Software : Chinese consumer group sues over Samsung, Oppo bloatware |
- Chinese consumer group sues over Samsung, Oppo bloatware
- Week in Tech: Week in Tech: Apple presses play on Music, but will Microsoft hit pause on Windows Phone?
- 6 Essential Mac Mouse and Trackpad Tips
- Apple Music mess up your iTunes library? These 7 steps will fix it
| Chinese consumer group sues over Samsung, Oppo bloatware Posted:  Although manufacturers and carriers have backed away from loading up smartphones with a bunch of useless software in recent years, at least two hardware makers are being taken to task in Chinese courts for doing just that. Shanghai Daily today reported both Samsung and Oppo face legal action in China in an effort to protect consumers from smartphone "bloatware," or the practice of loading up devices with software of questionable utility or worth. The Shanghai Consumer Rights Protection Commission announced the action on Thursday, which has already received approval in separate cases from the The Shanghai No. 1 Intermediate People's Court. Cited as two of the worst offenders were the Samsung SM-N9008S with 44 preinstalled apps, while the Oppo X9007 model tipped the scales with a whopping 71 pieces of bloatware, including "various games and other programs." Take that, bloatwareShanghai's consumer rights defenders studied 20 different smartphone models prior to taking legal action, noting that many of them were sold with preinstalled apps that could not be removed from the device. Perhaps more damning, the Commission also claimed some of the handsets "stole" cellular data - accusations Samsung and Oppo will have 15 days to respond to before trial dates are set. "We hope it will force other companies in the sector to end the unreasonable, but common, practice of preinstalling apps without telling consumers. This is something that is very much necessary for the healthy development of the whole industry," Commission Secretary General Tao Ailian said yesterday. The consumer rights group hopes to force Samsung and Oppo to clearly indicate on the packaging which apps have been preinstalled, as well as "instructions on how they can be removed." Godspeed, good people! |
| Posted:  You know something's big when it eclipses Kanye West's Glastonbury impression of a man trapped in a lightbulb factory: yes, we're talking about the launch of Apple Music and Beats 1 Radio, which might just be the future of music. And that's not all. We've heard Mark Zuckerberg explain why Facebook's machines aren't scary and sinister, seen what looks awfully like the iPhone 6S and heard a Microsoft rumour so tasty you might want to lick it like a lollipop. An Android Lollipop. It's week in tech! Music Non-StopIt's here and it's pretty good: Apple Music launched this week as a direct competitor to Spotify and Tidal and the other streaming services. But it's not all good. It appears to have killed off the Home Sharing feature for music on iOS devices, it's replaced half of our album art with "random junk that Apple Music has downloaded from the internet" and the catalogue has some notable omissions. Naturally we've identified the five issues Apple Music really needs to fix. Facebook faces the musicFacebook boss Mark Zuckerberg delivered a Q&A this week, facing tough questions from celebrities. Yes, we're being a bit sarcastic. Zuck reckons that one day we'll be able to send thoughts to one another, which sounds terrifying, and he explains that Facebook is building AI systems "that are better than humans at our primary senses: vision, listening, etc," including "systems that can recognise everything in an image or a video." That's not terrifying at all. Still, until the machines take over at least Facebook advertisers can make money annoying us with ads in between Facebook videos. iPhone 6S: the "S" doesn't stand for "secret"Apple's iPhone 6S has gone into production, and it's believed to have the same Force Touch tech as the Apple Watch and recent MacBooks. It's rumoured to have a massively improved camera too, and if the leaked photos are accurate the differences between it and the iPhone 6 are internal: like other S-version iPhones, it looks almost identical to its predecessor. It doesn't seem to be getting the rumoured dual-lens camera, though: maybe we'll see that in the iPhone 7. LG G4 S: the "S" stands for "stop making so many G4s""There are now more versions of the LG G4 than there are Pokemon," Matt Hanson says. "Having yet another version of the LG G4 seems a little like overkill, and could end up confusing consumers," but it seems that LG is going to carry on regardless. The G4 S will look pretty similar to the LG G4, but it might be a little bit cheaper. HoloLens: to Infinity and beyondFancy playing Disney Infinity in augmented reality? Disney might just make that augmented reality, um, reality. John Vignocchi, VP of production at Disney Interactive, is more excited about AR than VR. "We've had multiple meetings and discussions with Oculus; multiple meetings and discussions with Sony about Morpheus; multiple meetings and discussions with Microsoft about HoloLens. We're very interested in that space," he said. It's the Amazon Hour of Power!Next-day delivery is so 2014. This year it's all about one-hour delivery, an idea that older heads will remember as the last big idea of the dotcom boom before the bubble burst and CEOs had to go and live in their cars for a couple of years while angry shareholders hunted them with flaming torches. But it's back. Back! BACK! And this time it's made it as far as London, where Amazon will be offering one-hour delivery to Prime members – albeit only on certain products to a few Prime members in certain postcodes, so it's a bit like a taxi driver who won't go south of the river. Roam if you want to, roam around the worldThe EU, eh? What's it ever done for us? Well, it's just binned international roaming fees, which is pretty good. As of June 15, 2017, roaming fees won't be charged to people travelling within the EU. The only losers here appear to be the mobile phone companies, so don't be entirely surprised if they start demanding we vote to leave in the 2017 referendum. Meanwhile closer to home, Ofcom has banned the practice of charging for "freephone" 0800 and 0808 numbers from mobiles. Other numbers – starting 084, 087, 118 or 09 – will still be charged, but the costs will be made clear when you call. Is Microsoft going to grab a Lollipop?This time last year Microsoft killed Nokia's Android experiments, but it seems that it might be having a change of heart: the tastiest tech rumour doing the rounds this week says Microsoft is seriously considering killing off Windows Phone and embracing Android for its mobile phones. Far-fetched? Maybe, but the rumour appeared just days after Satya Nadella sent staff a mission statement saying that Microsoft must "make some tough choices in areas where things are not working." Is Windows Phone one of those areas? Watch this space. |
