Apple's iTunes Radio streaming service could be set for an imminent launch outside the United States, with the service reportedly showing up on iOS devices in the UK and Canada.
AppleInsider brings word from readers on both sides of the Atlantic who've seen the iTunes Radio service show up within the Music app on their iPhone, iPad and iPod touch devices.
In the UK, the users say they're able to stream music using iTunes Radio, while the Canadians who're seeing the service are as yet unable to use it.
Apple has not made any announcement regarding the international launch of iTunes Radio and it is thought the company has been working on the licensing deals necessary for a roll-out outside the U.S.
The service allows users to play custom radio stations based on songs, artists or genres, or choose from playlists curated by Apple or guest DJs.
If users take a liking to particular songs, they can add them to their iTunes library by purchasing the song from within the Radio portion of the music app.
Have you seen iTunes Radio appear within your Music app yet? Let us know in the comments section below.
How many of your phone's pre-installed apps do you actually use?
"Bloatware," as it's called, is a problem for smartphone owners everywhere. It takes up space and uses battery life and data, and more often than not it can't be deleted.
But South Korea's Ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning has ruled on new guidelines that will require smartphone makers to allow users to delete unnecessary pre-installed software.
Not all pre-installed software will be required to be deletable. A phone's app store or app marketplace app will be required, for example.
The new rules will go into effect beginning in April.
A world without bloatware
In a Korean-language press release the ministry said the new rules will give consumers more battery life and storage space on their gadgets.
Other types of apps that will still be mandatory include apps related to NFC, Wi-Fi, and customer service.
Still, this is great news for customers whose new phones currently come with dozens of non-deletable apps pre-installed.
This could cause issues in the future with customers deleting certain apps and then having no way to re-download them later, though it will be up to phone makers to address that themselves.
Meanwhile we can hope that similar regulations make their way to other countries eventually.
The latest Motorola flagship is here - read TechRadar's Moto G review for the full scoop!
*Lights cigar* Yup, the pieces were coming together (credit: Vietnamnet.vn)
'Will the Nexus 5 launch in some new colours?' That was the case. A good ol' fashioned in-n-out investigation. No dirty hands, no mess.
We spent the night on the hunt for some shmuck who claimed to have the answers we were looking for but the trail had run cold. A little too cold, if you catch our drift. Who squealed? And what did they know that we didn't?
At our wits end we found ourselves propped up at the bar of some sleazy joint downtown. You know, the kinda place you can swig your juice in peace without some low life bumbin' his gums at you. That's when we got a report that a red Nexus 5 had been spotted in Vietnam. Of all the places...
Red mist
But then the story got real interesting. The same source said that the scarlet handset will be available in "late February or March" and that there'd be a yellow variant, and all.
Even through five glasses of whiskey we could see that this red looked a lot brighter than the one our old friend's video had shown. Someone was fudging the truth. It was time to get outta there and get back on the trail.
Samsung's betting big on, well, big, as the South Korean company looks to be focusing on large, 5- to 6-inch smartphones and even bigger tablets, with sizes of up to 20 inches expected.
G4Games is reporting that during its quarterly earnings conference call Samsung's Executive Director, Hyunjoon Kim, revealed the company's big plans.
Samsung led the phablet charge with the Galaxy Note back in 2011 and it's still the market leader in that space, so it's no wonder the company is planning to focus on that area.
Too big?
But 20-inch tablets is another matter altogether, as they'll almost certainly be a fairly niche product, though we've recently seen Samsung edge in this direction with the 12.2-inch Galaxy Note Pro.
Kim stated that these giant devices will be a new tablet category and that the slates will have high resolution screens. There's certainly a market for such things but we'd be surprised if they fly off the shelves.
He also stated that the company will be producing various tablets which will be modified versions of the Galaxy Tab, as if the market wasn't already flooded with enough different Samsung tablets.
Finally, Kim reiterated that the company will be improving the screen sensitivity of its devices, which will allow for the likes of improved Air Gestures.
