7 new Apps for Android.

1. Ambience Nature Sounds.

ambience nature sounds

A good-looking app that plays soothing nature sounds to accompany your meditation or your working process.

Price: free

Download

2. Canvy.

Canvy

Canvy is a new contacts app, which brings beautiful material design, automatic curation, big, big pictures, and floating shortcuts to your phonebook.

Price: free
Download

3. PopOut 3D GIFs

PopOut 3D

This app makes use of the 2-white-stripe method to trick our brains and make GIFs pop out with a pseudo-3D effect. You record your own clips and need to follow a set of rules for it to come out perfectly, but don't worry — there are clear instructions and a “practice” mode

Price: free

Download

4. Weather Wiz.

WeatherWiz

This is a beautiful-looking weather app that definitely deserves a spin. Check it out, you might end up replacing your current favorite. 

Price: free

Download

5. Microsoft StaffHub

MS Staff Hub

Much like the famous Slack, this is a communications app geared towards professionals and office work. It's made for business chats, schedule and project management, sharing files, and even manage shifts. Of course, it's deeply integrated with OneDrive to make project sharing quick and easy.

Price: free

Download

6. SystemPanel 2

SystemPanel

As the name suggests, this app is built to give you deep, deep insight into everything that's going on with your phone. From hardware components and usage to active apps and processes and all the accounts they are using. Users with root access will, naturally, enjoy more control, such as individual process restrictions.

Price: free

Download

7. StringiFy

Sringify

Sort of like IFTTT, Stringify lets you create automatic actions, which trigger from specific events. These span from different apps to different IoT appliances. For example, you can set your home lighting to come on when you are in the area of your house. Or, you can have a post automatically be shared to all your social media accounts when you post it via Twitter (for example). Really, there are a ton of combinations you can make, this app is a tinkerer's dream.

Price: free

Download

Samsung to play Plus card with S8, sport Beast mode and launch late

The next Galaxy smartphone, which may act as the knight in shinning armour for the Korean giant, was expected to launch or at least showcased at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona but now a new date in April is being sought.

Samsung might be going for the kill with the new Galaxy S8 due to its setback with the Note 7. It no longer wants to hurry but take its time and go in for a bulls-eye.

The next Galaxy smartphone, which may act as the knight in shinning armour for the Korean giant, was expected to launch or at least showcased at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona but now a new date in April is being sought. 

Change in Launch Strategy

Experts claim that the delay in the launch is to make sure that all battery issues are resolved unlike Note 7 and also ensure that marketing and communications teams have enough time to bring back confidence about the brand after the fiasco. The time might also be used to harvest some hype about the flagship as well.

The date change has tactical advantages as well, experts said. The push back to April gives Samsung a different tactical angle to take with its press launch. Even if Apple does not release the equivalent of an iPhone SE 2, the Galaxy S8 launch will come a few weeks after all of Samsung’s Android-powered rivals will have shown off the handsets at Mobile World Congress. Samsung’s press launch will be in the enviable position of making the last move with this generation of handsets.

                                                            Beast Mode

Apart from launch strategy, the new phone is expected to come with a ‘Beast’ mode. Samsung, which unveiled the mode in a trademark application, is expected to launch the mode in competition to battery-saving modes currently available in Android. The ‘Beast’ mode may be able to leverage greater processing power, graphical ability and increased memory of the handset.

Hardware Changes

The Korean giant is also expected to emulate Apple’s startegy of adding an ‘S’ or ‘Plus’ variant with the upcoming flagship. It is rumoured to be making two different Galaxy S8 sizes - one, called Galaxy S8, will have a display around five inches in size, just like its predecessor - the Galaxy S7. The other phone will be the company’s first 6-inch phone. The Plus is also speculated to arrive at the same time with a AMOLED display. However, experts claim that the S8 Plus has similar overall footpront as the now-discontinued Galaxy Note7.

According to a tipster on weibo who has been accurate on previous calls related to Samsung devices, the Samsung Galaxy S8 will feature 8GB of RAM. In addition, it will also sport a UFS 2.1 flash storage chip. In addition, S8 Plus might sport a dual-camera set up at the rear just like the iPhone 7 Plus.

Both the phones, either might be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor or an Exynos 8895. The devices are expected to be running on Android 7.0 Nougat.

