Valve launches Steam client for Linux

Valve has announced a Linux client for its digital video game distribution service, Steam. To mark the occasion, it's also offering a 50 to 75 percent discount on over 50 Linux game titles till 21 February. The games company officially supports Ubuntu, and has made the client available on the Ubuntu Software Center. 

Team Fortress 2, the Free to Play game, is also available on Steam for Linux. Valve announced that for a limited time, Steam users who play the game on Linux will automatically receive a free, exclusive in-game item: Tux, the Linux mascot, that can be carried by any of the game's classes and traded between players. Other Valve titles available on Steam for Linux include Half-Life, Counter-Strike 1.6, and Counter-Strike: Source. 

In addition to games, the Steam for Linux client also includes Big Picture, the new mode of Steam designed for use with a TV and game controller. Big Picture had come out of beta in December 2012.

"The introduction of Steam to Ubuntu demonstrates growing demand for open systems from gamers and game developers," said David Pitkin, Director of Consumer Applications at Canonical. "We expect a growing number of game developers to include Ubuntu among their target platforms. We're looking forward to seeing AAA games developed with Ubuntu in mind as part of a multi-platform day and date release on Steam."

"We're huge fans of Linux. It's like the indie OS-a perfect home for our indie game," said Alen Ladavac, CTO of Croteam, creator of the Serious Sam franchise of games. "And who better to lead the charge into Linux gaming than Valve? With Steam distribution on Windows, Mac OS, and now Linux, plus the buy-once, play-anywhere promise of Steam Play, our games are available to everyone, regardless what type of computer they're running. That's huge."

Steam claims to have 50 million accounts around the world and offers over 2,000 game titles.

DoT orders blocking of URLs with IIPM-related content: Report

The Indian Department of Telecom (DoT) has reportedly issued a fresh order telling the ISPs to block 78 URLs. Interestingly, 73 of these URLs feature content related to Arindam Chaudhuri's IIPM. The news was first reported by MediaNama, which has also posted a copy of the DoT order containing the full list of URLs that the ISPs have been ordered to block.

The blocked URLs include content from The Indian Express, The Economic Times, The Times of India, The Wall Street Journal, Outlook Magazine, FirstPost, Rediff, The Caravan Magazine, and others. On the face of it, all blocked URLs seem to carry content critical of IIPM and/ or 'Director of IIPM Think Tank' Arindam Chaudhuri.

Interestingly, the list of entities also features a government organisation, the UGC, which finds itsorder highlighting the unrecognised status on IIPM on the banned list.

A report over at Livemint notes that the DoT directive was issued on the basis of a Gwalior court order.

As expected, Twitter users were up in arms against the order, with the move being criticised by one and all. Minister of State for Human Resources, Shashi Tharoor, was forced to issue an explanation with many irate users looking towards him for a reaction. "I have written to @milinddeora asking him to remove the DOT block on the UGC website." and "Assume @milinddeora will look into those. Blocking a UGC site concerns my Ministry." @milinddeora is the Twitter handle of Milind Deora, the Minister of State, Communications and IT, the ministry under whose purview the DoT falls.

Arindam Chaudhuri has also reacted to the developments, telling Firstpost, "Last year one of our channel partners had filed a suit against Google and submitted ISPs about certain defamatory articles about us on the internet. After hearing the suit, Hon'ble Court had asked Google to remove those links. However, Google failed to comply by the order and subsequently, the Hon'ble Court asked ICERT to block the those defamatory URLs till further orders."

In 2011, IIPM had filed a lawsuit against The Caravan magazine, its proprietors Delhi Press, for the magazine's February 2011 story titled "Sweet Smell of Success: How Arindam Chaudhuri Made a Fortune Off the Aspirations - and Insecurities - of India's Middle Classes". Also included in the lawsuit were author of the story Siddhartha Deb, Penguin, publishers on a book that Deb was working on at the time, and Google for "publishing, distributing, giving coverage, circulating, blogging the defamatory, libellous and slanderous articles".

Micromax A116 Canvas HD selling 25 units per minute

Micromax had recently launched its A116 Canvas HD smartphone. The smartphone was available for pre-booking from company's website and through the deal site snapdeal.com, and a total of 9,000 units were sold out in just 24 hours. As per company's claims this smartphone is being booked at a pace of 25 units per minute.
 
