Meet the Lumia 925, the latest smartphone flagship in Nokia’s increasingly populous Windows Phone portfolio. The 925 is clearly Nokia’s answer to criticisms of its high end devices being too heavy.  At the device’s London launch earlier today, Vodafone’s Patrick Chomet – brought onstage to talk up the new Lumia which the carrier will be ranging in Europe — couldn’t avoid commenting negatively on the Lumia 920’s weight. For all the noise about the 925’s camera, its less hefty hardware is the key design difference here.

The 925 drops a full 46g compared to the earlier Lumia 920, weighing in at 139g vs the 920’s hefty 185g. The phone feels pleasingly light in the hand, helped by its slender profile: it’s just 8.5mm thick at its thickest point (vs 10.7mm for the 920). In order to achieve a sleeker, lighter device, yet keep the 4.5-inch display, Nokia has dropped built-in wireless charging – but it’s not ditching the tech entirely. It has included wireless charging as an add-on via clip-on shells – likely sold separately — which increase the thickness of the 925 by a few millimetres but don’t appear to add too much weight back on.

It’s a compromise but one that results in a sleeker, more attractive handset out of the box. If it’s a choice between wireless charging – which remains something of a gimmick — or a lightweight phone, most people would opt for the latter. And that’s a calculation Nokia has clearly made with the 925.

The handset design also takes a few steps in a new direction for the Lumia range, with aluminium edging running around its four sides – a band which doubles as the phone’s antenna – coupled with a polycarbonate back. The two-tone look and feel is a definite departure for Nokia’s high end phone design. Colour options are also more subtle, with the black version having anodized, almost charcoal looking aluminium edging, while the white 925 has silver edges. There’s also a grey colourway. The trademark bright Lumia colours are reserved for the wireless charging shells — including red, yellow and cyan.

The PureView-branded 8.7MP camera on the 925 is the other big focus here. The hardware introduces a sixth lens to the device, which Nokia says improves performance in bright sunlight. This is in addition to strong low-light capabilities, which it has touted on its other Lumia flagships – including most recently the Lumia 928.

During the 925 launch Nokia demoed both the low and bright-light photography capabilities of the phone, inviting the press to compare the shots with photos taken on their own smartphones. The Lumia 925 came off as better at snapping in the dark than iPhones, the BlackBerry Z10, the HTC One and even the Lumia 920, pulling a brighter, more colourful image from out of the gloom. It also appeared to capture more detail in strong light conditions in Nokia’s test conditions.

As well as the extra hardware lens, the 925 includes a new suite of camera-editing software called Nokia Smart Camera. This makes use of a burst mode that takes 10 photos at around 5MP each. It then offers a series of image-manipulation options to enhance the photo. Some of these features were a little hit and miss under the press launch lighting conditions. Others looked a little gimmicky, such as the ability to composite a series of movements into one shot. But others seemed like they could be genuinely useful, such as a feature that allows you to create the best shot by choosing from various facial expressions — much like the timeshift feature on the BlackBerry Z10/Q10. Or another that lets you remove a moving object from an image, such as a person or car passing in front of the scene you’re trying to shoot.

The Smart Camera software won’t be exclusive to the Lumia 925 for long – Nokia said it will be pushed out to other Nokia Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices as an update in Q3. But for the moment, the Lumia 925 has the lion’s share of Nokia’s camera creativity, including some new features in its Creative Studio image editing app, such as a tilt shift and radial focus. And the Oggl app.

One more new software addition in the 925′s screen settings allows users to tweak the colour saturation and temperature of the AMOLED screen to dial down how poppingly bright the colours are and opt for more muted, photo-realistic tones if you desire. Elsewhere, this is a business-as-usual Windows Phone 8 device loaded with the usual suite of Microsoft and Nokia apps, which include its HERE mapping and location apps and Nokia Music. It is also skinned with the new more flexible Windows Phone homescreen that allows for three different-sized live tiles.

The 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip powering the Lumia 925 doesn’t sound that beefy, considering the proliferation of quad-core phones in the Android ecosystem at least, but it’s as top-of-the range as Windows Phone gets right now. And Nokia argues that no more processing clout is required to do all of the image processing going on under the 925′s hood.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Nokia is going big on the camera features in its new 925 and 928 Lumia devices, continuing on in its PureView legacy first introduced back when it was still making Symbian devices. Within that it is adding a few key apps to the device — Oggl from Hipstamatic, the slick video sharing app Vyclone and Cinemagraph — but there is still no sign of popular picture-taking and picture-sharing app Instagram.

