Sony officially announced the beginning of negotiations with Toshiba to acquire its CMOS image sensor business. Sony is aiming at Toshiba’s fabrication facilities, equipment and even the 1,100 employees working on CMOS image sensor engineering and design at the company.

If the deal goes through, Sony will have Toshiba’s plant in Oita, Japan. This acquisition would put Sony in a position to increase its CMOS image sensors production muscles. It’s exactly this area where the company anticipates further market growth.

And the company’s optimistic forecast isn’t unfounded. Sony CMOS sensors are found in Apple, Google, Samsung, Motorola and a plethora of Chinese manufacturers’ smartphones. In high-end digital cameras, Nikon also utilizes Sony sensors.

For now, financial information on the future deal isn’t disclosed. Sony expects negotiations to come to an end by the end of the…

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While most developed countries boast of super-fast Internet speeds, majority of people in emerging markets like India and Africa are still stuck with 2G Internet. Aware of the fact that it’s the latter where the future growth of the company lies, Facebook has announced an internal initiative that lets company employees experience the social networking service on slow Internet speed.

Appropriately dubbed 2G Tuesdays, the initiative allows staffers to get a taste of Facebook on 2G speeds for an hour on each Tuesday of the week. The program, however, is optional.

“People are coming online at a staggering rate in emerging markets and in most cases are doing so on mobile via 2G connections,” a Facebook spokesperson said. “But on the lower end of 2G networks, it can take about two minutes to download a web page. We need to understand how people use Facebook in different Internet connections in all parts of the world so we can build the best experience for them.”

Earlier this year, Facebook also launched a slimmed down version of its social networking application. Dubbed Facebook Lite, the app weighs only…

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It’s not rare to see celebrities in Apple’s Siri ads. We have seen everyone from Samuel L Jackson, Zooey Deschanel, John Malkovich, and even Martin Scorsese.

In the latest commercials, we see Jamie Foxx and Bill Hader in short videos using Siri, which on the new iPhones also works even if the phone isn’t connected to a charger. The videos are short and to the point, as Apple commercials usually are, and also amusing, particularly the Bill Hader one.

You can watch them…

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Samsung’s behemoth 18.4″ Galaxy View tablet (or perhaps “all-in-one” is more appropriate) is nearing official status. While you wait you can satisfy your curiosity by reading its user manual, discovered by GalaxyClub.nl.

Scrolling through the pages we see some interesting stuff – stereo speakers, an optional SIM slot and GPS. We can’t fathom why this could be useful, 18.4″ doesn’t exactly scream “on the go tablet.” Come to think of it, it will probably never leave home Wi-Fi range so the SIM slot is not entirely necessary either.

It seems that the main charger will be an old-school round DC jack, the manual explicitly says that you can’t use the microUSB port. Quick Charge 2.0 can provide up to 15W, so this must be a power hungry gadget (mostly the screen we’re guessing, the chipset doesn’t sound like it would need more power).

Multi-Window – both split-screen and pop-up views – will be available, the large screen will enable some desktop-level multitasking. And if 18.4″ isn’t enough, you can mirror the screen on a compatible TV. The Briefing on TV feature will launch automatically at a preset time and display weather, schedule and other info.

You can go the other way too and watch TV on the Samsung Galaxy View. There’s no info which regions and standards will be supported though.

There’s a selfie camera (no camera on the back, that would look weird). It’s mostly for video calling. Family Square seems to be a family-scale social network, where you can register several phones and share phots with them (and vice versa) and set those photos as a screen saver.

Here’s the English language manual (PDF) if you want to leaf through it yourself.

Via (in…

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It’s been only a few hours since the Droid Turbo 2 went official, and DxOMark has already done a full analysis of its photographic capabilities. The benchmarking website has given a general score of 84 to the device, placing it at spot number 4 on its charts, behind the Xperia Z5, Galaxy S6 edge, and Nexus 6P.

According to DxoMark, for photos the handset offers accurate white balance and generally pleasant color. In good lighting conditions, noise is barely visible and the camera offers “very strong” detail preservation. On the negative side, low-light conditions result in a loss of fine details, with ghosting and other artifacts being visible sometimes. “When flash is used, strong luminance shading and chromatic noise visible in the corners,” the analysis said.

As for video, stabilization is good, color rendering is pleasant, and details are well preserved. On the negative side, the analysis revealed autofocus instabilities and inconsistent object tracking. Specifically in low light, the autofocus triggers slowly when there’s a change in scene. In addition, strong luminance noise and chromatic noise is visible in the corners in low-light…

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During the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call yesterday, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook revealed that around 30% of the new iPhone buyers in the quarter were those who switched from handsets running Google’s Android operating system.

Cook further said that this is a new switching record ever since the company began tracking this information around three years ago. “It’s a huge number and we’re very proud of it,” he said. It was also revealed that only a third of existing iPhone users have upgraded to the newest iPhones till now.

It’s worth mentioning that Apple has been aggressively courting users of Android-powered devices – last year, the Cupertino-based company launched a dedicated website for them, and the ‘Move to iOS’ app introduced in iOS 9 is also aimed at helping Android users switch to…

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While some pre-orders for the Huawei-made Nexus 6P smartphone have already started shipping in the US, looks like a number of hopefuls won’t be getting the handset until November second week.

Many of those who pre-ordered the device are now receiving an email from Google revealing that they won’t be getting their Nexus 6Ps until November 7-14. “We’re working hard to meet the strong demand we’re seeing for the color and memory size you ordered,” the company said in the email.

To compensate the inconvenience caused by the delay, the Mountain View, California-based company is offering a $25 refund to the affected users, which it says will be processed as soon as their order ships. It’s worth mentioning that the device’s Canadian launch has also been delayed due to supply…

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Apple’s mobile payments service Pay will be rolled out in Canada and Australia by the end of the ongoing year, and will be expanded to countries like Hong Kong, Singapore, and Spain early next year.

This was revealed by CEO Tim Cook during the Cupertino-based company’s fourth-quarter earnings call yesterday, saying that Apple wants to expand the service to more “key global markets.” It’s worth mentioning that the service will initially only be available to the owners of American Express cards.

Apple Pay is currently only available in the company’s home country of US and the UK, where it was launched back in October and this July, respectively. There is, however, no official confirmation on how many users are currently using the mobile payments service.

Source |…

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Last week Sony started rolling out its concept Marshmallow build to Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact users who had registered for the beta test, and now the build is receiving its first over-the-air (OTA) update.

Carrying a build number of MRA58K.Z1.2085, the update brings several new features, including Tap to wake, support for MIDI via USB as well as more bitrates for flac audio content, and an updated keyboard. The update is rolling out slowly, so it might take some time before its hits your device.

If you aren’t in the know, the beta test is limited to select European countries, including Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, United Kingdom, Ireland, and…

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Apple announced its Q4 earnings for the fiscal 2015. The tech giant achieved a quarterly net profit $11.1 billion from $51.5 billion of revenue. Both numbers mark a significant improvement from the $42.5 billion of revenue and $8.5 billion of profit the company achieved a year ago.

The tech manufacturer’s net profit is up by almost a third year over year. The revenue on the other hand jumped by almost a quarter. Apple’s gross margin for the quarter was 39.9%.

During the quarter, Apple sold 48 million iPhones and 9.8 million iPad units. Mac sales on the other hand, came in at an all time high of 5.7 million units.

Going forward, Apple expects revenue between $75.5 billion and $77.5 billion in the next quarter. The period will will feature full availability of the iPhone 6s family, as well as the song holiday shopping season….

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