Investors temper Samsung recovery expectations
Samsung managed to get a lot of its financial mojo back earlier this year after the successful launch of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Galaxy S6 edge. The new flagship devices helped set the stage for a turnaround by Samsung after 2014’s relatively dismal performance. Although the Galaxy S6 was greeted with strong reviews and strong sales numbers initially, investors are starting to pull back a little bit on expectations for the rest of the year. Samsung is expected to announce preliminary numbers for the second quarter and guidance for the rest of the year on Tuesday.
Several analysts are projecting second quarter earnings to be in the 7.2 trillion won range ($6.4 billion USD). Park Jung-hoon with HDC Asset Management probably expresses the sentiment the best when he says “I think so long as the first digit doesn’t start with a six it won’t be a shock.”
A survey of 39 analysts by Thomson Reuters indicates 2015 profit is expected to be around 27.8 trillion won ($24.7 billion USD), an improvement over 2014’s 25 trillion won ($22.2 billion USD) which was a three-year low for Samsung.
One item that seems to be troubling investors was Samsung’s failure to anticipate interest in the curved-screen Galaxy S6 edge. Although the company is now ramped up to meet demand, they may have missed their opportunity to capitalize on buyer interest. On a larger scale, analysts are also looking at trends in Europe and China that may not be the most favorable for the smartphone market, including Samsung.
source: Reuters
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Amazon’s Prime Day is a global shopping event for Prime members with more deals than Black Friday
An Amazon Prime subscription brings a set of perks that includes unlimited 1 or 2 day delivery, access to TV programs and films via Prime Instant, over 1 million songs via Prime Music as well as unlimited photo storage via the retailer’s Prime Photo service. Now, on the eve of its 20th anniversary, Amazon has announced Prime Day, a global shopping event exclusively for Prime subscribers.
Prime Day will be held on July 15th, with Amazon boasting that the sale will have more deals than Black Friday. Prime Day deals will be available for subscribers in the United States, United Kingdom, Spain, Italy, Japan, Germany, France, Canada and Austria. Deals will start as often as every ten minutes, and subscribers will have access to Lightning Deals, Popular Deals of the Day as well as unlimited free shipping. Greg Greeley, the Vice President of Amazon Prime had this to say:
“If you’re not already a Prime member, you’ll want to join so you don’t miss out on one of the biggest deals extravaganzas in the world.”
As implied, in order to access the Prime Day deals on July 15th, you must be an Amazon Prime subscriber. If you live in the UK and have been put off by the £79 subscription fee, you might be interested to find out that Amazon has lowered the price to £59 until July 8th. Don’t forget, if you live in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Dallas, Manhattan, Miami or London, you can also take advantage of one or two-hour delivery via the Prime Now app.
Finally, if you enter a photo to amazon.com/primeliving showing how Amazon Prime has helped you in your life, you stand a chance of winning a $10,000 gift card. There’s one gift card allocated per Prime eligible country, and you must submit the picture before July 15th.
Are you more likely to join Amazon Prime after finding out about Prime Day on July 15th? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
Source: BusinessWire
Come comment on this article: Amazon’s Prime Day is a global shopping event for Prime members with more deals than Black Friday
Here is an almost full spec sheet of Huawei’s upcoming 64-bit Kirin 950 chipset
China’s Huawei has been manufacturing and using it’s own chips in some of it’s own devices for a while now. Most notably Huawei P8 and Huawei Ascend Mate7.
We have heard some talk of them releasing a new chipset called the “Kirin 950″. The chip is said to include a 64-bit octa-core chipset that comprises four Cortex-A53 cores and another quartet of Cortex-A72 ones. The Kirin 950 will also be rated at 2.4GHz. For the graphics an ARM Mali T880 unit will be used.
A dedicated DSP audio co-processor, a Tensilica Hi-Fi 4 DSP, another co-processor, an i7, will act as a sensor, connectivity, and security hub, working in the octa-core heart’s stead. The chipset will also support dual-channel LPDDR4 RAM, UFS 2.0, and eMMC 5.1 storage. Camera lovers out there will be happy to know it can also support up to 42MP camera units as well as a list of other features.
