Peter's Interest

OnePlus has finally announced the launch date of its next flagship smartphone, the OnePlus 2. On July 27, the Chinese smartphone maker will unveil its new product, but with a twist: it will be launched via virtual reality (VR). In what is being billed as the first smartphone to be launched via virtual reality, the company has said it will come out with its own virtual reality headset made of cardboard, which must be used to see the launch. The company has designed their own custom VR headsets that are tailored to fit the One smartphone. The VR cardboard will be available for free, but one will have to pay for the shipping charges. However, no further details, like when can one order it or how long will it take to arrive, have been shared on the company's blog. The event is scheduled for 7 PM Pacific Time on July 27, which will be 7:30 AM on July 28 for the Indian audience. The blog post by Carl Pei, co-founder, OnePlus, stated, "In our industry, product la...

Apple has removed Civil War games from the App Store featuring the Confederate flag, according to a report from Touch Arcade   Ultimate General: Gettysburg  and the  Civil War  games by developer Hunted Cow no longer appear for sale. A statement from a developer of  Ultimate General  confirms that the studio's game was removed by Apple. . Apple isn't the only company to pull merchandise featuring the Confederate flag. Following the tragic shooting at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, a movement has called for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina capital building and a re-evaluation of the nation's relationship with the symbol of the Confederate army. In response, Amazon and eBay have removed or banned Confederate flag merchandise, and Warner Bros. has scrapped plans for toys featuring the banner. Apple's decision is likely to draw more controversy. Removing games in wh...

No longer will we have to buy an overpriced coffee to get a rubbish wireless internet connection. *Fist pump* Google is rolling out free wifi in New York as part of a trial the company hopes will eventually span across the whole of the world. The internet giant has even gone as far as to set up a company specifically dedicated to the task, called Sidewalk Labs. How will they do this you ask – through turning 10,000 of the big apple’s old phone booths into ad-supported ‘Wi-Fi pylons’ These converted booths are also intended to provide cell-phone charging, free domestic phone calls and a touch screen information hub about the city and transit directions. According to   Bloomberg News , these ‘pylons’ will be rolled out across New York this autumn.

Travel companies such as Thomas Cook, Qantas Airways, and Destination BC in Canada are also creating their own promotional VR videos.  Jennifer Parker   Holy cow.  My feet are planted firmly beneath me, but somehow I'm stepping into and through a map on the wall, when a blast of warm air ruffles my blouse. Now I'm on a sandy beach in Hawaii. A spray of clean ocean air mists my face. But before I can reach out and touch the fanned leaves of a sun-kissed palm tree, the ground beneath my feet shakes, and I've been sucked through a wormhole. Seconds later, I find myself in the swank lobby bar of a Marriott hotel. This is advertising on steroids.  Marriott calls this a "4D" experience, and its one of the latest innovations in virtual reality. Delivered via an Oculus Rift headset inside a special Teleporter station, this experience is part of the hotel chain's "Travel Brilliantly" campaign. You feel as if you're in a movie playing 360-degrees around...

Notification Centre widgets have become a useful part of iOS since they were first unveiled as part of iOS 8. If you have an iPhone or iPad, you can pull down the Notification Centre and add installed apps' widgets to the Today view by tapping Edit. From weather updates to sports scores, these widgets let you quickly check useful information without having to open apps. Most apps have a useful companion widget in the Notification Centre, while there are some that exist only for their widget. Orby Widgets is an app with 12 widgets that you might want to try. We checked it out to see if these widgets are useful. Design The Orby Widgets app isn't much more than a few cards that show you what each widget does. A button at the bottom left brings up the list of widgets and lets you tweak how the widgets display data. The app's design is satisfactory but we would've preferred it if the widget settings button was more prominently placed. The settings icon doesn't m...

Every driver hates getting stuck in traffic behind a bus or truck. To make matters worse, it is often risky to try to pass them since you don’t have a very clear view of what’s ahead. In a single-lane highway, the maneuver is even more dangerous. In order to reduce accidents, a new truck aims to help drivers in situations like these.   Developed by Samsung in Argentina – where one person dies in a traffic accident nearly every hour – the “Safety Truck” attempts to reduce accidents on the roads by showing what’s ahead on a huge screen on the back of the truck Images are captured by a camera on the front of the vehicle and transmitted on four monitors installed in the back of the truck. “The monitors give drivers behind the truck a view of what is going on ahead, even in the dark of night,” the company said on their website. Samsung Safety Truck is a partnership held between Samsung and the Argentine brand Ingematica. ...

WikiLeaks is a non-profit organisation which releases government related information to public. The objective of the organisation is to bring important news and information to the general public. The name, WikiLeaks, itself suggests that the organisation is solely into leaking secret information. It was launched on October 4, 2006 by Julian Assange who is currently living in exile for his work at WikiLeaks. The organisation released 1.2 million documents within a year of its launch. Recently on June 19, WikiLeaks released 60,000 diplomatic documents on Saudi Arabia. Here, we have collected seven world famous leaks by WikiLeaks. Keep scrolling! Guantanamo Bay procedures Guantanamo Bay Procedures was one of the first documents that WikiLeaks leaked. The document was released on November 7, 2007. It was a copy of 'Standard Operating Procedures' for 'Camp Delta' which was the code of behavior for the U.S. Army at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp. The release re...

