Tag Archives: Lumia

PTJ 162 News: Surface to Air

October 7, 2015 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Now it’s Microsoft’s turn on stage! The company held a big press event on Tuesday here in New York City and showed off a great big pile of new devices all designed to run its Windows 10 operating system. There was the Surface Book, a laptop/tablet combo that starts at $1500, the Surface Pro 4 tablet with an $900 entry-level model, three new Lumia phones, and the second version of its fitness tracker called Microsoft Band 2 for $250. The Xbox One console got a Windows 10 update and Microsoft announced the HoloLens Development Edition because HoloLens headsets will start shipping out the first quarter of 2016 for $3000 each. So, who on your gift list wants Windows 10 this holiday season?

Roku was also out with The New this week and introduced the Roku 4 set-top box, which can handle 4K video along with the now-standard voice search and gaming. Roku also has apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone to let you command the box from your mobile device. The Roku 4 is expected to ship October 21.

Also fresh for the fall fashion season: Google has officially released Android 6.0 Marshmallow and is pushing out updates to recent Nexus devices. Google also updated the YouTube app for iOS with its Material Design look and tools for editing videos within the app itself, many users do not like the redesign. Not at all.

Meanwhile, over in Cupertino, Apple has purchased Perceptio, a company developing technology for artificial intelligence software for smartphones. The Perceptio purchase goes with another recent purchase, the start-up VocalIQ, and company which makes software for processing natural language. Siri may be getting a brain transplant soon.

In Apple’s own software, the company says it has now resolved problems with the App Thinning feature promised in iOS 9 and has included it in the recent iOS 9.0.2 update. Apple has also made its keynote addresses searchable by keyword, if you search for a feature announcement by keyword.

Reddit has spun off a new site called Upvoted. The new site features some of the same content as its mother board, but none of the user comments, which are thought to. er, drive advertisers away from the main site.

Facebook, which has discussed drones and other various ways to bring the Internet to places that don’t have access, announced this week that it would be launching a satellite with a French communications company to bring the Internet to mobile phones over large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. Facebook, your eye in the sky now, too.

The European Union Court of Justice has smacked down a deal that let companies transfer personal user data from Europe to the United States with the Safe Harbor system. The EU court ruled the system invalid because it subjects users in the European Union to spying by US government agencies.

And finally, we’ve recently talked about vinyl making a comeback, but now audio cassettes seem to be having a smaller, but similarly nostalgic return these past few years. Some people have stubbornly held on to the format for decades despite CDs and digital downloads. Cassettes peaked in the late 1980s from almost a billion units. But by 2001, they accounted for only 4 percent of all music sales and by 2005, sales had fallen to fewer than 1 million. National Audio Company of Springfield, Missouri, still makes pre-recorded and blank cassettes and sold 10 million of them last year, with sales up 20 percent this year. Do we think this might be a Guardians of the Galaxy effect? Are cassette lovers just . . . hooked on a feeling?

Podcast

PTJ 64: Bing, Bump and Box

September 19, 2013 Pedro Rafael Rosado Leave a comment

J.D. tells which companies are offering deals for your old gear and Pedro has an Old School Tech Term segment to share with the class. In the news, Verizon challenges the FCC’s Open Internet rule of 2010; Netflix keeps an eye on pirates to decide what to buy; Nokia prepares to roll out new product; Sandisk debuts a new 256GB memory card; Bing attempts to redefine search; Box takes on Google Docs; and Grand Theft Auto V appears to be on the road to billion dollar sales in less than one month.

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PTJ 64 News: To Stream the Impossible Stream

September 19, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Another week, another legal tussle. Verizon recently threw down a legal challenge to the FCC’s Open Internet rule of 2010, which bans big companies from discriminating against little companies in favor of their own competing services or business partners on their broadband networks. Verizon says this violates its First Amendment rights and some legal eagles worry that the net neutrality rules may not survive.

Let’s not worry about Netflix for the moment, as it seems to have found a cheap way to do customer research. A Netflix VP said the company looks around to see what’s hot on the piracy sites and uses that intel for decisions about what programs to buy for its streaming service. (Why yes, Netflix does offer old seasons of Game of Thrones in its DVD rental department, but no streaming.)

There’s a snap in the East Coast air and companies are rolling out new stuff. A quick post from Nokia’s Twitter account seems to confirm October 22 as the date for the company’s fall hardware event. SanDisk, maker of memory cards, has announced its SanDisk Extreme Pro Compactflash memory card with a 256GB capacity. Microsoft Bing has gotten both a visual overhaul and a new mission to change the definition of search. If you don’t have it already, Twitter is said to be preparing a redesign of its mobile app as well to coincide with the arrival of Apple’s iOS 7, which arrived this week. But even though iOS 7 is fresh out of the gate, the 9to5Mac site reports that it’s noticed last week in its Web analytics that some people are browsing around with devices running iOS 7.0.1, iOS 7.0.2 and iOS 7.1. So the bug hunt has already begun.

Amazon has some updates up its giant sleeves too. While images of new Kindle Fires have been leaking around the Web, the supermegaüberstore also updated its Amazon Instant Video app for iOS to support Apple’s AirPlay technology and add integration with the Internet Movie Database.

