Ringo, a popular voice calling app that arrived in India earlier this year, on Thursday announced that it is introducing new tariff charges for voice calls in the country. The company says that using its services, people will be able to make calls across the country - local as well as STD -- at Rs. 0.19 per minute.



The app, which debuted its service last year in over a dozen regions, offers voice calls at Rs. 0.19 per minute. In comparison, popular telecom operators such as Airtel, Vodafone, Idea charge roughly around Rs. 1.20 per minute for STD calls, and Rs. 0.40 per minute with any special tariff plan. Ringo claims that users can reduce their talk time cost by up to 90 percent using its service.

So how does Ringo work?



A user first needs to download Ringo app, and tap on the person he or she wishes to call. Instead of the user talking to that person directly, as the company mentions on its website, Ringo calls that person and connects the user to that contact. For this reason, recipients don't need to have the app installed on their handset, and voice calls work without a reliable data connection.

Bhavin Turakhia, CEO and Founder of Ringo said:
"Our vision has been to make calling across the globe simple, seamless and low-cost for the masses. Our local calling service is not only the cheapest in India right now, but it is also free of typical telecom-related hassles such as STD charges and differential pricing,"."In a country where 3G penetration is not fairly high throughout, we also have a strong edge over Internet telephony apps, as Ringo calls do not use data, and are comparable in price."



We tested the app earlier this year and found it as good as advertised, though it is not 'completely Internet-free'. Ringo worked reliably and didn't have an issue even on spotty data networks. You can download the app for your Android phone from the Google Play Store, for your iPhone from the App Store, and for your Windows Phone handset from the Windows Phone Store.

Download Ringo App Now And Get 50 Local/STD Minutes Free Click to Download Now

Microsoft and Nokia have delivered the best Windows Phone yet.

The build quality befits the phone’s high-end status. Nokia has always enjoyed a reputation for solidly made gear and that’s certainly the case here: there’s nothing wobbly or creaky in evidence. Nor does the matte plastic back look or feel cheap – it’s a level or two above the plastic you’d find on the back of certain Korean-designed smartphones. The curved edges of the glass front panel also make for a lovely premium touch.
There are three hardware controls on the right-hand metal edge (the nano SIM tray and 3.5mm headphone socket are located on the top edge): a power button; a volume rocker; and a dedicated camera shutter button (more on that below). There’s a microUSB port on the bottom edge but, thanks to the wireless charging plate included in the Lumia 930’s box, you’ll rarely need to make use of that.
The Day-Glo orange finish of our review sample is certainly… eye-catching, and some might feel happier with one of the two more sober colour options: white or black. Oh, and orange isn’t the only wacky colour available: there’s fluorescent green too, if you're feeling particularly brave.

Dream screen

The 5in, 1920 x 1080 OLED screen is one of the Lumia 930’s best features, just as it was on the Lumia Icon. A 1080p resolution may not match the sheer pixel count of a 2K display such as that of the LG G3, but it’s still extremely sharp: the pixel density of 441ppi is still above that offered by leading phones such as the Apple iPhone 5s (326ppi), Samsung Galaxy S5 (432ppi) or Sony Xperia Z2 (424ppi).
It’s not just showing detail at which the Lumia 930’s screen excels: it’s also rich and vibrant when it comes to colour and contrast, bright enough to view outdoors on sunny days (albeit fairly shiny and reflective) and its wide viewing angles mean it stays vivid even when you’re viewing off-centre.
It’s a great all-purpose screen, although its 16:9 ratio makes it particularly suited to displaying video. The one slight issue we found is the presence of some smearing when scrolling through web pages and the like – but it’s hardly a deal-breaker.

What a performance

With a quad-core Snapdragon 800 and 2GB of RAM, the Lumia 930 is a powerful phone, and its AnTuTu Benchmark score reflects that. It racked up a total of 25,051, which puts it the same ballpark as phones such as the LG G2, Samsung Galaxy S4 and Sony Xperia Z1 and a little behind current top-tier models such as the LG G3, Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2. That said, it seemed totally at ease with whatever apps and games we chucked at it, and it’s the beefiest Windows Phone currently on sale (bar the equally-specced Lumia 1520, which is more of a phablet thanks to its 6in screen).

