Celebrity Sideboob is a website dedicated to one thing only: post images of celebrities showing the bare sides of their breasts. It's quite erotic, but it doesn't show hardcore images (although you can see nipples sometimes). The site posts its updates on Twitter. Surprisingly, one of its followers is Barack Obama. More »

Wealthy smartphone users are more likely to own an Apple iPhone and less likely to play games or post on Twitter than average users. According to research from The Luxury Institute, 62% of U.S. consumers earning at least $150,000 per year own a smartphone. 45% of people falling to that category own an iPhone, 35% use an Android-powered device and 25% have a BlackBerry. More than 80% of wealthy smartphone owners download mobile apps, with the most popular categories being weather (63%), news (51%), travel (42%), business/finance (39%) and sports (34%). Facebook, Angry Birds and Words With Friends are the most popular apps, however higher-income consumers use far less entertainment apps than the average smartphone user. “As you get older and have family and significant others, aging parents, and a lot more assets and investments, you’re going to need apps for far more relevant things than playing games and chatting with your peers,” The Luxury Institute CEO Milton Pedraza noted.

[Via Reuters]

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Wealthy smartphone users are more likely to own an Apple iPhone and less likely to play games or post on Twitter than average users. According to research from The Luxury Institute, 62% of U.S. consumers earning at least $150,000 per year own a smartphone. 45% of people falling to that category own an iPhone, 35% use an Android-powered device and 25% have a BlackBerry. More than 80% of wealthy smartphone owners download mobile apps, with the most popular categories being weather (63%), news (51%), travel (42%), business/finance (39%) and sports (34%). Facebook, Angry Birds and Words With Friends are the most popular apps, however higher-income consumers use far less entertainment apps than the average smartphone user. “As you get older and have family and significant others, aging parents, and a lot more assets and investments, you’re going to need apps for far more relevant things than playing games and chatting with your peers,” The Luxury Institute CEO Milton Pedraza noted.

[Via Reuters]

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Twitter for BlackBerry 3.0 brings easier photo-uploading, automatic link-shortening, BBM integration originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 02 Apr 2012 19:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink MobileSyrup  |  BlackBerry App World, Twitter  | Email this | Comments

The official website for the iPhone 4 "antennagate" class action settlement is live, as pointed out by co-lead counsel on the case Ira Rothken. Of course, speaking of cases, if you're an iPhone 4 owner who has taken advantage of the free bumpers Apple's been offering since 2010 then you're not eligible for the $15 settlement. Customers who meet the requirements (experienced antenna issues, couldn't return your phone without incurring costs, don't want to put on a bumper or case and either completed troubleshooting or no longer own the phone) can opt for the payout and file their claim at the website linked below. Of course, assuming you're not a stickler for that skin-to-metal and glass feel the case is probably the better deal overall, but as long as this issue is finally dead and buried we can probably all walk away happy.

iPhone 4 owners who don't want free bumpers can register for $15 antennagate settlements originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Mar 2012 06:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink @rothken (Twitter)  |  iPhone4Settlement.com  | Email this | Comments

Global media watchdog group Reporters Without Borders on Monday released its “Enemies of the Internet” list for 2012. The list is comprised of nations it feels inhibit its citizens’ freedom to express themselves on, or even denies access to, the Internet. Reporters Without Borders’s report focuses a great deal on countries that have reportedly blocked access to social networks and microblogging services in an effort to impede the efforts of activists as they tried to organize fellow citizens. It also updated its “under surveillance” list, which covers countries that may soon be added to the enemies list. Read on for more.

“Online social networks complicate matters for authoritarian regimes that are trying to suppress unwanted news and information,” Reporters Without Borders wrote in its report. ”It was thanks to netizens that Tunisians learned about the street vendor who set himself on fire in Sidi Bouzid and Egyptians learned about Khaled Said, the young netizen who was beaten to death by police outside an Alexandria Internet café. It was thanks to social networks that Sidi Bouzid and Khaled Said became news stories and went on to become cornerstones of the Arab Spring.”

