Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Software : Samsung Galaxy S5 Prime tipped for mid-June release

Software : Samsung Galaxy S5 Prime tipped for mid-June release

Samsung Galaxy S5 Prime tipped for mid-June release

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Samsung Galaxy S5 Prime tipped for mid-June release

Rumors about the latest handsets from LG and Samsung have been leapfrogging each other for weeks now, but a new report claims the two flagship handsets may be headed toward a collision course next month.

Naver.com (via The Droid Guy) caught wind of a potential release date for the Samsung Galaxy S5 Prime, the Korean manufacturer's purported attempt to one-up its own flagship Galaxy S5 with an even more high-end model.

Shunning rumors of inventory being in short supply, the latest scuttlebutt out of Korea claims the 5.2-inch S5 Prime will launch simultaneously on all three major wireless carriers in Samsung's home country "as early as the middle of next month."

Along with launch availability from SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ comes a target retail price of KRW 900,000 (about US$880, UK£523, AU$940), although the luxurious handset is expected to fall to a more affordable US$700 (about UK£416, AU$748) after pre-release discounts.

Primed for plastic?

Those details aside, prospective Galaxy S5 Prime owners may have a bigger hurdle ahead of them with the possibility the high-end device might be exclusive to Asian markets until supply catches up with potential demand in North America and Europe.

There's also the matter of what Samsung will use for the outer shell of the S5 Prime, which has been rumored to adopt a metal chassis instead of the plastic frame that faced some critical scorn on the Galaxy S5.

Regardless, Samsung is expected to pack a pixel-dense 2560 x 1440 display into the Galaxy S5 Prime powered by a quad-core Snapdragon 805 processor, 3GB RAM and a hearty 3000mAh battery.

The Prime is also said to include Android 4.4.3 KitKat, LTE-Advanced connectivity, a built-in heart rate monitor, fingerprint scanner and 16MP rear-facing camera, so all it's really missing is a firm release date.

Do Apple fans actually love Microsoft? 27m Office for iPad downloads says so

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Do Apple fans actually love Microsoft? 27m Office for iPad downloads says so

Microsoft has amassed a whopping 27 million downloads of its Office for iPad app, proving just how much Apple consumers wanted the classic productivity suite.

The announcement was made by Julia White, GM for Microsoft Office, at the TechEd North American 2014 event in Houston, according to ZDNet.

The figure is more than twice that reported by Microsoft on Twitter just over a month ago. It secured 12 million downloads by April 3, despite only launching on March 27.

The number will be vindication for the move to allow long-time rival Apple access to classic Windows software.

"If it had been done earlier, it would have been better for Microsoft frankly," Apple's CEO Tim Cook said last month, and those words seem even truer today.

Subscribers

However, the download figures don't necessarily mean more money for Microsoft, as the app itself is free, but provides a read-only experience of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. To actually create content, users need an Office 365 subscription.

In its third quarter earnings report for its fiscal year 2014, Microsoft reported 4.4 million Office 365 Home subscribers, a jump of nearly 1 million compared to the prior quarter. That figure will likely be even higher with the expansion to the iPad.

The market responded well to the new Office for iPad figures. Microsoft's shares were up $0.43 (£0.25, AU$0.46), or 1.09 per cent, to $39.97 (£23.73, AU$42.76) at the time of writing.

Interview: Cloud will make on-premise software perform better, faster says Microsoft

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Interview: Cloud will make on-premise software perform better, faster says Microsoft

It's all about the cloud

At first glance, Microsoft's annual TechEd conference has been all about cloud this year, with the announcements being new features and services on Azure rather than new versions of its server products. But many of the new Azure services are designed for companies who are still using on-premise servers, Azure technical fellow Mark Russinovich told TechRadar.

The new ExpressRoute service where you can connect your servers directly to Azure via an MPLS provider like BT rather than going over the public internet is only useful when you have servers in your company that you want to have connected to Azure over a fast link.

