| BBM for mobile sports annoying but critical notification, still hauls 5 million users Oct 22nd 2013, 04:21, by Juan Carlos Torres The BlackBerry Messenger app has finally arrived on Android and iOS, but it is not without its quirks. Despite that, according to BlackBerry, the reception has been extremely positive, leading one to believe in the future of the messaging platform. 
The BBM app is available for Android and iOS, but apparently on Android it presents the user with a persistent notification in the status bar, which may annoy a few people who prefer to keep that area of their device neat and tidy. Responding to user feedback, BlackBerry has introduced an option to toggle the icon, but users might want to keep that feature on if they want to be assured of being able to send or receive messages at all times. It’s not entirely BBM’s fault though. The way Android is designed, apps that are not currently running in the foreground are eventually closed, especially when memory goes down quite low. Apps that want to always be running, regardless of state or the device’s memory, are required to make their presence known with a notification icon. A messaging app such as BBM, thus, has no choice but to display the icon in order to be left alone, ensuring that messages are received and delivered at all times. That may not be much of a price to pay for the 5 million users that the app already has. That number comes straight from BlackBerry, who reported on the first 8 hours of the app’s existence for both Android and iOS. The numbers are quite impressive indeed, thoujght it remains to be seen if this will translate to long-term users as time passes by. VIA: Android Central, The Next Web |  | Next gen Qualcomm Snapdragon APQ8084 spotted in AnTuTu, runs at 2.5 GHz Oct 22nd 2013, 03:50, by Juan Carlos Torres If there’s one adjective that describes the mobile tech industry, it would be “fast”. Just as more and more high-end smartphones are adopting Qualcomm‘s latest Snapdragon 800, the ARM chip manufacturer is now reportedly already working on its next generation Snapdragon chip. 
No, it isn’t a 64-bit chip yet, which Qualcomm has pointed out, and then retracted, to be a merketing gimmick, in an attempt to discredit Apple and it’s new processor, which wasn’t manufactured by Qualcomm. Or at least there isn’t any indication that this new chip will be making that big a jump just yet. In fact, it seems that Qualcomm’s next Snapdragon will simply be an incremental upgrade. A leaked AnTuTu benchmark shows a Qualcomm chip with the model APQ8084, just a digit away from the Snapdragon 800 APQ80874, running at 2.5 GHz. In comparison, the Snapdragon 800 runs at 2.3 GHz, which may not seem like such a huge improvement, but should still boost performance a bit in a few places. The rest of the specs, such as the four cores and the maximum supported resolution of 1080×1920, remain the same. The GPU, however, is said to be a brand new Adreno 420. There is no information when this new Qualcomm chip will be unveiled, though there might be a chance of that happening at the Mobile World Congress early next year. It remains to be seen if upcoming smartphones, such as the rumored Samsung Galaxy S5, will already be sporting the processor by then. VIA: Pocketdroid | | New ASUS MeMO Pad 7 ME175KG rumored to come with dual SIM support Oct 22nd 2013, 03:19, by Juan Carlos Torres It seems that ASUS isn’t done churning out affordable tablets from its MeMO Pad line this year. Just a month after unveiling 8- and 10.1-inch models at IFA in Berlin, the company is now said to be preparing a MeMO Pad 7 tablet yet again, but this time with a slight twist. 
The last 7-inch budget tablet announced by ASUS was the MeMO Pad HD 7, way back in June. That device sported a 1280×800 resolution display, a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor, a 5 megapixel rear camera, a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera, and ran on an old Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. While specs are, of course, still unconfirmed at this point, it seems that the rumored new tablet will only be a slight upgrade in some aspects. The next MeMO Pad 7, with a model number ME175KG, will be sporting a slightly higher 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 MSM8226. The display, however, will remain at 7 inches, with the same 1280×800 resolution. The rear camera will also stay at 5 megapixels but the front-facing camera has seemingly been upgraded to 3 megapixels. Fortunately, it will not be lagging behind in Android version and will be running the latest Android 4.3 Jelly Bean. But the biggest change is probably the addition of dual SIM support on the tablet. The dual SIM feature should probably clue us in that the device is primarily targeted towards other markets, and indeed this new MeMO Pad 7 is said to be heading to China first, with no news of international availability. It is expected to arrive by the end of the year, so hopefully we’ll have more details before then. VIA: Notebook Italia | |
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