Earlier this week Twitter beefed up its security by introducing a two-factor authentication system (2FA) where users could choose to get a second temporary login password when they signed on to Twitter from an Internet browser. This was a much asked-for feature after incidents of high-profile Twitter accounts, especially of news organizations, were hacked in recent weeks. However, the new system offers little protection and does almost nothing when it comes to securing team accounts.

The 2FA system implemented by Twitter is based on its Twitter via SMS service. The biggest limitation of this service is it works only on few carriers globally. In other words, if you are on a carrier with which Twitter does not have a partnership to send Tweets over SMS, you won’t be able to implement the new authentication system. In India, Twitter has partnerships with Airtel, Tata Docomo and Reliance Communications only and does not support other leading carriers like Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Aircel among others. You can check the global list of supported carriers here.

Secondly, the new system works with just one mobile number, which has been verified on the particular Twitter account. This makes it useless for team accounts that are handled by multiple people and would do nothing to secure accounts that are at the highest risk of getting hacked like those of media organizations and government bodies.

To be fair to Twitter, the company acknowledges the limitations. Twitter’s product security team’s Jim O’Leary mentions as much in the blog post that introduced this feature, “This release is built on top of Twitter via SMS, so we need to be able to send a text to your phone before you can enroll in login verification (which may not work with some cell phone providers). However, much of the server-side engineering work required to ship this feature has cleared the way for us to deliver more account security enhancements in the future. Stay tuned.”

However, with the rapid growth that Twitter is witnessing it needs to do much more and much quicker. Hopefully, a better security system would be delivered soon enough. Till then, having a secure password and not falling for phishing attempts remains every user’s best bet.

Online retailer HS18 is back with its smartphone sale. This time the sale will last till midnight tomorrow, though we feel some products will be snapped up much before the deadline ends. First spotted by FoneArena, the retailer is offering some stupendous deals including the Samsung Galaxy S III for Rs 22,945 and the Galaxy Grand Duos for Rs 16,495.

Other interesting phones in the sale include the Sony Xperia Z for Rs 32,495 and the Lumia 820 for Rs 19,495. Other smartphones in the offer include the Galaxy Fame, Galaxy S Duos, Galaxy Y Duos and the Karbonn A12. Mind you, there are limited number of discount coupons associated with every phone and the offer is applicable till the last coupon is used. We have a hunch that the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Grand Duos won’t last for long so if you were planning to buy them, you might do it right away.

Nokia today slashed the price of the Lumia 920 from approximately Rs 36,000 and is now available for Rs 31,999 with most online retailers. It is available for Rs 32,369 from Nokia’s own online store in India. What’s more, Nokia is also bundling the DT900 wireless charging plate with the phone under this offer.

The price cut comes at an interesting time, roughly a week after Nokia announced the Lumia 925, which would be priced around Rs 34,000 before taxes. Nokia’s executives maintain that both the Lumia 920 and Lumia 925 will coexist in the market as both target different user segments. Nevertheless, with this price cut, it is clear that the Lumia 925 will be the de facto flagship product.

Do you think that the Lumia 920 and wireless charging plate at this price is a compelling deal? Let us know in comments below.

Yesterday Amazon announced preorders for the Kindle Fire HD in 170 countries but we were a bit disappointed as the online retailer won’t let us preorder one with an Indian shipping address. Today, an Amazon spokesperson has confirmed to BGR India that India is not in the list of the 170 countries but asked us to stay tuned.

Amazon has tied up with Redington for distributing its hardware products in India. The deal, we are told, also includes the Kindle Fire HD tablets. The world’s largest online retailer rarely ever does pre-orders for hardware in India and it could be a case where it is currently looking at a simultaneous online and brick-and-mortar store launch in India.

Everything said and done, it is more likely than not that Amazon would launch the Kindle Fire HD in India around the same timeline of June 13 when the rest of the world is getting it.

