Two BlackBerry Phones receive MasterCard Certification
October 30, 2011 by Serge
Filed under News, Smartphones
Press Release:
Research In Motion (NASDAQ: RIMM; TSX: RIM) today announced the BlackBerry® Bold™ 9900 and BlackBerry® Curve™ 9360 smartphones are the first SIM-based NFC smartphones to be certified by MasterCard Worldwide as PayPass-approved devices.
The certification was granted on the basis of the BlackBerry® smartphones meeting the functionality, interoperability and security requirements of MasterCard. With this certification, any MasterCard PayPass-issuing bank globally will be able to deploy MasterCard PayPass-enabled accounts to the SIM card of these smartphones.
The ecosystem to allow customers to take advantage of the certified BlackBerry smartphones for NFC payments is already growing.FranceTelecom -Orangebelieves that mobile NFC has the potential to enable a new revolution in mobile by further connecting people’s mobile digital world with the physical world around them.FranceTelecom –Orangeis the first operator worldwide to have commercial NFC launches in two countries,UKandFrance, with trials in several European markets.
“We are happy to offer the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and BlackBerry Curve 9360 as part of theOrangerange of mobile NFC devices. We are committed to actively marketing NFC devices, and these new smartphones will help accelerate the adoption of mobile NFC services secured by an Orange SIM, including mobile payments,” said Vincent Barnaud, Director of Contactless Services at France Telecom –Orange. “We have a strong partnership with RIM, and look forward to working together on more NFC initiatives in the future.”
Andrew Bocking, Vice President, Handheld Software Product Management at RIM said, “NFC technology is making smartphones even smarter and the MasterCard certification is a significant step forward in helping transform the way we use mobile devices for payments. We are working proactively with our carrier partners, banks, retailers and other industry players and we are excited to push the boundaries of how NFC can enable new mobile experiences for BlackBerry smartphone users around the world.”
“MasterCard is proud to be the first to certify these popular BlackBerry smartphones for mobile payments, and offer consumers another simple, easy, safe and convenient way to pay. In card payments, MasterCard has long been a leader in the testing and certification of products – for the benefit of customers, issuers, merchants and acquirers. We are delighted to extend this leadership role into the mobile payments arena and applaud RIM’s efforts to usher in the next phase of NFC adoption by delivering compliant devices to the market,” said Mung Ki Woo, Group Executive,Mobileat MasterCard Worldwide. “The availability of NFC on popular BlackBerry smartphones is an important milestone for the mobile contactless payments business.”
Facebook might add a “Trusted Friends” security feature
Facebook is currently testing a new security feature to its service, Time Reports. The feature is “Trusted Friends”, which would help you out in case you ever lost/forgot your Facebook password. Here’s how it works; you choose three to five friends who you really trust, and should you lose your Facebook password, Facebook will send codes to said friends who will then send you the codes so you can unlock your account again.
Facebook says that its akin to giving your friends your house key. You may be asking, why not rely on password recovery through e-mail? Well Facebook says that in the future, you may not know what e-mail you might be using, and you could just as easily forget your e-mail password
Be good with your friends folks, its Facebook that is at stake here.
Skullcandy launches the RocNation Aviator
October 30, 2011 by Taimoor Hafeez
Filed under News
Skullcandy is quite a popular name for music lovers, and if any of you were interested in getting one of their headphones, do take a peak at the RocNation Aviators. Designed as a joint effort between Skullcandy and Jay-Z’s entertainment company, Roc Nation, the Aviator is created with some really high grade materials and looks incredible.
Available now for AED 699 from Virgin Megastores, these could make for a great Eid gift.
Full Press Release:
iPhone 4S battery woes continue
After getting their brand new iPhone 4S, many people were dismayed at the abysmal battery life they were getting out of it. People reporting anywhere between 4 to 8 hours of actual usage, before the battery flats out completely. There is a 134 page thread as of writing this article on the official Apple forums with people trying to figure out how they can improve battery life.
