iTunes Movies and iBooks Store Mysteriously Go Down in China

Both iTunes Movies and the iBooks Store have gone down in China, with the digital fronts of both stores replaced with an “unavailable” message. The outage was first noticed via multiple reports on popular Chinese social network Sina Weibo (via AppleInsider).

While both storefronts are experiencing outages, Apple’s status page in the country indicates that all services are up and running. It’s unclear what caused the outages, but AppleInsider says it received unverified reports claiming that Apple pulled the two digital storefronts because of a pending government investigation into its business practices.

The mysterious outages come nearly seven months after Apple launched the iTunes Movies and iBooks Stores in the country, which marked the first time Apple’s customers in China had access to its entertainment ecosystem. Apple launched Apple Music in China at the same time as iTunes Movies and the iBooks Store; Apple Music, however, has not experienced any outages.

China has become increasingly important to the Cupertino company over the past couple years. After the Americas, China is Apple’s second largest market in terms of revenue.

Tag: China
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New MacBooks May Sport Metal Injection Mold-Made Hinges to Achieve ‘Ultra-Thin’ Design

Last November it was reported that Apple was working with suppliers to “fully redesign” many of the MacBook’s internal components to achieve a slimmer design. Today, DigiTimes reports one of those redesigns is a move to metal injection mold-made hinges.

Metal injection molding is a metalworking process that’s used to create very small metal pieces that are typically used by Apple for the internals of products like iPhone and Apple Watch. Apple is looking to use the technology for its MacBook hinges to save space and achieve an “ultra-thin” design, according to DigiTimes.

The new hinges will be supplied by Amphenol, who claims to produce some of the thinnest sliding hinges in the world on its website. The company partners with Microsoft to produce the parts for the hinges on the Microsoft Surface 4.

While DigiTimes has a mixed track record reporting Apple’s future plans, the report does corroborate an earlier report that Apple was working toward a slimmer MacBook, likely scheduled for release after WWDC 2016. However, it’s unclear which MacBook lineup these reports are referring to. Apple’s refreshed MacBook is expected to include faster Skylake processors and Thunderbolt 3 with USB-C.

Related Roundup: MacBook Pro
Tag: digitimes.com
Buyer’s Guide: Retina MacBook Pro (Don’t Buy)
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Satechi’s Bluetooth Gamepad makes mobile gaming fun for a console gamer (Review)

I have a shocking confession. I don’t play mobile games. I think it’s mostly for the same reasons I play very few games on my desktop. I grew up playing games on a console with a controller sitting on my couch. It’s what I’m used to. I don’t like tapping a screen repeatedly or using virtual buttons. It’s just not a rewarding experience.

But, I really want to like mobile gaming. I love Pokemon, and while I’m not as obsessed with it as I used to be as a kid, I love to sit down and bust out some game time and relax. Now with the combination of Satechi’s Bluetooth Wireless Game Controller and apps from the Play Store, I can easily catch up on some of my favorite games and explore new ones.

Physical Overview

The Game Controller looks almost identical to an Xbox One controller. The joystick, D-Pad, bumpers, and button placement are all identical. In the center of the controller, you’ll find five buttons: Link, Select, Mode, Start, and Mouse.

The bottom of the controller you’ll find a micro-USB port to charge the internal 220 mAh battery and a power switch you slide left to right to turn the controller on and off. Luckily, there are some power-saving features if you forget to turn your controller off.

One of the best innovations in the Satechi Bluetooth Wireless Game Controller comes in the way of a mount that pulls up from the top of the controller. It’s spring loaded so it will stay closed until you extend it and place your phone in it. Due to the spring, your phone stays securely attached inside the gamepad. The opening gets just big enough for my Nexus 6P (3.06 inches) with a slim case on it. With a slightly thicker Speck case, my Nexus won’t fit at all.

I’d really suggest using a case with your phone placed in the controller. The controller is made of hard plastic, so if your phone is moving around much, there’s definitely a risk it could scrape the paint of an aluminum phone or scratch a glass body. There’s also an issue of the arm squeezing the phone hard enough to press the volume and power buttons depending on placement. A case alleviated these issues on both the Nexus 6P and Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge.