Nokia is laser-focused on imaging as a USP for its Lumia range of smartphones. Every senior Nokia executive I met at the Lumia 925 launch in London last week emphasized on imaging. Yes, Nokia has the best music store out there (you get an annual all you can eat music subscription with the phone) and it has the best offline maps, and yet they kept emphasizing on the camera technology. It was only after sitting with Jo Harlow, Nokia’s executive vice president for smartphone business, did I realize why. Nokia is not content with cramming 41-megapixel cameras into its phones, it is planning to do something insane.

It was only on asking Harlow about the next big challenge for Nokia when it came to smartphone photography did I realize what Nokia’s engineers are attempting to do. “If you look at where imaging is going, computational imaging is an area of exploration. Being able to capture even more data — data you cannot even see with the human eye that you can only see by actually going back to the picture and being able to do things with them,” she said.

In other words, we are talking about Lytro-like light field photography where users can click a photo without focussing on anything in particular and later play around with the photographs by being able to focus on any part. In other words, photos remain alive long after they have been clicked.

“I think that is a key challenge to bring to a smartphone because computational imaging or computational photography requires computational power. That was one of the limitations in bringing that kind of experiences on a smartphone. Changes in the processing capabilities of smartphones opens it up as an area of exploration,” Harlow explained.

While it might sound audacious, Nokia is going full-steam ahead with its ambition of bringing computational photography to its Lumia smartphones. Nokia has announced it has invested in Pelican Imaging, which has the technology to bring light field cameras into a relatively slimmer smartphone form factor. Even on the chipset front, Qualcomm’s silicon with Adreno 320 GPU already has the capability to support such features.

On the other end of the spectrum, Nokia is also looking closely at India for its Lumia smartphones. “One of the things that we have done with an eye on India is to build out the portfolio and to have flagship devices that create aspiration but to really pay off that aspiration is to have lower end devices. The Lumia 520 is a great example of that. We will continue to push the boundaries of how low we can take Lumia. That’s one thing. Then, of course, there are things that are currently missing. Dual-SIM is an important one and to be really successful in the Indian market. And that’s something on our radar to bring to the portfolio,” Harlow admitted.

You can read my complete interview with Jo Harlow in today’s DNA here.

Disclosure: Nokia sponsored my travel and stay to attend the Lumia 925 launch event.

Google is considering to acquire Waze, a crowdsourced navigation service, Bloomberg reports. The news comes weeks after Facebook was reported to be eyeing the company, valuing it between $800 million to $1 billion. Waze uses satellite signals from smartphones to generate maps and traffic data, which can then be shared by users. By pooling in data from a number of users, the company then essentially provides real-time traffic information for a particular location.

Facebook is reported to have been in talks with Waze for at least six months. Earlier, Apple was also in the fray to acquire the startup to improve its botched iOS maps, but those rumors fizzled out fairly quickly. Apple is currently not in talks with Waze, the report claims.

Location and navigation services are the next frontier after content, apps, social networking and messaging for a fast growing smartphone market. Google already offers maps in most countries along with realtime turn-by-turn directions in some. Waze has over 40 million users globally.

Despite facing a mass exodus of senior executives and internal tensions, HTC could have sold close to 5 million units of its flagship smartphone, the One, since its launch over a month ago. “Orders are pretty good so far and are still more than what we can supply. This is partly due to the shortage of components. When the issue is resolved next month, we will have a better idea if it’s doing really well or not,” a HTC executive told the WSJ.

HTC had to delay the launch of the One by over a month as it faced component shortages, which eroded its first-mover advantage over Samsung, which was able to launch its flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S 4, at almost the same time as the HTC One. Samsung today announced it had sold 10 million units of the Galaxy S 4 in less than a month of its launch. While Samsung launched the Galaxy S 4 in more than 110 countries almost simultaneously, HTC is still struggling to meet its own launch timelines.

