Galaxy Gear : Review

 Galaxy Gear: The smartwatch 

 

If smartphone makers dipped their toes in the smartwatch pool last year, we can expect them to do the cannonball in 2014. Out of the all the smartwatches launched so far, the Galaxy Gear is by far the most interesting, not to mention packed to the gills with features. Despite Samsung’s heavy marketing budgets though, the Gear wasn’t exactly a runaway hit. The reason for is this we feel, is that Samsung seemed to have designed the Gear for loyalists, someone who’s current phone and future upgrade would be a high-end Galaxy device. After the dust has settled, Samsung has finally sent us a review unit of the Gear, which we tested with the Galaxy Note 3. Let’s find out what the fuss is all about.

Design and Build
The neon green version of the Gear is very striking and is quite the head-turner. Thankfully, the watch is also available in other shades which are a bit more understated. It’s a tad bulky but also light, so it’s not so bad. I found it quite comfortable during my week’s usage and after a point, you hardly notice it. The Sasmsung Galaxy Gear is built to last and that shows in its construction. The stainless steel frame around the display lends it a premium look and the rubber straps are firm, yet flexible enough to be worn comfortably. The 1.6-inch Super AMOLED display is also protected by a scratch-resistant coating.

Looks quite funky

The Gear just has a single power button and that’s about it. Everything else is based on gestures, which we feel is the way to go when you have to deal with such a small display. Samsung has designed the UI for the Gear in such a way so as to take advantage of the AMOLED panel. The minimalistic icons are devoid of colour so there’s always more black, for which, the pixels needn’t power on. When needed though, the panel can reproduce rich, saturated colours for the gallery and third-party apps. Sensitivity is pretty good as well and the watch works quite well with (some) riding gloves.

The charging cradle that’s bundled along

The Galaxy Gear comes bundled with a charger and the docking cradle. The cradle snaps on the Gear and is the only way to charge the watch as it has the microUSB port and an NFC tag. You can pair the Gear with a compatible Samsung phone using the NFC tag or manually via Bluetooth. We don’t get why it’s such a convoluted process to charge the watch as it would have made more sense to have the charging port and NFC on the Gear itself, rather than having to carry around the cradle everywhere. Wireless charging is also something that’s missing.
We found the Gear to be quite comfortable to use on a daily basis and the learning curve is very small.
Features and performance
Like any other wrist watch, the Gear too sports a fully adjustable wrist strap, making it a comfortable fit on most wrists. One of the highlights of the Gear is its ability to make and receive calls and for this, we have a dual-microphone array and a speaker that’s hidden at the base of the strap. The volume level is good enough for using indoors and the microphones are sensitive enough to pick up your voice, even if you aren’t holding your hand up to speak. This is great as you can go from eating a pizza to doing the dishes, without having to touch your phone. You can also answer and reject calls using S Voice. Besides voice commands, the Gear also has an accelerometer and a gyroscope which help it perform some neat gestures. For instance, you set the watch to show you the time or any other screen as soon as you make the motion of looking at it. You can also double tap the screen using two fingers at any point to check the battery and adjust the device’s volume.

The Gear Manager app

You can manage the Gear and the notifications you wish to receive directly from the Gear Manager app on your smartphone. The app is constantly running in the background, monitoring the activity you perform on the Gear. You can select a variety of themes, clock faces and specialised apps from the Samsung Apps store.

Besides the usual fitness apps, there’s also Evernote, Line, Pocket and ChatOn to name a few. There’s no dedicated Facebook or Twitter app yet, but you can still receive notifications from them. There are a bunch of pre-installed apps as well like Find My Device, Media Controller, Pedometer, Weather, Stopwatch and Timer.

A much more convenient way to recieve notifications

S Voice plays a big role in making the Gear a lot more intuitive. You can use this to reply to messages, email (only for the default app, not Gmail) and a couple more. Unfortunately, you cannot use this to interact with third party apps like Hangouts, WhatsApp, Gmail and the lot. You can also use S Voice to call people from your phonebook, text them or open an app. While the idea is good, S Voice isn’t. The whole process is very sluggish and it’s actually faster to get what you want with gestures rather than voice commands. It’s also not very good at understanding what you say. It works if you speak slowly and there isn’t much ambient noise but tough luck getting it to work outdoors.