We are not sure when the Kirin 950 will be released, but we would imagine it will go into their next flagship phone.
Source: mobile-dad
Via: Phone Arena
Come comment on this article: Here is an almost full spec sheet of Huawei’s upcoming 64-bit Kirin 950 chipset
HTC’s Q2 preliminary earnings show net loss of $256 million
Just as the naysayers had predicted, HTC’s Q2 preliminary earnings have not exactly proved to be a turnaround for the company. With the launch of its One M9, the Taiwanese firm was expecting to revive its fortunes, but even this HTC flagship failed to impress either users or critics.
On its website, HTC has posted its preliminary report for the second quarter showing a loss of around $166 million. The numbers are unaudited, but they are enough to reveal yet another negative quarter for the struggling company.
The website revealed that HTC made a quarterly revenue of $1.07 billion (NT$33.01 billion) and a net loss of $256 million (NT$8.03 billion) before taxes.
The outlook is quite gloomy for shareholders too as earnings per share fell by $0.3 (NT$9.70). In the previous quarter, HTC had marked a modest profit of $11.8 million from $1.36 billion of revenue, which had many industry watchers assume that the company might be headed for a comeback.
Source: HTC
Come comment on this article: HTC’s Q2 preliminary earnings show net loss of $256 million
Amazon Cloud Drive finally gets its own app
Using Amazon’s cloud storage service has been somewhat of a hassle considering the lack of any dedicated mobile apps. Users were limited to a watered-down app that only offered access to photographs and music. Today, Amazon finally released mobile apps for Cloud Drive across multiple platforms that show users everything that they have saved online. The launch of Cloud Drive’s mobile apps comes a few weeks after Amazon launched the service’s SDK, meaning that the app should be see integration with other apps and services in the near future.
Amazon offers two separate subscriptions for access to Cloud Drive that both start with 3-month trials. Users get unlimited storage for photographs and 5GB for other files for $11.99 per year. Amazon Prime members also get this subscription’s features at no additional cost. Storing absolutely anything and everything without being capped costs $59.99 per year.
Come comment on this article: Amazon Cloud Drive finally gets its own app
Strap on your Samsung Gear VR to experience Naughty America’s first VR porn scene
Over the years, the porn industry has been doing its part to bring adult content to the forefront by means of emerging technologies. Users have been able to watch their favorite videos in perhaps overly-immersive 3D and 4K for some time, but what if you’re looking for something a tad more captivating? Naughty America, producer of high-quality video content, is now here to help you out with all of your desires. The company has just announced its very first virtual reality scene entitled “2 Chicks Same Time”, which is formatted for 180-degree stereoscopic head tracking.
We’ll leave the content up to your imagination for now, but here’s a brief overview of what to expect from the scene:
Using a VR headset, males will be immersed directly in Naughty America’s first person point-of-view scene, with Nikki Benz and Jaclyn Taylor standing seductively before them, elevating the user to a new height — a more sensitized, sexual plane. And not just that, but Naughty America’s virtual threesome also allows couples and lovers a drama-free solution to asking partners to bring a third party into the bedroom.
Naughty America has also produced a VR porn experience for women, in which they’ll find themselves at the center of attention between a man and another woman. If you’d like to experience this immersive content for yourself, the company recommends using a Samsung Gear VR headset for Android users, the Homido Virtual Reality Headset and Mobile VR Station app for iOS users, or the Oculus Rift. The company also says that new VR porn scenes will be released weekly to its website, as well.
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Naughty America and film stars Benz and Taylor will be giving users a sneak peek of the new VR porn experience at Comic-Con this year. The event, which will be streamed over Periscope, will take place July 9th-11th and will allow interested users to watch the scene and discuss the experience with the film’s stars.
This may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s hard denying that virtual reality has been making some great strides as of late. Google is attempting to bring VR to the classroom with its new Expeditions program, and Chinese OEM OnePlus even has plans to unveil its next flagship with its own VR Cardboard headsets. Bringing porn to the virtual reality space is expected, but might not be widely adopted for quite some time. After all, we’re just now seeing more manufacturers produce affordable VR headsets, so not many users will be able to view these videos even if they’re interested.
