+ tech Pluz +

Aakash (Ubislate) Tablet Available Online

2011-12-18T13:57:00.001+05:30

India's ultra low cost Tablet PC that promises to make every citizen tech savvy, has now gone on sale on the seller DataWind's website and is available for delivery within the week.

Akash, with a price tag of Rs2,500 apiece , is now available through its portal 'aakashtablet.com'.an upgraded version of the tablet, dubbed as Ubislate 7, will be available in late January 2012, and is currently available for pre-order.

The tablet, with a 7-inch touch screen, features 256 megabytes of RAM, ARM 11 processor with the Android 2.2 operating system, two USB ports and HD-quality video.
Aakash’s commercial version is powered by Android 2.3 and has a resistive touchscreen, a 7 inch display with 800 x 480 pixel resolution, 256 MB RAM, 2 GB internal memory, 3.5 mm audio jack, and a graphics accelerator HD video processor.

Specifications	Aakash	UbiSlate 7 (The upgraded version of Aakash)
Availability	NOW!	Late January, 2012
Pricing	Rs.2,500	Rs.2,999
Microprocessor	Arm11 – 366Mhz	Cortex A8 – 700 Mhz
Battery	2100 mAh	3200 mAh
OS	Android 2.2	Android 2.3
Network	WiFi	WiFi & GPRS (SIM & Phone functionality)

Definitely there is no other touch pad computing device or tablet available close to the price of Aakash or UbiSlate 7. It is an up-to-date and low cost computing device which comes with a lot of attractive features and functionalities. The basic aim of this tablet is to provide low cost tablet for students.

WORLD’s FIRST DUAL SCREEN LAPTOP TOSHIBA LIBRETTO W100

2011-10-23T22:09:00.000+05:30

This tablet has two touchscreens, each with LED backlighting and 1,024 x 600 resolution. You will note the virtual keyboard, and it is billed as “the world’s first dual touch-screen Windows mini-notebook PC”. It can be used both vertically and horizontally, thanks to a built-in accelerometer. The battery life is good for 2 or 4 hours with high-capacity battery.Other features include Intel Pentium U5400 CPU, 62GB SSD, 2GB RAM, WiMAX, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 2.1, Micro SD/SDHC slot,USB port, and Windows 7 Home Premium 32bit.

Why blogger is better than wordpress for newbie

2011-09-09T01:16:00.001+05:30

a good number of bloggers are blog on Wordpress!. Is really there any reasons? Yes we know that Wordpress is better than BlogSpot. The reason being, its features such as more flexibility, less coding, high end features, a much better interface for multi-author blogs. But, there are many things for which Blogger is better than Wordpress.

Indexing Time

your posts will be indexed in the Search Engines much quicker with Blogger. Usually within a few hours of posting your newest page will appear, allowing you to receive the most traffic as quickly as possible. This is especially important as most blogs strive to talk about the newest and most relevant news as it breaks. If that news does not index for two days, it will already be old when people start to read your posts.

Integrated Login with Your Google Account

With the ability to easily connect all of your Google accounts, this is a big plus for Blogger. Many of the most useful features for a website are offered by Google, including AdSense, AdWords, and Webmaster tools for Google indexing. Instead of adding code into your templates, something that can quickly become confusing and result in broken websites, Blogger allows you to simply click a button and integrate AdSense or banners into your site.

Free Hosting Service and 100% uptime

Most important and powerful feature of blogger is its free hosting service if you prefer blogger.com you don't need to pay for any hosting charges, but if we are going for Wordpress, then we need a self hosted blog and for that, we will need to pay for hosting every month or year, Wordpress blog is hosted on other company servers where we don't get a 100% up-time, but in case of Blogger you get 100% up-time. Now just think about this - can Google go down like local servers? Then why we want to prefer wordpress??

Blogger vs Wordpress via SEO

Search Engine Optimization is one of the major reason why people stay alive in the competitive blogging world. If your blogging platform is not good for SEO, then it is not worth continuing with it. blogger is better than Wordpress via SEO. It is true that Wordpress has some SEO areas where it is better than blogger but when all has been summed up, Blogger will remain at the top.

Hacking and Security

Well, if you want a secure blog, then blogger is the best option .Wordpress is a target of many hackers, the platform has to keep on releasing new version in order to patch up the security flaws in the earlier versions. It is one reason which makes a blogger custom domain blog far better than a WordPress blog

Ease of Use

Operating a blogger blog is one of the easiest things to do, signing up takes seconds, allowing users to use their Google login and asking only for few basic information such as blog title and description. From there, blog posts can be typed up and entered with two or three clicks and are automatically indexed. For newcomers to the blogosphere especially, Blogger is the best choice when it comes to ease of use

Appearance and Code of Templates

After Google launched its XML powered themes function, many themes have been developed and most of them are available for free whereas most of the Wordpress themes are paid ones. In Blogger, there are a number of pre-built templates as well as thousands more available from other websites. Simply copy and paste them into your blog's template page and you have a new look. Additionally, the style sheets and HTML code for your template (if you are willing to do so) can easily be changed and enhanced to suit your specific needs.

Making money online

Without doubt, blogger is the best platform for those who want to make money online. Blogger is fully customized with AdSense. It is easy to open an Adsense account while on blogger, You can also use Amazon on blogger. you can use Amazon and Adsense on other platform also, but it is easier on blogger

More and more new features

Blogger has started to introduce many features. The first being - xml driven blog, then a new template editor and now, there is a big change that the whole blogspot.com interface will be changed to new look, and that will be really awesome.

