Mid-range Samsung Galaxy Alpha tipped with all-metal body
As if we should be surprised, Samsung is reported to be readying a variation of its Galaxy Alpha smartphone. According to SamMobile, a Samsung SM-A500 figures to be a mid-range take on the aluminum-clad handset experience.
The most interesting thing we’ve learned from our source is that the SM-A500 will have a full metal body, without a removable back cover. If true, this means the phone won’t have the new faux leather back…
Specifications are alleged to include a 5-inch 720p HD Super AMOLED display, a quad-core Snapdragon 400 processor, and 16GB internal storage. Cameras are expected to be 8-megapixels on the rear and 5-megapixels around front. Other details include a microSD expansion card slot and nano SIM card slot.
It’s said that this device will skip out on some of Samsung’s recent sensors (fingerprint, heart rate); the device is not expected to be waterproof.
The post Mid-range Samsung Galaxy Alpha tipped with all-metal body appeared first on AndroidGuys.
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Apple Expanding Boston-Based Research Team Working on Siri Speech Recognition
Last year, we highlighted a profile of Apple’s Boston-area speech technology team speculated to be working on enhancements to Siri. The group’s efforts appear to have been ramping up since that time, with a June report claiming Apple is seeking to eventually move away from the Nuance-powered system currently used for Siri.
Apple’s team in Cambridge appears to still be growing, with BetaBoston reporting Apple has leased 13,000 square feet of new space to house the team.
Several commercial realtors tell me that the Cupertino company has leased more than half a floor at One Broadway, an MIT-owned building that also houses Facebook’s small local team, several venture capital firms, and the Cambridge Innovation Center. The new office, about 13,000 square feet on one of the building’s upper floors, is a major expansion for Apple, which currently has a small team on the building’s fifth floor.
Earlier reports had noted Apple’s recruitment of several former Nuance employees for the team, and BetaBoston reports Apple has recently added members from Amazon, research and development firm BBN Technologies, and data management firm Actifio.
Apple has reportedly not yet begin building out its new space in Cambridge, but it could house up to 65 employees once completed.
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Apple September 2014 Media Event: Spoiler-Free Video Stream [iOS Blog]
With Apple’s September 2014 media event kicking off Tuesday morning at 10:00 AM Pacific Time, some users are interested in avoiding all of the announcements and waiting until Apple posts the recorded video of the event so as to experience it without already knowing the outcome.
For those individuals, we’ve posted this news story, which will be updated with the link to the presentation once it becomes available from Apple. No other news stories or announcements will be displayed alongside this story.
Users waiting for the video to be posted are welcome to gather in the thread associated with this news story, and we ask that those who follow the events refrain from making any posts in the thread about Tuesday’s announcements.
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Jawbone Up coming to Android Wear, Apple HealthKit and Windows Phone
Until now, Jawbone’s Up bands have had the best software of any fitness tracker on the market. The problem, of course, has been that if you wanted that slick app experience, you had to buy yourself some Jawbone hardware to match — a risky proposition when the device has some documented sudden-death issues. Not anymore, though. A company spokesperson confirmed that Jawbone will be opening up its API, allowing the software to work on Android Wear smartwatches and anything running Apple’s HealthKit (translation: if and when the iWatch comes, it’ll be Jawbone compatible). That means going forward, you can run Jawbone’s app on your smartwatch, and enjoy the software without having to wear an Up band if you didn’t want to. Additionally, Up is at last coming to Windows Phone, so if you own a WP8 handset and have been eyeing the Up24, you can finally take the plunge.
The Up app will roll out across these various platforms over the month of September, according to Jawbone’s spokesperson, at which point there will be two apps you can choose from: the existing Up application for Up band owners, which you can find on iOS and Android, as well as a separate open-access app for everyone else.
