploying Camera-Equipped Airplanes Over Cities For 3D Maps

Google Inc is deploying a fleet of small, camera-equipped airplanes above several cities, the Internet search company's latest step in its ambitious and sometimes controversial plan to create a digital map of the world.

Google plans to release the first three-dimensional maps for several cities by the end of the year, the company said at a news conference at its San Francisco offices on Wednesday.

Google declined to name the cities, but it showed a demonstration of a 3D map of San Francisco, in which a user can navigate around an aerial view of the city.

"We're trying to create the illusion that you're just flying over the city, almost as if you were in your own personal helicopter," said Peter Birch, a product manager for Google Earth.

Google's head of engineering for its maps product, Brian McClendon, said the company was using a fleet of airplanes owned and operated by contractors and flying exclusively for Google.

Asked about potential privacy implications, McClendon said the privacy issues were similar to all aerial imagery and that the type of 45-degree-angle pictures that the planes take have been used for a long time.

Google has used airplanes to collect aerial photos in the past, such as following the 2010 San Bruno, Calif. gas-line explosion, but the latest effort marks the first time the company will deploy the planes in a systemic manner to build a standard feature in one of its products.

By the end of the year, Google said it expects to have 3D map coverage for metropolitan areas with a combined population of 300 million people. The first 3D cityscape will be available within weeks.

This image released by Google shows a three-dimensional view of the Cliff House in San Francisco on Google Earth. (AP)

Google has for years operated a fleet of camera-equipped cars that crisscross the globe taking panoramic pictures of streets for its popular mapping service. The cars have raised privacy concerns in some countries.

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Sprint users: The hot new HTC EVO 4G LTE will hit stores this Saturday

If you're a Sprint customer up for contract renewal now or in the near future, there's a new hotness coming to town this weekend: the HTC EVO 4G LTE. Running the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, the svelte new smartphone features a 4.7" display, dual-core processor, 8-megapixel camera, Beats Audio, 16GB internal storage, and support for NFC for mobile payments and wireless data transfer.

As the name cryptically implies, the new HTC smartphone features support for Sprint's brand new 4G LTE network — so brand-spanking-new, in fact, that it rather barely even exists yet. The new device succeeds the original HTC EVO 4G launched back in 2010, which had the distinction of being the very first handset to run on Sprint's WiMax network — at the time, the first true 4G cell network in the U.S. It also had the distinction of having some pretty terrible battery life as a result, so we hope the new edition isn't plagued by the same frustrating shortcoming.

After a short delay at U.S. Customs over one of those pesky patent squabbles, the HTC EVO 4G LTE will finally be on offer at a Sprint store near you this Saturday, June 2, for an on-contract price of $199. Will you be picking one up?

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Google Launches Full-Scale Shopping in Search

Today, Google begins an experiment to change the way you shop online. When you search for a product, Google will deliver paid listings for shopping options right next to the search results. By searching for a product, you've demonstrated a possible intent to buy it, so Google has extended its search results with a department store where merchants can sell it to you.

Google is not selling products the way Amazon does. Rather, it's giving merchants who use its commercial ad model the opportunity to sell to you from the Google search results page. The ads aren't simply text. They include images and descriptions and current prices, and they only show items that are in stock. Google's shopping ads come with an API that lets merchants keep their listings accurate.

Google and merchants "have shared incentives to make sure this information is accurate," says Sameer Samat, Google's VP of product management for Google Shopping. These are ads, certainly, but they're also search results, and Google has to provide the most informative and accurate results here or else shoppers will head straight to Amazon. "It's about the reliability of the data. Consumer expectations have risen over the years, and this information needs to be accurate."

So instead of a mixture of small ads along the top, text ads on the side and shopping links inside search results, a large box will present Google Shopping ads within product-related searches. Google is testing a few layouts, but basically it will either be a row of products within the organic results or in a big box on the right side.

