Let's Talk Tech
They say good things come in small packages…
I was a big fan of Ultrapixels on the HTC One, and now they’re making an appearance on the One Mini.What’s missing however is optical image stabilization. Let’s take a look at some samples and see if the One Mini camera can hang with other mid-range handsets.
Microsoft donates about $2 Million worth of software every day to nonprofits as part of their Technology for Good initiative. Now Microsoft is adding Office 365 to their grant initiative, providing organizations free access to business grade document and presentation solutions.
Office 365 now joins Windows 8, Windows Server, and Visual Studio on the list of donation-ware for qualifying organizations, and should be available in over 90 countries by the summer of 2014.
Field Trip is an app which helps users discover fun and interesting things to see in their general vicinity. Chock full of trivia and restaurant reviews, it can be a pretty handy guide aiding, you in your local adventures.
Field Trip Day is coming to Pasadena on September 15th! What is Field Trip Day you might ask? It’s a day where people get together and use Field Trip. Together. Here’s how the Field Trip folks explain it:
Field Trip Day is an afternoon of local discovery, challenges, one-day-only opportunities, and hidden surprises. Armed with the Field Trip app and your wits, an afternoon’s adventure will reveal Pasadena’s secrets – from rocket launches to peanut butter soda, from the man who broke baseball’s color barrier to the man who revolutionized chewing gum, from auditioning for the role of Stanley in “Streetcar Named Desire” to learning the truth about a religious cult… explore Pasadena like never before.
The event is free to participate, but space is limited, so head over to the Field Tripper site to sign up! Who knows… I might even go…
So, a lot headlines talking about the Target Ticket beta keep comparing it to Netflix. Netflix is an all-you-can eat subscription service. You pay monthly to watch all you want. iTunes and Amazon built services which allow customers to rent or own digital copies of individual movies and TV shows (though Amazon now also has an all-you-can eat component with Prime, but I digress).
Now which of those to services do you think Target Ticket more closely resembles?
Target will be launching with 15,000 titles, and we’re expecting pricing similar to Amazon and iTunes. Movies can be rented for around $3-4 per title or owned for around $13-15, and Target is promising compatibility with Android, iOS, Mac, and PC. Content providers including ABC, AMC, CBS, CW, Fox, FX, HBO, The WB, NBC, Showtime, Starz, and USA are already on board.
Target Ticket is currently only available to Target employees with no official word on when it’ll open it’s digital doors for business.
So what do you think? Is this a service you’ll try out when it leaves BETA? Is there room for another movie “store”? Drop a comment below.
Tech moves fast, and what was top of the smartphone heap on week is old news the next. In actually using these devices, that aggressive release cycle can induce a little liberal guilt whenever I consider the amount of e-waste being generated.
We’ve long considered the dream of a modular phone which can be upgraded over time. Unfortunately the opposite trend is taking root in the phone industry. What little access and upgradability we did have, like swapping a back plate, battery, or increasing storage is often going away in the name of sleek design.
Well Dave Hakkens wants to change that. He’s released this teaser on Youtube showing his design renders for PhoneBloks, a phone which will last longer, allowing users to upgrade the components they care about over time. The concept rests on a Lego-like system of pieces that the user picks to customize their experience.
He’s starting off with a social media push on Thunderclap, and if this concept interests you, if you’d like to see this move beyond design renders and mock ups, head on over to PhoneBloks.com.
(via Andrew on G+)
“In the past, when we’ve launched a new iPhone, we lowered the cost of the old iPhone, making it more accessible to new people. But this year, we’re not going to do that.” – Tim Cook
Yes, they’re officially official! The iPhone 5S will reign as the new premier handset and the iPhone 5C will replace the iPhone 5 as a mid range offering. The iPhone 4S will remain as a “free on contract” option for frugal buyers.
The iPhone 5C is largely an iPhone 5 in a candy colored polycarb plastic shell. Inspired by phones like the Nokia Lumia, Apple is releasing the iPhone 5C in green, white, blue, pink, and yellow. Pricing will be very reasonable, coming in at $99 for a 16GB version and $199 for the 32GB model. This is a smart play by Apple, as it provides a much needed mid-range which wont be as expensive as the uni-body aluminum iPhone to produce. This should also help open up some Asian and African developing markets where consumers might not be interested in paying the Apple premium for the 5S.