Nokia has been making Lumia phones compatible with wireless charging for a while now, but customers have been required to pay extra for a charging plate. That’s no longer the case, and the 930 comes with one in the box. A nice touch, and one that’ll ensure buyers make the most of the phone’s fuss-free charging capabilities.
The 2420mAh battery feels just about adequate for purpose. If you're watching a lot of video, surfing the web often or taking loads of photos, you'll find it may not last an entire day – but less intensive use should see it stretch into a second one.

READ MORE: Nokia Lumia 1520 review

Yes we cam

The 20MP sensor on the rear PureView camera is able to take either 19MP 4:3 ratio photos or 16MP 16:9 photos, and automatically makes a 5MP version of all shots taken for faster uploading and sharing.
The camera has a wide f/2.4 aperture, dual LED flash and Carl Zeiss optics – and it feels like all these combine well to make it one of the finest smartphone snappers around. Both video and stills have superb clarity and colour, it’s more than adequate in low light, and Nokia’s “Living Images” feature is a nice touch: it plays a second or two of video before displaying stills, giving you an impression of a moment in time being captured. The large sensor and wide aperture also enable you to achieve a narrow depth of field in certain instances – and that can always make for lovely looking photos.
The only issue we have is the lack of HDR in the default camera. As you can see in our shot from the hilltop, this can lead to washed-out areas (in this case, the sky) where there's high contrast in a scene.
The default camera app, Nokia Camera, allows you to manually tweak a number of settings (white balance, exposure compensation, shutter speed, flash, ISO and focus) and this, coupled with the hardware shutter button (which you can half-press to focus) makes the Lumia 930 very photographer friendly.
Video, meanwhile, can be captured at 1080p quality in 30fps, 25fps or 24fps, and looks lovely when played back. There are four microphones, allowing you to record in surround sound, and Nokia has included a bass filter that lets you cut out low-frequency audio that could distort voices and other higher frequency sounds.

Windows Phone gets better

 The Lumia Icon came with Windows Phone 8, but the Lumia 930 offers the 8.1 edition of Microsoft’s OS. A .1 update might seem small, but there are a number of useful tweaks stuffed in: the Start screen is more fluid and customisable; there is now a proper notification pane (!) that can be accessed by swiping down on the Start screen; and there’s of course the Cortana personal assistant, Microsoft’s voice-activated answer to Siri and Google Now.
Cortana isn’t officially available yet on UK Windows Phones except in beta, so we can’t say for certain quite how well it (she?) works – but the feeling we get from using the 930 is that, slowly but surely, Windows Phone is improving to a level where it can now look Android and iOS in the eye. Except when it comes to apps.
The fact is, if you buy a Windows Phone handset you don’t have access to anything like as many apps as you would on an Android or iOS device. There are plenty available, including some of the big names such as Instagram, Vine and Spotify – but Windows Phone remains, and probably will remain for some time, the poor cousin of Android and iOS in this regard.

READ MORE: Windows Phone 8.1 review

Nokia Lumia 930 verdict

We liked the Lumia Icon a lot, and we like the Lumia 930 even more. It doesn’t make any drastic improvements to key elements – the screen, camera, performance are all the same – but the inclusion of a wireless charger and Windows Phone 8.1 out of the box make it a better buy. It doesn’t have as much raw power as top iOS and Android phones, nor access to their wealth of apps, but it’s the best Windows Phone yet.

