It hasn’t been very long since the world saw Android 4.2 Jelly Bean come to light, with all its fancy new feature enhancements, some of which have been welcomed across the globe with great enthusiasm. Whether you’ve tried the latest Android flavor on your device yet or not depends solely on what smartphone or tablet you are carrying, or if you’re using a custom ROM or prefer stock ones, but Google is on a roll already, having let out Android 4.2.1 just a while back, carrying, among various others, a bug fix that’s more obvious than all the others – the missing “December” in the original 4.2 release, which rendered people with birthdays and anniversaries in the last month of the year, well, without a reminder of sorts.
JoinedNovember 9, 2012
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It was somewhat funny when I came across Tap-Translate. You see, in my professional life, my industry is actually Translations & Localization, and coming from that, I know how important it is to be able to read a foreign language write-up with the right deliverance of meaning to reach the right conclusion. This is even more important in certain industries and professions, like the financial services sector, but anyone using the internet can come across any such case where you might find some information useful to you in a language that you don’t understand, but would still want to read it. Thankfully, with browsers like Google Chrome, you can get a whole page automatically translated – complete with automatic source language detection – but what if you don’t have access to such a desktop browser? What if, like me, you, too, are a fan of browsing the web on your iPad?
If you’re into shopping at all, and online version of it in particular, Black Friday and Cyber Monday would be nothing unfamiliar or new to you. Every year, retailers, brand manufacturers, stores and supermarket chains, wireless carriers, and almost everyone else, goes on a sale spree for the shopping frenzy that both these days are. Cyber Monday, in particular, caters to the digital crowd, and aside from the sales on goods that it brings, the app crowd can also rejoice, for this year’s no exception – both the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store – the conveyors of world’s biggest share of smartphone apps – are seeing massive sales on apps that have gone on pricing diets to mark the celebration weekend. We brought you a compilation of all the greatest iOS apps that went free for Black Friday a couple of days back, and now it’s time for its Android counterpart, the Google Play Store.
When I switched over from iOS to Android as my daily driver, the first thing that I ensued was the quest for battery optimization. It’s no hidden truth that iOS beats Google’s cute little droid hands down in this arena, and if someone claims otherwise, they might want to try reaching out to the likes of Guinness World Records or something, for that matter. Nevertheless, despite the platform’s own shortcomings, there are always steps that one can take to maximize the potential that the Li-ion cells in the back of your handset have to deliver.
Mobile phones with great cameras have been around for a good many years now, and while the units mounted atop the likes of Apple’s iPhone 5 and 4S, Samsung Galaxy S III or Sony Xperia lineup have been nothing short of impressive, Nokia PureView 808’s 41-megapixel shooter had, indeed, taken smartphone photography to a whole new level. Add to the mix the powerful noise reduction algorithms that these cameras come with, the variety of photo applications they have their disposal, and the connectivity for wireless and cloud sharing that they offer, makes one absolutely believe that this is the future of general photography, no matter what point-and-shoot cameras might have you believe.
Sometimes, even little things that we usually don’t pay much attention to, can have a significant impact over anything. Take the Android 4.2 update, for example. It was an incremental update – technically not much feature loaded – but it brought some things that captured the audience much more than many prior major updates combined. The feature that I am talking about in particular, however, is not a game-changer – it’s merely a convenience that has been added to the AOSP, making lives easier in the process for millions of Android users. I am talking about the ability to display widgets on lock screen and launching camera directly from the same.
Using an Android phone is no east feat, I tell you. Apart from the fact that if you’re a fond of playing around with the intricate workings of your operating system, and consequently flash a new ROM every week (can be even day, in extreme cases), one major annoyance that you’ll feel is the battery, which essentially drains faster than any other smartphone OS that I’ve played around with. It’s not really necessarily the device’s fault – a simple code inspection actually establishes that it’s how the AOSP is built which causes the battery to drain faster, and perhaps it’s Google’s acknowledgement of this fact that they’ve decided to take up Project Roadrunner after the successful implementation of Project Butter with Jelly Bean.
In the world of Android, rooting a device is what jailbreak is to Apple’s iOS creations, although the former is much easier compared to the latter, thanks to Android’s open source nature and direct Linux-based kernel base. Nevertheless, it does take quite some skill to achieve that for all the new devices that are released, and here, we owe thanks to the highly dedicated and active developer community that exists for Android, putting in tireless hours to make lives easier for us. This is symbolized in many cases. Take Google’s Nexus 4, for example, that got rooted just a few hours after its release, showing how much potential the platform has for community support and developers’ love.
The biggest problem with text-based conversation or communication is the lack of all other elements that help in conveying the correct message. For instance, you might jokingly make a remark over something, and the tone of your voice and the emphasis of syllables will tell the listener exactly how you intended it. Likewise, a joke might not really be a joke, which will be demonstrated by your body language. According to communication experts, 70% of the interpretation of our messages is defined not by words, but by how they’re delivered. This is a serious hurdle when you use text messages, IM, email, or any form of the written word.
Android 4.2 might not be Google’s next major update, as most people hoped it might be, but it’s still the latest smartphone/tablet operating system from the search giant, and that’s enough for most people to desire it more than perhaps anything else. Add to the mix the fact that the latest Google Nexus 4 comes preloaded with the new Jellybean version, and that the device is being sold at an exceptionally reasonable price point of $300, and users will be lining up to buy the device as soon as they can.
