Karthik R

I am getting a blank network msg pop up on the screen after placing a call.

Of the 125 apps you have installed, chances are high that some apps are particularly problematic. Either they are poorly coded, ping the network often and single-handedly drag down handset performance, or perhaps they just won’t quit, starting up when your phone boots and coming back to life like the undead after being killed by task manager software. To find out which apps are running, as before navigate to Settings > Applications > Running services. If possible, try uninstalling the suspicious software and observe whether performance improves A more advanced solution is to install third-party apps to monitor software behavior like Watchdog app which will alert users to oddly behaving software so they can be targeted for elimination . Also there is no point in installing a number of applications since they will keep slowing down your phone. Ideally you should only have those applications installed on your phone which you use regularly and remove the ones that are infrequently used, especially the free ones. I am having around 45 apps on my Galaxy S II / Photon and everything is butter smooth

@ Rahul Please post the other requisite information mentioned in the first post like ISP name, Plan details, your location, any other relevant comment.

Strange that I am not facing any wifi error while using it exclusively for GSM. On build number 4.5.1A-1_SUN-198_6 Anyway thanks a bunch for the find Kanaga

Rezound is capable of displacing Motorola Photon as the best Global phone now available with its 720p display, better internals. Hope Verizon comes out with an OTA update to turn on the latent GSM radio rather than us tinkering.

Nokia Was Paid $250 Million in Just One Quarter for Windows Phone Adoption Have you ever wondered why Nokia chose to use Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform for its future handsets, and not Google’s Android operating system? Or why it didn’t just launch devices for both markets like Samsung or HTC? Well, it may be something to do with quarterly payments of around $250 million. The Finnish company released its fourth quarter financial results today, which revealed it had received a rather large sum of money from its partner over in Redmond. In the fourth quarter of 2011, Nokia was paid its first quarterly “platform support payment” of $250 million. And it won’t be the last; these payments are expected to “measure in the billions” over time. But despite Microsoft’s payment and the popularity of its new Lumia devices, Nokia reported a €1.07 billion (approx. $1.4 billion) loss in its fourth quarter, as sales declined by 21% year-on-year. But it did see an increase over the third quarter, with 19.6 million smartphones and 93.9 million mobile devices sold, representing increases of 17% and 5% respectively.

Spectranet help secure the top spot for Rahul Dixit

I liked the 7mm super slim profile of the original Droid Razr better.

This should come as no surprise, Apple is the most profitable smartphone maker. They have a profit margin of 40% which means that of every $1 in sales, it makes 40 cents in profits. The branding works and people are willing to shell out more to be cool.

Lookout releases mobile threat visualization app for Android Mobile security guru Lookout, maker of data backup and security apps for all modern smartphone OSes, announced the release of a new app for Android that will show you where threats are being blocked, as well as the top current threats to your mobile device. Upon launching the app you are treated to a nifty 3D globe, with successfully blocked attacks represented by particles that fall onto the planet as you scroll along an interactive timeline scrolls through time. Tap on the information button and you are graced with the top three current mobile threats, as well as the breakdown between the proportion of spyware and malware (malware is currently whooping spyware at a 60:40 ratio). The globe on that page also tracks current threats, so you can see hotspots where mobile threats are emerging. The data is updated every hour, so if security is your thing you can watch as new threats create outbreaks and then get cleared up. Of course Outlook can only track phones with their security software installed, but with 15 million device installs worldwide they should capture a fairly typical cross-section of smartphone users. No word on when we might see Mobile Threat Tracker on other OSes, but if it proves popular we imagine it will show up sooner rather than later. If you want to try Mobile Threat Tracker out, you can get it on the Android Market. Perhaps this app shouldn't be recommended for the habitually paranoid... Source : Phonearena

