Through the years, we’ve always had an interest in good Internet start pages here at MakeUseOf. Of course, one of the most popular and well-used start pages, iGoogle, has been sacrificed by Google. This provided Netvibes with a surge of new users and of course even greater interest here at MUO. We’ve offered interesting ways to to use Netvibes to do things like manage your life, or use it as a feed reader. The growing volume of widgets and tools that are available on Netvibes makes it a useful tool for all sorts of great things. One of the uses...
After so much hype, many people were disappointed to see Motorola's first phone influenced by Google. Motorola was acquired by Google two years ago for $12.5 billion, but the real reason why Google bought Motorola wasn't clear. Motorola's patents weren't that useful, Motorola's market share is declining and the company continues to lose money every quarter.
Moto X is supposed to be Motorola's "hero" device, the flagship that shows the new direction of the company. More than 70 Google employees work at Motorola: from Motorola's new CEO, Dennis Woodside, to Steve Horowitz, Motorola's head of software and one of the original members of the Android team. "Nobody's buying products because of minor incremental improvements to Android. So let's rely on what the Android team does and build experiences that will leverage Google services," says Steve Horowitz.
Motorola's phones now use tweaked version of the stock Android. There are some changes, some new apps and some new versions of the stock apps, but they're added on top of the stock Android, so you'll see faster updates. Motorola not only uses Google's Android software, but it tries to create hardware that makes it easy to use Google's software and enhances its features.
Moto X is assembled in the US, in a former Nokia factory. "Motorola placed its entire assembly operation for the X in Fort Worth, Texas. Components come from 16 states and countries around the world, but 2,000 or so workers assemble the phones in Texas and ship them all over America," informs The Verge. Phones are personalized using an online service called Moto Maker, which lets you select the color of the backplate, the front and of the volume buttons, add a signature, pick some matching headphones and make the phone your own. In the future, you'll also be able to pick a different material: wood instead of plastic. At launch, Moto Maker will be limited to AT&T. Motorola will open it to the other US carriers in the near future: Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile and US Cellular.
"When a car company allows you to choose your interior details or Nike allows you to design your own shoes, it creates what Moto X head product manager Lior Ron calls 'the Ikea effect.' 'Once you finish assembling it, you're emotionally attached to that furniture,' Ron says. 'It's now yours. We see the same attachment here. You've basically gone through the process to build your phone - you are now emotionally attached to that phone.'"
The phone uses two low-power processors that are used by Moto X's most important features. Moto X is always listening, so you can say "ok google now" and then ask something. It's called touchless control and it always you to use your phone without having to touch it. The hotword feature is available in the Google Search app, but Moto X's hardware makes it more useful because you don't have to interact with the device first. There's also a gesture that quickly launches the camera app: just shake your wrist.
Moto X always shows the time and some notification icons. This feature works well because the phone has an AMOLED screen and black pixels are unlit, saving power.
So why are people disappointed? The phone doesn't have great specs: a 4.7-inch 720p AMOLED display, a dual-core Snapdragon S4 Pro 1.7GHz CPU, 2GB of RAM, 2200 mAh battery, 10 MP camera. So last year, you might say. A mid-range phone that costs the same as Samsung's Galaxy S4 or HTC One ($200 on contract for the 16GB version)? Non-removable battery and no SD card?
"We could go and make a higher-resolution screen, but it would just suck battery and nobody would know the difference," says Motorola's Jim Wicks. Most likely, Motorola couldn't source from Samsung a 1080p AMOLED screen and the 720p display was good enough. The dual-core CPU is cheaper, improves battery life and has a similar performance with the quad-core S4 Pro. It uses the same GPU from Nexus 4 and the new Nexus 7 and that's great. A phone is not about raw power, it's about responsiveness, battery life, ease of use. Most of the time, that raw power is left unused. Phones are more about GPU than CPU because responsiveness is more important than performance.
Moto X is not about specs, it's about experience and that's a lesson from the Apple school of thought. Specs are great, but only if they're actually used to build a great experience. A 400+ PPI 1080p screen and a quad-core CPU have their drawbacks and they're probably overkill. Apple's products don't use them, but they work well and are often more responsive than Android devices. The secret is probably software optimization and the integration between hardware and software.