Limitations

Blogger has imposed the following limitations on content storage and bandwidth, per user account:

§ Number of blogs = Unlimited

§ Size of pages = Individual pages (the main page of a blog or archive pages) are limited to 1 MB

§ Number of labels = 5,000 unique labels per blog, 20 unique labels per post

§ Number of pictures (hyperlinked from user's Picasa Web Album) = Up to 1 GB of free storage

§ Team members (those that can write to a blog) = 100

§ Stand-Alone Page = Limited to 10 stand-alone pages

Amazon's cheaper Android tablet to beat iPad

2011-09-04T16:14:00.000+05:30

Yes…!!! Finally “Amazon” is set to launch its well rumored Android powered tablet to break down Apple’s dominancy on tablet market. Most likely, Amazon would like to launch this tablet in upcoming October. Amazon is not the very first company that has plans for beat Apple in tablets market on the bases of fewer prices. Lenovo CEO Yang Yuanquing has already told the media about their upcoming tablet that would be able to beat Apple’s iPad on price point reduction bases.

Amazon's tablet could be priced at $300 or lower, significantly less than the base-level $500 iPad.

Like Apple, Amazon is also in the business of selling e-books, streaming movies and digital music. The more tablets it has in users' hands, the more e-books it can sell to them -- which is where Amazon is hoping to make even more money. This is the main reason Amazon is willing to sell hardware at a loss.

Several Android tablets have been released this year, which may too heavy, too expensive or just not quite there. That has kept many software developers from creating apps for Android tablets, which causes even more consumers to choose the iPad.

Google doesn't make an exact count of tablet-optimized apps available, but most educated guesses place it in the low three figures. Apple has more than 120,000 apps for its tablet. A blockbuster tablet from Amazon would change things, creating a serious incentive for tablet app developers to work on both platforms.

Tablet War- this time Apple against Motorola

2011-08-12T17:26:00.004+05:30

Apple, the maker of the iPad and iPhone has sued three of the largest manufacturers of Google's Android-based devices -- Samsung, Motorola (MMI.N) and HTC (2498.TW) -- for multiple patent infringements across multiple countries, pointing out "slavish copying" of design and "look and feel."

After the success in gaining injunction against Samsung and the distribution of the Galaxy Tab across most of Europe ( That means no sales of the Galaxy Tab are allowed going forward and until the case is resolved. Samsung can’t sell the Tab across Europe again if it loses in court.) Now it has been revealed that Apple also filed a similar injunction request against Motorola targeting the Xoom tablet.

The reference in the suit says that Apple has also filed a complaint over the design of the Motorola Xoom, which runs the Android operating system. But it's unclear if Apple is seeking an injunction that would immediately prevent Motorola from importing the tablets into Europe.

Apple and Motorola are also battling it out in U.S. courts over their competing phones. They have sued each other in court and the U.S. International Trade Commission is investigating complaints made by both companies.

The fate of Motorola’s tablet hangs in the air, and if there are any similarities with the case against Samsung then it’s probably going to result in the Xoom being taken off sale too. However, Motorola is already fighting Apple in the courts over 40+ patents, so they may be in a better position to negotiate with Apple.

As it currently stands, Apple is fairing better against its keytablet and smartphone competitors in the courts. Samsung has been forced to stop selling the Galaxy Tab, HTC is awaiting a decision in November regarding Android, and Motorola has to defend both its patents and devices against the company.

Aliyun - the brand new mobile OS by Alibaba with Ali-Cloud

2011-07-31T19:50:00.001+05:30

Alibaba to be the google of china and even launching their own mobile payment services AliPay, we have to admit that seeing them launch their own mobile operating system really did not come as big a shock as we expected. Aliyun will be launched on china's K-Touch cloud smart phone W700 by the end of this month.

Aliyun focused on the web and cloud services. it focus on the web elements like e-mail and search but should also support web-based applications and will back up call,photo,and text data in the cloud. Moreover, users can seamlessly synchronize, store, and backup data such as contact information, call logs, text messages, notes, and photos to AliCloud's remote data center. The stored data can then be accessed across all supported PC and mobile devices. Interestingly, online storage service promises to provide 100 GB of data storage absolutely free! .The Aliyun OS will apparently be "fully compatible" with apps from Android through a proprietary Waterloo-style emulation layer.

Linux runs underneath the platform and allegedly lets the device runs Android apps, although this hasn't been checked and might not apply to some apps. Most of the W700's features aren't known, though it has 3G, a back camera, and GPS.

Also Alibaba expects a tablet based on Aliyun Os by the end of this year and will also have an English version for other countries near the same time.

Although with Mozilla planning their own mobile operating system too, it looks like the smartphone operating system wars just got a lot bigger which can only be a good thing as consumers will have more variety to choose from.

NASA App for Android

2011-07-09T19:27:00.001+05:30

Through this application users can share NASA content with their friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter or via e-mail. They can find sighting opportunities for the International Space Station as well as keep track of current positions of the spacecrafts orbiting Earth.

You can discover a huge collection of stunning images, videos, mission information, news, NASA TV and featured content with this new NASA App for Android.

