Verizon announced a new promotion today that offers an additional gigabyte of sharable data when customers activate a new smartphone or upgrade a new smartphone on one of the carrier’s MORE Everything plans. In order to take advantage of this deal, you’ll need to be on a MORE Everything plan that uses at least 1GB of data.
About a month ago, word broke that Samsung was interested in acquiring home automation firm SmartThings and today the two companies have made things official. A blog post by the company’s founder and CEO, Alex Hawkinson acknowledged the deal and stated that SmartThings will continue to act as an independent company under Samsung’s Open Innovation Center group.
Image via Cnet
Last month Samsung ramped up the anti-Apple rhetoric with a new ad campaign that depicted iPhone users as “wall huggers,” constantly tethered to a power outlet due to the inferior battery in their non-Samsung smartphones. Today Cnet reports that the company has taken its campaign one step further by trolling real-life iPhone users at power outlets throughout major airports.
The new ads take the form of posters near power outlets that read, “Samsung Galaxy S5 with Ultra Power Saver Mode,” followed by a tagline that appears to poke at Apple’s own recent ad campaign: “So you have the power to be anywhere but here.” If you’d like to take a gander at the latest salvo in the ever-escalating flame war between Apple and Samsung, you’ll be able to do just that very soon at JFK, O’Hare, and Midway airports. Samsung says even more airports could be getting the ads if they’re successful in the first three.
In the world of wireless, words like “unlimited data” have their restrictions if you take the time to read the fine print of a carrier’s service agreement and it appears that T-Mobile is not exempt from such practices. An alleged internal memo obtained by TmoNews details how the company will address customers suspected of using its network to access peer-to-peer file sharing services.
Microsoft announced today that a new system update for its Xbox One game console will soon let users stream live TV to their iPhone or iPad. Set to arrive in the next few months, the Xbox One’s SmartGlass companion app will be equipped with the option to watch television via a local network connection without interrupting a gameplay session.
A MacBook, a flatscreen monitor rescued from a dumpster, a few parts bought on eBay and an abandoned McDonalds as a base may seem a reasonable basis for a hobbyist electronics project of some kind – but taking control of an abandoned NASA spacecraft might feel a little ambitious. Not so, says a team of nine geeks who have successfully taken control of ISEE-3, a spacecraft launched by NASA 36 years ago to measure the solar wind and radiation. The story of what has to be a strong candidate for coolest thing ever is told in full in BetaBeat.
The satellite’s battery has been dead for over 20 years, but it had solar panels to power 98 percent of the satellite’s full capabilities. In its heyday, it ran missions around the Moon and Earth, and flew through the tail of a comet. But technology gets old, and everyone happily let the successful satellite go, knowing it would be back in Earth’s orbit someday — namely, 2014.
Since the satellite went offline, the team had retired, the documentation was lost and the equipment was outdated. They could still hear the satellite out there talking, but they’d need to build the equipment to talk back.
They did have a few more expensive requirements, like a helicopter to lift a transmitter into place, but a crowdfunding campaign took care of the costs. There was then the small matter of getting permission from NASA, no doubt helped by one of the team being a former employee.
They brought the idea to NASA, but there was no precedent on which to base an agreement. No external organization has ever taken command of a spacecraft, but NASA didn’t want to say no, so they asked the team if they needed any help.
Astonishingly, they’ve now successfully placed the craft in a new orbit around the sun, and Google has helped them build a website that will be used to share data transmitted back from it – appropriately enough named Spacecraft For All. The full story is well worth a read.
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Samsung and Apple just announced that they have agreed to drop all patent suits against each other in countries outside the United States, Bloomberg reports. The two companies will drop suits against each other in Australia, Japan, South Korea, Germany, Netherlands, the U.K., France and Italy. This agreement does not include any licensing agreements, though. This has no effect on United States battles either.
In a joint statement, the two companies had the following to say:
Sprint’s plans to buy out the U.S. arm of T-Mobile from Deutsche Telekom came to an end today, the Wall Street Journal reported. According to the Journal, Sprint’s leadership was concerned that it would be too difficult to get United States regulators to agree to the merger.
The announcement is not yet official, but is said to be planned for Wednesday. If the merger had suceeded, the two companies would have united under the Sprint banner, possibly abandoning all of the “un-carrier” moves made by T-Mobile in recent years, including free one-week iPhone test drives on the network and unlimited music streaming on a variety of services.