One of the issues pointed out by The Guardian is that there’s a location service bug introduced in the GM release of iOS5 that could be causing this. Apparently “Setting the Timezone” seems to be the main culprit (found in Settings -> Location Services -> scroll to bottom to “System Services” -> Setting Time Zone.) What appears to be happening is that a bug keeps the location services always on when ‘Setting Time Zone’ is is turned on, resulting in your iPhone 4S constantly trying to triangulate its position via cellular antennas and GPS tracking. Turning this setting to off seems to have helped a lot of people, but not everyone.
Many people have also suggesting a complete factory reset of the iPhone 4S and then not restoring the data from the PC (resulting in a completely new phone, so to speak) but to download all of your synced data from iCloud. Others have suggested that turning off Calendar notifications also helps. Among these three, you should be able to get your iPhone 4S’ battery life back to normal, but if you have any other suggestions that work, do share.
Firefox releases Bing specific version
October 30, 2011 by Taimoor Hafeez
Filed under Industry, Internet, News
In the ongoing browser wars and domination for advertisement money on search engine results, Microsoft’s partnership with Mozilla is paying off with the recently released Firefox that exclusively uses Bing as its search engine. The new Firefox with Bing initiative gives Microsoft an edge with both IE 9 and Firefox using Bing as their default search engines.
If you look at StatCounter, you’ll notice that this move doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, with both Microsoft and Mozilla losing market share to Google’s Chrome browser. Right now Internet Explorer holds the lead with a 41.66% global market share, while Firefox has 26.79%. Google’s Chrome has 23.61% which may not seem like much, if the trends of IE and Firefox going down and Chrome going up continue, Google could well be dominating the browser, and therefore Search Engine world by this time next year.
Time will tell whether this partnership between Microsoft and Mozilla will pay out or not, but the browser wars have just gotten more fascinating than ever, with actual numbers supporting Google’s rise to world domination.
Tt eSports MEKA G-Unit Keyboard Review
October 29, 2011 by Mufaddal Fakhruddin
Filed under Components, Input Devices, Reviews, Spotlight
Last week, we took a look at Tt eSports’ Shock Spin HD headphones and walked away impressed by its simplistic design and excellent stereo performance. For this week, we have equipped ourselves with the MEKA G-Unit, a mechanical keyboard from Thermaltake that promises to be “armed for battle”.
The G-Unit is an upgraded model of the MEKA G1, which was a simple, non-flashy mechanical keyboard much like the SteelSeries 7G. The G-Unit, however, has all the bells and whistles that a proper, all-fuss gaming keyboard should – more macros than your fingers, backlit keys, profiles, and separate media congregation (we do not like F1 keys, please, laptop manufacturers.)
Like the Shock Spin HD headphones, the MEKA G-Unit (MEKA from now on) does not go overboard with styling, and I fear I am more than chumming up to Thermaltake’s simplistic ways. I am supposed to like flashy stuff.
Without its palm rest, the MEKA is surprisingly compact, although wide enough to run your mouse off the table if you are limited in space. Finished in black built-like-a-tank hard plastic, the keyboard’s only color comes from the small red ‘Tt’ logo and two red stripes that cut into the sides. With the palm rest attached, the keyboard sizes up a bit more, and adds another dash of red with a neat little dragon tattoo. The palm rest may not look much, it certainly isn’t as big as the Roccat Isku’s, and while my palm does slip out of the general area of the rest it should easily accommodate slimmer hands. The keyboard does feature backlit keys, but instead of lighting up everything, Thermaltake has gone with a more economic, or focused, route. Only the WASD, control, space, shift, arrows and Numpad arrow keys are lit, with caps lock and Numlock having their own LEDs to display their status.
