HTC is planning to release its extremely well-received virtual reality headset Vive to consumers later this year, possibly in November. In the meantime, the Taiwanese company is busy building out its VR ecosystem. HTC disclosed that it spent almost $10 million for a 15 percent stake in WEVR, an open VR platform and community based in Los Angeles. Read More
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HTC Spends Nearly $10M On A 15% Stake In Virtual Reality Platform WEVR
A police raid in Beijing has shut down a large counterfeit iPhone factory that had produced over 41, 000 handsets, reported to be worth $19 million. Read more…
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Chinese Police Shut Down a Huge Counterfeit iPhone Factory
While Tron-Club sounds more like a weekly meeting of Tron enthusiasts who enjoy dressing up in unitards and making whooshing sounds as they pretend to ride invisible Lightcycles, it’s actually a service that sends circuits to your home. Why? Because you should learn electronics, that’s why. As hardware becomes easier to build and understand, programmers are finding themselves at… Read More
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Tron-Club Sends Circuits To Your Home In Jolly Packages
The 1980s are back again! The guys who bought the Commodore name are releasing an Android smartphone for about $300. The price includes some bog standard specs but, most important, includes two emulators so you can play classic 1980s games right on your screen. The phone will appear in Europe first – including Italy and Poland – but if you remember programming guessing games in… Read More
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The Commodore PET Has Been Reincarnated As A Phone
Metals, which conduct electricity, and insulators, which don’t, are polar opposites. At least that’s what we’ve believed until now. But we have discovered that a well-known insulator can simultaneously act like a conductor in certain measurements . We don’t yet know the reason for this mysterious behaviour but it is likely due to new and exciting quantum effects. Read more…
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The Material That Both Conducts Electricity – and Doesn’t
Researchers at Clemson University have created a new sort of robotic design based on the long, curled tail of the seahorse. The seahorse is unique because it consists of “square prisms surrounded by bony plates that are connected by joints.” Other animal tails are cylindrical and therefore easily crushed. The researchers write: Researchers found that the square prototype was… Read More
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Scientists Turn To Seahorses For Nearly Unbreakable Limbs
In the wake of Apple announcing its subscription-only music service, Google made a free, ad-supported version of Google Play Music. Read more…
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Google Play Music Now Has a Free, Ad-Supported Version in the US
An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has a new plan to keep self-published authors honest: they’re only going to pay them when someone actually reads a page. Peter Wayner at the Atlantic explores how this is going to change the lives of the authors — and the readers. Fat, impressive coffee table books are out if no one reads them. Thin, concise authors will be bereft. Page turners are in. Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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Amazon Is Only Going To Pay Authors When Each Page Is Read
Apple announced iOS 9 on Monday, and while watching the keynote, I had just a little bit of déjà vu. Most of iOS 9’s new features seem to be squarely aimed at Apple’s biggest rival in mobile: Android. Specifically, they were about catching up to Android. Search improvements, proactive assistance, split screen, and transit directions? It’s been done, but the differences are the fun part, so we chased down the new iOS 9 screenshots and compared them to their Android counterparts. It’s not just about who copied whom; it’s also a chance to look at the different designs of the two operating systems. And hey, Apple isn’t the only one taking ideas from a competitor. Android M’s selectable app permissions are an exact copy of the iOS model. Siri and Search are chasing Google Now but hitting Google where it hurts The iOS 9 Search and Google Now screens. 8 more images in gallery iOS 9 adds a lot of “proactive assistant” and search features that were first seen on Android. The main search screen now looks a lot like Google Now, with cards showing various bits of information. Search differs from Google Now in that it shows suggested people and apps at the top, but the News and Nearby places are all Google Now. iOS search shows categories for Nearby places, while Google Now shows individual places with ratings and pictures. Read 19 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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Everybody copies everyone: iOS 9 features inspired by Android
It’s just a keyboard, and so it should be limited to keys. But with the new version of iOS 9 for iPad, announced at WWDC, the touch-sensitive QuickType keyboard now has the ability to transform into a trackpad whenever you set down two fingers on the keyboard portion of the screen. Simply move those fingers to the left and the cursor moves with them. This allows you to move the cursor… Read More
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Apple Just Turned The iPad Into A Real Computer With QuickType