Author: Juan Carlos Bagnell

Juan has been obsessed with consumer electronics since before computers had GUI’s. Out of college he worked on a JIT computing contract which supported DOE facilities in New Mexico. He’s been featured on numerous podcasts and radio shows lending his tech insights. You can also find him in LA directing voice over actors and producing spoken word recording.
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Android 5.1 Brings Better Device Protection for Lost or Stolen Phones and Tablets

Android Lollipop ForestTrying to steal a few headlines from Apple today, Google officially and publicly announced Android Lollipop 5.1.

Alongside bug fixes and performance improvements, Android 5.1 brings a much improved security with Device Protection. We’ve detailed Device Manager in the past, which can be used to locate a missing phone or wipe it clean in the event it’s stolen.

Device Protection now includes the ability to lock a device to your Google ID. Even after wiping and hard resetting a phone, Android will require you to enter in your Google account password before the phone can be used again. This follows recent state legislation in California and Minnesota mandating a “Kill Switch” on phones. The idea being a stolen phone will be far less valuable if it’s essentially a brick without the victim’s password. Continue reading “Android 5.1 Brings Better Device Protection for Lost or Stolen Phones and Tablets”

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Video Tutorial: How to Blur the Background of Your Phone Photos Without Apps or Filters

Got a great viewer question on my Instagram feed from follower kill.the.spiders who asks:

“Do you edit your photos or are they the way they are? The focus is amazing and the blur effect is impressive, also is it possible to make similar shots with phones, like the G3 for example?”

Let’s take a quick look at cameras, sensor size, and depth of field! This video should be watched full screen for the best experience, and don’t forget to increase the quality to 4K!

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Review: The North Face Surge II – Laptop Toting Rugged Backpack

The North Face makes some of my favorite camping and hiking gear, so I was really looking forward to trying out their Surge II backpack, which was designed to tote around up to a seventeen inch laptop. How does an adventure gear company fare when making a laptop bag? Let’s take a look…

Shop the Surge II on Amazon.
More info on North Face products.

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Android 5.0 “Lollipop” Update Rolling Out to LG G3 on AT&T

Google’s newest phone operating system has only made it to around 5% of the Android handsets out in the ecosystem, but that’s set to improve soon as the Lollipop update is starting to roll out to AT&T LG G3’s.

The update brings the slick new Material Design, and the ability to use USB Audio hardware, which I just tested on my G3 with a Zoom H4n. Pretty exciting to use professional grade recording equipment with my smartphone.

As with most rollouts, expect it to be delivered in stages, so fret not if you go into your settings and you don’t have an update ready to install. It should be on its way soon.

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Huawei Impresses with Fashionable Android Wear Smartwatch

huawei-watch-100570928-large.idgeThe wearables market is expanding, and we’re seeing more competition from tech companies trying to create fashionable accessories.

Primary in the Android Wear ecosystem, circular displays are becoming equated with “premium”. Leading up to MWC this year, Huawei took the wraps off their smartwatch solution. Huawei Watch will sport a higher resolution display than the LG G Watch R or Moto 360, but to keep the device slim, will use a smaller 300mAh battery. The smart guts powered by a Qualcomm 400, 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of storage.

The stainless steel housing will arrive in three different colors, black, gold, and silver. I’m really happy to see that the front face will not be clad in glass, but sapphire crystal, which we know is far more resistant to abuse. While we don’t have pricing or shipping info yet, we can be pretty sure that combo means this is targeting a “premium” market. Continue reading “Huawei Impresses with Fashionable Android Wear Smartwatch”

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MWC2015: Galaxy S6 & Samsung Pay! HTC One M9 & RE Vive VR Headset! Announcement Reactions!

It’s been a crazy start to MWC 2015 with a pair of killer announcements from Samsung and HTC! New smartphones, mobile payment systems, and a VR headset! What were your first reactions to the news? Drop a comment below!

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Microsoft Unveils Lumia 640 and Lumia 640 XL Smartphones at MWC 2015

Microsoft took the wraps off a pair of new Lumias in Barcelona. Unfortunately no flagship phones were to be had, but the former Nokia hardware team showed off handsets adding even more pressure to the mid-range market.

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The Lumia 640 looks like it’ll be fairly standard Windows Phone fare. A 5″ 720p display will be paired up with a Qualcomm 400 and 1GB of RAM and a 2500mAh battery. The rear camera will be an 8MP shooter and the front will have a 1MP sensor for video chat.

The Lumia 640 XL takes the place of the 1320, moving the size up to 5.7″, a 13MP camera, and a 3000mAh battery. Both phones come with 8GB of internal storage with support for up to 128GB MicroSD cards. Both phones will ship with Windows Phone 8.1 Update 1, but will be updated to Windows 10 when available.

The design is plastic, polycarb shells in a variety of classic colors Orange, White, Yellow, and my favorite Cyan. The naming convention should be less confusing than the lower powered 1320, which had a higher number naming convention than Nokia’s flagship phones.

The positioning makes sense, placing these features in-between the upper entry-level Lumia 635 and the higher mid-range Lumia 830.

Microsoft also showed off a new fold-able Bluetooth keyboard specifically designed for phones.

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Buying one of these new Lumias will come with a one year subscription to Office 365, which includes a license for a tablet or PC, 1TB of cloud storage, and 60 minutes a month for Skype. A one year Office 365 license sold on it’s own costs $70.

Not bad at all considering the 640 will retail for 139€ for a 3G version and 159€ for the LTE variant. The 640 XL will sell for 189€ for 3G and 219€ for LTE. Both phones should be available in April worldwide with partnerships already announced with AT&T in the United States.

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SanDisk Reveals 200GB MicroSD Card, But Can Any Phone Use It?

We continue to see a battle between hardware and cloud solutions for how our data should be consumed. It’s great if you’ve got all your data backed up online, but if you don’t have an internet connection, having locally stored files is tremendously helpful.

As multimedia and gaming gets more storage intensive, popping in a larger memory card is becoming an attractive solution for those phone owners that have the capability to upgrade their storage. Now SanDisk is showing off the largest memory card on the market with their 200GB Ultra MicroSD.

Of course having HUGE storage isn’t particularly helpful if you have slow transfer speeds. SanDisk claims their card will be good for up to 90MB per second data transfer, which means you should be able to fill the whole card up in under 40 minutes on a solid USB 3 card reader. That speed is really helpful for app and camera performance, and is one of the reasons why Google does not provide memory card slots on the Nexus, to guarantee system performance. Sorry prospective Samsung Galaxy S6 shoppers… No memory card slot for you either…

While this is exciting, we’re still not entirely sure how well this card might work with phones that only outright support card capacities up to 64GB or 128GB. Also, having the biggest storage on such a tiny card means stepping up to a really big price tag. This Ultra Card will sell for $399, or four times the price of Sandisk’s $128GB Ultra card.

Being on the bleeding edge doesn’t come cheap. You can read SanDisk’s full press release below.

Continue reading “SanDisk Reveals 200GB MicroSD Card, But Can Any Phone Use It?”

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