Android 4.3 unveiled

Android 4.3 has officially been announced – it's been in the wild on Google Play Edition devices for a while, but the unveiling was put off for today. So, what's new? Well, 4.3 is a minor upgrade so it brings minor improvements and refines the user experience, rather than delivering game-changing features.

Multi-user support was introduced in 4.2 and it's updated in 4.3 with the new restricted profiles. A restricted profile can limit what content and apps can be used – even limit in-app stuff like what levels of a game can be played.

The suite of stock apps has been updated - Hangouts now officially replaces Talk and Keep is available out of the box. The Drive, Chrome and Maps applications have been revamped too.

The way Android handles notifications has been changed too. For one, you can view your notification history. Also, third party apps have access to notifications, which will help smart watches and apps that sync notifications across devices.

There are plenty of changes under the hood too. OpenGL ES 3.0 is now supported (Google presented impressive improvements in 3D game graphics) and the graphics stack should be faster overall. For games, Google unveiled the Google Play Games app, which lets you keep track of what your friends are playing and a leader board of achievements in the game.

The "master key" exploit has been incorporated into Android 4.3, of course.

Bluetooth 4.0 with Low Energy mode (low power usage and longer range for low-bandwidth accessories like those fitness tracking gadgets) is now supported in stock Android. Before, each maker had to roll its own drivers. Also for Bluetooth, AVRCP 1.3 is supported, meaning the phone can stream metadata about the currently playing song to the wireless speakers (or your car's stereo).

Wi-Fi can be kept on at all times to determine your position, even when you toggle it off.

A new hardware-based encryption for DRM has been added so content providers will be more willing to stream high-quality content. A new Netflix app is among the first to make use of this and streams 1080p video (it's now available in the Play Store).

An Android 4.3 update will be available on Nexus devices from the Galaxy Nexus up (4, 7, 10, you name it). Samsung Galaxy S4 and HTC One Google Play Edition will get the update soon, too.

Nokia Asha 311 review

Key Features: Nokia S40 OS; 3.2 megapixel camera; 128MB of Ram; 1GHz ARM 11 processor

Manufacturer: Nokia

Nokia Asha 311 - Design, processor and memory

IntroductionWith budget Android handsets now available for as little as £70 on Pay As You Go, is anyone really interested in cheap as chips, non-Android smartphones? Nokia certainly seems to think so, as this is exactly the type of handset that the Nokia Asha 311 will be competing against for your attention.

Like all of the phones in Nokia's Asha range the 311 runs on the company's Series 40 operating system. Unlike its Symbian siblings, however, the Nokia Asha 311eschews the keypads and keyboards found on most Asha models in favour of a touchscreen interface that dominates the phone's front panel. The question is, can a Series 40 powered phone really deliver an experience that rivals what you get on budget Android phones?

Design
Despite its 3.0-inch display lining up considerably smaller than many of the latest Android or Windows Phone handsets on the market, the Asha 311 looks pretty much like any other touchscreen smartphone when you take it out of the box. Beneath the touchscreen there are just two buttons that are used for call handling as well as moving through the menus. The red hang up button doubles up as the back button, for example. The right hand edge of the phone is also home to a volume rocker switch as well as a lock button, and that's your lot as far as physical controls are concerned. All other aspects of the phone are controlled via its capacitive touchscreen.

Naturally the Nokia Asha 311 has a standard headphone jack which is sensibly placed on the top edge, and here you'll also find both the microUSB port and Nokia's mini charging socket. The charger that comes in the box uses this mini charging port, but the phone can also be charged via its microUSB port if required.

The body of the Nokia Asha 311 is made entire from plastic and lacks the premium feel of Nokia's high end models such as the Windows Phone filled Nokia Lumia 800. However, the chassis doesn’t really twist or flex much when you apply pressure to it and overall it comes across as being quite sturdy when you hold it in your hand. It's not the most stylish looking handset Nokia has produced, but the combination of its smaller size and the curved battery cover on the rear make it feel very comfortable to hold.

Processor and Memory
Powered by the same 1GHz Arm 11 chip used within the recently reviewed Nokia Asha 302, the Nokia Asha 311 has 128MB of RAM to play with alongside  256MB of ROM, of which around 120MB is free for you to use. Although playing host to a fairly limited amount of internal storage, the Nokia Asha 311, like many of its rivals can be expanded through the use of the integrated microSD Card slot. The budget handset accepts cards up to 32GB in size.

