With just three months before both national and European Parliament elections, three large tech companies are falling further behind in their promises to tackle the threat posed by fake news …
New regulations proposed to Congress by the U.S Transportation Department’s Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) are set to take effect soon, which will limit the maximum charge of lithium-ion batteries to 30% or less when shipped as cargo on passenger flights or on cargo only planes.
USB 3.2, the next-generation USB standard expected to start appearing in devices later this year, will double the maximum speed supported to 20Gbps. This is achieved by allowing for two lanes of 10Gbps each, which can be achieved without reducing cable length.
The bad news is that the naming confusion around USB speeds is going to get even worse …
Global smartphone revenue continued to grow last year despite falling sales. That’s according to the latest GfK data, which showed revenue growing 5% in 2018 to hit $522B.
This is despite smartphone unit sales declining by 3% the same year …
The British parliament has said that tech giants can’t be trusted to do the right thing, and need to be regulated.
The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee said there are three areas in which legislation is needed …
The project manager in charge of commissioning the design of the US Army’s next-generation rifle has likened the task to ‘Steve Jobs and his engineers trying to convert the iPod Touch to the first 3G iPhone‘ …
A Japanese communications panel said on Monday that the country should consider legal action to begin imposing domestic-level rules on tech giants not based in Japan, such as Apple, Facebook ,and Google.
Austria is the next European nation looking to impose a specialized ‘tech tax’ on internet giants such as Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. This move follows in the footsteps of France and Germany to take action on a national level rather than awaiting an EU-wide agreement.
Just two weeks ago, French Economy and Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire announced the new GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) tax would take effect starting January 1. The country hopes to generate as much as 500 million euros in the tax’s first year in effect.
The same developer who found the original iOS 10 Dark Mode references in the Messages app, Andy Wiik, has found even more evidence that Apple was/is developing a black appearance for its iPhone and iPad operating system. The latest screenshots show the iOS 10 Simulator presenting the Settings app in a dark interface style, with black cell backgrounds and white text.
The screenshots are captured from the iOS 10 Simulator where it is easier to inject code and discover unfinished flags and behaviour, like this Dark Mode interface style …
Apple has apparently hit the delete button on a proposed rifle emoji that was previously accepted. Unicode, the group behind the character standard, ultimately decided to pull the rifle character from the next emoji set in Unicode 9. Buzzfeed reports, however, that Apple (which has voting rights within the group) largely led the opposition to the rifle emoji:
If there’s one thing guaranteed to eat your data plan’s allowance at an alarming rate, it’s streaming video. T-Mobile has been gradually adding more services to its Binge On program – which allows customers to stream lower-quality video from specific services without using up any of their data – and Re/code reports that Facebook video may be next in line.
A purported image of the front of an iPhone 7 has appeared on the Internet today, via mobipicker.com. Blurry cams and bad photography aside, the picture claims to a major new detail for the upcoming flagship iPhone 7 launch, which is expected to mostly resemble an iPhone 6s in appearance.
The image shows a tweaked Home Button that appears to be flat with the bezel, meaning Apple will drop the physical click in favor of a fully touch-sensitive capacitive Home Button. Noting that the image could quite easily be faked, it does appear to show a button that has no depth …
Alongside various new features (Siri, Auto Unlock, Apple Pay) coming in macOS Sierra, Apple’s next major desktop operating system, it also ships with the brand new version of Safari, Safari 10. Safari 10 introduces a major change in the way the browser handles plugins. In short, proprietary plugins like Adobe Flash will be disabled by default when browsing the web.
This means that websites will serve modern HTML5 representations of content as often as possible as they will not be able to detect an installation of Flash at all. Safari is smart however — it will allow you to enable Flash temporarily on demand …
Siri unlocks a new dimension of functionality in iOS 10, allowing third-party apps to integrate inline into the Siri voice assistant experience. Any developer integration expands utility of Siri dramatically but it’s important to note the limitations of the system Apple announced.
