Sailfish OS-touting Jolla phone unboxed, shows off its fresh 'sandwich' design

Jolla, a smartphone company that got jump-started thanks to its Nokia roots, has been hard at work on a device that's fresh and different, and their efforts have finally paid off – 'The First One' phone has now been officially launched. Right on schedule, too.

We've known pretty much everything there is to know about the first Sailfish OS-touting smartphone, including price, design and specs and even how The First One handles itself in at least one benchmark. Yet, nothing truly beats seeing, in the closest form to person, what a hefty €399 (about $540) price tag gets you. Thankfully, you can see several snaps of the entire contents of The First One's box and even the phone with its signature 'sandwich' design – a swappable backplate, called The Other Half, that changes the color scheme of the entire OS, depending on its own.

For those of you too busy to go digging for specs, keep in mind that those $540 bucks don't quite have the same bang they would otherwise do with, say, Motorola nowadays. Put forth simply, you get a 4.5-inch 540x960 qHD display, a 1.4GHz dual-core Snapdragon 400, 1GB of RAM and 16GB of expandable storage. Camera capabilities sit at 8-megapixels at the rear, along with an LED flash. Of course, and while we're still at the topic of noteworthy things, do take this in moderation – there's still no telling exactly how resource-hungry Jolla's Sailfish OS will be, so these may actually do the job just fine.

Jolla's The First One

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source: C Tech

Nokia develops the world's fastest humidity sensor based on graphene oxide

Researchers from Nokia's Research Center in Cambridge developed a new humidity sensor based on graphene oxide. The researchers say that the new sensor is ultra fast (the fastest humidity sensor ever reported, in fact), thanks to the graphene 2D structure and its superpermeability to water molecules. The sensor Nokia developed is thin (15 nm), transparent and flexible.



The sensor's response and recovery time (the time to go from 10% to 90% of the high humidity value and vice versa) is less than 100 ms. The response rate is a function of the thickness of the GO, the thicker the film, the slower the sensor. Nokia has filed several patent applications regarding this work.

Source: Nanowerk

New BlackBerry CEO writes brief open letter to fans

The BlackBerry saga took an unexpected turn recently when the company announced it is no longer interested in a full or partial sale. Instead, BlackBerry fired Thorsten Heins, it took $1 billion from Fairfax and other investors, it will seek another $1 billion from the Canadian government as it negotiates a huge tax refund, and it will continue making smartphones as it tries to right the ship. New BlackBerry CEO John Chen has quite a difficult task ahead, and he penned a quick letter to BlackBerry fans asking them to get ready for a big BlackBerry rebound in the near future.
“As you know, this is a time of significant change at BlackBerry as we accelerate our efforts to transform our business,” Chen wrote on BlackBerry’s blog. “I know there has been a lot said about BlackBerry, but let me remind you that at BlackBerry, we are not dwelling on the past. We are looking towards the future.”
He continued, “We have begun moving the company to embrace a multi-platform, BYOD world by adopting a new mobility management platform and a new device strategy. We are also leveraging our tremendous assets, including BBM, our network and QNX. While we are proud of these accomplishments, we know there is more work to be done. I know that it’s going to take time, discipline and tough decisions to reclaim BlackBerry’s success and we are ready for that challenge.”
Chen said BlackBerry is excited about the future, and BlackBerry fans should be excited as well. The full letter can be read on BlackBerry’s blog, which is linked below in our source section.

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BlackBerry

Source:

BlackBerry

Cross-platform MoliPlayer Pro bring wide video format support to Windows Phone

While we have all been sitting on a thumbs waiting for VLC to eventually come to Windows Phone, Moli Time Technology has been porting their own video player, MoliPlayer Pro to the OS.
The app, which has more than 100,000 downloads on Android, claims to be able to play almost everything, including RMVB, AVI, MKV, FLV, FLAC, APE etc…
The app is also able to play video stored in your Camera roll and your SD card, and will let you transfer video wirelessly over WIFI from your PC.
The app features:

• Plays almost all VIDEO formats: avi, mkv, mp4, h.264, rmvb, wmv, flv, ts, m2ts, and vob. etc.
• Plays almost all MUSIC formats: aac, mp3, ape, flac, and ogg etc.
• Displays almost all SUBTITLES: embedded or seperate: srt, ssa, and *.ass etc.
• MANAGES videos in folders
• Easy wireless video transfer from your PC browser in WiFi network.
• FAST upload from PC to the camera roll of the internal storage and/or SD card.
• Easy GESTURE control, swiping for volume, brightness.

Early reviews suggest the app lives up to its promises, but can struggle with high bitrate HD video.
The app lacks a free trial, but the developer appears enthusiastic about supporting the platform, and is offering 25% of his original asking price of $3.99, and is only charging $2.99 to start with.

Read more and find the app in the Windows Phone Store here.

Switching between launchers in Android 4.4 KITKAT [VIDEO]

To say that switching between multiple replacement launchers in Android has been a pain would be a vast understatement. It sucked, and for a lot of users — particularly those who don’t consider themselves “power” users — it was downright confusing. Thankfully, Google looked to address that in Android 4.4 KITKAT with a new menu option under settings.
Simply dubbed “Home,” this menu houses a list of all the different home-screen / launcher replacements you have installed on your phone. Touch one, and that is now your default launcher. It’s extremely simple, but it’s a change that’s going to save a lot of people a lot of headache (especially if you’re the type to switch launchers about as often as you switch underwear).
I should note that this menu also gives you the option to uninstall said launchers, though you obviously won’t be able to rid your device of the one that came pre-installed. No biggie, there — it’s always good to have a backup plan. Watch the video above to see how this simple, yet powerful feature works.