source: PCMag

Now the first serious challenge to Siri’s dominance has emerged, and “she” goes by the name of Evi. The brainchild of True Knowledge, Evi combines the company’s advanced semantic processing with a license of the same Nuance-based voice-to-text abilities that Apple baked into Siri. The result can be extremely impressive, as in brief testing Evi returns to complex questions that Siri either can’t answer, or only answers by punting to a web-search. Even better for most users is that Evi is available on both iOS and Android without being tied to a specific phone. And “she” is available in markets where Siri isn’t ported yet. That’s not to say Evi is a clearly superior solution; for one thing, True Knowledge’s server’s seem to be having trouble keeping up with the Android version of the app (it’s clearly labeled a beta in the Android Market). The integration isn’t as deep into the respective operating systems as Siri – you can’t get Evi to make an appointment for you the way you can with Siri. Also, Evi’s “voice” is less realistic sounding even than Siri, and doesn’t have the same lively personality that has charmed many an iPhone 4S customer. source: True Knowledge via TechCrunch, Phonearena market links: iTunes, Android - Android users be warned: the beta service routinely does not get a response from the servers right now (although checking back later often returns an answer). video intro

It would be great for Motorola PHOTON users if this update had to do with Ice Cream Sandwich but that seems unlikely at this point in time.