The focused lighting does seem limiting, even though it’s a lot easier on the eyes in dark. For example, whoever uses arrow keys anymore? In fact, who uses arrow keys on the Numpads, at all? I would rather have the ‘R’ and ‘G’ letter lit, along with the macro keys, which are surprising MIA considering they are the highlight of the keyboard. Moving on to the additional functionalities of the keyboard, you have the profile switchers on the left along with a utility key that disables the Windows button completely. On the right you have a bunch of basic media keys, such as play/pause, mute, volume +/-, stop, etc., and a backlit strength controller.
Also, like any good high-end keyboard, the MEKA features two USB ports and a headphone and a mic jack. However, unlike most keyboards, the MEKA does not use additional USB wires or sound cables. Everything just runs through a single USB cable, which is ridiculously wonderful. And it works. The USB ports cannot run external hard drives, no, but it can easily hold up two flash drives at once. The headphone jacks work well, too, with decent sound quality for what it is.
Introducing the Porsche Design P’9981 Smartphone from BlackBerry
October 27, 2011 by Abbas Jaffar Ali
Filed under Articles, News, Smartphones
Press Release
Porsche Design and Research In Motion announced the elite new Porsche Design P’9981 smartphone from BlackBerry®. Designed by Porsche Design, in collaboration with RIM, the luxury brand’s first smartphone delivers engineered luxury and performance.
The Porsche Design P’9981 smartphone from BlackBerry is instantly identifiable as a Porsche Design product. The exclusive material choices for this unique smartphone include a forged stainless steel frame, hand-wrapped leather back cover, sculpted QWERTY keyboard, and crystal clear touch display. This customized Porsche Design P’9981 comes with an exclusive Porsche Design UI and a bespoke Wikitude World Browser augmented reality app experience. It also includes premium, exclusive PINs that help easily identify another P’9981 smartphone user.
“Since 1972 Porsche Design has presented milestone products with iconic style, and the P’9981 smartphone from BlackBerry will be our next landmark,” said Dr. Juergen Gessler, CEO Porsche Design Group. “The pure and distinctive design, coupled with authentic materials and an emphasis on the manufacturing process, perfectly match our philosophy and complement the Porsche Design product assortment.”
“This collaboration stems from the shared belief that form equals function,” said Todd Wood, SVP for Industrial Design, Research In Motion. “The Porsche Design P’9981 is a truly modern luxury smartphone, where the timeless style of Porsche Design meets the unmatched mobile experience provided by BlackBerry.”
Powerful hardware and software
The Porsche Design P’9981 is built on a performance driven platform that features a 1.2 GHz processor, HD video recording, 24-bit high resolution graphics, and advanced sensors enabling new augmented reality applications. It comes with 8GB of on-board memory, expandable up to 40GB with a micro SD card.
BlackBerry® 7, the operating system for the new Porsche Design P’9981, includes a next generation BlackBerry® browser with a fast, fluid web browsing experience that is among the best in the industry. It also features Liquid Graphics™ technology, which delivers a highly responsive touch experience with incredibly fast and smooth graphics.
The Porsche Design P’9981 includes built-in support for NFC (Near Field Communications), which will enable many new and exciting capabilities.
The Porsche Design P’9981 smartphone from BlackBerry will be available from Porsche Design stores later this year.
Hands-on with the Porsche designed BlackBerry P9981
October 27, 2011 by Abbas Jaffar Ali
Filed under Articles, News, Smartphones, Spotlight
RIM and Porsche jointly took the wraps of the new P’9981 in Dubai today and we were there to bring you a hands-on with the device. There were some pictures floating on the web and honestly, I wasn’t too impressed but when that pretty much changes as soon as hold the unit in your hand. It is an extremely premium version of the BlackBerry Bold 9900 with a forged stainless steel frame and a hand-wrapped leather back. Take a look at it in the video.
Each of the P’9981 units will come with a BBM PIN that starts with 2AA and in the box you will also see a premium headset and a desktop cradle- both of which look great and are pictured below. The price for the P’9981 is going to be roughly US$2000 which definitely makes it a little too much for most of us but I can honestly see BlackBerry totting celebreties showing off the P’9981. The unit will be available in restricted quantities at Porsche design stores and selected outlets.
