Facebook will begin test flights of its solar-powered Internet drone later this year, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Monday. The Aquila aircraft has the wingspan of a Boeing 737 but weighs about the same as a car. Its wings are covered in solar panels that provide enough energy to keep it aloft for three to six months at an altitude of 60,000 to 90,000 feet, well above aircraft. It's one of Facebook's answers to the problem of extending low-cost Internet access to parts of the world that don't currently receive it. It's also something of an engineering marvel. "The idea is you can send it out to a place where it might be too expensive to deploy infrastructure otherwise," Zuckerberg said. "It will just fly and stay up there and can beam down Internet access."
Mark Zuckerberg is the latest tech leader to voice his support of Apple against the FBI. “We’re sympathetic with Apple,” the Facebook CEO told the audience at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. “We believe encryption is a good thing that people will want.” Even though Zuckerberg was clearly in support of Apple’s case for user privacy, the Facebook CEO acknowledged both sides. “At the same time, we feel we have a pretty big responsibility to help prevent terrorism,” Zuckerberg said, adding that Facebook cooperates with authorities to remove terrorist posts, profiles, or pages. “We have very strong policies that if there’s content [on Facebook] promoting terrorism, we’ll kick them off.”
Facebook remains committed to spreading the availability of the Internet in India, despite the The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's Free Basics is a service that offers no-cost access to 38 websites, including Facebook and its Messenger service, Bing Search, Dictionary.com, BBC News, Reuters Market Lite for crop and farming information, and local jobs and news sites.
You might be wondering: What’s so different between the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the newly announced Who needs
If you’re buying a high-end virtual reality headset in 2016, you’re probably not too concerned about money. After all, the Oculus Rift system alone will cost $599, and HTC just announced an But let’s say you are prioritizing price, rather than the vastly different experiences that the
Samsung had an opportunity to be an innovator by including future-looking technologies in its new Galaxy S7 and and S7 Edge smartphones. But the company played it safe with incremental upgrades like a microSD slot and better camera. Here are some existing and future-looking technologies Samsung did not include in the handsets. Some technologies are still evolving and could come in successor handsets. Samsung's new smartphones don't have the new USB Type-C port, which is the charging and connector port of the future for mobile devices. Instead, it has the older micro-USB port, which locks out the ability to hook the smartphone up to a range of peripherals. With Type-C, the Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge could have been hooked up to a wider range of high-resolution displays, but that won't be possible with the existing technology. Samsung's pocket-sized SSD T3 has a USB Type-C port that could directly plug in and provide expandable high-speed storage to the new Android smartphones. The SSD will still plug into the older micro-USB port via cable converters, but data transfer rates will be much slower than via USB Type-C.
It can see through smoke, it can dive underwater, and it can run Android Marshmallow. The CAT S60 is a 4G LTE smartphone with a 3,800 mAh battery that owners of thinner and lighter phones might kill for. With its ruggedized case, designed to survive a drop onto concrete from head height, it sounds like the special forces of smartphones. The phone’s two stand-out features, though, are its water resistance and its thermal camera. There are plenty of smartphones with IP68 ratings that can take a dip in a pool and live to tell the tale, but the CAT S60 is fully submersible to 5 meters—as long as you remember to batten down the hatches first. It has two mechanical shutters to cover the earpiece and microphone, and if you forget to flip those closed first, water’s going to find its way in once you go below 2 meters. Otherwise, you’re good for up to an hour under water.
Between Microsoft’s Surface and the iPad Pro’s Apple Pen, the stylus has officially made a comeback, but Huawei’s hoping you’ll like the one that comes as an optional accessory for its The stylus is sold separately for $89 and features 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity—compared to the Surface Pen’s 1,024 levels—and an elastomer tip. It’s not as dense as the Surface Pro 4’s stylus, but you’ll experience the same drag and resistance with it as you would with a real pen to paper.
We all know that people of all ages spend a crazy amount of time playing games on their phones. Samsung has recognized that by positioning the Galaxy S7 (and S7 Edge) as premiere gaming devices, building some nifty software into the operating system that mobile gamers will appreciate. It starts with the Game Hub, a special games folder of sorts that could serve as a launcher for running games with special conditions. You can choose to disabled notifications when running a game (useful), or reduce frame rate and resolution to save battery life (even more useful). For a basic puzzle or strategy game, you won’t notice a degraded experience by running at a lower res and locking the frame rate to a maximum of 30fps, but frame rate limiting has proven to be a very effective way to limit battery drain.
One of the most fun smartphone accessories to come out of this year’s Mobile World Congress expo has to be LG’s Rolling Bot. It’s a spherical ball that rolls around on command from a smartphone, and includes a camera and laser pointer. The bot can be controlled locally or remotely and is envisaged to be kept at home. When you’re away, you can remotely trundle around the house and check everything is OK via livestream—well, at least until you reach the stairs. LG also thinks it might be up to the task of entertaining your pets when you’re not at home. To that end, there’s a laser pointer embedded in the bot. Anyone with cats knows they go nuts when they see a spot from a laser, so LG might be onto something with this idea.
