Double display on LG V10

spotting a 4GB ram, 64GB storage, 16 mp rear camera,5 mp front camera, and 3000mah battery. The LG phone is the first of its kind. This is a certified beast
Full specs

Force touch on Iphone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus

 A unique feature of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus is the Force touch technology, the new pressure sensitive screen is a 3D touch display e.g you can touch touch to open your email, another touch to read and another touch to reply or forward, all from one touch

The past, present and future of ASUS according to its chairman

The past: 

ASUS was founded by T.H. Tung, Ted Hsu, Wayne Tsiah and M.T. Liao in April 1989.
The bumpy ride from Acer to ASUS

"Let me tell you the real story," the 62-year-old chairman said, while pouring some Chinese tea. "At the beginning, those four engineers were my engineers, and we were with Acer, and I had been in charge of Acer's R&D for quite a long time (12 years). One time, at a cafeteria, we dreamed about how to start up a small but beautiful company. They all elected me to lead them."

The present: Today's ASUS is over 13,800 people strong, around 6,000 of whom are based in Taiwan. Even though the company now offers a broad range of products including laptops, tablets, all-in-ones, smartphones, graphics cards, routers and more, it is still very active in the motherboard market. In fact, at the beginning of this year, ASUS sold its 500 millionth motherboard.

In Shih's opinion, the ZenFone 2 is a good example of design thinking. It's very affordable, but still packs an impressive punch in the specs department. Plus it looks and feels solid, even if it sticks to plastic for the body. The numbers reflect some success in certain regions. According to research firm BCN, ASUS topped Japan's SIM-free smartphone market with a 29.6 percent market share in the first half of 2015. Specifically, the ZenFone 2 ranked number three in July, which was already its second month in the country. On the other side of the world, the ZenFone 2 is listed as the top and second best seller on Amazon in Italy and the US, respectively, at the time of publication (Amazon updates its list hourly). Looking ahead, the company expects to ship 25 million smartphones this year, though Shih wouldn't confirm whether the upcoming high-end PadFone refresh would fall into this window.

But can ASUS fend off other aggressive smartphone brands such as Xiaomi, OnePlus and Huawei? Shih said it's inevitable that consumers will be drawn to the best blend of price and performance, and his company has to go with the mobile trend or else risk becoming irrelevant. The least his team could do is to follow the old wisdom and focus on customer happiness.

The future: big data and robotics.

ASUS ... in search of incredible

source

Huawei honor 7i has a flipping camera

Huawei is excited about its new device and just couldn't wait to launch the Honor 7i

specs
5.2 inch 1080p IPS display
octa-core snapdragon 616 chipset
3GB RAM/32GB Internal storage
3100 mAh battery
dual nano sims

It costs about $300

source

Twitter is now tracking the apps you download

Twitter has announced that it has started collecting data on the apps its users download and install on their smartphones.

The benefit for advertisers to better target users is obvious: Twitter users with Jawbone UP24 installed could find more fitness-related ads, while music subscriptions services could target users of their rivals with special offers or incentives to switch.

Twitter isn't the only service to be tracking it users' apps. Facebook checks which apps users have installed that use the Facebook SDK -- again to better target advertising of Facebook games and applications. WhatsApp will also retrieve a list of applications you have running.

If this all sounds a little too much, Twitter does point out that this is entirely optional -- you can turn off this feature, and the company details exactly how to do so for both Android and iOS on its website.

Source: CNET

Google Glass hack allows brainwave control

Google Glass has been hacked so that it can be controlled by brainwaves.

By combining the smart glasses with an electroencephalography (EEG) headset, the software makes it possible to take a picture without moving a muscle.

London-based start-up This Place said the tech could be utilised in high-pressure hands-free situations - such as during surgery.

It has released the MindRDR software for free in the hope that developers will adapt it for other uses.

Google made it clear that it does not support the app.

"Google Glass cannot read your mind," a spokeswoman told the BBC.

"This particular application seems to work through a separate piece of kit which you attach to Glass.