Android and iOS users, take note: Windows Phone is a real contender



Only a year ago, buying a Windows phone was a declaration of insanity.
You were throwing cash at a platform that imposed too many compromises - in the user experience, in the choice of available apps, and in the platform's laggardly disregard for the cloud. In the process, you were rejecting two rivals that were demonstrably superior.
But that was 12 long months ago.
In a few weeks, Microsoft releases Windows Phone 8.1, an update that essentially contains little but tweaks - but tweaks that are intensive enough to add up to much more than a meagre point release. In our week with the Developer Preview, we’ve realised that this update may yet rescue Windows Phone from its fate as a repent-at-leisure mistake, turning it into a credible alternative to its Google and Apple rivals.

SAY HELLO TO A PRETTIER, MORE FLEXIBLE START SCREEN

Back in the early days of Windows Phone 8, the fly-in Live Tiles that are the signature of the OS drew praise and criticism in equal measure - praise for their novelty and potential, and criticism for their inflexibility and occasionally sluggish performance.
In one update, WP8.1 remedies both flaws. The animations are now lightning fast and ultra-smooth, and you can customise the Live Tile interface to your heart’s content.
In fact, we reckon the new features may even seduce Android aficionados, renowned for their addiction to fiddling. Although Windows Phone has only two ‘home’ screens (Start and All Apps), you can now lose hours of your life to re-sizing and arranging the Start tiles to precisely fit your daily needs.
And if you want to take things to a logical extreme, there’s a new option to fit another column of tiles on the Start screen (you’ll need to activate it first in Settings - it’s set to Off by default), and the tiles themselves have new re-sizing options (so you can fit six across the width of a Lumia 1020’s screen).
And if that wasn’t thrilling enough, Microsoft’s native app tiles are now transparent, with your chosen wallpaper showing in the background. Couple that with the long-standing ability to change the accent colour and switch between dark and light backgrounds (the latter of which will chew through battery faster), and the options are enough to keep all but the most ardent tweaker happy.
The only thing that has us slightly baffled is why the Nokia apps bundled into Windows Phone (Here Maps, Here Drive+, MixRadio etc) lack the transparency of the native Microsoft apps - we’ll hope that’s sorted by the time of the full and final release in the summer.

CORTANA: THE PA THAT READS YOUR MIND

The Big New Feature in 8.1 is a merger of the best features from iOS and Android. Cortana is a personal assistant that aims to learn about you and your habits, and adapt its answers accordingly, with results improving over time. Microsoft claims that Cortana is the result of a research effort that began back in 2009, and makes use on the company’s rich well of enterprise and search data (not to mention the Halo license).
And on the whole, it works well - at least it does, once you discover how to activate it. We had to change our Lumia 1020’s Region and Language settings to United States and reboot before the Cortana icon would appear in the apps menu.
Prod the Cortana icon for the first time, and you’re launched into a set-up routine that lets you tune the service according to your interests and daily routine - as such, it’s similar to Google Now, with options for sports, headline news, places to eat, the weather and a trip planner.
The similarity to Now continues with the landing page that greets you once you’ve finished the set-up - a stack of information that includes news updates, your appointments and maps for any imminent journeys.
Tap the microphone icon to the bottom right of the landing page, and you’re into Cortana’s voice assistant. Since it’s officially US-only for now, we had to temper any verdict on its performance with the knowledge that it may stumble on our plummy English tones. But even with that caveat, it seemed as accurate as Google’s voice recognition (which is high praise indeed). And oddly, it appeared happier recognising the UK English pronunciation of mobile (‘mow-bile’) than the American (‘moh-bil’). Go figure.
Microsoft is clearly bullish about Cortana’s capabilities. If you tap your Lumia’s search button, it launches straight into voice recognition, which then slides into the Cortana landing page if you scroll upward (compare this to Google Now, which launches into the landing page first).
Expect Cortana to land on your UK Windows Phone in late 2014, by which time - if rumours are true - there will also be a Cortana Notebook online that let’s you control how much information is shared with the program.

