Tips To Travel Smartly With Google Maps

In just a decade, technology has advanced so much that now we don’t have to pay for GPS in our rented cars. Now, free navigation is available from none other than Google itself in the form of Google Maps.

Google Maps, introduced around a decade ago, has got a place in almost every Android and Non Android device. Nowadays, Google Maps can provide you with any direction, restaurant, fuel stations, cinema halls and lot more stuff. You can even spot the high traffic roads and what route to take to avoid tolls and traffic. Google Maps is a handy tool to travel smartly without any glitches.

There’s much more that we can do with Google Maps. Here are some tips you can follow to travel smartly with Google Maps:

Offline Maps

Offline maps are one of the best features that Google Maps Offer. While traveling we usually have problems with our data connection. To overcome this we can save Google Maps of particular region so that we can access it without internet connection.

By the mid of 2012 Google embedded Offline Maps feature into Google Maps. So, next time whenever you travel save Offline Maps in your Google Maps app. You can do so by simply tapping the hamburger button in the upper left of the Google Maps screen. Select the Offline areas. Finally, to add it in your local storage just tap on the plus button in the bottom. You can zoom in zoom out, drag the map to select the area to download the Offline maps of it.

Save Important Places

You can save important places with just a tap. While traveling, we usually encounter lot of places of interest. But after a trip we forget to checkout those places. To solve this problem you can save important places on your maps. You need to follow the steps below to save the location:

Tap on the location on the map.
A popup will appear from the bottom, touch it and press save.

Avoid Highways and Tolls

Google Maps not only provides information, it also makes the information usable by applying proper metrics and algorithms. Ultimately, it gives us option to avoid tolls and highways. Whether you want to avoid tolls, highways and traffic or all of them, select the required option and you are good to go!

Train and Bus Schedules

This is a useful feature that Google added a couple of years ago. It provides you with information like Train and Bus schedules on a selected location (from your present location to desired location). It will also provide you with the departure times and fares.

Explore

Google Maps help travelers allowing them to skim through the places at the tip of fingers, checkout pictures, and read reviews as well. You can also check nearby attractions and find all places of interest. You can effortlessly search for the things you might require during your journey and pin the locations.

Multiple Stops

You can add multiple stops in a single journey. Google Maps will take Multiple Locations as input and will give you a full plan on how you can travel between these locations.

Find ATMs, Restaurants and others

You can scroll the ATMs near your location easily. You can check the ratings of Restaurants along with the location information. To save on restaurants and hotels you can use Couponraja discount coupons and save some extra bucks. Couponraja is a leading coupon code aggregator in India that allows you to get discounts on popular restaurants like McDonalds, KFC and others. Also, when you book flight/train/bus tickets or hotel rooms, do not forget to check out some exciting discounts at Couponraja and save big.

So, download the Google Maps app for a comfortable journey right away and keep Couponraja coupons handy to make travelling easy on pockets.

Shrinking Camera Tech Turned Smartphones Into Super Shooters

When Apple unveiled its new iPhone 7 last week, Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Phil Schiller called the device's camera one of the most advanced ever put in a smartphone. Cameras in phones are so commonplace now that users take them for granted, but improving the picture-taking capabilities of the newest devices means cramming a lot of tech into a small, and thin, package.

Upgrading the cameras in smartphones typically requires improving the sensors that pick up the image, the optics that focus it and, perhaps most importantly, the software and computing power in the phone, said Daniel Sakols, vice president of business development at Amalence Inc., which makes the imaging technology for companies such as phone maker Huawei.

"There was a big increase in the available processing power to take this image information and do radically new things with it," Sakols told Live Science.

One of the first cellphones with a camera was the Nokia 7650, released in 2002. At the time, Nokia said the technology was going to usher in the "multimedia messaging era," according to a statement from November 2001. The camera, at 0.3 megapixels, was a far cry from current models, which range from 8 megapixels to 12 megapixels.

