Motorola begins Android 5.1 soak test for Moto X (2014) in Brazil, brings new Chop Twice gesture
The Moto X (1st Gen) began receiving its Android 5.1 update in Brazil a couple of weeks ago, and everyone asked when the second generation Moto X (2014) would get its turn. Well, it seems that today is the lucky day if you live in Brazil, thanks to Motorola rolling out the update in a soak test.
As for the rest of the world, there’s no need to worry as Motorola has said that:
“We have been working on putting the software through carrier and regional testing in other countries and for other devices, so please stay tuned for more.”
Besides the usual collection of bugfixes and stability tweaks, the Android 5.1 update will also include improved control over notifications and device protection. A new Moto Gesture has been added called Chop Twice that turns on the handset’s flashlight when you make a natural chopping motion with your hand. Chop twice to turn it on, and twice more to deactivate, just like the .gif image above demonstrates.
Here’s hoping that the soak test goes to plan and that the Android 5.1 update will be rolled out to Moto X (2014) handsets everywhere soon.
Source: Motorola
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Quad HD heaven: Download all the LG G4 wallpapers here now
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The LG G4 has been out for just over a week now and the consensus appears to be that the device is quite balanced – it’s not quite a stand-out, thanks to its older Snapdragon 808 processor, but it ticks all the boxes and has a few nice gimmicks, like its genuine leather back, to try and entice you over the fence. Chief among the improvements LG has made in this year’s device is the Quad HD display, and being the second 5.5-inch slate LG has released, it’s appropriately brilliant – and what’s a brilliant display without brilliant wallpapers. Fittingly, we have all 10 of the LG G4 wallpapers available here for download, so have at it:
Or here’s a zip to download if you prefer.
All these wallpapers are in the appropriate 2880×2560 resolution, which is perfect for those of you rocking a Quad HD display, but perfectly good if you don’t either. Only time will tell if the LG G4 is going to be a commercial success, but LG definitely has high hopes, and we hope for their sake that they’re right.
What do you think about the LG G4 wallpapers? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: Phone Arena
The post Quad HD heaven: Download all the LG G4 wallpapers here now appeared first on AndroidSPIN.
Square’s ‘cashtags’ get more specific for sending quick payments
Square’s let you securely wire money via its (cringe-inducingly named) $Cashtags for a bit now, but the feature’s gotten a little more streamlined as of late. Now, you can specify a dollar amount for payments by appending the ‘tags with a number. For example: cash.me/$RED/5 is a $5 donation toward AIDS research, as the payment company cleverly pointed out in its announcement tweet. Whether or not your pursuits are as noble are entirely up to you.
You can now add a number to the end of any $Cashtag to lock in a dollar amount. And you will. Oh yes you will. http://t.co/uLfqCvKfQ1
– Cash (@SquareCash) May 7, 2015
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Source: Square (Twitter)
Nintendo plans five smartphone games by 2017, first one this year
Nintendo has long resisted the lure of mobile gaming, preferring to stick to its traditional, console-focused business model. So, in March, when Nintendo announced it’s partnering with mobile gaming giant DeNA to bring its first mobile games to market, fans of Mario & Co. were positively excited.
Now Nintendo offered some clues on how it plans to go about mobile gaming. Talking to investors after yesterday’s announcement of Nintendo’s 2014 financial results, CEO Satoru Iwata said Nintendo plans to release around five mobile titles by March 2017.
The first of these titles will be released by the end of the year.
The CEO said Nintendo wants to make each of these games a hit and “thoroughly operate every one of them for a significant amount of time after their releases,” in a sign of the company’s “serious commitment to the smart device business.”
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Nintendo will not port existing titles to mobile, because that would result in a subpar experience for users:
“If we were simply to port software that already has a track record on a dedicated game system, it would not match the play styles of smart devices, and the appropriate business models are different between the two, so we would not anticipate a great result.”
Nintendo is still dedicated to consoles and sees mobile as a gateway towards the more premium experience offered by Wii, according to Iwata.
So, what should we expected from these first batch of mobile Nintendo games? All we know so far is they will be made for mobile (no ports) and they will have a cross-platform component. DeNA’s involvement may result in the inclusion of a strong IAP system, but that’s just speculation. Of course, Nintendo’s beloved panoply of characters will be front and center, Donkey Kong, Link, and Mario included. And that pretty much guarantees that Nintendo’s mobile games will enjoy a ton of attention, if not guaranteed success.
What do you hope to see in Nintendo’s Android games?
Oculus program makes it possible for novices to animate VR characters
A 3D animation studio called Masters of Pie has developed a prototype program called Geppetto that makes it easy to animate virtual reality characters. And yes, it’s “easy” even for those who’ve had zero training in animation. Geppetto runs on Oculus Rift and is named after Pinocchio’s creator, because its creators describe what it does as “digital puppetry.” That term’s right on the money: with the use of a Razer Hydra game controller, you can pick any part of the character and move it however you want to.
