Dropbox today increased its maximum storage option to 1TB for Dropbox Pro subscribers and introduced a bunch of new features while maintaining its monthly subscription charge at just $9.99. It’s part of the company’s effort to better compete with rival cloud-based storage services like Google Drive.
Swing Copters, the latest title from Flappy Bird creator Dong Nguyen, is in the limelight yet again this week following claims it plagiarizes another mobile game.
Development studio Open Name says the super-addictive title is a ripoff of Bog Racer, a game they released on Android back in July that was recently pulled from the Play Store after Google decided it was a Swing Copters clone.
Amazon is quickly learning that 3D gimmicks and a lack of third-party app support aren’t attributes consumers tend to look for in a smartphone, with one report suggesting that the retail giant has sold fewer than 35,000 Fire Phones since the device made its debut back in July.
The Samsung Galaxy S5 has become the latest tech giant to take on the Ice Bucket Challenge to raise awareness for ALS — but does it have an ulterior motive? Like the vast majority of videos that Samsung puts out, this one can’t help but take a swipe at competing devices from rival companies.
Now that Samsung is pretty much the only Android handset manufacturer making any money, you’d think that Android’s fragmentation problem would start to get better, but the latest Android fragmentation report from OpenSignal reveals the madness of developing for multiple screen sizes, hardware specs, and various versions of Android, has only gotten worse over the last year.
Chrome Remote Desktop is set to get a new screen recording feature that is expected to rollout to the public very soon. Available on both Mac and PC, it will allow users to shoot how-to videos and other screen casts without having to install dedicated screen recording software.
Apple’s bid to recover $16 million in attorney fees from Samsung following the massive patent dispute between the two companies has been blocked by the U.S. District Court. Judge Lucy Koh has also returned a $2.6 million bond posted by Apple to block sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Tesla Model S owners will soon be able to use an iPhone or Android-powered smartphone to start their car when they’ve forgotten their keyfob. The new feature will be introduced with an update to Tesla’s in-car operating system that’s currently in beta testing ahead of its public rollout.
The world already has more music streaming services than any sane person can subscribe to on a monthly basis, but Google is preparing to take on the likes of Spotify, Rdio, Pandora, and Beats Music with a new service of its own called YouTube Music Key.
The LG G Watch has been on sale for less than two months, but according to a new report from Korea, an LG executive has confirmed the company is already working on its second Android Wear device. Expected to launch this fall at IFA, the G Watch 2 is being labeled a “serious game changer,” and it’s being designed with Apple’s iWatch in mind.
EE customers in the United Kingdom can now pay a 50p fee when they call customers services to jump ahead of other callers in the queue. The priority service puts those who pay in touch with the next available operator while everyone else must wait, and it has been widely criticized by EE subscribers.
Google has Nest. Apple has HomeKit. And now Samsung is buying into the future of home automation too, with the $200 million purchase of SmartThings – a hardware startup that makes it easier for all your smart appliances to talk to each other.
SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson announced today that after starting from the bottom of KickStarter, his two year old home automation company has been bought by Samsung and is moving to Silicon Valley.
Researchers in the U.K. have developed a cellphone that is charged by ambient sound, eliminating the need for a charger. Filled with energy-harvesting “nanogenerators,” the device uses a principal called the piezoelectric effect to turn the sound vibrations in the atmosphere around it into energy.
Amazon is the latest company to move into the ultra-hot area of mobile payments with a new hardware/software combination called Amazon Local Register.
It’s essentially a credit card reader that attaches to your tablet or smartphone, and is accompanied by an app, allowing small business to take credit card payments.
Google is part of a global consortium that plans to install an undersea cable linking the U.S. and Japan to provide faster and more reliable Internet to Asia. The search giant hopes its “FASTER” project will make Google services more accessible to billions of people.
Barnes & Noble has decided to team up Google in an effort to reclaim its King of Book Retail title from their mutual rival Amazon.
Starting today, the two companies are partnering up to bring same-day delivery of books from local Barnes and Noble to customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay area, giving both companies an answer to Amazon’s same-day offerings.
Buying a home can be seriously stressful, but mobile app Zillow has been providing folks with great real estate information on local homes for a while now. I’ve used it several times to compare prices across homes I was interested in buying, as well and to just check out the kind of home my friends can buy, because I’m pretty nosy like that.
The Zillow app just updated with a fantastic new feature, too: instant mortgage pre-approval. This is a huge deal, as being pre-approved can make sure that your offers on homes, especially in hot markets like San Francisco and New York, are taken seriously. Pre-approved home loans are a great way to make that happen.
Having shut down Justin.tv on the back of a reported $1 billion Google acquisition, live video game streaming service Twitch is now blocking copyrighted music.
Twitch uses software called Audible Magic which scans videos for music that is owned or controlled by Audible Magic clients. This could take the form of either in-game or background music. Live broadcasts will not be scanned.
“The Audible Magic technology will scan for third party music in 30 minute blocks,” reads a blog post from Twitch. “[I]f Audible Magic does not detect its clients’ music, that portion of the VOD will not be muted. If third party audio is detected anywhere in the 30-minute scanned block, the entire 30 minutes will be muted.”
Scrolling to the bottom of every spam email in search of that tiny “unsubscribe” link is among my least favorite Internet chores, but Google is finally making it a lot easier to never receive spammy emails from all the brands, social networks, and Nigerian princes you’ve courted over the years.
To bring you one step closer to a clutter free inbox, the company announced on its blog this morning that Gmail users will now see a new “unsubscribe” link anytime they receive a bulk email.
As revealed by Steven Levy in his great book In The Plex, in the early days of Google one of the founders’ ideas for advertising the new search engine was to project a lazer image of the Google logo on the moon.
That idea obviously didn’t happen, but a new Easter Egg for Google Maps on PC does at least let users explore the surface of the moon, alongside that of Mars, to celebrate the second anniversary of the Curiosity rover touching down on the Red Planet’s surface.
Microsoft is hoping to appease Chinese workers who are unhappy about its massive layoff plans by offering them a free smartphone. Up to 300 employees can claim a free device every day, but only if they agree to resign.
Samsung vowed to end child labor in its supply chain once and for all with its new ‘zero tolerance’ policy on child labor, but after coming down hard on Dongguan Shinyang Electronics this summer for employing under age workers, the Android maker has decided to just enforce 30% of its policy.
Pebble today added three new additions to its popular smartwatch lineup, but they’re not the all-new Android Wear competitors you may have been hoping for. Instead, they’re actually original Pebbles with fancy new paint jobs — and they’re only available for a limited time.
Google today rolled out a new Chrome beta for OS X — officially dubbed Chrome Canary — which finally takes advantage of the 64-bit processors built into the latest Macs. The change should mean better performance when browsing the web, but it isn’t quite ready to become your daily driver just yet.
New images of Samsung’s upcoming Galaxy Alpha indicate it will be even thinner than Apple’s iPhone 5s. The handset’s rear-facing camera protrudes out of its back somewhat — just like the Galaxy S5’s — but overall, the device could well be the slimmest Samsung smartphone to date.