Battery myths !!

5 battery myths that you should be aware of 

Maybe they are not complete myths but still I believe that these are myths.

1. You shouldn't charge your device overnight : Now modern devices today are able to protect themselves from overcharging or overheating for the most part but here is the another part to this myths ideally you want to extend the battery life of your device to the maximum, you don't wanna charge your device to 100 percent nor drain the battery to zero percent this is because doing so will shorten the life of your battery. Now do I do it ? No I have life I just charge it and just don't worry about it, it's really not that big of a deal unless you really want to use this battery or the device for about 4-5 years otherwise you'll never have a problem.
2. Don't use you device while it's charging:  This myth is really been perpetuated by reports of phones blowing up in someone's hand or face while they were using it or charging for the same time. Although this can happen it is by the the exception not the rule because you just charging it and talking or using it. It is recommend that you always use the branded batteries in your device.
3. You shouldn't use third party chargers: Well you should know that there are some great quality even reliable 3rd party chargers out there but it is generally accepted that the 3rd party will not charge as well or as fast as the proprietary chargers directly from the phones manufacturers. you also wanna be careful that the charging capacity of the charger is consistent with the needs of your phone. Sometimes there could be a mismatch there and it could lead to problems. The other issue with some 3rd party chargers is the quality issue you can have a wire that's frayed or frays very easily and now you have a whole fire hazard, so you wanna be careful with that just do your basic diligence check and reviews, do a research and you could find a very good quality 3rd party charger. 
4. It won't hurt the device to leave it in a car or exposed to elements: Alright seems painfully obvious but clearly a issue to some people, you do not wanna leave your device in a car exposed to extreme temperatures whether it's extreme cold or extreme hot  obviously you don't want any rain or even condensation to get in the device because over time that may short out the electronics in the phone and you wanna be careful with that. At least if you gonna keep your device in the car in a very very hot sunny day keep it under the seat or under the covered where it is not exposed to the sun otherwise it will not survive it.
5. You have to drain your battery into zero percent if you can charge it again:  Well it seems that this myth comes from rechargeable batteries (AA,AAA) , well those really have to be drained before you can recharge them again doing otherwise will lessen the capacity of that battery's charge but batteries have evolved that is not a issue anymore you most certainly do not need to need to drain your battery to zero percent before you charge it again on the contrary you want to avoid draining to zero percent as much as reasonably possible. 

The Fall of Nokia

The end of a legacy 

If you grown up in, or lived through the 90s you must have heard the name "Nokia". It is a universal name when you think about cell phones, essentially for mobile telephony, the first name that came to anyone's mind was Nokia. With the Microsoft launch of the Lumia phones, Essentially, the end of Nokia as a smartphone company, as a Mobile manufacturer has officially come about.

Nokia welcome screen

Nokia was not always an electronic manufacturer. Back in the year 1865 Nokia started as a small paper mill. They grew in business and started the second mill around the town of Nokia. The name "Nokia" comes from the river: NokianVirta, which is in Finland. So, paper was not essentially Nokia's style and they started working with rubber, electricity and cables and they got large government orders and in the year 1960 is when the company decided to get into electronics. Like any other corporation in the world (like Garmin) Nokia started working with the military in year from 1969- 1979 Manufactured and developed a lot of electronics for military use, for use by govts. Which is what made the company bigger and stronger to reach what it could do in the future. In 1979 Nokia took it's first steps in telephony by creating MOBIRAOY  a joint venture with Finnish television maker "SALORA" . They also created Nordic mobile telephone services, which was later called NMT. It was the first telephony company service which was going to be wireless. In the 1970-80 Nokia launched a device called the Sanomalaitejarjestelma which was essentially a message based communication device. It was for sending messages. This was used by the Finnish military and they used this to send encrypted text messages between one and other, this later on transferred  into something that we use on a day to day basis called the short messaging service or SMS. Nokia also launched the first car phone called the MOBIRA SENATOR. It was the first wireless communication device that was ever installed on a vehicle. In 1987 the MOBIRA CITY MAN became the first portable cell phone from Nokia which could be carried around on person. It was lightweight roughly 800gms for the time and it was relatively cheap (sarcasm) costing about 6000 USD at the time for a device that could make calls while on the go was an innovation, was a revolution and this device was one of the first to do that. For all those who really read into politics in that day Mikhail Gorbachev was found using this device and the phone was nicknamed the GORBA in Finland because basically the person who disassembled the USSR was found using it. From mobility in the 80s Nokia decided to get into personal computing and they designed their first device called the MikroMikko, they were designed to be personal computers. This division was later sold to Fujitsu who converted it into their laptop version, which you still can buy in certain markets. Nokia tried to make laptops again with the Nokia Booklet 3G in 2009 and this attempt was as futile as the first and they dropped making laptops after this one.

