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Exclusive: Eye-Fi CEO Yuval Koren Steps Down; Roxio Exec Matt DiMaria Takes Lead

Lauren Goode — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 17:00:31 +0000

Eye-Fi’s Yuval Koren has stepped down as CEO of the company, and will be replaced by tech industry veteran Matt DiMaria, who most recently was executive vice president and general manager at digital media software company Roxio. Koren co-founded Eye-Fi in 2005 along with three others, and has had two stints as CEO of the company, most recently taking on the role in May of 2011. He will remain an advisor to the company. DiMaria joins Eye-Fi, which makes Wi-Fi-enabled SD cards for cameras, at a time when more digital-imaging products are coming out with built-in WiFi, forcing a reevaluation in strategy at the Bay Area-based startup.

Picturelife Tackles Simple Photo Storage

Lauren Goode — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:00:23 +0000

My digital photo life is a mess.

I have thousands of photos scattered throughout my computer, stored on backup drives, blasted to social networks and copied in different cloud services. There are currently 3,025 photos stored on my iPhone. And let’s not forget about the pictures in iPhoto.

It shouldn’t be so hard to get all of these photos organized in one place.

That’s what Picturelife, a recently launched cloud-storage service, aims to do. Picturelife, which was created by three startup entrepreneurs, wants to be Switzerland amid fractured photo-nations. It promises to do all the photo syncing for you when you’re not looking, to and from your desktop, mobile apps and various social network accounts. It also stores video clips.

[ See post to watch video ]

It works on both Mac and Windows computers. A full-featured version of Picturelife is available for iPhone and iPad, but the mobile app for Android is a limited version. There isn’t a Windows mobile app yet.

To start, Picturelife gives you five gigabytes of cloud storage for free; after that, it costs $7 a month or $70 a year for 100GB, and $15 a month or $150 a year for 300GB.

Maybe you’re more organized than I am, and you’re thinking: I’m already pretty committed to another media-storage service, like Flickr, or SmugMug, or the popular cloud service Dropbox. Or maybe you’re content with iPhoto.

Picturelife does have a lot of the same features as similar services. It also costs more than some (though less than Dropbox). And as a “freemium” service that is charging customers, it has some new-service kinks it needs to work out.

But it offers a few features the others don’t. It performs simple imports from your other photo sources, including iPhoto, Flickr, Tumblr, Facebook, Instagram, SmugMug and iPhoto. It has pretty clear-cut privacy controls, which you might appreciate if you’re fed up with the way Facebook handles privacy. And it offers incentives like bonus storage space just for sharing photos with friends.

I signed up for Picturelife, selected my plan and downloaded both the Mac desktop app and the iOS mobile app. Picturelife then appeared in the top menu bar on my computer screen, and as a “droplet” icon on the desktop. Picturelife doesn’t compress photo files, and it supports RAW files, too.

The desktop app’s layout sort of mirrors iPhoto, but has a nice, modern feel to it. On the left-hand side is a list of photo categories: Timeline (photos sorted by date), Albums, Places and All Pictures. On the right are a bunch of photo thumbnails, which can be size-adjusted. While the photo thumbnails are loading, the pictures appear with cool-looking color bars.

When you first log in, Picturelife should ask you which folders you want to sync your photos from, like Pictures, Downloads, Desktop, iPhoto or iCloud Photo Stream. In my experience, Picturelife simply began indexing all of the photos that existed on my computer — including work photos, screen grabs and photos from really old backup drives.

I was a little irritated by this, because Picturelife just grabbed a bunch of photos I didn’t want there. It also led to some duplicates, which Picturelife promises to avoid. Picturelife said it has fixed a bug that caused the service to pull from certain folders — in my case, an old iPhoto folder I had stored on a backup drive — and said that users should and will be given more initial control over the onboarding process.

After uploading the photos from my computer, I set about transferring the 3,000 photos from my iPhone to Picturelife. I could do this via the Picturelife mobile app, provided I was connected to a Wi-Fi network, or by tethering my phone to the computer. Syncing via Wi-Fi would have taken a full day, whereas tethering only took about 10 minutes.

From then on, the Picturelife iPhone app automatically grabbed any new picture I took with my phone and synced it with my account. This isn’t particularly innovative: Apple’s Photo Stream does this, too, though there’s a 1,000-picture limit on the photos you can keep on your device in Photo Stream at a time. (And syncing across four products — Photo Stream, iCloud, iPhoto and iPhone — is admittedly a little confusing. At least Picturelife has one brand name.)

I also linked some of my other accounts to Picturelife to import and share photos. I did this by going first to Picturelife settings, and then to “accounts.” I connected to Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and Twitter, but also had the option to connect to Google, Tumblr, Flickr and others. Picturelife quickly sucked up the photos from those accounts. It even imported photos in which other people tagged me on Facebook.

I liked Picturelife’s smart search function — which iPhoto doesn’t have — although it could be a bit smarter. When I searched for photos from “summer,” more than 600 photos came up that were from the past few summers. When I searched for photos from “Japan,” images from my recent trip to Japan came up. But when I searched for photos from a “New Orleans wedding,” a whopping 663 results came up, most of which were not from the wedding. Picturelife says it’s continually improving the search feature.

Sharing select photos from Picturelife to my social networks was pretty standard. Most photo services do this. But Picturelife makes privacy controls refreshingly simple. All photos are private by default. Should you decide to share a photo or an album, you can select, in the “Info” section of each photo, whether you want to send it to specific people, a group of people or a family member.

And even after you share it, if you change your mind, you can later go back and make it entirely private. I shared a photo to Twitter as part of my test, and later was able to adjust the settings so that Twitterers couldn’t see anything from the link I shared.

Picturelife’s app for iOS, like the desktop app, has viewing options for Timeline, Album and All Photos. In my experience, the app was fast and fluid, and offers some handy one-tap options like “Look for New Photos” or “Sync Entire Camera Roll.”

I did, however, encounter some minor bugs. Some of my pictures said “null” on them in my own Picturelife account, and the service misidentified the locations of some of my media in the “Places” map. And currently there isn’t an easy way to find imported video clips.

So Picturelife still has room for improvement. But I can definitely say that it has enough features to make it an appealing option for photo-happy consumers.

The Pramana Collective: New Tech PR Firm Made Up of Old PR Hands

Kara Swisher — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 15:30:35 +0000

A trio of high-profile tech communications execs from Twitter (Sean Garrett), Facebook (Brandee Barker), and Skype (Brian O’Shaughnessy), have joined forces to create a new firm called the Pramana Collective.

While PR types don’t usually get a lot of the attention, the joining of these three top Silicon Valley players is enough of a news event to warrant some mention.

(If only to try to figure out a good joke to make about its name, which sounds like a line of skin care products at a spa you can’t afford. I do like to amuse myself.)

Actually, according to a blog post from Garrett, which is below, Pramana is “the means by which one obtains accurate knowledge or true perception.”

(Namaste, and let’s hope that means Barker will finally give me a real comment when I shove my video camera in her face — inside joke alert!)

In all seriousness, communications is a critical part of the digital ecosystem, and this is a strong group. Barker, who was Facebook’s first PR head, has been doing a lot of consulting work since she left there; she was a key part of the team involved in the launch of “Lean In,” the unavoidable book by the social networking site’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg. O’Shaughnessy has just left the owner-changing Skype, and before that, he worked in key PR roles at Google. Lastly, longtime communications exec Garrett led the PR team at Twitter through some of its bumpiest years.

Here’s Garrett’s full blog post, which will give you enlightenment on the whole thing:

Finding Pramana

Brandee Barker has the calming wisdom of someone who learned a lifetime of lessons in her four years at Facebook. She started the company’s communications team and was its leader during Facebook’s most formative, fast-moving years. Brandee recognized that when you are moving at mind-bending speeds, you have to make 100 decisions a day and, within those, a few mistakes will be made. Brandee recognized and learned from both these mistakes and the many more successes gained by her and her team. She was my inspiration during my own journey of mistake/success reflection after my similar ride at Twitter.

Brian O’Shaughnessy makes things look easy. Yet, once you get past his self-deprecating jokes and his insistence on shining the light on others, you realize that you came away from a conversation with him twice as smart as when you started. And, one of most complex communications job in the last four years was running Skype’s. During that time, the company was owned by eBay, was spun out to a private equity consortium and then was sold to Microsoft. Off the 30 original eBay/Skype management team when Brian started in 2008. He left in February as the last remaining one. This wasn’t easy. It reflects on Brian’s innate ability to bring disparate people and perspectives together to forge successful strategies through leadership defined by bullshit-free objectivity and a mastery of technical knowledge.

Brandee and Brian share an unwavering sense of loyalty, strength of character and a desire to apply their learnings to something meaningful.

I feel the same way. And I’m pleased to join these two people that I have so much respect for as partners and co-founders of The Pramana Collective.

Since The Pramana Collective comes from the same place as the philosophies that I’ve clearly, if infrequently, written about here, I won’t dive into our feelings about the state of communications and the great changes that all corners of marketing are facing as lines between disciplines blur. But, practically, this change will have us focused on client needs and not definitions of marketing terminology or dated dividing lines. For example, whatever ‘PR’ was and currently may be to some is not relevant to us now — nor was it when we ran teams at Facebook, Skype and Twitter.

The Pramana Collective is a project-focused communications consultancy. This means that we will work with an organization to help meet a specific opportunity or solve a particular issue for a finite period of time. Among the offering mix will be branding, messaging, campaign development, and road mapping communications functions. This is the type of work that Brandee and I have both enjoyed doing as consultants since Facebook and Twitter.

What we won’t do is stick around to be an agency of record that provides ongoing support. We will provide objective recommendations on next steps and, as needed, suggest and help attain ongoing solutions of all stripes (in-house hires, consultants, agencies) to see through strategies. We look forward to partnering with our network of industry colleagues to find solutions for our clients long term interests.

Despite each of us having 20-plus years of experiences, multiple stints running comms teams for high-profile companies where we had amazing internal and external teams; we all would have benefited in the past from having access to a partner peer set that provided actionable intelligence, straightforward advice and a pure project solution mindset like The Pramana Collective’s offering.

When you are moving at a blindingly fast pace while trying to grow a team that’s never quite big enough, it can be a constant battle to stay ahead of being reactive to both external and internal forces and create space to form proactive campaigns around important initiatives and big moments — be they known well in advance or appear suddenly. We look forward to working with all sizes and types of organizations that share our interest in substantive, transparent and integrated communications.