"We've done additional optimizations on top of that such as optimizing the entire Linux user space to move it to an ARM instruction set, cache optimization, Dalvik just-in-time optimization, and we've changed the file system. It's full hardware-software integration to deliver best-in-class performance," says Iqbal Arshad, Motorola's senior vice president of engineering.
It's more about a high-end experience than high-end specs and that's hard to measure. People read the specs and assume that the phone with the fastest processor is the best one, but that's not always true. It's also about tricks that make the device appear more responsive than it really is, tricks that conserve battery, animations that make the experience more pleasant, squeezing every bit of performance from the hardware.
Moto X tries win the specs wars by ignoring it and focusing on something else: the human factor. Patriotism, esthetics, customization, efficiency - all of these try to make the phone more appealing. It's a new Motorola and they're just getting started.
"The Moto X will go on sale in the United States at the end of August or the beginning of September for a suggested retail price of $199.99 to customers who sign a two-year contract at five of the biggest U.S. mobile network operators," informs Reuters.
Flipboard, the popular social magazine app for mobile users, announced on July 23rd that its socially curated magazines are now available via the web, accessible from any desktop PC. Flipboard users are able to create virtual magazines by sharing collections of articles and content from around the web. Up until now, after creating a Flipboard magazine covering any topic imaginable, those Flipboard curators were only able to share those magazines with other mobile users. Now, anyone can read Flipboard magazines that are published to the web by mobile users. The content of these online magazines cover everything from health and...
Many Mac users have installed Windows on their Macs with the help of Boot Camp Assistant software from Apple to get access to games and software that are exclusively available for Windows. Users who have installed recent versions of Windows on Mac via Boot Camp probably have noticed that Macintosh drive appears in Windows Explorer [...]
Today’s web apps and extensions seem to have finally cottoned on to the idea that pictures are extremely useful when it comes to creativity and desirability. I guess we have the likes of Pinterest and Tumblr to thank for that. A collection of images manages to express so much in a quick viewing. It gives a great overview to the sorts of things that appeal to the collector, and makes you wonder if you like the item yourself. However, in order to have people make a beautiful collection of images, we need to ensure it’s easy for them to do...
Not sure why your computer keeps crashing? Investigate – all while getting to know your Windows system better – using built-in tools that come with Windows. If you’ve been afraid to poke around your system and figure out how to maintain it, don’t fear: it’s simpler than you think. There are plenty of articles on this very site pointing out third-party tools for maintaining your Windows system. What we occasionally overlook, however, are the tools Windows provides out of the box for doing the same things. Sure, they may be less feature-filled than some of the downloadable options – but...
Before the days of the Internet, most marketers were stuck using the tried and true vehicles for obtaining business or sales leads. They turned to things like cold-calling over the phone, sending out mass mailings, and other efforts to reach as much people with as little effort as possible. With the advent of the Internet, and particularly social networks like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, Marketers now have a whole toolbox full of tricks to convert you into a buying customer. The reality for most people on social networks is that they want to spend time connecting with others, having meaningful...
Spotify is often called a music streaming service, because, well, it’s a service that streams music. Obviously. However… Quick, stop the presses and hold the front pages, Spotify deals in more than just music. I know, right? Because audio doesn’t necessarily mean music, as any fan of podcasts will tell you. Comedy albums have been a thing for over 100 years, with gramophone records of a comic named Cal Stewart reciting humorous short stories having been released as long ago as 1898. famous comedians and comedy troupes have released albums in every recent decade, and the medium is still immensely...
Majority of computer users own at least one external hard drive these days. While it’s always a good idea to format the external hard drive with NTFS because of its advantages, sometimes you might have to format your external hard drive with FAT32. For instance, if you want to transfer files from a Mac to [...]
