How to uninstall Gear VR apps

Uninstalling Gear VR apps is easy from within the Oculus app.

Gear VR delivers all sorts of excellent experiences that are delivered right from your phone. However, the day may come when you need to unistall a few apps to make enough room for something new. When that time comes, the process is very simple, you just need to deal with it from inside of the Oculus app. We’ve got the details for you here.

Uninstalling Gear VR Apps

Whether it was because you ran out of storage space, or because you no longer want a game anymore, this is usually a pretty simple process. However uninstalling a Gear VR app requires an extra step when compared to uninstalling Android apps. Much like you don’t download Gear VR apps from the Play Store, you don’t uninstall games from within your app manager.

All you have to do, in order to uninstall an app for Gear VR is head into your Oculus app. Navigate to the library by tapping the open book at the bottom of your screen. This will show you all of the Oculus games, apps and experiences that you’ve installed onto your phone. If you tap and hold on the app you would like to uninstall, a pop-up menu will appear. It’s here that you’ll tap uninstall, as well as getting an easy peek at just how much space an app is taking up on your device. Another window will pop up, making you confirm that you want to uninstall a specific app. Tap uninstall and give it a few moments and that app will disappear right off of your phone.

Step by step instructions to uninstall Gear VR apps

Open the Oculus app on your phone
Tap Library at the bottom of your screen
Tap and hold the app you want to uninstall
Tap Uninstall
Tap Uninstall again

Have you had to uninstall apps?

The number of Gear VR games you can store at once is all dependent on the amount of storage space left on your phone. This means that eventually, you’re probably going to need to uninstall an app or two. Thankfully this is an easy process that ought to only take you a few moments to get done.

Samsung Gear VR

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Amazon

T-Mobile and Sprint are merging for $26.5 billion: Here are the details

T-Mobile and Sprint are coming together in a $26.5 billion mega-merger that’s all about 5G.

The rumors and speculation swirling for years are fomenting into a dust cloud of money. T-Mobile and Sprint, the third and fourth-largest carriers in the U.S., respectively, are poised to form a single entity in a $26.5 billion merger that would put the united company in a close third position behind AT&T with just over 70 million postpaid subscribers.

The companies announced the deal mid-day Sunday with a slick webpage called All for 5G, highlighting the ways in which the merged corporation will focus on next-generation wireless technologies more effectively against the competition.

Best T-Mobile phones

Should the deal be approved by U.S. regulators — a tall order in an environment that has discouraged M&A between intra-industry entities — the New T-Mobile, as the companies are referring to it — T-Mobile’s parent company, Germany’s Deutsche Telekom, would own a 42% stake and seat nine board members, while Sprint’s parent Softbank would have a 27% stake and four board members.

According to Bloomberg, which broke the story, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son will have a seat on the board.

On its merger marketing page, Sprint and T-Mobile promise that the New T-Mobile will keep prices low, offer outstanding service, and provide more competition, with “a MAJOR expansion of competition into rural markets and for businesses of all sizes!” Critics point to markets like Canada where just three well-entrenched wireless carriers have less reason to compete, forcing prices up and suppressing consumer choice.

According to a press release co-issued by the companies, the combined company will have a $146 billion market capitalization, with Sprint’s $59 billion number based on the $6.62 closing share price as of Friday, April 27. Officially, the new company will be called T-Mobile —the Sprint brand will disappear — and will have “expected run rate cost synergies of $6+ billion” compared to the two companies operating on their own.

The combined company will have lower costs, greater economies of scale, and the resources to provide U.S. consumers and businesses with lower prices, better quality, unmatched value, and greater competition. The New T-Mobile will employ more people than both companies separately and create thousands of new American jobs.

