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techknow beat by Bilal Iqbal   We interrupt our usual transmission to bring you this guide on budget gaming laptops. Say the shiny new Xboxes and the PS4s do not tempt a veteran PC gamer such as you; which then is the laptop you should go for? Chances are you already have your eyes set on that QR10,000 gaming monster sitting at Jarir or Virgin, but your finances just don’t allow you to splurge to that extent. If you are willing to make some compromises — yes, PC gaming is all about compromises — you could walk away with a perfectly decent gaming rig for less than half that price. At the entry level, those QR1,000, QR1,500 and QR2,000 laptops are all well and good, but they run on Intel’s built-in graphics solutions. These cards have come a long way recently and may even be good enough to play some games at lower settings (think Dota 2 and World of Warcraft). If one or two games are all you plan on playing on your new PC, check online for their performance on the machine you are planning to get. Getting the exact model of the Intel graphics solution may be harder than you would expect, but you should be able to find at least one salesperson with enough knowledge to get you the info. Google the specs of your machine for the game you intend to play. See if you can live with the compromises. Buy the laptop. End of story. Hardcore gamers: Let’s be honest here, you will get nothing capable of proper gaming in the price range of a brand new current-generation console. You will have to move to higher price brackets. In Qatar, QR2,500 is the sweet spot where you start seeing dedicated graphics cards in machines. At the lower end, closer to QR2,000, you will see some laptops with Nvidia GeForce 820m. By all accounts, 820m is only marginally faster than an Intel HD 4600 (a built-in card by Intel), and will not offer you much of an improvement in terms of gaming. Making a decision, treat 820m as a built-in card. Qatar being a small market, you will find that the laptop with the 820m will likely also come with superior specs (focus on RAM and the processor here, not the card). Also, you probably are not a gamer. Gamers need to go higher. At around and above the QR2,500 mark, you will find some laptops with the ATI Radeon M265 cards in them. At even higher prices, around the QR3,000 mark, you will encounter the Nvidia 840m graphics card. These two cards tend to perform similarly, with the Nvidia having a slight edge in performance. Given the fact that the machines with the Nvidia card in Qatar also tend to have better RAMs, the latter seems to be a better option to get. But if you are already straining your budget, you should get decent performance out of the machines with the ATI Radeon M265 in them as well. Acers seem to be the predominant laptops in this category, and while the brand does have a reputation for making flimsy machines, their latest offerings do seem to be as sturdy to the touch as the rest. The machines with Nvidia 840m make an entry around the QR3,000 mark, with offerings from virtually all brands in Qatar: Acer, HP, Dell and Lenovo. This category was pretty cut and dry up until a few days ago (Lenovo Flex 2 ranging between QR3,000 and QR3,600 was the machine you needed to get), but an on-going discount by Jarir Bookstore until January 3 has thrown in the fray a number of machines that deserve your consideration. Jarir does not offer the Flex 2. But it does have an HP Pavilion that gives you a Core i7, 840m 2gb, 8gb RAM and 1tb (1,000gb) of hard disk for QR2,700. Jarir is also throwing in a one-year subscription to Microsoft Office 365 for free (a QR300 value). The machine is not FHD, but really, you cannot do much better in this price in Qatar. The 840m itself is more suited to 720p gaming, so you will not be able to play many games at the higher FHD resolution on max settings anyway. Another compelling option is the Lenovo Z5070, which offers the exact same specifications as the HP, but more memory on the graphics card (4GB instead of 2GB) for QR200 more. At 720p resolutions, the difference in 2GB video RAM vs 4GB video RAM should not be much (if at all), but you may still want to shell out the extra dough for peace of mind. We also have an HP Envy (with metal body and better looks) at Jarir for QR2,800. This machine lets up on the processor, going down from Core i7 to Core i5, but offers 12GB of RAM and a FHD screen in turn. You will still need to play most games at 720p resolution, but the more RAM will be useful for heavy multitasking. The FHD screen will also be better for watching movies. Keep in mind though that the Core i7 processor on the Pavilion and Lenovo is up to 15-18% faster than the Core i5 — this is something that you will not notice in daily use, but in CPU-intensive tasks such as video encoding and playing CPU-intensive games such as Civilization. If you can extend your budget higher, I would urge you to extend it to QR4,050. That price will net you a Lenovo Y50 at Jarir Bookstore (down from QR4,500), with a Quadcore Core i7 processor (the Core i7s on the HP and Z5070 are dual-core) and Nvidia GTX 860m 4GB. You also get 8GB of RAM and 1tb hard drive space. No other manufacturer in Qatar is offering you an Nvidia GTX 860m in this price range; in fact, you have to move up to around QR6,000 to get this graphics card and will have to double your investment before you can move to a better graphics card. If PC gaming is your thing, and QR4,050 is doable, this is the machine you need to get. You will be able to play most PC games at high settings at FHD. There will always be that odd game that will overextend the reach of your machine, but such occurrences should be rare and far in between. Other vendors such as LuLu and Carrefour have the QHD version of the Y50 on sale for QR4,500, which itself is not a bad price. The QHD screen quality is better than the FHD version, but you do not get enough benefits to shell out the extra QR450. The Jarir Bookstore sale will last until January 3, 2015, and until then this is the variant you need to get. Once its price goes back up to QR4,500, the QHD version will be the better machine to buy, even if you will find yourself playing most games at FHD resolution and not QHD.   The author may be contacted on [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat    