This brings us to our name — The Pramana Collective. For you logophiles the full definition of Pramana is here, but, in short, it’s the means by which one obtains accurate knowledge or true perception. We believe that an organization’s sometimes hidden or obscured truths are the most powerful messages to drive a conversation. And, the “collective” will be our employees, clients and partners who both feel and act the same way.

Our first priority is hiring like-minded people from both the traditional comms world and other marketing disciplines who command the respect of entrepreneurs and executives. Indeed, getting the word broadly out to top talent who may be mapping out next moves is our primary motivation to talking about our consultancy’s formation now. If you are interested or merely curious, find me at sean at pramanacollective dot com.

And know that we believe that the best people need to have dynamic careers. As our projects will be diverse in scope, so will be the professional paths of individuals on our team. We may be a long-term opportunity for some and, for others, we might be an opportunity to attain broad perspective in between in-house jobs. Indeed, we plan to borrow the entrepreneur in residence (EIR) model that venture capital firms use.

We’ve got a lot of work to do. Having a basic web site would be nice. Regardless, whether it’s teaming on the small stuff or the profound, getting to work with Brandee and Brian already has made this journey one worth taking.

(Photo of Garrett, Barker and O’Shaughnessy courtesy of Steve Maller)

How One Person Captured 10,000 Photos at SXSW

Lauren Goode — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:40:43 +0000

Most of us are hitting our numbers if we produce a handful of sepia-toned Instagrams throughout a conference.

Not Oskar Kalmaru, the Swedish co-founder of the Memoto life-blogging camera. Kalmaru and the company’s CEO, Martin Kallstrom, brought the tiny device with them to Austin and have been taking a photo every 30 seconds since last Thursday.

This wearable square device got its early buzz late last year, when it hit crowdfunding site Kickstarter. The five-megapixel, eight gigabyte camera has a two-day battery, an accelerometer, a compass and built-in GPS.

Memoto raised more than $550,000 through Kickstarter to fund production of the $279 camera. It is currently set to ship at the end of April or early May. It’s being manufactured in Taiwan, after early samples were made in Stockholm.

When I asked Kalmaru today how many SXSW photos he now has stored on his laptop, he said it was around 10,000, which would take up 14 gigabytes of memory (Kalmaru cleared the camera during the festival).

Considering the frequency of shots, plenty of these were off-center, blurry, dark or black photos. Others were cool images of SXSWers crossing Sixth Street in Austin, with the sun bouncing off buildings and crisp blue skies in the background.

That’s where the Memoto software comes in, Kalmaru says: The subscription-based, photo-storage service smartly organizes your photos in a timeline, and chooses the best photo from a moment or an event. Tapping on that photo in the Memoto mobile app will reveal the collective photos from that event, but they’re not all cluttering your feed.

But Memoto could also face a privacy firestorm when the wearable camera does come on the market. One of the use cases Kalmaru gave me for the camera was meeting your significant other for the first time. Most people don’t have a memento or photo from this event; with this camera, you could. A better use case for the camera might be when you lean over to look at your new child for the first time, or when you’re on vacation and seeing a new landscape.

However, it’s hard to imagine a person you’ve just met would be comfortable with their photo being taken every 30 seconds. It could be terribly obtrusive during business meetings. And I’m guessing even friends you know really well would sometimes ask that you ditch the camera.

Kalmaru said Memoto has carefully considered this and has made the camera “pretty visible,” despite its small size. “We didn’t design it like it was some sort of spy camera. That was really important for us,” he said.

He also said the final version of the camera — which currently doesn’t have an on/off button — will turn off when you place the Memoto face down.

Which might be a good thing to do as you’re headed into the bathroom.

Kyocera Torque: Not Exactly Elegant, but Can Handle All Your Drops and Dunks

Lauren Goode — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 13:00:47 +0000

This week, I dropped my smartphone on cement, threw it down a flight of subway stairs and dunked it in a pot of water.

This wasn’t spurred by frustration or accident-prone-ness. I’ve been testing the new Kyocera Torque from Sprint, a rugged, waterproof phone that’s meant to be banged around. Kyocera and Sprint have aimed this squarely at thrill-seekers, heavy lifters, those in the military and anyone else who’s prone to dropping phones.

The Torque, which is only available through Sprint in the U.S., costs $150 but comes with a $50 mail-in rebate. Sprint’s unlimited data plans — which are required with the Torque — range from $80 to $110 per month.

It’s certainly not the first, or the only, phone out there that can take a few hits. Motorola makes the water-resistant, dust-proof Defy XT, available for $50 through a two-year contract with U.S. Cellular. Casio makes a smartphone that, like its G-Shock watches, is water-resistant and can handle drops of up to 10 feet. And Sprint sells the rugged Sonim XP Strike for $100 after a $50 rebate.

[ See post to watch video ]

But the Torque is the first LTE-capable rugged phone from Sprint. And it has a new-old feature that could potentially help you save your minutes: Direct Connect, the new version of Sprint Nextel’s old push-to-talk option for Nextel customers. So, in addition to throwing this smartphone around all week, at times I used it as a walkie-talkie.

Truthfully, I would rarely (if ever) use the walkie-talkie feature if I bought this phone. It’s really meant for people in noisy work environments — construction workers and truck drivers, for example. I can’t imagine the squawks of push-to-talk going over well in quieter places.

And this phone, with its thick casing, is far from elegant. Lastly, its five-megapixel camera was surprisingly sub par.

But to its credit, the Kyocera Torque withstood a lot of the torment I put it through. It serves its purpose as a rugged smartphone for users less concerned with style and more interested in durability.

The Torque, which weighs a pretty hefty 5.9 ounces, is made of a combination of shock-resistant plastic and rubber, with a thick casing that’s screwed onto the smartphone. (The iPhone 5, for comparison’s sake, weighs 3.9 ounces.)

In a dark bar, this might pass as a plain black Android smartphone. Get closer, though, and you’ll see the stippled, textured back of the phone, the teeth of the speakers, visible screws throughout the casing, and yellow highlights on the push-to-talk button, all of which give it more of a tough-guy appearance.

It combines a capacitive touchscreen with a series of physical buttons, including volume buttons on the side, the push-to-talk button and home and back buttons on the bottom front of the phone. It comes with four gigabytes of storage, which can be expanded with a microSD card.

Android fans who want the latest and greatest operating system might be disappointed that the Torque runs Android 4.0 and not the newest Jelly Bean operating system, although Kyocera says that an upgrade should be available in the coming months.

The four-inch LCD display on the phone is okay, but nothing to write home about. It is made of scratch-resistant glass, though, and its greatest attribute is probably its impact resistance.

Now for the fun stuff: The durability tests. I dropped the phone on the pavement multiple times while running in Central Park. The phone survived, and even had a little bounce to it when it hit the ground — not that cringe-inducing, glass-smacking sound you get with fancier smartphones.

I also tossed it down a flight of subway steps, ignoring looks from people who likely thought I was having a really, really bad day. When I picked it up, it was pretty much unscathed. I did have to wedge the back plate of the phone on again, but it still worked. Kyocera says the phone can be dropped up to 26 times from four feet and survive.

This phone can also be submerged in up to a meter of water for 30 minutes. I didn’t have a meter-deep tub available, but I did drop it in my go-to pasta pot and let it sit at the bottom for 30 minutes. I pulled it out, wiped the screen, and it was good to go.

I took a shower with it. Yes, I took my smartphone into the shower, reaching a new level of smartphone attachment. It was fine. But I couldn’t use the capacitive touchscreen while the phone was wet. I had to wipe it down first.

Kyocera boasts 18.9 hours of talk time with the Torque, and for those who really do spend most of their time talking and not browsing, that’s a good thing. The first day I used the Torque, I purposely didn’t run any apps, instead making a handful of phone calls throughout the day.

Call quality was good. The phone’s speaker is actually built into the glass display and offers direct-to-ear vibrations for improved sound, although at times, the audio was so loud it was harsh on my ears.

When I went to bed that night, the phone’s battery had drained by just around 15 percent.

The next day, I fired up some apps, including Gmail, Twitter, Google Maps, Instagram and RunKeeper. That night, the phone died.

Still, this is pretty excellent battery life compared to some other smartphones that require a recharge during the day under that kind of app load.

The biggest downsides of this phone were speed and the camera. The phone runs on a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor — a chip that has been around since 2010 and tends to show up in a lot of budget phones.

Although it is LTE capable — with Sprint now offering LTE in 67 markets around the U.S. — I pulled down 3G speeds in midtown Manhattan, with an average download speed of 1.93 megabits per second and an average upload speed of .88 Mbps. In some previous LTE smartphone tests I’ve done, I got an average download speed of 5.6 Mbps and 1.2 Mbps on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network, and 9.6 and 2.4 Mbps on Verizon’s LTE network.

And the Torque’s five-megapixel, rear-facing camera was disappointing. It was slow to fire up. I took more than a dozen photos in various settings — natural light, indoor light and darker scenes with and without flash — and all of the photos came out a little grainy. There’s also a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera on the phone.

The Kyocera Torque is tough enough to withstand some pretty brutal treatment, and will suit consumers who care more about durability and less about the fastest processor, the newest operating system and the best smartphone camera.

Survey Says: Despite Yahoo Ban, Most Tech Companies Support Work-From-Home for Employees

Kara Swisher — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:29:42 +0000

Last week, a fierce debate erupted over a range of social networks and in the media about a story we posted on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s new decree that employees at the Silicon Valley Internet company would no longer be able to work from home.

In a sometimes awkwardly worded internal memo I posted from Yahoo HR head Jackie Reses, the company rolled out the new rule — pushed through by Mayer — which requires that Yahoo employees who work remotely relocate to company facilities by June 1.

“Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home,” read the memo to employees. “We need to be one Yahoo!, and that starts with physically being together.”

The goal of Mayer to cure what ails Yahoo: Reviving a moribund and enervated workforce that has struggled to innovate and excel over many years. One of the many problems has been the liberal use of work-from-home policies that have been woefully mismanaged to create a culture that is simply not energized.

But, unless I am reading the memo wrong, the ban is not just limited to those who have arrangements to work from home full time — which number in the hundreds — but also employees who take one or two days a week at home.

Top sources told me that Mayer has been particularly irked about Yahoo parking lots that are slow to fill in the morning and quick to empty by 5 pm — which is atypical at other tech companies such as Google. (Mayer was a longtime exec at the search giant.)

At first, she tried to change culture in ways that rained down tasty perks on employees — such as free food and smartphones. Mayer has also been practical, instituting please-be-here Friday afternoon FYI weekly meetings and stricter performance reviews.

But she is now inevitably doling out more unpleasant medicine to the troops, starting with the banning of work from home, which has caused a big ruckus both internally and externally.

