Samsung"s First Tizen Smartphone Has Some Serious Game - Webmaster News

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You may have heard about Tizen as a platform for Samsung’s smartwatches, but the company has bigger plans for the OS, if the new Samsung Z smartphone is any indication. Unveiled Monday in advance of the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco, the Samsung Z is the world’s first commercial smartphone to run on Tizen.

Let’s back up: What the heck is Tizen? It’s yet another mobile operating system, this one based on Linux, and its principally operated by Samsung (Intel and a few others support it, too). Tizen was created with multiple kinds of devices in mind — not just phones — and it’s capable of powering cameras, wearables, smart TVs and even laptops. It’s currently the OS in most of Samsung’s Gear watches and some of its cameras.

While the Samsung Z isn’t the first phone to run Tizen (version 2.2.1), it’s the first one aimed at the mass market. It certainly has the features to appeal to a wide audience: a large 4.8-inch SuperAMOLED display with 1,280 x 720 resolution, an 8-megapixel rear camera and even a fingerprint sensor that’s just like the one on the Galaxy S5. It also includes S Health, Samsung’s health hub-app that comes with some of the company’s Galaxy phones.

The phone packs a 2.3GHz quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM. Storage is just 16GB, but you can get more via a microSD card.

The Samsung Z also has an LTE radio, and it features another of the marquee abilities of the Galaxy S5: the download booster that lets the phone combine both the LTE and Wi-Fi connections to accelerate download speed.

The great specs as well as the presence of advanced features suggests Samsung has big plans for its first real Tizen phone. Far from being just a model for developing markets, the Samsung Z is likely intended as a top-line model that developers can build to — similar to how Google regards its Nexus devices. The company only said it would come to Russia first, as predicted, but that releases in other countries would soon follow.

Samsung is the No. 1 Android phone manufacturer in the world, but the Samsung Z could be the beginning of a long-term strategy to undermine Android with Tizen, which Samsung has much more control over. That would take some doing considering Android has 1 million+ apps, and Tizen has very few, but software exists that will quickly let developers convert their Android apps to Tizen versions.

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Source: http://mashable.com/2014/06/02/samsung-z-tizen/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss

First Look at Humin, the App That Wants to Take Over Your Phone - Webmaster News

New Post has been published on http://www.outils-webmaster.eu/first-look-at-humin-the-app-that-wants-to-take-over-your-phone/

 

Many of the most popular iOS apps are ones that replace Apple’s stock apps: Calendar, email and messaging clients are all consistently at the top of the charts in iTunes. But there’s one app that comes on every iPhone that doesn’t get much attention from third parties — the actual phone app.

But a new app wants to do for the phone app what WhatsApp did for messaging, or what Mailbox did for email. In short, Humin wants to be your new phone.

Humin combines contacts, dialing and voicemail into one app, and uses contextual information to predict who your most important contacts are, and who you are most likely to want to connect with at any given time.

Ankur Jain, founder and CEO of Humin, believes the way most smartphone users approach their contacts list is fundamentally broken. He likens it to the state of online search engines in the mid-90s.

“It’s almost identical to the problem the Internet faced in the ’90s,” Jain told Mashable. “People forget, but you used to browse the web by alphabetical categories. Eventually, companies like Google realized you should be able to just search information the way you think about it so you can find what’s relevant. We can not only predict who you want to connect with, but you can also search for people the way you think.”

Humin contextualizes the relationships you have with your contacts by displaying personal details about each individual, and organizing contacts based on their relationship to you, instead of alphabetically. For example, when viewing a contact, you’ll see a menu of friends you both have in common.

Humin’s app allows you to add context, such as where and how you met, to your contacts.

Upon launching Humin, the first contacts the app surfaces are those who live nearby, and those who with whom you have connected recently or frequently — in other words, people you’re most likely to want to talk to in that moment.

And the app changes with you. Go to a new town, and the first contacts you see will be friends in your new location. Humin takes this a step further when you add a new contact from within the app: It allows you to record personal details such as phone number and email, as well as contextual information such as where and how you met.

The more you use the app, the more it learns from you, and the better its predictions will become.

Humin has been in development for more than a year and a half, and has been in private beta for the past few months. Earlier this month, Humin launched its early-access program, which enabled employees at some Fortune 100 companies to use it. The app will make its debut in the App Store in a few weeks.

Although Humin is initially launching on iOS, Jain said the company plans to take the app to Android, and can even see it potentially coming to other platforms such as Google Glass.

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Source: http://mashable.com/2014/06/01/humin-app-first-look/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=rss