Sponsored listings will be clearly marked as ads, but they'll also be much more attractive than ordinary search results. They'll resemble the info boxes for the recently launched Google Knowledge Graph, except that shopping results will be marked "Sponsored."

Old Google product results:

New Google Shopping results:

Google's New Kind of "Paid Inclusion"

Google has long shown shopping results in Universal Search. "Universal" refers to organic Google results that are more than simple links to webpages, such as images, news stories, hotel rooms and flights. Those aren't ads, they're just different kinds of data than pure webpages, so Google gives them a different presentation.

But as Google has added more shopping opportunities to Universal Search, it has started to move toward paid inclusion. MarketingLand reported yesterday that this seems to violate principles Google laid out explicitly in the past. Google didn't do so-called "paid inclusion" before. Results floated to the top of search because their reputation on the Web was the best.

But with all these new Universal sections, Google has begun to sell the opportunity to be listed. It has to keep these results up-to-date and accurate, and the only way to do it is to charge the providers as ad partners. It hasn't compromised organic search, but it has created these big, attractive boxes - labeled "sponsored" for clarity - in which merchants can pay to play.

Merchants will now bid on the opportunity to be listed in Google Shopping results, and organic search results for other products will be less enticing. But this isn't a clear-cut case to point and laugh at Google's unfortunate "Don't be evil" mantra again. Google Shopping results will provide people who are searching for products with the information needed to make a purchase, and if they're just doing research, the organic search results will be there below.

If Google is going to make money off of searches for products, it's not just a matter of running text ads. Google has to make search results into a storefront. If it can pull off the presentation and convince merchants to pay and participate, Google could break people of the habit of going to sites like Amazon to shop.

The experiments start on Google.com today, and merchants can participate by setting up Product Listing Ads campaigns. There will be a transition period this summer as shopping results move away from free, Universal Search results toward paid listings. Google plans to complete the transition by this fall.

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Samsung Galaxy S3 hits store shelves in India

Samsung Electronics launched its flagship Galaxy S3 smartphone in India on Thursday, making an aggressive push to counter Apple's popular iPhones in a competitive market.

The 16 GB smartphone, priced at 43,180 rupees in India, runs on the Android 4.0 platform and features a 4.8 inch screen.

The Galaxy S3, powered by Samsung's quad-core microprocessor, also tracks the user's eye movements to keep the screen from dimming or turning off while in use.

Samsung packs new features such as the S Voice, its equivalent of Apple's Siri, and launched its own music service on the device. The S3 also boasts of an 8 megapixel rear camera.

"India is one of the top three strategic markets in the world for Samsung," a company release quoted H.C. Ryu, Samsung's vice president of sales and marketing, as saying at the phone's launch in India.

The company is aiming to outsell its previous model S2 that helped the South Korean firm topple Apple as the world's largest smartphone maker.

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Google Search Just Got 1,000 Times Smarter

The Google Search of the future is here. Now. Today. The long-talked-about sematic web — Google prefers “Knowledge Graph” — is rolling out across all Google Search tools, and our most fundamental online task may never be the same again.

Starting today, a vast portion of Google Search results will work with you to intuit what you really meant by that search entry. Type in an ambiguous query like “Kings” (which could mean royalty, a sports team or a now-cancelled TV show), and a new window will appear on the right side of your result literally asking you which entity you meant. Click on one of those options and your results will be filtered for that search entity.

To understand the gravity of this change, you need to know about the fundamental changes going on behind the scenes at Google Search. As we outlined in our report earlier this year, Google is switching from simple keyword recognition to the identification of entities, nodes and relationships. In this world, “New York” is not simply the combination of two keywords that can be recognized. It’s understood by Google as a state in the U.S. surrounded by other states, the Atlantic Ocean and with a whole bunch of other, relevant attributes.

As Ben Gomes, Google Fellow, put it, Google is essentially switching “from strings to things.”