Apart from manufacturing most of the crucial components that go into smartphones on its own, Samsung also has a massive marketing budget to push its products, something that HTC clearly lacks. With little control over component supply and lesser room to negotiate pricing, HTC will continue to have a difficult job competing against Samsung, which also commands over 95 percent of profits among all Android players.

Barely hours after being spotted on benchmarks, HTC has officially announced the Desire 600. The Dual-SIM smartphone will be available in markets starting June and features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.2GHz quad-core processor and runs on Android Jelly Bean with Sense 5 UI running on top. Think about the Desire 600 as an affordable variant of the One.

Hardware specs include an 8-megapixel rear camera, 1.6-megapixel front facing camera and BoomSound dual speakers on the front similar to that of the One. It also features a 4.5-inch LCD2 qHD display, 1GB of RAM, up to 8GB of internal memory and an 1,860mAh battery, which HTC claims offers up to 11 hours of talktime and over 500 hours of standby time. It supports NFC, DLNA and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity apart from GPS, Wi-Fi and the regular connectivity options.

In sync with launching the Kindle Fire HD in 170 countries, Amazon has also opened up its Appstore in nearly 200 countries. Android users (including non-Kindle Fire HD users) can now get the Appstore and buy Android apps. This follows Amazon’s announcement last month of its plans to launch the Appstore in 200 countries this year. The world’s largest online retailer differentiates itself from Google’s Play Store by claiming it tests and checks every app before it appears on its store, which would at least theoretically ensure there is no malware unlike the Play Store.

At the time of the announcement we had correctly analyzed the move to precede the global roll out of the Kindle Fire HD tablet. Amazon is also rumored to be working on a smartphone, which it could unveil sometime this year. The global rollout of the Kindle Fire HD could be a dry run for a similar launch of its smartphone. With Amazon’s content ecosystem, a smartphone could pose a big challenge to both Apple and Google.

Like Amazon, Google’s Nexus range of smartphones and tablets have been very popular and Google too has recently started to sell both the tablet and smartphone in additional markets including India.

Amazon today announced it is launching its Kindle Fire HD tablets running on forked Android in 170 countries. Both the variants – Kindle Fire HD 8.9 and Kindle Fire HD (7-inch) – will be available from Amazon’s website. It will start shipping on June 13 but customers can pre-order them today onwards. We had earlier exclusively reported that Redington would distribute Kindle devices in India. Amazon announced its plans to launch its Android app store in India among other countries in April, which would enable users to buy apps and other Amazon services. The Kindle Fire HD 8.9 is priced at $269 and $299 for the 16GB version with offers that bring sponsored content on the lock screen or $284 and $314 without special offers respectively. The Kindle Fire HD 7 is available for $199 and $229 for the 16GB and 32GB variants respectively with special offers and $214 and $244 without special offers for the 16GB and 32GB variants.

Read on for the complete PR.

Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9” Now Available for Pre-Order for Customers in over 170 Countries Around the World, Shipping June 13
Kindle Fire HD—with a stunning custom 7” or 8.9” HD display, ultra-fast Wi-Fi, and exceptional battery life—perfect for web browsing, apps, games and books

Instant access to the most popular apps and games, including Where’s My Perry?, Pinterest, NBA JAM, and Asphalt 7—each one optimized for Kindle Fire HD

SEATTLE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–May. 23, 2013– (NASDAQ:AMZN)—Today Amazon announced that Kindle Fire HD and Kindle Fire HD 8.9” are now available to customers in over 170 countries and territories around the world for pre-order through Amazon.com, giving customers access to millions of apps, games, books, audiobooks and magazines, including more than 300,000 books that are exclusive to the Kindle Store.

