Lenovo’s Latest Hybrid Laptop Is Just as Bendy, But Packs a Super-Efficient Chip

Lenovo’s Latest Hybrid Laptop Is Just as Bendy, But Packs a Super-Efficient Chip

Tim Moynihan

Wired

How interesting is Lenovo’s super-bendy Yoga 3 Pro laptop? Interesting enough to inspire a trilogy of really awkward Ashton Kutcher poses . But if you look beyond those photos and its versatile hinge, the new Windows 8.1 convertible laptop will back up its pliable hardware with state-of-the-art components.

The Yoga 3 Pro is one of the first laptops to offer Intel’s next-generation “Broadwell” CPU—it has a dual-core Intel Core M-70 system on a chip—which is designed to deliver Core i5-like performance with much lower power consumption. And because Broadwell is built to run without a fan, the 13.3-inch Yoga 3 Pro is also dead-silent and superslim.

It’s about the thickness of a USB 3.0 port, and the new convertible laptop has two of them. The Yoga 3 Pro also has a built-in SD card reader, an HDMI-out port, and stereo JBL speakers. This machine is just half an inch thick and weighs 2.63 pounds—thinner and lighter than the 13-inch MacBook Air.
It doesn’t get quite as much juice, though. According to Lenovo, the new laptop grants up to 9 hours of battery life per charge of its battery. That’s a solid two- to three-hour improvement over its predecessor, the Core i5-powered Yoga 2 Pro. Like its predecessor, the Yoga 3 Pro has a sharp 13.3-inch IPS display with QHD+ resolution (3200 x 1800). It’s a touchscreen, which will prove useful when that screen is flipped all the way back in tablet mode.

Compared to previous models, the new Yoga convertible also has a metallic “watchband-inspired” hinge that lets you position the screen sturdily across a 360-degree range. The hinge secures the screen nicely, but the exposed aluminum-and-steel gears mean that you’ll want to make sure your ponytail is clear of the Yoga 3.

At $1,300 for the lowest-end configuration, it’s on the pricier side, but that higher cost of entry gets you a 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM standard. The highest-end setup, which bulks the storage up to a 512GB solid-state drive, will go for $1,700. The Yoga 3 Pro will be available in silver, gold, and orange and ship by the end of October. It’s available for preorder on Lenovo’s website and Best Buy now. 

Read More

Facebook's new Rooms app brings bite-sized forums to your iPhone

Facebook's new Rooms app brings bite-sized forums to your iPhone

Ellis Hamburger

The Verge 

"We’re not trying to build the next Snapchat — we’re trying to build the next Wordpress."
These aren’t the words you expect to hear from the guy building Facebook’s next big app. Facebook has spent the last two years cloning Snapchat, trying to buy Snapchat, and eventually creating a pseudo-Snapchat. None of these plans have worked, so now it’s building… a blogging platform?


Not exactly. Today, Facebook is launching Rooms, an iPhone app that lets you create tiny message boards for posting text, photos, and videos. In each room you can create your own username and identity, and post or comment with friends or strangers about anything from minimalist furniture to Kendama or Destiny. Like on conventional message boards, you can set moderators, pin posts, set age restrictions, type out some ground rules for posting, and boot bad members. You can set a wallpaper and theme, and even alter the "Like" button that appears below posts to be another verb. But Rooms has no connection to Facebook or your Facebook friends in any way.

Make no mistake: this isn’t an anonymous chat or discussions app, as rumored. It turns out that Snapchat and Secret aren’t the only apps Facebook’s eyeing as it grows its portfolio of social experiences. Rooms is all about building identity, but just outside the context of the world’s largest real identity service (Facebook). Rooms is perhaps most like Reddit, the web's town square for discussing specific interests. But Rooms forces you to create a different identity for each room you're in, and offers no front page or ranking system — yet, at least. For now, Rooms have chronological feeds, just like Instagram and Facebook.