Kyocera has published a new video of its Sapphire Shield smartphone cover in action, pitting it against standard impact-resistant glass in a few drop and scratch tests. As you might expect, the sapphire cover fared much better than the glass. While the glass display was easily scratched and shattered using a piece of granite, the Sapphire Shield looked like it had just come out of the box.
The Sapphire Shield can currently be found on Kyocera’s Brigadier smartphone, which became available from Verizon last week. The phone is currently one of a few to sport a sapphire display, though it’s widely believed that Apple will be debuting such a device early next month.
You can see the full Sapphire Shield stress test below:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_7tVP5YHt0]
Google recently released a 64-bit version beta version of Chrome for Windows 7 and 8 users and for an encore the company has turned its efforts towards Apple’s OS X. The search giant has silently added 64-bit support to its Chrome Canary and Dev channels for Mac users. If you’re running the latest version of Canary on your Mac, the software should read as 64-bit capable in its About tab.
The United States Department of Transportation is considering a new rule that would ban all in-flight cellular calls, the Wall Street Journal reported today. While some cell phone uses, such as social media apps and other data-dependent software, was recently declared permissible by the Federal Aviation Administration, voice calls are still up for debate, with the DOT arguing a phone call could be disruptive to other passengers.
In December the department will issue a proposition that will include a cellular call ban, though airlines are insisting the decision of whether not to allow calls should be theirs rather than the government’s. However, many airlines have reportedly said that even if it was their call, they would not allow calls on their flights. Some ideas to avoid the disruption have been floated by government officials, such as phone booths on planes where passengers would be free to make calls.
The USB standard has a fundamental security flaw that allows an attacker to take over any device it is connected to, whether PC or Mac, say security researchers in a frightening piece by Wired.
Describing the proof-of-concept Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell plan to present at the Black Hat conference next week, they say the weakness is fundamental to the way in which USB works. Rather than storing malicious files on a USB device, the researchers managed to hack the USB controller chip that enables a USB device to communicate with a computer, changing its firmware. That means it can allow absolutely any USB device, from a USB key to a keyboard, to be compromised.
“These problems can’t be patched,” says Nohl, who will join Lell in presenting the research at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas. “We’re exploiting the very way that USB is designed.”
“You can give it to your IT security people, they scan it, delete some files, and give it back to you telling you it’s clean, [but] the cleaning process doesn’t even touch the files we’re talking about.”
Unlike most malware, which targets Windows, this exploit allows any USB device to emulate a keyboard or mouse, taking complete control of both PCs and Macs.
As it’s undetectable, the exploit could be silently added to a USB key when it is inserted into a PC, and then infect the next device it’s connected to. There is, say the researchers, no protection at all against the method of attack short of never sharing USB devices – treating them as you’d treat a hypodermic needle: only ever using one you know to be brand new, and not dreaming of allowing anyone else to share it.
Following the recent revelation that Verizon Wireless would begin throttling some 4G LTE customers on unlimited data plans, FCC chairman Tom Wheeler has sent a letter to the carrier (full text below) expressing his disdain with the policy and question the necessity of throttling only customers on unlimited plans.
In the letter, Wheeler asks Verizon CEO Daniel Mead why exactly the company feels the need to only throttle customers on certain plans, rather than throttling based on the needs of the technology that powers the network. Wheeler says he is “deeply troubled” by Verizon’s claims that the policy is necessary to “optimize” the network, when in his opinion, it appears to more likely be a ploy to get customers off of unlimited plans.
Today, Square announced a new version of its popular mobile payment system that will support EMV chipped credit cards. EMV is a joint effort from MasterCard and Visa to help improve security credit and debit card transactions and is set to become a standard in the US by October 2015. In addition to EMV-equipped credit cards, the new version of Square’s payment system will still feature support for legacy magnetic strips, so customers will still have the option to swipe and sign.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ErA3QEZ41ME&start=1754]
Javier Verdura, Director of Product Design and Project Management for Tesla Motors pulls back the curtain on Tesla design during a recent RKS Sessions design talk. While the talk and Q&A is mostly focused on the physical design of the vehicles,Verdura answers a question about the GUI design briefly at 29:14, queued above, in which he notes that Tesla’s UI design team is largely made up of Apple alumni.
Verdura next talks about the design process and how everything goes through CEO Elon Musk at the end – something that should remind people of how Steve Jobs’ Apple worked.
After the decision last year to make unlocking smartphone and tablet devices illegal, the US House of Representatives today voted yes to allow the practice to become legal once again. This is already the second time the government has voted on this issue, as just a few weeks ago the US Senate approved the legislation to move on to the House. The final step in getting the law approved is the President’s signature, which should come with little delay as he has already spoken out in favor of the bill.
