Bharadwaj Chandramouli | Fone Arena

Pebble Smartwatch gets its own App Store with curated apps and watch faces

Fresh off the announcement of Pebble Steel, the smartwatch company also announced its own App Store for its Smartwatches. Called the Pebble App Store, the repository of apps and watch faces with curated lists will reside inside the official Pebble apps for iOS and Android, according to the company. This move has been expected to happen for some time now, especially with the growing popularity of the Smartwatch and the homebrew developer support it gathered in the initial months of launch. If numbers are anything to go by, about 300,000 Pebbles have been sold so far and software bits like apps and watch faces for the Pebble have been already downloaded over 3 million times through third party curated app stores like MyPebbleFaces.com, which is arguably the most popular, for now. That’s definitely going to change with the introduction of the Pebble App Store, and more over, with the introduction of SDK 2.0, developers can now do more with the Pebble and the new App Store will be having that as the base minimum requirement for apps.

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Pebble Smartwatch goes premium with Pebble Steel, it’s thin and comes in two colour variants

Exactly one year back, the Pebble was showcased to the public for the first time. It was truly one of the first “Smart”watches at that point in time but now we are in the middle of a revolution, where suddenly everyone wants to make one before giants like Apple make a splash into the hot wearables market. But Pebble has been playing it cool. With a comfortable lead in mind share, the company started to expand from its Kickstarter roots and then updated its smartwatch’s software with a new SDK, support for iOS 7 notifications and more. Initially introduced as a sporty colourful watch, one of the major complaints from many users(including us) was that it looked like a toy and the build quality was rather cheap.

Well, Pebble has a solution for it this year at CES 2014, in the form of the all new Pebble Steel, their new stainless steel chassis for the same good old innards. It has the same e-ink display, the same battery and the lot but it’s now thinner, has a stainless steel frame and is protected by clear Corning Gorilla Glass. Watch it in action in this promo video here –

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Huawei Ascend Mate 2 4G officially unveiled, packs LTE and a 13 MP camera

Huawei has just unveiled the Ascend Mate 2 4G at their CES 2014 press conference today in Las Vegas. The refreshed Ascend Mate, which was one of the first 6 inch devices to enter the world of phablets the same time last year, packs the same 6.1 inch 720p display, with a supposedly better IPS panel and finally incorporated 4G LTE inside. The Ascend Mate 2 4G is also slightly thinner than its predecessor and boasts a 200 MHz increase in clock speed featuring the 1.6 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor with Adreno 305 GPU. Sporting a new 13 MP BSI sensor on the back, it improves upon the 8MP one on its predecessor and also comes with a 5 MP front facing camera this time around.

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Xolo Q1000 Opus Unboxing

Xolo Q1000 Opus Unboxing

Broadcom, a company that powers most of the WiFiac chips inside smartphones these days had been very quiet in the SoC business, but they had recently announced new chips and a partnership with Xolo for their Quad Core low end chip. The fruition of that partnership is the Xolo Q1000 Opus, yet another Q1000 that looks and performs nothing like the other one. This low-mid range device, that launched to retail in December last year, is priced at Rs. 9,990 and has modest specifications to rival the competition in the same segment. We have got this phone for testing in our labs, so as a first order of business, here is our unboxing with a quick look at the hardware and an overview of the minimally modified software –

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF_4qpUaOrA

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Apple acquires Snappylabs, the maker of burst photo app Snappycam

Snappylabs, a one-man company that is known for the burst photography app called Snappycam, has been acquired by Apple, as per confirmation provided to Re/code. Apple’s A7 processor already enables super fast burst photography at 10 frames per second on the iPhone 5s, but from the looks of the acquisition, Apple might want to push for more with their default camera. The Snappycam app, which was recently pulled from the app store, could take up to 30 or even 60 fps high resolution images, which is pretty outstanding for a third party app. The company, which has now been acquired might pave the way for more camera innovation for the iPhone, at least from the software front.

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HTC’s unaudited 4Q 2013 results show small net profits amidst operating losses

HTC posted its first losses last quarter, even after the good performance of its flagship device – the One, and was expected to post huge losses this quarter too. Apparently, the Beats buy back seems to have provided some much needed cash for HTC, which has translated directly into small net profits for the company, after taxes. Today, HTC has posted its unaudited Q4 2013 results, with the numbers coming in at NT$42.89 billion(1.43 billion USD) of revenue with operating losses of NT$ 1.56 billion(52 million USD). However, as mentioned earlier, the company made back some of the money it lost on Beats earlier, with 31 million NT$(10.3 million USD) in net profits. These are currently “unaudited” and are usually published as guidance to shareholders before the real deal that will have the entire data.