Outdoor shots aren’t bad

Indoors is strictly average at best

The camera on the wrist strap is like the Holy Grail for voyeurs. The 1.9MP shooter manages 15 seconds of 720p video too. The camera quality is decent for outdoor shots during the day but in low-light and indoors, it is strictly average. You also get some of Samsung’s camera apps like Sound and Shot. Everything that’s captured is instantly relayed to your phone via Bluetooth. You can use some functions of the Gear, like the camera, even when it’s disconnected, which is where the 4GB of in-built storage comes in.
Battery life
Samsung promised about a day’s worth of usage for the Gear but actually managed to squeeze out quite a bit more. After the first charge, we got almost two days of continuous usage before we had to charge it. On subsequent days, it was a little less but it always went beyond a day. Now, we didn’t use the camera a whole lot but everything else was on. We made and received calls from the watch as much as possible and notifications for all commonly used apps were active.

There’s a single physical button on the Gear for power.

Verdict and Price in India
Samsung has priced the Galaxy Gear at Rs 22,900 and whichever way you cut it, that’s a lot of money for a smartphone accessory. It only gets worse as the Gear is sadly, only compatible with a handful of high-end Samsung phones. The trouble is, even if Samsung wants to increase compatibility to more devices, they can’t because the phones have to be on Android 4.3 and above and they should support S Voice. The Gear makes a great companion to the Note 3 especially since it’s so much easier to stay updated with notifications on the watch than it is to constantly keep pulling the massive phone out of your pocket. To increase sales, Samsung could have bundled the Gear with the Note 3 for a slight premium, which would have made it a much better package for someone buying the Note 3.

There’s definitely a market for a device like the Galaxy Gear. The ability to make and receive calls from the watch is a very nifty feature in times when you’re simply unable to reach your phone. I personally felt the camera was totally unnecessary but they had to show it could be done, so they did it.

There are a lot of ways in which Samsung can improve the Gear in order to make it a better product. Their first attempt seems more of an engineering exercise to test the waters and see what sort of a response a device like this would garner. We have a sneaking suspicion that Samsung is working on a range of smartwatches, each one catering to a specific need. We’ll probably hear more about them at one of their Unpacked events or at trade shows like Mobile World Congress. So we recommend you hold on till then to see what the second wave of smartwatches looks like.

Mavericks review

OS X Mavericks Review:





OS X Mavericks, the first of Apple’s post-big cat OS updates, is named for one of the nicest spots on Earth. Mavericks is a surf beach in California, and the operating system that takes its name definitely represents a new wave in Mac software, even though it isn’t a drastic change from OS X 10.8. The changes Apple has made are for the better, though, and since it’s free, there’s no reason not to take advantage of all that great new stuff.

Finder

The updated Finder in Mavericks offers a lot of advantages over the old version, including tabbed browsing and new tags for better organization of files and media. neither feature is an absolute necessity for a desktop operating system, and in fact they’ll likely appeal more to power users than to anyone else. But they represent exactly the kinds of refinements that Apple is embracing with its update strategy in Mavericks: namely, fixing small things that have been missed considerably by the small group of people who want them.

Tags offer a way to group files beyond where they reside on your computer, and really offer a big improvement over and above what’s possible with folder structures, the traditional organization method for desktop operating systems. By default, OS X Mavericks provides a number of different coloured tags for you to use, but if you want to customize you can also create your own. That means you can make ones for any group of content you want to be able to quickly call up regardless of where they’re resident on your drive.

I still think Apple would eventually like to move beyond a traditional file structure entirely on OS X, the way it has done on iOS, and Tags could be a beginning step towards helping make that transition. For tagged documents and media, it’s irrelevant where they reside, which does away with the notion of “location” in virtual space altogether. Perhaps the nicest tag feature is that you can simply drag files to your tags in the sidebar of your Finder window to assign them that tag, which is very convenient. The next step could be auto-tagging, but for now, I think this is a seed that’s being planted for a small group of really dedicated organizers who’ll get the most use out of it.

As for tabbed browsing, it’s again a feature that will probably be ignored by a large number of users. Still, those used to the mechanic on web browsers will find it handy for navigating files, too. You can open any folder in a new tab just by right clicking, and open new tabs that start at your “All My Files” view just by hitting Command+T. Drag-and-drop files and folders between tabs, and cut down on the clutter you normally accumulate by having multiple Finder windows open to move files between and to make it easier to find things in different folders.

Combined, Tabs and Tags make a powerful team. You can open a tab for any of your Tags, for instance, and then drag content from one your other tabs to that one to assign them different Tags. Then, you can also quickly switch over to that Tab to see the collection you’ve just created all in one place.

