Google will reportedly launch its photo sharing service sometime soon
According to a new report from Bloomberg, Google is very close to taking the wraps off of its new photo sharing and storage service. According to the publication’s unnamed sources, the new photo tool, which will be an entirely separate service from the Google+ Photos feature, will likely be unveiled at Google I/O 2015.
According to past rumors, the new photo service will allow users to upload photos to the cloud and share them to Facebook, Twitter, and more. Obviously since this service is coming from Google, there is potential that it will come with some of the great photo editing features found in Google+, like Auto Awesome, Highlights and Stories.
Although details beyond that are scarce, we may learn more when Google I/O takes place on May 28th and 29th.
This year’s developer conference is shaping up to be quite interesting. We may get our first look at the next version of Android, and Google may also unveil new voice action controls, more granular app permissions, and its “Designed for Families” version of the Play Store.
Phone Buddy smartphone stand review
A few weeks ago, I was sitting in a coffee shop trying to watch a soccer match on my smartphone, and while the video quality was more than good enough, the actual experience was quite poor. The reason I say this is because I was having to hold the phone with my hand which in turn meant that the display was not exactly stable. When the display shook, it invariably caught a reflection that obscured the picture and causing me to miss vital moments.
There are a few solutions to this problem, with the most obvious one being to use a flip case, but I find them annoying, and cases with built-in kickstands add too much bulk for my liking. Luckily, I think I’ve found the solution, thanks to spotting a little accessory called Phone Buddy, an extremely portable, dual-purpose smartphone stand.
The Phone Buddy is a piece of brightly coloured plastic measuring around 63 x 38 x 10mm, and weighing 7 grams. But, besides being light-weight and easy to carry around, what exactly does it do?
Firstly, the Phone Buddy is a smartphone stand. By inserting its plastic molded pin into your smartphone’s audio jack, you can rest your device at a roughly 45-degree angle. This means you can watch the game (or anything else) on the handset entirely hands-free, which is a much better experience than trying to drink coffee and hold the phone simultaneously. Resulting, in my experience at least, in much less coffee being spilled and more time spent viewing the match.
If you find that when you take your earphones out of your pocket or rucksack, the cables are always knotted up, then the second function of the Phone Buddy will come in handy. The Phone Buddy smartphone stand also acts as an earphone tidy, allowing you to insert your earphone jack into the holder and then to wrap the cable around before slotting your earphone cable through one of the inserts as pictured below. This means you can safely carry your earphones around without having to waste time untangling the cables while also having a portable smartphone stand to watch your content on your handset when and wherever you want.
I’ve used the Phone Buddy for the last couple of weeks with my LG G3 and so far, it’s held up extremely well to being carried around in a coat pocket or thrown into my rucksack. Because I have a few sets of earphones left over from previous handsets, I have assigned one Phone Buddy to my coat pocket and another to my rucksack. I’m even thinking of buying a third Phone Buddy that will serve as my trouser pocket unit.
The Phone Buddy is quite affordable at just £3.99 ($6.19) for a single unit or £9.99 ($15.50) for a pack of four with free shipping. It’s compatible with most smartphones on the market, even the fruit flavoured ones and is available in a variety of bright colours including blue, white, black, pink, yellow and blue.
You can also enter our giveaway where you have a chance to win 1 of 25 Phone Buddy smartphone stands.
Come comment on this article: Phone Buddy smartphone stand review
Mobile Google searches now show real-time tweets
Google and Twitter announced a new service today that will allow US mobile users to receive live Tweets — now that the social network’s firehose is connected once again — in their web searches. For example if you search for Golden State Warriors, Danger 5 or Game of Thrones on your cell phone, their most recent tweets pop up at the top of your search results. Users can also search specifically for, say, “NASA Twitter” to find everything that the space agency has recently tweeted. According to the official Twitter Blog, this feature will be landing on the desktop soon as well as expanding to other countries.
.@google We’re feeling lucky. 👊 Tweets will now show up in Google Search: https://t.co/3zMZ3OoAfu pic.twitter.com/NJI5oYkZS1
– Twitter (@twitter) May 19, 2015
Filed under: Networking, Google
Contest: Win one of 25 Phone Buddy smartphone stands! (UK-only)
We’ve just reviewed the Phone-Buddy, an extremely portable smartphone stand that also serves as an earphone tidy, and came away more than a little impressed by both its versatility and value of just £3.99 ($6.19) that includes free shipping. If you haven’t gotten around to ordering one for yourself just yet, you are in luck as we have 25 Phone Buddy’s to giveaway to our UK readers.