The pictures taken on the Nokia 7650 were 30 kilobytes and were saved on only 3.6 megabytes of RAM, according to a 2003 review by ZDNet. This means that few existing smartphone apps would fit on the Nokia phone, let alone image-stabilization software.

In comparison, the Samsung Galaxy Note 7, which launched last month, has a processor similar to that found in a laptop computer and has 853,000 times as much data-storage space as the Nokia 7650. The Note 7's camera has a sensor that picks up 12 megapixels, while the iPhone 6 has an 8-megapixel camera and a similarly powerful processor. Both Samsung's and Apple's phone cameras can run image-stabilizing programs, as well as apps that sharpen edges and adjust for lighting conditions, a whole suite of adjustments that the cameras make without the user even knowing.

Sakols said that improvements to phone cameras made taking pictures more convenient and allowed the phone to compete with point-and-shoot cameras, if not digital SLRs. "It's what phone manufacturers are building around," he said. "It's no longer about just having a bigger sensor."

Software isn't the only factor in improving the cameras in smartphones. For example, the earliest phone cameras lacked the ability to focus. Now, smartphones can alter the position of the lens slightly using tiny motors and can provide a wider variety of depths of field and better autofocus capabilities. In fact, a big selling point of the iPhone 7 is the optical zoom, which actually changes the arrangement of lenses. The iPhone 6 had only a digital zoom, which just enlarges the image with software; it doesn't add any detail.

The optics of focusing are becoming a big issue in camera design, Sakols said. As a result, some manufacturers are adding a "bubble" to the front of the camera to add focal length to the lens(the bubble is visible on an iPhone 6 if you look carefully). Samsung has had camera models with optical zoom in the past, notably the Galaxy K, but the addition of real lenses added bulk to the camera itself. (On Samsung's website the phone even looks a little like a point-and-shoot camera)

"When you look at the lens against a sensor of a given size, one of the interesting constraints [is] as the sensor size increases so does the lens in front of it to project a nondistorted image," he said. This is why manufacturers are adding bubble shapes to the lenses — to get a little bit of extra distance between the lens and sensor so that the lens itself can be a bit larger.

But there are limits, Sakols said. He added that most phone makers now try to limit the size of the image sensor in order to keep the lens size down.

This is one reason why even though pictures taken on smartphones are good, digital SLRs still have an edge in some areas. This can be partly explained by the physics of gathering light onto an image. The aperture of the lens limits the resolution of a magnified image because when light waves go through a smaller opening, they tend to diverge rather than hitting the sensor in parallel. This process is called diffraction. Magnifying an image only magnifies the loss of detail, so the big lenses that professional photographers use will outperform a smartphone camera's zoom in some areas.

However, software and hardware advances have leveled the playing field for smartphone cameras and narrowed the performance gaps among phone manufacturers. Apple was once far and away superior, but that's less true now than it was nearly a decade ago, Saklos said.

"Apple's imaging capability is pretty awesome," he said. "But it's not just the iPhone 6 that can produce these beautiful images. Other smartphone cameras can kick out a fab image as well."

Xiaomi- Smartphone maker

Xiaomi- the dark horse in smartphone industry

Xiaomi Inc.

It is a privately owned Chinese electronics company headquartered in Beijing, China. It is the world's 4th largest smartphone maker. Xiaomi designs, develops, and sells

smartphones , mobile apps, and related

consumer electronics.

Since the release of its first smartphone in August 2011, Xiaomi has gained market share in mainland China and expanded into developing a wider range of consumer electronics, including a smart home device ecosystem. The company's founder and CEO is Lei Jun , China's 23rd richest person according to Forbes. The company sold over 60 million smartphones in 2014.

The company has over 8,000 employees, mainly in mainland China, Malaysia , and Singapore , and is expanding to other countries such as

India, Indonesia , the Philippines and Brazil .

