Smartphones

Android is getting a massive visual overhaul

This review originally appeared on Trusted Reviews

Android 5.0 Lollipop is the latest version of the Google mobile OS. It takes over from Android 4.4 KitKat and is likely to be the last major revision we see of the system until well into 2015.

Lollipop is the future, in other words, but is it really worth getting worked-up about? We’ve been using Android 5.0 with the Nexus 9, one of the devices launched alongside the software. Here’s what we think.

Android 5.0 Lollipop: Material Interface

Having used Android 5.0 Lollipop for a while now, we think perhaps the most significant change for now is the way the software looks. Not every change made offers a dramatic shift in the way Android feels, but the interface design does.

Google calls it Material, and aside from freshening-up the look, it’s meant to add “responsive, natural motion, realistic lighting and shadows.”

First, let’s take a look at the new design. Here are your home screens:

You’ll notice everything is looking familiar, but a little different. Google has redesigned the soft keys — which now have a PlayStation-like flavor— and the Google app icons are different now.

It’s innocuous stuff, but tells you a lot about the aesthetic direction in which the system is heading. Android 5.0 Lollipop is all about friendly curves and shapes that have no intrinsic or obvious relationship with technology. They’re a circle, a square and a triangle: you don’t get much more basic than that.

We assume the idea is that they’re friendly compared with the rather more complicated soft keys of Android 4.4 KitKat. Despite their simplicity, the functions of two are pretty obvious even to relative technophobes.

The triangle already forms an arrow sign, and the circle is just like the Home button on an iPhone. When in doubt, copy Apple. The one on the right is called Overview these days, but it has much the same function as before: it brings up the multi-tasking menu.

The movement of the homescreens has changed. The animations are a bit less severe, with greater variance in their speeds and a greater sense of inertia. Android 5.0 Lollipop is all about shaving off that geeky exterior Android is still seen as having in some quarters.

You’re also likely to see a whole lot of the two headline backgrounds of Android 5.0. These are designed to look as though they’re made from real materials with clever use of textures. Once again, it’s a step away from the sharp technical refinement that has been more a clearer visual feature in previous Android UI elements. These backgrounds are still precise and geometric, but the textures are intended to ground them in the “real.”

It’s not so much “less geek, more chic,” but “less geek, more family-friendly.” Its no wonder Google has opted for this style, with tablets like the Tesco Hudl 2 plugging away at family buyers hard.

Is the new look good? Yes, it’s great. We already liked the Google Now interface used in some Android 4.4 phones, though, including the Nexus 5 and Moto G 2014.

The use of the real-time shadows/lighting promised on Google’s website is pretty subtle too. Those expecting jaw-dropping visual flashiness may be disappointed by this lack of bravado. Where you see the these live shadows most obviously is in the multi-tasking menu, which, as usual, is accessed using the right (square) soft key. Multi-tasking has gone 3D, folks, and each pane casts its own shadows. These are “design” shadows rather than realistic ones, mind you, and again are pretty diffuse. We like the look…

For the full Android 5.0 Lollipop Review, visited Trusted Reviews.

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Google Nexus 6 Hands-On

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Bigger might not mean better

This hands-on originally appeared on Trusted Reviews.

In recent years, Google’s Nexus smartphone line has become synonymous with high-end functionality and great value for money. The Nexus 6, however, is something of a curve ball, and a massive one at that.

It’s a phone brimmed with high-end components – a 2.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon 805 processor, QHD display – but one which has overlooked mass market appeal in favor of a phablet dwarfing 6-inch form factor. As the phone’s size has gone up, so too has its price. The handset will set you back $649 or $699 depending on your choice of internal storage – 32GB or 64GB.

Nexus 6: Design

There is no getting away from it, the Nexus 6 is huge. At 159.3mm tall, 83mm wide and 10.1mm thick it dwarfs flagship phones such as the Galaxy S5 and LG G3. Although it features an overall footprint not much larger than the iPhone 6 Plus or the Samsung Galaxy Note 4, it doesn’t carry its size as well as either rival.

I found the phone to feel bulky and cumbersome from the start. Its considerable 184g weight is distributed well across the phone’s sizeable form, but unlike some overweight handsets, the Nexus 6 does little to hide its size. It’s wider than the 6 Plus, less graceful than the Note 4 and fatter than both — it’s an awkward, gangly teenager of a handset.

