Samsung Chromebox Equipped with Intel i5 Chip Spotted Online for Sale

During the first week of January, Samsung revealed Chromebox desktop on its official site powered by Chrome OS, which is a Linux-based operating system designed to work with web applications.

The latest on the news on the Chromebox is that the device has been spotted online for purchase for about $400(Rs.24700/- approx). Powered by an Intel i5 Chip, the new Samsung Chromebox is designed to work on Mountain View's cloud-based Google drive and web-application systems.

The design of Chromebox has been changed retaining its internal components. Specifications of the device include a 1.9 GHz Intel Celeron B940 processor, 16GB of SSB, Wi-Fi, 4 GB RAM, 2W mono-speaker, a DVI port, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 2 display ports and headset jack all at the weight of 1.48kg.

Additional specs of the new device include 6 USB 2.0 ports, Bluetooth, Ethernet, DVI jacks and a display port. CompSource is selling the device at a price of $405 (Rs. 22,000/- approx) while Amazon sells at $423 (Rs. 23,200/-approx).

Facebook Announces New Search Engine

Facebook announced a new search engine called “Graph Search” at a much-anticipated press event at its Menlo Park headquarters this morning.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the search engine would leverage Facebook’s one billion members’ 240 billion photos, and 1 trillion interpersonal connections. Zuckerberg said Graph Search is designed to handle more precise queries than general web search, like “Who are my friends who live in San Francisco, my friends who live in Palo Alto, California and like Game of Thrones, and Mexican restaurants in Palo Alto, CA my friends have been to, and friends who like Star Wars and Harry Potter?” As results come back, users can refine results using a control panel on the right side of the screen.

The search engine was developed by a team led by Lars Rasmussen, who co-created Google Maps and Google Wave, and by Tom Stocky, Facebook’s director of product management. (See WIRED’s exclusive look at the inside story of its development.) In a demonstration of the software, Stocky showed how Graph Search could be used for dating and matchmaking, typing the query “friends of friends who are single males in San Francisco California who are from India.” He also showed examples of searches recruiters might run, like “John Cumber’s friends who work at Google,” and “people who have been product managers and who have been founders.” Their official announcement is here.

Rasmussen, meanwhile, showed off photo oriented queries like “photos of my friends taken in national parks.” Graph Search also supports media queries like “videos by TV shows liked by my friends.”

Zuckerberg said Graph Search is now going into limited beta to a “very small number” of users and will be rolled out “very slowly” after that. “It’s an honor to be able to build this service and offer it to the world,” Zuckerberg says. “I don’t think people will start coming to Facebook to do web searches, but I think in time people will come to Facebook to do this [targeted queries] when they can’t find what they want.”

Zuckerberg summarized the search engine as “Giving people the tools to do the [data] cut they want and get the pictures they want. That’s the third pillar of search and we’re calling it Graph Search.”

To help users formulate queries, Graph Search offers a rich auto-complete system, along with what is called a “power bar” on the right-hand side of the page to refine search. “We wondered whether users would understand the natural language part,” Zuckerberg says. “But a lot of users are very trained from using web search for a decade… and that works in Graph Search.” At the same time, Graph Search rewrites ad-hoc queries to be more structured, training users how to enter future searches. “People learn very quickly to formulate queries,” Zuckerberg says. “So the feedback we’ve gotten is very positive.”

Marti Hearst, a professor specializing in search engines and information retrieval at the University of California, Berkeley, says Graph Search should prove useful for a narrow range of queries.

“This is a social awareness tool, rather than a general purpose search engine, and so I think will have more limited use than a search engine like Google or Bing,” she tells us. “There may be a ‘killer app’ usage for it, for instance, as a tool to find places your friends like when you visit an unfamiliar city.”

As for whether users will be able to adapt to Graph Search’s query language, Sullivan says “I really need to see how it works … auto-suggest can go a long way towards making long queries work well.”

