Only 503 Microsoft Kins Sold?

Barely days after Microsoft s (in)famous Kin disaster wherein the company had to take the not-so-difficult decision of scrapping the entire project, here comes a shocker. According to one rumour, Microsoft, in all actuality, sold a total of just 503 Kins. That s including both the handsets.

While the 503 figure does seem unrealistic, this is what is the number claimed by John Gruber of Daring Fireballs who in turn claims to have heard it from an unnamed source from Microsoft. There is a different twist to the story as well with Pocketnow pointing out another interesting stat. Pocketnow noted that the Kin, being a social networking handset, came with a Facebook application. The interesting thing about this app is that this app is specific only to the Kin and using it one can actually see the number of monthly active users of the application. Since this app can only be used on a Kin, a rough estimate of the number of Kins out there can be guessed by the number of users that are connected to Facebook using it. This number is way off the 503 mark and is somewhere close to the 8,000 mark. Having said that, even 8,000 isn't such an awe inspiring number but heck, it is anytime better than the 503 figure we first heard.

                                                                                               Kin One
                                                       
In a different twist to the story, according to Business Insider, the fact that even Microsoft employees weren't particularly impressed or hopeful about the Kin is somewhat evident from the sentiments from the blog posts at Mini Microsoft, a blog of sorts where Microsoft employees rant about their problems. The blog has interesting quotes from people who are either current Microsoft employees or had worked for the company and left it as well, looking for greener pastures. A former Danger employee (Microsoft took over Danger) calls Microsoft a "dysfunctional organization where decisions were made by politics rather than logic". Another person commented, "I for one can't believe that no one has been axed over the Kin debacle. Billions of dollars were wasted, not to mention all of the smart people over there who spent 3 years with no return on the investment."

                                                                                             Kin Two

With the kind of things going on at Microsoft, looks like it is going to have a big task at hand ensuring Windows Phone 7 doesn't end up like the Kin.

Google Voice Opens Up, No More Invites Required

Google has announced that its Google Voice service would now be available for all U.S. citizens - without the need of an invite.

In a blog post announcing the decision, Google Voice product manager Craig Alker quipped, "We're proud of the progress we've made with Google Voice over the last few years, and we're still just scratching the surface of what's possible when you combine your regular phone service with the latest web technology."

Since the service was launched in U.S., Google Voice has managed to garner a decent userbase of about 1 million users. If you are one of those people who are wondering what Google Voice is all about, let us explain briefly. Google Voice basically gives you a single phone number that can be used to reach you if you have multiple numbers. Google Voice also offers its own voicemail message transcription service.

Google Voice was in the news not long ago when Apple blocked the Google Voice application from entering its App Store saying that it duplicated native iPhone capabilities. This led to the once good friends turn into foes.

Standard phone charger coming soon

An energy efficient standard charger for all mobile phones will soon be introduced in the global market, said International Telecommunication Union (ITU), a leading United Nations agency for Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) issues.

ITU officials announced on the first day of World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC-10) that standard mobile phone charger is ready to be introduced in the market. The new Universal Charging Solution (UCS) underlines the role of ICT in providing solutions towards mitigating climate change.

Director of ITU's Telecommunication Standardisation Bureau (TSB), Malcolm Johnson, told reporters on the sidelines of the conference that it was a significant step in reducing the environmental impact of mobile charging.

He said UCS would reduce 13.6 million tonnes of CO2 emissions each year and 82,000 tonnes of redundant chargers.

Johnson said the telecom industry led the development of UCS and hence it would be universally accepted by the telecom companies.

The standardisation of technology enables the same charger to be used for all future handsets, regardless of make and model. It will cut the number of chargers produced, shipped and subsequently discarded as new models become available.

The new standard will mean users worldwide will be able to charge their mobiles anywhere from any available charger, while also reducing the energy consumed while charging.

The new UCS standard was based on input from the GSMA, which predicts a 50 per cent reduction in standby energy consumption.