Source : BBC

Google's self-driving car has no steering wheel

Google has been demonstrating its driverless technology for several years by retrofitting Toyotas, Lexuses and other cars with cameras and sensors. But now, for the first time, the company has unveiled a prototype of its own: a cute little car that looks like a cross between a VW Beetle and a golf cart.
"They won't have a steering wheel, accelerator pedal, or brake pedal ... because they don't need them," Google said Tuesday in a blog post introducing the unnamed electric vehicles. "Our software and sensors do all the work."
Unlike previous models, these cars won't have human drivers monitoring them at all times. Google said the cars can detect objects up to 200 yards away in all directions and adjust their speed, turns and braking accordingly.
The cars' speed for now has been capped at 25 mph, allowing engineers to minimize the risk of crashes during testing.
The company plans to build about 100 prototype vehicles and begin testing them later this summer. If everything goes well, Google then will run a small pilot program in California over the next few years.

Source : CNN

Farewell Nokia: The rise and fall of a mobile pioneer

The once-staid Finnish company confirmed that it had completed the sale of substantially its entire devices and services business to Microsoft. Microsoft said the unit, now named Microsoft Mobile Oy, would fall under its devices group.

"Today is an exciting day as we join the Microsoft family, and take the first, yet important, step in our long-term journey," said Stephen Elop, the former CEO of Nokia and the new head of devices at Microsoft, in a blog post.
Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition is a sobering reminder that even the strongest companies can fall.

Next to Motorola, which invented the mobile handset, there was no bigger name in the business than Nokia. The company has been on such a steady downward slide over the past six years that it's easy to forget how dominant and long-lasting its reign was over the cellphone business. Samsung Electronics is heralded as a titan with just over a quarter of the global handset market today; Nokia at its peak in 2007 controlled 41 percent of the market.

"It's hard to imagine any vendor reaching 41 percent share in today's world," said Ken Hyers, an analyst with Strategy Analytics.

By the end of last year, Nokia's market share still sat at 15 percent, thanks to a horde of cheaper basic phones, according to data compiled by Strategy Analytics. Its share of the smartphone market was in the low single-digits.

But when Nokia was on top, nobody could touch it. That kind of success eventually bred an obstinate attitude and vulnerability that was exposed first by the Motorola Razr, and then more fully by Apple's iPhone.

The cellphone industry was highly fragmented with multiple vendors who looked at the market on a country-by-country basis. Nokia was one of the first to view the global market as a whole, building phones that worked in many countries at once. But at the same time, it recognized the importance of reaching every price tier. It established a strong presence in high-end Western markets, and saw one of its phone featured in films such as "The Matrix." It played well to audiences in emerging markets such as India, where phones would sold for as little as $40.

In 1998, Nokia overthrew Motorola to become the world's largest phone manufacturer. By the time I purchased the 5190 in a year later, Nokia supplied a little more than one out of every four phones in the market.

"Nokia was to mobile as Kleenex was to tissue paper," Hyers said. "That was how dominant they were."

Former Nokia vet Soderling said she started feeling emotional today when her Facebook stream started filling with pictures of the glowing blue Nokia sign being taken down at the Espoo, Finland, headquarters, replaced with a white Microsoft logo.

That Nokia could fall so low serves as a lesson to all handset vendors. As dominant as Samsung and Apple are, Nokia was even bigger in its prime.

source : CNET

Amazon announces Fire TV set-top streaming box with gaming capabilities

As expected, Amazon has launched its set-top box, dubbed the Amazon Fire TV. It sells for $100 and is available now.
What does it do? It streams video and yup, plays games. I went on record as doubting Amazon would push games in a big way but I was wrong. They're selling a $40 game controller (which comes with $10 worth of Amazon Coins to let you buy games, plus a free copy of the $7 Sev Zero title) to help you get the most out of your games.

So what makes the Fire TV stand out from the Apple TV or Roku? Not a lot, honestly. The Fire is more powerful, with a quad-core Snapdragon processor and 2 GB of memory. This is important for gaming but only 'nice to have' for streaming. I can't say I've ever thought "this needs more power!" when using an Apple TV or Roku.

