Let's Talk Tech
Arturo sent me some pics on Twitter of his work polishing up the LG G Watch R. The body is metal, but is covered in a black material. If you want a shiny look, LG sells the Urbane, or you can take matters into your own hands like Arturo did.
Taking finer and finer grades of sand paper to get down to the metal, and then finishing off the watch body with a dremel and some polishing compound, I think the completed project is looking really nice.
The Voyager spacecraft was launched in 1977, and on board NASA included a record with a series of recordings as our introduction to the galaxy. This spaceship is flying out past the outer reaches of our solar system, so it would take us quite a while to catch up to it if we wanted to take a listen to that record on board.
Thankfully, we live in the age of the internet, and online media distribution is way easier than planning a rocket mission.
Last week NASA uploaded the contents of the Golden Record to SoundCloud. You can listen to the intro below, or the full contents of the disc on NASA’s page.
NVIDIA is calling back almost 90,000 of their 8″ Shield Tablets over concerns that the battery can overheat.
The Shield was a niche favorite, focusing on a nearly stock Android UI combined with gaming prowess and the ability to stream games from a PC.
This affects tablets sold from July 2014 to the present, and should not affect any other NVIDIA products. You can read NVIDIA’s press release below.
Continue reading “NVIDIA Recalls 88,000 Shield Tablets, Battery Overheating Concerns”
It’s NEW Motorola time!
Rumors have been swirling about what the company will reveal now that they’re owned by Lenovo, and it’s not a single phone, but a trio of new gadgets.
The New Moto G
Gaining a water resistant build, Gorilla Glass, more color options in Moto Maker, this is the phone that bolstered Moto’s market share. It was an inexpensive, entry-level handset which brought a higher quality of performance to the budget crowd, one of the first Android’s to fight Nokia at “cheap” price points.
This Moto G will come in two flavors, 1GB RAM and 8GB of storage for $179, or 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage for $219. Both come with a 13MP camera, a 5″ 720p Screen, and an “all day” battery powered by a Qualcomm 410 series processor. Recently we’ve seen more companies like Asus and Alcatel’s Idol 3 delivering inexpensive options near this price, and Moto’s offering looks to be pushing the boundaries even further.
Moto X Style
This is our new flagship! Taking some of the lessons learned from building the Nexus 6, you can now get a similar phablet build with some of Motorola’s fun customizations.
Moto X Style has a 5.7″ QHD display. Happily they opted for the Qualcomm 808, the same processor powering the LG G4, instead of the more powerful, but hotter and slower Qualcomm 810. X Style will have 3GB of RAM, and if its build of Android 5.1 is anything like last year’s Moto X, it should smoke the Galaxy S6 in multi-tasking performance. Plus we’ll see the addition of a Micro SD card slot for storage expansion. The whole affair will be powered by a 3000mAh battery, which based on these specs, should be good for all day run time.
Continue reading “Motorola Announces Trio of Phones: Moto X Style, Moto X Play, New Moto G”
Services are becoming ubiquitous. It matters less which glowing rectangle we reach for, we want access to our data and our favorite programs. Including LTE in tablets is already gaining in popularity, and Microsoft is now building it into their newest version of their Surface tablet PC.
The Surface 3 is a mid-range solution, which for many folks can handily replace both a laptop and a tablet. It’s a smart play for adding cell phone data, as it’s focused on portable productivity, which Microsoft has been pushing with recent updates to Office and OneDrive.
It also fills a serious gap in Microsoft’s lineup, as there haven’t been many slates sporting LTE and running Windows.
AT&T will be the first carrier to launch the Surface 3 LTE, and they’ll kick off with a sale. You can snag a Surface 3 for $399 with the purchase of any Lumia phone on AT&T Next. You can read the full pres release below.
It’s that time folks. We’re getting close enough to the launch of a new iPhone for the rumor mill to kick into high gear. Around this time last year, many were praising the merits of sapphire for phone screens, only to have Apple omit that particular lifestyle feature.
Now with the 6S and 6S+ on the horizon, iOS fans are wondering if we’ll see improvements to storage.
This generation, Apple took a great step up for their mid-tier iPhone. Instead of spending $100 to bump up your phone to 32GB, you would receive a whopping 64GB. Unfortunately the base model iPhone remained at 16GB, which is a bit lean for a modern smartphone. Even 32GB can feel a bit cramped these days.
We’re expecting improvements to the camera, likely resulting in larger photos and video files. Phones are often a primary device for storing music, our apps are getting more demanding, and OS updates require a certain percentage of your storage to be unused and available. We ask a lot of our smartphones, and lacking the ability to upgrade the storage on an iPhone means users have to monitor their geebees very closely on that first tier iPhone. Continue reading “Will Apple Ever Kill the 16GB iPhone?”
It’s been an interesting couple of weeks at Reddit. The self-proclaimed “Front Page of the Internet” has been in a state of transition, as admins and investors work towards better monetizing the service.
Ellen Pao’s brief trek as CEO was peppered with controversy. Redditors questioned her policy regarding “safe places” after the admin team banned sub-reddits like Fat People Hate, but left racist haven Coon Town intact. Reddit’s community places a fairly high value on “authenticity”, and Pao’s personal life seemed to rub many the wrong way. High profile lawsuits regarding gender discrimination, and a husband accused of millions of dollars worth of investment fraud, fed an unending examination of her actions, policy, and whether she was the right fit for CEO of a social news aggregate built on volunteer labor.
Recently, the firing of a high profile community admin, responsible for coordinating the wildly popular AMA question and answer sessions, threw more fuel on a smoldering fire. Moderators, volunteers in charge of managing individual sub-reddits, protested by blocking access to their specific forums.
Ellen Pao took to traditional media to apologize for missteps and miscommunications, but this only added to the ire, for many it was further illustration of how out of touch Pao was with the Reddit brand and community. A petition calling for her removal as CEO quickly topped 200,000 signatures. Continue reading “Ellen Pao Steps Down as Reddit Interim CEO, Which Probably Won’t Change Much…”
Rumors have been swirling that a Microsoft phone shakeup was in the works. Recently sparked by internal discussion of “touch choices” facing Microsoft, and how the CEO Satya Nadella might completely scrap the Windows Phone line of products to focus on moving Microsoft apps to iOS and Android.
For fans of Live Tiles, thankfully that doesn’t seem to be the case in light of a new employee memo from Nadella.
Microsoft will be moving forward with new phone hardware, but will be reducing the number of offerings. The Lumia line is kind of a mess leading up to the release of Windows 10. Currently consumers can pick from 400, 500, 600, 700, 800, 900, 1300, and 1500 series phones made within the last year. It’s a confusing collection with lots of product overlap.
In the near term, we will run a more effective phone portfolio, with better products and speed to market given the recently formed Windows and Devices Group. We plan to narrow our focus to three customer segments where we can make unique contributions and where we can differentiate through the combination of our hardware and software. We’ll bring business customers the best management, security and productivity experiences they need; value phone buyers the communications services they want; and Windows fans the flagship devices they’ll love.
-CEO Satya Nadella
This year we got an early glimpse at the future of this strategy with the entry level Lumia 640 and 640XL. Now it seems very likely we’ll see Microsoft whittle down this collection to six individual phones. Entry level, mid-range, and flagship. At each of those three tiers we’ll probably see a “normal” sized phone and a “phablet” with the XL designation.
Though industry layoffs are always a sad story, fans of the platform can certainly benefit from more focus. You can read Nadella’s full email below.
Continue reading “Microsoft Laying off 7800 Employees, Streamlining Phone Portfolio”