BlackBerry willing to exit the smartphone market if profits don’t turn around
BlackBerry has taken a backseat to bigger smartphone manufacturers in the past few years, so they’ve diversified and pushed for software instead of strictly hardware. To an extent, it’s worked well for the company. Since their smartphone market share has completely plummeted and hasn’t rebounded, software seems to make the most sense, especially since BlackBerry’s major selling point is security.
In an interview, CEO John Chen stated that if the hardware division of BlackBerry didn’t start growing and turning a profit soon, they wouldn’t be against stepping out of the hardware game and focusing exclusively on software. Despite releasing a few newer devices in both the high-end and budget categories in the past few months, it’s pretty clear that there isn’t much demand for a consumer BlackBerry, and even their government and enterprise customers have explored other options.
BlackBerry is a prime example of a company moving too slow to adapt to the market changing around them. And in this case, with so many users invested in either Apple or Google’s ecosystem for their mobile devices, trying to shift a meaningful number of customers over to a brand new ecosystem is nearly impossible at this point. Just ask Microsoft.
source: Bloomberg
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Exclusive: Moto G launching July 29th with Moto Maker available in-store
The Motorola Moto G (2015) has been the subject of many rumours and leaks over the past few weeks ahead of its expected announcement tomorrow but while they have focused on the specs and design features, none have touched on the potential release date.
We can now exclusively reveal that the Moto G (2015) could be known as the Motorola G 4G and will launch in the UK (and presumably many other countries) on July 29th; that is in just two days, this Wednesday and just one day after the handset is announced. The information comes to us from a source at UK retailer Three UK, who has shared an image of a stock update for employees which reads:
As you can see, Moto Maker – which is Motorola’s customisation service – will also be available in store in the form of a voucher that will presumably need to be activated online and given that 800 phones have been sent to Three stores alone, supply shouldn’t be an issue in most markets as the supply chains seems plentiful.
Motorola in video:
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As part of the phone’s launch in the UK, Motorola are placing 200 tablets in Three stores to demonstrate Moto Maker and this is likely to be a strategy that will also apply to other carriers; we’d certainly expect US carrier to have an in-store demonstration of a similar kind.
Also revealed in this image is that the Samsung Galaxy J1 is a big seller for the UK network, with stocks “heavily constrained” and our source also revealed that the entry-level handset is in sharp demand as it is available from the very low price of £8 per month on contract or £59.99 outright and unlocked.
Back to Motorola and the Moto G could become as popular as the original handset, especially with the rumoured specs that include a Full HD display, choice of back covers and an expected price tag of just $179.99. At that price, the handset may yet be a bargain.
Are you planning to buy the Motorola G 4G? Let us know your views in the comments below guys and don’t forget to join us tomorrow for coverage from the launch events in the USA and London.
Samsung introduces the first wireless charging monitor
Wireless charging is continuing to be a more and more popular way to charge your smartphone. Devices such as the Galaxy S6/S6 edge support it natively and other devices can be Qi charging enabled through third-party products. Even some car manufacturers (Toyota) have employed wireless charging on some of their vehicles. Today, Samsung has announced the SE370, the world’s first monitor with wireless charging capabilities.
The SE370 is available in two sizes, 23.6 and 27 inches, both with a 1920 x 1080 resolution. On top of that, the monitor has a decent response time of 4ms. The monitor comes in only a high gloss white and has a very slim design. I personally think it was very smart for Samsung to include wireless charging on the monitors stand; I for one, seem to set my phone there whenever I am at my desk.
Samsung continues to pioneer in the Qi wireless charging standard. Their next devices, the Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 edge+ will both support wireless charging. A release date for the SE370 has not been set just yet, so keep an eye out for that.
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iPad Mini 4 Rumored to Be Smaller Version of iPad Air 2, A9-Based iPad Air 3 Still Possible for 2015
Apple’s fourth-generation iPad mini could be a miniaturized version of the iPad Air 2, according to Japanese blog Mac Otakara. The report claims that the iPad mini 4 will adopt some of the same features and specifications as the iPad Air 2, including an 8-megapixel rear-facing iSight camera, ultra-thin 6.1mm design and possibly a fully laminated display with anti-reflective coating.
