Watch Out Apple here comes Xiaomi

A China based tech company Xiaomi is fast becoming a pain to Apple. In 2014, Xiaomi sold 61 million smartphones, which has grown more than thrice its 2013 sales total. A few weeks ago, Xiaomi a five-year old company was able to raised $1.1 billion in new funding at a valuation of $45 billion.

Xiaomi smartphone price is significantly lower than iPhone, and it looks like iPhone. With that price it's a big deal for countries like China, India and other developing nation where average income is lower than those in the U.S. and Europe.

Xiaomi has also employed a strategy on selling their products online instead of having a physical store that that takes a big chunk of profit margins. They also use a "pre-order" system, producting the smartphones after an order is made and paid by the buyer. Since smartphone materials are continuously going down, they are reaping profits since the cost to manufacture the smartphone becomes cheaper than when the phone first went on sale.

Just look at Xiaomi Mi 4 (64GB internal storage) it looks really similar to iPhone 6 and it is also loaded with great features and amazing specification. The  Xiaomi Mi 4 has 5-inch IPS LCD display with full HD resolution and run on Android 4.4.3 KitKat OS and a MIUI 6 user interface. It is powered by 2.5 GHz Snapdragon 801 processor, Adreno 330 GPU, and has 3 GB RAM. The main camera is 13MP 1/3 inch sensor and an 8MP front camera. It is equipped with 3080 mAh battery unit.

iPhone 6 4.7-inch display, 64GB unlock version at TMobile is priced at $749 while the Xiaomi Mi 4 64GB is priced at $469.99 excluding tax.

HTC One M9

HTC One M8

HTC One M8 is equipped with 4 megapixel "ultrapixel" camera, however the HTC One M9 is said to have a high-resolution instead. 

HTC will be releasing their latest smartphone to replace last year's HTC One M8 and according to reports they will also be releasing their first smartwatch.

The HTC One M9 is expected to be equipped with a high-resolution 20-megapixel camera replacing the ultrapixel camera on the M8. HTC's ultrapixel has lower megapixel resolution at 4MP however the company said that having a few and large pixels will have less image noise. They didn't completely abandoned the ultrapixel they just moved it on the front.

The smartphone will be powered by an octa-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor. It will also feature the next generation HTC Sense interface, and Dolby 5.1 audio technology.

Windows 7 Support Is no Longer Free

Microsoft's Windows 7 is now (January 13, 2015) on extended support and the support will be over on January 14th, 2020.  A lot of people like Windows 7 which is clearly better than Windows Vista. About 55% of the PC of the world uses Windows 7 more than the user of  Windows 8 and 8.1 combined.

Now every versions of Windows 7 are transferred to extended support from mainstream support meaning there will no longer be free support for Windows 7 starting today January 13, 2015. Those with licenses paid up, or signed up to licensing programs will also need to pay for Windows 7 support.

Security patches will still be provided up to 2020.

Android Lollipop Slow? Here's a Fix

Android has significantly improve the Android Lollipop in terms of design, performance, apps list, and battery life. However, despite all these improvements you may experience some lag and slowdown that may frustrate you.

Android Lollipop users have reported to the Android AOSP bug tracker some lag problems that happened after two days of "standby" time, and it went back to normal when they do a reboot. Expert said that what causing the problem is a  "memory leak", were apps keeps on using RAM even though it is no longer needed.

Those apps after some time may use so much RAM that when you use an app you will experience a lag since the system don't have enough RAM for it to function. The system will by closing apps to open more memory, which will then force it to recreate and restore the state of the apps it closed if you need to use them again. This cycle will make the system laggy.

The issue has been reported and now tagged as "resolved" however they offer no fix for now. We will have to wait for future version of Android (Android 5.0.3 or 5.1, or 6.x) to get a fix. For now all we can do is reboot the system.