HTC has teased its Feb. 19 press event and what’s coming during it all week, and now the company has dropped an even bigger hint: Canon lenses.
While yesterday’s iris tweet from HTC seemed to indicate an incredible 1080p display or camera is on the way, this morning’s tweet is more verification that it plans to launch lens add-ons instead. Not just any lenses, though…Canon lenses.
Although not confirmed, HTC may launch the lenses for its M7/One smartphone rumored to début at Tuesday’s event. The lens attachments would essentially turn the handset into a DSLR.
The above Google Maps image is of Lucas Oil Stadium, otherwise known as the home of the Indianapolis Colts.
Google posted a 360-degree interactive photo tour of the stadium on Friday and said it is the first inside imagery of any NFL stadium in Google Maps.
The Google Maps team is (sic) “working hard (and having fun!) building the most comprehensive, accurate and usable map of the world — complete with imagery from inside your favorite sporting venues,” and it is subsequently trying to keep U.S. football fans entertained for the next 202 days until the 2013 kickoff of the National Football League.
With this new interactive, 360 degree imagery, you can march out of the tunnel and down the field towards the end zone, just like Andrew Luck did all season. Or check out the Colts’ locker room where Head Coach Chuck Pagano gave his memorable post-game locker room speech on November 4, after an inspirational win against the Miami Dolphins. You can also explore the stadium’s three concourses and suites, including the Quarterback Suite, a Field Level Suite and Loge-Level Suite.
HTC’s event is next Tuesday and leaked images of a HTC One device —codenamed “M7″—are popping up left and right in silvery white-looking colors and now black.
UnwiredView posted an image of the black device on Friday and reiterated there are no new design aspects to report. The image looks like a press shot and shows off the same hardware and UI designs previously leaked.
The M7, pegged as HTC’s flagship device running a 5-inch 1080p display similar to the Droid DNA, will also likely get some airtime at MWC in Barcelona after unveiling next week.
Google just unveiled a website for locating Nexus devices.
The website immediately requests access to a visitor’s current location, and then it serves up localized contact information for retailers and vendors offering Nexus devices. Folks need to select whether they want a Nexus 4, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, or even all devices, adjust the search area distance, and then contact the listed retailers for device availability.
Also, T-Mobile is currently the only Nexus 4 vendor, so Google’s tool is basically a T-Mobile store locator for those trying to find a Nexus 4. It is certainly still useful for those seeking an alternative Nexus device, though.
If visitors don’t want to give access to their location data, they can also manually type in their address. Check it out: www.google.com/nexus/4/retailers
Apparently, though, Feb. 14 is also the 154th birthday of George W.G. Ferris Jr., a.k.a. inventor of the Ferris Wheel. So, this year’s Valentine’s Day doodle is an animated logo that allows Web surfers to press a heart at the bottom and spin a Ferris Wheel to match characters with their valentine.
Oh, and clicking the search icon at the top of the Google Doodle promptly searches the name “George Ferris”. Also, for those not using a desktop web browser and instead on a device running Jelly Bean, Google Now—following yesterday’s big update—currently displays Google Doodles when dictating a search.
Mobile analytics firm IDC posted shipment results for Q4 2012 on Thursday, noting Android and iOS once again dominated the smartphone market with 91.1-percent of all shipments for the quarter.
Android and Apple shipped 207.6 million units worldwide during the fourth quarter, up 70.2-percent from the year-ago quarter, and landed 87.6-percent of the 722.4 million smartphones shipped worldwide in 2012. Android notably shipped over 497 million of those units alone in 2012, with 159.9 million having shipped in the fourth quarter, where as iOS only shipped 135.9 million units in 2012.
Android was able to reach triple-digit growth in 2012, as well, thanks to Samsung amassing 42 percent of all Android smartphone shipments last year.
Oh, Microsoft, is your budget like $500 for these ads?
Even though the Redmond, Wash.-based company admitted it is spending “seven figures” to revive its Google smear campaign, this latest Scroogled edition for Valentine’s Day looks extremely budgeted.
Microsoft’s “Happy Valentine’s Day from Outlook.com” ad depicts the Gmail Man opening and reading love letters and sticking random coupons in the envelopes based on key words in the letters, where as it shows The Outlook postman discretely delivering all letters without looking inside.
Microsoft asked viewers at the end of the ad, “Don’t want Google snooping on your Valentine?” It then recommended they go to www.scroogled.com to tell Google to stop combing through Gmail and selling ads.
Yeah. Check out the “pricey” animation work above.
