Microsoft and Google’s recent stance was really remarkable and they have launched services, such as SkyDrive and Google drive respectively to give Dropbox a run for money. However, Dropbox is also not a species to tolerate dejection. So, it has come up with improved services and lurkers such as Samsung, Sony and Apple. Let us take a closer look at what is the offer that each of them have for us.

Positive Features Of Services

Google Drive, the extended user end service of Google, has finally hit the market, thereby ending months of speculation. The good news that it offers us is that it comes with 5 GB free service and as much as 1TB in exchange of a nominal monthly fee. Added to this, a host of easy to operate sharing options comes as a bonus treat from Google. The Microsoft evolution, Sky Drive gets a fresh new look this time, with extended offers and novel propositions. Dropbox, joins the warfare with newly updated space for referrals along with improvisation and betterment of services and already present offers.

Let us have a neat idea on the positive offers they are presenting.

Pricing And Storage

Now Google claims to get bigger with a tempting storage space of complementary 5GB. So, the users will get greater opportunity to store more images, documents, contents and photographs now. Those higher resolution pictures, which had been a pain to store in Google until recently, will get squeezed inside the space without any laborious effort at all! In case if you still find the free storage space insufficient for you, all you need to do is to pay more $2.49 a month to get a bonus of 235 GB space. Options for power users are 100 GB of space for a monthly rental of $4.99 and $49.99 per month for 1TB in the cloud.

Microsoft’s stance is entirely different in this respect. It has rescaled its free space from 25 GB to 7GB! So, new users have to be satisfied with only 7GB of free space. However, it is still greater than Google. The lucrative offer that Microsoft makes is that a yearly package of 20GB will be available for $10, 50 GB for $25 and 100 GB for $50.

Dropbox’s offers might sound very nominal, being only 2GB free space. But, you can increase it to 500MBs extra with Dropbox referrals. So, you will achieve 16GB of free space at the end of it. The monthly and yearly pay plans are also quite profitable. With $9.99 a month you will get 50GBs of space. Likewise, you will get 50GBs a year with $99 and 100GB for $19.99 or the same space with yearly rate of $199 only. The powers users will be offered a group plan of $795 a year for 1TB. It will be enjoyed by five users in all, with individual space worth $125 a year per user. Some of the best online cloud services also performs well.

Sharing Options

Live document collaboration is a great feature being offered by Google Drive. A document can be worked upon with a group, while all the modifications you make will be synced back to Google Drive. The changes that you are entitled to, will also be backed by notifications pointing out the changes made in your document. You can extract out photos from Google Drive and attach them into the social networking sites and Google +.
Microsoft’s sharing looks much simpler. Sending large mail attachments will be easier with Sky Drive. An upload that you make shall only be accompanied by a web link by you to any recipient of your choice. This can be done in the form of posting in social networks or instant message.

Dropbox gives the option to share all the contents of its folder with every other Dropbox user. It will comprise of essential links to every file and folder you create. But, these will only be presented to them as readable and downloadable versions, without any permission to edit them.

Accessibility To Desktop Features

Till recently, Google and Microsoft lacked the Drop Box like desktop features. But the steep competition in the sphere has made them launch extensions that allow easy drag and drop options for the PC and Mac users just as they do with their desktop.

Sky Drive gives an additional feature to its users by auto synchronizing all the images in the folders and making them available all other devices running on Sky Drive. Fetch functionality option also enables users to access any file from their PC, fetch and divert it to any other system they are currently working on. But installation of Sky Drive is mandatory of course.

Mobile Applications

Mobile app is another sphere in this field that keeps the competition alive. The built-in Android apps feature in Google Drive is one of them. The users can share directly downloaded, uploaded and shared documents to their Drive account. But you cannot enjoy this privilege offline. Google reports that it is working to solve this iOS issue.

Microsoft presents Windows Phone apps with sharing options with iPad and iPhone. Sky Drive meant for iOS gives the user benefit to upload, manage and share photos and services even with a third party iOS application, which sounds very interesting.

Although Dropbox still lacks a Windows gadget, its plethora of smart apps includes iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android. However, it is needless to say that Dropbox is well aware of its lacuna and will sort it out soon. New Dropbox for Android sets free backup of your photos and videos, this is truly a great way to save your moments automatically.

The inspirational approach of Dropbox is clearly visible from the footsteps of Microsoft and Google. While Google’s USP us its easy sharing and collaborating options, more storage facility and iOS apps of Sky Drive is Microsoft’s USP. Drop Box takes it share of devoted users by virtue of hi end products and services. Thus, it is best to say that which is the best is solely dependent upon the end use of the user.

Alia Haley is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on technology and autos. Beside this she is fond of cars and fancy accessories. Recently an article on Google Vision attracted her attention. These days she is busy in writing an article on green future.