Features:

- Thousands of images from NASA IOTD, APOD and NASAImages.org
- On demand NASA Videos from around the agency
- Current NASA Mission Information
- Launch Information & Countdown clocks
- Current Visible Passes for the International Space Station (ISS)
- ISS and Earth Orbiting Satellite Tracker
- NASA Twitter Feeds from around the agency
- News and Features from the NASA topic areas
- Facebook® Connect and Integrated Twitter™ client for easy sharing
- Live Streaming of NASA TV
- NASA TV and What's On Your TV schedules
- Map and links to all of the NASA centers
- Featured content section

User rating

5 star	69
4 star	14
3 star	9
2 star	13
1 star	11

Average rating:

4.0

111

Google Plus (Google+) Looks Like Everything Else

2011-07-02T16:40:00.005+05:30

Google Plus is a new initiative from Google, which aims to simplify your social sharing experience and connect with people who matter to you in real life.Google plus takes a different approach towards social sharing and has better privacy control on the features provided.

don’t we already have Facebook, Twitter? then what is the difference ?

Are you fed up with people who mass tag you in photos and videos which really gets in the way of your social privacy? You don’t want to remove those friends from your social life, it’s just that you want to prevent them from doing nonsense stuff over and over again.In Google Plus, your friends or followers will have to take prior permission from you, if they want you to tag in a photo or video. There is no Wall so the question of spam links and malicious apps being posted on your profile is burned to death. If you tag someone in a post, and share it only with him, none else can see it. Not even mutual friends !

here's an easy way to understand Google+:

click on the image to enlarge

·         Circles = Facebook. Share content with your friends, only you don't have to share everything with everybody at once. You can pick and choose specific groups.

·         Sparks = Google Reader. Subscribe to news and information sources and get a constantly updated feed.

·         Hangouts = Tinychat. Live video conversations with multiple friends at once.

·         Instant Uploads = Microsoft Kin (and iCloud, and...). Snap photos with your phone and they're automatically uploaded to an online storage spot on Google Plus.

·         Huddle = GroupMe. Group chat.

·         Stream = it contain updates from all the people whom you are following. This includes photos, status updates, videos and comments from people whom you have added to your Google + circles.



Everything in Google + works through Circles.

A Circle is an identifier for the network you create and it is visible to you only. You can create as many circles you want and add friends to one or more circles that you have created. Noone except you would be able to see the name and visibility of your Google Plus circles.

The best thing regarding Google Plus is that Google will automatically scan your email contact list and Android contacts and suggest you people whom you want to follow. You may add these people to your circles one by one.

If you want to follow a celebrity or a famous person on Google Plus, simply search for his name on the search box and add him to a circle you have created. Again, this circle is visible only to you so you can safely name it anything you want.

Android users can install the official Google plus application from market.

At the moment, google testing with a small number of people. so you can't join without an invitation.

but i can invite some of you. so if you want invitation contact me

Motorola XOOM Now Available in India, now we wait for the Galaxy Tab 10.1

2011-06-29T13:33:00.001+05:30

The much-anticipated Motorola tablet is finally available in India. The device is based on Android 3.0 Honeycomb and the company has announced the WiFi-only and the WiFi+3G models in the Indian market.

The launch comes soon after the announcement of the HTC Flyer and as heard before the company brought the tablet to the market by the end of this month. The tablet is the first Android Honeycomb based device to be revealed to the world which is powered by a 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor and 1GB of RAM.

The company indeed took a long time o introduce the tablet in the Indian market, and along with the HTC Flyer it goes up against Apple’s iPad 2, RIM’s BlackBerry PlayBook and the Acer ICONIA A500 which was announced recently.

In regards to the specifications the Motorola XOOM sports a 10.1-inch TFT display with 1080p HD playback, it has a 5 megapixel rear camera with 720p video recording capability and a secondary 2 megapixel front facing camera, It includes an HDMI port, Bluetooth connectivity, GPS and A-GPS. The device has 32GB of in-built storage expandable using a microSD card. It is expected to have a 10 hours battery life with 3G and about 9 hours with WiFi.

The WiFi-only version is priced at 32,990 INR while the WiFi+3G would be selling at 39,990 INR. We expect the street price to be slightly lesser than the official tags. While the pricing for the WiFi-only version is quite competitive, the price of the Wi-Fi+3G model seems abrupt and now it seems that the launch of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 would lead to us to the final decisions on the best Android tablet available in India.

Software - DEEP FREEZE DOWNLOAD LATEST [New]

2011-06-25T02:41:00.002+05:30

[Download Now]

Deep Freeze is a program which could freeze the disk partition, which will restore partition on the current state of the computer reboots

Prototype dual-screened 2-in-1 Android smartpad from Imerj preview

2011-06-25T01:49:00.006+05:30

Volkswagen Temporary Auto Pilot brings hands-free driving to the highway

2011-06-25T01:34:00.001+05:30

Would you feel comfortable driving down the highway with a Temporary Auto Pilot (TAP) behind the wheel of your next Volkswagen? A new technology proposed by the German automaker won't take you from A to B automatically, but it will help out with more simple driving, so you can take your hands off the wheel while cruising down the highway at up to 130km/h (about 80 mph), for example. The system pairs Lane Assist with cruise control, and can be overridden by the driver at any time. The TAP system's Pilot Mode uses radar, laser, camera, and ultrasonic sensors to maintain a safe distance between vehicles, start and stop in traffic, and slow down before a bend. Speed is set by the driver, who you'll need to remain aware of your surroundings in case you need to take over control -- so don't get too comfortable poking around the menus on that AppRadio just yet.

