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Samsung has recently released emails sent back and forth between Steve Jobs and Jony Ive and Apple designer Bas Ording. The email shows Steve Jobs writing "This maybe our answer" in response to a forwarded blog post by Engadget that reviewed Samsung's fashion phone, SGH-E910.

Samsung's Fashion phone that apparently inspired Steve and his team.

iPods were popular in 2005 and iPhone hadn't surfaced yet. But Steve and other executives at were thinking of turning iPod into a mobile phone. From what we can see in the email messages, this fashion phone by Samsung inspired Steve and his team to put numbers around the click wheel of an iPod turning it into a mobile phone.


However, that iPod plus Phone concept never shone that much as Apple worked for a full touchscreen mobile phone and finally came up with 2007 iPhone. But Samsung showed it that Apple isn't always the most innovative. They too copied design idea from other companies including Samsung, with whom they are in legal dispute.

Source: The Verge.

Google has recently put a Google+ sharing box on its homepage. Notably, it rarely messes around with its homepage other than the occasional Google Doodles.



This big move has recently shown the tech enthusiasts just how much serious Google is with its social networking site, Google+. Adding the share box on Google homepage means a lot of things.When someone visits Google homepage without logging in, the top right features a sign in button that previously used to be on the top bar. Immediately after signing in, users are redirected to Google homepage with the share box of Google+.

It's time that will tell us how much big steps Google will take in order to publicize its rapidly growing social networking site.

Because numerous products did not have the impact the company hoped for, Google has decided to shut down a number of products and features in the coming months, said a Senior Vice President on Official Google Blog.


The products that will be shut down include Google Friends Connect - to be shut down on March 1, 2012, Google Gears - to be shut down on December 1, 2012, Google Search Timeline, Google Wave (here's our recent post on this matter), Google Knol - moving to WordPress.com and will stop working on April 30, 2012 and Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) project because there are institutions in better position than Google to take the research to the next level.

While Google did not show a statistics of how many people were using these services, it appears you have to visualize on your mind whether a service -- launched by Google -- has potential to create the impact it hopes for. Because if it doesn't, chances are the search giant will kill it and all your effort may just go in vain (think about Google Friends Connect on non-Blogger sites).

Google has just announced the date of shutting down the user activity of its once much anticipated collaborating service, Google Wave. The company nearly a year ago stated that it would stop developing that project although users would continue to enjoy the service until it's closed down.

Google, in an email to all Wave users, stated that all the existing Wave will be read-only from January 31, 2012. However, people will still be able to export Waves as PDF using its PDF export feature. Google has not strictly said when the service will go completely offline. But from the signs of the message, it's easy to guess that the service may be turned off soon after April 30, 2012.

You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage you to export any important data before April 30, 2012.

As an alternative to Google Wave, the email contained two external websites for interested people to try out. Apache Wave and Walkaround are the ones that made it into Google's mass email. Walkaround could be a better choice for people who like to collaborate using service like Google Wave because it has an import from Google Wave feature so you lose nothing if you were into Wave.

Click to enlarge. Photo courtesy: Mashable.

One of the most popular and most used feature of Facebook is its photo albums. Apart from updating status, playing Farmville and interacting with others, almost everyone on Facebook takes advantage of Facebook's unlimited photo album feature. Recently, the social networking giant has announced that it now shows larger photo in less time.

Published in Facebook's official blog, Justin Shaffer wrote, "Now, the photos you share on Facebook are bigger (720 pixels to 960 pixels) and load twice as fast, giving you quicker access to more detailed images."

Users don't have to worry about photos that have been already uploaded and share with friends as Justin added that the existing photos will appear larger as well.

Another update in the Photo feature is that Facebook is replacing its black old theater look with a white photo viewer that is significantly larger than previously the theater was.  The Theater look was released back in February when Facebook officially started supporting high resolution photos.

Let us know in the comments if this change means anything to you.

Nokia has recently announced Nokia 100 and Nokia 101, two incredibly low cost mobile phones designed for users in the low end market, specially in the Asian region. This is a move to survive in the competitive field with other manufactures such as Micromax, ZTE, Symphony (available in Bangladesh only) and other non-brand Chinese handsets popular in the market.

According to the sources, the new phones will cost $30 and $35 respectively. These phones are expected to hit the market later this year.

Nokia 100 is a classic handset that is focused on making calls and sending text messages. It features a color display, traditional menu items and FM radio as additional feature. The 101 features dual SIM support in addition to these. It also supports MP3 playback and microSD memory card support for up to 16 GB, which is quite uncommon in low cost phones in the market.