Sony Xperia UL launched with full-HD screen and quad-core processor

Sony has launched a new smartphone, Xperia UL, in the Japanese market with carrier KDDI.

Just like the recently launched Xperia A and Xperia ZR, this phone is also water and dust resistant and can withstand 1.5 metres of still water for 30 minutes. The phone is inline with Sony's new design philosophy that we've seen in phones such as the Xperia Z, Xperia SP, Xperia A and Xperia ZR and has the same signature aluminium power button that resembles a watch crown. It also features a thin strip towards the bottom which is essentially an LED light that lights up in different colours just like the Xperia SP.

Coming to the hardware specifications, the Xperia UL sports a 5-inch Reality display with a resolution of 1080x1920 pixels packing in 443 pixels per inch incorporating Sony's mobile Bravia engine 2 for better looking images and videos. It's powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 APQ8064 quad-core processor and has 2GB of RAM. It runs Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.

The smartphone features a 13.1-megapixel rear camera with Exmor RS for mobile and a VGA front facing camera. It offers 16GB of internal storage expandable up to 64GB via memory card (microSD / microSDHC / microSDXC ). The phone features NFC, 3G, Bluetooth 4.0, Infrared and 4G LTE connectivity options. It has a 2300mAh battery. The phone will be available in White, Pink and Black colours and will be available starting May 25 in Japan. There's no word on the phone's international availability as of now.

The phone had leaked in pictures a few days back on a Chinese website, while rumours of its existence had emerged in March.

Last week, the Sony Xperia A was officially announced by Japanese carrier NTT Docomo as part of its Summer 2013 collection. The water and dust resistant phone has a 720p display and is also powered by a 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 quad-core processor. Other specifications are similar to the Xperia UL.

ASUS Fonepad Price In India Is INR 15,999 - It's A Phone, A Tablet And A Phablet

ASUS Fonepad Price In India Is INR 15,999 - It's A Phone, A 

Tablet And A Phablet

• So, picking up a call from an over-sized tablet-phone doesn't really seem likely to appeal to you, but having that voice-call making facility isn't really undesirable, is it? At first, people clicking photos with their iPads looked bizarre, but we have now more or less gotten used to it. In India, the trend has particularly starting to become a common sight. After ASUS's initial failed attempt at making the PadFone, a phone that could transform into a tablet work, it has now got their Tablet to work like a phone. Yep, ASUS Fonepad is now in India in its full glory to let you make phone calls with a 7-inch, 1,280x800 pixel resolution LED backlit IPS screen in your hand at your ear. Weighing at 340 gram, the FonePad runs on the Android 4.1 aka Jelly Bean OS and has 1 GB RAM and 8GB Memory expandable via microSD up to 32 GB.
  
  Powered by a 1.2 GHz Intel Atom Z2420 processor, the ASUS Fonepad is featuring a Rear Camera of 3 megapixel with autofocus and without a flash and Front Camera of 1.2 megapixel. With a headphone jack and microUSB port at the bottom and the power button and the volume changer on one side of the Fonepad, ASUS has given a flap above the camera to insert the microSIM and microSD card. A 4,270 mAh Li-Polymer non-removable battery is covered by the matt finished back cover and we think that with the sizeable bezel, ASUS Fonepad will be just ergonomic and comfortably when held by both hands and it doesn't look ugly at all.
  
  
  The users with connectivity concerns should know that the Fonepad work on 3G as well as WiFi and this tablet-phone works just fine with either of them turned ON. Sadly, there's no NFC and no 5 GHz band, if that's what you're looking for. There is of course the support for Bluetooth 3.0 and USB 2.0. The Fonepad is said to work great with the Jelly Bean and there are toggle switches in the notification bar which can be moved around, a power saving mode and a selection of floating apps for multi-tasking purpose.
  
  About a month back, we told you about the ASUS Fonepad's launch in India. And as predicted, the price in India of this new gadget is Rs. 15,999/- and its price in the US market is approx. US$360. We are expecting a mixed set of responses and reviews for the ASUS's new offering. What is your say? Share with us in comments below.

Secrets of the PS4: Heavily modified Radeon, supercharged APU design(Part 2)

In the Gamasutra interview, Cerny states the following: “we added another bus to the GPU that allows it to read directly from system memory or write directly to system memory… As a result, if the data that’s being passed back and forth between CPU and GPU is small, you don’t have issues with synchronization between them anymore… We can pass almost 20 gigabytes a second down that bus. That’s not very small in today’s terms — it’s larger than the PCIe on most PCs!”