The second, and final, beta release of Mozilla Thunderbird 5.0 has been made available for download.

2011-06-24T00:29:00.000+05:30

New features in Thunderbird 5.0 include a revised account creation wizard and new add-ons manager. Bug fixes and interface tweaks round out the changes.

Full release notes for Thunderbird 5 beta 2 can be found at mozillamessaging.com.

Download
Beta builds of anything are not recommended for users unable or unprepared to manage with incomplete, buggy or unstable software.

Should you feel adept enough at coping, the Beta can be downloaded from: -

mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/early_releases/downloads/

The Mozilla Team also maintain a ‘Thunderbird Beta’ PPA, which provides packages for Ubuntu 10.04, 10.10 and 11.04.

Note that at the time of writing the PPA has not been updated with Thunderbird 5 Beta 2.

Add the following PPA to your Software Sources: -

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/thunderbird-next
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install thunderbird

MIPS chip slips through Android compliance

2011-06-21T21:52:00.000+05:30

Green robot no longer an ARM exclusive

A processor based on MIPS architecture has passed the Android Compatibility Test Suite, providing a welcome lifeline to the company whose share price has been in freefall lately.

The chip comes from Beijing-based Ingenic Semiconductor, whose MIPS32-based SoC (System on a Chip) XBurst has passed the 24,000 tests required before one can put the small green robot on the box. More importantly, the test allows manufacturers to install Google's Android application suite onto handsets, including the Android Marketplace.

Phones and tablets using Ingenic's SoC are already on sale in China, but without the critical Android endorsement which passing the test makes possible. MIPS reports that a Froyo-running handset is already on sale in China for less than $100, and will be shipping into the US any day now.

That handset might be cheap, but with Android compatibility it will have the Marketplace, and that means Angry Birds - it's the new Doom!

MIPS proudly announced the passing of the test, claiming that this development puts it "on top of the mobile mountain" alongside Android, with Intel still scrabbling up the slopes. But a glance at the MIPS share price shows a company in need of some good news: after peaking a shade under $18 in January, the company's shares now languish at under $7 following admissions that it wouldn't make its revenue targets for the year.

Having a little green robot on the outside of the box is very important to phone manufacturers, particularly in the west where the Android brand is widely recognised. Having an alternative to ARM is also to be welcomed, though it's Intel that the industry is really waiting for.

-source theregister

Joomla! 1.7 Alpha Released (june 6)

2011-06-21T21:11:00.001+05:30

Joomla is a free, open-source content management system (CMS) and application framework that powers 2.7% of the entire web. With a vibrant volunteer community, user-friendly features and plenty of power, Joomla is perfect for your site!

The Joomla Project is pleased to announce the availability of Joomla 1.7 Alpha 1 for download - on time and on target. This is the first release made within the new six-month release cycle that started with the delivery of Joomla 1.6 in January this year.

What is this release for?

There are several goals for this release:

To allow advance testing of sites and custom extensions so that site administrators and developers can report any problems before the final release.
To raise awareness that the end of the current development cycle is fast approaching.

Click here to download.

What is this release NOT for?

This alpha version of Joomla 1.7 is not suitable for production sites. It is to be used for testing only.

When is the final release due?

Joomla 1.7 GA (general availability) is due to be released on or about the 10 July 2011. The planned milestone before and after this date are:

05 June - Joomla alpha 1 released for public testing
10 June - Feature freeze to prepare for beta release
13 June - Joomla beta 1 to be released for public testing
27 June - Joomla beta 2 to be released for public testing
4 July - Version 11.1 of the Joomla Platform to be released
10 July - Joomla 1.7 GA released
10 August - Joomla 1.6 reaches end of life and is no longer supported
January 2012 - Next version of Joomla is released
April 2012 - Joomla 1.5 reaches end of life

Please note that dates may be subject to change depending on availability of volunteers and circumstances beyond our control.

How do I upgrade to Joomla 1.7?

Upgrading from Joomla 1.6 to Joomla 1.7 will be relatively easy. You will just use the Extension Manager just like you would upgrade from, for example, Joomla 1.6.2 to 1.6.3. This feature is not available for the alpha version of Joomla 1.7.

If you are using Joomla 1.5 then you will still be required to migrate your site using the jUpgrade component. When Joomla 1.7 GA is released you will be able to migrate directly from Joomla 1.5 straight to Joomla 1.7 (you can conveniently skip migrating to Joomla 1.6).

What’s new in Joomla 1.7 so far?

One of the major goals of Joomla 1.7 was to separate the Joomla Platform, that is the engine upon which the Joomla CMS runs, into it’s own product. The separation of the platform from the CMS, and its subsequent reinsertion, was completed last month. The new Joomla Platform includes many new features that will be of interest to developers. More information about those features and the platform will be made available closer to the release date.

Other features have been submitted to the Joomla Feature Tracker by members of the community and several of those are being reviewed for inclusion. Some have already been added to the 1.7 alpha package.

Compared to previous huge releases, such as Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.6, Joomla 1.7 is going to be a relatively gentle release with no big surprises.

What happens to Joomla 1.6?

