Review: Quarter is an External Battery for the iPhone That Charges With a MagSafe Cable
Beaver Electronics Co. has debuted a unique fast-charging external battery for the iPhone, which it’s dubbed “Quarter,” because it takes less than a quarter of the time to charge compared to a normal external battery. The secret lies in the charging method — Quarter has a built-in MagSafe port that allows it to be connected to MacBook’s MagSafe Power Adapter.
Apple does not allow third-party companies to use its MagSafe technology, so Quarter has been created without Apple’s permission and with components Apple likely would not approve of, but its super fast charging capabilities are undeniably enticing.
Design wise, Quarter is similar in size to an iPhone 6 Plus. It’s just as wide and a bit shorter, but quite thick and heavy. It’s 12.5mm thick and it weighs 180 grams. It’s made from aluminum and has an an extra lip at the top with a hole that could be attached to a bag or backpack, but given its size, I’m not sure anyone would want to use it that way so that extra bit of material is extraneous and an unusual design choice.
There are four indicator lights on the Quarter that are lit by a built-in LED. These lights let you know how much power is left, activated by shaking or tapping the Quarter. A shake or a tap is also how the Quarter is turned on to begin charging a device it’s plugged in to.
‘Pay with Amazon’ buttons are coming to third-party mobile apps
Amazon’s making it even easier for you to spend your money outside of its own site. Re/code reports that the online retailer is expanding Pay with Amazon, which lets customers use their saved payment info for third-party purchases, to mobile applications. Essentially, this means developers can start taking advantage of the feature on any app they make, giving people a familiar option to use during checkout time. Amazon has been offering the service for a couple of years now, though it was limited to desktop sites, rather than including smartphone or tablet apps. It’s too early to tell how many devs will start adopting the buttons, but Pay with Amazon does offer a quick, secure and, most importantly, familiar way for users to shell out more cash — and that may be hard to pass on.
Source: Re/code
Best photo gallery apps [2015]
Non-Nexus Android devices come with a default photo gallery application, but sometimes they aren’t all we want it to be. Many basic photo gallery apps are missing extra features or just look downright terrible. Android is a popular platform and, as a result, there’s a variety of different photo gallery apps available for all.
Some developers have even gone as far as recreating Apple’s iOS photo gallery app under a different name. Whether you want a professional photo gallery app straight from Google or a small-scale photo gallery from an independent developer, Google Play has something for you.
Google Photos
Google Photos has quickly risen to the top as far as photo galleries go. Not only is it a visually pleasing app to view photos in, but it’s also smart in that you can view them by year, the location a photo was taken at, and so on. There’s also the nice added benefit of free cloud storage for all of your photos. Granted, they’re compressed in a smaller, low quality format, but who wouldn’t want all of their photos backed up into the cloud for viewing on any device?
Piktures Gallery
Piktures Gallery claims to be the first gesture-based photo gallery for managing all of your photos and videos. This does everything a photo gallery app would do (it even has a GIF player) and takes quality up a notch. It has a fast and beautiful interface, lets you resize photos before sharing, and everything is very intuitive. It truly is gesture-based, as almost everything can be accessed through swiping and sliding. The user has little interaction with menus, except when selecting different views, categories, and so on.
MyRoll Gallery
MyRoll is a well designed replacement for your Android device’s stock photo gallery. Not only that, but it claims to be the first gallery to be Android Wear-compatible. It’s similar to Google Photos in that it’s an intelligent gallery, allowing you to organize all of your photos in a collage view based around events, data, and even location. There’s also a “Smart Mode,” which lets you highlight the best photos from your gallery and put them at the forefront. Similar to Google Photos, MyRoll will also notify of you of moments from the past, so you can look back and reflect on that trip to Paris or your child’s first birthday party.
Flickr
Flickr from Yahoo is another fun photo gallery app, as it just this year got a big overhaul. Not only can you upload and view all of your photos in the Flickr app, but you can also edit them with Flickr’s online photo editing features. There’s no need to worry about a lack of storage space, as Flickr gives you up to 1000GB of cloud storage for all of your photos and videos. And don’t worry about the interface, that’s one of the many things that was changed in the overhaul, and frankly, it’s very intuitive and user friendly now!
QuickPic Gallery
QuickPic is another gallery used by millions of Android users. It features a colorful theme and modern design (not Material Design, unfortunately) to help you easily find and access photos. Unique to QuickPic is its slideshow feature, which lets you view all of your high quality photos in a slideshow format. You can even exclude certain albums from the slideshow if you want to only go through a few moments with friends or family. It also has a neat file transfer feature, which allows you to share photos with other devices over the Wi-Fi.