If 2013's going to be remembered for one thing in the smartphone world, it's as the year where cameras got good. Almost any device you'd care to name now has a shooter that takes more-than-decent photos in daylight.
That leaves only one battleground where smartphone cameras don't fare so well – in the dark. On some of the biggest phones of the year, the main boasts haven't been about processing power or even the number of megapixels in the camera; but rather how good they are at taking photos once the sun goes down.
The HTC One, for example, was launched in March with only a 4MP camera, but one with much larger pixels (what HTC calls 'Ultrapixels). The reasoning behind that was clear: larger pixels means less noise, better light-gathering and all-round superior low-light performance.
Nokia, as well, has been focused on low-light performance, with both the Lumia 925 and Lumia 1020 featuring innovations like optical image stabilisation and oversampling to improve the phone's low-light performance.
Even Apple put a wider lens and better flash into its iPhone 5S, innovations that are almost exclusively geared towards taking better photos in the dark.
These approaches are a little different from those taken by other manufacturers: Sony is a prime example, with both of its 2013 flagships, the Xperia Z and Xperia Z1, sporting cameras that were big on the megapixel count, but suffered badly compared to the competition once things got dark.
Camera sensor sizes
The number one reason why 'proper' cameras – DSLRs – are so much better at taking photos in the dark is that they're a lot bigger. The camera's sensor, the little rectangle that 'sees' the outside world and turns light into electrons, is orders of magnitude larger in a professional full-frame camera like the Nikon D3S, or even a more enthusiast-level mirrorless camera like the Sony NEX C-3.
That matters because the bigger the sensor, the more light that hits it, and the brighter the picture is. It's like leaving a Post-It and an A3 sheet of paper out in the rain – far more water's going to hit your giant sheet of paper.
The end result is that low-light photos, like the one taken above, look great with a large-sensored DSLR, but are a poor-detailed mess on smartphones. In addition to just not being bright enough, there's another problem that plagues smartphone photos taken in the dark: noise.
To compensate for the small sensor size, smartphones often increase the sensitivity of their sensors, a value often referred to as ISO – the higher the ISO setting, the more sensitive the sensor is to light.
However, higher ISOs also generate 'noise', random pixels that light up or change colour, making the photo look grainy and downright horrible. It's not unlike turning your speakers up past where they were meant to – everything turns into a muddy mush.
Bigger (and more expensive) sensors can generally go up to much higher ISO settings without noise, which is one of the reasons DSLRs can shoot much better in low light. Whereas an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy can dial up to around ISO 3200, the very best DSLRs go all the way to 204,800, and even more pedestrian mirrorless cameras hit an ISO around 25,600 with ease.
To get around the problems of noise at higher ISO levels, manufacturers – in particular Nokia – have been turning to clever software tricks. Thanks to the 41MP sensor in the Lumia 1020, Nokia are able to employ oversampling, a trick that essentially combines pixels, reducing the overall megapixel count of the camera, but in turn cutting out those rogue pixels that cause noise.
According to Juha Alakarhu, Head of Imaging Technologies at Nokia: "With oversampling, we can avoid many of the problems that traditional cameras have, and we not only overcome the problems but make things much better".
Another factor in capturing good low-light images is the quality and size of the lens. For light to actually get to the sensor in the first place, it has to go through the optics, and for low-light photography, one number is important above all others: the aperture size. This number, measured as an f-stop (where, bizarrely, smaller is bigger), determines how wide the aperture on the lens goes at maximum, and therefore how much light goes through to hit the sensor.
Again, aperture size is something phone manufacturers are pushing hard. Whereas the iPhone 4 and Samsung Galaxy S2 both featured aperture sizes of around f2.7, the iPhone 5S goes all the way down to f2.2 – and Nokia goes even bigger, with even its midrange phones like the Lumia 720 sporting a f1.9 lens. That's close to the performance of full-sized cameras, where even the best lenses, costing thousands of pounds, rarely get beyond f1.4.