Google Play Music , Google's music streaming service, has  launched a free, ad-supported version  that will allow users to access its catalogue through curated playlists. Users will also be able to create stations based off a specific artist, song, or album. It's available online today in the U.S., with iOS and Android compatibility coming later this week. The company hopes that the free version will bring in more listeners who will eventually convert to paying $9.99 per month for the service, without ads. The paid version offers features that the free version doesn't, such as the ability to search and play specific songs or albums and offline streaming. Without a paid subscription, users will still be able to host 50,000 songs from their own library through Google Play's platform.  A free, ad-supported model is a pointed move away from recent industry trends, as prominent new competitors Tidal and Apple Music have declined to offer a "freemium" plan. ...

EASTBOURNE  (UNITED KINGDOM)   : Belinda Bencic reached her second grass-court quarterfinal of the summer on Wednesday, with the Swiss teenager advancing 6-4, 3-0 as opponent Eugenie Bouchard retired injured in Eastbourne.  Bouchard, the seventh-seeded Canadian whose prospects for repeating her Wimbledon final of a year ago are looking exceedingly dim, lasted 54 minutes before calling for the trainer to treat an apparent abdominal injury.  The Canadian could now face a fitness race before the Monday start at the All England club.  After a consultation, Bouchard retired to send Bencic into a Thursday contest against the winner from Spanish 14th seed Garbine Muguruza and Briton Johanna Konta.  Bouchard reached three Grand Slam semifinals in 2014 but has now lost 11 of her last 13 matches in a slump dating back to mid-March.  Bencic, meanwhile, reached the final on grass in the Netherlands 10 days ago, losing to Camila Giorgi.  She broke...

Google inserted the "undo send" feature last month into an email management application called "Inbox" designed for mobile devices. SAN FRANCISCO: Google is making it easier to steer clear of the trouble that can be caused by a misdirected or inappropriate email.  An option to cancel the delivery of an email within 30 seconds of hitting the send button is now a standard safeguard in Google's Gmail as part of a settings change made this week.  The "undo send" feature had already been available for the past six years in Google's experimental labs, but that required Gmail users taking extra steps to get it.  Gmail accountholders will now be able to activate the protection in Gmail's settings. The tool delays the delivery of emails from five to 30 seconds after the send button is pressed to give users a fleeting chance to retrieve an email mistakenly sent to the wrong person or an ill-conceived communique.  Google inserted the "un...

What do you do when you're king of the Linux server mountain and you want more? In  Red Hat 's case, you develop a new mobile software stack,  Red Hat Mobile Application Platform (RHMAP), and you  partner up with the world's top Android smartphone vendor, Samsung . Red Hat and Samsung are partnering up to create Android business apps. This isn't to say that Red Hat will become just another Android app vendor. The Raleigh, NC-based company's focus is still primarily on business, operating systems, the cloud and middleware. According to the companies' joint announcement, Samsung Business Services and Red Hat plan to deliver: Business applications: A series of enterprise-ready, industry-specific mobile applications that will run on the RHMAP and address key workforce management and business tasks, such as business intelligence, field and customer service, inventory management and sales catalog, pricing, ordering, and invoicing. The application...

Apple is sending a shiver down the spine of anyone who depends on mobile advertising for a living with the inclusion of ad-blocking extensions for iOS 9 in the next version of its Safari browser. The news surfaced last week, after developers discovered the provision in documentation following iOS 9's introduction at the company's Worldwide Developers Conference. The extensions can block cookies, images, resources, pop-ups and other content, Apple said. Apple's mobile users have been able to block ads in other browsers for some time. They just couldn't do it in Safari. Adding the capability to Apple's browser could be very problematic for content providers, because 55 percent of all mobile browsing is done with Safari. "This is worrisome," observed Joshua Benton, director of the Nieman Journalism Lab at Harvard University. "Publishers already make tiny dollars on mobile, even as their readers have shifted there in huge numbers....

NEW DELHI: Lenovo-owned Motorola is likely to release its next-generation Moto G smartphone, whose images and videos have hit the web recently. The  video  shows several details about the upcoming Motorola smartphone, including key hardware and software version. It seems that the third-generation Moto G model will share quite a few features with its predecessor, such as the 5-inch (720p) HD screen, 8GB internal storage, 1GB RAM, and microSD card support The new model will also be powered by the 64-bit Snapdragon 410 processor, with four cores running 1.4GHz. Its Antutu benchmark score is reportedly higher too at 23355, compared to the 17976 score of the second-generation model. Moto G (Gen 3) will run on Android 5.1.1 (Lollipop) operating system out-of-the-box. Like Moto E (Gen 2), the upcoming smartphone will support 4G networks. The biggest upgrade to Moto G will be the camera resolution, jumping straight from an 8MP rear camera to a 13MP primary shooter,...