Samsung to Unveil Its Own Round Dial Smartwatch at MWC 2015

After launching the range of Galaxy E and Galaxy A series smartphones separately from CES 2015, Samsung is now reportedly planning to join LG and Motorola by launching a smartwatch with a round dial at the upcoming MWC 2015 event.

The smartwatch is being said to carry the name SM-R720 (codename 'Orbis') and run on Samsung's own Tizen OS, which until now has been seen in company's Gear and Gear S wearables.

The leak, which comes courtesy Sammobile, is also being linked to Samsung recently being granted three patents for smartwatches with circular dial design. The patents, which were filed for back in 2013, showed the South Korean firm working on a rotating ring technology on its smartwatch. However, it is still unclear as to what features the smartwatch will flaunt by the time it is announced.

The rumoured Samsung smartwatch is likely to go head to head against the Apple's upcoming Watch, which was introduced in September last year. Also, LG might also introduce its new round-dialled smartwatch, which has been teased already at the ongoing CES 2015 event. As per the latest reports, the smartwatch is made for Audi, a popular automobile manufacturer, and features a three-button design apart from being made of stainless steel and sapphire crystal. Like Samsung's Gear S, the LG smartwatch has also been seen sporting a cellular data connection, which will let the wearable operate independently without the need to connect to a smartphone.

CES 2015 also saw smartwatches and fitness trackers from firms including Garmin, Alcatel, Sony and Withings.

Garmin launched a total of three smartwatches and a fitness tracker. While Alcatel and Sony launched One Touch Watch and Steel Edition Smartwatch 3 respectively, Withings introduced its Active Pop health-tracker.

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Snapchat Removes From Window Phones

Worldtechzone.Com

In lieu of growing security concerns in and around Snapchat, and more importantly, third-party apps serving as alternatives to the popular photo messaging application, Microsoft has taken the onus on itself to safeguard users' interests. Microsoft has taken all third party Snapchat apps off the Windows Phone store.

The move by Microsoft comes after Snapchat reportedly started blocking user accounts found to be accessing the service through third-party non-native apps.

Snapchat has been in the thick of things lately stemming from the fact that the service still has no official APIs for developers to issue. This has resulted in some privacy concerns with respect to the app after the gradual mushrooming of a large number of third-party apps.

Snapchat is currently available for the Android and iOS platforms. A native Snapchat app for the Windows operating system does not exist yet, something that is the soul harbinger of all the misery to Windows Phone users.     

Since official Snapchat apps are available on iOS and Android platforms users can easily remove third-party apps from their devices. The same doesn't hold true for Windows Phone users. Therefore, Microsoft had no option, but to take them all off from its official store.

One of the key advantages of Snapchat is that users' data (both text and images) is not stored for considerable period while using the service. However, the same cannot be said about third-party apps, hence the growing security concern.

Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/technology/story/all-third-party-snapchat-apps-removed-from-windows-phone-store/1/408131.html

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How To Buy Xbox Games and Windows Apps With Bitcoin ??

Microsoft has become the first major tech company to accept Bitcoin payments for digital content. Xbox games, Windows apps, music, movies, and more can be bought with the digital currency, but the option is only available to customers living in the U.S. for now.

Windows, Windows Phone, Xbox Games, Xbox Music, and Xbox Video stores are all accepting Bitcoin payments now for a wealth of digital content. First, you must add funds to your Microsoft account using Bitcoin, then make your purchases; you cannot pay with Bitcoin directly at this time.

You also cannot use Bitcoin to pay for certain services or subscriptions — such as Office 365.

Most Bitcoin transactions should be processed immediately, but Microsoft warns that they could take up to two hours. The company also notes that any funds added to your account using Bitcoin cannot be refunded.

The surprise move comes just months after Microsoft integrated Bitcoin currency conversion into its Bing search engine. It’s unclear whether the company plans to bring Bitcoin support to other countries, but it’ll likely be some time before we see a wide rollout.

Nevertheless, this is a pretty significant move from one of the biggest names in the industry.

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Cyanogen “Themes” App Takes Android Customization to New Levels

Cyanogen already offers customization options beyond anything stock Android can do, but a new app from the company promises to take smartphone personalization to a whole new level. “Themes” is a new app for Cyanogen OS announced on Monday, which lets you tweak every single thing about your operating system. In short, it looks pretty awesome.

Themes actually reminds us of the Theme Store, which let you choose from a list of free and paid themes or mix and match different styles with the OnePlus One. Now, it looks like Cyanogen is bringing that same feature to even more devices. That means you’ll be able to tweak the font, color, icon style, status bar and more on any phone or tablet running Cyanogen OS.

