Smartphone's Myths Busted!!

Most of us are told that there are certain ways we should treat our devices in order to keep them working in peak condition, preserve battery, etc. You’ll be surprised to learn that some of the things we all think to be true are, in fact, myths.

Myth #1:Swiping Clear The Apps From Resents tray Will Speed Up Your Phone

This is one of the biggest myths that people think to be true but actually its not. Swiping applications from the resents tray won't affect the performance of the phone because apps in your list of recently used apps aren’t actually “running” in the background and taking any computing resources. They’re just stored in your Phone’s cache memory, so you can go back to them more quickly.Closing apps this way will just make them reopen more slowly.Your smartphone will automatically kill tasks if it requires more memory.

Myth #2:Overnight Charging is Bad for the Battery

This is yet another big myth which is again completely untrue. Older phones had this issue Older devices could not tell when the battery was fully charged, which led to overcharging – a main cause for shorter battery lifespan and people still continue to think that smartphones also work the same way but its not true. There is a reason phones nowadays are called smartphones. Modern devices monitor the battery’s charge levels and cut charging once it’s full, so there’s no need to worry about leaving your phone charging overnight.

Myth #3:Higher the Megapixels the Better the Camera

 More megapixels look good on a specification sheet, but it does't guarantee that the picture clicked by your camera will be better.A megapixel just means one million pixels, and the number of megapixels tells you how many pixels a photo you’ll get from the camera will contain. Apple’s iPhone 6 still has an 8-megapixel camera, while high-end Android smartphones often offer 16-megapixel cameras. Cramming more and more ever-smaller pixels onto a sensor isn’t always a good idea. More importantly, the overall quality of the sensor, lens, and image-processing software is also very important.

Myth #4:Android phone gets Infected With Virus

A virus is a type of malicious software (malware) program that, when executed, replicates itself by modifying other programs and inserting its own code. So this is what a virus is and till date there has been no malware that replicate itself like a PC virus can, and specifically on Android this does not exist, so technically there are no Android viruses. However, there are many other types of Android malware and they mostly attack your smartphone when you download Apps from outside the Google Play store or untrusted websites. Of course, Android operating system updates don’t make it to many phones, and this does sometimes leave open security holes.

Myth #5:Only Use the Original Charger

Modern smartphones use USB chargers, which are standardized. As long as a USB charger can provide enough power, you can use it to charge your smartphone. But before buying, you should be aware that there is a difference between a poorly made knock-off charger and a replica charger from a reliable manufacturer. Using a cheap knockoff charger can be dangerous, and has caused fires and small explosions due to poor quality and use of substandard materials. But if you want to get a new charger for your phone, you don’t have to pay the manufacturer’s ridiculously high price, just opt for a reliable replacement from a reputable source.

Myth #6:Drain the Battery Completely Before Recharging it Improves Battery Life

These days smartphones use lithium-ion batteries, which will last longer if you keep them charged. Draining battery completely will affect its life in the long run. I would recommend not to let your smartphone battery fall below 15%.

Rooting an Android

Most of you would have heard the term Rooting maybe from a friend who is interested in techs or read it on the internet somewhere and would have wondered what is Rooting. Today i am going to clear all your doubts about rooting.

Rooting basically is the process of obtaining administrative privileges (Super User Access) on your device. As Android uses the Linux Kernel,(All about kernel) rooting an Android device gives similar access to administrative (Superuser) permissions as on Linux or any other Unix operating system. with these privileges/permissions you can overcome limitations that carriers and hardware manufacturers put on some devices.Thus, rooting gives the ability (or permission) to alter or replace system applications and settings, run specialized a applications that require administrator-level permissions, or perform other operations that are otherwise inaccessible to a normal Android user.

Various operations you can perform after rooting

1. Removing bloatware:- Bloatware are the unwanted software which are pre-installed by the manufacturer. Root access allows you to uninstall those apps.
2. Overclocking and underclocking your CPU:- All of you are familiar with terms CPU(central processing unit).
3. Flash a Custom ROM.
4. Using applications that requires administration permissions.

