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Yesterday, Walmart became the latest retailer to announce plans to offer the iPhone 4 and 5 on a pre-paid basis with Straight Talk, a no-contract carrier offering unlimited data plans. And if you go with anything else, you’re probably a sucker. The Straight Talk plan (which claims to save users roughly $950 a year after…
Firefox 18 now has retina display support and a speed bump for web apps. [Mozilla Blog]
If you’ve ever sat in a bath staring at your fingers as they wrinkle involuntarily, you’re in good company. Now, a team of scientists has worked out why it happens. A series of laboratory tests have shown that wrinkles on fingers and toes resulting from water immersion actually improve grip on wet or submerged objects.…
Piling on the Wall Street Journal’s cheap iPhone rumor resurrection, Bloomberg is reporting that the budget-friendly device Apple is working on will cost in the $100-$150 range. It would debut, at the very earliest, at the end of this year. https://gizmodo.com/wsj-apples-building-a-cheaper-iphone-again-5974315 Apple’s target with a second-tier iPhone would be developing markets, where iPhone costs aren’t…
Media streaming software Plex now lets you turn your server off and stream content from Dropbox instead. Neat. [GigaOm]
Whenever anybody explains the concept of gravity in terms of space-time using a sheet of rubber and a bunch of marbles, all I can ever think about is jumping up and down on the universe like it’s a massive trampoline. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just so damn distracting that it makes it hard…
A series of recent denial of service attacks on US banks are being blamed on Iran. According to the New York Times, “there is no doubt within the U.S. government that Iran is behind these attacks.” Recent months have seen PNC, Bank of America and HSBC all experience heavy DDoS attacks. The Times cites James…
After all the fuss over whether or not Instagram lost users over the holidays, Facebook has decided the best solution is to just ignore the problem altogether. https://gizmodo.com/instagram-says-25-user-exodus-is-bullshit-5971784 In fact, it’s just pulled user count data out of Instagram’s Developer API entirely. The graph above shows monthly active users as measured by Facebook logins: on…
For some reason, a small and backward-looking pool of people in the tech industry still believe that people hate typing on touch screens. Hence this plastic monstrosity, that seemingly aims to convert your sleek iPhone into a lumpen BlackBerry. Err, thanks? A Kickstarter campaign that—against all odds—succeeded, Spike’s TypeSmart keyboard swivels out from a case…
Think of voice recognition, and you probably think of Siri. Now, though, the company behind Apple’s tech, Nuance, is planning a cloud-based, cross-platform system which could make the tech properly useful. Codenamed Project Wintermute, the aim is to develop a platform-agnostic system which lives online. Crucially, that means the system could tie together data from…
There are plenty of external drives floating around at CES, but Rocstor’s offer up a rugged casing and secure encryption in a surprisingly sleek package. Rocstor has actually announced a trio of drives: the Amphibious X5, Hawker HX and Lancer LX. Sadly, the first isn’t waterproof, but it does use AES-256 encryption and both FIPS…
Microsoft’s confirmed that Messenger will be retired on March 15th—and users will be forced to use Skype instead. [TNW]
Happy Birthday David Bowie David Bowie is 66 today and to celebrate, we’ve collected three of his most awesome performances—Rockpalast in 1996, Astoria in 1999, and his 2002 show at Olympia. Enjoy! How Grow Endo Like a Pro With Winter in full swing, your outdoor herb garden isn’t going to be doing much, aside from…
Patent wars are still raging in plenty of parts of the tech world, but today there’s something of a ceasefire between Google and Microsoft. Google has just filed with the ITC to stop attempts to prevent Microsoft from using certain compression techniques with the Xbox 360. Microsoft wants to license a pair of patents that…
We love an underdog story. So when we saw that ZTE—a company which in the U.S. is not so synonymous with “quality” —was making a spec-monster phone, we were excited. After playing with it for about ten minutes, we’re a bit less enthusiastic. https://gizmodo.com/zte-grand-s-makes-it-official-everyone-and-their-mothe-5974061 On the good side, the phone looks very nice and it…
The Lenovo K900 is a big phone, yes, but it’s a designy big phone. It’s handsome, skinny, and slick like the finest smartphones ever made. We never thought we would be into a 5.5-inch phone until the K900’s brushed metal back landed in our hands. This phone is all about the hardware. The unibody construction…
Time was “tl;dr” was the battle cry of lazy internet jackasses, people with no attention span who nevertheless found the energy and wherewithal to complain about the length of any digital piece of writing that dared to be longer than a few sentences. Today, at CES, tl;dr is an irritating new “innovation.” Meet TLDR, a…
Developed as an affordable and reliable solar-powered lantern that can be easily deployed to parts of the world lacking reliable infrastructures, the Luci also happens to be the perfect camping accessory since it’s lightweight, durable, waterproof, bright, and collapses as flat as a pancake. Looking like a translucent cylindrical beach ball, the Luci can be…
If rain on your wedding day is a bad sign than what is having your wedding ceremony interrupted because your hot air balloon crashed? That’s what happened to poor Jonathan and Kerin Narcisse, who exchanged their vows in a hot air balloon, and then had a strong gust of wind slam their hot air balloon…
You know what sucks about buying 4G enabled netbooks and tablets? Suddenly you have another monthly bill to deal with. It adds up, making the gadget cost a lot more in the long run than the initial sticker price. T-Mobile’s 4G Connect effectively kills that. Now, when you buy certain netbooks or tablets, you’re going…