That sounds almost exactly like Garlic, with some additional HSA features baked in. Remember, the point of HSA is to allow CPU and GPU to share a common set of pointers and swap data more efficiently. It suggests that the PS4′s interconnect structure looks something like this:

This simplified structure shows the GPU with the lion’s share of access to memory bandwidth. Both the Onion and Garlic interfaces are faster than they were in Llano, and they’re tied to much faster memory, but they function in the same basic way. This is the most logical design based on what AMD has done before, it incorporates the direct memory bus that Cerny discusses, and it would be the easiest system for AMD to design given the firm’s limited resources.

The disadvantage is that it’s not particularly efficient. This table of available CPU-GPU bandwidth in Llano based on the type of operation being conducted indicates the problem:

Much of the anecdotal information on the PS4 suggests that the chip is designed for a much greater degree of sharing than Piledrive/Llano. We suspect that Option #1 integrated HSA-like features with an APU-style design. AMD would have had to make a number of improvements to bring these various capabilities up to more uniform bandwidth / latency, but these were improvements the company was planning to make with HSA in any case.

Option 2: Hearkening back to R600 and a modern ring bus

AMD could have opted for a ring bus. Ring buses are great for joining multiple components in a high-bandwidth, low-latency configuration where data is shared across multiple elements. Intel uses a ring bus for Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, and AMD’s first programmable GPU (R600) used one as well. The advantage of a ring bus is that it’d be simple. Not every component needs the same amount of memory bandwidth (the estimated 176GBps of memory bandwidth would be wasted on the CPUs) so you end up with 20GBps of bandwidth for the CPU cores and 176GBps of bandwidth for the GPU.

Sony has some experience with ring buses — the PS3′s Cell Architecture used one to manage communication between the various processing elements — but we don’t think this is a likely approach for the PS4. There’s no particular problem that a ring bus would solve, and no specific use-case that strongly suggests AMD would adopt one. Intel has used a ring bus in Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, but these GPUs are tiny compared to the 18 CU design that’s built into the PlayStation 4.

Nokia Teases Lumia 928 Launch on Verizon

Nokia has confirmed via a magazine ad, a billboard, and now a new website that its next Lumia device for the U.S. will be the Lumia 928.

Oddly, the teases come ahead of Nokia's May 14 Lumia event in London, which is expected to include the official reveal.

Nokia has a new website that encourages fans to "Stay tuned for updates about the newest Nokia Lumia. It features a photo of a Lumia device, which looks a bit less rounded than previous Lumias, snapping a photo of people on a beach.

The name of the device is not present on the page, but is revealed in the URL: nokia.com/us-en/lumia928.

But the smartphone also showed up in the pages of Vanity Fair. As noted by Engadget, the two-page advertisement features the same photo found on the Lumia 928 website, with a few more details about the camera: low-light support; PureView technology; optical image stabilization; a Carl Zeiss lens; and more.

The ad also carries the Verizon Wireless logo, so expect the Lumia 928 to hit the U.S.'s biggest carrier.

That Verizon logo also appeared on a billboard, a photo of which was posted on My Nokia Blog. That billboard tipped the "best low-light smartphone camera."

Last month, Nokia said during its earnings call that it sold 5.6 million Lumia smartphonesduring the first quarter, up 27 percent from the previous quarter. Approximately two-thirds of those Lumia sales were for smartphones running Microsoft's latest Windows Phone 8 platform.

"We are seeing our Lumia momentum accelerate as we exit Q1," Nokia chief Stephen Elop said. As a result, Lumia growth in the second quarter will likely exceed the 27 percent it saw in the first quarter, he said. Nokia sold 4.4 million Windows Phone-based Lumia smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2012, and 2.9 million in the months before.

How to bring back the Start menu and button to Windows 8(Part 2)

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Classic Shell

Classic Shell is free, open-source donationware that gives you the option of a classic (Windows 98ish), Windows XP, or Vista/7 Start menu. At its most basic, it replaces the Windows 8 Start button on your taskbar — but as always with third-party utilities, it has a ton of other features and settings that you can tweak to your heart’s content (in Classic Shell’s case, there’s probablytoo many tweakable settings). There is apparently an option for Classic Shell to boot straight to Desktop, but I couldn’t find it.

One strong point of Classic Shell is that it successfully rebinds your Start key, so that the Start menu pops up instead of the new Metro Start screen. Hitting the Start key from Metro pops up Classic Shell, too. Other Start menu replacements don’t usually cope quite so well.

Take care while installing Classic Shell, though: It’s not just a Start menu replacement, and if you’re not careful you will end up installing Classic IE and Classic Explorer, too.

Download Classic Shell (free)

Start8

Finally, a commercial offering that will set you back $5: Start8. Start8 is very similar to Classic Shell or StartMenu8, but it’s just a little bit smoother. Start8′s configuration interface is much easier to use (and easier on the eyes), and the actual Start menu replacement feels much more like a contiguous part of Windows.