Joomla 1.7 is the direct upgrade for Joomla 1.6. Joomla 1.6 will be supported for critical security issues only for a period of one month after the release of Joomla 1.7. After that time, only Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 1.7 will be available for download and will be supported by the Joomla project.

How can you help Joomla development?

The great news is you don’t have to be a developer to help build Joomla. The Joomla Bug Squad is one of the most active teams in the Joomla development process and is always looking for people (not just developers) that can help with sorting bug reports, coding patches and testing solutions. It’s a great way for increasing your working knowledge of Joomla, and also a great way to meet knew people from all around the world.

If you are interested, please read more on the Joomla Wiki and, if you wish to join, email Mark Dexter.

You can also help Joomla development by thanking those involved in the many areas of the process. Since the release of Joomla 1.6, a whopping 375 issues have been fixed by the JBS. The project also wants to thanks all of the people that have taken the time to prepare and submit work to be included in Joomla 1.7, and to those that have worked very hard on the Joomla Platform separation project.

click to download joomla 1.7(alpha)

Github Has Surpassed Sourceforge and Google Code in Popularity

2011-06-21T20:49:00.001+05:30

Github is now the most popular open source forge, having surpassedSourceforge, Google Code and Microsoft's CodePlex in total number of commits for the period of January to May 2011, according to data released today by Black Duck Software. This should probably come as no surprise, but it's good to have data to back assumptions.

During the period Black Duck examined, Github had 1,153,059 commits, Sourceforge had 624,989, Google Code and 287,901 and CodePlex had 49,839.

Black Duck also found that C++ and Java were the most popular languages for commits in these forges during this period of time.

Black Duck didn't look at language specific forges such as RubyForge, and it excluded shell, XML and assembler commits.

The most popular languages were:

C++ (362,077 commits)
Java (335,992 commits)
Python (296,896 commits)
C (264,468 commits)
JavaScript (251,557 commits)
Ruby (234,980 commits)
PHP (154,250 commits)
C# (125,848 commits)
Perl (89,720 commits)

Here's how the langauges broke down on a forge by forge basis:

Source: Black Duck Software

RedMonk co-founder and analyst Stephen O'Grady points to the percentage of C# commits in GitHub as a key indicator of the forge's popularity. As expected, the largest number of C# commits were in CodePlex - 35.3% of them. But GitHub was close behind with 31.9%. O'Grady described this as a "warping effect" caused by the GitHub's sheer number of GitHub commits.

Source: Black Duck Software

Update: O'Grady has released a slide-source readwrite deck on the subject of Github as the new center of gravity for open source development.

-source readwriteweb

Download full version games for PC

2011-06-18T13:13:00.001+05:30

1. Game Top

www.gametop .com/

2. Free download Game

http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/

www.download-free-games .com

3. Cheat Game

www.mycheatsite .com/

4. Play Free Game

www.acid-play .com/

The list of the best free & open-source software for Windows

2011-06-18T12:42:00.003+05:30

open source describes practices in production and development that promote access to the end product's source materials. Some consider open source a philosophy, others consider it apragmatic methodology.the concept of open source and the free sharing of technological information existed long before computers. For example, cooking recipes have been shared since the beginning of human culture. Open source can pertain to businesses and to computers, software and technology.

Here is the list of the best free & open-source software for Windows:-

WEB BROWSING

Mozilla Firefox
The premier free, open-source browser. Tabs, pop-up blocking, themes, and extensions. Considered by many to be the world's best brows

Download Page

VIDEO PLAYER, BITTORRENT, PODCASTING

Miro
Beautiful interface. Plays any video type (much more than windows media player). Subscribe to video RSS, download, and watch all in one. Torrent support. Search and download from YouTube and others.
Download Page

IM - INSTANT MESSAGING

Pidgin
Connect to multiple IM accounts simultaneously in a single app, including: AOL IM, MSN, and Jabber.

Download Page

VIDEO CONVERTER- MP4, IPHONE, ANDROID

Miro Video Converter
Convert any type of video to mp4 or theora. Convert any video for use with iPhone, iPod, Android, etc. Very clean, easy to use interface.

Download Page

DOWNLOAD HELPERS

SkipScreen
A Firefox extension that skips unnecessary clicks and wait times on Rapidshare, Megaupload, Mediafire, zShare, and more.

Download Page

E-MAIL

Mozilla Thunderbird
Powerful spam filtering, solid interface, and all the features you need.

Download Page

RSS

RSSOwl
Solid cross-platform RSS client.

Download Page

PEER-TO-PEER FILESHARING

Cabos
A simple, easy to use filesharing program. Gnutella network.

Download Page
Gnucleus
A very good Gnutella search and download filesharing program.

Download Page

VIDEO PLAYBACK

Miro
Beautiful interface. Plays any video type (much more than windows media player). Subscribe to video RSS, download, and watch all in one. Torrent support. Search and download from YouTube and others.
Download Page
VLC
Plays more video files than most players: Quicktime, AVI, DIVX, OGG, and more. Pretty good interface.Download Page
MPlayer
Similar to VLC-- plays loads of video formats.

Download Page
Media Player Classic
Compact, but powerful media player. Plays anything under the sun. No install necessary.

Download Page

WORD PROCESSING / OFFICE SUITES

LibreOffice
Big, full featured suite of tools for word processing and spreadsheets. Compatible with and a free replacement for Microsoft Word documents. Also supports OpenDocument Format.