Shedding more light on the trend, Snapdeal.com has shared that the first lot of the A116 Canvas HD was sold out within 15 minutes of announcing the sale at midnight of 14 February 2013. The second lot which consisted of 300 units and was up for sale at 9:00 AM to was sold out within 15 minutes and the third lot of 1,200 phones took about 45 minutes to be sold out.

Just to recap, Micromax A116 Canvas HD come with 5-inch HD IPS screen that sports 1280x720 resolution and a colour depth of 16.7 million. Micromax A116 Canvas HD is powered by MediaTek's MT6589 quad-core processor that clocks 1.2GHz. It runs on Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean) out of the box. It packs in a 2000mAh battery.

For camera, there is an 8-megapixel rear shooter with LED flash and 4X zoom and a VGA front camera. Other features of the smartphone include 1GB RAM and 4GB of internal storage, which can be expanded to up to 32GB via microSD card. It is a dual-SIM GSM + GSM smartphone.

 Commenting on the sales, Shubhodip Pal, CMO Micromax, said, "The response from our consumers has been phenomenal and the demand has been increasing every passing minute. After the unprecedented success of the Canvas 2, we are overwhelmed with the customer response for Canvas HD. This is the first time our online sales partners have ever witnessed a digital queue in cyberspace to such an extent for any product, to the traditional cue one normally sees. The data also shows that 60% of the orders received online have come from the metros."
 
He further added, "It was great to witness consumers wait until 12:00am for their chance to book the Canvas HD on Valentine's Day. We expect the sales of this device to touch a new high in the coming weeks which will soon be available for sale at all leading retail stores in the country. We hope to further strengthen our leadership in the new phablet category in India."
 
Commenting on the sales Tony Navin, Vice President - Business Development, Snapdeal.com said, "This product, one of the most awaited launches exceeded our expectations by a huge margin. We took this live at midnight and we were completely surprised to see all 500 units which we expected to sell in the entire day sold out within 15 minutes of launch. Our call volume shot through the roof with enquiries and we have replenished inventory levels to cater to more sales. In a category such as Mobiles, this kind of pace of sales beats our previous records that we have witnessed. Our partnership with Micromax is now more than a year old and has been one of the most exciting journeys for both the parties. We look forward to such meaningful associations in the future as well".

Micromax has shared that they are now looking at replenishing the stock at the earliest but did not mention the exact availability date for the same.
 

Nokia's 808 PureView officially declared as the last Symbian device

It was just a matter of time for Nokia to carve the initials R.I.P in its Symbian OS and now, the Finnish handset maker has made it official. Alongside releasing its Q4 results, the company stated in itsearrings call report that the Nokia 808 PureView , that garnered all the attention for its monstrous 41-megapixel camera, will be the last Symbian device in the history of the Symbian OS.

During our transition to Windows Phone through 2012, we continued to ship devices based on Symbian. The Nokia 808 PureView, a device which showcases our imaging capabilities and which came to market in mid-2012, was the last Symbian device from Nokia.

The report duly mentioned that the company sold 2.2 million Symbian handsets in Q4 2012. That's half as many as the Lumia Windows-Phone devices at 4.4 million units and less than 14 percent of the overall volume of smartphones totalling 15.9 million.

The company's sales in Greater China suffered a huge crash due to Symbian's decline. "On a year-on-year basis, the decrease in Greater China net sales was primarily due to our Smart Devices business unit, most notably lower net sales of our Symbian devices," Nokia said in its report.

The company's marketing expenses and have been declining on a yearly basis due to decreased attention to Symbian. The report goes on to say, "From an operating system perspective, the year-on-year decline in our Smart Devices gross margin in the fourth quarter 2012 was primarily due to a lower Symbian gross margin."

Prior to touch screen devices, the Symbian OS ruled the roost for quite a long time. The OS was highly noticed in the Nokia 9210 communicator phone followed by QWERTY devices like the E61, E71 and other E-Series phones offering better specs in an attempt to compete with BlackBerry messenger phones.

Nokia evolved further with offering camera phones, the Nokia N95 being the most popular. But by this time, Symbian was nearly hanging by a thread when the company decided to launch the Nokia N8 in its attempt to claw back market share and remain relevant to fast-changing consumers. Even though the device flaunted great camera capabilities,  it it never gained momentum because of Android and Apple that had already established their ground. Nokia was dethroned as the mobile leader by Samsung last year.

