Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

D11 tech conference of WSJ’s subsidiary All Things Digital (allthingsd.com) has some interesting stuff going on. One of the recent interviews that happened was with Motorola Mobility’s CEO, Dennis Woodside and its Senior Vice President of advanced technology and projects, Regina Dugan. It was in this interview that you can watch here that Regina introduced us to two important innovations happening in Motorola. Now, as you well know how Google acquired Motorola and how it intends to develop the smartphone manufacturer into a part of its own, most of the discussion concentrates on how this will be achieved. There are certain important developments happening in Motorola’s research facilities, and they are thinking about solving some issues that plague smartphone users these days, such as authentication. One of the first things that Regina introduced us to is the electronic tattoo that can authenticate your phone. Remember how you get access to your smartphone’s functions normally. Y...

Do you remember our earlier post on how to be smart on Facebook ? That gives an important lesson. You know, there are many Facebook pages that have been prepared to mimic the official celebrity pages. These pages are prepared solely as a marketing gimmick too. Since they are made under the name of a popular celebrity, they quickly interest the fans of that celebrity and get a fan following pretty easily. Then marketing becomes easy. This was one of the reasons why Twitter introduced verified pages. You know that simple check mark on Twitter accounts of VVIPs? That is a sign that the Twitter account is a verified one, and it does indeed belong to the person mentioned. Facebook has also gone the same direction by introducing verified pages yesterday. Here  is the official PR from FB. Verified pages on Facebook have a blue check mark on them, next to the name of the page or profile. Check out this official page of Michelle Obama. Facebook has the official page of the celebr...

Popular tech blog BGR has recently shared with us the images of certain parts of the upcoming iPhone 5S, the next iterative (probably not!) update to iPhone. Since that day in 2007 when iPhone got a cult following, people like us in the tech world have been watching Cupertino from every corner. This is the result. Thirsty geeks always get leaked images through some means. While we don’t know the origin of these images, we have asked BGR about it. Let me show you these images. 1. Speaker Bracket 2. Wi-Fi Flex Cable Ribbon 3. iPhone 5S Vibration Motor 4. Sim trays In another recent development, iDownloadBlog shared what is supposed to be iPhone 5S assembly line images. Here they are. Over the last few days, there have been quite a number of rumors regarding this upcoming smartphone. How great iPhone 5S will be , only time will tell. Since iPhone 5’s Maps debacle, the then chief of design, Scott Forstall had to resign from Apple. He used to be the head of...

Let me start with an apology for little or no updates in the past few days. It has been quite a mess here in the Blue Bugle planet. It took me a while to get myself updated on what is happening in our industry. Today, I have been looking through my news resources, and one of the upcoming devices that is expected to make an impact is Samsung’s Galaxy Note III—the third installment of the very popular Note series. Exactly how popular the Note family has been, one might wonder. Initial update on Samsung website pointed us in this direction : Galaxy Note, the original, did sell about a million units each month to reach a target of five million in March last year. Later on, Korean news source, MK News did report this success continued in the exact fashion—ten million in ten months. The core of that article talks about how Note II, the successor to Note, reached a million sales in South Korea. Although not close enough to compete with the success of iPhone or Galaxy S family, Note has ...

It was a fine morning in January that 72 year old Tami Fletcher went to the Radioshack Store in Long Beach, New York and purchased an upgrade to her old laptop running Windows. She had a Dell laptop of nearly ten years old that was running Windows XP Media Center edition. In the recent times her applications and the Internet connection have been slowing down unnecessarily, and she was not able to display some web pages properly. A friend of hers suggested that she upgrade her laptop’s hardware and get the latest Windows. This was what drove her to Radioshack. When she got the laptop back after three days, with the necessary hardware upgrade and Windows 8 , she was quite happy, until she reached home, turned on the laptop, and found herself wondering where all her stuff went. She was specifically told that none of her stuff would be lost in an upgrade, but she was looking at what was completely new to her. And there was no way old Tami could get herself acquainted with the new Wind...

Nokia’s Lumia 920 is arguably the best smartphone in the market today due to a number of reasons. It’s major disadvantage is that it is a Windows Phone device, and hence, less number of apps. If Lumia 920 ran Android, it might have proven to be a much greater success. It has the best camera, great display (although smaller than Galaxy S3 and HTC One), and amazing build quality. It is simply the best Windows Phone device out there. Now, Nokia is all set to release its upgraded handset in the Lumia 900 family—Lumia 928. My Nokia blog  recently discovered a billboard of Lumia 928 (location unknown), shown here. We are also not sure if it’s real or faked. It could well be a billboard for Lumia 920 that someone doctored. The rumors of a higher-end Lumia 920 device for Verizon Wireless started appearing at the start of the year itself. It has never been officially confirmed by Nokia, until now. Nokia has a new 928 page here  that talks about this device. Updates on the announ...

In the last few hours, I was engrossed in all kinds of thoughts and skepticisms about the latest tablet PC from Acer, Aspire R7. The tablet computer runs Windows 8 and comes with what most people call a ‘weird design’. However, is that really the case? How good or bad this new product really is? Let’s find out through this article. The First Impressions on the Design I looked through almost all of the first look reviews I could lay my hands on. Most of them talk about one most important aspect of this tablet PC—its design. Acer Aspire R7 as you can see here in this image is a weirdly designed tablet PC. It is neither a tablet, nor a laptop, nor a PC. Still, it works as all of them. R7 comes with an aluminum unibody design that has a hinge known as ‘Ezel hinge’. With the help of the hinge, this computer can take four different shapes, you know kind of like Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga. Aspire R7 has one of the best design innovations that we got to see in Windows 8 computers . The four...

A few days ago, you may have read our post regarding the new product from Google, Glass . It has come and we got to see it in action. The real question here is, whether anyone should really be excited about this augmented reality goggles from Google. Let’s find out. Google Glass has been the focus of attention in the technology world for the last couple of months. One of the first things that anyone would ask about Glass is whether it is stylish enough to be worn outside or would it make you look dorky? This is difficult to find out as the product has not reached our hands yet. Only a few people have had the opportunity to wear Glass and get out. EIC of Engadget, Tim Stevens was one of the first to experience Google Glass, and he has written in detail about it . His review points out “A heads-up display seems like a natural fit”. In comparison to your smartphones, Google Glass does seem easier to use. It does look stylish upon your regular eyeglasses. You may have noticed the sp...