We are now ecstatically witnessing the introduction of mobile devices with dual-core CPUs and drooling over the possibilities we did soon have at our fingertips. Now, we look down at anything that doesn't have more than one core - regardless of its performance. Not only are these new chips quickly becoming mainstream, Moore's Law is in full effect with our handheld devices since tri-core and quad-core systems are just over the horizon. We can't even fathom what's in the pipeline for the year 2015 and beyond (we don't think we're too far away from that 3D shark seen in Back to the Future 2). Let's not get too far ahead of ourselves here, however. After all, we first need to wrap our puny human minds around the idea of what this newfound power can do, and why it's changing the entire landscape of smartphones and tablets. In this article, we will focus on why multicore technology makes such a difference in the way we use our handheld devices, whether we should even consider purchasing a handset with a single-core chip inside, and why one-core tech is so 2010. Table of Contents : The birth of multicore Benefits of multicore chips Factors to look for What lies ahead Wrap-up The birth of multicore We push today's smartphones to the limit every day, completely oblivious that we're doing that much stuff on them. As new software applications and updates come out to improve our devices, the strain on our hardware increases as it works to run the additional functionality. Faster data speeds, gaming, video conferencing, multitasking and many other performance-intensive activities add a heavy burden to our once-speedy 1GHz single-core CPU. It simply doesn't matter if it's continually maxed out, attempting to keep up with the smartphone's skyrocketing demands. Such a weight on our mobile devices lend to a slower and less efficient execution -- and subsequent frowns and expletives. First, let's get the brass tacks out of the way. A core, in its basic terminology, is a distinct CPU. Any singular core is capable of executing all of the necessary computations and instructions to ensure a smartphone can function at all. Until the last year or so, one core is all we really needed in a mobile device; there simply wasn't enough demand on the processor to need that much more performance. However, software became more complex, operating systems added more functionality, and mobile applications exploded in popularity. New phones can conduct video conferences, play graphics-intensive games, record video in 1080p, and multitask dozens of apps at once. These activities leave our phones with no hope of keeping up with our daily grind. Chipmakers were able to crank out processors with faster clock speeds and slightly lower nanometer counts (more on that later), but they were quickly approaching a wall: these CPUs, if made any more powerful, would become too inefficient for use in a smartphone or tablet without making it large enough to carry cooling units. In a day and age where phonemakers are competing for the title of "world's thinnest phone," processors must be able to accommodate them while boosting performance simultaneously. A chip with any higher clock speed or cache -- remaining confined to the same small space -- would not only obliterate battery life, it would make the phone too hot to operate due to the overwhelming amount of thermal heat dissipating from it. Luckily, desktop chipsets went through a similar conundrum five or six years ago. Single-core CPUs hit a point where boosting clock speeds became too inefficient. Instead of trying to bump up the capacity of one processor, the next logical step was to add more of them and split the difference. With this feat of engineering, the multicore era was born; given the rapid influx of smartphone capacity, it was only a matter of time before mobile devices followed the same path. Benefits of multicore chips Multicore is swooping in to save the day. Let's say you're having a rough time at work; there's deadlines to keep and the mounds of paperwork continue to pile up, and fears of getting behind are growing. How much easier would the job become if you have someone else sharing half of the workload with you? What if both of you specialize in different areas? This is an illustration of what multicore chipsets aim to do: with extra processing cores, your device's tasks can be split up and managed much more efficiently. A dual-core chip typically consists of two identical microprocessors living side-by-side on the same die. In a multicore system, each individual processor can tackle separate duties. If you're running a streaming audio app while simultaneously catching up on Engadget news in the web browser, one core can now be dedicated to each specific responsibility, allowing for a faster and smoother experience not only in your multimedia and browser, but in all of your phone's basic functions as well. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q74pXDvlKzM&feature=player_embedded When using a phone with a single core CPU, have you ever noticed that basic processes and requests offer a fluid and smooth response -- until you try watching a video or opening a MP3 file? As additional jobs get tossed into the pipeline (queues that schedule / prioritize each necessary task and tell the processor in which order to do everything), it bogs the processor down because it can only perform one task at a time. By having extra cores at the OS's disposal, it allows core A to handle the multimedia while core B is freed to focus on the basic functions that keep the phone running smoothly. Some requests handled by our CPU can be complex tasks consisting of multiple steps. These can take forever if only one processor's involved, because each task has to be completed one-by-one. On a dual-core device, however, both cores employ the age-old strategy of teamwork to handle the duty faster. This is what multithreading can do to help -- multiple streams of data now have more than one outlet to push through, increasing the processing time and efficiency. Dual-core is more battery efficient It should make sense by now why having multiple cores sharing the same workload would be a more efficient means of processing tasks on your phone. Not only does this make multitasking much less of a nightmare, it adds to your total battery life. A 1GHz dual-core chip (where both cores are 1GHz each) that splits up the assigned tasks would only need to run at half its maximum clocking speed; the reduced speed of each core will result in the same -- if not slightly better -- performance and lower power requirements. Lower frequencies result in less mandated voltage, and the consequential reduction of power is reduced by the square of the voltage decrease. Most modern chipsets are designed to work with the platform's built-in task scheduler to ensure the CPU's running at the most optimal speed and voltage. When your device only has to worry about sustaining a few apps or basic processes, and only requires a small amount of processing power, there's no point in keeping both cores clocked out at 