Tecno M5 Hands On Detailed Review

TECNO M5 is the latest addition to the "M" series of medium end smartphone. Its one of the smartphones that a lot of people have been waiting for and finally it dropped last week.

Well, we have had the opportunity to lay our hands on one, both black and white colour and we will be giving you a good hands on review of what we saw after the break.

Dimensions, Weight and Contents

TECNO M5 is a medium range phone with dimensions 135.6 x 68.3 x 10.5 mm which makes it a very handy and as slim as the M7. It has a fairly curve body which helps in giving a nice grip when holding the phone. The M5 is weighing almost the same as the M7.

On first buy, you get a flip case and the contents in the pack are battery, charging kit, earpiece and manuals. 

As usual, the volume keys are at the top left side of the phone while the power button is situated at the opposite side of the Volume keys. Loud speaker is situated at the bottom back side of the phone with a small aperture to convey its sounds.

At the top of the device, you would find the USB port and a 3.5mm earphone port with a small distance apart. Furthermore, the back side of the phone is carry a 8MP camera with the powerful flashlight just immediately below the camera for a night time shot.  

SIM and Network

TECNO M5 is a dual SIM smartphone with both SIMs at standby just like its predecessors before it. It uses normal macro SIMs which can be inserted into  the phone by opening the battery cover to reveal the SIM compartments and also the 8GB installed memory card.

Network Bands are GSM900/DCS1800/WCDMA2100 and can transfer data with the 3.75G network since its a 3G supported smartphone.

SIM 1 can connect using the 3G/2G network while the SIM 2 is allowed to connect using 2G network alone.

Camera, Display and Resolution

TECNO M5 is spotting a 8.0MP back camera and a 1.3MP front camera capable of taking very nice shots. Also at night, good quality pictures can be taken with the help of the flash light located just below the camera. One thing though is that sometimes, the flashlight light get picked up by the lens and therefore in bright day, the image can appear brighter than normal.

Once those beautiful pictures are taken on the TECNO M5, they can be viewed on the display with good clarity, thanks for the resolution of the device which is 480 x 854. The resolution is further help by the fact that the screen is a 4.5 inch capacitive touchscreen display.
The front camera is good for video calls and Skype calls even though its just 1.3MP

Operating System and Processor

TECNO M5 comes with Jelly Bean 4.2 android which is then powered by 1.3GHz dual - core Mediatek processor.

For a medium end phone one could say that the processor speed and type is fairly good and should handle things well.

Memory and RAM

TECNO M5 comes with an internal memory of 4GB and an 8GB SD card pre-installed into the memory slot. The phone can support up to 32GB memory if you are so keen to increase the memory space. This is obviously one of the things that would appeal to a lot of people; that is, being able to increase memory space of their device.

Furthermore, TECNO M5 comes with a 1GB RAM to keep everyone happy. 1GB RAM is good enough to handle things well, besides, its a medium end smartphone.

Battery and Performance

TECNO M5 comes witha 1800mAh removable battery that can last you for hours when using the device. Another plus is that its removable which will of course appeal to a lot of folks out there.

Sensors and Connectivity

TECNO M5 has Gyro, Light and Proximity sensors, which are the norm in most smartphones today. Also, Bluetooth 4.0, AGPS, GPS, WiFi and WiFi Hotspot are connectivity features of this device. No NFC chip though.

Price Tag

Price tag for the TECNO M5 starts at N23,000 for most of the stores that I have seen (Divine Anyi Communications, you can order yours by calling the number: 08060791362). 

However, there are words that Tecno is offering it for N18,000. Am yet to see anyone buy for that price though.

Pre-Installed Apps

By default, Whatsapp, YouTube, Gmail, Facebook, Calendar and Flashshare are pre-installed into the phone. Other applications like Google+ etc are also included but not installed.

Other features include FM Radio, documents viewer, SNS integration, popular audio and video codecs are supported.

What We Think
We think the Tecno M5 make a pretty good medium end phone. The specifications are well balanced and well suited to the tasks its suppose to perform. 

However, on the price tag side of things, we expected a more reduced price than what is being offered out there.
Tecno M7 is still very new and the M5 is almost at par with the price tag of the M7.

Aside this, its believed that M5 isnt too bad a device and those that would want a piece of it can get it and should love it.