Some inside the company are clearly appalled, especially since it might more severely impact working mothers.

“When a working mother is standing behind this, you know we are a long way from a culture that will honor the thankless sacrifices that women too often make,” read one email I got from an internal source, referring to the recent birth of Mayer’s baby.

Many others at Yahoo’s Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ pointed to the nursery Mayer had built — for which she paid personally — next to her office as a perk others at Yahoo do not get.

“I wonder what would happen if my wife brought our kids and nanny to work and set em up in the cube next door?” joked a husband of another employee who will be losing her work-from-home privileges.

Yahoo employees, as far as I can see from its company careers page, offers the typical Dependent Day Care Flexible Spending Account, where staff can pay “dependent care expenses, such as day care or after-school care, with pre-tax dollars.”

While it is fair to raise the issue of how employees will cope given the sudden change in HR policy, others also think that limiting work at home is a good idea because it galvanizes culture and creates a spirit of collaboration that has been missing at Yahoo for far too long.

“Marissa is doing what good leaders do,” wrote one person on Twitter. “Making sure her Yahoo team is communicating & working TOGETHER.”

That is actually a sentiment expressed by Google CFO Patrick Pichette at a recent talk in Australia, when asked about telecommuting at Google:

“The surprising question we get is: ‘How many people telecommute at Google?’ And our answer is: ‘As few as possible’ … There is something magical about sharing meals. There is something magical about spending the time together, about noodling on ideas, about asking at the computer ‘What do you think of this?’ These are [the] magical moments that we think at Google are immensely important in the development of your company, of your own personal development and [of] building much stronger communities.”

That said, officially, many Googlers are allowed and even encouraged to work at home. The company told me when asked about work-from-home policies: “We do not have a formal policy and leave Googlers to use good judgment.”

It is the same for Facebook, which confirmed a “policy to provide flexibility as work permits.” In fact, one exec at the social network giant noted to me that its entire camera app was built from an engineer’s garage, with the group staying away from the office as long as they wanted to build it from home.

Business networking site LinkedIn also said it had “no formal policy at present,” but noted that many employees work from home full-time and part-time as the situation warrants and in consultation with managers.

It goes on and on like that throughout the tech scene, part of an ethos of letting tech talent make its own rules — from what they wear to when and where they work — that is deeply ingrained in the culture.

A Hewlett-Packard spokesperson said of the tech giant: “We do not ban [work from home] and many HP people do it … it is not at all an issue at HP and hasn’t been for years. Some folks have a regular schedule, while others can do it from time to time with the okay of their supervisors.”

An AOL spokesperson said the company doesn’t ban work from home.

A Netflix spokesperson referenced a well-known premium video company’s job deck, which stressed a “freedom and responsibility culture” and notes, “We don’t measure people by how many hours they work or how much they are in the office. We do care about accomplishing great work.”

Twitter had a different twist, but still supports working from home. Said a spokesperson: “We believe there are significant tangible and intangible benefits when employees are working under the same roof. We also recognize that every so often it’s important to be able to work remotely, and we allow for that flexibility.”

A Cisco spokesperson said the networking company also allows it, but it has to be approved by a direct manager: “It is certainly utilized by those employees who earn it. And, of course, with our collaborative suite of technologies like Webex (with video) and telepresence it is the next best thing to being there in person.”

A Microsoft spokesman said that the software company “offers flexible work schedules for all employees.”

Perhaps one of the best companies for a long time in the telecommuting space has been IBM. From its corporate Web page, also touting the environmental benefits:

“IBM was one of the first global companies to pioneer programs to reduce employee commuting. It has sustained these programs for nearly two decades. Two key aspects are its (a) work-at-home program and (b) mobile employees program. Today, more than 128,000 (29 percent) of employees globally participate in one of these programs. In 2011, in just the U.S. alone, IBM’s work-at-home program conserved approximately 6.4 million gallons of fuel and avoided more than 50,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions.”

Startups are much the same.

Said an Airbnb spokesperson of the online housing rentals site: “It’s a flexible policy and managers determine what’s appropriate on a case-by-case basis.”

At location startup Foursquare, a spokesperson said, “Our policy is to allow for ‘flexible work hours’ — and that applies to both the hours you work, and where you work from. While we don’t have any dedicated remote employees, our folks do work from home on occasion and we’re fine with that.”

Private social networking company Path is much the same, according to a spokesperson: “Path has a work-from-home policy. The manager and employee work out the details together.”

The only company I queried that did not respond immediately is Apple, which has been known for a long time to have much tighter rules with its employees. I will update when I hear from the company.

I also have emails in to Amazon, which is already known for flexible working policies.

But, overall, Mayer is forging new ground with her work-from-home ban. Whether that is enough to turbocharge the Yahoo culture is anybody’s guess.

As Expected, HTC Unveils Its New Flagship Phone, the HTC One

Lauren Goode — Tue, 19 Feb 2013 15:36:07 +0000

And you thought all the smartphone fun was going to happen at Mobile World Congress.

Today, at a event in New York City (with a concurrent event in London), Taiwanese handset maker HTC unveiled its new flagship phone, the HTC One.

As rumored, the aluminum-backed, Android-based phone is running on a 1.7GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor. It has a 4.7-inch 1080 display coated with Gorilla Glass, and front-facing speakers that play Beats Audio. It comes with an NFC chip, although currently there are no pre-installed apps that are utilizing the technology.

The phone was also displaying a new version of the user interface known as HTC Sense. It includes something called “Blink Feed,” which transforms the home screen into a constant feed of social updates, emails and news, as well as ESPN content through a partnership with ESPN.

And much emphasis was placed on the phone’s “UltraPixel” camera — which, the company said, means the megapixels are bigger. As HTC pointed out, the megapixel count on a camera doesn’t matter; it’s the size of the pixels.

In addition to “ghost” HDR and burst-shot modes, the HTC One is meant to capture better pictures in low light, and comes with a built-in video-editing solution, dubbed “Zoe.”

The LTE-enabled HTC One will begin shipping in late March; price has not yet been announced. The company has named AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile as its U.S. carrier partners.

The phone comes in silver or black, with 32 gigabytes or 64GB of storage.

HTC president Jason Mackenzie says HTC saw a “massive opportunity” to bring excitement back to smartphones and bring HTC’s offerings to another level. “This is not just another set of incremental improvements,” he said.

As my AllThingsD colleague Ina Fried wrote this morning, the launch of the One comes at a particularly tough time for the company, which found fast success on the back of Android, but just as quickly lost ground to other rivals in the high-end smartphone market, particularly Samsung.

According to Gartner Research, HTC’s share of the global smartphone market slipped to 4.7 percent last year from 9.1 percent in 2011 — even falling below flailing RIM (now, BlackBerry), which had 5 percent of handset market share last year. Samsung, meanwhile, soared from 18.7 percent of the market to 30.3 percent during the same time frame, topping both Apple and Nokia.

Embedded Analytics Can Save Time, Money and Lives

Gene Frantz — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 22:33:10 +0000

Imagine a pair of glasses for the visually impaired that combine video cameras in the lenses with a dedicated microprocessor and a speech-synthesis component that whispers in the user’s ears as he or she walks down the street: “Your destination is 75 feet ahead. Keep to the right to avoid sidewalk repairs. Your friend Chaz is approaching on the left.”

Welcome to the world of embedded analytics.

The business analytics market is booming, and an IBM ad even promises a day when the police arrive at an anticipated crime scene ahead of the prospective criminal. But analytics is increasingly taking place at the semiconductor level as well — within digital signal processor chips, or DSPs, to be precise — and that could fundamentally change the way we all interact with the world.

DSPs are specialized microprocessors optimized for speed. The first programmable DSPs from Texas Instruments appeared exactly 30 years ago and soon became central to the cellphone revolution. Because these chips can mediate our interactions with the world in very nearly real time, they make it possible for voices to be digitized, transmitted, received and then converted back into sound waves fast enough for natural conversation.

DSPs have also made digital imaging ubiquitous, enabling smartphones to shoot high-definition video and to stream everything from a blockbuster movie to yet another instance of a cat misbehaving.

The DSPs’ first two successes hinged on fast, efficient compression of data. But the latest high-performance, low-power DSPs are producing a wave of embedded analytics systems that boast an additional strength: smarts. And engineers are suggesting new potential applications for this intelligence almost daily.

Consider the enduring problem of drunk driving, for example.

An official with Mothers Against Drunk Driving recently asked me whether technology could help reduce the thousands of drunk-driving fatalities that still occur in the U.S. each year. I mentioned this to John H. L. Hansen, who’s head of electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Dallas and part of a study that uses specially equipped vehicles to monitor driver behavior. He told me that drunk drivers are easy to spot by subtle changes in the way they use the pedals and the steering wheel, a pattern of behavior that evinces guilt as surely as a failed Breathalyzer test.

Here’s where the analytics comes in. Embedded analytics involves gathering data from sensors, processing it in real time, using algorithms to make conclusions and then initiating action. In this case, the DSP would monitor usage of the pedals and the wheel, comparing it to the profile of a sober driver. When it determined a significant discrepancy, it would take action, perhaps easing the car off the road and shutting it down (or even calling 911), saving up to 10,000 lives a year in the United States and as many as 250,000 worldwide.

Let’s consider some of the other ways DSP-based analytics could improve our lives.

Facial recognition systems could both eliminate the need for passwords and thwart cybercrooks’ ability to breach your security. Simply look at a screen in your hotel room in Mumbai and you’ve got access to everything available to you through the cloud: your bank balance, a video link to your spouse in Barcelona, you name it.
Imagine communicating perfectly naturally with all the devices around you using touch, voice and even gesture. Analytics can make today’s remote controls as dated as rotary dial phones.
Imagine robots that can interact with us with near-human naturalness as DSP-based analytics enables them to perceive all our subtle cues of gesture, tone and facial expression. (Robotics is particularly interesting because this involves ultimately giving a robot the same ability we have to interact intelligently in real time with the world. That could be huge.)
On a grander scale, you can combine DSP analytics with radar, and suddenly you’ve automated the monitoring of all the flights going in and out of a major airport. Such a system could track the size, speed and location of each aircraft and make real-time traffic management recommendations.
With computational imaging you can integrate the perspectives of multiple cameras to produce 3-D results. Or to create higher-resolution images than possible with only one of those cameras. Computational imaging is particularly promising for security and for automated monitoring of industrial processes. It also enables you to combine the input from cameras on all four sides of a vehicle into one bird’s-eye perspective.
Your arms are full of groceries and it’s just starting to rain. But your front door recognizes you, and it graciously unlocks and opens as you approach.
Imagine a camera that can instantly analyze an image it has taken of a blood sample for signs of disease, a capability that’s equally useful in a busy first-world ER and a remote third-world village.
Your son loses his backpack, so you ask your phone, “Where’s Ethan’s backpack?” Locating it via a GPS tag in the label, your phone immediately replies, “In his locker at school.” Problem solved.

