Monish Kumar | Fone Arena

Newegg, an online retailer, set to enter the Indian market

Newegg, a popular online electronics retailer, has announced at the Computex 2014 event that they will soon be expanding to six new markets in addition to the four markets that they are currently operating in. The new six market that the company plans to enter includes – India, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland and Singapore and the four countries where the company already operates are US, Canada, UK and Australia.

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HTC Desire 816 Camera Samples

Earlier in the year, at the MWC 2014, HTC announced the Desire 816 as the higher mid-range phablet and it was launched in India in April for Rs. 23,990. The Desire 816 comes with a 13MP camera on the back and a 5MP front facing “selfie” camera. The internals are on the same lines as the budget Moto G, but HTC hopes to sell the Desire 816 with a larger screen, a much better camera combination and their HTC Sense UI.

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Sony Xperia Z2 Camera Samples

Sony announced the Sony Xperia Z2 at MWC 2014 earlier this year and it wasn’t much of an update when compared to the Sony Xperia Z1. The Sony Xperia Z2 comes with an almost similar body while the internals have been beefed up to match the latest generation SoC. Sony has decided to stick with the similar 20.7MP camera module on the Xperia Z2 that is currently found in the Xperia Z1 and the Xperia Z1 Compact.

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Motorola slashes price of Moto X 32GB by 100$ in US for a 48 hour sale

Motorola announced the Motorola Moto X nearly nine months ago and it was the company’s first smartphone after being taken over by Google. The smartphone was the company’s flagship and at that time, it could not compete with the top of the range specs laden flagships that came with 1080p displays and powerful quad-core processors. Moto X took a different approach by making the smartphone extremely compact and it was branded as Made in USA.

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RIP iPhone 4: One of Apple’s best iPhones will not get iOS 8

At the Apple Developer Conference event WWDC 2014 in San Francisco, which was held yesterday, Apple announced a lot of improvements and new features for their OS X and iOS operating systems. The iOS 8, as it would be called, will succeed iOS 7 and will be available for devices – iPhone 5s, iPhone 5, iPhone 5c and iPhone 5s. Of course it would debut on the upcoming iPhone 6. However, iPhone 4, which was a significant milestone for Apple has been left out of iOS 8 support, meaning that iOS 7 would be its last operating system.

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Apple Spotlight Search, now smarter, brighter and faster, coming to both OS X and iOS

At the WWDC 2014 event in San Franscisco, Apple made a number of announcements that were improvements to the iOS and OS X platforms. One of the things that was common to both the platforms was a much better and improved in-built search engine. Spotlight, as Apple calls it, is now smarter, brighter and faster.

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Apple introduces ‘Swift’, a new programming language for OS X and iOS apps

Among the numerous announcements at the Apple WWDC 2014 event in San Francisco, the announcement that brought the largest cheers and applause from the audience was the announcement of ‘Swift’, a new programming language. Apple’s Craig Federighi said that Apple wanted to create a language without the complications of Objective-C and they came up with ‘Swift’.

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One of the biggest advantages of ‘Swift’ is that the developers will be able to have a real time view of the results as they type the code which was not possible in Objective-C. The press release for Swift reads as follows

Swift is a powerful new programming language for iOS and OS X® that makes it easier than ever for developers to create incredible apps. Designed for Cocoa® and Cocoa Touch®, Swift combines the performance and efficiency of compiled languages with the simplicity and interactivity of popular scripting languages. By design, Swift helps developers write safer and more reliable code by eliminating entire categories of common programming errors, and coexists with Objective-C® code, so developers can easily integrate Swift into their existing apps. Xcode® Playgrounds make writing Swift code incredibly interactive by instantly displaying the output of Swift code.

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To make the transition from Objective-C to Swift smooth, developers can write the code such that Swift can reside side by side with Objective-C in the same application. Apple has published a 500page guide for Swift language on the iBooks store and developers can start using Swift which is available in XCode 6 beta.

Apple bolsters itself in the cloud storage race with iCloud Drive

At the WWDC 2014 event in San Francisco, Apple announced a number of software features for both iOS and OS X operating systems. Among these announcements was the announcement of the iCloud Drive which would help Apple establish itself in the cloud storage market.

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Apple has sold 800 million iOS devices with over half a billion iPhones

Apple held its annual developer conference WWDC 2014 at San Francisco yesterday and at the event, Apple made a lot of announcements about the upcoming software features. During the keynote, Apple also mentioned that they had sold more than 800 million iOS devices and well on course for hitting a billion iOS devices.

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Lava Iris X1 Unboxing

Lava Iris X1 is a mid-range Android smartphone that comes with above the price range specifications and shares its design language with one of the most premium smartphones in the market. Lava Iris X1 comes with a 4.5 inch FWVGA display, a quad-core processor from Broadcom and an iPhone-ish design language.

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Spice Stellar 360 Unboxing

Spice has just announced the Spice Stellar 360 which brings back the near extinct physical keyboard on a smartphone. The Spice Stellar 360 tries to bring together the BlackBerry style QWERTY keyboard on a smart phone and the very popular and widely used touch screen with Android at the heart.

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Gionee Elife S5.5 Unboxing

Back in February, just ahead of the Mobile World Congress, Gionee announced the Elife S5.5 which is currently the slimmest smartphone. The Gionee Elife S5.5 comes with a Full HD AMOLED display and is powered by MediaTek’s Octa-core SoC. It also comes with a 13MP camera module on the back. The device is super thin and today, we have the device at our office and we will be bringing you the unboxing.

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Oppo Find 7a Camera Samples

Oppo Find 7a is one of the successors of the popular Oppo Find 5. Oppo Find 7a comes with a 13MP rear camera that can record 4K videos thanks to the Snapdragon 801 SoC inside it. There is a also a 5MP front camera that was designed for video chatting, but is being used these days for “selfies”. The Oppo Find 5 too had a 13MP rear shooter and it was a very capable one. The Oppo Find 7a is arriving a year later than the Find 5 and lets check out how improved the camera on the Oppo Find 7a is.

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The 13MP rear camera can definitely take some great photos as we found out in our review of the Find 7a. Oppo has done a great job in the camera department of the Find 7a. You can find the camera samples right below. Use CTRL+CLICK to open the full resolution images in a new tab.

You can check out the 4K video sample from the Oppo Find 7a right below

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we9EzM_IgdY

As you can see above, the 4K video samples is full of colors and details. The Oppo Find 7a definitely has one of the best 13MP camera modules on a smartphone and the software algorithm seems to complement the camera performance.

Lava Iris Pro 20 Review

Introduction

The Lava Iris Pro 20 is a slightly stripped down version of the Lava Iris Pro 30 which was launched earlier this year. The Lava Iris Pro 20 looks very much like its big brother Lava Iris Pro 30 and both the Iris Pro phones look like the iPhone. The specifications of the Lava Iris Pro 20 are on the lower mid-range side and for Rs.12,999, lets check out how it performs.

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Android Wear notifications demoed by a Google Developer

We know one thing for sure – they are coming. Yeah! Smartwatches are coming as Apple seems to be prepping an iWatch while Google has already released a platform – Android Wear and its SDK for developers. Wearables are a huge category, but right now, in 2014, the concentration seems to be on smart watches. LG and Motorola were among the first companies to hop in with Google in the smart wearables market.

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