Motorola Moto X review: Demolishing the competition despite the odds

Google's Motorola has unveiled Moto X the first smartphone that's been developed with close collaboration with the Internet giant. While it doesn't really boast of high-end specifications, the much-hyped smartphone offers a few of differentiating features. Here's a look at 5 of the major ones.

1. Touch-less control
First seen in Google Glass and then in voice search on Chrome, the feature lets users control the phone with simple voice commands prefixed with "Okay, Google Now." This also lets users access Google Now, Google's voice-based assistant that fetches information and performs tasks like fixing appointments, setting up alarms, and doing currency conversions. The interesting bit is that you don't need to touch the phone or take it out of your pocket. If enabled, it always actively listens to the user and follows commands.



2. Active Display
Motorola has put an AMOLED screen on the Moto X, and these displays can be used to selectively display information without affecting the device's battery life. First seen in some Nokia phones, the display offers notifications for messages, calls and other events and the current time, without having to unlock the phone.

 
3. Quick Capture
The Moto X phone features a shake gesture that directly opens the phone's camera app. You need to shake the phone twice to turn on the camera to capture something spontaneously. You can then simply touch the screen to take a photo, similar to the Windows Phone camera app. One can also touch and hold to take multiple pictures quickly.

4. Authentication through wireless devices
You can also set the phone to authenticate when a trusted Bluetooth device is connected or if the phone is near a paired device such as a computer or a Bluetooth headset. This eliminates the need to unlock the phone every time. For example, if your Bluetooth-enabled laptop or speaker is around, your phone will know it's in a 'trusted' environment, and eliminate the need to manually unlock the phone.

5. Customisability
You can customise the body of the phone and choose from 18 back covers, different colour accents for the ring around the camera lens, accents around the volume and on-off buttons and get a personal message etched at the back of the phone. However, the customisation feature is limited to US carrier AT&T.

One note for our readers outside US, Canada and Latin America - if you are waiting to get your hands on the Moto X, you'll be disappointed as Motorola has decided to sell the phone in only the aforementioned regions.

Key Features of Moto X (16 GB) (Black)

• 10 MP Quick Capture Gesture Primary Camera
• 1.7 GHz Dual Core Krait CPU
• Water-repellent Coating
• 2 Years 50 GB Free Storage Google Drive
• Moto X Respond to Voice
• Miracast Wireless Display
• NFC Support
• Touchless Control: OK Google Now
• 16 GB Internal Memory
• Android v4.4 (KitKat) OS
• 4.7-inch AMOLED Touchscreen with Active Display

6TB helium-filled hard drives take flight, bump capacity 50%

It took Western Digital's HGST subsidiary more than a decade to develop a way to reliably seal helium gas inside of a hard drive. It was worth the wait.

HGST Monday announced that it's now shipping a helium-filled, 3.5-in hard disk drive with 50% more capacity than the current industry leading 4TB drives. The new drive uses 23% less power and is 38% lighter than the 4TB drives.

Without changing the height, the new 6TB Ultrastar He6 enterprise-class hard drive crams seven disk platters into what was a five disk-platter, 4TB Ultrastar drive.

"I'd say helium is one of the major breakthroughs in the hard drive industry because you can only increase the platter areal density so much with today's technology," said Fang Zhang, an analyst at market researcher IHS.

While the Ultrastar He6's 50% boost in capacity is impressive, what's most notable is the power reduction, Zhang said, because the high-capacity drives will be used in large data centers and cloud infrastructures.

At one-seventh the density of air, helium produces less drag on the moving components of a drive - the spinning disk platters and actuator arms -- which translates into less friction and lower operating temperatures.

The helium-drives run at four to five degrees cooler than today's 7200rpm drives, HGST stated.

Sealing air out of the drive also keeps humidity and other contaminates from getting in.

Netflix, which uses HGST high-capacity hard drives in its data centers, said the increase in capacity and lower power-usage in the Ultrastar He6 hard drives will go a long ways toward optimizing their streaming video server infrastructure.

Netflix serves up billions of hours of streaming video per quarter to over 40 million subscribers requires a constant effort to optimize server infrastructure, according to David Fullagar, director of Content Delivery Architecture at Netflix.