And then there’s the vast realm of health monitoring. If heart disease runs in your family, then DSP analytics and body sensors could continuously monitor you for the earliest symptoms. Your cardiologist then becomes your second opinion.

Which brings us to a fundamental question: Do humans really always need to be at the nexus of information flow?

The algorithms that drive DSP analytics can oversee utilities usage better than the most attentive homeowner, so why not take ourselves largely out of the loop and have the DSPs make seasonal temperature adjustments, start the dishwasher late at night when electricity costs are lowest and alert us about an unexpected spike in energy use? That helps free us up for other things — whether it’s spending more time with the family, finally reading “War and Peace” or just watching more cat videos.

As principal fellow at Texas Instruments Inc., Gene Frantz is effectively the senior engineer at the world’s third-largest chip maker. His long career extends back to the first commercial use of a DSP (in TI’s Speak & Spell for kids).

Facebook Confirms Snapchat Competitor -- Launching Poke iPhone App

Kara Swisher — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:28:10 +0000

Facebook said today that it was launching Poke, an app for the Apple iPhone that AllThingsD.com previously reported was poised to be released to rival the popular Snapchat.

Facebook’s new app to send impermanent messages is standalone and separate from the main Facebook app, bringing its total app count to five. Others include Messenger, Camera and Instagram. Blake Ross, a director of product at Facebook, said Friday that he and a small team built Poke in 12 days.

Poke is a reference to the irritating-to-oldsters-like-me and longtime feature, giving users of the social networking site the ability to “poke” each other to say hello.

In a blog post today, Facebook said:

“With the Poke app, you can poke or send a message, photo, or video to Facebook friends to share what you’re up to in a lightweight way. You can poke an individual friend or several at once. Each message expires after a specific time you’ve set, either 1, 3, 5 or 10 seconds. When time runs out, the message disappears from the app.”

In other words, it’s a feature-for-feature ripoff clone of Snapchat, which is about to need that big round of funding that the start-up is reportedly raising to further grow its self-destructible messaging empire.

As ATD reporter Mike Isaac wrote earlier this week:

Facebook’s new app is another in a string of the company’s aggressive movements into the friend-to-friend communications space.

For instance, Facebook has been highly interested in the fast-growing mobile messaging application WhatsApp (though Facebook isn’t buying WhatsApp, we’ve been told). Two weeks ago, Facebook launched an update to Messenger for Android, where people without a Facebook account can send messages to one another; it was widely seen as a direct, aggressive move into the space WhatsApp currently inhabits.

Photo messages are obviously important to Facebook, as well. It closed the acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for $735 million in September (vying aggressively with Twitter, which also wanted to buy the app). Facebook also launched the standalone Facebook Camera app earlier this year, which the company built in-house.

Facebook to Launch Its Own Snapchat Competitor App

Mike Isaac — Mon, 17 Dec 2012 06:57:38 +0000

Facebook is currently testing its own built-in-house version of a “Snapchat-like” application, a messaging app that allows users to send impermanent photo messages to one another, according to sources familiar with the matter.

Facebook plans to launch the app in the coming weeks, sources say, sometime before the end of the year.

Like Messenger and Camera, Facebook’s new app is standalone and separate from the main Facebook app. After the launch, this will bring Facebook’s app count up to four individual apps (five, if you count Instagram).

Facebook could not be reached for comment late Sunday evening.

Snapchat rose to prominence over the last year thanks to its capacity for sending private, “self-destructable” messages. A user can send a photo message to another friend inside the service, choosing the amount of time that the photo will be available for viewing (usually a matter of seconds). After the user views the photo message for the allotted amount of time, the photo deletes itself from the sender’s phone and the receiver’s phone, and Snapchat deletes the message from its servers. Snapchat also recently added video message capabilities to its service.

Facebook’s competing app will do much the same thing. After users open the new app, they are presented with a list of current message threads between them and their friends. Hold a finger down on one of the threads, and a timer comes up to ask how long the message should be viewable. From there, users are able to send the message — which, just like on Snapchat, will only be viewable for a fixed period of time.

Facebook’s new app is another in a string of the company’s aggressive movements into the friend-to-friend communications space.

For instance, Facebook has been highly interested in the fast-growing mobile messaging application WhatsApp (though Facebook isn’t buying WhatsApp, we’ve been told). Two weeks ago, Facebook launched an update to Messenger for Android, where people without a Facebook account can send messages to one another; it was widely seen as a direct, aggressive move into the space WhatsApp currently inhabits.

Photo messages are obviously important to Facebook, as well. It closed the acquisition of mobile photo-sharing app Instagram for $735 million in September (vying aggressively with Twitter, which also wanted to buy the app). Facebook also launched the standalone Facebook Camera app earlier this year, which the company built in-house.

The new Facebook app comes on the heels of a potential new round of financing for Snapchat. Last week, Om Malik reported that Benchmark Capital will soon lead an $8 million venture round for Snapchat, at a rumored valuation of $50 million.

“We haven’t heard anything from Mark [Zuckerberg] about a Snapchat clone,” Snapchat co-founder and CEO Evan Spiegel said in an emailed statement on Sunday evening. “We’re big fans of Instagram and the Facebook platform and we look forward to watching Mark continue to innovate and grow his company.”

For any start-up, watching Facebook move deeper into your territory is certainly daunting. But not all of Facebook’s home-grown efforts have killed off the competition. Facebook Questions, for example, was supposed to signal the end of Q&A site Quora. However, Facebook retired its Questions product after it failed to take off.

To put it another way: May the best app win.

Instagram Releases a Small Update, Complete With a Shiny New Filter

Mike Isaac — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 21:00:11 +0000

Instagram updated its mobile application on Monday afternoon, introducing a few tweaks to the app’s camera function, along with a new photo filter.

Among the most noteworthy changes in the new version:

A redesigned camera interface, complete with improved Camera Roll image selection.
Tweaks to the image news feed, including full-bleed photos and infinite user profile scrolling.
A curious integration with Foursquare. When your photos are geotagged, you’re able to click through to a venue page inside the Foursquare app, providing you with detailed information about the location. It’s interesting, because it essentially drives traffic and potential app installs from Instagram to Foursquare. Wonder how that deal came about …
Finally, the new filter, “Willow.” Oooh, ahhh.

The app update comes on the heels of a busy week of Instagram news. CEO Kevin Systrom announced last week that Instagram would disable support for Twitter Cards, no longer showing Instagram photos in the Twitter stream. That went into full effect over the weekend.

Instagram’s update launches before Twitter has had a chance to roll out it own photo filters product, which Twitter hopes to release publicly before the end of the year.

With any luck, the new Instagram version will go over better with users than the last one did back in 2011.

The app is available in the iTunes App Store and on Google Play.

Latest Lumia Smartphone: High Quality, but It’s Heavy

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 02:03:38 +0000

Both Nokia and Microsoft were once titans in the smartphone world, but the pair have struggled to find favor with consumers, carriers and developers in the iPhone-Android era. Now, the two companies, which have become close partners, hope they’ve finally found the formula for success. The product on which their hopes rest is Nokia’s new flagship smartphone, the Lumia 920, running Microsoft’s revamped operating system, Windows Phone 8.

[ See post to watch video ]

I’ve been testing the Lumia 920 and consider it a handsome, high-quality phone with attractive features that worked well for me. Not only that, but it costs half of what most other top-of-the-line smartphones set you back, and yet gives you twice the typical memory. It is greatly improved from the first flagship Lumia, last spring’s Lumia 900.

While this isn’t a review of the new Windows Phone 8 software, I can say that it also has improved in the past year. Its underlying architecture has been rebuilt, it is faster and more reliable, it now has smaller icons so you needn’t scroll as much to find what you want, and it still offers a fresh, engaging interface that sets it apart.

The brightly colored Lumia 920 is 65 percent heavier than Apple’s iPhone 5.

But the Lumia 920 has two big drawbacks: It is heavy and thick, and, like all Windows Phones, it has a much smaller app selection than the iPhone or Android phones.

This new Lumia, which costs $100 with a two-year contract from AT&T, has a sharp, vibrant 4.5-inch screen, a very good 8.7-megapixel rear camera, and is fast and fluid. It supports LTE, the most consistently speedy U.S. cellular-data technology, and has 32 gigabytes of memory for storage. It is made of plastic, but it is a solid-feeling plastic in bright colors — including red, yellow and blue — that are injected into the material.

The phone also has some unusual features. Its screen responds to fingernails and even fingers clad in regular thin gloves (though winter-weight gloves didn’t work for me). And it can be charged without plugging in a cable, by merely placing it on a charging plate that plugs into the wall. (The charging plate, normally a $49 option, is being included with the phone for an unspecified period.)

While I didn’t do a formal battery test, this Nokia lasted me through a day of mixed use. Voice calls were reliable and clear, and the phone’s speakers sounded great. Photos and videos looked very good.

In my tests, the LTE speeds were very good, averaging 17 megabits per second downstream. But AT&T’s LTE network is only in about 100 cities.

However, the Lumia 920 has a few characteristics that may turn off potential buyers. The biggest downside is its sheer size. This may be the heaviest modern smartphone I’ve tested, and it’s one of the thickest.

To give you an idea, it’s 65 percent heavier than Apple’s iPhone 5, and 40 percent thicker. We’re in an era of smartphones with larger and larger screens, but most phone makers take care to keep these bigger-screen phones relatively light and thin, something Nokia didn’t do here. For instance, compared with the latest high-end Android phone, Google’s Nexus 4, which has an even larger 4.7-inch screen, the Lumia 920 is 33 percent heavier and 17 percent thicker.

It can be charged by placing it on a charging plate that plugs into the wall.

The second major downside is app selection on the Windows Phone platform. The number, quality and variety of apps has improved considerably in the past year. But developers still either ignore Windows Phone or write for the platform well after they’ve launched on Android or Apple’s iOS mobile operating system. The Lumia 920 has about 120,000 apps, versus some 700,000 for the iPhone and the latest Android phones.

Sheer numbers of apps may seem irrelevant after a certain point. In fact, important apps like Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Kindle, Yelp, the New York Times and Words With Friends are available on the Lumia 920 and worked in my tests. Plus, only Windows Phones have smartphone versions of Microsoft Office programs.

