Hasta La Gadget!

The changes that are coming to your Facebook News Feed are numerous – but they’re not going to interrupt the way you do business on a daily basis. Instead you’re going to find the features added this week by the Facebook crew to be just that – Features: helpful and (hopefully) rather intuitive to use. For those of you working with the mobile app version of Facebook on either iOS or Android, this change-over will be extra simple: it is, at its core, a bridge between the mobile and desktop experience.

Facebook speaks up on the changes

What you’ll want to see first is Facebook’s designers speaking up about the changes they’ve made themselves. They’re always good at making the case for a positive forward movement, and today’s video is no exception. They’ll speak up here about each of the three main points this change is pushing before we go through them one by one.

Rich Stories

Design choices throughout this new iteration of the News Feed on Facebook show the company to be coming to terms with the idea that images are king. If you post a photo, you’ll find that you’ve got the largest preview showing in your News Feed that Facebook has ever shown before – along with Like, Comment, and Share buttons right below in newly smoothed-out sections. If two people become friends, you’ll see one of them in a tiny icon and the other represented by not just their icon, but their header image as well.

When you see a link being shared, you’ll also see a short list of icons associated with the people who have shared it on Facebook as well. Hovering over one of these icons expands the rest – this element is in place to have people finding new friends with similar interest, of course. Along those same lines you’ll find Upcoming Events appearing next to single dates – Fridays, for example, will be of particular interest.

Finally you’ll see newly revamped posts from pages – this will be great for pages such as SlashGear (http://www.facebook.com/SlashGear) for appearing in your News Feed in a newly sleek setup. As with the rest of the feature updates, this redesign is much more simplistic than it’s been in the past.

Choice of Feeds

With a new pull-down menu that reads “News Feed” until you switch it, you’ll be able to select from any of the following to syphon your feed down to just the items you want: Most Recent, All Friends, Photos, Music, Following, Games, or Groups. This filter will be working in both the desktop (web browser) and mobile user interfaces soon – simple and smooth.

This filter will not be the first time you’ll be seeing a page that only shows photos and videos, but it is the first time we’re seeing Facebook push the “Following” aspect in a completely separate way. You can follow people on Facebook without friending them – this is good for “famous” users and the like – with this filter you’ll be able to see things that they share with the public and nothing else. This is much closer to what we see on Twitter on the daily – not so much the personal friendliness of Facebook.

Mobile Consistency

Both the desktop and the mobile editions of this change-over are going to be pushed almost at the same time. The desktop version will be coming first – with a limited roll-out starting today, the day of the update’s announcement. The mobile version – for iOS and Android at once, mind you – will be out in coming weeks.

The “Mobile Consistency” title refers also to the idea that the design for both user interfaces are now much more close to one another than they’ve ever been before. The biggest addition to the desktop end of things is the left-hand sidebar – get anywhere you need to from any Facebook nook or cranny, no more need to go all the way back to the News Feed every time!

SlashGear 101: this week’s Facebook News Feed redesign is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Warranties have their place, but there’s no shortage of techies who prefer to do their own device repair when something goes awry. Unfortunately, no matter how technically inclined you are, some devices seem built specifically to make the task as difficult as possible. The folks over at iFixit have released their Repairability Guide, which shows Dell’s XPS 10 as the easiest to repair, and Microsoft’s Surface Pro as the worst of the bunch.

According to the Tablet Repairability Guide, the Dell XPS 10 is the best option for those who plan to crack their tablet open and do some tinkering, with it being rated as easy to open, with labeled cables, color-coded screw, and an easy-to-remove battery. The only complaint listed was the fact that the LCD is fused to the display glass.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire comes in second, also being easy to open with standard Philips-head screws and no proprietary fasteners to deal with. Dell makes the upper list again at number three with its Dell Streak tablet, which is simply listed as being easy to open with an easy-to-replace battery, but marred by the same LCD-fused-to-glass issue. The Kindle Fire’s negative mark is that its glass is fused to the device’s frame.

