In a surprise move, Apple has opened OS X betas to all users. The newly announced OS X Beta Seed Program provides general public pre-release access to OS X builds, a feature that was earlier available only to registered Mac developers.
Registering as a Mac developer costs $99 per year and though it comes with various other resources, pre-release access to OS X builds was perhaps the biggest feature, allowing developers to test their applications with upcoming OS X releases before everyone gets their hands on the OS. The idea is to let developers identify (and fix) any possible incompatibilities that their applications may have with the new OS, long before the general public installs the OS on release day and find that their favourite applications no longer work.
While developers benefit from getting early access to builds, Apple gets to test the OS by sending it to developers outside the company and receiving feedback on features that may be 'broken' in the OS.
By opening this feature to anyone, Apple is hoping that a larger number of people will participate in the program and give early feedback on OS X, which will allow Cupertino to fix bugs before the OS is released to the general public.
Anyone can join the OS X Beta Seed Program by registering on Apple's website. You just need an Apple ID and agree to Apple's Beta Seed and Confidentiality Agreement. Once registered, you will get access to pre-release versions of OS X in the Mac App Store Updates panel.
We strongly recommend you do not install OS X beta builds on your primary Mac as beta software can be buggy and can lead to loss of data. http://gadgets.ndtv.com/laptops/news/apple-opens-os-x-betas-to-all-users-512493
We may have many or all of our friends in Facebook, but we don’t know how to trace them. Here Facebook has come up with a new app, which detects our friends in our mobile’s contacts and give us his/her exact location. So far, this works only in United States.
This mobile application is added to both iOS and Android app markets to trace the nearby contacts. Using this app, users will live in real world through virtual world, yet in a simple way. This feature is a part of the recently released “Nearby Friends” feature.
Andrea Vaccari said that Facebook is aimed to connect people. This option is going be the next step in bringing friends together.
As it works only in United States so far, the location of the friend is optional. This app comes with a button known as close friends to find them. If the location is not updated publicly, one can trace his friend, as the status updated in Facebook is gives the location by default.
Vaccari, joined Facebook in 2012, is the project leader, after the giant networking site purchased his company, Glancee to trace new friends.
Within three miles around, the user can get the location of friends and family, and can get alerts of the whereabouts.
This app gets interesting as you use, you can learn more about its function. The good concept about this will be you can say your friends about the place with the time limit. The location is updated to limited period and only for some persons.
According to the latest news released about Google’s Project Ara, it seems that Google is all set to get inspired from PC’s. The most interesting block of the news is that Google is willing to promote this idea or their vision.
It was in a conference held last week, where Google outlined the plans that it has with Project Ara. Google has also announced that there will be a developers’ challenge for the purpose of promotion of this vision of Google. The prize of the challenge will be $100,000. Further details will be revealed in or around the middle of May on its official website.
According to the plans that Google has for its Project Ara, the device will be one of the best and easy to use smartphones for the common people. Majority of the components of the devices will be assembled separately and this is where Google plans to lower the prices via the third party dealers. The process of assembling will be exactly same as in case of PC’s. The only difference is that we assemble PC’s at homes but Google will do this for its buyers.With the cost of the parts reduced, Project Ara devices will also stay within the reach of the people with affordable price tags.
Now here comes the million dollar question! Will Project Ara be successful or even take off properly? According to the statements released by Google, it is looking forward to target the 6 billion people of the world who are without a smart phone. If this ultimately turns out to be the scenario, Project Ara can take off high time. But for that we will have to keep a track of the price at which the first phone is launched.
Initially, Google plans to bring three phones to the market. The price range is expected to be around $50 to $500, depending on the type of modular assembled in the Google Ara smartphone. At the recent Google Project Ara Dev Con, it’s also revealed that the Ara modular handsets will not enter the market until January 2015. Now all that we need to do is wait and look at the plot development.
Third-party batteries built by Panasonic are overheating with three reported cases of "burns to the chassis" prompting the recall by Sony
Sony has warned that the batteries in its Vaio Fit 11A laptop are a fire hazard and is asking owners of the unit to stop using it immediately.
The recall has been posted on the company’s website after it received three reports in which the internal battery of the Vaio Fit 11A overheated and partially burnt the housing of the unit.
Thankfully for Sony (and its users) the problem is a relatively small one. The Japanese electronics firm only shipped some 26,000 units with 7,158 of these going to Europe.
This compares well with a recall in 2006 that saw Dell and Apple issue warnings for more than 4.1 million laptops that contained Sony-built batteries.