“We hear the voices on Instagram,” Matt Rothschild, head of sales for Nokia in the Americas, said in an interview, indicating that the company is still working on a deal: “For now, we see great technology complementing Instagram; we are continuing to work on that.”

In fact, TechCrunch understands that Nokia and Microsoft have been working hard on closing an agreement but still there have been no dice. Both CEOs have visited the company, we understand, and have even offered to put up investment reaching into the millions of dollars to create the app. Many (although not all) see Instagram as a deal-breaker, holding back some from making the switch to Windows Phone as their next startphone platform. (This point can be argued against, of course: Android has been growing like crazy, but it only got Instagram around a year ago.) In any case, given how much of a song and dance Nokia is making about its camera features — with its own Smart Camera software leading the pack — you can see why Nokia was so keen on securing the Instagram deal, which also included waging its own viral campaign.

In the meantime, we are getting other things, led by Oggl. Launched only three days ago for iOS, Nokia has secured a partnership with Hipstamatic to put its new app — itself an attempt at a comeback after free Instagram and other apps have stolen Hipstamatic’s paid app lunch — on to its Lumia devices. Because of the existing relationship between Hipstamatic and Instagram, from last March (before Instagram was bought by Facebook), users will now be able to post pictures that they take via Oggl on to Instagram.

Nokia plans to take its Smart Camera software, which offers best shot, action shot and motion focus, to other Lumia devices in Q3 later this year. But unlike Nokia’s mapping technology Here, which is coming to many other platforms — this will be staying only on Lumia’s devices.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

So far, the Pebble smart watch has done little besides offer up watch faces for users to tinker with, but the apps are starting to come in, and today marks the much-anticipated debut of early marquee partner RunKeeper. RunKeeper was an early player in the smartphone-based activity tracker market, and continues to be an industry leader. It was a natural partnership for both Pebble and RunKeeper, and now consumers get to see what the two can do together.

The new Pebble RunKeeper integration works with both Android and iOS apps, and provides the same functionality for both. RunKeeper CEO Jason Jacobs says that his company is very interested in the wearable tech market, and he believes that the key to cracking open a much broader audience for fitness and health tracking tech could be gadgets like the Pebble, which make it even easier to access and use information gathered by tools like RunKeeper.

“What’s really exciting for me is that what people were expecting was that it just makes it easier to have a RunKeeper controller on your wrist,” he said, describing the experience of the Pebble integration’s early beta testers. “But what they’re finding is not only can it do that, but it’s actually more powerful than an app because it’s starting to change the way they’re interacting with the data, it’s more seamless to their experience, it’s not disrupting their flow.”

Jacobs says RunKeeper’s thesis as a company is that that’s exactly what needs to happen in order to help this kind of activity tracker technology find wider purchase among a mainstream audience. “The data needs to be more actionable, and it needs to be proactively given to you so that you don’t need to hunt and look for it,” he said. The Pebble is a good way to achieve that, since it can surface any data that a smartphone, either Android or iPhone, can gather on its wrist-mounted display.

On the Pebble, RunKeeper will display pace, speed, and distance travelled and offer workout start and stop features. It can work with runs, and also bike rides and walks, and does everything most will need to get a lot more out of their smartphone supported workouts right away. It offers RunKeeper a way to compete with wearables like the Nike+ GPS sport watch, all the while allowing them to focus on the tech they do best, leaving hardware to more specialized partners.

“The software is really hard, and we think it’s a really big opportunity, and we want to be the best at the software piece,” Jacobs explained. “Part of that is pushing the phone’s capabilities so that you don’t need hardware, but part of that is also playing nice with all the best of breed hardware that comes out. In terms of being that best of breed hardware ourselves, it’s not in our roadmap or aspirations. It is in our road or aspirations to be a good neighbour.”

This version of RunKeeper for Pebble is just a start, Jacobs says, noting that during the development process they realized they could add in much more, like setting pace on the smart watch, setting distance targets and more. RunKeeper also worked closely with Pebble to get this particular integration developed, and says we’ll see similar UI elements used as other fitness tracking apps come on board. Future work could go into helping RunKeeper differentiate its experience further as the development ecosystem for Pebble progresses.

Jacobs leads me to believe that RunKeeper will be opportunistic about partnerships with hardware companies and other software efforts operating in the same general space, and this Pebble partnership is just one part of a larger strategy to try to find the key to cracking the mainstream market with a product that, while successful, has had more niche appeal up until now. The Pebble is also arguably a niche product, but taken together, it’s possible two things aimed at a very specific audience could combine in just the right way to attract a much broader following.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Chef Sleeve has been selling its iPad-protecting plastic sleeves since 2011 to keep kitchen gunk off the iPad you’re using while you cook. They also make a dishwasher-safe, non-porous chopping board with a built in iPad stand (below right), and a smaller stand in the same recycled paper composite finish. But Chef Sleeve’s grand plan is to create a range of connected devices for the kitchen that link up with an iPad app to let people track their nutrition in a highly granular, yet low hassle, way.