Designed for entertainment, Kindle Fire HD is perfect for web browsing, apps, games and books. Features include:

Stunning customized HD display with in-plane switching, Advanced True Wide polarizing filter and customized laminated touch sensor for 25% less glare with rich color and deep contrast from any viewing angle; ideal for movies, apps, and gaming.
Custom Dolby audio and dual stereo speakers for crisp, rich sound.
The most popular apps and games.
Ultra-fast web browsing and streaming with built-in dual-band, dual-antenna Wi-Fi.
Front-facing HD camera for taking photos or making video calls.
Exceptional battery life—Kindle Fire HD gets over 10 hours of battery life.
Easy-to-use e-mail, calendar, and contacts for work or home, including Gmail, Hotmail, Exchange, and more.
Amazon-exclusive features like, Whispersync for Voice and Whispersync for Games.
“Buy Once, Read Everywhere” with the free Kindle app available on the largest number of platforms so customers can use their Kindle books on any of their devices.
Amazon’s top-rated, world-class customer service.
“Kindle Fire HD is the #1 best-selling item in the world for Amazon since its launch, and we’re thrilled to make it available to even more customers around the globe today,” said Dave Limp, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “Not only does Kindle Fire feature advanced hardware, it’s also a service. When combined with our content ecosystem, great email and browsing and top-rated customer service, we hope people around the world will agree that Kindle Fire HD is the best tablet for an incredible price.”

Kindle Fire is a Service

Kindle Fire is more than just great hardware—it’s a service. When a customer orders a Kindle Fire, it arrives pre-registered to their Amazon account and greets them by name. All of the customer’s Kindle content is there waiting for them to download and start enjoying—no long set-up process, and no syncing with a cable. Kindle Fire also comes with instant access to Amazon’s digital content right from the device, including all of the features customers love about shopping on Amazon—customer reviews, one-click purchasing and more. Whenever customers shop on Amazon, or buy a Kindle they know that they are also getting Amazon’s world-class customer service. Customers have been shopping on Amazon for over 15 years, and they continue to do so because of the unparalleled, end-to-end customer experience.

Arrives Pre-Registered

Kindle Fire HD comes automatically pre-registered so customers can immediately start enjoying their digital content purchased from Amazon or shop for new content.

Connect with Bluetooth and HDMI

Kindle Fire HD supports Bluetooth, enabling customers to connect their wireless Bluetooth headphones or Bluetooth speakers to listen to songs or audiobooks. With Bluetooth connectivity, customers can also easily connect to a wide range of Bluetooth-enabled keyboards. HDMI out makes it easy for customers to connect Kindle Fire HD to their big-screen TV to enjoy their favorite videos and photos.

Stunning Custom HD Display

The 8.9” display on Kindle Fire HD features an incredible 254 pixels per inch with a resolution of 1920×1200, meaning that pixels are indistinguishable to the human eye. The 7” Kindle Fire HD features a stunning HD display with 1280×800 resolution that delivers deep, detailed contrast and rich, natural color. Kindle Fire HD a laminated touch sensor to reduce glare and make the display easy to view even in overhead light, and an Advanced True Wide polarizing filter that results in a display that shows the same deep contrast and rich, detailed color from any angle.

High-End Laptop-Quality Wi-Fi—Fast Downloads and High-Speed Streaming

Kindle Fire HD comes with dual-band Wi-Fi and can automatically switch between the 2.4 GHz network and the less crowded 5 GHz network, resulting in better range and less interference.

Stay in Touch with Front-Facing HD Camera

Kindle Fire HD features a front-facing HD camera. Skype created a customized app tailored for Kindle Fire HD that is ready to use out of the box for free HD video calls at home and abroad. Kindle Fire HD makes it easy for the over 250 million customers already using Skype to get in touch with friends and family.

Email and Calendar

The Kindle Fire family features world-class Microsoft Exchange integration, with fine-tuned performance on many of the most critical email functions. For example, typical Exchange accounts sync with the oldest emails first, ending with the most recent emails—Kindle Fire instead syncs with newer emails first, then with older emails, getting customers access to the most recent emails they are looking for. Kindle Fire also features a new calendar app, making it easy for customers to stay connected and keep track of their schedules. The new email client offers support for the world’s most popular email providers—including Gmail, Microsoft Exchange, Hotmail and more.

