We conclude our list of what’s interesting on the horizon, and sure to come out on most major systems this year. Coming up next: Games that we hope will be released in 2012, and PS Vita Release titles.

Research firm IDC has released its updated data on mobile phone sales, which indicates diminished growth of feature phone sales and an increase of smartphone sales. The firm reached this conclusion by comparing sales data from the 4th quarter of 2010 and 2011. As a result of this shift in consumer trend, Apple has jumped one place from being fourth in the mobile phone market, to become third largest mobile phone vendor.

Image credit: ars technica

Nokia still rules the roost, but saw a dip in its booty for the year by 8.2%. At number two spot is Samsung, which saw a jump of little under 21% on the back of its smartphone and feature phone sales combined. The most impressive of the lot is Apple with unit sales jumping by 128% based on the sales on just one model of smartphone. LG lost significantly last year, as the company experienced a drop of 42% in units sold throughout the year. Chinese budget smartphone vendor ZTE and other vendors saw an increase of 8.9% and 6.3% respectively. The one company that is noticeable by its absence is RIM, which could not secure a spot on the list. For more juicy numbers, head on to the source by following the source links.

Sources: ars technical, IDC

In what looks like another desperate move by Research in Motion, the company’s VP of developer relations Alec Saunders has vowed to give away the tablet to prospective app developers. The developers need to sign-up and deliver an app for the BlackBerry’s BB AppWorld by the 13th of February to qualify for a free PlayBook.

So, on one hand the company is keen on clearing its stocks on PlayBook by selling them at a bargain, and on the other hand they are encouraging— some might say bribing— developers to create apps for their platform. Only time will tell if this strategy will work for an ailing company that once a prominent player in the market.

Source: SlashGear

This is an extremely helpful software for those who have various bandwidth hogging applications running on their PCs. If you would like to keep an eye on the bandwidth being consumed, and keep your usage down to a monthly quota, that is where NetLimiter saves you from all the hassles.

NetLimiter helps restrict or limit the bandwidth usage for certain applications and users can set this limit so that the most important one has the highest priority. It has a very simple interface, users can easily track the bandwidth been shared by different applications and then apply the required limitations. This is a great way to manage your broadband connection.

|Official Website|

Apple’s iMovie is not the only feature-rich video editing application available on the iPad as recently the famous video editing software Avid has launched its new version for Apple’s tablet. 

This app brings you all the professional video editing tools from Avid on your iPad for just $4.99. It allows users to access media stored on the device or import it using Apple’s Camera Connection Kit. It also lets users combine these videos using 3D animations, transitions, titles and soundtracks. It has a storyboard along with a ‘Precision Trimmer’ tool for much precise video trimming. Avid Studio for iPad supports picture-in-picture and users can also add titles, subtitles and credits with much ease.

Once completed users can directly upload these videos to YouTube or Facebook, share them via email or export them to the PC version of Avid Studio for further editing.

Link 

Microsoft is warning users against rival Google’s new data policy. The technology giant slammed Google with full-page news paper ads, stating that the recent policy changes by Google would allow the search giant to merge all the data it collects on user activity across services such as YouTube and Gmail, and help advertisers better target the customers.

The attack ads appeared in several papers including USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and New York Times. “Every data point Google collects and connects to you increases how valuable you are to an advertiser,” Microsoft stated in the ad.

Responding to Microsoft’s allegations, Google policy manager Betsy Masiello published a blog post, adding that the Microsoft ad is full of myths and users must not believe it. 

“A number of myths are being spread about Google’s approach to privacy. We just wanted to give you the facts,” Masiello writes.

In response to Microsoft’s accusations that Google sells users’ private information to advertisers, the search giant writes, “Google does not sell, trade or rent personally identifiable user information. Advertisers can run ads on Google that are matched to search keywords, or use our services to show ads based on anonymous data, such as your location or the websites you’ve visited.”