The iPhone 5S will retain the aluminium shell of its predecessor, meaning in the wild it will be difficult to see whether someone is carrying the latest and greatest. In part to address that, the color options for the 5S have changed. Silver remains, but instead of Black, the 5S Â will come in “Space Grey”. This may also be a response to complaints that the black iPhone was easily scratched. Also, for those wanting a bit more bling, a Gold version will also be available. I would expect this to be the top seller for this generation of iPhone, as even I can be guilty of wanting other people around me to know I have a bleeding edge phone. And yes. I did just say “bling”.
While the 5S wont be visually much different than the iPhone 5, it is packing new equipment under the hood to improve the iOS experience. A new camera is on board, marking the first improvement in two generations of iPhone. The resolution remains the same at 8 megapixels, but the new sensor is larger allowing more light to hit individual photo sites. When paired with a new f2.2 aperture lens, this should improve low light capabilities. The new camera app will also be capable of shooting continuous 10 frame per second stills. A new slow-motion video mode is also included which can shoot at 120 frames per second to catch all those great sports and pet moments in delicious slow motion detail.
A new processor is on board. The Apple claims the A7 is up to twice as powerful as the A6, though details regarding actual performance are thin. Interestingly enough, the new A7 is a 64-bit chip. I can’t really understand why Apple made this jump now, as the move to 64-bit on desktops was to facilitate more than 4GB of RAM (which the iPhone does not have). This could perhaps be a preemptive move towards unifying OSX on the desktop and iOS on mobile devices? We’ll just have to wait and see…
The new chipset does feature improved graphics processing thanks to OpenGL ES 3.0. Apple showed off a preview of Infinity Blade 3 which demonstrated dynamic lighting, improved texture mapping, and larger playable areas.
For those active smartphone users, the 5S packs a new sensor co-processor dubbed the M7. It’s a small mini-brain responsible for driving and collecting all of the data from the various sensors, gyros, accelerometers, and the compass. This is a cool piece of tech, as all that info can be collected and sorted by apps without the new A7 processor turning on. This should help battery life, and open new doors for tracking and location apps with the new M7 API.
Speaking of power, Apple claims 10 hours of LTE browsing, 40 hours of music listening, and 250 hours of standby time. No word yet on whether the battery can sustain real world use through dinner time…
Lastly, for those a bit more security conscious, Touch ID was introduced, which builds a capacitive fingerprint scanner into the Home button on the 5S. Apple demo’ed the feature, which should make unlocking an iPhone near invisible to the person who owns the iPhone, just by tapping the Home Button. This should be of interest to corporate and government IT departments which have to force smartphone users into using alphanumeric passwords which can sometimes be difficult to enter on a touchscreen display.
iPhone 5s will follow in the footsteps of previous iPhones launching at $199 for 16GB, $299 for 32GB, and $399 for a 64GB version. The iOS7 update goes live September 18, and iPhone pre-orders start September 13. The phones will be available for purchase September 20 in the US, Australia, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and China. That last is very important for Cupertino, as this will be the first time an iPhone will include the Chinese market at launch, and offering that mid-range iPhone 5C could help open up Asian markets which haven’t warmed to Apple’s mobile offerings in the past.
Watch the keynote at Apple.com. Full Press Releases after the jump! Continue reading “Apple Officially unveils iPhone 5S & 5C. Available September 20th.”
Enobong Etteh from Boored At Work joins me to talk about the Apple September 2013 Keynote which introduced the new iPhone 5S and iPhone 5C and iTunes Radio. We’ll also take a stab as to why the stock market wasn’t very excited by the news, with Apple stock falling 12 points after the unveiling.
Boored At Work on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/booredatwork/
The iTunes Radio announcement was one of the first things discussed during Apple’s keynote today, but Tim Cook ran over it so fast, I think you can still see tire tread on its back.
What should have been one of the more interesting services announcement for Cupertino was largely ignored. Apple created the online music sales market as we know it today, yet even with that legacy, very little was said about iTUnes Radio. With a nod and a collective shrug, we just took it for granted before moving on to hardware announcements.
Simply billed as “coming soon” on the official iTunes site, Radio will be another streaming service designed to compete with offerings from Pandora, Spotify, Google, and even Microsoft. It will allow you to build “stations” for your favorite music, and those stations will be synced across all of your devices via iCloud, so iPhones, iPads, and Apple TV can all get in on the act.
On a personal note, it’s a little shocking that even Microsoft was able to beat Apple to a service like this. Plus, it’s uncharacteristically tame of Apple not to work being late into more of a consumer oriented selling point. In the past being late to a service, Apple would’ve boldly claimed that they waited to perfect the offerings which were obviously inferior or confusing to consumers. There was no such bravado on display here today, and lacking that confidence is a dangerous place for Apple to be in this viscerally competitive market.