Nokia has announced the Nokia Lumia 800, one of two newWindows Phone handsets from the world's biggest phone manufacturer.
The Lumia 800 is the "first real Windows Phone" said Nokia CEO Stephen Elop. We like the sentiment, even if it's a rather sickly soundbite.
The Lumia 800 bears more than a passing resemblance to the Nokia N9 – the non-UK MeeGo-toting handset that never really got a chance.
Still, we praised the N9's rather super unibody design and we're pleased to see it given another whirl.
Here's everything you need to know about Nokia's new hope, which was previously known under the moniker of Sea Ray.
Nokia Lumia 800 UK release date
The Nokia Lumia 800 UK release date is 16 November. The handset is now available for pre-order on www.nokia.com.
And if you're wondering about its cheaper sibling, the Nokia Lumia 710 UK release date is early 2012.
Nokia Lumia 800 UK UK price
Carphone Warehouse has released pricing. The Nokia Lumia 800 UK price is £449.95 SIM-free or is available for free on a £31 per month contract.
Anyone who pre-orders the new phone from Carphone Warehouse will also receive a free £50 gift card to spend in Sainsbury's, Debenhams, Next or Toys R Us.
Phones 4u is offering free accessories worth £49.99 with every preorder of the Lumia 800 on £31 tariffs and above.
But as is so often the case with Apple, someone forgot to write the manual. Worry not. We've rifled through 200-plus improvements and come up with 21 iOS 5 tips to make your life easier.
If you haven't upgraded already, hook up your Apple device to your computer and launch iTunes now. Click on your device in the sidebar, and under Version you'll see a button called Check for Update: click it. Follow the onscreen instructions and we'll meet you back here once your device has rebooted to show you what's what.
And then you're ready to use our iOS 5 tips…
1. iOS 5 upgrade error 3200
Hit by the '3200 error' caused by the influx of traffic hitting Apple's servers? Time for a DIY iOS installation. Download the file that applies to your device using one of the links below. Then hold Option (Shift for Windows users) and click the Update button in iTunes. In the navigation window, select the file you downloaded and the update should begin.
Private Browsing. We all know what it's for… shopping for presents, right? Handily, Apple has finally seen fit to include the feature in iOS. Simply head to Settings > Safari and swipe on Private Browsing. There, your secret's safe with us.
3. Keyboard shortcuts
Find yourself tapping out the same phrases every day in mails and texts? That's valuable Facebook time you're wasting. Fortunately, Keyboard shortcuts are here to help. Go to Settings > General > Keyboard > Shortcuts to define shortcuts that will magically transform into the phrase you specify. The death of textspeak? We doubt it.
4. Weather reports
Apple's built-in Weather app has seen a much-needed update in iOS 5. Swipe down on a forecast for an hourly breakdown of the day. With Location Services turned on in Settings, you can get local weather reports too - just tap the app's 'i' button. And check out its strip in the new Notification Center, where a sideways swipe gives you a seven-day forecast.
If you've just bought yourself a new iPad, you're going to want to start downloading the best apps straight away.
It's the Apps that really set iOS apart from other platforms - there are far more apps available for the iPad than any other tablet. So which which ones are worth your cash? And which are the best free apps?
Luckily for you we've tested thousands of the best iPad apps so that you don't have to.
So read on for our best-in-class apps for each major category, followed by some more specific lists of the best free and paid for apps and games.
You can also check out a video of our top 5 iPad apps:
Why list a free e-book reader as the top pick when Apple's own iBook is included? Ask anyone who owns a Kindle - with this free Kindle app, you can download every book and magazine you have ever purchased for free and read them on the iPad.
Apple's iWork apps have been praised for their look and feel, but many actually prefer Quickoffice Pro HD. It dispenses with Pages', Numbers' and Keynote's visual clutter to present a clean, professional interface, while beating Apple to the cut by already fully integrating cloud synchronisation courtesy of Google Docs.
Even if astronomy's not your thing, you can't fail to be impressed by Star Walk. Point it at the sky, and using the iPad's digital compass you'll see a virtual starscape on your screen. It gets even better when you start move around - you'll see that the view pans with you, highlighting what constellations you should be able to make out.
While iOS is packed with useful features, itdoesn't offer native support for many popular video formats, and this is where the AVPlayerHD app comes into play. It supports all the biggies - XVID, AVI, WMV, RMVB, H.264 and MKV - and offers compatibility with external subtitle file formats such as SMI, SRT and TXT.
Accounts is an easy to use application to replace your paper checkbook. You can schedule transactions, create recurring payees list, transfer funds, reconcile, export data, view reports, graphs, and much more.
A mob of fun-loving zombies is about to invade your home. Defend it with an arsenal of 49 zombie-zapping plants that will slow down, confuse and mulchify all 26 types of zombies before they reach your door.
Rather than having ahefty one-off price, the new Jamie's Recipes is free, but contains only a 10-recipe sample pack - you have to buy more packs as In-App Purchases of around £1.49. We're loving the attention to detail - for example, ingredients can be added to a shopping list, which you can email to yourself or a loved one to pick up on the way home.
