Monthly Archives: September 2011

Skype 2.5 for Android, brings support for an additional 14 Android devices. This brings the total number of white listed devices for video calling to an exciting 41. Now Skype video calling will also be available by default on several Motorola Devices including the Atrix 2.5 or Xoom 2.5. Download the updated Skype for Android app from the Android Market or Skype.com/m using your Android phone’s browser or just scan the QR code below.

With Skype 2.5 for Android, the list of Android devices we’ve added Skype video support for include:

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
HTC Nexus One
HTC Shooter
Sony Ericsson Xperia Live with Walkman
Sony Ericsson Xperia neo V
LG Optimus Black
LG Optimus 3D
LG Optimus 2x
Motorola Photon
Motorola Droid 3
Motorola Bionic
Motorola Xoom
Motorola Atrix
Acer Iconia

For a full list of supported devices for video calling, please visit Android Market.

The Skype 2.5 for Android update also brings you further video enhancements. You can now switch between portrait and landscape mode during video calls, and zoom in with a simple double tap on the screen.

We also improved support for bluetooth headsets and included a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements, which should further boost the user experience of Skype for Android on your phone.

In addition, as with our recent Mac and iOS update, there will be an advertising platform introduced in this new release. Advertising will not be shown to users that have Skype Credit, a Calling or Skype Premium subscription.

Millions of people are already reading on Kindles and Kindle is the bestselling e-reader in the world for four years running. Today, Amazon is excited to introduce an all-new Kindle family: three all-new Kindle e-readers that are smaller, lighter, and more affordable than ever before, and Kindle Fire – a new class of Kindle that brings the same ease-of-use and deep integration of content that helped Kindle re-invent reading – to movies, TV shows, music, magazines, apps, books, games, and more.

“We’ve now reached the magical two-digit price point for Kindle – twice: the new Kindle and Kindle Touch are only $79 and $99. Kindle Touch 3G is the new top of the line e-reader with free 3G – no monthly fees or annual contracts – and is only $149,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon.com Founder and CEO. “Kindle Fire brings together all of the things we’ve been working on at Amazon for over 15 years into a single, fully-integrated service for customers. With Kindle Fire, you have instant access to all the content, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, the convenience of Amazon Whispersync, our revolutionary cloud-accelerated web browser, the speed and power of a state-of-the-art dual-core processor, a vibrant touch display with 16 million colors in high resolution, and a light 14.6 ounce design that’s easy to hold with one hand – all for only $199. We’re offering premium products, and we’re doing it at non-premium prices.”

New Latest Generation Kindle–Fits In Your Pocket–Only $79

The new latest generation Kindle is for readers who want the lightest, most compact Kindle at an incredible price. The latest generation Kindle features a new design that is 30 percent lighter at just 5.98 ounces, 18 percent smaller, and turns pages 10 percent faster. Kindle is now small and light enough to fit easily in your pocket and carry with you everywhere, yet it still features the same 6-inch, most advanced electronic ink display that reads like real paper, even in bright sunlight.

The new latest generation Kindle is only $79. Kindle is available starting today at www.amazon.com/kindle.

New Addition to the Kindle Family–“Kindle Touch”–Only $99

Kindle Touch is a new addition to the Kindle family with an easy-to-use touch screen that makes it easier than ever to turn pages, search, shop, and take notes – still with all the benefits of the most advanced electronic ink display. Kindle Touch is also lighter, smaller, eliminates battery anxiety with extra-long battery life and holds thousands of books.

New “X-Ray” Feature

Amazon invented X-Ray, a new feature that lets customers explore the “bones of the book.” With a single tap, readers can see all the passages across a book that mention ideas, fictional characters, historical figures, places or topics that interest them, as well as more detailed descriptions from Wikipedia and Shelfari, Amazon’s community-powered encyclopedia for book lovers. Amazon built X-Ray using its expertise in language processing and machine learning, access to significant storage and computing resources with Amazon S3 and EC2, and a deep library of book and character information. The vision is to have every important phrase in every book.

The new Kindle Touch is only $99. Kindle Touch is available to customers in the U.S. for pre-order starting today at www.amazon.com/kindletouch and ships November 21.