Also new to Finder is a sharing menu that allows you to send files directly to iMessage, AirDrop, email, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr. It’s another thing that’s been inherited from mobile computing paradigms, but also another very useful small addition.
Multi-monitor support

Back in OS X Mountain Lion, Apple introduced a full-screen feature for apps that allows them to take over the desktop entirely, which is again something that resembles a mobile OS feature. The big problem was that while it was nice to be able to set an app to take over entirely, you lost out on the other benefits of desktop computing, like having access to multiple monitors at once.

Mavericks makes it so that you can have an app take over one screen, but leave your others untouched, which is a huge improvement. But Apple didn’t stop there; they also made it so that you can finally have menu bars and docks on each of your other screens, instead of just on one as was the case with previous iterations of OS X. If you regularly run a multi monitor setup, as I do, this changes everything – it has all the benefits of using multiple computers independently, combined with all the benefits of sharing common media files and system resources.

Another multi-monitor addition is the ability to use AirPlay-connected screens to extend your desktop wirelessly, via screens attached to an Apple TV, for instance. This is again a huge benefit, since it could allow people who otherwise don’t have access to multiple screens a temporary second display via their television. Wireless displays never really took off as dedicated accessories, but this could be a huge help in terms of making it a more accessible technology for use in education and business in particular.

If I had to pick a favourite new feature for OS X Mavericks, the improved multi-monitor support would definitely be it. This is how I’ve always wanted my multi-screen Mac setups to work, and it doesn’t require any hacks or third-party software tools to happen.

New Notifications

Notifications on the desktop were yet another improvement borrowed from mobile. But in their first go-around with OS X Mountain Lion, they weren’t necessarily as useful as they could’ve been. In Mavericks, notifications get better thanks to the ability to take action from them directly. You can reply to iMessages, for instance, or emails. And you can get notifications from sources other than just apps – Apple has added notifications from web sites, too.

A small improvement that will probably have somewhat limited appeal, but that I noticed and fell in love with right away, is the notification for when you remove a flash drive, USB or SD card without ejecting it first. Ordinarily, with previous versions, OS X would pop up a persistent notification dialog box in the middle of your screen nagging you about good external drive behaviour. Now, a similar message appears, but it appears where all other notifications do, in the upper right-hand corner of your desktop, and you can more easily ignore it. Not that you should – ejecting first is good practice, but if you’re a blogger working at a feverish pace and swapping out flash cards quickly, it’s nice to be able to more easily ignore those notices in the short term.

Maps

Portable Speakers

4 Bluetooth speakers under Rs. 13,000

Bluetooth is pretty much ubiquitous these days. From being a feature that was found only in premium mobile phones and laptops not too long ago, it has become a connectivity option that is found in practically all smartphones, most laptops, and a large percentage of tablets as well.

The growth in the number of Bluetooth-enabled gadgets has sparked an entire industry of ancillary devices, with Bluetooth audio accessories being one area that has seen plenty of new launches in recent times. While audiophiles may frown at the loss in quality over Bluetooth, truth is that most people can't notice the difference, thanks largely to low bit rate audio sources.

Here are four Bluetooth-enabled speakers that serve different needs - from speakers that are ultra-portable, to ones that'll make audiophiles happy (don't frown, there's aux-in too), and one that can even charge your mobile.

Logitech UE Mobile Boombox

Design: 

Logitech UE Mobile Boombox sports a small, rectangular design that looks and feels premium. The speaker comes in attractive colour options, and is small and light enough to be carried around in your bag easily. The top has embossed Bluetooth and volume buttons while the back has the aux-in, Micro-USB and power buttons. In terms of design, the Logitech UE Mobile Boombox is definitely the best amongst our lot.

Features: 

Bluetooth (pair up to 8 devices simultaneously, connect up to 2 devices simultaneously), Rechargeable battery (up to 10 hours backup), Built-in mic, Aux-in

Performance:

The UE Mobile Boombox seems to hit the sweet spot between portability and performance, with the quality of sound surprising on almost all fronts. However, predictably given the size of the speakers one must add, the bass leaves a lot to be desired, but other than that the speakers hit all the right notes. You can pair it with your Bluetooth-enabled phone and enjoy voice calling thanks to the built-in mic.