GarageBand turns your iPad into a collection of Touch Instruments and a full-featured recording studio — so you can make music anywhere you go. Use Multi-Touch gestures to play pianos, organs, guitars, drums, and basses on your iPad. They sound and play like their counterparts, but let you do things you could never do on a real instrument.
Navfree turns your iPad into a fill-blown satnav device, offering turn-by-turn directions, voice and on-screen instructions, offline map use and address search and live search via Google and Microsoft Bing, among many other features. And it's completely free.
While some hold up Pulse as the best way to access RSS feeds - stripped-down, automatically refreshed website content that you usually subscribe to for free - it's a little too lightweight for us. It's fine if you only have a dozen or so feeds coming in, but if you follow a lot more than that, Reeder is the app for you.
If there's an iOS app that comes close to offering the kind of editing facilities that are available in a Mac OS X or Windows application, then it's this one, Filterstorm. For starters, it can import and process images in raw format. Add to that a host of editing tools, such as curves manipulation, colour correction, noise reduction, sharpening and vignetting, and you can see already that there's plenty here for photographers to get excited about - and it doesn't stop there.
You can create multiple notebooks, and stack and arrange them on a shelf. Each notebook has a default paper style - lined, squared, and more - but you can mix paper types in one book; yay! Better still, you can import your own templates. There's no handwriting recognition, and the option to type as well as hand-write would be nice, but even so: superb.
Find out how much vitamin C is in a bowl of ice cream. Learn what European country has the fourth largest population of children. Compute solutions to difficult trig and calculus problems. Balance complex chemical equations. Discover what is overhead as you gaze up at the stars. Finally crack that crossword puzzle. Whoever you are and whatever you do, Wolfram Alpha delivers insight and understanding into any facet of your life.
It may sound like stating the obvious, but this is clearly designed for the iPad from the ground up. It does more than just take advantage of the big screen and gesture recognition: other iPad features including the cameras and location services have been thoughtfully integrated as well.
There's only one way to watch Sky Sports on your iOS device, and that's using the brand new Sky Go app. It replaces the much-maligned Mobile TV app, which had the cheek to demand you pay money for it, even if you were already paying a monthly fee for Sky TV and Sky Player. Providing you're a Sky Sports subscriber, you have access to all 4 Sky Sports channels, as well as ESPN, Sky One and more.
If, like us, you were amazed by the desktop version of Google Earth when you first used it, you'll love the iOS version. The iPad's Multi-Touch interface is the perfect way to navigate the planet, allowing you to fluidly roll from one place to the next, pinching and swiping your way from one amazing place to the next.
Dolphin has a tough task to prove that it has enough killer features to persuade users to switch from Safari. It covers the basics well, but where Apple's browser leaves gaping holes, Dolphin dives straight in with a wealth of extras.
Top 50 best free iPad apps
Many great free iPhone apps cost 59p or more in their iPad incarnations, and the quality level of what's still free is often ropey. But among the dross lie rare gems - iPad apps that are so good you can't believe they're still free. Of those we unearthed, here are our favourites.
With the iPad, the larger screen and extra clout from Apple's A4 chip creates a gaming experience markedly superior compared to that on the iPhone, and already there are plenty of fantastic titles for the system. Here are our current top 30 paid-for iPad games.
If you've been fortunate enough to get your hands on a new iPad 2, you'll know that it's a very powerful piece of kit. But what apps should you get to show it at its best?
It's also fully capable of running the latest version of Apple's iOS operating system and great apps like iMovie and GarageBand.
Here we present 50 really useful iPad 2 tips. We cover everything from customising your Home screen through to getting more from built-in apps like Mail and Safari.
The vast majority of these tips will also work on the original iPad, so owners of the first generation device shouldn't feel neglected.
For 50 more iPad tips, check out a new iPad app called 100 Tricks & Tips for iPad 2, brought to you by our colleagues on MacFormat.
1. Create folders
iOS now supports folders. To create a folder all you need to do is tap and hold on an app until they all start to jiggle, then drag the app over another icon and release. Your iPad will create a folder with both the apps in. The folder will be named according to the category of the apps it contains, but you can rename it as you like.
2. Access all running apps
Double-clicking the Home button shows you all the apps that are running on your iPad in a bar along the bottom of the screen. To switch to a running app just tap on it here in this bar. Just swipe the screen downwards to remove this bar.
12 September lalu, media melaporkan, cadangan pelaksanaan cukai perkhidmatan sebanyak enam peratus terhadap pengguna perkhidmatan talian telefon prabayar yang dijadualkan mulai 15 September ditangguhkan sehingga kajian mengenainya selesai.
Menteri Penerangan, Komunikasi dan Kebudayaan, Datuk Seri Dr. Rais Yatim berkata, keputusan tersebut dicapai setelah kementeriannya mengadakan pertemuan bersama empat pengendali utama telekomunikasi di negara ini.
"Perundingan yang melibatkan pengurusan utama Celcom, Maxis, Digi dan U-Mobile itu berlangsung dalam suasana cukup baik dan kesemua mereka telah bersetuju untuk menangguhkannya dan tidak dilaksanakan seperti yang diumumkan sebelum ini.