The company doesn’t offer any specifics on when Themes will be available, though it’s possible the new app could launch in time to ship with the first batch of Cyanogen-powered smartphones from Micromax. There’s also no word on how pricing will work; we’re guessing Themes itself will be free, while some themes could cost a buck or two (or more).

We can’t wait to try out Themes for ourselves, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for any more news from Cyanogen.

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Google announces Android 5.0 Lollipop

After an extended testing and preview period, Google has announced the final release of Android L, its latest version of the world's most popular mobile platform. Android 5.0 Lollipop is debuting on three new Nexus devices — the Nexus 6 smartphone, Nexus 9 tablet, and Nexus Player streaming media device — and will be available on the Nexus 4, Nexus 5, Nexus 7, Nexus 10, and Google Play Edition devices in the coming weeks.

Lollipop's most obvious new features come in the form of visual enhancements and user interface changes, which Google has dubbed Material Design. The platform has new, more fluid animations, a cleaner design with a bolder color palette, a revamped multittasking menu, and offers new ways to interact with your voice. Many of the new Material Design features can be seen in the recent updates that Google has released for its own Android apps such as Google+. The Material Design initiative is meant to unify the software's look and feel across various form factors, whether that's a tablet, smartphone, home media streamer, or something else.

MATERIAL DESIGN IS MEANT TO UNIFY THE ANDROID EXPERIENCE ACROSS DEVICES

In addition to a visual overhaul, Lollipop brings over 5,000 new APIs for developers to tap into and lets multiple different Android devices with various form factors work better together. Google says that things such as songs, photos, apps, and recent searches can be seamlessly synced across various Android devices. Lollipop also includes new notification controls to limit alerts during meetings and other times, a new battery saver mode that can eke out 90 more minutes of life between charges, multiple user accounts, guest user modes, and new ways to secure your device via trusted Bluetooth connections. Lollipop will also include a protection against resetting the phone to factory defaults, which is designed to make it difficult for phone thieves to use a stolen device. Many of these features have been implemented by various Android device makers on their own smartphones and tablets for some time, but Google is now making sure they are part of the core Android experience.
Android 5.0 Lollipop is a big release for Google — it's the most significant visual update to Android since 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich was released in 2011, and it lays the foundation for Android to grow as a platform outside of smartphones and tablets. Google is very clearly pushing Android as the software for the future, and it wants Android to be on every connected device we interact with. Lollipop is the first step to getting there.

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Hundreds of Alleged Dropbox Passwords Leaked, Change Yours Now

Just when you though Dropbox was in the clear, a storm Just 

Just when you though Dropbox was in the clear, a stormsuddenly rises to dump a rain of worries on the service's millions of users. As much as 7 million usernames and their corresponding passwords have reportedly been accessed, with a few of them "teased" with a pastebin posting. This incident comes shortly on the heels of yesterday's revelation of a bug in Dropbox's desktop client that lead to some data loss. Considering passwords are involved, this new development, however, has more frightening consequences.

Aside from safeguarding the Dropbox account itself, the problem with passwords is that users tend to reuse them and be lazy about it, preferring to use easy to remember and easy to guess combinations rather than strong and somewhat obscure ones. In short, there's a high chance that once a user's password has been compromised in one site, the same password is likely to open the doors to other services as well, which is what could happen with this latest incident. One short segment of the full list of hacked passwords, amusingly all starting with B's, was made public on a Reddit thread, where other Redditors have chimed in to confirm that the passwords do actually work.

Dropbox has already been made aware of the situation and has already expired the passwords of those affected, forcing them to change their passwords, hopefully before anyone has had the chance to extract critical user information and files. But while Dropbox is fast in acting, it is also seemingly washing its hands of guilt from the incident. According to the company, its service has not been hacked. Instead, the leaked credentials came from third party services that connect to Dropbox and have been compromised. Dropbox also claims to have been aware of such attacks and have expired any affected passwords.

Regardless of whether you received Dropbox's worrying email or not, now would be a good time to change your password for the service, and perhaps to take stock of other popular and frequently targeted accounts that you might have in your utility belt. It is also an opportune time to learn about two-step authentication, which many services including Dropbox offer, and to enable them. It may not prevent your password from being stolen in this context, but it definitely prevents anyone from accessing your account using just the password. Hopefully you don't use the same password for other sites without two-step authentication.

[UPDATE] Dropbox has now made an official, short, and to the point statement about the incident. Dropbox was not hacked. The credentials stolen came from unrelated third party services that were then to used to attempt to login to different web services, which just happened to include Dropbox. Dropbox, however, says that it has security measures in place to detect such attempts and expires passwords when that happens. Here's Dropbox's statementin full:

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