Samsung to offer Galaxy S7 in two sizes, report says
The Samsung Galaxy S7 could come in two different sizes, according to a report from Reuters. Not only that, but Samsung is reportedly starting an initial production run of 5 million units, indicating that the company has high hopes for its new flagship.
Samsung will offer a 5.2-inch flat Galaxy S7 as well as a 5.7-inch version with a curved display called the Galaxy S7 Edge. The Korean tech giant did something similar earlier this year, offering a flat-screened Galaxy S6 and a curved-screen Galaxy S6 Edge.
The company is expected to initially produce 3.3 million units of the Galaxy S7 and 1.6 million units of the Galaxy S7 Edge.
This also isn’t the first rumor to hint that Samsung will offer two variants of the Galaxy S7, as renders of the Galaxy S7 and alleged Galaxy S7 Plus have shown up in the past.
The report from Reuters says that Samsung plans to launch the Galaxy S7 in February, which the Korean tech giant has done in the past. The Samsung Galaxy S6 was announced during Mobile World Congress and the year before that, the Galaxy S5 was announced in late February as well.
source: Reuters
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Verizon will give you up to $650 to switch to its network
Verizon announced today that it will be offering up to $650 to help with costs when switching over to its network. We’ve seen other carriers offer something similar, such as T-Mobile and its Carrier Freedom promotion.
Big Red will give you up to $650 per line to switch over to its network, but that’s only if you have an outstanding balance on your smartphone of up to that amount. Alternatively, Verizon will only give you $350 if you pay early termination fees.
There are, of course, some caveats. You must order a new smartphone with monthly payments from Verizon, and you have to port your number over to the carrier. This means that consumers must qualify for a monthly payment plan, which depends on your credit score/history (even those with good credit sometimes don’t qualify, for some reason).
Keep in mind that Verizon won’t be writing you a check. This $650 will come in the form of a Visa pre-paid gift card, which will come in the mail 6-8 weeks after sending in your smartphone. Of course, the carrier you’re leaving might not want to wait that long, so you may have to shell out the money upfront and use the gift card to cover costs elsewhere.
Verizon is offering this new promotion to those who are eligible starting today.
source: Verizon
Come comment on this article: Verizon will give you up to $650 to switch to its network
Reliance Jio will begin offering their 4G network to India in 2016
Reliance Jio, which happens to be a subsidiary of one of India’s private businesses, has announced that they’ll finally be rolling out a 4G network to customers over the next year. Currently, the network has gone live for employees, but the rest of India can expect to see it in 2016.
This network is completely forward-thinking and will supposedly be able to be upgraded to 5G when the time comes. This does mean that their network will be 4G only with no backwards compatibility with 3G, which means VoLTE will be a high priority.
While Reliance Jio won’t be the first carrier to offer 4G in India, they will be the first to offer a unified network across the entire country. The official rollout is expected sometime in March or April.
source: Android Central
Come comment on this article: Reliance Jio will begin offering their 4G network to India in 2016
Samsung’s smaller Galaxy S7 Edge might get scrapped in favor of the larger variant
It’s a pretty safe bet that we’ll see Samsung announce two versions of the Galaxy S7, just like they did with the Galaxy S6 in 2015, but we’re still trying to figure out exactly what two phones those will be. Rumors pointed at two sizes of the device, but with how successful the Galaxy S6 Edge was, it’s hard to imagine Samsung would abandon their curved flagship so quickly.
It turns out Samsung will probably be keeping both models by making some sacrifices. A new report suggests that Samsung will be scrapping the 5.2-inch version of the Edge device and will only offer the smaller GS7 in a normal model, while keeping the curved model of the “plus” size GS7. They’ll also likely rename the Edge Plus to just the Galaxy S7 Edge.
From Samsung’s perspective, this makes a lot of sense. It would’ve been hard to simultaneously launch four different devices from a logistical standpoint, and this keeps their flagship lineup from getting quite so muddied like it was last year.
Now we just have to wait until February to see if the early launch rumors end up being true.
source: ETnews
via: Phone Arena
Come comment on this article: Samsung’s smaller Galaxy S7 Edge might get scrapped in favor of the larger variant
Huawei will push out Android 6.0 for Honor 7 owners in India who request the update
Huawei is ready to push out Android 6.0 Marshmallow to Honor 7 owners in India, but for now, only to those who request the update by filling out Huawei’s OTA request form.
Interested users will need to head over to the form at the source link below to request the update. They’ll need to provide Huawei their IMEI number, software version, and a current email address. Huawei says that Android 6.0 will be pushed to devices 24-48 hours after registering for the update.