"As part of our efforts to optimize the delivery ecosystem for Netflix and our Internet Service Provider partners, we strive to build better and better streaming appliances. The high storage density and lower power usage of the Ultrastar He6 hard drives allow us to continue with that goal, and create a great customer experience," Fullagar said.

HGST said it's been working with key computer manufacturers, cloud and research groups, including HP, Huawei Unified Storage, Green Revolution Cooling, Code42, CERN as well as some of the world's largest social media and search companies, to qualify the drive.

"Data is going to the moon. As we deploy solutions that are tens and hundreds of petabytes, anything you can do to increase density is a boon," said Jimmy Daley, director of Smart Storage at Hewlett-Packard. "We are seeing about 2-watt lower power on random workloads compared to today's 4TB. That's about 20% [power reduction]."

Daley is currently testing more than a dozen of HGST's He6 6TB drives in HP's SL4500 servers, and expects hundreds of the drives to be in the servers by the end of the month.

The SL4500 servers hold up to 60 drives each. Previously, the SL4500 server, using 4TB drives, could hold a quarter of a petabyte, or 250TB of data; the box could potentially hold one-third of a petabyte, or about 333TB of data with the 6TB drives.

"To me, it is a clear indication of how important density is," Daley said.
"Density translates into reduction of footprint."

The helium drive was first announced last year under the HGST's HelioSeal moniker as a path for higher capacity storage for decades to come.

The new Ultrastar He6 drive offers the best total cost of ownership for high-capacity environments, such as cloud storage, massive scale-out environments, disk-to-disk backup, and replicated or RAID environments, HGST said.

But helium-filled drives can only boost density so much, Zhang said.

 After the initial boost in capacity for today's perpendicular magnetic recording drive technology, it will then take newer technologies, such as HAMR (heat-assisted magnetic recording), BPM (bit patterned recoding), and SMR or Shingled Magnetic Recording, to further increase the areal density of the drive platters themselves.

Today's hard drive platters max out at 625Gbit per square inch, or the equivalent to more than 1TB of capacity per platter. Seagate sees SMR, which overlaps bits on a platter like a shingled roof, as having the potential to knock hard drive capacity out of the park with 1Tbit per square inch areal density.

Seagate has plans to release 5TB hard drives based on SMR early next year and a 10TB hard drive by 2016 and 20TB by 2020.

Using HAMR technology, HGST expects to take drive platter areal density to 5 terabits (Tbits) per square inch.

Even with the areal density developments, helium will continue to be a key component in boosting capacity and reducing power requirements. The industry is expected to continue using the lighter gas in emerging drive technology, Zhang said.

Apple Introduces The iPad Air

Three years ago, Apple unveiled the original iPad, boxy and thick and heavy by comparison. Four iPads later, we’re here, welcoming the fifth generation iPad into the world.
And boy is it a beauty!
You’ve been waiting long enough, through a summer of rumors, so let’s just get right down to business on the new Apple tablet.

New Design

For the first time since the iPad 2, we’re seeing a brand new design for the iPad (fifth generation).
The new iPad sports the same 9.7-inch display as all of its predecessors, but with an updated shape following the design language of the iPad mini. It weighs just one pound, making it the lightest full size tablet in the world. It’s .4 lbs lighter than previous generations. Also, the iPad Air only 7.5mm thick, which is 25 percent thinner than previous iPads.

The bezel is 43 percent thinner on the sides and the edges of the device are tapered the same way the iPad mini drastically curves along the sides, as opposed to the gradual slope of older iPads.

Processor

Apple has updated the new iPad’s processor to the A7, the same you’ll find in the iPhone 5s. It’s 8x faster than the first generation and graphics are 72 times faster than then the first generation iPad. Of course, it would be interesting to hear stats on fourth generation iPad comparison, but you can’t always get what you want from an Apple announcement.
The new processor is also accompanied by that M7 motion co-processor that was used in the iPhone 5s, which focuses on computing information generated from the sensors to make the device smarter all around.
The new A7 processor runs on a 64-bit architecture, like all the new Apple products, with more than 1 billion transistors. Apple also tossed in MIMO technology to help with reliable Wifi, and all that with 10 hours of battery life, according to Apple.