But my searches of the app store on the new Lumia failed to turn up plenty of popular apps available on the Apple and Google platforms, such as Instagram, Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube, HBO GO, Spotify, Pandora radio, United Airlines, MLB, Scrabble and Starbucks.

Some other annoyances turned up in my tests. An update to one of the built-in settings features has remained stuck in the app store for days (Nokia can’t explain why). The camera, which claims superior image stability and low-light performance, generally did very well for me. But it sometimes had a tendency to take over-bright shots. For instance, an orange wine label came out as yellow.

Voice recognition is a weak point on the Lumia 920. Its ability to answer spoken questions and commands lagged far behind Apple’s and Google’s in my tests. And its dictation capability for things like email and texts was atrocious, never coming close to accurate.

The wireless charging plate worked every time for me. But it has a gigantic wall adapter and takes about an hour longer to charge the phone fully than the included standard charger cable.

All in all, though, the Nokia Lumia 920 is worth considering, if you can live with a heavy device — especially given its combination of low price and strong features.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Corrections & Amplifications
The app store on the new Lumia includes an app for Delta Air Lines. A previous version of this article incorrectly said the app was not available.

The Galaxy Camera: A Better Android-Based Camera, but a Big Commitment

Lauren Goode — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 14:00:46 +0000

Would you pay $500 dollars for a high-quality digital camera that’s always connected to the Internet? What if it meant paying another wireless bill or monthly fee?

With its new Android-based Galaxy Camera, Samsung is gambling that Web-crazed consumers will want to take on these commitments for the chance to share photos whenever they want.

The idea of marrying a Google Android mobile operating system with a digital camera is not entirely new. Nikon has done it, Polaroid plans to do it, and now Samsung has introduced this camera.

The Samsung Galaxy Camera has some distinct advantages over its main competitor, the $300 Nikon Coolpix S800c. It has better hardware and is running the newest Android OS, Jelly Bean. And the Nikon is Wi-Fi-only. While testing it (here’s my review of that camera), I wasn’t able to share many photos on the spot. Most times, I’d wait until I was back home or at a hotel before I would share the photos via Gmail, or to Instagram or Facebook.  

While testing the Galaxy, I’ve been able to share my photos at any time — even when I didn’t have access to Wi-Fi. And the camera shares photos quickly when it connects to AT&T’s 4G network (which is HSPA+, not LTE).   

But there are three key things to consider with this camera. For one, it’s relatively big. Another detractor is price: It sells for $499.99, although AT&T is currently offering the camera for $399.99 if you also buy any Samsung Galaxy smartphone — yes, a second device — with a two-year contract.  

If you want the constant connectivity, you’ll have to sign up for an AT&T data plan, or add another line to your existing AT&T plan. You can pay an additional $10 a month on top of your AT&T mobile plan to share between one gigabyte and 20GB of data, or you can opt in to a separate “data connect” plan that can range from $15 to $50 to share between 250 megabytes and 5GB of data.

And in case you’re wondering: The camera does not act as a phone.

There’s also a plan activation fee of $35.   So, unless you’re already an AT&T customer on a mobile share plan, you can expect to pay at least a $15 monthly fee to use this camera, plus a fee just to get it connected. While consumers are pretty accustomed to these costs when it comes to smartphones, they’re new to cameras.  

Some consumers might even wonder why they’d need such a high-priced Android camera when some newer smartphones, like the iPhone 5, the HTC Evo 4G, the Samsung Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II, have pretty good eight-megapixel cameras.

  With all that said, if you’re still interested in buying the Galaxy Camera — it’s an impressive camera, one that does take better photos than a lot of smartphone cameras.

  It measures 5.07 x 2.79 x .75 of an inch, and weighs 11 ounces. Its all-white body has a curve on the right side that’s covered with etched plastic for a better grip, and it feels solid.  

It’s also chunky, due in part to the large lens pocket on the front of the camera. It felt heavy in my purse and in my coat pocket. It didn’t fit in some smaller clutch purses, and it definitely wasn’t fitting in the pocket of my jeans. Samsung explains it size by saying that the camera basically crams two high-end gadgets into one.   

The Galaxy Camera has a powerful, quad-core processor, a large 16-megapixel image sensor and a 23-millimeter wide-angle lens. It has an attractive, 4.8-inch HD touchscreen display. On the top, there’s a dial for controlling the 21x zoom — which also doubles as a volume control button. Otherwise, there are no dials on the camera, keeping it refreshingly simple.  

  Its home screen looks just like the home screen of an Android smartphone — including icons for apps like email, Google Maps, a Web browser and the Google Play store. I was able to easily download apps for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

When you tap the camera icon, you can opt to shoot pictures in Auto mode, Smart mode or Expert mode, the latter of which offers some manual settings (like ISO, shutter speed or aperture priority). Auto mode includes a variety of fun photo filters. There’s also a one-tap video-recording button for capturing HD video.

In most situations, excluding some low-light settings or scenes with a lot of movement, the camera took amazingly crisp and vibrant photos.   And the option to share those photos right away was admittedly pretty convenient.

When I was out in Boston one night, I was able to take a good picture in the dark of the exterior of Fenway Park, and quickly post it online for my boss (who happens to be a rabid Red Sox fan). Over Thanksgiving dinner, I took pictures of a couple and their dog for a potential Christmas-card cover, and sent them the ones they liked on the spot. I shared photos via Instagram.

A photo taken with the Samsung Galaxy Camera

  I also used the camera to check email, browse Twitter and navigate an unfamiliar area using Google Maps.   It was almost enough to make me ditch my smartphone some nights — except, of course, I couldn’t receive or send text messages or make phone calls with the camera. So I still carried around both devices, and mainly pulled the camera out when I wanted to capture a really good-quality photo.  

In my experience, battery life on the Galaxy Camera wasn’t great. I had to charge it once every couple days, and I was using it intermittently. Samsung doesn’t have an official claim for battery life. The battery life of standard point-and-shoots is usually measured by how many shots you can take per charge. When you add a full mobile OS to the camera and allow for apps and Web browsing, it gets a bit tricky.

  Fortunately, as with Android smartphones, you can see which apps are running in the background, or put the camera into either “Airplane” or “smart network” mode to conserve power.  

The Samsung Galaxy Camera is the best Android-based camera that’s currently available, but consumers should weigh the cost commitment that comes with being always connected.

Nokia's Camera Guru Quits

John Paczkowski — Fri, 23 Nov 2012 21:06:50 +0000

Nokia has lost its top smartphone imaging guy.

Damian Dinning, the company’s longtime head of imaging and photography, is leaving after nearly a decade. An alumnus of Eastman Kodak and Minolta, Dinning came to Nokia in 2004 and oversaw development of the N8, the Lumia 920 and the 808 Pureview, a beast of a cameraphone with a 41-megapixel sensor. It’s not clear why he’s leaving the company — Nokia would say only that it is a “personal decision,” but according to a recent tweet, he’s got something exciting lined up for early December.

“Following the relocation of key strategic roles to Finland, and with great reluctance, Damian Dinning has made a personal decision to leave the company effective 30 November 2012,” Nokia said in a statement. “During the past nine years, [Damian] has made many innovative and valuable contributions to Nokia, most recently as a lead program manager in our Smart Devices business. We thank him for his service to the company and certainly wish him the best.”

[UPDATE: Dinning has posted a statement that he is going to Jaguar Land Rover.]

Testing the Speed of Internet Devices

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 21 Nov 2012 02:19:08 +0000

When you test the Internet speed of devices, what software do you use? I just got a new tablet and want to test it.

I and some other reviewers use a free product called Speedtest.net, made by a company called Ookla. On Windows PCs and Macs, I use the Web version of the product, at speedtest.net. On Apple and Android smartphones and tablets, I use the company’s free apps, available from those platforms’ app stores. The product works on Wi-Fi and cellular networks, displays a list of your results over time, and lets you export those results in a format that can be used in a spreadsheet.

I will be traveling to Antarctica on a cruise and will fly home, with strict luggage size and weight restrictions. I would like to keep a log about my trip, download and sort pictures from my camera, and e-read during the trip. Any suggestions what computer equipment best covers these options?

An iPad would do all this, if you buy the $29 optional Camera Connection Kit. I used this combination, with a digital camera, on a trip to Paris, and it worked well. You can plug in your camera via the connection kit, or just pop in its SD memory card, and the iPad will import the photos. You can create albums, and move individual photos among those albums. And, of course, the iPad weighs very little, especially the new Mini, and is a good e-reader.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

With New Features, Lytro Aims to Show Its Futuristic Camera Is No One-Trick Pony

Ina Fried — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 23:30:48 +0000

Camera maker Lytro has captured a lot of attention for its photos that can be refocused after a picture is taken.

But the start-up has a broader story that is only now becoming clear. By capturing far more data then just points of light, Lytro’s light-field images can be displayed in a variety of other ways.

Photo credit: Eric Cheng / Lytro

With a software update due Dec. 4, Lytro camera owners will soon have several new ways to manipulate their photos. One, which Lytro has been demoing for a while–and showed at our AsiaD event–is something called perspective shift.

The technique allows one to gain some three-dimensional perspective by subtly shaking a picture back and forth. (The embedded animated GIF with Walt Mossberg from AsiaD gives a sense for the effect.)

The effect must be enabled from Lytro’s Mac or PC software, but from there it is viewable on any device with HTML5 support. On an iPad, the perspective shift can even be viewed by moving the iPad around and using the tablet’s accelerometer to shift perspectives.

Lytro is also adding a series of filters to its software. While many image programs, from Photoshop to Instagram, can apply filters, Lytro’s filters can have different effects on the foreground and background and transform when the focus is changed or when the photo is put into perspective shift.

For instance, a mosaic effect keeps the focal point looking normal while the background is transformed into a series of tiles. Crayon (seen in this photo of sunflowers) keeps the focal point in color while making the rest of the photo black and white. Another, Blur+, heightens the blur of the parts of a Lytro picture that are not in focus.

Lytro

Update: Lytro said test photos showing off the new features are loading slowly, so we’ve taken them out for now. We hope to have them back in shortly. In the mean time, this static image shows the Crayon filter

Combined, the perspective shift and new filters should help give the public a better sense for what the Lytro camera is capable of, says Eric Cheng, Lytro’s director of photography.

“I think that’s what we are most excited about,” Cheng told AllThingsD. “[We're] showing how much data is captured and how we might use it going forward.”

As with other improvements, Lytro is making the change in software, meaning the new capabilities work not just on new pictures being taken, but also on all Lytro photos already captured.

Adding perspective shift does require the pictures to be reprocessed — a step that can take half a minute per photo. But at that point the photos can have filters applied and be shared back to the Web.

