Fetch’s shopping app puts a smarter concierge on your wrist
Talking into a smartwatch still isn’t the most socially acceptable thing to do, but a pair of startups is hell-bent on at least making it worthwhile. Fetch and Expect Labs — a personal shopping service and a purveyor of a voice-driven AI, respectively — have teamed up to make shopping on your Apple Watch a little less tedious with an improved concierge that works from your wrist.
Back in the day (i.e. last year), Fetch was best known for using a crew of humans to respond to messages sent from the app. If you wanted to buy, say, a sweet messenger bag someone was rocking in SoHo, you could snap a photo, send it along, and someone would eventually respond with the cheapest, most appropriate listing they could find. With Expect Labs’ voice recognition and analytical chops now being baked into the existing iOS/Apple Watch app, though, those requests can be chopped up and acted on more quickly. The end result? A faster first wave of hits, and a less headache-inducing shopping experience (they hope).
Let’s say you’re itching to laze under the sun in some far-off locale. You’ll be able to ask your Apple Watch to book you on the first flight to Bangkok next Thursday, and Expect Lab’s thoughtful back-end will dig up a handful of suitable flight options. From there, those results will get passed along to Fetch’s crew of shopping concierges so they can ferret out the best option and send it back home to you for approval. Well, eventually, anyway. Fetch and Mindmeld are talking up a partnership today, but a spokesperson confirmed that the actual functionality won’t go live for another few months (hopefully in time for a last minute summer holiday). And if you’re one of the countless multitudes who don’t — or won’t — wear an Apple Watch? No worries: The feature will find its way to Fetch’s Android app, too, though you’ll have to pay Fetch $10 a month on any platform for the privilege.
Filed under: Mobile
Basis’ fitness tracker now comes in titanium, talks to other health apps
As useful as the Basis Peak may be for tracking your fitness, your data has largely been trapped so far — you couldn’t see it outside of Basis’ own apps. However, you’ll be glad to hear that things are loosening up. An update rolling out to the Peak today will share the wristwear’s activity data with either Apple’s Health app or Google Fit, so you get a more complete picture of your health. If you only strap on your Peak when you’re running, for instance, you can still merge its info with the walking data your phone collects. Should that not be enough, there’s a second update coming on May 20th that will add a stopwatch, improve heart rate monitoring and open a “Playground” for testing app features (such as an activity map and a Photo Finish selfie recorder) before they’re available to everyone else.
On top of all this, Basis is ritzing up the Peak with a few new material options. The $300 Titanium Edition (above) swaps the usual aluminum case for its namesake nicer-looking metal, and gives you a cognac-hued leather strap in addition to the usual silicone. Whatever case you prefer, you can also get separate $50 leather straps in black, caramel, gray, light pink and tan. It’s doubtful that your sporty wearable will suddenly become chic, but it’ll at least look more appropriate when you’re dressed for the office.
Source: Basis
Hoopla lets you digitally borrow almost anything from your library
Today the Hoolpa service and apps added e-books and comic to its media library of audiobooks, movies, TV shows and albums. While the app has always synced with local libraries, it wasn’t until today that the app was meant for reading. The new offerings will be from IDW Publishing, RosettaBooks, Chicago Review Press and others with more publishers being announced in the coming months. The reading feature includes options similar to Amazon’s Whispersync with the ability to read a book across multiple devices and the options to adjust fonts, line spacing, columns and background. For comic book fans, a feature called “Action View” enlarges individual panels with a double tap for easier reading on mobile devices. “One of our main objectives for libraries is to be mobile centric,” said owner and founder Jeff Jankowski.
Developer Midwest Tape has been supplying books and other media to libraries for 25 years. The Hoopla app is the evolution of that relationship. When you attach your library card to the app, you’re allotted a certain amount of “check outs” per month (for example, San Francisco allows 10). The 6,000 e-books and comic books added today join the 300,000 movies, TV shows, audiobooks and albums currently on the service.
Filed under: Misc
Source: Hoopla
LG announces G4c, a smaller sibling to flagship model
LG today confirmed that a smaller, lesser-powered version of its G4 smartphone will soon be available. Expected to launch in “key strategic markets” in the coming weeks, the phone runs Android 5.0 Lollipop and features a number of LG software exclusives.
In terms of hardware, the phone comes with a 5-inch HD display, an 8-megapixel rear camera, and a 5-megapixel front-facing shooter. Powering things are a 1.2GHz quad-core processor with 1GB RAM and a 2540 removable battery. Storage is listed at 8GB with expansion available via microSD cards.