Intel sparked a wireless revolution over the last decade with its Centrino processor platform, designed to connect laptops over Wi-Fi, and now believes the 5G mobile standard will fuel the next big change in the way a new generation of devices communicate. The move to 5G networks will provide faster wireless connectivity through a host of technologies and change the way computing devices are built, said Aicha Evans, corporate vice president for Intel’s Platform Engineering Group and general manager for the Communication and Devices Group. Wi-Fi is ubiquitous today, but upcoming changes may involve making cellular connectivity a common feature on laptops. This is why Intel is putting a lot of energy into modem development for laptops and mobile devices.
Acer is venturing outside PCs with new products to update car software and prevent accidents. The company’s first products for cars, including a headset that monitors brainwaves for driver fatigue, are being shown at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week. The Taiwan company is also showing a telematics product to track car movement and keep in-vehicle software updated. Acer is entering the automotive business as a way to make money outside the slumping PC business. Success in PCs has eluded Acer, whose computer shipments have been falling since the netbook boom ended with the expansion of the tablet market in 2010. The headset idea is a novel one, though details about how it works weren’t immediately available. It may have been spun off from many available headset products, like Emotiv, designed to detect mental states. The headsets operate like EEG machines and associate the brain wave readings with algorithms to detect fatigue and other mental states. Acer didn’t say when the product would be released.
Sony wants to put the “smart” in smartphones with its new Xperia X series handsets, which come packing new “intelligent” predictive features, better battery management, and a greater focus on design. The company introduced the first three phones revolving around that vision—the Xperia X Series featuring the Xperia X, Xperia X Performance, and the Xperia XA—during Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. Sony says the Xperia X Series is part of the company’s new approach to add “layers of intelligent technology.” What that means in practice: To begin with, the phone's camera will get new predictive capabilities to take better action shots. Once you’ve centered the phone on its subject, the phone’s software kicks in to figure out what the subject will do next and grab a shot that has less blur, according to Sony.
Apple CEO Tim Cook isn't ready to confirm longstanding rumors that the company is designing a car, but he didn't exactly deny it, either, in an Asked about Apple's plans to build a car, Cook talked about the company's interest in many products and technologies. "The great thing about being here is we’re curious people," he told Fortune. "And we’re always thinking about ways that Apple can make great products that people love, that help them in some way." However, Apple doesn't "go into very many categories," Cook added in a rare media interview. "We edit very much. We talk about a lot of things and do fewer."
GitHub's popular code-sharing service for developers has long been available in a self-hosted enterprise version, and now it's coming to IBM's Bluemix cloud platform. Thanks to a new partnership announced Monday, IBM and GitHub will deliver GitHub Enterprise as a dedicated service on Bluemix across private and hybrid cloud environments. The service gives corporate developers a new way to code and work with GitHub’s collaborative development tools in a private, controlled environment. "It's essentially GitHub as a service," said Jim Comfort, CTO and general manager for architecture with IBM Cloud. GitHub Enterprise will be available as a service through IBM's security-minded
A Chinese iOS application recently found on Apple’s official store contained hidden features that allow users to install pirated apps on non-jailbroken devices. Its creators took advantage of a relatively new feature that lets iOS developers obtain free code-signing certificates for limited app deployment and testing.
Sure, you can find some decent laptops for around $500, but finding one that’s a little special is a bit more difficult. Lenovo’s Yoga 710 (in the 11-inch version) stands out from the mob, emphasizing portability and versatility. Its most enviable feature for the price is the 360-degree hinge. As your clamshell-bound friends look on enviously, Lenovo’s Yoga 710 in stand mode. It’s nice to find a 360-degree hinge in an affordable laptop.
Children and teenagers want to use computers, smartphones, and the Internet. But they don’t necessarily have the knowledge or maturity to use them wisely. Parents should keep a young child on a short electronic leash, and lengthen that leash bit by bit as the child gets older.
The And the answer was “A lot more than You have a bevy of options though. Beyond following the tutorial—stealth in, pistol kill, stealth out—you can fake an accident with a life raft, poison the man, disguise yourself as the man your target’s supposed to meet up with, or pick up the assault rifle and see how far you get.
Apple CEO Tim Cook has asked the U.S. government to withdraw its court action demanding tools that will allow the FBI to hack the passcode of an iPhone, and instead set up a commission of tech, intelligence and civil liberties experts to discuss “the implications for law enforcement, national security, privacy and personal freedoms.” “We have done everything that’s both within our power and within the law to help in this case. As we’ve said, we have no sympathy for terrorists,” Cook said in an email Monday to Apple employees. Apple said it would gladly participate in the commission. The FBI has sought help from Apple for a workaround to the auto-erase function in an iPhone 5c, running iOS 9, which was used by Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the terrorists involved in the San Bernardino, California, attack on Dec. 2. The FBI is concerned that without this workaround from Apple it could accidentally erase data, while trying to break the passcode by “brute force” techniques.