Here’s how the contest works:
- Leave a comment below telling us which phone you will use the Phone Buddy with if you win. Make sure your account is using a valid email address since that is how you will be contacted.
- Comments can be posted until Sunday, May 24, at 11:59PM GMT
- On Monday, May 25, we will select winners at random and contact them
- Another winner will be selected if we do not hear from you within the first day or two
- Participants must be UK residents
- We will update this post once the winners have been selected, so check here often on May 25. Good luck!
Come comment on this article: Contest: Win one of 25 Phone Buddy smartphone stands! (UK-only)
MasterCard Send is a new way to distribute funds quickly
Let’s face it: checks aren’t convenient. If you’re using them to pay for something, there’s all the extra writing and mailing. If you’re receiving them, there’s a whole process for getting them into your account. Well, MasterCard says it solved the convenience issue with Send: a new system that allows businesses and individuals to securely exchange funds in minutes. This means that you’ll no longer have to wait for a check to clear or for the transfer to go through. While businesses looking to send refunds, claims payments and rebates are a key focus, MasterCard is letting regular folks leverage the system to send money to friends and family, too. What’s more, you don’t have to be one of its customers to opt in, and you can use Send to pay for goods at participating retailers.
You can connect a debit card to access funds, but whoever you’re sending currency to doesn’t need a bank account as it’ll work with services like Western Union. Since it’s said to be available on any device, we’d surmise that the whole thing is driven by an app of some sort, but MasterCard hasn’t spilled those details just yet. Send is live in the US, with Berkshire Hathaway and FreeShipping.com being the first to sign on. We’ll be curious to see if it can take on the likes of PayPal and Venmo for beaming money to pals from across the table — should the need arise.
[Image credit: AP Photo/Toby Talbot]
Filed under: Internet
Source: MasterCard
Huawei Snapto Review
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The Bottom Line
- 4G LTE support in the US
- Incredible battery life
- Budget-friendly price point
- Below average camera
- Sluggish performance
- Average display
While have official 4G LTE support is great, the Huawei Snapto is found wanting in key aspects, and falls short when compared to its competitors in this price range.
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The worldwide budget smartphone market is extremely competitive, with a slew of solid mid-range and entry-level smartphones from various OEMs making their way to consumers. Not a lot of these devices see an official release in the US unfortunately, often due to their lack of full support for US network carriers, along with the availability of high-end smartphones at subsidized rates, albeit with contractual commitments.
Only recently have a few devices in the sub-$200 category, off-contract, been making their way to US, but there is still a significant gap in this segment, a void that Huawei is trying to fill with their latest budget-friendly offering. One of the big selling points of this device is its support for 4G LTE on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks, but what else does it bring to the table? We find out, in this in-depth Huawei Snapto review!
Design
When it comes to the design, Huawei takes a fairly simplistic approach with the Snapto. The device is made entirely of plastic, with the back featuring a textured leather finish, allowing for a feel in the hand beyond what you’d expect from a smartphone at this price point. The tapered edges of the removable back cover transition into a smooth matte plastic along the sides, and a glossy plastic wraps around the edges of the display. Opening the back cover gives you access to the microSD card slot and SIM card slot, but the battery is not replaceable.
Going around the device, the power button and volume rocker are both on the right side, and while responsive, they don’t come with a very satisfying tactile feel to them. The headphone jack and microUSB port are placed at the top and bottom respectively. The back houses the 5 MP camera at the top left corner, just above the LED flash, as well as the single speaker unit found towards the right at the bottom, with the Huawei branding featured at the center.
The company logo returns up front below the display as well, and the bezels around the display aren’t particularly thin, especially surprising given the use of on-screen navigation keys. The Snapto is also on the thicker side of things, with a thickness of 8.4 mm, and is also heavier than its all-plastic build would suggest, weighing in at 150 grams.
Overall, the design of the Snapto is quite underwhelming, and it feels like Huawei has instead chosen to focus on the internals of the device. That is of course not a bad thing, but if you’re looking for something more aesthetically pleasing, there are significantly better options out there in this segment.
Display
The Huawei Snapto comes with a 5-inch TFT display with a 720 resolution, with a resulting pixel density of 294 ppi. The display proves to be somewhat of a let down, with a lack of contrast, and poor viewing angles. Once you hit 45 degrees, there is a significant drop in brightness and quality, and sunlight readability is also not very good. The display is also kind of a fingerprint magnet, and despite my best efforts to keep it free from smudges, it still managed to collect fingerprints.
