Italian bank Veneto Banca launches official Windows Phone app
Veneto Banca is allowing its Italian customers to access their bank accounts through a new official Windows Phone app. The app itself allows one to use their smartphone to manage accounts, wire funds to contacts, create profiles and view income and expenditure.
Fast & Furious: Legacy drifts on to the Play Store
Furious 7 is the latest installment in the Fast and Furious movie franchise and is set to hit theaters from April 3rd with its exotic cars and crazy stunts. In case you can’t wait until then, the official Fast & Furious: Legacy game that puts you behind the wheel of more than 50 sports cars has just hit the Play Store. We have the video and download link after the break.
Fast and Furious: Legacy is an anthology experience, in that it includes cars and missions based on all seven films. It’s compatible with smartphones and tablets of all makes and sizes according to the Play Store listing, and you can experience 1080p graphics if your device allows it. Fast and Furious: Legacy is free to install, although it does have in-App-Purchases, so be aware of that if you are installing the game on a device that will be used by children. We have the video below along with the QR code and Play Store download link. In case you were wondering, the game is also available on iOS.
Features:
- Race in multiple game modes and international locations – Street, Drift, Drag, Getaway and Takedown modes with more promised. Locations range from Rio De Janeiro, Los Angeles, Miami, and Tokyo.
- Customize your ride – Personalize your cars with new rims, paint jobs, vinyl and more. Or just upgrade your card with new performance parts.
- Recruit your own crew – Play with friends, race head-to-head or play multi-player.
- Battle villains from the movies – Race against villains taken straight from the movies such as DK, Braga, and Carter Verone. Or join Tej, Roman and Letty on missions in Story Mode.
Click here to view the embedded video.
Come comment on this article: Fast & Furious: Legacy drifts on to the Play Store
Nest thermostat isn’t smart enough to figure out British Summer Time
The Nest Learning Thermostat is supposed to be super-smart, automatically learning your preferences and creating custom schedules to match. Unfortunately, British Summer Time (BST) is a concept that seems to be beyond its current level of intelligence. As The Next Web reports, a wealth of Nest users noticed over the weekend that their thermostats hadn’t adjusted properly. While the internal clock had changed automatically, users’ personal heating schedules continued to operate on Greenwich Mean Time. It’s a small and largely insignificant bug, but we suspect more than a few adopters were frustrated when they woke up to a freezing home on Sunday morning. After all, this is a device that’s supposed to be perceptive — observing BST should be easy-peasy for a company like Nest.
Filed under: Household
Via: TNW
Source: Nest
Tim Cook Calls ‘Religious Freedom’ Legislation ‘Very Dangerous’
Apple CEO Tim Cook has called recent “religious freedom” legislation passed in Indiana and Arkansas “very dangerous” in a public op-ed letter published by The Washington Post. Cook argues that there are nearly 100 pro-discrimination bills in the United States that “go against the very principles” the country was founded on and “have the potential to undo decades of progress towards greater equality.”
Cook’s letter comes in response to Indiana governor Mike Pence passing the controversial Religious Freedom Restoration Act last week, following intense opposition from opponents that believe the bill supports discrimination, particularly against gays and lesbians. The bill, based on the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, signed by President Bill Clinton in 1993, takes effect July 1st.
“America’s business community recognized a long time ago that discrimination, in all its forms, is bad for business,” said Cook. “At Apple, we are in business to empower and enrich our customers’ lives. We strive to do business in a way that is just and fair. That’s why, on behalf of Apple, I’m standing up to oppose this new wave of legislation — wherever it emerges. I’m writing in the hopes that many more will join this movement. From North Carolina to Nevada, these bills under consideration truly will hurt jobs, growth and the economic vibrancy of parts of the country where a 21st-century economy was once welcomed with open arms.”
Cook believes that the recently passed legislation in Indiana and Arkansas, and similar bills being considered in other states, draw comparisons to the days of segregation in the United States, adding that Apple will never tolerate discrimination regardless of the laws passed. “This isn’t a political issue. It isn’t a religious issue,” he said. “This is about how we treat each other as human beings.”
“Our message, to people around the country and around the world, is this: Apple is open. Open to everyone, regardless of where they come from, what they look like, how they worship or who they love. Regardless of what the law might allow in Indiana or Arkansas, we will never tolerate discrimination.”
Cook tweeted last week that Apple is “open for everyone” and “deeply disappointed in Indiana’s new law,” calling on Arkansas to veto its similar HB1228 bill. Indiana has received a lot of backlash for signing the bill, with several organizations and companies throughout the United States vowing to stop supporting the state.
Around the world, we strive to treat every customer the same — regardless of where they come from, how they worship or who they love.
— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) March 27, 2015
Cook has remained committed to equality in the workplace as chief executive at Apple. In November 2013, he publicly supported the U.S. Employment Nondiscrimination Act, legislation proposed to prohibit many civilian, nonreligious employers from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity for the purposes of hiring or other employment practices.
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
FDA Taking ‘Almost Hands-Off Approach’ to Regulating Apple Watch and Similar Wearables [iOS Blog]
As Apple and other companies create products capable of providing more and more detailed health-related information, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has decided to give the companies creating these devices breathing room to manufacture the devices free, for the most part, from the scrutiny of the agency (via Bloomberg Business).
The FDA’s associate director for digital health, Bakul Patel, noted that while the agency will be more lenient on devices aimed at simply improving the lifestyle of its customers, more health-invasive features, like a glucose monitor app on the Apple Watch, will continue to be reviewed by the FDA.
“We are taking a very light touch, an almost hands-off approach,” Patel, the FDA’s associate director for digital health, said in an interview. “If you have technology that’s going to motivate a person to stay healthy, that’s not something we want to be engaged in.”
The rule of thumb released in a few guidelines by the agency highlight that the FDA’s focus will be on devices and software that are attempting to replicate, or mimic, the functionality of a medical service or device. Basic heart-rate and step-counting aspects of these wrist-worn devices will receive little-to-no regulation from the FDA.
Marketing will also be a factor for the agency, according to Patel. If a company is attempting to promote a product as being able to assist doctors in making medical decisions, “it will require more oversight.” This is a concern not aimed currently at Apple’s own Apple Watch and HealthKit, due to both’s minimally invasive health-related functionality, but could become a concern in the future as Tim Cook himself echoed hopes of both platforms helping to pinpoint diseases and cancers in the near future.
“We have to be confident in what we are getting,” Patel said. “The trajectory is there and all signals are headed that way, but by the same token the research and science should get us that confidence. It boils down to will it work or not.”
“The FDA has a role to play for providing patients and consumers a level of confidence that they can use it,” he said.
With a focus “only on the higher end of technology”, Patel notes that the agency asks itself what kind of harm a user may face if the product fails, and uses that answer as a springboard into regulation of the product as a whole. The new laid-back angle is in stark opposition of how the tech world views the FDA, with most startups listing regulation by the agency as one of the biggest risks to a business “even when scrutiny is unlikely.” Patel, and the FDA, knows of the issue and plans to hire new staff in assisting to “improve relations with technology companies” in the future.
Although the FDA’s new lax approach to basic fitness-tracking will give companies more room to operate on their own terms, as technology for the smart wearables category moves forward, we’ll no doubt see more and more glucose- and blood pressure-tracking applications in the future. Apple itself has met with the FDA several times in the past few years, with most recent discussions centering around the functions and regulations of the Apple Watch.
One M7 getting Lollipop in India and other Asian countries
HTC is now pushing OTA updates to bring Android 5.0 Lollipop to One M7 users in India and other Asian countries.
Following the release of the Lollipop OTA for the One M7 in Europe and the US in February, HTC is now bringing the same update to India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam. Other countries have not been confirmed, but there’s a solid chance the update will be coming soon to other markets in Southeast Asia as well.
The update brings several Lollipop design elements to HTC Sense, including the new notification style, lockscreen notifications, the revamped quick settings, and the recent activities interface. The OTA changelog also mentions the addition of a search function within settings.
The software update bears the 7.21.707.105 version number and weighs in at roughly 775MB. To check for the update manually, visit Settings>About Phone>Software Update.
This may be the last major update that the two-year One M7 receives. HTC’s Mo Versi announced that only the Google Play Edition of the M7 would see Android 5.1, though the HTC representative backtracked to an extent the following day.
iCloud Photo Library: Explained
iCloud Photo Library — currently in beta — was designed to keep all your personal photos and videos safe, synced, and available on all of your devices.
That sounds simple, but the idea of a hybrid library, where our content seamlessly spans the internet and our iPhones, iPads, and Macs — where the line between online and offline blurs — can be tough to grasp.
For years many of us have manually, meticulously managed our photos and videos — transferring them from our camera and phones over cables and local networks, organizing them into folders, backing them up to drives, and hoping beyond hope each time that nothing would be damaged or lost.
Various online services have popped up to help, but often they’re just as manual or they’re attached to social networks whose views on privacy might not match our own.
iCloud Photo Library aims to solve all of that, by keeping all of our pictures and videos available, and doing it all automatically.
