Real Bollywood News

Undeniably attractive and super skinny, Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Arc is ready for a career as a runway model.
This fashionable specimen measures a mere 0.46 inches thick at its thinnest point, the middle of the concave arc that runs vertically down the back of the phone. It manages to make my iPhone 3GS look almost obese in comparison.
Slimness is a virtue in devices, as it reduces that embarrassing Visible Phone Line in your pocket. But premium phones usually have a bit of heft to them, and in that respect, the Xperia Arc feels a little too thin. Flimsy, even. At 4.13 ounces, it’s incredibly lightweight, thanks mostly to the removable plastic rear cover that gives access to the battery, SIM card and SD memory card.
Fragile as it seems, it’s a solid, well-performing Gingerbread phone with an excellent camera and a beautiful screen. There are some problems with the software, and a few head-scratchers in the design, but overall, I can recommend it. The phone is scheduled to arrive in the United States this summer, most likely on AT&T or T-Mobile networks.
The design generates plenty of interest during bourgeois dinner parties when it’s time for the ubiquitous “pull out your iPhone” ceremony after you run out of HBO shows to talk about. The Xperia Arc isn’t an iPhone, and its looks are definitely eye-catching.
Cool tooling aside, the backlit 4.2-inch “reality display” is reason alone to consider the Xperia Arc. The LED touchscreen is powered by Sony’s mobile Bravia engine, a descendant of what the company uses in its HDTVs. It has excellent color reproduction and brightness, even during sunny days.
The iPhone 4’s screen has better resolution — 960 x 640 pixels compared to the Xperia’s 854 x 480 pixels — and is better overall, but the Xperia Arc screen is lovely to behold. When you need a bigger screen for gaming or watching movies, the Xperia Arc has enough power to drive an HDTV using the HDMI connector that Sony Ericsson supplies with the phone.
The camera was probably my favorite feature. The phone sports a Sony Exmor R sensor for its camera and a bright, f/2.4 lens. The images it produces are sharp, fairly noise-free and have great color and contrast. Overall, it takes some of the best photos I’ve seen from a mobile phone.

Grab your coats: Hell has just frozen over. Or rather, Photoshop has come to the Mac App Store. For $80, you can now download Photoshop Elements 9 from the App Store.
Ever since the Mac Store was announced, there have been two standout examples of apps that would “never” be sold through Apple’s strictly-controlled channel. The first is Microsoft’s Office suite. The second was Photoshop. The reasons? Price and compatibility.
The thinking goes that Adobe and Microsoft wouldn’t want to give 30% of the revenue of their flagship products to Apple. The second, and more sensible reason is that these monster applications would never be accepted into the Store thanks to their deep and “illegal” ties into OS X.
Elements isn’t the full Photoshop, to be sure, and is clearly compatible with Apple’s rules (either that or Apple has bent them). More interesting is the price. The full Elements 9 costs $100, making the App Store version cheaper. It is missing the Adobe Elements Organizer, but as Elements is designed to complement apps like iPhoto, this is probably a good thing.
Elements is like a power editor for your snaps. You can tweak the basics, but the gimmick is that you get to use Adobe’s fancy-pants image processing features. You can paint out mistakes with a brush that uses Content Aware Fill to fill in the gaps. You can make panoramas. You can even switch in people from various group shots to get one picture with everyone looking good.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 is available now for $80, the same price as Apple’s Aperture.

Last, and probably least, in today’s deluge of new Apple products is the Thunderbolt Display, a new 2560 x 1440 LED monitor with Thunderbolt connectivity. The 27-inch screen hooks up to MacBooks, just like the existing Cinema Display, but the addition of the speedy Thunderbolt I/O, it almost turns into an iMac.
The monitor has three cables. One plugs into the power socket on the wall, one sends power to your MacBook’s MagSafe port, and the third hooks into the mini DisplayPort/Thunderbolt port.
This last cable not only carries the video from the MacBook, it also works the other way, giving the Mac access to the display’s three USB ports, single FireWire 800 port, Ethernet port and another Thunderbolt port, along with connections to the screen’s HD webcam and speakers.
The single Thunderbolt port will let you daisy-chain other peripherals, just like you could with old FireWire gear. Thus, the monitor can stay on the desk, hooked up to an embarrassment of add-ons, and with the connection of a single cable your lightweight MacBook Air will be transformed into a multi-talented workstation.
The Thunderbolt Display can be ordered now, for delivery in six to eight weeks. It costs $1,000.

