Moto X Announced

Moto X Announced by Google

There have been rumors around the internet for months concerning the “Moto X.” So what exactly is the big deal about this phone, which is the result of close collaboration between Google and Motorola?

Today everyone finally got their answers at Motorola's press conference during which they officially announced the Moto X. The phone is the first hardware manufactured by Google, which owns Motorola. As a result, the phone is sleek, glossy, and well-designed; any phone nerd's dream. It includes two cameras: a 10-megapixel rear camera and a 2-megapixel front camera. It can be customized with 16 or 32 gigabytes of memory. And the front panel, back panel, and accents, can all have their colors customized, with a total of 540 possible combinations.


But the real power of the Moto X doesn't come from its hardware. It comes from the software within. It's the first phone to use always-on voice activation for Google Now, which is included with the phone. Users can say “Okay, Google Now,” at any point, and the phone will start listening for commands. Users can use the voice interface to find directions, set alarms, search for information, or text contacts. Google Now also detects when the user is driving and provides navigation instructions for relevant waypoints.

In addition, the phone responds to gestures like a double-twist-of-the-wrist, which will pull up the camera from any screen. The idea behind this is that users should be able to capture moments as they happen without having to go through menus to find the camera.

Another feature of the Moto X touted by Google and Motorola is the active display. The screen uses AMOLED technology, which means that instead of unlocking and turning the phone on all the way, users can touch the screen to get at-a-glance information about updates. The screen also stays dim when this display is up, so it's not distracting or painful in dark environments.

The Moto X will be available “...late August, early September” for $199 (16GB) or $249(32GB) with a two-year contract.

Image from phandroid.com

 

Nexus 7 and Android 4.3 Jellybean Announced

If you've been considering getting a tablet but nothing has caught your eye yet, you might want to take a second look at Google's Nexus 7, which just received a major update, along with its operating system, Android 4.3.

Google today announced the release of updates to two of their flagship products, the Nexus 7 and the Android operating system.

The Android update, number 4.3, codenamed “Jellybean,” offers a number of incremental changes to the operating system. The biggest change is the addition of restricted profiles. Restricted profiles allow parents to change application behaviors on their childrens' accounts. This means parents can restrict their kids from making purchases, accessing inappropriate content, or changing system settings, much like parental controls on Mac and Windows operating systems.


Android 4.3 also added support for Bluetooth Smart, which is a low-energy version of the close-proximity Bluetooth profile. At the announcement event, one of the Google interns got on stage and did jumping jacks to demonstrate Android's ability to pull in measurements from a bluetooth heart-rate monitor.

The update also adds support for much better graphics, supported by some of the new hardware put out by Google, including the Nexus 7.

The Nexus 7, which has been Google's flagship tablet, also received significant updates. The biggest change was an increase in pixel density. The new Nexus 7 has a screen with higher resolution than the printed page, making it the most precise tablet screen on the market. It has a 1900x1200 pixel screen, which allows it to play full HD videos and games. In order to support this, the new Nexus 7 also features upgraded hardware, like a faster processor, doubled memory, and stereo speakers. The screen size however remains the same.

Google also refocused on Android as a gaming platform with the Nexus 7 announcement, revealing the “Google Play Games” app, which allows you to connect with your friends who also play games, and compares you across leaderboards. Several new games were also demoed on the Nexus 7, including a new Prince of Persia game and several racing apps. Also included in the Google Play store update was the option to rent textbooks for six months at a time.

The Nexus 7 starts at $229 for the 16GB version with Wi-Fi Only.

Dropbox Announcement Promises Much

Dropbox Announcement: They're "Replacing the Hard Drive"

With the amount of devices that the average person works on, it can take a lot of effort to keep track of your files. I can't count the number of times I've hunted for the latest version of a file on my phone, computer, or in the cloud. Today, Dropbox announced their plan to put an end to all of that. The Dropbox Platform, announced at their developer conference, aims to “replace the hard drive.”

Most of us are already familiar with the basic premise of the Dropbox Platform: if you've ever edited anything online, and then accessed that same file from another computer, you've used basic cloud sync features. Dropbox hopes to make “sync the new save.” Instead of having files that only exist in one location, like your phone or computer, they hope to make all of your files available wherever you need them.


The actual announcement was full of technical details for us nerds, but what it boils down to is this: Dropbox is providing Nerds and programmers with new tools to build apps for you. These apps will be able to share the same data via your DropBox account. That means your email, documents, and even progress in your Angry Birds games, will be available whenever and wherever you want them.

