The Kindle Fire was announced today by Amazon at an event in New York, sending shivers in rival tablet camps with its price tag. Amazon’s tablet has a 7-inch color display, runs the Android operating system and is on sale for $199, which is significantly lower than the price of the Apple iPad ($499).

The Kindle Fire has Wi-Fi connectivity, but does not offer 3G, and comes with a 30-day free trial of Amazon Prime. The device has 8GB of onboard storage and a 1GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor, and the display runs at 1024 x 600. Battery life is expected to be around seven hours of WiFi use from a full charge. It might remind some of the Blackberry Playbook as it looks very similar.

Kindle Fire will enable users to access 100,000 movies and TV shows, a million songs, apps from the Appstore, magazines and books. Unlike some of the competing tablets, it doesn’t have an embedded camera or a microphone. A comparison chart follows later in this blog post.

Amazon Silk

Kindle Fire Vs iPad Vs Nook

Amazon’s value proposition for the Fire comes from its vast, deep ecosystem and a highly customized build of Android that CEO Jeff Bezos suggests will rock our world, so you don’t want to read too deeply into these numbers — particularly when the iPad starts at $300 more — but it’s something to keep in mind.

The release date for Kindle Fire is November 15, 2011. You can pre-order it from Amazon here.

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Move over Google Nexus S. if a popular technology blog is to be believed, pictures of Google Nexus 3 – the next device from the search engine giant – has already been leaked.

Is this the Google Nexus 3?

Yes, this is the supposed picture of the Google nexus 3, which was first posted by Michael Blake on TechHog. However, Michael has recently revised his article and removed the picture saying:

Sorry everyone, I’ve been politely asked to remove the information from this page regarding the 3rd Nexus. I apologize for the inconvenience.

However I will not be removing the picture till I get that polite nudge. Now looking at the Nexus 3 pic, its apparent that  the device lacks the signature Android buttons like the Search, Menu, etc. Its a good decision because the buttons were never really needed, and they became particularly obsolete with Android Honeycomb. While the HTC is a strong contender to manufacture this Google phone (since it also mentioned about porting Unlocked HTC phones) we mustn’t forget LG and its keen interest in Android or Motorola as for the matter.

In all probability the Nexus 3 will be powered by the Ice Cream Sandwich OS – the latest version of Android OS for mobiles announced recently by Google.  You can also expect a dual camera as well as a dual core processor (Samsung Galaxy S II showed us the way this year). Given most of the device shipping by the end of this year will have dual core processors powering  them, this feature is a must. Also, an amoled screen would be an icing on the cake.

Update: Michael seems to think that the picture above is possibly a test model for the Nexus 3 by HTC.

Kindle 3 WiFi with Special Offers

While Amazon’s electronics  bestsellers list has been led by the Kindle Wi-Fi for about a year, the new #1 bestseller is the Kindle Wi-Fi with Special Offers, the advertisement supported variant of the Kindle, which is priced at $114, $25 cheaper than the $139 Kindle Wi-Fi.

The ad-supported Kindle WiFi has been on sale for about a month. Amazon doesn’t break down actual shipping numbers, but it’s clear that many Kindle buyers are willing to live with advertising that appears on the home screen and in the screen saver rather than part with an extra $25 to avoid the ads.

When it was first announced, there were mixed reactions. Many doubted whether users would be willing to spoil their reading experience by viewing ads for $25 off. But Amazon had clarified that the ads would be display unobtrusively, only on the Kindle’s screensaver, and on the bottom of the display. No ads would be displayed in any books, thus preserving the excellent reading experience that the Kindle is known for.

The popular e-reader has clearly been an important product for Amazon, and one analyst predicted that revenue generated from the device will top $5 billion in 2011. The Kindle 3 was launched by Amazon in July 2010.

Google will soon be launching the “Ice Cream Sandwich” – a new version of its Android operating system that packages the best of Honeycomb (Android software for tablets) into Android for mobile devices.

Google announced plans to release Ice Cream Sandwich by the end of the year at its developer conference in San Francisco, and promised that it is being designed to run smartphones, tablets, and any other Android gadgets. In fact experts say it will be a marriage between Honeycomb and Gingerbread – the latest Android OS for tablets computers and mobile devices respectively. The aim is to make it an operating system that runs across multiple platforms without a hitch.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab - one of the popular Android tablets in the market

Statistics about the growth of Android were revealed at the Google I/O conference:

Thanks to the ecosystem of manufacturers, developers and carriers, the platform has grown exponentially. There are now:

• 100 million activated Android devices
• 400,000 new Android devices activated every day
• 200,000 free and paid applications available in Android Market
• 4.5 billion applications installed from Android Market

Looking at the fabulous growth of adoption of Android technology by consumers, it only makes sense for Google to pour more energy and effort into seamless development of its flagship OS for mobile devices. Ice Cream Sandwich therefore is a step in the right direction. It will definitely transform the smartphone landscape and give food for thought to Apple’s iPhone’s iOS.

