Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G brought five rows of QWERTY goodness to our office, here goes the hands-on

The already classic Samsung Galaxy S I9000 might be rapidly approaching its third birthday, yet the manufacturer looks far from done extending the family. Meet the T-Mobile US exclusive, epically named Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G – a slide-out hardware QWERTY slider, whose specs are a curious blend of old and new.

The Samsung T699 Galaxy S Relay 4G is features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset with two Krait CPU cores, clocked at 1.5GHz. There’s a gig of RAM and 8GB of built-in storage, which can be further expanded via microSD card slot. The handset’s display comes straight from 2010 – it’s a 4” PenTile Super AMOLED unit with WVGA resolution. The same goes for the smartphone’s 5MP camera, capable of capturing 720p videos. Connectivity is fully covered, including NFC and T-Mobile’s sweet 42Mbps HSDPA. The T699 is powered by a 1800mAh battery.

Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G live photos

The Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G boots Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, dressed in the Korean company’s latest TouchWiz UI. Here it is in action.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

Thousands turn up to party in tiny Dutch town after Facebook invite goes viral, ends in riot

Oh no, not again. A girl in the Netherlands had been hoping to have a small party with close friends to celebrate her 16th birthday. Using Facebook to invite guests, she forgot to set the event as private. Perhaps you can guess what happened next.

When a Dutch teen living in the tiny town of Haren used Facebook to invite friends to her 16th birthday party, little did she know the chaos that would ensue.

Merthe Weusthuis had been hoping for a small celebration with just a few friends, but failing to make the Facebook event private destroyed any hopes of a quiet gathering.

To Merthe’s dismay, the invitation soon went viral, going out to an estimated 30,000 people. A number of websites were set up highlighting the party, some of which referenced Project X, a movie about a suburban birthday party that spins out of control. But the mischief makers didn’t leave it at that. A Twitter account and YouTube video also hit the Web, inviting party-goers to “be there.”

Fearing the worst, Merthe fled her hometown. And judging by what happened Friday night, she was wise to do so.

An estimated 3,000 party revelers descended on Haren, population just 18,000. As things got out of control, police moved in to disperse the crowd, but in the process were reportedly pelted with stones and bottles. The situation deteriorated further, with stores vandalized and looted and a car set on fire. Road signs and street lights were also said to have been wrecked.

Police, who had been expecting large crowds to turn up, reportedly made 20 arrests.

“[Merthe] posted the invitation on Facebook and sent it to friends, who then sent it to other friends and soon it spread like wildfire across the Internet,” police spokeswoman Melanie Zwama told AFP before Friday night.

Similar incidents

An incident of this nature isn’t the first, and is unlikely to be the last. In 2011 a girl in Australia was forced to cancel her 16th birthday party after her invitation sent using Facebook went viral, with more than 200,000 people indicating they would be attending the event, scheduled to take place in the girl’s house.

A girl in Germany also saw her Facebook invitation fall into the hands of thousands of people, resulting in some 1,500 revelers turning up to her birthday party. Fortunately, in that incident, there were no reports of trouble.

Perhaps users of the social networking site need to be a little more careful when using it to send out party invitations, unless, of course, their home is able to accommodate hundreds of thousands of guests, in which case it should be just fine.

[Source: Sky] [Image: Yuri Arcurs / Shutterstock]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Send a Facebook Friend a Real Burger or Cocktail With Treater

You know what your friend doesn’t want for their birthday? Or when they are having a bad day? A virtual cookie, cupcake or glass of wine. You know what they really want? A real cookie, cupcake or glass of wine.

That’s the idea behind Treater.com, a new website that is launching today. It allows people to send and receive small gifts instantly via the web to a smartphone. Yes, Treater lets you send the money — we’re still waiting on the technology to print a cupcake! — but it’s specifically the amount for the item you select. For instance, you can send $4.50 for a latte from Starbucks or a $9.50 bacon cheeseburger from Five Guys.

“We wanted to do something more than letting people like or send a message,” Treater’s CEO, Jeff Ross, told ABC News.

The site allows you to log in with your Facebook account, bringing in your Facebook contacts. It then suggests friends to whom you might want to send gifts, based on whether their Facebook timelines show it’s their birthday, they’ve just gotten engaged, etc. It also suggests gifts based on their activity — it might suggest a cupcake or cookie for a birthday or a sandwich or coffee if it believes that’s what your friend might enjoy.

You can also choose to send a gift for no particular reason. You can select from a list of categories, including Caffeine, Drinks, Sweet Treats, and Good Grub. Within those categories are specific retailers, including Starbucks, Pete’s Coffee, Chipolte, Shake Shack, Potbelly and others.  Listed under each retailer are the prices of specific items.

Select the item or items you want to send to your friend, pay for it, and it will then email or text your friend a link to a one-time Visa or MasterCard payment card with the amount. The site has been optimized for mobile so you can show it on your smartphone at the physical store. Treater is currently working on applications for iOS and Android and ways for retailers to scan a bar code within the app.

Ross said some relationships with retailers have been made (though Treater isn’t announcing them today), but even if there isn’t a formal relationship you can still use Treater at any of the locations since it is really just a credit card. Ross said the company had tested the service at all the locations on its site.

But there’s one last twist.  Whatever you have left over from the transaction goes into what Treater calls your Piggy Bank, where you can collect money and put it toward a gift for another friend.

See, much better than a virtual cupcake.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com