Watchmaker Fossil has announced that it is jumping into the smartwatch and activity tracker segment in collaboration with Intel.

The company announced the new Fossil Q series consisting of four devices. The most interesting of them is the Q Founder, an Android Wear smartwatch. Unfortunately, Fossil hasn’t unveiled the design yet and all we know is that it will have a circular display. The Q Founder will be available by holiday season and starts at $275.

Next is the Q Grant, which looks like a regular Fossil watch but has Bluetooth and stays connected to your phone and vibrates when you get a notification. You can also assign a color to your contacts through the Fossil app and the watch will flash the respective color on the LEDs on the side, so you know who’s trying to contact you. The Q Grant will be available on October 25 and will cost between $175-$195.

Next are the two fitness bands, Q Reveler and Q Dreamer. Both essentially do the same thing, track your activity and vibrate to alert you of notifications. The differences are in design and the bands available. Both will be available on October 25 for…

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Popular flash memory company SanDisk is being acquired by hard-disk drive manufacturer Western Digital for a total of $19 billion in a cash-and-stock deal. The value of the transaction, however, depends on the fate of China-based Unisplendour’s already-announced investment in Western Digital.

“If the previously announced investment in Western Digital by Unisplendour Corporation Limited closes prior to this acquisition, Western Digital will pay $85.10 per share in cash and 0.0176 shares of Western Digital common stock per share of SanDisk common stock,” Western Digital said in a press release.

“And if the Unisplendour transaction has not closed or has been terminated, $67.50 in cash and 0.2387 shares of Western Digital common stock per share of SanDisk common stock.”

It’s worth mentioning that Japan-based Toshiba has an intellectual property sharing joint venture with SanDisk, which uses the former’s foundries to make chips. Toshiba is supporting the deal, saying that it won’t affect the JV in any negative way.

Source |…

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Samsung has announced that all major carriers in the United States, including AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, and Verizon, now support its mobile payments service Samsung Pay, which was launched in the country on September 28.

“Starting today, October 21, Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 edge, Galaxy S6 edge+ and Galaxy Note5 users on the major U.S. wireless networks will be able to download and install the Samsung Pay application directly from Google Play,” the South Korean company said.

Samsung specifically mentioned that those on Verizon, which recently jumped on the bandwagon, with devices that need to be updated to work with the service will be automatically prompted for the update when they install the Samsung Pay…

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Nextbit has now started accepting pre-orders for its cloud-focused Robin smartphone. Those pre-ordering will have to shell out $399, and the handset – available in mint and midnight color options – is expected to begin shipping in February 2016.

If you aren’t in the know, Robin’s selling point is the way it handles the internal storage, making sure that you never actually run out of space – everything that’s important to you will be available offline, while the rest will be pushed from the cloud upon request. Nextbit not only promises 100GB available cloud space for everyone, but also says it won’t charge for additional space if required.

The company, which is run by former HTC and Google employees, took to Kickstarter for the funding of the smartphone, and raised a total of $1.36 million last…

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Acting fast, Apple has fixed the exploits used by the Pangu Hacking Team in their recently-released jailbreak tool that works on devices running iOS 9 through 9.0.2. The tool in question was released around a week ago.

Apple’s new iOS 9.1 patches the two vulnerabilities found by the Pangu Team: one was a kernel memory corruption issue that allowed arbitrary code execution with kernel privileges, while the other was a heap based buffer overflow issue (in the DNS client library) that allowed privilege elevation.

The Cupertino-based company even credited the Pangu Team for discovering the aforementioned vulnerabilities.

Source |…

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BlackBerry’s debut Android smartphone, the Priv, will cost $750 for the unlocked model in the US and $949 in Canada, according to the official listings of the device on the Canadian company’s online store.

The listings, which have since been taken down, also revealed that the device will ship starting November 16 – for those who aren’t already aware, recent reports have suggested that the handset will be officially up for pre-orders this Friday.

