Apple reportedly plans to start producing iPhones in India by end of April

Apple’s talks with India seems to have headed into a good direction. There are reports that the nation will be producing iPhones in its country starting the end of April 2017. According to Priyank Kharge, information technology minister for the Indian state of Karanataka, the devices will be made in Bangalore and will be targeted at India’s domestic market. In an interview with Bloomberg, Kharge said they didn’t discuss any other incentives for Apple during his meeting back in January with Apple executives. It was reported that this meeting was meant to cement the timeline for production to start.

Apple’s move into India, which is considered the fastest-growing major smartphone market in the world, comes at a time when iPhone sales have been slowing down in key markets such as China. The tech giant has reportedly given a “wish list” to India for working in its country. These supposedly included permanent relaxation of laws requiring foreign retailers to source 30 percent of their materials locally as well as so tax incentives. Apple hasn’t confirmed this production plan yet. But we should probably here something soon enough.

Source: Fortune

HP gunning for mobile market with two new phablets

HP's long hinted that it may get back into the mobile market post-webOS. Now that they've sold off Palm's mobile operating system to LG, HP is betting on Android to power their Slate 6 and  Slate 7 tablets which feature voice calling. Looks like HP is shooting straight for the supersized smartphone market where it can make a dent. The new Jelly Bean powered slates are coming to India first but we'll hopefully see them come to North America sometime soon.

Source: Re/code

Breaking: BlackBerry outage day 3 spreading to Canada, South America

It's not a good time to be a BlackBerry customer, specially if you're in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Japan, Hong Kong and more recently South America and Canada.

A report from the Globe and Mail early today pointed out that the glitches that have stalled services for millions of users not only continued but seemed to worsen.

"Users in Canada, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, India, Japan, Hong Kong and some parts of South America suffered patchy e-mail service and no access to browsing and messaging, ratcheting up negative sentiment towards a company already losing market share to Apple and Samsung," the report stated. 

The timing of this service failure could not have come at a more sensitive time. Apple is releasing the iPhone 4S and iOS 5 mobile operating system on Friday and Samsung is expected to launch a flagship Android smartphone called the Nexus Prime as well as the latest version of the Android mobile operating system Ice Cream Sandwich.

Many of BlackBerry's customers use their device for business and have vented their disappointment and rage through social networks. RIM hasn't released any statements regarding the new developments. Earlier reports traced the problem to a server outage in Slough, U.K., where RIM operates a data center, but the company would not comment on those reports.

A Reuters report stated, "RIM, which had said on Tuesday that services had returned to normal, said later the problems had actually spread beyond EMEA and India to Argentina, Brazil and Chile."

"The messaging and browsing delays ... were caused by a core switch failure within RIM's infrastructure,"  a RIM spokesman said. "As a result, a large backlog of data was generated and we are now working to clear that backlog and restore normal service."

Users affected by the BlackBerry e-mail, web and BBM service problems can check the BlackBerry Service Update page which has regular status updated from Research In Motion.

Sources: Globe and Mail

               Reuters

India develops world's cheapest $35 Linux laptop

Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal unveils the low cost computing-cum-access device in New Delhi on Thursday. Photo: V. Sudershan -The Hindu

It's a laptop, it runs Linux, it has iPad-like touchscreen features and it costs $35. This is the world's cheapest laptop, a LInux powered device that is being developed in India and is poised to start an affordable computing revolution of its own.

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