Visually, the Nexus 6 is basically an oversized Moto X. It’s not ugly phone, but it lacks the refined simplicity of the Nexus 5 and certainly can’t match the iPhone 6 Plus or Note 4. The two-tone colour scheme is easy on the eye and the metallic blue edges give the phone an air of elegance, but this is overshadowed by the phone’s cheap-looking – and feeling – plastic back.

Further highlighting the Nexus 6’s awkward design are the phone’s physical buttons – a power key and separate volume rocker. Both feel dwarfed by the handset’s overall size. They are well located in the centre of the phone’s right-hand edge, but are small and fiddly to operate.

Nexus 6: Screen

As with the phone’s overall look and feel, the Nexus 6’s screen fell slightly short of expectation on first use. While the handset’s 5.96-inch, 2560 x 1440 pixel QHD panel is sufficiently sharp and detailed, it lacks the pop and vibrancy of either the Note 4 or 6 Plus.

Unusually for an AMOLED panel, I found the Nexus 6’s colour range to be a little subdued. Hues aren’t exactly muted but neither do they wow. This ran throughout all elements of the Nexus 6 from the new Material OS design to web pages and the image viewer.

Where visuals were slightly off, the screen’s touch capabilities and performance were on point. Screen transitions were smooth, swipe gestures fluid and all multi-finger commands handled with ease. Brightness levels are also hard to fault. The phone’s screen adjusted elegantly to bouts of direct sunlight and periods in a shadowy corner.

We’ll need more time with the Nexus 6 to judge the screen definitively, but it doesn’t wow as much as the raw size and resolution suggest…

For the full Google Nexus 6 Hands-On, please visit TrustedReviews.com.

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iPad Mini 3 review

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Girls have quietly repurposed the photo-sharing app into a barometer for popularity, friendship status and self-worth. Here's how they're using it.

Secrecy is hardly new on Planet Girl: as many an eye-rolling boy will tell you, girls excel at eluding the prying questions of grown ups. And who can blame them? From an early age, young women learn that to be a “good girl” they must be nice, avoid conflict and make friends with everyone. It’s an impossible ask (and one I’ve studied for over a decade) – so girls respond by taking their true feelings underground.

Enter the Internet, and Instagram: a platform where emotions can run wild – and where insecurities run wilder. The photo-sharing app is social media’s current queen bee: In a survey released earlier this month, three quarters of teens said they were using Instagram as their go-to app.

Instagram lets users share their photos, and “like” and comment on their friends’. The competition for “likes” encourages creativity in young users, who can use filters and other devices to spruce up their images. And its simplicity – it’s just pictures, right? — comforts parents haunted by the cyberbullying they hear about on Facebook and Twitter.

But Instagram’s simplicity is also deceiving: look more closely, and you find the Rosetta Stone of girl angst: a way for tweens and teens to find out what their peers really think of them (Was that comment about my dress a joke or did she mean it?), who likes you (Why wasn’t I included in that picture?), even how many people like them (if you post and get too few likes, you might feel “Instashame,” as one young woman calls it). They can obsess over their friendships, monitoring social ups and downs in extreme detail. They can strategically post at high traffic hours when they know peers are killing time between homework assignments. “Likes,” after all, feel like a public, tangible, reassuring statement of a girl’s social status.

That’s not what the app creators intended, of course, but it does make psychological sense: as they become preteens, research shows that girls’ confidence takes a nosedive. Instagram, then, is a new way for girls to chase the feeling of being liked that eludes so many of them. Instagram becomes an popularity meter and teens learn to manipulate the levers of success.

Here are a few of the ways that girls are leveraging Instagram to do much more than just share photos:

To Know What Friends Really Think Of Them

In the spot where adults tag a photo’s location, girls will barter “likes” in exchange for other things peers desperately want: a “TBH” (or “to be honest”). Translation? If you like a girl’s photo, she’ll leave you a TBH comment. For example: “TBH, ILYSM,” meaning, “To be honest I love you so much.” Or, the more ambivalent: “TBH, We don’t hang out that much.

To Measure How Much a Friend Likes You

In this case, a girl may trade a “like” — meaning, a friend will like her photo — in exchange for another tidbit of honesty: a 1-10 rating, of how much she likes you, your best physical feature, and a numerical scale that answers the question of “are we friends?” and many others. Girls hope for a “BMS,” or break my scale, the ultimate show of affection.

