Wednesday 11 April 2012

Dell Streak Officially Announced For The UK, Available In The US Later This Summer


One of Dell’s worst kept secrets, the Dell Streak, has finally been officially unveiled by Dell. The phone/tablet hybrid is slated to launch in early June and will be available exclusively on the O2 mobile carrier in the UK.
dell-streak-off-1
I haven’t had the chance to play with one yet, but the Dell Streak seems like it will be a bit of an awkward phone, primarily due to its massive screen. With a 5 inch screen the phone attempts to fill in the gap between full blown tablets and cellphones…a gap that I’m not sure necessarily needed to be filled. From what I’ve read, the phone looks a bit goofy when held up to the face and used for calls.
Other than that, the device has some pretty impressive features:
  • Android platform complete with Android Market and Dell user interface enhancements
  • ARM-based Processor: Qualcomm’s powerful and efficient Snapdragon chipset and software platform with integrated 1GHz processor
  • 3G + WiFi + Bluetooth
  • UMTS / GPRS / EDGE class 12 GSM radio with link speeds of up to HSDPA 7.2 Mbps1 / HSDPA
  • 5 MP autofocus camera with dual LED flash. Easy point, shoot, and uploads to YouTube, Flickr, Facebook and more
  • User accessible Micro SD expandable memory available up to 32 GB2. Store up to 42 movies2or 32,000 photos2, or 16,000 songs2 with 32GB* Micro SD
streak_front
I don’t see it in the press release, but originally the Dell Streak was to ship with Android 1.6. I haven’t heard anything to contrary, so as of right now we’ll go with that. The press release does mention that the Streak will support over the air updates to Android 2.2 so it can support Flash 10.1:
The Dell Streak was designed with the future in mind and will support over-the-air updates including platform upgrades, Adobe Flash 10.1 on Android™ 2.2 later this year, video chat applications and other software innovations.
While I’m not sure the device is for me, I’m sure there are a few people that will find a tablet/phone hybrid useful. Are you one of them? Sound off in the comments and let us know why the Streak does or doesn’t appeal to you.

jailbreaking of iphone 4s




How To: Jailbreak iPhone 4S / iPad 2 5.0.1 using Absinthe (Both Mac & Windows)

It's here folks! After months of anxiously waiting for the A5 jailbreak, it's finally here! You can now jailbreak your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 using the DreamTeam's Absinthe program.

Here is our full step-by-step installation guide. Get to jailbreaking!

How To: Jailbreak iPhone 4S or iPad 2 using Absinthe



The Absinthe Untethered Jailbreak will support the following devices :
iPhone 4S running iOS 5.0, 5.0.1 (9A405 and 9A406)
iPad 2 Wifi/GSM/CDMA running iOS 5.0.1

Step 1: Download Absinthe from here (Mac) or here (Windows), extract it, than run it.

Step 2: Connect your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 to your computer via USB.

Step 3: Click "Jailbreak" to run the program. The process takes awhile in the beginning so don't worry! It will eventually say "Restoring in Progress," leave the device alone until it's completely finished.

1.png

Step 4: Once it's done, you should see the Absinthe icon on the Home screen. Tap the icon and it will then take you to the Greenpois0n site and reboot your idevice. After it loads back up, the Cydia icon will have replaced the Absinthe icon.

UPDATE: We didn't have any issues jailbreaking, but for those experiencing an "error establishing a database connection," you can find a fix here.

And that's all folks! You can than head over to Cydia and download all your favorite tweaks and apps! Make sure to look around the forums to see how other users are modding and tweaking their idevices! Also, you can check out our Theme Browser and App Reviews page to see what's hot in Cydia right now. Let us know how it goes!