Graph Search could be a hugely lucrative product for Facebook. Because people who run web searches are often close to making a purchase decision, advertisers are very eager to place ads next to search results. Close to 80 percent of Google’s billions in revenue is derived from this type of advertising.

Josh Elman, a former Facebook and Twitter product manager who is now a principal at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, thinks Facebook will be able “To monetize incredibly well,” on Graph Search. That will happen, he adds, “Once Facebook changes enough behavior to create intention for searching for recommendations and items that result in a purchase.

“When that happens they will be able to monetize incredibly well, but it takes searching for local business recommendations, product recommendations, etc., which people will have to switch over time to Facebook.”

For the moment, Facebook is not running ads on Graph Search. “This could potentially be a business over time, but right now we’re focused on building a good user experience,” Zuckerberg says.

Elman also thinks Graph Search will be adopted widely by Facebook users for certain use cases. “It’s pretty incredible,” he says. “We are just at the tip of the iceberg of the potential ways you can tap the information stored in your network… To help service existing FB queries for people this will get adopted quickly. Looking for friends in a given city, for friends with recent updates or photos, etc.

“But I think it will take time to have people with intent look to Facebook for new queries like ‘I’m hungry, what are good restaurants?’ or ‘What movie should I see?’ But I think over time, people will realize that asking friends is as easy as just querying this.

“I think we are just at the beginning of tapping the power of what Facebook has stored up in the graph of connections and content.”

Facebook executives at today’s event hastened to add that Graph Search will be “privacy aware,” a nod to widespread consumer concerns about how much information Facebook has compiled about its users and how extensive its privacy controls are. The only results Graph Search will turn are things you could already see on Facebook, and privacy changes to content are instantly reflected in search.

Tech writers have packed a Facebook auditorium for the event, having descended on the social network’s Menlo Park, California campus to “come and see what we’re building,” as Facebook’s invitation put it, ensuring a flurry of coverage.

Wall Street had been expecting a lucrative new product, judging from the recent spike in the price of Facebook stock, which last week rose 9 percent to a new six-month high above $30.

Facebook did a masterful, almost Apple-esque job of subtly hyping the event, sending out mysteriously worded e-mail invitations to tech journalists during the Consumer Electronics Show, just at the moment those journalists were starting to grow bored with the Las Vegas gadget bonanza. This led to a flurry of speculation and publicity.

We’re live in the scrum at Facebook HQ and will continue updating this post as the event unfolds, so check back for the news and our analysis.

Amazon.de puts up the Sony Xperia Z for pre-order

Sony's brand new Xperia Z smartphone has appeared on Amazon.de. The impatient among you can now pre-order the phone for 649 Euro (approximately 867 US Dollar).

For that money, you are getting a phone with 5.0-inch, 1920 x 1080 resolution display, 13.1 megapixel camera, 1.5GHz quad-core Qualcomm APQ8064 processor, 2GB RAM, 16GB internal memory wit microSD card slot, LTE support, Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and water and dust resistant body.

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Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 Review

Here's another tweener folks, the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11, the little brother of the venerable Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13 convertible Ultrabook. This time we're looking at a very lovely 11.6" IPS display with 350 nits of brightness and Windows RT with the same 360 degree hinge that turns this little laptop into a tablet or tent mode presentation machine. The Yoga 11 runs on a 1.4GHz Tegra 3 quad core CPU with GeForce mobile graphics that we've seen on the MS Surface RT, Asus VivoTab RT and various Android tablets. That means it runs the Windows Modern UI (formerly called Metro UI) with Live Tile apps but not Windows 7 x86 .exe apps like Adobe Photoshop or MS Access. It does however come with MS Office 2013 RT complete with MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint (but not Outlook, instead you'll have to make do with the built-in email app).

