Bharadwaj Chandramouli | Fone Arena

Unboxing the Nokia Lumia 800 Special Diwali pack

A few days back, we came to know of Nokia India’s special Diwali offer that offered a free headset with every Lumia purchase. The Lumia 800 offer was particularly juicy, with a free Monster Purity in-ear headset worth Rs. 5,110/- bundled in. But it was more inviting when we came to know of the newly reduced prices for the Lumia 800. So, we went ahead and bought one to see what the pack was all about. And hence, we bring you the unboxing of the special Diwali pack, just so that you can get an idea of what you get.

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Apple iPad mini set to launch at October 23rd event, says AllThingsD

AllThingsD, a very good source of Apple launch rumors has almost confirmed the existence of the new Apple iPad mini, thanks to its sources pointing to a iPad mini launch event set for October 23, exactly three days before Microsoft’s Surface launch event.

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Samsung Galaxy S III mini with a 4-inch display set for a German launch on October 11th

Samsung mobile communications head JK Shin has apparently confirmed to the Korean press that the 4-inch version of the Galaxy S III dubbed the Galaxy S III “mini” is all set to launch in Germany on October 11th.

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Senior Marketing executive leaves Nokia, Lumia 920 debacle to blame?

According to a report from Reuters, a senior smartphone executive who held an important position in the smartphones division, has left the company. Ilari Nurmi was the Vice President of product marketing before he left the company, and he made Reuters aware of his departure through an email to them.

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Nokia Xpress(beta), a cloud optimized browser that saves data & a lot more, now available for Lumia

Nokia has been toying around with a browser that compresses pages on the server side to save data consumption for its S40 range of devices for quite a while now. The Nokia browser, as it was called when it launched, had similar functionality to the Opera Mini web browser, it saved data and made browsing much faster by compressing images and using some server side algorithms for data compression. Now, the same technology is coming to all of Nokia’s Windows Phone devices, the Lumia device range, and it is called Nokia Xpress, but alas, it carries the beta tag, for now.

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Nokia Lumia 510 spotted again, specs and pricing leak out

The Lumia 510 is supposed to be Nokia’s first entry to the sub $200 smartphone market, and it was leaked out, a month ago, with pictures from China’s search engine “Baidu”. Now it has been spotted again, in pictures, and the specs and pricing have been reportedly confirmed by the anonymous tipster who sent this to GSMArena.

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Android Jelly Bean with Sense 4+ coming to the HTC One X and One S starting this month

Android Jelly Bean, the latest and greatest Android that has been running on all the Nexuses of this world, has been slowly trickling down to other OEM Android devices for the past few months. We saw it getting listed by Samsung for the Galaxy S3, and it was widely rumored to arrive for HTC’s flagships – the HTC One X and the HTC One S. But now, it has been confirmed along with the launch of HTC’s new phone – the HTC One X+.

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Nokia Lumia 920 and 820 officially priced in Italy and Russia, available mid-November

Nokia had unveiled the Lumia 920 and the Lumia 820 at their NYC event on September 5th, but did not announce the pricing as well as the availability, it was a mystery till now. But Nokia Italy has done the impossible and actually announced the launch pricing of both the phones and the availability.

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Texas Instruments backs out from the smartphone space, no more OMAP

Dallas, Texas-based Texas Instruments is a pioneer in the chip industry. It has been part of the major shift in the smartphone industry which introduced the “System on a chip” concept into the mainstream. But the chip maker has started to wonder about the prospects of its future, when it comes to the insanely competitive smartphone business. And the company has made a decision to switch gears, moving away from the smartphone business and concentrating more on a more profitable and stable, embedded chip business.

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Qualcomm announces quad-core Snapdragon S4 play chips, the specs race gets hotter

Just after the news about MediaTek prepping its entry level quad-core chips, the largest SoC maker in the world Qualcomm announced its new entry level quad-core entries into the ever competitive SoC market. And these new chips are added to the Snapdragon S4 play family of SoCs. The specs race gets way interesting after this announcement.

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MediaTek to make quad-core chips starting Q4 2012

MediaTek, the company behind those ultra cheap single and dual core system on chips launched recently, is prepping for another round of competition. Yes, they are now in the quad-core game, well, at least they will be, when they start making those sweet quad-core chips starting Q4 2012, according to reports from China Times.

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Google Play celebrates 25 billion downloads with $0.25 discounted apps for 5 days

With the ever burgeoning Android smartphone marketshare, it is inevitable that the Play Store will have some insane amounts of downloads too. Continuing with that upward trend of app count as well as app downloads, the Google Play Store has hit 25 billion downloads of about 675,000 apps and games. To celebrate this achievement, they have started to offer some discounts for the next five days.

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BlackBerry 10 details revealed at the BB Jam event

BlackBerry 10 has been more or less a mystery in the past few months, with a number of delays and continuous “death threats” to RIM from various blogs, but everything has been put to silence by the details and demos from the latest BlackBerry event – the BB Jam Americas, currently happening at San Jose, California.

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Samsung Galaxy S III TouchWiz remote wipe hack patched with OTA update

There was mighty uproar yesterday about a dirty USSD hack that enabled links with a simple USSD code wipe the entire phone back to factory reset. It was widely reported to have affected all the major Samsung devices that were running the company’s custom skin called TouchWiz. But the good news is, the exploit has been immediately patched by Samsung, with an OTA update for its recently released, and massively successful Galaxy S3. Continue reading “Samsung Galaxy S III TouchWiz remote wipe hack patched with OTA update”

Instagram updated for iPhone 5, removes live filters

Instagram, the most loved photo app/social network, which debuted on the iPhone, has been updated for the latest and the greatest iPhone, the iPhone 5. It adds support for the taller screen, meaning the resolution of the app is now 1136X640. While you are now able to see more of the app, weirdly, they have removed support for live filters. Continue reading “Instagram updated for iPhone 5, removes live filters”