techknow beat by Bilal Iqbal   The bar for what goes as an acceptably-designed app in Qatar seems to have been set quite low. Consider Al Cinema, developed by ADabisc, and a direct competitor to Cinema Qatar that I reviewed about three weeks back. Like Cinema Qatar, Al Cinema also aims to be the only app you will ever need when thinking about movies in Qatar if you happen to use an Android or an iOS device. Available for free on both Play Store and Appstore (the Apple Appstore also features a paid version), we will be looking at the free-of-charge Android version today. The iOS version should be functionally identical. The current Al Cinema user base in Qatar is somewhere between 10,000 and 50,000 (that’s the download category it has been placed in), which is less than Cinema Qatar (50,000 to 100,000). By the looks of it, Al Cinema is also newer of the two, sitting pretty at Version 1.1, when Cinema Qatar is already at Version 3.5. On the flipside, this could also mean that Aptrixx (Cinema Qatar’s developer) is a lot more active in developing its app. Firing up the app, you see that the top one-fourth of the home screen is covered in ads, with there being no way for you to get rid of them. The Cinema Qatar solution of one-time full-screen ad in your face seems almost better in comparison. Beneath the ad-tray, and the Al Cinema top bar, you are presented with a list of movies that are currently playing in Qatar. They seem to be presented in their order of release, with the latest films appearing on top. You can sort this list by Genres and can also instead choose to see them as in a grid — a useless feature given that it arranges the posters of the movies in a grid and takes away all the other useful information you could see at a glance in the list view, such as the Rotten Tomatoes and Al Cinema users’ scores, film age rating and the runtime. Even in list view, the developers do not seem to have optimised the space available to them. There is enough space in each listing to offer — in addition to Rotten Tomatoes and Al Cinema users’ scores — IMDb rating of a particular film as well. This alone could have been enough incentive to jump ship. Cinema Qatar restricts itself to just IMDb ratings. Alas, by omitting the IMDb ratings, Al Cinema puts itself in the same category as Cinema Qatar, offering an incomplete picture of the opinion on a film around the world. Tapping on a movie will take you to the movie screen, which is arranged rather nicely. The top third of the screen nicely summarises the movie ratings, allowing you to add your own rating as well. Again, I would like to see IMDb ratings added to it, but otherwise it is nicely done. Below, you can watch the movie’s trailer sourced from YouTube. Unlike Cinema Qatar, this feature actually works. You are able to watch the film’s trailer, although I couldn’t quite understand why all the trailers I chose played in a small window surrounded by black screen. I also encountered errors while playing ads at times, but it might have been due to the rather moody network performance I have been experiencing lately. Below the trailer you are presented with information on the film, such as the synopsis, the writers, director and the cast members. Like Cinema Qatar, the information isn’t always complete. For instance, in the case of the latest Hobbit film, the app was missing the entire starting cast. Perhaps, nobody acted in the film? Once you are done with the details, you can tap on the Showtime button right next to it to see all the theatres in Qatar where the film is playing. It breaks down movie timings according to the types of screenings. So it will tell you whether a screening is normal, VIP, 3D or in IMAX. The developers need to be very careful with updating this information, though. Consider, for instance, Big Hero 6. According to Al Cinema, there are two shows for the film at the cinema in Villaggio: a 10:45am 3D show, and two normal shows at 1pm and 3:15pm. However, when I went to the cinema, the timings were correct, but there was no 3D show. All three shows were normal screenings. Like Cinema Qatar, you can also choose to browse individual cinemas and see what they are playing, a useful feature if you happen to be in a particular area and don’t feel like driving elsewhere. You can also choose to search for shows at a particular time, a useful feature unique to Al Cinema. In practice though the feature does not work well: it will just take you to the movie screen in the app, where you will have to browse through all its showtimes. This is only slightly better than going through each movie individually. The app also has a tab for What’s On. But what’s on was apparently three films released in Qatar a while ago. I failed to get the point of this section. ADabisc should remove or rethink this feature for their next update. It is completely useless in its current form. There is also a tab for E-Tickets, which isn’t functioning at the moment. Instead, the developer wants to gauge your interest in booking tickets via the app. It asks for your e-mail and phone number (optional) and requires you to tick a box saying: “Yes! I want to book my cinema tickets online.” The feature may be made available in future if enough people show interest, I suppose. Like Cinema Qatar, Al Cinema also features a useless location map for all cinemas in its database. The cinemas are marked on a Google-sourced map. What makes this feature useless, however, is that it doesn’t tell you where you currently are. It also does not allow you to navigate to a cinema of your choosing. Wouldn’t it be better if it offered coordinates to the cinemas that you can then navigate to in a mapping application like Google Maps? Al Cinema is a perfectly okay app for your cinema needs in Qatar, but does not offer you enough incentive to switch from Cinema Qatar. In contrast, Cinema Qatar itself does not offer you enough incentive to switch from Al Cinema. Both seem to be on the same level at present, offering some features the other doesn’t but also losing out on other features. In the end, using one or the other might just be which of the two you downloaded first. I like the look of Cinema Qatar, but it does not give you complete information on the screenings in Villaggio’s cinema (it doesn’t tell you which screenings are in IMAX). Al Cinema, in contrast, tells you about IMAX screenings in the City Centre cinema, even when they don’t have an IMAX screen (what’s up with that?). The Q-tickets website seems to have more accurate information than either of these apps. In a pinch, either would do, but what they are both really waiting for is another Qatar-centric movie app to come and give them some serious whupping.    The author may be e-mailed at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat      

techknow beat by Bilal Iqbal   It may not look like so, but Huawei happens to be the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world. Yes, you heard that right. According to a July 2014 report by Strategy Analytics, Huawei was just behind Apple (number 2) and Samsung (number 1) in the global smartphone race, increasing its share from 4.8% of the world smartphone market in the second quarter of 2013 to 6.8% in 2014. The shipments almost doubled — from 11.1 million phones to 20.1 million. Granted most of these sales come from China and the lower segment of the smartphone market, where Huawei consistently delivers some of the best bang for the buck. But the not-so-little Chinese giant does like to play with the big boys too at times, recently in the form of the 6-inch monster Ascend Mate7 and the smaller but very desirable Ascend P7. To sweeten the deal, Carrefour in Qatar is selling the P7 at the discounted price of QR1,200 until this Saturday, down from its list price of QR1,700. The phone in question offers you a 5-inch Full High Definition screen with 4G in a body that weighs just 124grams. It even manages to cram in a decent-sounding (more on that later) 2,500mah battery. You get expandable storage, 2gb of RAM, 13mp back camera, and an 8mp front camera. The chipset is where the phone does go a little wrong, offering Huawei’s own HiSilicon Kirin 910T, which is four Cortex-A9 cores running at 1.8ghz paired to a Mali 450 GPU. This chipset tends to perform on par with the likes of Samsung Galaxy S4, losing out in the graphics department. To put things in perspective, Galaxy S6 is expected around March 2015 — in other words, three more months and P7’s chipset will be two generations behind the best of the best. That said, by all accounts, the chipset is more than capable of running Android smoothly through the day. Of course faster processors will do much better overall, especially on browsing through heavy web pages. The back camera gets commendations for its performance. In the words of Tech Radar: “The Huawei Ascend P7 has two cameras and both are winners.” The tech website praises the camera for images that are not over-processed. “Images taken at the full 13MP resolution come off the Ascend P7 at between 4MB and a massive 7MB in size, and are refreshingly free from JPEG-style artefacts.” Trusted Reviews found that the camera though good, could not compete in the same category as Galaxy S5 and the likes — not to worry, the P7 does not compete in that segment. The front camera also won its fair share of praise, although the GSMArena found that a 5mp front camera on Oppo Find 7a (another Chinese phone that competes in the premium segment) produced better results overall. Needless to say, for the price, you should be sufficiently pleased with the results the phone produces. The user interface of the P7 is something long-time Android may take a little getting used to. Huawei has doused the Android 4.4 Kit Kat in its own EmotionUI 2.3, which — like just about all Chinese phones available internationally — does away with the app tray. The approach is generally described to be iPhone-isque and simpler to use. Frankly speaking, I prefer the versatility offered by the traditional Android approach. However, I do like the fact that Huawei has incorporated Android soft key and done away with physical keys (which Samsung still clings on to). Even so, if you are a long-time Android user, you may want to play around with the phone for a while in the store to make sure you are comfortable with the UI.    Given the chipset’s middling performance, and almost as big a battery life as on the Galaxy S4, the battery test on GSMArena disappointed, scoring just 53 hours (Galaxy S4 scored 65 hours). The P7’s 3G talk time is decent at 13.5 hours (S4 does 11). The web browsing score also beats S4, lasting a little over 7 hours on a single charge with S4 lasting just under 7. The phone loses out in the video playback, however, lasting just over 8 hours, while the S4 lasted over 11 hours on the same test. If you like to watch a lot of videos on your phone, you might want to be extra cautious with this phone. Tech Radar also found that the battery was bad in a low-reception area — if you don’t get strong signals where you live or work, you may encounter even worse battery life. Generally though, the GSMArena score of 53 hours itself indicates that you should just be able to pull through a day of moderate usage with some restraint. Heavy users will just have to charge the phone through their work day — that’s just the price you have to pay for having a phone as thin as this. This brings us to the biggest selling feature of the Ascend P7 — its desirability. The phone is made from high quality materials. It is just 6.5mm thick. To compare, the S4 is 7.9mm thick, and even the mighty iPhone 6, touted for its thin frame, comes in at 6.9 mm. The P7 is seriously thin. I will be the first ones to acknowledge that svelte dimensions are not everything, but if these things matter a lot to you, then you can hardly do better than P7 — it’s a metal-body glass-enclosed super thin 4G smartphone all for the price of QR1,200. At its listed price of QR1,700, the P7 does find itself out of depth — there it competes with 2014 flagships like Galaxy S5 (can be had for slightly more), Xperia Z1 (can be had for slightly less), and Xperia Z2 (can be had for slightly higher). These phones retail for much higher and you generally have to wait for special offers to grab them at P7 list prices, but you should also find them for cheap in the open market. At QR1,200, however, there is little that can directly compete with the P7. The S4 itself can be found around Qatar on offers that bring its effective prices down to as much as around QR1,400. You do get a more mature UI and product, but you lose out on the premium feel, even as you pay slightly more. We are talking effective prices here though, accounting for shopping coupons and bundle deals — the Carrefour price is a flat QR1,200 until this Saturday. If QR1,200 is all you have to spend on a smartphone, you can’t do better than P7 at present. The quirks are something you can learn to live with and the looks are unmatched in this and much higher price segments. The Huawei Ascend P7 is a winner, if only until Saturday.    The author may be e-mailed at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat    