Photos Brought to Life

Photos come alive in stunning high-resolution on Kindle Fire HD. Fire’s mosaic view arranges personal photos beautifully, and customers will be delighted to see their best shots on their TV with HDMI out. Kindle Fire lets customers easily import their photos from Facebook and because their photos are securely stored in the Amazon cloud, they never have to worry about losing their favorite pictures.

Millions of Apps, Games, Books, Audiobooks and Magazines

Kindle Fire provides customers an incredibly large selection of digital content, including thousands of exclusives:

Instant access to the most popular apps and games, including Where’s My Perry?, Pinterest, NBA JAM, and Asphalt 7—each one optimized for Kindle Fire HD.
Millions of books, including over 300,000 titles that are exclusive to the Kindle Store. Over 650,000 books are priced at $4.99 or less; over 1.2 million are $9.99 or less. Hundreds of magazines and newspapers—including Vogue, Esquire, National Geographic and Better Homes and Gardens—with glossy full-color layouts, HD photography, and beautifully detailed illustrations.
Over 100,000 professionally-narrated audiobook titles available, with free samples to listen to before buying.
16 or 32 GB of On-Device Storage, Plus Free Cloud Storage for Amazon Content

Kindle Fire HD is available with 16 GB or 32 GB of on-device storage. This large on-device storage capacity is in addition to the free storage Amazon provides for Amazon digital content in the Amazon Cloud. Amazon digital content is automatically backed up for free in the Amazon Cloud’s Worry-Free Archive where it’s available anytime.

Powerful World-Class Processor—Snappy and Smooth

An HD display and HD content must be driven by a powerful processor and optimized software. The Kindle Fire HD family features world-class processors and an Imagination Technologies graphics engine for lightning-fast HD graphics and excellent fluidity. The 8.9” Kindle Fire HD is powered by the latest generation OMAP4 4470 processor and Imagination SGX544 graphics engine capable of over 12 billion floating point operations per second, and both Kindle Fire HD 7” and 8.9” come with higher memory bandwidth than Tegra 3. Combining the latest generation processors with significant customization of the Kindle Fire software by Amazon engineers results in a snappy and smooth experience for the user.

Dual Stereo Speakers and Exclusive Dolby Audio

Kindle Fire HD combines dual stereo speakers with the Dolby Digital Plus audio platform—the standard in high-performance audio—to offer a world-class audio experience. Dolby’s audio suite for Kindle Fire HD includes technology used to adjust volume and deliver easy-to-understand dialogue, and also optimizes for headphones versus speakers. All of these pieces combine to create an exceptional audio experience that results in clear, crisp and balanced sound quality.

10 Hours of Battery Life

Kindle Fire HD is optimized to deliver high performance without sacrificing battery life, delivering over 10 hours of battery life.

Thin and Light

Even with a custom display, a powerful processor, extra speakers and dual-band/dual-antenna Wi-Fi, Kindle Fire HD 8.9” weighs only 20 ounces and is just 8.8 mm thin.

Beautiful Leather Covers

Covers for Kindle Fire HD feature a premium textured leather exterior in a variety of colors and a subtle woven nylon interior to provide our lightest and thinnest form of protection. The integrated magnetic clasp ensures the cover remains securely closed while in a backpack, purse, or briefcase. The cover automatically wakes Kindle Fire HD upon opening and puts it to sleep when closed, making it easy to dive right back into whatever content a customer is enjoying.

Customers can discover full details and order Kindle Fire HD at www.amazon.com/kindlefirehd.

Pricing and Availability

Kindle Fire HD 8.9” is available for preorder starting today for just $284 at www.amazon.com/kindlefirehd.

Kindle Fire HD 7” is available for preorder starting today for just $214 at www.amazon.com/kindlefirehd.

