Apple will host next iPhone launch Sept. 9

Apple will show off its next iPhones on September 9 at an event in San Francisco.
The event will be held exactly a year after the company introduced the iPhone 6 and its larger sibling, the 6 Plus. The two phones have become Apple's best-selling devices ever and have made Apple the most profitable public company in the world.
Invitations to the event were sent out Thursday, with a terse tease: "Hey Siri, give us a hint."


More than two-thirds of Apple's revenue now comes from the iPhone, making it essential for Apple to keep introducing devices consumers desire. While the company continues to sell millions of phones, the overall mobile market has slowed, raising worries that not even Apple is immune to the lackluster demand. At the same time, Apple has to find a way to get buyers interested in tablets again. Its quarterly iPad sales have declined year over year for the past six periods in a row. A bigger iPad, which would appeal to business users, could be a way to do that.

This year's iPhone launch is the "S" cycle, which means the devices likely won't feature new hardware designs but instead could include other tweaks -- for example, Siri, Apple's voice assistant, debuted with the iPhone 4S. The company is expected to add its ForceTouch technology to the new devices, allowing the iPhones to differentiate between hard and light taps on the display. Other tweaks could include a faster processor and camera, as well as more color options.

Apple also is expected to reveal a new Apple TV box that it potentially will launch alongside an Internet-delivered television service. The company was believed to be readying those products for its annual developers conference in June, but instead they were pushed back. Apple couldn't broker deals with TV programmers to stock the new service with channels in time, according to reports.

Apple's streaming-video box has gone three years without a refresh to a new generation -- meanwhile, Internet-delivered TV has grown bigger and more accessible than ever. In that span of time, Apple has thrown plenty of splashy events, and each one has come and gone without Apple TV getting serious time in the spotlight.

Apple also could use its September 9 event to show off its newest iPads, if a report from Buzzfeed is correct. That would mark a break from Apple's traditional strategy of holding separate events for its smartphones and tablets. Typically, the iPhone is announced in September, followed by iPad news in October. Lumping them together could indicate Apple doesn't have big changes in store for the devices -- though market watchers have been waiting for the company to introduce a new 12.9-inch "iPad Pro." The iPad Pro is a wildcard for the September event.
The event at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco will start at 10 a.m. PT.

Read more: http://www.cnet.com/news/apple-will-host-next-iphone-launch-sept-9/

Daniel Kaufman, Pres. & CEO, Reagan Wireless Corp. 

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In October, Adobe will release a new app for editing photos

Photoshop is so well known that the product name is synonymous with photo editing. But the software itself is a success only on personal computers, not smartphones or tablets.
Photoshop's maker, Adobe Systems, hopes that will change in October at its Max conference for developers and creative professionals when it introduces a new Photoshop app for editing photos on Apple's iPhones and iPads. The free software, called only Project Rigel for now, is designed to bring a more accessible interface to what can be a dauntingly complex program on PCs.
"Project Rigel is designed and built in a way that serves the needs of professionals familiar with retouching tools on the desktop, but more so for people not familiar with Photoshop tools like content-aware fill or spot healing," Manu Anand, Adobe's senior product manager for digital imaging, said in an interview at Adobe's offices here. "It democratizes them and makes them easier to use."
The app itself has a touchscreen interface, with a menu of editing options across the bottom, pop-out tool adjustments on the left side and a strong zoom ability to offer precision when selecting areas of an image with fat fingertips. It's even got face recognition technology that Photoshop for PC lacks, a feature that identifies facial features then lets people enlarge or tilt eyes or raise the corners of a subject's mouth to emphasize a smile.

Bringing Photoshop to the mobile masses is crucial for Adobe as it tries to adapt its business to modern computing trends. The company has no desire to suffer Microsoft's fate, being largely left behind by the meteoric rise of Apple's iOS and Google's Android, the software that powers nearly all smartphones and tablets. Apps for those mobile devices are a way to stay modern and reach a broader market -- as well as a way to sell those new customers Adobe subscriptions that today appeal chiefly to creative professionals.

Read more: http://www.cnet.com/pictures/meet-project-rigel-photoshop-image-editing-for-mobile-devices-pictures/

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Can't get enough of smartwatches? Well, a whole new batch is on its way.