Buttons and Sticks

I wish I could say that Satechi knocked it out of the park with its buttons and sticks, but I do find some issues here. I will again be comparing the controller to an Xbox One controller, as that is obviously what Satechi based its design upon.

First off, let’s address the joysticks. The button placement, length, and width are almost identical in every way to the Xbox controller. They extend only slightly less (millimeters) from the gamepad than the Xbox controller and the surface is almost the exact same width.

Where they differ is the design on top of the joystick. The Xbox One controller has a concave design to cradle your thumb, Satechi, however, went with a flat design. This certainly leads to more thumb slipping while playing games, especially because of how stiff the sticks are. They can be a bit of a pain to move. I don’t have any doubt that due to their solid construction, these sticks will hold up over time.

The D-Pad is a bit of a mushy mess. There’s no tactile click to indicate when you’ve activated the press, you just bottom out. If the Xbox controller can be compared to a Cherry MX Blue switch on a mechanical keyboard, the Satechi Wireless Gamepad would feel much closer to the Dell keyboard that came with your pre-built desktop. Running around in Pokemon was a bit of an adventure because I never knew which way I was actually going to go unless I was looking at what I pressed.

The A, B, X, and Y buttons are a different story altogether. They feel nice to press like the glassy/plastic buttons on the Xbox controller. There’s no stiffness in these buttons and they’re easy to bottom out. The buttons share the same layout and color combination with the Xbox controller so there will be no confusion if you’re already used to one.

The five buttons located in the center of the controller are all fine. They offer no resistance and feel exactly like you’d expect them to.

Pairing and Gameplay

I have to give Satechi very high marks on how easy it was to pair the Wireless Gamepad to my phone. It took me about 13 seconds to open the Bluetooth settings on my phone, press the link button and tap the “ST-UBGC” listing. It paired instantly with no issues.

After pairing, I opened up the Gameboy Advanced emulator I use and entered settings. From the input menu, I selected the input method and chose the controller as an external keyboard. Everything worked perfectly from then on.

There is no software to control the gamepad, but most emulators or games that support gamepads will allow you to rebind keys.

As I said earlier, the D-Pad is a bit mushy and the joysticks are a bit stiff which interfere with gameplay a bit, but once you get used to them, you’re good to go. Gaming is responsive and free of any Bluetooth lag.

Where the sticks will really cause you issues is if you’re playing any kind of first person shooter games. It will NOT be easy to aim. I hope the sticks loosen up in time, but as of this review, they haven’t yet.

Conclusion

I love the world of gaming that the Satechi Wireless Bluetooth Gamepad has now opened up for me. My wife, however, is going to hate me mirroring Pokemon (or any other game) to our television with screen sharing and Chromecast, but, I get to play Pokemon in 65 glorious inches so I’ll deal with the flak.

There are certainly improvements that Satechi can make in a hardware revision, but I do believe that the gamepad is perfectly usable in its current state (but, it could get better). You can grab one from Amazon for only $30 with Prime shipping!

Product Link: Satechi Bluetooth Wireless Gamepad

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Witti Dotti – Novelty cubed (Review)

I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so excited to review a prodcut as I was when I received the Witti Dotti to review. I bugged my poor Editor, Matt, for weeks to get it. And then, that day finally came. It arrived on my doorstep. With great anticipation I opened the box. Never use a knife when excited. Thankfully, I did not cut myself.

So what is it?

The Witti Dotti, in its basest form, is a cube with an LED screen that is capable of displaying notifications from your Android device via Bluetooth. It’s very evident that Witti approached the Dotti with pixel art in mind. The screen consists of 64 LEDs that act as pixels. Each LED is capable of displaying an array of colors.

This is where the Dotti gets interesting. On the Google Play Store, Witti has a companion app for the Dotti, called simply, “Dotti.” With the Dotti app you can create your own custom pixel art for the device, choose what notifications to have the Dotti display and not to display, and a host of other things.

