LinkedIn has finalised the deal to buy Pulse for $90m. Lets hope Pulse doesn’t disappear or become a LinkedIn only app.
All posts by Gavin Fabiani-Laymond
Twitter Music App launches in a few hours
More news shortly, but twitter is about to launch its own music app which will be about music discovery rather than a music store.
Sony ousts new lightning speaker dock
Sony has released the SRS-GC11IP. Pictured below, this 0.8W speaker isn’t loaded with fancy features an alarm clock and AM / FM radio, and with the ability to also play tunes straight from a Lighting-ready iDevice. And that’s about it.
Looks good.
AppGratis pulled from Apple AppStore
Apple pulled discovery service and daily deal app AppGratis from the App Store. So far, AppGratis is silent on the issue and one can only speculate.
Lets hope this is nothing to serious.
Update. The app has definitely been in trouble for breaking App Store guidelines. It also fell foul of being over aggressive using the notification system.
Mind you some games and apps exploit the notification system too.
Get a free 64gb Playbook with a Blackberry Q10
Phones4U are offering a free 64gb Playbook for the first 300 customers. That’s not a lot, but maybe that’s all that’s left of stock that needs shifting.
So the cost, either £36 per month for 2 years or £550 sim free. The Q10 is the keyboard version of the new Z10 running BB10. As there aren’t many keyboard phones on the market this might sell reasonable well. Seems expensive though at £550 sim free.
It seems nowadays that all phones get released at over £500 today, regardless as to whether they’re worth that amount of money.
HTC One – Highlight video and freezing motion – HTC One Camera
The above is a highlight video lasting 32 seconds that is automatically produced from the photos and videos of an event. You have a choice of background music and you can change the random order of the compilation.
Some of the stills from this video are shown below. The photos below show how good the HTC One is at freezing motion. My dogs were running really fast.
How to mark all emails on the iPhone as read in seconds
This is a very simple trick, that some will know and others may not.
Simply, open the default mail app on the iPhone.
Tap Edit. Highlight one email.
Tap and hold Mark (button right)
Keep holding the Mark button, and now unhighlight the highlighted email (no more red tick).
Let go of the Mark button, and you will now see an option to Mark all as Read.
The Smartphone Experience has changed – so why don’t you!
It could be argued that when you buy a Samsung Galaxy, HTC One, iPhone, Nexus 4 and Nokia Lumia Windows Phone, you are now buying an experience, not just a piece of hardware and software, but a united piece.
Apple have led the way with the iPhone providing unity with the hardware and software. The same could be said when you buy a Samsung with its extra software, own media stores and touchwiz. With the HTC One, Sense 5 creates a unique experience. And the same applies for all the other phones.
We have often paid £500 or more for these devices, so why do some people rip the software off, change the launcher, jail break and more. As the years have progressed, new phones do more out of the box, do more perfectly out of the box too. 2 years ago it would make sense to delete software and change the look and feel.
So when we get a new phone in 2013, why do we still do the same things. Is it habit? Do we go in autopilot thinking we need this app, before we have even tried the new software for at least a few weeks.
I believe we should try and use the software provided by the respective companies before changing anything. It is not uncommon to realise you didn’t need to install that app, as the functionality is now provided as standard.
So here’s my suggestion. If you are going to spend £500 on a smartphone use it for a while as designed. If not buy the cheapest in its class, and redesign the heck out of it
Facebook responds to privacy issues about Facebook Home
Facebook has responded about privacy issues, that Home is subject to the same controls as everything else in a user’s Facebook account. It states that Facebook will not track user’s location any differently than the existing app, and while it could see what apps are launched, it can’t observe what actions are taken within them beyond the already existing Facebook API hooks. As far as information that is collected, it will have a list of apps that are in the Home launcher, and tracks data including which apps are responsible for notification, which is kept identifiable for up to 90 days.
For some people, privacy won’t be an issue, but I do worry myself that this might be a step too far.
HTC One – Daily Blog – Continuous Shooting
One of the things often forgotten about the HTC One, is its ability to capture motion perfectly. The camera can take 8 photos a second. That’s right 8 photos a second. All you do is press and hold the shutter button.
Now if you do this you get presented with a best shot option. Choose the best shot and the other photos are deleted. However, hit the back key and the batch is saved. Go to the photo editor, tap edit, tap retouch and tap action shot. Select a few photos and tap save and you can get the below affects.
Another way is turning Zoe mode on. And edit as above. Anyway have a look at the two photos below. Look at the old lady and the escalator. Rather cool.
It features like this that make the HTC One amazing. Also if you are taking photos, power off, when you power on , you are straight back in to camera mode.