Camera

The camera technology on current iPad models is incredibly outdated, to the point where it’s laughable to see someone hold up their iPad like a camera.
That said, Apple has decided to pay a little more attention to the iPad camera this time around, with an updated 5-megapixel iSight camera, with 1080p FaceTime camera in the front and dual-mics for video chat.

Pricing and Availability

The iPad (fifth generation) will be available in black, white, silver, and space gray (no gold, for some reason), and will replace the current generation (fourth) iPad at a $499 starting price. Wifi + Cellular starts at $629.
Meanwhile, the iPad 2 will remain in the line up for $399.
New iPads will be available on November 1, just in time for the holidays

Square Cash Goes Head To Head With Venmo And Google Wallet To Allow Anyone To Send Money Via Email

Square today is formally launching Square Cash, a product that allows anyone to send money to a contact via email. Square initially soft-launched the product to a limited number of users earlier this year but is opening the service more broadly to users with a few tweaks to the initial payments system.

As Square’s director of products Brian Grassadonia explains, this launch aligns with the company’s goal of reducing friction around payments and making commerce simpler. Whereas Square’s core products, including its iPad register and swiper, make payments easy for merchants, this makes sending cash to anyone as simple as sending an email.

Here’s how it works. The sender simply emails cash@square.com and CC’s the person they want to send the money to with the amount of money either in the subject or body of the email. If the sender has not already added his or her debit card, then Square will instruct the sender to register a debit card on a web page with just the card number, billing ZIP code and the expiration date. The recipient will immediately get another email from Square telling them that they have received money from the sender with a link to add the recipient’s debit card, billing ZIP and expiration date.

Once they type in their debit card information, this begins the transfer, which takes one to two business days. We’re told that the recipient has up to 14 days to enter the debit card and receive the money, and the recipient will get reminders every other day via email.

Square is also releasing native apps for Android and iOS that incorporate email, as well. When you open the Square Cash app on your phone, you’ll be prompted with a number pad, in which you type in the amount of money you want to send. Once you do this, the app will bring up an email from the dedicated email client on the phone. The email will be pre-filled with the amount the sender entered, and they can type anything in the body of the email, as well as input the email of the person they want to send money to. The user experience from then onwards is similar to how you receive/send payments via a traditional email client on the web. The app, Grassadonia adds, are for users who want to keep Square Cash at top of mind.

"We want this to be an extension of your offline world, so that no matter where you are, you can send money to anyone," Grassadonia says.

As for fees, Square says there aren’t any associated with Square Cash. This actually is a change from the initial version of the service, which charged senders $0.50 per transaction.

There are, of course, a number of competitors in the space. First, Venmo offers a similar peer-to-peer payments system that allows you to pay your contacts and Facebook friends from within apps. Google is also rolling out Gmail integration with Google Wallet that would essentially allow users to perform the same functions as Square Cash.

But Grassadonia says that Square Cash differs from some of the other offerings out there because you don’t have to be an account holder, and the service only requires you to enter your debit card number. In addition, Square Cash is email-client-agnostic so you can send from any email client. As for whether Square will add the ability for integration with Facebook, we’re told that there are no plans for social integrations as the company wants to keep Square Cash lightweight.

It’s not surprising that Square is betting on P2P payments with Square Cash. There are a considerable amount of opportunities to incorporate P2P payments into apps and scale across a number of markets. We heard that Venmo, which was just acquired by PayPal via the payments giant purchase of the Braintree for $800 million, was particularly attractive for eBay and PayPal. And PayPal CEO David Marcus seems to be investing in Venmo to build out the service to a global platform.

Skype Will Finally Start Syncing Chat Messages Across Devices

If you use Skype on your phone and desktop, you know how annoying its inability to effectively keep your chat message status in sync between different machines can be. After you start Skype on your phone, for example, it downloads and alerts you of all of the sometimes hundreds of messages you’ve received since you last shut it down, even though you’ve long seen them on your desktop. Sometimes, this also means the app will be unresponsive for quite a while (or just crash).