Overclocking

Now overclocking as the name suggests is the process of enhancing the clock speed of some Android devices from the stock clock speed. For example a device has 800 MHz clock speed then CPU Overclocking will be to increase this speed from 800 MHz to 1 GHz. It is also known as increasing the frequency of your device’s CPU. As the purpose of a CPU is to perform tasks on your Android device, higher is the CPU, faster it will perform the tasks and less will be the chances of lag. 

Advantages of overclocking

Overclocking is mostly useful on old devices having less CPU clock speed. If you wish to play 3D/HD games or you want to run the games / apps lag free you may Overclock your device’s CPU and it will work like a new device with higher clock speed.

Disadvantages of Overclocking

Overclocking your Android device will directly affect the battery life and will result in battery drainage. More burden you put on your CPU more battery it will consume. This can be tested only upon Overclocking an Android device that how much it battery it eats.

Underclocking 

Basically it refers to slowing down or restricting the speed of your device’s CPU to a lower number. Example:-, Let’s say a device comes with a processor having 800 MHz processing speed and you want to underclock it, you will reduce it’s speed to 600 MHz or 500 MHz.

Advantages of Underclocking

Underclocking is greatly effective as the battery life of your Android device is directly linked with the user of your device’s CPU, so in case you are not an Android freak and you don’t disturb your device much with gaming and other such processes, you can underclock your Android device to improve it’s battery life.

Disadvantages of Underclocking

Underclocking your device to the minimum lowest speed can result in sending the device to sleep mode. In that case you’ll have to pull the battery and put it back and then turn it on. So always restrict it to a suitable speed.

Flash a custom ROM

A custom Android ROM refers to a phone’s firmware, based on Google’s Android platform. Android is open source and therefore any developer can edit the code, recompile it, and re-release for a wide variety of devices. Users can install ROM's to change a device’s appearance and behavior.When you buy your Android device, it comes with what we call a “stock ROM” or the “stock firmware”. This refers to the preinstalled operating system. This ROM usually has limited functionality as defined by the phone’s manufacturer. By flashing a custom ROM, you can unlock extra features and sometimes improve the performance.

Using applications that require administrative permissions

There are a variety of good and useful applications which you are missing out on because you do not have the administrative privileges like Titanium Backup, lucky patcher, Xposed framework and many more.

Pros and Cons of rooting

Pros

Rooting frees your Android phone from the clutches of the mobile carrier where you got your phone from unless you got it unlocked. If that’s the case, rooting frees your phone from the restrictions of the Android OS.

Rooting allows you to install “unofficial” and advanced versions of the Android OS. Generally, Android OS are carried over-the-air by Google and selected carriers to their Android-released devices. And this usually takes awhile to happen. Luckily, there are developers who make this updates available and the only way you can install them is to root your phone.

Rooting allows you to uninstall stock apps which are most of the time useless and were pre-installed by the manufacturer or your carrier.

Rooting allows you to back up your phone’s system to an SD card so that you can try out custom ROMs and revert back to your old system.

Rooting allows you to move apps to an SD card instead of cramping your phone’s internal storage.

Rooting lets you overclock your phone’s CPU, making it performs faster than it was intended to perform by the manufacturer.

Rooting lets you fully personalize and customize your phone’s interface with cool themes, wallpapers, widgets and more.

Cons

Rooting voids your phone’s warranty.

Rooting can cause your phone to act abnormally, especially if not done properly.

Rooting renders your phone unqualified to receive OS updates through OTA. So you will be on your own to look out for valid sources. The good news is that your phone is probably running the latest OS after you have rooted it.

Rooting may make your phone perform faster but there are downsides to it specifically running too hot to the point of overheating your device.

A word of Advice

Rooting is an extremely dangerous process and might even brick your phone if not done correctly and it also voids your phone's warranty. So try rooting at your own risk. My advice try it on a old device first which has crossed its warranty period already. 