As a Public Barometer of Popularity

Instagram lets you tag your friends to announce that you’ve posted a new photo of them. Girls do the app one better: they take photos of scenes where no person is present – say, a sunset — but still tag people they love and add gushing comments. It’s a kind of social media mating call for BFFs. But girls also do it because the number of tags you get is a public sign of your popularity. “How many photos you’re tagged in is important,” says Charlotte, 12. “No one can see the actual number but you can sort of just tell because you keep seeing their name pop up.”

To Show BFF PDA

That broken heart necklace you gave your bestie? It’s gone the way of dial up. Now, girls use Instagram biographies – a few lines at the top of their page — to trumpet their inner circle. It’s a thrill to be featured on the banner that any visitor to the page will see — but not unusual to get deleted after a fight or bad day, in plain, humiliating sight of all your friends.

A Way to Retaliate

Angry at someone? Don’t tag the girl who is obviously in a picture, crop her out of it entirely, refuse to follow back the one who just tried to follow you, or simply post a photo a girl is not in. These are cryptic messages adults miss but which girls hear loud and clear. A girl may post an image of a party a friend wasn’t invited to, an intimate sleepover or night out at a concert. She never even has to mention the absent girl’s name. She knows the other girl saw it. That’s the beauty of Instagram: it’s the homework you know girls always do.

A Personal Branding Machine

Girls face increasing pressure not only to be smart and accomplished, but girly, sexy and social. In a 2011 survey, 74% of teen girls told the Girl Scout Research Institute that girls were living quasi-double lives online, where they intentionally downplayed their intelligence, kindness and good influence – and played up qualities like fun, funny and social. On Instagram, girls can project a persona they may not have time, or permission, to show off in the classroom: popular, social, sexy. Cultivating a certain look is so important that it’s common for girls to stage ‘photo shoots’ with each other as photographers to produce shots that stand out visually. (Plus a joint photo shoot is more evidence of friendship.)

A Place For Elaborate Birthday Collages

Remember coming to school on your big day, excited to see what you’d find plastered to your locker? Now girls can see who’s celebrating them hours before they get off the bus. Birthday collages on Instagram are elaborate public tributes, filled with inside jokes, short videos, and pictures of memories you may not have been a part of. “There is definitely a ‘I love you the most. I’ve loved you the longest edge to these birthday posts,” one parent told me. Collages that document the intensity or length of a relationship are a chance to celebrate a friend – or prove just how close you are to the birthday girl. Although most girls know to expect something from their closest friends, not getting one is seen as a direct diss, a parent told me. And it can be competitive: another parent told me her daughter’s friend stayed up until midnight just so she could be the first to post.

While girls may seem addicted to their online social lives, it’s not all bad — and they still prefer the company of an offline friend to any love they have to click for. (In a survey that would surely surprise some parents, 92% of teen girls said they would give up all of their social media friends if it meant keeping their best friend.) And, of course, likes aren’t everything. As 13 year-old Leah told me, “Just because people don’t write me a paragraph on Instagram doesn’t mean they don’t like me.”

Rachel Simmons is the co-founder of Girls Leadership Institute and the author of the New York Times bestselling book, “Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls” and “The Curse of the Good Girl: Raising Authentic Girls With Courage and Confidence.” Follow her on Twitter @racheljsimmons.

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SMS messages used to get lost due to a glitch with iMessages

Messaged received: Apple has released a new tool to answer complaints that switching from an iPhone to a different smartphone dooms iMessages sent to them from other iPhone users to an unseen purgatory.

Apple’s new web tool lets ex-iOS users efficiently deregister their phone numbers from Apple’s iMessage system and ensures that future SMS messages get delivered to the new device.

The fix corrects a long-standing problem: If former iPhone users don’t disable iMessage before transferring to a different smartphone, SMS messages sent to them by people still using Apple devices can continue to be sent as iMessages. But, since iMessage is exclusive to Apple platforms, those messages won’t be received on the new smartphone. The bug is the subject of a class action lawsuit in California.

To use the new tool, ex-iOS users just enter their phone numbers into the web browser. Apple then sends a confirmation code by SMS.

Fingerprint scans are more secure, except when it comes to the Fifth Amendment

Cellphone fingerprint passcodes weren’t on James Madison’s mind when he authored the Fifth Amendment, a constitutional protection with roots in preventing torture by barring self-incriminating testimonials in court cases.

