Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

In an event in Taiwan, HTC unveiled the next big device in its Butterfly series (you probably know it as Verizon’s Droid DNA). Droid DNA and its international edition, J Butterfly have been two of the most exciting and high-end smartphones developed by HTC. Here is Butterfly S, which comes with similar features and a whopping large screen of 5 inches, the largest that HTC has ever made. Engadget China has managed to get its hands on the device here . Here is the promo video of the device: Technical Specifications Here is the technical specifications of Butterfly S in comparison to two other devices, HTC One  and Samsung Galaxy S IV. Feature HTC Butterfly S HTC One Samsung Galaxy S IV Display Super LCD 3; 5 inch 1080p (441 ppi) Super LCD 3; 4.7 inch 1080p (469 ppi) Super AMOLED HD; 4.99 inch 1080p (440 ppi) Protection Corning Gorilla Glass 3 Corning Gorilla Glass 2 Corning Gorilla Glass 3 ...

In a recent talk between Microsoft and Nokia, the two companies contemplated a merger. WSJ reported the story  yesterday, and for quite a while, industry leaders have been cogitating on this move. Since 2011, Nokia has been in tie-up with Microsoft to use Windows Phone operating system on all of its major devices, notably the Nokia Lumia series ( Lumia 920 , 928 , etc). This has helped both companies in great ways. Here is an analysis as to whether the merger could pave way to success to these companies. Nokia Nokia, the Finnish smartphone maker, has been quite big in the market up until Android and iOS destroyed the stronghold of its Symbian OS. Nokia subsequently fell from the top and now has the tenth position in global smartphone market with about 2.8 percent of the market, according to research firm Gartner. Nokia lost its stock value considerably, and the strong stock, which some time in 2007 was trading at a peak rate of 40 dollars, now trades at around 3-4 dollars...

If you checked LinkedIn, the social network for professionals circa eight hours ago, you might have noticed the service was not available. It instead displayed this particular website (image from TNW): Approximately eight hours ago, an outage spanning several hours was noticed on LinkedIn, and the people started worrying that the service was being hacked into. Here are the outage details from DownRightNow: However, LinkedIn later confirmed on Twitter that the outage was caused by a DNS issue. Here’s the tweet: Our site is now recovering for some members. We determined it was a DNS issue, we're continuing to work on it. Thanks for your patience. — LinkedIn (@LinkedIn) June 20, 2013 What is the DNS issue they are talking about? Every website has to be tied to a specific IP address or a range of IPs. Although the website has a domain name (bluebugle.org, linkedin.com, google.com, etc.), this domain name has to be resolved to an IP address in order to correctly locate the...

Search one of these strings in Google. Chances are that you will find the live feed of an unsecured webcam. inurl:/view.shtml inurl:ViewerFrame?Mode= inurl:ViewerFrame?Mode=Refresh inurl:axis-cgi/jpg inurl:axis-cgi/mjpg (motion-JPEG) intitle:”Live View / - AXIS” | inurl:view/view.shtml^ A webcam, your webcam, may be secured unlike any of the public ones you may find. However, there are hackers out there who can easily get access to your webcam and feed it to the world. It is not at all difficult for them. With a bit of code, hackers can access any piece of hardware on your computer, and a webcam is no different. How serious are the consequences of exposing your webcam? Well, if you have children at home and you want to protect their privacy, you cannot be serious enough about this. Your webcam should be yours and you should have complete control over it. There was a recent investigation by BBC, about a Finnish hacker who hacks and sells people’s webcams for money. Here is th...

WWDC has seen some quite amazing achievements by Apple, and one of the most eye-candy is the new Mac Pro. Mac Pro is the desktop PC from Apple, running the new Mac OS X ‘Mavericks’ operating system, rival to Microsoft Windows. Let’s see what is new in this new Pro PC, which is, first of all, kind of different in looks. Check it out: Perched on a cylindrical metal pole inside a glass cylinder as shown here is the new cylindrical Mac Pro. You can see the expansion ports—USB and Apple’s own Thunderbolt ports, Gigabit Ethernet port, HDMI, power port, etc. How Is Mac Pro Different? In terms of design, this is something that nobody has ever attempted. As Apple is pretty savvy in the design of its products, this Mac Pro also has a unique, industry-leading design. The entire PC is within a cylindrical column of 9.9 inches by 6.6 inches, which means, it is slightly taller than your iPad 4 and not even as wide. Quite a tiny form factor for an extremely powerful desktop computer, isn’t ...

With the current technological advances, we have, such things as S-pens, C-pens, Wacom iPhone styli, etc., to help more natural pen input on touch devices. With these technologies, one might expect the way we be creative should change. One might expect to see a lot of mainstream drawings being done on such devices as the Galaxy Note. I mean, we are no longer in the era where styli were used just for navigation as in this PDA: So, why does that not happen? Why do the people still stick with the old style notepads for note-taking and the old-style canvas or plain paper and brush for painting? (You might say there are drawings made on Note, but the number is still low, and people still don’t find it quite enjoyable to draw on a tablet like Note; you can’t deny that.) The reason is that it is not a perfect technology quite yet. You can create a drawing on a Note but it takes time and effort, and it is not as natural as Samsung would want you to believe. In short, when you draw on a ...

Asus has manufactured a new, eye-candy product. It is a mouse, but the specialty is that it has also got a trackpad on. Named under the Vivo brand of products, it is known as VivoMouse. Engadget managed to build a gallery here  of the VivoMouse. Here are a few of the images (click to enlarge): VivoMouse has a three point multi-touch, circular trackpad on the top, which you can use when the mouse is off the ground. In that way, it can essentially act like a remote control for a PC. VivoMouse has been created to work hand-in-hand with Asus’s VivoPC, which is a new product the company is launching. It is a box PC with Media Center built in, and it will rival others in the market, such as Apple Mac Mini and Google Chromebox . These announcements came in Taiwan’s top computer technology show, Computex. Here is Asus’s press release announcing the product with further information. As soon as the third quarter of the year approaches these products should be available in shelv...