Hot Deal: RAVPower Element 10400mAh external battery for just $23.99

Running out of juice in the middle of the day is among the worst experiences the common smartphone user can run into. Battery technology is improving, but hasn’t reached it’s prime state just yet. For the hard-core user, keeping a device alive can be a real problem. In the battle to keep your smartphone brearthing, there is one kind of accessory users will never mind carrying around – external batteries.

These amazing gadgets carry a large battery, which can charge any of your devices via USB. They are as expensive as they are helpful, though. You should never let go of a good deal, and today we have found an offer that many of you will love.

Amazon is currently selling the RAVPower Element 10400 mAh external battery for just $23.99, a price that is very low if you consider its usual $79.99 price point. It is available both in black and white, and it qualifies for Prime shipping.

To put things into perspective, this charger can hold 10,400 mAh of power. The best smartphone batteries out there carry about 3,000 mAh (or a bit more) of juice. That means this external battery allows you to charge most phones multiple times.

• Buy RAVPower Element 10400mAh external battery for just $23.99

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Lookout Receives Additional $150M In Funding In Order To Secure Enterprise Mobile Applications

You’ve probably heard of Lookout, the mobile security company based in San Francisco. Many people use their products on Android, iOS and Kindle devices. If you search Lookout Mobile Security on the Google Play Store you’ll stumble upon four current apps available by Lookout: Lookout Antivirus & Security, Heartbleed Mobile Security, Zapper Task Killer & Manager and a FREE Lost Phone Tracker. The most used one is probably the first one listed here, Lookout’s Antivirus is an extremely capable piece of software, I’ve personally used it for a while mainly out of curiosity. You’ve probably used Heartbleed a few months ago to find out whether your device is affected with the Heartbleed bug which rocked the Android world at that time. The last two apps are kind of self-explanatory.

Lookout seems to be doing good as far as business and finances are concerned, their transition to the consumer market is proceeding as planned, They received $150 million of additional investments from Bezos Expeditions (owned by Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos), Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley Investment Management and Wellington Management. If we add this up to the $55 million Lookout received from Deutsch Telekom, Qualcomm Ventures, Greylock Ventures and Mithril, they have received a total of $280 million in investments. Lookout preloads its service on T-Mobile, Sprint and AT&T phones which on its own gives this company a great number of users, approximately 50 million. Lookout is aiming to replicate the success it had in the consumer market inside business applications and accounts. CEO Jim Dolce states that “The market opportunity is huge, so as you can imagine there are a lot of legacy vendors like Symantec and new entrants entering the space.”

All of this makes perfect sense if you think about it for a bit. Considering we do more and more financial business over the internet, it is kind of logical investors want to invest in ventures like Lookout. Financial transactions over the internet are just an example of course. People are always concerned about security and I believe that won’t change anytime soon. In this world we live in today it is hard to keep anything a secret and companies like Lookout can profit out of the whole situation by offering the best security around in order to protect not just your finances, but devices and whatever is on them as best as they can.

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American smartphone buyers prioritize LTE and screen size – what do you want in your phone?

A sound smartphone adviser will tell you there is no “perfect” phone. Personal preferences play the most important role in choosing the right device, but this doesn’t mean we don’t collectively tend to prefer certain features or factors over others.

A new study by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech is shedding some light on what American new smartphone buyers tend to look for. Americans are all about speed, so it’s obvious most users will prefer a device that has 4G LTE compatibility. This does include most devices nowadays, but this doesn’t yet make it less of a factor. We all want that LTE!

Another important variable is screen size. The display is the window into the smartphone experience, so it makes sense that users put this specification in high priority. I prefer larger displays, which offer ease to your typing. Some may want a smaller screen, which usually makes devices easier to hold.

Research and influences

There is a process we all follow when purchasing a new product. You may look for friendly advice or professional reviews, habits this study also happens to dig into. Kantar states iPhone buyers tend to do the least research before buying a phone. This makes sense, considering Apple has its reputation and a huge following that will say wonders about Apple’s gadgets.

This study reveals that about 25% of new smartphone buyers turn to friends for advice, while nearly 25% uses the carrier’s website. The next most popular advice would come from other websites (like us). We would also be wrong if we thought the internet is now taking over the world, as 64% of purchases are made in traditional brick & mortar stores… 24% of smartphone sales are done online.

Vancouver Sun

It seems stores are full of Samsung fans. A whopping 64% of users are recommended Samsung devices by in-store representatives, while only 30% are recommended an Apple smartphone. A bit over half of do buy a Galaxy device, while the rest go for an iPhone or another Android device.

Oddly enough, the above-mentioned specs are usually among the first I ask friends about when they seek for my advice. Size preferences, price ranges and design are crucial, so keep that in mind next time you need to help someone out.

Via: Phone Arena;

Source: Kantar Worldpanel ComTech;



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Google Stars Nightly Build Extracted And Leaked For Public Consumption

Earlier in the week we got to take another look at a more recent build of Google Stars thanks to Florian Kiersch, who was also the person to first bring Google Stars to the public’s attention back when we first heard about it. In his more recent post from earlier in the week he points out the changes from Google’s Bookmarks replacement extension and says that things have gotten some visual upgrades and tweaks. He also stated that the mobile version now looks more polished, and that overall Google Stars had functioned better, but he still didn’t think that it was ready for prime time.

