Hasta La Gadget!

Apple’s latest tweak to its online store has now included a real-life genius that you can chat to if you’re undecided about buying your next iPhone or iPad. If you’re based in the UK, Germany, Spain or Brazil, you can surf to either product page, and an “Ask Now” button in the top right corner will offer you a choice of a phone-chat, instant messaging or a guided tour. The staffers can even help set up your newest handset once you’ve purchased it — or just let you chat to someone if you’re feeling lonely. If we have a worry, it’s that this might be one of John Browett’s schemes to cut costs, but let’s hope he isn’t dreaming of a future where Cupertino’s personal touch is entirely replaced with an IM chat to someone in a call center.

Filed under: Internet

Apple brings Geniuses online in four countries, lets us ask questions before we buy originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 29 Aug 2012 06:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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RIM’s upcoming Blackberry 10 is expected to usher in a new era for the company, and hopefully produce devices and a platform that will prove to be competitive against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. While that remains to be seen, if you were considering Blackberry 10 devices as your next smartphone, you might be interested to learn that in an interview with eWEEK, RIM’s CEO Thorsten Heins was quoted as saying that there is nothing in Blackberry 7 that will be in Blackberry 10, essentially promising users a brand new operating system.

While the leap from Blackberry OS 6 to OS 7 might be considered to be major, its core remained the same which might have put some users off, but it looks like we can rest assured that Blackberry 10 will be completely new. However he states that “the DNA is still there so the experience will still feel intuitive to longtime BlackBerry users.” We have yet to get our hands on a Blackberry 10 device so we’re not sure what he means by that, but we’re certainly looking forward to seeing what RIM’s latest offering will, well, offer!

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: RIM confirms screen resolutions for upcoming Blackberry 10 devices, Blackberry 10 beta devices currently being shown to carriers,

They’re all sorts of reasons that you might not want your photos being shared without your permission. For a lot of people uploading photographs to Facebook is just a way to share with family and close friends. However, it can be difficult or impossible to control who those people share your photographs with later and to prevent people from downloading those photographs and saving them.

Security company McAfee has announced a new way to protect your photographs on Facebook called McAfee Social Protection. The application has launched as a beta product on Facebook and protects pictures from being shared without your permission. Social Protection is a Facebook app that works with a browser plug-in.

That browser plug-in and app combine to allow the user to select which friends can access their photos, and everyone else who tries to view the photographs will see blurry pictures. For the friends who are selected to be able to view the photographs, they will have to install the app to see them creating a layer protection. This may be the perfect plug-in to keep pictures of you doing something stupid from becoming an Internet meme.

Social Protection also prevents anyone from capturing screenshots of your picture. Instead of getting a clean screenshot capture tools only copy blank space. The app also disables the save and download feature and shows a padlock icon over the picture when the user scrolls over it. For now, the Facebook app and browser plug-in are only available for Internet Explore 8 and up or Firefox 8 and up. Chrome users are out of luck.

McAfee Social Protection polices your Facebook pics is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We mentioned earlier this week that rapper and Black Eyed Peas alum will.i.am had teamed up with NASA. The goal of the tie up was to encourage students to study science, technology, engineering, and math. As part of the team up between the rapper and NASA, will.i.am’s latest single called “Reach for the Stars” was transmitted from the surface of Mars by the curiosity Rover to students and media at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Successful streaming of the track from the surface of Mars makes “Reach for the Stars” the first interplanetary song and secures the song as an anthem for education for NASA. When we first reported that the song would be streamed from the surface of Mars earlier this week, we weren’t sure if the song was on board Curiosity or how exactly it would be beamed back to Earth.

NASA still hasn’t specifically said how the song was played back from the surface of Mars, stating that the song completed the journey of more than 700,000,000 miles from Earth to Mars and back. That description makes it sound like NASA simply beamed the song from Earth to Curiosity and then Curiosity shot the song back to earth where it was played.

NASA recently did this with a congratulatory message from administrator Charles Bolden. It appears that the song was not stored on the internal memory for the rover, which is no surprise. During the event, NASA engineers also spoke to students and media about the mechanics involved in getting a song back from Mars. Will.i.am’s i.am angel Foundation and Discovery Education also announced a $10 million classroom education initiative that will reach 25 million students each year. The initiative will focus on science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics.

Curiosity will.i.am “Reach for the Stars” music playback goes off without a hitch is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

For those who have been following the tech news, the legal battle between Apple and Samsung, and Apple and Motorola is nothing new. While Apple and Samsung might not have been able to reach a consensus and strike a deal with each other, it looks like Motorola has been more successful. It has been reported that Motorola has agreed to license out some of its standards-essential patents to Apple, at least as far as Germany is concerned. Naturally no word on what the royalty rates are since these are usually kept hush-hush, but it could be interesting to note that Apple’s willingness to license Motorola’s patents is probably as far as an admission that yes, they may have infringed upon some patents. We doubt Apple will ever come forward and admit that, but if we read in between the lines, it certainly seems that way. No word on how this will affect the ITC case between Motorola and Apple in the US, but it certainly looks like a step in the right direction towards a peaceful resolution.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: ITC rules that Apple did not violate Motorola’s patent, remands case back to judge, Motorola patent win might result in US import ban for Apple,