The update includes the much-discussed Google Now widget for home screen or lock screen, as well as movie passes from Fandango and ratings from Rotten Tomatoes. The updated app also boasts real estate listings from Zillow, a U.S.-only music button for when songs are playing in voice mode, and support for U.S. college sports.
The U.S. Naval Academy has adopted Google Apps for Government.
The Maryland-based, four-year coeducational federal service academy has offered an appliance-based email solution with secure communications to students, midshipmen, and faculty for years, but it has recently realized the “hefty license fee” it comes with is too expensive and limiting.
The USNA subsequently discovered many of its 4,400 midshipmen were using personal Gmail accounts, and so the academy decided to try Google Apps for Government instead. They assigned 100 users to Google Apps, with instructions to fully test all capabilities, and the trial eventually proved successful. The USNA has now rolled out Google Apps support to 7,200 users at the academy.
“It provided a full suite of communication and collaboration tools such as Docs and Calendar. Coincidently, Google Apps for Government also provided universal mobile access with no additional licensing costs,” explained USNA Chief Information Officer Lou Giannotti on the official Google Enterprise blog.
Aside from the USNA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Coast Guard Academy, and U.S. General Services Administration are just a few of the federal agencies currently offering Google Apps for Government. Giannotti said the USNA uses Gmail the most—roughly four terabytes of mail to be exact—and finds the chat feature very useful for communicating with midshipmen, but adoption of Docs and Calendar is steadily increasing too.
Russia has blocked the above YouTube video that features a make-up FX tutorial.
Roscomnadzor, otherwise known as Russian Federal Surveillance Service for Mass Media and Communications, a.k.a. Russia’s regulatory watchdog, blacklisted the video because it shows how to create a wound and implies suicide or suicidal tendencies. Russia notably launched a firewall Nov. 1, 2012 to restrict content like child porn and suicidal content.
YouTube has apparently removed the video in Russia to avoid the regulators blocking all of YouTube in the country, but Russian newspaper Vedomosti and the Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube LLC filed an appeal on Feb. 11 to unblock the video and cited it isn’t clear what type of video content is permissible to Roscomnadzor.
A spokesperson for YouTube in Russia, Alla Zabrovskaya, gave a statement on the matter to TechCrunch:
“YouTube provides a community where people from around the world can express themselves by sharing videos and being informed. While we support the greatest access to information possible, we will, at times, restrict content on country-specific domains where a nation’s laws require it or if content is found to violate our Community Guidelines. In this case, we have appealed the decision of Russian Consumer Watchdog because we do not believe that the goal of the law was to limit access to videos that are clearly intended to entertain viewers.”
Vertu, a luxury smartphone manufacturer previously owned by Nokia, launched an $11,000 USD Android-powered device today, dubbed “Vertu Ti.”
The Vertu Ti boasts a 3.7-inch sapphire crystal screen and runs Android 4.0 paired with a custom Vertu UI. The smartphone also features a grade 5 titanium casing, as well as a dual-core 1.7 GHz processor, 1 GB of RAM, 64 GB internal memory, 8-megapixel rear-facing camera with 1080p video, 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, and “Bang & Olufsen tuned” sound.
So, just think something like the HTC Incredible from a few years ago. Oh, and along with coming in four different shades of black, the new Vertu line sports the following fancy slogan: “Handmade in England. Powered by Android.” But, it doesn’t come with 4G.
There are only 326,000 Vertu smartphone owners in the world since launching 10 years ago, according to the BBC, and China is supposedly the largest market for such a high-end device. Despite the mediocre numbers, Vertu CEO Perry Oosting said the company went with Android instead of Windows when it left Nokia last October because of global reach.
Analyst and Pacific Crest partner Michael McConnell thinks the next-generation Google Nexus 7 will feature Qualcomm’s Snapdragon S4 Pro chip chipset instead of Nvidia’s Tegra 4 SoC.
“We believe NVIDIA has lost the application processor socket to QUALCOMM’s Snapdragon APQ8064 chipset (S4 Pro) in the next-generation Google Nexus 7 tablet,” wrote McConnell in a memo, according to Barron’s blog.
Citing supply chain conversations, McConnell attributed the chipset move to competitive pricing and a “decision to single-source the application processor and 3G/4G modem to simplify logistics and create a fully pin-compatible platform interface.”
The switch is still in the ‘probably’ stage, but the S4 Pro’s better integration with 4G-modem tech, as McConnell suggested in his memo, indicates Google plans to add LTE capabilities to the upcoming Nexus 7 tablet. Although lacking LTE support, the current Nexus 7 is available unlocked with HSPA+ radios.
NASA recently announced it would hold its first long-distance Google+ Hangout live with the International Space Station on Feb. 22.
