Nokia halts Lumia 2520 tablet sales due to charger shock hazard

Phone and tablet electrocutions are rarer than you think. Even so, preventing a possible accident from happening shows that it's better to be safe than sorry when it comes to faulty engineering, and Nokia made that very clear by halting sales of its Lumia 2520 tablet.

Sales of the tablet were halted in the U.K., Austria, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Russia, and Switzerland due to its charger, which Nokia has deemed defective. According to Nokia, the charger's plug "would come loose and separate," exposing internal components that would "pose a hazard of an electric shock" if you touched it while the plug is in a live socket.

Roughly 30,000 chargers, including 600 travel chargers sold in the United States, are affected by the defect. Nokia says no other chargers have this problem, and no confirmed incidents have surfaced yet. This makes Nokia's notice more of a precautionary measure than a reactionary one.

Nokia did not indicate whether affected users would get replacement chargers, nor whether they can obtain a full refund for the Lumia 2520 due to the affected charger. The company is "working with urgency" to arrive at a resolution to the matter, but in the meantime, if you are affected, make your way here for more information.


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Bye bye braille! This FingerReader ring can read books to the blind

Researchers from MIT Media Labs are developing a wearable device that can read out printed text using a synthesized voice, helping the sight-impaired read books without the use of braille. Called the FingerReader, the ring-like device has a mounted camera for scanning text.

Audio feedback comes in the form of a robot voice that sounds like it has a speech impediment. However, according to the research team's website, the device is "just a research prototype at this point," so audio feedback would be fixed if and when it becomes available to the mass market.   

To help the sight-impaired read text more efficiently, the device has cues or "haptic feedback" to help blind readers maintain a straight scanning motion with their finger. It gives out a vibration signal when their finger veers away from the line of text, and does the same thing when they've reached the end and the start of every line of text.

The device can't read the fine print in your contracts, but it can detect 12-point printed text, which is ubiquitous enough when it comes to printed text. In an interview with TechCrunch, Roy Shilkrot, one of the researchers for the project, hopes that the device will help more than the visually impared. He said that the device is for people with "disability, ability, and superability" and hinted that it could be used to translate languages.

The team behind the FingerReader is said to be looking into miniaturization and features such as tethering to a PC or smartphone. If you want to see the device in action
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Apple reportedly partnering with Shazam to integrate song-ID feature into iOS

Apple and song-ID service Shazam have struck a deal that could see elements of the popular cross-platform music app brought to a future version of iOS, sources with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg Wednesday.

As anyone familiar with Shazam knows, the software allows users to quickly identify a music track simply by holding a mobile device's mic close to the sound source and waiting a few seconds for the result to return.

It's not entirely clear if the app itself would be baked into iOS or if its technology would be incorporated into Apple's mobile operating system in other ways. For example, Bloomberg's report talks of a song-discovery "feature" being integrated into iOS, while also suggesting it could be incorporated in the same way as the Twitter app, which has been baked into the operating system of iDevices since version 5. 

The report also says Shazam is likely to be integrated with Siri, allowing a user to ask, "What song is playing?", in which case everyone within a five-meter radius will also discover the name of the music track you wanted to ID. Google Now for Android has long had a voice-activated song-ID tool, while Microsoft's new virtual assistant for Windows Phone, Cortana, also offers a similar feature, so many will see Apple's entry into the space as long overdue.

Overhaul

The expected move to make Shazam an element of iOS appears to be part of Apple's rumored plans to overhaul its music services, news of which first emerged last week. The company is apparently becoming increasingly concerned about the decline in song downloads from its iTunes store as more people turn to music streaming services such as Spotify and Pandora.

Apple launched its own music streaming service, iTunes Radio, last year, though few users are thought to be clicking through to the iTunes store to purchase tracks. Having Shazam installed on iDevices could certainly help to drive a few more download sales for Apple, as the app always provides links to the iTunes store whenever it identifies a track.

Shazam's executive vice president, David Jones, revealed last month that the app is currently on about 20 percent of iPhones in the US, with the figure jumping to between 30 and 40 percent for some European nations. While Shazam's revenue from users clicking through to iTunes and similar download stores currently tops $300 million a year, Apple's reported tie-up with the company could certainly help to boost profits for both parties.

[Source: Bloomberg]
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LG G Flex gets Android 4.4 Kitkat update from AT&T

If you've made a habit out of bending your LG G Flex out of shape, this piece of news may make you stop the roughhousing altogether. The curvaceous phablet gets the Android 4.4 upgrade from AT&T today, erasing one of our bigger gripes with the device. 

The G Flex, which came out in late January, shipped with Android 4.2.2 JellyBean, which sort of dampened the fun of bending a smartphone like its made of cardboard. Now G Flex owners get all the advantages of the newest version of Android 4.4 KitKat, like its interface improvements, longer battery life, and faster processing speed.

In an announcement on its blog, LG highlighted the benefits of the update, such as a "noticeable  speed boost" in running applications, support for battery-saving location mode, and restyled status and navigation bars. Aside from the OS version upgrade, LG also threw in the Knock Code feature. The function, which first appeared in the G2 and the GFlex as KnockOn, allows users to unlock phones by merely tapping twice on the touchscreen. The new version of Knock Code is more secure, requiring users to tap out a pattern to unlock the screen.

