At its IFA 2015 press event, Samsung emphasized the customization options of the Gear S2 and the plethora of designers and partners it has to pull it off. The collaborations include companies like Case-Mate, Casetify, Chow Tai Fook, Incipio, iTFit and SLG Design (also known as TheSom) and now Samsung is showing off what they have done for the Gear S2.
Starting with Case-Mate, which will offer leather bands for the Gear S2 and Gear S2 classic. Then, there are the more colorful Casetify straps in five distinctive designs (Dark Marble, Woodland Camouflage, Coral Tribal, Diamond, White Marble). They're made of sweat-resistant thermoplastic polyurethane (try saying that three times fast).
Case-Mate bands • Casetify straps
Chow Tai Fook bands will be sold in China and Hong Kong and are quite luxurious with diamond accents and 18k gold. iTFit will offers several straps made from NATO materials, which feature woven cloth and are hypoallergenic. Finally, SLG Design and Incipio will also offer straps, some of which look quite cool for our taste.
Chow Tai Fook • iTFit • SLG Design
This all goes to show the lengths to which Samsung has gone to offer unmatched personalization for its Gear S2 and Gear S2 classic smartwatches. It'll be interesting to see how much these niceties will cost, but we doubt any of them will beat an Apple Watch Edition with an Hermes leather band.
If bigger truly is better, Samsung has just taken the wraps off the best tablet we may have ever seen. Its name is the Galaxy View and this goliath has a whopping 18.4-inch display. You read that correctly -- 18.4 inches from corner to corner of its widescreen display. Release date and pricing are currently unknown, but expect Samsung to charge a premium for this leviathan.
Ridiculous though that might sound, Samsung reckons the View serves a noble purpose: couch potato nirvana. It's geared solely towards watching video. That's something you can already do on smaller tablets, of course, but the View's huge size will make movies and TV shows a lot more immersive.
The View is far less portable than most any other tablet, of course. It's heavy, you won't fit it into a backpack, and you'll look really daft using one on the bus. It doesn't need to be tethered to a power socket though, so unlike your TV you can watch it in your bedroom, carry it into your kitchen, and even pay a visit to the bathroom, all without missing a moment of "Spongebob".
Andrew Hoyle/CNET
It's running Android at its core -- version 5.1 Lollipop, to be specific -- but Samsung will load the slate with a custom overlay that puts streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu, Amazon and so on right at your fingertips. (Your media selection will vary by market: The UK, for instance, gets BBC iPlayer as well.)
You can switch back to the regular Android interface if you prefer, and you'll have full access to the Google Play Store, so the full realm of Android apps and games will be available to you. With Google Docs downloaded, and with a wireless keyboard attached, the View could also make a fair replacement for a desktop all-in-one PC.
Being an easily portable media machine for the home means the View is targeted much more towards families than the Android power user. As such, Samsung hasn't equipped the View with particularly high-end specs. It has a full HD display (1,920x1,080 pixels), rather than the higher resolution ultra HD screens seen on its smaller Tab S2 line, and its octa-core processor runs at just 1.6GHz. I'm not expecting that chip to fly -- gamers will probably want to look elsewhere -- but for the movie-munching tasks it's built for, I imagine it'll cope well.
The battery is expected to provide up to 8 hours of video playback, which is enough even to sit through "The Hobbit". It has a built-in stand too, which lets it lay almost flat, making typing and sketching easier, or to stand almost upright -- better for propping up and watching flicks.
Andrew Hoyle/CNET
Samsung hasn't paired the View with a stylus, as with its Note range, but I can really see this being a benefit on future models. As well as graphic designers appreciating the larger screen, I can picture families sitting around the View, creating all kinds of fun sketches together.
Outlook
Just as Samsung's Galaxy Note phones blur the line between phone and tablet, its Galaxy View blurs the line between tablet and TV. I'm not entirely certain that's a line that needed to be blurred, but I can't deny that a large, immersive movie display that I can still move easily around the house is appealing.
The View's make-or-break will certainly be its price and if Samsung hopes to get this massive slate into families' homes the world over, it'll need a very affordable price tag. There's so far no word on exactly how much this monster will cost, or indeed when it'll be on sale, but we'll update this analysis with all the news as we get it.