New Top of the Line Kindle e-reader–“Kindle Touch 3G” –Only $149

Kindle Touch 3G is a new addition to the Kindle family for readers who want the top of the line e-reader. Kindle Touch 3G offers the same new design and features of Kindle Touch – small and light, easy-to-use touch screen, storage for thousands of books, and extra-long battery life – with the unparalleled added convenience of free 3G. Kindle’s free 3G connection means you never have to hunt for or pay for a Wi-Fi hotspot – you simply download and read books anytime, anywhere in over 100 countries around the world. Amazon pays for the 3G connection so there’s no monthly fee or annual contract.

The new top of the line Kindle Touch 3G is only $149. Kindle Touch 3G is available to customers in the U.S. for pre-order starting today at www.amazon.com/kindletouch3G and ships November 21.

All Kindles have instant access to the Kindle Store with the largest selection of the most popular books people want to read. Millions of free, out-of-copyright, pre-1923 books are also available to read on Kindle devices, and Kindle customers can now borrow Kindle books from their public library. Kindle books are “Buy Once, Read Everywhere” – on Kindle, Kindle Touch, Kindle Touch 3G, Kindle Fire, iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, PCs, Mac, Android phones and tablets, BlackBerry, Windows phones, and web browsers with Kindle Cloud Reader.

All three new Kindle e-readers also come with special offers and sponsored screensavers that appear when you’re not reading. Customers enjoy special money-saving offers delivered wirelessly sponsored by AT&T, the Dove beauty brand and Amazon.com Rewards Visa Card by Chase. Kindle e-reader customers will also receive special offers in their own backyards from AmazonLocal, Amazon’s local deals marketplace with discounts on local services, products, and experiences. Customers can also choose to purchase a Kindle without special offers and sponsored screensavers.

New Class of Kindle–“Kindle Fire”–Only $199

All The Content–Over 18 Million Movies, TV Shows, Songs, Apps, Games, Books, and Magazines

Kindle Fire puts Amazon’s incredible selection of digital content at your fingertips:

* Over 100,000 movies and TV shows from Amazon Instant Video, including thousands of new releases and popular TV shows, available to stream or download, purchase or rent – all just one tap away. Amazon Prime Members enjoy instant, unlimited, commercial-free streaming of over 11,000 movies and TV shows at no additional cost. Kindle Fire comes with one free month of Amazon Prime.
* Over 17,000,000 songs from Amazon MP3, including new and bestselling albums from just $7.99 and individual songs from $0.69.
* Over 1,000,000 Kindle books, including thousands of bestsellers, children’s books, comic books and cookbooks in rich color.
* 100 exclusive graphic novels, including Watchmen, the bestselling – and considered by many to be the greatest – graphic novel of all time, which has never before been available in digital format, as well as Batman: Arkham City, Superman: Earth OneGreen Lantern: Secret Origin and 96 others from DC Entertainment.
* Hundreds of magazines and newspapers – including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Wired, Elle, The New Yorker, Cosmopolitan and Martha Stewart Living – with full-color layouts, photographs, illustrations, built-in video, audio and other interactive features are available from the new Kindle Fire “Newsstand.” Kindle Fire customers will enjoy an exclusive free three-month trial to 17 Condé Nast magazines, including Vanity Fair, GQ and Glamour.
* All the most popular Android apps and games, such as Angry Birds, Plants vs. Zombies, Cut the Rope and more. All apps are Amazon-tested on Kindle Fire to ensure quality and Amazon offers a new free paid app every day.

Cloud-Accelerated Web Browser – “Amazon Silk”

The Kindle Fire web browser Amazon Silk introduces a radical new paradigm – a “split browser” architecture that accelerates the power of the mobile device hardware by using the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services Cloud. The Silk browser software resides both on Kindle Fire and on the massive server fleet that comprises the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2). With each page request, Silk dynamically determines a division of labor between the mobile hardware and Amazon EC2 (i.e. which browser sub-components run where) that takes into consideration factors like network conditions, page complexity, and cached content. The result is a faster web browsing experience, and it’s available exclusively on Kindle Fire. Additional technical details are available in the Amazon Silk press release, released today at www.amazon.com/pr. To see a video about Amazon Silk go to www.amazon.com/silk.

Simple and Easy-To-Use

Amazon designed the Kindle Fire user interface from the ground up to make it easier than ever to purchase, manage, and enjoy your digital content. Just like with Kindle e-readers, Kindle Fire comes automatically pre-registered to your Amazon.com account so you can immediately start enjoying your digital content purchased from Amazon or shop for new content. All of your digital content is instantly available to enjoy and manage with a simple, consistent experience across all content types.

