The Nexus 4 was lost in a bar… Why is this so familiar?

Following in the footsteps of Apple, one of its biggest competitors, a Google employee left a Nexus 4 prototype at a bar in San Francisco. Refusing a free phone, the man who found it decided to leak details of the device to media outlets.

Turns out Apple isn’t the only one who knows how to lose a smartphone in a bar because it looks like someone at Google did the same thing. To refresh your memory, a man named Brian Hogan found an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar left behind by an Apple engineer. Hogan ended up selling it to Gizmodo for $5,000 and consequently ended up in a lot of trouble. This story ends a little differently.

The bar this time around was the 500 Club in San Francisco. It happened on a Tuesday of last month. Jamin Barton, a bartender nicknamed “Sudsy”, found the phone while closing. At first, he didn’t think anything of it.

“We find about 20 a week,” Barton told Wired. ”Most people come back for them in 15 minutes.”

But this particular phone didn’t seem like the others. Nobody came to pick it up and Barton noticed quite a few peculiar features like a lack of SIM card and a “not for sale” sticker accompanying a Google logo on the rear panel. Once he showed it to fellow 500 Club employee, Dave, it was confirmed to be the upcoming Nexus 4.

The Nexus 4 is the smartphone Google was planning to unveil in New York on October 29, but that event has since been cancelled due to Hurricane Sandy. And, we might add, every detail about the Nexus 4 has already been leaked, including photos of the device. It will be manufactured by LG and have a 4.7 inch display, a quad-core processor, and ship with Android 4.2. If it was meant to be a secret then Google clearly dropped the ball.

Dave took over from there, offering to call Google HQ and explain what had happened. And much like Apple, Google blew the whole thing out of proportion. Brian Katz, Google’s global investigations and intelligence manager, was sent to the 500 Club almost immediately. Dave assured Google that Barton would hand over the phone as long as whoever picked it up confirmed their affiliation with Google.

Long story short, after some drama involving a riot and the local police station, Dave handed the phone over to Katz. In exchange, Katz offered Barton a free phone if he would agree to keep the incident under wraps and not discuss it with the pubic until after the official announcement. Obviously, Barton refused the offer and was paid a freelance fee by Wired for providing photos published alongside the article. Looks like isn’t the only one that’s lost control of its secrets. 

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Meteor Shower: Scientists and Treasure Hunters Look in California for Debris

Wednesday night

So where did it come down?  People in the San Francisco Bay area are still puzzling over the fireball that went shooting across the sky Wednesday evening, making an audible boom and, perhaps, spreading debris across the suburbs and vineyards north of the city.

Scientists said the object was a meteor, most likely an errant hunk of rock from the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, traveling in an orbit that happened to send it tearing into the atmosphere over California.

Astronomers have been trying to calculate its trajectory from eyewitness reports, and there’s been natural disagreement over where any meteorites — fragments of a meteor that survive entry into the atmosphere and reach Earth’s surface — might have come down.  Bill Cooke of NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office in Alabama said he thought most debris would have ended up out in the Pacific.  Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute, a meteor hunter by background, suggested debris may have crashed near California suburbs such as Novato or Martinez.

But in a case like this, calculations only do you so much good.  If you’re interested in meteorites, there is only one thing to do — go out and look for them.

So Jenniskens, according to his office, was out in the field today, looking for shards of rock that, to the trained eye, would likely have been survivors of a trip from space.

His office said he would be organizing people who came on their own to look.  One person, asking not to be quoted since meteorites are Jenniskens’ subject, said this is a delicate issue.  Fresh meteorites are rare — so they have a market value.  So, this person said that Jenniskens, searching in the name of science, may find himself in a race against other meteorite hunters who see the potential for profit.

Source : abcnews[dot]go[dot]com

Can The LG Optimus G Make You Go O-M-G?

It didn’t get a fancy unveiling event in New York or San Francisco, but the LG Optimus G E973 is quite as interesting as any other smartphone launched far this month. The new flagship phone from the Korean electronics company has its work cut out for it, but it should be a viable contender based on its spec sheet. Let’s check it out in greater detail here.

Courtesy image by By reviewsongadgets

Specs

Looks like there won’t be any major leaps as far as spec sheets go from last year’s flagships to this year’s batch, although there are some improvements. The LG Optimus G comes with a 4.7-inch True HD IPS LCD screen with a 768×1280 resolution. It is powered by a 1.5GHz quad-core Krait processor and an Adreno 320 GPU and it runs on Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich (skinned with LG’s Optimus UI 3.0), likely set to get a 4.1.1 update.

There’s 2GB of RAM on board to make sure that the games and apps run fast and well. 32GB of internal storage should be ample for most users, although you can add up to 64GB of expandable memory via the microSD slot. Connectivity options include Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC, and LTE.

Those specs are pretty neat, yes? On paper, that looks good—if not better than—the current crop of flagship phones available on the market. Unless the remaining players like Sony and Samsung reveal something new to trump the Optimus G, it’s going to have quite a good run. Of course, the spec sheet gives us the numbers and won’t really make or break the success of this phone.

Flickr image by reviewsongadgets

Key Features

LG presents us with one of the more intriguing functions in a smartphone in recent memory: the QSlide Function, which takes multitasking to a whole new level by allowing users to overlap 2 different screens with different apps. A couple other notable functions are Cheese Shutter, which triggers the camera shutter based on your voice commands, and Application Link. You also get stuff like Dual Screen Dual Play, Screen Zooming, and Icon Personalizer. These functions are all in line with LG’s focus on “cross-tasking” and commitment to engaging user experience.