For iOS 10.0, the Siri API will only work with six kinds of application: ride booking (think Uber), messaging, Photo Search (find photos and videos in a particular app), payments (‘Send $100 to John with SquareCash’), VoIP Calling (e.g: Skype) and Workouts (for starting health and fitness activities) …
Nomad already makes some of the most versatile and practical accessories for Apple hardware, and now the California company is teaming up with Chicago’s Horween Leather Company to offer some high quality and stylish gear. The two companies are starting with new versions of Wallet, Nomad’s ordinary billfold that cleverly tucks a 2400mAh rechargeable battery and Lightning cable within, now available in two sizes and wrapped in Horween leather.
Microsoft and LinkedIn announced today that the two companies would become one after Microsoft purchases outstanding shares at $196 in an all-cash transaction valued at $26.2 billion, inclusive of LinkedIn’s net cash.
The new organization will give Microsoft a big social graph for professional life and is interestingly announced just hours before Apple’s WWDC.
LinkedIn also owns the popular Pulse Reader for iOS/Web.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-89PWn0QaaY
At WWDC on Monday, Apple will unveil the latest version of its mobile operating system, iOS 10. With the conference being light on hardware, expectations are high for Apple to announce some major new features for iOS 10 on iPhone and iPad. The rumor mill is quieter than usual, so there’s definitely a bigger opportunity to be surprised with this year’s keynote.
We have some idea about what to expect but we want to hear what you want to see Apple announce next week. Join in the poll after the jump to have your say on what you want to see in iOS 10 …
Late last year we got an early look at improvements coming to the next version of Bluetooth, and now the Bluetooth Special Interest Group has revealed the name of the upcoming version plus more specifics about the new standard. Bluetooth 5 will be the successor to Bluetooth 4.2, which was released at the end of 2014, suggesting a notable release this year. The new standard will be announced next week, and this is what we know so far.
Apple has released a special ‘Shot on iPhone’ TV commercial for European markets called ‘The beautiful game’. It features iPhone photography of football stadiums, goalposts and players. The ad will likely air during the UEFA European Football Championship games, which kicks off tomorrow …
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You have to feel a little sympathy for Microsoft. At a time when everyone wants to be writing apps for iOS first and Android second, Windows 10 is left out there as a platform people might get around to if they have time. But the company seems to be compensating by beefing up its efforts to both sell its services to iOS developers and create more iOS apps.
In the latest installment of their Uncarrier initiatives, T-Mobile today announced their new #GetThanked campaign. The campaign puts a focus on “thanking” T-Mobile customers for their loyalty to the company and brand by giving away free T-Mobile’s stock, gifts and promotions ever Tuesday, and inflight Wi-Fi for domestic fliers with Gogo.
Update: We’ve had the chance to review them and they are great.
Bose is one of the best-known names in noise-cancelling headphones with its QuietComfort 25 model a popular choice, and the firm is now gearing up for the rumored removal of the headphone jack from the iPhone 7 with a wireless version.
The new Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones, launched today, offer the same noise-cancelling performance as their wired predecessors, but with Bluetooth and NFC pairing.
These are our best headphones. In making them wireless, we had one goal: seamlessly merge Bluetooth and our Acoustic Noise Cancelling technology together with no compromise to the technologies or the audio performance we’re known for …
Tony Fadell hasn’t been able to shake the bad press as CEO of Nest since Google (now Alphabet) acquired his smart home accessories company, and today that story’s coming to a close as Fadell announced publicly that he’s stepping aside and ‘leaving the Nest’.
Update 2: Apple is reporting that the iCloud.com services have also been restored.
Update: Apple is reporting that the availability of some services has now been restored but several features of iCloud are still down and undergoing maintenance.
As noted by Apple’s system status page, a multitude of Apple services are currently experiencing instability and downtime for some users. The affected services include the App Store, Mac App Store, Apple TV services, iTunes In The Cloud and critical features like Find My iPhone. We have also had a few reports of Apple Music downtime, seemingly repeating the outage yesterday, but Apple’s official status report does not mention any problems with Apple Music at this time.