Here’s the latest in HTC’s series of weird ads
HTC has been regaling us with unusual commercials and promos for quite some time now. On the one hand, we can’t help admire their courage to try something different. On the other… there’s got to be a better way.
The latest in a series that most recently brought us a parody rap anthem and a series of surrealist “short films” starring Robert Downey Jr. is a clip called “Cellami.”
Apparently, if you suffer from SAD (Samsung Affective Disorder), iOS (Irritable Operating System), or “bi-phonal displeasure disorder,” the best treatment is a drug called Cellami. Only available as suppository, Cellami’s list of side effects is extensive and rather… exotic. Or you can just use a One M9. Your call.
What about this ad? Yay or nay?
TalkTalk’s unlimited everything SIM is £12 per month but laden with fine print
The UK mobile market is undergoing a serious makeover, with two huge acquisitions on the horizon and new MVNOs popping up left, right and centre. Quad-play provider TalkTalk is already known for its low-cost broadband, TV and mobile deals, but now’s a more important time than most to show you can stay relevant and competitive. Hence the company’s latest promotion, which sees the launch of a SIM-only mobile tariff that gives you unlimited everything — that’s minutes, texts and 3G data — for just £12 a month. Better yet, it’s being offered on a 30-day rolling contract, meaning you don’t need to sign up for a year or more of service to take advantage of the deal. Cheap, easy and tempting, right? Well, yes, but before you go cancelling whatever contract you’re on now, know that there’s a heap of terms and conditions attached to this otherwise attractive offer.
Firstly, there’s a time limit on the promotion, so you’ll need to grab an “all-in SIM” before the offer expires at the end of June. Also, while the deal’s technically open to everyone, new customers need to sign up to a TalkTalk broadband plan to become eligible for the unlimited SIM — cancel your internet subscription and the cost of the SIM rises to £24 per month with 2000 minute and 2GB data caps. (Starting to sound a little inconvenient yet?)
There are some restrictions on its use, too. You can only plug the SIM into a smartphone and tethering is forbidden, but more importantly, it’s bound by TalkTalk’s “Good Network Guidelines.” These state that if your activity is “compromising the data flow” of others on the network, TalkTalk can refuse to renew your limitless SIM, presumably once the current 30-day contract is up. If you’re already a TalkTalk customer, then this promo might fit your needs and then some. If not, though, it’s probably not worth changing your broadband provider for an unlimited SIM TalkTalk can effectively revoke at any time.
Source: TalkTalk
One of eSports’ biggest stars retires with repetitive strain injury
If you’re into eSports, then it’s highly likely that you would have heard of Hai Lam. He’s best known as the Mid Laner and captain of Cloud9, which is regarded as the best US eSports team for the popular online multiplayer game League of Legends. Nonetheless, just less than a week after his team finished second in the North American Championship Series, Cloud9’s shotcaller has announced he’s getting out of the game. Like football players are forced to retire when their knees give out, a persistent wrist injury means Lam can no longer mix it with other A-list players on the big stage.
In a blog post on the Cloud9 website, Lam explained his reasons for retirement, noting that his wrist injury made it hard to keep up with his teammates and deliver on a tournament level. In the world of eSports, professional gamers are considered athletes, thanks to their crushing training regimens and busy tournament schedules, so to hear of a big-game player being forced to retire due to injury shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.
It’s not been a particularly good year for Cloud9. After a poor showing in North America’s fully professional League of Legends league last year and an earlier than expected knockout in the 2014 World Championships in Korea, the team has found it difficult to replicate past successes. Its recent second place finish means the team might not even make the 2015 World Championships this fall. Lam says that teammates also lost confidence in his playing ability during that time, which contributed to his decision.
Although he won’t now figure as one of Cloud9’s major players, Lam isn’t going far. He’ll now enjoy the role of “Chief Gaming Officer,” helping to recruit and mentor new players as well as maintaining the group’s partnerships (which already include HTC).
http://www.gamespot.com/videos/embed/6424574/
Via: Kotaku
Source: Cloud9
Sony wants a piece of the entry-level Indian market
Sony announced it will focus on the high-end segment in order to bring its smartphone business to profit, but it seems the company is willing to make exceptions for markets such as India, where low prices are essential.
Speaking to ET Tech, Sony India managing director Kenichiro Hibi said Sony is planning to compete in the cutthroat Indian entry-level market against opponents like Xiaomi, Asus, Motorola, and Google’s Android One, and dozens of local players. Because India is growing at a fast pace, Sony sees the country as “completely different” from the global market, so it’s going to release phones costing Rs 8,000-10,000 ($125 to $160), a range Sony doesn’t target in other countries.
