New keyboard case turns your iPhone into Blackberry

Washington, Dec. 9 (ANI): A new device has been launched for iPhones aimed at making typing a lot easier.

American Idol host and serial reality TV producer, Ryan Seacrest, has invested one million dollars in the Typo keyboard, an accessory that is trying to make typing easy.

According to Mashable, the case snaps on to the top of an iPhone and turns the touch screen keypad into one that resembles the BlackBerry's qwerty keyboard.

The Typo Keyboard priced at 99 dollars targets those who carry two phones: one for typing and another an iPhone for most everything else.

The keyboard, which works when Bluetooth is enabled, adds less than 1 inch (2.54 centimetres) to the iPhone's length, the report added. (ANI)

iSPY: Apple Stores switch on iBeacon phone sniff spy system

Apple has switched on its controversial iBeacon snooping system across 254 US stores.
The fruity firm's iSpy network allows Apple to watch fanbois as they walk around an Apple store and then send them various messages depending on where they are in the shop.

This might come in handy when visiting an Apple store, for instance, which is offering the latest iStuff. Glance in its direction or wander past and your iPhone will suddenly spring to life, filled with messages about products you haven't bought yet Apple's iBeacon transmitters use Bluetooth to work out customers' location, because GPS doesn't work as well indoors. This functionality was quietly snuck into iOS 7. To take part all you need to do is download the Apple Store app and agree to let it track your location.

Apple claimed iBeacon offers "a whole new level of micro-location awareness, such as trail markers in a park, exhibits in a museum, or product displays in stores".
What that really means is that whenever you visit somewhere armed with iBeacon transmitters, your iPhone will bombard you with unwanted messages.
Luckily, there's a way to avoid the all-seeing eye of Cupertino: just switch off location services and you can go about your shopping trip without being surveilled.

According to AP, the flagship store on Fifth Avenue, New York City, was first to switch on its system on Friday and by this point every fruity outlet will have gone live. ®

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Briefly Difference between Window 7 and Window 8

Forumswindows8.com, the self-proclaimed largest Windows 8 help and support forum on the Internet, is filled with posts on such subjects as how to try to terminate a process in the Windows 8 task manager when access is denied and the state of Winodws 8 HP printer drivers. These hard-core Windows 8 early adopters group recently polled their users. And, 50,000 votes later, they found that their memberships' favorite Windows operating system was overwhemling Windows 7.

The breakdown for favorite version of Windows, from top to bottom, was Windows 7: 53%; Windows 8: 25%, XP: 20% and Other: 2%. Research house Gartner wouldn't argue. In a Webinar, Gartner analysts Steve Kleynhans and Michael Silver argue that if your company is still using XP you want to upgrade to Windows 7 and not be distracted by Windows 8.

Kleynhans said, "Get Windows 7 done, and then you can start to experiment and dabble with Windows 8, but don't let Windows 8 derail your Windows 7 upgrade project." He continued, “"We really don't think Windows 8 will get significant traction as a PC OS in a corporate environment." Gartner's clients are certainly following that course. Those who plan on upgrading are are moving to Windows 7 and plan to skip Windows 8 for PCs entirely.

According to Kleynhans, “Windows 8 will get 20% to 25% of the corporate user base, at most, before it's replaced with whatever comes next.” In short Windows 8 adoption "will look more like Vista, [and] it won't have the installed base that we've seen with Windows 7 or XP." Why? Because Windows 8 is a “plumbing" upgrade. This is an upgrade that drastically changes the technology without adding significant improvements. In particular, he thinks most users and IT departments will find the interface formerly known as Metro to be too different to find favor and Windows 8's use of two different interfaces to be too confusing for most users.

That's not what the Windows 8 forum survey found though. Their list of weaknesses in Windows 8 started with price: 35% followed by system requirements: 26%; incompatibility 25%; Windows freezes 20%; and only then does the interface show up with 18%.. A close reading of the forum's messages find that their members really do feel that Windows 8 will be over-priced and they're finding lots of hardware driver and software incompatibility problems.

These results aren't surprising. These are users who've already committed to Windows 8. From the start, they've accepted that Metro is not going to be anything like the Windows 7 Aero interface. Gartner's users have no such commitment.

