Light Start – All the Priv, Twitter stock, Gear S2 AR, Facebook searches everything, and WhatsApp
Brett Venter
All of the specs for BlackBerry’s Priv are now known
We’re not even sure at this point whether this leak was intentional or not but it doesn’t matter. We now know pretty much all the missing info regarding the BlackBerry Priv, except when it launches here in South Africa. Everything’s confirmed, the 1.8GHz Snapdragon 808, the 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and a microSD slot which supports up to… 2TB? Crap. There’s a 5.4-inch 2,560 x 1,440 screen in play, an 18MP camera and a 2MP front facer. We’ve even got a price and date for the Priv’s arrival, even if it is overseas. It’ll land from around 16 November and will cost at least $750 (R10,000) at launch. Probably a bit more.
If you work for Twitter, CEO Jack Dorsey has some stock heading your way
Well that’s cool – Current Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has announced that he’s donating a third of his stock in the social media platform, which amounts to about $200 million worth of the company, to Twitter’s stock compensation pool. The point is for it to make its way to Twitter employees, though the mechanism for this to take place hasn’t been changed. Long story short, there’s stock available to Twitter’s workers. This should help soothe feathers following some of the company being laid off recently as well but we’re sure Dorsey wasn’t thinking about that at the time.
Want to try on Samsung’s new smartwatch? There’s an app for that
Things like this are just going to make us even lazier than ever – Samsung have come up with a way to let you try on (for a given value of ‘try on’) their new Gear S2 smartwatch without having to ever leave the house. They’re released an app, onto Google’s Play Store, which will give you the entire guided tour around the Gear S2 – essentially putting annoying salesmen out of work. And, at the end of it, you can also see what one of Samsung’s new watches will look like on your wrist. It’s just a render, and it looks it, but it still beats having to go and put on pants.
Facebook is making every public post searchable – for you
Let’s not get alarmed, this isn’t about you or your privacy. This is just stuff you’ve already seen and already let everyone see, Facebook are just changing the way that their search works to include all of it. All 2 trillion posts. It’ll pop up if you search a specific term in Facebook but it won’t bury you under irrelevant data. Trusted sources, friends and the like will come first, before you wind up with what that housewife in Ohio has to say on the subject (which would be way, way down the search results, unless she’s on your friend’s list). End result? You might wind up spending less time in your little self-created bubble.
There might be a reason why MTN doesn’t like WhatsApp – but that’s good for you
In case you haven’t heard, MTN have asked ICASA to do something about messaging service WhatsApp, and services that look like WhatsApp. This is a silly move. It’s a bit like the existing taxi industry doing their nut over Uber. Nobody would be that stupi-… oh, wait. Anyway, there’s a reason that MTN have taken exception to WhatsApp and similar services, because these messaging apps are causing declines in the company’s revenues. Noticeable revenue dips. MyBroadband has a good rundown of the impact that has been seen in the past few years but even if it’s wholly accurate, we still maintain that mobile calls and data are overpriced in this country. Maybe if an SMS were more competitive…