The event kicks off at 11 a.m. EST on NASA’s Google+ page or YouTube Channel and will last an hour, connecting astronauts on Earth to coworkers orbiting 240 miles above.
NASA wants followers to submit any video questions they have by Feb. 12, because NASA astronauts Kevin Ford and Tom Marshburn and the Canadian Space Agency’s Chris Hadfield plan to answer questions about what it’s like to live at the station, etc.
NASA said it would only select a few video questions for the station crew and ground astronauts to answer, so the video questions must be 30 seconds in length or less, uploaded to YouTube, tagged with #askAstro, and feature name and location introductions from the person making the submission.
The U.S. space agency will also address live questions from followers on Google+, Twitter, and Facebook.
Whether you’re shredding Squaw Valley, Big Sky, or Okemo, Google Maps are a comprehensive, accurate and easy way to find the best route down the hill. Power up Google Maps on your Android device or iPhone, and the mountain information you need is right there. Blue, green and black runs are shown as solid colored lines and ski lifts are red dotted lines.
Google recently announced that Web developers could now create and share hosted websites with Google Drive.
Web developers can specifically create and share websites when they “store HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in Google Drive,” according to a Google+ post by Google Drive.
Google Drive also linked to an example, where it gave users the following how-to steps:
“See what surprise LG has in store for you this time, with an unexpected distinction.”
While there isn’t much else to go on, the company is definitely teasing an upcoming series. So, does LG plan to unveil the suprise at Mobile World Congress starting later this month?
Google updated its Android Dashboard yesterday to give accurate data on the distribution of each Android platform.
The pie chart above represents Android devices that accessed Google Play within a 14-day period ending Feb. 4, and it shows Gingerbread as having held the No. 1 spot at 45.4-percent. Ice Cream Sandwich came in second with 29 percent, and Jelly Bean sat at No. 1 with 12.2-percent.
Jelly Bean first crossed the 10-percent threshold last month and has continued to grow into February, while Gingerbread finally fell below the 50-percent mark in January and is steadily dropping. Ice Cream Sandwich also fell in the last four weeks, but only by .1-percent.
Samsung plans to announce its upcoming Galaxy S IV on March 15 and begin selling the rumored smartphone in black and white variants during the second week of April, according to a new report on Wednesday.
The report, by Tech weblog SamMobile, which cited a “trusted insider,” further claimed Samsung would send invitations to the launch event after Mobile World Congress.
Adding more to the rumor pile, the S IV, dubbed “GT-I9500,” will supposedly hit Eastern Europe first, and then roll out to the entire continent and Asia by the end of April, while the rest of the world will see a May or June launch date.
As for specs, the S IV will allegedly sport, among other things, an 8-core Exynos 5 Octa CPU, 4.99-inch Super AMOLED HD display, 2GB of RAM, 13-megapixel rear-facing camera with 1080p HD videos at 30FPS, 2-megapixel front-facing camera with 720p HD video, and Android 4.2.1 Jelly Bean.
9to5Google first reported last month that Google and Disney planned to launch an interactive 3D world that lets Web surfers literally find their way to the land of Oz with just the Chrome browser, and now the experiment is finally live.
Google took the upcoming Disney movie “Oz: The Great and the Powerful”and brought it to life in a full interactive, 3D browser experience without the need of additional plugins or apps. For the “Find Your Way to Oz” experiment, Google created the 3D environment with WebGL and CSS3. It also added audio effects with Web Audio API and built the photo booth and zoetrope with WebRTC’s getUserMedia feature.
You won’t need magical powers to take a journey down the yellow brick road; just point your favorite browser to the latest Chrome Experiment, “Find Your Way to Oz.” Developed in collaboration with Disney and UNIT9 in anticipation of the upcoming film, Oz The Great and Powerful, this experiment takes you through a dusty Kansas circus and leads to a vibrant land, following in the footsteps of the Wizard himself. Like any good circus, there’s plenty to keep you entertained: compose your own music, play with a fun photo booth and create your own movie with a zoetrope. The path to Oz also involves confronting an ominous tornado; surviving it completes the journey, enabling fans of the movie to watch an exclusive unreleased clip from the film.
Folks will need an up-to-date computer with a powerful graphics cards and webcam, and preferably the Chrome browser, to enjoy the experience. Smartphone users can also visit the world with their Chrome browser on Android devices or iOS.
New York City’s largest drugstore chain, Duane Reade, announced on Tuesday that it would integrate mobile game Ingress into more than 250 stores.
