Saturday 6 September 2014

Lenovo Yoga Tablet 10 HD+ review




If you want an affordable tablet, then Lenovo Yoga Tablet is the tablet for you. With its top quality screen, 16 hour battery life (a really very long battery life), one charge. A 10.1 inch screen, 1,920 x 1,200 IPS display; Qualcomm Snapdragon 400; 2GB RAM; 16GB storage; 802.11n Wi-Fi; Bluetooth 4.0; microSIM slot; microSD up to 64GB; 9,000mAh battery; 626g.

Unlike other tablets, Lenovo yoga has an adjustable kickstand hinge that props the device into several positions, and a 9,000mAh battery plus it’s got a full high-resolution 1,920 x 1,200 screen, front-facing speakers and a quad-core processor. It’s about $155 cheaper than most top tablets like apples iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab and Sony models. It’s got 802.11n Wi-Fi rather than the future-proofed 802.11ac hardware included in the Samsung and Sony models. It has an 8 Mega-Pixel camera and a 1.6-megapixel front-facing shooter.

One other striking thing about this tablet is that its display is High Definition (HD) that is 1,920 x 1,200 IPS display that makes watching HD YouTube videos so cool. Has a loud accurate sound and a useful multi-window mode. For better viewing it is advisable to tilt it up when it’s on flat surface.

Just like Yoga 10, Yoga 10 HD has an unusual spiral notebook aesthetic. The tablet has a cylindrical aluminum hinge that holds the battery. It comes with android 4.3 processor and 2G RAM that allow it to surf the Web and play movies reasonably well. The audio is excellent good for listening to music. Lenovo sells a $79 Bluetooth keyboard that can snap onto the top of your Yoga tablet for those who want to type when tablet is in the stand mode.



The tablet has three modes: Stand Mode, Tilt mode and Hold Mode

Stand Mode: allow you have a video conference with someone or watch a video clip while working on your PC



Tilt Mode: very useful when looking down at the tablet, and its useful for when typing, just like having a slightly tilted keyboard.



Hold Mode: of course when you want to carry it around










Friday 5 September 2014

QR Codes (Quick Response Codes)



For most Blackberry (BB) Users, Quick Response (QR) Codes are nothing new. You may have seen it before, even if you are not a BB user. QR Code is the trademark for a type of matrix barcode or two dimensional barcode. It was evented by Denso Wave in 1994 with the sole purpose of tracking vehicles during manufacture. It is a machine optical label that uses four standardized encoding modes (numeric, alphanumeric, byte / binary, and kanji) to efficiently store data; extensions may be used too.

QR codes can store URLs (Uniform Resource Identifier ), contact details like vCard, phone numbers, messages (SMS) and even an encrypted message for fast readability compared to the normal UPC (Universal Product Code) barcodes as illustrated below. That is why the name Quick Response (QR) was derived.


Even though it started off in the automotive industry, it is now widely used in product tracking, item identification, time tracking, mobile marketing, blackberry messenger, Even the Japanese immigration system now uses encrypted QR codes when issuing visa in passports for security reasons.

When you look at a QR code you will see square dots (black modules) arranged in a square grid on a white background, which can be read by an imaging device such as a camera or most modern smart devices with a camera and processed using Reed Solomon error correction until the image can be appropriately interpreted.

Today, most publications like university catalogs, business cards, books, magazines, articles have a QR code printed on them. Even the boxes of printers, TVs or other electronics now come with these codes. When you bring a QR reader close to the code, it quickly detects it and translates it to a message that can easily be understood by the user. When scanned, most QR codes takes you to the website (URL) of the organization or company that has the QR code. A printing company recommends that the minimum size for a printed QR code should be 0.03 inches (0.76 mm) square for a single "module", that is one "bit" of the code, to ensure that the printed result is legible for scanners or smart devices.


Having a QR code on your business card makes it easy in the sense that clients may forget your website address or even misspell it, or may not have the patience to type it out. With QR codes, this problem is taken care of.  Also BBM users can easily scan codes of friends and spontaneously add them to their contact list. It can’t get any better or I might just say perhaps someone may just invent something better.

With the beauty of this technology, comes its down side. It is advised that you should only scan reliable QR codes as some codes could carry malicious scripts or take you to a dangerous website with browser exploits.