Dimensions: 111.0 x 67.0 x 61.0 mm (4.4 x 2.6 x 2.4 inches)

Weight: 298g

Price: Rs. 8,995

In seven words: Great mix of portability and quality sound

BlackBerry Mini Stereo Speaker

Design:

 BlackBerry Mini Stereo Speaker is one of the smallest Bluetooth speakers you are likely to come across. It sports a unique curved design that makes it easy to clip the speakers on the flap of your backpack or even your pocket. There's a slider power switch on one side, the Micro-USB and headphone ports on the opposite side, and Play/ Pause button in between the volume up-down buttons on the top edge. The audio out port means you can leave your phone or iPod in the bag, or in your pocket, and just plug in your headphones into the BlackBerry Mini Stereo Speaker, should you feel the need to switch from speakers to the headphones. The speakers feel solid, and at just 3.51 inches long and 98g light, they are the only speakers in our selection that you can easily carry around in your pocket.

Features:

 Bluetooth (pair/ connect up to 2 devices simultaneously), Rechargeable battery (up to 14 hours backup), Built-in mic

Performance:

 As you would expect, give the size, the BlackBerry Mini Stereo Speaker will not win any awards for loudness, nor will you be able to appreciate the nuances of various instruments while listening to music. The unit is clearly not designed for music lovers, but for someone who needs an external speaker that is small enough to be taken wherever they go. We use the speaker for listening to podcasts in our car using our iPod touch, while simultaneously having it paired with our iPhone, and the unit automatically switched to the iPhone whenever we got a call, and back to the iPod touch, resuming the podcast where we left it. The battery life is as good as claimed (14 hours), and we went over a week on a single charge, with an hour-long daily commute each way.

Dimensions: 89.1 x 57.9 x 27.5 mm (3.51 x 2.28 x 1.08 inches)

Weight: 98g

Price: Rs. 4,500

In seven words: Portability and battery life you cannot beat

JBL Charge

Design:

 JBL Charge sports a rather unique cylindrical design that makes the unit look like a colourful torch. The top has volume controls and power button alongside LEDs that indicate how much charge is left, with aux-in and Micro-USB port present at the back. The left side has a flap that can be removed to reveal a USB port, which can be used to charge other mobile devices.

Features:

 Bluetooth, Rechargeable battery (up to 12 hours backup), Aux-in, full-sized USB port to charge other mobile devices.

Performance: 

The unique feature of the JBL Charge is of course the full-sized USB port, which, when combined with the humongous 6,000mAh battery, lets you charge other mobile devices while on the move. Having said that, the JBL Charge is no slouch when it comes to audio performance either. In fact, in terms of sound, it's our pick of this lot. Other than the fact it lacks deep bass, which is acceptable give its size, the JBL Charge tick all the right boxes and is loud enough as well. On the flip side, the unit takes around 3.5 hours to fully charge, and there's no built-in mic, which means it cannot be used to make calls.

Dimensions: 175 x 74 x 74 mm (6.89 x 2.91 x 2.91 inches)

Weight: 470g

Price: Rs. 9,999

In seven words: Quality sound, support for charging other devices

Creative Airwave HD

Design: The Creative Airwave HD sports a triangular design that reminded us of our digital alarm clock. The top has a sliding power switch, volume controls and a Bluetooth button that is used for pairing as well as switching devices. The back has the Micro-USB port for charging, and aux-in.

The Airwave HD is the biggest and heaviest speaker in our lineup, and at over 10-inches long and 980 grams, it obviously can't be carried around in your pockets.

Features:

 Bluetooth (pair up to 2 devices simultaneously), NFC, Rechargeable battery (up to 7 hours backup), Built-in mic

Performance:

 Setup and pairing of devices with the Creative unit is simple, and it is the only speaker in our line up with support for NFC pairing. However, for its size and price tag, the performance of Creative Airwave HD is a bit underwhelming. While the bass and mid-range output is average, the high end and mid-bass performance leaves a lot to be desired. The speakers are loud enough for a small party though. The built-in mic lets you make calls by pairing with your phone.

Dimensions: 260.0 x 95.0 x 95.0 mm (10.3 x 3.8 x 3.8 inches)

Weight: 980g

Price: Rs. 12,999

Ideal for: Pretty loud but not much else, really

Phones

Nokia Lumia 1020 review

 The Lumia 1020 is the spiritual successor to Nokia's first phone with a 41-megapixel camera sensor, the Nokia 808 PureView. While the 808 won rave reviews for its camera, the fact that it ran the dated Symbian operating system on underpowered hardware had many wondering - "What if this phone (rather, this camera) ran Windows Phone?" In that respect, the Nokia Lumia 1020 is the realisation of a dream that many have harboured since using the 808.

Sadly, many dreams shatter on their first contact with reality. Is the Lumia 1020 one of those dreams or does this story have a happy ending, let's find out.