Mobile Processors Vs Laptops Processors

Have you ever thought that there are smart phones and tablets that have processors with clock speeds of 2.3GHz and even more? Yet Intel made its own processors with clock speeds of 0.8 and 1.1 GHz. Why didn't Snapdragon just develop processors that could work for laptops?

Let's get one thing straight: MHz / GHz and number of cores are no longer a reliable indicator of the relative performance of any two arbitrary processors.

They were dubious numbers at best even in the past, but now that we have mobile devices, they are absolutely terrible indicators. I'll explain where they can be used later in my answer, but for now, let's talk about other factors.

Today, the best numbers to consider when comparing processors are Thermal Design Power (TDP), and Feature Fabrication Size, aka "fab size" (in nanometers -- nm).

Basically: as the Thermal Design Power increases, the "scale" of the CPU increases. Think of the "scale" between a bicycle, a car, a truck, a train, and a cargo airplane. Higher TDP means larger scale. The MHz may or may not be higher, but other factors like the complexity of the microarchitecture, the number of cores, the branch predictor's performance, the amount of cache, the number of execution pipelines, etc. all tend to be higher on larger-scale processors.

Now, as the fab size decreases, the "efficiency" of the CPU increases. So, if we assume two processors which are designed exactly the same except that one of them is scaled down to 14nm while the other is at 28nm, the 14nm processor will be able to:

• Perform at least as fast as the higher fab size CPU;
• Do so using less power;
• Do so while dissipating less heat;
• Do so using a smaller volume in terms of the physical size of the chip.

Generally, when companies like Intel and the ARM-based chip manufacturers (Samsung, Qualcomm, etc) decrease fab size, they also tend to ramp up the performance a bit. This puts a hamper on exactly how much power efficiency they can gain, but everyone likes their stuff to run faster, so they design their chips in a "balanced" way, so that you get some power efficiency gains, and some performance gains. On the other extremes, they could keep the processor exactly as power-hungry as the previous generation, but ramp up the performance a lot; or, they could keep the processor exactly at the same speed as the previous generation, but reduce the power consumption by a lot.

The main point to consider is that the current generation of tablet and smartphone CPUs has a TDP around 2 to 4 Watts and a fab size of 28 nm. A low-end desktop processor from 2012 has a TDP of at least 45 Watts and a fab size of 22 nm. Even if the tablet's System on Chip (SoC) were connected to an A/C mains power source so it doesn't have to worry about power sipping (to save battery), a quad-core tablet SoC would completely lose every single CPU benchmark to a 2012 low-end "Core i3", dual-core processor running at perhaps lower GHz.

The reasons:

• The Core i3/i5/i7 chips are MUCH larger (in terms of number of transistors, physical die area, power consumption, etc.) than a tablet chip;
• Chips that go into desktops care MUCH less about power savings. Software, hardware and firmware combine to severely cut down to performance on mobile SoCs in order to give you long battery life. On desktops, these features are only implemented when they do not significantly impact the top-end performance, and when top-end performance is requested by an application, it can be given consistently. On a mobile processor, they often implement many little "tricks" to drop frames here and there, etc. (in games, for example) which are mostly imperceptible to the eye but save battery life.

One neat analogy I just thought of: you could think of a processor's "MHz" like the "RPMs" meter on a vehicle's internal combustion engine. If I rev up my motorcycle's engine to 6000 RPM, does that mean it can pull more load than a train's 16-cylinder prime mover at 1000 RPM? No, of course not. A prime mover has around 2000 to 4000 horsepower (example here), while a motorcycle engine has around 100 to 200 horsepower (example here of the highest horsepower motorcycle engine ever just topping 200 hp).

TDP is closer to horsepower than MHz, but not exactly.

A counterexample is when comparing something like a 2014-model "Haswell" (4th Generation) Intel Core i5 processor to something like a high-end AMD processor. These two CPUs will be close in performance, but the Intel processor will use 50% less energy! Indeed, a 55 Watt Core i5 can often outperform a 105 Watt AMD "Piledriver" CPU. The primary reason here is that Intel has a much more advanced microarchitecture that has pulled away from AMD in performance since the "Core" brand started. Intel has also been advancing their fab size much faster than AMD, leaving AMD in the dust.