AFP/Los Angeles Instagram, the photo-sharing social network owned by Facebook, announced on Wednesday it has more than 300mn users as it unveiled a new system to authenticate celebrity members. The update means Instagram has for the first time overtaken Twitter, which claimed 284mn active users at the end of September. "Over the past four years, what began as two friends with a dream has grown into a global community that shares more than 70mn photos and videos each day," Instagram chief executive Kevin Systrom said in a blog. "Instagram is home to creativity in all of its forms, a place where you can find everything from images of the Nile River to the newest look from Herschel Supply or a peek inside the mind of Taylor Swift." Systrom also said Instragram would start using "verified badges for celebrities, athletes and brands," to help users ensure they are following these members and no copycats. "These badges will start rolling out over the coming days," Systrom said "We're committed to doing everything possible to keep Instagram free from the fake and spammy accounts that plague much of the Web... we've been deactivating spammy accounts from Instagram on an ongoing basis to improve your experience. As part of this effort, we will be deleting these accounts forever, so they will no longer be included in follower counts." Facebook completed its acquisition of Instagram in 2012. The original price was pegged at $1bn but the final value was less because of a drop in Facebook's share price. The main point of Instagram is to share smartphone snaps, which can be enhanced with image filters to mimic historic types of film. Debra Aho Williamson at the research firm eMarketer said Instagram has a good deal of potential for advertising with an estimated 52.5mn monthly users in the US alone. "With 300mn monthly users, Instagram's audience is becoming very attractive to marketers, especially brand advertisers, and its rapid growth will only make it more appealing," said Williamson. "Instagram's ad business is still very new and has a lot of growing up to do - for example, its targeting capabilities are still very limited - but the company's new authentication initiatives send a message to the ad community that their followers will be real entities and that the impressions they receive will not be fakes or bots."

AFP Football's World Cup and the Ebola outbreak topped the list of topics most shared by Facebook users around the globe in 2014, the social networking giant said Tuesday. The World Cup was the most shared item globally, followed by the Ebola crisis, Brazilian elections, the death of actor Robin Williams and the "Ice Bucket Challenge" to raise funds for research on Lou Gehrig's disease. Rounding out the top 10 were the conflict in Gaza, Malaysia Airlines -- which lost two aircraft during the year -- American football's Super Bowl, the Ferguson, Missouri protests over the police shooting death of an unarmed black man, and the Sochi Winter Olympics. But the most shared items varied considerably in different countries. In the United States, Ebola and the Ice Bucket Challenge were the top two items, followed by Robin Williams, the Super Bowl and the Ferguson, Missouri protests. The World Cup was number six for US users. Britain's most shared topic was the Scottish referendum, followed by the Ice Bucket Challenge and the World Cup. In Australia, Robin Williams topped the list followed by Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Malaysia Airlines. India's general election was the hottest topic in that nation, Facebook said, with the Indian Premier League of cricket second. In Mexico, it was the World Cup, the arrest of drug cartel leader Joaquin "El Chapo" Guzman and Pope Francis. In Spain, the top item was the Primera Liga of football, political activist Pablo Iglesias and the World Cup. Germany's most shared news was the World Cup -- Weltmeisterschaft -- won by that country's squad, followed by the country's Bundesliga football league and entertainer Helene Fischer. For France, the World Cup topped the list followed by President Francois Hollande and US rap artist Pharrell Williams. In Brazil, the biggest topic was the national election, followed by the World Cup hosted in the country and the annual festival Carnival.  Facebook still big on games  The "game of the year" on Facebook was Cookie Jam, a puzzle game developed by Los Angeles-based Social Gaming Network. "It launched a little under a year ago and scaled to a great audience of five million plus players," said Facebook games partnership chief Dan Morris. "Games are hugely important to Facebook," Morris said. "There are hundreds of millions of people playing a game on the Facebook platform or playing a mobile game through the Facebook app. We continue to invest on both sides of that equation." Two games from Candy Crush maker King Digital were at the top of new games on Facebook -- Bubble Witch 2 Saga, and Candy Crush Soda Saga. On the mobile side, the combat strategy game Boom Beach won top honors followed by the racing game Crazy Taxi: City Rush. Facebook and the developers get revenue largely from in-app game purchases, and to a lesser degree from advertising.

A Delta 4 rocket lifts off from from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on December 5, 2014 carrying NASA's Orion spacecraft on its first test flight. AFP AFP NASA's unmanned Orion space capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean off Baja California on Friday following its first flight test, the US space agency said. "There is your new spacecraft, America," NASA commentator Rob Navias said, as live aerial images showed the capsule floating toward the water aided by three parachutes. Orion splashed down in the Pacific four hours and 24 minutes after launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, NASA said. Navias described the test flight as "picture-perfect" and "a significant milestone for America's space program." Flight controllers said the vehicle was in stable condition and would soon be retrieved from the waters by a team that includes NASA, the US Navy and Lockheed Martin.

