StoreDot Super Battery Will Charge Your Phone in 30 Seconds

 

StoreDot, an Israeli tech startup, unveiled a prototype that can charge your smartphone battery in 30 seconds. The company hopes to start producing consumer-ready chargers in late 2016.

 

StoreDot uses biological semiconductors to store and deliver power in batteries far more quickly than current systems. The company has been constructing semiconductors built from peptides, which are organic amino acids that, when linked together, create proteins. Peptides have become popular among body-builders because of their protein creation and have been found to have a wide range of applications.

 

Demonstrated for the first time at Microsoft's Think Next symposium on Monday, the battery prototype only works for now with Samsung's last-gen handset. But StoreDot says that its technology will work with other phones, too.

 

       

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Amazon Introduces FireTV

                           

Amazon has joined the battle for the living room, introducing the Amazon Fire TV, a small black box that connects your HDTV to a world of online entertainment. It is designed to stream the company’s catalog of free and paid shows and movies and let users play online video games on their large-screen TVs.

 

Amazon will compete with Apple TV and console makers like Microsoft and Sony. One feature that distinguishes Fire TV from at least some competitors’ offerings is its ability to bring casual games to televisions. Owners can play games with either the remote control or Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet. There are far fewer games in Amazon’s app catalog than in Apple’s or Google’s. Although Fire TV owners will find King.com’s (KING) ingenious Candy Crush Saga in Amazon’s Appstore, they won’t find such popular time-wasters as the mobile shooting game Bioshock, the second-most popular game on the Apple App Store. Amazon hopes to rectify this imbalance by making its own games like combat game Sev Zero, which will make its debut on Fire TV.

Moreover, Amazon’s fireTV has a couple unique features, including a remote control with a voice recognition search feature, so a user can speak the name a show, actor or topic and find that content.

 

More fireTV features:

 

— Over 200,000 TV episodes and movies, millions of songs, and over a hundred games

— Unlimited access to thousands of popular movies and TV shows including exclusive titles like

     Downton Abbey and Under the Dome.

— Voice search
 

— Fast quad-core processor, 2 GB of memory, dedicated GPU

 

— 1080p HD video

 

— Dolby Digital Plus surround sound

— Instant streaming

 

Amazon's FireTv device will cost $99.

 

 

 

 

 

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What you need to know about Sony’s Xperia Z2

 

Sony will launch its new flagship, the Sony Xperia Z2 Smartphone (the follow up to the Xperia Z1) next month, and we will take a closer look at what the Japanese multinational calls as “The best of Sony in a smartphone".

 

Sony has made a substantial amount of subtle updates to the hardware and interface of the Xperia Z2, including a faster processor and a larger battery capacity than the previous series. Also, the Xperia Z2 is equipped with a larger screen and a thinner bezel with a metal material that surrounds the sides.

 

Additionally, the Sony Xperia Z2 will include Sony Digital Noise Cancelling – a first in a phone – and as is becoming the norm for Sony, it's waterproof as well. The new product will be able to record video with a resolution of 3840 × 2160 pixels at 30fps, and as you might expect from any  pièce de résistance, it comes with Android 4.4.2 KitKat.

 

More Specifications:

 

- 5.2 -inch screen with Full HD resolution ( 1920 × 1080 pixels ) wrapped with Sony's X-Reality technology, to optimize colors, contrast and sharpness while reducing noise.

 

- Qualcomm Snapdragon 801 MSM8974AB, the latest four-core processor made by Qualcomm with four 2.3GHz Krait CPUs in addition to 4G LTE, 3GB of RAM.

 

- High capacity 3,200mAh battery.

 

- Storage capacity: 16 GB of internal memory with support up to 64 GB of microSD cards.

 

- Available in three colors, namely white, black, and purple.

 

 

 

 

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Facebook acquires WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stocks

 

 

Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook is going to buy popular mobile-messaging startup WhatsApp for $ 19 billion.  

 

Zuckerberg's social network can't be acused of ignoring the trends. Their technologists have developed new platform apps for photos and messaging, but other companies were actually doing a better job (Instagram, WhatsApp).

 

Everyone's now talking about Facebook's mobile strategy but what I think is that we should be prepared to see more acquisitions like this in the future.

 

 

 

 

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How to Choose the Right Smartphone, Part 4: Final Considerations

 

 

Having pointed out the pros and cons of the different phone operating systems, here are some other important considerations when shopping for a smartphone:

 

Display Quality

 

Stay away from phones with screen resolutions lower than 1920 x 1080 pixels (1080p).

 

Processor

 

The fastest performance is offered by the Qualcomm's quad-core Snapdragon 800 processor for Android and Windows Phones and by the Apple's 64-bit A7 chip.

 

RAM

 

Choose devices with 2GB or more.

 

Internal Storage

 

Go for as much internal storage as possible. We suggest 32GB, and expandable memory via a microSD Card is highly recommended.

 

Camera
 

If possible, try the camera out in the store to verify the image quality of the phone. The number of megapixels is not always a reliable indicator.

 

Battery Life

Aim for phones with battery capacity of 3,000 mAh (milliamp hours) or more.

 

Read more about How to Choose the Right Smartphone here: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

 

 

 

 

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