A+ Gallery
The A+ Gallery takes the iPhone-style photo gallery and brings it to Android with a Material Design style. There isn’t anything particularly special or unique about this gallery, just that it takes the iPhone-style design and incorporates it to Android with a twist. You can view your moments based on year, collections, and moments. All of your photos can be synced or backed up to other cloud storage services like Dropbox and Google Drive as well as the ability to transfer them over to Facebook.
FOTO Gallery
Last up is a unique gallery called FOTO, which allows you to organize thousands of photos in under a minute. With the simple tap of a button, FOTO can organize all of your photos in varying folders. For example, selfies will go in a selfie folder, and family will go in a “family” folder. The organization isn’t perfect, so some photos might not end up where they belong, but it works for the most part.
FOTO Gallery also has all the basic search and view functions, but in addition to that, it also has Chromecast integration. If you’re not familiar with that, it will essentially let you cast your photos and videos to a TV with a Chromecast device in it. It’s very handy for getting a big-picture view of all of your moments!
Closing
There’s an insurmountable amount of photo gallery apps in the Play Store. That said, there’s way too many for us to include on this list, and we’ve no doubt missed some gems out there.
That said, we’re opening up the comments box to you, the reader! We’d love to hear what your favorite photo gallery/photo editing tools are. Be sure to let us know in the comments section below.
Come comment on this article: Best photo gallery apps [2015]
Facebook is testing a Craiglist-style Local Markets feature
The next time you clean out your house, you might end up selling your old stuff on Facebook instead of Craigslist. According to a report from Techcrunch, Facebook recently did a small test of a “Local Market” feature in its iOS app. Instead of the “messenger” button in the app’s bottom navigation bar, a “market” button appeared that took users to a categorized location for buying and selling items. The categories are familiar to anyone who’s spent time on Craigslist: you can browse items across cars, furniture, antiques, electronics, clothing, books, and many more. Judging by some posts seen on Twitter, it looks like Facebook has been testing the feature for a a few weeks now.
Source: Techcrunch
Apple’s iPad Pro may go on sale November 11th
With Apple’s iPad business continuing to slow down, the upcoming iPad Pro is one of the more important products in the company’s pipeline. Apple introduced it in early September but declined to give a release date, only saying it would arrive sometime in November. For Apple, that usually means the end of the month, but it seems that’s not the case this time. According to the well-connected Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac, Apple’s 12.9-inch iPad should go on sale on Wednesday, November 11th both online and in stores. Alongside the giant new tablet, Apple will also start selling its new Pencil stylus and Smart Keyboard for $99 and $169, respectively. If you’re ready to buy into Apple’s vision of a big-screen tablet, get ready to dive deep into your wallet: the iPad Pro starts at $799 for 32GB of storage and goes all the way up to $1,079 for 128GB of storage and LTE connectivity.
Source: 9to5Mac
Periscope’s first live horror flick will scare you off the internet for good
The internet can be a scary place if you’re not careful. Horror film producer Jason Blum is making sure of that. His latest film, Fifteen, doesn’t just leverage social media networks for its setting, they’re also the movies’ broadcast platform. The film follows a serial killer who livestreams his heinous crimes in real time using the Periscope app to promote his grisly deeds. So of course the movie itself is being shown on Periscope. It premiered on Thursday, just in time for the Halloween weekend, and is being billed as a “live horror experience”.
Via: The Verge
Source: Variety
Google’s ‘Who’s Down’ app is here because no one replies to your texts
Never let it be said that Google doesn’t like throw weird ideas at the wall and see what sticks. Take the quietly-released “Who’s Down” Android app that just hit the Google Play store, for example. It’s an invite-only app that simply shows you whether you’re “down” to hang out — presumably, once you have confirmed that you are indeed “down,” your friends nearby will see that status and include you in whatever wonderful activities they have planned.
Via: 9to5Google
Source: Google Play Store
Watch a live Director’s Commentary of ‘Until Dawn’ right now
Until Dawn is a spooky spectacle of classic horror themes and beautifully branching narrative paths — and today, developers at Supermassive Games will spill a bunch of behind-the-scenes secrets, live on Twitch. Supermassive is participating in an Until Dawn Director’s Commentary livestream at 3:30PM ET, hosted on the official PlayStation Twitch channel. If you have questions about the characters, setting, mechanics or story of Until Dawn, this is where you might find your answers. Were we supposed to loathe Emily? Who was Josh modeled after? Will Sam be our BFF in real life (please)? For the answers, tune in right here, right now. Who knows — the devs may even talk about Rush of Blood, the Until Dawn spin-off for PlayStation VR.