Also revealed were the specifications of the handset: Snapdragon 808 SoC, 5.4-inch display with a resolution of 2560 x 1440 at 540 DPI, 3GB RAM, 3410mAh battery – claimed to last 22.5 hours, and 2MP front and 18MP rear camera (offering features like 4k video at 30 fps, OIS, and Phase Detect Auto…

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Last week, BlackBerry started allowing consumers to pre-register for the Priv, and now it looks like the Canadian company will officially start accepting pre-orders for its debut Android device this Friday.

The information came courtesy of a recent advertisement that appeared online. As you can see in the image above, the ad in question clearly mentions Friday as the day when interested users will be able to start ordering the device.

If you aren’t already aware, retailers like Carphone Warehouse in the UK and Rogers in Canada have already started taking pre-orders for the Priv – while the former is offering it for £49($75)/month on a regular two year contract and £580 ($895) off contract, the latter will sell the device for CAD 399.99 ($305) on contract and CAD 799.99 ($610)…

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Yesterday Verizon decided to start teasing its upcoming Motorola Droid Turbo 2 by showing us its back in a quick video. However, we have previously learned that the Turbo 2 is going to be the first Droid-branded phone to be available through Moto Maker, Motorola’s online hardware customization service.

Naturally then, we should expect to see many different back cover variations for the next Droid Turbo after its October 27 unveiling. And the newly leaked image you can see below handily shows us some (if not all) of the options.

The first three covers from the left appear to be made out of leather, while the others could be kevlar, or some type of fabric. The Droid Turbo 2 is expected to sport a “shatterproof” screen, and top of the line specs.

We’re talking about a QHD display, Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 SoC powering things, 3GB of RAM, 32 or 64GB of storage, and a huge 3,760 mAh battery. At some point in the future, the Droid Turbo 2 will also be sold internationally, under the name Moto X Force.

Source (in Chinese) |…

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After almost a year since first announcing it, YouTube’s subscription service is now ready for everyone to use. The beta tag will be taken off on October 28, which is also when a name change will happen – the service will be known as YouTube Red, and not as YouTube Music Key anymore.

YouTube Red brings you quite a few things for $9.99 per month. You can view YouTube videos without ads, on any device, if you’re signed into your account of course. On mobile devices, Red lets you save videos for viewing offline, and it also enables background playback – so when you turn your phone’s screen off the music won’t stop.

Oh, and, “as a special bonus”, if you pay for YouTube Red you also get to use the Google Play Music All Access streaming service for free – with all the many millions of songs it houses. This works the other way round too, so if you’re already a Play Music subscriber, you’ll also get access to YouTube Red for no additional cost.

In addition, Google has announced a new mobile app called YouTube Music, which will be launched soon. As its name implies, this aims to make the process of listening to music through YouTube much more enjoyable than it is in the current app. YouTube Music doesn’t have a release date yet, but it will arrive sometime in the near future.

Starting next year, YouTube Red members will get exclusive access to new original shows and movies made by “some of YouTube’s biggest creators”.

YouTube Red will come with a one-month free trial so you know how well it works for you before spending any cash on it. Like many things, YouTube Red seems to be limited to the US at first. As a final note, the free YouTube service and associated apps will obviously remain available to use in the exact same conditions as…

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We’ve already told you about Apple releasing both iOS 9.1 and Mac OS X 10.11.1 El Capitan today, but the company hasn’t forgotten about its first wearable either.

So watchOS 2.0.1 is now available as an update for the Apple Watch, improving upon watchOS 2 by adding new emoji characters as well as fixing a big number of bugs.

After you apply this version, software updates should never stall, a managed iPhone should always be able to sync iOS calendar events to the Apple Watch, location information will always be properly updated, using a Live Photo as watch face won’t cause instability anymore, and when you use Siri to measure your heart rate the sensors will not stay on indefinitely.

Some issues that were impacting battery performance are allegedly gone now, as is another issue that could cause Digital Touch to send from an email address instead of a phone number.

To install watchOS 2.0.1 onto your Apple Watch, it needs to be placed on its charger and have at least 50% battery left. To initiate the update you go into the Apple Watch app on your iPhone (which must be running iOS 9.1), and choose General > Software…

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