Samsung refutes claim of Galaxy S6 Edge being so bendable
Last last week, SquareTrade released a video showing how bendable the Galaxy S6 Edge is. In fact even more bendable than the iPhone 6 Plus. Now Samsung is refuting the claim, and with good reason.
Samsung claims that the video shows the Galaxy S6 Edge being bent (and broken) under a pressure of 110lbf (50kgf). However, that kind of pressure just isn’t the norm. The majority of concern comes from the back pocket, which only generates about 66lbf (30kgf). Samsung’s own testing shows the Galaxy S6 Edge cannot be bent under 79lbf (32kgf). That level of pressure would snap a bundle of five pencils at once.
Samsung also feels that SquareTrade misled customers in that they only tested the front side of the phone, while many smartphones have different degrees of durability for both the front and back. Samsung will be asking SquareTrade to conduct the stress test again by targeting both the front and back sides, and release it to the public. However, they didn’t say they would ask them to do it at a different pressure level.
If you want to see Samsung’s own testing, here is a video showing their 3-point bend test…..
Click here to view the embedded video.
Come comment on this article: Samsung refutes claim of Galaxy S6 Edge being so bendable
LG teases new user interface (UX 4.0) on upcoming G4
LG continues trying to drum up some buzz for their upcoming G4 smartphone since Samsung will get a 2 month head start with the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge.
Today, they released a video teasing the new user interface, dubbed UX 4.0. LG claims it will be “human-centered” as in it will have the ability to anticipate the needs of the user.
This video will first show you some of the things they offered in UX 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, such as Knock Code and Gesture Shot. Then they highlight some of the new features in 4.0 such as Quick Shot, which gives you the ability to capture a photo while the phone is locked by pressing the volume button twice. They have also included an Expert mode within the Camera app.
A new feature called Smart Alert tells you that the weather is not only sunny, but it might be a great day for running or biking. There’s something called Smart Board that gathers information from your calendar, music, and health into a single screen. The new Calendar app allows you to add entries from social networks like Facebook.
None of it blows me away. Check out the video below and let me know what you think…..
Click here to view the embedded video.
Come comment on this article: LG teases new user interface (UX 4.0) on upcoming G4
Google’s mobile service could include free international roaming
It looks like Google’s upcoming mobile service won’t be the “small scale” experiment Sundar Pichai painted it to be during MWC 2015. At least when it comes to roaming, the service will operate at a global scale, according to UK’s The Telegraph.
Citing sources familiar with the matter, The Telegraph reports that Google is in talks with operators from around the world to create a “global network that will cost the same to use for calls, texts and data no matter where a customer is located.” In other words, Google wants to offer free international roaming to all of its users.
Google is in talks with the Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa, which owns the operator Three (active in the UK, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Sweden, Indonesia and more), to buy wholesale access to its network in order to provide free roaming to users of its future mobile service. Hutchison, which just bought UK’s O2, is an apt partner for Google, thanks to its global reach and the fact that it’s already offering free roaming to its customers.
Presumably, Google will sign up similar deals with other major carriers, creating a global network that lets users talk and get online without worrying about overcharges and buying local SIMs.
Free roaming appears to be a logical extension to Google’s approach in the US. The company has reportedly already signed deals with Sprint and T-Mobile to buy wholesale data, which Google would resell to its users. Google’s customers won’t have to worry about getting the best signal, as the service will automatically switch to the network with the best reception in the area. Roaming will presumably work in a similar way.
Google confirmed through its SVP for Android, Chrome, and apps, Sundar Pichai, that it’s working on its own mobile service, without providing a timeline for launch. However, the Google I/O conference, in late May, would make a great occasion for the debut of the service.
If Google begins offering free roaming, it will join T-Mobile, which has been giving its customers free voice calls and data (capped to 128kbps) internationally since 2013. We don’t know yet if Google will cap roaming connection speeds as well.
As a side note, The Telegraph reports that Google is currently not working on launching its mobile service in the UK. Like Wallet, it looks like the Google cell service will be US-only, at least at launch.
Would you pay $0.21 to read this article?