Rooms is all about building identity, but outside of Facebook

The app was built by Josh Miller, the co-founder of web discussions site Branch which Facebook acquired nearly a year ago. After joining Facebook, Miller pitched Mark Zuckerberg on an old idea. Everybody wants to talk about their favorite stuff, but nobody wants to spam their friends who don’t care about it. There’s Facebook Groups for that kind of thing, but Miller emphasized that each user should be able to cultivate different identities for different spaces. Thus, the age-old concept of a message board — a place to build your own persona and talk to people with mutual interests .
But don’t countless message board communities already exist? Yep, but not on mobile, Miller argued. Now Zuck was interested.

"I would love to impress that this was not our idea."

"I would love to impress that this was not our idea," admits Miller. "The early web seemed infinite, like what else is out there? You just type in a URL," says Miller. "But today you don’t get that. I only have a few apps on my home screen." He argues that the majority of Facebook’s increasingly mobile, 1.3 billion users likely haven’t used any of these sites on their phone.

Until this week, Reddit, which boasts 175 million monthly users, didn’t even have a mobile app of its own — and even now Reddit’s app is built largely for consumption, not creation. There’s no way to create new subreddits (topic-based rooms) or post videos on the fly. And this is setting aside the fact that message boards like Reddit can be awkward, unfriendly, or downright impenetrable to the average person unless you know exactly where to go. Additionally, most interest-based boards besides Reddit all live on their own websites, built on different systems.


"Mark said that in the early days of Facebook, the site was getting big enough where other colleges were interested, bus his inclination was to let UT and Dartmouth have their own Facebooks," says Miller. "But Dustin Moskovitz said, "No, we can’t do that. Maybe in the future, the idea that [Facebook is] one network is what’s gonna be most powerful about it.’" Moskovitz was right. You do need a platform, not disparate silos, to have real network effects.

But unlike Reddit and the other message board sites of yore, there are no discovery features to speak of — an almost unholy feature omission from a "Facebook app." The only way to join a room is if you’ve been invited to one. This happens in one of two ways — both involving QR codes. Before you pass any judgments based on QR codes, a notoriously terrible mechanism for sharing URLs, hear me out.

To invite you to a room, I tap "invite," which generates a QR code image that looks like a square movie ticket. Then, I text you the image. You simply save the image to your camera roll, and when you open Rooms, the app adds you to the room automatically. How? Rooms, like every other social app, asks for access to your camera roll. Each time you open the app, Rooms scans your recent photos for QR code invites, then automatically adds you to the corresponding rooms. If you’d rather do things manually, you can always tap Use Invite in the app and choose the QR code image, or even take a photo of a QR code you found in the real world. Miller hopes that everyone from yoga instructors to concert venues will print and post QR codes for people to grab and join rooms.

"Communities are just as addictive as things like Facebook."

It’s a fanciful, unique mechanism that Miller says feels much more native to phones than typing in URLs or searching with text. Nevertheless, the mechanic is a barrier, and virtually guarantees that all growth on Rooms will be organic — a real sign that Miller and Facebook aren’t bent on finding day-one viral success. Everything from MetaFilter to Reddit to FilePile took years to "go viral," Miller muses, so he approached the founders of all his favorite internet communities and asked how they did it. He heard one thing over and over again: you have to empower creators, and then a larger audience will follow. "We think this will be like forums with the 1-9-90 rule, where the vast majority of people are gonna lurk," says Miller, because that’s just the way interest-based online communities work. They have to be built from scratch.

Rooms won't have much content on day one, and the team behind it refuses to leverage any of Facebook's massive distribution network, or even your phone's address book. "You can’t connect a Facebook account. We don’t ask for address book access. We don’t ask for names. The only thing that’s optional is connecting email in case you lose your account," says Miller. "Netscape didn’t need a bunch of info from you to let you create and visit websites," he adds as he grins. It’s quite the comparison to draw — between a launch-day startup and the first web browser — but Miller clearly believes it.

If Rooms works, it will be because Miller and co. built a great tool for creating discussions. "We are a tool for making things, so your room brand should be ahead of ours," he says. "There’s no Facebook icon or name here. If Apple let us, we’d let each room be a separate app." And none of these apps would bear any Facebook iconography whatsoever. So why is Facebook putting some of its best engineers — including Alan Cannistraro, the guy responsible for many of the iPhone’s first apps — on a product that has nothing to do with Facebook?

