Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer who started his career on PC World and has written for dozens of computer and technology magazines, as well as numerous national newspapers, business and in-flight magazines. He has also written two novels.
He thinks wires are evil and had a custom desk made to hide them, known as the OC Desk for obvious reasons.
He considers 1000 miles a good distance for a cycle ride, and Chernobyl a suitable tourist destination. What can we say, he’s that kind of chap.
He speaks fluent English but only broken American, so please forgive any Anglicised spelling in his posts.
Image: Engadget
Twitter appears to be testing an official Twitter for Glass app, which would allow Google Glass users to tweet photos directly from the gadget, reports AllThingsD …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Dvice reported on a One Laptop Per Child experiment to deliver devices direct to kids, rather than via schools. OLPC dropped 1,000 Motorola Xoom tablets, sealed in boxes, to two remote villages in Ethiopia where the literacy rate is close to zero. In other words, the exact opposite of conventional wisdom, which says you deliver them via schools to areas where kids already read and write English.
“We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He’d never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android.”
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google is finally pulling the plug on the Meebo Bar, a tool for web publishers that allowed website visitors to interact with the site and share content, on June 6 …
Expand
Expanding
Close
While observing that Chromebooks have so far failed to make much of a dent in the market, we mentioned Intel’s CEO saying that he expected notebook prices to fall as low as $200. CNET reports Intel’s chief product officer saying that he expects most of these to run Android …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Twitter’s quirky video-sharing app Vine, which allows users to record and tweet ultra-short video loops, is coming to Android ‘soon’ according to a comment by Vine co-founder Dom Hofmann to The Verge.
The app, which is currently iOS-only, allows users to record a short video loop of up to six seconds to share on Twitter and Facebook. Vine was acquired by Twitter last October, and the app topped the iOS app charts earlier this month. It briefly caused embarrassment when a porn clip made it to the top of Vine’s Editor’s Pick.
Photo: Gizmodo
Display calibration and testing specialist DisplayMate has described the Galaxy S4 screen as a major improvement on the S3, citing it as a good reason to consider trading up …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Samsung’s share of the global mobile phone market grew by 22.9 percent in the past year, from 93.6m to 115m units, according to new data from the IDC Worldwide Mobile Phone Tracker.
By the end of the first quarter this year, Samsung shipped more phones than the next four vendors combined. Samsung’s domination is largely a result of making handsets for all market segments: smartphones for all market segments, from budget to premium, as well as featurephones, which until recently held the majority of the market share. It was only in the first quarter of this year that smartphones overtook featurephones for the very first time, grabbing 51.6% of the market.
A Samsung prototype showing a similar flexible display
LG has promised a smartphone with flexible display in the final quarter of the year. But don’t expect anything too exciting – as The Verge points out, the battery and circuitry are unlikely to be flexible, suggesting nothing more than a chamfered edge much like the Samsung prototype shown above.
And no, we’re not sure what the benefit is either.
Analytics company IHS has estimated that the ‘smart glasses’ market could generate 9.4m sales by 2016, with real growth beginning in 2014 when Google Glass goes on sale to the general public (via ZDNet). Sales have so far been restricted to a limited number of developers, celebrities and contest winners via the Explorer Edition.
The company describes 9.4m as the most optimistic forecast, and says that apps are key. Without compelling apps, they estimate just 1m sales.
While analyst forecasts are a black art at the best of times, predicting the sales of a new product category without even knowing who else may enter the market seems a particular stretch, but perhaps you can’t go too far wrong with a forecast ranging all the way from 1m to 9.4m …
CompareMyMobile.com reported that Samsung’s announcement of the Galaxy S4 generated a 127 percent increase in valuation requests on older Samsung phones, and a 29 percent increase in trade-ins. The firm, which monitors over 40 recycling stores in the UK, said that these kind of numbers had only ever been seen before following iPhone announcements. Trade-in values from a range of sites after the break …
Expand
Expanding
Close
We’ve heard a couple of rumors about a new waterproof version of the S4, with TechView now reporting that Samsung spokesman Young Soo Kim said during a press conference Q&A that a ‘ruggedized’ version would be announced within a few weeks.
The previous rumor we heard spoke of a ‘waterproof screen’, which we presume refers to the sealing around the screen since glass is generally already pretty waterproof, a feature that comes in quite handy when drinking beer.