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Nokia Lumia 1020 and Lumia 520 emerge as the favourites in #SmartFone13

2013 came to an end a few days back and so did our quest to see which two phones would emerge as the favourites in our #Smartfone13 championship for flagships as well as budget devices. Two major polls were run in parallel for about a week with several phones knocked out in the weeks before, to bring the tally to the final four. It was Sony Xperia Z1 vs the Nokia Lumia 1020 for the flagship battle and the Nokia Lumia 520 vs the Gionee Elife E6 for the budget devices battle, with the Lumias ending up as the winners. How? Go past the break to find out!

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Jolla Phone Unboxing

Today we have a very interesting smartphone to for unboxing. Any guesses? Okay. We will spill it out. It is Jolla. The first smartphone to run Sailfish OS. Lets dive right into the unboxing.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qdx4JgNSQ7Q

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Nokia DC-18 Universal Portable Charger Unboxing

Nokia accessories are as colorful as their Lumia and Asha lineup and today we will be unboxing the Nokia DC-18 Universal Portable Charger. Nokia DC-18 is a rectangular box shaped portable charger that is small, cheap and packs 1720mAh of juice.

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Samsung Galaxy Star Pro Unboxing

We recently unboxed the Samsung Galaxy S Duos 2 which was a budget smartphone from Samsung and today, we are unboxing yet another budget smartphone from Samsung – Samsung Galaxy Star Pro. The Samsung Galaxy Star Pro is the perfect definition of an entry level Android device. It just packs the bare minimum features necessary for Android to run.

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Notion Ink Adam II Review

Notion Ink Adam II Review

Notion Ink is a name that most of us remember for various reasons. Some of us remember it for the innovative wannabe product, a world’s first Tegra 2 chipset on board with an innovative Pixel Qi dual mode display and a rotating camera, that too way back in 2010 when Android 2.1 was doing the rounds. Some of us remember it for the lengthy delays in production and the overall failure to meet expectations due to sub standard retail hardware and experience. Suffice to say, it was deemed a failure.

But the company is now back with another product, the Notion Ink Adam II which was recently released in India for a starting price of Rs. 16,499. We had unboxed it a while back to find out if the device redeems itself from its predecessor’s failure. We were initially impressed, but now after about a week of usage, is the Notion Ink Adam II really worth our time and money? We find out in our full review.

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Samsung Galaxy S Duos 2 Review

Samsung Galaxy S Duos 2 Review

The Samsung Galaxy S Duos 2 is the much awaited successor to the S Duos which was the Samsung phone to get in the mid range not long ago. It had offered pretty much similar specifications as the Galaxy S but at a far lesser price making it a good deal, although only for a short time. Mainly because a lot of local players got aggressive with the pricing and offered a lot of better deals for a similar price, not to mention Nokia’s Lumia 520, which has been a popular device at a lesser price offering more value. With such renewed competition, Samsung hopes to offer a better deal with the Galaxy S Duos 2. How better of a deal is it? We find out in our review.

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Final – Nokia Lumia 1020 vs Sony Xperia Z1 #SmartFone13

After two rounds of really close battles between 8 smartphones, we have come to the finals of the SmartFone 13 championship for the best smartphone of 2013. Two devices have made it to the finals and they are – Nokia Lumia 1020 and the Sony Xperia Z1. Both the phones are awesome on their own and have beaten two other capable smartphones to reach this stage, which removes even an iota of doubt on how great these two devices are. Both being the companies’ respective flagships are packed with innovations as well as top class features. But which one do you think is the best of the two? Do you think one of them is good enough to earn the title of “Best Smartphone of 2013”?

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Google certified Cyanogen Mod Oppo N1 shipping on Christmas Eve

Oppo N1 is the first Cyanogen Mod phone to have been approved by Google’s strict CTS, for compliance to Android compatibility and of course, inclusion of Google Play on this limited edition device. The Oppo N1 Cyanogen Mod Edition was announced as “coming in December” but never really got solid dates owing to the obvious roadblocks, but thanks to this recent development, Oppo has revealed that the device is shipping on Christmas Eve i.e December 24th of this year. This marks the first time in history that a popular third party AOSP ROM based phone is Google certified and is shown the green light. Cyanogen Mod’s Koushik Dutta happened to be relieved about the announcement, as his G+ post read –

Google just approved our first CyanogenMod phone

Man, the last 24 hours has been a total rollercoaster of emotions, and it isn’t letting up it seems.

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Whatsapp crosses 400 million Monthly Active Users, 1/4th added in 4 months

It’s always fascinating to see the growth of a communications platform. The mobile phone grew worldwide thanks to a company called Nokia that connected people with calls and SMS as the medium, but in this age of apps and Smartphones, it’s Whatsapp that’s doing all the connecting. We have been watching its explosive growth over the course of two years, and it has been really interesting. Today, the company’s blog has announced that the service has crossed a whopping 400 million monthly active users, with almost a quarter of them – 100 million added in the last four months. This is seen as a huge growth for a space, in which there is suddenly a lot of competition, with some of them even willing to shell out big bucks for TV promotions and so on. However, it remains to be seen if people embrace choice or go for ubiquity.

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