"Communities are just as addictive as things like Facebook," Miller says. If Rooms succeeds at building a more personal, accessible Reddit for phones, it might be well on its way towards building the next Facebook.

Read More

Microsoft to Put Its Mark on Future Smartphones

Microsoft to Put Its Mark on Future Smartphones

Ina Fried

Re/code 

Hello, Microsoft Lumia. Goodbye, Nokia Lumia.
Microsoft confirms that all future Windows Phone models it makes will bear its own brand, rather than the Nokia name, as expected.

“We want to simplify and unify our smartphone branding,” Microsoft phone unit marketing chief Tuula Rytila said in an interview. “We are really using Lumia as connective tissue.”

This has basically been the plan all along (Microsoft has only had temporary rights to use the Nokia name with its smartphones). However, Microsoft did all sorts of brand studies to validate its choices.
As we’ve said before, the name issue isn’t the real challenge confronting Microsoft. The Lumia, by any name, still occupies just a fraction of a smartphone market dominated by the iPhone and Android-based devices.

During its earnings report Thursday, Microsoft said it sold 9.3 million Lumia phones last quarter, a slight bump from a year earlier, with total phone revenue of $2.6 billion.
Phone revenue for the current quarter is forecast to drop to somewhere between $2 billion and $2.2 billion, but most of that decline is from the feature phone segment. Microsoft said it expects both a sequential and year-over-year increase in Lumia smartphone sales for the quarter.

Microsoft isn’t totally out of the Nokia name game, either. The software giant will still use the Nokia name on its basic phones (and it has a 10-year license to do so). However, it will start transitioning its products (as well as the associated Facebook and Twitter pages) over to the Microsoft Lumia brand.
Microsoft has also been operating Nokia.com even though there is a still-existing Nokia company focused on network equipment and mapping technology.

By next spring, Rytila said, Nokia will reassume control of its Web page, with a friendly handover to take place and phone customers still to be sent Microsoft’s way.

Read More

Is Cody Simpson Trying to Be an Actor?

Cody Simpson's career has been full of surprises. He left his record label and collaborated with Justin Bieber on an album, and now he is getting into acting! The singer told E! Online that he will be playing a high school student named Pete on an upcoming episode of the show Cougar Town.

He says that being on set "sparked a little acting flame."

Obviously, we think he would be an amazing actor! Have you seen how intense he gets in his music videos? This could just be a one-time thing, but he seems to really enjoy doing it.

Read More

Taylor Swift Describes Her Ideal Relationship On ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’

Taylor Swift Describes Her Ideal 

Relationship On ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live’

Taylor was promoting her new album, 1989, on the late night talk show, but we became a bit more intrigued by her sit down chat with Jimmy Kimmel when she started discussing what a relationship should be like.

During the interview, Jimmy asked Taylor to reveal the meanings behind many of her lyrics. One song in particular, a bonus track, contains the lyrics: “One night, he wakes/ Strange look on his face/ Pauses, then says/ ‘You’re my best friend’/ And you know what is was/ He is in love.”

There’s no doubt that this song is about a real love story. In fact, Taylor admitted that the song is about friend Lena Dunham‘s relationship with Jack Antonoff.

Jimmy joked that because Taylor mentioned “friend” in the song, he assumed that meant it wasn’t a good relationship. “When I hear the word friend, I think that’s it. There’s no love,” he said.

But Taylor laughed and said no way. She believes that you should be friends on top of being in love. That way, “it’s a package deal.”

Read More

Taylor Swift Reveals '1989' Track Listing on Instagram!

Taylor Swift Reveals '1989' Track Listing on Instagram!

Taylor Swift has just revealed the track-listing for her upcoming album 1989 onInstagram!

“The full track list. #TS1989,” the 24-year-old singer captioned the pic.

In case you didn’t know, Taylor is dropping 1989 on Monday (October 27). She will perform some of the new songs during the We Can Survive concert at the Hollywood Bowl on Friday (October 24). 

