Bharti launches triple sim mobiles

India's top telecom services provider Bharti group Sunday entered the country's mobile handset market, launching eight triple SIM phones priced between Rs.1,750-7,000.

Beetel Teletech, a subsidiary Bharti Enterprises, launched the 'Beetel' range of phones that includes "a gaming QWERTY phone, triple SIM offering GSM+GSM+CDMA, the first phone to house a complete movie and a 3G phone with an exceedingly well designed and easy user interface."

The phones will offer a bouquet of value added services including popular social networking applications such as Facebook, a mobile commerce partner NgPay and a mobile portal browser.

"Through our range of product offerings we intend to address the value for money seeking Indian consumer who is keen on having innovative technology coupled with design features at attractive prices," said Vinod Sawhny, chief exeuctive, Beetel Teletech.

In the first phase, the Beetel mobile phones will be available through a nationwide distribution network of over 4,000 outlets across Delhi, Haryana, UP, Uttaranchal, Rajasthan, Punjab and the seven North Eastern States.

The company plans to establish its presence across India by the end of the current fiscal.

The phones powered by GPRS technology will allow users to make free calls and send messages.

As per Industry estimates, mobile handset industry has grown exponentially with 108 million mobile phones sold in the country in 2009-10, resulting in sales of Rs.27,000 crore as against Rs. 25,910 crore during the previous year.

Faster growth is expected in the coming years as the mobile replacement market that currently stands at 55 percent, is expected to reach 70 percent by 2010, according to Boston Consulting Group.

Bharti's entry into the cluttered handset market will add to the worries of mobile manufacturing majors, Nokia and Samsung, whose margins have come under increasing pressure in recent months from Chinese and smaller Indian mobile firms.

According to the Voice&Data 100 Indian Telecom Survey, these Indian brands strengthened their presence in the domestic handset market in 2009-10, growing at the expense of market leader Nokia. Even though the Finnish company's remained the leading seller of mobiles in India, its share came down to 52.2 percent from 64 per cent last year.

The mobile handset market grew 4.2 percent by revenue during the last fiscal compared to 7.9 percent in 2008-09. Around 108 million mobile phones were sold in the country during 2009-10, adding up to Rs 27,000 crore sales, up from Rs 25,910 crore the previous year.

Motorola hopes to launch tablet computer in 2011

Mobile phone giant Motorola hopes to expand its product line beyond cell phones and the company is looking at launching its tablet computer early next year.

"We want to make sure that any tablet that we deliver is competitive in the marketplace, and I think all of us will make sure that we will only deliver (computer) that when that occurs," Motorola's India-born co-chief executive Sanjay Jha said.

"Hopefully, that's early next year. The tablet would be Motorola's answer to Apple's iPad, which has dominated the market since its launch in April this year," added Jha.

Apple said in June that it has sold three million of its iPad tablets.

Jha has tried to turn around Motorola's troubled cell phone business by refocusing it on smart phones powered by Google Inc's Android operating system, the Wall Street Journal said.

"Google has made clear it doesn't think the latest version of Android, called Froyo, is appropriate for tablet devices," the paper quoted Jha as saying in a conference call.

The report added that Jha has said he would not roll out a tablet until the technology is ready.

"I will only develop a tablet if it is sufficiently compelling," he added.

Jha further said he is eager to get into the tablet business, but indicated that he is thinking about new forms of mobile computing.

He is also interested in models that are "even more smartphone-centric. Other phone makers have also been lining up their tablet computers to take on the iPad."

Samsung Electronics unveiled its seven-inch Galaxy Tab in the US market today, while Dell too launched a five-inch tablet.

Google Docs editing on mobile will be possible in few weeks

Google document editing will be possible in Android and the iPad in few weeks time. Finally the demand of users who has been asking for it since Google launched its own mobile OS has come true. Mobile users have been able to view documents hosted by the Chocolate Factory for years, and since many Android users find themselves incredulous that editing isn't possible, the addition will be a welcome one.

"In the next few weeks, co-workers around the world will soon be able to co-edit files simultaneously from an even wider array of devices,"said David Girouard, President of Google's enterprise group, in a post to a company blog.

For corporate users, Google has launched two-factor authentication for mobile users. One of the factors is the mobile device itself, but it's still a step up from securing solely against a password. That feature is available to enterprise users immediately, rolling out to the hoi polloi over the next few months.
Google demonstrated progress in adding collaborative editing of Office documents for Docs users on Windows desktops and laptops, a move that would let companies do without SharePoint, one of Microsoft's top money makers.