Desktop/laptop processors are somewhat similar in terms of performance, until you get down to tiny Intel tablets, which have similar performance to ARM mobile SoCs due to power constraints. But as long as desktop and "full scale" laptop processors continue to innovate year over year, which it seems likely they will, tablet processors will not overtake them.

I'll conclude by saying that MHz and # of Cores are not completely useless metrics. You can use these metrics when you are comparing CPUs which:

• Are in the same market segment (smartphone/tablet/laptop/desktop);
• Are in the same CPU generation (i.e. the numbers are only meaningful if the CPUs are based on the same architecture, which usually means they'd be released around the same time);
• Have the same fab size and similar or identical TDP;
• When comparing all of their specs, they differ primarily or solely in the MHz (clock speed) or number of cores.

If these statements are true of any two CPUs -- for instance, the Intel Xeon E3-1270v3 vs. the Intel Xeon E3-1275v3 -- then comparing them simply by MHz and/or # of Cores can provide you a clue of the difference in performance, but the difference will be much smaller than you expect on most workloads.

I will try to put together the answer the way I see it. Other, more experienced members will probably add more details and value later.

First of all, due to the difference in CPU architecture, mobile device processors and desktop PC processor support different instruction sets. As you have probably guessed, the instruction set is larger for PCs.

Another thing is false advertising. The speed advertised for PC CPU is often achieved and, CPU can run at that speed for long periods of time. This is possible because of excessive power supply from the mains, and decent cooling system that allows to remove the heat from the core. This is not the case for mobile devices. Advertised speed is maximal possible speed but it is much higher than the average speed. Mobile devices will often slow down their CPU, because of overheating and to save battery.

And the last but not the least is the availability of additional components like main memory (RAM), cache memory, etc. The amount of RAM is not the only criteria. There is also RAM clock speed that defines how quickly can data be stored and retrieved in/from RAM. These parameters also vary between mobile devices and PCs.

You could come up with more differences but the root cause is power consumption and size requirements. PCs can afford to draw more power from the mains and can also afford to be bigger, so they will always deliver higher processing power.

All you Need to Know about Samsung Pay!!!

Last month Samsung officially rolled out Samsung Pay in INDIA and was working successfully in US, South Korea and China. And here are some of the most Frequently asked questions (FAQ’s) about Samsung pay.

What is Samsung Pay?

It is a mobile payment service by Samsung India Electronics Pvt. Ltd. that allows you to pay for goods and services simply by waving your Samsung smartphone near a cash register instead of swiping a credit card or doling out your payment information.

How it works?

The service works with all regular swipe-based card machines which support NFC (near field communication) or MST (magnetic secure transmission). The former works by building a high frequency wireless network between the phone and the payment terminal, while the latter creates a dynamic magnetic field between the smart phone and the payment terminal’s card reader.

The user can make the payment by tapping the smartphone on a NFC enabled point-of-sale machine, selecting the card and authenticating the transaction through biometrics-fingerprint or a four-digit PIN. With other cards terminal that does not support NFC feature, the payment can be made using MST and thus is convenient to use everywhere.

Service available on only some Samsung smartphones?

No, currently Samsung Pay works with select models of company’s line of Galaxy smartphones.

• Samsung Galaxy Note 5
• Samsung Galaxy S7
• Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
• Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge+
• Samsung Galaxy A7 (2016 and 2017)
• Samsung Galaxy A5 (2016 and 2017)

It is also available on the Gear S2 smartwatch, but only for transactions on NFC terminals.

Bank Supported?

Currently, the Samsung Pay app supports credit and debit cards of Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank and Standard Chartered Bank. For State Bank of India, only the credit cards are supported while the support for debit cards will be added sometime in the future.

