Samsung Galaxy Note 800 (Note 10.1) launched in India for Rs. 39,990

Samsung has launched the Galaxy Note 800 (Note 10.1) in India. The pre-booking for the 10-inch tabletstarted on the Samsung eStore last week. It packs in a 10.1-inch WXGA (1280 x 800 pixel) TFT display, 1.4 GHz quad-core processor and runs on Android 4.0(Ice Cream Sandwich). It has 5MP Auto Focus rear Camera with LED Flash and 1.9MP front camera.

It has S Pen input and apps such as S Note, S Planner, Adobe Photoshop Touch. It also includes unique features such as Smart Stay, Pop Up Play, AllShare Play and AllShare Group Cast that were present in the Galaxy S3. It also comes with My Education app for school students that offers over 10000 innovative and interactive free videos for students from class 1 to 12. This app also has assessment papers with test on real time basis, test results, admission dates directory of schools and colleges.

The connectivity features include, 3G (HSPA＋ 21Mbps), Bluetooth v 4.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n (2.4 & 5 GHz). It has 2GB RAM, 16GB internal memory, microSD (up to 32GB) and 7,000mAh battery.

The Samsung Galaxy Note 800 priced at Rs. 39,990 and is available across India.

Micromax A90 Superphone Pixel review

Micromax is well known for their low end budget hardware but they’ve also had a fair few innovative products over the years. Striking the right balance between performance and price is hard but it seems that the indigenous company might finally be on the right track.

We got our hands on the newly launched Micromax Superphone Pixel and put it through its paces. Read on to find out how this ICS running device fared.

Hardware

There’s absolutely no doubt that Micromax has learnt from consumer feedback. The hardware quality leaves little to complain about. The design of the phone is very reminiscent of the Samsung Galaxy S2 right down to the patterned back. The front of the phone is refreshingly clean with nothing to distract from the screen.

Micromax has gone in with an all touch design with onscreen buttons replacing the capacitive controls generally found below the display. The panel is covered with a Gorilla Glass display which should offer some manner of protection from scratches.

On the right we have a power key which works to switch off the display. On the left is the volume rocker key. Over all the phone has a very clean design with few buttons and distractions. The lack of a camera key was a bummer.

Coming to the screen, the Super AMOLED display is absolutely stunning. Resolution is WVGA which feels sufficient given the size and price point though we wouldn’t mind a qHD panel. The display is perfectly visible under sunlight and maximum brightness reaches eye searing levels.

The back of the phone houses an 8MP camera with LED flash. Overall, the design of the phone doesn’t leave much to be desired. One of the better looking and feeling mid range devices out there and more so at the enticing price point.

Performance

The chipset here is a MediaTek MT675 combined with a PowerVR SGX 531 GPU. A potent combination, Android 4.0 runs like a charm on it with no lags whatsoever. RAM is 512MB which might be a bit low for all the power users but is generally enough for day to day usage.

As indicated by the Quadrant scores, the A90 (2370) comes close to and in some cases even beats higher range devices like the Sony Xperia U (2248).

With a score of 3950 in Antutu, the A90 has decent scores for its class of devices. The dual core Xperia U fares much better here.

A score of 2900 in Sunspider Javascript is not bad at all for a device of its class. The dual core Xperia U scores marginally better at 2435 but in real life usage, the difference was minimal. Synthetic benchmarks tell only half the tale. In terms of usability, there is no reason to be concerned as the phone remains speedy even under fairly heavy usage.

Software

Software wise there isn’t much to say. The A90 is running stock Android 4.0 ie Ice Cream Sandwich with the only customizations being a few custom icons.

Micromax has also bundled in a few apps but most of them turn out to be useful ones like Whatsapp instead of bloatware. Given that the phone comes pre rooted, it shouldn’t be too hard for a user to remove these manufacturer installed apps. We really wish more manufacturers would go down this route instead of providing customers a sub par experience. We’re looking at you, Touchwiz !

Multimedia

The inbuilt storage on the Micromax A90 is 4GB of which about 2GB is available. Memory can be extended by 32GB via the microSD slot. The smartphone supports the usual mp4, mkv and avi file formats for video playback. The MediaTek MT6575 chipset supports video playback up to 720p.

