One of the things that didn't get much attention during Twitter's massive redesign of its webpage and official apps were the new Brand Pages. The feature allows companies on Twitter to customize their main pages to feature banner advertisements, "pinned" tweets at the top, and auto-expanding...
Twitter wants to be your company's homepage
New RIM CEO Thorsten Heins is continuing his media assault, speaking to The Wall Street Journal about his plans for changing RIM. While his earlier comments were all about continuity, lately Heins is backpedaling a bit and emphasizing some changes...
Way back in June 2011, we detailed Sprint's roadmap for the rest of that year and pretty much every device we discussed has been released: the Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch, the BlackBerry Bold 9930, and the BlackBerry Torch 9850 all arrived on Sprint. There was one device that didn't, however: the Samsung Epic 2, the QWERTY-slider followup to the original Samsung Epic 4G. Since then, the only...
The Washington Post's Peter Farhi posted an opinion piece this week entitled "How Siri is ruining your cellphone service," in which he says that Apple's voice-powered assistant — a staple of the iPhone 4S, and presumably every iDevice going forward — is a "bandwidth guzzler" that's "flooding" our mobile networks with unprecedented data utilization, a trend that will ultimately saturate available spectrum. We should "prepare for higher cellphone bills," he says, or — perhaps looking to rile the defenders of net neutrality — "we could put some traffic cops on the beat to regulate our data demands and limit the traffic snarls and bottlenecks."
GigaOM's Stacey Higginbotham does an excellent job of debunking the piece, noting that Siri itself does not consume a lot of data — in fact, Ars Technica took a look at it a couple months...
Spectrum exhaustion is a concern, but Siri has nothing to do with it
Now that Samsung sells slates in nearly every screen size imaginable — 4.65, 5.3, 7.0, 7.7, 8.9 and 10.1-inches across — what's the next frontier? A rumor at Android and Me (perhaps corroborating an earlier rumor at BGR) claims that the company will double-down on pixels, pushing out an even larger tablet with a giant 2560 x 1600 (WXQGA) resolution screen and a 2GHz Exynos 5250 chip...
We'd like that screen resolution on our laptops too, please
Some of Apple's recently published patent applications detail a world where magnets can be used to do more than just stick things together. Coded magnets (diagrammed below) could create a unique magnetic signature that sensors could detect to unlock doors or identify users through keycards. In addition, subtle changes in a coded magnetic field could be used for detecting movement and swelling...
T-Mobile may have no knowledge of Apple's future iPhone plans, but one thing it does have knowledge of is how to support any customers on its network who are using unlocked iPhones. Yes, except for a strangely lucky few, the vast majority of them are stuck on EDGE speeds, but that doesn't mean that T-Mobile can't explain why and perhaps make sure those customers are able to get their APNs set up correctly. According to a document leaked to TmoNews, the carrier intends to provide basic support beginning on January 30th, including providing "information about feature [sic] and specifications,...
The military may spend billions on research and development, but not all spy technology needs to be specialized or expensive. By adding flash memory, antennas, and some plastic casing to a PogoPlug mini computer, security researcher Brendan O’Connor has created a tiny computer capable of being dropped out of a drone, thrown over a wall, or abandoned in the field without compromising security or incurring a loss of anything but $46 worth of parts. The Linux-based F-BOMB, or Falling or Ballistically-launched Object that Makes Backdoors, is designed to be highly configurable, capable of connecting to anything from a barometer to a GPS. It...
Two and a half years after being sworn in as the nation's first Chief Technology Officer, Aneesh Chopra is stepping down. Politco first reported a rumor, which was confirmed by the White House this afternoon. Chopra's last day will be February 8th. No reason was given for his departure, but the Washington Post reports that he's heading back to Virginia (where he served as Secretary of Technology) to possibly run for Lieutenant Governor and...
Rapid job changes are another facet of the technology industry, of course
Bill Gates revealed the details of an intimate letter this week that he sent to Steve Jobs shortly before the Apple co-founder passed away in October. In an interview with The Telegraph, Gates says he learned of Jobs' medical condition and wrote him a letter, one that Jobs later kept by his bed....
The European Union has officially approved Sony's buyout of Ericsson for ownership of the Sony Ericsson joint venture. The deal, which was announced in late October, will give Sony control of the company's phone development, and — perhaps more importantly — full rights to the company's patent...