The move comes as the company is gearing up for the holidays. After months of working its way through a backlog of orders, Lytro has caught up to demand (though it won’t say how many cameras it has sold). The company is also broadening availability, which until recently had been limited to sales on its own Web site.

The company is expanding into a few international markets as well as Amazon and the Target and Best Buy Web sites, along with a handful of brick-and-mortar CityTarget stores.

In the mean time, here’s a YouTube video Lytro has done showing the perspective shift feature in action.

Facebook Folds More Features Into iOS App

Mike Isaac — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:00:53 +0000

Facebook updated its iOS application on Monday afternoon, bringing the most popular features of companion apps Messenger and Camera to the main Facebook app. Among the updates are the ability to swipe left within the app to find chat contacts, the ability to upload multiple photos at once and the opportunity for U.S. users to give Facebook Gifts to friends directly from the phone.

Hardworking Tablet With PC Chops

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 01:02:54 +0000

I am writing this paragraph on a tablet in a coffee shop. That’s no big deal. As I look around, I see several people working on Apple iPads. But the tablet I’m using is very different — historic, actually. It’s the first personal computer made by Microsoft, a company determined for decades to make only the software driving others’ computers.

[ See post to watch video ]

With this device, called Surface, Microsoft is adopting the model of its longtime rival, Apple, which has always believed that the better way to deliver digital products is to build them end-to-end, including hardware, operating system and core apps, and an ecosystem of downloadable apps and content. That is what Microsoft is doing now with the Surface tablet, two and a half years after the iPad was born.

I have been testing the Surface almost daily for three weeks and I like it. It’s beautifully and solidly built and it’s the purest expression of Microsoft’s new Windows 8 touchscreen operating system which, like the Surface, goes on sale on Friday. The new operating system also works on laptops and desktops. It can be operated with a mouse or touch pad, but its dramatically different, touch-optimized user interface begs to be used on a touchscreen tablet.

This isn’t a cheap iPad knockoff. It’s a unique tablet, made of a type of magnesium with a feeling of quality and care. The Surface starts at the same $499 base price as the large iPad, albeit with 32 gigabytes of storage, twice Apple’s entry offering. Other versions cost $599 and $699. Unlike the iPad, the Surface is Wi-Fi only. It lacks a cellular-data option.

The Surface tablet with the Touch Cover — which uses molded keys, comes in bright colors and costs $120 — has a sturdy kickstand for typing on a desk.

Office and Keyboards

As fluid as the Surface is with touch and the tablet-like touch apps Windows 8 supports, Microsoft has given the tablet the ability to behave like a familiar Windows PC, at least in some scenarios. It comes with full versions of standard Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The three programs worked fine, in creating documents and in editing ones from older versions of the software.

Microsoft has designed two clever, very thin, optional keyboards that snap on magnetically and double as covers. These are better than any of the add-on keyboards I’ve seen for the iPad. And Microsoft has built in a standard USB port and a sturdy kickstand for typing on a desk. One keyboard, the Touch Cover, uses molded keys, comes in bright colors and costs $120. It’s bundled with the costlier models. The second, a rigid, black version with movable keys called the Type Cover, costs $130.

There is a downside to these keyboards: They are almost useless on your lap. There is no hinge to keep the screen upright and the kickstand works poorly on your legs. Despite that, these features make the Surface better for traditional productivity tasks than any tablet I’ve tested.

A Paucity of Apps

Still, there are rough edges to the Surface. The biggest is a paucity of apps for the new touch interface. At launch, Microsoft estimates there will be only about 10,000 third-party such apps available globally, of which about 5,000 will be available in the U.S. More important, many popular titles, like Facebook, will be missing. That’s a tiny number of apps compared with the 700,000 touch-operated apps that run on the iPad.

And there is more bad news about apps. This first edition of Surface uses a variant of Windows 8, called RT, that can’t run the vast array of traditional programs many Windows users rely upon daily, like Google Chrome, Adobe Photoshop, Apple iTunes or even Microsoft’s own Outlook. A second edition of the Surface, due in January, will run the full version of Windows 8, and most of these standard Windows programs. But it will be heavier.

Mediocre Battery Life

Surface, which is about as thin, but a bit heavier, than the full-size iPad, displayed much weaker battery life in my tests — about seven hours versus 10 for the iPad. That’s better than many Android tablets, but not what you’d expect from Microsoft’s pride and joy.

I tested the battery life using the same test I use on all tablets. I set the screen to 75 percent brightness, leave on the Wi-Fi to collect email in the background, and play videos back to back until the battery dies.

Screen and Cameras

The screen on the Surface is 10.6 inches, larger and skinnier than the big iPad’s. It was sharp and vivid in my tests, but inferior to the Retina display on the third-generation Apple tablet, which has much higher resolution. The cameras were a disappointment. They took only fair pictures. The rear camera has a mere 1 megapixel in resolution. Microsoft says it tuned the camera more for video, but in my tests videos were only okay.

Touch Keyboard

The touch keyboard is fast and easy to use. It can be switched among several styles — a standard configuration, a more cramped one with an added top row of number keys, and a split style, as on the iPad, for thumb typing. You can also summon a panel for handwriting input, though Microsoft doesn’t include a stylus.

Built-in Apps

Surface has the same built-in new-style apps as every Windows 8 PC, and the same app store. Like other Windows 8 machines, the Surface starts up in the new, radically different, tile-based Start screen.

The built-in apps include a touch version of Internet Explorer, an email program, and programs for social networking, instant messaging, photos, maps, videos, music and more. In addition, while Surface doesn’t run most old-style Windows apps, it includes some standard old Windows programs like the calculator, notepad and file explorer.

All of the built-in apps worked fine for me, except Mail, which lacks common features like a unified inbox, and an unread-mail folder. It also doesn’t support one of the two common types of consumer email systems, called POP. Microsoft concedes the Mail app needs to be improved.

On the other hand, the Music app, called Xbox Music, holds great promise. It lets users download songs like iTunes, organize them into “stations” like Pandora does, and stream them free like Spotify.

Third-party apps sometimes showed problems. Evernote took a long time to synchronize my account, and the Kindle app had to stop every few pages to fetch the next section of a book, even if the book had been downloaded. It also messed up some pages.

Bugs

I ran into a number of bugs while testing, some serious. All but one notable one were resolved by the time I wrote this review. It involves the inability of the Surface to authenticate with Microsoft services, like the app store, with some kinds of broadband modems and routers. Microsoft concedes this bug is known, but is still investigating. In my tests, this bug affected me in only one of my several test locations, but one is too many.

Bottom Line

Microsoft’s Surface is a tablet with some pluses: The major Office apps and nice optional keyboards. If you can live with its tiny number of third-party apps and somewhat disappointing battery life, it may give you the productivity some miss in other tablets.

Write to Walt at walt.mossberg@wsj.com.

Nikon's Android-Based Coolpix: A Camera that Shares Like a Smartphone

Lauren Goode — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:00:05 +0000

For years now, camera makers have slapped “Wi-Fi compatible” labels on digital cameras to try to convince consumers that they can easily access the Web and share photos from these devices. Technically, this is true. But they’re often much more clunky or complicated than advertised, especially compared to the photo-sharing experience you can get with a smartphone.

So Nikon has introduced a digital camera that’s meant to grab the attention of photo-happy smartphone owners and offer the best of both worlds: High-quality photos with easy sharing.

The Nikon Coolpix S800c is a sleek, compact, point-and-shoot camera that runs on an Android operating system. It hit the market last month, and costs $350. It takes 16-megapixel photos and has a 10x optical zoom. Like an Android smartphone, the camera has a capacitive touchscreen display that responds to gentle taps, is Wi-Fi-enabled, and offers mobile apps like Gmail, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Smartphone shutterbugs, rejoice!

[ See post to watch video ]

Well, maybe hold off on the celebrations. I like the concept of a hybrid camera, and having familiar apps and an Android keyboard at my fingertips made sharing easy. But I wasn’t hugely impressed with the quality of photos this camera captured, considering that it’s a Nikon. And the sharing was all really dependent on whether the camera was connected to a strong Wi-Fi network, so I ended up sharing and emailing most of the photos from home anyway, not while I was out and about.

And consumers curious about this emerging category of cameras may want to wait a few weeks to check out the Samsung Galaxy camera, another digital camera with an Android operating system. That camera will be available through AT&T, so it will have cellular data options in addition to wireless capabilities. Polaroid says it’s still planning on introducing an Android-powered camera, which it first showed off at the Consumer Electronics Show early this year.

The Nikon’s two-toned body has a slimming effect (in the U.S., the camera comes in a combination of silver and either black or white).

It measures 4.4 by 2.4 by 1.1 inches — smaller than an iPhone, but fatter, with rounded edges — and weighs just under half a pound. Photos and videos are stored on a full-sized SD memory card.

It has a luminous 3.5-inch OLED touchscreen display. Next to that, there are physical Back, Home and Menu buttons, offering a nice blend of touchscreen and tactile buttons for navigating the camera.

The Nikon Coolpix S800c is running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread — an outdated operating system — and it’s not updatable to newer versions of Android. In the case of this hybrid camera, though, I find this to be a bit more forgivable than if I were reviewing a phone or tablet with an old operating system.

Android users will find the camera’s interface to be familiar and user-friendly. The virtual Android keyboard pops up when you need to type. Android apps are easily accessible from the Google Play app store. The camera even has a lock screen that looks like the lock on an Android smartphone.

Before I took any photos, I went into the Google app store and downloaded my favorite apps, like Twitter and Instagram. YouTube, Gmail, Google Search and Google+ all came preinstalled.

To keep it simple for non-techies, the camera’s home screen has just five icons: Shooting, Play, Upload, Browser and Settings. Settings is where I connected the camera to my home Wi-Fi network. Shooting is where I accessed basic photo-taking functions.

Like smartphones, the Nikon Coolpix S800c has a GPS chip that records location data, so users can see where each photo was taken. I could take photos by simply tapping the display, and I could also pull, pinch and squeeze captured images on the camera’s display the way I would look at photos on my smartphone.

Unlike smartphones, this camera offers optical zoom and more obscure photo settings like Dusk/Dawn, Fireworks and Sports, for action photos.

For me, it wasn’t a total love affair with the Nikon. While the camera captures crisp, full-HD video, some still images came out soft or out of focus. I had to fiddle with the white balance at first to get photos to look normal, and not too orange or blue. The Nikon put its best face forward when I took pictures at night or in low light, but some daytime photos didn’t look all that much better than photos taken with my everyday iPhone 4.