The New York Times and its contemporaries may have conditioned their readers to pay subscriptions for access to online content, but one Canadian news source is about to mix things up with the introduction of a pay-per-article model. In addition to offering standard subscriptions, The Winnipeg Free Press will charge readers 27 Canadian cents ($0.21) for each article they read. According to NeimanLab, the newspaper (which is the region’s largest by circulation) will launch the pay-per-article system later this month. It hopes to tempt readers with the one-two punch of a 30-day free trial and this bizarre Pink Floyd pastiche:
Although it’s a first for a North American news source, the idea has already gathered some steam elsewhere. For example, Dutch startup Blendle allows users to select stories from a number of sources and pay for each article they read. At last count it had well over 200,000 subscribers. Interestingly, Blendle says that “regular news” — like the article you’re reading right now — doesn’t fare so well in a pay-per-click system. Instead, the articles that sell are longform journalism, analysis and commentary. Of course, Free Press offers a mixture of news and more in-depth coverage, but if Blendle’s results are anything to go by, the newspaper may have trouble persuading readers to stump up cash for the typical daily news that comprises a large portion of its content.
Source: NeimanLab
LG Display Claims Apple Will Release the ‘iMac 8K’ Later This Year
While it could be a factual error, Reddit points us towards an interesting comment on the LG Display blog last week that claims “Apple has also announced that they will release the ‘iMac 8K’ with a super-high resolution display later this year.”
“It has become clear that Japan is planning to launch an 8K SHV test broadcast and then promptly restructure the UHD service. Apple has also announced that they will release the ‘iMac 8K’ with a super-high resolution display later this year. Korea is also preparing to offer an 8K service demonstration at the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. LG Display displayed a new beacon of the 8K era by revealing their 98-inch 8K Color Prime Ultra HDTV at CES 2015.”
VESA’s new DisplayPort 1.4a standard paves the way for future displays at 7,680 x 4,320 pixels, but Apple has not made any announcements about releasing a Mac with an 8K display. Apple’s highest-resolution Mac is the iMac with Retina 5K Display, which has a resolution of 5,120 x 2,880 pixels.
While this report should be treated lightly until further information surfaces, it still proves interesting that LG Display would make a public-facing comment like this on its website. The most likely scenario is that LG will eventually remove or modify the comment now that it has been put in the spotlight.
Snowden shows John Oliver how the NSA can see your dick pics
In a surprise interview with Edward Snowden, John Oliver made NSA spying revelations more relatable to the American public through the topic of dick pics. The HBO comedian, who gives his satire a sharp bite via exhaustive research, traveled to Moscow for a sit-down with the infamous whistle-blower. Oliver wasn’t joking around at first when he called a Snowden leak that put Al Quaeda intelligence at risk “a fuck up.” He added that “you have to own that… you’re giving documents with information you know could be harmful.” After an awkward pause, Snowden said “in journalism, we have to accept that some mistakes will be made.”
The tone lightened up after that, however. Oliver had proved earlier that many Americans don’t care about NSA spying via several man-on-the-street interviews, with many folks confusing Snowden for Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. However, once he framed it in terms of private photos, the same people were outraged. One actually said, “if the government was looking at a picture of (my husband’s) penis, I definitely feel it would be an invasion of my privacy.” Oliver told Snowden, “this is the most visible line in the sand for people: can they see my dick?” From there, he went through NSA programs like PRISM and asked Snowden to “explain to me its capabilities in regards to (a) photograph of my penis.”
I guess I never thought about putting it in the context of your junk.
Snowden’s answers were hilarious and horrifying at once. He described how the NSA can see your private photos, even if they’re sent domestically. Citing PRISM and Google’s Gmail, for instance, he said that “when your junk was passed by Gmail (to a foreign server), the NSA caught a copy of that.” In the end, however, it was Oliver who gave Snowden a Journalism 101 lesson: “I guess I never thought about putting (the NSA leaks) in the context of your junk.”
Source: Last Week Tonight (YouTube)
Caltech sensor could turn your phone into a 3D scanner
3D printing technology is gradually becoming slightly more affordable, but we’re not all CAD experts and a cheap 3D scanner to help produce our own objects remains elusive. Fortunately, CalTech researchers, working under electrical engineer Ali Hajimiri, are working on a new “nanophotonic coherent imager” (NCI) that may one day allow users to scan 3D images with just their smartphone.
The tiny NCI chip measures less than a square millimetre and is based on Light Detection and Ranging (LIDAR) technology, which beams a laser onto a subject and analyses the light waves reflected back. From this data, the sensor can provide accurate height, width and depth information for each pixel in the shot. Typically, image sensors are only interested in the light intensity of each pixel, which doesn’t offer any distance information.
