This App Makes Conference Calls Completely Free And Painless

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/unison-conference-calls-2013-3

Unison is essentially a social network for the workplace, letting people collaborate and get updates on what people are up to regardless of where they are.

And one of its most compelling features will have you getting rid of whatever conference call service you use – "instant live group conversations."

As soon as you log in to Unison, you can share your audio with everyone on your team that's also logged in to the same Unison "room." While you're working, you only need to speak out loud to get the attention of everyone else.

No more long phone numbers and PIN numbers.

Here's what Unison co-founder Rurik Bradbury had to say about it:

Conference calls always have some innate level of confusion – dial-in codes, bad connections from people's cellphones, people simply not joining and having no idea who's on. It saps hours from most businesses' lives because it's so pervasive. Unison's a case of everyone logging onto their computer (even in a browser) and hitting 'talk live.'"

Intrigued?

Check out our tour of Unison here >

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A Giant iPhone Will Look Stunning

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5988345/a-giant-iphone-will-look-stunning

If you shut your eyes and listen closely, you'll hear the clop-clop of the inevitable: an iPhone that keeps getting bigger and bigger. And as much as we generally hate phablets, if an iPhone Plus looked like this, we'd melt.

Gizmodo reader Martin Hajek put together these gorgeous renders for Nowhereelese.fr, which imagine the iPhone Plus as a 4.8-inch wonder that eschews a physical home button for a display that clicks at its bottom—a terrific idea on its own, actually. There's barely any bezel, allowing for Biggie Phone that's virtually nothing but screen and lovely iOS. No clutter, not a stylus to be spied, and seamless aluminum in black or grey.

I'll take the latter, because I'm nostalgic for the old rear end of the original iPhone.

The only work that'd remain is figuring out a means of controlling such a big phone, comfortably, with one hand, or retooling the whole device to make better sense with two mitts. As we've agonized over, once you start going beyond four inches, a phone can become hostile to the hand holding it. But if the thing looks like this, we'll have to make concessions. Maybe. But looking great and being great will never be one in the same when it comes to phones. [nowhereelse.fr]

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How Your Smartphone Will Get Lytro-Like Superpowers

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5988341/how-your-smartphone-will-get-lytro+like-superpowers

As neat as they are, the Lytro camera's re-focusing tricks aren't going to convince most of us to replace our highly pocketable cameraphones. So a California company called DigitalOptics has found a way to give us the best of both worlds with a new ultra-thin sensor that promises Lytro-like tricks.

Instead of employing clever 'light field technology' like the Lytro, the Mems|Cam simply snaps a series of photos with varying depth of fields in quick succession, and then combines them all into a single image that allows you to change the focal point afterwards. It's not only a less complicated approach, but the images from the new sensor could be as large as 13 megapixels in size, compared to the Lytro's measly one-megapixel.

It sounds like a win-win development that surprisingly gets even better because the Mems|Cam sensor is created with 'micro-electro-mechanical systems' technology that results in ultra-thin electronics with incredibly low energy consumption. To the point where this new sensor uses about one percent of the energy of a traditional cameraphone sensor, and facilitates handset form factors as thin as five millimeters. At the moment there are no official announcements as to what hardware manufacturer will be adopting the Mems|Cam sensor, but it's already ready to ship and should be appearing in phones later this year. [Digital Trends via PetaPixel]

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Google to monitor unused white space across the US, take us one step closer to spectrum sharing

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/03/04/google-to-monitor-unused-white-space-across-the-us-take-us-one/

One of the biggest hold-ups in the global deployment of LTE and long-range WiFi is a lack of available spectrum. Even when a particular frequency is free and usable for mobile broadband, it's often officially reserved for some other purpose. Google's charitable wing, Google.org, has long claimed that as much as 6 MHz of white space kept aside for TV channels in the US is actually untapped, and now it's going to get a chance to prove the point. The FCC has just granted it a 45-day window in which to run a trial public database (linked below) to keep track of exactly which bits of spectrum are free in which parts of the country.

If all goes well, Google should find itself among up to ten other organizations that are allowed to supervise spectrum sharing -- in other words, allowing mobile devices to temporarily exploit available TV spectrum that isn't being used by the primary holder. Google's ultimate aim, we're told, is simply to "improve connectivity" at a global level. As to whether the other nine names on the FCC's list -- like Microsoft and Ericsson-owned Telcordia -- are equally altruistic, we have absolutely no idea.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, Google

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Via: The Next Web

Source: Google.org Official Blog, Google.org's Spectrum Database

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Supposed Galaxy S4 Spec List Suggests Eight-Core Processor

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5988263/supposed-galaxy-s4-spec-list-suggests-eight+core-processor

Someone who claims to be in possession of a Galaxy S4 prototype decided it would be fun to benchmark it, giving us a look at how the phone might, possibly, perform and what might be inside Samsung's next Android flagship.

The Antutu benchmark test reports that the S4 is powered by Samsung's own Exynos 5410 chipset, with its eight cores running at 1.8GHz clock speed. It's coupled with a PowerVR SGX 544 graphics processor, with 2GB of RAM onboard. The S4 in this allegedly current state also feature a 4.99″ display running at 1920×1080 resolution, with Android 4.2 the phone's launch OS.

The tested machine featured GSM and LTE radio capability, meaning one version of the device ought to launch worldwide. And there's a 13-Megapixel camera in it.

No holes can be picked in those specs. If, of course, these results are genuine—so best keep a grain of salt to hand for now. We're expecting Samsung to give us all a good look at 2013′s inevitably massively successful phone on March 14. [Sam Mobile]

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