Google launched Ingress, a World of Warcraft-like augmented reality game, as a beta in November 2012. Google Vice President of Product Management John Hanke heads Google’s Niantic Labs, a project that explores experimental mobile-social-local applications, and he and his team developed Ingress as a follow-up endeavor to the free Android app Field Trip.
Duane Reade detailed how the integration will work and noted it plans to expand social media and digital efforts and boost customer engagement with the offering:
An Ingress logo is located on the front window of Duane Reade stores around the city signaling players of the company’s participation and the existence of a value-added game asset located inside the store. Each asset will display its own unique code, which gives players a range of resources for playing the game including energy (XM), offensive and defensive game objects (resonators, weapons, shields) and possibly media objects. Each code may be used only once, but can be shared with each player’s online community. As the game evolved, cooperation across neighborhoods, cities, and countries will be needed to achieve the ultimate victory for either faction.
Duane Reade is one of the first retail partners in New York City for Ingress. Get more details in the press release after the break.
Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt just revealed that he and President Francois Hollande of France have introduced two initiatives to “stimulate innovation and increase revenues for French publishers.”
The executive took to the official Google Blog on Friday to tout Google’s successes and reiterate how its products promote a vibrant news industry that is essential to the free society, and then he described how the new initiatives will further help.
“First, Google has agreed to create a €60 million Digital Publishing Innovation Fund to help support transformative digital publishing initiatives for French readers,” Schmidt explained. “Second, Google will deepen our partnership with French publishers to help increase their online revenues using our advertising technology.
In related news, Reuters also reported that Schmidt and Hollande signed a deal in regards to payment of media links:
Publishers in France and Germany argue that Google should pay them copyright licensing fees for listing headlines and snippets of articles in its search engine results. Hollande has said that without a deal, legislation would be drafted to ensure that media outlets receive payment from search engines that post links to their content.
HTC CEO Peter Chou is going Steve Ballmer over the company’s upcoming M7 smartphone.
The executive publicly played with the M7, as seen in the NextTV’s video clip below, and repeatedly chanted the smartphone’s name in an excited tone during the company’s year-end banquet on Friday.
“This event today is a great opportunity for testing. I was still testing it just now,” said Chou on stage, as reported by Engadget via cnYES [translated], and then he briefly pulled out both silver and black editions of the yet-to-be released smartphone.
The quality of the video isn’t too great, and the above screenshots are from the event’s projection screen, so the only obvious details about the M7 is that it is slim and sports the iconic HTC camera with two lines on the back.
The M7 doesn’t look to have a 4.7-inch display, but HTC will confirm any rumored specs when, according to HTC chairperson Cher Wang, the device launches later this month.
Tech weblog Android Police posted leaked Qualcomm roadmap slides on Wednesday that suggested the next version of Android, dubbed “Key Lime Pie,” would release in the spring.
The slides specifically indicated an Android “K-release” would announce in “spring 2013”. Google’s I/O conference is going down in the spring from May 15 to May 17, so the timing is either coincidental or hints at a not-so-unusual I/O unveiling.
The information previously posted at this URL contained Qualcomm confidential and copyrighted information that was posted without Qualcomm’s authorization. It has been removed at Qualcomm’s request. Please immediately destroy any copies that you may have made of this information.
The order to remove might not relate to Key Lime Pie’s alleged launch date, but it’s certainly interesting that one of Android’s largest chip manufacturers is attempting to quell online reports that point to its leaked slides as evidence of a spring début for the next version of Android.
Super Bowl XLVII is Sunday, in case you already didn’t know, and Google—being the Internet advertising giant that it is— is doing everything it can to capitalize on the big day.
The YouTube Ad Blitz channel currently offers pre-game content like predictions, party recipes, and playoff coverage, but it will also let viewers watch their favorite game ads soon as they air on TV. Channel viewers can further vote for the best ad at the end of the game on Sunday.
Google also collaborated with Adweek to feature the Ad Blitz voting gallery, according to the YouTube Global blog:
To make this year bigger than ever, we’ve partnered with ADWEEK to feature the Ad Blitz voting gallery onAdweek.com as well as on YouTube, and ADWEEK’s executive editor James Cooper and senior editor Tim Nudd will break down the night’s highlights via a post-game Google+ hangout. We also added a slew of new social and gaming components to make the Ad Blitz YouTube channel the perfect big game companion whether you’re on your laptop, smartphone, or tablet.
New highlights to the channel specifically enable viewers to create and share a touchdown dance GIF, log into social networks to share team spirit or see real-time insight of the game, test accuracy with an ‘ole finger-flick Paper Football game, get instant advertising advice from an ad coach, and learn fun facts about game advertising via Adweek.
