Google has opened the doors to its magazine section of Google Play to UK customers today, where more than 100 titles are available to purchase individually or by using an annual subscription.
When the Android Market rebranded itself as Google Play, it brought with it a considerable amount of new content, including movies and TV shows to buy along with magazines too. At the time, outside of the U.S., very few of these new stores have been opened, however Google has been working hard to solve the licensing issues that no doubt plague its stores, resulting in new countries being added to the list all the time.
Today, it’s the turn of Google Magazines to launch in the UK. Announced through GoogleUK’s Google+ account, there are more than 100 magazines ready to purchase, either individually or through a subscription. The store went live last night, but the option to buy didn’t get switched on straight away, however it seems to be up and running now.
Publishers such as IPC Media, Future and Hearst are all represented, resulting in a varied collection of titles, including everything from Hello! to the New Statesman. Some areas are lacking though, with the Automotive section being without flagship magazines such as Top Gear and Evo, although both What Car? and Autocar are present. That said, it’s considerably better than Amazon’s Kindle Newsstand offering in the UK.
As far as pricing goes, a copy of Golf Monthly will set you back £4.99, while the Official Xbox Magazine costs £5.99. There are some bargains to be had too, as the current issue of Total Film is yours for only £1.99, and Wired for £2.99. Subscriptions are equally as varied, with Wired costing £17.99 for a year, but many come with a free trial period of either 14 or 30 days. Comparing these prices to Apple’s Newsstand sees Wired prices at £1 more in Google Play, but the annual subscription is the same, while Tatler costs £3.99 in both stores.
All magazines are listed as being compatible with Android 7-inch and 10-inch tablets, along with Google Chrome’s web reader too. Google hasn’t opened its Magazine store to any other European countries yet, although the tab has appeared in Google Play France and Germany, but could do soon.
The official CES 2013 website has given us a helping hand by revealing the ZTE Grand S smartphone, which is set to be the firm's flagship device.
Only yesterday we reported that ZTE's global chief design director had confirmed the Chinese manufacturer would launch a high-end handset at the Las Vegas-based show in January – and we now know what the device will be called.
Take a gander at the Exhibitor Press Events Schedule for Tuesday and at 1.30pm PST you'll notice the "Introducing the ZTE Grand S" event.
World's thinnest 5-incher
Click through to the event details and we're given some more clues as to what we can expect from the Grand S, including an impressive display and slender frame.
"ZTE's first FHD smartphone is also the world's thinnest for 5-inch FHD smartphones.
"Made of ceramic and featuring traditional Chinese style, the Grand S is the perfect phone for the fashionable set."
There has been a host of rumours surrounding various manufacturers working on 5-inch devices to challenge the popular Samsung Galaxy Note 2, and HTC has already officially unveiled its J Butterfly/Droid DNA/Butterfly around the world with a variety of names to keep us all on our toes.
We've contacted ZTE to see if we can find out any more details on the Grand S, but rest assured we'll get the full lowdown on the handset live from the show in January.
A snippet of information published on the CES 2013 schedule has revealed ZTE will launch the Grand S at the show, its first entry into the burgeoning 5-inch, 1080p smartphone/tablet hybrid market.
The coming year is shaping up to be one filled with 1080p smartphone/tablet hybrids, a trend kicked off recently with the arrival of the HTC J Butterfly, the Droid DNA and this week, the Oppo Find 5. The next model could be coming from ZTE, at least that’s the impression we get from its listing on the CES 2013 schedule.
An entry for January 8 reveals a ZTE announcement set to take place between 1:30pm and 2:30pm, where it will be, “Introducing the ZTE Grand S,” a currently unannounced device. Clicking the link brings up a windows with some explanatory text, saying, “Be the first to see the brand new Grand S, ZTE’s flagship handset in its high-end Grand Series of products.”
A new top-of-the-range phone from ZTE sounds interesting enough, but it gets better, “ZTE’s first FHD [which we take to mean Full HD] smartphone is also the world’s thinnest for 5-inch FHD smartphones. Made of ceramic and featuring traditional Chinese style, the Grand S is the perfect phone for the fashionable set.”
Quad-core power
So, the Grand S will have a 5-inch, 1080p screen just like the other devices we mentioned. For it to take the title of world’s thinnest, it needs to beat the Droid DNA’s 9.7mm thickness, which doesn’t sound too difficult, although we’re still waiting for the Oppo Find 5’s official dimensions. Early leaks pointed to a 6.9mm thickness, making it only sliver off the record-holding Oppo Finder at 6.65mm thick. If this is right, and as the Find 5 looked a lot thicker in the final pictures it may not be, then ZTE will have managed quite a feat if the Grand S is under that figure.
ZTE has previously been rumored to be producing a 5-inch, 1080p device named the Nubia Z5, which according to a recent rumor will measure 7.6mm thick, bringing it well under the DNA’s dimensions. The same source hinted the phone would feature a 12-megapixel camera, 2GB of RAM and a Snapdragon S4 chip. In the past, ZTE has used the quad-core Nvidia Tegra 3 processor, in the Grand Era for example, and sources have told CNet the Grand S will indeed feature a quad-core processor.
The devices are most likely the same, as ZTE has a habit of renaming its phones for different markets, however there’s a chance the Nubia name has been dropped in favor of continuing to build its already partially established Grand series.
CES 2013 begins on January 8 and continues until January 11.
Being Tasered by cops certainly isn't part of the usual Apple store shopping experience. So why did it happen to Xiaojie Li at the tech giant's store in Nashua, New Hampshire?