New Artificial Intelligence

Samsung might also include its new AI powered assistants reportedly named Bixby (male) and Kestra (female) with the Galaxy S8. Speculations are adrift that Google is talking to the Galaxy device-maker about making Google Assistant the only voice activated personal assistant on the device.

Apple working with Consumer Reports to pin down inconsistent MacBook Pro battery test results

On December 22nd, Consumer Reports said it could not recommend the MacBook Pro — a first for a Mac laptop. It caused a stir! Consumer Reports’ reasoning was simple: it got wildly inconsistent battery test results every time it tried to test multiple versions of the laptop. Its test is one that’s pretty common across the industry, loading up web pages one after another:

"For the battery test, we download a series of 10 web pages sequentially, starting with the battery fully charged, and ending when the laptop shuts down. The web pages are stored on a server in our lab, and transmitted over a WiFi network set up specifically for this purpose. We conduct our battery tests using the computer’s default browser—Safari, in the case of the MacBook Pro laptops.

In that test, CR saw the 13-inch MacBook Pro (with the Touch Bar) get results from 16 hours all the way down to less than 4 hours — again, wildly inconsistent. Similarly, the 15-inch version saw results range from a “that can’t be right” 18.5 hours down to 8 hours. Because the results ranged so widely, CR concluded that it’s not a good idea to buy this laptop until we know more about why these battery results are so inconsistent.

Yesterday, Apple’s Phil Schiller tweeted that the company itself doesn’t see anything like these results and is “Working with CR to understand their battery tests.”

That stir I referred to? It’s very real, and it happened mainly because the MacBook Pro was already at the center of very strong feelings amongst the Apple faithful. The laptops have not been as well-received as Apple might have hoped — for reasons ranging from dongles to processor power to price. You can add battery life to the list of things people don’t fully trust about the MacBook Pro now — especially after Mark Gurman reported in Bloomberg that Apple originally wanted to use some more advanced battery technology but had to fall back to something more traditional. Oh, and Apple decided that giving you an estimated “time remaining” time in the menubar was a bad idea and so pulled the feature from MacOS.

In short, this particular Consumer Reports battery test drama isn’t happening in a vacuum. Now, the going argument right now is whether or not its test is trustworthy. CR says it “tests hundreds of laptops each year, using identical procedures in highly controlled conditions,” presumably without varying results on those other machines. After Apple and CR hash out what happened with these tests, we will hopefully get more clarity about what is going on here.

he Verge also uses a looping website battery test, though unlike CR we use live data on the web. Because battery tests have a lot of variables, we don’t assume ours is objectively accurate in all cases — it’s better as a guide. In fact, every battery test should be treated more as a guide for what you might expect in real world use rather than an objective measure. The most diligent publications limit every possible variable to come to objective, comparable measures — work that is useful and laudable. But in the real world, the variables are infinite, so you want to do your best to describe real world results whenever possible.

In our review of the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar, we did both. Our looping battery test clocked in at 10.5 hours for the 13-inch model, but in real world (and not very intensive) usage, we got less than 6 hours of life on two different machines.

It’s too much to ask for objective, universally applicable battery life estimates. But it’s not too much to ask that these machines at least be a little predictable. Perusing 9to5Mac’s roundup of reviews, I’m sad to say you’ll find an equal number of reviewers suggesting battery life is an inconsistent question mark and others saying it’s in line with Apple’s 10 hour estimate.

Here’s one more result: in the three hours I’ve been awake today, the MacBook Pro (sans Touch Bar) has gone from 100 percent to 25 percent. But I have consistently had 15+ Chrome (a known battery hog, despite Google’s protestations) tabs open alongside Slack and Tweetdeck. In short: battery life varies and your results won’t line up with objective tests.

Whether or not the truth of the inconsistent battery results some are seeing on the MacBook Pro comes down to flawed tests, flawed software, or flawed hardware is unfortunately not something we can definitively say right now. What we can say is that it’s worth looking into. These are Apple’s flagship Macs, and the Mac’s reputation is built as much on trust as it is on finely milled aluminum.

Apple and Nokia are at it again over patents

Apple and Nokia settled a patent lawsuit back in 2011, but now, they’re back at it once more. the two firms square measure suing one another over again, however this time Apple is filing an antitrust case, not against Nokia however instead against third-party firms called patent assertion entities, or PAEs, that are engaged on its behalf. In getting even for this cause, Nokia is suing Apple directly.