Current T-Mobile CEO, John Legere, will remain chief executive of the new company, while current T-Mobile COO, Mike Sievert, will retain that position at the New T-Mobile while also acting as President of the combined entity. Immediately following the merger, the New T-Mobile will hire thousands of new employees to fill retail, call center, and network infrastructure roles, according to the executive team, with investments of $40 billion in the combined network. While Verizon and AT&T will each still hold considerably more spectrum than even the combined Sprint-Tmo, Sprint’s cache of unused 2.5GHz spectrum will be critical to migrating its customers to T-Mobile’s LTE network, and will allow both companies to deploy low-band 5G more easily when the opportunity arises in 2019 and beyond.

T-Mobile and Sprint believe that the merger is perfectly timed, since cable companies like Comcast and Charter are poised to enter the wireless market, either as MVNOs or, later, as infrastructure owners of their own networks. While that hypothesis has yet to be proven, Sprint and T-Mobile believe that there is more competition in the market today than ever before, and the combined entity will be able to compete better on the network and content side.

At the same time, with the recent end of Net Neutrality in the U.S., both companies believe that they are in a good position to eke out as much profit per consumer as possible with a diverse selection of plans that may be able to take advantage of the availability of slow and fast lanes that weren’t possible during the previous administration.

According to the companies, all of 54.6 million Sprint’s customers will be migrated to T-Mobile’s network within three years, and over 20 million Sprint customers already have phones that are compatible with T-Mobile’s.

Should regulators approve the deal, the companies expect it to close in the first half of 2019.

After Math: Get rich or die tryin

This was a big week for huge corporate profits. Microsoft and Nintendo reported healthy business growth to start off the latest earnings season. Amazon announced that it will be bumping the subscription cost for Prime by 20 percent. And a knockoff Mark Zuckerberg separated a number of fools from their hard earned money. Numbers, because how else are you supposed to calculate your net worth, acts of altruism?

32 percent: Looks like the computer-buying public is finally fed up with Apple’s recent spate of hardware “upgrades,” given that Microsoft announced its third-quarter earnings, totaling $1.1 billion in revenue. That’s a huge jump over last year’s paltry figure of just $831 million.

$120: Amazon Prime subscribers are in for a rude awakening come May. The company announced this week that it will be increasing the price of its annual subscription by 20 percent, from $100 to $120, for its US customers. Sounds like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is gearing up to finally start shopping at Whole Foods.

25 percent: Out of the more than 200 fake Zuckerberg Facebook and Instagram accounts that The New York Times discovered during a recent expose, 51 of them were running lottery scams. To be fair though, its your own fault if you fell for one of these. Zuck doesn’t want your money, he wants your data.

17.79 million units: Nintendo seemed to be on the ropes for a while there, its Wii game system getting absolutely pummeled by console heavyweights Microsoft and Sony. But with a spectacular reversal, Nintendo is fighting back. The company announced this week that it had sold 2.93 million Switch consoles in the first three months of 2018, down from the 7.23 million it sold in the previous three but still more than the Wii did during its entire production run.

$15: Got an online grievance but are short on cash? Fear not, for less than the cost of a night at the movies you too can hire a 19-year-old Serbian guy to DDoS your internet rival back to the stone age. Or at least you could up until the point that he got nabbed by the cops.

$155,000: No, seriously, that’s what Volvo actually expects you to spend for its upcoming luxury hybrid named after a stripper, the Polestar 1, through its new subscription service.

$61 million: We really are living in the Upside Down. Twitter announced this week that it turned a profit last quarter, the second time in a row that’s happened.

T-Mobile and Sprint will merge to create a 5G powerhouse

After years of on-again, off-again talks, it’s official: T-Mobile and Sprint have announced plans to merge. The all-stock, $26 billion deal values Sprint at $59 billion (the combined company would be worth $146 billion) and will give T-Mobile the reins, with the carrier’s John Legere serving as CEO and Mike Sievert continuing to operate as COO. Sprint chief Marcelo Claure will serve on the board of directors alongside Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Sprint’s parent company SoftBank. As for the ostensible reason for the merger? If you ask the networks, it’s all about 5G.