It’s certainly an unconventional way of updating handsets, but still nice that Huawei is already offering Android 6.0 for the Honor 7 in India.
Huawei hasn’t announced the official release of Android 6.0 Marshmallow for the Honor 7 in any other regions yet. In fact, the Honor 7 in the UK is still undergoing beta testing.
The company is hoping to bring the latest refresh of Google’s mobile operating system to many of its popular devices in early 2016.
Android 6.0 Marshmallow is available for the Honor 7 in India, but only by way of that request form linked below.
source: Huawei (Google Docs)
via: Android Central
Come comment on this article: Huawei will push out Android 6.0 for Honor 7 owners in India who request the update
Briteli App Review: Your professional content curator
If you like having your content aggregated into one central place, it’s likely you’ve used a service to curate everything for you. This saves you time and allows you to discover new content.
Briteli does just that. It’s an app designed to bring everything that interests you together. It offers both webpages and applications from the app store, and suggests new items based on what you’re currently looking at.
Briteli is pronounced as “brightly”, coming from “find apps that shine brightly”.
You can check out their website at brite.li
Setup
Surprisingly enough, you are not able to create an account. Surely this is a user-dependent app and you should have your preferences saved somewhere? Well, it turns out that it’s not really necessary, and I’ll explain why later on.
Settings wise, there are no settings. Text size, themes and any other adjustments are unavailable. When you look at the app size (190KB), it becomes clear that it’s basically a web page pulled into the app. This is by no means a bad thing, as the app can be updated anytime remotely and is kept bite-sized.
Overview
Briteli is split up into Collections. These Collections are really just topics with relevant content inside. Some Collections include “Photographers Toolkit”, “Cycling World” and “Astronomy and the Skies”. While it sounds like it covers a lot, there are less then twenty-five collections and I found some of them rather, arbitrary. At first I thought it was because the app is still starting up, but a comment from the website contradicted that:
“We plan to have less than 25 collections at any point in time based on current interest and trends. For example we may add a seasonal collection like ‘Football Fever’ during a soccer world cup.“
After even more use, I found it was OK with a small amount of collections that covered most of the spectrum, although everyone will probably have a topic that they wish was included anyway.
From these Collections, you can further sieve through apps or web content. It is, however, more focused on apps from the Play Store. This is nice as it allows you to discover decent content without being forced-fed popular apps that have been dominating the top ranks in the Play Store. I personally found and downloaded some apps that interested me. The developers also said that they would be adding in more web content shortly, followed by curated products.
Moving on to the actual app, it feels a bit empty. Think of it as a blank page with a few icons slapped onto it. It’ll be nice to see something more solid with settings as well.
Regarding the no account, I really don’t think that an account is necessary. For starters, Briteli doesn’t actually give you personalized feedback. Think of it as an index of content that you can browse through. Delete the app and re-install it, or access the website version and you end up at the same place. It’s effectively saying “They clicked on “Photography”, bring up the index of app webpages and apps that we put in”.
The app was smooth and efficient for the most part.
What we liked:
- Small app size
- Easy and clean UI
- Most major categories available
And not so much…
- The UI was too clean
- Limited, pre-set content
You should think of Briteli as an index. An index full of content that enables you to find the best things for you. It doesn’t adjust to you and your taste, but rather offer a category that you like. Briteli has the potential to become a really useful and great app for everyone.
The post Briteli App Review: Your professional content curator appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Hyundai Launching CarPlay in Sonata in First Quarter of 2016
Hyundai has confirmed that CarPlay will launch in the 2016 Sonata in the first quarter of next year, per the Detroit Free Press. The carmaker will reportedly sell an SD card with new software to get the system for an undisclosed price.
The report does not specify if CarPlay will be available in 2016 Sonata models sold outside of the United States, or if Apple’s in-dash software will be backwards compatible with the 2015 Sonata. The carmaker has not yet outlined plans to bring CarPlay to the rest of its vehicle lineup.
In April 2014, Hyundai announced that CarPlay would be available in the Sonata beginning in the 2015 model year, but it failed to deliver on that promise. CarPlay is only now beginning to experience wider U.S. adoption in 2016 vehicles from General Motors, Volkswagen, Honda and other automakers, as either a standard feature or entertainment package upgrade.
CarPlay provides hands-free or eyes-free access to Maps, Phone, Messages, Music, Podcasts and third-party apps including Spotify, Rdio, iHeartRadio, CBS Radio and MLB At Bat. The platform uses Siri and interfaces with your vehicle’s knobs, dials and buttons for safer access to common iPhone features. The software is compatible with iPhone 5 or later running iOS 8 or above.
