This week B&H Photo has opened an Apple-authorized mini-store inside their one and only Manhattan, NY location.

Mini Apple Stores have been found in big box retailer Best Buy for a few years now, but the opening of one in B&H Photo is much different. Unlike Best Buy, B&H is a single location, showing just how close the relationship between the two companies is. The mini-store features small facets of the Apple Retail experience, including the iconic wooden tables, AppleInsider notes:

The new Apple section of the B&H store features Apple’s iconic wooden tables, with one showcasing the full Mac lineup, including the new 13-inch MacBook with Force Touch trackpad. Another table showcases Apple’s iPod and iPad lineups, as well as Beats headphones.

B&H has been a go to location for photography nuts, and over the years they have expanded their product selection quite a bit. Currently they sell anything from camera gear to speakers and even Windows PC’s, so seeing this mini Apple location pop up inside makes it a complete one-stop-shop location now.

Source: AppleInsider

If you want to order the Microsoft Band online and want it shipped to you quickly, Best Buy is currently your best bet. The site currently shows that shipments are going out the next business day, while Amazon and the Microsoft Store site are currently showing shipments as going out in at least two weeks, if not longer.

Vine has sped up the process of watching videos through its app, and made enhancements that allow you to watch videos while offline or on a slow internet connection.

Vine has made some important tweaks to allow you to watch videos offline. The app now works in the background to download content, including your home feed. Here are the major changes made to get the app up to speed, according to Vine:

• We’ve done a lot of work to make sure the app starts downloading content, including your home feed, your activity notifications and Vines in Explore, before you even open it.
• We’ve also implemented network caching and introduced a new, smaller video file size that can be downloaded much faster when someone has a slower internet connection.

You’ll need the latest version of Vine for iPhone, 3.2, in order to take advantage of these new background features and speed enhancements.

• Free – Download Now

Source: Vine

Lighting is the most important part of any good photograph. Getting it right makes all the difference.

Anytime you see a discussion about photography, or read a set of tips and tricks for better pictures, you’ll find talk about the lighting. It’s the most important factor in the picture-taking process, and unlike settings and sliders to adjust your exposure, oftentimes we have no control over it.

It’s possible to get great photos under almost any lighting conditions, but to do that you’ll need to know how to use the available light to your advantage. It’s not as hard as you might think, and by following a few simple guidelines you’ll get better results from your camera.

Activision will release the second DLC pack for its hit first person shooter Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare first on the Xbox One and Xbox 360 consoles March 31. The pack, titled Ascendance, will include four new multplayer maps and the second chapter of the Exo Zombies co-op campaign, among other things.

Motorola Droid Turbo owners will be skipping Android 5.0 in-favor of Android 5.1 according to a Motorola software engineer.

In January Motorola announced that 2013 and 2014 Motorola devices would be updated “very soon”, but that promised update has yet to hit for all devices two months later. Late last night saw Luciano Carvalho, a software engineer at Motorola, posted on a Google+ thread giving a little more insight behind the delay of the Lollipop update for the Droid Turbo.

A small update is now available for users who pair their Pebble with an iPhone. This update bumps the watch up to firmware version 2.9.1 which includes to bug fixes. After the iOS 8.2 update some users experienced issues with SMS and Mail notifications and both have been corrected in this update.

Much of the attention lately has been on Pebble’s upcoming Pebble Time device, and the new features that it brings along with it, but that doesn’t mean current generation hardware is left behind.

The update is available now through the Pebble App. To grab the update; tap on menu then support and finally “check for update.” Be sure to let us know if you experienced the issues mentioned, and if this update fixes them for you.

Source: Pebble

Information broker. Health tracker. Digital wallet and keys. Communicator. Remote Control. We might not have gotten it presented on stage like that, but we still got it — it’s all one product. It’s the Apple Watch.

Just like the iPhone and iPad, different people will find each of those features compelling to a greater or lesser degree, and which ones they find compelling can change over time. The Watch as remote control is a great example: Apple hasn’t spent a lot of time on it yet, but it could become much more important as time passes.

Camera Remote

With the Apple Watch, you can remotely access the viewfinder on your iPhone’s iSight camera. That means you can put your iPhone somewhere, see what it sees, and take the perfect picture — even from afar. That could be for a selfie, group photo, or just to get what would otherwise be an impossible shot. You can even set a time lapse, right from your wrist.

I can see Martin Reisch — Instagram’s safesolvent able to take his renowned “stance” shots with just a few taps, no matter how insane his positioning.

Music + Audio

The Apple Watch can store up to 2GB locally and play it as well as any iPod ever could. It can also control your iPhone’s music playback, both locally stored music and from iTunes Match. If your iPhone is streaming to AirPlay-enabled speakers, whether you’re in your office or at the lake, you can control all of that as well, right from your wrist.

Right now headphone remotes are like iPod shuffles — they let you do basic actions. With Apple Watch, it’ll be more like an iPod nano. A small window that really lets you see into your audio.

Apple TV + iTunes Remote

Similar to the Remote app for iOS, the Remote app for the Apple Watch lets you connect to any Apple TV you own, at home or at work, along with any iTunes library on your Mac or Windows PC. Whether you’re in the family room or the board room, alone or in a group, there’s no more reaching for the hardware remote and no more reaching for the iPhone or iPad — There’s just a few taps and twists of your wrist.

Best of all, if you need to quickly pause at any time, you don’t have to find the controller or scramble for the phone — you can just tap what’s always on your wrist.

Siri + HomeKit

As cool as media remotes could to be, the bigger promise is home automation. With Siri, Apple’s personal digital assistant, and HomeKit, the company’s accessory interface framework, you’ll be able to do everything from opening and closing doors to setting lights to changing the temperature and more. And all with a word.

There’s already a BMW car remote, Pacemaker DJ, and an AMPLIFi remote for speakers and and guitar amps on Apple’s App Store for Watch page, and Apple demonstrated a garage door opener and closer with remote monitoring on stage.

HomeKit was announced last year for developers, but we’ll probably only start seeing an influx of HomeKit-enabled accessories for this year’s round of winter holidays. The Apple Watch will have been out for months by then, and my dream of lifting my wrist and saying “Siri, crash the compound!” could well be fulfilled.

The future of remote control

The big caveat here is that we don’t yet know how well any of this will work. It could be utterly seamless to the point where it’s transformative, or it could get off to a slow, glitchy start. After having seen the Apple Watch and HomeKit in person, I’m enthusiastic to say the least.

I can see a future where homes, toys, gear, and more is all easily controlled, at least at the simplest and most convenient level, by the device on my wrist.

The PayPal Here credit card transaction app is now available for Windows 8.1 users, and PayPal and Microsoft are offering a special promotional discount for US swipe transactions while using the app to celebrate its launch.