But what about the Asha line of phones? Well, as per the report, from a total of 79.6 million mobile phones shipped in Q4 2012, 9.3 million were Asha full-touch smartphones. In developing countries like Brazil, Africa and India, the Asha series phones are quite popular since they offer decent specs at highly affordable prices.

 "We will continue to innovate around our Asha smartphone line in order to compete with the very lowest levels of Android with assets that we have", says Nokia CEO Stephen Elop.

Nokia recently introduced the Asha 205 and Asha 206 in both single SIM and dual-SIM versions. Both devices reflect Nokia's heritage by combining stylish design and long-lasting battery life.

The Nokia Asha 205 and Nokia 206 are the first mobile phones devices to include Nokia's exclusiveSlam feature, which enables consumers to share multimedia content such as photos and videos with nearby friends almost instantly. Slam works with most Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones without the need to pair devices, and without the recipient needing to also have Slam Nokia commenced shipments of the Nokia Asha 308 and Asha 309, models offering a fluid 'swipe' user interface and an open environment for third-party application development.

Given that Nokia is planning to compete with the Android at the lowest level (which are priced below Rs. 5,000), the company will either have to scale its Windows devices to that level or continue to launch its feature smartphones based on Symbian for some more time. Currently, the cheapest Windows smartphone that is available is the Nokia Lumia 510, which is retailing for Rs. 9,999.

Last year also, Nokia had launched a few low to mid range devices in its Asha series and we believe that will continue to be their strategy for 2013 as well and have Windows Phone OS for their Lumia series.

Source: gadgets.ndtv.com

Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 spotted in first real images

It took a couple of rumours, a confirmation by the Samsung Chief and a supposed press render for the Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 to grace us with its appearance for real, at least according to DDay.

The Italian forum has posted a few images of the device that seems to have been photographed very carefully so as to not reveal much detail. Nevertheless, what we can see is that design wise, it looks like an over-sized Galaxy S III and nothing like Samsung's previous tablet offerings.

The tablet sports the same curved chassis as seen in the Galaxy S III and another possibility is that it could be used as a phone, considering the image shows a speaker grill housed on the top. We think Samsung may have stretched it a bit too far this time.

One of the images also shows the S-Pen holder at the bottom right of the tablet. The device also sports the traditional menu, home and back buttons. Though the images look pretty real, we wouldn't completely ignore the possibility of them not being final after all, considering what Samsung did with the Galaxy S III in an attempt to keep the final design under wraps.

As far as rumoured specs go, this new tablet is expected to sport 8.0-inch 1280X800 TFT (Super Clear LCD) display. It may come in two versions - Samsung GT-N5100, which will be a 3G+Wi-Fi version and the GT-N5110, which will be a Wi-Fi only version. The dimensions of the tablet will be 211.3X136.3X7.95 mm and it will weigh around 330g.

Other alleged specs for Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 include 4600mAh battery, 2GB of RAM, option of 16 or 32GB as internal storage, 5-megapixel rear camera and 1.3-megapixel front camera. Samsung Galaxy Note 8.0 is likely to run on Android 4.2 (Jelly Bean). Other connectivity options may include Bluetooth version 4.0, USB 2.0, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n and A-GPS.

Just a day ago, we heard rumours of the tablet being priced under $300. Also, apart from the Galaxy Note 8.0, the Korean manufacturer is planning to launch 7-inch and 10.1-inch tablets as part of the company's next generation Galaxy tablets that will be branded as Galaxy Tab 3. They will come with and without 3G support and will feature a 5-megapixel camera.

These Galaxy tablets will be developed under the codename "SANTOS" and their new code numbers would be GT-P3200, GT-P3210, GT-P5200 and GT-P5210. Additionally, there will also be a high-end tablet from the Korean manufacturer, the GT-P8200 currently codenamed "ROMA" that will come in 16 and 32GB variants.

Galaxy Note 8.0 key specifications

• 8-inch 1280×800 TFT (Super Clear LCD)
• 1.6GHz quad-core processor
• 2GB RAM
• 16/32GB (optional) with microSD expansion up to 32GB
• 5-megapixel rear camera
• 1.3-megapixel front
• 4,600mAh
• Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, USB 2.0, A-GPS
• EDGE (850/900/1800/1900) HSPA+21.1Mbps, HSUPA 5.76Mbps (850/900/1900/2100)
• Android 4.2 Jelly Bean
• 211.3×136.3×7.95 mm
• Weighs 330grams

Source: gadgets.ndtv.com