Tablet PC or the pen- enabled computer as Microsoft calls it, have been almost entirely credited to Apple since the release of the iPad in the first quarter of this year. It had been a long time since we heard anything about the tablet PC’s from Microsoft.  But now Steve Ballmer the CEO of Microsoft has come up with a statement that the company will be launching more tablet computers based on Windows 7 later this year.

The Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer also confirmed that the devices will be launched by Asus, Dell, Samsung, Toshiba and Sony. All of which are expected to arrive this year. The message came out of the Worldwide Partner Conference. However the company CEO was very careful not to reveal anything about the featuresof the tablets as it knows that the info will be serving well when they need to gather publicity for the device before its release.

We already know about the various tablets released by the companies whose names have come up as the possible manufacturers like the ASUS Eee Pad EP121, which was introduced at Computex, and the dual-screen Libretto W100 that Toshiba announced last month, but then the idea of Dell, Samsung, and Sony releasing Windows 7 slates is new. The ASUS Eee Pee EP121 a high-end tablet that offers a complete Windows 7 experience. It features a dual core Intel CPU (which CPU is still TBD), a 12-inch 1366×768 screen, and Windows 7 home premium, though with a nice fancy touch UI. It has a couple of docking stations available, including a keyboard docking station that turns the EP121 into a 12-inch notebook.

Whereas the Libretto W100 sports two 7-inches multi touch displays (1024 x 600 resolutions). The specs include an Intel ultra-voltage processor (no Atom here), a 62GB solid-state drive, 2GB of RAM, and Windows 7 Home Premium. You’ll also find a tiny 1-megapixel HD webcam, 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, a microSD card slot, one USB 2.0 port, and an 8-cell battery. Sadly, there’s no talk of mobile broadband or any 3G connectivity whatsoever.

The brief summary from Ballmer included that the devices would come in with several price points and several form factors. Additionally, it was mentioned that some would be able to handle digital ink, some would be dockable, some would be touch only and some would sport keyboards. Like I said, pretty generic. Noticeably absent from Ballmer’s list of manufacturers is HP, whose Slate tablet has reportedly been dropped, even though Ballmer himself showed it off at CES in January. Whatever be the case many experts have already counted out the utility of a windows 7 on tablet PC  but Microsoft still needs to sell more tablet computers as Apple sold 3 Million of the same in three months amid the rumours of it being  high priced and malfunctioned.

It is clear that the market for a thin but large, touch-screened thing-that-isn’t-a-phone is  on a high. So what if that slab only does 85 percent of what the PC can do?

We all know about how difficult it becomes to make an impact in the global market for any new web browser, and thus it remains unknown in major parts of the world. But, on the other hand, such a web browser does make it big at the regional level, that is, the region where it belongs to. To justify this, we can consider the example of the Maxthon which has gained huge popularity in China, but till now it remains unknown to most in major parts of the world.

Bangalore based startup known as Hidden Reflex, has now announced the launch of its “Epic” browser, which is fully based on the Indian culture and tradition, and is aimed at making Indians proud all over the world. The browser is both feature-rich and secure and is expected to meet all the requirements a user would expect from a web browser.

Being the first web browser to have been made completely in India, Epic browser is based on the Mozilla platform, and has incorporated most of the features mainly with the Indian hues in mind. Before we get into the discussion about the browser, let us know the details about the company Hidden Reflex, which has brought forth this web browser.

Founded by the then U.S. based Engineer Alok Bhardwaj in 2007, the company is currently based in Bangalore. Initially they comprised of a group of only three members, but now they seem to have grown into quite a bunch of individuals who are working on two separate products. Epic was the first product to be worked on and has been launched, while the other one is still under development.

The Epic browser is highly customizable and after the first installation, you will notice the vibrant colours of it. It initially comes with a “Peacock” background which seems a bit uncomfortable for the eyes. With around zillions of backgrounds provided by the browser to choose from, this does not seem to be a difficulty. With the launch of the Epic browser, you shall be entitled to over 1500 themes to choose from, which are compatible and available for the Epic.

The Epic browser is provided with a sidebar which contains a host of applications and they can be launched from there. Some of these applications include Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Orkut, Jobs, Games, Travel and many more. With the click on any of these icons on the sidebar, a widget-like window will be launched at the side of the browser. One drawback is there though, that you can open only one such widget per window.