Download Page
AbiWord
A word processor. Leaner and quicker than OpenOffice.
Compatible with Microsoft Word documents and OpenDocument Format.

Download Page

PODCASTING

Juice
Solid podcasting client.

Download Page

FINANCIAL TRANSACTIONS

Bitcoin
A "peer-to-peer" digital currency so you can buy things without paying
transaction fees.

Download Page

SOUND RECORDING

Audacity
Simple sound recording tool.

Download Page

GRAPHICS / PHOTO EDITING

GIMP
Photo editing application that rivals Photoshop in features.

Download Page
Paint.NET
Graphics editor with a very nice interface.

Download Page
Download Page
Inkscape
Vector graphics application.

FTP / SFTP

Download Page
Filezilla
Solid podcasting client.

IRC

Download Page
X-Chat 2
IRC client.

ARCHIVING

PeaZip
Fantastic archiving utility to extract and pack archives of an extensive amount
of formats. PeaZip also features password protecting archives, keyfile support,
system integration, a lovely interface, and much more.
Download Page

Chrome is now faster than fast...!!! (chrome instant pages)

2011-06-18T11:20:00.001+05:30

Remember the old feature in old Netscape browsers that prefetched links on a page so that when you clicked on it, the page would load from your cache instantly? Google's Instant Pages seems like that.

Here's how it works: You do a Google search. When you click a search result (usually the first one, because Google guesses you want the most relevant link), the resulting page loads almost instantly. So Google takes the time you use to choose a search result and uses that to prefetch a result into your browser's cache, so when you do click it, you'll load it really fast (from local storage).

Google says it only does this when they're very confident that you'll click the result, and then downloads and "pre-renders" it in Google Chrome (executes the Javascript), to save even more time.

It's very, very fast when it's in action, and Google says Instant Pages saves 2-5 seconds for every search. This is on top of the Google Instant feature, which already saved you about 2-5 seconds.

Instant Pages now in Chrome Beta version. The stable version of Chrome will get it in the next few weeks. They're also working on Instant Pages for mobile in the near future.

Download beta from here

Get Google Chrome (BETA) for windows
Get Google Chrome (BETA)for MAC
Get Google Chrome (BETA) linux

-source lifehacker

The Nokia 6600i has just been launched in India and it establishes itself as the smallest 5-megapixel phone in the market

2011-06-15T21:41:00.004+05:30

The Nokia 6600i has just been launched in India and it establishes itself as the smallest 5-megapixel phone in the market. The 6600i has a slider form factor with an extremely impressive design and style.

The camera being the phones USP promises to deliver crystal clear imaging with its 8x zoom and auto focus functionality. It also comes with a dual LED flash for enhancing image quality.

Other features include FM radio, playback for all kinds of media files/formats, stereo headsets and bluetooth v2.0. A microSD card slot capable of holding a 16GB card fits perfect for this phone.
-source : technews

Chrome may become Ubuntu's browser

2011-06-15T00:18:00.001+05:30

There is "a real possibility" that Firefox may be swapped out in favor of Chrome in future distributions of Ubuntu, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth has said.

Canonical considered using Chrome as the bundled browser in the last development round, but decided to stay with Firefox for 11.10. "That probably keeps us on Firefox for another year, at least, and we'll see from there," Shuttleworth said in a report on Network World today.

Firefox is the longstanding browser for Ubuntu, while Chrome is Google's browser that has been developed in tandem with the company's web-based operating system, Chrome OS. Chrome is seen as being the fastest browser for the Linux operating system.

Ubuntu has gone through a major change with its most recent 11.04 distribution, as consumers saw the Gnome desktop replaced with the Unity desktop.

-source cnet

USB on the Go for mobile phones

2011-06-13T22:19:00.001+05:30

One feature I miss on most mobile phones is the ability to connect a portable disk and transfer data to the phone. Apple, Blackberry or Android phones, all have to be connected a PC (or a WIFI connection) to transfer media and files across. How about when you want to transfer data from a USB Flash drive?

USB OTG to the rescue

USB OTG, or USB On The Go, provides is a way for two devices to talk to each other without the need of a PC. This allows you to just connect your Flash Drive, Cameras or other Media Players to your phone and directly copy files to and from your phone directly using the phone’s file manager application.
I was really excited when I first saw this feature on the Nokia N8 smart phone last year and thought that most newer smart phones would certainly come out with this feature. After all, who wouldn’t want this? A year later, most Smart phones still lack this feature, I’ve seen it primarily on Nokia devices (the N8, E7, C7, X2 and others) and some Android devices (Samsung Galaxy S II).

What can you connect using USB OTG?

Any USB device which doesn’t need more than a few milliampers of power to run. Most USB flashcards, External Hard Drives, Cameras or Media Players which don’t pull power from USB should work fine. If you’re looking at connecting that power-hungry 1TB drive to your phone, make sure the your drive comes with a separate power cable, if it charges from USB, it won’t work with your phone.
You’re not limited to connecting just storage devices to your phones. If you want to type out those real long emails, connect your USB keyboard to your phone and type them out on that! A keyboard can also help you achieve higher scores on some of your mobile games as well! If you’re looking for examples of the Nokia N8 working with various devices, here’s some examples of what you can do – the N8 with a USB keyboard and the N8 with a Wacom Graphics tablet.
Have you tried connecting other devices to your phone? Let us know what you were able to connect by leaving us a comment at the end of this post.