The two claim they can roll out a “broad and deep” 5G network faster together than they would by themselves. They also try to head off concerns about reduced competition by claiming that the 5G landscape involves a lot more than just mobile, as you primarily saw with LTE and earlier technologies. As 5G is becoming useful for fixed broadband, the unified T-Mobile and Sprint would ostensibly compete against cable providers like Comcast and Charter in addition to wireless giants AT&T and Verizon.

There’s a degree of truth to these claims. In addition to varying coverage maps, the two have wide swaths of wireless spectrum that only sometimes overlap (Sprint has the 800MHz and 2.5GHz bands, for example, while T-Mobile has 600MHz and 700MHz). You could see more comprehensive coverage. And there’s no question that 5G’s gigabit-class bandwidth and low lag make it more of a viable option for fixed internet access. The first 5G deployments are focused on replacing broadband, not upgrading the smartphone in your hands.

It’s not yet clear how this would affect sub-brands like MetroPCS, Boost, Mobile and Virgin Mobile.

If regulators clear the deal, it should close “no later than” sometime in the first half of 2019. However, that’s a big “if.” While the current US government is typically anti-regulation, it hasn’t exactly been kind to telecom-related mergers — just ask AT&T how its Time Warner merger is going. And it’s hard to escape flashbacks to 2011, when officials shot down AT&T’s attempt to buy T-Mobile amid widespread fears of reduced wireless competition. T-Mobile and Sprint have maintained that their unified company will actually produce more jobs (T-Mobile points to the wake of its MetroPCS acquisition as evidence), but large companies always claim this. Regulators will want to see proof that the combined entity won’t promptly slash thousands of jobs in the name of eliminating overhead.

Is this a good deal? It’s hard to say at this early stage. While this would unfortunately reduce the US to just three major cell carriers, the existing situation wasn’t exactly utopian. T-Mobile has been growing briskly in the past five years, more than doubling its subscriber base, but it still has ‘just’ 39 million total customers to AT&T’s 89.3 million consumers and Verizon’s 116.2 million connections (this includes some fixed wireless users). And while Sprint has been recovering from its worst days, it’s still growing slowly and bleeding cash with 54.6 million users across its various brands. A merger could create a third company on the same scale as AT&T and Verizon, forcing the incumbents to offer more competitive pricing… that is, assuming T-Mobile and Sprint don’t use the merger as an opportunity to rest on their laurels.

Source: T-Mobile, Sprint

Report: Huawei is developing its own OS in case it’s barred from Android

Android is the go-to operating system for those that aren’t into iOS, but that may not be the case forever. Samsung has been developing its own Tizen OS for some time now, even using it on some smartphones. Now it could be Huawei’s turn: The South China Morning Post says Huawei has been working on an Android alternative.

There are a few reasons an Android alternative might be important for Huawei. For starters, trade and security tensions between the U.S. and China have placed ZTE under threat of losing its Android license from Google. Huawei, another Chinese company, could be under the same threat.

Even without U.S.-China tensions, there are plenty of reasons Huawei might want to explore its own technology. For example, the company may be looking to reduce its dependence on other companies in general — as it has done in the mobile processor business. While it does still use third-party processors, many of its devices use chips built by the company itself.

According to the report, the plan to build a new operating system was set in motion by Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, and was really a failsafe in case of a “worst-case scenario.” The operating system hasn’t seen the light of day yet because it simply isn’t as good as Android — but another problem with it could be that it doesn’t have enough third-party support. Even if it is developing its own operating system, it’s possible that Google’s apps and services will still be available on it — though that will depend on the operating system itself.