Consumermate - The Ultimate Buying Destination for Mobiles, Digital Cameras and Laptops

Do you have a passion for photography? Are you worried of what camera you have to buy? Are you looking forward to buy a good digital camera that offers great features at a resonably fair price? Do you want to know about the latest deals and offers around? If so, I recommend you to login to this site ConsumerMate.com, a 9.9 Media initiative, where you can browse over a huge collection of cameras and choose the one that you feel is affordable and pleasing.

If you are looking for buying a higher-end digital camera, you can choose the SLR Digital Cameras, that, unlike the normal digital cameras, they have more advanced features like Live Preview, Optical Image Stabilization etc. Nikon has some of the best SLR cameras and ConsumerMate has compiled and categorized all of these based on their features. Just search ConsumerMate for SLR Nikon and you will get a whole lot of Digital Cameras come popping up. The Digital Cameras section not only offers banking options, hot deals and discounts etc., but it also helps prospective buyers zero in on a particular model that is best suited for them. You can find expert reviews for each product and they are provided by the Digit Test Center, India's No.1 Research Lab.

Apart from the Digital Cameras section, ConsumerMate.com also has Mobile Phones section where users can check all latest mobile phones price and their features. An LCD TV section and a Laptop section are also available that helps user in buying their respective products. So friends, I am pretty sure that you wouldn't have any difficulty in buying your gadget as ConsumerMate will become your ultimate buying destination for Mobiles, Digital Cameras and Laptops. Comments about your experiences with the site are always welcome! Good luck Readers!

Facebook lands women into Dark Net

A mother and her two daughters logged onto Facebook from mobile phones last weekend and wound up in a startling place - strangers' accounts with full access to troves of private information.

The glitch - the result of a routing problem at the family's wireless carrier, AT&T - revealed a little known security flaw with far reaching implications for everyone on the Internet, not just Facebook users.

In each case, the Internet lost track of who was who, putting the women into the wrong accounts. It doesn't appear the users could have done anything to stop it.

The problem adds a dimension to researchers' warnings that there are many ways online information - from mundane data to dark secrets - can go awry.

Several security experts said they had not heard of a case like this, in which the wrong person was shown a Web page whose user name and password had been entered by someone else. It's not clear whether such episodes are rare or simply not reported. But experts said such flaws could occur on e-mail services, for instance, and that something similar could happen on a PC, not just a phone.

"The fact that it did happen is proof that it could potentially happen again and with something a lot more important than Facebook," said Nathan Hamiel, founder of the Hexagon Security Group, a research organization.

Candace Sawyer, 26, says she immediately suspected something was wrong when she tried to visit her Facebook page Saturday morning.

After typing Facebook.com into her Nokia smart phone, she was taken into the site without being asked for her user name or password. She was in an account that didn't look like hers. She had fewer friend requests than she remembered. Then she found a picture of the page's owner.

"He's white, I'm not," she said with a laugh. Sawyer logged off and asked her sister, Mari, 31, her partner in a dessert catering company, and their mother, Fran, 57, to see whether they had the same problem on their phones.

Mari landed inside another woman's page. Fran's phone - which had never been used to access Facebook before - took her inside yet another stranger's page, one belonging to a young woman from Indiana. They sent an e-mail to one of their own accounts to prove it.

They were dumbfounded. "I thought it was the phone. Maybe this phone is just weird and does magical, horrible things and I have to get rid of it," said Candace Sawyer.

The women, who live together in East Point, Georgia, outside Atlanta, had recently upgraded to the same model of phone and all used the same carrier, AT&T. The problem wasn't in the phones. It was a flaw in the infrastructure connecting the phones to the Internet.