AT LAST - WINDOWS PHONE GETS NOTIFICATIONS

You can stop holding your breath, Dear World: 8.1 brings a notifications screen to Windows Phone. And just in case you’re worried that Microsoft has invented some kind of unique twist on a well-established system, you can relax - 8.1’s new Action Centre borrows happily and heavily from iOS and Android.
You access the Action Centre by swiping down from the top of the screen (sound familiar?), to be greeted by notifications sorted and stacked by type (novel, ay?). You only need to swipe to get rid of them, although curiously, you can’t banish individual alerts - you either swipe away all of your Facebook notifications, or none at all.
You’ll find four quick settings buttons atop the notifications screen that would look at home on any Android handset, along with a shortcut to all of your settings. By default, the four quick links are set to WiFi, Bluetooth, Airplane Mode and Rotation Lock, but you can change them to your heart’s content in Settings.
So there’s nothing new or crazy in the long-overdue debut of notifications on Windows mobile, but that’s absolutely fine by us. During our week with 8.1, we found everything where we expected it to be, and working as it should. For a platform that has sometimes refused to do either of those things, we couldn’t ask for any more.

An impossible fight for Windows Phone? Not at all.
Microsoft could do with a reward for its bravery. For all of its failings, the non-phone Windows 8 at least tried to meet the challenge set by the proliferation of devices and screen sizes head on - albeit with the risky strategy of gluing touch and desktop interfaces together. And despite resulting falls in PC sales and several failed attempts to usurp the iPad with the Surface, Microsoft has stuck to Windows 8, convinced that its solution would pay off in time.
In the case of the recent update to Windows 8.1, Microsoft's latest tweaks haven’t cured all of the ills - the new dabs of glue joining touch and desktop are too obvious (and with, in some cases, seriously illogical results).
But Windows Phone 8.1, due for final release this summer, has no need for glue - it can focus on refining one experience, with the singular aim of dislodging iOS and Android. And while 10% market share in the UK may not sound like the Wapwing of victory, it’s enough to take Windows Phone from obscure irrelevance to interesting underdog.
Even better, Microsoft's £4.6bn buy-out of Nokia means that it has control over its mobile hardware in a way it never enjoyed with laptops or desktop PCs. Windows Phone OS can be tuned to suit its hardware and vice versa, a benefit that Apple has exploited for years - and there’s a range of new Lumia smartphones arriving at around the same time as the 8.1 update to reinforce the point.

UNIVERSAL SEARCH: BETTER THAN ITS DESKTOP EQUIVALENT

If you’ve recently updated Windows 8.1 on your PC, you’ll recognise Universal Search immediately.
Windows Phone 8.1 Universal Search uses your location
Run a query, and you can swipe between the Bing-powered results across five tabs - Web, Local, Images, Video and Phone. The results are accurate, look great, and the layout is eminently sensible and quick to access (compare this to the desktop Windows 8 version, where the horizontal scrolling of results is something of a barrier).
Quite how useful you find it day to day will naturally depend on your habits - as we found over weeks with 8.1’s desktop equivalent, there’s usually a quicker way to access a contact, for example, by pinning them to your Start screen. But if you’re the type who fires off high volumes of random queries, Universal Search is a useful second home.
The only slight foible we could find was the short delay before results appeared as you swipe between the screens - it’s not long enough to be off-putting, but noticeable enough to make you wonder why Microsoft didn’t choose to have the tabbed results load in the background, while you scanned the first screen.

GOOGLE SYNC: THE CALENDAR’S BACK…

As a result of a wrangle between Google and Microsoft over Exchange Active Sync (EAS), Windows 8 users with Google Apps for Business accounts have been unable to sync their Google Calendars with the default Windows Calendar app since March 2013.
The good news is that 8.1 ends their misery - add a Google Apps account in Settings, and your Windows Phone will happily start syncing both your GMail and Google Calendars.

IMPROVED DATA AND BATTERY CONTROLS

You’ll find one new screen to join an older partner in Windows Phone 8.1 settings - Data Sense, meet Storage Sense. The former's a welcome addition to Windows mobile, to the point where it’s easy to overlook it in a review (‘what do you mean it wasn't there before?’).