What are your thoughts regarding the Tecno M5? lets hear it

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HTC Desire 300 is official

The HTC Desire 300 has just gone official. It’s an affordable device with a spacious 4.3-inch display, a dual-core processor and a 5-megapixel camera.

The Desire 300 is all about price of course, but HTC managed to include its signature BlinkFeed news and social aggregator, and the device runs on Android.

The display is a 4.3-inch 480 x 800 pixel one (WVGA), and that works out to a pixel density of an average 216ppi. There is a 5-megapixel auto-focus rear camera and a VGA front shooter.

The chip inside the device is an unspecified Snapdragon S4 dual-core with the clock speed at 1GHz with a lowly 512MB of RAM. Internal storage is 4GB, but luckily that’s expandable via microSD cards of up to 64 gigs.

The HTC Desire 300 release date is set for October 2013.

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Jolla HowTo Workaround for battery life NFC bug

Link to mobile view for Jolla Sailfish browser (browser is not automatically recognized yet):
http://reviewjolla.blogspot.com/2013/12/jolla-howto-workaround-for-battery-life.html?m=1

After publishing an article about finding the NFC bug, lots of users have tested workarounds to fix the bug. The software solution given there is now confirmed as safe, so I share it again in this detailed HowTo. Workarounds like this remains the only change for users to extend their battery life for normal level, as the next Sailfish update 2, version 1.0.2.5 does not offer a fix the this bug yet, but an update is on its way:

@zlatkoe @SimoRuoho ETA for NFC hot fix is second week of January. This time we need to make sure that it really works ..
— Harri Hakulinen (@HarriHakulinen) December 27, 2013

To enable developer superuser mode in Jolla

1. Go to Jolla Settings -> Developer Mode
2. Enable developer mode. Enable SSH connection.
3. Enter or generate a new password (options are visible after SSH). Remember it and Save.
4. Reboot your phone

After steps above, your phone has a new app called Terminal in the laucher view. Via terminal you are able to give commands to the phone as a root user, and practically everything is possible there - even causing the phone not to start, so please be careful and doublecheck every letter you write there. Giving wrong commands might affect to the warranty of your phone.

To prevent Jollas communication with The Other Half (NFC bug)

Open terminal. You see an exchanged keyboard, and an enter line showing "bash-3.2$ ". Thats where you write your commands. During the following commands, the enter line changes to "bash-3.2# ", telling you that you have entered developer superuser mode. In this mode its possible to command the phones hardware. During your writing, either the keyboard or the command line is higlighted - you can write even when keyboard changes to grey. Write the bolded commands below, and press enter after each:

devel-su <- you command your terminal to enter developer superuser mode
(your password) <- note: invisible writing. Jolla confirms that you are the superuser
systemctl mask tohd.service <- you put a mask to a buggy service commanding NFC chip
systemctl stop tohd.service <- you stop the service
exit <- you leave the devel-su mode
exit <- you leave the terminal (it closes)

Terminal closes, and you have now a phone using less battery. Cconsumption is reduced by 2% per hour, giving you max 500h standby time. Your phone does not recognize The Other Half any more, so the ambience does not change when you attach it. Everything else is normal. Masking the service, like commanded above, prevents the phone to enable connection after reboot, so this offers a permanent fix until removed.

To return everything the way it was

After Jolla distributes a Sailfish OS update fixing the NFC bug, you can remove your changes to the system. Its safer to do before installing that update, but this should work as well after it. Open terminal again, write the bolded commands below, and press enter after each:

devel-su <- you command your terminal to enter developer superuser mode
(your password) <- note: invisible writing. Jolla confirms that you are the developer.
systemctl unmask tohd.service <- you take the mask away, so the system can find the service again
systemctl start tohd.service <- you start the service
exit <- you leave the devel-su mode
exit <- you leave the terminal (it closes)

Terminal closes, and your Jolla can communicate with The Other Half again.

Is this all safe?

According to Harri Hakulinen, Chief engineer at Jolla, yes it is:

@SimoRuoho Stopping tohd.service should be otherwise ok, but if you do it you may need to start it again manually after update.
— Harri Hakulinen (@HarriHakulinen) December 27, 2013

According to several users, yes it is. Ive been carefully following comments going on at forums, twitter and The User Report tool during the last 4 days. People are reporting better standby hours, and none of them has reported  problems caused by this fix.

