Google's new Nexus 7 forces Apple's iPad Mini into a corner

Since its release in late 2012, many have considered Apple's iPad Mini to be the 7-inch tablet to beat. Now Google's new Nexus 7makes it look beaten. Apple needs to step up this fall or it risks being left in the dust.

Given that the iPad Mini starts at $329 for a 16GB Wi-Fi-only model while the Nexus 7 starts at $229 for a 16GB Wi-Fi-only model, it's difficult to justify purchasing the Apple device unless you happen to have a great deal invested in the iOS ecosystem already. But if, like many people, you use Netflix for movies, Amazon for books and Spotify for music, well, then you can pretty much choose any tablet you like.

The cost difference is just the beginning of the Nexus 7's advantage over the iPad Mini though. Don't believe it? Let's compare.

Display
The new Nexus 7 rubs the iPad Mini's biggest weakness — it's appalling display quality — in Apple's face. Unlike many iGadgets, the iPad Mini does not offer a high-resolution "Retina" display. Instead it has a 7.9-inch display with a 1024 x 768 resolution at 163 pixels per inch (ppi). The Nexus 7 offers a 7.02-inch display with 1920 x 1200 resolution at 323 ppi. While it might be challenging to see the difference between the iPad Mini's display and, say, the one on Samsung's Galaxy Tab 3, the new Nexus 7 clearly stands apart. Pixel-density difference is especially important when it comes to e-book reading — a typical use for a 7- or 8-inch tablet — because higher resolution displays are easier on the eyes.

                                      

Guts
The iPad Mini runs on Apple's A5 chip (which clocks in at 1 GHz) while the Nexus 7 uses a 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro. Apple tends to be mum about the RAM offered by its devices, but a teardown revealed that the iPad Mini rocks 512 MB. The Nexus 7, on the other hand, has 2GB. All Nexus 7 models have GPS capabilities built in while the entry-level iPad Mini relies on Wi-Fi to get location data (though the LTE-capable model does offer assisted GPS).

Both gadgets have 5-megapixel cameras in the rear and 1.2-megapixel cameras in the front.

Size
Purely speaking about measurements, the Nexus 7 has the iPad Mini beat on weight (it's 0.04 pounds lighter), but the iPad Mini is a bit thinner (it measures in at 7.2 millimeters while the Nexus 7 is 8.65 millimeters). The two gadgets are the same height (7.87 inches), but the Nexus 7 is narrower (4.49 inches) than the iPad Mini (5.3 inches). The smaller width measurement makes the Nexus 7 incredibly comfortable to hold, even with one hand spread out across its back.

Other little thingsThe Nexus 7 supports wireless charging. And its MicroUSB port also has SlimPort capabilities, meaning that it can connect to an HDMI adapter. (Unlike with the iPad Mini, there aren't any proprietary Lightning connectors involved.)

Battery
According to their makers, the iPad Mini gets 10 hours of active use while the Nexus 7 gets 9 hours. (However, Google does point out that simply Web browsing or e-reading will make the Nexus 7 last for 10 hours as well.)

Apple's 7-inch problemWhile Apple's 9.5-inch iPad dominates its size group, the company is facing a great deal of competition in the 7- to 8-inch tablet category. Until now, Apple managed to keep the competition at bay, but the Nexus 7 leaps above and beyond the iPad Mini. 

What worries us more is that, according to fresh rumors, Apple may not be planning to significantly upgrade the iPad Mini — with a high-resolution display and all — until sometime in 2014. If that is indeed the case, then the argument for buying a small iPad this holiday season will be fairly weak.

Leave Your Phone Behind

Lets take advantage of the slowness of August. Lets start the month a bit more simply.

This is a simple proposal to take back our in-between moments. Those once-solitary — or at least unmediated — moments that have been taken over completely by our phone, our texts, our e-mail, our social feeds, and our apps. This is hopefully a tiny but permanent dent against the casual tyranny of pervasive connectedness, constant virtual stimuli and hyper distractedness. We owe it to our discombobulated selves.