When I was connected to Wi-Fi, sharing the photos from the Nikon was simple. I tweeted photos and shared to Instagram the same way I would from my smartphone. I could even share a photo to the social networking app that we use internally at AllThingsD. And because I was logged into my Google account, the camera auto-filled my Gmail addresses for me. So, when I sent a picture to my 65-year-old aunt, who doesn’t email much, I didn’t have to struggle to remember her email address.

But when it wasn’t connected to a Wi-Fi network, the Nikon was just another point-and-shoot camera with a nice touchscreen. In some public places, like a coffee shop or hotel, the camera resisted connecting, even when I had no problem connecting my laptop to the open Wi-Fi network. In one situation, I relied on my iPhone’s “personal hotspot” feature to create a Wi-Fi network for the camera.

Nikon says the Coolpix should snap about 140 photos per battery charge, but battery life on this one is a little bit trickier to measure, since it’s operating, in some ways, like a smartphone. For example, unless you shut off the camera entirely by holding the power button down for several seconds, it still keeps the OS running on minimal power in the background in order to offer a quicker start-up when you press power again.

In my experience, the lithium ion battery lasted just under two days with intermittent use. If you’re taking this camera on a long vacation, you can expect to have to charge it regularly. You may even want to buy an extra battery, since its battery is removable.

I also experienced some minor bugs with the camera. It froze up twice, forcing me to remove the battery to shut it down entirely and restart it. It also showed a weird error message that the SD card in the camera couldn’t be used, even though the card wasn’t full or locked.

The Nikon Coolpix S800c is cool in concept. It puts your favorite Android smartphone apps right at your fingertips, and if you have access to Wi-Fi you’ll get that instant gratification that comes with immediate sharing.

But it isn’t superb enough to make it my main camera squeeze, or even set it apart from some smartphones with good cameras. If I was going out for a hike, meeting friends for dinner or headed to a wedding, and I had to choose just one device to take, it would still be the smartphone.

AT&T to Offer Samsung's Android-Based Galaxy Camera

Ina Fried — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 20:27:38 +0000

AT&T said on Thursday that it plans to carry Samsung’s Galaxy Camera, an Android-based point-and-shoot with built-in 4G wireless.

The point-and-shoot camera market has been hit hard. Smartphones increasingly replace traditional cameras as consumers prefer the ability to immediately tweak and share their photos over such things as image quality, optical zoom and other advantages of a camera-only option.

Now, though, Samsung, Nikon and others are offering an option that aims to deliver the best of both worlds by combining the optics of a point-and-shoot camera with the Android interface and, in some cases, even the cellular connectivity found on a smartphone.

The downside of cellular capability, of course, is that customers will need to pay for all that data use, which, with large pictures, can easily add up.

The Galaxy Camera, first announced back in August, packs the Jelly Bean version of Android along with many of the social sharing features found on the Galaxy S III phone, along with a 21X optical zoom and 16-megapixel sensor.

“Wirelessly enabling Samsung’s Galaxy Camera will create a significant shift in how consumers share and communicate with photos and videos,” AT&T senior vice president Chris Penrose said in a statement. “By posting instantly to social networking sites or sending directly to another device, the person behind the lens is essentially offering family and friends the opportunity to share in the moments as they are actually experiencing them. We’re excited that the AT&T wireless network will help enable these opportunities.”

Whether consumers are willing to pay for and carry a second device, though, remains to be seen. AT&T said the Galaxy Camera will be available “in the coming weeks” but didn’t announce pricing for the device or related service plans, though it would seem a natural addition to one of the new plans that lets customers share a bucket of data across multiple devices.

The iPhone Takes to the Big Screen

Walter S. Mossberg — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:04:03 +0000

The world’s most popular smartphone becomes significantly faster, thinner and lighter this week, while gaining a larger, 4-inch screen — all without giving up battery life, comfort in the hand and high-quality construction.

[ See post to watch video ]

That’s my quick take on Apple’s new iPhone 5, the sixth generation of the iconic device, which goes on sale on Friday. I’ve been testing the new iPhone for nearly a week and I like it a lot and can recommend it, despite a few negatives, such as a new maps app that has one big plus, but other big minuses. On balance, I still consider the iPhone the best smartphone on the market, especially with its staggering 700,000 third-party apps and a wealth of available content.

The price is the same — $199 for a 16-gigabyte base model, with higher-memory models at $299 and $399, all requiring a two-year contract.

Bigger Screen

In increasing the iPhone’s screen size, Apple took a different approach than competitors. It kept the same side-to-side width, yet added height to grow the screen from its previous 3.5-inch size. For those who prefer the gargantuan screens on some other phones, like the 4.8-inch display on Samsung’s Galaxy S III, the iPhone 5’s screen likely won’t suffice. These competing big screens are typically both taller and wider.

iPhone 5

However, I found the new iPhone screen much easier to hold and manipulate than its larger rivals and preferred it. In my view, Apple’s approach makes the phone far more comfortable to use, especially one-handed. It’s easier to carry in a pocket or purse and more natural-looking when held up to your face for a call.

And the moment you turn it on, you notice that the new, larger, screen can display more content—six rows of icons instead of five; and more contacts, emails and calendar entries without scrolling.

Despite the larger size, Apple managed to retain the same number of pixels per inch on the iPhone 5 as on earlier models, so the new model keeps the “Retina display” effect, which allows for sharp details. The screen continues to look great.

There’s a temporary downside: Many apps will fail to fill the whole of the larger screen until they are revised. But they still work as intended.

Design

While this new model isn’t a radical redesign, it offers a much bigger change than the current iPhone 4S did when it was launched last year. The minute you pick the iPhone 5 up you notice it’s much lighter—20 percent lighter, in fact. It’s so much lighter that you wonder if it’s a demonstration mock-up, not the real thing.

Yet unlike many competitors, this isn’t a plastic, insubstantial-feeling device. Although Apple claims it’s the world’s thinnest smartphone—18 percent thinner than the prior model—the iPhone 5 retains Apple’s trademark, solid-feeling, metal construction, with an aluminum back this time, instead of a glass back. Like many Apple products, it’s gorgeous.

There’s one design change that’s already rankling people, however: To accommodate the thinner design, Apple has adopted a new, thinner connector on the phone for plugging in the charger cable and connecting to accessories, like speaker docks. A new cable is included, but owners of the new phone will have to buy $29 adapters to keep using existing accessories.

The iPhone 5 also boasts a large array of new software features — though nearly all are available for older iPhones as well, via a free upgrade to the operating system, called iOS 6.

Speed, Battery and Camera

Perhaps the single biggest functional improvement in this iPhone — something you can’t get by upgrading the software on an older model — is speed. Apple has finally connected the iPhone to the fastest cellular data network, called LTE, and data downloads and uploads just fly, even when you aren’t on Wi-Fi. Also, the processor now has twice the previous speed.

Apple is hardly the first smartphone maker to include LTE. In fact, it’s one of the last. But including it in the popular iPhone is a big deal, especially since, unlike on some early LTE models, the blazing cellular technology doesn’t decimate the battery life on this phone.

Using an iPhone 5 on the Verizon LTE network in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., I averaged almost 26 megabits per second for downloads and almost 13 megabits per second for uploads. Download speeds peaked at 42 megabits per second. These speeds are more than 10 times the typical speeds I got on an iPhone 4S running Verizon’s slower 3G network and are faster than most Americans’ home Internet services. While LTE affects only data, voice calls I made on the iPhone 5 were clear, better than in the past. I had no dropped calls.

The iPhone 5’s battery lasted between 9 and 12 hours every day, in mixed use. For most people, the phone would last the day without recharging.

Apple shrunk the size of the rear camera, but kept the 8-megapixel resolution and added a cool, easy panorama feature and the ability to take still photos while making a video. Photos and videos I took looked great and were improved when in low light.

Maps and Software

Google vs. Apple

Compare screen shots of Google’s maps app and Apple’s own maps app.

iPhone 5 White House map (Apple Maps)

iPhone 4S White House map (Google Maps)

iPhone 5 navigation (Apple Maps)

iPhone 4S navigation (Google Maps)

The biggest drawback I found is the new Maps app. Apple has replaced Google Maps with a new maps app of its own. This app has one huge advantage over the iPhone version of Google Maps — it now offers free, voice-prompted, turn-by-turn navigation. Google had made this available on its Android phones, but not the iPhone. Apple’s navigation worked very well, with clear directions displayed as large green highway signs.

But the app is in other ways a step backward from the familiar Google app. For instance, while Apple’s maps feature a 3-D “Flyover” view of some central cities, they lack Google’s very useful ground-level photographic street views. And they also lack public-transit routing. Apple will instead link you to third-party transit apps. Also, while I found Apple’s maps accurate, they tend to default to a more zoomed-in view than Google’s, making them look emptier until you zoom out.

Siri, Apple’s voice-controlled intelligent assistant, can still be unreliable (it’s still a beta) but I had success with some of its new features, such as looking up movies and sports scores. It now allows you to dictate and post Facebook status messages and book restaurant reservations via the separate OpenTable app.

Speaking of Facebook, Apple has added sharing to that service as a built-in feature that works with many apps on the phone.

There’s also a nice new feature that lets you respond to a call you can’t take with either a canned text message (such as “I’ll call you later”) or a reminder to call back.

Apple’s FaceTime video-calling service now works over cellular connections as well as Wi-Fi. I was able to make several crystal-clear video calls over LTE, one from a parked car.

And Apple is introducing a new photo-sharing service, which lets you set up a stream of selected pictures and invite specific friends to subscribe to it. Any new pictures you add to these shared Photo Streams pop up on subscribers’ phones and they can comment on them.

Siri on the iPhone 5 can look up movies and sports information, above, as well as make restaurant reservations via the separate OpenTable app.

Some rival phones boast some features Apple chose to omit. These include a wireless function called NFC, for paying for goods wirelessly, and face recognition for logging into your phone. But I regard such features as either little-used or unperfected. For instance, NFC isn’t available in most stores and, in my tests, facial recognition on phones has failed to work time and again. For some, these features matter a lot, but I’d bet most users won’t care about them, at least in their current state.

Carrier Plans

Carrier plans for the new iPhone are too complex to detail here. In general, if you’re a current iPhone user, you won’t be able to upgrade at the $199 price unless you’ve had your current phone for a minimum period. And unlimited-data plans generally aren’t available to new users, though Verizon will sell you one if you are an existing customer with unlimited data and pay an unsubsidized price of $649 for the phone. AT&T will allow existing users with unlimited plans to keep them, even at the subsidized phone price, if they’ve had their current iPhones for a certain length of time, generally around 20 months. Sprint is the exception: It offers unlimited data to all iPhone buyers, existing and new.