Ice Cream Sandwich features shown off at the conference included compatibility with major video game console controllers and the ability of Web cameras to recognize who is speaking at given moments.

“With Ice Cream Sandwich we will make consumers really happy,” Android engineering team chief Mike Claron promised a room packed with thousands of software developers.

“It will work on phones in every size and shape, tablets in every size…even tablets that transform to laptops.”

The Ice Cream Sandwich will most probably debut with the next Google Nexus device, which is planned for release around Christmas 2011.

White iphone 4 release date

From June 2010 to April 28, 2011? According to macstories.net, the huge delay has been caused:

…due to alleged production issues with the white paint, which — according to many — caused problems with the camera lens, as well as light leaking from the front panel. The final version of the white iPhone, as reported last week, introduces a redesigned proximity sensor that has a different shape and doesn’t sport the grille of small holes seen in Steve Jobs’ on-stage demo last year.

In short,  there were much more challenges than Apple’s designers had anticipated. Steve Jobs sees the whole thing as a learning process. It has benefited the company more broadly. “We obviously think about this in a generic way because you have a white iPad,” he said.

Meanwhile, even as people in the United States are waiting with great anticipation for the white iphone, retailers in Belgium and Italy have been found selling these to their customers a day before the release date set by Apple, i.e. April 28, 2011.

Will the white iPhone 4 be available in your country tomorrow?

According to this press release from Apple – White models of iPhone 4 will be available in Austria, Australia, Belgium, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Macau, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, UK and the US, beginning Thursday, April 28 and in many more countries around the world soon.

White iphone vs black iphone

The white iPhone 4 ships with iOS 4.3.1 (build 8G4), released in late March for the GSM iPhone 4. And thats almost about it. There are no hardware changes in the white iphone when compared with its black cousin. Even the death grip network problem stays with the white iphone 4!

First a bit about the Nokia C3 – Its a nice looking QWERTY phone with a 2 megapixel camera (no flash though) and a 3.5mm audio jack. It does not have 3G but features WiFi (which turns out useless – explained later). The C3 also includes SMS with threaded conversation mode, email with support for POP3 and IMAP accounts, and the Nokia Mobile Communities app featuring Facebook and Twitter clients with a pre-installed home-screen widget.

To be honest its a nice phone for those who love to text (sms), especially with its threaded conversation thing. But what puts back this wannabe smartphone are the following:

1. Its built on the Symbian series 40 platform (most Nokia smartphones including E63 and E71 are built on the more advanced Series 60)
2. Browsing the internet on this phone is a pain in the a**.  Reasons: a.) For some reason the WiFi can be utilised only for connecting the inbuilt  communities application which lets you connect to your twitter and facebook accounts;  if you want to browse other websites in the browser you can only do so via your mobile operator. Why have a WiFi then? b.) The speed of the internet (both GPRS and WiFi) is quite slow c.) The included Opera browser doesn’t work.
3. From point 2(c) above, comes this third point – quite a few important in-built applications just DO NOT WORK in the Nokia C3. For example, besides Opera not working, I cannot get to work the Nokia Ovi store application on this phone. Every time I open the Ovi store, I get the error “To use Nokia Ovi Store, you must be connected to the internet.” I get three options to choose during this error – log, select and exit. The log button only shows a log of this error. Clicking the select options shows the application is connecting to Ovi store but returns the same error. I don’t need to tell what exit does.

I must say I am not tearing this phone apart in a hurry, its been more than a month now that I’ve been using the Nokia C3. I know I should not expect smart-phone level features with this cheap phone, but at least the functionality and software that Nokia promised should work! If you’re going to suggest that I should do a software update, I’ve already done that! Did not make a difference really..the things that didn’t work still don’t work. The GPRS is slow and WiFi can only be utilised for the Communities application (Facebook and Twitter).

And did I tell you that the Facebook interface that you get on the Nokia Communities app is horrible. I wish I knew how to take a screenshot in a mobile phone (I guess you an do that in the Androids an the iOSes?)  and explain how dumb it looks.

The only feature I like in this phone is the favourite contacts widget on the top of the home screen where the pictures you associate with your top contacts are visible instead of their names. Its gives the screen a cool look.