In order to target the low-price segment, Sony considers releasing devices that are exclusive to India and manufacturing phones locally.
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Sony’s latest launch in India is the Xperia E4g, an LTE variant of the mid-range Xperia E4 listed in India Rs 13,290 ($213). While relatively inexpensive, the E4g (and other devices Sony may launch here) faces stiff competition. Just last week, for instance, Xiaomi introduced the arguably superior Xiaomi Mi 4i at a starting price of Rs. 12,999.
As for the global market, Sony raised some eyebrows with the Japan-only Xperia Z4, while the company is doubling down on marketing the Xperia Z3 in the rest of the world.
Do you think Sony stands a chance in India?
Kojima and del Toro’s ‘Silent Hills’ is not going to happen
Silent Hills, at least as it was originally conceived, is no more. The next chapter of the once-popular horror series had built considerable hype off the back of a fantastic playable teaser, P.T., which was released last summer. When solved the teaser offered up a trailer for a new Silent Hill game, revealing that Metal Gear Solid creator Hideo Kojima, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro and The Walking Dead star Norman Reedus were all on board. According to both del Toro and Reedus, that is no longer the case. At the San Francisco International Film Festival, del Toro was quoted as saying that his collaboration with Kojima is “not gonna happen.” Norman Reedus later tweeted an article reporting the game is canceled, adding he’s “super bummed” about the news, and Konami has confirmed to Eurogamer that its contract period with the actor has “expired.”
The hows and whys of the game’s cancelation are unknown, but Kojima is in the midst of an extremely messy breakup with long-term publisher Konami. The rift between Kojima Productions and Konami (which owns the studio) will apparently lead to the designer exiting the company after the completion of Metal Gear Solid 5. Although Silent Hills looks to be a casualty of the spat, Konami says it will continue the Silent Hill series, just as it pledged to continue developing Metal Gear Solid games without Kojima.
Incidentally, if you own a PS4 and haven’t played P.T., your time to do so is limited. It’s a free download, and a lot fun (so long as your idea of fun involves being terrified), but it’ll be removed from the PlayStation Store on April 29th.
Filed under: Gaming
Source: Konami (Eurogamer)
(Update: reminders too) You can also set alarms and send notes to your phone from Google Search
Update: Google’s support page “Link your phone to Google” indicates that, in addition to the four commands mentioned below, you can also use the “set a reminder” command. We couldn’t get it to work on our devices, but it’s worth trying for yourself.
The page also clarifies the requirements for the feature to work:
“For now, you have to be in the United States with your browser language set to English.
The Android device you want to link needs to have:
- The most recent version of the Google app
- Now cards turned on
- Web & App activity turned on
- Google Now notifications turned on
- Location reporting on “High accuracy” mode”
Original post:
It’s not just “send directions” and “find my phone.” It looks like Google is adding a slew of commands that let you control your Android phone from Google Search.
As discovered by Google Operating System, you can now quickly set alarms and send notes to your Android phone by typing in some simple commands.
For now, the features are only available in the United States, though “find my phone” works worldwide so there’s a good chance the others will follow. If you want to try them out from elsewhere, you can try adding “&gl=us” at the end of the URL of your search query, like this: “https://www.google.com/search?q=set+an+alarm&gl=us”
To set an alarm on your phone, just type “set an alarm” or “set alarm” and you will be shown an interface that lets you pick the hour and the device that you want to set the alarm on. You can also type “set and alarm for 12pm” to pre-select the hour.
It’s just as simple to send a note: type “send a note” or “note to self” and you will be shown a text field where you can type in a brief note. Click the send button and a notification with the note will appear almost instantly on your device. You can also include the note text in the main command, like “note to self visit Android Authority.” From there, you can either copy the text or share the note to Gmail or Google Keep.
To recap, you can now use the following commands in Google Search:
- “send directions”
- “find my phone”
- “set an alarm”
- “send a note”
We’ll keep an eye for more functionality, so stay tuned and let us know if these work for you.
Car headlights of the future won’t blind other drivers
Carnegie Mellon’s work on headlights has made an appearance here before, where it’s near-future smart headlights would parse raindrops and ‘cancel’ them out, projecting light around the rain drops, substantially improving visibility. But that’s just one of many tricks that the Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute’s smart headlights are now capable of. The newest iteration’s feedback system continuously looks at what your headlights are doing, processing and thinking about how to shine better. To start, the system detects vehicles headed towards the car and disables the range of light that’s directed at the oncoming driver, even on high-beam settings.