An Apple store in Nashua, NH is at the center of a somewhat disturbing story surrounding the Tasering of a Chinese woman who wouldn’t leave the store when asked.
The woman, 44-year-old Chinese national and Newton, Mass. resident Xiaojie Li, reportedly turned up at the store last Friday to buy two iPhones. After making the purchase, Li, who says she can’t speak English, then tried to buy several more iPhones but was refused by Apple store staff, who told her a two-per-customer limit was in place.
Unhappy with this, Li started videoing other customers she claimed were being allowed to buy more than two units. Hardly surprisingly, staff told her to leave.
Over the weekend, a determined Li apparently ordered two more iPhones online, returning to the same store on Monday to collect them. Staff recognized her and refused to give her the items, and once again ordered her to leave.
When she refused, staff called the cops. Despite an officer asking her to leave, Li stayed inside the store. At this point an attempt at arrest was made but Li reportedly resisted for 15 minutes.
Taser
In a video (below) uploaded to YouTube showing part of the incident, you can see – and certainly hear – Li screaming as she’s Tasered by a cop.
Having been issued with a stay-away order by the Apple store, Li was arrested for trespassing and resisting arrest.
“If she left the store when she was told to leave the store, it would’ve been done at that,” Nashua police captain Bruce Hansen told WCVB TV. “She was told she was under arrest after repeatedly being told to leave the store. She didn’t submit to the arrest. The officer used the Taser on her to get her to submit to the arrest.”
Resellers
With her daughter acting as interpreter, Li said she was buying the phones for relatives back in China, but according to Nashua police chief John Seusing, the store has been having trouble with visitors buying multiple devices to sell at inflated prices overseas.
Li, who was carrying $16,000 in cash when she was arrested, said through her daughter that she was trying to buy the handsets for relatives back in her home country.
Li’s boyfriend, John Hugo, said he was outraged by what had happened. “You go into a store, and you end up getting brutalized by the police,” he told WCVB TV, adding that even if she was a reseller, “does it rise to the level of getting a beating from police?”
There's no doubt that 4G is going to be a success in Britain; faster speeds, improved services and better handsets are all things most consumers are constantly hankering over.
However we're in a special situation in the UK, with one network allowed to deploy the superfast networks ahead of its competition. EE already owned 1800MHz spectrum, capable of delivering the LTE signal, and successfully petitioned the government to allow it to offer the service to consumers.
The other big players: O2, Vodafone and Three, will have to head through an auction in 2013 to get their hands on the prized spectrum to deliver the same services, so it would seem EE has gained a huge advantage by going first.
But with the announcement of the next wave of cities getting 4G from EE, will the network gain enough from being the first to rollout the technology, or will it be associated with high costs and unknown technology? If, as it states, it will have one of the best networks out there, could launching at the same time as the others pr have prevented it having to learn how we will use 4G data while everyone is looking?
It's had to invest in a huge marketing spend, convince consumers to pay more for phones and we've many people I've spoken to don't like the prices: £36 for 500MB of data, all the way up to £56 per month for an 8GB allowance was seen as eye-watering to many.
While we can't expect to pay rock-bottom rates for the faster speeds (it's not free to deploy 4G, obviously) there was a massive contradiction in the messages from EE. On the one hand, it was saying it had chosen the data limits based on 3G usage, yet with all its posters and marketing materials it was extolling the virtues of all the new things customers can do, such as gaming and video on the go.
What will we do with it?
These activities suck down reams more data, making any 3G learnings largely irrelevant. While it's not fair to expect EE to know how Britain will consume 4G data on the go, saying 'you used to use 512MB happily, so you'll do the same on 4G' makes very little sense.
Tom Bennett, director of network services at EE, told TechRadar that EE has spent a lot of time with large networks in other countries that already have 3G, such as Verizon in the US, and confirmed that it was expecting 4G to bring the likes of YouTube into the top 10 most visited websites on a mobile.
With that in mind, it might have made more sense to give more generous data limits on 4G; if EE is confident consumers won't use them, where's the harm? It's now got to deal with being seen as overly expensive, even though the sky high prices should be expected.
The point to be made here is that by being first to market EE gets the reflected glory of being a technology pace-setter; Bennett told us that in his opinion doing so would put EE 'ahead [of competitors] by a significant margin' in terms of its 4G network quality.
And that's the key point: come mid-2013 when Vodafone et al come online with their own offerings, EE will have an entrenched customer base and a (hopefully) refined range of price plans to provide super fast speeds at a lower cost.
It's perfectly plausible that Three or O2 will use EE's 'expensive' reputation to offer cheaper 4G, but all have to bear the cost of a massive roll out and network update, making such a scenario less likely.
Do we want 4G yet?
So here we are, five weeks into 4G Britain. We've got no stats on user take up as yet, but TechRadar's tests have shown 4G to be much faster, provided you have a faster signal. Bennett tells us that independent tests in Manchester saw 4G and 3G combined speeds averaging 7.6Mbps , which is definitely faster than 3G offers.
But beyond the early adopters, very few will pay the high price to get a 4G contract when they're unsure how much data they'll be using. We need education, statistics and most importantly, a price war to convince most of us need a 4G phone in our lives.
We should raise a glass to the networks for the speed of the rollout though: the transition from 2G to 3G took nearly seven years in the UK; the move to 4G will take under two. Businesses that can swallow the cost will be able to be more connected than ever before which will provide a boost to the economy.
Price aside, 4G speeds will bring us faster downloads, more connected devices than ever before and a new world of entertainment – but consumers need to be convinced that's worth paying for when their current smartphones are providing a decent experience already.