Verizon has been throttling unlimited 3G data subscribers for years now, but never 4G LTE users. Until today, when they announced this morning that beginning October 1st, the top 5% of 4G LTE data users who coincidentally meet a series of other factors will get throttled. According to DroidLife, a recent report showed that over 20% of Verizon data users were still on an unlimited data plan, so it’s no surprise that Verizon would want to push these users to a tiered data plan.
Update: Statement from Bose regarding the complaint below the fold…
Bose has filed a legal complaint against Beats Electronics over the use of noise-cancelling technology used in their headphones, according to CNBC. Apple, of course, announced earlier this year plans to acquire the headphones maker in a $3 billion deal, which it expects to gain regulatory approval for by the end of September.
BREAKING: Bose sues Apple's Beats over noise-canceling headphone patents. (via @CNBCJosh) $AAPL
— CNBC (@CNBC) July 25, 2014
Re/code reports that Bose has filed a request with the International Trade Commission to ban the sale and import of certain Beats products. The following patents owned by Bose appear to be relevant in the complaint:
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Data released by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reveals that there are now as many mobile Internet connections as there are people in the USA. While not everyone has a mobile data SIM or dongle, those with multiple devices make up for those left out, taking the average to a fraction over 100 percent.
Six other countries also manage to have more mobile data subscriptions than people, Finland topping the list with an average of 1.25 connections per person. The overall average across the 34 countries within the OECD grouping was 72.4 percent.
(via The Register)
Early last year, Beats announced it would be renovating an abandoned warehouse in Southern California to become its newest office. Located in Culver City, just minutes from Los Angeles, the area purchased measures in at a whopping 105,000 square feet and reportedly sold for upwards of $20 million.
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<a href="http://www.swatch.com/en/watches/originals/new-gent/suow705-sprinkled" target="_blank">Swatch’s design style</a> clearly reflects Apple’s clean, uncluttered aesthetic
Update: Swatch has denied the claim, in a statement to Reuters.
A new rumor that popped up today from VentureBeat claims that Apple is working with Swatch and Timex to create different styles of its upcoming iWatch. The rumor puts Apple’s wearable plans in-line with Google’s: the Mountain View company makes the Android Wear software that powers hardware from a variety of vendors.
While it’s true that Swatch teamed up with Microsoft to create an ill-fated smart watch in 2004, it doesn’t seem likely that Apple is poised to join forces with any third party to create its own entry to this market. Here’s why…
Samsung’s latest ad entitled “Every Day is Day One” is really, really nice. The cinematography is top notch and the soundtrack makes it even richer (a cover of David Bowie’s “Absolute Beginners”). It features Samsung’s Galaxy phone and Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smart watch without being embarrassingly tacky, and it was done in partnership with the Association of Surfing Professionals (ASP) as Samsung Mobile is a global partner.
The only issue is competitive professional surfer Kelly Slater cameos in the ad with his Samsung sponsorship clear in the shot seen above, and Kelly Slater is a proud iPhone owner just like you and me. 😎🌊📱
Despite the mixed affiliation, the ad really is a great one. More of this and less focusing on Apple might go a long way… you never know. Anyway, be sure to check out the full ad over at 9to5Google.
In the weeks between the Apple-Beats acquisition first being reported as being in final talks and the two companies both officially announcing the deal, Billboard interviewed Daniel Ek, the CEO and co-founder of the streaming music giant Spotify, asking about his take on Apple becoming a subscription streaming music competitor through Beats Music.
At the time, Ek was reserved in saying too much about the proposition. “I don’t like speculating about things that haven’t happened,” Ek stated. He did, however, say that he always believed Apple would enter the streaming music space and doubled down saying Spotify is focused on “building the best possible product” while noting the service’s 40 million users with 10 million paid customers.
The Spotify CEO was interviewed last week at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference and once again asked about the Apple-Beats deal, this time with the acquisition being official:
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Lenovo’s $2.91 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility from Google is still pending regulatory approval, however it looks like the company is already mapping out a new strategy. Despite being one of the world’s largest PC makers, Lenovo is halting the development of Windows tablets under 10 inches in size and migrating its remaining inventory to markets like Brazil, China and Japan where there’s more of a need for low-cost slates.
Apple, in turn, has had a huge success with the 7.9-inch iPad Mini which quickly became one of its best sellers after its introduction almost 2 years ago.