Friday 29 November 2013

Jolla smartphone With Sailfish OS

Ex-Nokia employees unveil Jolla smartphone


London, Nov. 28 (ANI): A team of former Nokia employees has finally unveiled the Jolla smartphone, pronounced Yol-la, with an operating system MeeGo, now renamed Sailfish that was abandoned by the Finnish mobile maker in 2011 in favour of Windows Phone.
Display: Ample 4.5" IPS qHD display, 5-point multi-touch with Gorilla 2™ Glass Camera: 8 megapixel AF camera with LED flash, 2 megapixel front-facing camera
Jolla runs on Sailfish OS, but can also run most of the apps designed for Google's Android system.
According to the BBC, the company has paired with a major Finnish network, and hopes to set up a similar deal with a UK operator.
Only 450 Jolla phones were made available at launch on Wednesday evening, with the majority going to customers who have pre-ordered the device.
Antti Saarnio, chairman and co-founder of Jolla, said that called Sailfish OS had not been given enough chance to succeed.
Analysts predict that Sailfish is going to face a tough challenge in a market dominated by smartphones running Android software or Apple's iOS.
However, one analyst from CCS, Geoff Blaber has a different view, as he said that it might seem Jolla was taking on an impossibly large challenge by trying to muscle in, but its strategy could pay off as it offers interchangeable back panels that alter the phone's software. (ANI)

Friday 15 November 2013

What is NFC & how does it work?

NFC : Near Field Communication

nfc smartphones aa 600px
If you’ve looked at the hardware specifications for a top of the line handset at any point in the last few years, there’s a good chance that you’ve seen NFC listed on the spec sheet. But despite the age of NFC, it hasn’t yet become the norm for all smartphones. If you’re content with an older handset, or can’t quite justify springing for the latest top of the line model, you may be wondering what all the fuss is about. So here’s a rundown of what NFC is, how it works, and what it can be used for.
NFC stands for “Near Field Communication” and, as the name implies, it enables short range communication between compatible devices. This requires at least one transmitting device, and another to receive the signal. A range of devices can use the NFC standard and can be considered either passive or active, depending on how the device works.
Passive NFC devices include tags, and other small transmitters, that can send information to other NFC devices without the need for a power source of their own. However, they don’t really process any information sent from other sources, and can’t connect to other passive components.  These often take the form of interactive signs on walls or advertisements.
Active devices are able to both send and receive data, and can communicate with each other as well as with passive devices. Smartphones are by far the most common implementation of active NFC devices, but public transport card readers and touch payment terminals are also good examples of the technology.

How it works

Just like Bluetooth and WiFi, and all manner of other wireless signals, NFC works on the principle of sending information over radio waves.  Near Field Communication is another standard for wireless data transitions, meaning that there are specifications which devices have to adhere to in order to communicate with each other properly. The technology used in NFC is based on older RFID (Radio-frequency identification) ideas, which uses electromagnetic induction in order to transmit information.
This marks the one major difference between NFC and Bluetooth/WiFi, as it can be used to induce electric currents within passive components as well as just send data. This means that passive devices don’t require their own power supply, and can instead be powered by the electromagnetic field produced by an active NFC component when it comes into range, but we’ll talk about that in greater detail some other time. Unfortunately, NFC technology does not command enough inductance to be used to charge our smartphones, but QI charging is based on the same principle.
magnetic fields
Electromagnetic fields can be used to transmit data or induce electrical currents in a receiving device. Passive NFC devices draw power from the fields produced by active devices, but the range is only short.
The transmission frequency for data across NFC is 13.56 megahertz, and data can be sent at either 106, 212 or 424 kilobits per second, which is quick enough for a range of data transfers – from contact details to swapping pictures and music.
In order to determine what sort of information is to be exchanged between devices, the NFC standard currently has three distinct modes of operation for compliant devices. Perhaps the most common use in smartphones is the peer-to-peer mode, which allows two NFC-enabled devices to exchange various pieces of information between each other. In this mode both devices switch between active, when sending data, and passive states when receiving.
Read/write mode, on the other hand, is a one way data transmission, where the active device, possibly your smartphone, links up with another device in order to read information from it. This is the mode used when you interact with an NFC advert tag.
The final mode of operation is card emulation, whereby the NFC device can be used like a smart or contactless credit card in order to make payments or tap into public transport systems.