The iconic Nokia 3310

    In-fact the first device used to make a satellite call in 1984 was a Nokia device. The world's first GSM call was made in 1991 in Helsinki over a Nokia supplied network by the prime minister of Finland. who can forget the classic Nokia tune which was made to become the brand image for the company. First introduced in the 1990s in Nokia 2100 phones. Nokia also popularized mobile phone photography at one point of time it was the largest camera supplier to the world because of the camera in it's mobile phones, which were being used by everyone. So, at one point of time Nokia was the largest vendor of cameras. Nokia has also been a trend setter so to speak, The Nokia 1100 was the highest selling mobile phone ever made over 250 million units of the device were sold which set a benchmark for many devices to come. At the peek of it's existence in 2008 Nokia sold over 475 million handsets which is a record yet undefeated.  The Nokia 3310 was an iconic phone it was launched in September 12 2000, it was one of the most durable phones that was ever made for a consumer. This phone would fall and break apart into pieces, but you could basically put it back together and start using it again. Infact even today after the invent of several smartphones, several metal made phones the Nokia 3310 is believed to be one of the most robust phones. It is essentially a cult centre and has become a cult favorite where people makes internet memes and lots of jokes around the Nokia 3310 that it would survive a tsunami etc but, the Nokia 3310 has become an icon and will remain an icon for the generation who has seen it. The Nokia 1011 was the first phone, which was a mass produced phone for general markets after it's army and military appliances. Nokia came into the market with it's first consumer friendly device phone it was the 1011. The memory could hold 99 phone number at the time and it sold for a whopping 1600 USD. The design of the device was really iconic and a lot of manufacturers I'm guessing from China copied the design and made pencil boxes for kids that looked like the phone. In 2002 the Nokia 3510 was the first phone that could process data over GPRS  that basically led to the use of data over mobile networks.The revolution that we have today with 3G and 4G networks, the 3510 was on of the first devices to do GPRS over wireless network. In 2007 Nokia acquired a Chicago based mapping company NavteQ, they were the largest manufacturers for navigation data for the automobile industry. Nokia acquired this and later made this into what we know today as HERE maps. It is one of the largest mapping technologies that is available in the market today, they sell their data to a lot of companies including Garmin, Amazon.com , BMW for their navigation equipment.Despite it's sale to Microsoft as a smartphone company. Nokia retains it's Here maps business and will continue working on it and supplying several independent apps for ios, Android as well as microsoft phones or Windows based phones as Here maps as an independent application which is known to be loved by users however, the interface was not appreciable on ios and android and Nokia is working on redesigning their eco-systems. Nokia networks which is a wholly owned subsidiary of the company will also stay back with the company. It's a multinational data network and telecommunications equipment company and provide costumer care support, fixed mobile convergence, hosting, iPTV, mobile TV WCDMA frequencies and a lot more to governments, railways and other big institutions. Anyone and everyone who follows Nokia, is also aware of the MeeGO operating system, when Nokia announced that Microsoft will be acquiring Nokia the whole MeeGo division quit and formed "Jolla". Which recently launched Jolla phones in India as a starting stage this OS is supposed to be the next promising OS that is going to change around the about the market strength from Android, iOS and Windows phone. Let's see what the future holds. But Jolla is an independent company. Another company that's a lot of people are with is Vertu. Vertu is a luxury, sort of, division of Nokia where they would manufacture luxury phones based on symbian. Recently the company shifted it's focus from making Symbian phones to Android Smartphones continuing what they used to do with luxury devices. This division also remains independent and has not been acquired by Microsoft.
Well whatever the future of Nokia maybe, this 10 year agreement between Microsoft and Nokia essentially marks the end of Nokia as a brand that used to manufacture phones. Whether after Nokia  after 10 years Nokia re-tries the mobile market, whether it attempts to remake phones is yet unknown. But what happens in the next 10 years will essentially decide what the resultant of Nokia phones is going to be. Will Microsoft be able to continue Lumia phones, and sell them ? Because they have been cold since their launch/inception of windows phone, they have not been very well appreciated in the market. Will Nokia get to see the future again ? 

USB OTG

USB ON THE GO 

Geeks always want more and more from their devices. Even their device has limited features they still want more. USB OTG is another thing which is made for geeks. 