Source: PlayStation Blog
New Apple TV Tidbits: Limited App Discovery, User Guide, Amazon Pulls Apple TVs, and More
The new Apple TV officially launched today at Apple Stores and select resellers in the U.S. and other first wave countries. As customers begin receiving their new Apple TV deliveries around the world, the following are useful tidbits about the new fourth-generation device.
Apple TV Support and User Guide – Forum Discussion
Apple has updated its Apple TV Support portal for the new Apple TV, including an official Apple TV User Guide that contains detailed information about how to set up and use the streaming box. The user guide is broken down into several categories: Getting Started, Basics, Siri, iTunes, App Store, Photos, Music, Home Sharing, Search, Accessibility, Safety and more.
Apple TV apps – Forum Discussion
iMore has shared a video that scrolls through all of the new Apple TV apps currently available through the tvOS App Store. Due to the current lack of discoverability, the video searches tvOS apps based on their first letter in alphabetical order.
Eli Hodapp at our sister website TouchArcade explains in his Apple TV first impressions:
If screenshots on Apple pages are any indication, categories for the Apple TV App Store are coming (maybe?) but as of this writing, there’s a distinct division between the haves and the have-nots in the Apple TV app world. Currently, the Apple TV App Store only shows what’s featured. If your game isn’t featured, it effectively doesn’t exist. There’s no way to browse genres, top lists don’t exist (this arguably might be a good thing), and finding something that isn’t featured requires typing its name in the search field.
MacRumors recently published an Apple TV apps roundup that goes into more detail about some of the new apps and games, including Airbnb, Alto’s Adventure, Crossy Road, Plex, Sing! Karaoke, Withings Home and more.
Charging and Using the Siri Remote – Forum Discussion
Apple has published a support document with step-by-step instructions on how to charge your Siri Remote and get help if it isn’t working. Apple TV will alert you when your Siri Remote needs to be charged, or you can manually check the remote’s charge by navigating to Settings > Remotes and Devices > Bluetooth and selecting the remote.
In countries and regions that support Siri, the remote is called the Siri Remote. Elsewhere, it is called the Apple TV Remote, but has identical functionality otherwise. International users can easily access Siri by changing their Apple TV’s region to the U.S. or other supported countries.
Amazon Removes Apple TV
Apple TV and Chromecast devices are no longer listed on Amazon
Following through with its plans, online retailer Amazon has removed all Apple TV and Chromecast listings from its website, per Variety. Amazon removed the Apple and Google streaming media players because they are incompatible with its Prime Video streaming service, which it believes may cause confusion for customers.
In a statement provided to BuzzFeed News, Apple emphasized that the lack of Prime Video support on the new Apple TV is solely Amazon’s decision.
Incidentally, that Amazon Prime Video is the exception to the conga line of content offerings above is entirely Amazon’s doing. A ~magnanimous~ Apple tells BuzzFeed News that “all are welcome” on its new Apple TV platform. But Amazon — which recently purged Apple TV from its store — doesn’t have a Prime Video app in the Apple TV App Store. And as of a few days ago, it hadn’t submitted one.
Amazon told BuzzFeed News the company “doesn’t have anything to share” on the topic.
Visit the Apple TV section on the MacRumors discussion forums for more tidbits.
Tags: Amazon, Apple TV apps, User Guide, Siri Remote
Buyer’s Guide: Apple TV (Buy Now)
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Acer Chromebook 15 review
The Chromebook 11 C740 is perfect for students on a budget or anyone needing a small and light machine they could take with them anywhere. But Acer has a much more powerful Chromebook in its lineup this year. Enter Acer’s Chromebook 15, a true powerhouse for all of your office needs. It’s also perfect for entertainment with its crisp Full HD display.
It’s an impressive machine, and it may be the only Chromebook you’ll ever need.
Design
This is no compact laptop. With such a large display, it needs to have a bigger housing. The new Chromebook 15 wants to be the machine that can meet all of your needs, and in doing that, portability isn’t the focus. At almost 5lbs, I’d hardly call the Chromebook lightweight, but it’s fairly easy to carry around.
