Motorola on Wednesday kicked off an interesting Moto 360 watchface design contest, which has as the main prize the company’s first Android Wear smartwatch. The contest rules also include the value of the device – listed at $249, which is in line with the European pricing for the device mentioned earlier this week – but the company has denied it on Google+.
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We’ve said in the past that we’re willing to put up with some of Google’s shadier antics mostly because its services are so useful. However, a new filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Google has a new plan that could put our tolerance to the ultimate test.
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Chinese manufacturing giant Foxconn, which has more than one million employees, is the biggest electronics maker in the world. The company builds many of the popular electronics devices available in stores around the globe, including Apple’s iOS devices. However, Foxconn has not been running a smooth operation, as it had to deal with several scandals.
After being heavily criticized for labor practices in the past, the company is now part of a different investigation which revealed that several former employees allegedly took bribes totaling more than $5 million from component suppliers in return for preferential treatment.
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Even though Apple has beaten Samsung twice in the U.S. so far, it failed to obtain the significant win it needed to really deliver a big hit to its archenemy. In fact, Apple has also been found to infringe a Samsung patent in the second U.S. lawsuit between the two giants, which is apparently an asset for the Android maker in its reportedly renewed settlement negotiations. Some reports based on recent legal documents from the two companies’ legal teams suggest that a settlement is still unlikely, however.
Meanwhile, Apple has scored another minor victory against Samsung in Europe, where a Dutch court upheld a ban against older Samsung Android handsets.
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Over the past month, one obvious trend has taken the App Store by storm: sleaze apps. Make It Rain hit the top of the iPhone download chart in early may with gameplay features such as bribing federal judges. Toilet Time became the No. 2 app (so to speak) in mid-May by promising to let players to “use your pee to clean dirt from the toilet.” And of course, there was the king of all sleaze apps: Weed Firm, a marijuana business simulator that was populated by such memorable characters as “a horny dancer.”
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Samsung definitely wasn’t trying to reinvent the wheel with the Galaxy S5 but Samsung’s mobile boss J.K. Shin still thinks that you’re not giving it nearly enough credit for being innovative. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Shin said that “despite the lack of any eye-popping technology,” the Galaxy S5 delivers new features that its core customers want and love.
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One of the most popular music streaming services in the world just hit another major milestone. Spotify announced on its blog on Wednesday that it now has over 10 million paying subscribers and 40 million active users across the 56 markets in which the service is available. Last March, the company reported that it had 6 million subscribers, which means that the latest data shows a 66% increase in paying users in just over a year.
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Tennis fans might marvel at the quick reaction times of their favorite players, especially since most professional serves for men’s tennis average between 120 and 130 miles per hour. Now tennis legend Roger Federer has done a cool new promotion with Google in which he wears Google Glass to give us a first-hand look at what it’s like having a ball fly toward you at an insanely fast speed. It’s an almost certain bet that Federer will not be allowed to bring Glass with him to Wimbledon next month, but from the footage Google showed it doesn’t look as through the headset impeded his vision in any way or distracted him while playing. You can check out the full video of Federer playing tennis while wearing Google Glass below.
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LG is apparently taking a more aggressive approach to collecting user data from Smart TVs that can be then sold to advertisers, TechDirt reports, as the company is ready to turn a Smart TV into a rather “stupid” TV for users who fail to accept its privacy policy.
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There aren’t many games that I’ve returned to after I’ve finished them. Borderlands 2 was one of those games. After storming through the campaign on my own when the game first released in 2012, I returned to the world of Pandora late last year to begin anew with a cooperative partner. Even with the plot still fresh in my mind, the limitless array of weaponry and the markedly different character classes give each play through new life.
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