"Mereka menerima baik nasihat kementerian, pandangan kerajaan serta sentimen yang dilahirkan Perdana Menteri, Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak," katanya kepada pemberita selepas mengadakan pertemuan dengan wakil syarikat-syarikat telekomunikasi tersebut di Angkasapuri di sini hari ini.
Antara yang hadir dalam pertemuan tersebut ialah Ketua Pegawai Eksekutif (CEO) Celcom, Datuk Seri Mohammed Shazalli Ramly; CEO Kumpulan Maxis, Sandip Das; CEO Kumpulan Digi, Henrik Clausen dan CEO U-Mobile, Dr. Kaizad Heerjee.
Now that the 7-inch Amazon Kindle Fire has been announced, we thought it would be a good craic to slam its specs up against those of its key rivals.
Of course, this has to include Apple's peerless iPad 2, but instead of plumping for the gorgeous Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, we've chosen to compare it with its new sibling the Galaxy Tab 7.7 because of its size.
And to complete our line-up, we've plumped for the HTC Flyer – another 7-inch tablet that, like the Kindle Fire, is based on a heavily customised version of Android 2.x.
Operating system
The Kindle Fire runs its own special OS. But it's not been developed from the ground up by Amazon – it's based on Android 2.x, rumoured to be Android 2.2 FroYo. The HTC Flyer also has a heavily customised version of Android – it's based on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. The iPad 2 runs iOS 4 (soon to be iOS 5) and the Galaxy Tab 7.7 runs the tablet-specific Android 3.0 Honeycomb as you can see here:
Pricing
The Kindle Fire is slated at $199 in the US, which would probably translate to a £199 price point in the UK – although there has been no confirmation of a UK release as yet. As we know, iPad 2 retails from £399 for 16GB, while the HTC Flyer has finally come down to a decent price point for the 16GB version - £329 and up. We don't know a Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 UK price as yet.
Thickness and weight
The 7-inch Kindle Fire is 11.4mm thick, substantially more than the 8.8mm-thick 9.7-inch iPad 2. The 7-inch HTC Flyer is even thicker at 13.2mm. The thinnest accolade goes to the Galaxy Tab 7.7 at just 7.9mm thick. As for weight, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 is the lightest at 335g, the Kindle Fire is 414g, the HTC Flyer is 421g, while the iPad 2 clocks in at 601g for the Wi-Fi version. Here's the Galaxy Tab 7.7:
Screen resolution
The Kindle Fire has a resolution of 1,024 x 600 as does the HTC Flyer. The iPad 2 is next in line at 1,024 x 768 (remember that's a 9.7-inch display too) but top of the pile is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7 with a 1,280 x 800 pixel resolution 7.7-inch display.
Screen type
The Kindle Fire and iPad 2 have IPS LCD multi-touch panels, while the HTC Flyer has a capacitive LCD screen. The Samsung Galaxy Tab is the first tablet to feature a Super AMOLED Plus display. It's hugely bright and super clear.
Processor
All the tablets are dual-core aside from the HTC Flyer which uses a still-speedy 1.5 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon chip. The iPad 2 uses the Apple A5 (below), while the Galaxy Tab 7.7 uses a (probably Samsung) 1.4GHz model. The Kindle Fire has a 1GHz Texas Instruments OMAP chip.
Memory and storage
The Kindle Fire has 512MB of memory, like the iPad 2. However, it only has 8GB of internal memory which by anybody's reckoning is quite poor for a device based around content. The iPad 2 comes in 16, 32 and 64GB variants as does the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7. The Flyer comes in 16 and 32GB memory versions. The Samsung and HTC devices also have 1GB of internal memory.
Camera and video
The Kindle Fire doesn't have a mic or camera – something which a lot of commentators believe is a sizeable hole in the Fire's armoury. All the other tablets are capable of 720p HD video and have front and back cameras. The HTC Flyer wins the day here, with a 5MP rear snapper as shown here:
Connectivity
The Kindle Fire only connects to the web via Wi-Fi, there is no cellular 3G data. All the other tablets are available in Wi-Fi only plus Wi-Fi + 3G versions should you wish. The Kindle Fire is also the only tablet not to support Bluetooth or GPS too. Surely Amazon will need to launch a 3G model at some point.
Battery life
While the iPad 2 and Samung Galaxy Tab 7.7 cite a battery life of 10 hours, the Kindle Fire says its battery life is 8 hours. The HTC Flyer battery life is "from 8 hours". The Kindle Fire in use:
Summary
Obviously the Kindle Fire isn't out in the UK yet, but if it does come here for £199 or so then it will still be a steal. Amazon's problem is if people buy the Kindle Fire expecting the full iPad-a-like tablet experience - they won't get that. The Kindle Fire is a worthy content device, but surely Amazon will need to top-out its range with a full 3G tablet to truly compete with high-end tablets like the iPad 2 and Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7.
KUALA LUMPUR, 11 Okt: Pengguna Unifi dan Streamyx akan dikenakan cukai perkhidmatan kerajaan sebanyak 6 peratus mulai 1 Januari 2012 nanti.