At launch, companies using this technology include popular services such as Shutterstock, Yahoo! Mail, and FedEx, as well as a number of smaller companies. As developers have a chance to use these tools more, we'll start to see more apps include the ability to save to Dropbox. Dropbox hopes to integrate this feature into as many apps as possible.

The three components of the feature are the Sync API, the Datastore API, and Drop-Ins. The two APIs allow programmers to interact with a user's Dropbox data without actually giving them access to the data. Basically it's a set of rules designed so that programmers can help you, but not hack you. The third component, Drop-Ins, are another set of tools for developers that speed up the development process, so that the time before their app has Dropbox functionality is reduced, and takes less work.

Following concerns over users' privacy in the wake of the NSA PRISM scandal, Dropbox has stated “We’ve seen reports that Dropbox might be asked to participate in a government program called PRISM. We are not part of any such program and remain committed to protecting our users’ privacy.”

Also announced at the conference was that the Dropbox service has now grown to 175 million users.

 

 

Cyber Attacks Increasing Around the World

Cyber Attacks on the Rise around World

There's a new type of war being waged in the metropolitan areas of the digital world.  Just like the "war on terror," this war is also composed of highly unpredictable attacks by an unseen and unknown enemy. These attacks are called "cyber attacks," and they're carried out not just by the traditional "bad guy," but by anyone ambitious enough to learn how to get started in cyber crime.


Cyber attacks can be carried out in one of a few ways. The first is a DDOS attack. DDOS stands for Dynamic Denial-Of-Service. A DDOS attack is not an attack meant to damage the affected system, but to slow it down by increasing the strain put on the computer. It's the digital equivalent of causing a scene to distract a store's security while the perpetrator can scope out vulnerable areas for later entrance.

There have been a rash of DDOS attacks on American banks http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/fbi-briefs-bank-executives-on-ddos-attac/240154858 but they appear to have ceased for the time being. This could mean that a more vicious cyber attack could be in the works - one like the recent $45 million ATM heist http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/13/4326336/cyber-caper-behind-the-scenes-of-the-45-million-atm-heist in which cyber thieves made off with a record amount of cash through careful coordination between hackers and criminals in the physical world.

In addition to these private cyber attacks, countries may be starting to wage even colder wars in the world of cyberspace. There have been recent allegations that China and Russia have been stealing weapons and tech from the United States through cyber attacks, although this may just be the ritual stoking of the fire following even more news about cyber warfare from the Pentagon.
The Pentagon this week launched "Plan X," which is a five-year cyber warfare research project. The goal of Plan X is to create technology that allows the military to fight cyber attacks in cyberspace under the command of generals and other non-technically-competent military personnel. The "Plan X app" is reported to be a large touch-screen table that commanders can interact with to send virtual warriors into cyber warfare. According to DARPA's website http://www.darpa.mil/Our_Work/I2O/Programs/Plan_X.aspx "Cyberspace is now recognized as a critical domain of operations by the U.S. military and its protection is a national security issue."

So where does this leave the rest of us who aren’t multi-national banks, governments, huge businesses, or hackers? For the most part not much has changed – the threat is just growing stronger. That means it’s more important than ever to install and update your anti-virus software. If you don’t have one, download Microsoft Security Essentials. Hackers are able to pull off such large-scale attacks because they use computers infected with their viruses. If you don’t give them a foothold, there’s one less computer they can leverage for their nefarious purposes.

Google IO Conference Keynote Rolls out Amazing New Features

Google IO Conference Keynote Speech Reveals Amazing Tech

Remember watching Star Trek, where the crew members could just speak to their computer and it would instantly know what they were referring to and provide them with that information? Well, nerds are ahead of schedule on developing that computer, and they work at Google.


Google kicked off their sixth annual three-day IO conference for software developers today with a three-hour keynote talk announcing new developments. The tech behemoth has already announced some groundbreaking improvements to not only their flagship search product but to many of their other products as well. We've rounded up some of the big ones for you here:

The biggest change, of course, is the "Star Trek Computer," a phrase used multiple times during the keynote. This change comes practically through an upgrade to Google's new search feature as well as to their Chrome browser on both desktop and phone. While logged into the browser, users can simply say "Ok Google," and then make their search. But instead of searching for things like you normally do, the new search is conversational. After searching for a place to go, you can simply say "Ok Google, how far is that from here?" and Search will automatically detect what "it" refers to and where "here" is, and provide you with your immediate answer (in minutes) as well as links to driving directions and other info. There are a lot of other upgrades to search as well to make it more conversational like being able to say "Ok Google, show me pictures of x" and it will automatically pull up images instead of the standard search results.