Yet those tiny skin ridges we all share were at the heart of a Virginia court case last week in which a judge ruled that police, who suspected there was incriminating evidence on a suspect’s smartphone, could legally force the man to unlock his device with its fingerprint scanner. While the Fifth Amendment protects defendants from revealing their numeric passcodes, which would be considered a self-incriminating testimonial, biometrics like fingerprint scans fall outside the law’s scope.

“If you are being forced to divulge something that you know, that’s not okay,” said Marcia Hofmann, an attorney and special counsel to digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation. “If the government is able through other means to collect evidence that just exists, then they certainly can do that without stepping on the toes of the constitutional protection.”

“The important thing is,” Hofmann said, “is it something you know, or something you have?”

The Virginia ruling was perhaps the most clear-cut decision among similar cases whose outcomes have varied significantly by circumstance. In United States v. Fricosu (2012), a court ruled because it was “a foregone conclusion” that the defendant’s password-locked data was incriminating, the Fifth Amendment didn’t apply. In United States v. John Doe (2011), the defendant, who had a hard drive protected by encryption, at first didn’t receive Fifth Amendment protection, but that decision was reversed by an appellate court that ruled that if Doe provided his decryption password, then it would “lead the Government to evidence that would incriminate him.” Last week’s Virginia ruling is a fresh example of what can happen when a 225-year-old law is applied to a field as rapidly changing as digital security.

“I think the courts are struggling with this, because a fingerprint in and of itself is not testimony,” said Hayes Hunt, a criminal defense and government investigations lawyer at Cozen O’Connor. “The concern is, once we put a password on something or on ourselves, we have a certain privacy interest.”

Judges across the country will only have to make more decisions about biometrics, as their use by everyday consumers is on the rise. Today, our data is protected by everything from iris scans at airports to heartbeat measurements and ear-print smartphone locks. “This whole area is in such a state of flux,” said Jody Goodman, a counsel at Crowell & Moring. “It seems like every week there are new things happening.”

Apple in particular is one of the most widely-recognized consumer technology companies that have adopted biometrics, though it wasn’t the first. Its latest flagship iPhones and iPads come with Touch ID, which lets users unlock their devices or make payments by scanning their thumbprints instead of inputting a numeric passcode. But while Apple and other companies with fingerprint scanners on their devices say the feature provides more protection from data theft, the Virginia ruling means that data protected only by an old-school passcode is afforded stronger legal protection under the Fifth Amendment.

The solution for those seeking more legal cover for their data, though, is surprisingly simple. If a defendant’s data is protected by both a thumbprint and a passcode, he or she could invoke the Fifth for the thumbprint, thereby blocking access to the data — at least according to the precedent set by the Virginia case. But for now, iPhones at least lack this option, probably because it’s not being demanded by consumers.

“I think Apple will respond to what the market demands,” said Goodman. “Most people don’t want to be bothered [by additional security]. That’s why the fingerprint technology was created in the first place.”

A Taiwanese news site reports that Apple is considering using 3D technology in the next iPhone

Apple may be gearing up to introduce a glasses-free 3D display on its next iPhone.

The Taiwanese media website Economic Daily News reported that the screen would be “naked eye 3D,” meaning that it would be a glasses-free setup. It couldn’t be built using the current embedded touch technology Apple has used in the past, but the site says Apple would again solicit touch screen manufacturer TPK to develop the next-gen phone.

The report is highly speculative, but Apple has dipped its toes in 3D devices for years, according to MacRumors. Apple applied for a patent six years ago for 3D stereoscopic displays, and applied for a patent for 3D Hyper Reality displays that would change the perspective of objects on a screen in relation to where the user moves their head. Amazon’s Fire Phone also uses what’s called “dynamic perspective” to produce a 3D-like experience.

Apple’s iOS already uses a parallax feature which gives a 3D-style effect to the iPhone screen—try rotating your screen and notice how icons move in relation to the background, giving the phone a feeling of depth.

How to use the cloud to free up more room

We’ve all been there: Running low on iPhone storage space, scrambling to delete photos we can live without to record new memories. Well, Apple’s newest iOS update gave us a handy new way to get more storage out of our iPhones without upgrading the hardware.