New wave of Android Wear watches aims to make up for lost time

Asus, Huawei, LG and Motorola will introduce their newest smartwatches next week at the IFA electronics trade show in Berlin, according to people familiar with the companies' launch plans. The devices will all run Google's Android Wear software, which was created to power wearable products like smartwatches.
You might be forgiven if you don't remember Android Wear, which Google introduced last year with much fanfare, but which hasn't resulted in any blockbuster products. Next week's releases will mark the second big wave of Android Wear devices, following on from that dismal showing in 2014. Android powers the vast majority of the world's smartphones, and Google and its partners are hoping for similar success in the burgeoning market for wearables.
The goal is that the new Android Wear devices will have enough features and alternative designs to lure buyers away from the Apple Watch, which -- despite criticism -- became the world's most popular smartwatch within its first few months on the market earlier this year.

"Apple Watch has clearly raised the bar for the global smartwatch industry," Strategy Analytics analyst Neil Mawston said. "The ball is now in the court of rivals, like Samsung, to respond."

Some early wearables, including Samsung's Galaxy Gear from late 2013, used Android, but the initial version of the software -- which wasn't tailored for wearables -- caused devices to run slowly and batteries to drain quickly. Samsung quickly switched to its homegrown Tizen software in its smartwatches as an alternative.
Android Wear emerged in early 2014 as a modified version of Android created specifically for smartwatches and other Internet-connected wearables. Google and its partners -- Samsung, LG and Motorola -- unveiled the first devices that used Android Wear at Google's developer conference that June. The software promised a simple user interface, instant notifications and the ability to perform simple tasks, like texting friends, using voice commands. Other companies such as Sony and Asus introduced smartwatches of their own.
But consumers largely disregarded those initial devices. Smartwatch makers collectively shipped only 720,000 Android Wear units in 2014 out of a total 4.6 million wearables, according to market research firm Canalys. Samsung, the world's biggest smartwatch vendor last year, chose to push devices running Tizen instead of Android Wear, and nearly three out of every four smartwatches shipped in 2014 came from the Korean company.
Of the Android Wear watches, Motorola's Moto 360 stood out with its round face and the company's decision to use premium materials such as a metal case and leather strap. But others quickly followed with the same strategy. Motorola is slated to unveil the follow-up at the show.

LG, meanwhile, is expected to release a smartwatch similar to its LG Watch Urbane LTE, which the company showed off in March. The Urbane LTE ran on software called WebOS, which LG purchased from Hewlett-Packard to use on its own products; the new version will run on Android Wear.
Huawei debuted its first smartwatch -- a device designed to look as much as possible like a classical round-face timepiece -- at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona earlier this year. And Asus is expected to give more details about the ZenWatch 2, which made its debut in June at the Computex trade show in Taiwan. The company hasn't shared many details about the device.

Every smartwatch player has taken a backseat in the wake of the Apple Watch's introduction in April. With only three months in the wearables market, Apple surpassed Samsung to become the leader in smartwatches. In the second quarter of this year, 76 percent of smartwatches came from Apple, while Samsung's control of the market tumbled to 7.5 percent, according to Strategy Analytics.

Read more: http://www.cnet.com/news/next-wave-of-android-wear-smartwatches-set-to-make-their-debut/

Daniel Kaufman, Pres. & CEO, Reagan Wireless Corp. 

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Microsoft is turning the iPhone's camera into a 3D scanner

Microsoft wants the camera on the back of your phone to do more than take 2D photos. A new project from Microsoft's research lab is turning the average smartphone's rear camera into a 3D scanner — one that can automatically create 3D models that are supposed to be good enough for printing. In a demo video, researchers use an iPhone 5S to scan objects just by moving the phone around them. The phone tracks the object that's being captured and then builds up a model as the camera captures it from different angles.

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Most smartphones should be able to do this
Some of the models created in the demo video look rough, but they're pretty impressive when you consider that the iPhone wasn't designed to make them. Microsoft says that no additional hardware is needed to turn the iPhone — or other modern smartphones — into a 3D scanner; computation is all done on the phone, too. That's a bit different from what Google is doing with projects like Tango, which use additional hardware, including a motion-tracking camera and a depth sensor, when mapping the world. Those additional sensors are likely to give Tango better results, but Microsoft says that just a single camera should be enough to make models for printing or use in augmented reality gaming.