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Take a ride in Honda’s self-driving car (video)
One day (soon, according to GM) it won’t be weird to get in a car, go for a drive and see the driver take their hands off of the wheel while the car continues on self-guided. That day isn’t today though, so while I’ve already had demos of “autonomous driving,” hopping in this Acura TLX for a quick drive through Detroit was still special. So far I’ve only seen similar technology working in controlled environments, but this time the car was navigating its way down the same highways I drive on regularly, and dealing with real drivers just trying to go about their day. As it turns out, after three years in development Honda’s technology can handle merging into highway traffic better than some people I know.
That blurry spot on top of the Acura is part of the array of radar, sensors and cameras that tell the car where it is and what’s going on around it. Blended with GPS data (including street information and the speed limit, etc.) the car is able to manage going on and off of the freeway, driving, and even changing lanes or merging with traffic. Once we began to enter the highway (M-10, underneath the Cobo Center) Honda’s system notified the driver it was ready to take over with an audio cue and a light on the dashboard, and when he pressed the button it just kept driving on the planned route. The only truly weird thing — as anyone who has driven this route would expect — is that the car’s system kept it going at the posted speed limit, as the usual downtown traffic whizzed by going quite a bit faster.
Other than the unusually low/legal speed for the area, the only other indication inside the car that anything was different are the screens displaying the accumulated sensor data. Honda’s engineers said it can detect objects hundreds of meters directly in front of the car, and on the screens it pointed out not only any traffic nearby, but also their predicted path for the next few seconds. Merging from M-10 onto I-94 proved tricky because of heavy traffic however, and with another audio cue it prompted the driver to take over again. Once he handled the merge, it drove along in slow-moving traffic, then signaled and exited onto I-96 as planned on its way back to the ITS World Conference 2014. If this were an Uber driver (and it might be, eventually), I’d probably give it five stars.
So far Honda hasn’t have laid out a specific timeframe to launch this technology, although industry watchers expect to see various forms available by 2020. More testing is needed before this hits streets in your town, as well as answers to the legal/insurance questions about who is responsible when the car is doing the driving. It’ll need to lose the roof rack filled with equipment, but the software proved surprisingly capable dealing with normal, every day traffic, and I could see the current implementation with its notifications for the driver working in a real world environment.
Filed under: Transportation
Source: Honda
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Twitch’s CEO sees Amazon integration as an opportunity, not an obligation
When Amazon purchased Twitch for almost $1 billion, the question burbled to the top of everyone’s mind: which Amazon service will invade the platform first? The idea hangs with minor dread, a concern that a corporate agenda will ruin what customers have come to love about the game streaming service. Twitch CEO Emmett Shear isn’t worried, however. He’s been adamant Twitch sold to Amazon because it promised autonomy. “Our attitude towards it is not that this transaction happened, therefore we have to do integrations,” he explained at TechCrunch Disrupt. “It’s that now we have the opportunity.” Amazon, he explains, offers Twitch new resources for security, licensing and marketing — but says that Twitch will only integrate Amazon services that benefit the consumer.
So, what would be a good Amazon experience for the Twitch consumer? The CEO has some ideas. “What might be a good experience is watching this game on Twitch,” he imagines, “with a way you can buy it right now at a 20 percent discount. That sounds like something our broadcasters would want to offer and our viewers might like it.” Incentive-based Twitch viewing is just one idea, however, and Shear says it’s not something either Twitch or Amazon will force on broadcasters or viewers.
Shear says Twitch is exploring less consumer-facing integrations too — specifically citing issues with content licensing. “We can put our music licensing team with their music licensing team and see if they can interact. We have an opportunity to see if that makes sense or not.” Still, he’s choosing his words carefully: an opportunity, he says again, not an obligation.