1GHz each. Doing so causes the phone to undergo a large amount of idle time, so the CPU ideally will minimize its output to match what the system requires in order to maximize battery life. In fact, some phones give you the opportunity to determine a CPU's current clock speed, as well as its absolute minimum and maximum. If you own an Android device, one such application that can measure these stats is Quadrant Standard. By selecting "system information," the app will give you a full rundown of what speed your CPU's working at currently and its upper / lower capacity. Of course, chipmakers are doing everything possible on their end to assure higher power efficiency, but the software it runs on needs to be optimized -- both from the OS and individual apps. There's a massive amount of complexities involved when coding for multi-core devices; in most cases the OS is already optimized (Android, a Linux-based platform, has been this way practically since its inception), so any additional battery life savings are left to the devs. If developers don't know how to code for proper multithreading, their app could ultimately **** the battery dry in no time at all because it's still reliant on stuffing everything down one pipe. Since dual-core hasn't been around too long, it's likely we'll see mammoth increases in this category as devs learn to adjust to the new chips. Sadly, we don't get the option of dictating how our CPUs run -- manufacturers make their chips smart enough to automatically adjust clock speeds, reallocate resources to handle pre-determined tasks, and do anything else necessary to optimize your phone's performance. This likely is for our benefit, since we'd likely just tinker with the settings and cause the phone to either underwork or overwork if we don't know what we're doing. Additionally, with dev coding already so advanced, user-adjustable CPUs would simply toss on an extra layer of complexity. So while we'd love to have the option of turning off specific cores and reallocating resources to however we see fit, chipmakers have at least found the most ideal way to manage our power consumption for now. Dual-core is faster Many chipmakers elect to run their CPUs as part of a SoC -- a system-on-chip -- which saves money and consolidates space inside the phone by including several elements of a phone's processing power onto one integrated circuit. For instance, NVIDIA's Tegra 2 throws several "purpose-built cores" in: an eight-core GeForce GPU, a core designed specially for audio, two cores for video encoding / decoding, and myriads of other cores that specialize in one form or another. By keeping these essential elements together on one SoC, it takes much less time and energy for everything to talk to each other. Many popular websites feature ActiveX / JavaScript content, embedded video, and various other forms of multimedia. In a single-core system, that lonely CPU not only bears the load of processing the site's content, video decoding, Flash content, and anything else related to the browser, it also is required to handle everything going on in the background -- Facebook and Twitter streams, the phone app (which is constantly pinging the cell tower), messaging, calendars, and anything else. The heavy burden has the poor core overworked; it's running at the absolute maximum frequency, it's slowing the rest of the phone down, and it's gobbling up battery life for breakfast. Below is a demonstration of the speed difference between a dual-core and single-core. Faster multitasking and UI response Smooth multitasking on a single-core device can bring lackluster results. What good does it do to have 40 apps running in the background if it takes 30 seconds to pull one of them up and begin using it? Like we mentioned earlier, the more tasks you stuff into the pipeline, the longer it takes for the processor to crank through them all. Indeed, everything suffers as a result. Touch responsiveness typically gets hit hard in this kind of situation. Since user interaction is inherently latent as it is, further delays in processing time are inevitable when multitasking. Single-core CPUs, when being fully utilized, cannot immediately switch over to get these specific tasks taken care of. Indeed, in a dual-core system, one core can specifically work on these basic user tasks while the other tackles more intensive jobs, allowing for faster and smoother multitasking and bringing back a more immediate response to your touch gestures. Dual-core offers a better gaming experience Have you ever wondered why you can't play console-quality games on your phone? Unfortunately, a chipset with this capability of handling advanced graphics of that degree hasn't been brought to market yet (fret not, they're on their way), but dual-core SoCs at least allow for a better gaming experience. Multi-core technology is at the root of our most advanced gaming consoles. The Xbox 360, for instance, is outfitted with three 3.2GHz PowerPC cores and a 500MHz ATI GPU with 10MB of embedded DRAM. When we compare this setup to that found on our phones, it's no wonder we still have a long ways to go. But we're getting closer; today's mobile game engines are now fitted with multithreading to take advantage of the constantly evolving CPUs that're running them. These engines have reduced the size of individual tasks that the processor has to work through, and increased the number of threads to enable the CPU to push through more jobs simultaneously. Allowing the game's AI to run on a separate processor as the rendering lends to a much smoother gameplay with better graphics. Taking a look at the Adreno roadmap below, it's not far-fetched to think that our phones and tablets will be up to par with current gaming consoles: Many of the dual-core chipsets on market now offer a quality gaming environment that's comparable with the last generation of consoles. Qualcomm claims its Adreno 2xx series (found in this year's Snapdragon chips) brings game performance similar to the PlayStation 2 and the Nintendo Wii, Tegra 2 chips offer an ultra-low power GeForce GPU with eight cores to do the heavy lifting on the graphics, and Apple says the PowerVR SGX 543MP2 GPU found in its A5 SoC is nine times as powerful as the A4. What else does an extra core offer? Besides offering a better battery, faster loading, multithreading and improved gaming, we saw a lot of new functionality come to our phones over the last year, and multi-core tech is largely to thank. 