In a nice development for photo sharing enthusiasts, Google has launched Views, a photo-sharing hub that, unlike any other, is all about sharing 360 degree panoramas or photo spheres as Google calls them. Before you start to wonder at the complexity of composing 360 degree shots, it is probably already possible on your Android phone (in case you forgot). Photo spheres was one of the improvements on Android 4.2 — a direct face-off with the iPhone’s Panorama mode. The Views community hub hopes to be the catchment spot for all the panoramic captures you take with your Android (version 4.2...
Recently facebook has introduces a new feature called Embed Post that will let users to easily embedded posts, photos, videos etc on their blogs.
Currently, only a few big media publishers got early access to embeds including Mashable, CNN, The Huffington Post, Bleacher Report and People Magazine. For else you have to wait until officially released.
Using embed features you can shared only public content that share on Pages and personal profiles.
Embed Facebook Post:
Here’s a trick, so you can easily embed any facebook status on your website.
Just open any facebook status and copy the permalink by right-clicking on the date of the post and replace it with URL_HERE in the below code and then copy and paste these code on your website.
Facebook allows users to embed public posts, including photos and videos, on their websites. This workaround will let you embed any Facebook post even if embeds are not enabled for you.
As any of you who follow the news will no doubt be aware, the British Prime Minister David Cameron recently announced plans to ban Internet pornography. ISPs in the U.K. will, by the end of this year, be required to block all porn sites (and any other sites that get lumped in with them) from being viewed unless users actively opt-out of the filters and opt-in to being able to look at pornography. This isn’t illegal porn, which the vast majority of people would accept has no place in normal society. Instead, this is run-of-the-mill pornography that is perfectly legal...
Technology has come a long way over the past few decades with the advent of increasingly complex bits of software, hardware, and networking. Despite this progress, technology still hasn’t managed to solve one of the most fundamental forces in life: entropy. No matter how hard you try to fight it, time breaks down all things and the result is clutter – computers are no exception. The best we can do in light of entropy is to repair the chaos ourselves and that’s where WinOptimizer 10 steps in. Ashampoo WinOptimizer 10 is available for $39.99 USD on Windows XP, Vista, 7,...
In my online work, I spend a lot of time examining what people are searching for on the Internet. I’m not the only one. We’ve always been into Google search here at MUO. We’ve offered everything from a cheat sheet of Google search shortcuts and tips, and help with getting search results for your site to look the way you want them to. We’ve also closely watched the value of search results as Google has continually attempted to upgrade its algorithm. In 2012, Yaara felt that search results were much cleaner, while Justin offered up tips on how to extract...
Choosing some sort of password management strategy to deal with the huge amount of passwords we need is crucial. If you’re like most people, you probably store your passwords in your brain. To remember them all, you have to cut corners — choosing weak, easy-to-remember passwords and reusing them for multiple accounts. But there are better ways — a good password management tool will allow you to use secure passwords without devoting lots of time to memorization. We’ll cover a variety of different password management tools here, from the high-tech to the traditional. It’s important that you sit down and...
Enjoy a streamlined version of YouTube that’s usable from your couch and lets you follow the channels you love, easily. YouTube’s TV version just might be the best way to use the web’s best video site, and most people aren’t aware it even exists. Longtime YouTube users might remember YouTube XL, Google’s first attempt at bringing YouTube to the big screen. It worked well enough, but the current incarnation – called YouTube TV – is a vast improvement. It’s controllable with just a few buttons, visible far from the TV screen and generally much cleaner than the standard site. And...
Don’t worry email isn’t dead or even old-fashioned yet, whatever the naysayers might be predicting. Social media might be taking over as ice-breakers, but the email is not only holding its own, it is also the strongest prong of the trident when it comes to having a handshake with someone who matters on the Web. Very few people in fact master the art of emailing. My colleague Joshua called it email sending anxiety. It is a very real thing and surprising, because all it takes are a few precisely paced tips to email efficiently. Sending professional emails gives an intangible...
The Windows boot logo screen is probably the only area of Windows operating system that can’t be customized easily. In fact, no version of Windows allowed users to change the default boot logo without using third-party tools. Even though hundreds of customization tools were released even before the release of Windows 7 RTM, there were [...]
