Here's what a $4 smartphone chipset can do

Allwinner is a chipset maker thrd of anywhere. But the same was the story when MediaTek first came to light. This chip maker like everyone else has also stated to be entering the 64bit market.

Coming to the relevance of this post title, this chip maker has recently announced the A33, a quad core chip set that'll cost you $4. Yeah that's right. Just $4. And this chip has already entered mass production.

Now at mere $4, you cannot expect it to blow your heads off. But it just works. The Allwinner A33 has a quad core Cortex A7 with a dual core Mali 400 MP-2 GPU. Details like clock frequency hasn't been known as of yet but its been said to support screens with resolutions 1280x800. Thing of the past, but still not too bad when majority of mid-range devices still have 720p displays. Some even go below that at just 540p. Not that 540p is bad but fitting this resolution on a 4.5" or 5" display makes me want to die. So device makers that want to lure more customers can get a use out of this and finally abandon those 540p displays. It certainly doesn't support 4k but does have the ability to play 1080p videos at 60fps.

Allwinner claims their design is more power efficient than other Cortex-A7 quad core designs. On a 4000mAh battery, it can have 400 hours of standby or 6½ hours of 1080p video playback.

The A33 is also said to be pin-compatible with its predecessor A23 which is dual core Cortex-A7 but the question here is how many devices already use the chip maker's SoC.? Their primary targets are the devices in the price range of $30-60. So you can expect to see some dirt cheap phones and tablets that you can gift your toddlers. After all, you don't want then to play candy crush all day on your work device. But don't expect to see it state side any soon.

Google's Office Suite for Web finally gets a new Material designed Homescreen.

About a month back at Google I/O, we were promised to get new Homescreens for Google's Office suite products. Now if you visit Google Docs, Sheets or Slides, you'll be presented with the all new Material design Homescreen.

Previously when you opened those web apps, you were directly presented to the editor. But If you wanted to see your documents, you'd have to browse through all your Google Drive folders. But now with these new homescreens, whenever you open any of these web apps, you'll be presented with all your recent documents, or spreadsheets or presentations in one place. But you can still easily create new documents by hitting that big + button on the bottom right of any page.

These new Homescreens also allow to quickly switch to other apps. Just hit it and choose from Docs, Sheets or Slides. You can go to your Drive too. These resembles very much with Android counterparts. There's also an overflow menu button just like in Android that'll allow you to rename, remove or open in a new tab.

But on a sad note, these new changes brought new bugs. I was trying to get my documents to these new Homescreens but I'm out of luck. Trying to open them from Drive also was no good. Also when I go to Google Drive, I just get a glimpse of my files and folders and then they all disappear and are replaced by a drawing showing different devices and a text saying I can access my stuff on every device.

Hope this is just a minor bug that hasn't affected more people. Because more and more people have started relying on Google's free and evolving Office Suite. And throwing a major bug on professionals' faces wouldn't be a good for Google.

Update: The files disappearing bug seems to be already resolved.

Simplocker Ransomware is getting even more powerful.

Before we get into detail, a ransomware is a type of malicious software designed to block access to a system ny encrypting files and other data until a sum of money is paid.

Simplocker is one such ransomware targeting Android. It was first discovered 2 months back but in the time till now, it has made itself more efficient in what it does. It can now encrypt even more data and get even more control of your device. According to a Slovakia based security company ESET, Simplocker has been evolved to show ransom warning in English instead of Russian and it now demands payments in Dollars instead of Euros. With this latest version, it can gain Administrator access and make it harder for a user to remove it once the device is infected.

It still cannot automatically get Administrator access of your device but it does ask you to do so. And you probably would give it the access it needs without much thinking. Yes that's right. You yourself could have been guilty. How it does so is pretend to be an app that requires Administrator Access and certainly will ask you to give permissions. After you hit the Agree button, you've pretty much lost the control of your device. Next it displays a warning telling the user that they have been caught with the kind of data they shouldn't have had like child pornography or bulk spamming and asks for a fine via MoneyPak voucher to release your phone from lockdown.

But as ESET has discovered the ransomware, they also have come up with a solution for it. You can remotely download ESET's Simplocker Decryptor App and get your phone Decrypted and also uninstall Simplocker for you.

Now this article will sure come up with the topic about amount of Malware that Android has. Lets get this straight. Downloading apps from Google Play won't do any harm to our device whatsoever. But people often become greedy and try to save money by downloading paid apps from untrusted sources. This is where the problem starts. That unknown source wants you to think you're saving money while it loads up a money eating ransomware on your phone ready to take control. So the security of your device in entirely in your hands. Unless you're doing something illegal and are been tracked down by NSA. 

Google donated $100,000 to help people take shower on a Bus.

Google Impact Challenge is a Google Venture that help non-profits pursue their goals. The Impact Challenge helps non-profits invent technology that can help tackle and transform lives around the world.

While on one hand, Google's commute buses have been stopped or Google has pay for using those commute buses on San Francisco streets, while on the other side Google invested about $100,000 in a Google Bus project.

A San Francisco non-profit Lava Mae, just showed a trial version of its Bus that aims to give showers to those homeless people who live by the Bay Area. This project was funded as a part of Google Impact Challenge.