Dotti app

Build Quality

The Dotti feels solid. The outer casing is made form a tough feeling plastic that has a semi-smooth texture. There’s enough texture to the plastic to make you feel confident in your grip when you’re holding the device. The LED screen is bright, vibrant, and feels of high quality. There’s a glossiness to the screen that compliments the device quite well.

The Dotti’s LEDs shine spectacularly. You can see this device, very clearly, from across a room if you need to. The back of the Dotti houses a micro USB port for charging it. Under the plastic next to the micro USB port is a tiny LED that indicates when the Dotti is charging and when it is fully charged. I found the back of the Dotti to be quite peculiar. It has a warped pyramid effect and I am not really sure what the reasoning behind that design choice was. I think it has something to do with the Witti branding, as a whole. Regardless, the Dotti is a solid feeling device that feels high in quality.

I was a bit shocked by the Dotti’s size. I expected something much larger, but the reality is a device that measures in at H 65 x W 65 x D 31 mm. The official specs are:

• Color: Artistic White
• Bluetooth: v4.0 BLE
• Wireless Range: 15m (49ft)
• Charging Input: Micro USB
• Weight: 82g
• Dimensions: H 65 x W 65 x D 31 mm
• Battery: 720+ Hours in notification mode, 5+ Hours with continuous light
• Application: iOS7 (or above) or Android 4.3 (or above)

Function

After spending a decent amount of time with the Witti Dotti, I began to ask myself, “What in the world is the point in this thing?” It took me quite a while to find an answer. Ultimately, the Dotti is a novelty. It’s not meant to fill any particular need in your life. It’s just a fun chunk of plastic that can display your Android device’s notifications. I hate to admit it, but when I first started using the Dotti, I was a bit disappointed. Over time though, the little rascal grew on me and I began to find uses for it. Let me start with the most practical use.

Let’s say, hypothetically, that you’re sitting at your desk jamming to some tunes while you’re at work. Like you do every day, you put your phone on vibrate (or silent) so that it does not disturb your coworkers. You have a history of missing texts and other notifications because of this. Well, no more. When a notification hits your Android device, the Dotti will begin to flash an icon that corresponds to the type of notification you’ve received. The Dotti is equipped to display unique notification icons for many, many third party apps including:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Whatsapp
• Wechat
• Facebook Messenger
• QQ
• Line
• Weibo
• Skype
• Google+
• Instagram
• Viber
• IFTTT
• Hangouts
• Kakaotalk
• Telegram
• Snapchat
• Outlook
• Pushover
• PagerDuty

The most unique use I found for the Dotti was not even my own idea. One day, while messing around with the Dotti, my wife said to me that it would be great for someone who is hearing impaired. This was a stroke of genius. I absolutely cannot think of a better target audience for the Dotti than those who are hearing impaired. It would be a great tool for them to use to help avoid missing text messages and other notifications. I think Witti should explore this idea further and possibly tailor a model of the Dotti towards that function. If they market it that way, a person may even be able to get their health insurance to cover the cost.

The not so practical

Outside of it’s intended function, the Dotti has some not so practical (but still fun) uses. It has an animation function that will flash Space Invader looking aliens every second or so. It also can serve as a great nightlight. There is a built in clock, but it’s very difficult to read so I would not recommend using it. There’s a battery indicator to show you the current charge on your Dotti, and there’s even a built in “Dice Game” that’s not really a game at all. You just shake the device and it displays a random number of dots (like you would see on a standard six sided die).

Clock function

 It’s not all fields of roses

Unfortunately, the Dotti is not without it’s flaws and disappointments. My first qualm with it is its price. $69.99 is just too much to ask for this thing. It is just not practical or useful enough to justify that price. I don’t care how good the build quality is, something this novel is not worth more than $20-$30, and that’s pushing it.

