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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Most independent studies have shown that Verizon has the strongest overall mobile voice and data network and now the carrier is poised to make it better than ever. Verizon on Monday announced that it’s started rolling out its XLTE network upgrade that promises to deliver not only faster peak download speeds but also twice the available bandwidth for users. This means that you’ll be much more likely to get a decent mobile data connection even in crowded areas where lots of people are trying to upload and download data at the same time.
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OK, so BlackBerry CEO John Chen knows that consumers have been dumping BlackBerry handsets in favor of iPhones, Android phones and even Windows Phones for years now. However, he’s not giving up on consumers just yet and he really thinks that BlackBerry can rise once again to become a major power in the consumer smartphone market if we just give it enough time.
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When it released iOS 7.1, Apple thanked the hackers that had jailbroken iOS 7.0, therefore allowing it to patch several security exploits. Since then, no iOS 7.1 version has been successfully jailbroken – at least on 2013 devices. However, it looks like an untethered iOS 7.1.1 jailbreak is possible, with two independent sources confirming it.
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Google Maps is far and away the best online mapping service out there and it’s no mystery why: Google has been working on it constantly for years and it employs more than 7,000 people whose sole job is to make it better. This year has seen a huge flurry of new Google Maps features and to help you keep track of them all we’ve decided to list our five favorites that you should definitely check out to enhance your traveling experience.
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