1080p video playback and capture, glasses-free 3D technology, improved speech recognition and language processing, improved multimedia, higher-resolution displays, and many more features are much easier to accomplish using dual-core capabilities -- and as we start piling on more cores, it'll get even better. Frankly, most of these features can be utilized on a single-core chip, but they're done so at the expense of overall performance. When this additional functionality is used, the processor simply can't do everything at once -- it has to prioritize, and ends up getting overworked in the end. This is why we seldom see phones do this; a few more gimmicky features aren't worth putting your handset's reputation in jeopardy. I don't do much on my phone, so dual-core's not for me. There's a few reasons why it makes sense to stick with a single-core device... for now, at least. The biggest one is cost. If you're using your smartphone as a glorified calculator and planner, you're likely not going to see a measurable difference in performance. Why pay a premium price associated with the extra core? Another reason, is that the most powerful single-core chips on the market still have a higher clock speed than most dual-cores. But not for long -- we'll soon begin seeing multi-core chipsets clocking at 2GHz or higher. Unless cost is a significant factor, there are very few ways to benefit from a single-core device. Factors to consider in a mobile CPU By this point you should have a general idea of why we get so excited when we see anything that's dual-core. The giddiness won't be letting up anytime soon either; Moore's Law is in full effect for tablets and phones as next year will witness the introduction of tri-core and quad-core devices. As we shop for another handset, there are a couple factors that are important to look at in a CPU. Clock Speed The most visible measurement of a CPU's power and worth is its clock speed. Most midrange to high-end smartphones won't settle these days for anything less than 1GHz, though this number hasn't increased much further. Once single-core chips began reaching the 1.2-1.5GHz threshold, it was virtually impossible to continue boosting this particular number any higher without making the phone overheat too much; what's more, dual-core chips are typically at a lower clock speed than the highest-performing singles. What gives? When you're given two cores at 1GHz each, your performance will become much more effective than just one core with 1.2GHz. It's awfully hard to compare clock speeds between the two because of this. Only when we're judging multi-core speeds on a level playing field will we actually have an accurate assessment of performance. And until the software catches up with the capability of the new multi-core chips (ie. developers code their apps to use multithreading optimally), these processors won't give us a precise indication of how well our CPU is actually performing anyway. For now, take dual-core clock speeds at face value -- a decent generalized method of measuring a CPU's ability to perform, but that's about it. Nanometer count Nanometers, in the case of a CPU, measures the size of a transistor. When it's smaller, more transistors can fit on the same board, which generally translates into a better performance. Tinier transistors will also consume less energy, allowing the chipset to run at a higher frequency without worries of your phone melting, and we'd likely see an overall improvement in battery efficiency. Lastly, a smaller size is typically less expensive to manufacture. The newest generation of chips offer a much smaller transistor size, with most competitive SoCs having reached 45nm. Don't blink though -- the next-gen chipsets will be as low as 28nm, and many semiconductors are already working on 10nm solutions (though time to market is way beyond the horizon). What we can expect to see soon Quad-core A few companies (such as NVIDIA and Qualcomm) have introduced quad-core chipsets that should be available for sampling sometime later this year, and will likely appear in mobile devices at some point in 2012. If this year's been any indication, there's a good chance we'll see Tegra 3 -- aka Kal-El -- come to market first. The transition to quad-core will give another massive boost in performance altogether. Additional cores will enable our phones to handle even more of a workload, which means we can start looking forward to console-quality gaming, an exponential increase in speed, even higher-res displays, 1440p video playback, improvements in speech recognition, and lower power consumption (to name a few). Will quad-core devices will make our current high-end handsets look turtle-slow? Check out this video - NVIDIA released the above video demonstrating the graphics on Kal-El -- which isn't even running at its final market speed, by the way -- and shows its comparison to a Tegra 2. ARM Cortex A15 If your phone or tablet has a CPU from NVIDIA, Texas Instruments, Samsung, or Qualcomm in it, it's most likely been licensed to use ARM's chip architecture and / or instruction sets (Qualcomm designs its own chips but licenses the ARMv7 instruction set). Many of today's dual-core devices, such as Tegra 2 and Samsung's Exynos, run off of the ARM Cortex A9 architecture, and the company behind it all continues to refine its craft. Recently the processing giant announced its next-gen Cortex A15, which will be available by the end of 2012. ARM's partners will first use A15 on dual-core processors and eventually start using quad-core. At its maximum capacity, the A15 will be able to clock up to 2.5GHz and extend out to 16 cores. Certainly, it'll be quite a while before we see phones that reach those types of numbers, but we like seeing what path is going to take us there. Intel Intel is one of the fiercest competitors in the desktop and laptop CPU space, but has barely even graced mobile devices with its presence. That's all about to change, however, as the company's released a tablet chip by the name of Oak Trail that will soon be available in Windows 7, Android, and Meego tablets. This will be succeeded by Cloverview -- another tablet CPU shrunk down to 32nm -- and an unnamed 22nm chipset to be announced in 2013. For smartphones, a 32nm chip code-named Medfield will begin appearing in devices early next year. 2GHz In April, Samsung unveiled its intention to bring dual-core smartphones running at 2GHz by next year. These chips will likely be taking advantage of ARM's Cortex-A9, which has a design that's capable of reaching these speeds. Wrap-up It's time to look at the bottom line. Is it worth investing in a phone or tablet with a dual-core, high-performance CPU? The answer isn't as cut and dried as we'd like it to be, but your daily grind should be a strong indicator of what your ROI will be. If all your smartphone is being used for is some basic emailing, web surfing and texting, it's probably not worth the difference in cost to go with a better processor at this point in time -- the difference won't be that significant. But if you're constantly using your handheld device for work, play, and everything in between, you'll want to take advantage of the higher performance with better yields in battery life. As you can see, the landscape of mobile processing technology is constantly evolving. Agree with Moore's Law or not, dual-core will quickly become mainstream, and quad-core chips are likely to grace high-end devices sometime in 2012. How long will it be before cost really isn't a factor anymore? Hard to say -- for all we know, by this time next year we may be writing about single-core devices in our history e-textbooks. Source : Engadget

