Voice Control Is Coming to DirecTV's Smartphone App

DirecTV released their (long overdue) Android tablet app just over a month ago, and it looks like that low-key entrance was paving the way something bigger: a voice control rollout over both its iPhone and Android mobile apps.

Prosaically dubbed "Voice," the app's addition is powered by a combination of Nuance software and DirecTV's own, in-house proprietary tech. And thanks to the old pros at Nuance, the app does a great job of responding quickly and accurately to your commands. But rather than being integrated into the original UI (which remains mostly unchanged), Voice is tacked on as an entirely separate screen. Activating Voice turns your phone into one big, blue microphone, so you're either manually tapping through or you're using Voice—never both.

At this point, though, the app's functionality is limited as far voice control goes. You're stuck with vocalizing most of the same step by step instructions you'd be inputing with a normal remote. Granted, saying the title of a show, for instance, is far less tedious than seeking it out letter by letter, but it still isn't quite able to handle the fully natural speech you'd be inclined towards. No tapping open the app and absentmindedly telling it to record all new episodes of Breaking Bad; you'll have to go through search and then tell it what you want to do—a minor but noticeable inconvenience.

Voice is still in its infancy, though, and it's one of the first apps from a television provider that employs voice recognition technology at this level. You should be seeing Voice come to DirecTV mobile in the App Store and Google Play Store sometime this summer, with tablet versions surely soon to follow.

Five Simple Ways to Keep Your Android Malware-Free

While it's true that Android is a little more susceptible to malware attacks than iOS, the situation isn't nearly as bad as Apple would have you believe. With a little knowledge and a sprinkling of common sense, you can make your device impervious to even the most dastardly of digital assaults. Here's how.

1. Set a Lock Screen

Yes, Android lock screens seem to be about as secure as Sony's Playstation Network—but they do offer at least some security against casual attacks.

You get a bunch of different options for your lock screen security - pattern, pin, password and Face Unlock, on stock Android at least. Of those, password is the most faff, but also the most secure. Pin is technically more bits of entropy than pattern (theoretically, at least). Sadly, pattern, while being quite cool, leaves you vulnerable to smudge attacks, which some very bored researchers proved have a 68 per cent chance of working in ‘ideal' conditions.

But no matter what security measure you choose, it's still gonna be better than no password at all, and it'll stop most casual attacks. It's worth the one second of inconvenience 50 times a day, honestly.

2. Install an Anti-Malware Program

Just like as on a Windows machine, some kind of anti-virus software is handy. You may have noticed that everyone's been talking about BadNews recently, a fairly horrific piece of malware that infested systems through an ad service, and sent premium-rate SMS messages in order to gain its designers money. It was discovered by security firm Lookout, and (unsuprisingly) according to them, users of its product would've been protected against the malware.

There are plenty of anti-malware apps out there, many of them free; we'd recommend the aforementioned Lookout, AVG or Avast. Mostly, they'll watch out for malicious code, check installed apps against a database of naughtiness, and generally protect your phone when you subject it to your dodgy taste in Russian fetish sites.

3. Don't Cache Passwords

It's annoying, but true. Caching passwords, while incredibly handy, is also a godsend to anyone who steals your phone. Recently, we received a review device here at Giz that had a bunch of previous passwords from an unnamed previous user - we had logins to his emails, social media accounts, everything. For an identity thief, that's the jackpot. Of course, security measures like lock screens help, but the only foolproof method of protecting those passwords is not to save them. (Oh, and turn on two-factor authentication while you're at it.) Generally, the apps that save passwords most are you internet browser - Chrome, in other words.

4. Check Your SuperUser Priviledges

If you've made the (sensible) choice to root your Android device, you'll need to be extra-careful about security. Rooting a phone allows apps to run with ‘root access', outside the normal checks and balances introduced by Android. A malicious app with root access would be dangerous - able to do basically anything to your phone, without your knowledge (that's why phones don't come rooted out of the box).

