Nokia officially unveils Lumia 625; estimated retail price is 220 Euros

The word is official now. Putting an end to all rumours and leaks, Finnish giant Nokia has finally unveiled its Lumia 625 smartphone. As reports had previously indicated, the smartphone features a 4.7-inch super-sensitive LCD display – the company’s largest smartphone screen to date. The display on the Nokia Lumia 625 can be viewed in direct sunlight and comes with super-sensitive touch technology for use with gloves or nails.

Sports a large 4.7-inch LCD display

Here’s a quick look at the specifications of the Nokia Lumia 625:

• 4.7-inch WVGA display with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels
• 4G/LTE
• USB 2.0, WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g/n
• GPS with A-GPS
• 5MP rear camera with autofocus, LED flash, 1080p@30fps and VGA front-facing camera
• 8GB internal memory + microSD support for up to 64GB more memory

The Nokia Lumia 625 smartphone is powered by the latest version of Windows Phone 8 and also includes the Nokia Lumia Amber update. Further, Live Tiles update directly to the homescreen and the People Hub feature allows users to stay connected with friends and family. It also packs the benefits of some Windows Phone 8 features like Xbox Live, Microsoft Office and 7GB of online SkyDrive storage.

The Nokia Lumia 625 smartphone includes five brightly coloured changeable shells. In addition to that the smartphone comes with a range of integrated camera applications like Nokia Smart Camera, offering handy features like removing unwanted objects from pictures, and Nokia Cinemagraph, which turns photos into living memories with added movement.

The colourful, interchangeable shells

On the Nokia Lumia 625, users will have access to more than 165,000 apps including Vimeo, Temple Run and WhatsApp. Additionally, there is SD memory card support on the smartphone, allowing up to 64GB of additional content storage.

Nokia Music on this Lumia smartphone provides users unlimited streaming of ad-free mixes without registration or subscription, plus the ability to download mixes for listening offline with the smartphone. Nokia has also teamed with Coloud to create BOOM headphones and integrated microphone and buttons for voice calls and music control.

The Nokia Lumia 625 smartphone also offers maps and location experiences from HERE – HERE Maps, HERE Drive and HERE Transit, providing free maps, turn-by-turn navigation and public transport guidance.

The newly unveiled Nokia Lumia 625 smartphone

Those interested can pick from a range of colours including orange, yellow, bright green, white and black. The Nokia Lumia 625 will retail at an estimated price of 220 Euros (Rs 17,305 approx.) before taxes and subsidies. The company plans to begin selling Lumia 625 smartphone in China, Europe, Asia Pacific, India, Middle East, Africa and Latin America in Q3 2013.

"With our largest smartphone screen to date, the Nokia Lumia 625 is a perfect example of how Nokia is delivering leading smartphone innovation and experiences at every price point," said Jo Harlow, Executive Vice President, Nokia Smart Devices. 

Nokia officially unveils Lumia 625; estimated retail price is 220 Euros

The word is official now. Putting an end to all rumours and leaks, Finnish giant Nokia has finally unveiled its Lumia 625 smartphone. As reports had previously indicated, the smartphone features a 4.7-inch super-sensitive LCD display – the company’s largest smartphone screen to date. The display on the Nokia Lumia 625 can be viewed in direct sunlight and comes with super-sensitive touch technology for use with gloves or nails.

Sports a large 4.7-inch LCD display

Here’s a quick look at the specifications of the Nokia Lumia 625:

• 4.7-inch WVGA display with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels
• 4G/LTE
• USB 2.0, WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g/n
• GPS with A-GPS
• 5MP rear camera with autofocus, LED flash, 1080p@30fps and VGA front-facing camera
• 8GB internal memory + microSD support for up to 64GB more memory

The Nokia Lumia 625 smartphone is powered by the latest version of Windows Phone 8 and also includes the Nokia Lumia Amber update. Further, Live Tiles update directly to the homescreen and the People Hub feature allows users to stay connected with friends and family. It also packs the benefits of some Windows Phone 8 features like Xbox Live, Microsoft Office and 7GB of online SkyDrive storage.

The Nokia Lumia 625 smartphone includes five brightly coloured changeable shells. In addition to that the smartphone comes with a range of integrated camera applications like Nokia Smart Camera, offering handy features like removing unwanted objects from pictures, and Nokia Cinemagraph, which turns photos into living memories with added movement.

The colourful, interchangeable shells

On the Nokia Lumia 625, users will have access to more than 165,000 apps including Vimeo, Temple Run and WhatsApp. Additionally, there is SD memory card support on the smartphone, allowing up to 64GB of additional content storage.