 OTG allows you to attach several USB peripherals into your device through micro USB to full size USB adopter. The basic idea is to use more input devices than just touchscreen and limited on board storage. Suppose you are on a tight budget and you are thinking to buy a smartphone with non expandable storage then a OTG can save you couple of bucks, just plug in a regular USB thumb drive and store whatever you want in it. You can use it right away anywhere. So by this way you can carry many USB drives according to your file needs. Now let me tell a more spectacular story, there are couple of devices in the market that allows you to connect a external hard drive into your smartphone
that makes it so astonishing. Which enables you to use high amount of data anytime. Having OTG support means that you are more secure as you can store your confidential/sensitive data material into a external USB stick which prevents from misuse of it. You can also backup your entire phone apps and settings through Titanium backup (device must be rooted) and store the image file into a USB stick to prevent data corruption or data loss.
  OTG is not a new thing, it's specification was first used in late 2001. But they became more popular with the smartphone era, Nokia's N8, C6-01, C7, Oro, E6, E7, X7, 603, 701 and 808 Pureview were one of the first generation devices to have this functionality in their device. Later Blackberry also came up with this on their Blackberry 10.2 OS. In android it was first introduced with the Honeycomb 3.0 OS. later all the newer versions got this functionality. An adopter is required to attach USB peripherals to the devices.

  The story is not just limited to storage options (USB and hard drives) there are different aspects as well. Using physical keyboard and mouse with OTG cable is also possible. I know using a mouse and keyboard as input devices with smartphones is not an intelligent thing. But think about the tablets.Everyone admits the fact that they like to type on physical keyboards rather than on touch screen. In tablets attaching keyboard and mouse gives you more precision on work and offers better reliability. It creates a desktop like experience on the tablet. Gaming with joysticks is also possible with smartphones, you can connect various gamepads to the devices through OTG cable. A regular Xbox 360 joystick suits the best to most of the devices although you can connect PlayStation joystick and others also. Joysticks provide better control than ordinary touchscreen based control. It's just like a car with a automatic gearbox and a car with a manual gearbox, the user will always have more precision with manual gear box. Similarly Joysticks gives you more clicky, tactile feel over touchscreen. Most of the high end games are compatible with joysticks and works at their best with them. 
Hence having a OTG functionality over your device is a big plus point to the user. More functionality makes the devices more cooler.     

Windows phone, The lightweight operating system.

Windows phone, the new emerging competitor

 

All though windows phone was present from the 2005. But this got changed with their modern live tile UI. Personally I still don't like windows phone but things are changing at a good pace. 

Let's begin with the main reason why windows phone os still lacks in the competition with the leading operating systems. 

App support- Windows phone store is very far behind from giants like android and ios. Yeah they are emerging at a very good pace but still I don't think that they will catch up with them.

Lack of openness - Customization in windows phone is very limited to folders and tile size arrangement but in operating systems like android you are getting a tons of options like widgets, scrolling animations, icon packs, UI customization.

Side loading of apps- Windows phone doesn't have this functionality because of some security reasons. But this feature was present on android since the day one. 

But if we consider the non- geek people who just like to use their phones as day to day driver not as a power house or an arsenal of features then windows phones are very well. Due to the openness of  android, it is more prone to bugs and security attacks where as simplicity in windows phone makes it much safer and efficient to use. Windows phone is just like the next generation of blackberry, as they have less features but they are so secure and have a class in them. The biggest advantage of having a windows phone is that you are assured to get updates for at least 2 years from Microsoft. But in android you're always doubtful about the assurance of future updates until you got a nexus device. But Microsoft makes sure that every windows phone user gets their latest version of OS. Microsoft always makes sure that even their low end devices ( With 512mb RAM) will get the latest update. Unlike their desktop version of operating system windows phone is one of the most securest platform.

Nokia has been the pioneer of windows phone. Couple of months ago Microsoft made their Windows phone free of charge, meaning that no manufacturer will be charged for installing windows phone os on their devices . This decision was made because of the falling sales of windows phone in the global market. So manufactures like Micromax, lava brought some windows phones to the market but they failed very poorly that now they are thinking to discontinue their windows project. So here the question comes why a user should buy a windows phone ? 

Well everyone have their different tastes and choices so windows phone is for those particular type of person who uses their phone for day to day use or mediocre usage. Windows is perfect for photography lovers and music lovers. The lumia series of windows phone offers phones for every budget. Windows phone is also suitable for the people who uses a lot of Microsoft services, although alternatives are still available in android.