Beyond that, it's another streamer. You can of course watch Amazon content on it, as well as Netflix, Hulu and the rest of the usual suspects. HBO Go is coming but not available yet. With the debut of this season of Game of Thrones this Sunday, it's unfortunate that HBO Go isn't ready yet.

If you already own a streamer like the Roku or the Apple TV, I see no reason to switch to Fire TV unless for some reason you want to play Android games on your TV. If you've yet to purchase a streaming solution though, the Fire TV might be a good choice. Of course you can't access iTunes content on it; if you already have a collection of iTunes music and video you might want to stick to Apple TV. And though Fire TV has a microphone in the remote, Roku has a headphone jack in its remote, which is great for late-night movie watching when you don't want to disturb the family or neighbors.

courtesy: itworld

Nokia Android

The new Nokia X, X+, and XL smartphones that Nokia unveiled here at Mobile World Congress 2014 technically do run on Android, just as the leaks and rumors promised -- and that means you'll be able to load up Android apps with ease. However, this X and family don't turn in the full 'Droid experience that you think.

On top of the Android 4.1 frame, Nokia has painted an interface that pulls from both Asha and the Windows Phone OS

The Nokia X and X+ are almost identical, except that the Nokia X+ has more storage and an SD card. The XL has a 5-inch WVGA display and a 5-megapixel camera with autofocus, LED flash. There's also a 2-megapixel front-facing camera. For simplicity's sake, I'll just talk about the Nokia X, which I saw ahead of MWC.

Specs on the dual-SIM Nokia X are modest. It has a 4-inch screen with an 800x480-pixel resolution, a 1GZH dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, and Assisted GPS. Beneath the display, you navigate the screen with the Home button that doubles as a Back button. The phone measures 10 millimeters thick (0.39 inch) around the middle, which is pretty typical, if not a bit thicker than a lot of premium phones (but hey, it stands upright!)

Although it may run Android underneath all the layers, the Nokia X and X+ aren't really Android phones. They deliberately don't look the same and don't feel the same. As such, these aren't phones for fans in search of a budget Android device.

The 89 euros Nokia X ships in the first week of March, and Nokia has a specific audience in mind. (Psst! It isn't Android users.) First-time smartphone owners make up Nokia's dream demographic, with 22-year-olds in the center of the target. (The X+ costs 99 euros and the XL will cost 109 Euros. Both phones will sell in early Q2.)

The Nokia X, X+, and XL aren't coming to countries where high-end smartphones reign supreme. For instance, it isn't touching the US, Korea, or Japan. Specifically, Nokia will pump the Nokia X into Asian countries like China, Thailand, Indonesia, and Vietnam, as well as Egypt, India, Pakistan, Russia, Poland, Brazil, and Mexico.

Source

Finally! MIT scientist helps you get all the ketchup out of the bottle

A lubricant called LiquiGlide, developed initially at MIT, is the potential savior for all those frustrated by bottles of ketchup, shampoo, lotion, and everything else where there's always something left behind.

Being of smart business mind, Smith doesn't actually want you to know what his magic substance consists of.His new company's CEO, Carsten Boers, hinted to Fast Company that its texture is not dissimilar to a sponge. The promise is, of course, that it's also odorless and tasteless.

However, given that all its ingredients are reportedly FDA approved, the range of its potential uses -- both consumer and industrial -- seems limitless.

Courtesy : CNET news

Skype social media platforms hacked by 'Syrian Electronic Army'

The group posted anti-surveillance messages, including a message telling people not to use email services of Microsoft, the owner of Skype.

It claimed "they are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments".

The hack comes after recent revelations about surveillance programmes being run by US intelligence agencies.
"Don't use Microsoft emails (hotmail, outlook). They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments," the hackers posted on Skype's Twitter account and its blog.

The post has since been removed.

Skype acknowledged that it had been hacked but said that "no user information was compromised".

The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), which says it supports President Bashar al-Assad, has been behind recent hack attacks on the New York Times and Twitter.

The SEA has also targeted various other media companies, including the BBC, CNN and the Guardian.