The group points to microblogging services and social networks like Twitter as a means of quickly disseminating information and even organizing against oppressive regimes. In combination with the advent of other recent technologies such as mobile phone-based to video broadcasting, the group says these services are “increasing the possibilities of freeing information from its straightjacket.”

“The mixing of journalism and activism has been accentuated in extreme situations such as Syria, where ordinary citizens, appalled by the bloodshed, are systematically gathering information for dissemination abroad, especially by the international news media, so the outside world knows about the scale of the brutal crackdown taking place,” the group wrote.

New to the “Enemies of the Internet” list this year are Bahrain and a number of other countries, which join the likes of North Korea and China. Egypt, Malaysia, Australia and France find themselves on the group’s ”under surveillance” list, Australia for working with ISPs to create a mechanism for censoring certain online content, and France for filtering Web content and maintaining its “three-strikes” policy, which cuts off Internet access to people found to be downloading copyrighted content illegally three times. Libya was removed from the list following the fall of Moammar Gadhafi.

Reporters Without Borders’s full report can be viewed on the organisation’s website.

A new iPhone app called Highlight is poised to be this year's breakout hit at South by Southwest, the Austin tech and media conference that has become known as a web service kingmaker after launching services like Twitter and Foursquare to a wide audience in years past. In the context of a major tech conference, Highlight makes an appealing promise: let it run in the background of your phone, persistently collecting your location data, and it will notify you when your friends, their friends, or people with shared interests are nearby. Highlight is only the most prominent in a collection of apps offering this sort of "ambient social networking." More »

Apple’s next-generation iPad tablet will be named the “iPad HD” according to a recent report. A purported parts list from accessory vendor Griffin that included multiple entries for iPad HD accessories was published on Twitter by Michael Fonfara on Thursday. Fonfara claims to have somehow confirmed the name with Belkin as well. Apple will unveil its next-generation tablet during a press conference in San Francisco on March 7th. The new iPad is expected to feature a high-definition 2,048 x 1,536-pixel display, a quad-core Apple A6 processor, 4G LTE connectivity, a slightly thicker aluminum case and an updated version of Apple’s mobile operating system, iOS 5.1. An image of the purported parts list follows below.

[Via Gizmodo]

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Mercedes-Benz has unveiled plans to integrate Apple’s Siri voice assistant into its A-Class vehicles, according to a report from PSFK. The integration would allow drivers to access their iPhone apps using voice commands. The feature is being called the Drive Kit Plus program and will work in conjunction with Mercedes-Benz’ Digital DriveStyle app to translate the iPhone’s screen onto the in-car display. The program will feature compatibility with popular apps such as Twitter and Facebook pre-installed, and drivers will be able to listen to music, change radio stations, update their status on social networks and send text messages using voice commands as well. According to the report, the car’s integrated Garmin navigation system will be also compatible with Siri commands. Mercedes-Benz is the first car maker to integrate Apple’s voice assistant into a vehicle, with the feature reportedly set to debut at the 2012 Geneva auto show next month and a rollout to all A-Class vehicles scheduled to begin this fall.

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Twitter Promoted Tweets: coming to an iPhone, Android app near you originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Feb 2012 15:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink All Things D  |  Twitter  | Email this | Comments

The Pope, divine mouthpiece of God himself and owner of vast riches and influence, has taken to Twitter. Half holy, half Kardashian, Hitler Youth graduate Benedict XVI is now social mediafied. So why is his Twitter handle so unbelievably weird? More »

Love staying connected and using excess paper? Adafruit's got your back with its latest project. The Internet of Things (IoT) printer goes online via an Ethernet jack, printing up data on 2.5 inch wide receipt paper. You can print things like Twitter feeds, news briefs or sports scores using its open source software. Putting the box together requires some soldering and an Arduino, but once you're done, you'll finally be able to live out your fantasies of becoming an old timey stock broker. Video of the printer with a slightly grating Twitter song soundtrack after the break.