Nokia Music on this Lumia smartphone provides users unlimited streaming of ad-free mixes without registration or subscription, plus the ability to download mixes for listening offline with the smartphone. Nokia has also teamed with Coloud to create BOOM headphones and integrated microphone and buttons for voice calls and music control.

The Nokia Lumia 625 smartphone also offers maps and location experiences from HERE – HERE Maps, HERE Drive and HERE Transit, providing free maps, turn-by-turn navigation and public transport guidance.

The newly unveiled Nokia Lumia 625 smartphone

Those interested can pick from a range of colours including orange, yellow, bright green, white and black. The Nokia Lumia 625 will retail at an estimated price of 220 Euros (Rs 17,305 approx.) before taxes and subsidies. The company plans to begin selling Lumia 625 smartphone in China, Europe, Asia Pacific, India, Middle East, Africa and Latin America in Q3 2013.

"With our largest smartphone screen to date, the Nokia Lumia 625 is a perfect example of how Nokia is delivering leading smartphone innovation and experiences at every price point," said Jo Harlow, Executive Vice President, Nokia Smart Devices. 

Android 4.3 to bring improved 3D gaming, text input, multi-user profiles

At a cosy breakfast meeting at its headquarters in San Francisco, Google has announced Android 4.3, the latest revision to Android Jelly Bean. It has been a long time coming, too. It was initially expected at Google I/O in May, but despite many subsequent leaks, hasn’t been officially detailed until today.

Whether it was worth the wait is debatable. It doesn’t include any breakthrough new features, only small upgrades to the existing system. Introduced by Google’s VP of Android Product Management, Hugo Barra, we were treated to short demonstrations of four key features.

New Features

Better Multi-User Profiles: The first is a revised version of the multi-user profiles introduced on Android 4.2. Now, in addition to generating different user accounts for several users, access can be controlled at a user level. It’s perfect for parents who let their kids use the tablet, as not only can you restrict which apps can be opened in an account, but they also behave differently depending on the settings. For example, if you block in-app purchases, the levels or features which are unlocked after paying don’t even show up, so it even removes temptation.

Better 3D Gaming: Moving on to gaming, Android 4.3 is the first platform to support Open GL ES 3.0 graphics, which improves 3D performance, and gives developers lots of new graphical toys to enhance their games. A pair of demos showed off some very impressive shading, colors and textures, plus complex realtime shadows on character’s faces, and JJ Abrams style lens flare, all rendered in 1080p.

Bluetooth for fitness bands: Bluetooth Smart, better known as Bluetooth Low Energy, which allows improved connectivity to power efficient Bluetooth hardware – which are designed to operate for some time on a small battery – such as health and heart rate monitors, smart watches, and fitness wristbands. Finally, Android 4.3 has a new set of video-related DRM APIs. The first example of how these will benefit users comes from Netflix, as the latest version of its app will stream 1080p movies and TV shows, all thanks to the new APIs.

Other features: Other new features in Android 4.3 not demonstrated at the event include background Wi-Fi location, easier text input, faster switching between user profiles, plus a wide variety of newly supported languages.

Android 4.3 is launching on the new Nexus 7 tablet, which is the first device to support those new DRM APIs, and will also be coming to the old Nexus 7, the Nexus 4, the Nexus 10, and the Galaxy Nexus smartphone. Happily, the new Google Edition Galaxy S4 and Google Edition HTC One will also be getting Android 4.3, but no time frame other than, “soon” was provided.

Using Asynchronous AdSense Ads with Responsive Design

JavaScript affects the loading time of your web pages. That’s because when you include any JavaScript code in your HTML web page synchronously, the browser will download and execute the script first before it can render the other HTML tags that come after the script.

Steve Souders, web performance engineer at Google, says that JavaScript loaded synchronously is the “weakest link” and, in some cases, JavaScript can even block your web pages from rendering.

Asynchronous AdSense Ad Tags

Services like Google Analytics, Google DFP, Twitter and Facebook have therefore switched to asynchronous JavaScript for serving advertisements andwidgets. This is a more efficient method as the scripts load in parallel and do not block the web page from rendering.

Also, if the web server hosting the JavaScript file has become slow or offline, the other HTML elements of your web page would still render just fine in the browser.

Google too offers publishers the option of using non-blocking asynchronous ad tags for serving AdSense ads on their websites. If you wish to offer a better experience to your visitors, and also improve your site’s page speed, it may be a good idea to migrate your old AdSense ad code to the new asynchronous JavaScript tags.