The Power

For your continuously evolving tablet experience, the Motorola Xoom is well equipped by a dual core processor, i. e. each core runs at a speed of 1 GHz, giving you an amazing 2 GHz of processing power. Browse the web faster with this tablet, a level of performance that will not disappoint you. The sleek, design makes it appealing to the eye. It is lightweight and can go anywhere and everywhere with you. Packed with powerful features and backed by connectivity, its functionality will help make your tablet experiences a lot more efficient as well as enjoyable.

The Accessories

You have the option of expanding the power as well as the capability of the Motorola Xoom tablet with a host of different accessories. Smart docks do not just serve as places where you can charge your device; they make your tablet a great portable work station/ play station that matches your lifestyle and your personality. Use the Standard Dock to watch videos or listen to your favorite songs through external speakers while your device gets charged. You can also send high definition content to your television directly, or blast your music without having to attach external speakers, with the help of the Speaker HD Dock.

A Whole Lot More

The Motorola Xoom is equipped with a 5 megapixel camera on its rear side, with flash. Now you can capture videos in high definition – 720p. You can also view as well as edit photo and video content, and then display it on the HD screen of your tablet or on a HDTV which has HDMI connectivity. Posting your creations on social networking sites like Facebook, or on Picasa or YouTube just got a whole lot easier. The tablet also comes with a 2 megapixel front facing camera that allows you to connect with your friends, colleagues and family through video calling.

The tablet has micro USB ports, and HDMI facilities apart from WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. The high definition multi-touchscreen with 1200*800 resolution is easy on the eyes, while the 32 GB capacity lets you store all your favorite content and more. The 1 GB RAM paves way for faster operations. The tablet is also equipped with GPS and various other location services like Google Maps, and eCompass.

Summary – All in all, this is one great tablet, considering the features it offers and the affordability factor. You will not be disappointed by all that it brings with itself.

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To Update iTunes 10.6: Launch iTunes player and check for the software update from Help –> Check For Update, you will be prompted for both device and iTunes update available.

New iOS 5.1 Software Update
This update pack contains:

• Japanese language support for Siri (availability may be limited during initial rollout)
• Photos can now be deleted from Photo Stream
• Camera shortcut now always visible on Lock Screen for iPhone 4S, iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 4G
• Camera face detection now highlights all detected faces
• Redesigned Camera app for iPad
• Genius Mixes and Genius playlists for iTunes Match subscribers
• Audio for TV shows and movies on iPad optimized to sound louder and clearer Podcast controls for playback speed and a 30 second rewind for iPad
• Updated AT&T network indicator
• Addresses bugs affecting battery life
• Fixes an issue that occasionally caused audio to drop for outgoing calls

Watch out the short video after the jump.

New iTunes 10.6 Update

• iTunes 10.6 adds the ability to play 1080p HD movies and TV shows from the iTunes Store.
• Improved song matching on iTunes Match
• Improved album artwork handling, downloading, and display
• Addresses an issue where songs may skip when playing from iCloud

Well a basic difference between N9 & Lumia 800 is N9 comes on MeeGo operating system where as Lumia is on Windows 7.5 a.k.a Mango. Here is a quick review to a brilliant device which i have got hand’s on experience.

Nokia N9 Specifications:

The official nokia n9 press release from Nokia Pakistan confirms the features as listed below:

A MeeGo Operating System,
A 3.9" AMOLED touchscreen,
8 Megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics
16/64 GB built-in memory
Dolby Digital Plus decoding
Dolby Headphone
Availabe Colors: Black, Cyan & Magenta
Free GPS application included (Drive app)

Nokia N9 : Design

Nokia N9 is a beautiful awesome looking phone with sleek and stylish design, however its much like its predecessor the Nokia N8 (check iTechGiz Nokia N8 previous post here). However the design was some how very much like the previous model but you cannot say it is complete from the previous design as N8 comes with a home screen button and QWERTY keyboard underneath the screen, whereas N9 is a complete button-less phone on main screen.

Nokia N9 : Software

Also called the successor to Nokia N900, N9 runs on MeeGo 1.2 Harmattaan and it the very first phone of its kind manufactured by Nokia carrying MeeGo OS. It was no doubt a promising open-source OS available (as N900 carries MeeGo 5) but the growing technology and OS competition will radically put it aside or it would have to be so powerful to climb up the competition.

Nokia N9 is undeniably comes with excellent software that consumes its hardware efficiently. The 1GHz Cortex A8, TI OMAP 3630 chipset processor runs like a fluid even on multiple applications running. This is a single core processor which truly supports multi-tasking capabilities.

