Microsoft Sued For Its Live Tiles

The patent breakage lawsuit originates from SurfCast, an OS development company based in Portland, which owns a patent granted in 2004 pertaining to a “System and method for simultaneous display of multiple information sources.” Just from that title alone, it would sound like SurfCast could sue over just about anything from Google News to Hootsuite. Of course, the patent itself isn't quite as broad, but still not great. It details a GUI that ”organizes content from a variety of information sources into grid of tiles each of which can refresh its content independently of the others.”

It reminds me of the Live Tiles, though doesn't really look all that much like Live Tiles. But, don't get disheartened Micrsoft fans. Microsoft also holds a patent for Live Tiles, which covers “systems and methods for providing a user interface mobile devices enable data and services available through mobile device to be represented as a set of tiles maintained a display space.” Microsoft's patent was filed back in 2006, but it was rejected in 2009 specifically because of the prior art existing in SurfCast's patent. Microsoft reapplied and the patent was granted in 2011.

               SurfCast names “Windows Phone, Microsoft Surface with the Windows RT Operating System, Microsoft Windows RT, Microsoft Windows 8, Microsoft Windows 8 Pro, and Microsoft Windows 8 Enterprise Operating System” in its suit, but surprisingly leaves out Windows Phone 7/7.5, which has been using this same system for 2 years now, going back to before Microsoft held a patent for the system. The same couldalso be applied to any of the now 120,000 apps that have been submitted to the Windows and Windows Phone Stores, because Microsoft details ways for developers to create Live Tiles, which means each app would be infringing when it is submitted to the store.

In return Microsoft will go to court in order to prove that its method for displaying information in boxes is "unique" compared to the method of displaying information in boxes that was patented by SurfCast.
 

 You can go over to http://www.surfcast.com/ and have a look at their website.

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Angry Birds Roost Exclusively For Lumia Users

Good news for Lumia users.Angry Birds Roost is an exclusive app for Nokia Lumia handsets. But before you get ready to play the latest Angry Birds battle, you need to know one important thing. Angry Birds Roost is actually not a game but is a virtual store where you can buy all things regarding the game. Wanna buy a ringtone or Angry Birds video? This is the place to for those things as well as a holiday gift for the super Angry Birds fan on your list.

You can also catch the latest Angry Birds news direct from developer Rovio. In addition, one cool feature allows you to snap a picture, add your favorite Angry Birds character, and send it to your facebook and twitter fans. This is sure to make your iOS and Android owning friends jealous ! If you own a Nokia Lumia model and just need to know what is going on with the Angry Birds, you can install the app for free .If you want the next Angry Birds game, Angry Birds Star Wars is coming out November 8th.

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Blackberry 10 To Launch In Q1 2013

Last month, RIM informed that carriers would begin testing new BB10 devices sometime in October, with plans for an early 2013 launch. Since then,there have been rumors that BlackBerry 10 launch might be delayed. Now CEO Thorsten Heins is speaking back up, confirming that a Q1 release is still on track, and talking some more about the carrier testing currently underway.

While it’s good to hear that a Q1 launch is still in RIM’s plans, that means that there may be a delay from what was planned and the first hardware may be landing closer to March; for the moment, timing more precise than “Q1″ just isn’t available.

What’s good to hear is that the carrier testing has begun as planned, and Heins claims that over 50 carriers worldwide have already begun evaluating BB10 launch hardware. That’s going to mean both full-touch as well as hardware keyboard devices, and recent leaks have been making it look that there could be quite an assortment of BB10 hardware on the horizon, including some with very competitive specs.

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Windows Phone 7.8 Features Leaked

Microsoft didn't mention anything about WP 7.8 in its event. Joe Belfiore and co didn’t even announce a date when the update will be released.


                               Whoever is managing the Windows Phone Italia Facebook page seems more talkative, however, and answered a question from a fan, revealing the new features that v7.8 will bring. The response has been deleted since.
The list includes the new homescreen, something called 'Club',  Xbox Music and SmartGlass.
           
                      In case you don't know yet, Windows Phone 7.8 will be released for 7 and 7.5 devices, as the old phones won't get updated to WP8.

