For Samsung, it's time to take revenge

Right after Apple announced iPhone 4S, Samsung has filed injunction against Apple to block iPhone 4S launch in France and Italy. Samsung has reported that Apple has violated on two patents held by Samsung related to WCDMA standards for 3G devices. It would only be a matter of time to see Samsung file lawsuites against Apple in more countries. This patent war is surely getting ugly.

Mobile Accessibility Lite: App for visually challenged

AT&T has teamed up with Code Factory bring a new application Mobile Accessibility Lite, designed to help visually challenged people use Android OS. Mobile Accessibility Lite is actually a suite of 10 accessibility applications. Here is a detailed video about the app:

You can do the following using this application:

• Dial and answer calls
• Contact management
• Texting
• Alarm and calendar management
• Web browsing
• Email access
• GPS
• change phone settings etc. 
• Has English, Spanish, German and Italian language support at launch.

For more information, head here. 

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Gingerbread pulls more marketshare

The recent marketshare detail released by Android developers show that Gingerbread is now at 38.2% while Froyo is at 45.3%. Combined, these two versions of Android. The following table gives a better view of marketshare:

Amazon Fire on Fire

There are reports that Amazon has been receiving around 250,000 pre-orders for their brand new tablet, Kindle Fire. It seems that they are getting 50,000 pre-orders per day and at this rate, we will not be surprised if Amazon sells more tablets than Apple in the first month atleast. Would this be the catalyst that Google has been waiting for to boost Android OS's tablet marketshare? Let's just wait and see. 

Nokia's Windows Phone devices just weeks away

Stephen Elop has announced that Nokia is ready to launch their much awaited smartphone running Windows Phone 7.5 in few weeks time, in this quarter. This makes it certain that we will get a glimpse of these new devices as Nokia World that happens on 26th of this month. 

It looks like Nokia is planning to make full use of the holiday shopping season in USA, Europe and other parts of the world, though it is not clear when and which countries will get to taste mango first. 

A slew of announcements from Adobe at MAX 2011 conference

Adobe's MAX 2011 conference is on and there is a slew of announcement done during the Keynote and here they are:

Creative Cloud

This is a new initiative from Adobe to redefine content creation process. Creative Cloud will be at the centre where users can access application, services and also share their work.

"Adobe Creative Cloud reinvents creative expression by enabling a new generation of services for creativity and publishing, that embrace touch interaction to re-imagine how individuals interact with creative tools and build deeper social connections between creatives around the world,” said Kevin Lynch, chief technology officer at Adobe. "The move to the Creative Cloud is a major component in the transformation of Adobe.”

Napster to get a new owner, Rhapsody

Napster, the popular music streaming service currently owned by BestBuy will be acquired by popular music service, Rhapsody. As part of the deal, Rhapsody will get the subscribers and other assets and they will have the rights for Napster logo and brand name.This deal might give Rhapsody around 400,000 subscribers and will help them compete with Spotify in a better manner.

Hotmail app for Android released

Microsoft has finally released Hotmail application for Android. Here is a brief list of features available in the application:

• Push email
• Contact and calendar sync
• Proper folder/sub-folder structuring
• Multiple hotmail accounts can be added
• Attachment support, picture sharing

This is part of the revamp that Microsoft has been doing w.r.t Hotmail. Even the web interface has got lot of changes and looks a bit like Outlook.

Market link: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.hotmail.Z7

Sony Ericsson to work with FreeXperia Devs

For a while, Sony Ericsson Developer program has been following the activities of custom ROM developers like FreeXperia. After unlocking the bootloader (a while ago) for 2011 Xperia devices, SE has now decided to work with FreeXperia devs. It's a two way process where SE will assist these devs and also learn from these devs.
 Below is part of the blog explaining this on SE's blogs site.

We therefore decided to assist a group of developers called “FreeXperia”. The overall open developer community is important to Sony Ericsson, and we hope to learn from it, and share knowledge ourselves. The FreeXperia group was supported with devices and technical know-how, and they are now in the process of creating custom ROMs based on the CyanogenMod for several of our latest Xperia™ phones, including Xperia™ PLAY and Xperia™ arc.

 For more information, you can head here

Ubuntu 11.10 is just days away

Canonical has announced 13th of October as launch date of Ubuntu Linux version 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot. Currently in Beta 2 state, Canonical is on the fast track to release this OS one week from now. They have setup a website that shows countdown to release of 11.10. In case you are interested in learning a bit more on what is happening w.r.t 11.10, you can head to this site which shows the development status: http://status.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-oneiric/ and this is the current status

If you are curious to try the 11.10 version of Ubuntu, you can upgrade from existing version by pressing Alt+F2, run 'upgrade-manager -d' and then select upgrade to 11.10 but since this is still a beta, I would suggest you not to try it on a production or primary host/machine. You can get more technical information or download Ubuntu 11.10 CD from here

Windows Gadgets R.I.P

Windows Gadgets, commmonly knows as Widgets is more of less a flop product from Microsoft. They used to suck CPU/memory resources in Vista, part of the notorious sidebar. In Windows 7, users are allowed to places these Gadgets anywhere on the desktop and still were hardly useful. Enter Windows 8 Start screen with live tiles, Microsoft decided that these Gadgets will be even more useless and hence, they decided to pull the plug. Microsoft has decided to end support for developing and uploading of these Gadgets to Windows Live gallery, website that hosted these widgets. However most popular and most used gadgets will be available for download from Live gallery for unknown period of time.

If you are avid user of these gadgets, you better download them all and save them somewhere before Microsoft kills the site once and for all. 

Mac OS X and Safari market share rises

Max OS X now holds 6.5% of desktop OS marketshare, a record. The share was pulled from Microsoft's Windows. Still, Windows marketshare is at 92.4%. On the browser side, IE still dominates with 54.5% of share while Safari hits 5% mark. Firefox and Chrome, as usual are on the rise, slowly eating up IE's share.

Source