Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

Amazon has announced its new tablet, the Kindle Fire HD, in two editions, two days ago. The editions available in this new tablet family include a 7 inch model and an 8.9 inch model. Based on the tone of the announcement, one could tell Amazon is targeting Apple iPad hard. Here in this article, let’s look at the highly ambitious new product from Amazon and see how far it could go into the future. The Tech Specs The original Kindle Fire was released by the end of 2011. In this HD version, the tablet has two incarnations; check out their specifications below. feature  Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD 7-inch Display LCD IPS 8.9 inches, resolution: 1920x1200; 254ppi LCD IPS 7 inches; resolution: 1280x800 Operating System Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (with modification) Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (with modifications) Processor Dual-core OMAP 4470 1.5 GHz Dual-core OMAP 4460 1.2 GHz Gra

Right now, the version of Hyper-Text Markup Language supported in browsers far and wide is HTML 4. The next version is on the way; the World Wide Web Consortium  is working on the next version of the markup language to enhance the performance of web pages. In this article, let’s look at the details of HTML 5. What Is HTML? HTML is a group of web technologies, primarily including the markup scheme itself, Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and a scripting language (most commonly used is JavaScript). The markup scheme mentioned here is for creating elements within a web page so that the browser knows what to display and where. The CSS part is for showing the elements their formatting—color, text size, font, and such other stuff. The scripting language is for creating user-executable code that the browser can interpret and present to the end users. So far, HTML went through four major revisions. Minor revisions are always happening and popular browsers incorporate the available new stan

Have you been hearing a lot about NFC (Near Field Communication) technology lately? To a layman, this is just another technology, like ‘Super’ AMOLED, ‘Retina’ Display, ‘PureView’ camera, ‘multi-core’ processor, and probably you think this is another marketing gimmick to get the device sold at the end of the day. You may haven’t paid much attention to it either. However, there is a group of people who are very optimistic about NFC. Let the myths be busted! Let me explain to you in simple terms what NFC is and what it does. Near Field Communication is a set of wireless standards that enables radio communication between two electronic devices by bringing them in close proximity Well, that doesn’t sound so easy to understand, does it? In layman’s terms, with NFC, you can connect two devices (wirelessly) by tapping them together. That’s right! Just tap your phone to another and they have established an invisible link. The prospective applications of this technology will astound yo

The sinking Finnish ship hopes to get a help in the horizon! Nokia, who lost in competition with Apple, Google, and Samsung in the cellphone market, has come up with its latest release—Lumia 920, equipped with Microsoft Windows Phone 8. This makes Lumia 920, the second smartphone to be announced with Windows Phone 8 operating system (the first being Samsung ATIV S ). Here’s a first look review of the phone. The Specifications Feature Value Operating System Microsoft Windows Phone 8 Display 4.5 inch, IPS TFT Capacitive Touchscreen, 16.7m colors, 768x1280 px resolution, 326ppi Processor Qualcomm Snapdragon S4, dual-core 1.5 GHz Body 130.3X70.8X10.7 mm; 180g Networks HSPA+, FD-LTE 4G for up to 42 mbps speed Battery 2000 mAh Li-ion; maximum talktime on 3G: 10 hours, 2G: 17 hours Camera 8.7 MP autofocus with PurView technology Memory 1GB RAM, 32GB storage, 7GB in Mi

Do you want your blog to load much faster than it does now? In that case, you can go for external CSS stylesheets. In this tutorial, we will deal with externalizing the stylesheet on Google's Blogger platform. I have been working on putting the stylesheet on my blogs on an external server for some time. Here is the tutorial for you. Blogger Template Stylesheet For analysis, let’s look at this blog: RedBugle (redbugle.blogspot.com). The basic design of the blog is this right now: I have used the Awesome Inc., template of Blogger as you can see. The goal is to achieve the same look and effect after externalizing the blog’s stylesheet. By the way, CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) is a part of the HTML markup that contains the information as to how the blog displays on different user agents (browsers). In Blogger, the entire stylesheet that you can customize and change according to the need is contained in between these two tags: '<b:skin><![CDATA[' and ']]><

If you look at the statistics, people purchased a lot of tablets and smartphones this year. Even the advent of thin laptops—Ultrabooks, and netbooks—hasn’t done much in improving the sales of PC and laptops from last year’s. However, the sale of total number of PC units worldwide has remained almost the same over the last few years. This year also, there is no marked downfall in this. Speculations are afoot in the technology world about the future of PCs and notebooks. Several bloggers have expressed concern about their (PCs and laptops) future. Here’s an analysis on this. Look at the image below:      Data source: Statista There are a lot of things to be learnt from this image. Firstly, the number of sales of PCs has remained a constant over the last few years; the number of laptops sold has increased gradually; and there is a regular, expected growth in sales in the handheld PC market dominated by Apple iPad, iPhone, and others. It shows low or no future for Ultrabooks and ne

 Facebook, being the largest social network, is a haven of hackers. They have been targeting Facebook users for years. A lot of things can be done with a hacked Facebook account—promotion of products, free advertisements, building email lists, and spamming. You can find out if your account has been compromised through a few symptoms. One way to know if your account has been hacked is obvious. You spot new people in your friends list; your account sends out spam to your friends; it shows up promoting illicit stuff—drugs, sex toys and pills, spam, etc.; or you have lost access to your account because of a change in password. But there is a chance that the attacker has been working secretly without your knowledge, making it difficult for you to recognize the situation. In such cases, he does not send out any information from your account or change your password. Instead, he would be gathering information from your account—your personal and financial details and information about you

Facebook is the largest social network in the world and the first website in terms of overall traffic. Hence, it is very advantageous to have a page on it and have some people promote it for you. The way people can vote for your page on Facebook is by Liking it. Every page on Facebook has the ‘Like’ link, with which you can do this. However, people have started abusing this privilege. In order to be successful in Facebook quickly, people have started campaigning to get more Likes in illegal ways possible. These ways include purchasing Likes, using malware to get Likes, and Likes generated by hacked accounts. All of these dishonest activities are against the terms and conditions of Facebook. The automated spam fighting module of Facebook has been recently upgraded to remove the spam Likes on pages. Facebook has recently published a blog post  about this. .................................................................................... Also Read: Why Apple Should Fear Google

One of the biggest news in the Berlin Radio Show (IFA, Berlin 2012) was the announcement of the first ever smartphone with Windows Phone 8 version, ‘Samsung ATIV S’. This is one of the releases made by Samsung on the 29th of August. The ATIV S is part of a family of products, under the ATIV brand (containing ATIV Tab and ATIV Smart PC). In this article, let’s check this phone out. Announcement at IFA: Phone Specifications Feature Value Operating System Microsoft Windows Phone 8 Display 4.8 inch HD Super AMOLED 720 x 1280 pixels; 306 ppi Processor 1.5 GHz; dual-core Krait processor Memory 16/32 GB internal storage; 1GB RAM; MicroSD support up to 64 GB Battery Li-ion 2300 mAh Dimensions 137.2 x 70.5 x 8.7 mm ; 135 g Camera Rear – 8MP autofocus camera with LED flash; front – 1.9MP Connectivity Features Bluetooth 3.0; Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n; NFC Looking at t