The company isn’t being all that public about the new operating system just yet. According to a statement from the company, it has “no plans to release its own OS in the foreseeable future.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard reports of Huawei building its own operating system. In 2012, it was reported that the company was developing an operating system in case it could no longer use Android or Windows Mobile. Since then, Microsoft’s focus has shifted away from Windows Mobile, really leaving only one option — Android.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Here’s everything you need to know about the Huawei P20
• Report: Best Buy has broken ties with Huawei and will no longer sell its phones
• Huawei to refocus its efforts on other markets in the face of U.S. roadblocks
• Huawei P20 Pro vs Google Pixel 2 XL: Can the P20 Pro dethrone Android royalty?
• Apple releases an iOS update to fix infamous Telegu text bug

Shrinking demand forces Apple to slow down iPhone X production

The iPhone X launched to stellar reviews and equally strong sales, but Fast Company is reporting that demand has slowed considerably. A source within Apple’s supply chains has said that the company plans to make a mere eight million units for the second quarter of this year.

Part of the problem stems from the simple fact that the rush of holiday sales convinced Apple to produce too many iPhone X units and now needs to “burn off” its supply. In total, Apple sold more than 77 million iPhones during the 2017 holiday season. Tim Cook has said that the iPhone X outsold all other models every week of the first quarter since its release. This tracks with Above Avalon analyst Neil Cybart’s estimate that the iPhone X accounted for about 35 percent of all smartphone sales during the holiday season.

Demand for the device has slowed down considerably since then, however, and Apple’s supply chain reflects this new reality. TSMC, which produces many of the chips used in the iPhone X, warned investors of falling demand for its chips. Analysts expected TSMC to earn about $8.8 billion, but the company’s quarterly guidance reports say that number is closed to $7.8 to $7.9 billion.

Australia-based AMS, which makes some of the components used in Apple’s facial recognition system, warned that it expects its second-quarter revenue to be half what it was in the first.

Internally, there are reports that some within Apple are disappointed in the iPhone X sales and have questioned the wisdom of releasing a $1,000 smartphone. This mindset may help determine Apple’s game plan for 2018. The company is expected to release three new iPhones this year, including a 6.1-inch LCD model.

The LCD phone could be priced as low as $550. Some sources within Apple say that the company expects this more affordable iPhone to account for as much as 50 percent of unit sales once it is launched.

None of this means that the iPhone X is a failure. Cybart estimates that, by the time the 2018 iPhones launch, the iPhone X will have sold 60 million units and earned Apple $59 billion in revenue. There are plenty of companies that would love to have that level of “disappointment.”

Editors’ Recommendations

• Apple will halve iPhone X production after limp holiday sales, report says
• Apple beats revenue forecast in first quarter, but iPhone sales took a hit
• Apple passes Samsung in smartphone sales, as newer models are shunned
• Entry-level MacBooks may make an appearance in June at WWDC 2018
• Apple iPhone X Plus: News, rumors, specs, and more

Russia’s attempt to block Telegram crashes the country’s internet

Pixabay

Earlier this month, a Russian court gave regulators the authority to block Telegram, a popular encrypted messaging app that’s used not only by an estimated 13 million Russian users but Kremlin officials as well.

It was like releasing a bull in a china shop — or a bear in the Russian Tea Room.

As government officials tried to pull the plug on Telegram, the company responded by repeatedly switching IP addresses, encouraging users to rely on VPNs, and moving to American hosts Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services. After playing what the New York Times called “whack-a-mole” with thousands of individual IP addresses, the regulatory agency Roskomnadzor ham-handedly began blacking out entire subnets.

The entire Russian internet quickly spiraled into chaos, with hundreds of unrelated businesses unable to access the web. Among those affected was Viber, a Kremlin-approved messaging service, as well as museums, car dealerships, and schools.

Tanya Lokot, an expert on Russian digital media, explained in an interview with Slate that the clumsy nature of enforcement by Roskomnadzor is not unusual. “There have been a lot of complaints against Roskomnadzor because they do a lot of arbitrary blocking,” she said. “In Russia, I don’t think anybody is terrified of Roskomnadzor in terms of the power it has. People are more terrified of its incompetence.”

Telegram is quite popular in Russia because of its encryption. Legislation introduced in 2016 mandated that all messaging services needed to provide back-door access to the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB).