To build this world of things, Google is tapping a variety of knowledge databases, including Freebase, which it bought in 2010, Wikipedia, Google Local, Google Maps and Google Shopping. Currently, Google’s Knowledge Graph has over 500 million people, places and things and those things have at least 3.5 billion attributes.

That’s a lot of things. According to Google, search users will see these new knowledge graph results at least as often as they see Google Maps in results. In fact, this update will have a greater initial impact than the updates that brought Google Images, videos, news and books, combined. It’s big and it’s probably going to be everywhere.

Summaries of Good Stuff

In addition to the window which will help users find the right “thing,” Google will also surface summaries for things, which, again, will try to be somewhat comprehensive by tapping into the various databases of knowledge. A search for Frank Lloyd Wright, for instance, will return a brief summary, photos of Wright, images of his famous projects and perhaps, most interestingly, related “things.” People who search for Wright are also looking for other notable architects. It’s a feature that may remind users of Amazon’s penchant for delivering “people who liked this book also bought or searched for this one” results.

Gomes said that the search results are tailored to deliver information that best relates to the initial search result. So the details delivered about a female astronaut will likely outline her space travel record, because that’s what people who search for her are, according to Google, most interested in.

Since this is a knowledge graph (“Web” might be a better word), the results are designed to help you dig more deeply into related topics. Google showed us how someone might start by searching for a local amusement park, find an interesting rollercoaster as one of the “things” that relates to the park and end up digging in on details about that coaster and other similar rides. It’s a “skeleton of knowledge that allows you to explore information on the web,” said Gomes.

There is the potential, Gomes added, of serendipitous discovery. The more you dig into things, the more things you learn about.

Of course, not every “thing” is the right thing. Wikipedia is, for example, a community-sourced encyclopedia that is known for both its breadth and depth of information and the occasional whoppers of misinformation it stores. Google’s Knowledge Graph includes an error reporting system. When users find misinformation, Google will share it with the source and the knowledge graph will get just a little bit smarter

For now, though, the Knowledge Graph is not getting any smarter about you. If you search for an ambiguous topic and then guide Google Search to the more defined set of results, the same query later will not go directly to that filtered information — at least not yet. “We don’t have anything to announce for personalization,” said Gomes.

The Competition

Google’s chief search competitor, Microsoft Bing, also has millions of entities, but it’s not aiming for the purely semantic model of search results. Instead, Bing execs told Mashable that it’s focusing, in part, on much smaller set of segments that its users typically search on (i.e.: restaurants, hotels, movies) and trying to surface relevant information regarding those segments. A search result for hotels, for example, might include reservation tools. And while Google search now blends in Google+ results, Bing’s latest instantiation has moved social information to the right side of its search results page

It’s unclear for now how the Google Knowledge Graph, which pushes aside keyword results in favor of relationships and artificial intelligence, impacts all the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) many web sites have done to push their search rank ever higher. Also unknown is how, if at all, Google’s sea change will impact Google+. Gomes revealed that some Google+ changes were coming “independent of this” update and that Google will be talking about them separately.

Eventually, Google’s search will get smarter and will stop asking for your help to understand your query and start answering complex questions like “What is the coldest lake in the world in July?” It doesn’t matter why you want to know that, just that, someday, the right answer will be a click away on Google Search.

Google’s Knowledge Graph will roll out across the U.S. (and on all Google platforms: desktop, mobile, tablet) in the coming days. Eventually, it will go global. Give it a try and let us know what you think of the brand new Google Search in the comments.

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3G Capable BlackBerry Curve 9320 Announced, To Arrive In June

RIM has announced a new BlackBerry phone – the Curve 9320, an entry-level device with 3G capabilities and BlackBerry OS 7.1, which according to the latest reports, is expected to arrive in India sometime in June. Pricing is as of yet unknown, but it is expected to be anywhere between Rs. 12,000 and Rs. 14,000, looking at where it would fit in the BlackBerry lineup.