Camera

The camera on the Micromax A90 is an 8MP unit which takes remarkably good stills in sufficient light. Low light performance predictably suffers with a fair amount of noise and visible banding.

Day light images are crisp and noise free for the most part. Auto focus is very quick as long as conditions are ideal.

Battery Life

For a 1600 mAh battery, you won’t expect battery life to be anything out of the ordinary. You’re in for a pleasant surprise ! The phone keeps going on and on. Between the optimized software, low power processor and fairly large battery, the A90 is able to squeeze in over a day of usage. Even after heavy usage, the phone always had battery life left over to use the next day in our tests.

Video Overview

You can check out a quick video demo of the phone below.

Conclusion

The Micromax brand name is still associated with low end cheap phones and this legacy baggage might hold back what is otherwise an excellent product. With the perfect mix of good performance, brilliant display and fantastic pricing, it is hard not to recommend the A90.

We loved the display and the fact that the phone comes with stock Ice Cream Sandwich. Additional RAM is one area where we believe Micromax could have worked on. We would wholeheartedly recommend this phone to anyone looking for a good Android experience on a budget.

Pros

1. Fantastic display

2. Stock Android 4.0

3. Smooth performance

4. Great battery life

Cons

1. Update to Jelly Bean unlikely

2. 512MB RAM may be limiting for power users

Voice Search arrives in 13 new languages

Norwegian restaurants in New York City.” I can type that phrase fast, but I can say it even faster—and when I’m on the go, speed is what I’m looking for. With Voice Search, you can speak into your phone to get search results quickly and easily. Voice Search is already available in 29 languages, and today, we're bringing support to 13 new languages for Android users—bringing the total to 42 languages and accents in 46 countries. In fact, 100 million new speakers can use Voice Search now, with the addition of:

Basque Bulgarian Catalan European Portuguese Finnish Galician Hungarian

Icelandic Norwegian Romanian Serbian Slovak Swedish

Each new language usually requires that we initially collect hundreds of thousands of utterances from volunteers and, although we’ve been working on speech recognition for several years, adding these new languages led our engineers and scientists to tackle some unique challenges. While languages like Romanian follow predictable pronunciation rules, others, like Swedish, required that we recruit native speakers to provide us with the pronunciations for thousands of words. Our scientists then built a machine learning system based on that data to predict how all other Swedish words would be pronounced. 

This update has already started to roll out, and will continue to do so over the course of the next week. How you get started with Google Voice Search depends on what kind of phone you have. If your phone runs Android 2.2 or later, and you see the microphone icon on the Google Search widget on your homescreen, all you have to do is tap the icon to start a voice-powered search. Otherwise, you can install theVoice Search app from Google Play . Note that you can only speak one language into the app at a time, and you may need to change your language settings to use one of these new languages.

As with other languages we’ve added, one of the major benefits to Google’s cloud-based model is that the more people use Voice Search, the more accurate it becomes. 

• 

  Review: Dell Venue Pro

  Pradeep 'Shifty Rat' Menon, Sep 05, 2011 1712 hrs IST

  What you'd get if Apple and Microsoft had an illicit affair.

  Stylish; Impressive screen.

  Heavy; Low quality camera; Multiple interface issues.

  Check specifications

  Write Review

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Expert Review

Dell Venue Pro
MRP: Rs 35,000
Street Price: Rs 24,000 (Flipkart.com)


What's peculiar about technology is the ever-accelerating speed at which it seems to evolve. Pretty soon we'll have intergalactic space travel, teleporting Subway sammiches, and iPhone releases every other day. Consider the phones we use, for example. I don't know how old the average TechTree reader is (12?), but I remember an age when mobile phones didn't have a colour display. Phones could just make calls and send messages, and that was a pretty big deal by itself.

Phones evolved, and now we can do some pretty crazy stuff with them. You can take 360-degree pictures, automatically scan and save visiting cards, point your camera at the sky and see stellar constellations, and even use your phone as an internet router. The Dell Venue Pro is among the newest phones out there, and I was curious about what new features I'd find on it. I had last used a Windows Phone a few years ago and I wanted to see how it would hold up against the Androids and iOSes.


The Package
The package, eh? The package from the guy who sent it to us was: the phone and its charger in a plastic bag. I definitely hope this isn't how regular customers get the phone - I'd be pretty mad if a salesman tossed a phone worth 35 grand into a plastic bag and threw in a charger as an afterthought. Anyway, it seems the package should contain earphones and a little leaflet (probably to reassure you about your impulsive buy).