Sadly, and slightly annoying, in a design faux pas, the microSD card slot sits under the battery so you have to remove the battery to swap cards. On the plus side, Nokia includes a 2GB card as part of the package, giving you a decent amount of space to store your music tracks, photos and videos clips. On the connectivity front it supports 3G as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, but sadly GPS doesn't make an appearance.

Specs
As you would expect, the Nokia Asha 311 is driven primarily via its touchscreen. This is pretty small, measuring just 3.0-inches across the diagonal and its resolution is quite low too at just 240 x 400 pixels. That said, the small size of the display does mean that the pixels are quite tightly packed together making it looks a little bit sharper than you'd expect. The display is bright and its viewing angles are quite wide, and this combined with its vibrant colours make it quite good by budget phone standards. However, the lower resolution does hamper some apps, such as the web browser and Facebook, simply because it means the display can’t show that much information in one go.

Further adding to the user expereince Nokia has preloaded the Asha 311 with a number of apps. For example, its Social app is where you can access your Facebook, Twitter and Flickr accounts, the Chat app supports communications across Facebook, Google Talk, MSN Messenger, Yahoo and Nokia Chat, and there are also a few games included, such as the first level of Angry Birds. Nokia has also added its Nokia Maps application. However, as the phone doesn’t have GPS it has to use mobile triangulation to work out your rough location.

Further let down by its lack of support for voice guided navigation, the Nokia Asha 311's mapping ability is bolstered slightly by its ability to allow you to plan basic routes that are less than 10km in distance.  There's an on-phone app store too, but the range and quality of the apps is a bit limited, especially compared to what's available on Android phones. Nevertheless, the phone does come with what Nokia calls a 'Games Gift'. This allows you to download up to 40 EA games from the app store for free. The games are very basic, Java games, though, so their appeal is a bit limited.


The 3.2-megapixel camera takes only passable shots. They're fine for uploading to social networking sites, but the quality really isn’t good enough for much more than that as detail levels are smudgy, it struggles with tricky lighting conditions and colours tend to look dark and muted. There's also a video mode, but this takes quite jerky looking video at low frame rates, so isn’t much cop either.

Verdict
We really didn’t expect all that much from the Nokia Asha 311. After all, the other Asha handsets that we've looked at have been pretty mediocre. However, despite some weaknesses, such as the lack of GPS and basic web browser, it's a surprisingly strong feature phone, quite speedy to use, has a pretty intuitive user interface and long battery life. Still, as with a lot of recent Nokia handsets, when put next to the likes of the Huawei Ascend G300 it looks very basic, as that model has a much larger screen, GPS and the infinitely superior Android web browser.

Nokia Asha 501 review

Nokia recently announced the dual-SIM Asha 501 smartphone with a fresh single-Swipe user interface. The monoblock touchscreen device brings a new Asha software platform to the users and developers. The Asha 501 will be offered on dual-SIM model option as of now for Rs 5,199. Here is our take on the smartphone.

Design

Nokia Asha 501 is meant for the youth and first time internet users. The device comes in candy bar form factor with monoblock design. There are no keys peeking out or crevices for dust to get collected in the keys. Nokia's budget phones are known for being strong and survive great falls. The back panel hugs to the body in such a way that even when the phone accidentally slips from your hand, it doesn't come out easily along with the battery. Nokia has used slightly stronger than the regular plastic material with the device.

The back panel has bit of glossy finish which makes it easy to slip out of hands. It measures 12.1 mm thick and the phone is deceptively lighter at 100 grams than it appears. Nokia has placed the volume keys on the right side of the phone with the Power/Sleep key is located just under it.

There is just one hard button under the display. Surprisingly, it is a Back key instead of the typical Home button.

Hardware

Nokia Asha 501 is the typical small display bearing budget phone just like the predecessors - Asha 311 and Asha 308. The Asha 501 packs 3-inch TFT LCD touchscreen display supporting native resolution of 320x240 pixels.

It might not be the best display out there but the 133 pixels per resolution pixel density is decent enough. We do feel that the display could have been a bit bigger.

Nokia has not specified the processor used and the device packs 64 MB RAM which is decent enough for platform. Nokia Asha 501 supports dual-SIM configuration and requires micro-SIM modules. The SIM card slots and the memory card slot are located under the back panel and are not easily swappable.