All of these changes are integrated into another of Google's new Maps app. The app has been totally overhauled from its previous version and shifts its focus again to a more personalized approach. In addition to a completely new look and new back-end features, the app allows you to use the map in the way that you think of the world, instead of as a map. When you're logged in, it will show you reviews from your friends, places you've visited, and contextual information based on where you've been and what you like. It also shows you results for your search like "sushi restaurant" directly on the map instead of as a sidebar.

One of the changes that probably won't get as much attention, but is still significant, is the upgrade to Google+. The social networking site is getting a facelift to be more congruent with other Google services, but also has a host of impressive features that blow Facebook out of the water - at least to the few people who use it regularly. The new Google+ will automatically pick the best photos from your albums, and allows you to edit your photos with a simple interface that doesn't require complex technical knowledge. New features will be rolling out today and over the next few days.

And the biggest business change that rolls out today is the announcement of Google Play's All Access service. This service allows users to stream music from Google Play's massive database, create radio stations, and save music for later listening - all for $9.99 a month. The service poses a major threat to Spotify, which has most of the features of Google's service for the same price, but with less integration into a huge app ecosystem like Google has.

As you can see, us nerds are incredibly excited about the future of what Google has to offer. Stay tuned for more announcements from this year's Google IO!

Facebook Home Initially Disappointing; Will Evolve

Facebook Home In Early Stages

Facebook recently released a new kind of app called Facebook Home, and the reviews are lackluster so far. But if the tech giant's history proves to be any indicator of long-term success, this is just the beginning of a long relationship with the software.


Facebook Home, launched April 12, 2013, promised to turn the user's phone into an all-in-one social hub with pictures, live updates, and easier chatting with Facebook friends. But reviews over the days since its launch have not been favorable. Complaints frequently mention how much battery the app consumes, though many people seem hopeful to use it if certain features were included. The likely reason behind this reception is the choice of phones that Facebook chose to support the app.

The phones that support it so far are high-end Android smartphones like the Galaxy SIII and the Galaxy Note II. The people using the app so far are more concerned with bleeding-edge functionality than a much larger user-base would be. Early media reports on Home's "Failure to Launch" seem to ignore the limited user base that it has been released to.

Facebook has been working on better integrating user feedback into their designs, after having gained a reputation for inconsiderate and abrupt homepage redesigns. Their latest site redesign therefore focused on usability and good design. Home only achieves the latter, but is clearly hoping to improve its product based on the less-than-congratulatory reviews online.

The official Facebook app has had almost 7 million installs, customers which Facebook is no doubt looking to convert to the new Facebook Home app, so it makes sense that they would polish the app on high-end devices before releasing it to a broader user base. As always, computer repair experts and Nerds look forward to seeing where this trend is headed - Facebook never does anything small!

Image from Facebook

Updated Facebook Newsfeed Coming

Facebook Newsfeed gets Facelift

Facebook users will be seeing a significant number of changes coming from the familiar blue-and-white website in the near future. In a press conference today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that they would be rolling out some dramatic alterations to the website’s layout.

The new layout will come in the form of a news feed redesign. Facebook is attempting to unify the look and function of the website over all devices, including tablets, desktops, and mobile phones.


Another significant change being made is the separation of posts from pages that you like. Users like George Takei, who frequently posts, complained that posts from pages such as his own were getting buried in Facebook’s algorithm and not showing up on users’ feeds at all. In response, Facebook created a separate news feed which displays all activity from pages that you’ve liked in Twitter fashion. It will update live and can be completely customized.

In addition, the visuals have been upgraded to feature content more prominently, instead of the text that users tune out while using the website. Photo albums have been revamped to be front and center, filling the news feed with larger and more efficiently spaced graphics. This trend toward graphics is being implemented throughout the site, leading to a cleaner interface that feels at home on phones and tablets, while retaining the same look on the desktop.

This announcement comes shortly after Facebook announced testing of their Graph Search and about a year after the Timeline change came to profiles. Facebook hopes to be an all-purpose social hub with these changes and recapture some of their user base who is leaving it for other sites.