The same is true of the new reserved IP addresses that guarantee that what you're running on Azure will show up on the same IP address. "When you talk about being able to talk to a site from your own environment and not wanting anyone else to talk to it, that's one way to do it," explains Russinovich. "You can reserve an IP address and add it to your routers and set the access controls so the traffic from Azure can only come to you."

Or take the Azure file storage service, which lets you treat cloud storage as if it was a NAS or a file server you connect to on your local network using familiar SMB. It was the team building the web site services for Azure that originally asked for it, because file shares were the way they distributed website code between servers for failover and setting those up on Azure was a lot of work.

"They told us they needed a file share. 'Why do we need to create virtual machines, turn on file sharing and figure out failover for them just because we want to share files between the servers?' They had to either rewrite their infrastructure to not share files that way or pay this management and configuration burden of creating these severs that have file sharing in the traditional server sense. And many of the people writing web sites wanted the same things. Now it's just file sharing as a service."

That means if you have applications that use a file share, you can easily move them to the cloud. But it's also useful if you're taking advantage of the new developer feature that lets you run a Windows client on Azure for the first time, for building and testing software, because you can build and test apps that will work with a file share when you run them on your own systems. In fact, points out Russinovich, "Anything where we talk about hybrid cloud is actually focused on on-premise customers; Azure site recovery is completely focused on them."

The way that works is that if your entire site goes down, you can switch over to working on Azure immediately because the site recovery service puts a copy of all your workloads and data up there and keeps it up to date automatically. "Today what I need to do to make a highly available disaster recovery service that's resilient to failure is I have to go to my boss and say we need to get hosting and we need to buy servers there and we need to configure the network for them and that's just the first steps for a disaster recovery system which we're not going to use very often but we will pay the cost of having ready to go constantly. Or I can use Azure where I can spin it up quickly and I'm only paying for storage which is really cheap."

There are also new features in Azure Active Directory, the service that connects you to Office 365. The premium version can tell you if any of your PCs are showing up as being part of botnets detected by Microsoft's security team, for example. "We're able to correlate security events," Russinovich explains, "so we have Office customers who are being attacked and our telemetry will tell us what's going on. If they're getting spear phished, we can divert those messages into junk mail folders so the users don't even see them."

Azure Active Directory Premium includes a preview of a new service that Russinovich hopes will "help IT get a handle on this shadow IT thing" by finding out which cloud services users are sending data to. "We're trying to give them the control without getting in the way of the users because if we get in the way of the users they will just bypass them – and if your users are bypassing you they're creating problems for you." The idea isn't to find cloud storage like Dropbox and turn it off; it's to find out about it so you can manage it. "IT is in the business of managing credentials and securing them properly but when it comes to cloud services, business managers are storing these things, losing track of them, putting them in spreadsheets... Once IT discovers them, they can say 'we need to help you manage those credentials, because if you don't we're putting the whole business at risk'.

New server software sooner

Although cloud is increasingly the future of Microsoft - a change in direction which Russinovich points out started under Steve Ballmer and has spread through the whole company – it's also bringing benefits to server products like SQL Server, Office and Windows Server. "We're working on aligning the cadences because we're updating the cloud all the time and we want to get that stuff back into the boxed software faster and faster."

You won't have to update as often as Azure does if you don't want to, he promises. "There's going to be options for people that want to move slowly and people that want to move fast; the Azure Pack you can move fast with, System Centre is more slow. There will be tracks for the fast path and for when I want to stand it up and have it work for ten years and not touch it."

Something Microsoft has learned from building Azure is that long development and testing cycles aren't the best way of getting good software. "With the boxed software, the mentality is that once it gets out into the world we've lost touch with it, so we have to go through a year-long beta to make sure it's solid, so that when we give it to you it doesn't break. But what we found is that instead of making the platform more stable, it has the inverse effect. Because our systems then are designed for this really slow way of pushing things out, when something does break we can't get around to fixing it because our system don't support pushing something out quickly. The only way you can get more stable is to release more often. Once you're getting things out quickly and detecting where health goes awry really quickly, then you don't have to let things bake for ever."