The Epic browser also features to be the first browser which has built-in anti-virus protection. The browser also supports a long list of Indian languages (currently 12) and an Indian content sidebar that shall aggregate news headlines, TV to live cricket commentary and other things that matters to all Indians. This also includes a bunch of productivity applications like a free word processor, video sidebar and my Computer Browser.

To experience a whole new genre of browsing and fun, you can try this appealing browser which is available for free and can be downloaded from here. Go ahead and try the hues of India now!

While all the other manufacturers were bringing innovative new products to the market; with great design, user friendly interface and rich features and functionality, Nokia didn’t quite seem to keep up and so slowly began to escape the news.

None of their recent phone launches made people sit up and take notice. However, their recent announcement of the N8 seems to be doing that. Armed with a bevy of features, the new Nokia N8 comes with an enviable specifications list. But it’s not just the specifications that make the N8 an important product. The phone also brings several new never seen before features for a Nokia phone, such as a 12 megapixel camera with xenon flash, 720p/25fps video recording, multi-touch capacitive OLED touchscreen, HDMI-out, anodized aluminum body, Wi-Fi 802.11n and Bluetooth v3.0, among others. But perhaps one of the most important features is the operating system – Symbian3 – which makes the Nokia N8 the first device to flaunt this OS. Today we take a look at some of these features in detail of what is perhaps the most important device for Nokia in years.

The Design

The Nokia N8 has a mono-block design, but for the first time Nokia has used anodized aluminum in its design. So far they had restricted themselves to using steel when it came to embellishing their phones with metal, but for the N8 their metal of choice was a bit more up market. The aluminum will give the phone a rich feel and along with making it sturdy, also reduce the weight, which for a phone with so many features, is bound to be on the higher side.
The design of the phone is fairly simple but still quite good looking and definitely better than what Nokia usually comes up with. The phone looks sleek and sturdy, with curved sides and top and bottom, which gradually become narrow towards the edges. The top and bottom sides are completely flat and house all sorts of buttons and ports, from the 3.5mm headphone jack to the all important HDMI-out. The design of the N8 reminded me of the Sony Ericsson Aino though.

The Display

The Nokia N8 has a 3.5″, 640 x 360 pixel, AMOLED display. The touchscreen employs the capacitive technology. Nokia has so far used a capacitive display only on the X6 but what they haven’t used so far is multi-touch technology, a feat made possible by the new Symbian^3 OS that the phone sports. The display is capable of displaying up to 16.7 million colors and has a proximity sensor for automatically turning off when you bring it close to your face during a call. An ambient light sensor is also available for automatically adjusting the brightness level. Nokia phones usually come with excellent displays and we expect the N8 to be just as good, if not better. Also, despite the fact that it is capacitive, Nokia will be supplying a special stylus for certain markets such as China, where handwriting recognition is used a lot.

Camera

The camera is one of the biggest attractions of the Nokia N8. It is the first phone from Nokia to feature a 12 megapixel autofocus camera. Also, while other manufacturers often leave their cameras at impressive sounding resolution figures, Nokia has also equipped the camera with a xenon flash, a rarity these days on phones but at the same time a boon when it comes to photographing in the dark. Also, a first for Nokia is the ability of the N8 to record HD videos, 1280 x 720 to be precise, at 25 frames per second. If you think those are just fancy sounding numbers then you should take a look at the images and videos released by Nokia taken on the N8. One look at them and you’ll realize that the Nokia N8 has all the makings of an excellent camera phone, perhaps the best yet.

HDMI-Out

What’s the point of having such a good camera if you cannot watch your photos and videos on your TV? Well, Nokia has taken care of that and provided the N8 with HDMI-Out connectivity. Simply connect the N8 to your HDTV with the supplied HDMI cable and you can view all your photos and videos in their full high definition glory. The N8 also supports Dolby Digital Plus surround sound output through the HDMI.

Connectivity

The Nokia N8 is the first phone in the world to support five GSM frequencies. That is 850/900/1700/ 1900/2100! This means no matter wherever in the world you go, you can be sure that your N8 is equipped to support the service providers available there. It also supports HSDPA up to 10.2 Mbps and HSUPA up to 2.0 Mbps. Also, the Nokia N8 is one of the few phones announced so far to have Wi-Fi 802.11n support. If that was not enough, the Nokia also comes with Bluetooth v3.0, making it the second device after the Samsung Wave to have this feature. A-GPS is on board along with FM radio and transmitter.

