Thursday, 19 February 2015
Tuesday, 17 February 2015
Samsung Galaxy A7
Samsung launched four new smartphones for the Indian market on Monday: the Galaxy Grand Prime 4G, Galaxy Core Prime 4G, the J1 4G and the new Galaxy A7 which is part of the Series of full-metal body smartphones.
The smartphones were on display at the Samsung Forum 2015 in Bangkok and we got a chance to spend sometime with each of these phones. The Galaxy A7 is the device that has already been launched in India, with a price of Rs 30,499, while the other three will launch in mid-March. Samsung is expected to announce the price of Grand Prime 4G and Core Prime 4G phones at the time of the launch, while the J1 4G will cost Rs 9,990 in India.
The Galaxy A7 which is the most expensive smartphone of the A series is part of Samsung’s new series which are sleek in design, sport a full-metal body and aimed at the mid/high budget segment user. Here’s our first impression of the smartphone.
Design, Screen: The USP of this smartphone is the slim design (it’s only 6.8mm thick) and comes in a full metal unibody design. Personally, this is one of the best-looking phablets from Samsung I’ve seen. The screen is 5.5-inch full HD Super AMOLED which means its big enough to watch videos and movies and the resolution is quite sharp. While a big screen is not my personal preference, for those who want a phablet that doesn’t look too tacky and is available for under Rs 40k, this is a worthy option to consider.
It’s a slim phone aimed at the chic crowd, the one that Samsung hopes will go for its phones because they might find the iPhone over-priced. Thankfully Samsung kept the back cover design simple and did not add any faux leather look, which looked tacky on older phones.
Storage, Processor, RAM, Connectivity: Samsung’s smartphone comes with 16 GB total storage space, 2GB RAM and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 615 Octa-core processor which includes two quad-core A53 chips clocked at 1.5 and 1 GHz respectively.
Users can expand the space on the phone to 64 GB via a microSD. Of course, for users who want more space this won’t seem like a great option given that other phones on the market offer more space for a lower price. Examples include OnePlus One (which comes with 64GB and is priced at Rs 21,999) and the Xiaomi Mi 4 which has launched a 64 GB version of smartphone in India for Rs 23,999.
Camera, OS: The Galaxy A7 has a 13 megapixel rear camera and a 5 megapixel front camera with a wide-angle for group-selfies. It’s also got the usual-modes that Samsung tends to add on its smartphone camera, which also includes a Beauty-face mode.
While there was no lag on the camera and it was fairly easy to switch modes, I wasn’t too impressed by the beauty face mode. The skin tends to look rather plasticky and a flawless that borders on the unnatural, which isn’t something I favour. Of course, if you want selfies with perfect skin and a really good-looking smartphone to flash while you’re taking them, then the A7 is a phone for you to consider.
The Galaxy A7 runs Android 4.4.4 which is dated now specially considering the Galaxy S4 has already got the Android 5.0 Lollipop update (and also a price drop to Rs 17,499). The A7 might be a new phone but the old OS is a disappointment and once again highlights the problems of the fragmented Android universe.
ZERO RATING SYSTEM
Cost elimination on data usage: GOOGLE to launch "zero rating " system
Once you get a smartphone, the biggest concern
remains the data usage. If you have a sufficient data plan you will
download more and more
apps, if not you will hesitate to do.
What if someone is paying for your data plans so that you
can access, download and update all the apps you want? Yes, Google, according
to some reports, is looking for capitalisation of data. Google has started discussing the idea called
'zero rating' with some app developers about reduction, and possible cost
elimination of data.
In India, Google is reportedly planning the same with
biggies like Redbus, Flipkart, Ola cabs and others.
Under zero rating- mobile network operators do not charge
end customers for a pre-specified data volume for specific applications or
internet services, via the operator's wireless network in metered data plans
and tariffs.
A study from Mckinsey and International Labor Organization,
involving some 8,000 smartphone owners, has revealed that expensive data is one
of the biggest reasons why people hesitate in downloading or using apps on
their phones. As per the survey, over 25 percent people from India, Thailand,
Egypt, Indonesia and Philippines experience this problem.
Reportedly, Google may be looking to capitalisation of data
costs. People actually use their smartphones looking for lucrative apps and
everything, but downloading the same is a headache with current plans.
Sunday, 15 February 2015
Saturday, 14 February 2015
Connecting Devices Wirelessly
Connecting Devices Wirelessly
This class describes the key APIs for finding and connecting to other devices from your application. Specifically, it describes the NSD API for discovering available services and the Wi-Fi Peer-to-Peer (P2P) API for doing peer-to-peer wireless connections. This class also shows you how to use NSD and Wi-Fi P2P in combination to detect the services offered by a device and connect to the device when neither device is connected to a network.
Thursday, 12 February 2015
ASTC
Adaptive Scalable Texture Compression (ASTC)
In addition to being supported on modern hardware, ASTC also offers improved quality over other GPU formats by having full alpha support and better quality preservation.
