In recent weeks, Samsung has defended the plastic design of the Galaxy S5 in interviews and in blog posts on its own site, explaining that the phone packs less bloatware than previous flagship devices, and releasing ads that send a “Galaxy S5 is cool” message. All this happened while Samsung also had to defend itself yet again against Apple’s copycat allegations in a second trial it eventually lost.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
This can’t be emphasized enough: You really shouldn’t expect everything you send over Snapchat to remain private. The New York Times points out that Snapchat has added a new feature in its latest update that will let you easily save any text message that you receive over the service, which is something that you traditionally haven’t been able to do for the pictures that are sent through the app.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
LG’s next flagship smartphone has been long rumored to offer users a high-resolution display, and the company has just confirmed just how great its screen will be. In a press release, LG said that a 5.5-inch Quad HD (QHD) AH-IPS LCD panel for smartphones was certified as a QHD display after passing tests by NEMKO, the Norway-based international testing and certification organization for electrical products.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Motorola has been careless enough to reveal more details on its website about its upcoming Moto X+1 flagship handsets, shortly after it confirmed the phone’s name on a MotoMaker page. Droid-Life has found more evidence that suggests the Moto X+1 will be soon launched, including carriers mentions, as well as leather options for the phones rear case.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Now this is an incredible way to count calories. Israeli company Consumer Physics has launched a new Kickstarter project that might be the most ambitious idea we’ve yet seen on the popular crowd-funding website. The product is called SCiO and it’s essentially a handheld spectrometer that breaks down an object’s compounds by scanning the way that light interacts with its molecular vibrations to determine its unique optical signature.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Man bites dog, human steals robot’s job? That’s sort of the story in Japan, where SingularityHub reports that Toyota is temporarily replacing robots with human workers so they can figure out what the robots can do better and thus build more efficient robots. Essentially, Toyota has found that you can’t rely entirely on robots to do all the work for you if you hope to keep boosting their productivity — rather, you need humans who have knowledge of the production process teach them better ways to build cars.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Millions of Americans are still trapped in AOL dialup hell… but they might not be for much longer. Jackdaw Research chief Jan Dawson has put together a handy chart showing AOL’s operating income before depreciation and amortization (OIBDA) by segment and he concludes that, based on AOL’s current dialup subscriber churn rate, the company “has another 5 years before dialup business dies and it has to find a new source of profit.”
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Ahead of its release back in Mach, Titanfall was rumored to have helped Microsoft sell as many as 1 million Xbox Ones. That rumor was never confirmed nor denied, but now we know how many copies of Titanfall sold last quarter, and it looks like the rumor is at least plausible. According to NPD numbers cited by COO Peter Moore, EA sold 925,000 copies of Titanfall last quarter. These numbers don’t include digital sales bought from EA’s Origin PC service or from the Xbox One dashboard. They also don’t include worldwide sales.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
The Federal Communications Commission’s plan to allow for Internet “fast lanes” has just run into another major roadblock. In a letter sent to the FCC, several tech heavyweights slammed its reported plans to let ISPs charge Internet companies more money in exchange for ensuring a faster delivery of their traffic. Among the many huge names to sign the letter were Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Netflix, Dropbox and Yahoo.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
After employing the chief of Gotham’s finest and Iron Man himself to promote the new HTC One (M8) – though they were not in character in those commercials – HTC is ready to use an actual hero to promote the handset — at least by association. The Taiwanese handset maker will offer a few lucky winners a limited edition S.H.I.E.L.D. HTC One (M8) phone that has a S.H.I.E.L.D. logo on the back and identifying number.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report