That illuminates a grave problem. Generally Web sites and computers are compromised from within. A hacker can get a Web page or computers to run programming code that they shouldn't. But in this case, it was a security gap between the phone and the Web site that exposed strangers' Facebook pages to the Sawyers. Misconfigured equipment, poorly written network software or other technical errors could have caused AT&T to fumble the information flowing from the Sawyers' phones to Facebook and back.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said its wireless customers have landed in the wrong Facebook pages in "a limited number of instances" and that a network problem behind those episodes is being fixed.

It's unclear how many people were affected by the problem the Sawyers discovered, and whether it was limited to Facebook.

The reason all three women experienced the glitch is a function of the way cellular networks are designed. In some cases, all the mobile Internet traffic for a particular area is routed through the same piece of networking equipment. If that piece of equipment is misbehaving or set up incorrectly, strange things happen when computers down the line receive the data.

Usually that means a Web site simply won't load, said Alberto Solino, director of security consulting services for Core Security Technologies. In the Sawyers' case, ``somehow they got the wrong user but they could keep using that account for a long period of time. That's what's strange,'' he said.

The AP tried to contact two of the people whose Facebook pages were exposed to the Sawyers, but the calls and e-mails were not returned. It's unclear whether they are also AT&T customers, though security experts said that's likely the case.

Indeed, it was the case in a similar incident in November. Stephen Simburg, 25, who works in marketing, was home for Thanksgiving in Vancouver, Washington, when he logged onto Facebook from his cell phone. He didn't recognize the people who had written him messages.

"I thought I had gotten really popular all of a sudden, or something was wrong," he said. Then he saw the picture of the account owner, A young woman.

He got her e-mail address from the site, logged off and wrote the woman a message. He asked whether he had met her at some point and she had borrowed his phone to check her Facebook account. "No," she wrote back, "but I was just telling my family that I ended up in your profile!"

Simburg and the woman figured out they were both using AT&T to access Facebook on their phones.

World's expensive phone @ Rs 14.7cr

A British company has unveiled the world's most expensive mobile phone -- a gold iPhone encrusted with nearly 200 diamonds. Dazzling with gold and diamonds, the phone's meant for those with large wads of cash.





The phone, designed by Stuart Hughes for the Liverpool-based Goldstriker International, is made from 22-carat gold. It has 136 diamonds in the front bezel and an Apple logo made out of no fewer than 53 diamonds. The phone's front navigation button comprises a rare diamond of 7.1 carats.





The phone, which took over ten months to make, ships with a seven kg chest crafted from a single block of granite, offset with Kashmir gold and lined with Nubuck leather on the inside.





Called the iPhone 3G Supreme, it was reportedly commissioned by an anonymous Australian businessman. The phone retails at a hefty 1.92 million pounds, or Rs 14.7 crore.

Redundant Features in Mobile Phones

Have you ever come across a feature in your mobile phone and wondered why its creator thought of something so useless that most people would hardly care about? We sure have felt like that about certain features and today we bring you a list of such features that we think nobody would ever want/need and would care less if it was removed from their phones.

Massive User Manuals/Software CDs

What do you see when you open the box of your brand new phone? Well, the phone of course, but other than the phone and its accessories lies a huge bundle of user manuals, some of them so thick that the user may not give it a second look.

Some of us do read them, but just once or perhaps twice and after that they are made to serve a life sentence inside the phone's box, never to see the light of day again. So what is the point of chopping all those trees and making these manuals if they are hardly going to be used?

Manufacturers should realized this by now and provide only a small quick start guide and provide the rest in the form of a PDF, either on the company website or on the phone's memory itself. Apple, for example, does this. However, the rest of them provide enough manuals in one box to make you wonder how many forests were cleared to make them!  The same goes for software CDs that you get with the phones. They would hardly ever get used more than once, after which they just contribute to the e-waste of our planet. Can't the software just be provided on the memory of the phone itself, so that when you connect the phone to the PC, the software will be installed automatically?