The Keyboard is a Star

For those of you who spend most of your time in the web browser, email and MS Office, the Yoga 11 is a compelling, highly portable companion with a sharp display and long battery life. Unlike pure tablet designs running on Tegra 3 and Atom CPUs, the Lenovo Yoga 11's keyboard is permanently attached, making it a prime pick for those who do a lot of typing. And the island style keyboard is simply amazing given its relatively small size (this is an 11.6" netbook-sized machine). Lenovo knows how to do keyboards, and the AccuType keyboard with Synaptics multi-touch trackpad are a pleasure to use. The keyboard handily beats the optional detachable docking keyboards found on Asus transformer style tablets, the Samsung ATIV 500T dock and Acer Iconia Tab W510. Sure, we wish it were backlit, but otherwise, it's a typist's dream. Unless you have very large hands, you'll likely be typing at your best rate quickly.

Yoga 11 vs. the Windows 8 Tablet and Convertible Competition

The price, at $699 for the 32 gig model and $799 for the 64 gig, is comparable to the Samsung ATIV 500T and Acer Iconia Tab W510 Intel Atom Windows 8 tablets with their keyboard docks but $100 more than the 64 gig MS Surface RT with Touch Cover. It's cheaper than the Windows 8 Atom-powered Asus VivoTab TF810C ($799) plus optional $199 keyboard dock (total $1,000). That said, it is the most expensive Windows RT product to date and is priced higher than the recently heavily discounted Asus VivoTab RT TF600 (it started life at $599 + $199 for keyboard dock but can be found for less these days). While the Yoga 11 might seem expensive compared to traditional notebooks, we don't consider it overpriced among Windows 8 tablets since you're getting the keyboard and bigger battery in the deal. In fact, it's the only Windows RT machine that offers a convertible design like the larger, heavier and more expensive Intel Core i5 convertible tablets that typically sell for $900 to $1,500. Keep in mind that Lenovo often has good sales on their website, and you might find it for less.

Design, Ergonomics and Audio

It's hard to argue with Lenovo build quality and design for their ThinkPad and IdeaPad products. ThinkPads are understated and built like tanks, while IdeaPads are stylish and also use very good quality materials and attractive industrial designs that set them apart from budget products. The Yoga has rubber paint finish over its metal casing, and that makes it easy to hold onto and it resists fingerprints. As with the Yoga 13, Lenovo offers two colors: silver gray and clementine orange, though we've yet to see the cool looking orange model on sale in the US. The inside surfaces are black and the keyboard deck has a soft touch textured finish. The island style keyboard is inset so the keys don't contact the display and the trackpad is roomy for an 11.6" notebook computer.

Like the Yoga 13, the Yoga 11 has a unique 360 degree hinge. It doesn't just open flat, the display bends over backwards until it rests against the bottom section, turning the Yoga into a tablet. There's also tent mode where you open it to an upside down V with the hinge up in the air and the edges of the display and keyboard dock resting on a desk or table. When in tablet or tent mode, the keyboard faces out. That means if you're using it like a tablet, the keyboard surface rests against your hands or desk. Lenovo claims to have designed the inset keyboard to take the abuse, but just in case it feels too weird, you can buy their sleeve that covers the keyboard deck. The hinges are very sturdy and stiff, and the display doesn't bounce when you touch it.

The charging port, full size SD card slot and a USB 2.0 port are on the right, as is the rotation lock button. The full size HDMI port, another USB 2.0 port and 3.5mm combo mic-stereo headphone audio jack are on the left. There's a volume rocker on the left as well so you can change volume when the Yoga is in tablet mode with the keyboard disabled. The power button is on the front left edge and stereo speakers flank the left and right sides toward the front. Volume is sufficient to fill a small room and quality is decent, though it certainly can't compete with big notebooks with high end audio. Sound through the headphone jack is very good and the tablet works with Bluetooth headphones and speakers. Since this is a single band 2.4GHz only tablet, we noted that WiFi can interfere with Bluetooth, sometimes resulting in audio delay when watching streaming video over WiFi with Bluetooth speakers connected.

