Post “New iPad”, Apple drops iPad India Price [16GB Wifi available for INR 24,500]

Post the launch of new iPad, Apple has dropped the price of iPad2 and importantly, has discontinued the 32GB and 64GB variants.

So the only two options, i.e. a)16 GB Wifi-only is now priced at INR 24,500 and b) 16GB WiFi + 3G will be priced at INR 32, 900 (earlier it was INR 36, 900/), though it will take a few days to reflect the updated price at retail stores.

iPad2 - Sill better than the new iPad?

As far as ‘New iPad’ availability is concerned, expect the same to be available by mid-May in India.

#IssuedinPublicInterest

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Tuanbao CEO Ren Chunlei: ‘Investment is Poison’

Tuanbao (aka Groupon.cn) CEO Ren Chunlei is quickly becoming my new favorite internet crazy person. Hot on the heels of his decision to stop accepting money from customers — all deals on Tuanbao are now free — he’s given another interview in which he suggests his investors are poisonous and blamed them for Tuanbao’s downfall.

Speaking to China Business News, Ren seemed to blame investors for the company’s massive layoffs, saying that they had pushed him to expand rapidly during the first half of 2011, and then forced him to lay people off in the second half of the year. One investor apparently promised to deliver some “rescue money” only after Tuanbao slashed costs. But after the layoffs, Ren says, this investor gave only one million RMB ($158,000) and told Ren to tell everyone at the company that’s all they were going to get. Ren characterized this as “acting like a hoodlum” and said he was very disappointed by the investor.

As for the layoffs, sure, Tuanbao is down to about 100 employees after having more than 2,300 at its high point last year. In other words, it laid off 96 percent of its staff in less than one year. But Ren sees things differently: at one hundred employees, the company has twenty times the staff it did back when he founded it with a team of five.

Ren offered some sound advice for startups: pay attention to the person when you’re looking for investment, because money taken from the wrong person “is like poison.” True, but perhaps it’s not a great idea to be bad-mouthing all one’s former investors while simultaneously looking for investment to support a company with no income?

Whatever, Ren’s not worried about that. And he’s not worried about old shareholders blocking new investors from buying into Tuanbao. If they do, he says, the company will go bankrupt and he can just start a new company with the new investors, free of the old investors’ influence. Good to know, but it makes you wonder why any merchant would want to work with Tuanbao when its own founder is apparently willing to declare bankruptcy and start a new company at the drop of a hat.

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iOS beats Android in HTML5 Performance

We recently did a post on the most popular mobile browsers in the world (fyi: Android browser is apparently the most popular browser), but that’s the point of doing a story like that, it doesn’t really tell you what the browsers are good at, if anything at all. A study by Spaceport.io uses their open source PerfMarks project to determine how mobile browsers perform when it comes to HTML5, here are some results:

Game and app performance relies heavily on animated objects smoothly moving around the screen. As such, this test – when conducted across various operating systems, browsers and devices – serves as a proxy for evaluating performance of HTML5 games and apps.

The high average values across the two top animation techniques are skewed due to a single outlier: the Samsung Galaxy Nexus. This outlier pulled up the average for all other Android phones. Since this is an Android 4.0 phone, it is seen that massive improvements were made to the default Android Browser in the latest OS version.

The results here are well below 100 moving objects, regardless of the device or technique. That should be surprising given how powerful this hardware is. Some of these tablets have Tegra graphics cards but these are clearly not being well utilized by the Android Browser software stack.
Although not an Android device, the Blackberry Playbook is also included in this group for the sake of comparison. It is able to support 85 moving objects using CSS 3D transforms. Therefore the Playbook beats out all of the Android tablets for HTML5 (at least in terms of number of translating images).

Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPod supports all the animation techniques tested, all the way back to the iPhone 3GS. Right off the bat this is a major step above Android. Unlike the Android Browser, there is more than one acceptable option; both canvas and CSS 3D transforms will perform adequately.