Hardware

The Nokia N8 runs on a ARM 11 680 MHz processor and also has 3D Graphics HW accelerator. There was a time when Nokia smartphones used to have hardware graphics acceleration (remember Nokia N93, N95, N82?) but later they abandoned it for a faster CPU. Now the Nokia N8 has the bests of both worlds. With a dedicated graphics accelerator, the N8 will be able to display better quality graphics while gaming or image and video playback and it will also facilitate the high quality image and video recording that the phone is capable of, without stressing the processor which would be free to do other tasks.
The N8 also comes with 256 MB of RAM for all your applications, which should come in handy knowing how good Symbian is with multi-tasking. Also, the phone will have 16GB of built-in memory for all your files and furthermore it also supports a microSD card slot so you can expand it up to 32GB, taking the total memory to a whopping 48GB.

Software

Nokia N8 is the first device in the world to run on the new Symbian3 operating system. An update over the previous S60 5th Edition, Symbian3 is supposed to focus on enhanced usability and better integration with social networking services. It now features a new home screen that you can populate with multiple widgets. Actually, there are now three homescreens, so you can keep even more widgets on your phone. The interface is now designed with touchscreen devices in mind, unlike the previous S60 5th Edition. You only tap once everywhere in the UI instead of the single tap-double tap nuisance of the previous OS. Most of the apps have undergone slight change in the design as well.
Many have said that the OS is not much different from the previous version and although features like enhanced usability, multiple homescreens and multi-touch technology are all good, it’s too little too late now. We think Nokia should have done much more than add a few features that actually should have been there long time back. The competition has moved far ahead in terms of software development and if Nokia needs to keep up, it will take more than a spit and shine job. They should instead do with Symbian what Microsoft did with the Windows Mobile. Dump it completely and start anew with something like Windows Phone 7.

What We Think Of It

As we mentioned, the N8 is an important product for Nokia. It’s how N95 was four years ago. It comes packed with a boatload of features with many of them not just being the first on a Nokia phone but first on any phone. But these days it takes more than just impressive hardware to sell phones; the success of the iPhone is testimony to that fact. Despite having what can be best described as mediocre hardware in todays day and age, the iPhone continues to sell in impressive numbers. It’s all because of the software that the phone has, which works double time to ensure that it makes even mediocre hardware work great.
While it’s a good thing that Nokia updated the Symbian OS, what they need to do right now is work even harder and come up with something even more impressive that is at least comparable to the current batch of smartphone OSes in terms of look and feel, if not better. Just imagine, if they manage to do that and then put it on something like the N8, how good the overall combination will be. We know we shouldn’t be bashing something that we haven’t used yet but from whatever we have seen so far through pictures and videos, the Symbian3 hasn’t really got us excited as, say, the iPhone OS 4.
That doesn’t mean we aren’t excited about the phone itself though and we really can’t wait to get our hands on it. What makes the phone even more exciting is that despite the laundry list of features that it has, Nokia is planning to price it very competitively. When the Nokia N97 was launched it was selling for 550 Euros. In comparison Nokia has quoted only 370 Euros for the N8, which when converted to Indian currency, turns out to be around Rs. 22,000, which is just incredible. Although we know the price won’t exactly be that when it launches here in the third quarter of this year, even if it is something around Rs. 28,000, it will still be pretty decent value for money.

Following the launch of Intel’s Pine Trail range of Atom processors, every manufacturer seems to be busy with refreshed versions of their respective netbooks. We have for review Dell’s Inspiron Mini 10.

While some makers, like Asus, have made nominal changes to the exterior, the Mini 10 has gone through a complete makeover since its last iteration. This earlier model was appreciated for having an HDMI port on-board, but trashed for a paltry 3-cell battery that was packaged along with it. Dell has tried to perfect their netbook formula with this model. Let’s find out if they have succeeded in doing so.

Design and Build

The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 looks nothing like its predecessor. But like earlier models, this one too is available in a good variety of colored tops. The base is white for most models. The netbook looks pretty cool and unique; unique because of the way the screen hinge rests on the bottom half and not at the edge, unlike most laptops. The build feels plasticky, but is fairly sturdy nonetheless. At 1.37 kilos, it is fairly lightweight and in line with most netbooks today (that also weigh under 1.5 kg).The resistance offered by the hinges of the lid isn’t that great, but thanks to the placement, the screen doesn’t stretch back all the way. So, even if the hinge resistance wears off, say after long use, it wouldn’t be a big issue to continue using the netbook.