It’s a little surprising that we haven’t had a more official announcement if it’s true, but we shall see …
http://youtu.be/3OI9L3vOOXc
Swype, the predictive keyboard that allows you to simply leave your finger on the touchscreen keyboard and swipe from letter to letter, has finally arrived in the Google Play store – but only after Jelly Bean was released, with its built-in Swype-alike Gesture Typing …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Three Nexus One smartphones are orbiting the Earth as the brains of what NASA calls a nanosatellite: a tiny cube satellite measuring only four inches square and costing less than $3500 …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Those Google Street View cars have been busy, with Google adding Hungary and Lesotho to reach a total of 50 countries and five million miles of roads. Google has also updated 350,000 miles of existing Street View imagery in 14 existing countries.
Google launched the service in the US in 2007, rapidly expanding from there. Although best-known for the highly visible cars, Google has used a range of other vehicles, including 4x4s, trikes and even backpacks to get to hard-to-reach places. Last year, it announced a Ground Truth initiative to overlay its mapping data with a whole of supplementary ranging from prohibited turns to traffic levels.
The company was yesterday fined a trivial sum for illegal wifi-sniffing by the cars.
If you were concerned that wearing Google Glass wasn’t going to make you look quite scary enough, Reddit users fodawim (via Gizmodo) discovered some code in the MyGlass Android companion app that allows a user to take a photo by winking …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Google not only escaped criminal prosecution in Germany after its Street View cars were found to be capturing private wifi traffic, but it has now pretty much walked away scott-free as the Commissioner for Data Protection and Freedom of Information fined it just €145,000 ($190,000).
The pointless fine (reported by Engadget) could probably be paid with the change found buried in the seats of the Streetview cars …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Facebook Home, the Android front-end that claims to offer a people-centric rather app-centric approach, has hit half a million downloads in its first week, noted Benedict Evans (via TNW).
It’s an impressive number for an overlay that works only on a handful of handsets so far. However, we note that the poor reviews continue, with an average of 2.2 out of 5, and 1 star by far the most common vote. Based on the ratings, we suspect at least half of those downloads were people made curious by the hype and who removed it after a fairly brief play (like our own experience).
The delayed HTC One, HTC’s flagship phone originally due to have been launched a month ago, has finally launched. It’s intended to compete with the Samsung Galaxy S4, and HTC had hoped to beat Samsung to market before a shortage of camera components forced a delay.
The all-metal unibody handset with Snapdragon 1.7Ghz processor, LTE, NFC, 1080×1920 display and full 1080p HD video recording is available from AT&T, Sprint, Best Buy, Radio Shack, Walmart, Target, Amazon.com, Costco, Car Toys, Sam’s Club, HSN.com, and HTC.com. The 32Gb model starts at $199 on a two-year contract …
Expand
Expanding
Close
When a transcript is posted of a five-hour secret meeting between WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange and Google’s Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt, you’d expect it to be pretty riveting stuff. Only … it isn’t, very …
Expand
Expanding
Close
WordPress has followed Tumblr’s lead in releasing a much more attractive Holo version of its blogging app (via Engadget) …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Don’t imagine that paying $1500 for your ‘Explorer Edition’ prototype Google Glass makes you the legal owner: Wired dug into the terms of service to find that Google is effectively treating the limited edition gadget like a piece of software:
Expand
Expanding
Close
Strategy analyst Benedict Evans (via Daring Fireball) has done some admittedly rough-and-ready number-crunching on Nexus sales based on Google development data to come up with a figure of just 680,000 Nexus 10 tablets in use – compared to 1.5m rumored Microsoft Surface sales.
If true, that’s rather painful for Samsung, especially when both figures are compared with the 36.9m iPads sold in the second half of 2012 alone.
[protected-iframe id=”e84502c600b26160ce1e59c8bcccf9dd-22427743-8994189″ info=”http://live.wsj.com/public/page/embed-A0F16F2B_4A38_43C3_802F_7AB87FAEFE24.html” width=”512″ height=”288″ frameborder=”0″ scrolling=”no”]
MLB.com digital head Bob Bowman told AllThingsD that they were slowly picking up Android users – up from 20% two years ago to 30% today – but that iOS users still spend more.
The site offers a free app with a choice of paid subscriptions, at $19.99/month and $24.99/month. Bowman said that the majority of paid sign-ups came from iOS users …
Expand
Expanding
Close
Photo: digitaltrends.com
There are times when tech companies seem to spend more time in court battling patents than they do launching products. Microsoft should now be able to spend less time in court after signing an apparently wide-ranging patent licensing deal with Chinese company Hon Hai, the largest contract electronics company in the world.
The terms weren’t disclosed, but apparently provide ‘broad coverage’ for devices running Android and ChromeOS.