Let's Talk Tech
Shown off during the MS keynote unveiling Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 was a new touch cover for the little slates. Instead of sporting a keyboard, it offers a series of custom built controls for remixing music through XBox Music. Hopefully this will be the beginning of custom built hardware for a variety of different creative solutions.
Joe Hahn from Linkin Park takes us for a quick spin around the Surface Remix Project.
Kingston Technology is hooking us up with an incredible prize pack to give away for Fall!
SD cards, USB flash drives, MobileLite wireless card readers, and a big daddy 240GB HyperX solid state drive! Some amazing gear to up your flash storage game!
I know you folks want to be on board, so here are the details:
I can’t thank Kingston tech enough for supporting SomeGadgetGuy with this amazing prize pack. For more info on Kingston products, please check out: http://www.kingston.com/
Good luck!
Full rules and regulations after the jump.
Not a lot of news on this one yet, and I’m building it off of a tweet here, so I’ll update when we have more info.
Looks like BB is going to be acquired:
BlackBerry agrees to be acquired by a group led by Fairfax Financial Holdings for $4.7 billion. http://t.co/JL1Y5syX6q
— CNNMoney.com (@CNNMoney) September 23, 2013
Pretty much all we know right now.
***UPDATE!***
It’s official. Blackberry is going private.
Prem Watsa, Chairman and CEO of Fairfax, said:
“We believe this transaction will open an exciting new private chapter for BlackBerry, its customers, carriers and employees. We can deliver immediate value to shareholders, while we continue the execution of a long-term strategy in a private company with a focus on delivering superior and secure enterprise solutions to BlackBerry customers around the world.”
Fairfax Financials has 6 weeks to conduct due diligence. Stock holders would receive $9 per share in cash (stock currently trading at 8 points).
Official Blackberry press release after the jump.
Before I even get into this announcement, can I just say it’s starting to become a real bummer when companies release these new products at swanky events but don’t do a live stream. I digress.
At a swanky un-watchable event in NYC this morning the Redmond Surface team officially took the wraps off of the new Surface Pro 2. A substantial update to the progressive little Windows 8 tablet released in February of this year. This was a necessary release time table for Microsoft as the OG Surface came out right before a new generation of lower power processors from Intel.
The design and dimensions remain largely unchanged from the original. There weren’t many criticisms about the form factor or build quality. One of the few exterior updates is a change to the angle of the kickstand allowing for improved lap usability.
Continue reading “Microsoft unveils Surface 2 and Surface Pro 2 in NYC”
I wont get into all the drama surrounding this app. For those curious, there’s a third party ROM team called CyanogeMod which just went corporate and is looking to improve how people might load the CyanogenMod custom ROM onto various smartphones. For a brief time, the Focal camera app BETA was baked into CyanogenMod, but was removed for stability reasons and issues with licensing. Focal Developer Guillaume Lesniak shared his perspective on his G+ page.
Anywho, now Focal is its own standalone app on Google Play, and while we’re definitely talking BETA here, it’s got serious potential to offer a unified high quality camera experience to all users regardless of what phone they might be using.
Focal borrows some of the aesthetic of the stock Android Nexus app. Your shutter control floats on top of the viewfinder, and menus are hidden by swiping gestures. A slide up from the left side of the screen (in portrait) brings up a scrolling menu where you can find a huge number of photographic controls. Sliding across the shutter button allows you to change between photos, videos, panorama, photoshere, and switching between the front and rear cameras.
The number of options at your command is pretty formidable. The basics are up front, toggling the flash, adjusting white balance, “Scene Mode” options (auto by default), and activating HDR options. Exposure controls and metering options help dial in brighter or darker pics, and in camera filters allow you to see what your shots will look like in black and white, sepia, and negative color space. Lastly color saturation and JPEG quality settings can help your shots retain more detail or achieve smaller file sizes.
What’s ingenious is how well laid out these options are. They aren’t anything you wont find on another manufacturer camera app, like on the HTC One or GS4 for example. They are laid out in a very straightforward way here however. Tapping on one category provides the user a pop up with icons and text to explain what options they have for controls. That pop up remains until the user taps on the category again to collapse the options. Every control is found in this interface. Not like on other apps where some options are found on screen and some are buried under a separate menu. It really is the most intuitive layout I’ve seen on a camera app featuring this much control.