Sony has blamed the issue on a non-removable battery pack built by Panasonic, according to reports from theWall Street Journal .
“The safety of our customers is of the utmost importance, so we are advising those with affected models to switch off the unit and discontinue use,” says the company.
“We have provided customers with a simple tool to check the serial number to identify whether it is an affected model. “
The Vaio Fit 11A went on sale this ferbuary and can be changed from a laptop to a tablet by folding back the screen over the keyboard. Sony Chief Executive Kazuo Hirai described the decision to recall the product as “agonizing”.
CHINESE HARDWARE MAKER Lenovo has unveiled the second-generation of its Flex range of dual-mode laptops, which come powered by Microsoft's Windows 8.1 operating system.
The Lenovo Flex 2 range of dual-mode laptops comes in 14in and 15.6in models, both able to sit in a traditional laptop pose or fold back up to 300 degrees to make a screen with a stand, taking on a tablet-like form for watching videos.
The Flex 2 range boasts 1920x1080 widescreen displays with 10-point multitouch, and Intel Haswell Core i7 processors with Nvidia Geforce graphics or, if you prefer, AMD APU processors with Radeon discrete graphics.
The Lenovo Flex 2 laptops offer Dolby Advanced Audio v2 with the option of dual array digital microphones to go with the HD 720p webcam.
The black or silver casing hides your choice of a 1TB hard disk drive (HDD), a 1TB hybrid drive (SHDD) or 256GB solid-state disk (SSD) drive.
"The new Flex 2 gives consumers two great devices - a full-function, multitouch laptop and a second, Stand mode - in one machine, all at an extremely affordable price," said Dilip Bhatia, Lenovo PC Group VP of worldwide marketing and design.
Expect to see the range hitting the streets in June with prices starting at £299.99 for the 14in model and £349.99 for the 15.6in model, depending the specifications you choose.
Lenovo has been on something of a spending spree of late after buying Motorola Mobility from Google and IBM's server division as it attempts to bring itself further into the mainstream market in Europe and America.
The Flex 2 announcement follows a series of budget Android tablets that it previewed at the beginning of April.
Why Google Should Buy Dropbox Because it has the potential to create a true Internet of You.
Illustration by Juliana Jiménez Jaramillo
Siri and I don’t talk much these days. Which is odd, because she probably knows more about me than anyone else in my life. She knows where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’m going. She knows how many books I own, and which ones I’ve actually read. She knows whom I talk to every day, and what I say.
By all accounts, I should be outsourcing most of my daily life to Siri. Apple claims that “Siri is so easy to use and does so much, you’ll keep finding more and more ways to use it.”
Note it, not her;perhaps Apple found the premise of Her, about a more-human-than-human operating system, to be unsettling. But there’s no need to fear that I’ll fall in love with my digital assistant; at the moment, I barely like her. She’s useful for sending texts or emails while I’m on the road, and her voice recognition capabilities are remarkable. Even still, she’s not that bright—she can’t really do anything I can’t, despite the resources (and my data) at her theoretical disposal.
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This should scare the good people in Cupertino, and it should give pause to the folks in Mountain View. If anyone should be finding “more and more ways” to use Siri, I should. I am an unabashed Apple fanboy. I find nothing weird about anthropomorphizing an operating system. And if everyone’s excited about the Internet of Things, I’m even more excited for the Internet of Me: the possibility of automating, operating, optimizing, and organizing every detail of my life. I don’t want the NSA or advertisers rummaging through my data. But I’m happy to let someone do it, provided they find patterns within it that I can use.
As I upload more and more of my documents, emails, and pictures to the cloud, Siri—or at least the OS she’s the emissary of—should find “more and more” ways to mine them. Siri could help me plan for meetings. She could help kids do their homework. She could fact-check my articles. She could help me find the perfect birthday gifts. She could keep me up to date on work-related tasks and conversational threads. I’d gladly subscribe, perhaps paying in the double-digits per month, to a savvier Siri.
If only she knew where to start. As it happens, I’m one of the 200 million users who’ve stashed things away on Dropbox. I store my working life on Dropbox: presentations, spreadsheets, rough drafts, and so on. Increasingly, I also store my personal life on Dropbox: photos, home movies, backup files, and e-books.
