android photography

As you can see, quite a number of very cool features, and this is just for the alarm part of the Clock app that comes installed by default on the Galaxy S2!

The next tab is the World clock one - here you can have any number of world clocks, so at a glance you can see the time all over the world - very handy if you frequently travel abroad - also if you have overseas clients for example!

Adding new clocks is easy, simply tap on Add city, and then start typing - all of the timezone related cities are loaded. As you'd expect, you can set Daylight Savings Time settings as well.

Not that you'd ever use the phone as a real stopwatch for when you do a marathon, for example, but it does pretty much everything it's supposed to. You can start the clock, do laps, stop, restart and reset.

The timer I use quite often, especially when preparing food :) This is the one thing my previous phone lacked, and I'm very glad to have it now. You can specify the exact time the timer should run for, and can at any time reset it. It's also easy to restart it after the buzzer goes off. 

And, of course, you can change the sound it makes when it goes off, and set the volume.

The timer is probably my most used feature of the Clock app so far. It does what it's supposed to, which is great!

The Desk clock feature allows you to use your phone for just that - a Desk Clock :) This one you'll really only use if you buy the optional desktop dock for the phone (which I haven't yet...). It does look pretty snazzy though:

It looks even nicer if you flip the phone horizontally:

The buttons you'd need when using the phone as a desk clock are all right there. I would have definitely used this feature if I had the desktop dock thing.

Anyway, as you can see the standard Clock app that comes with the Samsung Galaxy S2 is pretty much all you'd ever need. It does everything you'd expect, and more!

Till next time!

PS - if any of you out there use a third party clock app, feel free to let me know by leaving a comment!

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Also, if I remember correctly, Kies air isn't installed by default - this only gets installed when you connect the phone to your pc with Kies installed. After syncing, the app should appear in your list.

Feel free to leave a comment if your phone doesn't include all of the above, or even if some of the apps are not. Would like to know what the rest of the world is experiencing :)

Cheers for now!

What is Cloud Computing- Definition
The term “cloud” is a metaphor to “Internet”. The Cloud computing defined as a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, server storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.
Cloud computing customers do not own the physical infrastructure rather they rent the usage from third party provider. They consume resources as a service and pay only for resources that they use. Most cloud computing infrastructures consist of services delivered through common centers and build on severs. Sharing resources amongst can improve the speed of computing when the servers are unnecessarily left idle.
Present Many companies like Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com are delivering services from the cloud. Google has a private cloud which gives their services like email services, document applications, text translations and maps. Microsoft Sharepoint online service allows for application tools to be moved into the cloud, and Microsoft currently makes its office applications available in a cloud.

Service Models of Cloud computing
Cloud computing offers both the software and hardware as a service over the internet. These services are classified into three categories:

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)
2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

1. Software as a Service (SaaS)
In this model, a complete application is offered to the customer, as a service on demand. A single instance of the service runs on the cloud & multiple end users are serviced. On the customers‟ side, there is no  need for  upfront investment in servers  or software licenses, while for the provider, the costs are lowered, since only  a single  application needs to be  hosted &  maintained. Today SaaS is  offered by companies such as Google, Salesforce, Microsoft, Zoho, etc.

2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Here, a layer of software, or development environment is  encapsulated & offered as a service, upon which other higher levels of service can be built. The customer has the freedom to build his own applications, which run on the provider‟s  infrastructure.  To meet manageability and scalability requirements of the applications, PaaS providers offer a predefined combination of OS and application servers, such as LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP), restricted J2EE, Ruby etc. Google‟s App Engine, Force.com, etc are some of the popular PaaS examples.

3. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
 IaaS provides  basic storage and computing capabilities as standardized services over the network. Servers, storage systems,  networking equipment,  data centre space etc.  are pooled and made available to handle workloads.  The  customer would typically deploy his own  software on the infrastructure. Some common examples are Amazon, GoGrid, 3 Tera, etc.


Cloud deployment models
Cloud computing model can be deployed in several ways. According to the characteristic of those models we can identified four main models.

1. Private Cloud 
The cloud infrastructure has been deployed, and is maintained and operated for a specific organization. The operation may be in-house or with a third party on the premises.


2. Community Cloud
 The cloud infrastructure is shared among a number of organizations with similar interests and requirements.
This may help limit the capital expenditure costs for its establishment as the costs are shared among the organizations. The operation may be in-house or with a third party on the premises.


3. Public Cloud 
 The cloud infrastructure is available to the public on a commercial basis by a cloud service provider. This enables a consumer to develop and deploy a service in the cloud with very little financial outlay compared to the capital.


4. Hybrid Cloud 
 The cloud infrastructure consists of a number of clouds of any type, but the clouds have the ability through their interfaces to allow data and/or applications to be moved from one cloud to another. This can be a combination of private and public clouds that support the requirement to retain some data in an organization, and also the need to offer services in the cloud.

Benefits
The following are some of the possible benefits for those who offer cloud computing-based services and applications:

•  Cost Savings 
Initial expense is really cost effective. The billing model has a per usage basis. The Maintaining cost and service cost are much lower than the traditional computing methods.

•  Scalability/Flexibility
Cloud computing infrastructures have massive storage capacity. There for users can do computation with large size of data. If we consider in industrial level,
Companies can start with a small deployment and grow to a large deployment fairly rapidly, and then scale back if necessary. Also, the flexibility of cloud computing allows companies to use extra resources at peak times, enabling them to satisfy consumer demands.

•  Reliability
We can use multiple redundant clouds to do our computation purposes. This supports business continuity and disaster recovery.

• Maintenance
Cloud service providers do the system maintenance, and access is through APIs that do not require application installations onto PCs, thus further reducing maintenance requirements.

•  Mobile Accessible
This is also a major benefit coming with the cloud computing. Mobile workers have increased productivity due to systems accessible in an infrastructure available from anywhere.

Challenges


• Data Security
Security is the main problem involves with the cloud computing structure. Cloud service providers can monitor the usage of the cloud and the data. Users don’t have the understanding about the  back end data storages. They don’t know exactly where they are storing their data. This problem can solve if service providers can assure a good security level and if they use any encrypting mechanism.

• Data Recovery and Availability
This is also a challenge which achieve by the service providers. The service providers should maintain a good disaster recovery system and  capacity and performance management system.

• Management Capabilities 
Despite there being multiple cloud providers, the management of platform and infrastructure is still in its infancy. Features like „Auto-scaling‟ for example, are a crucial requirement for many enterprises. There is huge potential to improve on the scalability and load balancing features provided today.


• Regulatory and Constitutional Restrictions 
In some of countries, Government regulations do not allow personal information and other sensitive information to be physically located outside the state or country. In order to meet such requirements, cloud providers need to setup a data center or a storage site exclusively within the country to comply with regulations. Having such an infrastructure may not always be feasible and is a big challenge for cloud providers.