Online backup
With iCloud Photo Library, every picture or video you take with your iPhone or iPad, or load into Photos for OS X, will be uploaded to Apple’s servers. What’s more, they’ll be preserved in their original format, including any RAW files you may have imported.
That means all your pictures and videos are effectively backed up online, and if anything ever happens to your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, those pictures and videos won’t be lost. They’ll still be there, in your iCloud Photo Library, available and accessible for any replacement device you get. You can even access them from any web browser via iCloud.com.
Pictures and videos of our friends and families, of our children and pets, of the special events and occasions we enjoy together, are among the most precious, most irreplaceable of our possessions. Trusting them to a device we might lose, damage, or have stolen, or to a laborious transfer and backup system that might fail just when we need it the most, just isn’t workable.
Likewise, having some old pictures and videos on your Mac and new ones on your iPhone or iPad — a hodgepodge of different files on different devices — is just as untenable.
That’s why iCloud Photo Library won’t just backup pictures or videos as you take them. It will backup all the pictures and videos on all your devices, new or old. That’s all the pictures or videos you’ve taken and are in the Photos for iOS app on your iPhone or iPad, and all the iPhoto, Aperture, and file folder pictures and videos you’ve imported into Photos for OS X on your Mac. That’s every picture or video you’ve been collecting, for as long as you’ve been collecting them.
In other words, iCloud Photo Library takes all the work and most of the risk out the primary backup process. One you enable it, whenever you’re online, your pictures and videos are just backed up and your memories are kept safe.
Sync and state
Once your photos and videos are in iCloud Photo Library, as long as you’re signed into the same Apple ID (iTunes or iCloud account) and you’ve turned iCloud Library on, they’re also available for on all your devices, including iPhone, iPad, and Mac.
That means iCloud Photo Library is, essentially, also a sync tool. It makes sure any picture you’ve taken or imported into Photos for iOS or Photos for OS X isn’t just backed up online, but pushed back down to all of your devices.
Snap a picture or video on your iPhone and it’ll show up on your Mac. Import some old pictures on your Mac and they’ll be available on your iPad. It really is all your pictures and videos on all your devices.
What’s more, iCloud Photo Library will propagate the “favorite” status of your pictures and videos. Hit the star one place, it shows up every place.
iCloud Photo Library will also preserve any edits you make to your pictures and videos. Any adjustments are stored separately from the picture and video itself but synced along with it, so if your brighten or saturate or crop a photo on your iPad, those changes will also show up on your iPhone or Mac. If you trim a video on your Mac, it’ll trim on your iPhone or iPad. And since edits in Photos are non-destructive, you can change them again, or reverse any changes, and that will sync as well.
It’s not just all your pictures and videos everywhere, it’s all your pictures and videos everywhere, just the way you want them.
Storage savings
iPhones and iPads are currently limited to between 8 GB and 128 GB of storage, and many people have an 16 GB or 32 GB devices. Yet in an age of 8 megapixel pictures and 1080p video, that fills up fast. Even a Mac with an SSD drive can storage constraints.
That’s why keeping photos and videos all locally can be a problem — you can run out of space, and sometimes sooner rather than later.
It’s especially frustrating if you’re anxiously trying to take a picture or video of something amazing, or in a hurry to import something urgent, and you’re told there’s no space left and all you can do is try and figure out, under stress, what older pictures and videos you’re willing to sacrifice to make room for the new.
Purely offloading all pictures and videos to the cloud isn’t a perfect solution either. If they’re all stored online and you end up with a slow, limited, or non-existant internet connection, you lose immediate access to any photos or videos not stored to your device.
It’s just as frustrating to run into a friend or relative and want to show them that incredible picture or video and then run straight into zero bars and a blank screen.
Apple’s solution to both problems is called “optimize storage” and what it does is smart. It takes a look at how much space is left on your device and then begins to intelligently manage it for you. To save on storage, it caches a manageable portion of photos and videos on your device — your most recent, favorite, and frequently accessed — and keeps the rest — older and seldom accessed — up on the cloud.
Moreover, for the photos that are cached locally, iCloud Photo Library optimizes them for the size of the display. If you’re on an iPhone, you don’t need the full sized RAW file, so you’ll get an appropriately sized JPG. For photos that are on the cloud, you’ll get a thumbnail, but can tap them at any time to download them locally.
The result is that you have instant access to all the pictures and videos that matter most to you, and one tap access — provided you’re online — to your full archive of pictures and videos. It is, very literally, the best of both worlds.
Best of all, since it’s automatic, you don’t have to worry about cables or cards, files or folders, micromanaging or manually moving things around.