Samsung plans a U.S. release for the sequel to its most successful Android smartphone by the end of the summer, according to a senior executive of the company.
“We expect to release the Galaxy S2 in the U.S. market sometime in August,” said Shin Jong-kyun, Samsung president of mobile business and digital imaging, in a briefing with reporters in South Korea on Wednesday. The story was first reported by Yonhap News.
The phone was initially released in South Korea — Samsung’s global headquarters — in April, subsequently rolling out to Europe and southern Asian countries in the months that followed.
The release of the Galaxy S2 comes at a particularly contentious time for Samsung, one of the largest manufacturers of Android-powered smartphones. The company is embroiled in a bitter patent dispute with Apple, the latter claiming Samsung’s Galaxy Tab and Galaxy S products were utter rip-offs of Apple’s iPad and iPhone devices.
“We love competition, but we want people to invent their own stuff, and we are going to make sure we defend our intellectual property,” Apple COO Tim Cook said on the company’s earnings report conference call on Tuesday.
Samsung’s first Galaxy smartphone model — which admittedly looks a lot like the first iPhone — was hugely successful for the company. In its first six months after release, Samsung sold 10 million Galaxy S smartphones worldwide. Total sales of the Galaxy S2 from the countries it has already been released in amount to approximately 3 million devices thus far.
Considering the patent dispute with Apple, Samsung’s sales figures beg for comparison to the iPhone’s success. Apple reported record sales of its iPhone devices in its earnings report on Tuesday, with 20 million iPhones sold in a period of only three months.
But Shin has the company’s sights set high. Samsung is heavily promoting its latest tablet offering, the Galaxy Tab 10.1. And Shin expects the company to sell over 60 million smartphones by the end of this year.
Whether that number is realistic or not remains to be seen. If customers love the phone as much as our sister site Wired.co.uk does, Shin’s expectations may not be far off base.

Apple’s Q3 results hugely outpaced analysts’ estimates. The company earned $28.57 billion in total revenue, $7.31 billion of which was net profit. It shipped 20.3 million iPhones and 9.25 million iPads, in addition to 3.95 million Macs and 7.54 million iPods.
If those statistics aren’t staggering enough, here are a few more comparisons to help put things in perspective.

• The $6 billion in revenue from Apple’s iPad sales, up a whopping 183 percent year-over-over, now exceeds Dell’s consumer PC business. Twice.
• Apple’s $358 billion market value now totals more than the former Microsoft-Intel “monopoly” combined.
• Exxon Mobil, the largest publicly traded company in the world, is less than 20 percent larger in market value than Apple.
• Apple’s cash and marketable securities now totals over $76 billion. That sum in $1 bills would fill Apple’s new 500,000 square foot data center to a depth a six feet and weigh 83,000 tons.
• Using only this quarter’s net profit, Apple could empty out the $1 billion in unused dollar coins sitting in U.S. vaults more than seven times over. The resulting sea of golden Sacagaweas would weigh over 130 million pounds, or about 65,250 cows.

Had enough? Of course not, so come up with your own fun facts with the Reddit widget below.

The next year in tech will be all about building connections between PC and post-PC devices, whether phones, tablets, game consoles, e-readers or next-gen SmartRoombas. They’ll be connections without cords, built on shared interfaces, proximity-based communication, and storage, syncing and computing infrastructure increasingly shifted to the cloud.

That’s what Tuesday’s release of OS X Lion is all about: building on the App Store and iCloud. That’s what Microsoft’s forthcoming Windows 8 is all about: building on unified IDs on everything from Windows Phone 7 to Office to Xbox and Skype.
And I’m going to convince you that this is even what Google+ is really all about. You can see this already in Google+’s mobile apps for Android and iOS; we’ll see it more as Google continues to integrate more of its web properties into the social network.
The company-wide rollout of “+” is Google’s play for the whole stack — half Trojan horse and half battering ram.
Identity and the Social Layer
If you’re thinking of Google+ solely in terms of social networking and comparing it head-to-head with Facebook or Twitter alone, you’re making a mistake.
We’ve long passed the Friendster moment of making and browsing stand-alone databases of profile pages. Social networks don’t work that way any more, just as PCs aren’t stuck with sorting and saving local files in folders.
Today, social networks maintain your identity across a wide range of cloud-based services spanning multiple devices. Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Twitter aren’t just providing you with the digital equivalent of your mailing address, but also your driver’s license, passport, car keys and credit cards.
At O’Reilly Radar, Edd Dumbill offers a helpful anatomy of social networks’ new functions:

• Identity — authenticating you as a user, and storing information about you
• Sharing — access rights over content
• Notification — informing users of changes to content or contacts’ content
• Annotation — commenting on content
• Communication — direct interaction among members of the system