Here’s my effort towards the balance: leaving my phone behind, if only for short periods at a time, when:

— Going to work meetings within walking distance of my office. New York City makes that particularly easy, especially depending on where you work and where your business meetings are (most of mine are around midtown area). If you know where you're going, you hardly need Google Maps, admit it.

— Regular grocery run: Easy if you don’t make lists, but slightly more difficult if you do on the phone/list apps. One way to be disconnected on this would be to turn the airplane mode on. I have done it and it even saves time with fewer distractions, believe me.

— Going to the gym: You need to focus on your regimen anyway, don’t you? Like above, best to use your phone in airplane mode if you’re using it as a music player there.

— Going to my local prayer hall, a 15-20 minute affair at best. And you need silence inside the hall anyway. Leave the phone behind.

— If you want to take it up a notch: Buy a small watch, or use your old one lying around. You don’t wear one these days, and use your phone more as a watch than anything else. On these short trips, you don’t need your phone for the time keeping.

— While you're at it, get the simplest $69 Kindle, sans 3G. It is a lot more peaceful book reading device than your iPhone/iPad or any other more user-friendly connected device. The basic Kindle makes it lot easier with its clunkiness.

India sends its last telegram. Stop

Hundreds of people thronged the 75 telegraph offices remaining in the country to send their last telegrams to friends or family as a keepsake.

The company cancelled holidays for staff at the offices to handle the rush, Shameem Akhtar, general manager at the Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd., which runs India's telegram service, said.

The company says declining revenues forced it to end the service, which had become obsolete in an age of email, reliable landlines and ubiquitous mobile phones. The number of mobile phone users has exploded, with 867 million subscribers as of April.

The last message was booked at the counter of Central Telegraph Office Janpath, sent by Ashwani Mishra to Rahul Gandhi.

The telecommunications ministry said it lost £165 million in the last seven years and that it was time to put an end to the service.

India's telegram service began in 1850, when the first telegram was sent from the eastern city of Calcutta to Diamond Harbour, a southern suburb nearly 25 miles from the city centre.

Over the next few decades, telegraph offices proliferated, wiring the vast subcontinent with a network that became known for its speed and dependability.

At its peak in the mid-1980s, more than 45,000 telegraph offices dotted the country, with tens of thousands of telegraph workers and delivery men dispatching more than 600,000 telegrams a day

Malala's UN Speech

What It's Really Like to Own an iPhone 5

                                        

The dust has settled on the iPhone 5 launch, and the initial hype has died down. For me, it's now just my regular workday phone, with less of the "shiny object" sheen it had on launch day. Now that we've had time to digest the hype, what's it like using an iPhone 5 on a daily basis?

Maps has let me down

Let's get maps out of the way. Admittedly this is an issue with iOS 6 and not the phone itself, but it really damages the overall experience (especially given that I've left my 4S on iOS 5).

Apple maps is just as poor as the reports say. While I "ooh-ed" and "ahh-ed" at the 3D images when I first got iOS 6, Apple maps doesn't serve me well on a day to day basis.  

iOS 6 users have complained vocally about the lack of transport directions, but I had issues with the basics: Last week it failed to find a venue that Google Maps pulled up in a second. For the conference I'm attending this week, I'll be looking up the venue on Google Maps before I leave. 

Yes, lighter is better

It might seem minor, but the lighter and thinner form factor does make a noticeable difference day to day. I frequently watch TV shows on my phone (I sometimes watch entire movies on it, in fact), and the lighter iPhone 5 is clearly easier to hold for extended periods. 

Who moved my headphone jack?

I like Apple's new EarPods a lot. They're significantly less "tinny" than previous Apple headphones and just as robust (I've broken many headphones, but never an Apple pair). They fit me great, too. They're never going to compete with the high-end headphones on the market, but for $30 they do a decent job.

And yet there's one quirk I still haven't adjusted to: The headphone jack is on the bottom of the phone.  You quickly get used to the fact that you need to have the phone upside-down in your pocket when listening to music (and the volume buttons switch sides as a result), but for some reason I still try to toggle the screen to portrait mode by putting the headphone jack to the top.  

