Forget the Notes and the Megas, which are already extremely large Android handsets, because Samsung on Monday introduced a 7-inch smartphone, its biggest Android phone yet. Dubbed the Samsung Galaxy W, the phone isn’t a flagship device by any means. Instead, it’s a 7-inch tab-phab-phoneblet that has the ability to make cellular calls. It will be available in South Korea later this month.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
If there’s a better way to start June than by downloading a handful of awesome paid iPhone apps for free, I don’t know what it is. With WWDC 2014 about to get underway, many developers are celebrating by offering their apps for free for a limited time. As many of you are well aware, we here at BGR love sharing news of high-quality free apps that go on sale. Buying apps is important if you want to support developers and help ensure that they’ll launch great new apps down the road, but who are we to complain if they’re going to give the milk away for free every now and then?
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
We’re now just hours away from Apple’s big keynote at the annual Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, and we’re starting to wonder if there’s anything left for Apple to surprise us with this year. It’s obviously a pretty safe bet that Apple’s most exciting announcements of the year — new iPhones, new iPads, an iWatch, etc — won’t come until later this year, but Apple still has plenty in store for us at WWDC 2014 on Monday.
And now, two of Apple’s biggest rumored announcements have been confirmed ahead of the show by The New York Times.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
A Reddit user with a throwaway account has posted a series of images showing various OS X 10.10 features. This is “the new OS X,” he wrote, adding that he took the photos himself at Apple in California. While the user has since removed the images from Reddit and deleted his account, the pictures have apparently been verified by one of Reddit’s mods, and also by MacRumors’ sources.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Samsung is now living the dream: It’s built a smartphone that it can lard up with as much bloatware as it likes and there’s nothing Google can do about it. Samsung on Monday took the wraps off the Samsung Z, its first-ever smartphone that runs on its own native Tizen operating system. The new device features a 4.8-inch Super AMOLED display, a 2.3GHz quad-core processor, an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera, a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera, a fingerprint scanner, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a 2600mAh battery and Tizen 2.2.1.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Google will spend more than $1 billion on deploying its first Internet-beaming satellite fleet, The Wall Street Journal has learned, with the company expected to start its Internet program with 180 small satellites that will be orbiting the earth at lower altitudes than traditional satellites, and which would help Google bring the Internet to remote locations where other means of connecting the population to the Internet aren’t practical.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Remember the Asus Transformer Book Duet? Asus imagined a dual-booting Android/Windows tablet/laptop that would offer users four independent modes, and switch between the two operating systems in just four seconds, and demoed the concept at CES 2014. However, following pressure from both Google and Windows, the device never saw the light of day. Both companies reportedly insisted that their partners do not release such dual-booting devices, but it looks like Asus is not ready to give up.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
When companies like Comcast talk about all of the intense “competition” they face in the broadband market, changes are they’re talking either about competition from mobile carriers that have capped data plans or from 5Mbps DSL services that are no longer adequate to meet our needs in the age of Netflix streaming. However, The Washington Post reports that the Federal Communications Commission is finally looking into changing its antiquated definition of broadband, which now stands at any Internet service that delivers download speeds of 4Mbps or higher.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
The iPhone 6 really won’t be much of a surprise whenever it’s finally revealed since we’ve been seeing leaks showing us its exact shape and size for the past several weeks. However, Nowhereelse.fr has published a new video that was purportedly filmed during Apple’s preparations for its Worldwide Developers Conference next week that seemingly shows a full render of the iPhone 6.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report
Forget net neutrality — do we need search neutrality as well? Pando reports that home automation company Vivint found itself mysteriously removed from Google search results this past winter just two weeks after the search giant officially announced its acquisition of rival home automation company Nest. Although Vivint is now appearing again in related searches, the company says it never got a clear explanation for why it was removed or why it took Google four months to restore its status.
Read more here: Boy Genius Report