Second, the Dotti app is atrocious. It’s very basic, not necessarily easy to navigate and doesn’t seem to really compliment the device at all. I was especially disappointed in the art function of the app. I thought the 64 pixels would go a lot further than they did. My dream was to do an 8-bit Megaman head to display on the Dotti, but I just could not accomplish this with the Dotti’s color palette and limited pixel density. You are able to make basic designs like smiley faces and Pac-man, but this feature ultimately felt like a waste to me. Witti could have done so much more with it.

Finally, the battery life is terrible. I can get about a day out of it in continuous light mode, but with a 3-4 hour charge time, you begin to ask yourself “Why bother?” If you want to use the Dotti to display pixel art or run the animation function, the 3-4 hour charge time for barely a day of use just doesn’t seem worth it.

*I cannot verify the claim that the Dotti will last 720+ hours on notification mode, as my time with it was spent in continuous light mode.

Conclusion

The Witti Dotti is a neat device. It’s fun and novel, but not terribly practical. The build quality is excellent, the LED screen is bright and vibrant, and the product overall just exudes quality craftsmanship. However, the $69.99 price tag is a turn off. Nothing about this device justifies that price. If you are able to find a Dotti for less than $30, I’d say go for it. You’ll enjoy it. But if you have to spend more than $40, I’d recommend you pass on it until you can find a better deal.

At the time of this writing, Amazon.com has the Witti Dotti on sale for $39.99

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Apple might finally be revamping the App Store

Finding anything on the App Store is kind of a nightmare, but Apple apparently has a way to fix that. And the Cupertino company is considering taking a page from Google to do it: paid search results, according to a report from Bloomberg. Meaning, say, Adobe could buy keywords that’d ensure Lightroom would appear when you’re looking for say “photo editing.” If that means actually finding the app you’re after on the first try instead of it being buried under a sea of clones and junkware promising more followers on the likes of Instagram or Twitter — if it shows up at all — then, awesome.
Bloomberg says that the team working on this is about 100 deep and lead by the company’s vice president, Todd Teresi, though whenever we’ll see these changes isn’t exactly clear. But, this seems like a plan that goes slightly against Apple’s “people are not our product” statements, so maybe take this rumor with a grain of salt.

Source: Bloomberg

Millions of kids used e-cigarettes last year

Stephen Dorff is apparently more influential than we all thought — if the youth of America even know who he is. Last year 3 million middle-schoolers and high-school students used e-cigarettes as their preferred method of tobacco delivery, according to a report by the Center for Disease Control. The CDC says that this carries over from 2014, where e-cigs were the most used tobacco product among those surveyed. In 2011, e-cigs represented 1.5 percent of overall tobacco use among that population and in 2015 the number skyrocketed to 16 percent. That’s despite cigarette and cigar usage dropping during the same period. So yeah, kids really like battery-powered smokes.

There are a few caveats to this research, though. For starters, the CDC only surveyed kids in public and private schools stateside, which it says prevents the data from being representative of those who are home schooled, dropped out or are in juvenile detention centers. More than that, responses were self-reported and could fall prey to recall and response biases.

Can you blame the kids, though? Other research has shown that vaping is far safer than traditional cigarettes. And playing Flappy Bird on a vaporizer is a lot cooler than Drug Wars on your graphing calculator during algebra class ever was, too.

Via: The Verge

Source: Center for Disease Control

How to use Google search to find your lost Android phone – CNET

Google has cooked up a new way to find a lost Android phone.
Google

We’ve all lost our mobile phone at one point or another — sometimes in our homes, sometimes in the car and sometimes out in the wild unknown. Now instead of searching everywhere to track it down, you can rely on Google for help.

This little-known Google feature lets you find your Android phone or tablet using Google’s search engine on your PC, as long as you meet the right criteria.

Your Android phone should have the Google App installed, Now cards enabled, Web & App activity enabled, Google Now notifications turned on and, finally, location reporting should be set to “High accuracy” mode.

Here’s how it works:

• First, use your computer browser to log in to the Google account you have set up on your phone.
• Now type the phrase “find my phone” into Google’s search engine on your PC. In response, Google displays a map that attempts to zero in on the location of your device. Give it at least several seconds, and you’ll eventually see a location on the map that’s accurate enough to give you a sense of where you left the phone. For example, the map told me that the location of my device was accurate to 46 feet.