To that end it’s just kicked off a Kickstarter campaign for its next product: a smart Bluetooth scale, which it’s calling Smart Food Scales, that will enable people to weigh ingredients and snacks and then determine the exact amount of fat, salt, sugar, vitamins and so on in the ingredients they’re using in recipes or the snacks they’re eating at home.

“This is our first smart product. We now want to activate these pieces of hardware and take the iPad even further and enhance the experience in the kitchen,” says Chef Sleeve’s Michael Tankenoff. “The Bluetooth scale will sync up with our iOS app on iPad or iPhone. Say you’re weighing strawberries. We house the USDA database of food information, so you select strawberries. Not only will it tell you the weight, but it tells you all the nutritional information.

“For example, you’re preparing a salad — you put your bowl on the scale, add your lettuce, select lettuce, reset to zero, add your tomatoes, select tomatoes, reset to zero, keep going, build this recipe and when you’re done, now you know exactly the nutritional value of that salad that you have every day.”

As well as the health conscious and people watching their weight, Chef Sleeve envisages the scales being useful for individuals with conditions such as diabetes to help them track their sugar intake, or people with specific nutritional deficiencies who need to make sure they’re getting enough of certain vitamins in their diet.

The company is looking to raise $30,000 via its Kickstarter campaign, which runs until the end of the month. It’s showing the following prototype screenshots (below) of the planned iPad software. It also intends to open up its API at some point in the future, so that third-party developers can build apps for the smart scales — although it’s going to be careful about how it does this, as it wants to keep any other apps wholesome (scales can, after all, be used to weigh non-foodstuffs too).

After the scales, Chef Sleeve says it will look to launch other connected devices that tie back in to its iOS app to keep adding to a range of smart kitchen devices. A thermometer could be next, says CEO Santiago Merea. A chopping board with an integrated scale could also be on the cards “at some point” — but he says the company is being mindful about its mainstream consumer buyer. “We need to be careful about our demographic. We’re not going to throw rockets at them,” he told TechCrunch. “We want the design to be very homey, very crafty.”

If the uptake of the scales is strong, it could end up generating some fascinating data for Chef Sleeve — such as what, when and how people eat — which it said it will look to feed back into its product development.

“Our pledge is going to be to not store any personal information at all — because we don’t need to but we also don’t want the risk of being hacked,” said Merea. ”Food is personal… So we’re not storing any personal information but we don’t need to. With that data we can also even help our customers. It’s going to be really cool what we can do with this.”

Chef Sleeve already has stores interested in carrying the smart scales, according to Merea. It’s hoping to get into speciality kitchenware stores with the smart scales, a shift of its retail strategy which, to date, has been mostly focused on selling via Amazon (and its own website).

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

If you do much photography at all, you probably have come across and enjoyed Adobe Lightroom, the digital darkroom suite that makes photo editing a snap, especially for RAW files, which preserves a wide variety of information for better results when tweaking things like exposure, sharpness and color balance. Now, Adobe’s Lightroom lead Tom Hogarty has demoed an upcoming version of the software for iOS (via Engadget), and it looks good.

The Lightroom demo appeared in an episode of The Grid, and showed an early beta version of Lightroom running on an iPad 2. The mobile version uses Smart Previews, a feature recently introduced in the Lightroom 5 beta Adobe introduced in April. That allows you to make edits to a photo’s preview even when it isn’t connected to the source file, and then have those updates applied to the original RAW once it’s reconnected. That means that you won’t have to carry around huge files on your iOS device, and can still do a lot of the things you can do with Lightroom for desktop on your mobile device.

The fact that Lightroom syncs and transfers edits back and forth from the mobile and desktop versions is probably the most impressive part of the whole thing. RAW editors exist for iOS already, but the industry standard from Adobe coming to Apple’s mobile devices is a huge development that will really add to the photographers toolkit. Hogarty wouldn’t say exactly when Lightroom is coming, but it’s nice to see that it’s in development and apparently quite far along.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Jawbone is doing something a lot of developers will probably be interested in, by opening up the UP fitness tracking wristband as a platform play, with an open API coming soon. Jawbone’s new version 2.5 update for the iOS UP app allows you to integrate with IFTTT, MapMyFitness, Withings, Sleepio, Wello, RunKeeper, Notch.me, Maxwell Health, Lose It!, and MyFitnessPal.