On the inside we have a typical 10-inch, 1024 x 600 pixel display. It’s quite bright and displays content with good clarity. A higher resolution (1366 x 768 pixel) display is also available in the higher priced SKU. The webcam, however, delivers slightly grainy output. The keyboard design is similar to the bigger Inspirons. Although not of an isolated (chiclet) design, the keys are well-spaced and offer decent tactility. Typing on them was a fairly non-strenuous affair.

The Function keys (F1-F12) are primarily configured to change brightness, volume, toggle Wi-Fi, check battery status etc. This is now implemented better, since the typical Alt-F4 (close application) shortcuts work as well. You can also make Function keys perform as normal if you prefer. Below that is a wide touchpad that’s carried over from the previous model. The touch response is accurate. Although it does not have multi-touch gestures, like two-fingered scrolling, the side-scrolling strips work just fine. You can also configure one-handed zoom in/out to the left edge of the pad, which is nifty.

To the sides, we have the typical array of ports. On the left, there is VGA, two USB and a SD/MMC/MS card reader. To the right we have LAN, another USB port, and the headphone/microphon e jacks. HDMI from the earlier model has been removed from this one. One noticeable problem was the positioning of the air vents. All of them are placed at the bottom. In most laptops, you’ll find at least one to the sides. As a result of this, the bottom part gets a little hotter than usual.

While it’s bearable when performing non-intensive tasks, we did realize the heating was a little over the top when running benchmarks on it. However, the paltry 3-cell battery on the earlier model has been replaced with a higher capacity 6-cell one. Still, the design of the laptop avoids it protruding too much, which is nice. The two speakers under the belly emit clear output at a fairly audible volume. Lastly, the Mini 10 came with a cute little one piece adapter (unlike the typical wire-adapter- wire chargers), which is not as messy to carry around.

Other than the little extra heating, we didn’t have any other complaints with the design and build of the new Dell Inspiron Mini 10.

Real World Performance

Our review unit came pre-installed with Windows XP SP3. Using XP feels a little dated now that Windows 7 has become common fare, even in netbooks. Thankfully, higher-end SKUs offer you an option of either Windows 7 Starter or Home Basic. Still, XP runs pretty smooth on the newer-generation hardware. That’s right, the Atom N450 1.66 GHz processor and 1GB of RAM were good enough to keep it running swifty. Moderate amount of multi-tasking shouldn’t be too much for this baby.

We tried HD video playback on it. While 1080p HD videos lagged as expected, 720p videos mostly ran without a hitch (we installed the latest K-lite Codec pack and played them on Media Player Classic). Come to think of it, the HDMI port from the previous model would have been a nice addition in this version, to project those movies onto an LCD TV.

Battery Life

The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 came with a 56 Whr, 6-cell battery. We put it through our first test — the 720p video drain. Brightness and sound were set to max. Here it delivered an unbelievable run-time of seven hours. That’s a great figure, probably the highest I’ve seen in my time.

Under regular usage, i.e. typing a word document in an online document editor, when connected over Wi-Fi, it again gave us an up-time of roughly seven hours. Note that the brightness level here was a notch or two under maximum. So, for basic office usage (without wireless internet) that number could shoot to Dell’s 8-hour claims on their website. That’s very good battery life and it clearly shows the improved power optimization in the newer generation Atom CPU.

Price and Verdict

The price of the Dell Inspiron Mini 10 starts from Rs. 15,900 (delivery charges extra) on the Dell India website. This comes with 1GB RAM and 160GB hard drive with XP pre-installed. The pricing is pretty fair. The high-end version, with a higher-resolution (HD) display, 2GB RAM, 320GB hard disk and Windows 7 Home Basic also carries a value for money tag of Rs. 20,000.

Dell has tried hard to perfect the netbook with this one and we have very little to complain about it. The only con that we would point out is the soaring temperatures at the base. But under non-intensive usage, when seated in an air-conditioned room, the heating wasn’t that noticeable.

The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 is a very good netbook to go for. It looks good, is fairly comfortable to use, has great battery life and you have three configurations to choose from. We give it two thumbs up!