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Social media led police straight to movie pirates
How can law enforcement agencies track down some of the world’s most (in)famous pirates? The same way that we find out how our school frenemies are doing: stalking them on social media. TorrentFreak has investigated the recent convictions of three of the UK’s biggest file-sharers to learn how exactly they were caught. It turns out that copyright enforcement officials are doing the same sort of armchair-sleuthing that we all do, only that they’ve got a hotline straight to the police.
For instance, 22-year-old Reece Baker was more commonly known by his online alias, Baker92. According to the report, his fatal mistake was to include a shout-out to his “baby momzie Ria” in an NFO (info) file. Officials at the UK’s Federation Against Copyright Theft guessed that Baker92 was a surname/year of birth combination. They then searched Equifax’s credit-rating database to find anyone born in 1992 with that surname and, potentially, a child with a woman named Ria.
Similarly, 24-year-old Sahil Rafiq posted torrents under a wide variety of usernames, including memory100, hail_alpha and sohail20. Unfortunately, the sohail20 identity was also used on the customer support website for an online retailer. Rafiq had posted a question concerning his laptop, but signed the piece “Kind Regards, Sahil Rafiq.” With his real name, authorities took very little time in finding his Facebook profile and, from there, were able to alert the police.
Facebook was also the petard by which 40-year-old Graeme ‘Reidy’ Reid was hoisted, since he used the same anonymous e-mail account on his profile as he did his piracy. FACT bods simply searched for his Hushmail address and his Facebook page popped up — where he’d obligingly listed his occupation as “encoder.” We’ve not checked, but presumably bank robbers are going to start making similarly honest alternations to their social media pages in the near future.
As much as FACT would like you to think twice about sharing illegally-obtained material around the web, there’s another moral here. After all, if enforcement officers were able to find these people with a few well-chosen Google searches, then perhaps the secret is to not be so forthcoming with your personal information.
Source: TorrentFreak, FACT
US Air Force allows enlisted ranks to fly drones
The US Air Force is hurting for drone pilots, and it’s willing to take an unusual step to make sure its unmanned aircraft are well-staffed: it’s letting the enlisted ranks fly. As of next year, non-officers can pilot the RQ-4 Global Hawk recon drone once they have the necessary training. The move (along with help from other branches) should give the Air Force more daily combat air patrols even as it grapples with the effects of budget cuts. It promises a morale boost, too, as everyone could get more training and better hours.
There’s precedent for this. Other branches already allow enlisted personnel to fly drones — the Air Force has just been persistent with its officer requirement until now. Also, this echoes the process that opened up ground spotting to non-officers. There are risks, of course. Enlisted ranks elsewhere rarely get to fly drones this big, and there’s a concern that this will diminish the prestige of flying in the Air Force. However, those sacrifices might be worthwhile if they keep officers from burning out.
[Image credit: Globe Newswire]
Via: Wall Street Journal
Source: US Air Force
Xiaomi Mi 5 spotted in video and press renders
Xiaomi fans probably feel that they have been waiting forever for the company’s Mi 5 flagship. Gradually, some new details are emerging and today a number of press renders and a leaked video have appeared, showcasing a fair bit about the upcoming smartphone’s looks.
The leaked pictures show off the Mi 5 in a variety of colors, including Black, Gold, Pink and White options. The phone appears to have taken on a more curved design than the Mi 4, with slightly rounded corners and an oval-shaped home button which reportedly houses a new fingerprint scanner, á la the Galaxy S6. The previously rumored 2.5D curved glass display and 3D glass back panel also seem to make an appearance.
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The short video clip, embedded below, which claims to show the Mi 5 in action reaffirms the look of these press images. However, this model doesn’t look quite as slim as the renders and the corners are noticeably more rectangular.
Previous hardware specifications have pinned the Xiaomi Mi 5 on a quad-core Snapdragon 820 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 5.2-inch QHD display, a 16 megapixel rear camera and an 8 megapixel front facing camera. The phone is also said to come with 16GB or 64GB of internal storage and a 3,030mAh battery. A Mi 5 Plus version of the phone with a 5.5 or 5.7-inch display has also been rumored, which may account for the slightly wider looking handset model on the video.
The Xiaomi Mi 5 is rumored to cost around 2500 Yuan ($390) when it finally launches, which would make the smartphone quite the bargain.
AIVAnet 