Comparisons with Bluetooth

You might think that NFC is bit unnecessary, considering that Bluetooth has been more widely available for many years. However, there are several important technological differences between the two that gives NFC some significant benefits in certain circumstances.
The major argument in favour of NFC is that it has much lower power consumption than Bluetooth, even lower than the new Bluetooth 4.0 (aka Bluetooth low energy). This makes NFC perfect for passive devices, such as the advertising tags that we mentioned earlier, as they can operate without the need for a major power source.
However, this power saving does have some major drawbacks. Most noticeably that the range of transmission is much shorter than Bluetooth. While NFC has a range of around 10cm, just a few inches, Bluetooth connections can transmit data up to 10 meters or more from the source. Another drawback is that NFC is quite a bit slower than Bluetooth, transmitting data at a maximum speed of just 424 kbit/s, compared with 2.1 Mbit/s with Bluetooth 2.1 or around 1 Mbit/s with Bluetooth Low Energy.
But NFC does have one advantage when it comes to speed, faster connectivity. Due to the use of inductive coupling, and the absence of manual pairing, it takes less than one tenth of a second to establish a connection between two devices, a speed which has only recently been matched by Bluetooth 4.0.
galaxy-nexus-google-wallet
Google Wallet is an NFC based wireless payment system that allows its users to store debit and credit card information to make payments at PayPass-enabled terminal at checkouts.
You may have noticed that NFC based Android Beam, or S Beam on Samsung’s Galaxy handsets, actually uses Bluetooth or WiFi Direct to share information between devices. These two technologies actually only use NFC to quickly link the two devices together. This combination of wireless standards allows for maximum wireless transfer speeds, but without the longer connectivity times associated with Bluetooth.

A standard for the future

With the growth of interactive advertising, contactless payment systems, and the introduction of services like Google Wallet in the US, NFC is the wireless standard best poised to make our smartphones a viable alternative to credit and transport cards.
There are already over 300,000 MasterCard PayPass merchant locations in the US, but there’s still a way to go before NFC adoption rates are high enough for these technologies to become viable on a mass scale. But if a few more budget and midrange smartphones start shipping with NFC, this could be the way that a lot of us pay for our goods in the future.

Thursday 14 November 2013

How to create your Own Run Commands

How to create your Own Run Commands

There is no doubt that Microsoft Windows is the most widely used operating system in all parts of the world. Apart from being simple to use, it is quite rich in features as well, which makes our lives quite easy.
The Run command available on Windows operating system is one such power packed feature that lets you to open a document or an application instantly with the help of just 1 command. So, rather than clicking several icons or using multiple commands, you can use the Run command to open any program or document instantly.
crete your own run command
But, do you know how to create your own run commands? Well, it is really easy, which involves just few steps. Through this article, I will help you understand how to access your favorite applications by creating custom Run commands.
Open Run Command
Before I show you how to create your own Run commands, let’s take a quick look on how to open Run Command. First of all, you need to open the Run window by just pressing the Windows Key along with the R key, i.e. Windows + R. Now, you have to type the name of the program that you desire to open up or execute. Unfortunately, not all programs can be accessed through this method. So, let me show you how to create Run commands that do not come as inbuilt commands.

Steps to Create your own run commands


Step 1. The first step is to select the software or application for which you want to make custom Run command. For example, let us consider Google Chrome as the example here. Remember, you can choose any application other than which is already there in the Run command.

Step 2. In the second step, right click on the desktop of your computer system and make a new shortcut.
Right click > New > Shortcut

Step 3. As you select the Shortcut option in the 2nd Step, it will open up a dialog box. And, the dialog box will ask you path of the application or software for which you want to create the Run command.

Step 4. Now, you need to browse through the files and choose the one that shows “chrome.exe”. Well, it is quite obvious that all the executable files can be found in the C drive (or wherever the Operating System has been installed), inside the folder “Program Files”. For example, “C:\Program Files\Google Chrome\chrome.exe

Step 5. Once you are done with Step number 4, just click on “Next” button and simply provide a relative name to that shortcut. Remember, the same name will be used later in the Run command.
For example, “GC” for Google Chrome

Step 6. Now, click on the “Finish” button. Once it is done, an icon related to that application or software will show up on your computer’s screen. It means that the process of creating shortcut has been done successfully.

Step 7. In this step, just cut and paste that recently made shortcut icon into your computer’s root drive, in its Windows folder.
For example, C:\ Windows , Make sure you are the administrator of the computer or have its password.

Step 8. Now, you are done with the set up and can run the application through Run Command. Just go to Run and enter the keyword “GC”, and Google Chrome will begin executing.