Remember back in June when I said Apple hoped to schedule a special event in October to show off a new wearable device? Remember how I also said this: “Could things change between now and fall? That’s certainly possible.” Turns out that was a prescient hedge, because things have changed. Apple now plans to unveil a new wearable alongside the two next-generation iPhones we told you the company will debut on September 9th.

John Paczkowski | Re/code

Ich hatte mir diesen Abend ohnehin schon freigehalten.

We don’t want you to worry about choosing the right plan or having enough space. So today, we’re simplifying Dropbox Pro to a single plan that stays at $9.99/month, but now comes with 1 TB (1,000 GB) of space.

The Dropbox Blog

Für reinen Online-Speicherplatz zahlen wir schon ganz bald nichts mehr. Dann stehen nur noch die hintergeschalteten Dienste im Vordergrund.

Warum Prozentwertungen für Gadgets und Videospiele totaler Quatsch sind kaum Aussagekraft besitzen, zeigt einmal mehr der ‚Verge Score‘ von 5.9/10 für das Amazon Fire Phone, das nach ersten Schätzungen nicht einmal die Hardcore-Shopping-Enthusiasten erreicht hat.

Amazon famously never gives sales figures for any of the devices it sells, preferring to let its financial results do the talking. […] But we can have a stab at estimating how many Fire Phones are in use, based on data from Chitika, which runs an ad network.

According to a release from Chitika, looking at activity on its ad network in the 20 days after the Fire Phone’s release, the Fire Phone accounted for 0.02% of activity – although a more precise figure, in another graph, shows it as around 0.015%.

The Guardian

Selbst wenn Charles Arthur mit seinen Annahmen grob daneben liegt, hätte ich erwartet, dass bereits die prominente Platzierung auf Amazon.com, dem Online-Einkaufsportal schlechthin, mehr als nur einige Zehntausend Besteller zur Folge hat.

➝ Video

Hashtag: Hyperlapse. Instagram setzt mit Hyperlapse (kostenlos; App-Store-Link) das um, was Microsoft vor drei Wochen als Technik-Demo präsentierte.

Cliff Kuang gehört die Exklusiv-Reportage zur dritten App¹ der Facebook-Tochter, die ganz großes Kino (in Form ganz kleiner Videoschnipsel) ist.

Inspired by a demo in which he saw gyroscopes attached to cameras to de-blur their images, Karpenko had an aha moment: Smartphones didn’t have nearly enough power to replicate video-editing software, but they did have built-in gyroscopes. On a smartphone, instead of using power-hungry algorithms to model the camera’s movement, he could measure it directly. And he could funnel those measurements through a simpler algorithm that could map one frame to the next, giving the illusion that the camera was being held steady.

Wired.com

Eric Johnson schrieb in einer Handvoll schnell zu überfliegender Absätze den dreijährigen Startup-Verlauf von Twitch zusammen. Er endet mit einem Ausblick, der wesentlich dazu beigetragen haben dürfte das Amazon 970 Millionen für die Streaming-Plattform von derzeit (nur) 55 Millionen Zuschauern zahlte.

So, what’s next? Shear said most of the company is heads-down on improving video streaming quality and speed. However, he has a bone to pick with a subset of those people who say they’ve never played a videogame: Try as they might to avoid the label, many of them are actually gamers. On a recent airplane flight, his seat-mate listened to him explain how Twitch worked and then waved it off because “I’m not much of a gamer.”

“And then he pulls out his iPad and spends the next six hours playing videogames!” Shear said. “I’m like, dude! You’re totally a gamer! We just don’t have the games you play yet. When we do, you’ll watch.”

Re/code

Gamelofts Asphalt 8: Airborne (kostenlos; universal; App-Store-Link) ist einer der ersten iOS-Titel, der ohne externes Zubehör live vom iPhone aus sendet. Kein Wunder also, das Google hier mitbot. Der Direktübertragung haftet etwas an, das YouTube-Aufzeichnungen vermissen. Ben Davis formulierte es überzogen romantisch, aber verständlich:

In a way, the success of Twitch is not really a story about games — people would be playing games anyway. It’s about the desire to connect.

Vulture

WSJ: For most handset makers Android is the only option. Is that a problem?

Mr. Yu: It’s difficult to say. We have tried using the Windows Phone OS. But it has been difficult to persuade consumers to buy a Windows phone. It wasn’t profitable for us. We were losing money for two years on those phones. So for now we’ve decided to put any releases of new Windows phones on hold. We have worries about Android being the only option, but we have no choice. And we have a good collaboration with Google.

Juro Osawa + Yun-Hee Kim | The Wall Street Journal

Huawei beantwortet (indirekt) einmal mehr die Frage, warum Microsoft sich das Telefongeschäft von Nokia kaufen musste. Ihr Kommentar zu Tizen: „No chance“.

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Xiaomi seems to be following Samsung’s method of copying Apple while it is starting out, and (hopefully) once it feels it has gotten enough traction, it will start coming up with its own designs. The Galaxy S was definitely a derivative product, but once Samsung got a little more into the Android smartphone business, it started to go off in its own direction. (A massive worldwide lawsuit-fest between Apple and Samsung helped, too.) If Xiaomi wants to avoid the mess we’ve seen Apple and Samsung go through, it will have to stay relatively close to its home turf until it comes up with its own designs. […]

Xiaomi is a company in need of some self-confidence, though. It has built an amazing device, but it has sullied the Mi4 by cloning the iPhone design. Xiaomi is like an extremely smart student that still cheats off the person next to it because it doesn’t trust itself to come up with the right answer.

Ron Amadeo | Ars Technica

Bis das jedoch nicht passiert, steht Xiaomi für tolle Hardware, zum Kampfpreis, die nicht zufällig wie ein iPhone aussieht, sondern auch freizügig iOS nachbaut und sich mit Marketing-Material schmückt, an dem es keine Rechte hält.

Ich würde wirklich gerne sehen, welchen eigenen Beitrag die Firma von Lei Jun im weltweiten Smartphone-Markt, der sich im Moment exklusiv zwischen Android und iOS aufteilt, leisten könnte.

Im iOS-Ökosystem tummeln sich viele lebhafte Podcast-Apps, die sich gegenseitig zu neuen Höchstleistungen anstacheln. Das Ergebnis ist eine konstante Weiterentwicklung in viele Geschmacksrichtungen – von Castro über Pocket Casts (3.59 €; universal; App-Store-Link) bis Overcast. Für die nächsten 24 Stunden wagt Instacast 4 (kostenlos; universal; App-Store-Link) ein ‚Teste-mich‘-Experiment, bei dem die App zum ersten Mal ihren vorgeschalteten Download-Preis (zuletzt bei 1.79 €) verliert.

Die Podcast-Software von Martin Hering lotete bereits in der Vergangenheit verschiedene Preismodelle aus und bietet seit diesem Jahr unter dem Namen ‚Instacast Cloud‘ erstmals auch ein Abo-Modell an.

As an Instacast Cloud member you can support the ongoing development of our cloud infrastructure and get a lot of benefits on the way. During this summer leading up to the release of Instacast 5, we are planning to introduce certain cloud features that will only be available to members.

Vemedio Blog