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We've known for some time that Motorola's Moto 360 smartwatch will include Qi wireless charging, but Italian blog Mister Gadget has given us a first look at how exactly that'll work. A small dock will hold the Moto 360 in place, allowing it to charge on your bedside table or desk while keeping the display visible and level. There's also a neat animation that consists of a blue circle that slowly fills as the watch charges. It seems like a good alternative to finicky charging cables, but we'll have to reserve judgement until trying the dock for ourselves.

Also in Mister Gadget's post are a few other details about the upcoming smartwatch. According to the site, its battery lasts for over two days, it will include IP67 certification,...

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Sony is giving up on e-readers after facing stiff competition from rivals like Amazon’s Kindle. "We do not have plans to develop a successor Reader model at this time," says a Sony spokesperson in a statement to BBC News. The PRS-T3 is the last Sony e-reader and it will be sold across Europe until stocks sell out. The move comes just months after Sony shuttered its ebook distribution store in the US and Canada, making it less surprising that the company is killing off the associated hardware.

Sony will still keep selling its e-reader hardware in Japan alongside ebooks from its online store. That might not mean much for its prospects in Sony’s home turf of Japan though. While Sony and Kobo have attempted to beat Amazon’s e-readers, the...

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 Hey, you! Want to explore the surface of Mars? No problem! All we need is a few billion dollars, a couple hundred of the world’s brightest minds, and for someone to get around to solving that pesky “massive levels of radiation” problem. On second thought, that might take a while. Until then, Google Maps will have to do. Read More

Timex's latest entry in the Ironman line of GPS watches, the Ironman One GPS+, comes with a lot of features found in other smartwatches designed for athletes to track their activity, with one major addition — the watch comes with standalone 3G connectivity that allows you to track and upload your runs, assign contacts to monitor your run and broadcast your location — all without having to connect to a smartphone.

The watch also has a built-in email-based messaging app that allows your contacts to get in touch with you by sending messages to a special email address. The Ironman One GPS+ connects to AT&T's cell network, and comes with one year of free 3G connectivity. The technology itself that allows the watch to connect to cellular networks without the need to pair with a smartphone comes from Qualcomm.

Other features of the watch include a 1.5-inch Mirasol display that is similar to the one showcased on Qualcomm Toq, 4 GB storage for music, which can be transmitted to a Bluetooth headset, 8 hour battery life with GPS enabled (three days without) and water resistance for up to 150 feet.

Timex hasn't mentioned when the Ironman One GPS+ will be available, but if you're interested, you can pre-order the watch right now for $399. Timex isn't the only watchmaker looking to offer ruggedised watches with smart features, as Casio has announced that its latest offering in the G-Shock series will feature SoundHound integration.

Are you excited by what Timex's smartwatch has to offer?

Source: Timex

Absolutely breathtaking great white shark footage captured by Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researchers using their SharkCam underwater drone near Mexico's Guadalupe Island.

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Considering how many third-party keyboard apps there are on Android, it’s surprising how few manage to stand out from the crowd. By combing things like beautiful design, unique gestures and impressively accurate auto-correction, Fleksy is one keyboard that manages to do just that.

Starting out and using Fleksy

Coming in some 37 different languages and with access to over 700 emoji icons, downloading and setting up Fleksy is simple enough for anyone to get started with the app. When opening Fleksy for the first time, you will be taken through a tutorial that shows you how to use the keyboard. You may feel a little intimidated by the gestures at first, but it won’t take long before you’re sliding around your keyboard like a pro.

Gestures are perhaps one of the more interesting aspects to Fleksy. Everything from scrolling through auto-corrected words, to inserting a space, using a period, deleting words and hiding the space bar can all be done with a few simple swipes.

By doing a double Swipe, and swiping down with two fingers, you can hide the space bar and you’re left with nothing but three rows of letter keys. This is our favorite way to use Fleksy; it forces you into a sort of flow with the keyboard. Type a word, swipe forward to space. Type a word, swipe forward to space. Swipe up to change the word, swipe down to change it back. Swipe forward again for a period. Hold for numbers and punctuation. Swipe back to delete. It’s something you have to use and experience for yourself to understand just how intuitive and fun it really is.