I've done this at least 30 times now, and my befuddled brain still acts surprised when it doesn't work.

Time to re-buy all my accessories

For me, the new cable has to be the most annoying aspect of switching to the iPhone 5. The charger on my bedside table can't be adapted to work with it and my Mophie charging case is rendered useless too.  Carrying around the Lightning connector cable everywhere I go is my backup plan until I take the plunge and fork out yet more money for accessories.  

Despite these little issues, I like the iPhone 5 more than I expected.  On paper, it's a bit faster, a bit lighter, a bit thinner and has a slightly bigger screen. In reality, these many small improvements add up to a noticeably better experience.  

Developer Hacks His Microwave Into The Microwave Of The Future

Tired of your dumb old microwave that just shoots frigging’ radio waves at food to cook it? Stupid thing probably can’t even play animated GIFs or send Snap chats or download the Fergie. What’s the point?

In the coolest mod I’ve seen in ages, developer Nathan Broadbent has hacked away at his microwave to add stuff that any self-respecting microwave manufacturer of the year 2013 should have probably added themselves. Voice commands! Bar codes that pre-set cooking times! A SELF SETTING CLOCK.

Meet the Raspberry Picrowave. As you might’ve gathered from the name, it’s a Microwave mashed up with a Raspberry Pi, the $25 micro-computer adored by modders, hackers, and geeks ’round the world

Here’s what it can do so far:

• Clock sets/updates itself across the Internet
• A bar code scanner pulls cooking instructions from an online database. Such a database didn't actually exist, so he’s building one himself, adding directions as he goes.
• Voice Commands, like “Microwave, Twenty seconds, Low.” (Alas, Nathan says his kitchen’s acoustics screw this up a bit.)
• Custom sound effects (because beeps are for chumps).
• You can control the microwave from your phone. The only uses I can think of for this are: when you know you’ll want microwaved popcorn later and can preload a bag, or when you want to convince your friends that you’re the biggest geek on the planet because you have a microwave that you can control with your phone.
• It tweets when it’s done cooking, because of course it does.

If nothing else, man oh man do I want that self-setting clock. My (two-year old) microwave uses the most ridiculous and impossibly obfuscated series of button presses for clock setting, so a power outage at my house generally means at least three months of the microwave swearing that it’s blink-thirty.

Stuffing a Pi into your microwave is cool and all, but the scale of the project gets a whole lot more impressive once he starts getting into the deeper details, from wiring the Pi into the microwave’s power supply, to designing a new control panel, to etching and producing a custom PCB that fits in the place of the original.

Entrepreneur's Choice: Is Your Kid Worth $100 Million?

Would you sell one of your kids for $100 million? Be honest.

Imagine your little Ben didn't burp or fart or throw up when your boss came over. Or think flushing the toilet was "mom's job." But sat quietly with other Benjamins in piles of crisp, neatly organized rows, ready to be enjoyed.

No talking back. No wanting to play at 6 am after drunken date night. No asking for homework help after your long day at work.

Food expenses, tuition and summer camp payments, babysitting fees. Gone. Gone. And gone.

It takes nine months and change to create a kid. It takes a lifetime, if you're lucky, to earn even a small fraction of $100 million. And most die trying, holding a bag full of regrets and a souped-up LinkedIn profile.

Surely few, if any, would say they'd accept this offer. An unscientific poll of several of my friends uncovered no takers.

One of my friends, James Altucher, commented:

"I would sell a leg or an arm or have a lobotomy. I would do anything to keep them free. I would be a slave on a ship. I would be thrown in prison. I would pray all day. I'd do anything, rather than have my kids taken away. I would be beaten to a pulp. I would take drugs. I would take cyanide. Nothing would take them from my side. My kids were given to me. It's been my honor since birth."

I first pondered this eery question after reading Rabbi Ephraim Shore poignantly recount what it was like to be diagnosed with multiple myeloma, a cancer of the blood so horrid that his doctors encouraged him not to Google it.