Sharp IPS Display

The Gorilla Glass, 1366 x 768 IPS gloss display is a highpoint. It's very sharp, has very good color balance and factory calibration and good contrast. It's a great tablet for viewing photos and watching movies since flesh tones look natural and colors pop. Viewing angles are very wide since this is an IPS display. Though I truly appreciate the portability of 10.1" tablets like the MS Surface, the move to 11.6" surprisingly makes for a more enjoyable and immersive experience when viewing photos and videos. The Yoga 11 works well with YouTube, Netflix and Hulu streaming video and it can play Adobe Flash.

Performance

Since this is a Tegra 3 tablet with an ARM9 mobile CPU, we can't provide our usual army of synthetic benchmarks like the Windows Experience Index or PCMark scores (those run only on Intel and AMD x86 family CPUs). The 1.4GHz Tegra 3 with 12 core GeForce graphics is certainly up to the task of running Windows RT (Microsoft chose that CPU and optimized RT for it). We have no complaints about performance and it feels very responsive in the Live Tile interface. Desktop mode is surprisingly more spritely than Intel Atom Windows 8 machines, and we suspect the GeForce is better suited to the job and the drivers may be better for the Tegra 3 vs. Intel's licensed Imagination Technologies graphics used in Atom tablets.

Games we downloaded from the Windows store, including 3D games, actually played at higher frame rates on the Tegra 3-equipped Yoga 11 than on Atom tablets like the Acer Iconia Tab W510 and Samsung ATIV 500T. The included MS Office 2013 RT (the machine ships with the preview version but Windows will update it to the full version automatically) runs quickly and smoothly, though we noted a bit of keyboard lag when typing in MS Word that becomes more noticeable as the document gets longer. This is an issue with all Tegra 3 Windows RT tablets, and we assume Microsoft will eventually offer an update that fixes the issue. MS Excel and PowerPoint don't have keyboard lag.

Windows RT vs. Windows 8

While Windows RT looks and feels exactly like Windows 8 on a laptop or desktop, it has one limitation: it only runs apps from the new Windows Store. Why? Like mobile OS tablets, RT runs on an ARM family CPU rather than the x86 CPU used in traditional Windows machines. Your Windows apps that come on CDs like Adobe Creative Suite and Autocad are compiled for Intel compatible CPUs (Intel and AMD traditional processors), so you can't install them and run them on the Yoga 11 (the bigger Yoga 13 runs on an Intel Core i5, so you can run Windows x86 apps on it). Instead you'll use the included music and video players with XBOX Live integration, the capable photo viewer and various news-centric apps for weather, sports, news and travel. There's an email client that works with MS Exchange, Google (including push), POP3 and IMAP email, a good calendar app that can sync with Google, Live and Exchange and a People app that's your contacts plus Twitter, Live and Facebook social networking rolled into one. You can download more apps including Skype, Netflix, Kindle and Nook for the Windows app store on the laptop. Currently the store has 35,000 apps available for download (both free and paid) and that number is growing very quickly.

There are two versions of IE 10 here: the Modern UI IE runs in full screen mode and offers Adobe Flash for a list of Microsoft whitelisted sites. IE 10 on the desktop looks, feels and acts like the browser you're familiar with and allows Flash on all sites. There's no QuickTime or Evernote browser plugin at this point because they'd have to be re-written to run on ARM CPUs. And there's currently no Chrome web browser for Windows RT, but as a consolation, you can change your default search engine from Bing to Google in browser add-on settings under desktop IE 10. And no, iTunes isn't available for Windows RT.

Like Windows 8 Pro machines, the tablet has both the Modern UI with Live Tiles and the Windows desktop view (very similar to Windows 7, minus the Aero Glass visual effects). Thus you can use Windows Explorer to manage files, use the same control panel you're accustomed to on PCs and use IE 10 in desktop mode (windowed rather than full screen) and access the command prompt. Some long time Windows staples are here like MS Journal and calculator but not Windows Media Player. The standard USB 2.0 port has Windows drivers for keyboards, mice, hard drives, flash drives, optical drives and game controllers like Microsoft's own wired XBOX controller for Windows. It also has printer drivers for popular printers but no drivers for USB 3G/4G dongles. Since it's Windows, support for NTFS drives is included, along with FAT32 and ExFAT.