Nokia N9 : Design

Nokia Lumia 800 borrowed the design of Nokia N9 with slight changes that too minimal to accept. The most inspiring this was the concept of no button on screen surprised me when i hold the phone and was just wondering how could we go back to home screen. Here is the introduction of new feature called Nokia Swipe, It just like swiping your finger end to end on screen and your would be directed towards home screen. Nokia N9 comes with only 3 hardware button i.e. Volume up, volume down and power button all placed on right hand side of the phone.

Nokia N9 : Features

The absence of physical button on Nokia N9 did ‘not cost any problem to me all it require a SWIPE on the phone to navigate between home screen, apps and task manager. In-order to exit an app you need to swipe your finger edge to edge and it will bring you to the home screen. In order to wake up your device from lock mode is to double tap on display screen, well you need to remember some tricks when using the device.

Other than swipe, Nokia N9 also comes with NFC (Near Field Communication) technology, which is indeed a future technology for pairing devices. With just "bump" or "touch" of two devices, certain action could be performed such as sharing of photo’s, songs broadcasting songs to NFC-enable speakers or even transacting payments, playing multi-player games and many many more. I assume N9 is proud to endowed with this amazing feature.

Nokia N9 : Camera

The camera is quite impressive as it take beautiful pictures showing good color reproduction, fast focus and simple shooting mechanism works well. However i noticed that under low light condition the camera does not perform that well as expected, but this issue came out when i compared the result with my normal camera else it is unnoticeable. Off course the camera is not a DSLR rather its the top echelon of smartphone cameras.

Nokia N9 : Battery

Nokia N9 battery life is decent as most smartphones unless you use to its extremes, however if you use your phone as internet hotspot functionality the battery would be drained out within a day, otherwise it managed a couple of days with prompting a low battery notification.

Nokia N9 : Pricing

Nokia N9 is available in Pakistan market with a price tag of Rs.49,900.

Conclusion:

My complete experience with Nokia N9 on MeeGo 1.2 operating system was most continent and fascinating. If your wants are just limited and you’re after and excellent looking phone, N9 would be a fair deal, although Nokia’s going to have a head to head battle with most convincing mass market to buy N9 rather than consumer friendly iPhone 4S. In short, the best phone with a very limited future.

Nokia 808 Pureview

I repeat FOURTY ONE Mega pixel built-in camera phone from Nokia just went surprised when i just heard. The 41 MP camera drives pixel over-sampling technology combining the its power with Carl Zeiss Optics is able to capture images with best results as we can tell you this from sample pictures we have seen until now.

On the other hand you can use it as as "Creative Shooting Mode" to capture images up to 38 mega-pixel of resolution later on re-frame, crop and to zoom in to grab the best picture with in a picture. The camera converts your image to suitable sizes for sharing and storing purposes.

Nokia 808 : Video Recording

The Purview technology also extends to video’s user can record videos at 1080p at 30fps with 4X lossless zooming, all the credit goes to the giant sensor and powerful image processing which is capable of handling over 1 billion pixels per second. However if you lower down the video quality to 720p you can increase zoom up to 6X or 12X lossless in HD i.e. (640 x 360).

The new Nokia 808 PureView has set a new standards in a life of smartphones and brilliant camera. The Nokia 808 is said to be the first ever video recording phone to allow recording without distortion at audio levels beyond the capability of human hearing, which means you can capture CD-like audio quality no matter in what harshest environment you are in.

Nokia 808 PureView Smartphone Full Specification

• 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
• 3G Network HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1700 / 1900 / 2100
• Screen AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors, 360 x 640 pixels,
• 4.0 inches (~184 ppi pixel density), Multitouch, Corning Gorilla Glass,
• Nokia ClearBlack display   
• Memory microSD, up to 32 GB, 16 GB storage, 1 GB ROM, 512 MB RAM
• GPRS Class 33
• EDGE Class 33
• Speed HSDPA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps
• WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, UPnP technology
• Bluetooth Yes, v3.0 with A2DP
• NFC Yes
• USB Yes, microUSB v2.0, USB On-the-go support
• Camera 41 MP (38 MP effective, 7152 x 5368 pixels), Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, Xenon flash, 1/1.2” sensor size, ND filter, geo-tagging, face detection, 1080p@30fps, 3x digital zoom (effective 24-74mm f/2.4 @1080p), Secondary Yes, VGA; VGA@30fps video recording
• OS Nokia Belle OS
• CPU 1.3 GHz ARM 11
• Sensors Accelerometer, proximity, compass
• Messaging SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
• Browser HTML5, Adobe Flash Lite
• Radio Stereo FM radio with RDS; FM transmitter
• GPS Yes, with A-GPS support
• Java Yes, MIDP 2.1
• Colors Black, White, Red
• SNS integration
• Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
• HDMI port
• MP3/WMA/WAV/eAAC+ player
• MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV player
• Voice command/dial
• Document viewer
• Video/photo editor
• Predictive text input
• Body Dimensions 123.9 x 60.2 x 13.9 mm, 95.5 cc
• Body Weight 169 g

Nokia 808 PureView Price

Nokia 808 price are still to unveil, stay tuned to iTechGiz or follow us on Facebook page to get updated. Watch out the video after the jump

The working of default ASCII is performed via uploading your images to their own servers and then tranforms the image pixel by pixel. Apart from that AsciiFi uses the latest HTML5 with in your browser and convert your uploads to Ascii character. All you have to drag and drop the image from your desktop to AsciiFi website.