Dropping to the bottom of the list, we find a lot of Apple and Microsoft products, with the Surface Pro coming in dead last. While the battery is not soldered to the motherboard, that is the only positive aspect that is listed, with it’s negative marks being comprised of “tons” of adhesive to keep the components in place, as well as DIYers risking severing the wires when opening the device. Next up, in order, is Apple’s iPad Mini, iPad 4, iPad 3, iPad 2, and then Microsoft’s Surface RT tablet. A consistent problem with the iPads is the risk of cracking the glass while taking it apart, as well as too much adhesive. The Surface RT is said to be hard to open with a fused LCD.

[via iFixit]

Dell XPS 10 and Kindle Fire are the most repairable tablets, Surface Pro and iPads come in last is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Users who rely on Apple’s iCloud service were greeted with a rude awakening this morning as the service started experiencing an outage around 4 a.m. ET and is still experiencing issues as of this writing.

Earlier this morning, nearly all of iCloud’s services were completely down, but as of now, only three services are still experiencing outages: Photo Stream, Documents in the Cloud and “Backup.” The last service being extremely important as those of us who prefer to back up our iOS devices via iCloud are currently unable to do so. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Apple Censors ‘Barely Legal Teen’ From iCloud Emails, Attachments, Leap Wireless Is Stuck With Heaps Of iPhones In Its Inventory,

We haven’t been hearing much hearsay on the second-generation iPad mini. Of course, we know it’s coming at some point, but today’s leak seems to be the first out of many that we’ll see in the coming months. Unconfirmed photos of what appear to be the rear shell of the second-gen iPad mini have leaked out onto the interwebs.

A member of Chinese site WeiPhone has posted photos of the rear shell in a forum thread, which shows all angles of the piece of aluminum that is said to be a part of the second-gen iPad mini. Of course, the shell looks very similar to the current iPad mini, but it does look a tad bit thicker. That could just be the angles of the photos giving us that effect, but a thicker iPad mini wouldn’t be unheard of.

For instance, the full-size iPad gained a bit of thickness after the iPad 2. Granted, it’s only a bit thicker, but the thinnest iPad that we’ve seen came out over two years ago. Apple may be stuffing a Retina display in the iPad mini, as well as some faster hardware, which would understandably make the device just a tad thicker than before.

The photos also show a bright blue Apple logo, as well as the word “iPad” towards the bottom. We’re guessing this just a part of the manufacturing process, or it could mean that Apple is planning to offer colored logos with this next-gen device, although that seems highly unlikely. Obviously, we don’t know much about this leak, so we’re keeping a good amount of salt nearby until we hear something a bit more official.

[via MacRumors]

iPad mini 2nd-generation rear shell leaks is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Apple has finally restocked its supply of iPad Minis in its online store. The device is listed as “in stock” in many countries including the United States, Canada, and many others. Customers in Europe are still being waitlisted, with the Apple’s website telling them that there is still a 1-3 day wait time. Due to supply constraints, Apple was only able to ship out 60% of its 10 million iPad Mini orders in Q4 2012.

The supply constraints were due to a conflict with the production of panels used in the iPad Mini. Not only that, the production company that provided the backlight module for the iPad Mini also reported that it had shortages. With these shortages, Apple wasn’t able to meet its shipment estimate in Q4 2012, and the effect had carried on over to 2013.

It’s better late than never for Apple to get its shipments of iPad Minis in order. Hey, at least it wasn’t as bad as the whole Nexus 4 debacle between LG and Google. The iPad Mini features a 7.9-inch 1024 x 768 resolution IPS LCD display, 1GHz dual-core A5 processor, 512 MB of RAM, 5MP rear-facing camera, 1.2MP front-facing camera, and iOS 6. It’s not the best tablet around, but it should please many Apple product lovers who want prefer smaller tablets.

With the iPad Mini, you’ll have access to the 300,000 apps that are optimized for the iPad. It’s also been speculated that Apple may have an announcement in the coming months that should be centered around the upcoming iPads. If you’re willing to wait a little while longer before getting your iPad, it’s something worth checking out.

[via MacRumors]

iPad Mini now back in stock in many countries is written by Brian Sin & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.