Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

What drains power in today’s electronics, what causes high temperatures and costs in today’s electronic equipment, could be behind extreme electronics of tomorrow. Our world is gearing towards a better tomorrow, where the supercomputers will be millions of times faster than today’s. Processing will be remarkably faster, and high level applications will run in nanoseconds. What will help us achieve this for our future? The technology known as MIM diodes and its successor, MIIM diodes (Metal-Insulator-Insulator-Metal diodes). Let’s check them out in detail. What Is MIM & MIIM? A diode is one of the most basic electronic components of any circuit. It is used to conduct electrons in one direction, like a valve. Advanced diodes are capable of modifying the current as well, such as sine wave to square wave, AC to DC, etc. Diode is such an important component in today’s electronics that without them nothing would be possible—no cellphones, tablets, PCs, display technologies, speake

I have been studying the new iOS 7 for a few days now, and it seems apt to make a post about it right now. It has been more than ten days since Apple introduced the latest edition of the legendary mobile OS in the World Wide Developer Conference. For such a long time, iPhone and iOS have been in need for a formidable software update. iOS 7 is that update. For how long can Apple keep competing with a more streamlined open-source operating system like Android? While new mobile operating systems, such as Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 , were making an entrance, iOS stayed the same. While innovative user interfaces were being ported on top of Android by device manufacturers like HTC and Samsung, iOS stayed stale and strong. Time has finally come for it to stay stale no longer. This is what motivated the operating system update. The person who was in charge of iOS and the desktop operating systems in Apple was Scott Fortsall, who left Apple after the Maps fiasco . Lately, the hardwar

Have you been hearing quite a bit about the upcoming custom TLDs lately? A few domain names that may appear in the near future are .google, .apple, .microsoft, .app, .book, .android, .search, and the list goes on. These are custom top level domains, slightly different from the existing generic top level domains you know, such as .com, .org, .net, .info, .mil, .edu, .biz, .gov, etc. Each of these generic TLDs has its own use; for instance, .mil is allocated for military websites only, while .gov is for government websites. When it comes to custom TLDs, anybody can apply and get a TLD that they would like. It could be your name, your company name, or any word you choose. ICANN (Internet Corporation of Assigned Names and Numbers) manages TLDs and custom TLDs across the world. The corporation announced that it would take applications for these custom TLDs on June 20, 2011 in Singapore, and the application process started between Jan 12 and April 12, 2012 . Around that time, ICANN al

When you are looking for a new smartphone, you often come across some of these display technologies in technical specifications—LCD, LCD IPS, LED, WLED, OLED, SLCD, TFT, Retina Display, AMOLED, Super AMOLED, PLS, Super PLS, and so on. What the heck are these acronyms? How can you find out what is what and what matters the most? It’s a difficult job indeed. There are quite a number of things you need to understand and appreciate. But here, in this article, let me clear a few doubts and myths. Display Technology When we consider a smartphone screen, there are three major aspects to consider—the basic technology used, the resolution, and the technology used for wide-angle viewing. The first part is the actual display technology, which you probably know about. In yesteryear computers, you have CRT (Cathode Ray Tube), and then came LCD for flat panel displays. Realistically speaking, if you go into the detail of display technologies, there are actually only two types of major display

Technology team, Mobile Geeks traveled to Taiwan this month and they had the first look at the world’s first transparent smartphone. I was looking through their review here , yesterday. Take a look at the video here: As you can see the phone is still a prototype without any specific software on it. Also, the display doesn’t light up quite as visibly as other phones. The maker of this particular device is Taiwan-based Polytron, about which we in the technology industry haven’t heard a lot. The company makes quite a number of electronic and optical vision glass products and one of them is trademarked Polyvision. This is a type of glass product that becomes transparent on electrification. See here: Here’s how it works. When there is no electricity passing through the glass, the LCD molecules are aligned randomly causing the light to get scattered away, and the glass becomes opaque in a dull white color. On the other hand, when there is electricity passing through the glass

As far as mobile and tablet operating systems go, we have a lot in our hands. There are our big guys, Android and iOS; Windows Phone has come recently and taken a small chunk off the market; and there are upcoming Ubuntu and Firefox OS . You have probably been hearing a lot about Tizen these days, haven’t you? Tizen  is a new mobile operating system that is coming to our world, founded by the Linux Foundation and promoted by the Tizen Association , which has among its members such biggies in the tech world as Intel, Samsung, Sprint, NTT Docomo, Vodafone, Panasonic, Huawei, Fujitsu, etc. In this article, we will take a detailed analysis of Tizen OS. What Is Tizen? You are familiar with Android OS , Apple’s iOS, Windows Phone, etc., right? Tizen is an upcoming operating system that will power tablets and smartphones. But it doesn’t stop just there. It is expected to power much more than that, such as small netbooks (ultrabooks); IVI (In-Vehicle Infotainment) systems such as vehi

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C.org) has announced that the HTML 5 specification has become final. If you are confused what it is all about, check out the advantages and features of HTML 5 . This will mark the future of the web, without Adobe Flash and other such insecure technologies. You may probably know about Apple’s long-term disapproval of Adobe Flash . Even Adobe accepts Flash is more or less insecure. In HTML 5, you have amazing list of features, all of which are compared in HTML5Rocks , a web collaboration that talks about the features and benefits of this version. In short, these are the features offered in HTML 5. 1. Graphics HTML 5 can show you graphics without the help of any external technologies. The supported list of technologies include 2D/3D Canvas, CSS 3D transforms, WebGL, SVG, SMIL, etc. With these new 2D and 3D transform features and web fonts, you can use HTML 5 to create presentations on web pages. 2. Offline Capability Another feature of HTML 5

Doesn’t it look quite so difficult to believe if someone offered you cloud storage for hundreds of gigabytes absolutely free? Symform  is a cloud storage company that offers exactly that. You have to pay no money to get cloud storage from Symform; all you pay them is extra storage space available on your computer. Symform has created this revolutionary idea of storing others’ files right on your computer as a means of networked storage (which is known as cooperative storage cloud). I have got questions in my inbox from people asking whether this is really true or if any scam is involved. It seemed to most too good to be true. Let’s look at the details in this post. The Basic Idea It’s an interesting idea. Let’s assume you need 10 GB of cloud storage. To get that 10 GB free, you have to sign up with Symform and allocate 20 GB from your computer for the Symform network. That is a 2:1 ratio that you have to maintain. Symform takes twice the amount of space you need in cloud from y

Welcome to Blue Bugle. Ah! Today is a great day for us here. It has been a while since we started the idea of this blog here. And at last it has materialized. Here is the first ever blog post from us, and it’s now a long way to go still. The real work starts here now. And it’s demanding. Quite a bit demanding indeed. We don’t know where the blog will reach in the coming days. But we have a pretty good idea of what we want, and how to get it. The road is long and tedious. The work is slow and precious. The support is necessary and ever-insufficient. We hope you will all enjoy this ride with us. The Blue Bugle will be an open technology magazine, where we will share with the readers what we see in the world around us, well the technical world of course. Let me kick-start this game now! VJ