If you ordered/order and activate your HTC one between 6/14/13 and 7/15/13, you can recieve a $25 Google Play gift card by registering at: HTC Google Play

HTC will then send you a confirmation code that you can redeem through the Play Store!

Props to XDA for the find.

If Vine still leaves you pining for the choppiness of GIFs, Microsoft's got you covered -- on Windows Phone 8, at least. Redmond's Blink app, which helps smartphone photographers capture bursts of images, has hit version 2.0 and scored the ability to create short animated clips, aptly dubbed Blinks. In addition to the bite-sized videos, the latest update bakes in camera settings in capture mode, sharing to social networks and web galleries for shared creations. Microsoft Research also released Blink Cliplets for Windows 8 and RT, which allows users to layer static and dynamic elements atop footage. Hit the break to check out the new release of Blink in action, or jab the first source link for the download.

It's amazing the way a nice piece of tech can radically change the world over just a few years. Just decades ago, everything changed when we started putting computers in homes, and it changed again when we started putting them in pockets. But regardless of how revolutionary these innovations are, they're gone incredibly fast. It's a poignant observation, and who could have put it better than Steve Jobs.

In this recently released clip—put out to promote the Silicon Valley Historical Association's hour-long documentary based around the interview—Jobs ruminates on his legacy. Not how it will last though, but how it can't. Appreciate these leaps and bounds as they happen; your grandkids are going to be too busy with their holodecks to sit still for your rants about the iPad.

Steve Jobs Explains How Every Tech Innovation Will Be Lost to History

Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 Benchmarks Smoke Competition | TechnoBuffalo





Qualcomm unveiled its quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor earlier this year and the first benchmarks are starting to crop up.

Engadget recently had a chance to give the processor a whirl and published its own benchmarks using Qualcomm’s mobile development platform (MDP) devices. The new processor came away the clear winner. In Quadrant 2.0, the processor notched up a score of 22,022 on a smartphone and a score of 20,762 on a tablet. To put that into comparison, in our own tests we found that the Optimus G Pro, HTC One and Galaxy S4, all of which use a Snapdragon 600 chip, scored 11,858, 11,850 and 12,405, respectively.

The new processor is advertised to offer up to a 75 percent performance boost over the Snapdragon 600-series and each core is now clocked at up to 2.3 GHz. The Snapdragon 800 also features a new Adreno 330 GPU and, while manufacturers may not offer them, support for displays with resolutions up to 2048 x 1536-pixels. It’s unclear exactly what devices will sport the Snapdragon 800, though the Samsung Galaxy Note III is rumored to use the chip.

The Snapdragon 800 series will likely power some of the top tier smartphones and tablets released in the second half of 2013, and it looks like we have a lot to look forward to.

HTC's just pulled back the proverbial curtains on the Butterfly s at its Taiwan launch event. It'll arrive boasting a familiar-sounding 5-inch 1080p display, front-facing BoomSound stereo speakers and Sense 5 as expected.

When it comes to internals, the Butterfly s runs Android Jelly Bean on a quad-core 1.9GHz Snapdragon 600 (faster than the HTC One), an impressive 3,200mAh battery, quad-band HSPA/WCDMA radio, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of built-in storage, expandable once again through microSD.

As for imaging, alongside that primary UltraPixel camera and Zoe software features, there's a 2.1-megapixel wide-angle shooter on the front.

It's currently scheduled for a release in July in Taiwan, accompanied by a NT $22,900 (roughly $766) price tag, but no word when (or even if) it'll reach foreign shores.

With Facebook jumping on the hashtag bandwagon, Mark Zuckerberg and his team may be getting ready to launch new products that could shake up our social media regimen.

While previous reports have stated that the social media giant will launch an RSS service similar to Google Reader (while will sadly R.I.P. July 1), a source tells TechCrunch that a video-sharing app similar to Vine will be implemented into its Instagram property.

Both could equal bold moves on the Zuck's behalf as it continues its digital battle against the character-driven Twitter. The company recently announced its use of clickable hashtags to create a more community-based feel on the site.

FB's hashtag product manager Greg Lindley, wrote, "We'll continue to roll out more features in the coming weeks and months, including trending hashtags and deeper insights, that help people discover more of the world's conversations."

The news is set to officially drop at its mysterious press event June 20.

Source

In just over a week, Microsoft will be convening its Build 2013 developer conference.

Company execs have said to expect information of interest to developers across most every major product family: Windows, Windows Azure, Office 365, Windows Phone, Xbox and Visual Studio during the conference. But, with the launch of Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2 public previews on day one, June 26, this year's Build will focus primarily around the next version of Windows, and to a somewhat lesser extent, Windows Azure, my sources have indicated.

Microsoft officials still aren't sharing information about who will keynote Build on Days 1 and 2, what kind of content will be featured in sessions, or how many attendees are expected for the three-day confab. (This year, Build will be in San Francisco, the first time Microsoft has held a major developer conference there since 1997.)

But company officials were willing to set the stage for Build via a phone conversation late last week.