Performance and Hardware
Under the hood, the Huawei Snapto packs a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor, clocked at 1.2 GHz, backed by the Adreno 305 GPU and 1 GB of RAM. This was the processing package that powered a lot of the mid-range devices in 2014 and was quite impressive, which is unfortunately not the case this time around. The Snapto feels quite sluggish when it comes to everyday performance, and while usable, is slow to the point where the slowness is not only noticeable, but also, at times, frustrating.
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For example, the pre-installed Google Keyboard rarely kept up with what was being typed when sending text messages, and going back to the homescreen from an app sometimes resulted in a 2 or 3 second delay before all the application icons re-appeared. Multi-tasking wasn’t particularly smooth either, with their being a noticeable slowdown when opening more than a couple of apps. The Adreno 305 GPU handled gaming decently well, however, graphic intensive games like Asphalt 8 had lower frame rates, and the occasional stutter.
The Snapto comes with a standard suite of sensors and connectivity options, including 4G LTE support, that allows for high-speed internet access on the AT&T and T-Mobile networks, and their respective MVNOs. 8 GB of on-board storage is available, further expandable via microSD card by up to 32 GB. The single speaker unit at the back actually sounds surprisingly good, and gets fairly loud without the distortion that is sometimes seen with other similar budget-friendly devices. As is the case with any device with a speaker in this position, the sound gets muffled when the phone is placed on a flat surface.
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The Snapto packs a non-removable 2,200 mAh battery that provides surprisingly impressive battery life. The device comfortably lasted a full day of use, and then some, with just under 5 and a half hours of screen-on time, which is just fantastic. There is also a power saving mode baked in, with options including normal, smart, and endurance, to get even more juice out of the device. Battery life is certainly one of the highlights of the Huawei Snapto.
Camera
The Huawei Snapto comes with a 5 MP rear camera with a LED flash, along with a 2 MP front-facing camera. The camera application is fairly easy to use, with a few different shooting modes to choose from, along with the ability to manually adjust certain settings such as white balance and ISO.
Unfortunately, the camera proves to be an extremely poor performer, with the pictures taken consistently out of focus and lacking in sharpness. The camera does come with a useful feature that allows you to take a shot by pressing the volume down key twice, but that is the only good thing about the camera experience this device provides.
Software
The Huawei Snapto runs Android 4.4.4 KitKat with Huawei’s Emotion UI 2.3 on top. It’s not too far a departure from the traditional Android experience, but Huawei did make a few notable changes. For starters, an app drawer isn’t available, which can take some getting used to, and will require users to depend on folders to keep things organized. The available icon pack takes on a square motif with rounded corners, and the notification shade also comes with an expandable quick settings menu, which is certainly useful.
The Google keyboard is available as the default, but we’ve already mentioned the issues with it in terms of performance. The Recent Apps screen retains stock elements, although Huawei has added individual close buttons, and a one touch clean button. The lock screen gives users the ability to directly open the dialer, the messaging app, or the camera, and once in the homescreen, a simple swipe up will give you access to essential tools like the calendar, calculator, flashlight, and clock. I did really enjoy the ability to change each volume profile by pressing the setting button after pressing a volume button, a feature I wish every Android device had.
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There are a few pre-installed apps that come with the device, but it isn’t too bad, and at least there isn’t any carrier bloatware you have to worry about. There is also a simple mode, if you prefer to have a cleaner looking launcher. You also have the ability to disable apps from running when the screen is off, which is a contributor to the impressive battery life of the device. Finally, there is a notification manager that allows you to set from a single location which apps can send you notifications.
On the downside, I wasn’t very happy with the default notification sound, or should I say music. Whenever I received a notification from apps like Snapchat or Gmail, the phone would play a song which is kind of excessive, especially if you receive notifications frequently. Luckily, this is something that can be changed in the Settings.
Specifications
| Display | 5-inch TFT display 720p, 294 ppi |
| Processor | 1.2 GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 Adreno 305 GPU |
| RAM | 1 GB |
| Camera | 5 MP rear camera with LED flash 2 MP front-facing camera |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n Bluetooth 4.0, GPS, USB 2.0 |
| Storage | 8 GB, expandable up to 32 GB |
| Software | Android 4.4.4 Kitkat |
| Battery | 2,200 mAh |
| Colors | Black White |
| Dimensions | 144.5 x 72.4 x 8.4 mm 150 grams |
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Pricing and Final Thoughts
The Huawei Snapto is available for $179.99 with color options including black and white. The main competition for the device are the identically priced and specced Moto G (2014), as well as the slightly more expensive, but arguably more powerful, Asus Zenfone 2.