Now, that shouldn't put you off rooting. Rather, you need to be slightly more proactive about managing apps on your phone. When you rooted, you probably installed SuperSU or Superuser, which allows you to grant programs root access, and view which programs have been actually using their root priviledge. Be extremely careful about which apps you grant superuser permission to; only give it to trusted apps from trusted sources. It's also worth going back through the list every now and again, to clear out any unnecessary guff.

5. Ensure You Only Install Apps from Trusted Sources

One of the most common methods of infection on Android is downloads of dodgy apps. An anti-malware program, as mentioned above, will provide one layer of defence against dodgy apps, by flagging up anything malicious-looking.
Of course, the best protection is common sense. Thanks to Google, most apps in the Android app store are pretty clean, and the danger comes from attacks like the BadNews exploit discovered by Lookout, which infected otherwise-OK apps through the advertising system. Either way, big-name apps are more likely to be secure; installing apps from third-party sources will always be dangerous, and ultimately comes down to how naive—or trusting!—you are.

Why Facebook Could Finance Your Next Phone...?

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the unveiling of Facebook Home

Facebook Home was released last week for six new high-end smartphones. But Facebook isn’t going to make its mobile platform ubiquitous by targeting pricier devices; it needs to blanket the low end of the market too. Which is why you should expect the social network to start outright subsidizing smartphone and even tablet purchases.

Facebook unveiled its Facebook Home “apperating system” earlier this month, pitching it as a way to move the focus of mobile phone and tablets from software to people. The device should be a boon to users who spend a lot of time chatting and swapping photos on Facebook, but businesses will soon benefit, too: Facebook plans to show advertisements right on the lock screen of the device, interspersed with photos and status updates.

Such ads should earn Facebook a pretty penny, and they’ll be particularly lucrative if Facebook can target them based on location and other mobile phone data. Facebook Phone ads could be lucrative enough, in fact, to underwrite smartphone and tablet purchases.

Here’s how it might work: Facebook could offer to pay mobile subscribers’ out-of-pocket costs for a device like, say, the $200 Samsung Galaxy Note II. In exchange, Facebook Home would be allowed to show advertisements a bit more often on the device and to report back a bit more tracking data than it normally does (Facebook says Facebook Home tracks only the same data as Facebook’s mobile app, plus some anonymized app launching stats on rare occasion).

Facebook wouldn’t be the first company to offer ad-supported discounts on digital devices. Amazon does this already, knocking roughly 30 percent off the price of a Kindle e-reader for those willing to accept ads on the lock screen and holding down the price of its Kindle Fire tablet by showing ads on all of them. If you think about it, the entire ecosystem of devices running the Android operating system is advertising subsidized, since Google only gives away the mobile OS as a way of getting its ads into more smartphones and tablets.

Facebook has shown itself willing to embrace aggressive ad practices in other cases when other companies have already blazed the trail For example, it has defended its recent mining of users’ grocery store receipts and web surfing habits by pointing out that other online advertising aggregators already collect such data. When it comes to ad-supported phones and tablets, Facebook could say the same thing. And it probably will.

Here's What Unsuspecting Iranians Do With a Stolen Laptop

The Hidden app, which can help Macbook owners nab computer thieves by secretly snapping and sending pictures of the new owners, has inadvertently provided one Londoner with an amusing glimpse into the life of an Iranian family that is now in possession of his Macbook Pro.

Dom Del Toro, an animator living in the U.K., installed the app just days before his laptop was stolen. Somehow, it ended up in Tehran, and it's now in use by an Iranian family that apparently enjoys playing Jenga and wearing unusual headgear:

The full set of photos the computer has transmitted can be found at his Tumblr. (Previously, an Oakland, Calif. man used the same app to Tumblr-document -- and eventually catch -- his own Macbook thief.)

No telling if these are the real crooks, but it's an interesting anthropological jaunt, at least?

