Samsung has closed its high-profile Samsung Experience store in one of Europe’s biggest shopping centres.
“We regret to announce that we will be closing the Samsung Experience Store at Westfield Stratford City at the end of this year”, Samsung told CNET today. Photographs posted on Twitter by visitors to the mall in London show the shop already being dismantled.
Merry Christmas.
reddit recently raised a round of $50 million where the new investors agreed to give back 10% of the shares they bought to the community in the form of a “cryptocurrency” that was to be “backed” by reddit shares. For legal reasons, it is unlikely we will make the cryptocurrency exchangeable for actual shares, since we are not a public company, and therefore it would be illegal to give shares to millions of people. Howevever, we are working on a legal strategy and I’m sure the cryptocurrency will be exchangeable for something of value.
Also, we used the word “cryptocurrency” originally, but a better term is “digital asset”, since in many ways notes will not be like a currency at all. For instance, we are not planning on letting users buy gold with the cryptocurrency (although we haven’t eliminated that possibility).
The asset will be based on blockchain technology. As I have said in many previous reddit comments, we are not committing to any particular protocol at this time, but our preference is either for colored coins or sidechains depending on the winds of the bitcoin world in the coming months (the bitcoin world changes very, very fast, and we want to be certain we pick the best technology).
So, 1/6th of Reddit users will randomly be gifted a ‘digital asset’ that will probably be exchangeable for something of value at some point in the future. Maybe. Reddit tries out some weird stuff.
Twitter Cards aren’t available to third-party clients over the API, which has forced Tweetbot and Twitterrific to come up with their own custom integrations to display tweet previews for web content. The result is that the timeline shown in these two clients will look different and out of place after you get used to the richness of previews in the Twitter app.
This isn’t completely true. Twitter Cards are implemented through metadata tags in the website source. All the information for cards are described by this information. The Twitter app crawls the linked URL to strip out this info and displays it as a ‘card’.
Whilst the Twitter API won’t expose the formatted data inline, there’s nothing stopping third-parties from crawling URLs themselves and accessing the same information. With a little bit of work, Tweetbot could mirror the ‘cards’ functionality 1:1. Twitter might balk at it but I haven’t seen anyone toe the line yet to find out. I don’t think there is a rule (yet) that prevents it.
Noto also read out Twitter’s new mission statement, which he admitted was a mouthful: “Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.”
“I struggle to read it every time,” Noto said.
Ignoring the weird PR crap and the alarming focus on revenue maximisation, the CTO himself ‘struggles to read it every time’. Isn’t that a good enough sign you should pick something else?
The iOS lock screen may appear simple and almost featureless at first glance, but it actually serves quite a few different functions, and adding landscape support for all of them is certainly a non-trivial task. Again, it strikes me this is likely the reason for not supporting this yet, given the almost certainly enormous complexity of this part of iOS’s codebase.
There is a lot of effort involved, yes, but it’s disappointing that Apple didn’t make the effort with the iPhone 6 Plus. It’s a bit hypocritical for Apple to expect third-party developers to go the extra mile and optimise app layouts, when it can’t dedicate the time to do it fully as the platform vendor.
But Geekbench only measures CPU performance — year-over-year, the iPad Air 2 is even more impressive in terms of GPU performance. Apple claims, “The A8X chip has an astonishing 2.5 times the graphics performance of the A7 chip,” and from what I’ve seen, that’s true.
The iPad is no longer following in the wake of the iPhone, performance- and specs-wise. It’s forging ahead. With 2 GB of RAM, it’s a year ahead of the iPhone (we hope) in that department. Performance-wise it’s fast enough to replace a MacBook Air for many, many people. The demos that Apple chose for last week’s event — the Pixelmator image editor and Replay real-time video editor — emphasize that. Those are performance-heavy tasks, and the iPad Air 2 handled them with aplomb.
The gap between the iPad’s hardware capabilities and iOS’ software capabilities grows further. Apple isn’t known for overspeccing their devices. There’s something we aren’t seeing yet, for sure.
I think the Mac changes are good. Great, even. The Retina iMac is a technical feat of engineering and well priced, at that. You need to pay more than $2499, but I don’t think it is unreasonably costly considering the quality of display it includes. Whether the GPU can hold up to the task is another matter.
However, on the iPad side, I don’t think Apple is deserved of any praise. The iPad mini lineup is a literal disgrace. On the low end, Apple is still selling the A5 Mini. The iPad mini 3 doesn’t even deserve a numerical designation. It’s exactly the same product with Touch ID. Not updating the internals at all is insane to me. One of the most compelling aspects of the 2013 Mini was the fact it was identical to the Air in performance, just smaller. That nicety is gone completely with this generation. Even Apple didn’t care for the thing, giving the new Mini only a fleeting mention on stage.