Hands-on: HTC One X - Hindustan Times

Hands-on: HTC One X - Hindustan Times

I.B.M. Aims to Sharply Simplify Corporate Data Center Technology


Corporate data centers are the slowpoke laggards of information technology. But major suppliers of hardware systems are working on new ways to speed things up.
Noah Berger for The New York Times
Steven A. Mills, I.B.M.'s senior vice president in charge of hardware and software.
Jon Simon/Feature Photo Service for IBM
The PureSystems technology, the product of a major investment put at $2 billion.
It can take up to six months, research shows, to get a new business application up and running, from buying the hardware to fine-tuning the software. An estimated 70 percent of corporate technology budgets is spent on installing, updating and maintaining current technology — keeping the digital lights on.
Although the problem has been developing for a long time, technology managers and analysts agree it is growing worse. That’s because the pace of technological change is accelerating and business users expect more services, faster. The difficulties, by all accounts, are worldwide.
“The current model is broken, it doesn’t scale,” said Sunil Bajpai, group general manager for the Center for Railway Information Systems, the technology arm of India’s state-owned railway system. “The demand for new applications and the demand for data are endless. We have to simplify.”
I.B.M. is bringing its answer to the marketplace on Wednesday — an effort that industry executives and analysts say is the most ambitious step yet to simplify and streamline data center technology. With this initiative, I.B.M. will sell bundles of server hardware and software packaged in simplified systems, with setup and maintenance automated by intelligent software. Tasks that now take days or weeks can be reduced to hours, the company claims.
The so-called expert integrated systems, known as PureSystems, are the product of a $2 billion investment in research and development and acquisitions over the last four years, I.B.M. says.
Other major suppliers — including Oracle, Hewlett-Packard, EMC, Cisco and Dell — are moving along the same path.
Without real progress in making data centers nimble and efficient, more corporate computing chores, analysts say, will be farmed out to the cloud — remote data centers managed by others, with programs delivered over the Internet. The major technology companies all have cloud offerings, but their mainstay business remains selling hardware and software to corporate customers.
Hardware suppliers like H.P., EMC and Cisco, analysts say, are getting together to sell server computers and storage and networking equipment in packages. But these companies, they say, lack the extensive software assets and expertise of Oracle, the database and business applications giant, which acquired Sun Microsystems, a maker of both hardware and software, in a $7 billion deal that was completed in 2010.
Oracle offers hardware and software packages, tailored for specific computing chores like database queries and data analytics, which carry the branding prefix “exa,” as in Exadata and Exalytics.
I.B.M. is taking a similar approach, but going further in terms of the variety of software options offered, including systems that are ready to run Web applications on top of I.B.M.’s Websphere middleware, according to John R. Rymer, an analyst at Forrester Research.
The I.B.M. options include four operating system environments — Linux running on either Intel microprocessors or I.B.M.’s Power chips, I.B.M’s AIX and Microsoft’s Windows. And there are four choices of load-juggling, virtualization software including VMware (a unit of EMC), Red Hat’s KVM, Microsoft’s Hyper-V and I.B.M.’s PowerV.
“It’s not an I.B.M. proprietary design — this is a multivendor offering,” said Steven A. Mills, I.B.M.’s senior vice president in charge of hardware and software.
The hardware is a bundle of I.B.M. processing, storage and networking, and it includes systems management software that has been under development for years. The company says the management software allows for automated installation and updates of programs, and monitoring of the performance of all the hardware and software — operating systems, virtualization programs, databases, middleware and applications.
Software applications suppliers, who have been briefed on I.B.M.’s plans, are enthusiastic about the automated tools to peer into all the layers of software and hardware. Infor, the third-largest maker of business applications software, after SAP and Oracle, fields about a million customer-support calls and online inquires a year.
Only about 3 percent of the customer problems are directly attributable to issues with Infor applications, said Charles Phillips, Infor’s chief executive. Typically, Mr. Phillips said, an Infor application will begin performing poorly because of changes elsewhere in a computer system, like an operating system patch or the addition of storage disks.
“But we always get the first call because the application is what users see,” he said. “So we end up having to diagnose the entire stack.” The automated tools in the I.B.M. systems, he added, could cut Infor’s support costs.
Larry Augustin, chief executive of SugarCRM, a supplier of Web-based customer relationship management software, said the automated installation and configuration software in the I.B.M. systems could be a big help. For customers who want to run SugarCRM from their own servers, Mr. Augustin said, “We won’t have to spend as much time getting them up and running.” He added, “This is going in exactly the right direction.”
The new I.B.M. systems start at $160,000 and become generally available in June. How well they will do in the marketplace is uncertain, but analysts say they represent a shift toward simplifying corporate technology that seems inevitable.
“Enterprise technology is really struggling to keep up with the demands of businesses that have to move faster and faster,” said Matthew Eastwood, an analyst at IDC. “This is the next step that needs to take place in data centers.”