Intel's New Android Processors Show Off Mind-Blowing Speed. Intel is getting into the mobile processor market, creating Atom processors for Android phones. At this year's CES, Intel had the several Android prototypes that were running on 32mm Intel Atom processors. These are the first Android phones that we've seen to be running on Intel's architecture, and the tech giant was using the prototypes to demonstrate the benefits of Atom over other mobile processors. The actual hardware on display at the booth was a developer device that is never coming to market. The prototypes were all running Android 2.3 (Gingerbread), and came loaded with software that was meant to show off the capabilities of Intel's mobile chipset. In my hands on with the prototypes, I was surprised by how fast and fluid the phones' performed. Asphalt 6, a game that normally stutters on dual-core phones, had no issues running on the single-core Atom. Along with increased gaming performance, Intel claimed that the Atom processor would support hyper-threading (for more efficient management of resources) and would help with conserving battery life. Intel claimed that the prototypes had a battery life of about 6 hours while playing video. Read more here

It has been discontinued.

Samsung Galaxy Ace won't be getting ICS. Also uninvited to the party are the Galaxy Fit, and the budget Galaxy W and Y. It may be that these older or cheaper phones don't have the grunt to mix it Ice Cream Sandwich-style or Samsung just doesn't think it's worth the effort. Source - Cnet I don't see Android fragmentation issue ending

That is self-contradictory. I don't recall of any android phone which comes without touch interface.

Commendable move by TRAI but hope it doesn't get abused by sly operators as Common Man pointed out.

Google released the latest Android version distribution numbers this week, and despite the hype surrounding Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the OS has made it to only 0.6 percent of the activated devices in use. The low penetration of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich can most certainly be attributed to the fact that it is only available on two smartphones, the Google Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S, and manufacturers have not yet released upgrades for their devices that are still running Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

Wish that the New Year brings along happiness and good tidings to all my dear friends.

New Year's Eve has always been a time for looking back to the past, and more importantly, forward to the coming year. It is a time to reflect on the changes we want (or need) to make and resolve to follow through on those changes. What kinds of New Years Resolutions will you make for yourself this day? Do post them here. Set realistic targets that you can achieve and stick to them Wishing all members a very happy new year!

lol

No 3G in GSM mode is a definite turn off for me.

Sony quietly confirmed a forthcoming Ice Cream Sandwich update for its Tablet S and Tablet P devices last week through its online community forum.