 

These changes will be rolling out over the next few months, though you can ask to be put on the list of people that it rolls out to first, if you want. Eventually the change will come to everyone, but it will be modified based on how people use it, as well as user feedback. The announcement can be seen at http://www.facebook.com/newsfeed

A Tour of CES 2013 Part 1

What Cool Stuff is Showing up at CES 2013?

Every year, tech enthusiasts and future-focused consumers alike converge on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show.  From the innovative to the downright wacky, it’s a platform to showcase the newest tech gadgets and get a preview of what electronics will be capable of in the years to come.   CES 2013 offered an expansive collection of cool – from next generation TVs to connected homes and cars, the future of gaming, and more.

Televisions typically dominate CES.  Last year brought a bevy of integrated 3D options, while this year heralds the next stage in high definition resolution.  Current model high definition TVs are typically 1080p resolution.  TVs showcased at this year’s CES are rolling out with 4K, i.e. “Ultra HD” resolution.  This roughly translates to 4 times the high definition resolution of 1080p, making it possible to bring ultra clear picture to ever larger screens.


With no content currently available to take advantage of that concentrated resolution (heck, your eyes aren’t even capable of processing that level of detail), the technology isn’t something most of us will be running out to buy tomorrow, but in a few years it’s sure to be more mainstream.

Speaking of watching TV, Dish took advantage of CES to announce their partnership with Sling to allow customers with their Hopper DVR service to watch content anywhere, via any internet capable device.  More impressive yet, they’ll offer iOS and Android apps to allow users to download recorded content onto their mobile devices to watch offline.  This addresses the main limitation to those looking to catch up on their favorite shows while travelling or when out of area of a stable WiFi connection.

Smart homes and Smart cars were also a big hit at this year’s CES.  AT&T announced plans to offer expanded home security automation.  Their “Digital Doorman” is a touchscreen doorknob that opens with a PIN instead of a key.  If the kids lock themselves out, you can open the door remotely over the internet.  They’re also planning to offer motion sensor video cameras to be installed around the house, allowing you to keep tabs on your home when you’re away via your computer, smartphone, or mobile handheld device.

Car manufacturers are integrating more technology into the dash. The 2014 Chevy Impala will come with expanded “My Link” infotainment capability integrated into the dash.  Access apps right from the touchscreen on your dash, so you can use your navigation or Pandora radio applications without having to pull out your Smartphone.  The screen is fully customizable, letting you have your favorite apps, common numbers dialed or radio stations right on the home screen.  Hands free calling and integrated navigation are also included.

GM and Ford both announced plans to offer app developers access to their software so they can develop apps to incorporate your car with your wireless technology.  Expect future generation of these vehicles to offer more seamless integration with your smartphone (allowing in-dash access to contacts, calendars and reminders, for example), as well as custom apps to improve fuel economy, safe driving, and more.

In addition to these cool innovations, CES 2013 was dominated by next generation gaming.  Stay tuned next week for a new handheld gaming platform, playing PC games on tablets and true game immersion via a virtual reality headset.

 

Apple's New iPad Mini

Apple Unveils Star of the Show: iPad Mini

In a much-anticipated event, Apple today released a spread of new devices, highlighting and improving the smallest form factors that the company has become well-known for. Two of the devices were additions to their iPad line of tablets.

With the first viewing, our inner Nerd died a little… The iPad 4 is relatively unremarkable. Except for the fact that they have ditched the "new iPad" branding in favor of numbers again, there is little to differentiate this device from its predecessors.

So how do they get away with calling it new and improved? They did add a faster A6X processor, HD front-facing camera for “Facetime”, and a Lightning connector, which made its first appearance on the newest iPhone. Other than these minor changes, which come as a sort of slap in the face to new iPad owners, there are few improvements. So unless you just have to have the latest or are in the market anyways, experts say – wait.
However, the event finally caught our eye with the new addition to their tablet line. The iPad mini is the star of today's show. The iPad mini has a 7.9 inch screen, down from the 9.7 inch screen of its big brother. The spin, this smaller screen has the same number of pixels as the iPad 2, which makes for a higher pixel density, and therefore crisper display. The device can be held in one hand, and contains all the features of the other iPads, down to the processing speed.

With the decent and competitive price of just $329, the iPad mini promises to pose a serious competition to the other 7-inch tablets, such as the Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire. Its construction is of more solid materials and has a smaller bezel, which translates to a higher device to screen ratio. Early reports are mostly positive. Both devices become available on November 2, just in time for the holiday gadget gifting season.