Microsoft's project is called MobileFusion, and researchers are currently trying to get it running on iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. There are no release plans yet, but the intention is to make it available to the general public eventually.

Daniel Kaufman, Pres. & CEO, Reagan Wireless Corp.

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Sundar Pichai: Google's new boss from humble roots

With Google creating its own parent company, Alphabet, there's a bit of moving about in the Google boardroom.

Larry Page is now chief executive of Alphabet. Sergey Brin is its president.

And moving up to be in charge of Google is 43-year-old Sundar Pichai.

Great news for Pichai, and good news too for India - his appointment makes him the latest Indian to earn a massively high-profile job in the US technology industry. Microsoft's Satya Nadella is the other notable example.

Pichai's life story is remarkable, and his rise to the top of Google is a glowing endorsement of India's standing in the global technology industry, and equally, a reassuring reminder of the so-called "American Dream".

Pichai was born and schooled in Chennai, India. He captained his school's cricket team, leading it to win regional competitions.

He studied Metallurgical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur (IIT Kharagpur). According to one of his tutors, quoted in the Times of India, Pichai was the "brightest of his batch".

He has evidently used his talent to great effect at Google, a company he joined in 2004. Products under his watch include Google's web browser, Chrome, as well as the Android mobile operating system.

Android is by far the world's most popular mobile OS - a fact made perhaps more startling by the fact Pichai's family did not possess a telephone until he was 12 years old.

Challenges

According to a profile in Bloomberg magazine, Pichai's upbringing was humble. His family lived in a two room apartment. Pichai didn't have a room - he slept on the living room floor, as did his younger brother.

The family didn't own a television, or a car.

But Pichai's father planted the seeds of technology into his boy's mind, partly thanks to his job at British conglomerate General Electric Company (not to be confused with the American General Electric).

"I used to come home and talk to him a lot about my work day and the challenges I faced," Regunatha Pichai told Bloomberg, adding that Sundar had a remarkable talent for remembering telephone numbers.

After graduating from IIT Kharagpur, Pichai was offered a scholarship at the ultimate breeding ground of tech geniuses - Stanford. The plane ticket to America cost more than his Dad's annual salary.

At Google, Pichai is described as soft-spoken, and well liked. He is also very popular among developers - he runs Google's annual developer event, I/O.

"Sundar has been saying the things I would have said (and sometimes better!) for quite some time now, and I've been tremendously enjoying our work together," wrote Larry Page in his blogpost announcing all the big changes.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin have been hands-off with Google's day-to-day running for sometime, and so, in Pichai's life, today's announcement is simply making it official: he's in charge.

His remit is best summed up as Google's core products - the bits that make the real money. That includes things like search, advertising, maps and YouTube.

He has challenges to navigate, like YouTube's increasingly intense battle with Facebook in the video space. The social network has dramatically increased the amount of video being watched on its site - but YouTube still holds the title of most popular, for now at least.

Read more: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-33858436

Daniel Kaufman, Pres. & CEO, Reagan Wireless Corp. 

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Amazon Prime's new policy says that customers can add just one other adult to an account

Amazon Now Only Lets You Share Prime With One Other Adult Instead of Four

Amazon recently made some changes to the ways customers can share their Amazon Prime membership. It used to be that you could share the subscription’s free two-day shipping with four other people. But as of last week, Amazon put a stop to that.

Its new policy says that Prime customers can add just one other adult to an account — and you’ve got to be cool with that person having access to your credit or debit card for purchases. They can add their own cards, of course, but payment methods will be visible to both people sharing a Prime account. This is a mandatory requirement if you want to share Prime moving forward.

In order to share content, Prime benefits, and Amazon Mom benefits, both adult account holders need to authorize each other to use credit and debit cards associated with their Amazon accounts for purchases on Amazon. This will not affect either of their current payment settings, but each adult will be able to copy the credit and debit cards of the other account to his or her Amazon account and use them for purchases with Amazon.

With the change, Amazon is clearly positioning Prime sharing as a household convenience meant for two partners or a family. (The company always “required” everyone to have the same shipping address, but rarely enforced this policy.) Note that both people in an Amazon Household get access to Prime Instant Video and the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library — but that was already the case before.

Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/amazon-now-only-lets-you-share-prime-with-one-125765875399.html

Daniel Kaufman, Pres. & CEO, Reagan Wireless Corp.

www.reaganwireless.com