The LG G4c will be sold in a variety of colors including Metallic Gray, Ceramic White, and Shiny Gold.
Pricing and exact availability will be announced in the weeks to come.
The post LG announces G4c, a smaller sibling to flagship model appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Best Buy selling Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge in Blue Topaz and Green Emerald
Samsung launched two new colors for the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge the other day–Blue Topaz and Green Emerald. The colors certainly aren’t available in a lot of places, however, Best Buy is preparing to sell these after-launch colors.
Listings for the Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 Edge in 32GB and 64GB models have appeared on Best Buy’s website. But, only the unlocked versions are available, so customers are going to have to dish out quite a bit of money. The Galaxy S6 is priced at $899.99, and the S6 Edge is priced at a little over $1000. On the bright side, both come with free shipping!
The price obviously alienates a lot of customers, especially after having sold the devices for roughly a month now. What’s more disappointing is that you can’t mix the two colors up–Blue Topaz is exclusive to the Galaxy S6 and Green Emerald is exclusive to the Galaxy S6 Edge.
There’s currently no date on when Best Buy will ship out these smartphones. Not only that, but they seem to be sold out online, which indicates that either there’s a high demand for these gorgeous colors or Best Buy just isn’t ready to sell them yet.
While the listings are on Best Buy’s website, there’s no clear indication if they’ll be selling these colors in-store just yet. There’s also been no clear word on selling these devices exclusively outright or if they’ll offer a contract options down the road.
Would you purchase the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge in Blue Topaz or Green Emerald? They certainly are gorgeous colors on the device. Let us know in the comments!
Come comment on this article: Best Buy selling Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge in Blue Topaz and Green Emerald
Rumor: Android Wear getting speakers and phone support
The rumor mill is starting up again, and this time its with Android Wear. A source told Artem Russakovskii that Android Wear could be getting speakers and on-watch calling support.
While these ideas are certainly not new by any means, it would be new to Android Wear, and it would open up a lot of cool possibilities to partners, such as LG and Motorola.
It’s certainly not a far-fetched rumor, considering that the Apple Watch already has these convenient features. As you can imagine, Google would want to bring speakers and calling support to smartwatches as soon as possible to stay competitive.
As Russakovskii said in his Google Plus post, there’s no official timing on these features. However, he does say that a watch with speaker hardware is coming soon. Possibly a smartwatch that is something like LG’s Watch Urbane LTE?
With how popular smartwatches have been and an expected announcement of a new Android version at Google I/O, we’re hoping we’ll hear something more official at Google’s developer conference.
In the meantime, what do you think of speaker and phone call support on Android Wear? Would you use it on your smartwatch?
source: +Artem Russakovskii
Come comment on this article: Rumor: Android Wear getting speakers and phone support
T-Mobile’s Galaxy S Tab 10.5 getting Android 5.0 OTA
As of yesterday, T-Mobile is pushing out a new firmware upgrade to the Samsung Galaxy Tab S 10.1, bringing the device to Android 5.0.2 Lollipop.
Keep in mind that updates like these take time to roll out to everyone. The update started rolling out to the device on May 18, but it could take some users as long as June 5 to get it on their tablets.
It’s great to see T-Mobile being quick on their feet with this update, at least, as far as carriers are concerned. AT&T pushed out Lollipop to their variant just last week.
If you haven’t received a notification just yet, you can check manually by going into your app tray and tapping the Settings icon. From there, tap General > About Device > tap OK > tap Start. From there, Lollipop should begin installing on your device. Once it’s finished, you should have a new baseband version–T807TUVU1BOE1.
Have you gotten the update yet? Let us know in the comments!
source: T-Mobile
Come comment on this article: T-Mobile’s Galaxy S Tab 10.5 getting Android 5.0 OTA
Samsung brings its Continuity-like platform Flow to the Play Store
Samsung announced Flow, its platform for transferring activities across devices, at its developer conference in November 2014. Now a beta version of the Flow app is available in the Play Store for you to try out, with a couple of limitations.
First up, at this stage, Flow is only available for users in the United States. Second, compatibility is limited to a handful of Samsung devices:
- Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge
- Galaxy Note 4 and Note Edge
- Galaxy S5
- Galaxy Tab S
- Galaxy Alpha
However, Samsung says it will expand the availability of Flow to “Samsung wearables, laptops, TVs, and even more devices,” though it’s not clear whether this includes devices from other manufacturers.