As with Notifications, Microsoft has kept to the basics and presented them well: Storage Sense shows how much space you’ve used (both on internal and external storage), while letting you switch storage locations for music, photos, apps and downloads. Data Sense lets you cap your data usage, both with a hard limiter, and also through restricting background data. Simple, unoriginal, but very effective.

How to get the Windows Phone 8.1 update now
We’ll safely assume you have a Windows Phone device (or you’re about to buy one). If so, and if you’d like the 8.1 update for free, head on over to the Windows Phone App Studio, and login using your Microsoft account.
Once that’s done, go to the Store on your Windows Phone, and search for ‘Preview for Developers’. Install it, then find and open the Preview app on your device. Again, login using your Microsoft credentials.
Now head back to Settings, find Phone Update, and check for updates - lo and behold, Windows Phone 8.1 should begin to download. Job done.

WHAT DID MICROSOFT MISS?

Although Windows Phone 8.1 is a real leap forward, there are still aspects of the OS in need of polish.
For example, Live Tiles can look a mess - a flashing wall of animations, none of which make much sense. Combine the wrong set, and you end up with a screenful of bad advertising, none of which you particularly recognise or want to tap. Android widgets, at their best, are still a superior life form (not least because many actually facilitate actions, more than giving information).
Then there’s the Windows Phone Settings screen, which is still a headache: too many entries, with no categorisation and often baffling decisions as to what gets filed where. If Microsoft are happy enough to borrow from the best of iOS and Android, this looks like the next logical place to run the photocopier.
Lastly, Windows Phone’s multitasking could be easier to use; although it’s quick enough to access with a long press of the Back button, you only see one app pane at a time. Compare that to stock Android, where you can see up to four, and scroll quickly through them (or even better, the nine-pane set-up in the latest cut of HTC’s Sense).

Windows Phone 8.1 verdict



Windows Phone 8.1 may only be an evolution of Microsoft’s mobile OS, but there’s enough spit and polish in this update to make it a serious alternative to Android and iOS.

Cortana shows real promise, and Universal Search is an addition you can imagine using every day. But ironically, it’s the fluffier aspects of 8.1 that may win Windows Phone new friends - the endlessly adaptable Start screen, the new tile transparencies, and the refinements to the animations.

Our only reservation, for now, remains the breadth and quality of apps available in the Windows Store. Yes, it's now filled to the point where most of the mainstream apps are represented - but there still isn’t the depth of choice and consistently high quality that you’ll find in the Play Store or iTunes App Store.

But we’re at a point where the strengths are beginning to outweigh the weaknesses; 8.1 means that Windows Phone is ready for prime time.

Classy Build But Not that Stylish 

The Lumia Icon is a large phone and, at almost a centimetre in depth, isn’t especially slim, but it doesn’t feel particularly hefty in your hand or uncomfortable in your jeans pocket

 

It’s well built, too, with a metal-rimmed body and Gorilla Glass 3 screen that curves slightly at the edges. True to Nokia’s reputation, there’s not a hint of creakiness to it. The only thing we’re not too hot on is the white matte plastic back, which feels quite nice to touch but looks somewhat naff, especially with the large “4G” logo and Verizon branding. There are three hardware buttons on the right edge of the phone (volume, power and camera shutter, the latter of which can be half-pressed to focus), a nano SIM tray on the top edge next to a 3.5mm headphone jack, and three capacitive buttons underneath the screen (back, home and search).

A  Screening  Success

The Lumia Icon sports a 5in full HD LCD screen, which works out to 441 pixels per inch. It’s exceptionally vivid and bright, with gloriously juicy colours and sharp detail, and we had no problems using it outdoors in bright sunlight. The image quality remains vivid even at wide viewing angles, too.
While 1080p 5in screens have become almost the standard for higher-end smartphones these days, not all are born equal. The Icon’s display is mostly excellent for whatever you’re watching on it, from games to photos, videos, but there is some slightly off-putting smearing while scrolling quickly down web pages – the only bum note.

