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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January 20,2020

Washington D.C., Jan 20: An American bride asked for money from her invitees so that they can be on the 'exclusive guest list'.

Weddings can be surely expensive. But is it feasible for one to charge the guests to make up for the expenses?

According to Fox News, that is exactly what happened in a recent American wedding. A 19-year-old shared on Reddit that her cousin was getting married on Sunday and announced that she would charge 50 dollars to those who wanted to attend her wedding.

"She said that they can Venmo her money so there won't be no [sic] problems and everyone who paid will be added onto the 'exclusive guest list' which basically means you won't have to wait in line while other guests pay," wrote the user named DaintySheep.

While she refused to pay for entry into her cousin's wedding the bride-to-be contacted the elders in the family which ended up in an embarrassing situation.

"She wanted to get the money she spent on her special day back. I told her I wouldn't be able to come because this was outrageous and that I wish her well on her special day. She contacted my aunt and my aunt called me cheap and rude. My parents offered to pay for my entry, but I refused," continued the disheartened girl.

While in almost every nook and cranny of the world gifting the bride-groom with money is a tradition, asking for money from friends and family to replenish the money spent on a wedding is can be said to be a rare scenario.

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July 2,2020

Leiden, Jul 2: Astronomers have discovered a luminous galaxy caught in the act of reionizing its surrounding gas only 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The research, led by Romain Meyer, PhD student at UCL in London, UK, has been presented at the virtual annual meeting of the European Astronomical Society (EAS).

Studying the first galaxies that formed 13 billion years ago is essential to understanding our cosmic origins. One of the current hot topics in extragalactic astronomy is 'cosmic reionization,' the process in which the intergalactic gas was ionized (atoms stripped of their electrons).

Cosmic reionization is similar to an unsolved murder: We have clear evidence for it, but who did it, how and when? We now have strong evidence that hydrogen reionization was completed about 13 billion years ago, in the first billion years of the universe, with bubbles of ionized gas slowly growing and overlapping.

The objects capable of creating such ionized hydrogen bubbles have however remained mysterious until now: the discovery of a luminous galaxy in which 60-100 percent of ionizing photons escape, is likely responsible for ionizing its local bubble. This suggests the case is closer to being solved.

The two main suspects for cosmic reionization are usually 1) a population of numerous faint galaxies leaking ~10 percent of their energetic photons, and 2) an 'oligarchy' of luminous galaxies with a much larger percentage (>50 percent) of photons escaping each galaxy.

In either case, these first galaxies were very different from those today: galaxies in the local universe are very inefficient leakers, with only <2-3 percent of ionizing photons escaping their host. To understand which galaxies governed cosmic reionization, astronomers must measure the so-called escape fractions of galaxies in the reionization era.

The detection of light from excited hydrogen atoms (the so-called Lyman-alpha line) can be used to infer the fraction of escaping photons. On the one hand, such detections are rare because reionization-era galaxies are surrounded by neutral gas which absorbs that signature hydrogen emission.

On the other hand, if this hydrogen signal is detected it represents a 'smoking gun' for a large ionized bubble, meaning we have caught a galaxy reionizing its surroundings. The size of the bubble and the galaxy's luminosity determines whether it is solely responsible for creating this ionized bubble or if unseen accomplices are necessary.

The discovery of a luminous galaxy 800 million years after the Big Bang supports the scenario where an 'oligarchy' of bright leakers emits most of the ionizing photons.

"It is the first time we can point to an object responsible for creating an ionized bubble, without the need for a contribution from unseen galaxies.

Additional observations with the upcoming James Webb Space Telescope will enable us to study further what is likely one of the best suspects for the unsolved case of cosmic reionization," said Meyer.

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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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