So, there you have it for a closer look at the Huawei Snapto! While the Snapto does have some strong selling points like LTE support, a good sounding speaker, and incredible battery life, I don’t think that this is a good choice for the average user. Buying a budget phone officially with LTE support in the US is great, but you really have to ask yourself whether you’re willing to give up a lot of what makes a smartphone good, with the display, performance, and camera, all points of contention. As mentioned, the competition in this space is heating up, and there are certainly more compelling options at this price point out there.
Uber will give you a driver that speaks Spanish
Would you rather say “¡hola!” to your Uber driver instead of “hello?” You’ve got it. The ridesharing firm has formally launched UberEspañol in six US areas (Chicago, Los Angeles, Orange County, Phoenix, San Diego and Tucson), giving you the choice of a Spanish-speaking UberX driver when you need a lift. This sadly leaves out posher ride options, but it’s a big deal if you’re more comfortable with the language or have a passenger whose English isn’t that great.
[Image credit: Getty Images]
Filed under: Transportation, Internet
Via: LA Times
Source: Uber Blog
Fove headset uses eye-tracking to make VR more real
If you’ve shoved one VR headset on your face, you’ve pretty much shoved them all on your face. They all immerse you in a 3D world with a device that tracks your head movement so you can look around. The Fove on the other hand, does more than just track your noggin, it also tracks your eyes and recreates how you see the real world while reducing strain on the system running the simulation. The company’s slick Kickstarter video promises an impressive experience and even in its early stage, it delivers.
After an initial calibration that required me to follow and focus on a green dot, I was dropped into a game where I was tasked with shooting triangle-shaped objects from a spaceship. The first few moments of the game seemed like every other VR demo I’ve experienced. I did note that the graphics and latency are impressive for a $399 headset. Then I focused on an object sitting in the foreground (a radar ball sitting in the cockpit of the spacecraft) and realized that the depth of field had changed based upon my gaze. The game itself was nothing special, but the eye tracking had created a more realistic experience.
We don’t see the world in the infinite focus that VR headsets (or video games in general for that matter) present. Instead our eyes dart between objects in the foreground and background and our depth of field changes accordingly. While it takes a moment to register that the Fove is doing this, once I realized what was happening, I stopped playing and stared starring. The eye tracking and refocusing wasn’t instantaneous, but it was pretty close.
It does this by tracking your pupils. It’s still in the early stages and there are still issues with it being fooled by mascara and eyeliner. The algorithm sees the dark area (usually your pupil) of the makeup and adjusts itself accordingly. Fove told Engadget that a future version of the algorithm will only look for things that are dark and round.
This future also has a one year lead time before Kickstarter backers receive their Fove. Of course with all things crowd-funded, there’s always a good chance that the ship date will slip and a larger, better-funded company could develop its own eye tracking piece of hardware. But for now, Fove is looking good by watching where you’re looking.
Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals, Wearables
Source: Kickstarter
KFC’s Tray Typer keeps you clicking even with greasy fingers
Horror of horrors, you’ve just downed a plate of Colonel Sander’s famous fried chicken only to have that text you’ve been waiting for suddenly ping your phone. What do you do? Clearly the answer isn’t to reach for the napkins. No, instead you do what every red-blooded poultry eater should: pair the keyboard mat on your serving tray to your phone and you answer that all-important text, greasy fingers be damned.
This slick keyboard is part of Kentucky Fried Chicken’s latest advertising campaign in Germany. Known as the “Tray Typer”, this reusable keyboard is barely thicker than the standard paper inserts. It connects to a phone via Bluetooth and allows you to continue using your mobile device after your fingers have been sullied with chicken renderings. The keyboards were reportedly so popular that each one handed out during the German promotion ended up being swiped and taken home.
Filed under: Wireless
Via: Verge
Source: Gute Werbung
Instagram introduces Layout for Android & new creative tool, Structure
Instagram has announced two new features, the Layout app and Structure, a photo editing tool.
As of today, Layout is now available on Android (Note: For the moment, it is not in the Play Store). The app gives users the ability to combine photos into a single image. When you open Layout, it shows previews of custom layouts as you choose photos from your camera roll. The Faces option makes it easy for you to find those with people.
To combine photos, you can drag and drop, pinch to zoom, and/or pull their sides in order to make the desired adjustments. Flipping and rotation are also possible with Layout.
The app’s last feature is Photo Booth. Tapping this starts a countdown and selects photos that will be placed immediately in the layout.
Structure is a tool that brings out details and textures in images. It is available in the latest update for Instagram.
The post Instagram introduces Layout for Android & new creative tool, Structure appeared first on AndroidGuys.
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