Lava Mae founder Doniece Sandoval, a marketing veteran said such a mobile sanitary station was essential for the Human Rights of the city's homeless.

"You're living on the streets and you're filthy, you're trying to improve your circumstances," she told The Assiciated Press. "But you can't interview for a job, you can't apply for housing and get disconnected from the sense of humanity."

The non-profit bought a bus and refurbished it at a cost of about $75,000. The bus has 2 bathrooms with hot showers, shampoo, soap and towels. Watch this video to get into details about how this venture will really help homeless people of the Bay Area.

Project Athena finally predicts some L flavour for Chrome.

About a couple months back, Google unveiled Project Athena that is intended to bring a new User Interface and Window Manager to Chrome OS. After then we seldom heard about advancement in the project. Only till now.

"Athena is a brand new project the Chromium OS team is experimenting with in order to bring a new kind of user experience."

Today +François Beaufort  unveiled on a Google+ post the new look for window manager in the Chrome OS.

Window Manager on Athena build

What can be made out from the look is that it bears much resemblance to the Android L's recent apps view. Windows stacked over each other. The look sure makes us think of more resemblance of Android L to be ported to Chrome OS like the notifications. Syncing your Android's notifications on your Chromebook with the new Android L notification bar UI would be so cool. That's just a personal preference though but looking at this UI forces me to think if it would be more difficult now to navigate through windows in Athena when you'll first have to go to Window Manager and then select the window than what we already use and are accustomed to. Changing tabs is much more easier by just clicking the desired tab instead of this approach (If ever this approach is undertaken).

Recent Apps screen on Android L

We still can't be so sure as to what Google's Chromium OS team has planned for Athena but I personally think Google will surely come up with a totally different method of interacting with your browser. After all its the same company that has showed the potential of a browser to be used as an entire OS.

MediaTek working hard. Launches MT6795 True Octacore with built in LTE support.

When it comes to MediaTek, people know it because of its low cost mobile processors powering the smartphones of emerging world. You wouldn't hear the name too often if you don't live in Aisa. Most of the high end phones use processors made by Qualcomm so its quite understood if you haven't heard the name in the West. But MediaTek is the chip manufacturer that first ever brought to the world the True OctaCore Processor..

MediaTek at a press event today has announced a new processor that is quite worthy to grab your attention. The new chip in MediaTek's army, the MT6795 is a beast of performance and power that can set Qualcomm to break out in cold sweat.

The MT6795  is an Octacore processor much like the MT6592 except for the performance part. It will have four 2.2 Ghz cores for intensive tasks and four 1.7 Ghz cores for normal utilities. It will be working on ARM's big.LITTLE architecture, uses heterogenous multi-processing and it comes packed with PowerVR Series 6 GPU to bring in intensive graphics. It as well has a dual channel LPDDR3 clocked at 993MHz for top end memory bandwidth in a smartphone.

The MT6795 is capable of handling screen resolutions upto 1600*2560 pixels that are used on most high end tablets these days. So it can easily handle the 2k (thats 1440*2560) displays on phones at 120Hz too. It also supports camera sensors upto 20 MP and 4k video recording or else you can choose a 1080p resolution for recording at 480 fps. It can be set upto a frequency of about 2.2 Ghz. Talking about benchmarks may not be worthy as more and more OEMs try to crank up benchmark tests by software enhancements if lets just take a look. It is also said to be the first Octacore SoC with LTE built in.

All this being said, MediaTek has still to work a lot on making its source code open to developers. So this might just not be the time when more developers and expensive devices start using MediaTek chips. After all, developers can't live without tinkering their gadgets.

This maybe MediaTek's perfect chance to make a dent in Android One program and get itself included as an official partner for Android One phones.

Blackberry launches its own Personal Assistant with BB 10.3

When every smartphone OS whether it be iOS, Android or Windows Phone is getting a virtual personal assistant, Blackberry, the initiator of the smartphone realm was still lagging behind in terms of features and functionality. Sure they do have expertise in security but lack of apps and coping up with rivals in terms of functionality, Blackberry is lagging far behind other smartphone OSes.

Its not been much time since they announced the awkwardly shaped Blackberry Passport, they have today announced the launch of their own Personal Assistant stating its been worked for BB 10.3 on Passport. Again, coping up with rivals.

See the post here.

The official Blackberry blog says its a voice activated feature but it remains to be seen if its voice activated as Google Now on the Moto X. 

It would not be as functional or contextual as Siri or Google Now but it can help you manage simple tasks like searching emails and calendar, finding out what's trending on twitter, or sending trivia night invitations. It does learn about you by how you interact with it.

It can also set reminders for about meetings, appointments or your anniversary. While driving you can ask it to read your latest emails and it does so. You can also ask it to mark the email as unread without even touching your Passport. 

Doing tasks that require hardware interaction is still absent in Google Now while Blackberry Assistant supports this functionality.You can turn on-off your flash light and maybe you can do other tasks too like controlling bluetooth and wifi. Changing profiles should be an ease too.

Now the most important question that remains here is whether or not this feature come to other Balckberry phones running BB 10.2.?

With so many leaks about upcoming technology around the world, it is quite surprising as to how Blackberry was able to cover it all up until now. Maybe its all about Security then.