Amber update is rolling out across all Windows Phone 8 Lumia smartphones

By Vijay @ 03:05pm

Nokia has started rolling out its much-awaited Amber software update to all its Windows Phone 8 Lumia smartphones, which will now come with new and improved camera features and other apps.

The Amber update is Nokia’s initiative to build up on Microsoft’s latest update GDR2 to the Windows Phone 8 software, which brought a new FM radio player and improvements to Xbox music and the Internet Explorer browser. The Amber update will be available first for the Lumia 920 and Lumia 820 in select countries as well as the Lumia 521, Lumia 810, and Lumia 928 in the US, and will be reaching out to all devices including Lumia 520, Lumia 620, Lumia 720, Lumia 820 or Lumia 920 by the end of September.

Features-wise, as expected this update brings improved image processing with better noise reduction, color reproduction, exposure control, autofocus, refined low light performance, and a number of other camera improvements depending on the phone model and its camera capabilities.

An interesting part would be the availability of Nokia’s Smart Camera app across the Lumia portfolio, which was restricted to the Nokia Lumia 925 only. After updating their phones to Amber, users will be able to download the app from the Windows market place. In addition to that, the update will also bring Nokia’s newly launched Pro Camera app for better video particularly for the Lumia 920, Lumia 925, and Lumia 928, starting from today.

Apart from camera related tweaks, the Amber update will also come with Nokia Glance Screen to set a clock on the device’s screen when the phone is inactive. This will also come with battery-level and an indicator for silent mode. This feature will be available in the ‘display and touch’ section in Settings menu, and will be available for all WP8 Lumia devices except the Nokia Lumia 520 and Lumia 625.

Along with this, the new update will allow users to make use of the flip to silence for an incoming call and double-tap to wake and easy unlock features, which are pretty popular on smartphones by other brands as well.

Internet Explorer 11 Developer Preview available for Windows 7 PC’s

By Vijay @ 09:46am

Microsoft’s Windows 8.1 Consumer Preview introduced their latest version web browser, Internet Explorer 11. Today the company has released the developer preview of IE11 for those still on Windows 7.

 Internet Explorer 11 promises to bring improved performance, faster page load times, new standards support for next generation sites, and a completely redesigned “F12” developer toolkit.

A faster browsing experience is thanks to new technologies such as Internet Explorer 11’s ability to natively decode images in real-team using a machine’s GPU, this ability plus the browser’s additional capability to render text on the GPU is said to also use less memory usage, reduce energy usage, and improve battery life.

In addition, the latest version of Microsoft’s browser is the first to implement the World Wide Web Consortium’s Resource Priorities, allowing web developers to pick which parts of a web page need to be loaded first. A little bit of artificial intelligence also never hurts (except in every Sci-Fi movie ever), which is why Internet Explorer 11 supports HTML5 link prefetching and pre-rendering; this allows the web browser to try and anticipate where you will visit next and load those links before you click on them.

 Microsoft has been putting a lot of their cards into the “Hardware-Accelerated” category for the past few Internet Explorer releases. Internet Explorer 11 includes support for WebGL technology to render 2D and 3D content using the machine’s GPU.

To protect a user’s machine against malicious intent, Internet Explorer 11 scans all WebGL content for unsafe content. In addition, the hardware-accelerated WebGL content will only run on verified safe GPU drivers and hardware.

Also Internet Explorer brings improved developer tools allowing web developers to profile sites and fix performance faster than ever. The new F12 toolkit includes a UI Responsiveness and Memory Profiling tool, Live DOM Explorer, CSS inspection tool, and JavaScript debugging support.

If you currently use Internet Explorer, go ahead and download Microsoft’s latest developer preview here. Otherwise, just stick with whichever browser you are probably using instead.

Source: IE Blog