The BlackBerry Curve 9320, first spotted in early March, is essentially the 3G-variant (7.2Mbps down, 5.76Mbps up) of the recently launched Curve 9220 (read our review), and shares most of its features, apart from a larger 3.15MP camera (compared to the 9220’s 2MP offering), with flash and image stabilization, as well as the GPS connectivity sorely-lacking in the 9220.

Common specifications include a 2.44-inch 320x240 pixel display, 512MB of RAM, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n connectivity, stereo FM radio, 512MB of ROM, microSD card slot support up to 32GB, and a 1450 mAh battery, which is rated to deliver up to 7 hours of talk-time, and 30 hours of continuous FM radio playback. The Curve 9320 should also arrive in the same range of colours as the 9220.

Of course, like the Curve 9220, the Curve 9320 will come with the new dedicated BBM-button, for one-click access to the platform’s many integrated features. RIM has also added Parental Controls, allowing for feature and app access restrictions in BBOS 7.1. When introducing the smartphone, Carlo Chiarello, EVP of RIM’s Smartphone Business division, said:

“The new BlackBerry Curve 9320 is designed to make it easy for users to stay socially-connected. The new BlackBerry Curve 9320 will be especially popular with customers upgrading to a smartphone for the first time and existing Curve customers looking for a step up in speed and functionality.”

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Facebook Launches App Store, Seeks iPhone Magic

Facebook says it is launching an app store that will allow people to get access to social apps on the network, without much heavy lifting. The company made the announcement in a blog post today. The company is hoping that the new app store will make it easy for apps to be discovered on the platform.

Facebook, lately has been trying hard to make the world aware of its role in the fast growing app economy.

For instance, it has been talking up the success of video apps such as Socialcam and Viddy, and points to how it has turbocharged the downloads on Apple’s iOS platform. Of course the success of those apps and their post-download usage is debatable, for many view them as spam. In addition, there was been some talk of social news readers losing some traction after a fast start, that has made some question Facebook’s role in the app-economy.

In a blog post on their developer blog, Facebook’s Aaron Brady notes:

In the coming weeks, people will be able to access the App Center on the web and in the iOS and Android Facebook apps. All canvas, mobile and web apps that follow the guidelines can be listed. All developers should start preparing today to make sure their app is included for the launch.

For the over 900 million people that use Facebook, the App Center will become the new, central place to find great apps like Draw Something, Pinterest, Spotify, Battle Pirates, Viddy, and Bubble Witch Saga. Everything has an app detail page, which helps people see what makes an app unique and lets them install it before going to an app.

The App Center is designed to grow mobile apps that use Facebook – whether they’re on iOS, Android or the mobile web. From the mobile App Center, users can browse apps that are compatible with their device, and if a mobile app requires installation, they will be sent to download the app from the App Store or Google Play.

Facebook is also betting on creation of paid apps and building an ecosystem around those apps.

Many developers have been successful with in-app purchases, but to support more types of apps on Facebook.com, we will give developers the option to offer paid apps. This is a simple-to-implement payment feature that lets people pay a flat fee to use an app on Facebook.com. If you are interested in the beta program, please sign up to receive more information.

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Samsung's 2012 Smart TV range arrives in India

Samsung Electronics has announced the launch of the 2012 range of Smart TVs in India. The three series that arrive here are the LED ES8000, LED ES7500 and the Plasma E8000. These televisions have the voice control, motion control and facial recognition features to add to the whole ecosystem of apps and online content.

We have covered the launch of these Samsung televisions in detail, earlier this year, at an event in Bangkok. Check out our previous coverage as well as a video of these televisions in action here.

Announcing the launch of the Samsung 2012 Smart television series, Mr. Raj Kumar Rishi, VP & Business Head, Audio Visual Business, Samsung India said, “Samsung’s global leadership in televisions has rested on our continued thrust on innovation and excellence. 