Mobile document editing is an enviable consequence of Android's move into the tablet space, and Google's provision for the iPad is unsurprising as the company seeks to make cloud editing standard. Editing of Google Documents on the move makes the cloud platform a lot more attractive, and might transform more of those 30 million users from experimenting early adopters into regular users.

MSI launches F-series laptops in India at Rs. 37,000

MSI has launched four new F-series laptops which comes with Intel Core i5 microprocessors. The four new F-series laptops are FX400, FX600, FX700, and FR600. The F-series which is the first in the country to bring Intel Wireless Display technology is priced in the range of Rs. 37,000 and Rs. 53,000 depending upon the configuration.

The new range of laptops run on Intel Core i5 processors with Intel Turbo Boost and Intel Hyper-Threading technologies. MSI claims that new GPU Boost Technology will make the best GPU power by automatically switching graphics modes.

Coming to the Intel WiDi (Wireless Display)technology, it allows the user to stream HD audio-video content to a HDTV wirelessly, using a special adapter. However, the necessary requirements for that to happen are a minimum of 4GB RAM and Windows 7 (64-bit) OS.

The F-series notebooks come loaded with Nvidia GeForce GT 325M GPU with 1GB GDDR3 video memory for better gaming and graphics experience. MSI states that GPU Boost technology helps maintaining balance between performance and battery life.

The FX400 comes with a regular 1.3 megapixel web cam while the rest models have 720p HD quality capable webcams. In terms of sound, the FX700 equips obstruction-free sound providing speaker technology implemented in collaboration with Dynaudio and THX. All F-series notebooks come with HDMI port and have 250GB-320GB internal storage.

India's e-commerce likely to grow as 3G begins: eBay

Once 3G and mobile broadband services start in India, buying and selling of products over the internet are likely to grow at a rapid space, according to a top official of the e-commerce site eBay.

"E-commerce is taking off slowly here but I think the Indian market can experience significant growth over the next few years as 3G services are launched and mobile broadband gets more ubiquitous," eBay's President and CEO John Donahoe said.

Electronic commerce, commonly known as e-commerce consists of the buying and selling of products or services over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks.

"I think what you are going to see here in India is with more people having access to the Internet through their mobile devices, you are going to see changes in consumer behaviour in terms of willingness and an ability to buy online," he added.

In India, at present, the e-commerce business is growing at 30 per cent and eBay itself is growing at 60 per cent. Ebay has about 2.5 million users in India.

Moreover, he added that e-Commerce sites like eBay are not only a platform to buy and sell products but also help the economy by creating direct and indirect jobs. About 12,800 sellers use eBay India as a primary or secondary cource of income.

"We not only help people buy and sell products, we help them to earn a livelihood," he added.

Goods worth Rs. 150 crore will be sold by Indian sellers exported outside the country this year.

Now, make phone calls from your Gmail account

Google will now facilitate Gmail users to call telephones directly from their email. It will be in direct competition with Skype and traditional operators like AT&T and Verizon Communications.

After offering computer-to-computer voice and video chat services, Google will now allow calls to home phones and mobile phones directly from Gmail. Calls to the U.S. and Canadian phones from Gmail would be free of cost this year and for calls to other countries, there would be certain charges fixed at a lower rate. Google said calls to Britain, France, Germany, China and Japan would be as low as 2 cents per minute.

According to analysts, this service would likely be a bigger competitive threat to services like Skype's than to traditional phone companies, which have already been cutting their call prices in recent years in response to stiff competition.

"This is a risk to Skype. It's a competitor with a pretty good brand name," said Hudson Square analyst Todd Rethemeier. Like Skype, Rethemeier said the Google service will likely be much more popular among U.S. consumers making international calls, than among people calling friends inside the country.

Soon, computer will read minds to search web

Imagine searching the internet simply by thinking. Well, your imagination may soon turn into reality, say scientists who claim to be developing a computer which reads human minds.

A team at Intel Corporation is working on a new technology which will directly interpret words as they are thought, unlike current brain-controlled computers which require users to imagine making physical movements to control a cursor on a screen.

In fact, the scientists are creating detailed maps of the activity in the brain for individual words which can then be matched against the brain activity of someone using the computer, allowing the machine to determine the word they are thinking, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Preliminary tests of the system have shown that the computer can work out words by looking at similar brain patterns and looking for key differences that suggest what the word might be.

Dean Pomerleau, of Intel Laboratories, said, "The computer uses a form of 20 questions to narrow down what the word is." So a food related word like apple produces activity in those parts of the brain related to hunger. So the computer can infer attributes to each word being thought about and this lets the computer zero down on what the word is pretty quickly.

"We are currently mapping out the activity an average brain produces when thinking about different words. It means you'll be able to write letters, open emails or do Google searches just by thinking," Pomerleau said.