Cypher's Dot

Nigeria BudgIT App

2012-01-27T11:57:00.000+01:00

Proposed 2012 Nigeria Budget

At a time when Nigerians are demanding transparency and accountability in governance, a group of brilliant Nigerians at BudgIT teamed up with EnoughisEnough Nigeria and Co-Creation Hub Community developers to build a free online application and within 60 active hours, the aptly named “Cutgovtwaste 2012’’ app was created.

The application was launched on January 12th 2012 and allows individual prune government budget by eliminating all unnecessary spending as deemed fit. Development of a mobile version of this app is underway but I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it if I were you.

So, are you up for some pruning; to help make government more efficient and to free up funds for capital development? Click here. Be sure to read the rules carefully then share your result with friends on Twitter or Facebook.

Click to learn more on BudgIT.

THE WORLD’S THINNEST PHONE……for now

2012-01-24T15:57:00.000+01:00

If you like real thin, you are going to love the new device by the Chinese smart-phone manufacturer-The Ascend P1-S unveiled at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. Coming in at a mere 6.68mm thin, this 4.3inches Super AMOLED touch-screen beauty presently bears the title of ‘world’s thinnest phone’.

Huawei is mostly known for its bargain Android phone notable amongst them is the Huawei U8180 ‘Gaga’ phone being sold exclusively by Etisalat in Nigeria at about N19, 000. Recently, they seem to be taking it up a notch with the release of the Huawei U880 Vision and now, the Ascend P1-S.

The Ascend P1-S is built with premium components with a metallic frame running around the edge of the device. The 4.3inches super AMOLED corning Gorilla Glass display delivers a sharp, clear picture with a resolution of 960x540, though some believe that the Ascend would have been better with a "HD" resolution of 1280x720 (frankly, anything from 480x800 works for me). It weighs about 130g having a dimension of 127.4 x 64.3mm.

The phone comes in a metallic finish with black, ceramic white and cherry-blossom pink colour options. The Huawei Ascend P1-S is powered by a dual-core 1.5GHz TI OMAP 4460 Cortex-A9 processor, has 1GB of RAM and 4GB of internal memory. There is also a microSD card slot for extra storage of up to 32GB.

The Ascend P1-S will be shipped with a stock version of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, so there is no overlay software to drain the battery and slow the device. Other features of the Ascend P1 S include an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with dual LED flash (the camera doubles as a 1080p video recorder) and a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera for video calling, facial recognition capabilities, Bluetooth v3.0 with A2DP, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and HDMI ports. The Ascend P1-S is powered by a 1670mAh which Huawei claims will give 30% better performance than other high-end devices.

Pricing on this device is presently unknown, but would keep you updated when the device starts shipping around April.

SEO Boosting Search Engine Traffic to Website or Blog - Nigeria Technology Guide

2012-01-11T22:09:00.000+01:00

SEO Boosting Search Engine Traffic to Website or Blog - Nigeria Technology Guide

HOW WE ALMOST BECAME TWO SPECIES

2012-01-10T20:58:00.000+01:00

#say cheese#

Imagine you, humped back, practically naked except for a flimsy piece of animal skin or even leaves hanging loosely from your waist and a club hanging on your shoulder, living in a world with no electricity (just mean ‘ol fire). A world where Apples and Blackberries are just fruits and Tablets are stone slabs for making crude sketches. A world devoid of robots (Android), sleek cars (just your ever-dependable sturdy feet), toiletries (no toilet papers- Eeek!). A world where the only way to claim a chic (uhm! mate) is to slay vicious beasts before you are deemed worthy to profess your ‘oonga-boonga’ love to her. Sounds awesome uh? No? Well, according to gene studies, ancient humans almost started down the path of evolving into two separate species before merging back into a single population. Lucky for you that happened; your name would have been Yogi or worse- Shoonga, Grot or Ushmo (lol!!!).

According to scientists, genetic split in Africa resulted in distinct populations that lived in isolation for as much as 100,000 years (the longest modern human populations have been isolated from one another). To carry out their study, the researchers compiled a 'family tree' of different mitochondrial DNA groupings found in Africa and discovered that a major split occurred near the root of the tree giving rise to the different mitochondrial lineages predominant in the East and West and another predominant in Southern Africa.