Microsoft is reaching out to two main audiences this year at Build, said Steve Guggenheimer, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Developer and Platform Evangelism Group: The existing Win32, line-of-business/commercial developer community and the startup community. "We need a good conversation with that community," said Guggenheimer about the existing .Net developer base, many of whom have felt disenfranchised by Microsoft's recent developer push toward HTML/JavaScript.

"We haven't done a good job telling the .Net developers we haven't forgotten them," Guggenheimer acknowledged. "We need to tell them that."

Guggenheimer, unsurprisingly, wouldn't talk specifics about what new products and technologies Microsoft plans to announce at the show. When I asked whether Microsoft would be providing attendees with code or at least information about some kind of Xbox One and/or Windows Phone Blue software development kits (SDKs), Guggenheimer declined to comment. He did say Microsoft's message will be a furthering of what officials started detailing last year regarding the benefits of an increased amount of shared/common code across the guts of its key products.

"We will not be making a sharp turn. We will show how strong the bridges are" between Microsoft's various product families, Guggenheimer said. "We want to show people what's possible, going cross-platform."
Reading the Build tea leaves

That's all Microsoft officials are saying right now about Build 2013. But there are a few additional hints and tips worth passing on.

We do know that a first public preview of Visual Studio Blue, a.k.a. Visual Studio 2013, should be available in conjunction with Build. One would assume the next VS release would have more features to simplify and improve the development of Windows Store/Metro-Style apps, since that's what Microsoft wants and needs developers to build.

I'm curious whether the Bing AppEx team — the group that built some of the nicer apps for Windows 8, including Weather, Travel, Sports and new cooking/recipe and fitness apps — will field an SDK, too. According to a recent Microsoft job description, the AppEx team is building a framework for the development of Windows Phone apps.

On the Windows 8.1 front, there seems to be little left to announce about the OS update itself, given all the leaked builds over the past few months, coupled with Microsoft's own disclosures about many of the coming features. Over the weekend, the Windows team turned on the new Windows Store experience, so those with existing leaked builds can see the new look and feel of the Store plus some of the updated Microsoft apps that are part of 8.1.

The Windows Phone team, which is dependent on the Windows core, is still working on delivering smaller, incremental updates to the Windows Phone 8 operating system. A "GDR3" build is expected to arrive this fall around the time that Windows 8.1 is made available. Windows Phone Blue is expected about six months after Windows 8.1 is released to manufacturing, making disclosures (at least public ones) about the SDK for that release largely unlikely at the Build show.

Microsoft is known to be working to deliver even more common code across its phone, PC/tablet and entertainment console product lines. But that doesn't mean developers should expect a "write once, run on any version of Windows" experience to arrive in full in 2013. Unifying the app stores across these product lines also doesn't appear to be a 2013 thing, either, from what I'm hearing.

On the Xbox One front, Microsoft officials have said the company's new console operating system is actually three OSes in one. The "gaming" OS (residing in the "exclusive partition") is going to be where Microsoft-sanctioned third-party games will live. But Microsoft is expected to continue to gate which games will integrate with Xbox Live via a certification process, which means a "public" SDK for Xbox One doesn't seem like a 2013 deliverable. If Microsoft creates an app store for indepedent developers for Xbox One, that store won't be open for business in 2013, from what I've heard.

I'd think third-party SDKs, like MonoGame, Xamarin and PhoneGap, could get some play at Build, given Microsoft's planned cross-platform messaging. Windows Azure Web Sites, the hosting framework for Web applications and sites created using various languages and stacks (including a number of open-source, non-Microsoft-developed ones), may come out of preview soon as well and be a hot topic at the show.

Source

Apple is the latest technology company to reveal the scale of US government requests for data on its customers — and perhaps more importantly, also the information it says it's unable to share.

US government surveillance of mobile phone communications and social media has been in the spotlight since allegations about the National Security Agency's PRISM system were first published. It was originally claimed by The Washington Post that PRISM saw the NSA "tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading US internet companies", including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Although those claims have been questioned, and the companies named have denied any involvement, there has been considerable fallout and some have been asking for permission to reveal the actual level of requests they receive that are related to national security for access to customer data.

Source

Saudi Arabia reportedly is planning to block access to WhatsApp within weeks, if the U.S.-based messaging provider fails to comply with requirements set by the country's telecom regulator.

According to a Reuters report Sunday, citing local newspaper Arab News, Abdullah Al-Darrab, governor of the Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC), said the government had been communicating with companies providing WhatsApp and other similar communication services to urge them to cooperate and comply with Saudi telecom providers, enabling the local telcos to censor the services. However, "nothing has come of this communication yet", the governor said.

Al-Darrab said Viber was blocked last week as it was difficult for the state to monitor and deprive telecom companies of revenue generated from international calls and texts, adding that WhatsApp and Skype may be next on the list.

Asked when WhatsApp services will be blocked, the CITC chief said it was highly likely to commence before the holy month of Ramadan, expected to begin July 9, 2013.

The Saudi Arabia regulator in March said it was working with over-the-top (OTT) service providers to resolve the issue. Back in 2010, the Middle Eastern country also threatened to ban BlackBerry Messenger services unless the Canadian company allowed the regulator greater control to monitor messages.

Saudi Arabia may block WhatsApp from July 9 | ZDNet