However, keep in mind that you must be careful with what you do. In the developer mode, wrong commands given can break your phone.

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My summer with the Google App Engine Team

Today’s post is contributed by our Summer 2011 team intern, Chris Bunch. Chris did some great work on our Logs and MapReduce APIs and is also the first “App Engine Triple Crown” winner for developing the Experimental Logs Reader API in Python, Java and Go simultaneously.

Four years ago, I was a brand-new Ph.D. student at the University of California, Santa Barbara and when our research group (the RACELab) heard about Google App Engine, we were intrigued. We thought it presented a new model that enabled apps to scale the right way without severely constricting the types of programs users would write.

But we wanted to experiment with the core functionality of App Engine: the APIs, the scheduler, etc., and so we built AppScale, an open-source implementation of the Google App Engine APIs that allows users to deploy applications written in Python, Java, and Go to the infrastructure of their choice.

Wherever possible, we implement support for the App Engine APIs with alternative open-source technologies. We’ve added support for nine different databases, database-agnostic transactions, a REST interface that users of any programming language can communicate with (via an App Engine app), and the ability to run high performance computing programs over the whole thing and talk to it from your App Engine app. And here’s my favorite part - it all deploys automatically! You don’t need to tell it what block size you want for the distributed file system, or the size of the read buffers: we configure the necessary services automatically. Since AppScale is completely open source, if you don’t like the defaults, change them!

After creating our own system to run Google App Engine apps, I wanted to see how Google does it. Therefore, I decided to become an intern on the App Engine team and see if I could give them (and by extension, the App Engine community) something amazing over the summer. I started off with some work on the MapReduce API, making the sample app much easier to use and prettier all around. I also made a YouTube video showing how it all works and how easy it is to run MapReduce jobs over App Engine.

I then looked at a recurring question that App Engine users encounter: “How can I get my logging information for my application to answer data analytic questions?” It was an excellent problem to tackle, as we have users who want to be able to determine application-specific queries that Google Analytics or the Admin Console don’t answer. Currently users have to use appcfg to grab all their application’s data to a remote machine and run some analysis script over it.

To solve this problem, I created the Logs API, which gives applications programmatic access to their logs from within App Engine itself. Applications can use it to query small numbers of logs within a single request, and they can utilize the Pipeline, MapReduce, or Backends APIs if they have lots of logs they want to analyze. Logs contain both request-level information (e.g., the URL accessed, the HTTP response code returned) as well as logging info generated by the application (the logging module in Python, the Logger class in Java, and the logging methods that Go’s appengine package provides). The Logs API is available for use as of App Engine 1.6.1 by programmers using the Python, Java, or Go runtimes, in both the production environment and the local SDK.

I had a great time putting the Logs API together, and had a unique experience interning with the App Engine team. Programming in Python, Java, and Go on a daily basis was an exciting new challenge, and I loved it! 

Interested in interning with the App Engine team? Check out google.com/students for more information on internships.

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The Iterative Web App Redesign of the Compose Page

On April 7th 2009, we announced a new version of Gmail for mobile for iPhone and Android-powered devices. Among the improvements was a complete redesign of the web applications underlying code which allows us to more rapidly develop and release new features that users have been asking for, as explained in our first post. Wed like to introduce The Iterative Webapp, a series where we will continue to release features for Gmail for mobile. Today: Compose view redesign

Youre on the subway and you get the brilliant idea to host a TV viewing party for your friends for the premier of Conan OBriens new show. You pull out your phone (or your iPad) and start typing names into the compose page at gmail.com. (Yes, it works on the subway.) Youve added Naveed, Suzy and 7 others before you remember that Naveed made you eat grass at the last BBQ. You want to remove him from the list but his email address has scrolled way out of view. Argh! After some intense scrolling and lots of backspaces, you finally manage to get rid of Naveeds email address.

Enter our redesigned Compose page. It has new address fields that automatically expand to fit all the email addresses that youre entering, so youll never have to worry about this type of problem again.

As always, when you start typing an name into the new compose view, youll see possible contact choices in the autocomplete dropdown. When you select a contact from the autocomplete dropdown, only the persons name is entered into the address field. This saves screen space and wont leave you thinking "man, who is hikingfan@gmail.com?" when youre reviewing an email before sending.