Filed under: Gaming
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Google Cast Beta extension for Chromecast gets an update with 1080p tab casting Support
The Google Chromecast device is still one of my favorite little additions to my home. It makes things extremely easy to keep the cord cut in our home. A new update to the Chrome Cast Beta plug-in for your Chrome browser has landed and offers up a nice little bit of options for your casting needs. Similar to the Chrome Beta app for Android, the Google Cast Beta plugin is more like a testing ground for the brave to play with additional features that may or may not find their way to the more standard, and often times more stable, release of the same plugin. The update to the Beta version of this plugin brings in some nice little tweaks.
In the plugin’s settings you will find a section towards the bottom called ‘Custom mirroring settings’. They make sure to make a special note that this section is for ‘Advanced users only.’ In this section you can adjust your minimum and maximum bitrates in kbps, along with adjusting the maximum capture framerate. A final setting in the list lets you swap around from 854 x 480, 1280 x 720 and 1920 x 1080. The standard Google Cast extension only offers three options and none of the fancy adjustment options that the beta version offers. It keeps you at a maximum of 720p with a High or Extreme bitrate option.
It is fun to play about with if you have a little knowledge and respectable internet connection/router. I gave it a whirl myself and the image is much crisper on my 39′ HD TV. Sadly there are some nefarious internet issues plaguing the area today, so anything that requires any sort of good connection speed is worthless for me.
Head to the Chrome web store to install the Google Cast Beta extension and play about with the settings.
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The post Google Cast Beta extension for Chromecast gets an update with 1080p tab casting Support appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
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The Higgs boson could destroy the universe in the wrong conditions
That Higgs boson that everyone was so eager to find last year? As it turns out, it could be the end of everything — in the wrong circumstances, anyway. In his upcoming book Starmus, Stephen Hawking notes that the once-elusive particle could become less than perfectly stable at energy levels of 100 billion giga-electronvolts or higher. If it gets to that state, it could trigger a vacuum bubble that would expand at the speed of light, eventually collapsing all space and time; you wouldn’t even know the disaster was coming if the event happened on Earth.
Don’t start panicking that we’re about to destroy the universe by accident, though. Right now, even a massive accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider has “only” smashed together particles at 3.5 tera-electronvolts per beam. It would take a collider larger than our planet to reach dangerous energy levels. Still, it’s interesting (if slightly disconcerting) to realize that we could theoretically erase existence if we were really, truly bent on it.
Filed under: Science
Via: Daily Mail
Source: Sunday Times
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PayPal and Coinbase are partnering to enable Bitcoin payments
Remember that One Touch mobile payment solution PayPal announced last month? It’s ready — Braintree CEO Bill Ready announced at Disrupt that customers with the PayPal app will have access to mobile payments starting today. The mobile payment platform is the first fruit Braintree has borne since PayPal acquired it last year, but it isn’t the last: Ready says his company is laying the foundation for PayPal Bitcoin payments, too.
Ready says that PayPal is partnering with Coinbase to enable a Bitcoin-based payment system. “This would be PayPal’s first foray into Bitcoin,” he said. “But it’s via the Braintree platform.” That service is still in the works, he says, and it won’t be handled exclusively through PayPal — merchants interested in using the emerging system will need a Coinbase wallet to accept payments.
Filed under: Misc
Source: TechCrunch
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Google must offer more to end EU antitrust case
A few months back, it looked like that Google was set to avoid fines from the European Commission stemming from a multi-year probe into the outfit burying rival ads in search results. With new “arguments and data,” the competition said it isn’t satisfied with those concessions, and Reuters reports that the search giant will have to pony up more in order to close the case. If you’ll recall, Google had agreed to give Bing, Yahoo and others equal visibility rather than face a $5 million fine, but after those companies weren’t happy with the proposal and submitted new claims, the Commission wants a revised offer. In response to an ad by publishers on the other side, executive chairman Eric Schmidt posted a letter on Financial Times over the weekend. Saying that it was built “to show results that answer the user’s queries directly,” Schmidt maintained that the company doesn’t promote its own stuff “at the expense of our competitors.”
[Photo credit: Getty Images]
Source: Reuters
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AIVAnet 