In India too, we have been the first to introduce the latest, innovative technology products such as LED TVs, 3D TVs and now 2012 Smart Television series. Samsung’s 2012 TV and AV strategy rests on three pillars: Smart Interaction, Smart Content, and Smart Evolution, and our 2012 Smart television range exemplifies the same. I am confident that the new Smart television range will help us create new segments and further fuel the growth of the flat panel television market in India.”

A dual-core processor powers these televisions, which also boast of the AllShare feature that will allow wireless sharing of media to the television from Samsung smartphones, tablets and cameras, power Samsung’s new Smart TV range.

What we see for the first time is the Smart Evolution kit, which will allow users to upgrade the hardware on the televisions, without needing to buy another one. These kits will hit markets in 2013.

Samsung’s entire Flat Panel TVs product portfolio has models that are priced in the range between Rs. 12,800 to Rs. 273,000.

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Nokia 808 PureView To Launch First in India And Russia, This May

Nokia has announced it will begin rolling out the Nokia 808 PureView cameraphone in select markets in May. The Finnish mobile giant also announced that India, and Russia, will be the first two markets to get the PureView on retail shelves.

The Symbian Belle-based Nokia 808 PureView, or PureView 808 as it was first known, stole the show when it was unveiled at MWC 2012, receiving the Best Mobile Device award at the prestigious event.

Even in our own ThinkDigit Weekly Poll, which asked readers “Which top-end smartphone unveiled at MWC do you most fancy?” the Nokia 808 PureView won out, displacing the quad-core processor powered flagships – the LG Optimus 4X HD, HTC One X (read our review), and Huawei Ascend D Quad – at least in terms of reader interest.

In the meanwhile, the Nokia 808 PureView has also won the award for Best Imaging Innovation for 2012 from the Technical Image Press Association (TIPA). Jo Harlow, Head of Smart Devices at Nokia, spoke about the importance of the device in the entire smartphone industry, saying:

“PureView has completely raised the bar on imaging performance for the whole smartphone industry - and Nokia is not stopping here. We’re going to carry on developing PureView for our future smartphones in ways that will again revolutionize the imaging experience.”

The Nokia 808 PureView features an extra-large 41MP sensor, along with high-performance Carl Zeiss optics and new pixel oversampling technology. Offering a maximum image resolution of 38MP, the Nokia 808 PureView’s camera sensor condenses 7 adjacent pixels into one, downsizing it to an extra-sharp and light-sensitive 5MP or 8MP image. Max image quality at 4:3 aspect is 38 MP, while at 16:9 aspect is 34 MP.

The Nokia 808 PureView also features a built-in Xenon flash, alongside a LED light for video. It can handle 1080p HD video recording at 30 fps, with stereo sound, and 4x zoom. Nokia has also included the Nokia Rich Recording feature, which enables audio recording at CD-like levels of quality, previously only possible with external microphones. It also comes with Dolby Headphone technology, transforming stereo content into a personal surround sound experience over any headphones and Dolby Digital Plus for 5.1 channel surround sound playback.

While all this probably makes the Nokia 808 PureView the greatest cameraphone to date, Nokia has decided not to put too much juice into the rest of the phone’s specifications – it features a relatively low-resolution 640x360 pixel Gorilla Glass AMOLED display, albeit with a 16:9 display.

Other specifications include a single-core 1.3GHz processor, 512MB of RAM, 16GB built-in storage, USB-on-the-Go, Bluetooth 3.0, HSDPA 14.4Mbps, HSUPA 5.76Mbps, Wi-Fi N with DLNA, GPS and A-GPS, stereo FM radio, and even NFC connectivity.

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Samsung Announces Galaxy S III with S Voice And A Bunch of Other IOS Features

Samsung announced the Galaxy S III today at the Unpacked event in London. Apple’s biggest competitor in the smartphone space, and the only other manufacture making any significant profit, showed off the upgraded 4.8-inch 720P SuperAMOLED display device that now weighs 133 grams among other minor spec improvements.

