News flash: Apple’s iOS is more locked down than Android … okay, that’s not exactly a secret. This is why something like Facebook Home is not available on any iDevice at the moment. But they did bring deep integration for Facebook and Twitter earlier, and are apparently going to do the same trick once again, this time with Flickr and Vimeo.

According to 9to5Mac, the photo-sharing service and the video sharing site are going to get new connections in Apple’s upcoming iOS 7.

The rumor says iOS 7 users will be allowed to sign into their Flickr and Vimeo accounts through the settings menus, like how you can integrate Facebook and Twitter accounts now. And both the services could be accessed by third party apps. You will be able to upload photos and videos to both the services directly from the iOS Photos app.

The iOS users who have Flickr and Vimeo accounts will certainly benefit from the integration, if it happens that is. It will also be good for both the services as well. Yahoo would certainly welcome more traffic to Flickr, which has just been updated in a major way.

But the inclusion of Vimeo is a surprise, as the site is mainly for short films and high-quality videos. Videos shot in a smartphone end up most of the time on YouTube. But, Apple’s OS X is integrated with both Flickr and Vimeo, so the new rumor can’t be pushed aside that easily.

We will keep you updated about iOS 7, so stay tuned to Mobilemag.

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Samsung’s latest and greatest smartphone, the Galaxy S4, is currently available in two versions, one with a quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 processor and another with the South Korean company’s own Exynos 5 Octa with 4 Cortex-A15 cores and 4 Cortex-A7 cores. With the Exynos 5 Octa, Samsung promises energy efficiency by switching between battery-saving Cortex-A7 and the high-performance Cortex-A15 cores. But it appears like the S4 is not using the best possible way to do the shifting.

You can see how things work with the Octa below.

The image that you see below shows how the cores should be working.

According to Developer AndreiLux, the Galaxy S4 currently switches all 4 cores between the two processors like a cluster rather than using core-pair shifting. The device appears to have arrived with lower level firmware.

AndreiLux says:

“Basically there are three modes of operation of big.LITTLE:

Cluster migration: When load rises, just like when a phone increases its frequency per DVFS, all the cores will jump from the LITTLE processor to the big one. You either have 4 A7 cores or 4 A15 cores online.

Core migration: When load rises, it will only jump those cores from the LITTLE processor whose load exceeds the capacity of the A7 cores: You can have a single A15 online with 3 A7′s on. Or any other combination of a total of 4 processors.

HMP (Heterogeneous Multi-Processing): This is a vastly more complex working mechanism, and its implementation is also an order of magnitude more sophisticated. It requires the kernel scheduler to actually be aware of the differentiation of between the A7 and A15 cores. Currently, the Linux kernel is not capable of doing this and treats all CPUs as equals. This is a problem since we do not want to use the A15 cores when a task can simply be processed on an A7 core with a much lower power cost”.

So when the A15 cores are activated, the battery will be killed faster. This might explain why some people are experiencing heating and battery drain problems with their S4s. But hopefully Samsung will release a software fix soon that could make the S4 more power efficient.

Head here if you are interested in reading more details about this find.

What are your thoughts about all this? Do you have plans to buy the S4? If you are using the device now, are you having power issues?

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The post Exynos-based Samsung Galaxy S4 Not Fully Power Efficient, Says Developer appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

The main problem faced by all HP Touchpad users is the scarcity of apps, but of course dual booting into Android is a good way to access apps that are unavailable. If all goes as it should, a better solution could arrive in just a few months, provided you are willing to help Phoenix International Communications in their attempt to resurrect OpenMobile’s ACL for webOS.

In case you are new to ACL, it’s Application Compatibility Layer, and it allows running of Android apps on non-Android devices. The webOS ACL will allow users to run Android apps alongside native webOS applications, and its alpha version appear to be working fine on a Touchpad as you will see in the video below.

Since OpenMobile worked on the project earlier, Phoenix is promising that the final build will be available for purchase and download by July. It’s a Kickstarter project and they have, at the time of writing this, managed $5,991 of the $35,000 goal with 24 days to go.

They are offering various gifts including a copy of the ACL software, their LED flashlight keychain, and even the developer’s Touchpad depending on how much you pledge.

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When it comes to mobile operating systems their are the giants, iOS and Android, next we have those with fewer users such as Windows and Blackberry, and there are the new comers like Firefox and soon Samsung’s Tizen OS powered offerings.

Apparently the Tizen Association are readying to make some sort of announcement concerning a Samsung manufactured phone running the highly customisable Tizen OS. While we currently don’t know what the specs will be, it is a safe bet to assume the Samsung Tizen device will be a mid-to-high end phone rather than the budget Firefox models we’re seeing.

Tizen OS is said to suit power users who enjoy full control over their operating systems, which could lure current Android and iOS users over to the new system. Of course that is also what Ubuntu for Phones is attempting to do when it launches later this year.

While Tizen looks interesting enough, it is never easy to break into the OS market, even if you are an established player like Samsung. What do you think of Tizen, does it stand a chance?

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What happens to your Facebook and Twitter accounts after you die? The assumption is that your presence in social media will simply fade away, but thanks to services like LivesOn and DeadSocial, that doesn’t have to be the case. It can be far, far creepier.

In the case of LivesOn, which launches next month, the service analyzes what you do online while you’re still alive, using algorithms to effectively create a digital version of you. When you do kick the bucket, your Facebook and Twitter profiles will live on as LivesOn will favorite tweets, share links, and do other social media-ish things on your behalf. In a sense, you get a digital avatar that lives on forever, mimicking the behavior that it recorded while you were still among the living.