Nokia Lumia 820 Up for Sale In UK

                         After Windows Phone 8 was released it is now time for Nokia & Microsoft's other partners to unleash the potential of WP8.The first WP8-powered smartphones should probably be introduced to us in the next week, so it's time we learned the prices
               Carphone Warehouse has released the info about the Nokia Lumia 820 in the UK. The smartphone outlet is offering the device SIM-free for £379.95.

                      Other major UK stores such as Expansys and Phones4UK are taking in pre-orders for the Lumia 829, but they haven't revealed the asking price yet.
                         
                 The device is already on sale in Germany and has started shipping in Europe.

Top Best Video Editing Apps For Android Phones

Smartphones nowadays are already packed with HD capabilities and it’s no wonder why people choose their trusted phones to capture and record videos. But don’t you know that you can also enhance your video with the use of Android applications? Here is a list of the top 6 video editing apps for the Android Platform.

1.Snip Video Trimmer

             If you’re fond of watching movies on your smartphone, then you probably have explored the option of trimming down your videos. Snip Video Trimmer is a fantastic app for editing and creating videos on the fly. Aside from being a video editing application, Snip Video Trimmer also lets you shorten clips and view information directly from the app itself. You can also upload and share short videos over the web.

Snip Video Trimmer is simple software that doesn’t necessarily have fancy additions compared to its counterparts. But, for users who just need a lighter video editing application on the go, then Snip Video Trimmer is the right application of choice

2.Vid Trim Pro

        If all you need to do is some simple cropping, VidTrim should do the trick. Once you are done trimming a video, it can be shared directly from the app. The paid version of VidTrim removes the ads and allows saving individual frames as still images.

3.Magisto

          For something with a bit more potential, yet hardly more difficult to use, check out Magisto. It is an intelligent video editor that stitches clips together, adds fancy transitions, and lets you spice things up with an audio track of your own. The editing process is automated for your convenience.

4.AndroMedia HD

         AndroMedia is a full-featured video-editing program for Android that offers many of the same features you might find on a traditional desktop video editor. Features include the ability to add effects and transitions, to overlay title clips and captions, and to fade in and out video.

The app supports MP4,MOV,JPG,PNG,MP3, and WAV file formats, and finished videos can be exported in standard or high-definition and uploaded directly to YouTube from within the app.

5.Ultimate Special FX

            Have you ever wanted to become an action star on your own movie? This is your chance to become one–and all you need is your smartphone to do your bidding. Turn ordinary shots into stunning, breathtaking movie clips with the Ultimate Special FX application developed by TechCat Mobile.

Ultimate Special FX offers users different visual effects that they can apply to their videos. From missile pods to air destruction, nothing is more satisfying than having Hollywood-style video effects rolling out on your camera. To add special effects, users just need to select a specific scene, and then start shooting on their cameras. In order for the visual effects to be seen in your shot, you need to let the app know what scene you need to insert the effect.

Don’t expect to see some fancy or complex special effects that you see in movies, as Ultimate Special FX is still in its infancy. As of now, the app is only limited to a number of scenes, but rest assured the developers will be adding more effects in the later updates.

6.Lapse It

Lapse It for Android is a unique way to brilliantly capture videos, as it converts any video you shoot into a stunning piece of art. For those of you who aren’t familiar, Lapse It is an award-winning, full-featured app that captures amazing time lapse clips using only your Android camera.

Lapse It is fairly easy to use and beginners who are new to taking videos will become instant professionals with just a week’s practice. To capture time-lapse videos, users just need to select the duration of seconds in between images, select a color effect, and hit the capture button to start shooting. After you finish recording, the app will then give you options to render your videos in either MP4, MOV, or FLV formats with various resolutions and frame rates.

Are Nokia Asha Phones "Smartphones"?