Build/ Design

Nokia Lumia 1020 inherits characteristics of other members of the Lumia family, with a polycarbonate body that looks and feels premium. The layout of buttons and other ports is pretty standard as well, with the volume controls, power and dedicated camera buttons on the right edge. The top edge has the headphones port and the micro-SIM slot, while the bottom has the Micro-USB port, loudspeaker and a lanyard slot. The three standard Windows Phone buttons lie below the display and the Search button is as useless as ever, pointing to Bing instead of universal search, a long-standing gripe of ours with Windows Phone devices.

The back of the Lumia 1020 looks different from its Lumia cousins, thanks largely to the 41-megapixel camera module that sticks out of the back. However, the bulge is not as big a problem with the 1020 as it was with the Nokia 808 PureView. The 808 was not the easiest phone to carry around, measuring 13.95mm at its thinnest and 17.95mm thick at the camera module. The Lumia 1020, however, is just 10.40mm at its thickest (you guessed it, the camera module), and the bulge as compared to the rest of the body is not as pronounced as the one in the 808. However, the phone is unable to lie flat on its back; instead it rests at an angle that makes it easier to glance the screen if you are looking from front, an unintended benefit. The phone weighs 158 grams, but doesn't feel too heavy.

The Lumia 1020 is available in Black and White colour options, in addition to the Yellow that we received as our review unit.

Display

The Nokia Lumia 1020 comes with a 4.5-inch (768x1280 pixel) ClearBlack AMOLED display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and a pixel density of 334 pixels per inch. While the resolution and pixel density might be dwarfed on paper when compared to the likes of HTC One, in real world usage, most are unlikely to notice a difference. The display on the 1020 is bright and the colour reproduction closer to the real world when compared with most other AMOLED displays, similar to what we noted in our Nokia Lumia 925 review.

Nokia claims that its ClearBlack technology ensures that users see truer blacks, which in turn enhances the contrast of the display, thanks mainly to reduced reflections on the screen. The result is a screen that is easy to use, even in bright sunlight.

The screen comes with Nokia's super sensitive touch technology which means that the touchscreen can be operated even while wearing gloves or by using a pen as a stylus.

Camera

Check Out The Video

Pros

• Great camera
• Good performance, display

Cons

• Expensive
• Nokia Pro Cam app lags
• Windows Phone is very limiting

Ratings (Out of 5)

Design: 3.5 Display: 4 Camera: 4.5 Performance: 4 Software: 3.5 Battery Life: 3 Value for Money: 2 Overall: 3.5

Window 8.1 review

Windows 8.1 review




Window 8.1

Review Windows 8.1 adds a layer of polish to the previous release, Windows 8, and fixes various annoyances. But has Microsoft done enough to rescue its OS against a background of plummeting PC sales and unimpressed customers who want Windows 7 back?

Discussion of Windows 8.1 tends to focus on the Start screen and revived Start button. This is not just a cosmetic change. Start has been "reconceived" in Windows 8.1, and the main tiled screen is now an easily customised favourites panel instead of being the sole launch menu.

By no coincidence, it is more like the Windows Phone user interface, where you pin your favourites to the main screen and access all apps by swiping your finger right. In Windows 8.1 you swipe down instead of right, or click the down arrow.

Tiles can be small too, so you can now have a huge number to view without scrolling if you wish, though small tiles have no captions.

It is a mistake, though, to concentrate on Start - especially as many users tell me they rarely use the Start screen, with the taskbar along with desktop shortcuts handling the applications they use most often.




More instructive is to look at what Microsoft is bringing out in the companion operating system to Windows 8.1 – Windows Server 2012 R2 and the PC and server management suite System Center 2012 R2 – and how this relates to Windows 8.1. These are due to be released on Friday.

A number of business-oriented features are now exclusive to Windows 8.1 or, in some cases, third-party devices running Apple iOS or Android. They do not work on Windows 7.




These features include workplace join, which identifies a device in Microsoft’s Active Directory without full domain join; work folders, which synchronise work documents stored in a user’s directory on the server; and selective wipe, which removes company apps and makes their data inaccessible.

If administrators require encryption on work folders, selective wipe makes the data there unreadable as well. Windows 8 is also required if you want the controversial UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Secure Boot, which will only load signed drivers at boot, making it harder for malware to load.

Windows Store apps are inherently more manageable than desktop applications, since they are isolated from one another and from the operating system. Microsoft’s aim is to reposition Windows 8 as a device operating system, with these business-oriented features working alongside the new touch-friendly user interface.

The recent deal announced with Delta Air Lines, rolling out 11,000 Surface 2 Windows RT (yes, the ARM version) to pilots, shows how this can work.