Google further clarifies that the company has not changed its privacy controls in any way. Users can edit and delete their search history; edit and delete their YouTube viewing history; use many of the Google services signed in or out; use Google Dashboard and our Ads Preferences Manager to see what data has been collected; and use data liberation efforts to remove any information they want to from  the services.

Google launched a comon privacy policy and terms of service for all of its products, last month. The new policy allows user information from Google products to be treated as a single set of data. So, if users are signed in, Google may combine information they have provided for one service with information from other services, and treat the user as a single entity across all its products.

This post was written by Swati, Editor of Buzzom.com, Asia's #1 Social Media Blog.

Google has made documents stored on the Google Docs cloud available for offline use for Android users. The way the system works is that the documents need to be marked for offline usage, and any changes made to those files by the user are automatically synched with the Google Docs server when the device is in a Wi-Fi zone.

On another change that Google has introduced to this service is improved presentation for tablet PC users that lets them download high-resolution version of the documents and navigate through them using swipes and flips on the screen. You can learn more about these features by accessing the Google Help Center for offline capabilities  and the new reading layout.

While buying a smartphone there is one thing which concerns us a lot, and that is the battery life. After all, to perform all those awesome tasks you need the device to be on, and longer it stays that way the more awesome it gets. GSMArena has been performing a series of battery tests on a number of smartphones, here are 10 of those which provide the highest amount of talktime.

Samsung has released another touch-screen, dual-SIM phone in the India market, dubbed the Champ Deluxe Duos (C3312). The phone has a 2.8-inch screen (262K QVGA), comes loaded with Smart Touchwiz user interface and a virtual QWERTY keyboard that supports Hindi.

Other notable features of the phone include Bluetooth 3.0, a 1.3MP snapper and an FM tuner. It is also bundled with software that allows Push Mail with Activesync, Facebook and Twitter access. Samsung is presently selling the Champ Deluxe Duos (C3312) for Rs. Rs 4790, which puts it at the bottom of the price range of Samsung’s dual-SIM line-up.

If you are a tablet or smartphone user, it makes sense to carry and consume newspapers and magazines digitally. Here are a few apps that serve you a magazine-like experience, with an emphasis on apps that aggregate local/Indian content. 

The Humble (and somewhat popular) Indie Bundle is now available for download on Google's Android based systems. This addition makes this games’ bundle compatible across Windows, Linux, iOS and Android.  The bundle includes Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Osmos, and EDGE, and if you decide to pay more than the average price you also get World of Goo!

Purchase of this bundle on one platform makes its available across all the other compatible platforms too. Most of these games are free of any DRM (digital rights management) system, except those that feature multiplayer may require a product key for validation. You can split the amount that you are willing to give for the bundle between the game’s developers, Humble Bundle Inc., or a charity like Child's Play Charity, or the Electronic Frontier Foundation. If this is something that has tickled your fancy you might want to head on to The Humble Bundle website  that is running a promotion for a limited time.

Following the decision of Sweden’s Supreme Court to not hear the appeal of The Pirate Bay's (TPB) previous administrators, it seems that the group is all but confirmed to cool their heels behind bars and pay a hefty fine too. A District Court in Sweden found Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, and their financial backer Carl Lundstrom, guilty of aiding copyright infringement, in 2009.

This court sentenced each of them to a year in prison, and slapped a total fine of 30 million kroner (US$4.5 million). The group appealed for a retrial on the grounds that a judge was a member of several pro-copyright organizations; but this was promptly denied by the Swedish court. In 2010 however, an appellate court reduced the prison sentences to between four and ten months each, but increased the total fine to SKR46 million (US$6.8 million). Following this, the group appealed to the country’s Supreme Court to hear their case, but this was also declined.