Since no one would make this trade, he wrote, we must all value our kids much more than $100 million. Yet very few of us act that way.

Though silly in many ways, the question opens a window into our priorities. Our personal priorities. And our professional ones as well, as not spending enough time with our kids is often cited as the #1 parenting regret.

We work all day while our kids are at school.

We work at night while our kids play at home - next to us or in the next room - but without us.

We travel to "must-attend" meetings while our kids perform in recitals without us.

We take the dinner meeting while our kids eat without us at home.

We look at our phones when our kids want us to look at them.

We watch a meaningless game on TV instead of just playing a game with our kids, which would mean the world to them.

We get frustrated with our kids when we should be enjoying them.

We yell at them when they should be the ones yelling at us for being so selfish.

All the while, we secretly look forward to a day when our kids are in college, out of the house and off our payroll.

Do most of us really act as if each of our kids are worth $100 million to us? A collective $300 million if you have 3 kids like me?

If $100 million were wired into your account today, you would sit down and spend a tremendous amount of time caring for it and thinking about what to do.

You would ask questions like, what do I need to do to protect it? What should I do to make sure it grows well into the future? How can it help me live a happier, more enjoyable life?

So why is it that we don't ask the same questions about, or spend the same amount of time thinking about, our kids, who we all seem to value more than riches?

Why don't we spend more time working on how we can be better parents and not just better employees and managers? And, just as importantly, how we can enjoy our kids more and be happier at both work and home?

For me, at least, the hardest part of being a working parent is not the long road trips or long hours or frustrated clients. It's the internal struggle I fight between two equal and opposing forces - the time I invest creating shareholder value and the time I invest building family values.

Both are important. But at what cost does pursuing one bankrupt the other?

I spend more time at work than I do with the kids. And they spend more time at school than they do with me. And that's not changing anytime soon. The only way to come out ahead is to stop fighting the quantity game and start focusing on quality.

And that's what the question forces you to think about.

Living like your kids are worth more than $100 million forces you to invest your time with them wisely. Just like you look for quality investments for your money, you need to find quality ways to spend time at home.

As it turns out, Rabbi Shore was misdiagnosed. And like many of us who have faced our own death, he spent his time in the cancer ward taking stock of his life.

"My death sentence was withdrawn and my life was renewed," he writes.

And his main takeaway? "I’ll be spending more time with my kids and truly enjoying them."

Ultimately, the best present you can give your kids is your presence. Your full and undivided presence. And, just like earning $100 million, that's not always easy.

What decisions would you make differently if you truly valued your children more than $100 million?

Skyfall (Adele cover) by Acoustika

There Was nothing much i could do instead of appreciate this awesome cover for Skyfall...

Review: Sony Xperia ion

Ever since Sony absorbed Ericsson’s stake in the company and became just Sony Mobile, the company has went on to flood the market with a ton of new phones, some of them with just minor differences from the other. One such phone is the new Xperia ion, which differs from the previous Xperia S so few ways you can count them all on one hand with fingers to spare. We decided to take a look and see what all is new.

Design The design is one of the major differences between the Xperia ion and the Xperia S. The Xperia S is a fine looking phone but the Xperia ion takes things up a few notches. It drops the now familiar transparent glass strip at the bottom and goes for a monolithic design. You’ll notice on the front that there are now four instead of three keys below the displays, each with its own icons. We’ll get to these later.

On the back you will find an all new metal shell covering almost the entire back surface. There are just three plastic strips, one each on the top, bottom and the left, which is where all the antennas reside. The top portion comes off and inside you will find the micro SIM and the microSD card slot. The NFC antenna is also located at the top, so that’s where you’ll have to touch the phone if you want to initiate a data transfer.

On the right edge of the phone (when seen from the front) are the power button, volume control buttons and the camera shutter key. All these keys are extremely thin and small for such a large phone and difficult to use, particularly the power button, which is just the most annoying thing on the entire phone. It’s ridiculously tiny so your finger keeps hunting for it every time you want to lock or unlock the phone unless you are looking directly at it. The positioning of the power and volume buttons on the same side of the phone also makes it awkward to take screenshots.