Box, one of the many online storage and sharing services up in the cloud, has a new application for creating and editing digital documents. It’s called Box Notes, and this next-generation text editor is taking on Google Docs, Microsoft’s online version of Word, Evernote and even the new startup, Quip. Box Notes is still in beta, but the new tool promises real-time concurrent editing, comments and inline annotations and hyperlinks.

Bump, the sassy little app that let users share photos and other files by plonking phones together long before the Samsung Galaxy got in on the act, is joining Google. The tech news sites are reporting that Google bought Bump for somewhere between $30 and $60 million dollars. Although the Bump app had versions for iPhone and Android and the two platforms could bump together, insiders are predicting that the iPhone version may be going away soon. For a different kind of bump, if the Google Street View photos of certain places around Indonesia look a little shaky, it might be because the Google Street View car taking the photos has been involved in three different traffic accidents outside Jakarta.

In gaming news, Grand Theft Auto V arrived this week and Amazon reportedly sold out of the game for certain consoles like the Xbox 360. The game is expected to grab 1 billion dollars in sales for its first month of release. (Anybody have this game yet? Can you drive a Google Street View car in-world?)

And finally, we here at Pop Tech Jam are pouring out a 40 and cranking the volume up to 11 in honor of Ray Dolby, the legendary sound pioneer who passed away last week at the age of 80. Thanks for all those multichannel memories, Mr. Dolby.

Podcast

PTJ 62: The Swaggiest Swag In All The Land

September 5, 2013 Pedro Rafael Rosado Leave a comment

Despite all the big tech news this week J.D. takes a few minutes to help El Kaiser work up the courage to cut the cable, um, cable. In the news Microsoft buys Nokia’s phone handset division; CBS and Time Warner finally make up; Big announcements at the IFA Berlin show; Google acquires a smartwatch maker; U.S. retailer Target gets into the streaming video game; another government agency trips through U.S. phone records; and Skype celebrates its 10th birthday.

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PTJ 62 News: Berlin Stories

September 5, 2013 J.D. Biersdorfer Leave a comment

Summer’s over and it’s back to business. The Microsoft announced late on Labor Day evening here in the US that it was buying Nokia’s phone handset division for 7.2 Billion dollars. The company even published a 30-page PDF of a PowerPoint presentation on its site that outlined the strategic rationale for the purchase. It’s very colorful, if you like PowerPoints. (Nokia, when not getting parts of itself bought by Microsoft, also just launched an embedded Internet-linked navigation and infotainment system called Here Auto.)

The IFA Berlin show is up and running this week, and bringing with it plenty of tech announcements. LG Electronics announced a 55-inch OLED television called the LG Gallery that looks like a painting in a frame — except with a 2.2 channel speaker system inside, with most Van Gogh reproductions don’t include. LG has also jumped back into the tablet race with its G Pad, an 8.3-inch Android tablet with an HD display.

Acer also had a few new products to announce, including a 24-inch all-in-one computer with a Nvidia Tegra 3 system-on-a-chip inside that’s running Android Jelly Bean 4.2 and a phone with a 6-inch screen called the Liquid S2. It runs on the 4G data networks and it can also shoot video in ultra high-definition 4K. Acer also has a 10.1-inch Iconia A3 Android tablet coming too. Samsung, Sony and several other companies all had IFA announcements as well this week.

The Samsung Galaxy Gear was also formally announced this week. While we’re checking our watches, Google recently completed the acquisition of smartwatch maker WIMM Labs. WIMM Labs put out its own smartwatch in 2011, but Google itself has not commented on any smartwatch plans of its own. (It did, however, rename the next version of Android after a candy bar.) Amazon, not to be left out of product news, released a new version of the Kindle Paperwhite.

Target is getting ready to introduce its own video-on-demand service called Target Ticket. Maybe you’ll be able to order up a Target Ticket flick on a PlayStation 4 console this fall, as Sony has confirmed its next generation game console will have voice command ability through the Eye camera peripheral.

Another government agency besides the National Security Agency has been tripping through the phone records of Americans. This time, the situation involves drug-fighting federal and local law enforcement officials from The Hemisphere Project using an AT&T database to check out call logs that go back to 1987.

Apple finally confirmed that it’s having a September 10th press event. Photos have been popping up around the Web purporting to show a batch of the lower-cost iPhone 5C models tucked into the same types of clear plastic boxes used by Apple to sell its iPod Touch and iPod Nano media players, so we’ll see if those were real or rumor-driving props designed to make the tech blogs hyperventilate.

Skype has just celebrated its 10^th birthday. The little startup accounted for 167 billion minutes of international voice traffic in 2012, much to the traditional telephone companies’ dismay. And speaking of 10-year anniversaries, the Daily Telegraph newspaper over in London has named its “10 Most Annoying Social Media Features of the Past 10 Years.” Go poke yourself, Facebook.

Oh yeah, and CBS and Time Warner finally made up and restored order in the cable universe for several million subscribers. Stand down, Big Bang Theory fans.

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