If you don’t want to use gestures, that’s fine too. But you’ll really be missing out.

As for how good Felksy’s auto-correct algorithms are, they are some of the very best we have ever used. Period. It’s always impressive just how well Fleksy is able to decipher what our clumsy fingers are trying to hammer out. Part of it is simply good engineering from the development team at Fleksy, and part of it is thanks to being able to help Fleksy learn your typing habits from Gmail, Facebook and Twitter. You can sync what Fleksy learns between devices too, so you won’t have to keep starting over.

We would recommend Fleksy on just the stock option presented to you on installing the app for the first time alone, but of course there is a lot more.

Customizing Fleksy

One area where Fleksy really shines is how aesthetically pleasing it is. There are two sets of themes that can be unlocked in different ways. The first set come with the paid app, which also allows you to purchase one premium theme from the second set for free (we used our free premium theme on a gorgeous blue gradient). The second set can all be purchased for $0.99 if you aren’t happy with the 8 you already get.

To unlock the first set of themes in the free trail for Fleksy, you have to earn achievements — a genius way to get you to learn how to use Fleksy and have fun doing it.

If you don’t want to see your keyboard at all, that’s OK too. Really. There’s an option to make your keyboard invisible so you can see your entire screen. If you’re already good with a software keyboard and once you get good with gestures, the invisible keyboard is surprisingly easy to use. If nothing else, you have to try it for fun.

Other ways you can customize Felksy include making the keyboard appear cap sensitive, changing how big the keyboard appears and enabling, disabling or changing the intensity of typing sounds and key press vibrations.

Our favorite Fleksy setup is default sound and vibrations, smaller keyboard, Deep Blue theme, no space bar and case sensitive layout. We’re sure you’ll find something that suits you best too.

Wrap up

It should be obvious at this point how much we like Fleksy. To reiterate from the beginning of this review, by combing beautiful design, unique gestures and impressively accurate auto-correction, Fleksy has managed to stand out from the crowd.

We highly recommend downloading Fleksy without reservation.

 

 

The time has come to turn out your pockets and support developers and charity at the same time. In return you get some great Android games on the cheap. The Humble Mobile Bundle 6 is now available with six games split into the customary two tiers.

If you've never purchased a Humble Bundle before, here's the skinny. You get to pay whatever you want and that gets you access to the first tier of games—in this case Elliss Infinity, Duet Premium, and Combo Crew Special Edition.

Humble Mobile Bundle 6 Is Now Live With Threes!, Combo Crew, Joe Dever's Lone Wolf, And More was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Posted by Pedro Chaparro Monferrer, Software Engineer

Cross-posted on the Official Google Blog

Whether your email address is firstname.lastname@ or something more expressive like corgicrazy@, an email address says something about who you are. But from the start, email addresses have always required you to use non-accented Latin characters when signing up. Less than half of the world’s population has a mother tongue that uses the Latin alphabet. And even fewer people use only the letters A-Z. So if your name (or that of your favorite pet) contains accented characters (like “José Ramón”) or is written in another script like Chinese or Devanagari, your email address options are limited.

But all that could change. In 2012, an organization called the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) created a new email standard that supports addresses with non-Latin and accented Latin characters (e.g. 武＠メール.グーグル). In order for this standard to become a reality, every email provider and every website that asks you for your email address must adopt it. That’s obviously a tough hill to climb. The technology is there, but someone has to take the first step.
Today we're ready to be that someone. Starting now, Gmail (and shortly, Calendar) will recognize addresses that contain accented or non-Latin characters. This means Gmail users can send emails to, and receive emails from, people who have these characters in their email addresses. Of course, this is just a first step and there’s still a ways to go. In the future, we want to make it possible for you to use them to create Gmail accounts.

Last month, we announced the addition of 13 new languages in Gmail. Language should never be a barrier when it comes to connecting with others and with this step forward, truly global email is now even closer to becoming a reality.

With his latest album, Lazaretto, Jack White wanted to prove there was still life in vinyl records. And it turns out he was right: the album is the best-selling vinyl in two decades. According to Billboard, the album has sold 60,000 units to date on vinyl, the biggest single-year vinyl sales since Pearl Jam released Vitalogy in 1994. The number also represents a quarter of all Lazaretto sales, with the album selling a total of 238,000 units across all platforms.