Instead Microsoft tests things out first with internal systems "so if we inflict pain it's on us". If it works well, the new code goes first to a small section of Azure and then to more and more of the cloud. That's the same way Windows Update works. "We don't throw patches out to the whole world at once; we do it to a subset so if there's a problem we can fix it before we impact everybody."

Feature: US TechEd 2014 shows Microsoft's resolute focus on enterprise and cloud

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Feature: US TechEd 2014 shows Microsoft's resolute focus on enterprise and cloud

At its TechEd event in Houston, Microsoft unveiled a whole host of new enterprise-related services and updates, especially in regards to Azure, its cloud platform used to businesses and organisations.

Microsoft unveiled ExpressRoute, a service which gives direct private connections to Azure, either through exchange providers, or by connecting Azure to existing corporate WANs.

This is a leap from the previous methods of connecting to Azure which were either over VPN or the public Internet. ExpressRoute will be offered at four tiers: 200Mbps, 500Mbps, 1Gbps, and 10Gbps. The connectivity is limited to connections via two U.S sites.

VPN connectivity has also been extended by Microsoft beyond the old single on-premises endpoint to multiple site connections as well as allowing multiple virtual machines to join each other. Previously, there was no good way to attach multiple machines so Microsoft addressing this will remove the headache many companies currently have.

Two new classes of virtual machine have also been added to Azure, expanding the effectiveness of the service. The new machines are called 'A8' and A9'. A8 has 8 cores and 56GB of RAM while the A9 is a little more powerful with 16 cores and 112GB of RAM.

Alongside the hardware, the machines will feature 40Gbps of InfiniBand networking. Introducing these new virtual machines increases the usefulness of Microsoft's Azure service to more computer intensive tasks, such as modelling and simulation thus increasing the customer base.

Azure securing your storage

Arguably the largest announcement made in relation to Azure is Azure Files, which adds new storage options on top of virtual hard disks, queues, tables, and arbitrary blocks of binary data. With Azure Files, Microsoft now offers storage space using the SMB 2.1 protocol, meaning that files can now be accessed via Windows' Native Networking, providing a persistent location to store file-based data. This means that users no longer have to run their own virtual machine to offer file sharing, a massive win for businesses.

Security in the cloud is a big concern of companies that are looking to store data virtually, especially data of a sensitive kind. Microsoft has realized this and has added extra security features to Azure with a preview of anti-malware virtual machines which allows anti-malware software from various vendors to be injected and used on virtual machines.

Trend Micro will also start offering a disk encryption service for virtual machines, with the keys to the encrypted drives being held on its servers in Germany. While this detail may seem insignificant, it will mean that companies worried about the US Government will have to jump through more hoops when requesting access to data from companies such as Trend Micro.

Microsoft is now extending Azure beyond current infrastructure as a Service and Platform with the Azure RemoteApp, meaning that organisations can run desktop applications in the cloud and send them to end users using remote desktop software on Windows, OS X, iOS, and Android.

Visual Studio not forgotten

Aside from Azure, Visual Studio has also been updated, bringing new features as well as tools for Windows Phone 8.1 and 'Universal' Windows. Microsoft supports three UI frameworks for universal Windows apps (XAML, HTML and DirectX), giving developers the choice of writing the app in C#, JavaScript, and C++. This essentials means that developers can now install a single set of developer tools to target the whole Windows market.

Microsoft also updated Visual Studio Online with further API hooks, meaning that further integration to third parties is possible.

Updates to Apache Cordova, a framework for delivering multi-device hybrid mobile apps using HTML, CSS and JavaScript, have also been released. Microsoft lists five advantages for hybrid apps: the app maker can take advantage of all the code editing features in Visual Studio; hybrid apps can be built using multiple open-source front-end frameworks; inspect performance issues, analyze memory usage, and perform other debugging and diagnostics tasks on Android 4.4 and Windows Store; a remote agent can be used on a Mac to enable building for iOS right from Visual Studio.