techknow beat by Bilal Iqbal   Before the One M8 came along, and before the earlier One M7 and the even earlier One X, Desire was the moniker Taiwanese giant HTC had reserved for its high end Android phones. Eventually though, the moniker was relegated to the company’s mid-end and lower-end offerings, devices that were unable to really compete in the cutthroat market they existed in. Many of them were solid contenders in their segments, but none of them was particularly, ahem, desirable — certainly not along the lines of the Moto G anyways. The Desire Eye then — launched in Qatar last week for QR2,100 — may be a return of the moniker to higher ambitions. The device sports cutting edge technology that keeps it ticking along with the rest of the high end competition, while offering a feature that gives it its very name: a 13 megapixel front facing camera with dual-LED flash. In fact, the camera is the entire raison d’etre for the Desire Eye, otherwise the HTC One E8 itself does a pretty decent job in the mid-high end tier. To the camera then — selfies never looked this good. GSMArena even went on to call this device an “undercover flagship,” and it is easy to look why. The phone boosts a 5.2 inch Full High Definition screen and sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 chipset running four cores at 2.3ghz apiece, paired with Adreno 330 GPU. This is the combination you will find in virtually all current high-end phones with the exception of Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and the yet-to-be-released-in-Qatar Google Nexus 6 (they offer faster chipsets). The screen may miss out on QHD resolution (as offered by LG G3), but still packs more than enough pixels for your daily needs. Internally you get 16gb of expandable storage and 2gb of RAM. You also get features such as quick charging (60% battery charged in 30 minutes), FM Radio, stereo front speakers, dust and water proofing (something the One M8 does not have), and Bluetooth 4.0. The entire package is powered by a rather measly-sounding 2400mah battery, but GSMArena tests show that HTC has done a good job on optimising its phone and the battery should last you easily through the day. The phone lasted for 10 hours of browsing over Wi-Fi, 10.5 hours of continuous video playback or 19 hours of calling — all this is good for a GSMArena score of 70 hours. To compare, Galaxy S5 gets a score of 72, One M8 gets 71, LG G3 gets 69 and iPhone 6 gets 61 hours on the same test. The big selling feature of this phone is the 13 megapixel front-facing camera. Clearly, this is targeted at all the selfie-craze in the market. You will not be able to find any other known competitor offering a similar camera in the front — if you take selfies, this is the phone for you, period. There’s even two dual-tone dual LEDs to accompany the cameras. The Dual-tone helps with reproducing accurate colours and the flash is a nifty feature to have, especially for selfies — most of the time you will find yourself taking pictures in low light situations, and the flash performs admirably, according to reviews. Trusted Reviews described one picture it took under darkened conditions as “a massive step up from the noisy and murky front-facing efforts we get from most phones under the same dark and dingy conditions.” Even though the phone offers 13mp snappers on both front and the back, there is a perceptible difference in the quality between the two, according to GSMArena’s testing. The back camera is much better. It would have been nice to get a great camera upfront too, but I guess good will have to do for now. You also get the well-received HTC Eye Experience, a bunch of software features to help you take better selfies. The big front camera is great for selfie lovers, but it will also be the reason why many others will pass on the Desire Eye: it adds height to the phone. In hand, the phone feels rather strange, unnaturally tall. The phone measures 151.7 x 73.8 x 8.5mm. To compare, the One M8 packs in a slightly smaller screen at 151.7 x 73.8 x 8.5mm, and this phone itself is not known for its great screen-to-body ratio with the twin-speaker sporting facade. The LG G3 packs a much bigger screen than both Desire Eye and One M8 in a shell that is no taller than the latter: 146.3 x 74.6 x 8.9mm. So you do pay for that camera in terms of size of the phone. That said, the size is something you can learn to live with. The lack of a premium feel is also something you may be able to get used to in a few days (the plastic on the Desire Eye feels and looks cheaper in hand than, say, the G3). But if you just aren’t that much into selfies and don’t need the bigger front camera, you could just skip along to the more premium HTC One M8, the cheaper HTC One E8, or the many competitors that can be had for the same price. The asking price of QR2,100 is not bad. But at this level, the only way Desire Eye can distinguish itself is with its selfie functionality — and I guess that’s exactly what HTC was going for. Those who want the bigger front camera will have no choice but to go for it, but others may need incentives in the form of price cuts or extra goodies to take home with the camera — a selfie rod, perhaps?   The author may be e-mailed at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat        

AFPTwitter is boosting safeguards to prevent its network being used for harassment and abuse, it said on Tuesday. The online messaging service said it was improving its process for reporting such behavior so as to make it more mobile friendly and require less initial information. Twitter said the changes will make it easier to flag tweets and accounts for review. Behind-the-scenes improvements would also "enable faster response times" for such reviews, Twitter's director for user safety, Shreyas Doshi, wrote on a blog. The updates will be accessible to all users in coming weeks.

techknow beat  by Bilal Iqbal   In its Play Store description, Cinema Qatar gets right down to what it does —“Cinema Showtimes for all cinemas in Qatar” — before promising a slew of features that may make it sound like the best thing to happen to you since your first shawarma bite. “In addition to timings you can view the movie ratings, cast, plot, news, trailer and other information about a movie. You can also get push notifications for new movie releases,” the app promises, and in my experience, delivers to varying levels of success (or lack, thereof). You see, the app does indeed have all of the features that it promises, only that in most cases the implementation is sorely lacking. The touted trailers feature, for instance, opens a small preview window that presumably takes its feed from YouTube. But we would never know that because I was unable to get the videos to play. In all instances, I got the following error message: “This video is unavailable in safety mode,” followed by a promise to “Learn more.”, complete with a full-stop and an underline. But as it turns out, even a thousand taps on plain text masquerading as a link will not help you learn more. Either that, or something awful has gone wrong with the implementation of this feature. Before I discuss some of the other “value added” features of the app, I will say this: the app does at least get the basics right. It tells you the show timings for all movies playing in all cinemas in Qatar (as provided by the cinemas themselves, according to an in-app disclaimer). Opening the app, you are presented with a scrollable screen of all the movies currently playing in Qatar, with basic information on each film such as its IMDb rating, cast, director and genre. At this point, I urge you to resist the temptation to tap or scroll. Instead, be patient for a few moments, for the full-screen ad to pop into your view. This will happen every time you open the app and while supremely annoying, this is the only time you will encounter an ad while using the app — the compromises one has to make to use free software. Tap the large cross in the top-left corner of the screen and you are good to go. Tapping a movie will reveal the cinemas with show times. If all cinemas are playing it, you may have to scroll down to get to the cinema you are looking for. One does feel that the screen space could have been utilised more effectively — just a little less than a third of the screen is used by the movie poster and buttons leading to the film’s trailer that never loads, and synopsis and cast information. The layout though is fine for the most part. What I did not appreciate was that there was no way for me to know which of the show timings was for IMAX (for films also showing in IMAX). The app creators may think that all screens are made equally, but IMAX screens do tend to be bigger than regular cinema screens. The fact that I have to go to a ticket-booking website to know about the IMAX timings of a particular film negate the entire point of the app. Thankfully, Cinema Qatar does tell you the timings for 3D screenings. Curiously, it also offers timings for the VIP screenings in the City Centre and Novo Cinema Theatre. Clearly, the exclusion of IMAX timings is laziness on part of the developer. The More Info button takes you to another screen that has the film’s IMDb rating, the sometimes incomplete plot synopsis from IMDb, cast and director names with pictures, the storyline and a review sourced from God knows where. In theory, these are all useful and informative bits, but I would not be using them to replace my usual sources any time soon.  The app also allows you to browse by cinemas instead of movies. The good thing here is that it sorts the cinema in the order of their distances from you. So you can choose a cinema of your preference and see what films are playing there. There is also Location Map for each cinema, which again seems to be a half-baked implementation and isn’t particularly useful. It does not help you navigate to the cinema in question nor does it pin point its exact location. It just gives you the map of the area the cinemas is in, sourced from Google Maps. The third tab that you can try out in the app is Coming Soon, which as expected gives you a synopsis for movies that are, well, coming soon along with their expected release dates in Qatar. This is a rather useful feature to have given that the release dates in Qatar frequently differ from those in the US. There is also a News tab that I will, frankly speaking, not rely solely on for my entertainment news. As of this writing on November 26, the latest entertainment news in the app was published on November 22.  That’s it for Cinema Qatar. The app does not have the option to book or buy tickets online, which seems like a missed opportunity. The developer could also have included the RottenTomatoes score for a particular movie, to give an indication of what critics think about it. All in all, the expression “strictly adequate” seems to be the mantra here. It can certainly do with more polishing, and some of its ‘features’ will actually do well to, well, actually work. Don’t get me wrong, the bar has been set low, but for now Cinema Qatar will do in a pinch. The app is available on both Google Play Store and Apple App Store for free (the Apple App Store has two versions, ad-free for 2 dollars or ad-supported for free).   l The author may be e-mailed at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat      