Each “pixel” within the sensor is a LIDAR, allowing for multiple data points to analyse the phase, frequency and intensity of the reflected waves. Combining all the data together forms a detailed 3D image, which is apparently accurate to within microns of the original scene. Here’s the explanation of how it works:
If two light waves are coherent, the waves have the same frequency, and the peaks and troughs of light waves are exactly aligned with one another. In the NCI, the object is illuminated with this coherent light. The light that is reflected off of the object is then picked up by on-chip detectors, called grating couplers, that serve as “pixels,” as the light detected from each coupler represents one pixel on the 3-D image. On the NCI chip, the phase, frequency, and intensity of the reflected light from different points on the object is detected and used to determine the exact distance of the target point.
As promising as the technology is, the first proof of concept chip produced in the lab only has 16 LIDAR pixels in the sensor and is therefore only capable of capturing small image segments. The 3D coin image, picture above, required movement of the camera in between shots, but the development team is working on scaling up the technology into a larger sensor. In the future, Hajimiri says, that the current array of 16 pixels could also be easily scaled up to hundreds of thousands of pixels, enough for a low resolution camera.
This 3D scanner technology is already found in self-driving cars and robots, and, thanks to this research, will perhaps one day make its way into our smartphones too.
Ion Galactic: The Conflict – a strategy based Sci-Fi board game for Windows Phone and Windows 8
Ion Galactic: The Conflict is a Windows Phone game where you are tasked with conquering the galaxy. The game is presented in board game fashion where you manage and build a collection of ships along with plenty of enemy bases to capture and hostile ships to destroy in two gaming modes.
You will need to build up a large armada of ships, along with several strategically placed defensive units, to have any hopes of success. Available for low-memory Windows Phones and Windows 8 devices, Ion Galactic is an appealing, casually paced game to pass the time with. The game lacks a lot of action packed sequences but if you are a fan of board games like RISK and Axis and Allies or just looking for strategy game for your Windows Phone/Windows 8 device, Ion Galactic is worth a try.
Wave Launcher Android app review
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Launchers can completely customise and change the way your device looks, feels, and functions, and it’s one of the beauties of Android that they’re so easy to apply. One such launcher is Wave Launcher.
This particular launcher isn’t a standard launcher in the general sense of what we’d expect; it fits more into a category of an overlay than anything, providing an invisible layer on top of your current setup that will allow quick access to your favourite apps. It is with this idea that Wave Launcher provides an additional layer on top of whatever is happening on your phone that you can appreciate how the app is able to do what it does without interfering with anything.
Wave Launcher provides a calibrated hot spot on your device where a motion gesture is used to trigger the app and gain access to the frequently used apps that are arranged in, you guessed it, a wave. What is present on this wave is completely customisable and apps can even be grouped into folders to fit even more in the quickly accessible launcher.
Wave Launcher can be customised with icon packs to suit the theme of your device and because it’s a layer with a customisable trigger point, won’t interfere with anything – including the keyboard.
The app is incredibly easy to use and provides a brilliant function whilst remaining inconspicuous and independent from the remainder of your devices’ functions. Wave Launcher is free in the Google Play Store and you can grab it using the link below.
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Video: LG teases software features coming to the G4
Following the announcement of the display panel that will equip the G4, LG is now revealing another crucial part of the G4 experience: the software.
In a Korean language video, LG is teasing the new UX4, which resembles the previous iteration of LG’s Android skin, but adds a couple of new features.
Aesthetically, LG UX 4.0 seems to be flatter, more simple, and more abstract than UX 3.0 (running on G3, G Flex 2, and others), with the bright color scheme borrowing from Google’s Material design guidelines.
Smart Bulletin, launched on the G3, is making a return, consolidating LG’s various proprietary features, like Smart Settings, LG Health, a Calendar app, Smart Tips and more. Like before, Smart Bulletin will be available with a swipe from the homescreen, similar to Google Now on the default Google launcher.
Instead of having to long-press the volume down button on the back to launch the camera, you will be able to double tap it. That’s a similar to the way the camera can be launched on the Galaxy S6, but it remains to be seen whether LG has been able to reduce the time needed to launch the camera, as the long-press feature was quite slow on the G3.
More on LG
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The video is also teasing LG’s calendar app, the homescreen widget that can recommend various activities, a photo album app, and the ability to quickly customize ringtones for specific contacts.
The LG G4 will be announced on April 28 in New York, and Android Authority will be there to bring you our first impressions. What do you think of the LG G4 so far?
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