Continue reading Adafruit's Internet of Things Printer combines your love of information, receipts

Adafruit's Internet of Things Printer combines your love of information, receipts originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This above is the first glimpse of Android 4.0 running on the Nokia N9. Yes, it looks like Ice Cream Sandwich is in being ported to the company's iconic handset by no other than Alexey Roslyakov and team NITDroid -- the folks who previously put Android on the Nokia N900. The project, which is still in its early stages, made significant progress after recently overcoming a framebuffer driver/HAL hurdle, allowing ICS to be displayed on the phone. In addition, a dual-boot solution is in the works letting Meego and Android 4.0 coexist on the device. We certainly can't wait to experience using Ice Cream Sandwich on some of the hottest white hardware around. Can you?

Nokia N9 spotted running Ice Cream Sandwich, dual-boot in the works originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Feb 2012 06:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Steve Troughton-Smith (Twitter), Netbooknews  |  Alexey Roslyakov (Twitter), talk.maemo.org  | Email this | Comments

Twitter has caught some flack in other countries for giving accounts free reign on what they can tweet. Twitter responded that it'll adjust its policy to include the ability to censor tweets if a country demands it to. We just might see Twitter's first high profile case sooner than later because Brazil just sued Twitter for allowing accounts to tweet where DUI checkpoints are. More »

Continue reading Arduino hack turns Space Invaders alarm into Gmail Notifier (video)

Arduino hack turns Space Invaders alarm into Gmail Notifier (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Ubergizmo  |  Grant Gibson  | Email this | Comments

A new study suggests that social networking services such as Facebook and Twitter are more difficult to resist than cigarettes or alcohol. A team from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business recently conducted an experiment involving 205 people in Wurtzburg, Germany to analyze the addictive properties of social media and other vices. Participants in the week-long study were polled via BlackBerry smartphones seven times per day and asked to report when they experienced a desire within the past 30 minutes, and whether or not the succumbed to that desire. They were also asked to gauge each desire on a scale from mild to “irresistible.”

In total, 10,558 responses were recorded and a total of 7,827 “desire episodes” were reported by participants. The results of the team’s study will soon be published in the Psychological Science journal, however preliminary data provided to The Guardian suggests the highest rate of “self-control failures” were tied to social media services.

“Modern life is a welter of assorted desires marked by frequent conflict and resistance, the latter with uneven success,” said Wilhelm Hofmann, the leader of team conducting the study. Hofmann suggests people may fail to resist social media so much because there is no obvious or immediate downside to checking services like Twitter or Facebook. He does warn that these services can ultimately be a huge drain on users’ time, however.

“Desires for media may be comparatively harder to resist because of their high availability and also because it feels like it does not ‘cost much’ to engage in these activities, even though one wants to resist,” Hofmann said. ”With cigarettes and alcohol there are more costs – long-term as well as monetary – and the opportunity may not always be the right one. So, even though giving in to media desires is certainly less consequential, the frequent use may still ‘steal’ a lot of people’s time.”

With the relaunch of BGR over a year ago, I decided to switch comments to a more robust platform that I thought would give us more than useful sign-in options like Facebook and Twitter, but also features to help moderate comments and better reduce noise. One request we receive regularly is to do a better job at moderating the comment section. While we can’t moderate every comment all the time, I believe that discussion on BGR is incredibly important. In the early days, I couldn’t find a better place to engage with passionate people about the topics we covered. Now, a very small group of people are ruining the discussion with personal attacks on other commenters, on us, and on each other.

We’re working on a much-improved solution for commenting on BGR. In the meantime, we’ve added a feature that allows readers to turn comments off at will, and by default keep comments off until they are re-enabled.

I’m disabling comments for a bit, though. I’m tired of reading nonsense and of interacting with people that solely troll this site just to get a rise out of other commenters and start a holy war in the comments section. I’m tired of having to delete crap and I’m tired of people complaining that a few thousand people ruin it for millions. Maybe I’m just tired of you.