According to IDC, Xiaomi is now the third largest smartphone maker in the world followed by Lenovo and LG at fourth and fifth place respectively. Samsung remains at the first place despite declining shipment volume, followed by

Apple Inc. at second place. Xiaomi also became the largest smartphone vendor in China in 2014, having overtaken Samsung, according to an IDC report.

At the end of December 2014, Xiaomi became the world’s most valuable technology start-up after it received US$1.1 billion funding from investors, making Xiaomi's valuation more than US$46 billion.

Xiaomi entered the Indian market in July 2014 and since then has expanded rapidly in India. Earlier, Xiaomi used to sell exclusively on Flipkart until announced its partnership with both Amazon.com and

Snapdeal on April 7, 2015. This is seen as a bid by the smartphone manufacturer to expand its retail base in India. It has also teamed up with Airtel Store and The Mobile Store to sell some of its selected devices. Later, in Q1 2015, it started its own store and also stopped selling its accessories to Flipkart and other online stores. On its first anniversary in India , it launched its own Mi Store App. On August 11, 2015, it started its first factory in Sricity , Andhra Pradesh in a partnership with Foxconn .

ZTE blade A1 trending

                          ZTE BLADE A1

ZTE Blade A1 is a budget Dual SIM ( Nano SIM) Dual Standby smartphone that features a 5 inch HD  IPS LCD Multi touch display with 720 x 1080 pixels resolution and 293 ppi pixel density. The screen size and display features guarantee crisp picture quality and an enriching gaming, surfing and video watching experience . ZTE Blade A1 runs Android 5.1 Lollipop with customised MiFavor 3.2 UI running on top and is powered by 1.3 Ghz octa core processor and 2GB RAM where many cores and big RAM facilitate that numerous tasks can run parallel to each other without slowing down the User Interface.

On the memory front, ZTE Blade A1 comes with 16GB Internal memory which is expandable upto 128GB via SD card, which is sufficient  to store a wide range of photographs, songs and videos. This smartphone sports a high resolution 13MP Rear camera with LED Flash for taking clear pictures and a 8MP Front facing camera for selfies and video calling. This device is equipped with a  2800mAh battery and a host of connectivity options such as 3G, GPRS/EDGE, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth and Micro USB. The highlight of this phone is that, in this price it boasts of a fingerprint sensor at the back. Other sensors available are Accelerometer and proximity sensor. It will be available in the following colour options- Smart White, Vibrant Yellow, Dream Green, Cool Blue, and Space Grey.

How to make your smartphone faster

                 How to make your smartphone faster

Here are the top 5 tips to make your phone run faster:

1) Use only essential widgets on your homescreen – each widget consumes memory and processing power which can slow your down your phone.

2) Uninstall apps that you don’t use – after awhile your phone can get cluttered as some Apps are designed to always run in the background. If you rarely use an App, then uninstall it to free up memory and CPU resource.

3) Install Apps to your phone memory – if you have an SDCard, always install Apps to the phone memory, which can be accessed faster. If you have Apps on the SDCard, then move them back to the phone memory with an App called Move2SD available from the Play Market.

4) Use Static rather than Live wallpapers – Live wallpapers consume processing power and memory. Unless you really must have them, uninstall them.

5) Kill tasks occasionally – Some Apps will run in the background indefinitely unless you kill them. Most of them won’t cause a problem, but it pays to check your running tasks from time to time. Hold down your Home key and check the Task Manager.

6) Don’t use Task Killers. Android manages tasks very well and Task Killers just make your phone unstable and can slow it down further.

Xiaomi’s Wearable Device Tracks Your Sleep, Steps And Heart Rate

Xiaomi’s much-speculated second wearable device is now official, after the Chinese company unveiled the Mi band pulse.

A report from speculated that the Mi Band, the company’s debut wearable, made Xiaomi the world’s second largest seller of wearables behind only Fitbit. That was before the Apple Watch went on sale, of course, but this follow-up builds on that potential.