Courtesy BBC technology news

Samsung's 110-inch Ultra HDTV is the world's largest

BY RICHARD LAWLER
Samsung promised at CES last January that it would deliver a 110-inch UHDTV this year, and with just a couple of days left to spare here it is. Apparently rolling out in China, the Middle East and a few European countries first, there's no word on price (the 85-inch version that launched earlier this year had a $40K pricetag attached when it launched), but can you really put a price on a TV that's bigger than a king-size bed? That's right, at 2.6-meters by 1.8-meters there's more than enough room for well-heeled VIPs or employees of large companies and government agencies (the target market for the S9110) to catch some z's on it -- and bring a few friends. It's available for custom orders just before we see the new generation of Ultra HD (including a 105-inch curved model) at CES 2014 next week, although most of us will be looking for TVs that actually fit inside our living room.
Update: Even though the set is custom order only, an Associated Press report puts the price at about $150,000

Tech's biggest misfires of 2013

BY BRIAN HEATER

THE NSA GETS CAUGHT READING EVERYONE'S EMAIL
Granted, it's not as if all this went down in the 2013 calendar year, but given the sorts of revelations that were uncovered, we'd be remiss if we didn't include it this time out. The question, then, is where precisely to start with the government agency's laundry list of civil liberties violations? After all, while it's likely that few were genuinely surprised that the government's been doing this manner of snooping, the information revealed by Edward Snowden was shocking in precisely how deep, thorough and extreme the NSA's collection methods were.

PRETTY MUCH EVERYTHING BLACKBERRY
while we've been holding out hope that the Canadian smartphone manufacturer would have turned things around by now, each new piece of news out of Waterloo seemingly confirms that it hasn't quite found the bottom yet. By all accounts, it should have been a banner year for the company, wrapping up January by launching the long-awaited BlackBerry 10 with a bang. The release arrived with two new handsets -- the Q10 and Z10 -- and a complete rebranding for the company, finally shedding the stuffy Research in Motion moniker for the more familiar BlackBerry. Shortly after the announcement, the company's newly named creative director (and sometime singer-songwriter) Alicia Keys tweeted from her iPhone. It wasn't a make-or-break moment for the smartphone wars, but it was hard not to read the gaffe as symbolic of the company's larger struggles.

MICROSOFT GETS DRM-HAPPY WITH THE XBOX ONE
After nearly a decade between consoles, Microsoft's Xbox One got off to a bit of an inauspicious start. What should have been a celebratory time for the gaming powerhouse was preceded by something of a muddled mess, thanks to a jumble of confusion surrounding the admittedly obtuse digital strategy put forth by Redmond. One thing was for sure: Gamers were pissed about the console's DRM, most notably the 24-hour physical disc check-in for used games. The plan was even more problematic for those without access to a stable internet connection. Anyone who's ever spouted that tired cliche about there not being any such thing as bad press has clearly never been on the wrong side of a video game flame war, and with its chief competition, the PlayStation 4, launching at virtually the same time, Microsoft saw fit to make a change.

Smart devices get smarter, but still lack security

While many smart devices are coming with more cool features, improved security isn't one of them

by Taylor Armerding

As you shop for that new "smart" refrigerator that can do everything including figuring out when you're low on milk, perhaps you should also think about the risk of some mischievous hacker taking control of it and having 5,000 gallons of milk delivered to your door.

That scenario is real. It has been demonstrated. Security experts have been saying for more than a decade that, in the world of electronic devices, "smart" does not mean secure. They have warned that if security is not made a priority, the convenience provided by those devices will be undermined by cyber criminals.

And most of them say things have gotten even worse since those warnings began, in part due to the explosive growth of consumer devices with embedded computers.

In an interview with PaulDotCom Security Weekly TV this past February, Craig Heffner, a vulnerability researcher with Tactical Network Solutions, put it bluntly. "Go back 15 years in computer security, pick every problem we've had from then to now, and you'll find it in embedded systems," he said.

That would make it a problem growing by orders of magnitude. At a conference on the Internet of Things (IoT) last month, sponsored by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the agency's chairwoman, Edith Ramirez, said the 3.5 billion sensors now on the network are expected to grow to trillions within the next decade. Indeed, many of today's new cars already have more than 100 embedded, connected computers.