Alice is a modern day student’s companion and accomplice in conquering all programming predicaments, making it easier for students to develop interesting 3-D environments, writes Umer Nangiana Dean Carnegie Mellon University Ilker Baybars.     Photos by Nasar T K Many students struggle with developing algorithms and figuring out how to apply problem solving techniques. But worry no more because ‘Alice’ is here. She’s here to enable students to learn these skills through 3-D animations and storytelling. Available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese, Dutch and German languages, Alice is a modern day student’s companion and accomplice in conquering all programming predicaments. Alice makes it easier for students to develop interesting 3-D environments and to explore the new medium of interactive 3-D graphics. And, Alice has very well landed in the Middle East. Know who Alice is? “Alice is a 3-D interactive tool. It allows you to create animations and the purpose of those animations is to help students learn programming concepts. It is not a tool to create animations but uses animations to teach programming,” Dr Saquib Razak, Assistant Teaching Professor, Carnegie Mellon University Qatar, tells Community.  Dr Razak and his team of faculty and students from Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar recently introduced ‘Alice Middle East.’ The 3-D interactive educational animation software is designed to help primary and secondary school students learn the basics of computer programming and teach them how to apply logical thinking and problem solving techniques. It was recently demonstrated in the university. “It is a tool to make conventional studies more visual. You cannot create movies out of every subject that you want to teach but you can create small simulations and small worlds where you can show to the students what happens instead of just telling them what happens,” says Dr Razak. In the times before Alice or any such concepts, the students would not get to see the effects of a certain equation or a law of physics they were taught in the classroom. But, with Alice, you can put the equation into motion through programming. A not just science subject, Alice has the ability to help teach students other non-scientific subjects as well. “There is a lot of flexibility in the tool. There are a lot of equations that you can put. So if you want to teach mathematics, physics, etc., you can have the students see the effect of a phenomenon using Alice. You can also teach non-scientific subjects like English, social studies and others,” says the professor. “For instance, if you are teaching American History, you can create in Alice a simulation based on that and show the students what happened. Also, for instance, if you are teaching them about religion, you can teach them how to pray. We actually have a model that has all the movements that can simulate prayers,” he says. Alice was founded by the late Randy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. The program was named after Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland because of Carroll’s ability to communicate clearly in an entertaining way. The software has now been implemented in countries in the United States, Asia, South America, Central America, Europe and the Middle East with an estimated 1.4 million downloads per year. How did Alice come to Qatar? Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser expressed a keen interest in ‘Alice’ in 2008, which prompted Carnegie Mellon faculty to explore the possibility of developing a version of Alice for the Middle East. Funded by the Qatar National Research Fund (QNRF) National Priorities Research Program, ‘Alice Middle East’ was first implemented in 2012 with an initial pilot program in Al-Arqam Academy, a private English-speaking school in Doha. Since September 2014, computing is replacing ICT (Information and Communications Technology) in UK primary schools, so that children can be introduced to computational thinking from an early age. Carnegie Mellon faculty have been taking the lead, by introducing Alice as a tool to engage students in computing and also by training teachers in Qatar’s schools to implement and integrate the new curriculum. In addition to supporting the new UK computing curriculum at Al-Arqam Academy, the Supreme Education Council (SEC) has piloted ‘Alice Middle East’ since September 2014 in two independent schools; Ali bin Abi-Talib Independent School (year 8) and Khalid bin Waleed Independent School (year 8). The introduction of ‘Alice’ in independent SEC schools will help address a shortage of students in Qatar pursuing higher education in fields relating to computer science. Nour Elhouda, a teacher at Al Arqam Academy, while commenting on the impact of Alice in her classroom said innovation is driven by expression. “Our future generation is highly creative and our teaching methods must support this. Alice has enabled students to express their ideas through storytelling, and animation whilst also learning programming skills along the way,” says Elhouda. “Learning it was easy. It could be that I already had the programming background so it was enjoyable for me. Programing can be a hassle with all those errors sometimes but in a visual programme like Alice it becomes easier,” asserts Elhouda. She noticed that even the students who did not have the background of programming found Alice easy to handle and understand as it is all about drag-and-drop elements into your scene. Dr Razak was tasked with the localisation of the existing US version of ‘Alice’ for the Middle East. The goal of the project is to make it easy for young students to explore computer science concepts through developing interesting 3-D animations that are both fun to create and educational. “For ‘Alice Middle East’ we developed 3-D models relevant to Qatari culture, including camels, land cruisers and Zubarah fort, making the student learning experience more contextual and helping bridge what a student has learned in a school setting with their home culture. We have also developed a textbook for Arabic-speaking students,” Razak says. Dr Razak and his team require supporting the schools at least for the first two years where, in the beginning, they train teachers and we give them the curriculum. After a year, when the teachers learn to use it better and be able to make changes according to their needs, Dr Razak wants them to come back to the developers. “So that we can learn from them because, you know, our expertise is in computing, not in teaching at that level. We want to learn this from the teachers on what we are doing wrong so that we can fix it for the next schools. This is how we did it. The one schools are using right now is a much improved curriculum,” points out Dr Razak. “The development and implementation of Alice for the Middle East demonstrates Carnegie Mellon’s commitment to research that impacts the development of Qatar. We hope this creates a generation of technology innovators that will be at the forefront of Qatar’s future development,” says Ilker Baybars, Dean of Carnegie Mellon University in Qatar. ‘Alice Middle East’ is led by Director and Lead Project Investigator Wanda Dann and Dr Razak, the co-lead project investigator. The team consists of Huda Gedawy, a Carnegie Mellon computer science graduate and the curriculum developer; Aliaa Ahmed, current Carnegie Mellon computer science student and curriculum developer; Mounira Tlili, current Carnegie Mellon computer science student and curriculum developer; Don Slater, systems scientist; Fatma Almoghunni, character artist; Omar Ashour, and Mohammed Fituri, both Carnegie Mellon computer science students and character artists. Carnegie Mellon faculty are also tracking the students’ progress through in-depth analysis which will measure the impact ‘Alice’ has had upon their performance in fields such as computing, technology and math. Alice was demonstrated to secondary school students this weekend during CS4Qatar for Women, an outreach program that aims to introduce young women to computer science and explore career possibilities in the field. As a global leader in education, Carnegie Mellon University is known for its creativity, collaboration across disciplines, and top programs in business, technology and the arts. The university has been home to some of the world’s most important thinkers, among them 19 Nobel Laureates and 12 Turing Award winners. In 2004, Qatar Foundation invited Carnegie Mellon to join Education City, a groundbreaking centre for scholarship and research. The campus continues to grow, now providing prestigious education to more than 400 students from 40 countries. The university offers five undergraduate degree programs in Biological Sciences, Business Administration, Computational Biology, Computer Science and Information Systems. You can experience ‘Alice Middle East’ by downloading the programme at http://alice.qatar.cmu.edu.  