In stark contrast to the judiciary opinion, Peter Sunde argues that the work done by TPB should be considered for a Nobel Peace Prize as it has been “one of the most important movements in Sweden for freedom of speech, working against corruption and censorship”. The people involved with TPB project have been part of other movements such as “famous leaks projects to aiding people in the Arab Spring”.The current administrators of TPB are more confrontational in their response as make a call to “… flex your muscles, fellow pirates, and give power to us all! Build more sites! More nets! More protocols! Scream louder than ever and take it to the next level!”

Sources: TorrentFreak, ars technica

Facebook would be submitting the initial paperwork for the $5 billion IPO today, according to a latest report from the Reuters. The social network is expected to raise as much as $10 billion, which will value the company at $75 billion to $100 billion, making it one of the largest IPOs.

The $5 billion is a preliminary target and could be further boosted in the coming months, in response to investor demand. The Facebook IPO will dwarf almost any before that, including Google Inc’s $2 billion IPO, the IFR reports.

The social network has selected Morgan Stanley as the lead adviser for the IPO. Morgan Stanley had earlier lead the IPOs of Internet giants Groupon and Zynga. Other banks that would be participating in the Facebook IPO, include Goldman Sachs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Barclays Capital and JP Morgan.

Facebook’s highly-anticipated IPO would provide the company with funds needed to continue its expansion and stave off competition from other Internet majors such as Google and Twitter. Analysts state that Facebook may set its price at the low end of the valuation range to entice investors.

This post was written by Swati, Editor for Buzzom https://buzzom.com, Asia’s No 1 Social Media Blog.

Week in Social Media: Google and  Twitter censorship, @PMOIndia spoofs, and why the Indian government shouldn’t use Twitter’s censorship tool. Not when it already has the power to block offending links without any notice.

Sometimes, the medium also becomes the subject of world news, as was the case on Friday, when Twitter account posted a blog post titled the Tweets still must flow.

"Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country - while keeping it available in the rest of the world. We have also built in a way to communicate transparently to users when content is withheld, and why."

Acknowledged by many as the "the free speech wing of the free speech party", Twitter’s decision on Friday to begin country-specific censorship was a bit of a PR disaster for the platform. The white knights of free speech railed against the platform by participating in a #twitterblackout on Saturday.

When discussing the nature of censorship involved, it must be stated that Twitter already filters out and prevents offensive hashtags from trending, and has a terms of service in place which doesn’t allow child porn. It’s easy to see the logic of censorship when having to filter pro-Nazi content in France and Germany as it is law. With global ambitions, this kind of reactive censorship is one way for way Twitter to prepare itself to operate in countries where freedom of speech is not a constitutional right. 

What’s redeeming is that Twitter’s censorship mechanism is built around transparency via Chillingeffects, which is currently in place to deal with legal takedown notices for copyrighted movie and music content. The same protocol has been grafted to now deal with legal takedown requests from world governments. No country’s censorship request has actually been listed on Chillingeffects.org yet; the idea is that everyone in the world will be able to see a record of what the government wanted deleted in the first place. Another caveat is that the actual tweet will not be deleted, and will continue to be visible in countries where it hasn’t been censored. And finally, censorship will not apply to Re-Tweets, @Replies, or Quoted Tweets.

If Twitter users are in a country where a tweet has been disappeared, an alert box will show saying “Tweet withheld.” To cirvumvent this, users can switch their country in account settings to view blocked tweets. 

The tweet will be visible in countries where it was not withheld, and this essentially means that any attempts to actually censor content will only highlight issues that the governments would want suppressed in the first place. Countries that actively try to censor tweets, will essentially bait Twitter, and in time, this too is sure become a part of the news narrative, leaving a trail that many will eagerly examine and amplify.

Google redirects Blogger accounts to country-specific domains

While Twitter’s censorship story occupied headlines, Google’s also made subtle changes to its privacy policy to collect and store information across all of its services, and enable country-specific blocking of content by automatically redirecting all blogs to their local domains. Unfortunately there hasn’t been much debate around the same since it was buried in a Blogger help page until TechDows reported it yesterday. It’s not clear if Google will have the same level of transparency as Twitter in dealing with and publicly acknowledging censorship requests.