Nokia debuts the single swipe access gesture through the Asha software platform 1.0 on the Asha 501. The single swipe access is heavily inspired and designed by the same person who worked on the user interface MeeGo mobile OS. With single swipe, the user can close the open application. Swipe driven user experience brings something fresh to the segment.

Multimedia

Music playback was immense fun on the phone and it has a decent speaker - which is loud but not clear and certainly not annoying. Watching videos on the phone is fun because the new interface allows resuming the video right from the second it was left off.

Battery

Nokia has held its position strong when it comes to battery in the budget and affordable devices. Though there may not be enough processing muscle, the phones actually last longer than the Android counterparts. Unfortunately, we did not have a second micro-SIM so we managed to test the battery life only on single micro SIM. With a normal usage involving some phone calls, texting, emails, and web browsing activity, the phone lasted for two days. Even with the music listening, the phone managed to go beyond one and a half day easily.

Nokia has reworked and designed special battery for the Asha 501 - at least that is what we were told. It is a 1200 mAh battery and on dual-SIM configuration should offer more than 8 hours of continuous talk time. We were not surprised with this battery for Nokia promises standby time of a month and a half.

Price..rupees 5000 approx

Chinese telecom major ZTE to launch smartphones for India markets this month

 Aiming to become one of India's top three handset vendors, Chinese telecom major ZTE had announced a tie-up with Delhi-based firm Calyx to launch its smartphones in the domestic market.

The new smartphones will be launched this Friday in India.

ZTE, which supplies handsets to Indian handset-makers such as Micromax and Karbonn and telecom operators Reliance Communications and Idea Cellular, has set a target of selling one million smartphones in the first year.

"With our foray into the open handset market in India, we want to become a dominant player here and be among the top 3 in the next three years handsets already contribute 10 percent of our revenues here," ZTE India CEO Xu Dejun said.

As a part of the partnership, Calyx, a real estate player will be responsible for distribution, sales and marketing of ZTE phones in India.

"We will initially focus on five states - Maharashtra, Goa, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. ZTE devices will be available pan-India by October," Calyx Telecommunications Executive Director Gaurav Somani said. He added that the company will invest about Rs. 500 crore in getting the inventory, marketing and distribution of ZTE products.

"At a later stage, we are also looking at setting up ZTE My Shop to sell the products," Somani said. ZTE is introducing five models, priced between Rs. 5,799 and Rs. 14,999, followed by tablet PCs by Diwali.

"Our tablets will be in the premium category based on 3G or 4G technology and we are looking at launching them by Diwali," Xu said. According to Cybermedia Research, smartphone sales in the country stood at 15.2 million in 2012 against 11.2 million in 2011, a growth of 35.7 percent. Samsung led the pack with 43.1 percent share, followed by Nokia (13.3 percent) and Sony (8.2 percent).


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HP shakes hands with Android, finally

Hewlett-Packard seems to have taken a sudden liking to Android, the most popular mobile operating system in the world. Two of the six devices the company launched in India on Wednesday run this operating system.

Among them the HP SlateBook X2 is an Android version of their Envy X2 Windows 8 hybrid, while the HP Slate All-in-one is among the most affordable touch computing devices available in India at the moment. 

The HP SlateBook X2 is a 10.1 HD hybrid device powered by a NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor and running the latest Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2. With 64GB storage the device will be available for Rs 39,990.

The HP Split X2 is a larger 13-inch detachable hybrid running the Windows 8 operating system and powered by Intel Core processors. Aimed at people who need to use a larger screen. This device is priced at Rs 64,990.

The HP Pavillion 11 Touchsmart notebook will again be among the cheapest touch notebooks available at the moment. With Asus and Dell already offering affordable touch devices in this segment, HP seems to have finally woken up to the potential. Priced at Rs 31,990, this notebook will have an 11.6-inch screen.

Having pioneered the touch all-in-one, HP has now introduced one with Android Jelly Bean. With its 21.5-inch Full HD screen NVIDIA Tegra 4 processor, the HP Slate can prove to be a good value for money purchase for first time computer buyers. For those looking for a high-end all-in-one, the HP Envy Rove gives 20-inch diagonal IPS screen and Intel Haswell processors for Rs 69,990.

The company also launched the Touchsmart Ultrabook for Rs 64,990.



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