To install the update, just pull down on the notification panel and then go to Settings > General > About phone > Software Update > Update Now. From there, just follow the instructions. To increase the chances of a successful install, LG recommends logging on to a Wi-Fi network (the file's over 600MBs) and having at least a 50 percent charge on your phone.
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This app can help you read an entire nonfiction book in 15 minutes

If you want to read a lot of important nonfiction books, but just don't have the time, Blinkist can help. It's an app that simplifies and spits out key points from important nonfiction books.

Remember Cliff Notes, those shorter cheat sheets of information that you'd use in high school and always try to get away with reading instead of the full text? That is essentially what Blinkist does on your iPhone or iPad. The app takes the full text of notable nonfiction ebooks and turns them into nuggets of information that you can quickly process without hundreds of tedious page flips. Blinkist promises to make you smarter fifteen minutes at a time.

The first thing we noticed about Blinkist is that the library is a bit weak, perhaps not surprisingly since it's a new app. When you start it up, you can browse through digital catalog to pick the books that interest you — ones with topics that tickle your fancy or ones you've meant to get around to reading but never found the time for — as long as those choices fall within the couple hundred books Blinkist currently provides. We selected far more then we were able to get through over the course of the three day free trial ($5 a month or $50 annually for full access). It's still conceivable you could clear the shelves, but titles are being added on a regular basis.

There are many categories within Blinkist's library, and plenty of them are popular among the tech crowd. where you'll find mostly bestsellers. These are the water cooler books, the manuscripts that make it to the top of the New York Times Bestsellers list. Author names and book titles will likely be familiar, like Freakonomics or Lean In. We were caught off guard by Sun Tzu's Art of War, but we won't deny it's an important work.

For those concerned that Blinkist is too embracing of a soundbite culture, minimizing the text down to the simplest concepts with little regard for the process, you've little to fear. This isn't books being Twitter-fied. In our browsing, we found Blinkist's summaries to do a solid job of summing up the text in a way that keeps the primary information intact. If anything, Blinkist is probably one of the better encouragements we've found for wanting to check out a full book. We read through the abbreviated chapters and ended up wanting the full text.

The name "Blinkist" comes from the app's name for its concise chapters, or "blinks." The idea is that a blink captures a key concept from the book and makes it readable in two minutes. Every book is made up of a collection of blinks which are accompanied by a final summary page to conclude the experience. It's no replacement for the complete work of the original author, but we definitely found it possible to take quick facts and ideas from the Blinkist briefings.

With the popularity of speed reading thanks to a wealth of apps that promise to increase the rate at which people process text, it's interesting to see Blinkist go the other way with it. You read just as slow — there's just less text to deal with. Blinkist hasn't resorted to an algorithm for finding the important text – its library is hand-curated. This explains its small size and slow growth and is understandable given the app's goal. But it also makes it hard to commit to a paid price for the service. You'll pick up a couple facts, ideals, and applicable concepts from Blinkist's text, but you're still better off picking up the actual book.
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Diddy Defeats Jay Z As Wealthiest Man In Hip Hop 2014

What did Diddy use to kick out Jay Z, who has reigned as the Cash King for so long?

Jay Z has been dethroned as the richest hip hop star in the world. And no one else but his friend and business mogul, Sean 'Diddy' Combs is now the Richest Man in hip hop.

According to the recent Forbes list, Diddy ranks No. 1 on this year's Forbes Five, list of hip-hop's wealthiest artists, with an estimated net worth of $580 million. The bulk of the Bad Boy Records founder's wealth comes from non-musical ventures, namely his deal with Diageo 's Ciroc. The agreement entitles him to eight-figure annual payouts and a nine-figure windfall if the brand is ever sold and Ciroc's value has never been higher.

The No. 2 spot goes to Shawn "Jay-Z" Carter, with a net worth of $475 million. He's still rolling in cash from megadeals like his $204 million Rocawear sale in 2007 and his $150 million pact with Live Nation the following year.

Andre "Dr. Dre" Young ranks third with $350 million, thanks mostly to his Beats by Dr. Dre headphones. Bryan "Birdman" Williams owns the No. 4 spot, riding his Cash Money/Young Money empire to a fortune of $150 million and rounding off the list is Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson at $125 million; with the bulk of his fortune coming from heavy sales of his music, merchandise, video games and books in the wake of his smash debut Get Rich or Die Tryin' and particularly from his payout for the sale of his stake in Vitamin Water parent Glacéau to Coca-Cola in 2007.

Guys what do you think of this new list? Hit us with your thoughts below.

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Alex Ekubo And Belinda Effah Tie The Knot In "Folly"

They look so cute together but it's just a movie. We brought you news about the movie "Folly"  Read here if you missed it.

Alex Ekubo and Belinda Effah, tie the knot in "Folly"  The movie is produced by Elizabeth Daniel and features Yvonne Nelson, Joke silva, Uche Jumbo and Joseph Benjamin.

The movie sure promises to be a must watch..
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