Acer V350 sporting a 720p display revealed through GLBenchmark

It appears that Acer is working on an upper mid-range handset that will be unveiled sometime next year, as a handset has recently appeared on GLBenchmark showing an Acer smartphone with the codename V350. 

The GLBenchmark is a good place to see upcoming handsets, as tests are usually carried out here and the data is logged on its servers, giving a glimpse of some of the features that the handset will come equipped with once it gets officially revealed.

From the benchmark, we can see that the Acer V350 runs on Android 4.1.2 Jelly Bean and is powered by a 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 processor. Another highlighted feature of this handset is that it features a 720p display, but as of yet, there is no word on the size of the screen that will be fitted on the Acer V350. Apart from this, details about the handset are scant.

It is believed that the Acer V350 will be unveiled at either the CES 2013 event or at the Mobile World Congress event, both of which will take place in the first half of next year.

In related Acer mobility news, a budget friendly tablet that goes by the codename B1-A71 had also popped up on the GLBenchmark a few days ago. This tablet will compete directly with the rumoured budget offering from Asus, which is codenamed ME172V and tipped to be a Nexus tablet.

The Acer Iconia B1-A71 had recently been cleared by the Federal Communications Commission and is believed to make its debut at the Consumer Electronics Show slated to take place in January 2013.

From the GLBenchmark, a few details of the device had been revealed, such as it will run on Android 4.1.2 and will feature a screen size of 1024 x 552 pixels, which would translate it to an actual display size of 1024 x 600 pixels with a pixel density of 169 ppi. The processor noted on the benchmark is 1.2GHz dual-core and the GPU is PowerVR SGX 531.

According to a post on Benchmark.rs, this 7-inch offering from Acer will also come equipped with 512MB of RAM, 8GB of storage, a microSD card slot for storage expansion, GPS and Bluetooth 4.0. The thread also features some press shots of the tablet giving us a preview of what it will look like once it gets officially unveiled.

It appears that the budget Nexus from Asus, the ME172V, will face some serious competition from the likes of the Acer Iconia B1-A71.

For those who do not know what the Asus Me172V is about, it is a tablet that is believed to be a Nexus branded device with a 7-inch form factor. The tablet will come in black and white colour variants and will be priced between $129 to $149. This is a bit more expensive than the previously perceived price tag of $99. This low end tablet from Asus will feature a 7-inch screen with a resolution of 1024 x 600 pixels and a TN panel rather than an IPS panel, which means viewing angles will not be as great. The device now is believed to sport a VIA WM8950 chipset featuring a single Cortex-A9 core and Mali-400 GPU along with 1GB of RAM. The internal memory found here is said to be 16GB and as far as camera optics are concerned, the device will feature a 1.3MP camera.

Hopefully, the Acer V350 smartphone and the Acer B1-A71 tablet will be launched in the near future and we don'tneed to wait too long for an official release.


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DRDO working on India's own OS to beef up cyber security

The Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) along with with other premier institutes is currently developing the nation's very own operating system. The development process is a result of the need to have a strong cyber security system installed in the country. DRDO Chief V K Saraswat went ahead to reveal that the OS will be ready in the next three years. The DRDO Director-General was further quoted as saying, “One of the major elements of cyber security is having our own operating system because today we are dependent on all OS systems which are imported whether it is based on Windows, Linux which is likely to be having malicious worms/things and hence it is essential that we have our own OS.”

Saraswat was at NAVCOM-2012, a two-day international conference on Navigation and Communication in Hyderabad, when he made the revelation. Speaking to reporters at the conference, he added, "We have already started a major programme and are one-and-half-years into that programme. It (Indian OS) is a major effort requiring large number of software engineers working together." Interestingly, 150 engineers across the country are working towards getting the Indian OS ready. The project is wholly an Indian effort and hence, does not involve any foreign expertise, Saraswat shared. 

He shared that defence researchers and scientists ought to work together with the industry, DRDO and other scientific departments to put together India's OS. This, he said, would mean that we would be independent of what comes from elsewhere.  

Clearly, the issue of cyber security has been the cause of big worry for the nation. As per a recent revelation, last year, more than 1,600 people were arrested for cyber crimes registered under the Information Technology Act, 2000 and under sections of Indian Penal Code (IPC). In a written reply to the Rajya Sabha, Milind Deora, Minister of State for Communications noted, "As per the crime data maintained by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), a total of 154, 178, 288, 799 and 1,184 persons were arrested for cyber crimes registered under IT Act, 2000 during 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively."

The IT Act, 2000 allows detection/tracking on cyber crimes and punishment to culprits, thereby providing a legal framework to address issues pertaining to such crimes in the cyber space. Deora added that a total of 429, 195, 263, 394 and 446 persons were arrested for cyber crimes registered under sections of IPC relating to cyber crime cases during 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively. "As per the crime data maintained by NCRB, a total of 217, 288, 420, 966 and 1,791 cyber crime cases were registered under IT Act, 2000 during the years 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, respectively, thereby showing a rising trend," he added further. 

A recent report by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) – Crime in India 2011 – shed light on how the nation has fared as far as cyber crimes go. According to the report, the number of cases that were registered under the nation's IT act last year were 1,791 – a considerable rise of 85.4 percent from the 966 cases registered in 2010.       

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