It might have been the most unusual customer to ever appear at Apple’s Palo Alto store, but not entirely out of place in the heart of Silicon Valley. On Friday morning, among the hundreds who queued for the iPhone 6S to go on sale, it was not human, not animal, but machine. Brianna Lempesis in San Diego was inside the machine, a Beam telepresence robot that’s capable of trundling around on wheels and videoconferencing with anyone it meets. A telepresence robot trundles into Apple’s Palo Alto store in the hopes of buying an iPhone 6S on launch day, Sept. 25, 2015.
Microsoft is nearing the launch of Windows 10 Mobile, and that means new smartphones running the operating system are around the corner. While the company is expected to release its own set of smartphones, it is also working with manufacturers to produce third-party devices that run the OS. Microsoft's activities on behalf of device makers are part of an effort to build out an ecosystem of handsets after scaling back its own ambitions in the mobile market last month. The company
UphoricTV, a digital TV network focused on music fests like Bonnaroo and Outside Lands, will soon make its debut on Verizon’s go90 service.
Microsoft’s new Lumia phones—the Lumia 950, Lumia 950 XL, and more recently the Lumia 550—have been the subject of speculation for weeks. Now, a leaked presentation that looks very Microsoft-y appears to have put a stamp of authenticity upon the rumors. Slides posted to
I’m busy discovering the Future of Video Games™ at Oculus Connect 2015 this week, but there’s still plenty of news happening for the monitor-bound crowd. Get those breaching charges ready—the closed beta for
A look at the top new and updated Android apps and games out this week.
If there’s one announcement out of Oculus Connect that’s got me excited, it’s that Netflix has finally arrived on virtual reality, courtesy of I’ve been waiting quite a while—probably since the first time I
The Google Play Services 8.1 APK is now ready for developers, who can put many new features to use like ambient maps mode and app invites. Google’s Magnus Hyttsten took to YouTube for another zany video that outlines the new tricks. While With Ambient Mode, Google Maps will be able to render in a simple, low-color version on your Android Wear watch, much like some ambient watch faces.
The iFixit team also figured out how the new iPhones' cameras are so spectacular.
Adobe recently rolled out its latest update to Adobe Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, the company’s basic desktop photo and video editing programs. Both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements are available now for $100 each or as bundled together for $150. The new Elements 14 suite comes with a number of improvements, including support for 4K resolution videos—but other than that, many of the new features aren’t so notable for what they add but for what they take away. Top of the list is a new shake reduction feature first seen in the flagship version of Photoshop. This allows you to easily correct any of those blurry selfies or great photos snapped just a little too quickly.
U.S. antitrust authorities may be ready to follow their European counterparts in investigating how Google licenses its apps and services for use on Android smartphones. Authorities in Android is an open source operating system, but many of the apps and services that Android phone and tablet buyers see and use are proprietary Google offerings, including Google Now, the Play Store, and Google Maps. Some companies —most notably Amazon.com in the U.S. and Yandex in Russia—have sold Android tablets and phones without Google’s suite of apps and services, replacing them with their own equivalents. A
Sling TV is rolling out a refreshed user interface that should allow for faster flipping through video channels. Xbox One users are getting the update first, but there’s no word on timing for other devices such as Roku and Android TV. While the new interface doesn’t look much different than the old one, it does include a couple of important changes. The biggest improvement is the inclusion of program details for every time slot as you scroll through the channel guide. Previously, Sling TV showed the name of the current program, but only times and thumbnail images for past and upcoming programs. Here’s a comparison of the current app on Android TV, and the new app on Xbox One:
Microsoft’s newly released To use it, all you have to do is highlight a term or phrase, right-click, and select “Smart Lookup” from the context menu—or at least that’s how it works once you’ve activated the feature. Since Smart Lookup sends data from your desktop to Bing, Microsoft does not turn on the new feature by default.
Forget about the rumors: As part of the company’s quarterly earnings announcement released Friday, BlackBerry confirmed it would roll out an Android phone in late 2015. The company did not provide any significant details such as specs, pricing, or U.S. carrier partners, but BlackBerry did say the phone will be called Priv—as in privacy. “Today, I am confirming our plans to launch Priv, an Android device named after BlackBerry’s heritage and core mission of protecting our customers’ privacy,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen said in a written statement. “Priv combines the best of BlackBerry security and productivity with the expansive mobile application ecosystem available on the Android platform.”
This is one of the best connected-home products to reach the market so far, but it’s not perfect.
The version of Windows 10 for devices from the Internet of Things will soon get security features from the company's operating system for computers and tablets. The company Those are the same features that Microsoft uses to protect other systems running Windows 10, and it goes to show one of the advantages of the company's new operating system: Microsoft can migrate features from one version of Windows 10 to others fairly easily, in addition to allowing developers to build applications across a range of devices using the Windows universal app platform.
You feel like you NEED that new phone. But you don't, you really don't.
Something's happening to the Outlook apps for iOS and Android. Quietly, they’ve begun to take on more and more responsibility—not just email, but calendaring and file information as well. It's no accident. Smartphone apps began life as focused, single-purpose products, but Microsoft's betting we'll want more interconnectivity moving forward. Just as cosmic dust collected into stars and planets, then began rotating about one another, colliding and sometimes gobbling each other up, Microsoft’s mobile apps are being built to interact with each other, share information, work together. Microsoft's vision for its mobile apps: More sharing and interacting to surface the right data at the right time.