All you have to do is set it and forget it. iCloud Photo Library does all the work, and you get to do is enjoy all your pictures and videos.
iCloud plans
iCloud Photo Library counts towards your iCloud storage pool. Everyone with an Apple device gets 5 GB of storage for free. For most people, part of that space will be taken up by device backups, mail, and other data. How much that leaves for pictures and videos can vary. You can, however, buy more iCloud storage whenever you like. As online storage goes, it’s not inexpensive, but it does work with all of Apple’s services.
Current monthly iCloud plan options include:
- 20 GB: $0.99
- 200 GB: $3.99
- 500 GB: $9.99
- 1 TB: $19.99
The bottom line
iCloud Photo Library backs up all your pictures and videos, syncs them across all your devices, and intelligently manages your storage so you don’t run out of space on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. It takes all of the problems typically associated with picture and offers a simple, efficient solution.
Professional photographers and videographers will likely still need to take care of libraries, but for most people, most of the time, iCloud Photo Library makes manual management a thing of the past, and brings us fully into the automatic future.
Samsung aren’t working on Android 5.1 for the Galaxy Note 4 or any other devices yet
If you are the proud owner of a Galaxy Note 4, you’ve probably been getting more and more excited about the news we keep hearing that Samsung is working hard on an Android 5.1 update that will bring the latest version of TouchWiz to your device. Sadly, it seems that these rumours may well be untrue.
Indeed, the Galaxy Note 4 is still waiting for the Android 5.0.2 update in some regions, instead having to make do with Android 4.4 KitKat. So why isn’t Samsung working hard on bringing Android 5.1 to its vast array of devices? Just that, Samsung’s vast array of devices means that it takes longer to update each eligible device, which means it can’t just move its developers on to next version of Android. According to SamMobile’s sources, Samsung is not working on Android 5.1 for any of its devices at the present time. Nor is there any details available about bringing the latest TouchWiz to the Galaxy Note 4 when Android 5.1 is eventually released. And it could be worse.
Remember when the Note 2 was released with Jelly Bean 4.1, Samsung decided to skip the Android 4.2 update and move right along to 4.3 leaving the Note 2 on the same software for a year or so? It might well happen with the Note 4. While you could understand the reasoning in part, that the Note series is more difficult to update thanks to its additional features and S-Pen functionality, it was cold comfort to those Note 2 owners. I know because I was one of them. Let’s hope that Samsung doesn’t decide to do something similar with the Note 4 with regards to Android 5.1 as it struggles to get through its backlog of scheduled updates for its devices.
Source: SamMobile
Come comment on this article: Samsung aren’t working on Android 5.1 for the Galaxy Note 4 or any other devices yet
Auto-complete blunder leaks passport details of world leaders
Australia has proved that it can hold its own against Hillary Clinton any day when it comes to email blunders. The nation’s immigration department accidentally disclosed the passport numbers and other personal info of every world leader attending last year’s G20 summit, then compounded the problem by hushing it up. Affected leaders include US president Barack Obama, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and British prime minister David Cameron. According to an email obtained by the Guardian, “the cause of the breach was human error… (an immigration employee) failed to check that the autofill function in Microsoft Outlook had entered the correct person’s detail into the email ‘To’ field.”
As a result, the world leaders’ info was leaked to organizers of the Asian Cup soccer tournament, likely to their great surprise. The mistake was noticed immediately by the employee, who brought it to the attention of his superiors. However, after determining that it was “unlikely” the email was in the public domain, an immigration officer recommended against sharing the leak with the affected countries. That provoked a strong reaction from Australia’s opposition party, which said “the prime minister (Tony Abbott) must explain this serious incident and the decision not to inform those affected.” Many nations including the US and UK have strict laws requiring that victims of data breaches be informed — especially if they’re in charge of the entire country.
[Image credit: Associated Press]
Filed under: Internet
Source: The Guardian
HTC One M9 pre-orders begin shipping today
US pre-orders for the HTC One M9 will begin shipping out today, March 30th, and should be completed by April 3rd, according to an email circulating by HTC. It looks like those who pre-ordered will receive their new One M9 ahead of the general in-store launch date, which is set for April 10th.
Orders for the HTC One M9 will begin shipping on Monday 3/30, and should ship by Friday 4/3 at the latest. Any changes to this will be communicated directly to you from HTC.
The One M9 has been made available to pre-purchase from almost all major US carriers, including AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint, and Verizon’s pre-orders are scheduled to begin tomorrow. HTC is also allowing you to compare all deals and buy the handset directly through its own online store.
Despite a delay to its home launch in Taiwan last month for software fixes, the company appears to be on schedule for the broader rollout of its M9. If you’re still undecided about whether the M9 is right for you, be sure to check out our in-depth review.
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