First look at HTC First – a Smartphone with Facebook Home

HTC and Facebook have jointly announced that they will be bringing out the first Smartphone with Facebook’s “Home” on April 12. Let us have a look at the Smartphone.

Here is a list of the specifications of HTC First –

• Processor: 1.4GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (MSM8930AA) processor
• Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean)
• Display: 4.3-inch with 720 x 1280 pixels
• Internal memory: 16GB
• RAM: 1GB
• WLAN: 802.11 a / b / g / n and Bluetooth 4.0/ LTE
• Rear Camera: 5MP
• Front Camera: 1.6MP
• Battery: 2,000mAh (Non-removable)

Image: http://gadgets.ndtv.com

The 4.3” display with the touch screen gives you super clear images and video watching experience is one of its kinds. The 1.4GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 (MSM8930AA) processor powers the phone. The phone does come with an internal storage of 16GB. However, there is no room for a memory card and so one cannot expand the memory with a memory card.

HTC One availablein India for Rs 42,900

The phone is built with a 2,000mAh non-removable battery. The 4.1 Jelly Bean Android version powers the phone to work seamlessly. The Smartphone has been made available in white, pale blue, red and black.

HTC has always brought phones in the market with superior and sleek design. The HTC hardware has always been eye-catching. There is no doubt that the HTC First will also sit in the same range as other phones introduced by HTC with rich looks and features. The HTC first will have the pre-installed Instagram, the app that Facebook purchased a few months back.

In France, the phone will be launched in association with Orange and in England, with EE. There is no information about the release dates of the phone in the rest of Europe.

Facebook aiming it high with Android phones

The giant social networking site, Facebook, has high plans to enter the Android phones. It is an endeavor to enter the mobile computing market, however without having a phone of its own. Facebook will be using a latest app, which will replace the home screen itself on some of the Android Smartphones.

Mark Zuckerberg, who is the CEO of Facebook, has announced that their company has come up with “Home”, a new software. “Home” will display the social network on those mobile devices that are run on the Android OS by Google. “Home” will allow the users to make modifications in Android.

These modifications can help the users in displaying the Facebook messages, newsfeed apart from the messages on the home screen itself. These modifications can help the users to have all the contents on the home screen and make it easy for them to access it.

There will not be the conventional lock screen on those devices that have installed the “Home”. Instead, the users will be able to have a look at the feed that shows status updates, a strip of ticker of photos apart from the ads by Facebook.

The first Smartphone that will have the “Home” built in it will be by HTC. The Smartphone will be known as HTC First. The expected date of the release of the phone is April 12.

Facebook to have a new look to its newsfeed

Top societal networking site Facebook will soon be having a novel look to its trendy newsfeed. The new look will be unveiled in this week. This is an attempt to offer something new to the members of the site that have now crossed well over one billion. The new newsfeed alteration will be displayed on March 7.

The venue for the exhibition of the newsfeed is a media event at Menlo Park in California, which happens to be the headquarters of the company. This event comes close on the heels of the previous event that took place in January, where the social search features were displayed.

The newsfeed is considered to be the pillar of the social networking site that includes images, videos as well as comments. There are other couple of pillars on which Facebook stands firmly – the user profiles and the search. It is not the first time that there is any update in the feeds.

The previous update had taken place in September 2011. The ads were then directly fit into the feeds. The company now seriously focuses on mobile first experiences as the number of mobile users are increasing who access social networking sites on these devices.

Facebook’s new Graph Search tool – a challenge to Google?

So what Facebook doesn't still have a phone of its own, it has its very own Graph Search tool. Experts and analysts feel that the new tool from Facebook might be soon able to make it more revenue. But what about the extremely popular search engine – Google? Has Facebook encroached on the areas dominated by Google or will it, in the future?

It would be too premature to comment on what difference it will make on Google’s search. But one thing is for sure, whatever is the outcome, it won’t affect Google soon. The Facebook stock might also come under a bit of pressure, mainly from the investors who were expecting a stronger announcement like a Facebook Phone.

Image: www.cnet.com

There is lot Facebook can search through the bigger search bar now. People will be able to find their past images, the hotels friends and family visited, the films that their friends enjoy and even possible dates too. It is more of a comprehensive search from Facebook. But what will happen if Facebook remains clueless about the queries?

Well, Microsoft’s Bing is there for the rescue. It will pull in the normal search results in that case.

Facebook purchases Instagram for $1 billion

Social networking giant Facebook has bought the image sharing app Instagram for an amount of $1 billion. The purchase has been done partly cash and partly in stock. Instagram is a photo-sharing app specially used in mobiles. Facebook has bought the app to strengthen their dominance in the mobile photo-sharing world.

Interestingly, Instagram that is only about a couple of years old has only about 1/14th of traffic as compared to Facebook. However, it has its own strong points and that is why Facebook was desperate to own the app. Instagram gives users the power to add photo effects as well as add filters.

Instagram did not have a decent revenue flow, in spite of having around 30 million users. When the company started the team consisted of nearly 12 employees. The entire team will now go with Facebook.

This will also be a first time for Facebook when it will be acquiring a team, a product that has such a huge number of users.

Indian NIT student lands a hefty job with Facebook

For a middle-class Indian student landing a job with social networking site Facebook, was like a dream come true. He is a student of the Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad. Facebook has offered him a package of Rs. 1.34 crores ($262,500). It has been the job offering of the highest monitory benefit, according to the officials of the MNNIT.

This is the highest paid job offered to a graduate student of the MNNIT in its history so far.

The identity of the student has been held back by the institute owing to security reasons. The student is currently studying his (or her, we don’t know) eighth semester of the B.Tech (Electronics).

There have been even more success stories related to MNNIT. However, the other successful students were offered packages in the region of Rs. one million. This is the first ever highest annual package for a student from all the NITs ever.

How to add new photos to your Facebook photo album

Though, Facebook is a social networking site, due to the volume of the users and the sharing, it is a widely used websites for photo sharing. You have created an album to upload your picnic photos. However you are stuck and don’t know how to go about your job. Don’t worry. Adding photos is fun and easy. Here is how you can do it.

It would be wise to have all the photos in a single folder before you start uploading them. So put all the images you wish to upload in only one folder if they are scattered around. Create a folder if needed at a location you can easily remember.

Then log on to your Facebook account and navigate to your profile. You can go to this page by clicking “Profile” to the right hand top corner of your screen.

When the profile page loads, you should see “Photos”. It is one of the many tabs that appear below the name of your profile.

When the next page downloads, pick the desired album. It will be the album where you would like to include the photos. Clicking the album will load a page from where you can view the current photos in that album.

This is the step for which you have come so long. Now it is time to add more photos. Click “Add More Photos”. It is a tab to the top left of your page.

Now, open the drive and the folder which you have created some time back. It is the same folder where you have saved all your photos. Clicking the folder will display all the images in it. It has a selection box so that you can select only those images you want.

You can select each image individually. However, if you have made this folder to upload all the images, click “Select All” to select all the photos in one go. Next, click on “Upload”. It will start uploading the images one by one and will also show you the progress of the upload through a pop-up box.

Once done successfully, one more pop-up box should appear giving you the confirmation of the successful upload. Click “Ok” and it will load another page. Here you apply the captions and the tags of your friends. Bingo, you have uploaded photos to your album successfully. Congrats!

You can even work with the Simpler Uploader as well. Click “Try The Simple Uploader”. Click the link and you will find loads of “Choose File” buttons on the page. Click the button to upload a photo. Select the desired photos and click “Open”. Select photos of your choice and click “Upload”. As done in the above step, here you can add captions as well as tag your friends.