Maria V. Alyokhina, a member of the band Pussy Riot, which has been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for several years, spearheaded a public protest against the ban. Demonstrators littered the sidewalk in front of the FSB with paper airplanes, the corporate symbol of Telegram.

The country has previously attempted to make all internet communication companies store their information on Russian servers, and even suggested that Russia might disconnect from the rest of the world and create its own internet.

Some experts fear this could be a warm-up act for blocking even high-profile companies. “The Kremlin could safely move on to block Facebook or Twitter,” Russian intelligence expert Andrei Soldatov wrote in a tweet. “Political costs cannot be higher than now. I hope it was not the plan all along.”

A week like today, and the Kremlin could safely move on to block Facebook or Twitter. Political costs cannot be higher than now. I hope it was not the plan all along.

— Andrei Soldatov (@AndreiSoldatov) April 17, 2018

Lokot agreed. “They’re willing to go this far to basically shut down half of the Russian internet and disrupt the work of so many other companies, including Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and a bunch of Russian companies,” she said.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Telegram app is a favorite of Kremlin officials, but Russia wants to block it
• Russia bans Popular messenger app Telegram, Kremlin must use new service
• How to block text messages on iOS and Android
• France is making its own WhatsApp clone in response to surveillance fears
• Staff at Russian nuclear facility caught using supercomputer to mine Bitcoins

Enter now to win a free Samsung Galaxy S9+

Arguably the hottest phone of the year, so far, is the Samsung Galaxy S9+, with its 6.2-inch QHD+ Super Amoled screen, Dolby Atmos stereo speakers, dual aperture camera lens, and powerhouse 6GB of RAM. This is the phone for anyone and everyone who loves to watch movies and TV shows on their phone, play games non-stop, and keep productive on the go, thanks to such a large screen.

You’d normally have to pay $839 to buy this beast of a flagship, but if you enter right now at Android Central Digital Offers, you could win one of your very own for free! All you have to do is sign up and you’re in it to win it!

Samsung has brought a lot to the table this year, and the Galaxy S9+ features the very best when it comes to the Samsung experience. There are productivity features, like real-time translation through the camera, so you can find you way in foreign lands or translate documents on the fly. There are fun features, like AR emoji and stickies. And best of all, there’s that gorgeous 2960×1440 infinity display.

Even if you’re not looking to upgrade right now, the Samsung Galaxy S9+ is an awesome phone for this year and the next, and it could be yours for free. All you have to do it enter at Android Central Digital Offers!

Enter now at Android Central Digital Offers!

The AmazonBasics Bluetooth sound bar is down to $45 right now

Step up your audio game.

The AmazonBasics 2.0 Channel Bluetooth Sound Bar is down to $44.78 right now. That’s more than $25 off the average price and $5 better than the last time it went on sale.

This 31-inch sound bar features dual full-range stereo speakers (up to 90dB) and comes with its own remote control, as it’s not compatible with universal or TV remotes. Best suited for televisions less than 42 inches, this product has three sound modes including Standard for TV programs, News for programs filled with mainly dialogue, and Movie for optimized soundtracks. It also features Bluetooth so you can stream sound from your phone, tablet or computer seamlessly.

Amazon offers free tech support for 60 days after delivery with this item, so you can easily get assistance with setup, connection, troubleshooting and more.

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This AmazonBasics nano Bluetooth speaker gives you six hours of music for $8

Tiny but powerful.

This yellow AmazonBasics Nano Bluetooth speaker is down to $7.89. It normally sells for $15, so this deal is almost half off its regular price. It has never gone lower than $12 before. Blue is also on sale for $8.03. Both speakers are fluctuating up and down in price but anything under $10 is a steal.

This is a tiny, portable, speaker with a silicon handle. You can carry it or hang it. It has a Bluetooth range of 30 feet and works with any Bluetooth device from any platform. The battery will provide up to six hours of playback. The design is splash-resistant. It also has a built-in mic so you can use it to answer the phone. Users give it 4 stars based on 629 reviews.

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