On the left side of the phone are the micro USB and micro HDMI ports placed neatly inside a plastic flap. They are both nearly of the same shape so you will have a hard time initially figuring out which is which and it doesn’t get any easier in the dark when you’re trying to connect a cable.

On the top sits the lonely headphone jack in the middle.

Getting back to the keys below the display, if you read our Xperia S review, you’d know that I complained a lot about the unfortunately design of these keys, which makes them extremely difficult and frustrating to use. Unfortunately, instead of improving upon that design, Sony has made it worse on the Xperia ion.

All four keys have icons and none of them are backlit. Instead, there is a tiny white strip of light below each of them that is so dim that it is hard to see even in darkness. Now here comes the ridiculous part. The touch sensors for these keys is placed on neither the icons nor the white strips but rather slightly above the icons and just below the display. So if you press on the icon basically nothing happens until you realize you have to press a bit above. And even then the touch area is extremely small and the keys aren’t very sensitive so if you press lightly or a bit below nothing happens. And in the dark it’s practically things get even worse because the stupid strips of light switch off a few seconds later, causing you to hunt around for the keys.

At this point it seems Sony was just trying to see how far the user could go before they throw the phone out of the window out of sheer frustration. If this was not their intention then it makes me wonder what on Earth would have made them chose such an atrocious design for such an important part of the phone’s user experience and why couldn’t they learn from the universally hated keys below the Xperia S. It also makes you wonder how much time Sony actually spent testing these devices before deeming them fit for selling on the market.

Other than that the hardware of the Xperia ion feels really great. It’s not as narrow as the Xperia S due to the bigger display, which we will talk about next, but the metal body feels really sturdy and premium, especially compared to plasticky phones like the Galaxy S III or the Optimus 4X HD. Even the design is very handsome and carries the classic Sony design language of simple but strong design lines. Just wish it was more user friendly.

DisplayThe display is the second biggest difference on the Xperia ion over the Xperia S. The Xperia S had a 4.3-inch HD display whereas the 4.55-inch HD display. On paper it might seem as if it’s just a bigger display but it’s not just that, it’s a much better display. The Xperia S display was pretty mediocre and the only thing really going for it was the pixel density, which is very high. The Xperia ion display trades some of the pixel density for significantly better colors, contrast and black levels.

The display on the Xperia ion looks really rich and vibrant and colors, to use the tired phrase, really pop. Photos, videos, games, applications, everything looks better on this screen compared to the Xperia S. It still hasn’t improved in some aspects, though. It is still using a low refresh rate, which causes noticeable blur while scrolling, especially in the browser and the viewing angles are still unimpressive. But overall this display is a big leap ahead of the Xperia S display. Still not as good as the display on the One X, though, which remains the best in the business.

Hardware and SoftwareThat is pretty much it when it comes to differences between the Xperia ion and the Xperia S. On the inside, both the phones are running the exact same hardware. On the hardware front, both phones have a Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8260 SoC with a dual-core 1.5GHz Scorpion CPU and Adreno 220 GPU. On the memory side, both phones have 1GB of RAM. Only differences is that the Xperia S had 32GB non-expandable internal memory whereas the Xperia ion has 16GB with a microSD card slot.

On the software side, the Xperia S launched with Android 2.3, Gingerbread but things have changed in the past month and it now runs on Android 4.0.4, Ice Cream Sandwich, which is exactly the same as the software found on the Xperia ion.

Since this is the first time we are seeing it, I’d like to talk about it. Having used a lot of custom Android user interfaces over the years, I must say I love what Sony has done with the software on these new Xperia phones. The UI on the new ICS ROMs on these phones is top notch and at least to me is the best looking of all the custom interfaces out there. The UI is just plain classy and unmatched in the aspect by any of its competitors. Sense UI in comparison just seems bloated and gaudy while the Nature UX looks its usual juvenile self. Sony’s UI is sleek, stylish, user friendly and filled with some nice touches.