Start8 has a curious option where you can actually have the new Windows 8 Metro Start screen pop up as a menu, rather than full-screen (pictured at the top of the story). This is kinda neat, though you’re probably better off sticking to the normal Windows 7-style Start menu replacement.

Like Pokki, Start8 can disable your hot corners and boot directly to Desktop. Start8 also has a bunch of configuration options for how the Start key interacts with Desktop and Metro, which can be useful if you’re looking for a very specific functionality.

Download Start8 ($5, free 30-day trial)

Secrets of the PS4: Heavily modified Radeon, supercharged APU design(Part 1)

For months, there have been rumors that the PS4 wouldn’t just be more powerful than Microsoft’s upcoming Xbox — it would be capable of certain compute workloads that Redmond’s next-generation console wouldn’t be able to touch. In an interview last week, Sony lead hardware architect Mark Cerny shed some major light on what these capabilities look like. We’ve taken his comments and combined them with what we’ve learned from other sources to build a model of how the PS4 is likely organized, and what it can do.

How to bring back the Start menu and button to Windows 8(Part 1)

You’ve just booted up Windows 8 for the first time, navigated your way to the Desktop, and now you’re wondering: “Where on earth did Microsoft put the Start button and menu?” For some reason, Microsoft decided that Windows 8 was better without a Start button and menu, instead forcing mouse-and-keyboard users to try and interact with the awful Windows 8 Start screen.

The good news is, despite Microsoft’s best efforts to ensure that the Start button and menu remain banished from its new OS, a bunch of Windows 8 Start menu replacements have already emerged. Really, it just goes to show how devoted the Desktop Windows userbase is: Microsoft completely stripped out the underlying Start menu code to quash potential Luddite revolutionaries, and yet months after the release of Windows 8 there are dozens of Start menu and Start button replacements — some of which are far superior to Microsoft’s own Windows 7 Start menu.

Let’s take a look at the best, cheapest, and most authentic Windows 8 Start menu replacements.

Windows 8 Start button and menu replacements

StartIsBack

If you want a Windows 8 Start menu replacement that looks exactly like Windows 7,StartIsBack is for you. You get the same Start button orb icon, the same Start menu search box, the same jump lists, and — for better or worse — even the same Aero transparency! As you can see in the screenshot above, StartIsBack even detects if your system needs to restart to apply some patches; it really is just like the Windows 7 Start menu.

Where StartIsBack diverges from the Windows 7 Start menu, though, is configurability: StartIsBack is fully customizable, and includes a handful of useful Windows 8-specific features, too. You can configure which hot corners are enabled, make your PC jump straight to the Desktop when it first boots up, and configure a key combo to show the Windows 8 Start screen (Win+Ctrl by default). If Start menu and taskbar transparency aren’t your thing, StartIsBack lets you disable it — and you can change the Start button orb icon, too. If you want a Windows 8 Start menu replacement that feels just like Windows 7, StartIsBack is for you.

Download StartIsBack ($3, free 30-day trial)

Pokki

Where StartIsBack tries to replicate the Windows of yesteryear, Pokki (free) is very much its own beast — and as much as I love the Windows 7 Start menu, I have to admit that Pokki is probably even better. It utilizes a neat “pinning” system that isn’t unlike the home screen of your smartphone or tablet (though I would argue that the Windows taskbar/superbar still does a better job). You can also add widgets to Pokki, such as Gmail or Facebook, which display your latest email or status updates.

By default, Pokki will configure your Windows 8 system to boot straight to the Desktop — and there is an option that will just completely disable the hot corners, if you so desire. (Remember, Win+C pops open the Charms menu, if you need.) If you’re looking for a Windows 8 Start menu/button replacement that isn’t reminiscent of Windows Vista/7, Pokki is for you.

Download Pokki (free)

StartMenu8

If you want the Windows 7 Start menu look-and-feel, but you’re not prepared to fork out a few dollars for StartIsBack or Start8, StartMenu8 is a solid alternative. While the interface won’t win any prizes — it feels a lot like the early Linux apps that ruthlessly ripped off Windows — you get a fair amount of configurability, and a handful of Windows 8-specific toggles that are very useful.

By default, StartMenu8 will skip the Windows 8 Start screen and go straight to the Desktop, and disable Windows 8′s hot corners. There’s also the option to disable the sidebar, if you really don’t ever want to see Windows 8 ever again. The StartMenu8 button icon can be altered, and you can add and remove which links appear up the right side of the Start menu. Overall, StartMenu8 looks and feels a bit clunky — and, incidentally, watch out for some delicious bundleware during the installation process.

Download StartMenu8 (free)