Free Cloud Storage

Just like Kindle e-readers, Kindle Fire offers free storage for all your Amazon digital content in the Amazon Cloud. Amazon digital content is automatically backed up for free in the Amazon Cloud’s Worry-Free Archive where it’s available for re-downloading anytime.

Amazon Whispersync Now for Movies & TV Too

Just like Kindle e-readers, Kindle Fire uses Amazon’s popular Whispersync technology to automatically synchronize your Kindle library, last page read, bookmarks, notes, and highlights across the widest range of devices and platforms. With the introduction of Kindle Fire, Amazon is expanding this technology to include video. Start streaming a movie on your Kindle Fire, and when you get home, you can resume streaming right where you left off on your TV – avoid the frustration of needing to find your spot.

Easy to Hold in One Hand

Just like Kindle e-readers, Kindle Fire was designed to disappear so you can lose yourself in the content. Weighing in at just 14.6 ounces, Kindle Fire is small and light enough to hold in just one hand and carry everywhere you go. The lightweight, compact design makes Kindle Fire perfect for web browsing, playing games, reading and shopping on-the-go.

Brilliant Color Touchscreen

Content comes alive in rich color on a 7-inch full color LCD touchscreen that delivers 16 million colors in high resolution and 169 pixels per inch. Kindle Fire uses IPS (in-plane switching) technology – similar technology as used on the iPad, for an extra-wide viewing angle – perfect for sharing your screen with others. In addition, the Kindle Fire display is chemically strengthened to be 20 times stiffer and 30 times harder than plastic, which means it is incredibly durable and will stand up to accidental bumps and scrapes.

Fast, Powerful Dual-Core Processor

Kindle Fire features a state-of-the-art dual-core processor for fast, powerful performance. Stream music while browsing the web or read books while downloading videos.

Free Month of Amazon Prime

Right out of the box, Kindle Fire users will experience the benefits that millions of Amazon Prime members already enjoy – unlimited, commercial-free, instant streaming of over 11,000 movies and TV shows with Prime Instant Video and the convenience of Free Two-Day Shipping on millions of items from Amazon.com.

Only $199

The all-new Kindle Fire – with all the content, Amazon’s revolutionary cloud-accelerated browser, free storage in the Amazon Cloud, Whispersync, 14.6 ounce design that’s easy to hold with one hand, brilliant color touchscreen, and a fast and powerful dual core processor – is only $199. Customers in the U.S. can pre-order Kindle Fire starting today at www.amazon.com/kindlefire and it ships November 15.

For high resolution images and video of the all-new Kindle family, visit www.amazon.com/pr/kindle

Flickr the photo-sharing service has unveiled its first Android app, along with a new social feature known as Photo Session.

Available as a free download the Android Market, the app allows users to stake, filter and upload their photos directly to Facebook, Twitter or Flickr, from their Android mobile phone.

Features include camera functions like flash, ratio selection, and shutter focus, and ten filters.

LaCie announced the LaPlug, a simple solution to share any USB hard drive or key over a local network. The LaPlug also offers a convenient way to access data at home or on the go, as well as share personal files such as vacation or birthday photos with family and friends. Additionally, the LaPlug can stream multimedia content and back up multiple computers to one central location. Even better, all this functionality can be achieved with USB hard drives a user already owns.

SHARE USB DISKS ON YOUR NETWORK—WIRELESSLY
The LaPlug turns any USB hard drive into a network storage device sharing files wirelessly throughout the home. Simply connect the LaPlug to the network then connect the drive to the LaPlug. Instantly the user has an easy and cost-effective way to make files stored on their USB hard drives more accessible than ever. For ultimate convenience a user can connect a USB printer to the LaPlug and make it wirelessly available to all computers on the network.

ACCESSIBILITY AT HOME AND ON THE ROAD
Not only does the LaPlug make USB hard drives accessible throughout the home, it even supports remote access. Instead of emailing large files between friends, just give them access to the LaPlug – all they need is an Internet connection. The user can even set up a custom web address so access to the LaPlug is as easy as typing a URL.

MULTIMEDIA STREAMING
It is easy to access USB drives connected to the LaPlug from any networked equipment that’s UPnP™/DLNA®-certified, such as the PlayStation®3 or Xbox®360, as well as the LaCie LaCinema Classic HD. If a user has movies on a USB key they can just connect it to the LaPlug then play the movie using the multimedia device on the network. Instantly watch movies from the comfort of your living room even if the LaPlug is located in another part of the house. The LaPlug also plays music files from a USB drive or streams music to computers on the network running iTunes®.