Sony is looking to get people excited for the upcoming launch of the PlayStation Vita. We've already heard about the special pre-order First Edition that's shipping out to early adopters a week before the February 22nd North American release date,...
Sources "familiar with the matter" have told The Wall Street Journal that Facebook is preparing to file papers for its initial public offering as early as February 1st. Facebook has long been rumored to be considering an IPO for early 2012, but has continued to decline comment...
Vergecast? On a Friday? What's that like? Well, you're about to find out. Everything is about to get real less than an hour from now. Real in the sort of way that you can only be real when you're about to head into the weekend, and you're feeling ready to talk about technology with zero regrets...
The promise of social media is that your profile will aggregate information about you wherever you go — think check-ins and Facebook's Open Graph. But what if a single location could have its own stream of content, created by many people? The Broadcaster Project is a group working to create cheap, ubiquitous devices that allow just that. The Project recently demonstrated its public text box, a computer set to...
Jon Rubinstein, once a prominent voice in the mobile community as he sought to reinvent Palm, has gone quiet in recent months at HP — and that's not often a good sign for any top-level executive's future prospects. Indeed, Rubinstein has...
Richard (a.k.a. "bolivar-shagnasty"), a Reddit user and a US airman deployed in Afghanistan, just wanted to unwind by playing some Bastion on his PC, but his internet connection was so terrible that he couldn't even connect to Steam to download the game. So in a last ditch effort he sent an email...
If you missed out on the HP TouchPad fire sale extravaganzas of 2011, now's your chance to grab a WebOS tablet at a discount. Woot.com has...
Since launching the Micro Four-Thirds standard in 2008, Olympus and Panasonic have remained the only major manufacturers producing cameras and lenses for the mount. Four years on, Japanese lens...
Id Software's Rage for iOS set a new benchmark for smartphone games in 2010, with graphics performance that belied its low asking price. The game's HD variant has now been upgraded to version 2.0, adding HDMI output via Apple's breakout cable and an assortment of new features and bug fixes. Higher-resolution models for players and weapons should...
When Poland signed the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement yesterday, lawmakers from the left-wing Palikot's Movement showed their dissatisfaction in an unusual way: by donning the Guy Fawkes masks popularized by the group Anonymous. Besides their association with a group known for...
We know Microsoft will launch Kinect for Windows hardware next month, but a new report claims that the software giant could be working with Asus to build that support directly into laptops. The Daily says it has "checked out" a pair of official prototype Asus laptops that include a Kinect sensor built-in. The sensor, running on a Windows 8 laptop, reportedly stretches across the top of the screen, and includes a set of LEDs at the bottom of the display.
Asus released its own WAVI Xtion hardware last year, based on the same PrimeSense technology used in Kinect, so it's clear the company has experience with motion-controlled devices....
VIP Deals, an Amazon merchant, has been caught offering customers a refund in exchange for five-star reviews. A report in The New York Times yesterday detailed how customers that purchased a $9.99 (reduced from $59.99) leather case for the Kindle Fire received a letter with their case. The letter offered to refund the cost of the order in return for the customer writing a review. The merchant also dropped a subtle hint on which score was expected, stating "we strive to earn 100 percent...
In an interview with CrackBerry, RIM's new CEO Thorsten Heins has clarified his recent comments about the company's strategy for the near future. One of the major quotes from Thorsten's first comments after becoming CEO was that RIM doesn't need...
PocketNow is claiming to have spent some time with a near-final build of HTC's Sense UI for Android 4.0. Sense has traditionally been one of the heavier skins around, so many have been wondering how it would gel with Google's stylish, minimal...
A number of Transformer Prime owners are experiencing random lockups on their devices following the recent Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich update. Gary Key, an Asus technical marketing manager, has confirmed that the company "hope[s] to have a fix available in early February." The issues follow no clear trend, and 400 replies at XDA Developers suggests that it's reasonably widespread. We saw no evidence of lockups during our week-long preview...
The latest release of Google Earth is here, and it's a pretty significant one — a new rendering technique in version 6.2 allows you to smoothly pan and zoom around the world without running into the "patchwork quilt" effect. Earlier releases had the problem of matching images that were taken at different times or in different weather, but the effect is fairly seamless. It's not quite perfect everywhere — for example, close-ups of the North...
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