The keys look a little uncomfortable but honestly aren’t as bad as I thought they would be. Otherwise, it is the similar BlackBerry 9900 experience. Some more pictures of the P’9981. Let us know if you have any questions in the comments below and we’ll try and get them answered for you.
AMD FX-8150 Review
October 27, 2011 by Taimoor Hafeez
Filed under Components, CPUs/Memory Modules, Desktop PC, Gaming Systems, Reviews, Spotlight
The AMD FX series CPUs have been talked about since longer than I care to imagine, with a lot of excitement surrounding the new architecture coming in from their Opteron, server based CPU, lines. Eight cores with eight threads on a CPU running at 3.6GHz on stock and the ability to turbo up to 3.9GHz on all eight cores or 4.2GHz on four cores, the AMD FX-8150 had a lot of promise. And what with the world record breaking 8.429GHz overclock on liquid helium, the hype for the Bulldozer CPUs was higher than ever.
Instead what we got was something of a mixed bag: a CPU that on paper is powerful enough to outshine any mainstream LGA1155 offering from Intel, but in reality isn’t. With the launch of the FX series, AMD plans to bring back their historical moniker of their previous FX branded CPUs which were the flagship offerings from the company at the time; now the FX brand is fragmented into four, six and eight core CPUs with different speeds and prices.
The specs of the FX-8150, their flagship FX series processor is pretty impressive. Made on a 32nm die with 2 million transistors and compatible with all AM3+ motherboards, the eight cores run at 3.6GHz, supported by 256 KB of L1 Instruction Cache, 8 MB of L2 and L3 Cache. As with the FM1 chips, the new FX CPUs also support DDR3-1866MHz natively.
Apple patents “Slide to unlock” gesture
October 27, 2011 by Taimoor Hafeez
Filed under Apple, Industry, Mobile Apps, News, Smartphones, Software
The iPhone was in development long before Steve Jobs revealed it to the world back in January 2007. Therefore it comes as no surprise that one of the highlight features of the iPhone and iOS, the ‘slide to unlock’ feature on the lockscreen, was applied for a patent back in December 2005. Two days ago the US Patent & Trademark Office granted Apple this patent. Given how broken the current patent laws are, I won’t be going into whether this is right or wrong. However, as things stand, currently every Android phone manufacturer are infringing on this patent given the wording below.
A device with a touch-sensitive display may be unlocked via gestures performed on the touch-sensitive display. The device is unlocked if contact with the display corresponds to a predefined gesture for unlocking the device. The device displays one or more unlock images with respect to which the predefined gesture is to be performed in order to unlock the device. The performance of the predefined gesture with respect to the unlock image may include moving the unlock image to a predefined location and/or moving the unlock image along a predefined path. The device may also display visual cues of the predefined gesture on the touch screen to remind a user of the gesture. In addition, there is a need for sensory feedback to the user regarding progress towards satisfaction of a user input condition that is required for the transition to occur.
That said, this patent doesn’t mean the end of “slide to unlock” gestures for all Android smartphones. In a recent lawsuit Apple filed against Samsung for both hardware and software patent infringements, a Dutch court ruled against Apple saying that another mobile device, the Neonode N1m already had this feature. The N1m was released in March 2005, so the tech already predates the iPhone. You can see the ‘slide to unlock’ gesture at the 4:13 mark in the video below.
So as you can see, the N1m already had this technology long before Apple, which means that just like the Dutch court, any other court in the world can also invalidate Apple’s claim on patent infringement since the “slide to unlock” gesture already existed. The wording in the bove patent though, about unlocking on an image in a specific part of the screen is where Apple can still win out. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if some update or the other comes out where Google essentially changes the gesture based unlock on Android, or whether they already hold a similar patent through one of their many recent acquisitions.