Although there is a very deep divergence in the mitochondrial lineages that can be different from inferring when the populations diverged from one another, the scientists identify this as the most likely scenario that two populations went their separate ways early in our evolutionary history. This gave rise to separate human communities localized to eastern and southern Africa that evolved in isolation for between 50,000 and 100,000 years before merging to a single population. Though people still carry a signature of the ancient split in their DNA, today's Africans have been proven to be a part of a single population.....and I am mighty glad I can profess my love in English and type this post on a super cool laptop #thumbs up#.

*sighs* 'me love Beyonce!'

DUAL-SIM ANDROID GOODNESS FROM SAMSUNG

2012-01-10T19:43:00.000+01:00

Samsung today introduced the Galaxy Y Duos and Galaxy Y Pro Duos, a pair of Android smart-phones in the Galaxy product family that have space for two SIM cards, letting you lead a double life on your phone.

The two SIM cards mean you've got two phone numbers at your disposal, one for work, for instance, and one for your personal life. You can use data according to your plan, regardless of the SIM. Both phones run on the GSM technology (850/900/1800/1900 MHz bands) and have Samsung's TouchWiz software overlay.

The Galaxy Y Duos is an all-touch Android 2.3 Gingerbread setup with a 3.1-inch QVGA screen, a 3MP fixed-focus camera, and the Android works. It also has a 1300mAh battery.

On the slightly higher end of the scale there's the Galaxy Y Pro Duos , which runs the same Android version and has a full QWERTY keyboard on its candy-bar frame (that keyboard is how you know it's "pro"). As a result, the screen is a smaller 2.6 inches. There's a 3MP camera on the back, but Samsung has also added a front-facing VGA camera and a slightly larger 1350mAh battery.

While there's no pricing for this yet, Samsung has shared a January release date, and a first market: Russia. The Galaxy Y Duos will then "gradually" roll out to Europe, Africa, Latin America, Southeast and Southwest Asia, the Middle East, and China. The keyboarded Pro version is headed to Europe, Africa, Latin America, Southwest Asia, and the Middle East.

North Americans looking for this type of solution are sadly going to have to keep looking for now (or start lobbying Samsung).

(Credit: Samsung)

TOSHIBA EXCITE TABLET- THE WORLD'S THINNEST TABLET.........for now

2012-01-09T10:50:00.000+01:00

The Toshiba Excite X10 is now the world’s thinnest 10-inch tablet, measuring a mere 7.7mm thick (the iPad 2 is 8.8 mm thick, in comparison), but don’t forget that the iPad 3 is presumably just around the corner (along with quite a few Android slates.....which isn't so unusual).

The Excite X10, which sits on the "premium" shelf just above Toshiba's budget Thrive tablets also includes a Micro USB port, a Micro HDMI port, and even an SD card slot. There's also room for a dock connector like you might find on the iPad. Other features include;
A 2MP front facing camera, 5MP rear facing camera, 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP 4420 processor, screen resolution of 1280×800 and 1 GB of RAM.

Though really thin, The Excite X10 has been described to be quite sturdy though some quarters have reported that the screen gets darker at the point of interaction with the finger (even when just a little force is applied) just like you might expect from a resistive touch-screen. Being a top of the line tablet, one would expect it to launch with Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, but alas, its shipping with Honeycomb 3.2 but it would be upgraded to ICS in the nearest future, so rest easy.

The Excite X10 will go on sale during the "first quarter of 2012" coming in 16 GB and 32 GB versions.

Pricing is rather high and is expected to cost around N85,000-N110,000 when it eventually arrives here in Nigeria. Nonetheless, a price drop is inevitable as competition is never lacking on the Android platform.

In conclusion, I would definitely love to go for a ride with this device and give a hands-on review on this beautiful work by Toshiba.

Summary
Operating system Android: Honeycomb 3.2
Internal storage: 16 GB and 32GB (Expandable)
Camera (integrated): 5 megapixels. Secondary camera: 2MP
Weight 1.23 lb
Announced: January 8, 2012
Predictive text: Yes
Networking: Wi-Fi (integrated) 802.11 b/g/n

Welcome!!!

2012-01-09T01:16:00.000+01:00

Hello there!!! Welcome to Cypher’s Dot. Your one-point stop for everything awesome relating to gadgets, mobile phone technology, scientific breakthroughs, random book reviews and yes, occasional babblings by yours truly. At Cypher’s Dot you would get to read my opinion on various topics. While I promise to be as un-biased as possible, I’m only human thus, your constructive criticism and opinions are gladly welcomed and together, we will build Cypher’s Dot to a formidable blog.
Cheers and welcome onboard.