I absolutely miss my E71. Read this blog I wrote this very month a year ago – Why I love my Nokia E71.

This is a killer deal for people who are still running Windows XP or Vista on their machines – you can now get the Windows 7 Family Upgrade Pack (3 Users) for just $99.99 on Amazon – that’s a discount of $49.96 (33%)!

The cost actually comes down to just $33.33 per individual upgrade. I have already decided to order this package, as both my brother and I are running Windows Vista on our laptops. We just need one more person who needs Windows 7 on their machine to split the cost.

Oh and I forgot to mention, this is the Windows 7 Home premium edition that we are talking about, which would cover almost all your OS needs (unlike Windows 7 Basic). Already many geeks (bloggers, tweeters and friends) have mentioned how much of resource hungry Windows 7 is NOT as compared to Vista, and therefore I am looking forward to a significant increase in my laptop’s performance once I get my disc!

Moral of the story: If your PC is able to run Vista, you don’t have to download the Windows 7 upgrade advisor to check whether your computer will be able to support Windows 7 or not. You can buy and install it with your eyes closed! Amazon says its a limited period offer ..may end in a few days so get your hands on this deal before it expires.

Good day folks!

Amazon is fixing that. A post on the Kindle blog says that users of the new Kindle will get real page numbers in the next software update. Interestingly, Amazon says that page numbers will correspond to print titles,which should help those who want to swap between print and ebook editions of the same title.

Kindle users will also be given the option of making their notes and highlights public, which raises the prospect of reading a book annotated by the author or by an expert critic. It could be a brilliant feature if it’s well implemented.

The new features won’t be available for older versions of the Kindle, something that has annoyed loyal customers, but they will be added to Kindle apps for mobile devices “in the coming months”.

Kindle users who want to upgrade early can get the release here.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

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Before scroll below and check out the HTC Thunderbolt pics, let me tell you that I got to know about the yet to be unveiled HTC Thunderbolt today on twitter, because it was trending worldwide.

Thunderbolt sports a lage 4.3" screen and resembles the HTC Desire

Thunderbolt is the latest Android powered 4G smartphone offering from HTC, the other 4G handsets being Evo and G2. Some are speculating that it will be Verizon’s First 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) Smartphone. In early October, Verizon had announced that it will launch its 4G LTE network in 38 U.S. cities by the end of the year and will debut a half-dozen LTE smartphones and tablets at CES.

The HTC Thunderbolt kickstand features a Google logo

Between its 4.3″ display (suggested in earlier leaks), its proudly-sported kickstand, and its all-around Evoeque look, it seems like Verizon’s (kinda unimaginative) answer to Sprint’s flagship Android phone. – Gizmodo

If you’re wondering about the significance of LTE (Long Term Evolution), it’s the widely adopted 4G-ready mobile network standard that will finally enable mind-numbing data transfer speeds (in its current state, it theoretically offers peak download rates of 326.4 Mbit/s) on our mobile phones.

The phone features the new Symbian3 OS, a 12 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, an HDMI port, huge processing and graphical display power and a massively overhauled UI – basically, it’s meant to be a really smart smartphone.

The N8 is available in 5 colours

The Nokia N8 is a fairly large device – but that’s not to say that it’s chunky. It’s merely large due to having a large 3.5-inch OLED screen, and it comes in at just 12.9mm thick.

The camera has an aperture of F2.8, focal length of 5.4mm and a Xenon flash. According to Nokia, the N8 is its first 12-megapixel camera-phone and the company claims that the image sensor used is bigger than many of those found in dedicated digicams.

The capacitive touchscreen measures 3.5 inches diagonally and has a resolution of 640 x 360 pixels. One thing Nokia smartphones have never lacked is their suite of connectivity features. The quad-band GSM N8 also supports quad-band WCDMA, Wi-Fi (b/g/n), Bluetooth stereo and Assisted-GPS. It also comes with free walk and drive navigation as well as Lonely Planet and Michelin guides on Ovi Maps.

In terms of performance, Nokia claims the N8 is more efficient when it comes to memory management, which means more applications can run at the same time. The N900 is a good example of this. So if the same kind of experience can be ported over to the N8, it should be something to lookout for. For the record, the N8 has 256MB of RAM and a 512MB ROM.

Wrapping up this section is the 16GB of onboard memory with the option to increase that to 48GB via the microSD expansion card slot. The N8 also has the ability to act as a USB host for transferring data to another USB device.

Click here to read the full specs and purchase information for Nokia N8.