Lenovo Interested in Acquiring BlackBerry [Wall Street Journal]

Chinese giant Lenovo is the last on the long list of companies and individuals looking to acquires BlackBerry's assets. There have been rumors that Intel, Samsung, Google, LG or even the Canadian's company co-founder Mike Lazaridis might have expressed their interest in acquiring BlackBerry.

Today, Wall Street Journal reports Lenovo has already signed a non-disclosure agreement that will allow the Chinese company to check BlackBerry's financial books. This means that if Lenovo considers BlackBerry a good asset to its smartphone bussines, it will bid against Fairfax Financial, the Canadian consortium that has already made a $4.7 billion offer a few weeks ago.

Unfortunately, there's no telling what will happen in the next couple of weeks, so until Lenovo comes out with an official statement we can only speculate on the subject.

Lenovo logo
Image credits to Lenovo

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Oppo N1 Goes Official in Indonesia

Chinese mobile phone maker Oppo has made its Oppo N1 smartphone official in Indonesia, where it will release it starting with December.

The new device was announced in late September with a 5.9-inch Full HD IPS display and with a 1.7 GHz quad-core Snapdragon 600 processor. The smartphone also comes with 2GB of RAM and 16GB/32GB of internal memory, as well as with a 3610mAh battery inside. Oppo N1 packs a 13-megapixel rotating camera, capable of recording videos at full HD resolution. The camera module can be rotated 206 degrees, so it can be used both as a rear and front camera.

The mobile phone is running under Oppo’s Color OS platform, which is based on Android 4.2 Jelly Bean, and it’s the first device in the world to come with CyanogenMod support right from the start. According to techinasia, Oppo N1 will be priced at IDR 7 million ($616 / €455) in Indonesia.

Oppo N1
Image credits to Oppo

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Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) Officially Released

Canonical has announced that the next installment of their operating system, Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) has been officially released and it's now available for download.

Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) may not seem like much when compared with the previous Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring Ringtail) released, but it's an obvious evolution, at least in terms of stability. One of the biggest changes in Ubuntu is the implementation of a new Linux kernel, which right now is actually the latest stable version available. This is great news for the owners of new hardware who will be able to enjoy the new operating system without much fuss. According to the developers, Ubuntu 13.10 includes the 3.11.0-12.19 Ubuntu Linux kernel which was based on the v3.11.3 upstream Linux kernel. Other important changes include a number of improvements for AppArmor, which has received some extra attention during this development cycle.

For example, support has been added for fine-grained DBus mediation for bus, binding name, object path, interface and member/method, AppArmor has been integrated with several services as part of the ApplicationConfinement work in support of click packages and the Ubuntu appstore, and the support for policy generation via the aa-easyprof tool and apparmor-easyprof-ubuntu policy has been improved. Ubuntu 13.10 (Saucy Salamander) also comes with Unity 7, which is a shame because everyone was expecting Unity 8, which will be integrated on the phones. In any case, users will enjoy the “101 Scopes” upgrade. Formerly known under the name of Lenses, the Scopes have been integrated much better with Unity, providing much more relevant responses to the user's queries in the Dash.

Users will be able to upgrade to the new version of Ubuntu in no time. Just open Software Sources and Press Alt+F2 and type in "update-manager -d" (without the quotes) into the command box. This should trigger the updates and the rest is a piece of cake. Just follow the instructions and you will have Ubuntu 13.10 installed in no time.

Ubuntu 13.10 Released
Image credits to Canonical

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