So, what exactly does Flow do? Primarily, Flow lets you transfer the state of an app from one device to another. Say you’re looking for a place to hang out tonight: you find a place on Yelp on your Galaxy S6, but decide you want to take a closer look, so using Flow, you transfer the activity to your Tab S 8.4 tablet. Yelp opens up on the tablet straight to the place you were checking out on the phone. Once you make up your mind, you can use Flow to send the activity to your Gear S, which will show you directions to the place.
This is the Transfer functionality of Flow; the other feature currently available is Defer, which is a way to save an activity for later. This works a little like Pocket or other read-it later apps, but instead of working with websites only, Flow can save activities for later. This means you can defer editing a spreadsheet, and pick up where you left off a couple of hours letter.
Besides Transfer and Defer, Samsung says more features are coming to the platform soon: Notify (notifications across devices), Mirror (open up the same activity on multiple devices) and Split (presumably, divide an activity between devices).
Flow can be accessed from any Android app with the common Share intent or developers can easily build the feature directly into their apps to make using Flow even easier.
Because Flow works through Bluetooth or WiFi, the devices need to be physically close to each other, which is a bit of a limitation. On the flip side, your data is not sent over to the cloud, which should appease the privacy-conscious.
Many see Flow as an answer to Continuity, a similar feature that Apple introduced in June 2014 for iOS and OS X devices. And a number of Android apps that tackle some of the same problems as Flow already exist. For instance, Pushbullet let you share links, files and notifications across devices; Pocket or Instapaper let you save websites for later; while Nextbit’s Baton feature (which is preloaded with Cyanogen OS) allows the transfer of app states between devices. Still, Flow looks like a fairly polished all-in-one solution, and we look forward to giving it a run.
Check out Flow in the Play Store.
Apple Pay Gains 35 More Participating Issuers in United States [iOS Blog]
Apple updated its Apple Pay participating issuers list today with 35 additional banks, credit unions and financial institutions supporting the contactless payment service in the United States. Apple Pay now has close to 300 participating issuers nationwide, and several hundred more plan to support the NFC-based mobile payment service in the future.
The full list of new Apple Pay participating issuers is reflected below, although it’s worth noting that some banks, credit unions and financial institutions listed may have already had support for the contactless payments service and are only now being reflected on Apple’s website.
The full list of new Apple Pay participating issuers:
- 1st Financial Federal Credit Union
- Affinity Bank
- Bank of Springfield
- Berkshire Bank
- Box Elder Credit Union
- C&F Bank
- Capitol Federal Savings
- Christian Community Credit Union
- Community First Credit Union of Florida
- Credit Union of Denver
- Denver Community Credit Union
- Education First Credit Union
- Educators Credit Union
- Financial Partners Credit Union
- First City Credit Union
- First Premier Bank
- Freedom Credit Union
- NASA Federal Credit Union
- Numerica Credit Union
- PremierOne Credit Union
- Purdue Federal Credit Union
- Rivermark Community Credit Union
- San Francisco Federal Credit Union
- Simmons First National Bank
- Summit Credit Union
- Synchrony Bank
- The Citizen Bank of Clovis
- UMe Federal Credit Union
- University Federal Credit Union
- Utah Power Credit Union
- Valor Credit Union
- Vermont Federal Credit Union
- WSECU
- WECU (Whatcom Educational Credit Union)
Apple Pay remains available in the United States only, although Apple is committed to an international rollout of the mobile payments service in additional countries such as Canada, China and the United Kingdom. Canada, a well-prepared candidate for Apple Pay, could be the first country to embrace the service outside of the United States as early as November.
Apple Releases New 15-Inch MacBook Pro With Force Touch and $1,999 27-Inch iMac With Retina Display
Following a rumor yesterday that Apple would release new updated versions of the 15-inch MacBook Pro and 27-inch iMac, today the company updated its storefront with new models of the computers.
The new 15-inch MacBook Pro gained all the expected updates similar to its 13-inch sibling: a Force Touch trackpad, faster flash storage, longer battery life, and better graphics. The MacBook comes in two configurations of 2.2GHz and 2.5GHz for $1,999 and $2,499, respectively.
The iMac line that received an update today was not in fact the non-Retina version but a new $1,999 configuration of the 27-inch iMac with Retina 5K display. Both the 15-inch MacBook Pro and 27-inch iMac are available to purchase right now from Apple’s online store.
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