Mac Otakara claims that Apple may release the new iPad mini alongside an A9-based iPad Air 3, contrary to a sketchy report last week from Taiwan’s Economic Daily News that said no new iPad Air will be released in 2015 and that the iPad mini 4 could be Apple’s last 7.9-inch tablet as the company focuses on its larger-sized iPad Air and much-rumored “iPad Pro” in the future.
KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who has a respectable track record at reporting on Apple’s upcoming product plans, recently issued a note to investors that also claimed the iPad mini 4 will essentially be a smaller version of the iPad Air 2. Kuo did not make any predictions about the iPad Air 3 or the “iPad Pro” in his note, but he has mentioned the latter 12.9-inch tablet in previous notes to investors.
Apple releasing a trio of new iPads later this year — the iPad Air 3, iPad mini 4 and “iPad Pro” — could help the company rebound from five consecutive quarters of declining iPad sales. Moreover, while Mac Otakara has a respectable track record reporting about Apple, there is not enough substantive evidence at this time to firmly suggest that all three tablets will actually be unveiled this autumn.
Apple, Google, and Microsoft Among Companies Signing New White House Climate Pledge
Apple will join twelve other companies from across the country today at the White House in support of the American Business Act on Climate Pledge, which aims to tackle climate change head-on thanks to the backing of partners like Apple.
The new pledge will cut nearly 6 billion tons of carbon pollution through the year 2030, “an amount equivalent to taking all the cars in the United States off the road for more than 4 years.” Apple’s addition to the pledge doesn’t appear to include any projects debuting exclusively for the new initiative, but the company will seemingly continue to heavily support a positive environmental message, now in partnership with the White House.
Apple, already running all of its U.S. operations on 100% renewable energy, will bring an estimated 280 megawatts of clean power generation online by the end of 2016 through investments in Arizona, California, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon and Sichuan Province, China. Since 2011, Apple has reduced carbon emissions from its global corporate facilities, data centers and retail stores by 48%.
The other companies signing the pledge include: Alcoa, Bank of America, Berkshire Hathaway Energy, Cargill, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, Microsoft, PepsiCo, UPS, and Walmart. By signing on as a partner, the companies are voicing support for a “strong” outcome for the climate negotiations in Paris this December, and promising an “ongoing commitment” to positive environmental action.
In total, the American Business Act on Climate Pledge amounts to about $140 billion in environmental investments, with all of the participating companies estimated to generate more than 1,600 megawatts of new renewable energy. As the White House points out, the partnerships announced today “are only the beginning,” with a second round of pledges expected to be announced sometime this fall.
Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.
LinkedIn brings back contact export feature after user backlash
LinkedIn has discovered that folks really don’t like waiting for their contact info. A couple of days ago, the company removed its CSV and VCF file export tool, supposedly to discourage third-parties from “scraping” user data. You could still get the data by requesting an archive from the company, but that process took up to 72 hours. LinkedIn’s business-oriented community was not thrilled, so the company quickly backpedaled, saying “we’ve heard you loud and clear… effective immediately, we have turned the CSV download link back on.” However, once it gets the wait time for archival requests down to “within minutes,” the feature will be turned off again.
Filed under: Internet, Software
Via: Slashgear
Source: LinkedIn
Brits can now pass their Facebook profile on after they die
When a loved one passes away, their Facebook profile page can become an important place for friends and family to remember them by. The company already offers memorialized accounts, which shows the word “remembering” next to their name and stops anyone from logging in, but now it’s going a step further with legacy contacts. The feature is rolling out in Europe today after its US debut in February, and allows users to choose a friend or relative to manage their account after they’ve died. Once activated, this person can write a post at the top of their timeline — for instance, to share details about a memorial service — respond to friend requests and update their profile and cover photos. Users can also give legacy accounts permission to download an archive of their profile, including photos and posts, for safe keeping should they wish for their account to be deleted.
