Author: Swadesh Parasher

Honor PowerBank (AP007) 13000 mAh is a bang for your buck [Review]

We want to do so much with our smartphone, but often have to compromise our workflow to keep our smartphone alive till the end of the day. It gets worse when we are travelling and we cannot arrange a stable power source to recharge our phones. This is where a efficient PowerBank comes to rescue – but finding a right one is not always easy thing to do.

Honor PowerBank AP007 is not only cheaper but if we believe their specs, it also offers a way more than its competitor — is that so?

Unboxing

In the box you’ll find 3 items: 1 PowerBank, 1 USB cable (small), 1 user guide. There is no power adapter/charger provided out of the box.

Build Quality & Design

The PowerBank is one solid rectangular desing, with plastic casing at the top and bottom. The device looks really sturdy and strong at the first impression, and is on the little heavier side. The full metal body is robust, and can take some hit.

Top side has device specifications printed on it, which states that the PowerBank has Input and Output range of 5V — 2A. The capacity of the PowerBank is 13,000 mAh, which is manufactured in China by Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Bottom of the device is the part which will handle all the input/output operations. It has two output USB ports, which is capable of charging two phones simultaneously. There is a microUSB port to charge the PowerBank, so that it can be used when required.

A round Power button is located at the right side of the panel, with 4 LED lights to indicate the power level when Power button is pressed. The function is pretty similar to the “Mi PowerBank”.

Operation & Ease of Use

The PowerBank is very easy to use, thanks to the minimalistic design approach. Electric circuit has intelligent sleep and energy saving mode to ensure optimized power consumption. The power bank has two USB slot with 5V – 2A output that lets you charge two devices at a time. There is a power button and LED indicators to show the charge. The power bank has gone through Reliability Testing that includes 1 m Height Drop Test, Vibration and Shock Test, Salt Spray and Shell Pressure Test, says the company.

The LED lights at the bottom of the rectangular casing, lit up when a device is connected to it, and indicates the current power level of battery of the PowerBank. You can also see the power state, when no device is connected by simply pressing the Big circular Power button on the device.

During our test we could charge a BlackBerry Z3 with bundled USB cable without any issues, and it took the same time to charge the device as it would with the official blackberry charger that came with the mobile. However, it didn’t faired well, when we tried to charge the mobile phone with other USB cable. We checked with other device connected simultaneously, and it worked great as well.

The device didn’t state anywhere whether 2A is the combined output, or it is being devided between the two devices connected to the port. We didn’t experienced slow charging or incompatibility issues during our test, so it doesn’t really have direct effect unless your device support higher than 2A charging.

We also tested Huawei Honor 6 Plus with the device and it was slower than the official charger bundled with the smartphone. But, the smartphone doesn’t really work well with any other charger — that is why it is bundled with Fast Charger.

See Also: [Review] We tested 5 Huawei Honor 6 Plus for a month, here’s what we think!

What we think?

Honor PowerBank doesn’t target high end consumers, but it does pack a massive backup option at considerably low price (Rs. 1,399 in India). The device works great, and does provide 90% conversion rate, given that we could charge our Blackberry Z3 upto ~4 times.

There are many other options available, but Honor has established itself as a brand that people has started to trust. The company is working hard to provide good after sale support, and is currently trying to win consumers who otherwise would choose other already established companies.

If you are looking for a PowerBank with bigger backup, you can go with it.

GENERAL

Brand Honor

Model Number AP007

Battery Capacity 13000 mAh

Model Name Honor

Output Power 5 V

Battery Type Li-Ion

Color Grey

ADDITIONAL FEATURES

Reliability Testing (1 m Height Drop Test, Vibration and Shock Test, Salt Spray and Shell Pressure Test)

IN THE BOX

Sales Package Power Bank

June 26, 2015
What is Airplay and how does it Work?

But there are certain limitations as you can stream media from Apple to Apple device only like iPod, iPhone or iPad. You can even use itunes to configure your computer with an airplay speakers set, Apple TV or a receiver. But the great thing is about wireless technology as you will be performing all this with wireless technology.

The wireless has the power to operate within the range of several hundred square feet. So, let suppose that you own an airplay speakers set and you want it to set these at one end of your house. The second speaker set has been idealized for the other end. You just have to configure both these speaker sets with your iPhone and you can play a single song at both ends while sitting in your living room.

It hasn’t yet finished here as you can derive more benefits out of Airplay, if you are using online media streaming. Suppose if you are enjoying a movie on your iPhone but you feel the sound little depressed then you can boost the sound with the help of airplay technology and get the real sound out of your airplay speakers.

While considering about the compatibility of airplay speakers and airplay software, you should not forget that you can even configure your airplay software with third party speakers. Although it may not be an easy job at first hand but with little effort you can configure the airplay technology with third party speakers. Many third party manufacturers have been granted with Apple license and they can use their software while making compatible with Apple software.

It is not a difficult job to connect your device with Airplay speakers and you can broadly use two methods. The first and one click method will be using your wireless router for creation of home network. You just have to connect your speakers with the router and then connect your device with wireless network to enjoy the fun.

While the second method will require Apple airport express to connect your airplay speakers and your device. You can find a quick guide on the brochure and start making fun. Good luck!

June 24, 2015
Intel Remote Keyboard: Control your PC from your Android

If your PC is running Windows 7 or 8.1, you can connect your smartphone to PC and control your PC from other side of a room. It not only works as QWERTY keyboard, but also as a mouse too with scroll bar and trackpad for your input needs. A keyboard is displayed on your phone display with enough whitespace above to perform trackpad functions with multi-touch gestures. A single finger tap on the screen produces left mouse click while two fingered tap produces a right mouse click.