1. Welcome to New York

2. Blank Space

3. Style

4. Out of the Woods

5. All You Had to Do Was Stay

6. Shake It Off

7. I Wish You Would

8. Bad Blood

9. Wildest Dreams

10. How You Get the Girl

11. This Love

12. I Know Places

13. Clean

Read More

Taylor Swift Learns Adam Levine's Weakness By Mentoring On 'The Voice'

Taylor Swift Learns Adam Levine's Weakness By Mentoring On 'The Voice'

The 24-year-old entertainer chatted with host Ellen DeGeneres about her upcoming appearance on The Voice and revealed judge Adam Levine’s biggest weakness.

“You learn things about these coaches. Like you learn their weaknesses. LikeAdam Levine’s weakness are musical theatre songs. Did you know that?”

Read More

You Won't Believe What Terrifies Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift has recently opened up about the terrifying parts of fame, but now she's talking about some completely new fears — and they are kind of hilarious.

The "Shake It Off" singer appeared on The Ellen Show and revealed what really scares her: Sea urchins and being framed for a crime she didn't commit!

"They're like a grenade!" she said about these underwater creatures. "They're sitting there waiting to completely injure you. You can't see a sea urchin."

Tay really goes into detail about the dangers sea urchins pose to everyone who decides to go in the ocean. Girl is not messing around! She also explains how she's paranoid about being framed and having to go to jail. It's seriously hysterical.

Read More

First promo for Taylor Swift‘s appearance on The Voice is here!

First promo for Taylor Swift‘s appearance on The Voice is here!

First promo for Taylor Swift‘s appearance on The Voice is here!

The 24-year-old singer is set to serve as a universal mentor, offering advice to all four coaches – Adam Levine,Blake Shelton, Gwen Stefani, andPharrell Williams.

Taylor will appear in three episode for the Knockout rounds, starting on Monday, October 27.

In the promo, you get a sense of her dry humor when she pokes fun at herself and even calls her craziness “assumed and understood.”

Read More

Even Taylor Swift's silence is golden

Even Taylor Swift's silence is golden

According to Entertainmentwise.com, "Track 3" from her new album, "1989," shot to No. 1 on iTunes in Canada after it was released. The only problem was, the release was an accident, as the track is eight seconds of white noise.

The track was eventually removed.

The singer's latest project, one of the year's most eagerly awaited albums, is set for release in the U.S. on October 27. A song cowritten with fun.'s Jack Antonoff called "Out of the Woods" was released last week, and it skyrocketed to No. 1.

Read More

Is Kris Jenner Going to Be Selena Gomez's New Manager?

INSTAGRAM

Ever since Selena Gomez fired her parents as her managers, Kendall and Kylie Jenners's mom Kris has been rumored to be taking over the position. After Kris posted a photo of her and the "Come and Get It" singer hanging out together in Paris, we were definitely wondering what was going on. Now, for the first time ever, the truth has been revealed.

In an interview with Ryan Seacrest, Kris admitted that she's currently not Selena's manager, but she would totally "love to [be]."

“[Selena] kind of fits right in with her beautiful dark hair and that gorgeous face. I love her," Kris said. "I think she’s an amazing talent. She’s a triple threat for sure, but no, I’m not managing her.”

Even though Kris isn't currently working with Selena she definitely seems open to it, so we wouldn't be surprised if they connect in the future. That being said, the singer's mom apparently isn't a big fan of Kris so maybe she'll persuade Selena to hire someone else.

Read More

Taylor Swift Shares Amazing Photo Of Her Personalized Cat Lady Robe

Taylor Swift Shares Amazing Photo Of Her Personalized Cat Lady Robe

Taylor Swift looked totally cute in cat robe , Taylor’s airplane attire on Oct. 21 included a customized cat robe that would surely make her furry friends Meredith and Olivia Benson super proud!

Taylor proudly posted the picture on her Instagram on Oct. 21, saying, “This is a good example of what I typically wear on planes, in front of lots of other people who all have eyes.”

The robe, which looks super comfy, is covered in bug-eyed cats and even has her name inscribed across the back in gold cursive letters!

Read More