It has barely been 12 hours since Yahoo unveiled the new look Flickr and it is already facing a lot of flack from its loyal users. An official forum on Flickr, which was started to get user feedback has gone massively wrong with most users hating the new look and demanding that Flickr rolled it back to its old look or at least give users the option to choose whether they want to go for the new look or remain with the old one.

Users used phrases like ‘hideous’, ‘horrifying’, ‘messy’ and ‘utter heap of crap’ among others. What’s worrying is that most of them claim to be pro account users who pay Yahoo an annual subscription fee to use the service. However, with new Flickr, Yahoo has almost done away with pro account and offers an ad-free account with same benefits as the free one for an annual subscription of $49.99. There is a $499.99 annual subscription Doublr plan that offers 2TB of space and all the benefits of the free account. This too isn’t going down well with paying members as earlier pro accounts used to offer loads of extras to members that included analytics and statistics.

However, it seems that Yahoo is now aiming to attract new users to Flickr while hoping that existing ones would continue to use the service by dangling the free 1TB space. And that is indeed an attractive proposition and hopefully, most users hang around just for that, until someone else comes up with a compelling enough offer.

Not even 24 hours after announcing the acquisition of Tumblr for $1.1 billion, Yahoo has announced it is bringing 1TB of storage to Flickr users. Users with free Flickr accounts will get 1TB (1,024GB) of cloud storage to save their photos in full resolution. This probably makes Flickr the only photo sharing service to offer 1TB of free storage. Yahoo claims it is 70 times bigger than what competition is offering.

The update brings photos to the forefront again rather than having tiny thumbnails with blue links. Now users won’t have to bother about the size of the photographs as they can upload them in full resolution without fearing the risk of running out of storage space. Apart from a new UI for Flickr that brings a new view and sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Tumblr, Yahoo is also launching a Flickr app for Android smartphones and tablets, having witnessed a 25 percent increase in usage after launching the iOS app.

Flickr has 89 million users with over 8 billion photos uploading about 2,630 photos every minute. Users can choose from three kinds of accounts at Flickr.

Free:

• 1 Terabyte of photo and video storage
• Upload photos of up to 200MB per photo
• Upload 1080p HD videos of up to 1GB each
• Video playback of up to 3 minutes each
• Upload and download in full original quality

Ad Free:

• $49.99 per year
• All the benefits of a free account
• No ads in your browsing experience

Doublr:

• $499.99 per year
• 2 Terabytes of photo and video space
• All the benefits of a free account

Yahoo has made lots of product announcements ever since Marissa Mayer took over as the CEO, first announcing the iOS app for Flickr and then making Flickr Pro go free for three months. It also revamped the Yahoo homepage along with its Yahoo Mail service. Its weather app also received many accolades and it has also acquired companies like Astrid and Summly.

While announcing its $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr today, Yahoo promised not to “screw it up” and will let Tumblr remain an independent entity that will continue to operate from its own HQ with its staff and product roadmap remaining unchanged. The announcement notes from both companies were very unlike what one would expect from an all-cash $1.1 billion transaction with Tumblr CEO, David Karp, closing his notes with “Fuck Yeah.” While we have already seen Yahoo’s press release announcing the deal, read on for Karp’s memo to his staff.

News!

Everyone, I’m elated to tell you that Tumblr will be joining Yahoo.

Before touching on how awesome this is, let me try to allay any concerns: We’re not turning purple. Our headquarters isn’t moving. Our team isn’t changing. Our roadmap isn’t changing. And our mission – to empower creators to make their best work and get it in front of the audience they deserve – certainly isn’t changing.

So what’s new? Simply, Tumblr gets better faster. The work ahead of us remains the same – and we still have a long way to go! – but with more resources to draw from.

Yahoo is the original Internet company, and Marissa and her team share our dream to make the Internet the ultimate creative canvas. I couldn’t be more excited to have her help. We also share a vision for Tumblr’s business that doesn’t compromise the community and product we love. Plus both our logos end with punctuation!