With the Air 2, it’s obviously difficult to make products drastically better every year. The Air 2 is an incremental improvement when I feel like it needed something spectacular. Don’t ask me what that amazing thing is, because I don’t know. The delta between the iPad 4 and the iPad Air 2 is really not that large, given the timeframe. In January, I said that “iPad hardware is outstripping the capabilities of the OS it runs”. With the A8X, that disparity has widened still. I continue to believe Apple will unveil a new split-screen environment for iPad multitasking soon and it is a real shame that it wasn’t ready for today’s event.
And yeah … 16 GB is a joke.
The Global Shipping Programme is an easy way for business and private sellers to reach millions more buyers with minimal changes to your current processes. This new programme is designed for sellers who don’t currently offer international postage on listings.
The Global Shipping Programme works by automatically showing international postage costs on your eligible listings to prospective buyers in other countries at no additional cost to you. Your items will be available first to buyers from selected EU countries and later in 2014 to buyers in selected non-EU countries.
I can’t comment on whether or not this is bottom-line profitable for eBay, but I do know that this is spectacularly executed. Obviously, eBay drives more bids, more sellers and more money to flow through its service by encouraging international postage, but that’s not what I want to talk about. It’s the execution that is genius.
As long as a seller shipped domestically before, almost nothing changes in the workflow to participate in this program. eBay takes on the responsibility of not only shipping the items, but also calculating the various regional prices. eBay manages customer information and sends the seller a proxy domestic address, just like a normal domestic auction. The seller posts the package to eBay and eBay ships it to its final international destination.
This means the seller only pays domestic shipping charges to eBay. eBay recoups its expenditure through the additional P&P costs that the buyer is already used to seeing.
In fact, the process is so transparent that eBay can (and is) automatically enrolling sellers into the scheme without being obnoxious. eBay isn’t asking the seller to take on any additional responsibility, so there’s no penalty for the seller to be part of the scheme.
The efficient reallocation of resources here, where eBay is pooling individuals to take advantage of its economies of scale in distribution, is just sublime. This is what you call an elegant product change.
Apple organised a high-profile dinner for 250 fashion insiders, co-hosted by Azzedine Alaïa, Marc Newson and Jonathan Ive. But the guest of honour was the Apple Watch, several versions of which were displayed in a case right in the middle of the dinner venue, a space normally used as Mr Alaïa’s showroom. On their way out, guests were given exclusive images of the product, shot by Davis Sims and styled by Karl Templer, the very duo behind the Apple Watch’s fashion editorial debut on the wrist of Chinese supermodel Liu Wen in Vogue China.
The photography is nice, but notice how every picture shows the Apple Watch from a top-down perspective. At no point do the shots show the side of the device, where the thickness is noticeable. It concerns me a little that the photographers made a seemingly-conscious effort to conceal the depth of the Watch. On the flip side, the post also includes an interview with Vogue China’s editor and she seems to love how it looks …
Many users are reporting that cellular functions and Touch ID are no longer working post update, so we would recommend holding off until further notice. Many who have updated their iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, and iPhone 5s are reporting no problems, so it appears this problem is likely confined to iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
This obviously shouldn’t have happened. I’m not sure how this got through QA, but I don’t really care. What matters is if a bug of this ilk recurs again, in the future. Then you can say Apple has structural problems as an organisation. Isolated incidents are not signs of poor management — they are (in most cases) genuine mistakes.
Apple has started airing two new iPhone 6 ads starring the duo of Jimmy Fallon and Justin Timberlake. Tim Cook unveiled two ads starring the pair during the iPhone 6 announcement earlier this month with ads that focused on the Health application and size of the phone.
The new ads, dubbed “Huge” and “Camera” started hitting airwaves tonight and focus once again on the size of the display and the upgraded cameras with enhanced image stabilization, slow-motion and time-lapse capabilities.
The idea of these ads is clever, but I don’t think they have been executed very well. Camera is decent, but Huge is cringe-worthy. Timberlake’s repetition of “It’s huge!” comes across as an insult. On top of that, these ads don’t scale well geographically. The ad requires you to recognise who is speaking and it is not obvious enough. At the iPhone event, Cook asked ‘Do you know who they are?’ to the crowd. It was followed by an awkward prolonged silence.
Both cameras shot well in good light, with great performance in super bright sun. Especially welcome were their ability to capture even bright reds like Mrs. Incredible’s costume (shot with iPhone 6).
Solid, bright reds are notoriously difficult for image sensors to capture but both iPhones handled them well.