Its housing sports a white-colored textured design, which looks alright while very generic. It has a microweave pattern, keeping the Chromebook from looking too generic, but that comes with a lot of downsides. The Chromebook 15 attracts dirt and grime way too easily. If you don’t clean it often, the dirt and grime it collects from sitting on your desk gets difficult to remove, making it a real eyesore.
The Chromebook is also oddly thick. You’d think a machine like this would have a certain amount of thinness to it with having such low specifications.
As far as the keyboard goes, it’s frustrating in that it’s not spacious enough. It resembles that of the compact C740 (and the Chromebook 13 from 2014). It’d be natural to think that a larger Chromebook would come with a more defined keyboard footprint. The trackpad is very responsive, and there’s little jump to it.
There are certainly a lot of pitfalls as far as design goes. It all feels so very generic, which isn’t something you want out of a pricier Chromebook. However, if you bought this Chromebook for media, you’re in luck.
Hardware
The Chromebook 15 has a 15.6-inch Full HD (1920×1080) display that shows media beautifully. Not only is it great for media, but the larger size allows you to manage more browsers, tabs, and other applications easily. There are also two front-facing speakers placed on either side of the keyboard, which sound good.
The model I was sent to review is the CB5-571-362Q, the unit with a Full HD display. Interestingly, Acer isn’t advertising this, but it’s actually an IPS panel, an interesting choice that doesn’t allow for those nice wide-viewing angles, and the matte finish evokes little glare. Other configurations of this model with a much less enthusiastic display, which in turn bring the price down.
On the left side of this unit is your power, an HDMI port, a USB 3.0 slot, and an auxiliary port.
On the right side is a SD card reader that can support up to 128GB of extra storage, and a USB 2.0 port. With this model you also get dual-band 802.11AC WiFi and Bluetooth 4.0.
Finally, above the screen is a 720p HD webcam along with a microphone.
Performance
Inside the Chromebook 15 is a fifth-generation Intel Celeron processor, 4GB of RAM, and a wicked fast removable M.2 32GB SSD. This is possibly the most interesting aspect of the Chromebook 15’s hardware. The SSD is small in size, but if you were to ever need more room, there’s potential for breaking into the Chromebook and swapping it out for a larger capacity SSD.
Most probably won’t need more space than that on the Chromebook, given that all of your documents are in the cloud, but its a nice possibility for the power user. Beyond that, everything was smooth as expected. There were no hangups in testing, and things were generally faster and smoother than previous models. This machine boots up in an advertised 7 seconds. I even found it could do so in 5 seconds.
As far as performance goes, Acer did a fantastic job. I really like the ability to pop open the machine, something that many manufacturers are moving away from.
Battery
As per the norm on a Chromebook, battery life is out of this world. It’s frustrating having machines that only last two, three, maybe four hours of use, which is all commonplace as far as Windows laptops go. Not that that’s a bad thing. Windows laptops have much more powerful hardware than you’ll ever find in a Chromebook.
Acer understands the users’ needs for a long-lasting battery, and thus, threw a monster 3220mAh battery in here that can last up to nine hours of consistent use. In other words, you can get a full 8-hour work day from the Chromebook 15, even longer if you aren’t using it for eight hours straight. Very impressive.
Software
As you might expect, Acer’s Chromebook 15 is running the latest version of Google’s Chrome OS. Everything runs smoothly, applications open quickly, and the marketplace is constantly expanding with more applications, thus making a Chromebook even more useful.
For those not familiar with Chrome OS, it does require an Internet connection, though there’re ways to create documents offline, making an Internet connection not constantly necessary. You’ll need to connect up when it’s time to sync your documents to the cloud for access on another computer.
Honestly, there isn’t much to say here. Chrome OS, is still, well, Chrome OS. It’s not for everybody, as you can only access cloud-based applications. There’re no native Windows or Mac apps on this machine to be seen, though there’re ways to boot another operating system on here if you ever get tired of Chrome. However, at that point, you’ll see a serious drop in battery life and most certainly performance. And in that case, you mine as well have bought a different laptop.
Closing
The suggested retail price is $449, though you can buy it from the Google Store starting at $349, and other retailers may even have their own markdowns. Several other models start at $249 from various retailers, such as Amazon and Newegg.
When it comes down to it, the Acer Chromebook 15 is a nice machine specifically for media. That large and crisp 15.6-inch display paired with the dual speakers make for a great movie night or YouTube session, but at $349, it’s a very generic Chromebook that may leave you wanting to look elsewhere.
[Acer] [Google Store] [Amazon] [Newegg]
Come comment on this article: Acer Chromebook 15 review
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