As always, everything that Tumblr is, we owe to this unbelievable community. We won’t let you down.

Fuck yeah,
David

On the face of it, the Nokia Lumia 925 looks like a thinner variant of the Lumia 920 and it is not until you hold the phone in your hand that you realize how different it actually is. The Lumia 925 is thin, beautiful and takes care of most of the things that many found lacking in the Lumia 920. It is 8.5mm thin, is relatively very light and gets a more premium finish thanks to the metal frame.

In terms of design, what I like the most about the Lumia 925 is you get the feeling of sturdiness thanks to the metallic parts while getting the familiarity of polycarbonate plastic on the back, which is durable and resistive to getting scratched or dented.

While the Lumia 925 retains most of the specs of the Lumia 920, there are a few key improvements especially when it comes to the camera, which surprisingly Nokia didn’t talk a lot about during the unveiling.

The Lumia 925′s camera has six lens elements rather than 5, which makes it according to the company, the most advanced camera on a smartphone. A lot of tweaks have gone behind the scenes to improve the sharpness and overall photo quality in both daylight and low light photos. If you may recall, the Lumia 920′s daylight photography skills weren’t really worth writing home about.

I tried shooting with both the HTC One and the Lumia 925 in auto settings and photographs were certainly much better on the Lumia 925 under both low light and daylight conditions. Unfortunately, I was not allowed to transfer photos from the Lumia 925 but the difference was drastic enough to come to the conclusion.

Even Nokia Smart Camera software is pretty intuitive and is similar to the editing features available on the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and HTC One.

Nokia has managed to get most of the things right and filled the holes left with the Lumia 920. However, it still faces the challenge of selling it in the market and getting it into people’s hands. It has got the pricing right too, approximately Rs 33,400 before taxes and subsidies. The Lumia 920 was the best Windows Phone smartphone and the Lumia 925 clearly topples it. Now it remains to be seen if users feel the innovation and are willing to swap sides and move to Windows Phone.

Disclosure: Nokia sponsored our travel and stay to attend the press conference.

As expected, Nokia today announced the Lumia 925, which carries along the same PureView camera technology that was earlier seen in the Lumia 920 but in a much thinner frame. The Lumia 925 is also the first device in the series to ditch an all polycarbonate plastic body for a metallic frame that comes with a polycarbonate plastic back. Unlike the Lumia 928, however, the Lumia 925 does not sport a Xenon flash and comes with a dual-LED flash like the Lumia 920.

On the specifications front, not much has changed between the Lumia 920 and the Lumia 925. It still sport a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor clocked at 1.5GHz, 1GB of RAM, a 8.7-megapixel PureView camera with OIS, an 4.5-inch AMOLED Clear Black Display and 16GB of internal storage. In order to maintain the slimness, the Lumia 925 ditches built-in wireless charging and comes with optional wireless charging covers. The Lumia 925 will be available in white, black and grey colors while the wireless charging covers will be available in white, black, red and yellow.

Nokia is making a big deal about the Carl Zeiss lens in the Lumia 925 and it claims that there are 6 elements in the lens assembly, which is a first for a smartphone. Previously, Apple made a big deal with the 5 element lens in the iPhone 4S, which was further carried over in the iPhone 5.

Nokia today also introduced a Smart Camera mode that clicks ten images at once and edit the pictures with options like Best Shot, Action Shot, and Motion Focus, features that have been recently introduced in the Samsung Galaxy S 4 and the HTC One. It will first be offered in the Lumia 925 and will be available to other Lumia smartphones via an update.

The Lumia 925 will be available in select markets in June for Euro 469 (approximately Rs 33,400) before local subsidies and taxes. India is not a part of the first wave of launch countries. Watch this space for our hands-on and first impressions of the Lumia 925.

Photographs: Rajat Agrawal