Apple has made significant improvements to its ISP (Image Signal Processor) which have resulted in apparent gains in sharpness, color rendition and low-light performance. The iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus are the best smartphone cameras I’ve ever used, and approach the best point-and-shoot cameras I’ve ever shot.
I was really impressed by this picture. The red is vibrant and deep and the outlines are super-crisp. It also helps the picture is relatable. It’s not framed or staged. Panzarino is at Disneyland, taking photos of his daughter. I can connect with it much better than the sample images posted in other reviews.
Sources tell me that Apple isn’t yet happy with the watch’s battery life, which isn’t going to break any industry standards. “It’s about a day right now,” said one, adding that Apple is working on various modifications ahead of the device’s 2015 launch to improve it. Reached for comment, Apple spokeswoman Nat Kerris declined to provide an estimate on expected battery life, but said the company expects users will charge their Apple Watches once daily. “There’s a lot of new technology packed into Apple Watch and we think people will love using it throughout the day,” Kerris said. “We anticipate that people will charge nightly which is why we designed an innovative charging solution that combines our MagSafe technology and inductive charging.”
It goes without saying that higher battery life is always better. However, in most instances, one day battery life is all you need. Use through the day … charge at night. Apple clearly scrapped its sleep tracking features for this version because otherwise there would be no good time to charge it. You don’t want to unstrap something at midday just to ensure it can track your sleep patterns in the evening. There’s a natural cycle of how human beings live and the Watch mirrors that. I think 24 hours of longevity is perfectly acceptable.
All the social networks I tried didn’t feel terrible. In fact, some of them were very positive experiences. In particular, Twitter and Instagram worked really well.
Granted, I haven’t used one of these things personally, but there is no way I could described that Instagram interface as a “positive experience”. It’s horrid. This is the definition of a phone on your wrist — a conceptual disaster.
Smartwatches succeed when they do enough things that phones can’t do or are bad at doing. I always come back to how Jobs introduced the iPad, clearly placing the iPad as better than both a phone and a laptop in several key areas. The same thing applies to the watch. The obvious example is the health sensor tracking — phones don’t have contact to the skin so they can’t do that stuff.
That’s what I’m most looking for on Tuesday; what else has Apple done to make the iWatch superior to an iPhone. Health tracking alone isn’t enough.
Samsung announced its new curved-display smartwatch last week, but today we were able to get up-close and personal with the new wearable. Unlike most smartwatches, the Gear S has two very special features. The first is a curved 2-inch, AMOLED display, and the second is 3G connectivity, allowing the smart watch to be used independent of a smartphone.
The curved display measures in at a 260×480 resolution, and under the hood you’ll find a GPS sensor, an accelerometer, gyroscope, UV detector, barometer, and heart rate monitor, alongside 4GB of internal storage and 512MB of RAM. It’s all powered by a dual-core 1.0 GHz processor and Tizen, Samsung’s own mobile operating system.
The Gear S has a 3G radio in it, so it can actually operate without a tethered phone giving it network access. This cuts battery life significantly of course, but as I was speculating on Twitter, smartwatches might be able to get away with ‘only’ one-day battery.
I like the conceptual design of this watch as well. My hypothetical iWatch is basically a band that has an integrated — seamless — curved display. The Gear S’s face is not too far off what I imagine. The main difference here is that the screen is still separated from the band — I think the iWatch would be made such that it look like all one part, with the screen inline to the body.
Remember back in June when I said Apple hoped to schedule a special event in October to show off a new wearable device? Remember how I also said this: “Could things change between now and fall? That’s certainly possible.” Turns out that was a prescient hedge, because things have changed. Apple now plans to unveil a new wearable alongside the two next-generation iPhones we told you the company will debut on September 9th.
There is no way this watch/band/thing is being released in September, although that’s not what is surprising. If you look at history, the iPad was announced in January and released in April. The iPhone was announced in January and released in June.
What’s surprising is the announcement in September, alongside the new (big deal) iPhones. Apple has no clear motivation to rush an announcement — they could easily wait until October (just like their original plan that Packzwoski reported on a few weeks ago).
You could argue that coupling the products at the event is a sign that the iPhone and iWatch are meant to go together, like the iWatch is some ‘minor’ accessory. I just can’t get behind that, though. The whole community has been hyping this product for a long time now. If expectations were inflated, I think Apple’s PR team would have got the word out by now. They haven’t. This product is a big deal.
So, here is my guess, the iWatch is demoed in September but only briefly. The star of the show will be the phones. Needless to say, release information for the watch will also not be available. (Think how the Mac Pro was a sneak peek at WWDC). Then, in October, Apple can finalise details and really get the marketing train pushing for the watch’s public debut — I’m guessing late November. This gives people a taste of Apple’s trump card, but September is still firmly cemented as iPhone month.