Proprietary ports
Standards such as miniUSB or microUSB have been available for quite sometime. For audio there is the 3.5mm jack. Yet manufacturers think it is a brilliant idea to provide proprietary ports, which restricts a user to cables and accessories that are exclusive to the device instead of just plugging in any old USB cable or headphones and getting the job done with minimum fuss. Nokia had been pushing its Pop-Port for quite sometime, until they eventually saw the light and adopted microUSB and 3.5mm audio jack a while back. Samsung is following suit. Sony Ericsson, LG and others are still in the dark in this respect.

Mini QWERTY keypads
 QWERTY keypads on mobile phones are miniaturized versions of the full QWERTY keyboards that we use with our computers. They are smaller and hence take a while to get used to. The keys are smaller than standard phone keypads but since you have to press one key for one character, it is preferred over the standard T9 keypads. But then somebody goes ahead and creates this: 

I fail to see the logic here. Why take something that is already so small that if made any smaller would become unusable, and then reduce it in half? If you cannot design a phone wide enough to fit a full QWERTY keypad in, why not just accept defeat and fit a standard T9 keypad, which works pretty well and is definitely better than the mini QWERTY thing? Makes no sense.

Self Portrait Mirrors 

Unless you live on a deserted island with no one around to click your pictures or just too proud to ask someone else to do it for you, you would never need this. Trust me.

 






Digital Zoom

I think we have said time and again that digital zoom is the poor, retarded and handicapped sibling of optical zoom and if you want to zoom, optical is the way to go. Yet mobile phone manufacturers think it is necessary to provide this useless, good-for-nothing image degrading feature in their phones. And if it wasn't crazy enough, they go ahead and boast of its presence, even bragging about the insane number of time you can ruin your picture (2X, 4X, 10 BillionX, etc).

Excessive Number of Features in Cameras 
Mobile phone photography is about point and shoot ability. It is for those times when you wouldn't be carrying your camera but wished you did. It is not supposed to have any settings beyond taking a picture and perhaps turn off when you are done. But these days mobile phone cameras have so many features that had the inventor of cameras still been alive today, he'd have a heart attack just counting them!

Apart from the standard features, there are more complex features along with the fancy stuff like face detection, smile detection, blink detection, what-the-person-had-for-breakfast detection and what not! The thing is most people hardly use these features, even if they might brag about it when they buy the phone. Remove them from their phones and they probably won't even notice it. So what is the point of adding unnecessary features and making it more complicated when there are dedicated cameras available to do that?   

100000000000000000 Megapixels camera

3 Megapixels is more than enough for anyone in a mobile phone camera. We don't need more megapixels than we know what to do with. Try improving the image quality instead for a change.

Handwriting Recognition 
A quick quiz: count the number of people you know including yourself who own a touchscreen phone and use handwriting recognition for inputting text. Chances are you haven't gone beyond the fingers of one of your hands. Except for the East Asian countries, where characters are easier drawn than typed, the rest of the world prefers to type in the words instead of writing them on the screen.

Although the idea seems very good on paper, there is a world of difference between writing with a pen or pencil on a rough surface of paper and writing with a stylus on the slippery surface of a touchscreen. The lack of friction makes even a person with the neatest handwriting write illegibly. Add to it that most handwriting software require you to draw the characters with the utmost precision, and you end up with something that you use just once after buying the phone and then stick to the on-screen keypad for future text input.

Front Video Call Cameras
Few people in the world are known to have made a video call using this feature. Fewer still in India, considering the appalling 3G coverage in our country. It is just another useless thing that manufacturers make us pay for.

Holes for Lanyard

This one isn't a big deal since even if we don't use the lanyard on our phones the holes just hide somewhere in the corner and barely bother anyone. But what I find amusing is holes for lanyard on phones that weigh as much as a small dog. Do manufacturers really think we'll carry those things around our necks?