"Five years ago, more things than people connected to Internet," she said. "By 2020, 90% of all cars will have some kind of vehicle platform, up from 10% today. By 2015, there will be 25 billion things hooked to the Internet. By 2020, that will grow to 50 billion. In the consumer market, smart devices will track our health, help us remotely monitor an aging family member, reduce our utility bills and tell us we're out of milk."

But all that, she said, will come with "undeniable" privacy and security risks. In response, she said, the stance of the FTC is that, "companies need to build security into their products, no exceptions."

Top vendors like Google, Apple hope to take smartwatches mainstream in 2014

Smartwatch developers must focus on cutting prices, adding more apps, and improving the look to attract broad consumer interest

When International CES opens in Las Vegas in early January, a flood of wearable computing devices, including smartwatches, will be on display.

The fledgling smartwatch market is tiny compared to that for smartphones, or even wearable devices like Google Glass or smart

Still, the smartwatch phenomenon promises to blossom in 2014 as experts expect Google to launch a model by summer followed by Apple sometime in the fall. Even Microsoft is reportedly working on one.

To achieve any degree of greatness, though, these major tech innovators and their smaller competitors must overcome some significant hurdles.

For instance, most of the smartwatches unveiled to date are too expensive, at $200 to $300 each, for widespread adoption. Most of the devices also require a connection to a smartphone via Bluetooth, which implies that users face the added cost of the smartphone and a wireless service contract.

The early smartwatches also lack functionality and mostly run fewer than 20 smartwatch apps.

Southampton University supercomputer goes live

A £3.2m supercomputer, one of the most powerful in the UK, has been installed at the University of Southampton.

The Iridis4 has 12,200 processors, each of which can perform a trillion calculations per second - a measurement referred to as a "teraflop".

The IBM machine also has a million gigabytes of disk space and 50 terabytes of memory.

Home computers generally have between 500GB and 2TB of disc space and about 4GB to 6GB of memory.

There are 1,024 gigabytes in a terabyte.

The university said the new machine would allow academics to work on more projects at faster speeds.

The world's most powerful computer is China's Tianhe-2, which can perform 33,860 trillion calculations per second.

Moto X : supposed iphone killer

The Moto X, the first real Google phone, is the coolest thing Motorola has done since being acquired by Google. It offers 5 features that has not been seen in any other smartphones before, not even the iPhone!
Feature 1: You can design your own color scheme.
You get your customized phone within four days, courtesy of Feature 2.
Feature 3 is the most useful: touchless mode.
Feature 4: Motorola observed that many people wake their phones many times a day just to check the time or missed messages. The Moto X displays this information briefly every time you move it.
Feature 5: You can fire up the Camera app by twitching your wrist a couple of times, as though trying to dislodge a mosquito; it works whether the phone is on or off.

Full Specs

Microsoft’s one million servers: what it means

By Nancy Gohring
Digging through the transcript of Microsoft’s recent Worldwide Partner Conference, a number of people paused at CEO Steve Ballmer’s comment that the company now has one million servers. As interesting is that he said that Google has more and Amazon fewer, while other big names like Facebook and Yahoo are in the 100,000 ballpark.

--Does Ballmer know how Microsoft compares to his competitors? Probably not. As well-known Amazon Web Services
engineer James Hamilton notes, Amazon has never released a server count. Neither has Google, although two years
ago a Stanford professor deduced, based on official data about Google’s data center energy output, that Google had around 900,000 servers
--What does the number mean about Microsoft data center efficiency? That’s a tough one to answer. Microsoft’s IaaS and PaaS services are dwarfed by AWS. Bing is dwarfed by Google. More than 300 million people use Outlook.com, but 100 million more use Gmail.

Then there are Microsoft services, like Office 365 and other hosted enterprise software, that neither AWS or Google offer.

Do all of Microsoft’s flagging competitive services, like Azure and Bing, plus its enterprise services, add up to more workloads than AWS has? Or is Microsoft just really inefficient at running its data centers?