Google received an "A'' from investors for its third-quarter report that ushered the Internet search leader into a new era under Alphabet, its recently formed parent company.
The numbers released Thursday indicated that Google is making significant strides in the increasingly important mobile-device market, with its earnings surging 45 percent to nearly $4 billion, or $5.73 per share.
Ruth Porat, Alphabet's chief financial officer, cited improvements in mobile search and more mobile traffic on Google's YouTube video site as keys to the quarter.
Alphabet, which replaced Google as a publicly traded stock earlier this month, won extra credit by announcing plans to spend nearly $5.1 billion buying its own shares over an unspecified period. Buying back stock is something Google never did in its 11-year history as a publicly traded company.
Apple has removed hundreds of apps from the iTunes App Store that secretly collected personal information from anyone who downloaded them. Most of the 256 affected apps were made in China, but they were available worldwide on the app store and were downloaded 1 million times, according to app analytics service SourceDNA, which first discovered the problem.
The apps' creators used a software development kit from a Chinese advertising company called Youmi, which allowed the developers to put ads in their apps. That's kosher.
But Youmi's software gathered information about the people who downloaded the apps, including their email addresses and iPhone serial numbers -- sending all that data to Youmi's servers. That skirted Apple's strict privacy guidelines for app developers.
And the way Youmi designed the software hid that fact from the developers and Apple's iTunes App Store gatekeepers.
SourceDNA did not say which apps were affected. The company told Apple about the problem on Sunday, and Apple removed the apps on Monday.
"This is a violation of our security and privacy guidelines," Apple said in a statement. "The apps using Youmi's SDK will be removed from the App Store and any new apps submitted to the App Store using this SDK will be rejected."
Anyone who already downloaded the apps will still be able to use them but the apps won't be updated.
The data collection does not appear to be the developers' fault, since Youmi was disguising the fact that its software was sending that data to its servers. Apple said it is working with the app developers to update their apps, ensuring they are safe for customers and in compliance with the app store's guidelines. The apps are banned from the store until they are fixed.
This is the third big lapse in Apple's typically tight app store security in the past month.
Last week, Apple (AAPL, Tech30) banned a group of apps that were able to peek into encrypted communications between the iPhones they were installed on and the servers the phones communicated with.
In late September, the app store suffered a major attack, forcing Apple to remove dozens of popular apps that had been infected by malware. The malicious apps were capable of duping customers into giving up their iCloud passwords and opening dangerous websites.
"Starting today, we will notify you if we believe your account has been targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state," he said.
Anyone who comes under attack will be given a warning, advising them their account has been compromised.
They should then check their computer for malware or viruses as well as change their password to lock out spooks or hackers," Stamos continued.
"To protect the integrity of our methods and processes, we often won't be able to explain how we attribute certain attacks to suspected attackers.
"That said, we plan to use this warning only in situations where the evidence strongly supports our conclusion.
"We hope that these warnings will assist those people in need of protection, and we will continue to improve our ability to prevent and detect attacks of all kinds against people on Facebook."
At a certain point after it unveiled the brand new iPhone 6s family, Apple has quietly added support for Bluetooth 4.2 to its year-old iPhone 6 series and the iPad Air 2. Back in 2014 when they launched, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus featured Bluetooth 4.0, while now it seems that Apple has equipped the phones with either the hardware to support the latest Bluetooth 4.2 standard, or has pushed a firmware to make the improvements possible. Naturally, the iPhone 6s family also comes with the same Bluetooth 4.2 connectivity.
So what is the benefit of having this latest version of the Bluetooth spec? It's mostly about speed: 4.2 brings a 2.5-fold increase in speeds and a 10-fold increase in data capacity. It also improves on its privacy, security and power efficiency aspects.
All of this coincides with the expected upcoming launch of a new, Bluetooth 4.2-enabled Apple Keyboard, Magic Mouse and Magic Trackpad.
At the same time, the original iPad Air, iPad mini 2, and iPhone 5s all remain on Bluetooth 4.0.
