efflorescence

Looks like Apple took a lot of lessons from its fiercest competitor in the smartphone ecosystem, Android.

Command center is inspired from quick toggles.
Lock screen notifications on Android are for a long time.
Safari tab switching is exactly like Chrome’s.
Finally multi tasking is available for iOS, lifted directly from webOS cards UI, designed by Matias Duarte, Android design head.
iTunes Radio sounds a lot like Play Music All-access, although a lot limited.
Mail app allows swipe to delete, Gmail has this function from years.
Calendar apps looks very similar to Google’s.
Navigation drawer in core apple apps, e.g., iMessage, all updated Google apps feature it.
Swipe to unlock, Lock screen looks very Holo-ish.
Auto-app updates finally comes to iOS.
Notification Sync, Google Play Services offer it for a month by now and its amazing, I must say.
Apple Maps, that were limited to iOS till now are available on Mac, Google Maps is available everywhere.

It seems iOS is morphing into Android slowly, but its still crippled by the restrictions imposed by Apple, you still can’t make Chrome your default browser, neither Maibox as your default Mail app, you can’t post a picture from the photos apps to Tumblr directly, I mean WTF is this, it is 2013, not 2007!

This Electronic Frontier Foundation page helps in understanding visually, how the goverment, hackers, police and lawyers could snoop over user data and how use of Tor and HTTPS could minimize the user private data being snooped illegally.

Yet another ‘Revolutionary’ Phone/Phablet/Tablet!

As if it was not already enough.

The latest edition of the annual Internet Trends report finds continued robust online growth. There are now 2.4 billion Internet users around the world, and the

Very Insightful Presentation by Mary Meeker on Internet Trends and the future. 

Jolla is the meebo based linux fork mobile OS and are launching their first device also called “Jolla” today. This new mobile OS brags “Android™ app compliant” as one of its core feature.

In the mobile ecosystem war everybody knows the importance of apps and its ability to make or break a product, everybody wants to ride on the success of Google’s Android by supporting the apps written for android OS on their devices by creating a virtual app running environment or some other neat trick. Blackberry is trying this with android runtime environment. Jolla confirms the android app compatibility. Ubuntu phone is expected to support it and so does Tizen, now it is to be seen, if any of these turns out to be the wildfire success like Android. 

LG India has now officially announced the launch of Nexus 4 smartphone in the country today. Priced same as the pre-order listing, the phone will be available at INR 25,990 (16GB version) in the country.

Finally.

Google’s free storage limit for Gmail and Google Drive was 10 GB and 5 GB respectively. If you were a heavy drive user, you may already have exhausted your free 5 GB storage limit and maybe 5 GB of your storage was sitting idle in Gmail, because you were not a heavy gmail user. Now, with this change you could use your free unutilised gmail storage for drive because the Google storage has been unified.

Pay for cloud storage only after you have exhausted your 15 GB cloud storage completely.