You can polish a turd.

The phone is a beauty. It's large, sleek, and looks bloody expensive. It's a tad heavy and a bit unwieldy, but then we live in a world where people are dumb enough to walk around with iPads, so this is no biggie. The Venue Pro features a slide-out keypad bearing keys so tiny that you can only type with a safety pin. I didn't bother using the keyboard during the test period because, you know, I have fingers.

On to the tech specs: the phone runs on a 1 GHz (Scorpion Core) Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and has anAdreno 200 GPU thrown in for graphics muscle. It has 512 MB of RAM and 8 GB of onboard storage space, but you can't add memory cards for additional space. Probably because Dell thinks you shouldn't be carrying more than 8 GB of data anyway. The most impressive thing about this phone is its display: a 4.1" AMOLED Gorilla Glass screen. It's unbelievably responsive and a delight to use, thanks to its clarity and rich colours.

The Dell Venue Pro's screen.

Alright, so the phone looks great. In fact, I used it for two whole weeks and almost everyone who saw the phone had to ask about it. Of course, I claimed it was mine, because there's no way in hell I'd admit to being a TechTree employee. This thing is a fine chick magnet, my lonely friends! Those swanky colours, the fade-in and fade-out menus, the techno ringtones, and the click-clack of the slide out keyboard is audio-visual foreplay for the dumb and pretty women around me. I had to play dumb to bond with them but hey, I added 10 new contacts to this phone. It's like the one app that I can never find on iTunes - iAttract.


Day 2 Of Phone Usage
The first day was a dream. The next was like the day after your wedding - reality hits home. It started when I decided to configure my phone service provider's internet settings. Simple enough. Hmm, go to Settings, then go to... ok, Phone? Oops, no. Umm, Network? Dammit. Mail? Internet Explorer?! Messaging?! MUSIC AND VIDEOS?!CALCULATOR!!!!!!!!!!


 

Revolution now means reverse evolution.

This couldn't be happening. My swish phone wouldn't allow me to tweak \ control \ access my network settings! The max I could do was swipe twice to disable 3G. I tried Wi-Fi next, and surprisingly, I could get on my WAN network. I was about to use Internet Explorer after many, many years - I was cornered. I had to do this. I poked the screen.

404 error.

I screamed, dropped the phone, and fell on the ground, rolling all over the dirty TechTree floor in agony. I wailed and kicked around and punched the furniture around me. I had a long tantrum, after which I took the rest of the day off and went home. This wasn't right - Microsoft would pay. I sat under a dim lamp in a corner of my room as I sulked and swore to avenge my pain.

However, I had to know my enemy well to defeat him. I returned a much stronger man to where I had dropped the Venue Pro and picked it up. No one steals a phone when they see a 404: Page Not Found error - it's the law of the jungle. I tried every possible thing to access the internet, but nothing worked. For a few minutes, I managed to accessGoogle.com, but the rest of the time was 404 Happy Hours. Buy one, get one free.

 He started it.

Meh. I decided to move on. I decided to personalize my phone at this point. Apparently I had to create a Windows Live IDfor a "wholesome" experience. So be it. At this point, it magically connected and let me finish registration. Then some random messages warning me to wait or die appeared. I looked away.

As I sat there clueless about what was going on, it demanded that I update my Facebook app. Glad that I had not been physically assaulted by the phone yet, I quickly clicked Yes. It did a few swanky things and soon I was on my Facebook page. You know how Facebook looks tacky on all mobile apps? Well, Windows just took it to another level. All I could do was see my homepage, my profile page and update my status, without my privacy settings.

Here's the best part. All your FB contacts are automatically added to your contacts list. People I'd never seen or met before were on my phone list. I had to scroll for a few hours just to call my mom to inform her that I was dying of Carpal Tunnel Syndrome. You can't even have your favourite numbers at the top. Pretty soon I was just staring at the phone with my mouth open. To finally remove all the Facebook contacts, I had to reset the phone. No lies.

I gotta finish this. I spent the rest of the day running through everything, and found that there were a billion things you could not do. You know how you can add pictures to a contact? Well, you can't do that here. Hell, you can't even add a ringtone to any contact. Even worse, you can't set some favourite song as a ringtone. Wow. Just wow.