In its case, Apple argues that these PAEs aggressively pursue cash for patents Nokia transferred to them — one thing it says shouldn’t be allowed as a result of it’s “anti competitive and abusive.” Nokia is on an individual basis suing because it believes Apple owes it money for patents utilized in Apple products.

The two corporations last had a licensing spat back in 2009, when Nokia sued Apple over claims that Apple infringed on a number of its essential patents. These commonplace essential patents are used across the business and as such, are alleged to be authorised on honest, reasonable, and non-discriminatory — aka FRAND — terms. this implies corporations will make the most of these patents while not paying outrageous licensing fees because they’re essential to most products.

The companies eventually reached a settlement agreement during which Apple paid a one-time fee to Nokia then was scheduled to pay regular royalties in the future.

Apple’s new case, that was filed in California, goes after PAEs that Nokia has partnered with to pursue extra patent money. Apple claims these firms, that embody acacia research and conversant Property Management, are “conspiring with Nokia in a scheme to diffuse and abuse [standard essential patents] and, as the PAEs and Nokia absolutely supposed, monetize those false guarantees by extracting exorbitant non-FRAND royalties in manner Nokia couldn't.”



Apple continues to mention that these PAEs are able to pursue violation cases because in contrast to Nokia, they don’t manufacture anything and instead engineered a complete business around fighting violation. Apple implies the PAEs, and in particular, Acacia, has it out for the company, as proved by the quantity of patent lawsuits they’ve brought against it. PAEs have reportedly sued Apple a minimum of 12 times based mostly off former Nokia patents; by itself, tree has sued Apple over 40 times based mostly off patents from Nokia and other firms. Apple desires the court to declare this practice of habitually and aggressively suing based on other companies' patents extralegal.

Meanwhile, Nokia filed a suit today directly against Apple in Europe and the USA that claims the company remains infringing on Nokia patents. Nokia says that since settling that initial case, Apple has “declined resultant offers created by Nokia to license different [parts] of its proprietary inventions, which square measure utilized by several Apple product.” therefore primarily, Nokia is arguing that Apple owes money because it takes advantage of a lot of Nokia patents than it’s presently paying for. The lawsuit covers 32 patents, as well as display, user interface, software, and video-coding technology.



Nokia’s lawsuit is actually retribution for Apple’s lawsuit, but Apple, whereas facing two opponents — Nokia and PAEs — is trying to upend patent law. Apple’s case might ultimately be monumental in however future patent legal proceeding is tried. That is, if it wins and doesn’t simply settle things in an exceedingly couple years.

New blocking technology: Mobile phones could become useless in moving cars in the UK

Mobile phones could be set to automatically stop working in moving cars, making it impossible for drivers to text, call, or send emails at the wheel.

The Department for Transport (DfT) is reportedly considering implementing new technology that would block phone signal for drivers. 

The software would make mobiles virtually useless by disabling any function that requires internet access or connection to a telephone network.

Ministers are to meet car manufacturers and mobile companies in the new year to discuss the plan. 

The move comes after almost one in three motorists admitted to having used their phone while driving, and 17,500 people were taken to court last year.

Campaigners have said they want to change attitudes towards texting and driving; in an RAC survey, a fifth of motorists said they believed it was safe to check social media and send text messages while sitting in traffic, despite it being against the law. 

Earlier this week, Victims' Commissioner Baroness Newlove, said: “It is time to make using a mobile phone while driving just as unacceptable as not wearing a seat belt or drink-driving.

“We need better education and hardhitting messages to ensure the next generation know what could happen.”

A DfT spokesman said: “We are determined to crack down on mobile phone use at the wheel,

“Our plans to double penalties for this serious crime should act as an incredibly strong deterrent.

“We will continue to explore what more can be done to tackle this crime.”

Smartphone manufacturers have also been urged to create a 'drive safe' mode - similar to the 'flight mode' option, which will block calls, texts and emails and avoid drivers being distracted.  

The government has already cracked down on mobile phone use in cars by introducing tougher penalties for anyone who uses their phone behind the wheel.

This includes automatic bans for new drivers, a fine of £200 and six penalty points.

And if the offence results in a death then a driver can be jailed for life