                  Yesterday,I saw a Nokia commercial that if you buy a Asha 'smartphone' you will receive some kind of a gift voucher.Now I wan't exactly paying attention to the ad but when I heard the word 'smartphone' I was quite stunned
     
                       .Surely,I agree that Asha phones are the best feature phones available in the market at present but for that reason a "smartphone"??Isn't that a bit too much?Moreover ,they lack one of the main things that a smartphone possesses-multitasking .
                                   Yes,that is the main point of having a smartphone. You don't need to close an app to see your email or make an urgent call,it will stay active in the background until you resume the app.For me,it is the main thing in a smartphone(besides other things of course) and I just can't live without it
                              I just think that Nokia should stop calling its Asha phones smartphones.Cause that is gonna mislead the customers.Asha phones are about 5,500-6,500 INR in India while the lowest Android phones are above 7,000 INR. Obviously ,if one needs a cheap smartphone one will buy the Asha one,thinking it to be a smartphone.
                In the end it is true that the Asha phones are the best featurephones but they are simply not smartphones.Thats the truth.So, Nokia stop misleading your customers please.

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Cortex-A50 Chips With Thrice Performance Increase By ARM

                      The A50 Cortex chips have been announced by ARM today,which are supposed to be 3 times faster than the fastest processors of today, keeping battery life in mind as well.T ARM’s timeline matched AMD’s as well, as they expect to ship the first A50-based devices to ship in 2014.


                  ARM says that the performance boosts will be due to multi-threading improvements, a shift to 64-bit processing, and perhaps most importantly a die-shrink, as the A-50 series chips will be made with transistors that are a mere 20nm across. As with any die-shrink, that will lead to faster and more efficient circuitry. The backwards-compatible 64-bit processing is also interesting, as it allows chips to “seamlessly transition from a 32-bit to a 64-bit execution state”, so in the next few years phone and tablet chips will be ready for a shift to 64-bit computing (and concurrent increases in RAM size), paving the way for ever more complex mobile OSes.

           ARM also  announced two chips as the lmain products of the A50 series, the Cortex-A53 and the Cortex-A57. The A57 will be the high-end performance chip, and we can expect to see them in some of the most beastly mobile devices in 2014 . The A53 will be held to around the same computational power as todays Cortex-A9 processors, but they will be much smaller in size and use about 1/5th of the energy. The size-shrink might make them more useful for wearable computers and other embedded devices, with more battery juice as well
             On the other hand,Intel is also not left behind.They are already seeing the future dominated by 48 core processors! 
          What do you reckon?

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Top Best Finance And Management Apps For Windows Phone

                        After Windows 8 has released and Windows Market has 125,000+ apps,Microsoft is promising a huge boost for its app ecosystem, as more and more people equip themselves with those phones.

So I decided to look into the apps that are available in the Store regarding business and money management.

            There are a few WP-specific apps, while most popular names are also there,which are pretty well made.

1.Pageonce Personal Finance(Free)

          This app automatically organizes your accounts and collect your transactions, help manage your bills and send you real-time notifications – all this from the convenience of your Windows Phone .

Features:

• Bill management on the go

• Monitor credit card transactions

• Check bank account status

• View detailed bill statements

• Review investment portfolios

• Receive account activity alerts and push notifications

• Safe and secure

• Remote data destruct in case you lose your phone

2.Stocks Tile($0.99)

             This app  provides a quick overview of stock quotes and realtime change. It can show charts for different periods as well as detailed stock information and news. Supports live tile updates with push notifications on 5min intervals or more. Up to 4 stocks can be displayed on tile. All stock information is retrieved from Yahoo! Finance.

           

3.Stocks(Free)

       This app helps you to track your favorite stocks and indices right on your Windows Phone. Keep a list or use the "quick search" feature to easily find today's hottest trade. See the latest quotes at a glance, or dive into the details for price/earnings ratio, market cap, volume and more. Want the full picture? Get up-to-the-minute market news with direct feeds from Bing.

4.My Budget($0.99)

         My Budget is an easy solution to balance your accounts, track your expenditure, and manage your money and more. As a personal finance application one can enter receipts, assign each transaction to a category and to an account.