Through the combination of iOS5 and the iPhone 4S, an incredible 250 objects can be moved around while maintaining 30 FPS. This is some serious performance, and makes complex games a possibility.

Even the oldest device here (the iPhone 3GS) is able to reach 53 moving objects at 30 FPS. This is another stark contrast with the one moving object on the low-end Android devices.

The iPad 2 on iOS 4.3.3 was at best able to achieve 198 moving objects while maintaining 30 FPS. However, since updating to iOS 5.0 the iPad 2 can achieve 326 moving objects. As with the iPhone, all techniques are supported on both iPads.

iOS is strongly in the lead here – both in terms of phones and tablets. Developers can expect to have more than 200 moving objects on the best iPhones, and more than 300 moving objects on the best iPads, but only around 100 moving objects on the best Android phones.

To conclude, the iPad 2 manages over 300 moving images at 30 FPS and cannot be beat for speed on any browser/device/OS combination.

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Happy Holi and International Women’s Day from Pluggd.in Team

Pluggd.in team wishes you a happy Holi, the festival of colors/radiance and importantly, the time when you let go of all your enmity and hug people around you.

So fill up your water guns, hug your friends (plus enemies) and enjoy the day!

We also would like to wish all our women readers, a happy International women’s day. We have been covering a few great women entrepreneurs and do stay Pluggd.in for more stories from women entrepreneurs.

Recommended Read: Are you celebrating your milestones enough at your startup?

[Image courtesy: Today’s Google doodle.]

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Apple unveils ‘The New iPad’ and Apple TV – makes it even harder for competitors to keep up!

Apple has somewhat made a cult following of its tablet, the iPad and today Apple has made some very exciting announcement on devices that have been best sellers and trend setters in their own areas. The new iPad and Apple TV bring some amazing features that make them must haves for Apple lovers.

Here’s a look at what the New iPad can boast about:

The ‘New iPad’ has a A5 quad core processor, 4G LTE, and a Retina Display. Retina Displays are famous for their high resolution. The new resolution on the retina display translates to 2048-by-1536-pixel resolution at 264 pixels per inch (ppi) and also features a fingerprint-resistant oleophobic coating. The New iPad will also have a battery life of 10 hours on 3G, 9 hours on 4G. The New iPad is also capable of acting as WiFi hotspot for upto 5 devices !Among other announcements were a new 5MP camera called iSight and uses sensors from the iPhone4s boasting of 1080p recording. There seems to be no change in the form factor and is still thin, and still costs $499. For the 16GB WiFi version. It will be available in 3 different storage sizes 16, 32, 64 gb and will be available starting March 16^th in U.S., UK, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, France, Hong Kong, Singapore and Austria.

Apple also demoed a cool new app called iPhoto that allows for great image editing capabilities, it allows editing images that are upto 19MP and features that make adobe photoshop look quite boring. But this will cost you $4.99 more. The new Apple TV features support for 1080p video. Additionally, movies and TV shows from iTunes are now available in 1080p. The new Apple TV also features a streamlined interface and costs $99. This product might not make its way to India for a while but it is still interesting. The Apple TV also supports iCloud’s photo stream. This means that photos taken from an iPhone or iPad appear on the Apple TV automatically.

This new iPad means that Android and Windows8 tablets have their work cut out for them. Already falling behind on the tablet race these competitors will really have to up their game if they want to be anywhere close to as successful as the iPad is.

Still not an iFan?

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Founders Drinks Manila with Serkan Toto – 21 Mar

Our friend E27 is working together with Roofcamp, WebGeekPH and Amazon Web Services to bring Founders Drinks to Philippines. Serkan Toto will be talking about his views on the tech scene in Asia. Audiences can hear the insights that he has gathered throughout his career as an independent web and mobile industry consultant.

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Event Details

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When: Wednesday, 21st March 2012
Time: 6pm-9pm
Where: Pasto at El Pueblo, Adb Avenue Corner J. Vargas Streets Ortigas Center, Pasig, Philippines
Register here.
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