A few of the features shown off were S-Voice, which is like Siri (on-stage presenter asked for the news and got the weather), Scan and Match for Music (iTunes Match), and Airplay-like “AllShare Cast” for streaming content to your HDTV through the AppleTV-like AllShare Cast Dongle. Samsung also named its iPod nano-like music player ”Pebble,” which bears a resemblance to the iOS Kickstarter watch that goes by the same name.

One cool new thing is a face recognition photo app. It lets you instantly send pictures to your friends that it recognizes in your pictures. The S III also has a pop-up player, which is sort of an app version of picture-in-picture that allows you to watch a movie while you switch around to other applications.

Initial reviews seem a little luke-warm on the device. Most call it an incremental update from the S II with new features that also brought some new flaws.

Oh, and Phil Schiller will not like this news: Flipboard for Android is debuting on the S III.

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YouTube to Offer More Than 100 Online Channels of Original Programming

The people behind the Tribeca Film Festival are getting a channel, but unlike the channel from the people behind the Sundance Film Festival, don't look for it on television.

Tribeca Enterprises, the parent of the Tribeca Film Festival, is teaming up with Maker Studios to create a channel on YouTube.com, named the Picture Show, that is to go live later this year.

The channel on YouTube, which is part of Google, will be a home for online series and short films, rather than the feature-length movies that are released by Tribeca Film in theaters and on the video-on-demand channels on cable systems.

"We believe bringing content to audiences across multiple platforms is the right strategy," said Jon Patricof,president and chief operating officer at Tribeca Enterprises. As a result, "digital platforms like YouTubeare highly important," he said.

The Picture Show was among several channels that were announced by executives of YouTube and Google at a presentation in New York on Wednesday; others include Team USA, a channel for the US Olympic Committee, and Wigs, a channel aimed at women.

The intent is for YouTube to offer more than 100 online channels of original programming; shows on some of the initial channels are being sponsored by advertisers like AT&T, General Motors, Toyota and Unilever.

The YouTube presentation completed two weeks of events, hosted by digital media companies, that were intended to help attract money from marketers that might otherwise be spent on the most popular advertising medium of them all, television.

"Because television is the largest piece of the pie, it's the one everybody's going to nibble at," said Zain Raj, chief executive at Hyper Marketing in Chicago, which owns agencies in fields like digital, direct and shopper marketing.

Television ad spending in the United States last year totaled $71.8 billion, Nielsen reported this week, up 5 per cent from 2010 and perhaps the first time the figure has topped $70 billion.

The digital media events were held under the portmanteau Digital Content NewFronts - as in a new version of the upfronts, the presentations that broadcast networks and cable channels make each spring to marketers ahead of the fall TV season. The impetus for the NewFronts was the increasing willingness of consumers to watch video online and on devices like smartphones and tablets.

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Gmail Gets Translation Capability

Google announced on Tuesday that Automatic Message Translation -- a Gmail feature that translates messages from one language to another -- has graduated from Gmail Labs.

Jeff Chin, a product manager for Google Translate, wrote in a blog post on the official Gmail blog that because message translation was among the most popular labs, "we decided it was time to graduate from Gmail Labs and move into the real world."

Hyderabad: Gmail users will now be able to translate e-mails in foreign languages into the their own, with Google introducing a new feature.

Google on its official Blog has said a new 'Translate message' header will be soon introduced in Gmail.

"Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email. The next time you receive a message in a language other than your own, just click on Translate message in the header at the top of the message," Jeff Chin, Product Manager, Google Translate, said.

The idea mooted after Google introduced automatic message translation in Gmail Labs and prompted the labs team to go for a survey in which the teams found the necessity of Gmail message translation.

"Since message translation was one of the most popular labs, we decided it was time to graduate from Gmail Labs and move into the real world. Over the next few days, everyone who uses Gmail will be getting the convenience of translation added to their email," Chin added.

The feature also automatic translation feature. Google had recently announced that it is increasing everyone's free storage in Gmail from 7.5 GB to 10 GB.

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