Thankfully, it looks like those days will soon be over, as the Skype team today announced that it plans to roll out chat message status syncing across devices over the next few months.

“We are working to synchronize chat message status across all of your devices so you will know the current status of all of your chats on every device you use to interact with Skype.”

This news was buried deep in a summary of Skype’s most recent (and previously announced) architecture changes and releases.

As the Skype team notes, people now use Skype across multiple devices, so it has decided to finally make syncing a priority. It’s unclear when exactly this capability will start rolling out beyond Microsoft’s vague statement that it’s coming “over the next few months,” however.

Microsoft has recently poured a significant amount of resources into the Skype platform. Not only has it rolled out a new backend architecture that de-emphasizes the peer-to-peer nature of Skype in favor of more centralized services, but it’s also added a number of new features based on these changes.

For example, the company added web-based Skype support to Outlook.com and launched improved push notifications for Windows Phone 8 (even when the app isn’t running) and similar features that its more centralized architecture now enable. It’s also working on connecting the more consumer-focused Skype with its Lync communications suite for businesses.

IBM has reported its third quarter revenues were $23.72 billion compared to $24.74 billion this time last year.

IBM has reported its third-quarter revenues were $23.72 billion compared to $24.74 billion this time last year. The revenues were down due to the company’s underperforming hardware division, which is taking a hit with the growing popularity of cloud services. Revenues for the nine-month period totaled $72.1 billion, a decrease of 4 percent, compared with $75.2 billion for the nine months of 2012.

Revenues in the hardware group were down almost entirely across the board. Revenues from its Systems and Technology segment totaled $3.2 billion for the quarter, down 17 percent from the third-quarter of 2012. Pre-tax income decreased $291 million to a loss of $167 million.

Total systems revenues decreased 19 percent, and revenues from Power Systems were down 38 percent compared with the 2012 period. Revenues from System x were down 18 percent. Revenues from System z mainframe server products increased 6 percent compared with the year-ago period. Total delivery of System z computing power, as measured in MIPS (millions of instructions per second), increased 56 percent. Revenues from System Storage decreased 11 percent. Revenues from Microelectronics OEM increased 1 percent.

Software revenues were up just 1 percent the prior year, showing again the company’s stagnating revenues in the third quarter.
“Hardware is down as a trend,” said Ray Wang, co-founder of Constellation Research. “There is an impact because of cloud computing.”
IBM had some of its best results with its cloud services efforts. Cloud revenue is up more than 70 percent year to date with revenue in third-quarter exceeding $1 billion, of which about $460 million is delivered as a cloud service.

As more companies choose cloud services, it can be expected that this trend will continue for IBM and other enterprise providers.

7 Apps You Don't Want to Miss for your Android device

From an app that makes your Android device look like an iPhone to another that gives 2D pictures a 3D look -- many interesting apps launched this week. Each weekend.

Cameo

Cameo is a new app for creating videos with your friends. The app helps you create a video, which you can then enhance with effects to make it a polished, finished product. You can share completed videos on social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter, or upload them to Instagram and YouTube.

Zombie Kong Word

How could you possibly improve Donkey Kong? What about adding zombies? Zombie Kong World takes the traditional game, and adds a zombie twist for a fun new take on the original.

Tadaa 3D

Tadaa helps you make 3D illusions with your iPhone’s 2D camera. The app comes with dozens of built-in filters, and makes creating your own unique images a snap.

iOS 7 Keyboard For Android

iOS 7 Keyboard brings Apple’s keyboard to your favorite Android devices. The keyboard looks and feels exactly like the one in iOS.

Rhymes With Friends

Challenge your friends to a poetry slam with Rhymes with Friends. The app has solo and challenge modes, and lets you add finished poems to a digital book that you can share publicly.

Today - Calendar Widgets

Need a little help keeping up with your schedule? Today is a collection of minimalistic calendar widgets that can help keep you organized on your favorite Android tablet or smartphone.

 

Achvr

Are you trying to achieve something? Whether you’re trying to learn how to code or lose a few pounds, Achvr is a social network that aims to help you get there. With the app, you can earn points for achieving different goals, keep track of things you’ve accomplished and discover which goals you have in common with your network.