I found myself calling the wrong people often. This was because when you clicked a name, it would show the number in a large font and the contact name in tiny letters on the upper left corner. I even called people I'd never met before! You know how awkward it is when you call a Facebook contact you've never met in person?! It's downright creepy, Microsoft!

Hey, remember me?! From Facebook?

The Pictures section was again slick, but that's where it ended. It was as if the coding team was on vacation and they made the designers finish and launch the OS. The only options the Pictures menu allows is Set As Wallpaper, Delete,or Cancel. Hey, what about all the other things I want to do? Like email it, edit it, move it to another album, or mark all?


Camera
The camera was a lot of fun. Not because of awesome pictures, but because we had a game where anyone who took a non-blurry picture would win 500 bucks. Nobody won. The camera runs on two modes: Off and Parkinson's. In the light of day, the camera works decently. But walk into a room, or try to take a picture any time after 6 pm, and all you get is a blur. The awesome screen just amplifies the camera's shortcomings.

That's AWESOME!! What is it?

Music And VideosA-ha, the best part. When I plugged the Venue Pro into my computer for the first time, nothing happened. My computer and I just sat there, staring at each other. Since the guy who sent us the phone didn't send a driver disc, I had no clue what software came with the Venue Pro. I Googled  for "dell venue manager" and got nothing. After a few minutes of reading angry reviews, I found it. Turned out I had to use Zune to move stuff to the phone. I don't like it, but I persevered.

The Zune download went like this: first, it made me download the installer. Once it was installed, it said there were new "software updates", and made me download those too (why not just update the installer file, you jackasses?) and then, they made me download phone updates. I played along. Zune finally powered up - after flashing the intro screen for about two minutes. All this on a computer that could simultaneously and single-handedly launch 20 rockets into space.

If you thought iTunes sucks, you've got to see the Zune. You'll never utter a word about iTunes being inflexible again. It's like someone has a warm shotgun barrel against your nuts. It's their way or no way. Zune forced me to add all the songs on my computer and convert my videos, and all my private pictures. I was terrified because I figured my phone would automatically upload everything to Facebook too. It felt like the Great Robot Takeover that I had feared all my life. The way Zune takes over your computer is just tyrannical. I imagine this is what a cavity check at Chennai airport feels like.

Bitches need lurvv too.

After taking a few hours to add songs, I tried the music player. It was alright; but after what I'd gone through, anything would sound good. Kinda like the 50 bucks the warden gives you when they let you out of prison. I had no complaints and quietly moved on.

I had had enough of this phone, at this point. I didn't care about that stupid mobile version of Office, or Outlook, or theCalendar, or that ridiculous search function on the homepage. Oh yeah, what the hell is up with that? Do you think the first thing I think of when I look at my phone is, "I gotta run a Bing search"? Jeez.

I don't know about this new direction the phone makers have taken. You've got to get into the philosophy of a phone. What is a phone? What are you going to use it for? I get that they want to reduce confusion for the technologically-challenged customers, but they have to draw the line somewhere. Apple was the primary retard, but even it looks sane in comparison. It takes an idiot to go astray, but it takes an even bigger idiot to follow him. The whole "we will decide what to give you" attitude is absolute crap. I used to hate my Symbian phone before I used the Dell Venue Pro, but now I realize that at the very least, there's a filesystem on my phone. I can do a bunch of things with my stuff. Sure, the newer phones have many new utilities \ apps, but all the old and very essential functions are gone.

This is what happens when style replaces common sense. Seriously, I wonder what Microsoft's focus group was like: were they talking to high-schoolers? I can't imagine any adult using this phone. Ever. And I'm also curious about why they named this Windows, because there is absolutely no connection between the computer OS and this piece of shit. The only Windows this thing needs is one that you can throw it out of.


VerdictThis phone has layers. Multiple layers of fail, that is.

• Yes, you can make calls. After 10 minutes of going through contacts.
• Yes, you can send messages. Unless you accidentally hit the Search button and lose everything you typed, because the phone does not save drafts.
• Yes, it will give you more friends. But none that read TechTree.

Features: 1/5
Design And Build Quality: 3/5
Performance: 1/5
Value For Money: 1/5
Mojo: 1/5

Overall Rating: 2/5