Battery Life

The Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 has a relatively beefy 4 cell Lithium Ion battery that Lenovo claims is good for up to 13 hours of actual use time. We've averaged 11.5 to 12 hours use with brightness set to 60% and WiFi active. Standby times are superb, just as with mobile OS tablets like the iPad and Android tablets. Leave it sleeping for a few days and you've still got plenty of juice with little drain over time. There's no need to shut down the Yoga 11 given the excellent standby times and we found it the perfect instant-on companion for email, web, social networking and MS Office use.

The laptop comes with a small notebook style charger rather than a compact wall wart charger and it charges very quickly. The Yoga uses Lenovo's newer style rectangular charging connector rather than the old barrel connector.

Conclusion

We love most everything about the Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 except the price. It's a brilliantly portable, high class convertible Windows 8 tablet with the best keyboard you'll find on an 11.6" machine. The display is top notch and we don't wish for 1080p on a screen this small. The Yoga 11 is responsive and has superb battery life and standby among Windows machines. The only drawbacks? The nice bits cost money and this isn't cheap compared to mainstream laptops. Windows RT can't run Windows 7 apps, so this won't be a main computer for those who need Windows 7 apps like Adobe Photoshop or iTunes. On the bright side, it requires fewer Windows updates and is less prone to viruses and is an excellent mobile companion and second machine. Oh, it has more than twice the battery life of the Yoga 13, Sony Vaio Duo 11 and Dell XPS 12 convertible Intel Core i5 Windows 8 Ultrabooks.

List Price: starting at $699

Website: www.lenovo.com

BlackBerry Z10 leaks in a lengthy 1080p video demo

Here's a lengthy video demo of the upcoming BlackBerry Z10 in its full glory. It's not an official demo, of course, we doubt we'll see one before RIM's unveiling event on January 30. But still, it's as good as it gets.

In fact, the 7 minutes worth of footage show the hardware and software of the BlackBerry Z10 (if that's the correct retail name at all) in such detail that we may as well stop reporting any future leaks before the announcement. Just kidding, alright?

The only downside to this clip is that the narrator speaks in German, which kinda leaves you without the first-hand commentary, if you are not fluent in the language. But hey, the action on the screen is more or less self-explanatory.

Of course, you shouldn't miss the the specs. The narrator mentions that the BlackBerry Z10 has a 1280x768px 4.2-inch screen (which kinda contradicts with the 4.3-inches we've heard before) and an 8 megapixel camera with a LED flash. It runs on a TI OMAP4470 chipset with 1.5Ghz dual-core processor. There's 2GB RAM and 16GB storage. The smartphone weighs only 125g.

The authors of the video from Telekom-Presse.at have also published a video, shot with the Z10, but the sample is rather shaky to judge anything from it (except perhaps the lack of video stabilization). If you are interested, check it out in the Source link below.

On the positive side, the title of the hands-on video embedded above says Teil 1, which means there is a Part 2 in the works. Stay tuned!

Source | Via

Facebook’s Bold, Compelling and Scary Engine of Discovery: The Inside Story of Graph Search

Beast had a birthday last week. The First Dog of social networking — live-in companion to Mark Zuckerberg and his bride, Priscilla Chan — turned two. The proud owners baked a cake for the Hungarian sheepdog and decided to throw an impromptu party. Naturally, when it came time to compile the guest list, the couple turned to Facebook, the $67 billion company that Zuckerberg founded in his dorm room nine years ago.