“Migrating to localized domains will allow us to continue promoting free expression and responsible publishing while providing greater flexibility in complying with valid removal requests pursuant to local law. By utilizing ccTLDs, content removals can be managed on a per country basis, which will limit their impact to the smallest number of readers. Content removed due to a specific country’s law will only be removed from the relevant ccTLD. “

The Elephant in the room

Will countries like India slip into the dark ages of the Internet? Pranesh Prakash, programme manager at CIS India feels that our internet laws are kind of like being in a Stalinist regime, where people were erased from photographs. Under s.79 of the Information Technology Act. passed in 2011, every intermediary (i.e. the website, host, telecom provider, is responsible for removing an offending piece of content from the web, and must do so within thirty six hours. What’s more, these censors can do this anonymously, since the intermediaries do not have to disclose any information or grounds on which the content was removed. CISIndia.org has published a list of around 25 websites that have been blocked, for an example of censorship in India, visit cartoonsagainstcorruption.com. The website can be viewed on Blogger, for now. 

Attack of the clones

The Indian PM’s Office has signed up for the US-based micro-blogging service @PMOIndia last week. The account doesn't carry the verified yet, but has attracted 35,000 followers within a week of being set up, and is being handled by Pankaj Pachauri, Communications Adviser to the Prime Minister's Office. While PMOIndia’s 22 tweets over the last week are boring, bureaucratic and inconsequential, the fake Twitter accounts are a lot more colourful. @pm0india and @PM0lndia, which clearly declare themselves as parody accounts have survived, while deceptive handles without a clear disclaimer that they were spoofs (@PMOlndia, pmolndia) have been deleted.

Snarkiest Tweets so far:

"A brilliant attempt to tweet silence in 140 characters," @RoflIndian.

“Now PM can speak in 1000 characters, but all except 140 will be silent.” @upendrakbisht

"Prime Minister wins Bravery Award for not following Sonia Gandhi on Twitter." @pm0india

Apple has surpassed HP in the global PC shipments, according to a recent report from market research firm Canalys. The report, which took into account desktops, laptops, netbooks, and tablet PCs, points out that Apple shipped more than 15 million iPad tablets and 5 million Mac (laptops and desktops) in the fourth quarter, taking 17 percent share of the total 120 million client PCs shipped worldwide. HP, on the other hand, shipped 12.7 percent of the total PCs in the same period.

“We’re going through the biggest shift the PC industry has seen in 20 years. It’s very difficult to grow in the classic PC market when all of the growth is coming from iPads. For example, the Netbook category, which was all the rage a few years ago, has been decimated by iPads. And that’s a big problem for HP,” Steve Brazier, CEO of Canalys told the CNET.

Brazier stated that due to the vast demand for tablets, non-conventional PC manufacturers like Motorola, HTC, RIM, and Amazon, with their tablet offerings, would find a significant place in the PC market.

“In five years, maybe less, a company like Amazon may be a bigger PC company than some of the top fives today. It’s a fundamental shift so those who are in denial are in trouble,” he added.

Another game-changer in the PC market could be the Intel Ultrabook. However, Canalys analyst Michael Kauh points out that the Ultrabook may see limited adoption through the first half of 2012, before it finally gains momentum later in the year, as Intel launches its new line of processors and begins pushing an aggressive marketing campaign to promote the product.

Temple Run from Imangi Studios is a free game availale for the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch in the App Store. This is an endless progression game, where you have stolen an idol from an ancient temple, and the monkey guards over there are chasing you! Your objective is to jump, slide, and run, collecting coins on your way, and travel as far as you can without getting caught by the monkeys, or falling off track.