Reuters/Bengaluru Indian outsourcing major Infosys Ltd's back-office services unit was overcharging Apple Inc , leading to the exit of top executives, two senior Infosys people said on Thursday. Infosys, India's second-largest IT services exporter, said this week it had fired Abraham Mathews, chief financial officer of its Infosys BPO unit, for failure to comply with the company's code of conduct. Infosys BPO chief executive officer Gautam Thakkar resigned on "moral grounds" and would leave the company on November 30, Infosys said. It did not give details about the charges against Mathews. Infosys spokeswoman Sarah Gideon said the company would not comment further on the confidential investigations. "The financial irregularities are not material in nature and the company has already made required disclosures. The company has taken disciplinary action on employees," she said in an email. Apple did not immediately respond to an email sent outside business hours seeking comment. The irregularities in Infosys BPO's dealings with Apple came out during an internal audit, said one of the people at Infosys, who declined to be named as he was not authorised to speak to the media. Though the audit showed that the financial impact of the wrongdoing on the company was minimal, Infosys decided to take a tough stance to demonstrate its "zero-tolerance policy for any improper conduct," he said. The Economic Times newspaper on Thursday said Infosys would soon fire at least six more employees at the unit, after investigations revealed that they had produced inflated invoices and allegedly overbilled Apple for many months. Infosys earlier this year brought in Vishal Sikka as its new CEO to chart a new strategy for the company, once a trend-setter for India's more than $100bn IT outsourcing industry. Infosys has struggled in recent years to retain staff and market share.   

by Bilal Iqbal There was a time when the 3.5 inch screen on the original iPhone could correctly be described as huge. Touchscreen phones were just coming in vogue, and circa 3-inches was common for the first of such devices. Consider the Samsung Armani that launched with a now ridiculous-sounding 2.6 inch screen in 2007 or LG Prada that came with a 3-inch screen. One of the first Samsung phones running Android, the I7500 Galaxy flagship, came with a 3.2 inch screen. Now, an entry-level Samsung smartphone, the Galaxy Pocket 2, features a 3.3 inch screen. The smallest iPhone comes with 4 inches of screen, and that’s already a generation old — the latest iPhones start with a 4.7 inch screen and are not afraid to embrace the phablet form factor in the form of the 5.5-inch-screen-touting iPhone 6 Plus. The Galaxy Pocket 2 and its competitors from other manufactures are decidedly cheap devices, specced down to a price. When price is of no concern, and even when they are making phones for smaller hands, manufacturers do not tend to go lower than 4.3 to 4.7 inches. With even the iPhone 6 embracing this size, the chance of getting specced-out phones in much smaller bodies may already be a lost cause. Clearly, the trend reflects market demands. True, there may be a minority of people who either have tiny hands or prefer holding a smaller phone, but most people like big screens. The bigger screens make up for their size by making life much easier on the web, in games and just about any task on the phone that you can think of. But there are some people who just can’t or won’t live with big-screen phones. They do not have as many choices in the market as their big-screen counterparts. For this comparison, we are only considering phones that feature the bleeding edge of technology in small form: the Galaxy S5 Mini and HTC One Mini 2 feature low-end specs that just don’t cut it. LG itself does not have a smaller version of its excellent G3. The only smartphones that fit this criterion from known manufacturers are: Sony Xperia Z3 Compact, Apple iPhone 6, Samsung Galaxy Alpha and Sony Xperia Z1 Compact. First off, the Apple iPhone 6 is the biggest of the four devices and also the most expensive (starting at QR2,800). If you are dead set on getting the latest iOS device, then the iPhone 6 is your only option. Apple could have easily given you a much smaller device with the same screen size if it had wanted, but it chose to make the phone thinner instead of reducing the height or width of the device. The Galaxy Alpha features a screen as big as the iPhone 6, but beats it on size: it has less height, less width and less thickness. It does compromise on battery life (it features virtually as big a battery as the iPhone 6, but consumes more power), getting 52 hours in the GSMArena battery test, vs 61 hours for the iPhone 6. Honestly speaking, we are used to seeing much better scores nowadays, and both devices disappoint on this count. If you are a light to moderate user, you should be able to get through a day easily with both devices, but you may find yourself reaching out for the power outlet before the day is up if you tend to do a lot on your phone. The better battery life on the iPhone 6 may last you an extra couple of hours, depending on your usage pattern, which may mean the difference between driving back home after work with a dead phone and a working phone. Apple iOS is also universally known for its easier accessibility for new users. What the Alpha has going for it is a higher resolution camera, Android flexibility, removable battery, lighter and smaller body. Enter the Sony Xperia Z3 Compact. While Sony may be struggling to differentiate itself enough to win customers in the big-screen segment, it has the formula nailed down perfectly in the compact segment. The Z3 Compact features the exact same internals as its bigger brother, the Xperia Z3, in a body that is genuinely compact. The only thing that is different is the screen resolution — the Z3 Compact features a 4.6 inch 720p screen (same as the Galaxy Alpha and almost the same as the iPhone 6, 750p), while the Z3 features a FHD (1080p) screen — and less RAM (2gb vs 3gb). Apart from that you get the same class-leading (in terms of resolution) 20.7mp camera, Snapdragon 801 quadcore chipset running at 2.5ghz and Adreno 330 GPU. The battery size gets smaller, yes, but the battery life is better than the already-excellent score that the Z3 posts. The Z3 Compact scores a 101 hours on the GSMArena test, which is almost twice as good as the Galaxy Alpha and the iPhone 6. You should roughly be able to get two days of heavy use out of a Z3 Compact on full charge. The phone may not be the thinnest of the three at 8.6mm, but is smaller when it comes to width and height (127.3 x 64.9 x 8.6 mm). Sony achieves this by putting a marginally smaller screen in its phone and by not having a physical home key like Apple and Samsung. This is also truer to the phone’s Android roots. It retails for around QR2,200, the same as Galaxy Alpha. Lastly comes the Z1 Compact, which features almost the same components as Z3 Compact but can be found for much lower price in the market. It has a smaller screen of 4.3 inches in a body that is sized virtually the same as Z3 Compact and its battery scores 65 hours on GSMArena battery test. In hand, the Z3 Compact feels much more premium than Z1 Compact, owing to the minimal bezels. So unless you are hampered by limited budget, the Z3 Compact is the better option of the two. Most reviewers tend to copout at this point by saying: to each his own. But we believe the Sony Z3 Compact is truly a remarkable device for what it is and the price it is going for. On numbers alone, the Z3 Compact has us won over.     l The author can be contacted by e-mail at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat      

AFP/Seoul/New York Samsung Electronics has announced plans to slash the number of smartphone models it issues next year by up to one-third as it tries to cut prices in the face of intense Chinese competition. The strategy, confirmed by a company spokesman on Tuesday, was unveiled during a presentation in New York by the South Korean conglomerate's head of investor relations, Robert Yi. Yi said the company - which last month reported a near 50% plunge in third-quarter net profit following a 20% drop in the previous quarter - would reduce the number of smartphone models in 2015 by between one-quarter and one-third. The strategy is expected to be accompanied by a significant increase in the production of remaining models that can be sold more cheaply to compete with cut-price Chinese rivals. The recent nosedive in Samsung's fortunes followed several years of stellar growth and a seemingly endless succession of record quarterly profits driven by its all-conquering mobile unit. Its flagship Galaxy S smartphone has suffered in the high-end market from the popularity of arch-rival Apple's new iPhone 6, while its dominance of the middle- and low-end handset segment has been challenged by Chinese handset makers such as Huawei, Xiaomi and Lenovo. For the moment, Samsung is still the comfortable leader by sales volume, but its share of the global smartphone market has fallen from 35% a year ago to just under 25%, according to Strategy Analytics. WiFi hubs to replace New York pay phones Thousands of high-tech terminals offering free WiFi and other services will soon replace New York's remaining fleet of seldom-used pay phones, the city mayor said. Mayor Bill de Blasio called the "LinkNYC" system "the fastest and largest municipal WiFi network in the world." Up to 10,000 terminals will provide free Internet access up to 150 feet (45 metres) from hubs, which will be phased in across the city's five boroughs beginning in 2015. Free domestic phone calls can also be made from the stations, which feature a touch-screen interface, a cell phone and tablet charging station, and provide access to emergency services. WiFi is already available in dozens of New York parks, as well as a small part of the Chelsea neighbourhood.