That said, the Windows 8 fans don't love the Metro user interface either. In their ranking of favorite Windows 8 features, Metro came in the lower-end of the pack. In order, their top favorite features were: Fast boot and shutdown, 55%; Easy installation, 50%; Internet Explorer 10, 35%; Restart/Restore capabilities, 28%; Built-in application integration, 26%; Windows Explorer, 25%; App Store, 23%; and then Metro at 22%.

Forumswindows8.com also asked their membership which mobile operating system they'd rather buy. The winner? Android with 42%, followed by Windows Phone 8, 29% and iPhone, 22%. This does not bode well for Microsoft making any progress in the smartphone market.

On the other hand, Microsoft did at least have the support of this Windows 8 fan group when it came to tablets. 35% of them would rather have a Microsoft Surface than an Android tablet, 33%, or the hated Apple rival iPad with 26%.

Windows 8 will arrive for the general public on October 25th. As I predicted before, and I'll predict again, Windows 8 is going to be dead on arrival. Leave aside Gartner's predictions, if even people who are passionate about Windows 8 prefer Windows 7 by two to one, well, what more need be said?

Apple spent over $60 million on U.S. lawyers against Samsung

(Reuters) - Apple Inc has paid its leading outside law firm approximately $60 million to wage patent litigation against Samsung Electronics Co Ltd in a California federal court, according to Apple legal documents filed late on Thursday.

Apple and Samsung are engaged in global litigation over each other's intellectual property. The two mobile technology rivals have gone to trial twice in the last two years in a San Jose, California federal court, and juries have awarded Apple a total of roughly $930 million.

In court filings, Apple asked U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh to order Samsung to pay $15.7 million of the total amount Apple has spent in legal fees.

"Awarding fees to Apple 'flows quite naturally' from the jury's willfulness verdict as well as Samsung's extensive record of willful, deliberate, and calculated decisions to copy the iPhone, in blatant disregard for Apple's IP," Apple's attorneys said in its filing.

Apple could not immediately be reached for comment, and Samsung declined to comment.

In its fee motion, Apple said it has paid the Morrison & Foerster law firm approximately $60 million through last month, not counting lawyers who had billed less than $100,000 on the case.

Apple received "a significant discount" on Morrison & Foerster's standard rates, it said, because of its longtime client relationship with the firm. In addition, Apple expected to pay its other main outside firm, WilmerHale, approximately $2 million in fees for a week-long damages retrial that took place last month.

The case in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California is Apple Inc vs. SamsungElectronics Co Ltd, 11-1846.

(Reporting by Dan Levine; Editing by Phil Berlowitz)

Now Twitter to be available on mobile phones without Internet

 Twitter Inc is tying up with a Singapore-based startup to make its 140-character messaging service available to users in emerging markets who have entry-level mobile phones which cannot access the Internet.

U2opia Mobile, which has a similar tie-up with Facebook Inc, will launch its Twitter service in the first quarter of next year, 

Users will need to dial a simple code to get a feed of the popular trending topics on Twitter, he said.

More than 11 million people use U2opia's Fonetwish service, which helps access Facebookand Google Talk on mobile without a data connection.

Twitter, which boasts of about 230 million users, held a successful initial public offering last month that valued the company at around $25 billion.

U2opia uses a telecom protocol named USSD, or Unstructured Supplementary Service Data, which does not allow viewing of pictures, videos or other graphics.

"USSD as a vehicle for Twitter is almost hand in glove because Twitter has by design a character limit, it's a very text-driven social network,

Eight out of 10 people in emerging markets are still not accessing data on their phone, he said.

U2opia, which is present in 30 countries in seven international languages, will localize the Twitter feed according to the location of the user.

"So somebody in Paraguay would definitely get content that would be very very localized to that market vis a vis somebody sitting in Mumbai or Bangalore," he said.

The company, whose biggest markets are Africa and South America, partners with telecom carriers such as Telenor, Vodafone and Bharti Airtel Ltd. U2opia usually gets 30 to 40 percent of what users pay its telecom partners to access Fonetwish.