CENTRALIZE BACKUP FOR CONVENIENCE AND SECURITY
The LaPlug offers a convenient way to automatically back up all computers in a household onto one central location. Use the included backup software or Time Machine®. Either way, simply configure automatic backups once then rest assured knowing all data is secure. Since the LaPlug supports Wi-Fi, once the computer is configured the user does not need to connect it to the LaPlug in order to initiate backups. It works as soon as the computer is connected to the local network.

AVAILABILITY
The LaCie LaPlug will be available through the LaCie Online Store, LaCie PROgram+ Partners and LaCie PROgram+ Reseller starting at the suggested retail price of $74.99. For more information, visit www.lacie.com.

Canonical have launched the Ubuntu App Developer platform with guides, tutorials and other resources to help them create apps specifically for the Linux OS, or to port other apps to the platform. No registration and No fees. are required.

Ubuntu recommend using PyGTK to create applications for Ubuntu. Quickly will get you up and running with a PyGTK app right away.

Ubuntu is a computer operating system based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution and distributed as free and open source software. It is named after the Southern African philosophy of Ubuntu (“humanity towards others”).

Ubuntu is designed primarily for use on personal computers, although a server edition also exists. Ubuntu holds an estimated global usage of more than 12 million desktop users, making it the most popular desktop Linux distribution[9] with about 50% of Linux desktop marketshare. It is fourth most popular on web servers, and its popularity is increasing rapidly. – Wikipedia

More info: http://developer.ubuntu.com/

onOne Software have said that they are in the process of upgrading the DSLR camera remote from the present 1.3 version to a more superior 1.4 version. One of the expected upgrade will be an additional support for the Canon 60D and the Nikon D7000. The first ever to be produced DSLR Camera Remote was mainly produced to function with the iPhone or iPod Touch.

“DSLR Camera Remote is highly popular among professionals and hobbyist photographers who appreciate the significance of shooting remotely and we are tremendously thrilled to present a new and distinct version that enhances iPad support and the ability start, stop and monitor video as a direct response to their requests,” said Craig Keudell, president of OnOne Software. ”We anticipate to fullyexploit the available new platforms in the ever changing digital photography sector in order to offer customers with tools that will assist them in spending additional time behind the camera.”

Additional Features of the DSLR Camera Remote:
UPGRADED IPAD: The latest version of the DSLR Camera Remote HD has completely made use of the large screen or interface. It also has other unique features which include the image thumbnails and larger previews as well as a speedy access to various available options such as the intervalometer and auto bracketing.

Latest Video Mode: This includes the Start and stop video recording for supported cameras and even distant monitor video on an iPad, iPhone or iPod Touch. The latest iPad version also has Video mode.

More info: http://www.ononesoftware.com/products/dslr-camera-remote/

CANON U.S.A. ANNOUNCES SELECT PIXMA PRINTERS NOW SUPPORT APPLE’S AIRPRINT ENABLING WIRELESS PRINTING FROM iPad, iPhone & iPod Touch

Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging, today announced that the PIXMA MG8220, MG6220 and MG5320 Wireless Photo All-In-One inkjet photo printers will now support AirPrint* wireless printing for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. AirPrint allows users to wirelessly print photos, emails, web pages and other documents without the need to install device drivers, saving time and making for a seamless user experience.

AirPrint will be supported by the majority of Canon PIXMA inkjet printers launched from this point forward. AirPrint works with iPad, iPad 2, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPod touch (3rd generation and later) running using iOS 4.2 or later.

For more information on the support models and other details, please visit www.usa.canon.com/airprint.

†Based on weekly patent counts issued by United States Patent and Trademark Office.

All referenced product names, and other marks, are trademarks of their respective owners.

Availability, prices, and specifications of all products are subject to change without notice. Actual prices are set by individual dealers and may vary.

iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch are trademarks of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. AirPrint and the AirPrint logo are trademarks of Apple Inc. All other product and brand names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective companies.

* Printer firmware update is necessary for AirPrint function. Certain exception may apply. AirPrint functionality requires an iPad, iPhone 3GS or later, or iPod touch 3rd generation or later device running iOS 4.2 or later, and an AirPrint-enabled printer connected to the same network as your iOS device. A printer connected to the USB port of your Mac, PC, AirPort Base Station, or Time Capsule is not supported.