Do you think VR porn will catch on? Be sure to let us know what you think in the comments below.
Samsung brings 2TB solid-state drives to your home PC
You no longer have to bend over backwards to get more than a terabyte of fast, flash-based storage in your home computer. Samsung is shipping 2TB versions of its 850 Evo and 850 Pro solid-state drives, giving you as much capacity as a decent-sized spinning hard drive while maintaining that all-important SSD speed. They’re only available for desktops at the moment, but Samsung is promising similarly cavernous models for laptops. Just be prepared to pay dearly for these no-compromise drives right now — the ‘standard’ 2TB 850 Evo is officially priced at $800, while the slightly faster, longer-lasting 850 Pro could easily break the bank at $1,000.
Source: Samsung Tomorrow
Amazon’s Cloud Drive storage service gets dedicated mobile apps
While Amazon already offered mobile apps for sorting your photos and music parked in its Cloud Drive repository, there wasn’t an option for getting at all of your stored files. Late last week, a dedicated Cloud Drive app for iOS arrived in the iTunes App Store, joining both Android and Amazon versions that debuted in late June — all three of which rolled out rather quietly. Similar to the Dropbox app, the mobile software allows you to organize and access photos, videos, documents, spereadsheets and other files you’ve stored in Cloud Drive. As you might expect, you can also preview images (no editing abilities), PDFs and other documents from within before sharing in another app, with a link or as an email attachment. And yes, you can use the app to play videos and music stored in Amazon’s cloud, too. Until now, desktop apps for PC and Mac offered the only direct access to Cloud Drive as a whole, and mobile devices could only leverage those media-specific apps.
If you’re in need of a refresher, there’s not free tier for the service, only a 3-month trial at no cost. From there, unlimited photo storage will set you back $12 a year while $60 per year secures the Unlimited Everything plan. Of course, Prime and Fire device owners get the unlimited photo storage option for free.
Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, Amazon
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Amazon, Google Play, iOS
WhatsApp may get “like” and “mark as unread” options in next update
According to some reports from beta testers and other sources, WhatsApp may be getting a couple new features when their next update rolls out. The new features include a “Like” button and some ability to mark messages as unread.
One beta tester, Ilhan Pektas, tweeted out a message recently that translates roughly as, “Like Button for divided images in WhatsApp: o #cool”. Facebook has already implemented some existing features from other platforms into WhatsApp, like the “read message” tick marks found in their Messenger app that made their way over to WhatsApp. So it would not be a stretch to imagine Facebook adding a “Like” button to WhatsApp, especially in light of the role the Like button plays in their main service.
The other rumor concerning new features comes from ADSLZone and has to do with marking messages as “unread.” Being able to mark a message as unread is nothing new in technology as can be seen in virtually any email client. However, given the interactive, two-way nature of WhatsApp, that may impact how an “unread” message feature is implemented. Currently WhatsApp provides the sender with an indicator via a blue tick mark that a recipient has seen their message. If a recipient goes back and marks a message as unread, WhatsApp will need to determine whether the sender would also see that change in status or if this would just be for recipients. ADSLZone came across this information in an internal WhatsApp document discussion.
source: AndroidPIT
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Leaked video shows full 3D render of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5
A new video has leaked showing a full 3D rendering of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Note 5. The video details quite a few things about the design of the company’s flagship phablet and really shows just how much inspiration from the Galaxy S6 has bled over into the Note line.
The rear camera of the device has picked up the squared-off shape from the S6, and the heart rate monitor has moved to the side of the camera, too. It looks like a full unibody design, just like the S6, which also probably means there won’t be an SD card on board here either. The sides of the devices show a single SIM tray, so unless that tray ends up being big enough to hold both the SIM card and an SD card, it’s a pretty clear indicator Samsung won’t be bringing back expandable storage.
Otherwise, it looks like what everyone was expecting from the Galaxy Note 5. Nothing too surprising, for better or worse. We’ll likely see an official announcement in September from Samsung.
source: OnLeaks (Twitter)
via: SamMobile
Click here to view the embedded video.
Come comment on this article: Leaked video shows full 3D render of Samsung’s Galaxy Note 5
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