These are questions posed by Roger, in the comments after Hamilton’s blog post. He suggests we can’t compare efficiency based on server numbers: “The numbers they should brag about are ratios – servers per system ops/admin person, annual power consumption per user, servers per user, etc.” he wrote.

--Regardless of the comparison, what more does the one million figure tell us about Microsoft’s data center? Hamilton does the math for us. He figures that one million servers equals 15 – 30 data centers, a $4.25 billion capital expense, and power consumption of 2.6TWh annually, or the amount of power that would be used by 230,000 homes in the U.S.

Those numbers are all huge, but plausible given Microsoft’s size.

--Should we care? Hamilton argues the number isn’t useful “mostly because a single data point is open to a lot of misinterpretation by even skilled industry observers.”

That said, apparently there’s significant interest throughout the industry. Data Center Knowledge said that its page that lists the best information about who has the most servers is one of its most popular.

Take a look, it’s very interesting to see the enormous differences in scale. Rackspace, for instance, has just 94,000 servers. In 2011, SoftLayer said it had 100,000. EBay has 54,000 servers, compared to Facebook’s “hundreds of thousands.”

Ultimately, it’s intriguing to find out how many servers Microsoft has, particularly because the giants in the industry are secretive about such data center metrics. But unless we have additional metrics, it’s just too hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from the number.

Read more of Nancy Gohring's "To the Cloud" blog and follow the latest IT news at ITworld. Follow Nancy on Twitter at @ngohring and on Google+. For the latest IT news, analysis and how-tos, follow ITworld on Twitter and Facebook.

The end of Symbian: Nokia ships last handset with the mobile OS

Two years ago, Symbian was still the #1 mobile operating system. What happened?
by Christopher Null (PC World)

Will the last one to leave please turn out the valot?

This week, Finnish smartphone creator Nokia announced that it had shipped its final handset running the Symbian operating system. As the last company in the world building phones using the Symbian OS, Nokia's withdrawal from the platform means Symbian is now completely defunct.

Symbian's fall from dominance is a tale about which books can (and should) be written. Its origins date to the '80s, but as of 1998, Symbian's existence was formalized when an old PDA company, Psion, changed its name to Symbian and took funding from the major phone manufacturers at the time, including Ericsson and Motorola, to become the official caretaker of the rising mobile OS.

But Nokia has always been Symbian's biggest supporter. The company produced millions of phones running the OS, and the two have always had close ties. Together they dominated the cell phone market throughout the early 2000s; in fact, Symbian remained the top-selling smartphone OS worldwide until late 2010.

That abrupt reversal of fortune was due to a couple of factors: First, the rise of Android and iOS as the dominant phone OSes, sought-after by consumers dropping simplistic handsets in favor of smartphones. Second, Nokia's fall from grace (for much the same reason), along with its fateful 2011 decision to jump into bed with Microsoft and the Windows Phone OS. At that point, the only remaining Symbian backer (and the main contributor to the Symbian code base) said goodbye to the OS, and the writing was on the wall for what would happen next.

Today, Symbian is actually maintained by Accenture, a management consulting company, to which Nokia outsourced development (and shipped off thousands of employees) in 2011. Accenture is supposed to maintain the OS through 2016.

So, what killed Symbian? Complexity, according to Nokia. In reports, the company blamed Symbian's difficult and unfriendly code structure for the extended time it takes for a phone using that OS to be developed. BGR quotes a Nokia spokesperson complaining that a typical Symbian handset required 22 months of development time, compared to less than a year with Windows Phone. In today's environment, when markets are made and lost in a matter of weeks, that just won't fly.

For businesses with large deployments of Symbian smartphones, well, there's probably little need to fret. First, there's no question you've seen this day coming for at least a few years, and chances are you've long since figured out a successor to standardize on. For those stragglers, that deal with Accenture means you'll likely get security updates and other fixes for the next three years--that's plenty of time to decide whether you want to jump to Android, iOS, Windows Phone, or--dare we suggest it--BlackBerry. (The smart money seems to be on moving to Android.)

Catchyit : The Symbian OS has had a good run, take a bow ... goodbye