AFP/Los Angeles Smartphone app Snapchat on Monday began letting users in the US send money to friends by simply typing dollar amounts into new "Snapcash" messages. The new feature came from a first collaboration between Snapchat and Square, a mobile payments company headed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. "The product you're seeing today is fast, fun, and incredibly simple," Snapchat, which has been eagerly looking to boost revenue, said in a blog post. Those opting to use the new feature must store their debit card numbers at Square to carry out the transfers and users must be 18 years of age or older. However, about half of Snapchat users are reported to be 17 or younger. Financial terms of the alliance between Snapchat and Square were not disclosed. The new service was added as Snapchat works to boost the money-making capabilities of its popular app, which sees messages disappear shortly after being viewed. Last month, Los Angeles-based Snapchat began weaving ads into the service. The new ads were the first paid content at Snapchat. Users have the option of ignoring ads, which automatically disappear after being viewed or within 24 hours, according to Snapchat. The startup said the reason for dabbling with advertising is simply that it needs to make money. "Advertising allows us to support our service while delivering neat content to Snapchatters," the blog post said. The introduction of ads came just weeks after a huge trove of evidently intercepted Snapchat images and videos were exposed online, raising fears about what may be revealed in messages intended to vanish seconds after beng viewed. In what was referred to as "The Snappening," people who used third-party programs instead of the official Snapchat application had copies of supposedly transient missives squirreled away by hackers who began posting them online. Snapchat assured users that the startup's servers were not breached, nor were they the source of the leaked images. Snapchat rocketed to popularity, especially among teens, after the initial app was released in September 2011.

AFP/London Facebook is preparing a new office version of its social networking site to compete with other sites like LinkedIn, the Financial Times reported on Monday citing sources familiar with the matter. "Facebook is secretly working on a new website called 'Facebook at Work'" that would allow users to "chat with colleagues, connect with professional contacts and collaborate over documents", it said. Facebook last month reported its quarterly profit nearly doubled to $802mn (640mn euros) but saw its stock pounded after outlining a plan to invest heavily in the future instead of revelling in short-term riches. "We are going to continue preparing for the future by investing aggressively, connecting everyone, understanding the world, and building the next-generation in computing platforms," Facebook founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg said then. "We have a long journey ahead," he said. Facebook, which has 1.35bn monthly active users worldwide, was set up in 2004 by Zuckerberg with fellow students at Harvard University who wanted to set it up as a college networking site. The site has been seeking to broaden its offerings, unveiling an application that lets people chat anonymously in virtual "rooms," evoking the chat rooms from the early days of the Internet. It is also testing a feature that lets users of the leading social network make purchases by simply pressing an on-screen "Buy" button. Facebook completed its multibillion-dollar deal for mobile messaging application WhatsApp last month.

AFP Yahoo Mail users took to Twitter to express frustration about disruptions Friday on the free messaging service. Website Downrightnow.com, which monitors popular online services, listed the status of Yahoo Mail as experiencing "likely disruption" and displayed a graph indicating it had been down for several hours. The graph showed Yahoo Mail being down several times in a one-day period. Yahoo did not respond to an AFP request for comment regarding the nature and extent of the problem. "Yahoo mail is down... AGAIN,"  a Twitter user wrote in commentary fired off with the hashtag #yahoomail. "Totally frustrated."

A handout photo released on November 13, 2014 by the European Space Agency shows Rosetta's wide-angle camera image capturing the position of lander Philae (circled) at 14:19:22 GMT (onboard spacecraft time). Reuters/BerlinEuropean Space Agency scientists will on Friday decide whether to try a risky drilling procedure to anchor an exploration probe to the surface of a comet before its batteries run out. The lander, released by the Rosetta spacecraft on Wednesday after a 10-year odyssey 500 million km (300 million miles) from Earth, floated away from its planned landing site after harpoons designed to hold it down failed to deploy. The probe is now resting precariously on two out of three legs in the shadow of a cliff on the comet. The lack of light means the probe, dubbed Philae, would not draw sufficient energy to operate on its solar panels as hoped once its batteries run out later on Friday. The ESA team are also uncertain of its exact position, making it difficult to "hop" the probe into a better position using its landing gear. The probe - virtually weightless on the comet's surface - was supposed to drill into the surface of the celestial body after landing, but its unstable position means there is a risk it could bounce off if the drill is deployed. But with the batteries about to run out, the scientists - based at the ESA's operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany - told the BBC on Friday that it was time to take more risks with the probe. Despite the landing setbacks, the 10-year Rosetta mission has achieved many breakthroughs, including the first time a spacecraft has followed a comet rather than just whizzing past and the first time a probe has landed on a comet. Comets are of interest to scientists because they are remnants from the formation of our solar system, over 4.6 billion years ago. These masses of ice and rock have preserved ancient organic molecules like a time capsule and may provide insight into how planets and life evolved. Even if Philae is unable to drill into the surface to analyse samples, the Rosetta spacecraft will continue to follow the comet until at least the end of 2015, even as it passes closest to the sun on its orbit. Philae is also taking pictures and gathering data on how the comet changes during the day. The ESA will give an update on the mission at 1300 GMT.

