Sennheiser CEO on fashion 'phones and battling Beats

Last year I had the chance to interview Luke Wood, the boss of Beats headphones, about the bass-heavy company's meteoric rise to prominence -- a fashion-focused bombardment that left traditional audio companies struggling to keep pace. This year, at the IFA trade show in Berlin, Daniel Sennheiser of German firm Sennheiser is having his say.

Sennheiser is one of the many manufacturers caught off guard by the popularity of Beats' celebrity-endorsed fashion 'phones. I wanted to know how the company was coping with the competition, and the challenges of selling headphones in a post-Beats world...

Read the full story here... Source: CNET

MyGlass app lets you control Google Glass from your phone

Like the idea of Google Glass, but don't fancy swiping the side of your specs the whole time? There's an app for that. It's called MyGlass, and it's just been updated to let you control your hi-tech spectacles from your Android-powered mobile.

I know, part of the appeal of Glass is that you don't have to fetch your phone out of your pocket, but endless swiping and speaking commands might get a little tiring. And that's where MyGlass comes in...

Read the full story here... Source: CNET

NSA 'secret backdoor' paved way to U.S. phone, e-mail snooping

The National Security Agency created a "secret backdoor" so its massive databases could be searched for the contents of U.S. citizens' confidential phone calls and e-mail messages without a warrant, according to the latest classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

A report in the Guardian on Friday quoted Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat who serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, as saying the secret rule offers a loophole allowing "warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans..."

Read the full story here... Source: CNET

TalkTalk fined £750,000 for calling you and hanging up

TalkTalk has been given a talktalking to for calling people and hanging up. Ofcom has fined the phone company £750,000 over excessive silent and abandoned phone calls.

Telecoms watchdog Ofcom slapped TalkTalk with the fine for making 9,000 silent or abandoned calls to potential customers during a telesales campaign in 2011.

TalkTalk blames two call centres, run by Teleperformance Limited and McAlpine Marketing Limited, that went over the limit for telemarketing calls on four separate occasions in two months. TalkTalk has cut ties with the companies and intends to get them to pay the fine.

If you have a landline you probably know the drill: you've just settled down to watch The One Show with some cold cuts and a flagon of mead, when the phone goes. When you answer, you're greeted by silence or a dead line.

Automated calls often fail to realise the phone has been answered by a real person. Thinking you're an answering machine, the robophone either ends the call -- an abandoned call -- or fails to play the intended message -- a silent call.

The maximum fine for abandoned calls is £2m.

[Source: CNET]

MapsOpener jailbreak tweak sets Google Maps as default maps app

Some iPhone users who’ve tried the new Google Maps already will want to use the app instead of the often criticized Apple Maps. Sadly, Apple doesn’t yet offer a way to make Google Maps the default application, which would allow iOS users to choose which mapping app opens when mapping URLs are clicked or using Siri.

As expected the crafty folks in the jailbreak community have already cooked up a new tweak called MapsOpener that will make Google Maps the default. You can check out the tweak courtesy of Hashbang Productions and available via Cydia’s Big Boss repo.  As we told you earlier this week, jailbreak tweak FullForce will also make Google Maps scale to the iPad’s large screen. Check out MapsOpener demoed below.

 [Source: 9to5Mac]

LG phone with quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro arriving this fall

Qualcomm is announcing a partnership with LG to deliver a new quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro-based phone this fall, launching first in Korea in September. While LG hasn’t officially announced anything, this is almost certainly the rumored Optimus G; a device said to have 2GB of RAM, a 13-megapixel camera, and a 4.7-inch 720p IPS LCD display. Interestingly, LG is said to be leveraging its own subsidiaries to build a quad-core phone exactly to company chairman Koo Bon-Moo's specficiations; a phone with the same early fall release window. Judging by what we've seen from the company's recent Optimus 4X HD, our interest is definitely piqued.

AnandTech confirms that LG's as-yet-unnamed device will contain Qualcomm’s benchmark-crushing APQ8064 quad-core SoC including the Adreno 320 GPU, combined with an MDM9615 baseband chip, pointing out that this is the same combination going into Xiamoi’s China-only Mi2 smartphone. If Xiamoi sticks to its October release window, odds are good that LG's new device will be the world's first phone with the APQ8064.

[Source: The Verge]