Use Google Chrome to Drag Images into e-mails

Google now lets you add images directly to emails and Buzz in Gmail by a simple drag-and-drop function. This new feature makes it easy for you to add images to an email instead of adding them as attachments. This way you get to see the image pasted and also check if it was the correct image. Unfortunately, this feature works only in Google Chrome browser.

Gmail had introduced the new drag-and-drop attachments last month. Now extending that feature a bit more, users can add images directly into their messages. The best part is that you don't have to enable any setting. Just use Google Chrome's latest build, which can be downloaded from www.google.com/chrome.

But there's one problem with this feature. People may start sending chain emails with those funny, bizarre, and terrifying images.
Folks, please make the best of this feature but don't abuse it.

Motorola FlipOut: A Square, Android 2.1 Phone

Images of an upcoming Motorola handset FlipOut have surfaced online. Photos of the square shaped Motorola handset were grabbed by Italian HDblog.it. FlipOut has MotoBlur interface layered over the Android Eclair 2.1 operating system. U.S. nationals can expect to see this phone next month in three different colors.
Motorola FlipOut has a square form factor in which the screen can be slided to reveal the QWERTY keyboard. This square handset has a 2.8-inch display screen and runs Android Eclair 2.1 with MotoBlur branding. Inside the FlipOut, Motorola has packed a 700MHz microprocessor, 512MB ROM, and 256MB RAM so that Android's 2.1 update can run smoothly.
Apart from that, FlipOut will sport a 3.1 megapixel camera and GPS. This phone will support 3G networks. It would be interesting to see how this phone performs against the Microsoft's freshly announced Kin One.
The Kin One has more rounded corners and bit stubby looking while the FlipOut is purely square in shape. Again, both smartphones seem to target the social network frenzy audience. In a way, it looks like square-DSi. We're yet to get an official word on this smartphone.

Nokia's 3 New Mid-range 3G Phones in India

Nokia has introduced three new 3G enabled mobile phones in India - E52, 6700 Slide and 7230. All these handsets were announced in November 2009 but are being introduced now, reported Fonearena. These phones are compatible with the UMTS/3G networks and will have a social networking flavor in them. Both Nokia 6700 and 7230 are slider phones while E52 has a candy bar form factor.
Nokia E52 smartphone from E series is a worthy successor to the Nokia E51 model but unfortunately, has been introduced very late in India. Slim and sleek E52 has 2.4-inch QVGA display with up to 16 million color support. This phone has 3.2 megapixel camera with flash and also has built-in A-GPS as well as Nokia Maps support. Nokia E52 has social networking apps integrated and supports Windows Live, Yahoo!, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. Apart from that, the E52 supports Mail for Exchange, IBM Lotus Notes Traveler, Nokia Messaging, POP/IMAP and select third party solutions. E52 has up to 60MB internal memory which is expandable with up to 16GB microSD card.

Nokia E52 would be available in India for about Rs. 12,400 and might be offered in four colors options.

 

Nokia 6700 Slide is yet another 3G enabled handset which was deemed to be made available last year but is being officially introduced now. Do not confuse Nokia 6700 Slide with Nokia 6700 Classic. Blame Nokia for such confusing numbers and not us! Nokia 6700 comes with 5 megapixel Carl Zeiss optics autofocus camera with dual-LED flash and has a dedicated camera button.

This phone comes with Symbian S60 9.3 third edition with feature pack 2. With 60MB internal memory, this phone can hold up to 16GB usable to store music and video. Nokia has also added FM radio and the music playtime of this phone is claimed to be 29 hours but offers 2.5mm audio port unfortunately. This 6700 Slide has 5-way navigational D-pad like key in the centre. These multimedia features may attract many but this phone offers talk-time of 4 hours in GSM mode and 3 hours in 3G mode.
Nokia will sell 6700 Slide for Rs. 11, 500 approx. in India and would be available in six colors.

 

 

Third in line is the Nokia 7230 which is a 3G enabled smartphone that runs Symbian S40 OS comes with 3.2-megapixel camera capable of recording video at 15 frames per second. Offering 3.5mm audio port, the 7230 has Stereo FM built-in. Nokia offers 2GB microSD card free with this phone as it has 45MB of internal memory and capable of holding up to 16GB microSD card. It offers up to 5 hours talk time on 2G and 3 hours of talk time on 3G networks.

Nokia 7230 would be available in India for about Rs. 7,000 with options for Graphite and Hot Pink colors.
All three phones are 3G-enabled and fall in mid-range price bracket.

Google Chrome Speed Test

After incorporating every possible feature within their browser, either through built-in feature or through support for add-ons, browser makers seem to be concentrating on one thing and one thing only - Speed.

Every new version of the browser boasts of increased speed compared to its previous version. 10%, 20%, 50% faster, such figures aren't hard to come by. Whether the browser actually delivers these figures or does it really matter in real life usage is a different matter altogether. But one thing is for sure, these browser makers really want you to browse the web as fast as it is technologically possible.
Recently Google released the version 5 Beta for their popular Chrome browser. But instead of just stating that it is fast, they went ahead and did something totally outrageous. They compared the browsing speed to that of a speeding potato shot through a custom-made canon, the waves of sound and a bolt of electricity. As usual, when it comes to such things, we were a bit skeptical while watching their video. To be honest, we do not believe that any browser is as fast as a bolt of electricity, or even a flying potato for that matter! Or maybe we are just used to the terrible Internet speeds here in India.
But we had to test it ourselves. We did not have access to potato-shooting canons or Tesla coils, so instead we decided to take the traditional and more realistic route to testing the browser performance - loading some webpages on it and comparing it with others that are available. We also threw in a couple of benchmarks to get a better idea of the situation.
We ran the test on a Dell Studio 14 with 2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8700, 4GB RAM and running on Windows 7 Ultimate 32-Bit. For comparison, we took all the major browsers out there, including:

• Internet Explorer 8
• Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2
• Google Chrome 4
• Google Chrome 5 Beta
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.3
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4 Beta build 3
• Apple Safari 4.0.5
• Opera 10.53

Note that we were only testing the speed and performance of the browser, not its actual usability and other features. So go ahead and check the results.

Peacekeeper Score

Acid 3 Test Score

Internet Browsing Speed Test (Click on image for high resolution version with actual time in seconds)

For the test we opened the Techtree homepage, Twitter login page, Facebook login page, Amazon home page, The Big Picture homepage, Wikipedia page for this entry, Softpedia home page, InterfaceLIFT home page, Google Maps homepage, and then we downloaded this high resolution image. All these are sites we use on a regular basis and hence they are the best judge for a browser's speed.
As you can see, Chrome 5 Beta is not really all that fast in real life compared to other browsers, although it did have an edge in the Peacekeeper browser benchmarks. Also, Chrome beta isn't as fast as Google claims it to be.