Amazon Fire phone now official: Starting $199 for 32GB on contract with AT&T

June 19, 2014

Jun 19: Amazon just unveiled Fire, their first ever smartphone which will be sold exclusively via AT&T with a two-year contract. Pre-orders begin today and customers can either pay $199 for the 32GB version or $299 for the 64GB version. The phone ships on July 25. Amazon is also throwing in 12 months of Amazon Prime service free with Fire.

Amazon Fire phoneThe Amazon Fire sets its self apart with a couple of defining features which Dynamic Perspective and Firefly. Dynamic Perspective uses a new sensor system to respond to the way you hold, view, and move Fire, enabling experiences not possible on other smartphone. The fours sensors on each corner of the phone are also accompanied by infrared LEDs for the depth perception to work even in pitch darkness. Firefly quickly recognizes things in the real world—web and email addresses, phone numbers, QR and bar codes, movies, music, and millions of products, and lets you take action in seconds with the dedicated Firefly button.

Fire features aluminium buttons and injected moulded steel connectors for a premium look and feel. You also get a 4.7-inch HD IPS display with Corning Gorilla Glass 3 and a rubber frame for protection. The display boasts of 590nots of brightness, making it readable even in hard lighting. You also get global LTE coverage, Wi-Fi "ac" with channel bonding, NFC and Bluetooth.

It"s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset running at 2.2 GHz. There"s 2GB of RAM and internal storage options of 32GB or 64GB. There"s no mention of a microSD card slot however. The Fire also gets a 13MP rear camera with a f/2.0 lens and Optical Image Stabilisation. There"s a dedicated camera button too and pictures captured can be saved to Amazon"s Cloud Drive, which offers unlimited storage.

Multimedia is taken care of by dual stereo speakers placed on either side (horizontally) along with the Dolby Digital enhancements. The Fire also comes bundled with flat-cable earphones with magnetic earbuds for easy storage.

Fire deeply integrates Amazon exclusive services like X-Ray and Second Screen. ASAP (Advanced Streaming and Prediction) predicts which movies and TV episodes you"ll want to watch and prepares them for instant playback before you even hit play.

Mayday is now available over 3G and 4G, in addition to Wi-Fi. Simply hit the Mayday button in quick actions and an Amazon expert will appear via live video to co-pilot you through any feature on the device. Amazon experts are able to draw on the screen, talk you through how to do a task, or do it for you. This feature is available 24×7, 365 days a year, and it"s free.

Amazon will also release the SDK for Dynamic Perspective and Firefly so apps like MyFitnessPal can give you nutrition values when you point the camera to any food objects.

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Agencies
July 9,2020

Twitter has hinted that it is planning a paid subscription platform that can be reused by other teams in the future.

The news that the micro-blogging platform is building a subscription platform with a team codenamed "Gryphon" resulted in Twitter stock rising over 8% on Wednesday.

Twitter revealed its plan via a job listing that seeks a full-stack senior software engineer in New York to join "Gryphon".

Interestingly, Twitter "edited" the job listing once the news broke, removing the part about "Gryphon" and any mention of their internal team or their subscription feature. The listing said the company is looking for an Android engineer to "work on a bevy of backend engineering teams to build components that allow for experimentation to deliver the best experience possible to all of our users".

Later, Twitter users noticed that the company restored the earlier job listing that mentioned the upcoming subscription platform and "Gryphon".

A spokesperson for Twitter told CNN on Wednesday that it's only a job posting, not a product announcement.

This is not the first time Twitter has thought of a paid product. 

In 2017, it sent out a survey to users and a preview of what a premium offering of its TweetDeck app might look like, including breaking news alerts and more analytics, according to The Verge.

"We're conducting this survey to assess the interest in a new, more enhanced version of Tweetdeck. We regularly conduct user research to gather feedback about people's Twitter experience and to better inform our product investment decisions, and we're exploring several ways to make TweetDeck even more valuable for professionals," a Twitter spokesperson had said at that time.

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Agencies
June 26,2020

Facebook will introduce a new notification screen on its platform that will warn users if the article they are about to share is over 90 days old, the company announced on Thursday.

“We’re starting to globally roll out a notification screen that will let people know when news articles they are about to share are more than 90 days old,” Facebook wrote in a blog post.

The social media platform had previously introduced a context button in 2018 that provides information about the sources of articles in the News Feed. Building upon that, the new feature will inform users about the timeliness of the article.

“To ensure people have the context they need to make informed decisions about what to share on Facebook, the notification screen will appear when people click the share button on articles older than 90 days, but will allow people to continue sharing if they decide an article is still relevant,” Facebook said.

The social media giant stated that timeliness is important in understanding the context of an article and curbing the spread of misinformation on the platform.

“News publishers, in particular, have expressed concerns about older stories being shared on social media as current news, which can misconstrue the state of current events. Some news publishers have already taken steps to address this on their own websites by prominently labelling older articles to prevent outdated news from being used in misleading ways,” Facebook added.

Apart from this, the platform will also be testing a similar notification screen for information related to the global Covid-19 pandemic. The notification screen will provide information about the source of the link shared in a post if the link is related to information on Covid-19. It will also direct people to its previously introduced Covid-19 information centre for “authoritative” health information, it said.

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Agencies
June 7,2020

New Delhi, Jun 7: The Government of India (GoI) must strengthen the laws to protect animals, said People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) India CEO Dr Manilal Valliyate on Sunday, following an elephant's death in Kerala and cow injured due to ingestion of explosives in Himachal Pradesh.

"Such incidents are not just restricted to certain regions but are happening all across the country. PETA receives more than 100 similar cases every day. People send in their complaints to us, not just for cows and elephants but for so many other animals as well," he said.

The PETA chief urged the GoI to strengthen the laws established to protect animals.

"As per the current laws set out against animal cruelty, the perpetrator would only be charged Rs 50,000 as a fine. That is equivalent to no punishment at all," added PETA India CEO.

He expressed his anguish against municipal agencies as well, saying that they are not doing "serious" work. He also highlighted how cows are left on the roads to wander, after milking them, to feed on garbage, in several parts of the country.

"These injustices against animals through explosives has been going on for quite a while. But for the first time, it has received such public attention," he said.

After a pregnant elephant was fed cracker-filled pineapple and her eventual death on May 27 in Kerala's Palakkad district, a pregnant cow sustained fatal injuries on May 25 due to accidental ingestion of explosives in Dadh village of Bilaspur district of Himachal Pradesh.

One person has been arrested in the Dadh village for allegedly hurting the cow.

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