Overall the software and services Microsoft unveiled were not surprising to industry watchers and are simply incremental upgrades to its key enterprise services off which it makes so much of its revenue.

Firefox sponsored tabs won't be 'a mess of logos,' promises Mozilla

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Firefox sponsored tabs won't be 'a mess of logos,' promises Mozilla

Mozilla announced in February that it was developing special ads for the tiles on Firefox's home page, also known as the page that appears when you open a new tab.

Now Firefox Vice President Johnathan Nightingale has acknowledged that the announcement "didn't go over well" and has sought to assuage some user fears.

"A lot of our community found the language hard to decipher, and worried that we were going to turn Firefox into a mess of logos sold to the highest bidder; without user control, without user benefit," Nightingale wrote in a blog post.

"That's not going to happen," he continued. "That's not who we are at Mozilla."

Identity crisis

When the feature was announced Mozilla explained that Firefox users would see a mix of popular websites and sponsored content in the tiles previously populated by users' frequently visited sites.

Nightingale hasn't contradicted that, but he emphasizes that Mozilla will test the new tabs page extensively before rolling anything out to your average Firefox users.

In the meantime they'll test the new sponsored tiles on pre-release channels "in the coming weeks," Nightingale wrote.

"These tests are purely to understand what our users find helpful and what our users ignore or disable," he wrote. "These tests are not about revenue and none will be collected."

That is until Mozilla is sure Firefox users won't revolt, at least.

Microsoft may let users upload songs to OneDrive, play in Xbox Music

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Microsoft may let users upload songs to OneDrive, play in Xbox Music

Update: We weren't expecting much by way of Microsoft comment, and we weren't wrong:

"We're always working to improve and enhance Xbox Music through new features and services, but have nothing to announce at this time," a spokesperson told TechRadar.

The mystery remains.

Original article below...

Microsoft may be working on a new feature that would combine aspects of OneDrive and Xbox Music to create a cloud-based music storage and streaming service.

Files that refer to a "OneDrive Music folder" were found in OneDrive source code by Chinese website LiveSino.

The feature would let users upload song files to OneDrive and then stream them to play on various devices with Xbox Music.

Users could upload songs to the OneDrive Music folder through the web or the OneDrive app, then stream them to any device with an Xbox Music app, according to the uncovered files.

Deal with the devil

The Xbox Music/OneDrive Music folder would allow users to stream songs through Xbox Music that might not normally be offered on the service.

Amazon and Google have offered similar services for a few years, but it's no secret that Microsoft is playing catch-up in the music streaming game.

Microsoft was said to be adding a similar music matching feature back in December through a partnership with Sony, but it would be no surprise if it turns out Microsoft is developing the feature independently using OneDrive.

With the similar nature of these reports, though, things are getting a little muddled. We've asked Microsoft to help clarify, and we'll update this article if we hear back.

Silence the most obnoxious tweeters with new Twitter mute feature

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Silence the most obnoxious tweeters with new Twitter mute feature

Twitter has introduced a new middle ground for keeping unwanted content out of your tweet-sphere via a new mute feature.

Rolling out to its iOS and Android apps as well as twitter.com over the coming weeks, the mute feature helps "edit your Twitter experience" by blocking out what you don't want to see from certain users.

The feature was spotted at the beginning of the month, but now Twitter is officially turning mute on for all.

What you can do with Twitter mute

With mute, tweets and retweets from specified users won't be visible in your home timeline, nor will you receive push or SMS text alerts from that user.

A muted user can still favorite (or "fave," as Twitter likes to say), reply to and retweet your tweets, but none of those actions will appear in your timeline.

Thankfully, muted users won't know you muted them, so there won't be (or shouldn't be) any awkward, "Why'd you mute me, bro?" questions to have to explain. It's less harsh than a block, but still enough to keep from experiencing Twitter update overload.

To set up mute from the Twitter app or from the web, hit the "more" option on a tweet, and then mute @username. To mute someone from their profile page, tap the gear icon and choose mute @username.

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