Thursday 19 April 2012

19/04/2012

Spotify released an ICS-ified version of its mobile app.

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   One of the biggest music streaming services in the world has provided us with what they described last week as a 'big announcement'. Now this is only available if you have Spotify Premium at the moment, but this is a beautiful looking app and really is an advancement and improvement over the old app in so many ways. It fits in really well with Google's themes and Spotify have to be commented on this one.

   Sorry iOS users Spotify is working on getting you some of this eye candy too, just hold tight and hopefully it'll arrive soon.

Barclay's unleashes PayTag!

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   Those of you who live in the US of A have Google wallet and if you don't then your carrier is p[robably involved in the Isis project. But, for us on the other side of the pond, not only do we lack LTE but we also don't have a viable NFC payments solution yet. Well Barclay's has something to say about that today!

   This isn't exactly an elegant solution by any means; it is simply a sticker which you apply to the back of your device, no fancy app, no intricate installment just whack it on the back of your phone and off you go! The sticker will let you pay for goods up to £15 in value, which will rise to £20 in June, so it will genuinely be useful for that cheeky chocolate bar at lunchtime... We know you buy it!

   The only issues here are what you do if your phone gets stolen... Barclays says one call and payments are disabled (quite hard to do without a phone I do acknowledge) and second if you trade your phone in we;re not sure whether they charge you for a replacement or what really. You can't really pull this off and reapply it. Barclay's must have considered this before todays annoucnement so I'm sure we'll find out soon enough.

In other news:
  • Orange UK has promised an update for Galaxy S2 users to ICS tomorrow, so connect your phone via Kies, you might be lucky today.
  • Nokia annpunced a $1.7billion loss for Q1!!!!! Ouch!!! But they did have about $9billion of sales, so well it's not too bad. AND Colin Giles who was the Vice-President of sales resigned today too, citing family reasons for his departure, take what you will from that!
  • Microsoft announced there will be a fourth variant of Windows 8; enterprise edition!
  • Verizon sold more iPhone in Q1 of this year than sales of all it's LTE phone range put together!

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