ASTC is a block based texture compression algorithm developed by ARM. It offers multiple block footprints and bitrate options to lower the size of the final texture. The higher the block footprint, the smaller the final file but possibly more quality loss.
Note that some images compress better than others. Images with similar neighboring pixels tend to have better quality compared to images with vastly different neighboring pixels.
Wednesday, 11 February 2015
Android operating system
Android operating system
Android operating system is a stack of software components which is roughly divided into five sections and four main layers as shown below in the architecture diagram.
Android operating system is a stack of software components which is roughly divided into five sections and four main layers as shown below in the architecture diagram.
Android development
Application Components
Application components are the essential building blocks of an Android application. These components are loosely coupled by the application manifest file AndroidManifest.xml that describes each component of the application and how they interact.
There are following four main components that can be used within an Android application:
1. Activities
An activity represents a single screen with a user interface. For example, an email application might have one activity that shows a list of new emails, another activity to compose an email, and another activity for reading emails. If an application has more than one activity, then one of them should be marked as the activity that is presented when the application is launched.
2.Services
A service is a component that runs in the background to perform long-running operations. For example, a service might play music in the background while the user is in a different application, or it might fetch data over the network without blocking user interaction with an activity.
3.Broadcast Receivers
Broadcast Receivers simply respond to broadcast messages from other applications or from the system. For example, applications can also initiate broadcasts to let other applications know that some data has been downloaded to the device and is available for them to use, so this is broadcast receiver who will intercept this communication and will initiate appropriate action.
4.Content Providers
A content provider component supplies data from one application to others on request. Such requests are handled by the methods of the ContentResolver class. The data may be stored in the file system, the database or somewhere else entirely.
Application components are the essential building blocks of an Android application. These components are loosely coupled by the application manifest file AndroidManifest.xml that describes each component of the application and how they interact.
There are following four main components that can be used within an Android application:
1. Activities
An activity represents a single screen with a user interface. For example, an email application might have one activity that shows a list of new emails, another activity to compose an email, and another activity for reading emails. If an application has more than one activity, then one of them should be marked as the activity that is presented when the application is launched.
2.Services
A service is a component that runs in the background to perform long-running operations. For example, a service might play music in the background while the user is in a different application, or it might fetch data over the network without blocking user interaction with an activity.
3.Broadcast Receivers
Broadcast Receivers simply respond to broadcast messages from other applications or from the system. For example, applications can also initiate broadcasts to let other applications know that some data has been downloaded to the device and is available for them to use, so this is broadcast receiver who will intercept this communication and will initiate appropriate action.
4.Content Providers
A content provider component supplies data from one application to others on request. Such requests are handled by the methods of the ContentResolver class. The data may be stored in the file system, the database or somewhere else entirely.
Android operating system is a stack of software components which is roughly divided into five sections and four main layers.
Linux kernel
At the bottom of the layers is Linux. This provides basic system functionality like process management, memory management, device management like camera, keypad, display etc. Also, the kernel handles all the things that Linux is really good at such as networking and a vast array of device drivers, which take the pain out of interfacing to peripheral hardware.
Libraries
On top of Linux kernel there is a set of libraries including open-source Web browser engine WebKit, well known library libc, SQLite database which is a useful repository for storage and sharing of application data, libraries to play and record audio and video, SSL libraries responsible for Internet security etc.
Android Runtime
This is the third section of the architecture and available on the second layer from the bottom. This section provides a key component called Dalvik Virtual Machine which is a kind of Java Virtual Machine specially designed and optimized for Android. The Dalvik VM makes use of Linux core features like memory management and multi-threading, which is intrinsic in the Java language. The Dalvik VM enables every Android application to run in its own process, with its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine.
Application Framework
The Application Framework layer provides many higher-level services to applications in the form of Java classes. Application developers are allowed to make use of these services in their applications.
Applications
You will find all the Android application at the top layer. You will write your application to be installed on this layer only. Examples of such applications are Contacts Books, Browser, Games etc
Linux kernel
At the bottom of the layers is Linux. This provides basic system functionality like process management, memory management, device management like camera, keypad, display etc. Also, the kernel handles all the things that Linux is really good at such as networking and a vast array of device drivers, which take the pain out of interfacing to peripheral hardware.
Libraries
On top of Linux kernel there is a set of libraries including open-source Web browser engine WebKit, well known library libc, SQLite database which is a useful repository for storage and sharing of application data, libraries to play and record audio and video, SSL libraries responsible for Internet security etc.
Android Runtime
This is the third section of the architecture and available on the second layer from the bottom. This section provides a key component called Dalvik Virtual Machine which is a kind of Java Virtual Machine specially designed and optimized for Android. The Dalvik VM makes use of Linux core features like memory management and multi-threading, which is intrinsic in the Java language. The Dalvik VM enables every Android application to run in its own process, with its own instance of the Dalvik virtual machine.
Application Framework
The Application Framework layer provides many higher-level services to applications in the form of Java classes. Application developers are allowed to make use of these services in their applications.
Applications
You will find all the Android application at the top layer. You will write your application to be installed on this layer only. Examples of such applications are Contacts Books, Browser, Games etc
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