The new integrations mean that data gathered from those apps and devices like the Withings Smart Body Analyzer can now be pulled into the UP app itself, and combined with information gathered from the Jawbone wristband to provide a more complete picture of a user’s health. The IFTTT integration can be used to help you create your own motivational alerts when you’ve been inactive for too long, or to brag when you’ve blown past your daily step count goal.

The information from the UP can also go out to some specific apps, providing them with data on your sleep patterns and daily movement activity. And this is just the start: Jawbone is starting things off with a few select partners, but after that it intends to open up the API for any developers interested in building Jawbone UP integration into their own apps.

“We are now unstoppable in terms of leadership in today’s market,” explained Hosain Rahman, Jawbone CEO. “The platform we see the API is the first step of that; a limited set of partners with unique experiences, but the whole experience is much deeper.”

Jawbone made its reputation on building Bluetooth products like stereo headsets and earpieces, but then moved into audio equipment like the Jawbone speakers and health monitoring devices like the UP. Other competitors in the space have already moved to open up third-party integrations, like the Nike+ Fuelband, which plugs into Path and Lose It! Jawbone’s platform plans are much broader and deeper than the ones of some of its competitors, however, according to Rahman.

“A lot of these platform announcements like API releases are more PR than they are actual real developers on a platform building value for users,” he said. “We spent a lot of time sitting with developers, looking at what they can enable, what their data structure was, how to pull their experience back into UP, how you really create robustness around them, how to build APIs that work dependably and how we can make sure users can get this stuff.”

This should open the door for a much more holistic picture of personal health, available across a wide range of devices. Individually, these devices have been doing well, but the real opportunity is when apps and hardware start working with one another. Jawbone is taking a great first step towards that end with this API release, but it’ll be interesting to see how the UP platform handles normalizing a huge volume of data from a wide variety of partners in a way that doesn’t overwhelm individual users.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

It’s like Amazon buying a big stake in Twitter; Alibaba – the largest e-commerce player in China with $170bn in sales has just purchased 18% of of Weibo, the largest Twitter-style microblogging platform in China, Weibo (400 million users) for $586m.  The investment is expected to generate  $380 million in social commerce and advertising revenue for Weibo over 3 years, and if all goes according to plan, Alibaba has an option to increase the stake to 30%. Earlier this year, Mercedes made 12% of its annual Smart Car sales target in one day on Weibo.

The official news release is here, but in a nutshell, the Chinese Twitter equivalent states “We believe e-commerce will play a vital role in building an eco-system around Weibo’s open platform.”  Yep, and we think e-commerce will play a vital role in building Twitter too – investment from a Amazon would allow it to explore new business models for social commerce and cooperating in the areas of user account connectivity, data exchange, online payment and online marketing. Social commerce experiments on Twitter are multiplying with Twitter-commerce startup Chirpify securing $2m investment last week from Voyager Capital, and American Express opening a Twitter payment service.

So, will Amazon follow suit over here in the West and buy up Twitter? Or will it be eBay?

Article courtesy of Social Commerce Today

I was lucky enough to get Incident Tech’s new gTar, a MIDI/DSP-based guitar that is perfect for both teaching and composition. The guitar, with the current software and feature set, isn’t quite the shredder’s dream – yet – but as a teaching system it’s excellent and I found it quite playable both “live” and while recording MIDI music.

To be clear, this is not an electric guitar with built-in pickups. You can’t plug it into an amp and go all Valhallen on your basement without an iPhone or iPod. Instead, the guitar outputs MIDI signals for each string and fret and can either connect directly to an app like Garage Band or Logic or you can connect it to an amp via the headphone-out jack. The gTar also has a series of embedded LEDs in the neck and, using your iPhone or iPod, you can play along to a preset number of open source and licensed songs. A free play mode turns the iPod into a mini amp with multiple instruments and a custom light show maker.

I haven’t had the chance to really sit down with the gTar and the attendant iOS app to really understand it fully but from my brief interactions I’ve found it to be far cooler than I originally imagined. Given that it has a full set of real, tunable steel strings coupled with a unique fret and vibration sensor, it seems to me like the perfect way for a guitarist to branch out into electronic composition without much fuss or cost.

I did see a bit of lag in the iOS app, especially when in Free Play mode, and the audio quality wasn’t excellent coming out of the tinny speakers. However, once I connected the auxiliary output, I saw better performance. This, for example, is how it sounds plugged right into the microphone jack and recorded to Garage Band.