Dumbill calls this “the social backbone of the web.” It’s already a much bigger part of the tech ecosystem than any particular portal you may log into and stare at for part of the day reading status updates.
When Google’s chairman and ex-CEO Eric Schmidt talks about Facebook’s achievement, he almost never uses the word social. Instead, he talks about identity:

Fundamentally, what Facebook has done is built a way for you to figure out who people are. That system is missing in the internet as a whole. Google should have worked on this earlier. We now have a product called Google+, which has been in development for more than a year and a half, which is a partial answer to that…
I think that’s the area where I would have put more resources, developing these identity services and ranking systems that go along with that. That would have made a big difference for the internet as a whole.

Facebook, the biggest social network, is already using its identity machine to power login credentials for cloud-backed client apps like Spotify, comment threads for web sites like Gawker Media, personalized search for Bing and integrated contact management for Windows Phone 7. Twitter plays a similar role with a huge ecosystem of sites and applications, and increasingly inside Apple’s iOS.
At a minimum, Google+ will do the same for Google’s webapps, browsers and operating systems — and potentially many more third-party partners who want to take advantage of that sheer number of accounts. Google’s chief advantage is that unlike Facebook, it has direct access to its own giant mobile computing platform: Android.
For Schmidt, mobile computing, too, is about identity and personalization, not just communication:

Mobile devices… are inherently better [than PCs]. They’re more personal; with your permission, they know who you are [and] they can make suggestions for you.

Facebook may know who you are, but it doesn’t have Google’s or Apple’s vertical control of the computing platform on desktop or mobile. Instead, it has a trusted, longtime partner and investor who does: Microsoft.
Google’s Strategy: The Best Defense Is A Good Offense
This is why we can’t just look at these social networks head-to-head to understand what they are or what’s going to happen next. To borrow Google+’s guiding metaphor, we have to look at their extended circles. And the most important intersection of Google’s and Facebook’s extended circles is Microsoft.

I have an odd-shaped head and funny-shaped ears. This doesn’t usually cause me too many problems in the technology sphere, apart from headphones of course.
Being a runner, I’m always on the lookout for in-ear headphones I can use when I’m running. Although my wife seems to be able to use the default Apple ear-buds without a problem, anything but the snuggest of fit simply falls out for me.
The last few weeks I’ve been giving the Radiopaq Sports Flex headphones out and I think I may have found my answer. Firstly they have a soft plastic extension that fits round the back of your ears to avoid the cable pulling on the headphone buds themselves. They also have an extension cable that can be adjusted to just he right length to suite the position of your iPod. Finally they have a skip and pause button built into the cable.
Now, these things alone aren’t all that revolutionary I know. However, combine these with the sensible choice of materials used and build quality and you have a nice solution to taking music with you while you run. Even my strange shaped ears seem to have met their match, with the Flex headphones staying in place for the majority of my 10K runs.
Keen to follow up this success I have also been giving the Radiopaq Duo street headphones a try. These are essentially a more portable version of the sort of headset you might wear at home to listen to music. Other street headphones I’ve tried have been much to tight to be comfortable for long periods (my big head strikes again), but the Duo has enough adjust-ability built in to accommodate even me.
Perhaps the bottom line with both these headphones is deliver great sound. I know that is the primary concern for an audiophile product. But for me, I’m just happy to find something that lets me join the rest of the world taking their music out and about.

Recently, I was sent a copy of Wreck This App to check out on my iPad. It is an interactive adaptation of Keri Smith’s bestselling book Wreck This Journal. Published in 2007, Wreck This Journal has sold more than 400,000 copies and is one of the bestselling titles in the history of Perigee Books. An interactive journal that encourages creativity through destruction—everything from painting and scribbling to dripping and tearing—Wreck This Journal offers a variety of activities that expand the definition of creation, providing the perfect inspiration for an app.
Wreck This App replicates the format of Smith’s book with interactive tools that allow users to draw, paint, drip, and smear. The app prompts users to employ their best mess-making and destructive abilities, whether doodling on top of an imported self-portrait or tapping “holes” on the screen. The resulting creations can be shared, with easy prompts for exporting to Facebook and Flickr.
I must admit, this app is alot of fun and it is kid appropriate. Think of it as a multiple page activity book that both you and the kids can have alot of fun!
To celebrate the release of the app for iPad and iPhone, Penguin Books has provided GeekDad with 3 codes to giveaway. Just leave a comment below an we will randomly select 3 winners on Monday, July 25th at 6:00pm CST. Include your email in your commenting profile, or we won’t be able to find you if you win!