techknow beat by Bilal Iqbal  There are rumours in the industry that Sony may give up on its six-month release cycle starting with the successor to the Xperia Z3. The strategy might have seemed good when Sony started it — and it still does look rather tempting on paper — but a $1.5 billion loss just two weeks back indicates that the consumers are not biting. The Japanese giant has been releasing well-reviewed phones that seem to be focusing on things that should matter the most to consumers: the latest Xperia Z3, for instance, is being marketed around as a two-day-charging phone. And if reviewers are to be believed, the claims do hold true. GSMArena’s battery test puts the Xperia Z3 as good for 85 hours, which means if you use the phone one hour daily each for calls, videos and web browsing, you should easily get three days of use from it. In the individual tests, the phone lasts for about 11.5 hours of web browsing on a single charge, or over 12 hours of video playback. The score is better than the scores put up by the iPhone 6 (61 hours), Galaxy S5 (72 hours), HTC One M8 (71 hours) and LG G3 (69 hours). You do not sacrifice much in terms of anything. In fact you get waterproofing, something that is only offered by the Galaxy S5 among its direct rivals. You get a FHD 5.2 inch screen, a capable camera, and specifications that match all other competitors. The phone also sports a premium dual-glass design. The problem perhaps does not lie in the high end devices, but the mid and low range. According to a Fortune.com article, Sony had previously admitted that its devices targeted at developing markets had not done as well as they had hoped. The fact that Sony has failed to reveal its Android 5.0 Lollipop update plans for devices outside of its Xperia Z range also does not bode well for the Japanese giant. This also reflects in Sony’s revision of its target of selling 50mn phones in 2014 to 41mn devices. That said, Sony is not expected to cop out of the smartphone business, so consumers should not worry about the uncertain state of Sony’s mobile division while making their choices. How then does the Xperia Z3 hold up? Quite well, actually, when we go by retail prices. But its main competitors (except LG G3) are all older by six months or more now and can be had for far lower prices than Xperia Z3’s QR2,800 asking price. The Galaxy S5, for instance, can he had for around QR2,000 to QR2,100, the HTC One M8 can be had for QR2,400 to QR2,600, often with a QR200-worth Dot View case thrown in for free. The LG G3 already retails for a much lower QR2,460 and comes with QR400 worth of freebies of its own (a JBL headset and an LG Quick Circle case). Consider also the Xperia Z2, which retails for QR2,600 but can be had for far lower in the open market. It features a marginally slower processor but otherwise comes will all the bells and whistles that the Xperia Z3 boosts and can be had for QR1,900 to QR2,000 in the open market. GSMArena found that the Xperia Z2 does as well on its battery test as the Xperia Z3 (the Z2 got a slightly higher score of 89 hours, but the more important browsing and video playback scores are virtually the same). There is no doubt that the Xperia Z3 is a definite improvement over the Xperia Z2: it is faster, lighter and more compact. The version in Qatar also has dual SIM support. But we feel Sony held back some of the features they could have put in Z3 in favour of the Z4. It could have, for instance, come with the Snapdragon 805 chipset that comes in the Note 4. The Snapdragon 805 does not offer that much boost in terms of processing power, but features Adreno 420 GPU (vs Adreno 330 in in the Snapdragon 801 chipset found in the Xperia Z3). The Adreno 420 is up to 40% faster than Adreno 330, according to Qualcomm, the chipset manufacturer. While Adreno 330 at present is more than enough, the Adreno 420 offers better future proofing. Then there’s the matter with the screen resolution. Sony argues that it stuck with FHD resolution instead of QHD (as found on the Note 4 and LG G3) because the latter offers no tangible benefits on a screen this size and is much more taxing on the battery life. The claim is not without its merits — the G3’s battery score suffers primarily because of its taxing screen — but come March 2015, if the Z4 is announced with a QHD display, many will say Sony was just saving for later. As it is, the Sony Xperia Z3 is a capable phone that is priced simply too high. Sure, it’s new, but it comes with most of the same components as the much cheaper Z2 and the even-cheaper Z1. The three Zs most follow the same formula, with each iteration being a refinement of the previous edition. This is not the same as with other manufacturers, like Samsung with Note 3 and Note 4, HTC with One M7 and One M8 and LG with G2 and G3. Satisfied owners of Note 3, One M7 and G2 may find compelling enough reasons to upgrade their phones to the latest versions, but we cannot imagine a satisfied Xperia Z1 user wanting to upgrade to Xperia Z3. This in turn is also good news for new buyers then, as you get Sony’s smartphone formula for cheaper in the forms of Xperia Z1 and Xperia Z2. To us, if the Sony Xperia features and designs tickle your fancy, the Xperia Z2 is the one to go for. The Xperia Z1 is too unwieldy, with big bezels surrounding its 5 inch screen. The Xperia Z2 does a good job with the bezels, becoming compacter while offering a bigger and better screen (Z2 and Z3 have 5.2 inch IPS displays, while the Xperia Z1 has a non-IPS 5 inch display). The Z1 also does not exhibit the same longevity as Z2 and Z3 in terms of battery life.   The author may be contacted at [email protected] or followed on Twitter at @tknobeat      

AFPThe European probe Philae on Wednesday was on course to make the first-ever landing on a comet after separating from its mother ship, mission control said. Philae ejected at around 0835 GMT, said Andrea Accomazzo, flight operations director at the European Space Agency (ESA). "We see it in telemetry," he said, amid cheers and relieved applause from members of the team. "The Philae lander has separated from the Rosetta orbiter, and is now on its way to becoming the first spacecraft to touch down on a comet," the agency said. Touchdown by the 100-kilogramme (220-pound) robot lab is expected around seven hours later. A robot lab bearing 10 instruments, Philae is designed to carry out experiments on Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, racing towards the Sun at a distance of more than 500 million kilometres (300 million miles) from Earth. Comets are believed to be pristine clusters of ice and carbon dust, holding secrets on the origins of the Solar System -- and possibly of life on Earth -- 4.6 billion years ago. If all goes well, Earth will receive a signal at about 1600 GMT saying Philae has landed. "Now, it's down to the laws of physics. We're on the way to the surface," said ESA's senior science advisor, Mark McCaughrean. "I don't have finger nails, so I won't be biting them," he quipped. Philae is meant to settle down at a gentle 3.5 kilometres per hour, firing two harpoons into a surface that engineers fervently hope will provide enough grip. Ice screws at the end of its three legs will be driven into the low-gravity comet to stop the probe bouncing back into space A final check found an apparent malfunction with a small gas thruster on top of Philae which is supposed to fire at the same time, providing a downward push, said Stephan Ulamec with the German aerospace firm DLR. "We are going to have to depend entirely on the harpoons," which if the surface is right can penetrate to a depth of 2.5 metres (more than eight feet), Ulamec said. Conceived in the 1980s, the 1.3-billion-euro ($1.6-billion) Rosetta project was approved in 1993. The orbiter, carrying Philae, was hoisted into space in 2004, but needed more than a decade to reach its target in August this year -- a six-billion-kilometre (3.75-billion-mile) trek around the inner Solar System.

Expedition 41 light Engineer Alexander Gerst of the European Space Agency (ESA) (L), Commander Max Suraev of the Russian Federal Space Agency (Roscosmos) (C),  and NASA Flight Engineer Reid Wiseman (R) sit in chairs outside the Soyuz TMA-13M capsule just minutes after they landed in a remote area near the town of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan AFP/Arkalyk, KazakhstanA three-man multinational crew of astronauts returned to Earth Monday aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, after spending 165 days working together at the International Space Station, NASA said. ISS commander, Russia's Maxim Surayev, his American colleague Reid Wiseman and German Alexander Gerst from the European Space Agency touched down at 10:58 pm Sunday (0358 GMT Monday). The three men smiled broadly from reclining chairs as medical personnel tended to them amid patches of snow on the barren steppe just northeast of Arkalyk, Kazakhstan, where they landed. Surayev flashed a V for victory sign while Wiseman pumped his fist as they waited to regain their land legs after nearly half a year of weightlessness. "Everything was in the spirit of cooperation, so I think that everybody needs to learn and follow the example of the ISS crew members," Surayev said. "Let's try to live together side by side. This is the most important thing," he added. While in space the crew traveled more than 70 million miles (112.7 million kilometers), NASA said. The "bulls-eye" touchdown was executed amid low clouds and fog "following a flawless descent back into the atmosphere," according to NASA TV. The spacecraft was pulled onto its side by its parachute upon arrival, which NASA TV added was not uncommon. The US space agency said the "departure of Wiseman, Gerst and Surayev marks the end of Expedition 41," referring to their mission to the ISS to carry out equipment repairs, maintenance and experiments.  Surayev was on his second long ISS mission, having now spent a total of 334 days in space, while the other two astronauts were on their first trip. The three men were pictured smiling and with their arms around each other before hitching the ride back home, undocking from ISS at 7:31 pm (0031 GMT). Another three-person crew remains on the ISS to "continue research and maintenance aboard the station" and will be joined by three more astronauts who launch from Kazakhstan on November 23, NASA said.  NASA lost its ability to reach the space station when the shuttle program ended in 2011 after 30 years. The US space agency has helped fund private companies in a push to restore US access to the ISS. In the meantime, the world's astronauts must rely on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft to get to the ISS and back, at a cost of $70 million per seat. There are 15 country participants in the ISS program, though the US and Russia contribute the lion's share of funds for the project.