My Budget V2 is rewritten completely to do the following

1. Support multiple accounts.

2. View balances at a glance.

3. Checkbook Registration.

4. Schedule Bills and Transactions with recurrence

5. Track expenses with spending limit

6. Transaction history.

7. Passcode protect

5.Toshi Finance(Free)

          You know Toshl, tight? It is available on almost every major platform, so if you have been already using it, you can just log onto your account from your Windows Phone, and sync your prior info.

The apps offers a great and simple interface, and all bells and whistles for managing a budget with income and expenses. If you want to manage more than one budget, or need more export formats, you'd have to dole out for ToshlPro, though, and that's $20 annually. 

6.Expensify(Free)

          Best things in life are free, and, as users on other platforms know, Expensify is one of the best options to manage your expense reports, complete with receipt scanning, creating a report and emailing it for you. Road warriors will appreciate it.

7.Finance Helper(Free)

           All-in-one income/expenses tracker, including recurring items like bill payments, which can be displayed on a Live Tile as "due soon" or "past due", for example. In addition to loan payments calculator, you also get numerous export options and syncing with Windows 8.

8.myMoney Book($2.99)

         With a great Modern UI interface, and all the necessary options to manage a balanced budget, including backup, myMoney Book should be on the top of every Windows Phone owner's list for a personal finance app. It has an edge in terms of versatile Live Tile display of your content, but one caveat, too - it is paid, to the tune of $2.99.

Intel Researching On 48 Core Processors In Phones And Tablets

Everyone knows that someday or the other soon enough quad core processors will be history.They will be replaced by much more sophisticated,more powerful chipsets. But where will this lead to?

                   According to Intel ,in five to ten years we could be seeing 48-core processors.Sonds incredible right?Infact,Intel sees 48-core processors powering both smartphones and tablets. That's twelve times as many as there are in a high-end chip available today! Needless to say, having so many cores on a single piece of silicon would allow smartphones and tablets to handle CPU-intensive tasks with ease by splitting the workload. For example, if someone is watching a high-resolution video, each frame could be decoded by an individual core. Advanced tasks that currently require processing to be offloaded to a computer in the cloud will be performed offline. All the while, Intel promises that such chips will be energy efficient.

                        However, there are a few problems, and one of the most significant ones is the software used on smartphones and tablets today. Simply put, the code is not yet optimized to distribute tasks among so many cores. In fact, even consumer-grade desktop operating systems aren't ready for such chips. That's why we'll have to settle down with what we have today and wait patiently for researchers to finish their work.

What do you people think?Lets know in the comments!

Lumia 920 Is Fat Says HTC

            HTC called Lumia 920 a fatty on its Facebook page ,comparing it to the HTC 8X and didn't just stop there.They added that Lumia 920 is 20 pennies heavier than its HTC counterpart.

                        The American penny weighs exactly 2.5 grams. So 20 pennies weigh 50 gms, meaning HTC is referring to the 55 g heavier than the WP 8X Lumia 920.

Here’s the picture attached to the post.




                              This rivalry over who’s Microsoft’s favorite started when the HTC Windows Phone 8X and 8S were released as “signature” devices. Nokia’s Head of Marketing Chris Weber took to Twitter to call out HTC as just tactically rebranding their portfolio unlike Nokia, which is “driving an industry-leading smartphone franchise exclusively around Windows Phone”.

Galaxy Premier Announced

Rumours have already been around about the Galaxy premier for some time.Finally,today Samsung has announced it.However,this phone is no S IV.Its just another way to bring back the Galaxy Nexus.
                           The Galaxy Premier has a 4.65-inch, 1280 x 720 Super AMOLED display, 8 megapixel rear camera with 1080p video recording, 1.9 megapixel front facing camera, 1GB RAM, 8 or 16GB internal memory with microSD card slot, Bluetooth 4.0, Wi-Fi, GPS, NFC and a 2,100mAh battery.

The exact chip running inside has not yet been determined the leaked benchmark scores suggest that the Galaxy Premier has a TI OMAP4470 with a dual-core 1.5GHz ARM Cortex A9 CPU and PowerVR SGX544 GPU.

                         The Galaxy Premier will start selling from next month and in Ukraine in December for around 5,555UAH ($680).