Citibank card holders have also been integrated apart from Visa, MasterCard, and American Express.

Samsung has partnered with Axis Bank to facilitate payments using UPI. It will also support payments through mobile wallets. Currently, Paytm, the largest digital payments firm in INDIA, is the only wallet on board.

What does the setup process involve?

Once the Samsung Pay app is installed, register your fingerprint on the device if you haven't done so already. The camera will launch so you can scan your credit or debit card. Check that the number, name and expiration date are all correct. Finally, the app will need to verify the card by sending you an SMS or email from your bank.

A total of 10 cards can be added to Samsung Pay.

How do I make a payment with Samsung Pay?

From the lock screen, swipe up from the small Samsung Pay bar just above the home button. Then place your finger on the home button to verify your fingerprint and hold the back of the phone against the payment terminal.

Once the payment is made you will get an Android notification that confirms the merchant name and the amount of your purchase. This information is also documented in the Samsung Pay app.

Is it secure?

yes it is sucure as Samsung Pay does not store the account or credit card numbers of cards on the device, instead using tokenization (when applied to data security, is the process of substituting a sensitive data element with a non-sensitive equivalent, referred to as a token, that has no extrinsic or exploitable meaning or value.) for transactions. Each time a purchase is made, the Samsung Pay handset sends two pieces of data to the payment terminal. The first is a 16-digit token that represents the credit or debit card number, while the second piece is a one-time code or cryptogram that's generated by the phone's encryption key.

What if I lose my phone?

Payments can't be made from your phone without being authorized via fingerprint or the PIN chosen during the setup process. If you register with Samsung's Find My Mobile service you can remotely erase information on the phone, including any cards stored in Samsung Pay.

Can I use Samsung Pay even without a Wi-Fi/cellular connection?

Yes, although you will only be able to make 10 payments without the device being on Wi-Fi or cellular data. You will also need to have an active internet connection to add a card and to access transaction history.

Does Samsung Pay also work for returns?

Yes. Merchants may require you to hold the phone against the payment terminal in the same way as when you make a payment to process the return. Also, you will be asked to match the payment information on the receipt with the last four digits of your virtual card number. This is accessed through the Samsung Pay app.

Does Samsung Pay works with Non-Samsung Phones?

The answer is No, Samsung Pay is available exclusively to users with a compatible Samsung device. Gift cards can be sent from Samsung Pay to non-Samsung users.

Samsung Pay Play Store

Guide to Setup Samsung Pay (Official Samsung pay website link). Click Here

Microsoft PowerShell...

What is PowerShell?

PowerShell is an automation platform and scripting language for Windows and Windows Server that allows you to simplify the management of your systems. Unlike other text-based shells, PowerShell harnesses the power of the .NET Framework, providing rich objects and a massive set of built-in functionality for taking control of your Windows environments. 

PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC)

PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) is a platform for testing and ensuring the declarative state of a system. DSC allows you to scale complex deployments across environments, enables collaboration of management, and corrects for configuration drift.

PowerShell ISE

The PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) is a Windows application that supports enhanced usage of PowerShell for beginners and experts alike. The ISE's many features include:

• A built-in editor for writing, testing, and debugging scripts 
• Full IntelliSense tab completion, syntax highlighting, and context-sensitive help
• A myriad of keyboard shortcuts
• Support for right-to-left languages
• Extensible add-ons

Extend the PowerShell Experience with Microsoft Operations Management Suite

Operations Management Suite (OMS) gives you visibility and control of your applications and workloads across Azure and other clouds. Integral to this, it enables customers to transform their cloud experience when using PowerShell for both Linux and Windows Server. OMS Automation elevates PowerShell and Desired State Configuration (DSC) with a highly available and scalable management service from Azure. You can graphically author and manage PowerShell resources including runbooks, DSC configurations and DSC node configurations from one place. With OMS hybrid runbook workers, you can extend your OMS Automation capability and apply, monitor and update configurations anywhere, including on-premises.

Source: - Microsoft PowerShell