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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Samsung on Monday said that it wants to bring biometric sensors to even more mobile devices, The Wall Street Journal reports, including more fingerprint scanners and also iris scanners for future devices. Such biometric sensors could help Samsung further strengthen the security of its Samsung Knox, a mobile software solution developed for enterprise.
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Big changes are coming to the Xbox One with surprising speed right now. First, Microsoft caved last week and announced that it would begin selling the Xbox One without a bundled Kinect sensor for $399.99, matching the price of Sony’s PlayStation 4 video game console. Now, a new leak suggests that another sought-after change to the Xbox One could be coming very soon.
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Apple recently hired a new retail boss in former Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts and 9to5Mac’s sources say that she’s planning a big, much-needed shakeup to Apple’s retail operation. The biggest change that Ahrendts seems intent on making is adding more mobile payment integration into Apple’s retail stores to blur “the lines between Apple’s online and physical stores in order to improve the overall experience for Apple customers,” 9to5Mac says. This comes as Apple is developing its own comprehensive mobile payments platform aimed at making it easier for iPhone and iPad owners to buy things online, most likely with the help of biometric sensors such as the iPhone 5s’s fingerprint scanner.
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As great as the HTC One (M8) is, it looks like the best is still yet to come from HTC. The reliable @evleaks claims that HTC’s upcoming One (M8) Prime flagship phablet will be “made out of an exotic material, a composite of aluminum and liquid silicone,” which Alpha Materials, Inc. informs us is almost as light as aluminum but is also significantly stronger. So from the sound of it, it looks as though HTC’s next major release will be even more durable than its current lineup of high-end smartphones.
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Thanks to an ongoing issue with the way Apple built its iMessage platform, users who switch away from an iPhone to an Android phone or any other cell phone are faced with a huge problem: once they bail on the iPhone, they often can’t receive text messages from contacts who are still using iPhones. This is because Apple’s system still sees them as iMessage users, and it tries to deliver messages sent using Apple’s Messages app as iMessages. To make matters even worse, the iPhone users who send those messages see their status as “delivered” even though they are not being received.
Thankfully, there are ways to avoid this annoying bug if you’re planning to make the switch from iOS to another platform.
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Apple is buying Beats Electronics. Maybe. Some day. News of the deal broke nearly two weeks ago and at that time, an announcement was supposedly imminent. Then a video of Dr. Dre’s drunken celebration seemingly confirmed the news alongside additional reports from several big papers. But Apple and Beats have yet to make any announcement.
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A new report out of Taiwan says that Apple has already chosen display suppliers for the iPhone 6, with LG and Japan Display being the primary suppliers. In addition to those two companies, Innolux has apparently also been contracted to provide 4.7-inch iPhone 6 screens, UDN says, in order for Apple to meet the expected increased iPhone 6 demand, while Samsung and Sharp have been both rejected.
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