The controls are extremely simple. Just swipe left or right to turn, swipe up to jump, swipe down to slide, and tilt your device to collect coins. As you collect coins on your way, you can use them to buy power ups, utilities, unlock new characters, and download wallpapers from the store within the game. There are various power ups like a Coin Magnet, Invisibility (allows you to pass through obstacles, without getting hit), and some utilities like resurrection wings, which resurrect you if you die. On your path, you will have to tackle some obstacles like trees, fire, and broken bridges, to advance in the game by jumping over them, or sliding through them.

As you go on in the game, you will unlock achievements, which increase your multiplier. What's a multiplier? Well, it multiplies each point you score (Duh!). For example, if your multiplier has reached 30x, each point you get mill be multiplied by 30! Fun, right? The game also has Game Center support, so you can challenge your friends, or be jealous of how good someone else is at the game!

Overall, I'd say that the game is a lot of fun to play, and is highly addictive! Afterall, this is the first game which I have ever rated a 5/5! You'll always be saying, "Just one more game!". So, head on over to the App Store, and download Temple Run for free!

Nokia seems all prepared to launch their fourth device in its popular Lumia series of Windows Phone based smartphones. A Dutch retail site has recently spilled the beans on the Nokia Lumia 910, revealing a bunch of details, but it is now pulled down and it redirects to the Nokia Lumia 800.

Apparently, the Nokia Lumia 910 will sport a 4.3-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display and would be powered by a 1.4GHz processor. It will also include a 12 megapixel camera, but we are guessing it won’t be the same deal as the Nokia N8’s camera. It will also include a 1830 mAh Li-Ion battery which is expected to provide up to 7 hours of talktime.

It will run Windows Phone 7.5 Mango and the pre-loaded Nokia apps which come with every Lumia smartphone. The device will have 16GB of built-in storage.

|Via|

More development on Amazon’s arrival in India as MediaNama reports that multiple sources have confirmed that Amazon is launching in India as Junglee.com. Apparently, Amazon may soon launch a marketplace in India which would be in partnership with multiple e-commerce ventures and for whom the company will facilitate transactions.

Amazon is yet to confirm this development and it is yet uncertain as to when it will officially launch in India. MediaNama reports that a certain source claims it was expected last week, while another mentions that it will launch in a few days. Well, this is seems very legit as this is not the first time we have heard about it. Moreover, Amazon has been holding on to this domain since quite a while.

Update: Junglee.com is live, and proudly carries a "Service provided by Amazon" logo at the bottom.

|Via|

This is something that Samsung would have liked to keep under wraps until the upcoming MWC in Barcelona, but the news is out through the backdoor. Samsung’s next offering in the Galaxy S line-up has emerged on the web in photographs and a user-created video on YouTube.

The upcoming smartphone is expected to be called GT-I9070 when it goes retail. It will sport a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen (WVGA), 1 GHz dual-core processor and a 5MP camera capable of video capture at 720p. The screen on the device is slightly curved and a 3.5mm stereo jack features at the bottom of the phone. The battery of GT-I9070 is reportedly rated at 1500mAh and the operating system will be Android 2.3.6 (Gingerbread).

Source: GSM Arena

Torrent tracker website The Pirate bay is dealing with the recent call for Internet censorship in its own and interesting way. The organization has started a promotion program called Promo Bay, by which an artist can find themselves being promoted on the landing page of the website.

A request to be part of Promo Bay can be sent to The Pirate Bay by filling up a form with information like name, a link to the work (blog, video, etc.), and an image representing the work or the artist/organization, and the choice of country where the promotion will feature. The selection process is completely at the discretion of The Pirate Bay staff based on criterion such as the number of requests received for a country or type and quality of content.

A Brazilian artist (novelist, lyricist) who goes by the name of Paulo Coelho is being currently featured on The Pirate Bay. In a blog-post related to this promotion, Coelho writes that the sales of his books have witnessed a growth since his work was made available on P2P sites. In the past, Neil Gaiman has stated that P2P websites can be – or should be – looked at as an effective promotion tool and not as a black hole of lost sales. This makes for some interesting food for thought.