The Future?

USB OTG is not a new technology by any stretch. The first announcement of this technology was made way back in 2001. In fact, a lot of media players and DVD drives already support this feature. We would have thought that every mobile manufacturer would feature this on their range of Smart Phone devices. The Symbian^3 OS and Android OS ( as far as I’m aware ) already support this feature. So why are mobile manufacturers slow pushing out this feature?

Why your smartphone battery isn’t as good as your smartphone

2011-06-13T22:11:00.000+05:30

-source nokia

Let’s face it, we’d all love our smartphones’ battery to last longer. But the simple fact is that the phones’ need for extra juice is outpacing enhancements in battery technology. Even though batteries have improved since the early days, battery manufacturers are struggling to squeeze as much as they can from more than a decade old lithium ion technology. So what exactly is it that makes life so tough for our batteries?
Old technology evolves slower
Smartphones are relatively new. Batteries have been around for more than a century. Why does this matter? Because new technologies inevitably evolve at a faster pace. Lithium ion polymer batteries for handheld devices haven’t changed dramatically in more than 15 years. A battery’s power comes from a chemical reaction, the transfer of electric-charge-bearing electrons between the anode and the cathode, and that reaction is difficult to improve. To drastically improve that, we need new material or an inspired inventor.
Smartphones are getting fancier
The bigger your screen and the higher its resolution, the more power it will suck up. That’s unlikely to change anytime soon. On top of this power hog, you have ever more hardcore processing requirements. Most smartphones contain Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and GPS inside. Often these work simultaneously. What’s more, newer devices also have a 4G radio chipset that needs loads more power to decode loads more data. So, even though smartphone hardware is much more energy efficient today than it was when phones lasted longer, the power requirements are massively greater.
‘Appy days
We all know about the massive increase in the use of apps. The figures are truly astounding. Ovi Store, for example, currently gets over 3 million downloads a day. While most app developers don’t want to create something that will intentionally ruin your battery life, sometimes it’s a balancing act between functionality and power. Most of us have got used to plugging our smartphones in overnight, but if battery technology doesn’t improve soon, smartphone innovation might hit a wall.
Hope on the horizon?
So what are our prospects? Research labs across the world continue to squeeze smaller and smaller amounts of power out of Lithium ion. And, theoretically, there is the possibility that graphene, a single-atom-thick sheet of graphite that has the potential to store and transmit energy, could one day in the distant future be used commercially. But until that time, we’re probably going to have to get used to the fact that our smartphone battery just isn’t as good as our smartphone.

Nokia's latest smartphone fails to impress market watchers

2011-06-13T13:46:00.000+05:30

Nokia's opportunity to create a third ecosystem based on Windows Phone is vanishing fast, warn experts

Nokia's chief executive Stephen Elop left the stage quickly after his speech last week, when he set out how the Finnish mobile phone company planned to build the "third ecosystem" in the fast-growing smartphone market.
He had been was speaking in London, and said he was confident that in partnership with Microsoft – which from this autumn will supply its Windows Phone software to top-end Nokia handsets – the company would continue its drive to connect the "next billion" people to the mobile network.
Richard Windsor, global technology marketing analyst at broker Nomura, was unimpressed. "Well, I'm still selling the stock," he said as he watched the Canadian leave the room.
He is not alone: analysts around the world are marking the company's stock down. They reckon it will make a loss for at least the next two quarters and that its mobile business will shrink by 20% this year and then remain at about the same size for the next two years.
Meanwhile the company's credit rating has been cut by Fitch and Moody's rating agencies to just a notch above junk. If Nokia were a European country, you would be thinking of Greece, not Finland.
The company's market value is now $24bn (£15bn) having fallen to its lowest level since the first half of 1998. In June 2000 it hit a peak of $285bn.
It is a shaming situation for a company that was once the Goliath of the mobile market. Now it seems to be careening unstoppably downhill as operators and customers shun its internet-enabled smartphones, based on the Symbian system that Elop intends to kill off. At the same time he is struggling both to downsize the company and speed up product development.
"We believe the new guidance [from Nokia] is a strong indication that our worst-case scenario for the company, of accelerating market share and gross margin decline, is crystallising," said Bernstein analyst Pierre Ferragu. "The Nokia brand is at risk of losing visibility and the opportunity to create a third ecosystem based on Windows Phone is rapidly vanishing."
The only light in the darkness is that the company has been discussing the sale of its share of Nokia Siemens Networks, a joint venture building telecoms infrastructure, which represents about 30% of revenues but is barely profitable. However, if that succeeds it could make the company vulnerable to a destabilising bid.
The reason for Nokia's latest dose of financial pain is that analysts have caught wind of the fact that it is cutting prices – both on its smartphones, which represent about 25% of its handset sales but generate some 50% of mobile revenue and the cheaper handsets which sell at a rate of about 75m a quarter.
At this low end of the phone market, Nokia has been losing share rapidly to cheaper Asian rivals. In May it warned it would miss sales and profit targets, blaming tough competition.
Nomura's Windsor thinks the group has little time to turn around because the smartphone sector will see its fastest growth this year and in 2012, and then level off. "After that, all you're really left with is competition, trying to get market share from rivals."
The promise that Microsoft's Windows Phone, a new mobile operating system launched in October 2010, will spark a whole new ecosystem to rival Apple's iPhone and Google's Android is viewed with scepticism by many. "Windows Phone offers a nice experience, but nobody has bought it," said Windsor. "There are nine different devices being offered on 60 operators, and we calculate 1.3m have shipped." (Microsoft said 2m shipped in the first three months, but has not said how many have been activated.)
Windsor reckons Nokia's Windows Phone device, expected in the autumn, will therefore be "irrelevant, because it will be an expensive device, and the top-end market is effectively lost to Apple's iPhone and Android phones such as HTC. The only chance for Nokia is in the mid-tier of smartphones selling at about $200 to $300 – but we won't see those for at least 12 months."
During that time, he thinks, cheap Android smartphones made in China will take over the bottom end of the smartphone and "feature phone" market.
Dean Bubley, who runs the research company Disruptive Analysis, said: "I think the ecosystem will happen, but in a different timescale to Nokia's revenues. Developers are starting projects to write apps for Windows Phone. And there can be more than just Apple and Android in the ecosystem space. There are on the internet – Google, Facebook, Skype – so why not on mobiles? It all depends what they can show off by the first half of next year. If I were Elop I would be concentrating on getting a phone out really quickly."