To date, sorting through your Facebook friends could be a frustrating task. Although the site has a search bar, there has been no easy way to quickly cull contacts based on specific criteria. But Zuckerberg was testing a major new feature that Facebook would announce on Jan. 15 — one that promises to transform its user experience, threaten its competitors, and torment privacy activists. It’s called Graph Search, and it will eventually allow a billion people to dive into the vast trove of stored information about them and their network of friends. In Zuckerberg’s case, it allowed him to type “Friends of Priscilla and me who live around Palo Alto” and promptly receive a list of potential celebrants. “We invited five people over who were obvious dog lovers,” he says.

For years now, Facebook watchers have wondered when the company would unleash the potential of itsunderpowered search bar. (Nobody has feared this day more than Google, which suddenly faces a competitor able to index tons of data that Google’s own search engine can’t access.) They have also wondered how a Facebook search product might work. Now we know. Graph Search is fundamentally different from web search. Instead of a Google-like effort to help users find answers from a stitched-together corpus of all the world’s information, Facebook is helping them tap its vast, monolithic database to make better use of their “social graph,” the term Zuckerberg uses to describe the network of one’s relationships with friends, acquaintances, favorite celebrities, and preferred brands.

In the weeks leading up to the launch, Facebook executives were still trying to come up with a name for the new product. They were hoping to stay away from the word “search,” to distinguish it from web search. (Only a few days before the launch, one Facebook executive slipped and referred to it as “browse.”) But after hours of contortionism, they relented; nothing topped Graph Search. “It’s descriptive — it’s search,” Zuckerberg says. “And the graph is a big thing.” The idea is that Facebook’s new offering will be able to extract meaning from the social graph in much the same way that Google’s original search unearthed the hidden treasures of the web. “People use search engines to answer questions,” Zuckerberg says. “But we can answer a set of questions that no one else can really answer. All those other services are indexing primarily public information, and stuff in Facebook isn’t out there in the world — it’s stuff that people share. There’s no real way to cut through the contents of what people are sharing, to fulfill big human needs about discovery, to find people you wouldn’t otherwise be connected with. And we thought we should do something about that. We’re the only service in the world that can do that.”

The result is surprisingly compelling. The mark of a transformative product is that it gets you to do more of something that you wouldn’t think to do on your own. Thanks to Graph Search, people will almost certainly use Facebook in entirely new ways: to seek out dates, recruit for job openings, find buddies to go out with on short notice, and look for new restaurants and other businesses. Most strikingly, it expands Facebook’s core mission — not just obsessively connecting users with people they already know, but becoming a vehicle of discovery.

Zuckerberg says that this is in fact a return to the company’s roots. “When I first made Facebook, we actually offered some functionality that was like this but only for your college,” he says. “Facebook then was arguably as much for meeting new people around you and exploring your community as it was for keeping in touch with the people you already knew. But it was such a hard problem to do it for more than a few thousand people at a time. We transitioned from connecting with whoever you wanted to primarily staying with people you already knew. But Graph Search is like the grown-up version of that discovery aspect. Exploring your community is a core human need, and this is the first big step we’re taking in that direction.”

The first of many steps, that is. Graph Search will be improved based on how people actually use it. So Facebook plans a slow introduction, limiting the initial rollout to a small number of users. Zuckerberg’s expectation is that by the time it becomes available to millions it will be considerably improved.

For example, he thinks he can make it easier to find invitees for a canine birthday party. “We don’t have the ‘who has dogs’ field yet,” Zuckerberg says.

Samsung to launch Galaxy S II Jelly Bean update in February

Just over a week ago, Samsung announced the details surrounding the upcoming Galaxy S II Jelly Bean update, but didn't mention an exact date when for the start of its rollout.

Today a company spokesperson has told CNET the update for the former Android flagship is coming in the beginning of February in Singapore, with the rest of the markets to follow.

The update will be downloadable only via the Samsung Kies app and not over-the-air, because of its extra large size.

Launched with Android 2.3 Gingerbread back in 2011, Samsung has been taking good care of its former flagship upgrading it to Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and now to Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. More than 40 million people have bought the device paving the company's road to the throne as the biggest smartphone manufacturer out there.

We'll continue to follow the news surrounding the update in the coming weeks.

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