Future work, reported in the Scientific American, will attempt to add GPS data that will adjust the direction of headlights, illuminating the route you’re heading on, making your lane appear brighter than the others. The new system, apparently the size of a smaller footlocker, can also detect and track obstacles traveling up to 80 kph, like an errant deer as close as five meters from the headlights, although how this gets parsed (whether it would activate an auto-breaking system or something else) would depend on car manufacturers themselves if they decide to integrate something similar. For now — and for a few more years — these headlights are likely to remain research prototypes.
Filed under: Transportation, Science
Source: Scientific American
Scientists spot runaway galaxies
It’s well established that runaway stars and planets are a cosmic reality, but runaway galaxies? Yes, amazingly enough, those exist. Scientists have discovered at least 11 galaxies moving so quickly (up to 6 million miles per hour) that they’re escaping the gravitational tug of their host clusters. Most likely, these wayward celestial bodies are the result of three-way interactions — a small elliptical galaxy tied to a larger counterpart will fly off into space when another big galaxy gets close enough. It could take a long time before astronomers have a better sense of how common stray galaxies might be, but it’s already apparent that the universe is messy at its grandest scale.
[Image credit: NASA, ESA and the Hubble Heritage Team]
Filed under: Science
Via: Gizmodo, EurekAlert
Source: Harvard-Smithsonian CFA, Science
[Poll] What went wrong with the Nexus 6?
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We reported a few days ago that Google‘s earnings call basically pointed out weakening Nexus device sales relative to the prior month, and that it was primarily due to the Nexus 6 and its inability to compete at the same level as the Nexus 5 and Nexus 7. Now, before you get the wrong idea, by no means is anybody saying that the Nexus 6 is a bad device – in fact, it’s widely accepted as one of the best Android devices to date, and we’d definitely agree. But it should be fairly obvious that it doesn’t have the same appeal as the Nexus 5 did, and we wanted to ask you, our readers, what went wrong with the Nexus 6? Or perhaps worded differently – why didn’t you buy a Nexus 6? Which of course means its poll time:
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post’s poll.
At the end of the day, Google probably doesn’t mind too much what happens to the Nexus devices it launches, as long as there are enough for its developers to take advantage of, but it’s always good if the devices sell well too. We’ll have to see if Google changes its tune this year when they inevitably launch a new Nexus smartphone.
Feel free to let us know your opinion in the comments below as well.
The post [Poll] What went wrong with the Nexus 6? appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
Google says Nexus 7 pulled from Google Store, buy the Nexus 9 instead
Now that Google has come official with this news, it is time to announce that Google is no longer going to be selling the Nexus 7. That’s right, for all intents, the 7-inch Android tablet that has been the benchmark of Google’s vision for Android in a tablet, is no more.
Over the weekend, Google rather silently pulled the Nexus 7 from the online store, leaving just the Nexus 9 when searching for a tablet in the Google Store. Official word, as reported by Engadget, is that there is still some inventory around the stores and carriers, but their emphasis is now on the Nexus 9, built by HTC.
If you are still considering this tablet, which we recently put side-by-side the iPad Mini 3 in a little shootout, you best not waste any time. Head to stores like Amazon, which still have stock starting at $165.00.
The Nexus 7, as mentioned, has been a fairly solid device for most users. Indeed, everyone we know that still has their original 2012 version of the tablet, are still huge fans of the ASUS built device. Even if, like my own 16GB model, it has a few issues. Sadly, in more recent developments, many Nexus 7 users of both the 2012 and 2013 models, have been experiencing near complete device failures, be sure to read up on that before you spend your cash.
As the Nexus 7 comes to its end, let’s pay homage to it by bringing you our initial device review and a few highlights from its time with us. (That sounded pretty morbid, we still use our Nexus 7 tablets, and love ‘em, but we have to admit that the specs are a little dated, obviously, and we just might consider buying something a little newer if we were buying now ourselves.)
Nexus 7
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- Nexus 7 (2013) review (video)
- New Nexus 7 official: specs, features, availability
- Apple iPad Mini 3 vs Google Nexus 7 (2013): pocket-sized tablet comparison
- Nexus 7 (2013) vs Nexus 7 (2012): by the numbers
- Android L preview factory images arrive for Nexus 7 (2013) Wi-Fi and Nexus 5
- Some users reporting Nexus 7 brick issue on Android 5.0+ Lollipop
It is not a sad day, folks, it is just the next step in the evolution of Nexus tablets as Google discontinues selling the Nexus 7 in the Google Store. Do you think there will be a 2015 version of the Nexus 7 launching later this year?
AIVAnet 