Welcome to the Weekly Tech Update with me, Mike Walmsley. It’s a look at everything that has happened in the world of technology, the Internet, Search Engines and social media over the last week.
Technology
After months of speculation Apple have finally announced that they will be holding an “event” next week on 12th September in which they will announce the new iPhone and the latest incarnation of their mobile operating system iOS. There are many rumours doing the rounds about the new phone that include the fact that the latest iPhone will be longer than previous models, it will have a repositioned headphone socket next to the connection dock and the connection dock will be smaller than on existing models. Are these rumours true? Well there’s less than a week to wait and we will all know.
Amazon is now taking pre-orders of their 7” Kindle Fire tablet in the UK. Amazon also announced a higher spec Kindle Fire HD. The devices will be delivered on Oct 25th and prices start from £129 for an 8GB Kindle Fire up to £199 for a 32GB Kindle Fire HD. This means that it is cheaper than Google’s own Nexus 7 tablet.
Nokia have announced the launch of their flagship Windows Phone 8 model, Lumia 920. It has plenty of great features including a 1.5GHz dual core chip, 4.5” display and the camera is reported to be very good. I’ve used an LG Optima than ran Windows Phone 7 in the past and found it to be a very good phone. The problem was the lack apps and this is likely to be true of Windows Phone 8 phones to start with.
The launch of Microsoft’s Windows 8 operating system is probably going to be key to the survival of Nokia. As more Windows 8 mobile devices flood the marketplace then it may become a more tempting platform for developers to develop for. One thing that is for sure apps tend to make or break a mobile operating system.
Internet
For those of you who like to watch the BBC via its dedicated iPlayer service there is good news! Now, as well as being able to stream programs to your device you can also download programs to watch when you are not connected to the Net. Downloads can be saved for up to 30 days and can be played over 7 days. So you really don’t have an excuse to miss the goings on in Eastenders ever again.
Yandex, the Russian search company, has now opened up its cloud storage solution, Yandex.Disk to anybody. You receive a fairly hefty 10GB of space for free and this is doubled to 20GB if you introduce a friend to the service.
Search Engines
Bing have been playing fast and loose with the number of search results that they offer you. The standard number of results is considered to be 10 per page but over the last couple of months they have been offering up to 18 results on a single page. Microsoft, the owners of Bing, say that this is intentional and is based on the types of results that the query produces. It appears that if your query produces results that includes news items, photos or videos than you are likely to see more results on the page. Do you think this would enhance or detract from your user experience? Let me know what you think.
Another change is that when you search for images on Bing they display the results in a Pinterest style. Further if you have authorised the Bing app on Facebook then you can search your friends photos for specific text. You might want to see all the pics of your friends on New Years Eve. Type in New Years Eve and you will get all those pictures that your friends were in.
Social Media
Twitter is now providing users with the ability to embed their Twitter stream into a webpage. The feature can be found under settings and then widgets and is easy to configure. For myself one of the best features is that it allows photos to be automatically displayed. As I take quite a lot of pics with Instagram I think this feature will really brighten up my webpage when I finish the redesign. Yes I am in the process of rebuilding my website.
Finally, Facebook is cracking down on those attempting to gain fake “Likes”. The social media giant is using sophisticated tools that can automatically detect when Likes are being generated using malware. The purpose of generating fake likes is to lure other unsuspecting users to a Facebook page and then redirect them to a website with nefarious intentions. Users are tempted to click on the link due to the Facebook page appearing to be so popular. I’m not looking for fake likes but if you are enjoying this then do please give me a thumbs up!