If that’s too offensive of a “digital legacy” for you, then DeadSocial might be a little more palatable. Instead of algorithms feeding into your social profiles, you simply pre-write a series of updates and messages that can then be sent out posthumously on Facebook and Twitter. It’s still a little creepy, as you’re sort of writing from beyond the grave, but at least they’re your own words.

Would you use either of these two services? What should happen to your social media presence when you die? Should it simply pass away with you?

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Ever had the urge to use a new Wii U controller for gaming and other activities on your PC?  Developer and modder Chris Manning has bridged the gap and created software that makes it possible.

He has enabled the Nintendo’s Wii U big pad controller to communicate with your PC systems and even was kind enough to make the software available to you for download so you can mess around with this tweak as well. According to Manning, he isn’t done there, he is now working to release a new update that will allowing streaming to work and add touch screen support to the Wii U pad.

Chris adds, “Follow the readme.txt closely!  This requires a bit of technical know-how to get working.” Below is a video of the software in action and a link to download your own copy.

Without touch and streaming capabilities, the use potential for this Wii U Controller ‘mod’ is limited at this stage, but there is plenty of future potential here. What do you think?

SOFTWARE DOWNLOAD

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Thankfully for those of us who keep getting the “out of stock” sign in Google Play, a clever team of developers over at XDA-Developers have created a “rough hack” to convert your LG Optimus G in to a Nexus 4.

As the Optimus G and Nexus for are almost identical in hardware the developers decided it made sense for the phone to be able to run the Nexus 4 vanilla Android build, and it does. The process is reported as being “very dangerous” and not recommended for those with little to no knowledge of flashing Android devices, as there is the real risk of bricking your phone.

If you do manage to get it all working though, you will be able to enjoy Android the Nexus way, and will even be able to make use of Nexus only tweaks, and even official Nexus updates, unfortunately you will also loose LTE connectivity and your internal storage will be capped at 8GB. Hopefully in the not too distant future they will find some kind of mod around those limitations, though.

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It looks like the problems with the new Apple Maps aren’t the only ones plaguing the iPhone 5. It turns out that the autocorrect feature is adding “random” accents to anything you type in Italian. There have been multiple reports of this issue in Italy, so it’s not just affecting a small handful of users.

I can’t speak or read Italian, but I do understand that accents can have a dramatic effect on words, completely changing their meaning. Present tense becomes past tense and the word for “and” can become the word of “he is,” for example. This comes about when you use the autocorrect feature with iOS6 and, well, everyone uses autocorrect on their smartphones these days.

While the autocorrect seems to “learn” its mistakes when the user manually selects the correct replacement, this process can take up to seven iterations for that single mistake. Considering how many words in Italian have (and don’t have) accents, you can see how this problem would affect nearly every possible piece of text you could type up on the iPhone.

So, what is the only current solution to “Accent-gate” on Italian-language iPhones? Turn off autocorrect…. or, if it makes any sense for you, switch to another language until Tim Cook and the team at Apple fix this issue.

The post Mamma Mia! “Accent-gate” Hits Apple iPhone in Italy appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

I’ve had my Sony Tablet S for almost a year and it keeps getting new updates. The Ice Cream Sandwich update also brought along something called “small apps” that can run over the top of other apps for multi-tasking. Now, another software update has been pushed out to the Sony Tablet S, bringing more “small apps,” plus a new feature called Guest Mode.

The new Guest Mode is similar in some ways to the multi-user function on the new Nook tablets. For the most part, smartphones and tablets are an individual experience, but what if your friend wanted to borrow your tablet briefly? With Guest Mode, they are given a completely separate session with separate home screens and logins from the main account. This way, they can’t snoop around in your Facebook or Gmail.

You can password protect Guest Mode and hand-pick which apps they can (and can’t) use. You can even have multiple guest modes, in case you want one for your colleagues and another one that’s a little more censored for the kids.

The update also brings along more of the “small apps” that came along with the first ICS update. The browser is still there, making it easy to check things while still in another app, but they’ve added a handy calculator, voice recorder, and countdown timer, as well as faster access to the universal remote. I particularly like having that calculator there.

There are also some other changes, like a new “Walkman” app for music-playing and a new “album” app for viewing your photos, but these don’t really change your experience all that much. If you’ve got a Sony Tablet S, just wait for the update to get pushed to you over the air and run through the steps. The update takes about five minutes and then your tablet will restart itself. It’s still ICS and not Jelly Bean, but I am digging some of these incremental upgrades.  If you’re interested in buying one, the price has dropped to just $329, not too bad for a 9.4-inch, Tegra2 tablet.

The post Sony Tablet S Software Update Brings Guest Mode and More appeared first on Mobile Magazine.

We post a lot of content on the Internet, whether they be tweets on Twitters or pics on Flickr. We also upload a lot of videos on YouTube, but is there any way to get them back? Now you can with something called Google Takeout.

Say that you uploaded some of your best videos onto YouTube, but your computer hard drive crashed and you lost the original files. Up until now, you could only go into the YouTube Video Manager and download the transcoded MP4 files that have already been processed by Google. That’s mostly okay, but it’s even better if you can get the real original file that you uploaded in the first place, especially if you want to do any additional editing.

That’s the good news. The bad news is, as far as I can tell, you can’t cherry-pick which original videos you want to download, because Google Takeout is configured to download everything that you have with any particular service. In my case, and I don’t consider myself to be a heavy YouTube uploader, Takeout is telling me that I have 255 estimated files with an estimated total size of 27.5GB. That’s pretty hefty, but at least we now have that option.

Head over to Google Takeout now and download your own original YouTube uploads. How big is your estimated total size?

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