Blue Bugle: Mobile, Desktop & Web Technologies

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...

Whoa! Look at that! That is a complete 360° panoramic image of the city of London. It just doesn’t end there. To get the amazing experience of looking at the city as a whole, just visit BTLondon . There you go! The people behind this amazing 320-gigapixel photograph of London are from British Telecom and a largely less known company that takes panoramic images of major world cities, 360Cities . That company does have a number of images and virtual tours that you can check out. This panorama was created to celebrate the financial performance of BT. 320 Gigapixel is not simple or small. It is huge. Do you know the actual size of the images that you capture with your smartphone camera (8 MP or 13 MP)? Those images could easily be larger than the display of your desktop computer. A 320 Gigapixel image, by our calculations, could be print on a sheet of 1885.62 inches in length and width, assuming a perfect square. That is a 157 feet long image. The panorama of London shows everything...

Apple trademarked Retina Display in Nov, 2012. Retina Display is one of the major attractions of Apple’s top products. Introduced with the iPhone 4, during Steve Jobs’s reign, it sure sold quite a number of iPhones in two years. At this time, however, is Retina Display still relevant? Should Apple be actively marketing this feature at all? Let’s see. What Exactly Is It? Retina Display or any display at that matter has a particular ppi ratio (Pixels Per Inch). [ Learn about pixels ]. If, on a display panel, there are more than a fixed number of pixels in every inch, that display will be rich enough to avoid the pixelation issue given by older, low pixel-density devices. If you can see individual pixels, such a display looks rather dull. Look at this image below. One of half of the Apple logo is pixelated, and you can see the difference. Creating too many pixels and cramming them up within a display is a very expensive job. This is the reason why mainstream smartphone manufacture...

Amazon has enabled a new service known as AutoRip which enables downloading music CDs that you purchase on Amazon. This means, you don’t have to wait for the CD to arrive to listen to the new music, but you can go ahead and immediately download the music from Amazon into your personal cloud. However, the CD you are purchasing should have the AutoRip facility available. Check out the Amazon AutoRip website  to find some titles with this feature. If the title is AutoRip eligible, it will have the AutoRip icon on it. The one found on this image of The Haunted Man album. About Amazon Cloud Amazon has its own cloud storage offering, which gives you 5 GB of free storage online. The music you purchase with AutoRip option can be saved to this cloud platform immediately, and you can play it back with the Cloud music player. The compatibility of the music player is quite universal. The Cloud Player works as a web app, or you can install the specific app available for various mobile ...

Within CES, the International Consumer Electronics Show, of Las Vegas, we have been seeing some TVs, which sport not High Definition (HD) video output, but better than that, Ultra HD format, also known as 4K and 8K. Many movies are being shot these days in 4K, and broadcasting industry will probably move to this standard in the very near future. We have also seen the latest Snapdragon 800  processor that supports 4K image/video capture. What is the big deal about these displays, and what is 4K technology really all about? We will see in this article. In these first few sections, we will introduce the basics to novices. The Resolution of a Display You might have heard about various terms—VGA, QGA, XGA, WXGA, HD, FHD, etc. In order to understand what they are, you should first understand what is meant by display resolution. Resolution is a measure that indicates the number of pixels on a display. Pixels are the smallest elements on a screen. These square shaped elements a...

Apple iPhone has an amazing camera: 8 MP with a lot of cool features. There have been even speculations of iPhone camera being comparable to a low-end DSLR camera. Redmond Pie has a comparison of iSight camera and Canon 5D Mark III here . And FStoppers have this extremely hilarious video comparing iPhone 5 camera with two DSLR cams, Nikon D3S and Hasselblad H4D: Gizmodo has also given a nice comparison  of iPhone 5 camera with the other smartphone cameras in the market today. Apple iPhone 5 already has a panoramic shooting option that gives 240 degree images of high quality. The electromechanical gyroscope made in micro proportions within the iPhone 5 works perfectly with the camera to shoot these images. [Gyroscope is the stability device of a smartphone that helps in display orientation and smartphone gaming.] The iPhone 5 panorama option is good, but it has its glitches too. For instance, if you shoot a moving object, there is a chance that you will capture the object t...

Worldwide gaming systems provider, Razer has come up with the new edition of its popular gaming laptop, Razer Blade. The laptop is thin and extremely powerful. The technical specifications are as follows: Processor 3rd Gen Intel Core i7 (2.2GHz-3.2 GHz) RAM 8 GB dual-channel DDR3 (1600 MHz) Storage 500 GB 7200 rpm SATA & 64 GB SATA III Solid State Drive for faster data transfer Display 17.3 inch Full HD 1920x1080 px resolution Graphics Intel GMA HD (mobile mode) and NVidia GeForce GTX 660 M with 2 GB GDDR5 video RAM Operating System Windows 8 64 bit or Windows 7 HP 64 bit Dimensions Width 42.7 cm Height 27.7 cm Thickness 2.24 cm Weight 2.99 kg Other features Razer Switchblade UI Anti-ghosting keyboard HD Webcam (2MP) Digital 7.1 surround sound support (through HDMI) Three USB 3.0 ports Kensington l...

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 ...

Have you noticed our PDF documents appearing on some of our blog posts? I create a PDF file (which may be a public speech or any other important document available in the public domain) and I upload that PDF to a storage service. I then make the file available in a blog post by embedding a specific piece of code. In this post, let me tell you ways you can embed PDF and by extension other files (spreadsheets, presentations, etc.) on your blog. Let me make a riveting thrilling story from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle available to you through a PDF embedded file on this post. As a first step, if your document is not in the PDF format, you need to convert it. You can use any of the freely available PDF converters out there. Some popular PDF printers are CutePDF , BullZip Printer , PDF Creator , etc. Once you have the PDF file ready, you can use any of these services to get it uploaded—Slideshare.net or a cloud storage service  like Google Drive or Dropbox. Slideshare Method Slideshare ...

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 ...

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 ...

As you well know, Google's YouTube is one of the most popular video sharing sites out there. Millions of people watch videos in YouTube daily and probably wonder if there is any way they can download them into their computers. A few tech-savvy people do it through certain browser plugins and computer applications designed to download online video. In order to get YouTube movies into a DVD, first you have to download the video, and then if necessary, convert the format so that it fits into a DVD. The downloaders usually do the conversion too. First, let’s look at how you download videos from YouTube. If you have a regular Windows PC or laptop, then use one of the following applications to download videos from YouTube. Some of these applications also work with other video sharing sites like MetaCafe, DailyMotion, MegaVideo, Veoh, etc. VDownloader Well, if you want a free application for video download, this is the one. VDownloader is an absolutely free application, and it ...