HTC Sense 3.0

The Htc sense UI has become the talk of town since its release which took place on 13th April 2011.

The UI has not changed drastically but subtle changes to the older sense UI have been done.

The HTC Sense 3.0 won't be available for any of the older phones.This has been credited to the lack of

hardware configurations in the older phones like Incredible S, Inspire 4G,Desire HD, HTC Thunderbolt, Desire S,etc.

Currently the only phones\tablets that will be bragging the latest UI are Flyer,EVO 3D and sensation.

Though you may come across videos on the net where the Sense 3.0 has been flashed onto the older phones like Desire HD.It can be seen from the videos that the Sense 3.0 doesn't support the video resolution of these phones.The Sense 3.0 seems to be compatible with phones having better graphic processing capabilities(e.g The HTC sensation and EVO 3D has Adreno 220 GPU while HTC Flyer has Adreno 205 GPU). The requirement for a better GPU may be owing to the support Sense 3.0 provides to 3D widgets.

Some of the defining features provided buy the new UI are just enhancements over the earlier ones,e.g: the new weather widget seems similar to the earlier one but is supported by the new peppy 3D effects,the HTC Trace text input which is similar to the Swype text input,It also boast of a 360 degree 3D carousel effects for the menu which make menu selection a delightful experience also,it has a multifunctional lock screen and also the integration with social networking sites has been increased.

The other updates that have been made to the UI are:

Zero wait Map:User will be able to scroll through the maps without any wait time.

Catch all Calls: The phone will detect if its kept in an enclosed environment like a bag or a drawer and if it is kept in one the ring will be louder.

Never Miss a turn:This feature lets you take a call while you are using the phone for directions while driving,unlike the earlier version where you could either take a call or use the phone for directions but couldn't use both the features simultaneously.

Preview your drive: You can map your drive and navigate accordingly.

Flip to silence:The phone can be put to silent mode by simply flipping it over.

Map with Compass:Map integrated with a compass to help navigate better.

Mozilla Firefox 4

It's been a forthnight since Firefox 4 released.The first major upgrade to Mozilla Firefox since July 17^th 2008 when Firefox 3 was released. Firefox 4 has had about 69,404,093 download at the time of writing this blog(you can check the latest count from http://glow.mozilla.org/). This article provides you a peek into the various feature that the browser has to offer.

1. The UI has changed a lot.As can be seen from the pic below, the firefox toolbar has been shrunk.You can see a single Firefox button at the top left of your screen.The tool bar blends smoothly with Windows 7.

2. Firefox Panorama: This is a brand new feature brought in by Mozilla. It displays a very different approach towards tabs.The button which can be seen in the pic below provides an entry into the Panorama view of Firefox.You can assimilate similar tabs into one box and even size the boxes as per its priority and importance.
   
   
   

3. App Tab: This one is another feature dedicated to tabs. Using this feature you can pin various tabs the toolbar.The app tab feature disallows accidental closing of the tab.Also the tabs are retained when you restart the browser.This feature comes in handy for sites like gmail,faceook,twitter ,etc.and if you get a new mail or somebody pings you, the app tab turns blue indicating the event.

4. There have been other changes to Tabs ,which include their location on the screen and the 'switch to Tab' feature.
5. Hardware accelreation: This is proving out to be the major feature with respect to the competition between the browsers.IE has it,now Firefox also boasts with this feature.Hardware acceleration is a feature which aims at the smoothening animation and rendering webpages much faster.This is done by handing over processor intensive task to the Graphic processing unit. The edge that firefox has over IE is that its harware acceleration is supported by Mac OS and Linux too.
6. A new javascript renderer which goes by the name of 'JagerMonkey' has made Firefox's Java Script handling even better.
7. Full HTML 5 Support.

These new features seem to have rejuvenated Firefox, whose second place position was being threatened by the emergence of Chrome.This browser wars only seem to intensify with Chrome's aggressive update cycles.

As of now Internet Explorer has about 44%, Mozilla Firefox has about 29% while Chrome has around 14% of the total browser market share.