While it could still be a ways off, Google Stars is now something that eager users can at least play with in its current state. Thanks to Florian Kiersch, anyone that is willing to play with an early test build of Google Stars has the capability to install the unpacked extension. Kiersch was apparently able to pull out a nightly build of the extension for public use, and has uploaded the .crx file to a cloud server which we have the link to below. Just like it was described, the Stars extension sits next to your other extensions in the omnibox in Chrome, but the button is actually in the address bar where the old bookmark button used to be. So as stated when this is released officially or for anyone who decides to play with this build, it does replace your bookmark button.

Upon using the new extension, you’ll also notice that a new dropdown pops up with a selection of options that you can utilize after the bookmark gets saved,(when you “star” things)like adding it to a specific folder, and the ability to change the bookmarks description as well as the web address if needed all from the dropdown menu. You also have a button to immediately trash anything you “star” from the dropdown menu as well, so you don’t have to open up Google Stars and navigate to it. Easy right? Up top you have your settings menu along with the ability for filtering what you want to look at. You can narrow things down to image, video, or web categories, or you can just leave it on all and everything that you have ever starred will be displayed. Everything is also dated, starting from the most recent things you star to the oldest. The list view works pretty nicely, and changing back and forth between lists and grids has a nice little animation. All in all it seems to work pretty well, and while it seems fairly stable for where it’s at it is a nightly build and not meant for every day use so there are probably some bugs somewhere. Still, it’s fun to play with so if you wanted to check it out for yourself, hit the link and get your hands on it. Google had recently blocked the installation of extensions from outside sources, but you can easily bypass this as it’s merely a security restriction to prevent malicious extensions from harming your computer. Simply save the downloaded .crx file of the chrome extension to your desktop(or anywhere you like), open up the extensions menu from settings/tools/extensions, then drag and drop the .crx file on top of the extensions window. That’s it. Have fun and let us know what you think if you decide to check it out.

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Google may be working on a smart assistant for enterprise with HP

Google Now is one of Android’s killer features, but it pretty much only works for consumer purposes. For most people, that’s perfectly fine, but in Google’s eyes there is a huge, untapped market for a digital voice assistant for enterprise customers. According to a new report from The Information, Google may be working with HP to bring some type of Google Now for business onto smartphones.

The theory behind using Google Now in an enterprise is that it would be easy for an employee to use voice commands to check out company specific information like product inventory levels without having to manually search for and type things. It’s already easy to use Google Now to check the weather or sports scores, so it makes sense that if it could integrate into a business system, it could be a huge hit. If any company knows about business and enterprise systems, it’s definitely HP, so if this report is true Google picked a pretty solid partner.

The report also mentions that HP and Google may be looking to do something past software and may actually co-develop a Nexus device specifically for enterprise users. It’s definitely not the Nexus 6 that we’ve seen break cover so often recently, but with enterprise being a great market to break into, I wouldn’t be surprised if a Google/HP partnership does happen.

What are your thoughts on Google trying to compete for business consumers? Smart idea, or should they just stick with consumer products?

source: Business Insider

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Google testing Ultra Violet “chat heads” for Hangouts on desktop

Google is reportedly working on a new feature for the desktop version of Hangouts that will make chatting a much better experience for users. This new feature is called “Ultra Violet” and will allow you to set up floating conversations that you can move around your screen, as opposed to just having minimized tabs like we do now.

The circles float around like Facebook’s famous “chat heads” and expand into a full conversation when clicked. Whenever a new conversation starts, another chat head is added to the row below the current conversations, which makes it easy to keep track of which conversations are currently active.

Ultra Violet is in a pretty experimental stage, relying on APIs that are only available in Chrome’s dev channel release. Being in such an early phase also means there are tons of bugs that need to be squashed before we see anything released to the public. There’s no word on if the feature would come to mobile devices, or if it will finally allow Hangouts to sync text messages, but we should hear more about it in the future.

source: Android Police

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Google experiments with new Hangouts featuring Messenger-like chat bubbles [LEAK]

Although highly functional, the current Hangouts app for Android has grown into this bloated mess that not even Google knows how to sort out. While many of you are still waiting around for Google Voice integration, video/voice messages, or maybe even MMS to arrive, it seems Google is already experimenting with an entirely new Hangouts — only for the desktop.

Leaked by the guys at Caschys Blog the new Google Hangouts for desktop — codenamed Ultra Violet — features Facebook Messenger style chat heads for quickly switching between conversations. These bubbles can be moved around your desktop and in their current state, rely on experimental Chrome features so stability is more than likely on the shaky side.

Other than that, it seems that’s all there really is to this leak and there’s nothing indicating that this version of Hangouts will ever make its way out of the experimental stage. If it ever does, we imagine Google would want to keep a unified experience across desktop and mobile, so maybe this is a hint of things to come?

[Caschys Blog]

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