At first blush, it seems counterintuitive that we’d be storing so much on a service unconnected to our mobile devices. But that’s Dropbox’s secret weapon: It’s platform-agnostic. For all the beauty, simplicity, and elegance of iOS and Android, those operating systems are black boxes to everyday consumers. Most users probably don’t transfer files onto and off of their tablets and smartphones using anything other than the onboard app stores. This limits what users can put on those devices and, accordingly, it limits what users can do with them. As Dropbox acquires more of those files, en masse, it acquires all of their potential use cases. It just so happens that all the files not on our tablets and smartphones are among our most important—for some of us, they’re the only reason we still keep laptops at all.
So far, Apple’s iCloud has access to the lighter side of our lives, and Dropbox has access to the serious side. That balance may tip, and not in iCloud’s favor. Dropbox is muscling in on Apple’s turf with Carousel, a beautiful photo-management app with the potential to do a lot more. Just a few days ago it announced the purchase of Loom, an Apple-centric photo and video storage service, and Hackpad, a collaborative document startup. The company is moving swiftly and aggressively to perform an end-run around Apple’s and Google’s mobile cloud offerings.
Steve Jobs realized that Dropbox would one day pose a threat to his designs on the cloud; he allegedly made a play for the 2-year-old company in 2009. Drew Houston, Dropbox’s CEO, declined the offer. Today Houston’s company is valued at over $10 billion. Apple could still afford to buy Dropbox, and it should probably try.
But my money’s on Google. Google, unlike Apple, could integrate Dropbox into its platform practically overnight—and make billions of dollars off Dropbox-related services. Google, unlike Apple, faces threats from Dropbox on all sides of its business.
And Dropbox is starting to look very Google-y. Back in February, Houston piqued the Valley’s curiosity by hiring Dennis Woodside, the former CEO of Motorola, away from Google. During his brief stay at Google, Woodside ran ad sales in the Americas; Google’s top brass doesn’t hand over positions like that to just anybody. Woodside isn’t the first signal of Dropbox’s ambitions in mobile advertising: About a year ago, Dropboxbought Endorse, a mobile coupon startup. It bought TapEngage, a tablet-optimized advertising service, in 2012. Those acquisitions went largely unheralded, but in retrospect, they’re starting to form a pattern. A wide-reaching ownership over 200 million users’ most treasured digital artifacts provides Dropbox a trove of information that’s in some ways more useful than Google’s. Web search will remain a valuable market for many years to come. But search within one’s personal web—or at least informed by it—might be even more valuable.
For all its potential, Dropbox isn’t a search company. It may be gobbling up a lot of the world’s most useful information—but unlike Google, it’s not (yet) adept at organizing that information. Its acquisition history suggests ambitions, however inchoate, in the advertising space. Google, meanwhile, wrote the book on digital advertising. It also has the team, infrastructure, technical depth, and resources to power a massive, Dropbox-based ad platform. With Dropbox at its disposal, Google could move further into predictive and need-state-based advertising. It could also build a competitive hedge against Facebook’s segmentation-based ad platform.
On its own, Dropbox might take years to reverse-engineer Google, but it’s squirreling away all the data it needs to do so. The Google it might build—the Internet of You, and all the services you’ll need for it—will be increasingly central to our cloud-powered, mobile lives. The learning curve to build it will be steep and perilous. It’s a tall mountain to climb, but the view from the top is spectacular.
Say hello to the Samsung Galaxy Ace Style, a simple smartphone aimed at young social types, that's due to hit the UK in April.
Samsung's popular Galaxy Ace range just expanded with the new Samsung Galaxy Ace Style, an affordable and simple smartphone that rocks the latest TouchWiz interface. The specs are basic but the compact Gaaxy Ace Style should be a dependable mobile web machine for the youthful target audience, and a streamlined experience for smartphone newbies.
With a 4-inch TFT screen, the Samsung Galaxy Ace Style is compact enough to slip inside pockets and tiny bags, despite being typically chunky. The Style looks almost identical to older Galaxy Ace models, but now the glossy plastic rear has a go-faster stripe straight down its middle - presumably that's the 'style' part. It'll come in two colours, Cream White and Dark Gray.
Packing a basic dual-core 1.2GHz processor and 512MB of RAM, the Samsung Galaxy Ace Style won't exactly be palm-singingly fast, but it should hopefully cope with the simple things well, even with the feature-packed TouchWiz interface on top of Android 4.4 KitKat. The 5-megapixel camera on the rear is an upgrade over previous Galaxy Ace models, and is joined by a VGA lens to the front.
Specs are rounded off with a 1,500mAh battery, and 4GB of storage expandable via the microSD memory card slot.
Expect the Samsung Galaxy Ace Style to hit UK stores in April, with pricing yet to be confirmed.
