Friday 31 May 2013

Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 13


Lenovo has experimented with ways to convert laptop to tablet before, notably with the ThinkPad Twist, but the IdeaPad Yoga 13 converts from laptop to tablet by flipping the screen all the way over so it sits underneath the keyboard.It's on sale now for around £1,000.




Google Play Music comes to iOS


Google Music



Google's music streaming service is coming to iOS "in a couple of weeks". Speaking at the D11 conference, Google VP Sundar Pichai said Google is "working like crazy" to being Google All Access to Apple's walled garden.
And not without good reason: the music streaming industry, once the reserve of Pandora and Last.fm (remember those guys?), has diversified at breakneck speed. Twitter has launched a music platform, Apple is working (and perhaps struggling) to launch "iRadio" this summer, and startups like Bloom are trying to dig out the earth from beneath the established players.
Streaming music is one of the few areas of growth in the music industry. In 2012, digital revenue increased by 9 percent. In comparison, the entire industry's revenue inched up by only 0.3 percent. Digital now accounts for a third of total industry revenues.
As major online players broaden their offerings -- music, video, social, news -- in a relentless hunt for user data, music streaming's reach is expanding.
In April, Twitter launched Twitter Music, which uses Spotify and Rdio to provide streaming music to users and music discovery services based on their tweets and the tweets of the people they follow.
Apple has been engaged in protracted discussions with major labels about a new "iRadio" service. It secured a deal with Universal Music in May but negotiations with Sony Music were reportedly held up by discussions about how skipped tracks are charged.
Streaming platforms pay record labels a fee each time a track is played. At one stage, Apple had apparently managed to bargain the labels down to a fee that was half of what Pandora currently pays. It didn't hold, however. Recent reports suggest that it will pay the same, or higher, fee as Pandora, and potentially also an advance.

In the meantime, it looks like Google will launch its music service on iOS before Apple does. Google All Access costs $9.99 (£6.50) per month and is currently only available in the US. Users get a 30-day free trial, and if they sign up before 30 June get the service for $7.99 (£5.30).A Google spokesperson declined to comment when asked about Google All Access coming to the UK.As more and more companies offer platforms for legal music distribution, record labels have more choice in terms of who they want to work with and who they want to suppress, as Grooveshark has discovered.What's the upshot of this diversification in streaming platforms? In 2012, the volume of illegally pirated music via P2P dropped 26 percent. You can be sure it will fall again in 2013.


HTC One gets Nexus version



The HTC One is following in the footsteps of the Samsung Galaxy S4 and is getting the Google treatment. The "Nexus edition" HTC One will be sold with the stripped back, pure Android operating system. Announced by Google VP Sundar Pichai, recently appointed head of Google's Android division, at the D11 conference on 30 May, the HTC One Nexus will be sold out of the Google Play store from 26 June.



It's the second Nexus edition smartphone in as many weeks. Announced at the Google I/O conference on 15 May, the Samsung Galaxy S4 Nexus will go on sale on the Google Play store at the same time as the HTC One.
And judging from Pichai's comments at D11, we can expect to see more Nexus devices as Google seeks to provide a standardised Android experience across the board.
"We're developing a user experience that scales across the world [...]," TechCrunch reported Pichai saying at D11. "We're making Android the operating system that is consistent across [a range of platforms]."He denied that Google would go as far as Apple in controlling its OS, saying, "people will get plenty of opportunities to differentiate".
With both phones running the same software, and with little difference in price ($599/£390 for the HTC One and $649/£425 for the S4), these two big-hitters will be going head to head in a straightforward test of their hardware and popularity.

Rumours of the HTC One Nexus began when the pure Android Galaxy S4 was announced, with some suggesting that it would have a very limited initial run, perhaps as low as 50,000 handsets. With the HTC One Nexus perhaps undermining HTC's standard HTC One offering, limiting the initial run might be a way of mitigating its impact. The HTC One Nexus will offer 32GB of inbuilt storage, half of what you get from the standard HTC One, but it will be $50 (£33) cheaper. It will only be available, at first, to customers in the US.


Fabulous Jewellery Collections



Maheep Kapoor launched her festive collection at the same place she usually displays her designs - at the Satyani boutique in Mumbai. We got the jewellery designer to tell us a little about her colourful collection, her fascination with jewellery and who she'd love to see wearing her designer trinkets

























Collection at Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week 2013



The Wills Lifestyle India Fashion Week (WIFW) is an event organized and promoted by the Fashion Design Council of India and sponsored by Wills Lifestyle.






















Indian bridal fashion with the launch his first ever collection at India Bridal Week. Taking classic styles and tweaking them a bit, we saw lehengas, embellished saris and tailored jackets