MMS

We all cried foul when we came to know that the iPhone did not have MMS support at the time of its launch. But did anyone stop and think how many of us actually use that feature? Think about this. One MMS costs me five rupees on an Airtel connection. I can add only limited amount of content to an MMS and there is a size restriction. Why wouldn't I just send an email that does not cost anything and allows me to add any amount of data to it? Most phones these days support email and if you have a data connection on your phone to send an MMS, then you can send an email as well. I suppose phone manufacturers understand this as well, so why do they still peddle this outdated technology? 

Low Quality Headphones 

This one falls in the shameful category. It is really sad to see manufacturers who tout the music playback capabilities of their phones provide such low cost, low quality headsets with their phones. It is only Sony Ericsson that has consistently given good quality headsets with their music phones.

Of late even Nokia has started including some good quality stuff with some of their phones. Rest all supply those nasty Made in China crap that you wouldn't even give your kids to listen to, leave alone use yourself. What this means is that if you care about audio quality, you most certainly would need to spend on an additional pair of earphones/headphones.  

Launch of new mobile & LCD Tv categories on consumermate.com!

Though I've already reviewed this site, it's time to review this site again, since consumermate has added new categories like Mobile Phones and LCD Tv's in addition to the Laptop category in the recent past. It has the latest street prices for different products and helps in choosing the product best suited to the consumer’s needs through its buying guide and Ask US sections. And since new categories have been added on consumermate.com, you can get the best deals for Mobile Phones, LCD TV’s as well as laptops. Also a more recent addition to the site is the Online Store Facility with which you can view the prices and buy your favorite products which are available at leading online stores across the country.

The site offers many offers hot deals, discounts, banking options, free offers etc. You can find all models and all brands of laptops, mobiles, LCD Tv's on this site. It helps prospective laptop buyers zero in on a particular model that is best suited for them. ConsumerMate also boasts of some extremely unique features with its Ask us section, Compare Models section, Buying guide, Hot Deals and Digit Test centre ratings section etc.

The Test Center gives expert ratings and reviews for each and every product that is available on the site. These reviews and ratings are provided by the Digit Test Center, India's No.1 research lab. There is also a Customer Support and Forum section where you get yourself clarified about pricing and deals of products. If you are unsure even after all these, you can straight away ask any questions on the products in the Ask Us section. The Expert panel will contact you and guide you further in buying these products. So why waiting? Choose wisely from a wide range of collections and buy your product in no time. Happy shopping!

Samsung Marine

A submersible mobile phone, Samsung Marine provides water protection up to 1 metre of water for 30 minutes.Encased in anti-shock material, Samsung Marine can withstand bumps, bangs, scrapes, dust and water.

The phone is adaptable for even the toughest environments -- including rain, fog, humidity, sand, and extreme temperatures. The Marine is equipped with outdoor friendly features such as external speakers, noise cancellation and a flash light.

Multimedia features include a built-in camera, camcorder, FM radio, a music player, and expandable memory up to 8GB. The phone is priced at Rs 7,030 and available in two colours. javascript:void(0)
Publish Post

HTC launches Touch Diamond2

HTC Corporation has most recently launched in India, its flagship smartphone, HTC Touch Diamond2. The 13.7mm thick smartphone has a 3.2-inch high-resolution wide-screen VGA display. The phone has 5 megapixel auto focus camera that comes with a new touch sensitive zoom bar for faster zooming, expandable memory, gravity sensor and an ambient light sensor.The phone also has EDGE, Wi-Fi, 3G and Bluetooth with A2DP. 

A new people-centric communication approach, that provides a single contact view that displays the individual conversation history of contacts regardless of voice, text or email used is an added feature. An important feature of the smartphone is that it is equipped with HTC's latest TouchFLO 3D user interface. An added feature is that the phone comes equipped with a Push Internet technology, which relieves slow downloading and rendering of Web pages on a mobile phone. The new HTC Touch Diamond2 comes with a price tag of Rs 29,990.

Nokia Ovi Store: A 360 degree view

Nokia's much-anticipated online software and content store, Ovi, is finally live. Nokia's answer to Apple App Store, Ovi can access more devices than its rivals and will utilise social networking and location-based information to suggest relevant mobile content.

