First things first: no, Microsoft is not ditching Windows Phone and switching to Android. Curiously, however, the brand new smartphone vendor apparently does have plans to develop and sell a line of Android-powered smartphones that will be offered alongside its newly acquired Windows Phone lineup from Nokia.
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Gmail for Android has been updated to version 4.8, which offers various user interface tweaks as well as new features including a very useful “Save to Google Drive” option that will let them save attachments to the cloud instead of downloading them on their mobile devices. Attachments can also be printed directly in Gmail for Android 4.8.
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Motorola has already leaked the official name and price for its upcoming flagship handset – the Moto X+1 expected to retail for $400 without a contract – but the Lenovo-owned company has not made the handset official during its media event last week. Instead, the company only announced the very affordable Moto E and a new Moto G version that packs both LTE support and a microSD card. However, well-known leaker @evleaks has revealed more details about the handset.
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While Microsoft’s New York event taking place on Tuesday was supposed to be about the Surface Mini – a 7-inch to 8-inch tablet meant to fight against similarly sized devices running iOS or Android – Computer World has learned that Microsoft will not actually unveil such a Windows tablet. Instead, the company will announce Surface Pro 3 models that will have bigger screens, possibly going up to 12-inch in size.
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The only consumer survey that matters has found that among all businesses across every industry, Comcast and Time Warner Cable are the two most hated companies in America. The American Customer Satisfaction Index, which is put out quarterly by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business and is considered the most comprehensive customer satisfaction survey in the United States, has just come out with a new survey showing once again that Comcast and TWC have the lowest customer satisfaction ratings of any ISPs in the United States. And that’s not even the worst news for the two companies in the latest survey.
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Ever since Lavabit shut itself down last year, several different new alternatives have been proposed for people who want a truly secure email system that can’t be accessed by government agencies such as the NSA. BostInno reports that a team of students from Harvard and MIT are banding together to create a new email service called ProtonMail that they say will be more secure than Lavabit and won’t be hackable by the NSA or other spy agencies. Not only does this new email service offer end-to-end encryption but it’s also based in Switzerland, where it won’t have to comply with American courts’ demands to hand over user data. The service launched as a public beta last week after spending two weeks before as an invitation-only private beta. Anyone will be able to use ProtonMail to a limited extent for free, although the students say that “power users” will have to pay $5 a month to use the service.
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Microsoft Research has accidentally published an extensive document that offers the first images of the company’s touch-first Office productivity suite. The document has since been pulled, but not before screenshots of the touch-first versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook were captured.
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Right now when you log into Netflix, you’re presented with a sea of titles that can be overwhelming if you don’t know what you’re looking for. However, in the future Netflix plans to pare back on the number of titles you’ll see on your post-login screen to just three or four personal recommendations that it thinks will be surefire hits based on things you’ve watched in the past.
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A lot of you out there are helping Google rake in cash without even realizing it. Econsultancy draws our attention to a new study from UX firm Bunnyfoot that shows only 36% of users understand that Google Adwords are actually paid advertisements and not organic search results, even though Google clearly marks them as ads. This is actually an improvement from last year, when Bunnyfoot found that 81% of Google users clicked on Google Adwords and fully 41% of all users didn’t know that they were ads. While Google obviously doesn’t mind that so many people are unwittingly giving ads their clicks, it also means that the company is in a somewhat precarious position: If more and more people start realizing that its Adwords are paid ads and not organic search results, it could significantly reduce the total number of clicks those ads get in the future.
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Two weeks ago, news broke that Apple was about to purchase Beats Technology for $3.2 billion. The deal, which has apparently been delayed, has confused industry experts, with some viewing it as a sign of Apple’s lack of direction without Steve Jobs and others calling it Apple’s “best idea since the iPad.” Most believe Apple is buying Beats mostly for its music streaming service, rather than for its headphones. If that is the case, Reuters published a piece today showing why this would make sense, and why the record labels are rooting for Apple to succeed in music streaming.
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