Beyond tracking your steps and sleep, alarms and some notifications, the Mi Band Pulse includes a heart rate tracker, as previously speculated. That addition — the device usesPPG to measure your heart rate — has made it slightly larger than its predecessor. The original Mi Band took a little time to add iPhone support, but Xiaomi’s website confirms that the wearable will work with both Android (4.4 or later) and iOS (iPhone 4S / iOS 7.0 upwards) from the get-go.

Most importantly, the device has retained a low price tag. That’s 99 CNY, or around $15, this time around. The original Mi Band will still be available for those seeking something more basic, with a  slightly lower price of 69 CNY, or around $11.

Fans of Xiaomi and its low-priced tech gadgets may be disappointed to hear that the wearable will go on sale in China only initially, as part of the country’s massive 11/11 Singles Day online shopping festival.

Xiaomi told us that it doesn’t yet have anything to say about international sales. However, we expect the Mi Band Pulse to be available outside of China soon, since the Mi Band itself retails in India, Europe and the U.S. too via Xiaomi's global mi store.

I bought a Mi Band recently as an inexpensive way to test whether fitness tracking is something that I want to take seriously. With the addition of a heart rate tracker, Xiaomi just made dabbling in this area more compelling — although we haven’t tested the Mi Band Pulse out yet.

Micromax launches world slimmest smartphone

                  Micromax Canvas Silver 5

New Delhi: Micromax on June 18th, announced the launch of its latest flagship smartphone - the Canvas Sliver 5. With a thickness of 5.1mm (end to end) and weighing a mere 97 grams, the Canvas Sliver 5, according to Micromax, is the world's slimmest and lightest 4G smartphone.

Crafted in a distinct metallic frame, which is made from aircraft grade aluminum, the smartphone is a perfect confluence of design and substance. Each element of the device is meticulously designed and adorned to make it the slimmest smartphone and a stunning looking device. Powered with Dirac HD sound and NXP Smart Power Amplifier, music enthusiasts can enjoy louder sound, deeper bass and room-filling deep sound.

Commenting on the launch, Vineet Taneja, CEO, Micromax Informatics Pvt. Ltd. said, "At Micromax, we have been consistently working on the design language of our devices to align them with the evolving needs of new-age consumers, and addressing them before anyone else in the eco-system. The Canvas Sliver 5 is a testimony to this vision, bringing together the elements of unmatched design, style and performance in one device as a result of diligent efforts of our R&D team to find the perfect balance. Our association with Hugh Jackman for the smartphone truly embodies the aspirational and fearless persona of the brand Micromax."

He also added, "We are also strengthening our promise of offering great service to millions of Micromax consumers across the country. With Canvas Sliver 5, we are introducing a new challenge for ourselves to build on our commitment for service excellence by offering a 7 day doorstep service policy."

On the performance front, the Canvas Sliver 5 is equipped with a 4.8-inch AMOLED HD display, which provides a 16.7 million color depth catching every color in its brilliant and spectacular form. Power packed with a 1.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon quad-core processor and a 2GB of DDR3 RAM, the smartphone ensures efficient multitasking. The smartphone comes with a 16GB ROM to enable the users to store their favorite pictures, videos, documents and more. An evenly placed 8MP AF rear camera with SONY IMX219 sensor, 4P Largan Lens and Blue Glass Filter enables users to shoot high quality images while the 5MP FF front camera incorporates intelligent beauty mode for clicking perfect selfies with great ease.

Running on the latest Android Lollipop 5.0, the users can avail great benefits like optimized battery usage, improved application performance, refreshed notification system etc. High power consumption has always been a problem for ultra slim phones but the Canvas Sliver 5 comes with a 2000mAh high density Lithium Polymer battery and an intelligently optimized User Interface, which automatically enables 30 per cent power saving for long lasting battery life.

Available at a price of Rs 17,999, the Canvas Sliver 5 comes with a free 4G SIM and double data offer from Airtel which doubles the 4G data amount for any consumer activating the 4G SIM. The device will be available from end of June 2015 across India.