Upgrading

If you own an iPhone 4S and especially if your carrier won’t let you upgrade yet at the $199 price, you may be content with just upgrading to the new software, which gives you a lot. But you’ll be stuck with the smaller screen, bulkier size and pokier cellular speed. If you own an older model iPhone, or are switching from another phone, however, the iPhone 5 is an excellent choice.

Bottom Line

Apple has taken an already great product and made it better, overall. Consumers who prefer huge screens or certain marginal features have plenty of other choices, but the iPhone 5 is an excellent choice.

Email Walt at mossberg@wsj.com.

Not Ready for iPhone 5? Upgrade Offers Some New Tricks.

Katherine Boehret — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 01:03:45 +0000

The good news for plenty of current iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users pondering buying the new iPhone 5 is that they’ll get many of the 200 new features in Apple’s free update for mobile software, iOS 6, available on Wednesday.

[ See post to watch video ]

I’ve compiled a handful of the most significant features you’ll get with the iOS software update, which I tested on the iPhone 5 and the newest iPad. Some older devices won’t be able to use all of these features and one feature will work only on the iPhone 5: taking a still photo while recording a video. Here are some highlights of the new features. There are many more features too numerous to mention.

Do Not Disturb

Finally, the iPhone can let its owners sleep at night — with options. Until now, the iPhone’s silencing switch turned off all sounds with no alternatives. This meant that people who wanted to turn off alert sounds for Facebook notifications and incoming emails while they slept had to give up receiving phone calls in the middle of the night from, say, a relative having an emergency.

The Do Not Disturb feature (turned on in Settings and adjusted in Settings, Notifications) turns off all sounds but can make exceptions. If you want to be notified whenever one of your favorite contacts calls you, the phone will ring. Another optional feature of Do Not Disturb lets calls ring through if a person calls twice in a row within three minutes. Do Not Disturb can be set to work on a daily schedule, like from 11 pm to 7 am, so you don’t have to remember to turn it on. People who are trying to maintain separate work and personal lives may even set this to work after they leave the office, only allowing calls from certain groups (like family and close friends) to ring between 6 pm and 8 am.

If your phone’s silent switch is on, the phone won’t make noise no matter how Do Not Disturb is set.

The Panorama feature in Camera works on the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5 and newest iPod touch.

Panorama

In iOS 6, Apple (as it often does) took a feature that’s already available in many smartphones and made it a lot simpler to use: capturing panoramic photos. In Camera, select Options at the top center of the screen and choose Panorama. A small on-screen diagram will appear to guide you as you click the shutter button once and pan the phone from left to right, following an on-screen arrow along a center line. Panorama works on the iPhone 4S and 5, as well as the newest iPod touch.

Better Sharing

IOS 6 has improved sharing in two significant ways: It’s now integrated with Facebook and enables sharing directly from the places where people think about sharing. You can share to Facebook using various tools such as the Notification Center screen (pull this down from the top of the screen and select Tap to Post in Facebook); using Siri (tap and hold the Home button before saying, “Post to Facebook”); or by clicking a share button (a square with an arrow) on nearly any screen — including photos.

Until now, iOS forced people to open Facebook, select Photo in the app and then choose an image to share. Now, people can tap the share button while looking at a specific photo and send that photo out to Facebook.

Likewise, you can now add photos or videos to emails as you’re composing them — not by starting with photos. This is something people naturally do on their desktops as they add photos or videos to emails. Do this by tapping anywhere on the screen in the body of the email to see the Select, Select All, Paste options appear. Then tap on the right arrow and select Insert Photo or Video.

Siri now works on the newest versions of the iPad and iPod touch, and can do more things, like launch apps.

App Store

While Apple’s App Store now holds 700,000 apps, the revamped App Store app for iOS doesn’t look overcrowded thanks to a more organized layout. Search results appear in card format, one per screen. By swiping one app to the left, another appears. Developer information, reviews from other users and screen shots of the app appear in a helpful, methodical format. While the old App Store forced people to scroll down a lot, this App Store makes better use of the horizontal plane. It does a better job of displaying Genius, a feature that suggests apps you might like according to those you’ve purchased.

Maps

Apple is now shipping its own Maps app, replacing Google’s Maps app on devices receiving the update. This app takes some getting used to, and its maps appear a bit more zoomed in, overall.

But its turn-by-turn directions (available on the iPhone 4S, iPhone 5, iPad 2 or later) will be a big help for people who want a hands-free option for driving: Just plug in your destination address, pick a route and tap start to hear navigation instructions announced out loud as you drive. The text of the directions still appears on the device’s lock screen, in case you put it down and it locks and you need to quickly glance at the next step.

Siri

Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, has been updated to do more and now works on the latest-model iPad and iPod touch as well as the iPhone 4S and 5. Siri can now open apps and do more with them; I composed a Facebook message and never touched any keys. But it still has its inaccuracies: In a quiet office, I said, “Launch Google Plus,” which Siri interpreted as “Lunch Google Plus,” and then said, “I found 15 lunch restaurants, 11 are fairly close to you.” This is a failed experience that happens all too often.

Freedom from Wi-Fi

Now, the FaceTime video chats you make on iOS can be conducted over cellular, not just Wi-Fi. This works on the iPhone 4S and 5, as well as the newest iPad, so long as it has cellular data capability.

Write to Katherine Boehret at katie.boehret@wsj.com.

Wonder If Jony Ive's One-of-a-Kind Leica Will Be Laser-Cut From a Single Piece of Alu-min-ium?

John Paczkowski — Tue, 18 Sep 2012 17:57:09 +0000

When Apple CEO Steve Jobs first unveiled the iPhone 4, he compared it to “a beautiful old Leica camera.” It’s fitting, then, that Jony Ive — the guy responsible for its design — has been tapped by the legendary camera maker to create a limited edition Leica M. Leica Chairman Dr. Andreas Kaufmann said at an event Monday night that the Ive-designed camera will be a one-off, and will be sold at auction for charity.

Apple hasn’t responded to a request for comment.

Another Android Smartphamera! This Time, From Samsung.

Lauren Goode — Wed, 29 Aug 2012 17:30:08 +0000

Last week, Nikon announced a new digital camera, the Nikon Coolpix S800c, which runs on an Android operating system to offer shutterbugs the same fast sharing capabilities that they get from their smartphones.

Not to be outdone, Samsung Electronics has announced its own Android-based digital camera with a newer operating system and greater optical zoom than Nikon’s Android “smartphamera.”

It’s called, of course, the Galaxy Camera.

The Galaxy Camera is heavier than the Nikon, measuring 2.7 inches by .75 inches, and weighing 10.7 ounces. It runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, with a 1.4 GHz quad-core processor and eight gigabytes of onboard storage, with an SD card slot for more.

It has a 16-megapixel CMOS sensor, boasts a 21x optical touch zoom lens, and has a 4.8-inch HD LCD screen. It also has voice control, which lets the photographer shoot pictures and zoom in and out using voice commands.

Some other notable specs of the camera: It includes built-in editing features and automatic cloud backup, shoots full HD video and has Bluetooth capabilities in addition to Wi-Fi.

The Galaxy Camera was unveiled today at the IFA Consumer Electronics Show in Berlin, Germany. Its price point and launch date are still unclear, but I’ll update when I have more information.

Finally, Facebook Speeds Up Its iOS App

Mike Isaac — Thu, 23 Aug 2012 17:00:18 +0000

If you’re one of the millions of people using Facebook’s main iOS application, you already know it’s horrendously slow.

Well, you’ll be glad to know that on Thursday afternoon, Facebook will launch a major update to the app for the iPhone and iPad, drastically improving speed and overall performance.

Thank heavens.

We knew this was coming, and it is much needed. Frankly, the app’s performance up to now has been embarrassing, considering Facebook is the most installed iOS application in the entire world. Slogging through the feed was sluggish. Photos took forever to load. Even the basic action of opening the app itself took longer than other apps.

Consumers no longer regard performance as a bonus feature when considering an app — performance is a necessity. Especially on iDevices like the iPhone, the iPad and the iPod Touch, pieces of hardware synonymous with speed, refined user interfaces and a fine-tuned operating system that handles apps with ease.

Facebook acknowledges as much. “People have different expectations when it comes to using Facebook for iOS,” Mick Johnson, Facebook iOS mobile product manager, told me in an interview this morning. “They expect a level of performance and speed that just wasn’t there.”

Johnson says that the largest pain points — scrolling through the feed, photos and loading the app — will all be much faster, by a factor of two. Also, Facebook mobile developers working on the three separate iOS apps — Facebook, Camera and Messenger — are all now sharing a code base with each other, so Messenger and Camera are actually running inside of the proper Facebook app, bringing many of those features to Facebook for iOS. (As a bonus, a shared code base means faster development cycles, so we’ll probably see improvements sooner.)

This is all well and good. But why on earth did this take so long? For a company that claims to be “mobile first,” you’d think that Facebook would have gotten its apps up to speed much sooner. Not to mention the added pressure of Facebook needing to shift ad dollars away from the desktop as the mobile application continues to rise in popularity. Perhaps a speedier application could help to serve up Facebook’s newly released mobile ad products — like “Sponsored Stories” and “Offers” — in a more effective way.

Johnson raises a fair point. “Up until now, we’ve focused on getting to scale,” he said. “We have 500 million users accessing it monthly across 7,000 different types of mobile devices.” In order to reach that wide swath of people, Facebook has focused on HTML5, a programming language which, in a nutshell, made it easier to push the same Facebook experience out to everyone across the world at once. As a Facebook spokesman pointed out to me, iOS devices are just one of thousands of different phones accessing Facebook — to focus on one while neglecting the others would have been problematic. Especially when you consider just how important international growth is to Facebook, where the vast majority of people aren’t using smartphones.

So basically, Facebook had to go back and rewrite the whole thing from scratch. While the current Facebook app is predominantly HTML5-based, Johnson and his team gutted it and rebuilt it using the Objective-C programming language, which makes better use of the iPhone hardware and focuses on the advantages of using a native application, rather than rendering Facebook items in the app using Web data. (For more nerdy deets on this, look at Facebook’s engineering blog.)

This doesn’t mean that Facebook is abandoning HTML5, Johnson says. “The mobile web is still very important to us, as are all of our interfaces,” he said. Problem is, HTML5 is a technology that, while promising in the long run, isn’t able to deliver the type of speed and performance we expect right now. It’s a long bet, and something that Facebook aims to continue developing.

No word on an Android update, though Johnson hinted to me that it’s probably already in the works.

Look for the new app to hit Apple’s App Store later on this afternoon.