[Image credit: shutterstock]
Filed under: Internet, Facebook
Via: Telegraph
Android flaw lets attackers into your phone through MMS videos
If you’re an Android user, you’d better hope that a stranger doesn’t send you a video message in the near future — it might compromise your phone. Security researchers at Zimperium have discovered an exploit that lets attackers take control if they send a malware-laden MMS video. The kicker is that you may not even need to do anything to trigger the payload, depending on your text messaging app of choice. While the stock Messenger app won’t do anything until you see the message, Hangouts’ pre-processing for media attachments could put you at risk before you’re even aware that there’s a message waiting.
Google is already on top of the flaw, and has pushed out a fix to its hardware partners. However, whether or not you’ll get that fix will depend on your phone’s manufacturer. Zimperium tells Forbes that the Nexus 6 and Blackphone are already safe against some of the related flaws (other Nexus devices are likely in a similar boat), but more common third-party phones from Samsung, HTC and others are typically still vulnerable. It’s also unclear as to whether or not these companies will deliver fixes to their relatively recent devices in a timely manner, or at all. Depending on when you got your handset, it might remain exposed.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Google
Via: Forbes
Source: NPR
When and where to watch the OnePlus 2 Live Stream launch
As you’re probably well aware, OnePlus will be live streaming the launch of its new flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 2, later today (July 27th). As one would expect with OnePlus though, the launch isn’t exactly conventional. OnePlus gave away a bunch of VR cardboard glasses a few weeks ago, in preparation for streaming the OnePlus 2 launch in 3D. But when and where can you catch the live stream event?
OnePlus has released an app for its fans to watch the live stream in all its VR glory, but if you don’t have cardboard VR glasses, don’t worry. OnePlus has stated that there will be a cardboard-free 360 experience built into the OnePlus 2 launch app. There’s still a fair bit of time between now and launch, so if you are handy with a piece of card and some scissors, you could always make your own VR glasses, following the directions given here. You can also download the OnePlus 2 Launch app from here. Let us know your thoughts about the interactive launch in the comments below.
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Epic App Battles of Android: Pandora vs. Slacker
Welcome to the firsts installment of Epic App Battles of Android: Music Edition! Here is our first epic match up!
In the blue corner, we have Pandora, founded in 2000 with 100 Million Downloads and a user rating of 4.4
In the red corner, we have Slacker, founded in 2006 with 10 Million Downloads and a user rating of 4.2
Who will win this epic battle between the legendary titans? Read on and find out.
Round 1: App design
Pandora brings to the table a clean, white, high-resolution user interface that is present when searching for stations, viewing your feed, profile, and adjusting the applications settings menu. At first glance, the interface is overwhelming due to the multiple tabs and shortcut menus.
Once you take the time to create stations, which is very simple to do, all of your stations will be listed under the stations tab. The stations tab is probably the most important aspect of Pandora because it allows you to choose the station you want to listen to. It also gives you the option to select multiple stations and shuffle them together into one station. After a station is selected the user interface changes to a gradient hue of navy blue and displays cover art of the song as the song plays.
The ability to switch from the now playing screen back to the Pandora homepage to view your profile which is Pandora’s version of a Timeline, the Feed, and Settings tab creates a comfortable user experience and is very easy to use.
Rating: 7.5
Slacker takes a totally different approach to its user interface. The homepage of Slacker has a mix between white and variations of gray triangles creating a high-resolution wallpaper background. The header and footer menus of the app are deep blacks that, when viewed against the wallpaper background, gives the application a beautiful and monochromatic design.
Slacker’s ‘Now Playing’ menu is simply gorgeous. The menu displays the current song’s album art while behind the album art is a background of the same cover art just with a low opacity giving a sleek appearance. That combined with the creatively designed play, skip, and back icon buttons creates an ascetically appealing. Switching between Slacker’s menus are hidden gems. The ‘gems’ are creative transitions that flip, flop, and fly around like slides of a PowerPoint presentation. The snappy transitions, intuitive menus, and crisp, rock-star like graphics allow Slacker to have a bit of swagger.
Rating: 9.5
Round 1:
Pandora – 7.5
Slacker – 9.5
Round 2: Features
Pandora, which is pegged as a music discovery app, takes a simplistic approach to music-streaming. Pandora attempts to create an intimate music experience for you, based on the songs and artists that you love. Search for Lecrae or maybe Justin Timberlake, and Pandora’s algorithm engine built off the Music Genome Project creates a playlist loaded with comparable artists from a library of nearly a million songs.