In addition to the aperture size, there's something else manufacturers can play with: optical image stabilization. The reason many hardcore photographers use tripods to capture images in the dark is that by increasing the exposure time (how long the shutter's open for), you increase how much light hits the sensor. Sadly, long exposures also mean one other thing: blur, from our ever-fallible shaky human hands.
Optical image stabilization is a means of staving off blur: by essentially giving the lens a bit of suspension, minor shaking can be eliminated, and slightly longer – and brighter – exposures can be taken. Although optical image stabilisation has been a staple in high-end camera lenses for around a decade, it's a relatively new (and welcome) addition to the smartphone world, with Nokia adding it since the Lumia 920, and the HTC One following close behind.
However, optical image stabilisation, being a physical process, adds bulk to phones – one of the reasons the camera is so prominent on phones like the HTC One and Lumia 925. That's the reason why many manufacturers are now looking to a software solution to low-light photography – post-processing.
Just as Photoshop can fix red-eye and a wonky horizon, software can also fix the noise: it's just a matter of processing power. With phone processors now routinely quad-core monsters like those packed into the Samsung Galaxy S4 and Lumia 1520, processing power is abundant – and image processing, historically a task out of reach of mobile devices, is now pretty simple.
Nokia has been "building its own propriety imaging algorithms", and it's now even added support for the lossless RAW image format, which is far more friendly to post-processing on computers. Hopefully, that means upcoming smartphones will hit higher ISO levels with less noise, all meaning there's a better chance of you getting a half-decent selfie in the next bar you choose to frequent.
Across the board, then, there's no indication of the low-light improvements slowing down. Although some things – like the size of the aperture – are almost as good as they can physically get, there's constant improvement across the board, all minor changes that promise major rewards in the near future.
According to Nokia, "The overall image quality is the combination of all these things coming together, and we continue to work hard and push the boundaries in all of these areas".
But with the best cameras still costing thousands of pounds, not to mention being larger than a whole flock of iPhones, the challenge is reducing these breakthroughs down to a size – and more importantly, price – where they can be crammed into our pockets.
We might soon be seeing some major changes to Samsung's TouchWiz smartphone interface, as some recently uncovered patents point to the addition of 'hot corners'.
By tapping one of the four corners of the screen a selection of shortcuts will apparently appear, giving users quick access to apps, settings and notifications.
Not only would these shortcuts make it quicker and easier to access commonly used apps and features, but they could also make one-handed operation more viable on large handsets.
Each corner seems able to house at least three shortcuts, for a minimum of twelve in total, though as the corners resemble dials it's possible that you can turn them to reveal even more shortcuts.
Social sounds
The patents, turned up by GalaxyClub, also suggest that Samsung is working on new social features for its music app, allowing users to share music that they like with friends and comment on other people's shared music.
It's unclear if or when we'll see these features in a Samsung phone, but with a TouchWiz overhaul rumoured for the Galaxy S5 it's not unreasonable to think that these changes might feature in the flagship handset too.
Samsung may be looking at hardware changes too, with the home button rumoured to be biting the bullet
The much rumoured Nokia Normandy Android smartphone may in fact be called the Nokia X if and when it's officially unveiled.
That's according to a tweet by the often reliable @evleaks, which said simply "Project Normandy = Nokia X".
If the Nokia X does manage to break cover we could be looking at a 4-inch display, a Qualcomm S4 processor, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage and a 3MP camera according to a source which spoke to The Verge.
Lower your X-pectations
Nokia's Normandy handset has been popping up with alarming regularity lately and its very existence is a little puzzling given the Microsoft sale.
But we've seen so much of it now that there's little doubt it exists and if the Nokia X is ever going to see the light of day it will likely do so during Nokia's press event at MWC 2014 next month. Though given those specs it's unlikely to be a show stealer.
Wondering what other wonders might emerge at MWC? We'll guide you through what to expect.