Road to VR Executive Editor Ben Lang had the chance to try it out and managed to manipulate the alien character into a pose within five minutes. “Above the character is a timeline which allows users to animate by associating poses with particular moments (keyframes) on the timeline,” he said. “When played back, the character moves from one pose to another accordingly.” Geppetto’s but an unfinished prototype right now, and what you can do is very limited: you can’t use it to create your own character or animate a Toy Story spinoff. The studio does plan to add more features and refine the ones it already has, hopefully to be able to release it in time for Oculus Rift’s consumer launch in 2016.
Via: Road to VR
Source: Masters of Pie
Samsung updating Galaxy Tab 4 10.1-inch with Android 5.0.2
If you are the proud owner of a Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 of the 10.1-inch variety, good news, you are about to receive the Android 5.0.2 Lollipop update.
Samsung began pushing the update to users via OTA on Thursday. As always, watch for the notification, or head into the System Updates section deep down in your settings.
Included in this update for your tablet, aside from the wonders of Android Lollipop itself, including Material Design, is a new TouchWiz UI, new notifications panel, multitasking menu and a slew of performance enhancements and bug fixes. In addition, there is a new lock screen with improved notification handling. Much the same stuff we see on the recently updated Galaxy Tab S 8.4.
As a reminder, for those that do not have the device, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1 is, as the name suggests, a 10.1-inch device with 1280×800 resolution. It is powered by a 1.2 GHz quad-core processor with 1.5GB of RAM and 16GB of internal storage. It was first released almost exactly a year ago, and ran for about $349.00.
What aspect of Lollipop are you most interested in experiencing on your Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 10.1?
Texts from Mom, Samsung’s touching Mother’s Day ad
Sunday May 10th, 2015 is Mother’s Day in over 80 countries including the USA, Canada, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Greece, India, Italy, New Zealand, and Switzerland. To mark the occasion Samsung has released a new ad, which in the gentlest way possible reminds us that Moms have a way with words – especially when they text them.
The #TextsFromMom ad, featuring the Galaxy S6 Edge, shows a series of lighthearted situations where Mom can text the wrong thing. Some of the classic messages from Mom include texts ALL WRITTEN IN CAPITALS, and confusing a Selfie with a normal photo. The comic reply to the ALL CAPITALS message is of course, “Why are you shouting?” To which Mom replies, “I’M NOT CAN YOU HEAR ME???”
Probably the funniest one is when Mom sends a message asking her daughter if she wants to get some ice cream, and the emoticons are not quite the rights ones. Check out the video to see what I mean.
For those in the USA, Samsung is also running a #TextsFromMom Twitter contest until 11:59PM on May 11, 2015. The handset maker is offering 3 Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge devices as prizes.
To enter you must tweet a funny or entertaining screenshot/photo of a text from your mom, including the hashtag #TextsFromMom. You must also follow @SamsungMobileUS, and have your privacy settings set to “public” to receive a Direct Message for the Entry to be eligible. One more thing, you must get approval from your Mom prior to submission!
Even if you are in a country not celebrating Mother’s Day (like the UK, which had its Mothering Sunday in March), it is still worth following Samsung’s advice, “This Sunday, give her a call.”
Logitech remotes can turn down Hue lights before movie night
Logitech’s Harmony remote just got considerably more useful when you’re setting the mood for a movie. A recent hub firmware update (available through the Android and iOS apps) for its Smart Control and Ultimate remotes lets you adjust Philips’ Hue lights at the start or end of an activity. You can set a colorful backdrop before kicking off a house party, for instance. Frankly, this makes Logitech’s Hue integration considerably more useful — you can now light up a dark room and turn on your TV before you even reach the couch.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Household, HD
Via: Dave Zatz (Twitter)
Source: App Store, Google Play, Logitech
Facebook: If your feed is an echo chamber, you need more friends
Facebook wants you to know that you’ve only got yourself to blame for the lack of diversity in views on your news feed. The social network has recently conducted a study to find out why people mostly see posts that mirror their own beliefs and to find out if a “filter bubble” is to blame. “Filter bubble” is what you call the situation wherein a website’s algorithm shows only posts based on what you clicked (or Liked) and commented on. For this particular study, the company used anonymous data from 10.1 million Facebook users who list their political affiliations on their profiles. Researchers monitored “hard news” links posted on the website and looked at whether they were posted by conservatives, liberals or moderates.
The result? According to a blog post on Facebook research, which details the contents of the study (emphasis ours):
“While News Feed surfaces content that is slightly more aligned with an individual’s own ideology (based on that person’s actions on Facebook), who they friend and what content they click on are more consequential than the News Feed ranking in terms of how much diverse content they encounter.”
The study admits that the filter bubble effect is real — in varying degrees, based on political affiliation — but it claims the website’s algorithms doesn’t play that big of a part. Who you’re friends with apparently has a more profound effect on your news feed, with the study pointing out that “birds of a feather flock together:”
Friends are more likely to be similar in age, educational attainment, occupation, and geography. It is not surprising to find that the same holds true for political affiliation on Facebook.