Image: Labnol

If you are anxious to get to know the actual coding behind the tool you can find at GitHub. Enjoy your conversations and don’t forget to share your comments below.

Note: There is one catch. You will have to use a good browser — one like Google Chrome or Firefox. Safari doesn’t support the FileReader API, and, sadly, if you’re using an old version of IE, then you’ve come to the wrong place.

Speed Issues: The first factor that needs to consider when tethering a mobile phone with a computer is the speed. The speed you get when you tether your mobile phone won’t be the same as the one you get when you decide to use a dongle, for many reasons. For example, a lot of people decide to tether their mobile phone with their computer via Bluetooth. This leads to them experiencing slow internet connection problems due to the difference in latency and the fact that their network is prone to interference. When you use your dongle with your computer you have nothing to worry about since your dongle is connected directly to your computer so you get better speeds.

Reliability: I also think a broadband dongle is more reliable than tethering your mobile phone with your computer because of a lot of factors.  When you tether your mobile phone you shouldn’t expect to get the same experience because your mobile phone isn’t designed for tethering, and as a result there will be background applications trying to use your internet connection. If you decide to use a dongle you will be able to get optimal performance due to the fact that your dongle is being used for the sole purpose it was designed. In other words, a broadband dongle is more reliable when compared to tethering a mobile phone.

Battery Issues: Another problem with tethering a mobile phone with a computer is that the battery is affected. Too much data usage affects the battery of a mobile phone and that is exactly what tethering brings about. This will lead to the battery of your mobile phone discharging quickly and as a result leading to your battery deteriorating over time. You don’t need to worry about experiencing this problem with a broadband dongle since a dongle doesn’t have need for a battery.

Portability: The final thing you have to consider when it comes to tethering vs. using a dongle is the portability issue. The great thing about using a dongle is that it is more portable when compared to mobile tethering. Most dongles are as small as a USB flash disk, and as a result you can easily connect one to your computer without anybody knowing. This isn’t the case with a mobile phone because you often need to get a USB cable, or you need to get an external Bluetooth device and still use your mobile phone. Overall, this leads to more load for you and as a result impact the quality of your experience. I think both a mobile phone and a dongle are portable, but a dongle is far more portable.

Paul is a broadband internet expert that helps people choose the best pay as you go mobile broadband.

Dual sim phones from Nokia are really affordable to your pocket, now you do not have to handle multiple phones as both sim cards are available at the same time when the device is not being used, but while one sim card is active, the other is disabled. Nokia expanding its dual sim range with the launch of Nokia X1-01, Nokia C2-00 and Nokia C2-03.

Nokia C2-00: Design

The Nokia C2-00 is a stylish impressive phone with sleek design weighing 74 grams. It runs on Nokia Series 40, offering some key advantages as internet access (no WiFi), a built-in web browser and Nokia Messaging for e-mails.

Nokia C2-00: Hot Swap Sim Feature

The dual sim device is also know as hot swap featured phone because you don’t have to switch off your phone to replace different sim with the desired one. Sim1 is place in a traditional way that is under the battery whereas Sim2 can be swapped without removing battery.

Nokia C2-00: Camera

Nokia has been giving the camera features in its low-end devices. There is a rear VGA (0.3 mega-pixel) camera allowing users to capture photos, videos around themselves. Nokia C2-00 has a screen of 1.8 inches capable of giving resolution of 128 x 160 pixels with 64k colours.

Nokia C2-00: Memory

Apart from basics, the device has a mp3 player and loud speakers to enjoy your favorite songs without hand free. The memory is supports is up to 32GB via microSD card slot which is more than expected, you won’t be complexly filling out that much memory until you are song lover and to fill your device with your songs and multimedia.

Nokia C2:00 Battery Time

Nokia C2-00 comes with BL-5C non-impressive battery, as it can can give you only 3.5 hours of continuous talk time on full charge. From past, we have experienced good battery time than Nokia C2-00 maybe it is because of camera integration and the availability of Java apps which is effecting batteries performance.

Nokia C2-00: Price

The dual sim, multimedia phone is in affordable price and believe it is not too hard, you can buy this phone at:

Price in Rs. 5000/- (Karachi market)

Price in USD $57/-