OK, that’s fine. But what if your phone is lost somewhere in your home? Google won’t tell you what room it’s in, but it can ring your device so you can try to track it down yourself.

• To ring your device, click the icon or link for Ring on the map. Your device will ring at full volume for up to five minutes. Once you find it, simply click the power button to turn off the ringing.

But what if you own an Android tablet instead of a phone? You can still use the find feature. I used it to locate my Nexus 7 tablet and it worked just fine. Clicking on the Ring icon fired up the ring sound on my tablet so I was able to locate it.

The Google search feature isn’t the only way to track down a lost Android device. A similar feature, called Android Device Manager, can locate and ring your device. If you think your device has been stolen, you can also remotely lock it and reset the password or erase its data. To learn how to use Android Device Manager, check out this helpful how-to article from CNET.

Apple offers a similar tracking feature, called Find My iPhone. Using your iCloud account’s find option or the Find My iPhone app, you can track down your iPhone or iPad, ring it to locate its exact location, lock it or erase its data.

So whether you own an Android phone or tablet, or an iPhone or iPad, you do have options for tracking it down the next time it goes into hiding.

Editors’ note: This post was originally published on April 16, 2015, and was updated to include more information about the requirements for using the feature.

Google Drive for Mac and PC now offers granular choice of which folders to sync locally

More robust selective syncing is now available for Google Drive on Mac and PC, allowing users to save space by choosing what folders they’d like to sync locally.

With the change, users can head into the “Sync Options” portion of the Preferences menu and either choose to sync everything, or only select folders. If you choose the latter, you can then select the specific folders and sub-folders you’d like to keep synced. If you deselect a folder, the local files will be removed, but they’ll stay safely stowed away in the cloud. Prior to this change, you could only apply selective syncing to top-level folders, which wasn’t all that useful.

In another minor change, the Google Drive app will now alert you when you’re about to delete a shared file or folder. Now, it’s less likely that you’ll accidentally cut off access to a file that you’ve shared with others.

Google Play podcasts might finally launch on April 18th

Podcasts have been rumored to come to Google Play Music for a long time now, and it looks like that wait is finally over. As noticed by Android Police, NPR sent a newsletter out to member partners that said podcasts would come to Google Play Music on April 18th. It’s not concrete confirmation, and we’ve been burned in the past by similar accidental disclosures (like Bill Simmons tweeting that podcasts would launch on Google’s platform back in February), but this seems like pretty solid evidence that Google Play Music will get perhaps its biggest missing feature filled in soon.
There aren’t many other details to be gleaned from NPR’s accidental disclosure; the newsletter says that podcasts will be coming to Android as well as “other platforms.” It seems pretty likely that the feature will roll out on iOS and the web as well. Most avid podcast fans have gotten by just fine without official Google support thus far, but if you hate switching between apps for your audio needs or just prefer Google’s apps, this should be a solid addition to your phone. The real question is what exactly took Google so long to add this feature in the first place… but that hopefully won’t matter as of next week.

Via: Android Police, 9to5Google

Source: NPR

Homeland Security urges you to uninstall QuickTime on Windows

The Department of Homeland Security is echoing Trend Micro’s advice to uninstall QuickTime if you have it on your Windows computer. While the multimedia program’s working just fine, the security firm has discovered two new critical vulnerabilities lurking within it that could allow remote attackers to take over your system. Unfortunately, they might never be patched up: Trend Micro says Apple will no longer release security updates for the Windows version of the software, hence the call to jettison it completely.

The good news is that Trend Micro hasn’t spotted any active attacks targeting those specific vulnerabilities yet. But both the firm and Homeland Security stress that because Apple has abandoned the program, the only way to protect yourself from potential threats is to dump it — Windows has a lot of safer alternatives you can use anyway. These flaws don’t affect QuickTime for Mac in any way, though, so OS X users can carry on.

Source: Reuters, Department of Homeland Security, Trend Micro