What this does is allow you to listen to the artist you like and discover an artist that you might have never heard of but creates similar music. The free version of Pandora is limited to 6 skips per hour and has ads and commercials throughout your listening experience. Upgrading to Pandora One, the subscription service, enables fewer interruptions and removes ads as well as other perks like more daily skips.
What We Like about Pandora
- Ability to get introduced to new music
- Sleeper Time – Set a timer for how long you would like to listen from 15, 30, or 60 minutes. This is great for listening before going to bed.
- Alarm Clock – Set an alarm time, and you can wake up to your favorite artist station instead of a pesky rooster or alarm tone.
What We Don’t Like about Pandora
- The lack of control over music content. You only have the ability to pick the artist station not actually listen to that particular artist music.
- As an Android app, Pandora for Android has a good design, but it doesn’t feel like an Android application it feels like an iPhone app placed into the Android ecosystem. We would like to see them actually create Pandora for Android using Google’s Material Design guidelines.
- When you find a song you like you can’t save it to a playlist, replay it, or save it for offline playback like a lot of other streaming music apps.
- The free version only allows 6 skips per hour.
Rating: 8.5
Slacker is a Discovery and On Demand service which, for the most part, is relatively unknown compared to other heavyweights in the streaming music category like Pandora, Spotify, and iHeartRadio. Although Slacker seeks to change that by giving you everything, including the kitchen sink.
Slacker is a hands-on music experience for those seeking more control. The free version of Slacker is quite limited compared to what you can unlock with the paid versions. The free version of Slacker allows you to search for your favorite artist, but only allows you to play similar titles, not the actual artist. Also in the free version you are limited to 6 skips per hour. Much like what Pandora offers.
You do have the ability to listen to curated playlist from genres, moods, seasons, etc. Although Slacker Plus and Premium boasts a music library of over 2.5 million songs and gives you control over creating a playlist, and saving songs offline to listen to when there is no available internet connection. One more amazing feature is the ability to listen to entire albums and searching for song titles.
What We Like about Slacker
- Beautifully designed user interface, crispy sleek graphics
- Ability to save songs to favorite playlist and even save to your device with no internet connection available
- Search for songs of an artist by demand
- Ability to listen to entire Albums playback songs
- Ability to stop, fast forward, rewind, and even repeat songs
What We Don’t Like about Slacker
- Free version is plagued by constant on screen Advertisements
- Can only skip 6 songs per hour on the free version
- Doesn’t have the option to set a timer to allow the app to turn off by itself
Rating: 8.5
Round 2:
Pandora – 8.5
Slacker – 8.5
Round 3: Price
Pandora’s Free Version: Ads, commercials, and limited to 6 skips per hour
Pandora’s Pandora One Subscription: $4.99 per month or $36 for the year upgrades you to no ads and fewer interruptions
Rating: 8
Slacker’s Free Version: Ads, commercials, limited listening time, and 6 skips per hour per station
Slacker’s Radio Plus: $3.99 per month, ad-free listening, unlimited song skips, offline stations for data-free listening
Slacker’s Premium: $9.99 per month, play songs and albums on demand, create custom playlists, listen to offline playlists and albums, unlimited skips, ad-free listening
Rating: 9
Round 3:
Pandora – 8
Slacker – 9
After 3 rounds of head to head action between Pandora and Slacker, we have to take it to the judges score cards. It was a close fight but Slacker prevailed with a score of 27 points compared to Pandora’s 24.
Final Score:
Slacker – 27
Pandora – 24
Summary
It seems that Pandora, being a veteran, got too comfortable in its place in the streaming audio market, allowing other apps to encroach on its territory. Now we have other services that offer the same features as Pandora and more.
Before this battle I had never used Slacker, and I really felt no needed to because I have been a loyal fan of Spotify for the last 2 years and have paid my monthly dues faithfully. Slacker is an extremely well designed app that offers an array of interesting and useful features. It is also easy to use and created a fun user experience.
Tell us what you thought about the battle by leaving comments below. Which streaming music app do you use?
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AIVAnet 