Of course, Lazaretto is far from a standard vinyl release, as White and Third Man Records have produced an album with an assortment of unique features for music nerds. Dubbed an Ultra LP, the album features tracks hidden under the center label, a locked outer grove so that one...

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Every week we cover new Android apps with Fresh Meat on Wednesday, followed by Android Gaming on Thursday and Top 10 App Updates on Friday. When Monday rolls around, we look back to see which apps were the most appealing to our audience. Read on for the 5 most popular Android apps from last week. These apps are ones that are most likely new and haven’t appeared in the Top 5 list more than 3 times.

1. SwiftKey Keyboard

App info: SwiftKey Keyboard is a free, award-winning keyboard app for Android that delivers the best next-word prediction, smarter autocorrect, support for over 800 emoji, emoji prediction and much more!

 

2. Google Now Launcher*

App info: Upgrade the launcher on your device to make Google Now one swipe away. From your primary home screen, swipe right to access Google Now cards that give you just the right information, at just the right time.

 

3. DrawTime

App info: DrawTime is a unique application that lets you create your own, fully customized clock widget using digits drawn by you!

 

4. Ahagame

App info: This is a game resembling a box of sweets. You will get different flavours and user experience in each game. You can also try for free boosters by using a spinner or solving a riddle. The games can involve shooting with an object, solving a question or getting through a maze.

 

5. Better Open With

App info: Created to mimic Android’s default “Complete action using” dialog, Better Open With shows you a visually similar popup screen when you choose to open a link, an image, a PDF or any other filetype – listing all possible app handlers as you normally see.

 

Note:  To ensure that all apps receive a fair chance to make the list, we will retire any app that has made the list for three consecutive weeks and will place it in our Android and Me App Hall of Fame. We will post this Hall of Fame list in a dedicated series. Any app with * next to the title indicates it will now be added to our Hall of Fame list and will no longer be listed in this article.

Welcome to the roundup of the best new Android applications, games, and live wallpapers that went live in the Play Store or were spotted by us in the previous 2 weeks or so.

Featured App

Bubble Birds Quest

Today's roundup is brought to you by Bubble Birds Quest From Banda Games.

35 Best New Android Games From The Last 2 Weeks (7/22/14 - 8/4/14) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

 With the digitization of books, music and movies, there is no doubt that content discovery has changed. The days of browsing your friends’ bookshelves or leafing through CDs has passed. Yet, the iTunes store and other hosts of digital content have done little to support bringing social discovery into the digital age. This is exactly the experience that Bitcovery founder Raj Lalwani and… Read More

If you've purchased an app or game on the Play Store recently and gone to see if you could return it, you may have noticed something a bit odd: you could still do so outside of the alleged 15 minute return window. In fact, that now seems to be the case for many paid apps and games, despite no published changes in the store's refund policies.

To test this seemingly longer window, three members of the AP team all bought apps on the Play Store.

The Play Store's Refund Window Now Seems To Be Around 2 Hours For Many Paid Apps And Games, Not 15 Minutes was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

July saw the release of what's probably the biggest (or at the very least, the most high-profile) game of the year: Modern Combat 5. You can check out Ryan's review here, but there are a lot of other entries to Android's game catalog that you should consider playing. Our top seven picks from this month are below, in no particular order, with honorable mentions thrown in as well. Students, load up on them so you'll have something to play in class on the bus. 

Leo's Fortune

Stop reading this roundup and go read Ryan Whitwam's review of Leo's Fortune.

[Game Roundup] Our Top Seven Picks For The Best New Games Of July 2014 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

For a lot of our readers, July is really freakin' hot. It was also a surprisingly hot month for new app releases, especially if you're a fan of advanced tools and alternates to built-in apps. Below are our seven favorite apps from July, in no particular order, with a list of honorable mentions as well. It won't make you any cooler (figuratively or literally), but your phone will appreciate the attention.