You’ll notice just a bit of lag and some bum notes when I strum but for the most part I’m able to play normally and the guitar and phone keep up. There are two ways to strum the strings. You can either use a standard plectrum that, for the most part, works well or you can use a more precise metal plectrum, called the SmartPick, which closes a circuit and ensures the MIDI output is a bit cleaner. Most guitarists would probably steer clear of a metal pick, but it’s your choice.

Plugging the guitar via USB directly into Garage Band, on the other hand, gives a direct MIDI signal that allows me to do stuff like this:

Because it outputs digital data, you can change the “voices” on the fly and add effects and delays. The iOS app has a number of built-in effects including distortion and chorus and you control the level with the lightpad that appears on the phone screen.

Given the limited time I’ve had with this thing I’m loath to make a final judgement but as it stands I’m quite impressed with this 1.0 release and look forward to seeing what Incident has in store both in terms of on-board firmware improvements and in improvements to the iOS app. As it stands, however, the gTar is very playable and very fun.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

The Nest thermostat has already gone through a hardware revision or two and found its way onto plenty of physical and virtual store shelves, but parent company Nest Labs is eager to get it into even more households in short order.

The Palo Alto company has just announced that it has teamed up with energy providers from across the country that will see new climate-control services (not to mention some rebates) go live for customers in a handful of markets.

So far, the list of partners includes National Grid, NRG Energy, NRG subsidiaries Reliant and Green Mountain Energy, Austin Energy and Southern California Edison. You can probably guess what markets those last two serve. These newly forged partnerships could see adoption of the household gadget surge — customers who ink deals with National Grid, for instance, can claim a $100 rebate to help defray the costs of a Nest thermostat.

While the others don’t offer much in the way of actual cash back, Nest’s tie-ups emphasize the long-term value of having a Nest over a run-of-the-mill thermostat. The way the folks at Nest look at it, their gadget is only going to become more useful as the days get longer and warmer, and those new services I mentioned earlier should only help matters when it comes to the cost-conscious.

First up is Nest’s so-called Rush Hour Rewards, which are meant to reduce the load on already-strained power stations once it starts getting really hot outside. Rather than cranking the temperature down low and leaving it there as a hapless human might, the Nest instead gets a feel for the sorts of climates its users prefer and will sporadically turn down the temperature to keep things within that preferred range. By occasionally introducing blasts of cold air instead of just leaving things to run at full blast, the Nest can keep your house at about the same temperature as before without much of a corresponding bump on the bill.

Also part of the package is what Nest calls “seasonal savings,” which will see the smart thermostat measure user temperature preferences over the course of the year and make minor modifications over the course of a few weeks. The idea is to reduce a user’s heating bill by carefully acclimating them to a new, more cost-efficient temperature scheme without the residents even noticing.

For now, only customers who select certain plans with those power companies can use these new services, but I very much doubt that team Nest is content to leave things as they are. These sorts of deals will only serve to raise the company’s profile, and buy-in from power partners is a big deal for Nest especially as the company’s rivals have moved to make their own wares smarter. Consider Honeywell: it already filed a lawsuit against Nest last year for supposed acts of copyright infringement, an allegation that Nest Labs vigorously disagrees with. Meanwhile, the conglomerate is gearing up to release a rather handsome smart thermostat of its own, so deals like these could help Nest stay a step ahead of the pack.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Online note-taking company Evernote revealed something very interesting via its CEO Phil Libin, who told IDG News Service that his company wants to design hardware products and eventually make them itself. Libin said Evernote will move soon to start releasing Evernote-branded gadgets, which will be co-designed and manufactured by external OEM partners.

Libin didn’t share too much in terms of details around what kind of products we might see bearing the Evernote logo, offering only that they’d look to create devices that are “new and magical” in the IDG interview, instead of wading in to compete with others in existing categories.

Evernote has already done some work with hardware partners and products, like the Evernote Smart Notebook by Moleskine. The book allows users to snap a photo of its pages, which use “specially formatted paper” designed to work specifically with Evernote, and have their handwritten notes converted to a digital format. It seems likely this is the type of product Libin is referring to: ones that uniquely suit Evernote’s vision of a pervasive, constantly connected digital notebook that stores any kind of media.

So while we probably won’t see an Evernote Phone or Evernote Tablet, other opportunities would seem to abound. Image- and audio-capturing devices, for instance, with direct connections to Evernote make a lot of sense in the same vein ans the Moleskine connected notebook.

A hardware ecosystem would probably still be a secondary concern for Evernote, which remains focused on the problem of building apps that work seamlessly across devices according to Libin, but it could be a route toward greater visibility among the general public, and toward greater engagement from existing users.

We’ve reached out to Evernote directly to see if they can share more about their hardware plans, but they did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

[via Engadget]

Article courtesy of TechCrunch