The interface is smooth, but performance is very shaky on several phones. Taking a pic froze my HTC One. The GS4 was able to utilize most features, but rendering a PhotoSphere locked it up. The LG Optimus G Pro was the most stable, but would default to the lowest resolution output for pics.
As for output, it’s hard to see much difference between the various phone apps and Focal. Using Focal’s quality settings, you can dial up jpegs almost twice as large as what you would normally see out of a phone app. The biggest I saw was a 5MB image off the LG. Usually your phone’s camera app will pump out around a 2MB pic.
So the verdict? Not read for your main driver. It is called a BETA, and that label is accurate. What we see is some pretty terrific potential though. For the number of phones I get to play with, there’s something nice about some consistency. For my personal phones now I tend to fall back on the same apps and launchers so I know where everything is by muscle memory regardless of what phone or tablet I use.
Adding a consistent camera experience would be a nice addition to the list.
The phrase “data security” can mean a couple different things. Is your data safe from hackers? Is your data backed up? Would your data survive a flood or a fire?
Rob Moore, the CEO of ioSafe, joins me to chat about some of their solutions which should help answer ALL THREE of those questions about your data and how secure it might be!
I’m a little torn on this story.
On the one hand, I think it’s great that Apple will start taking steps to block the use of knock off cheap Lightning connector cables and chargers. There’s a chip built into each cable, communicating with the iPhone or iPad to verify authenticity. This chip can be cracked and cloned, but there are still varying reports of people getting shocked or even killed by knock offs.
Apple has started a trade in program, where customers can bring in knock off chargers and get an official Apple charger for $10. This is a very conscious move on Apple’s part getting ahead of a market which could be damaging their brand, and acknowledging a potential consumer health risk.
However, there’s a part of me which can’t help but point out that Apple’s use of non-standard connectors and cabling is what’s causing this cottage industry of building and selling knock off chargers. Buying the official Lightning connector cable by itself from Apple will set you back $30. Buying an Amazon branded Lightning cable will still run you $14. Total cost to get an official Apple cable and charger is around $50.
Buying a decent MicroUSB cable capable of charging and syncing any Android, Blackberry, or Windows Phone? About $5, or at least usually less than a dollar a foot.
In part it was this kind of situation that the EU was hoping to avoid back in 2010 when they started working towards a universal device connector. Not just to halt the price gouging of every company coming up with proprietary connections, and the e-waste associated with one-off accessories, but also the health and safety issues associated with people trying to find deals. MicroUSB was eventually agreed upon, but Apple decided to continue with a proprietary dock connector. To appease the EU, Apple released a $20 Lightning connector to MicroUSB adapter, which will allow your iPhone to charge off of those aforementioned $5 cables. While within the letter of the law, it certainly violates the spirit of developing a standard.
If you’re using a cheap “alternative” brand charger for your iDevices, I would highly recommend checking out Apples trade in offer. Saving a few bucks is hardly worth a fried iPhone.
(via PhoneArena)
That was fast.
So, iPhone 5S was officially released two days ago, and Touch ID has already been bypassed. It must have taken an army of L337 haxxors running server farms to crack the protection right? Well, unfortunately for us fans of biometric security, it would seem that the same low tech methods for bypassing still work, even on Apple’s improved fingerprint sensor.
So, as long as you can gain access to someone’s fingerprint, you know those pesky traces of ourselves we leave after touching just about any surface we come in contact with, even potentially ON the fingerprint reader itself, you can spoof someone’s print well enough to fool Touch ID.
From the Chaos Computer Club (the team responsible for the hack):
“In reality, Apple’s sensor has just a higher resolution compared to the sensors so far. So we only needed to ramp up the resolution of our fake… “
Earlier implementations of optical fingerprint readers could even sometimes be fooled by silly putty, so I had very high hopes that Apple’s implementation would solve this problem. The dream of not having to enter complex alpha-numeric passwords on an unforgiving touchscreen isn’t quite realized yet.
Now the process for spoofing your print still requires a little work, making sure you can take a high resolution picture of the print, printing it out, and transferring it to a glue or latex membrane. You have to judge for yourself if the information on your phone is valuable enough for someone to go through this process to try and obtain it. Also, to be fair to Apple, it does require more work to crack than Google’s “Face Unlock” from the front facing cameras on Android handsets.
Unfortunately this will likely strike a blow to corporate and government use, as while it’s still one of the best implementations of biometric security we’ve seen on a mobile device, it’s still entirely defeat-able.
A video demonstrating the exploit can be seen below.
(via CCC)