In case you haven’t heard of it, Blocks is a U.K. company aiming to build modular smartwatches that can better suit the needs of wearable buyers looking to modify their gadgets to best suit their needs. And now the company has already demoed an early prototype of its Blocks modular smartwatch at a Bluetooth Special Interest Group event in London, Engadget reports.
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FreedomPop isn’t happy selling its free smartphone service only in the U.S., as the company now plans to expand to Europe. It will begin in Belgium, where it wants to test out its new service, TechCurnch reveals. FreedomPop is a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that purchases bandwidth from Sprint in the U.S, and then offers users 200 free voice minutes, 500 free text messages and 500MB free of data each month. In Europe, the carrier will have a similar approach.
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The market for web TV streaming devices is heating up and Roku and Google’s Chromecast look like the big winners so far. Per GigaOM, new data from researchers at Parks Associates estimates that both Chromecast and Roku each have sold around 3.8 million units in the United States over the past year while Apple TV has sold only 2 million units in the U.S. over the same period. This makes a lot of sense because Chromecast and Roku’s new USB dongle are both less expensive than Apple TV, which is supposedly due for a major refresh sometime this year.
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AT&T’s controversial “Sponsored Data” plan, originally unveiled in January, has been billed as both a cause for concern and a potential boon for consumers, but in the months following the announcement, not a single high-profile company has joined the pilot program. Re/code reports that AT&T has added several smaller names to the program since then, but what could have been a landmark partnership for the the program, Prime Data on Amazon’s Fire Phone, never came to fruition.
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We’ve known for a while that Fleksy, one of the best third-party Android keyboards around, is coming to the iPhone. Now, however, we have a better idea of exactly when we can expect to see it. Per 9to5Mac, Fleksy says that it’s still on track to launch its third-party keyboard app this fall after the launch of iOS 8. The app, which earlier this year broke the world record for fastest typing on a smartphone, now supports 40 different languages and should be a very popular item when it finally hits the App Store.
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Honeybees are very important to humans, sustaining Earth’s dominant species with help of their unique ability to pollinate plants. However, humans are not equally helpful to bees, as bees are dying at unprecedented rates thanks to a colony collapse disorder (CCD) that’s apparently so dangerous, even the White House wants it fixed. While some scientists are trying to figure out how to prevent bees from dying, others are thinking about how to replace them with tiny robots that will be able to take their jobs one day, Business Insider reports.
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A technological revolution is about to take place within the automotive industry and Apple could be leading the charge. ABI Research published a report on Wednesday predicting that over 24 million cars will be fitted with Apple’s CarPlay by 2019. When Apple launched CarPlay earlier this year, only select Ferrari, Mercedes-Benz and Volvo models were compatible with the software, but dozens of other manufacturers have signed on to include CarPlay functionality in the future, including Ford, BMW, Audi, Toyota and Nissan.
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HTC finally managed to turn things around in the second quarter as its cost-cutting efforts managed to yield a slight unaudited profit of $75 million. Revenue continued to slide despite supposedly solid sales of the company’s flagship HTC One (M8) smartphone, however, and things could get even worse moving forward. According to new claims, sales of HTC’s latest hero phone are already slowing down.
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It’s been six years since Apple first unleashed its App Store onto the world and to celebrate several popular paid apps are going on sale for a limited time. As MacRumors documents, you can now get popular apps such as Monument Valley, Threes!, Lost Toys and Drafts for iPad at big discounts of between 50% and 80%. MacRumors also directs our attention to AppShopper’s big list of discounts that will give you a comprehensive look at which apps are getting their prices cut and for how long. In the six years since its launch, the App Store has paid out more than $15 billion to developers and has served as the blueprint for other app stores such as Google Play. We can’t think of a better way to celebrate its birthday by getting some super-cheap apps of our own.
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Samsung again has to face child labor allegations in China, The Wall Street Journal reports, where China Labor Watch said it found several cases of underage workers being hired by at least one Samsung supplier in the country – Shinyang Electronics. Samsung on Thursday said it’s looking into these findings, adding that according to its previous audits – both internal and external – no underage workers were found at more than 100 Samsung suppliers that were inspected in China.
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