Welcome to a Faster Web The first commercial deployment of SPDY, a protocol designed by Google to make websites faster, launches today.

2011-06-13T10:27:00.001+05:30

SPDY, a protocol google revealed in late 2009, dramatically speeds up Web page loading by changing the way that browsers communicate with servers. Until now, Google has only tested the research project internally and deployed it on a few of its own sites. But today, the protocol launches as a commercial product.
Website optimization company Strangeloop has built SPDY into its flagship product Site Optimizer, software that sits in between a website and its users, and adjusts the site's code to make pages load more quickly. Strangeloop's customers will have the ability to turn the protocol on easily; in tests, the protocol has sped up websites by 10 to 20 percent.
At first, this will only make a difference for people who visit websites using Google's Chrome browser (the only one that supports SDPY), but Strangeloop expects that it could end up having a big impact on mobile devices as well, since Google is likely to build SPDY into browsers designed for Android.
The speed with which a website responds to users is an increasingly important technical and economic issue. According to the content-delivery network Akamai, people only give a site three seconds, on average, to load before giving up and navigating away. Better performance often means more page views, and thus more interaction with users. For online shopping sites, this translates to higher sales.
It's not just individual sites that have an interest in speeding up the Web. Google has been working to make the Web as a whole faster, reasoning that the entire experience needs to be lightning-quick and smooth to keep people happily using its many services. Google also hopes to entice people to use more Web services and less desktop software (see, for example, its Chrome OS), and the company knows this won't be possible if they struggle with performance.
There are a lot of ways to speed up a website. Changing the protocols that determine how information gets sent over the Internet is potentially the most rewarding but also one of the trickiest. These protocols are fundamental to communication between websites and servers, so they can have far-reaching effects on website performance across all devices. However, to roll SPDY out to the entire world, all browser manufacturers would have to adopt it, and every server would have to support it, says Joshua Bixby, Strangeloop's president. This is a tall order, and so SPDY has "real implementation challenges," he says.
Strangeloop's existing product is, however, well-positioned to help Google make a start. Strangeloop already helps businesses speed up their websites by handling optimization for them without requiring them to change their code or hardware. The Site Optimizer software sits between a company's Web server and the user's browser and adjusts the website's code automatically to make it load faster; this already includes improvements customized for specific browsers. Site Optimizer customers can choose to turn SPDY on, making their servers behave as if the protocol were installed, for customers who visit their sites using Chrome.
Browsers today typically open up lots of connections to a server, in order to start downloading lots of information at once—images, ads, text, and so on. Tom Hughes-Croucher, chief evangelist for Joyent, a company that provides cloud software, explains that, while this does speed things up, the approach also has its problems. Those connections take time to "warm up" and start downloading at their full capacity. Also, they don't prioritize well, so the user might end up waiting for images at the bottom of a page to load when what he's really looking at is on top.
SPDY addresses this problem by opening one connection that is capable of loading many different parts of the page at once. It also allows programmers to manage how pages load, so they can deliver more important pieces first.
Strangeloop's product is designed to handle using SPDY, so customers don't have to worry about writing different code for users who do and don't use SPDY. The company worked extensively with Google engineers to get SPDY deployed and running effectively.
Bundling SPDY with existing optimization products is a good starting strategy for Google, says Eric Hansen, founder and CEO of the website optimization company SiteSpect. He expects Google to eventually include SPDY in its own optimization product, called mod_pagespeed, which is similar to Site Optimizer. Google needs to do whatever it can to get websites to adopt SPDY, he says, because that's the biggest part of its "uphill battle" to gain acceptance for the protocol.
Bixby believes that websites will become more willing to use SPDY when they see its potential benefits. "What's really exciting to me is its capabilities on the mobile side," Bixby says. Google hasn't yet built SPDY into Android's browser, but when it does, the protocol stands to make an even bigger difference. Since mobile Internet browsing is painfully slow and Android handsets have a large portion of smart phone market share, Bixby thinks SPDY could make a difference in that arena. He says, "I would be very surprised if we don't see this in Android in the near future."