Once you select a contact from the autocomplete menu, youll also notice that the contact becomes an object that you can tap on. Tapping on a contact opens a detailed view that lets you double-check the persons email address or remove them from the email. Yes, this means you can remove an email address in two taps!

Some other nifty new features which will help you compose your emails faster:

• Remove the contact you just added by tapping Backspace.
• Press the + button to see your top contacts, or hide them by pressing the – button.
• If for some reason autocomplete fails you and the person you are trying to reach is a Gmail user, just type their Gmail username and a comma, and well take care of the pesky @ sign and the rest (so [hikingfan] becomes [hikingfan@gmail.com].)
• The page now fills the entire screen, giving you more space to see what youre writing.

This update is available for Android, iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch devices. We always love to hear what youd like to see next, so be sure to leave your feedback in our Help Forum or the Mobile Product Ideas page!

Happy composing!

Posted by Andra Adams, Software Engineer Intern, Google Mobile

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TweetDeck and Google App Engine A Match Made in the Cloud

Im Reza and work in London, UK for a startup called TweetDeck. Our vision is to develop the best tools to manage and filter real time information streams like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. We offer products like our TweetDeck desktop client built on Adobe AIR, and our iPhone application. We are happy to say that we use App Engine as key part in our backend.

Were a small startup, so early on we started to look for tools that would give us the biggest bang for our buck. Combined with the fact we love Python, we thought it might be worth taking a look at what Google App Engine had to offer. The first feature we started playing with was the mail sending facility.

It was easy! Sending mail was a single call-- no messing around. Combined with the fact that it was sent via tried-and-tested Google Mail servers, this meant that we had a simple mailing solution where we didnt have to deal with spam blacklists, mail retries or SPF records. We could really see App Engine being our sole email provider for transactional emails (new users and forgotten passwords), but also for newsletter-type mailing.

When we got started, our existing backend was hosted on Amazon EC2 and SimpleDB, and we knew that we needed a way for the two systems to communicate with each other. App Engine provides all the basic tools to define any sort of resources you want--but more importantly, it has the Python standard library. We implemented a small mail API, with authentication provided by an HMAC-SHA1 of the request information and a shared secret key. The API has been made extremely general: its JSON input format contains fields to send messages to blocks of email addresses that are either defined in the request itself, or which exist as a template in App Engine (templates are defined as strings in a Python module).

The whole setup currently works quite well. Were already extending our mailing system to use App Engines task queues-- exposing a number of queues to break large mailing jobs into a series of subtasks, thus spreading mailing sending over a large period of time. We have plans to make an even tighter bridge between our EC2 systems and App Engine, which involves keeping our subscriber list entirely in App Engine, and adding and removing from that list as appropriate.

We also use App Engine for various other prototypes and smaller applications that are part of our product. We use it to serve our "TweetDeck Recommends" feed, and weve even developed small tools to apply TweetDeck fan badges on Twitter homepage backgrounds using the Imaging API! The lesson from us, of course, is that using something like App Engine doesnt have to mean everything runs on it. Its an extremely good platform for creating APIs or smaller parts of your application that do specific tasks, and do them well. Think of it as the UNIX metaphor applied to the Cloud.

We love that weve been able to grow the functionality that Tweetdeck provides by progressively using more of the cloud. App Engine provides the perfect platform to compose new services quickly, iterate on them in production, and scale with demand as Tweetdecks install base grows. Thanks to App Engine and the cloud, theres nothing holding us back from tackling the needs of our user base.

Here is a video interview of Reza and the Tweetdeck team.

Guest Post by Reza Lotun @rlotun, TweetDeck

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R GA shares why digital agencies are turning to the cloud

We believe that building in the cloud is a quicker way to build new apps, but just how quick? Michael Piccuirro, director at R/GA, told us, “things that we would have taken years to build, we’ll be able to produce in weeks or months.”



R/GA is an international digital marketing agency that develops large, interactive experiences for its clients, working with brands such as Nike, Johnson & Johnson and MasterCard. In Michael’s words, R/GA chose Google Cloud Platform “because it’s a great tool that allows us to build solutions very quickly and deploy them somewhere that can scale to whatever we need.”



Check out this video to hear it all in Michael’s own words:







- Posted by Benjamin Bechtolsheim, Product Marketing Manager

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