Sunday 3 February 2013

The dual-display YotaPhone

The YotaPhone which was showcased at the 2013 CES in Las Vegas will be available in the second half of this year.

It is a dual-screen (less than 10mm thick) device that's half Android smartphone and half ebook reader. On one side is a standard full-colour screen, but flip the phone and you have an electronic paper display, the kind that is found in e-readers.

I'm not sure if it's my cup of tea, but fiddling with the slab should give an idea.

The YotaPhone screen is Colour on one side and Grey-scale e-reader on another.


The YotaPhone Specifications

Processor.           : Qualcomm's 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon S4 Plus
Memory              : 2GB RAM
Screen size          : 4.3 inch, not bad.
Resolution           : 1,280 x 820
Thickness            : 9 mm, about the same thickness of the iPhone 4S
Connectivity        : 4G LTE, and NFC
Camera               : 12 MP, front camera 1.3 MP
Video                  : 1080p HD video
Storage capacity  : 32GB and 64GB
Expansion slot     : Not available. Reminds me of the iPhone.
Weight                :139g

The reason for the grey-scale screen? To preserve battery life. Well, we'll just have to see about that.


Source



Malaysia takes top spot: Bribery Table

We all want to make headlines, but not for the wrong reason!

Despite all this, I still love my country and hope it will make amend one day. Soon, I hope.

The Wall Street Journal.


Source: The Wall Street Journal, December 2012.

Despite Malaysia’s high-profile anticorruption crusade, half of the corporate executives surveyed by a global corruption watchdog believe that competitors have obtained business through bribery, underscoring the hard task ahead for Prime Minister Najib Razak‘s government in weeding out graft.

Transparency International said Malaysia scored worst in the 2012 Bribe Payers Survey. It asked about 3,000 executives from 30 countries whether they had lost a contract in the past year because competitors paid a bribe—and in Malaysia, 50% said yes. Second on the dubious honor roll was Mexico, at 48%.

A Transparency International survey suggests businesses in Malaysia must navigate a haze of corruption. Japan ranked as the world’s least-corrupt place to do business, with just 2% of respondents saying they had lost out due to bribery; Malaysia’s neighbor Singapore was second-cleanest, at 9%. Even Indonesia, with a long-standing reputation for corruption, fared better than more-developed Malaysia: Southeast Asia’s largest economy came in at 47%.

By comparison, 27% of respondents in China said they thought bribes had cost them business.



Via TGM