Bharadwaj Chandramouli | Fone Arena

Nokia rebuts Tamil Nadu Government’s tax claim, as acquisition nears

Nokia has been involved in a long term tax battle with the Indian government for more than a year now, and things don’t seem to be getting any better for the Espoo company. Adding fuel to this fire is the Tamil Nadu government, which has recently moved to assess sales tax for devices that are exported from the Chennai Sri Perumbudur manufacturing facility. Nokia claims that these allegations from the government are baseless, as, by law, exports are exempt from taxes. With yet another tax evasion claim, it will be even harder for Nokia to complete its transition in time for the Microsoft acquisition.

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Microsoft unveils Direct X 12, lists benefits for Mobile

After a long wait, Microsoft has finally unveiled its plans for the next generation of its graphics APIs, Direct X. These APIs were developed by Microsoft for making game development easier on Windows and eventually on all of its other platforms. It provided a standard way, an abstracted layer, for developers, to take advantage of complex graphics hardware. This spurred the PC gaming industry, until the recent years, in which the development of the API tapered off, with evolutionary additions.

With Direct X 12, which is apparently a big departure from the current programming model, Microsoft hopes to reinvigorate game development on all its products, right from PCs to phones, tablets and of course, the Xbox One. Direct X 12 was revealed at the Game Developers Conference with hardware partners in AMD, Nvidia and Qualcomm, to name a few, and will ship on products starting 2015.

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Nokia X Videos – Multitasking, Custom Launchers, Sideloading APKs and In Depth UI Walkthrough

It just feels like yesterday, when almost all of us were in denial that a Nokia Android phone could exist, but Nokia has put forward its boldest bet ever, especially at a time when it has been acquired by Microsoft, a company that has been at odds with Google since forever. Anyways, the device was revealed to much excitement and curiosity at the Mobile World Congress event, and eventually arrived in India just few weeks later. We had unboxed the device and also showed you how to root it and get Google Play services and apps on it, but as you might have guessed by now, we were curious to find out more about the device over the course of our usage. So we made a few videos to showcase what we found and learnt, skip past the break to find them.

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How to root Nokia X and install Google Play Apps

We had unboxed the Nokia X a while back, right after it launched in India. Only a few weeks back, Espoo’s first bold entry into the low end Android smartphone segment was revealed at MWC. The phone might be running Android, a Google owned entity, but is completely devoid of anything that resembles Google services. Nokia completely forked the open source variant of Android, just like Amazon did, by choosing not to include Google services and apps, which are obviously a conflict of interests for the company. But being open source, the malleable Android is always willing to bend to our will, and soon enough, enterprising developers who got their hands on the Nokia X, devised a way to install Google apps and services onto this neat little device. We followed their path, and made a video, so that willing users can take advantage of it too –

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_smAYnH6A64

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LG’s G Watch will be Google’s first “Nexus” Smartwatch, powered by Android Wear

Close on the heels of the announcements from Google for Android Wear and Motorola’s Moto 360 Smartwatch, LG has announced that it will actually be making the first smartwatch powered by the new wearables platform. The LG G watch, as it is called, will be the first smartwatch to release to the market, powered by Google’s Android Wear platform. LG and Google have apparently worked on this device together, right from design, just like a Nexus product. The details of the LG G watch have not been revealed yet, but the availability is set to the second quarter of 2014.

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Motorola announces Moto 360, the first circular smartwatch powered by Android Wear

Right after Google announced that Android is coming to wearables with Android Wear, Motorola has brought itself to the fore of this new Android Wear ecosystem by announcing its first Smartwatch – the Moto 360. As you might have guessed from the name, the Moto 360 has a circular display, which is a first for smartwatches. Android Wear marks an interesting development in the smartphone, although this has been rumoured for quite a while now. Powered by Google Now as its main contextual engine, Android Wear enables wearables like the Moto 360 to take at-a-glance information to the next level.

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Ravpower Wireless Charger Unboxing

Wireless charging has been spearheaded by the Qi Wireless Power Consortium for quite a while now, and we have seen phone manufacturers implement the standard in many of their high end phones. On the other hand, we have the wireless chargers being manufactured by a large number of companies, including phone manufacturers themselves, slowly building up the momentum. Technically, it isn’t completely wireless right now, as the charging pads need to be connected to the power plug for it to work. But that hasn’t stopped many manufacturers from making all kinds of wireless charging pads. One of them is Ravpower, who makes the Qi-based wireless charging pads. We had taken a look at their “Dynamo on the go” with our unboxing video, watch –

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6xDB2GXAkQ

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Leaked LG wearable envisions a colourful alternate way to carry a stylus

LG might be working on the Google Smartwatch for all we know, but it seems like they are trying their hand at some other wearable products as well. evleaks has posted the image above, which looks to have a colourful wearable capacitive stylus that can bend. While we have no exact details for this product, it does look like an accessory at best, for the phone as well as for us. At a glance, it will look like a wrist band, but the next moment you can whip it out and start taking notes on your large screen phone. The tip of the stylus reminds us that this is definitely of the capacitive type, which means that it can work for a product like, lets say, the iPad too.