However, Eli Pariser, who once gave a TED talk on the perils of the filter bubble, warns that the study might be downplaying the effects of the Facebook algorithm. “Certainly, who your friends are matters a lot in social media,” he writes in his response to the study on Medium. “But the fact that the algorithm’s narrowing effect is nearly as strong as our own avoidance of views we disagree with suggests that it’s actually a pretty big deal.”
Pariser isn’t the study’s only critic either: Christian Sandvig from Social Media Collective argues that there’s a very small percentage of Facebook users that volunteer “interpretable ideological affiliations” on their profiles, which is one of the requirements to be part of the research. He writes: “We would expect that a small minority who publicly identifies an interpretable political orientation to be very likely to behave quite differently than the average person with respect to consuming ideological political news.” Sandvig also finds the way the study was framed to be questionable, almost as if it was written as an alibi: “Facebook is saying: It’s not our fault! You do it too!”
As you can see, the study’s become quite controversial. If you want to come up with your own conclusions, you can pore over the study on Facebook Research for a more thorough look at the results, and see even more details in the paper published in Science.
Via: The Verge
Daily Roundup: LG G4 review, Nintendo makes money again and more!
In today’s Daily Roundup you’ll find our review of the new LG G4, read all about how Nintendo is making money again and get a sneak peek at the new controller for Guitar Hero Live. Get the details on these stories and more past the break.
LG G4 review: refined, but not game-changing
When LG cooked up last year’s G3, we (and many of our contemporaries) fell in love with it. At last, a well-designed phone with a killer Quad HD screen and a custom interface that didn’t make us want to wrap a USB cord around our necks! Building a beloved smartphone is no small feat, but it’s still not as hard as crafting a sequel that will be just as well-received. When it came time for LG to design the new G4, the company latched onto a handful of areas it thought people really cared about. It rebuilt its 16-megapixel camera from the ground up.
Nintendo is finally making money again
Nintendo recorded its first annual profit since 2011 today. Its final results for 2014 (technically April 1st 2014 to March 31st 2015) reveal a $207 million operating profit on $4.6 billion in revenue. That’s nothing to write home about, and way lower than initially expected, but still represents a dramatic improvement from previous years’ consecutive losses. The past three months have actually seen a pretty heavy negative swing for Nintendo, with the international launch of new-and-improved 3DS models failing to make much of an impact, and the Wii U continuing to languish in 3rd place behind the PS4 and the Xbox One.
A close look at the new, yet familiar guitar in ‘Guitar Hero Live’
Tim Dunn and Nate Coppard are on a mission to rewire your brain. They’re respectively the senior producer and senior designer behind Guitar Hero Live‘s new six-button guitar, and while neurological change is not their direct goal, it’s a side effect they seem to relish. The new guitar has two rows of three buttons each, stacked on top of each other at the end of the neck – this not only adds an extra button to the series, but it allows for fresh challenges. “It’s not something people will be familiar with,” Dunn says, glancing down at the Guitar Hero Live guitar in his hands.
‘Guild Wars 2′ cheater faces public humiliation before ban
Most cheaters in online role-playing games face an ignominious end. The developers ban them, and that’s all she wrote. Not one particularly egregious Guild Wars 2 offender, however. When game developer ArenaNet finally took action against a hacker who had been terrorizing player-versus-player battles for weeks, the security team decided that some public humiliation was in order. It stripped one of the player’s characters naked, jumped this persona off a ledge, and proceeded to delete every character linked to the account – all recorded for posterity on video, as you can see below.
Xbox One rumor claims DVR is coming to replace Media Center
Even as Microsoft buries Windows Media Center, there’s a rumor that it actually does have a plan for a replacement. According to Paul Thurrott’s sources, the Xbox One will gain the ability to record live TV “probably this year.” That’s the kind of feature Microsoft originally envisioned for its all-in-on game console, but so far does not offer. The live TV tuner that’s available in Europe and coming to North America offers some trick play pause/rewind support, but full DVR functionality would be a big shift.
This speaker lights on fire (and it’s supposed to)
Your Sonos setup is pretty handy, what with its wireless audio and all that, but you know what it’s missing? A mothereffin’ open flame that bounces along to your music’s beat, that’s what. Because seriously, a jammin’ stereo is basically useless if it doesn’t run the risk of burning down the your house. And before you ask, no The Sound Torch wasn’t concocted by The Talking Heads’ David Byrne. However! Its Danish designers say that it’s perfect for either your next DJ set or family picnic. For the latter you could probably even skip using one of those grody public grills with these feats of pyrotechnics.
Tesla’s first acquisition is a Michigan auto parts maker
Tesla’s just made its first acquisition: a tool and die shop based in Grand Rapids, Michigan (roughy 150 miles west of Detroit) that makes automotive stamping parts. As The Detroit Free Press reports, the current Riviera Tool will eventually become Tesla Tool and Die and will retain its current employees, possibly hiring more in the future.
Filed under: Misc
AIVAnet 