Depending on the market, the Optimus G will come with either an 8MP rear camera or a larger 13MP snapper. The camera UI features a number of goodies like the aforementioned Cheese Shutter, Time Catch Shot, Smart Shutter, and Low Light Noise Reduction.

Even telephony should get a boost with the active noise cancellation and dedicated microphone. You can make decent calls even in noisy situations, and you won’t likely experience call quality problems even when you’re using a VoIP service application or video-calling via Skype or some other provider.

Design

The unibody design and Prada- and Chocolate-influenced aesthetics should appeal to many prospective buyers, making the Optimus G a prime alternative to already-revealed smartphones that don’t really bring anything new to the table design-wise. While the Optimus G looks really good, its design doesn’t really stand out all that much, either. But with very little in terms of embellishments, the smartphone keeps the user focused on what he’s doing on the phone itself, which is why the 4.7-inch IPS screen becomes so prominent on the design.

This isn’t a review yet, of course, so we can’t really tell you anything about performance. However, the smartphone looks good on paper, and it’s pretty easy to see it challenging flagships from other manufacturers better than how the Optimus 4X fared against rivals like the Samsung Galaxy S III and the HTC One X. Priced right, the Optimus G can give other flagships a run for their money. However, at the moment, estimates have the phone’s price at around $900, which just won’t do considering the alternatives are priced much more attractively.

Still, with what we’ve seen so far—and with some hands-on videos you can find all over tech blogs and on YouTube—you get a pretty good first impression of the Optimus G. It won’t take the spotlight from the iPhone 5 or from a new Galaxy S model should there be one, but it’s going to get people thinking about it and looking at it and, ultimately, consider purchasing it.

Tags: voip service

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com

Zuckerberg talk restores investor confidence….a little bit

Following Mark Zuckerberg's Q&A in San Francisco on Tuesday, Facebook shares climbed by $1.50 to $20.93, though this still leaves them some way below the launch price of $38.

When Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he was well aware of the importance of what was his first interview since Facebook went public back in May.

With shares hitting a low of $17.55 last week – way down from their $38 launch price – the 28-year-old CEO was keen to calm the nerves of investors by clearing up various issues surrounding the social networking site and its plans for the future.

The 30-minute appearance evidently did some good, with stock rising $1.50, or 7.7 percent, to $20.93 in trading on Wednesday. It may not have been the kind of increase he’d been hoping for, but hey, it’s heading in the right direction – for now, at least.

Speaking to the LA Times about Zuckerberg’s performance, Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter said, ”He said what he needed to: He and Facebook care about shareholders, he is aware of and troubled by the low share price, he appears to believe the stock is undervalued, and appears to understand that he has to communicate Facebook’s strategy more clearly going forward.”

Another analyst, Macquarie Securities’ Ben Schachter, said it was vital for Zuckerberg to make more appearances like this, enabling him to communicate with investors directly. “Better understanding Zuckerberg’s priorities, motivation and general focus is a positive for investors,” Schachter said.

At Disrupt’s Q&A on Tuesday, Zuckerberg said the performance of the company’s stock “has obviously been disappointing” but added that “we do things to build value over the long term.”

Earlier this month, in another attempt to restore investor confidence, Facebook said in an SEC filing that Zuckerberg has no intention of selling any of his more than 500 million Facebook shares for at least the next year.

The announcement came after some of the company’s major investors unloaded a portion of their stock. Early investor Peter Thiel unloaded the majority of his shares – about 20 million of a total of 25 million – in the middle of August, followed a few days later by Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz, who sold a much smaller amount.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Stolen iPhone results in cop chase, shooting, school lockdown and finally, arrests

When the victim of a phone theft reported the incident to cops in San Francisco on Monday, they probably didn't expect that a cop chase, shooting, school lockdown and eventual arrest of the suspects (with one found in the trunk of a car) would be the result.

A stolen mobile phone usually, at the very most, results in a visit to the cop shop, the filling out of a few forms and then a trip to the phone store to sort out a replacement. But, evidently, it doesn’t always work out that way.

In San Francisco on Monday, for example, a smartphone stolen in the city’s Ocean View neighborhood resulted in a police chase, a school lockdown and an officer firing their gun.

According to a San Francisco Chronicle report, it all started at around 6.30am when two men stole a pedestrian’s iPhone at gunpoint. Using the phone-locating Find My iPhone app, officers discovered that the device was somewhere in the Noe Valley neighborhood in the center of the city.

After pinpointing the suspects, officers approached them but – surprise, surprise – they both scarpered.

During the pursuit, one of the suspects turned towards an officer with their hand concealed close to their body – of course, a move like that in such a tense situation rarely ends with a friendly shake of the hands and the exchange of a few pleasantries. No, in this case, the pursuing officer, believing her life to be in imminent danger, took out her gun and fired at the suspect, who subsequently managed to escape unharmed.

As the chase continued, police locked down nearby St. Paul’s Catholic Church and its adjoining elementary school for around half an hour to secure the safety of those inside.

Cops then tracked the stolen handset to a car with a person sitting inside. After apprehending the occupant, they also found someone hiding in the trunk, together with a stash of other allegedly stolen smartphones. Job done.

It might seem like quite a palaver for one stolen phone, but with smartphone theft on the rise, and more handset owners getting up to speed with enabling find-my-phone type apps, perhaps we’ll be hearing more stories like this in the future.

Security experts also recommend that handset owners enable the lock screen on their device and install a remote wipe app to prevent personal details being taken in the event of a theft – or loss – of a phone.

[via AppleInsider]

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com