Apple’s iOS 8.1 activated a feature called the iCloud Photo Library, which automatically uploads your photos and videos to your iCloud account — Apple’s version of cloud storage. iCloud users get 5GB of storage space for free, but can bump that up to 20GB for $.99/month, 200GB for $3.99/month, 500GB for $9.99/month and so on.

If you choose to activate iCloud Photo Library, your iPhone will by default keep big, high-resolution files both on your device and on iCloud. But here’s where the storage-saving trick comes in: You can set the iCloud Photo Library to upload the higher-resolution files to the cloud and keep only compressed (read: smaller) versions on your iPhone. Those compressed versions are still good enough to show off your photos to family and friends on your iPhone screen, but they take up much less space on your device — leaving you free to take more photos and videos.

To turn on the iCloud Photo Library on your iPhone or iPad, first make sure you’ve got the latest iOS 8.1 update installed and that you’re signed up for iCloud. Then go to Settings, select iCloud, find Photos and turn on iCloud Photo Library. Then, for the space-saving trick, activate the “Optimize” feature, which is also accessible by going to Settings, selecting Photos & Camera, then iCloud Photo Library.

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IAC plans to replace Rad with “an Eric Schmidt-like person"

Tinder’s CEO Sean Rad is out of the top role at the dating app that he helped to found over two years ago, a report says.

The side-swiping application is majority-owned by Barry Diller’s IAC, which has plans to replace Rad with “an Eric Schmidt-like person,” reported Forbes. Rad will remain on Tinder’s board and will act as president once the new CEO comes on board. Until then, he will stay on as the acting chief executive.

Rad has faced a tumultuous year, despite helping the dating service log 600% growth over the past 12 months. A sexual harassment lawsuit that led to the ouster of Tinder Chief Marketing Officer Justin Mateen also cast a pall over Rad’s leadership.

Whitney Wolfe, a co-founder of the app who was forced out, accused Rad and Mateen of sexually harassing her. The suit was settled in September, but not before Mateen resigned.

Rad’s demotion comes as Tinder launches an aggressive new monetization initiative for the dating service. The premium service will be an option on top of the otherwise free application and is the company’s first attempt to generate cash flow from the service.

This article originally appeared on Fortune.com

A new report supports the theory that the Chinese government is sponsoring the attacks

Digital footprints from previous cyberthreats believed to have emanated from China have been linked to recent attacks on pro-democracy websites in Hong Kong, according to a new report.

The findings of cybersecurity forensics firm FireEye suggest that there may be a “common quartermaster” behind the two attacks, further supporting a running theory that Chinese officials are breaching Hong Kong’s networks to suppress or spy on the ongoing political uprising there. Protesters in Hong Kong have been demonstrating since September, pushing for greater freedom in choosing their political representation.

FireEye analysts said they made the discovery when they matched digital certificates from a series of quiet data thefts originating in China, which FireEye reported earlier this year, to those of a conspicuous network-blocking attack that disrupted a pro-democracy Hong Kong news site in October.

Because the two types of attacks have very different agendas, the fact that they shared common certificates suggests they may be motivated by Chinese state interests, said FireEye analyst Mike Scott, one of the report’s authors.

“We understand that there has been a long series of campaigns over the past 10 to 15 years coming from China [to steal intellectual property],” said FireEye analyst Ned Moran, who co-authored the report. “We can tie that intrusion activity through technology data points to the [pro-democracy news site attack], which is attempting to suppress speech in Hong Kong. Who would benefit from both of those activities?”

Scott added that the reason his team was able to detect the digital certificates was because whoever created the malware didn’t employ high levels of security, a step attackers often skip because digital certificates function more like receipts than fingerprints, revealing only usage and not attackers’ identities.

Supporters of the pro-democracy movement, known as Occupy Central, have been the target of recent attacks that cybersecurity watchdogs believe are also the work of the Chinese government. On Sept. 17, a group of coders backing transparency in Hong Kong’s government reported that several protesters’ Android operating systems had been infected with spyware. Two weeks later, Lacoon Mobile Security found that a similar spyware was targeting protesters’ iOS systems. The firm said that because cross-platforms attacks are so rare, the perpetrator is likely “a large organization or nation-state.”

FireEye analysts said that they did not discover any direct links between the attacks on protesters’ Android and iOS devices and the attacks on pro-democracy news sites, but said that the attackers may be using several methods to achieve their goal.