| 6 Essential Mac Mouse and Trackpad Tips Posted:  IntroductionThey're an integral part of your computing setup, and you use them so often you practically forget they're there. We're talking about your mouse and trackpad, and there's more to them than you might think; both input devices offer options and shortcuts that can make your life easier. Here are six top tips to improve the way you use your Mac's mouse and trackpad. 1. Customize Trackpad GesturesOpen System Preferences > Trackpad. Click on the first tab, Point & Click. If you'd rather tap your Mac's trackpad than press down to click, check the first box. If you want to add a secondary click (a control-click action), check the next box down and choose one of the options from the drop-down menu. The next option, Look Up, is very useful. Check it and you can tap any word in any document with three fingers to look it up in the dictionary, thesaurus and Wikipedia. Finally, to move windows by dragging with three fingers, check the bottom box. 2. Control the way you scroll and zoomYour Mac is configured to allow you to zoom in and out of images and web pages by either pinching and unpinching with two fingers or by tapping the trackpad with two fingers to activate what Apple calls Smart Zoom. That can be very useful, but can also be confusing if, say, you tend to leave your thumb resting on the trackpad. To switch off this behavior, tap the Scroll & Zoom tab in the Trackpad System Preferences pane and uncheck the second and third boxes. If you don't want to rotate an image with your fingers on the trackpad, turn that off, too. 3. Change the default gestures for navigating OS XIn OS X, you can activate Launchpad or Exposé and slide between full-screen apps using either three or four fingers to swipe across the trackpad. The default is four, but we prefer to use three. To change it, click the More Gestures tab in the Trackpad pane and make sure the relevant items are checked. Choose "Three fingers" from the drop-down menus. If you set swiping between full-screen apps to use three fingers, make sure you also set the "Swipe between pages" option to two fingers to avoid confusion. 4. Use gestures in QuickTime PlayerIn addition to system-wide gestures, there are some that only work in specific apps. In QuickTime Player, drag two fingers from left to right across the trackpad to scrub forwards through video. To return to normal speed, just lift your fingers from the trackpad. Drag two fingers from right to left to scrub backwards. The further across the trackpad you drag, the faster the video will go. To enter full-screen mode, spread two fingers across the trackpad. To leave full-screen, pinch with two fingers. 5. Configure scrolling with the Magic MouseApple's Magic Mouse uses many of the same gestures as the trackpad, and you can customize these as well. To change the direction in which pages scroll when you swipe up and down with one finger, open the Mouse pane in System Preferences and click Point & Click. Uncheck "Scroll Direction: Natural" (that's "natural" according to Apple, anyway). You can switch off the right-click option of the Magic Mouse here, if you find the lack of a separate external button confusing (or hard to press with consistency). We find, though, that if you leave it on, you'll eventually get used to it. 6. Create navigation gestures for the MagicYou can swipe between pages and full-screen apps, as well as activate Mission Control, using gestures on the Magic Mouse. Navigating pages can be done with one or two fingers. If you set it to one, make sure you uncheck the "Swipe between full-screen apps option" in the More Gestures tab of the Mouse pane to avoid potential confusion. If you don't use Mission Control, you might want to uncheck the box that allows you to activate it with a double-tap, so you don't keep launching it by accident. Finally on the mouse front, if you ever want to check your mouse's battery level, click the Bluetooth menu bar item and hover over the Mouse that's currently connected to see the charge remaining. |
| Apple Music mess up your iTunes library? These 7 steps will fix it Posted:  While this week's arrival of Apple Music has been received positively by most users, some are reporting that the metadata in their existing iTunes libraries has been messed up since enabling iCloud Music Library. iCloud Music Library scans your iTunes library so that you can access all of your music from your other Apple devices, however some people are finding their metadata to suddenly be inaccurate, with incorrectly labelled albums, wonky artwork and more. Thankfully, there is a way to restore your iTunes library back to what it was before the update – simply follow the seven steps listed below: 1. Close iTunes 2. Head to your iTunes music folder (usually username > Music > iTunes) 3. Drag the iTunes Library.itl file from this folder to your desktop 4. Open the Previous iTunes Libraries folder 5. Drag the most recent iTunes Library[DATE].itl file into the Music > iTunes folder 6. Rename the file iTunes Library.itl 7. Reopen iTunes If followed correctly, those steps should completely restore your iTunes library to what it once was. Hopefully, Apple is working on an update that prevents this issue from happening at all. iCloud Music Library is somewhat essential for many of Apple Music's features, like making albums available offline. With that said, enable it at your own risk. |
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