Intel actually developed this app for use with its NUC and Compute Stick mini-PCs that are designed to be connected to televisions, but it works with devices running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 too.

Intel Remote Keyboard is available free of cost at Google play store. It’s easy to set up, just download it from Google Play store but devices should be compatible to be able to use this app. To connect, a companion software should be installed on your PC too. The mobile app automatically detects the host computer, and you can pair it by scanning a QR code on your PC screen with smartphone. Both smartphone and PC should be on same Wi-fi network to communicate with each other.

Apple users should not worry either. Intel’s documentation says an iOS version is coming soon.

You can download Android app from here. And companion PC software from here.

June 23, 2015
WebAssembly: A new binary format to make web faster [wasm]

Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Apple and many other major oragnizations teamed up together to participate in this new approach to make internet faster. How they are planning to achieve this? The answer is simple, yet complicated.

The new group – WebAssembly Community Group is organized to design a new bytecode to write web applications. ByteCode is actually a machine-readable instruction set that is faster for web browsers to load than high level language.

It is known that machine performs faster with Assembly language because they don’t need to translate the human readable instructions into machine understandable language. It allows computer to execute instructions efficiently and save considerable time to display output.

WebAssembly or wasm for short, is a new standard protocol and instruction set, which will allow developers to code browsers and web applications. The new format is meant to allow programmers to compile their code for the browser (currently the focus is on C/C++, with other languages to follow), where it is then executed inside the javascript engine.

Instead of having to parse the full code, though, which can often take quite a while (especially on mobile), WebAssembly can be decoded significantly faster.

WebAssembly team is working on a standard programming language which is based on bytecode for specific languages to design web applications. What this means, the encoding and decoding of webpages and web applications will be much faster because it won’t have to parse the whole source code to construct the output.

Mozilla and Microsoft offers very similar structure with their Asm.js and TypeScript projects, which is a stripped version of the Javascript, to parse pages faster. Seeing them come together to build this web standard, is a step into internet of future.

Currently, only C and C++ code can be compiled into a WebAssembly (a.k.a wasm) file.
Moreover, the developers of wasm know that JavaScript is supported everywhere so for older web browsers, they are providing a polyfill — a JavaScript script that will convert WebAssembly bytecode into asm.js for those browsers that don’t support wasm.

As JavaScript inventor (and short-term Mozilla CEO) Brendan Eich points out today, once the main browsers support the new format natively, JavaScript and WebAssembly will be able to diverge again.

The whole project is still on the very early stage, and there is a lot of work to do but, with all the major four browser developers working together, wasm should appear soon.

June 23, 2015
Gift your loves ones a Google Play Store gift voucher.

Buy this card for your loved ones or redeem the one sent to you for your own shopping. This card can be directly redeemed on the Internet or on your Google Play Store on your Android devices. Please remember that credit card is not required.

These cards are for Indian residents who are 18 or above. For the youngsters between ages thirteen to seventeen, who wish to do the same have to get consent from their parents/Guardians. Note that these cards don’t have any additional fees or expiry dates. However, they are a single-use gift. You can buy your favorite books, movies and games through this card. Not only this, but these cards can also be used to buy your choice applications and other content.

Entertainment got easier now. Once you buy the card, you can select from the collection of digital entertainment like songs, cinema, application and more from the Google Play store. From the comfort of your own home, now you can simply reach to your favorite without much hassle.

The company has announced that these prepaid vouchers will be present in denominations of Rs. 500, Rs. 1,000, and Rs. 1,500. Within next few days, these prepaid cards will be available at few selected stores of Vijay Sales and Hotspot stores. The company is planning to launch them to Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Jaipur and Pune.

According to a post from Google India blog, you can inquire the cashier sitting at the register for these vouchers. For more information and to redeem the gift card, please click here.

June 23, 2015
Beats is selling cheap $17 plastic headphones at $200

Beats, which is often recognized by its brand symbol ‘b,’ is nearly impossible to be spotted near you, when you are on a train, flying on a plane or walking down the street. The brand got wider exposure when it fell under the Apple brand name.

So what it really is, that they are selling at steep price of $199? Is it only the name and how it is presented to us, or there really are some premium materials inside which is worth the price? After reading the analysis, you would probably conclude that – beats by Dre headphones are simply garbage.

According to some new in-depth analysis published over on medium by PopMech — The headphones are incredibly cheaply made. The compnay cuts corner everywhere it can; gluing pieces together instead of using screws, and reducing the amount of tooling wherever possible.

After a precise teardown of a $199 beats headphone, Avery Louie figured out that they use metals to increase the weight of the earphone, 1/3 of the entire weight of the headphones comes from metal weight. This is somewhat common trick to make products feel more substantive.

Louie figures that a pair of Beats headphone, which claims about precision sound design, the headphones use freaking off-the-shelf drivers! What is most shocking of them all is, the entire cost to produce a pair of headphone is only $17 — with most expensive of everything that they offer, being the outer package, manual, soft case, box and sleeve run that costs $7.

So why they are selling this cheap product at a insane price of $199? Mostly, they spend most of the extra $$ on agressive marketing and making consumers think that they are opting for a premium product, which is totally worth every buck.

At the end, they are saving a hefty amount of money that shows directly into their Quarterly profit charts.

Dr Dre once mused, “if you aint in it for the money then get out the game.” So, this is what he meant.

June 20, 2015