Recently, Canada's Research in Motion (RIM), too opened its online store, BlackBerry App World offering a variety of free and paid applications. Others hotting up the online application space include Microsoft's Windows Mobile Marketplace and Google Android Marketplace.

Here's a 360 degree view of the Nokia Ovi Store, its pluses, minuses and much more.



Starting up
Ovi Store is Nokia's market for Internet services where users can share photos with friends, buy music and access third-party applications. The countries to first gain access to Nokia Ovi include Australia, Singapore, Spain, Italy, Germany, Russia, Ireland and UK.

Users can register at store.ovi.com through their Nokia device browsers to download applications, games, videos, podcasts, productivity tools, web and location-based services. A user can get to the Ovi Store by going to store.ovi.com on either his PC or Nokia mobile phone. If a user clicks on a piece of content on his PC, the store will send his phone a text message with a link. The user clicks on the link in his phone's messaging programme, which will send him to a WAP site. Now he needs to click download and go through a log-in screen.

If the content costs money, he will have to go through two screens to share his credit card information. The multiple languages Store is open for business and Nokia has stocked the shelves with both local and global content for a broad range of Nokia devices.

Live at 20,000
To begin with, Ovi Store packs over 20,000 titles, including both free and paid applications, podcasts, wallpapers and ringtones. Nokia Ovi's rival Apple App Store offers over 35,000 applications. Incidentally, Apple's and Google Android's debut figure was much less in comparison.

The Ovi Store has a list of Nokia devices and allows users to sort content depending on which phone they use. According to a popular tech site, it has 868 for Nokia E71, 987 for the Nokia N95 8GB, and 596 for the Nokia 5310. Of these, most are ringtones, wallpapers and videos, not apps, according to the site. As for apps, there are 436 for the N95, 414 for the E71, and a mere 154 for the Nokia 5310.

Searching for content
Underneath the main phone selector tool are several ways to search for content, including lists for applications, audio & video, games and personalisation. Every category has a list of sub-categories below it.

Below this are twelve featured applications, which display the category under which they would normally fall. However, since the store is still in its initial stages, most apps have not been rated yet.

On clicking on an application, users will land on a page specific for that app where they can read more information about it. The information includes the size of the application, the ability to report issues, user reviews and also how to determine if your phone is compatible with the application.

Users can also choose to have the store recommend applications based on the mobile device they are using. Plus, there's also a way to sort between free and paid apps.

Supports 50 models
Ovi Store supports more than 50 Nokia devices including the upcoming Nokia N97. Nokia claims that the Ovi Store is available globally to an estimated 50 million Nokia device owners.

Currently, Nokia holds about 40 per cent of world's mobile phone marketshare and 45 per cent of the smartphone market share. As for the payment, users can pay with their credit card or can have the charges added to their phone bill.

Languages
The mobile content is available in several languages including English, German, Italian, Russian and Spanish. It supports operator billing in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Russia, Singapore, Spain and the United Kingdom.

Nokia said that in the US, AT&T plans to make Ovi Store available to its customers later this year.

Few biz apps and NO Facebook!
Nokia Ovi store misses out the popular social networking hangouts Facebook and Myspace. On the social networking side, it has Hi5, Friendster, Buddycloud and also location based social network Gypsii.

Another big disappointment is lack of business applications. The site so far offers mere 10 business applications including See-Fi, a calendar sharing tool, Projekt, to-do list manager and ABBYY Business Card Reader 2.0.

OS disappointment
The fact that content is model-specific is sure to disappoint several users. This is unlike Apple App Store or Blackberry App World where all apps support all models. This is largely due to the same OS in all the models. While Nokia's large flock of mobile devices in the market don't support varied OSes.

Nokia Ovi store site displays a list of Nokia phones and allows users to sort content depending on which phone they use.