[App Roundup] Our Top Seven Picks For The Best New Apps Of July 2014 was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

Without question, cocktails are the most fun and playful type of drinks on the menu, with their vibrant colors, toy-like swizzle sticks, plastic straws, paper toothpick umbrellas, swords of stacked fruit, and the exotic-shaped glasses that contain the concoctions. And yet – the cruel irony of it all – cocktails are off limits to children! Read the rest

The HTC One M8 running Windows Phone is real, and you need only follow a Verizon URL to prove it. HTC hasn't yet announced the rumored device, but a photo sitting right on Verizon's servers seems to confirm that the phone is indeed coming — and likely soon. WP Central's original report says the "One (M8) for Windows" will be available from Verizon on August 21st. Hardware-wise, it's probably the same M8 that's been running Android for a few months now, but this one's clearly aimed at fans of Microsoft's OS.

When reached by The Verge, HTC declined to comment on the photo's authenticity. The company is hosting a press event on August 19th, and it's likely we'll hear confirmation of the new, aluminum-clad Windows Phone on that date. The...

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Last week saw the leak online of the brand new Expendables movie.

Scheduled for an August 15 U.S. release, Expendables 3 leaked in near DVD quality a full two weeks ahead. The timing and quality combined to make the leak one of the most prominent in recent years.

The movie studios behind the film have been rather quiet, but behind the scenes they have been trying hard to limit the damage. Lionsgate in particular sent takedown requests to numerous file-sharing sites. While most sites complied by taking down infringing links or copies, some failed to respond.

In response to this apparent lack of cooperation, Lionsgate has now sued the operators of six file-sharing sites – Limetorrents.com, Billionuploads.com, Hulkfile.eu, Played.to, Swankshare.com and Dotsemper.com. The complaint (copy below) filed at a federal court in California accuses the sites’ owners of direct, contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.

Limetorrents is the only torrent site in the lawsuit, and Lionsgate notes that the Expendables leak was still prominently available on the site when the complaint was drafted.

“To date, the operator(s) of the site have not responded to Lions Gate’s demands. Rather, as of the date of this filing links to the torrents allow users to access ‘swarms’ where the Stolen Film is being shared remain on the site, including in the fifth-ranked position for ‘Movie torrents’ on the site’s home page,” the lawyers write.

In the complaint, first reported by THR, the movie studio demands a wide range of measures. Lionsgate asks the court for a temporary restraining order, a preliminary injunction and a permanent injunction to stop the sites from further distributing the film.

This includes a request to suspend the sites’ domain names, or transfer them to Lionsgate. In addition, the movie studio also wants all financial institutions who do business with the sites to freeze their assets. If granted, Lionsgate could severely damage the sites in question even if the operators remain silent.

Finally, the movie company demands actual or statutory damages for the financial loss it has suffered. Since there is only one film at stake, the statutory damages are limited to $150,000 per site.

At this point it is unknown whether Lionsgate is also investigating the source of the leak, which isn’t related to any of the sites listed in the complaint. A third option would be to go after individual filesharers, which Nu Image did when they sued 23,322 alleged pirates who shared the first Expendables movies.

Thus far well over two million copies of The Expendables 3 have been shared via BitTorrent, so there are plenty of targets for sure.

Update August 2: It appears that the feds are also investigating the source of the leak, we’ll cover this in a seperate article if more information comes in.

The complaint

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Beats Electronics is now part of Apple's family. Both companies today published statements on their respective websites essentially confirming that the $3 billion acquisition announced in May is already complete. "Music has always held a special place in our hearts, and we’re thrilled to join forces with a group of people who love it as much as we do," Apple said. "Beats cofounders Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre have created beautiful products that have helped millions of people deepen their connection to music." CEO Tim Cook took to Twitter with his own messaging welcoming Dre, Iovine, Luke Wood, Ian Rogers, and other Beats employees to Apple.

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Fashion designer Michael Bastian is partnering with HP and retailer Gilt to sell a smartwatch this fall. Described by Gilt as a "Michael Bastian smartwatch engineered by Hewlett-Packard," the timepiece couples a circular face with a fairly aggressive sporty design. Although its shape bears a small resemblance to the Moto 360 smartwatch, its 44mm face is far more inline with traditional watches than Motorola's. It'll launch with a selection of straps in brown leather, black rubber, and green nylon. The watch will be able to receive notifications for things like emails, texts, and sports updates. It'll also offer music controls and display weather forecasts.

Given how basic its function set is, it's unlikely that Gilt will be positioning...

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