Take the Album application, for example, which is the custom photo gallery app on the Xperia ion. The photos appear in a grid with the latest one being the largest. You can pinch to zoom on the grid to go from one image taking the entire width of the display to up to eight tiny images side by side. In this last mode you can have an incredible 104 thumbnails on the screen at once, which is convenient if you have a ton of images in the gallery.

Even the video player is nice. It shows large vertical thumbnails for your videos and when you click on them it shows you data pulled from Gracenote for your movies, such as description, actor names, etc. 

There are a few things where the Xperia UI lags behind the competition, namely in the lockscreen and the notification screen department. All of its rivals are now offering the option to have multiple icons on the homescreen that you can quickly launch while simultaneously unlocking the phone. The Xperia UI only has the option to start the camera and even that is not very useful when you consider you can press and hold the shutter key to do the same.

The notification area is also lacking any shortcut icons that you can use to quickly access certain functions from anywhere in the UI.

The pre-installed software on the Xperia Ion is fairly minimal and you can uninstall most of them. They will, however, return if you choose to reset your phone.

Performance A good looking UI is just half the story. The performance is equally important. Unfortunately, here things are a bit of a mixed bag for the Xperia ion. The UI stutters quite a bit when using the stock applications on the phone. This is especially noticeable when using the Settings applications. It's a bit perplexing because none of these applications are particularly complex and shouldn't be taxing the system so much.

However, things are quite a bit different while running third party applications. Basic applications such as Twitter or Facebook to high quality 3D games such as Dead Trigger were handled perfectly by the Xperia ion despite running on last year's hardware. The performance difference between the stock and third party apps is a bit alarming and points to lack of optimization on Sony's part rather than the hardware itself, which seems capable of handling almost anything that you can throw at it.

Moving on to the other aspects of the performance, I noticed that the loudspeaker on the Xperia ion sounded terrible. It was barely audible in some cases and sounded as if it was being blocked by something. You could boost the sound a bit by using the xLOUD present in the settings but that just makes it a bit louder and the quality remains terrible.

Thankfully, Sony provides a solid pair of in-ear headset with the phone. The sound quality with these is really good for a bundled pair of earphones and most people would never feel the need to upgrade.

I tried playing some HD videos on the Ion. The default video player, although looks great and pulls up useful information, does not support a lot of formats. You can easily get around that problem, though, by downloading a free third party video player, such as MXPlayer or DicePlayer.

The network reception and the general radio performance on the Xperia ion was satisfactory.

Camera The Xperia ion has the same 12 megapixel camera from the Xperia S. From the camera specifications down to the camera software is identical. In terms of image quality, this is still one of the best camera phones on the market, with superb high resolution images with good amount of detail. It’s only problem is the noise level, which is too high, even in day light images. This is remedied by using night mode in low light situations but you have to hold the phone very still or use support otherwise it generates blurry images.

Video quality-wise the camera isn’t particularly impressive. The videos have the same noisy look as the stills but lack the clarity and the detail and not in line with the quality offered by competing devices, such as the Galaxy S III.

Battery Life
I didn’t get time to run the Xperia ion through our usual battery life tests but in my daily usage I got around a day of battery life, which is similar to the Xperia S. With most of the specifications being identical between the two phones I can’t imagine the battery life being any different.

Verdict The Xperia ion is a modest upgrade over the Xperia S but improves upon key factors such as display and build quality. Unfortunately, it is too similar in other aspects and even retains the annoying behavior of the keys below the display. It makes us wonder why Sony bothered with the original Xperia S at all if they were going to launch the ion just a few months later.

What makes things worse for the ion, though, is its pricing, which puts it right in the One X and Galaxy S III territory. As nice as the Xperia ion is, it is not good enough compared to these phones, both of which feature vastly more powerful hardware and better display performance. Had it been priced under the Rs.30,000 mark, it would have been worth considering but at its current price I can’t help but suggest you give this one a miss. This is especially true considering Sony is bound to announce a new flagship soon in the form of the Xperia T/TX and you would definitely want to wait for that if you’re a Sony fan.