As  Powerful  as  the  Best  of  2013

There’s the beefy quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 processor on board, along with 2GB of RAM, and this makes the Lumia Icon a truly powerful phone. We benchmarked it with AnTuTu and it scored 25,302, putting it roughly in line with the LG G2.
While the Samsung Galaxy S5 and Sony Xperia Z2 are speedier (we’d expect upcoming LG G3 and HTC One replacement to be, too), the Icon should certainly be considered a top-tier smartphone when it comes to processing grunt, and we never once noticed any performance-related sluggishness with apps, games or general UI shenanigans.

Another cracking Nokia camera

There’s a PureView camera, but it’s not the excellent 41MP version used on the Lumia 1020. It boasts instead a (still very respectable) 20MP sensor that takes either 19MP 4:3 ratio images or 16MP 16:9 ratio images, and makes a 5MP copy of any photos you take for quicker sharing. The camera comes with a wide aperture of F2.4, a dual LED flash and Carl Zeiss optics, and all these things fit together to make it a superb snapper by mobile phone standards: images are clear and sharp, and you can get good, crisp results even in very low light conditions.
The default Pro Cam app (which you can bring up straight away by holding down the hardware shutter button, even when the phone is in screen lock mode) offers a host of manual shooting options: focus, exposure, white balance, shutter speed and ISO can all be tweaked, should you wish. It also lets you crop and reframe photos after you’ve taken them.
Video can be captured at 1080p HD quality and either 30, 25 or 24fps, and looks excellent for a phone. We’d have liked a slo-mo 120fps mode, too, but there is one bonus in the inclusion of four separate microphones and thus clearer audio quality than most smartphone videos. We found it picks up gusts of wind quite easily, which is a somewhat unfortunate side effect (at least if you like shooting on moors, rooftops and the like).

Windows Phone is still an issue

There’s no nice way of saying this – but like all Windows handsets, the Icon suffers from a paucity of apps in comparison to iOS and Android. While a lot of the more popular big name apps are available (Spotify, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Instagram, Angry Birds), many are nowhere to be found and it's far from the first choice platform for developers with pioneering software. There are no signs of that changing anytime soon, either.

The tile-based Windows Phone UI itself is a joy to use, and despite its different approach to other smartphone interfaces it doesn’t feel particularly unfamiliar or confusing - a clear sign of good design.
Another plus side of Windows Phone is the inclusion of handy, well-made native apps such as Here, Here Drive+, Office and Local Scout. Here, in particular, makes for an excellent alternative to Google and Apple Maps. There’s also a handy 7GB of free OneDrive cloud storage.

Nokia Lumia Icon verdict

The Nokia Lumia Icon is probably the best Windows Phone around at the moment: it bests the Lumia 1020 in every major respect except looks and camera skills, boasts quad-core power and a fantastic screen. And it isn’t even particularly pricey.
Like any Windows Phone, it’s slightly hampered by its app selection, but if it were available in the India we’d suggest it over any other Windows handset.
That being said, the spec is just a little bit "best of 2013", we have little doubt the coming 2014 crop of new Windows smartphones from Nokia and elsewhere may surpass it on specs and design. And that means, in the end, that the lack of availability on this side of the pond may end up being only a fleeting loss.

We can’t say we ever thought we’d be reviewing a Nokia tablet. But here we are. And the Lumia 2520 isn’t just Nokia’s first ever tablet, it’s a polycarbonate slice of tech history in glossy red (and glossy white, matte cyan and black).

Forty-one million pixels. Think about that for a moment. Your current phone probably captures eight. Your compact, maybe 12. Your SLR probably sneaks in about 14 (or 20 if you're lucky). And yet Nokia's Lumia 1020 is a smartphone that captures more than all of those 'proper' cameras put together.

This begs a few questions: do megapixels matter, or is that massive number meaningless? Even if it does have a killer camera, is the Lumia 1020 also a killer phone? And does the rave yellow handset come with free shades? Read on to find out.