Xpertfeed

Android One hits the UK with Karbonn Sparkle V launch Summary: The UK has its first official Android One launch with a Karbonn device, despite Google's lack of interest in bringing the platform to developed markets. n The UK has become the latest country to get Android One handsets. The Android One-powered Sparkle V will be one of four handsets by Indian manufacturer Karbonn to launch on Amazon today. Karbonn is hoping the Android One device will appeal to price-sensitive consumers and those making the move from feature phone to smartphone. The Karbonn Sparkle V will be priced at £129, or £99 as part of a Black Friday promotion on Amazon, pitching it against stiff competition from the likes of the Moto G, Microsoft's Lumia 635, and a range of other Android devices from smaller makers. The Android One platform,  launched in September  in India, sees Google taking the reins of both handsets' hardware and software. With Android One, Go...

Getting a digital detox, the Swiss way: One app shows you how to dodge smartphone addiction Summary:  If you're worried you're getting a little too attached to your smartphone, one telco is offering its customers an app for switching off. Every since the BlackBerry became the exec's status symbol of choice, smartphone addiction has started to take hold among mobile users. Can't stop checking your messages? Real life events like going to the cinema or taking your partner to dinner getting in the way of reading your emails? Then the solution to your problem could well be at hand, in the form of a digital detox that offers you time out from the online world. How do you do that? With an app, of course. The higher your My Time score the better, as it shows more focused, less frequent use of your phone. Your score is boosted, for example, if you use the phone for a concentrated period of time. Reading or talking on your phone for half an hour ranks as highly ...

Microsoft says Storage service performance update brought Azure down Summary:  Microsoft officials are attributing a nearly 11-hour Azure outage across a large part of the world earlier this week to a performance update the company made to its Storage services. The nearly 11-hour outage that hit Microsoft Azure customers earlier this week was due to a performance update Microsoft made to Azure storage services, according to company officials. Microsoft Azure Corporate Vice President Jason Zander acknowledged the problem and explained the root cause in a November 19 blog post . On the evening (US Pacific Time) of November 18, customers across the US, Europe and parts of Asia  experienced problems with various Azure services . The issue also affected Xbox Live and MSN.com — parts of which rely on Azure — as well as Visual Studio Online and Search. Further exacerbating the problem was the fact that the Service Health Dashboard and Azure Management Portal b...

Microsoft to open source more of .NET, and bring it to Linux, Mac OS Summary:  Microsoft is porting its server-side .NET stack to Linux and Mac OS X, and is making more of that stack available as open source. Microsoft is planning to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and to take that open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X, alongside Windows.  Microsoft officials announced the company's latest .NET programming-model plans on the opening day of the Connect(); developer-focused event on November 12. In April 2014, Microsoft announced plans to open source a number of its developer technologies, including ASP.NET, the Roslyn .NET compiler platform, the .NET Micro Framework, .NET Rx and the VB and C# programming languages. Microsoft officials said they planned to make these technologies available via a newly created .Net Foundation. Today, the company is adding more pieces of .NET to its open-source list under the MIT open-source ...

Android Lollipop rollout delayed due to battery drain bug Summary:  Android fans will have to wait another week to get their hands on Android 5.0 as Google fixes a bug that was causing severe battery drain. In news that will come as a mixed blessing for Android fans, the rollout of Lollipop has been put on hold due to bugs that were causing severe battery drain. If you were wondering why your Nexus or Google Play Edition phone hadn't received   an over the air (OTA) update delivering Android 5.0 , the answer appears to be that Google is ironing out some serious bugs that would have made it unwelcome in the first place. The good news is that the issues are now fixed. The bad news for Android users is that Google has pushed the Lollipop rollout back as a consequence, from its originally scheduled date of November 3 to November 12. News of the delay arrived yesterday via Artem Russakovskii, founder of Android Police.  According to Russakovskii , the first OT...

NetApp launches cloud version of its ONTAP operating system Summary:  NetApp will offer its popular storage operating system on top of Amazon Web Services as well as under a licensing model. The aim: Make moving data from public to private clouds easier. NetApp on Tuesday launched a cloud-based version of its ONTAP storage operating system as the headliner of a series of offerings designed to simplify hybrid deployments. With the move, NetApp is setting itself up to be more of a neutral software-provider as data shuttles between enterprise data center and the public cloud. The news, announced at NetApp's Insight conference in Las Vegas, gives customers of the storage vendor two ways to consume ONTAP---as a service on top of Amazon Web Services infrastructure for $5 an hour or as a license. George Kurian, executive vice president of product operations at NetApp argued that current hybrid cloud deployments have been hampered by data silos that don't interoperate we...

Adapter kit allows Kinect for Xbox One sensors to work with Windows 8 Summary:  Microsoft has a $49 adapter kit that will allow Xbox One sensors to work with Windows 8 and 8.1 PCs and tablets. Microsoft is making available a $49 adapter kit that will allow Kinect for Xbox One sensors available for use with Windows 8/8.1 PCs and tablets. Microsoft also is enabling developers to make their Kinect apps available in the Windows Store for the first time, officials said on October 22. The first of those commercially available apps are available today, including Nayi Disha, a series of interactive apps for early childhood education; YAKiT, a 2D/3D character design app; and Microsoft's own 3D Builder, which allows users to scan people or objects and create a 3D print of that model. The new Kinect Adapter for Windows requires a USB 3.0 port and won't work with the Kinect sensor for Xbox 360. It is available for purchase in more than three dozen countries starting...

Best business phones? Android, iOS, Windows Phone, BlackBerry Summary : There are some outstanding smartphones available for the business user and in this article we identify the best ones running iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and BlackBerry. There are a few common features across smartphone operating systems that business users typically look for in a device. These include long battery life, solid hardware design, reliability, fast performance, ample storage capacity, good communications performance, and availability of key applications. Each major smartphone platform offers several good candidates for the business user, but in this list we'll take a closer look at what I think is the top phone from each OS. They are arranged in order of current smartphone market share, not necessarily in order of my own personal preference. Android 4.4: Samsung Galaxy Note 4 The Samsung Galaxy Note 4 is starting to ship to consumers in...

The new digital workplace: How enterprises are preparing for the future of work Summary:  As innovation in computing devices, apps, and potent new techniques for applying them proliferate in the consumer world, companies are struggling to close the gap. That the average employee today has better information technology at home than at work has become a standard refrain in discussions of IT modernization. The consumer world of bleeding-edge smart mobile devices, jam-packed app stores, wearables of every description, a constellation of game-changing sharing economy services  ala  Uber and Airbnb -- even the rise of 3D printing -- has decidedly made the typical enterprise look like a rather staid "slow follower" of technology trends. Now, however, a confluence of trends is providing impetus for organizations to become much more digital than they have until recently. One key reason: The growing dominance of millennial workers as a share of the workfo...