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Microsoft Surface 2 with LTE announced, priced at $679 for the 64 GB version

After confirming the presence of a mobile-enabled version in the works when launching the Surface 2, the Redmond giant has finally taken the wraps off Microsoft Surface 2 with LTE 4G on the AT&T network, retailing at a price of 679$ for the 64 GB version. The Surface was Microsoft’s first play as a PC hardware company. The first product, called Surface RT, was largely a flop due to poor usability and performance, and even took a write down in the company’s earnings. Surface 2, the successor, was launched almost an year later, with good reviews and better reception from consumers, but still not as popular as Microsoft would like. Touted as a portable productive machine, the Surface 2 in its initial variants lacked a LTE chip for mobile data, which was apparently a highly requested feature, and hence we are seeing it now, in the form of the slightly modified LTE variant of the Surface 2.

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OneNote for Windows goes free, Mac client and new APIs introduced

OneNote, the note taking application that lives inside the office suite has now been unbundled on Windows and made free for the desktop, like it has been on other platforms and even the Windows Store. Talking of platforms, Microsoft has also just introduced OneNote for Mac, which has been a long standing request from Office for Mac users. The client will work just like the Windows client, with access to the OneDrive cloud, the familiar arrangement of notebooks and all the tools OneNote is known for. Apart from this, Microsoft has also opened up new APIs for OneNote, with which one can develop apps supporting the service and the cloud.

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China welcomes Nokia X with 1 million pre orders

The Nokia X made a huge (green) splash at the Mobile World Congress event a couple of weeks and has been rapidly making its moves into markets, with it launching in Malaysia, India and the Phillipines. It is now all set to launch in China, and just 5 days after announcing the device for the market and opening the pre-orders, Nokia has reportedly received 1 million of them already. The company posted this on its Weibo account with a celebratory image touting the big number.

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Flipkart teases Moto X launch day offers, to reveal details in a couple of days

Motorola had revealed its plans to introduce the Moto X in India, during the Mobile World Congress event, and it also had said that, much like the Moto G, the X too will be launched through Flipkart. As a confirmation, Flipkart has now started to tease the Moto X launch on Twitter, adding that there will be exclusive launch day offers and that the launch details will be revealed in a couple of days. With the success of Moto G, Flipkart goes ahead with yet another exclusive launch, but this time, the reception might not be as overwhelming. This is mainly because the phone is already late to the market, and its initial pricing in the US was off the mark, making a really capable device flop in the market. But now that the prices have come down drastically, it will be interesting to see how well it is priced for the Indian market.

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Nokia X Unboxing in India

Nokia X is the first smartphone from the Espoo company running Android, and more importantly, Android apps. It was launched in India just a day back for a price of Rs. 8,599/-. “X” is symbolic in many ways. the company is now at the cross roads of a transition from being an independent company to being owned by Microsoft, the maker of software running on Nokia’s current smartphones. X is also the bridge between Nokia’s struggling smartphone business and its traditional feature phone business. Nokia knew, that without apps, its revived Asha platform phones are getting nowhere, and they also knew that it will never create this familiarity factor with Windows Phone, a crucial factor for any company that has a wide array of devices. Hence the Nokia X happened, and just a day after it officially launched in India, we now have it with us, in retail form, for a quick unboxing and overview of the device on video, watch –

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Leaked ad sheds light on the new HTC One’s Dual Cameras

The All new HTC One has all but been completely revealed at this point in time, but till now, we have never been able to get solid information on how the dual camera setup is going to work. Well, this new leak, a Telstra brochure acquired by the good folks at GSMArena, might shed some light on the “Duo Camera” setup that HTC is going for, in its latest flagship device. We all know how the 4 MP UltraPixel camera underwhelmed us after the initial excitement, but HTC seems to have worked out a solution and then more with this implementation that retains the UltraPixel’s advantages.

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Gionee Elife S5.5 Hands On

elifes5.51

Gionee introduced the Elife S5.5, the world’s slimmest smartphone at just 5.55 mm thickness at an event in China last week. The company showcased the device at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, and we got some time to check out the slimmest device. The phone has a 5-inch (1920 x 1080 pixels) Full HD Super AMOLED touch screen display from Japan Display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It is powered by a a 1.7 GHz Octa-core MediaTek MT6592 processor and runs on Android 4.2.2 with Amigo 2.0 UI on top. Check out the hands-on video below. Continue reading “Gionee Elife S5.5 Hands On”