HTC One impresses but software disappoints

Ready for the battle of the phones? This year's crop 

An attendee tests the new HTC One during a launch event in New York

of high-end smartphones is starting to emerge, like bear cubs crawling out of their burrows, sniffing the spring air. First out is the HTC One, a handsome, powerful animal that should do well this year. 

The HTC One belongs to the big camp of smartphones running Google Inc.'s Android software. Collectively, they're the big alternative to the iPhone, though no one model outsells the iPhone. What makes the HTC One really stand out is that it's the only phone that can match Apple Inc.'s standards of feel and finish.

Much like the iPhone, the HTC One has a beautifully machined aluminum back and aluminum detailing on the front. Also like the iPhone, the metal edges are beveled, or "chamfered" as the industrial designers call it. Plastic and metal are joined together so well that you can't tell by feel where one ends and the other starts.

While the HTC One clearly borrows some elements of the iPhone 5's style, it's hard to mistake the HTC One for the iPhone. For starters, it is half an inch taller and broader, with a huge screen. It's also noticeably thicker at its maximum, but that's cunningly concealed by a bulging back and narrow edges. Bigger screens are one way Android phones take on the iPhone, and that inevitably leads to bigger phones, but the HTC One carries its bulk very well.

A staff member displays Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC's new 'HTC One' during a press conference in Taipei

The screen is quite a sight, boasting a resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels - as many as you'd find on a 50-inch TV set. You'd have to line up three iPhone 5s, side by side, to show as much detail as you can on one HTC One screen. That doesn't mean the screen is three times as useful. These pixels are just so small that the eye can't take advantage of the full resolution.

Above and below the screens are two speaker grilles. That means that when you turn the phone sideways to watch a movie, you'll get real stereo sound, without headphones. The speakers are great, too, pumping out surprisingly deep sound.

The price you pay for a body that feels as tight and sharp as a knife fresh from the forge is that nothing goes into or out of it. You can't change the battery, and you can't expand the memory with cards. Again, this is very much in the iPhone's vein, but it's a contrast to Samsung's Galaxy phones, which have chintzy plastic backs that allow you to change batteries and plug in memory cards.

The camera does something interesting, but the results are disappointing. It's well known that boosting the megapixel count of camera sensors doesn't really do much for the image quality, but phone and camera makers can't seem to stop using megapixel count as a marketing tool, so the megapixels keep climbing. HTC has finally taken a stand against this trend, with a camera sensor that has only 4 megapixels of resolution. It's a timid stand, though, as HTC doesn't actually tell you it's a 4-megapixel sensor.

Rather, HTC calls it an "Ultrapixel" camera. The story is that the sensor pixels are twice as big as they are in most phone cameras, which means they can gather more light. More light per pixel means better pictures in indoor lighting, at least in theory. In practice, I found the images to be better than those of other Android phones in low lighting, but not as good as those from the iPhone 5, which are of higher resolution. Low-light pictures taken on the HTC One do show relatively little "noise" - which usually looks like colored speckles - but the images aren't particularly crisp.

Another hardware feature that reaches but doesn't deliver is the infrared diode on the top edge. Through it, the phone can control your TV or cable box. But setting up the software is daunting. I was confronted with going through a list of 1,800-plus channels and manually selecting which ones I get from my cable provider. Even if I were to set this up, I still couldn't control the DVR functions of the cable box from the phone. So as a replacement for the remote, the HTC One falls short.

The phone's other big shortcoming isn't really new, or unique to this model. Rather, the problem is that HTC is doing what it's always done, and what competitors like Samsung do, too. It can't leave Android alone, but tinkers with it to "improve" it and put its own stamp on it.

The result is a baffling interface, with four different "home" screens from which to launch apps. It might reward those who take the time to customize it and really get to know it, but most people aren't like that. They're better served by simple, consistent interface. Google recognizes this and keeps Android relatively simple on its own Nexus line of phones. HTC and Samsung seem determined to make things complicated.

AT&T, Sprint Nextel and T-Mobile USA are set to start selling the phone this month. Prices will be about $200 with a two-year contract. There's no word yet from Verizon.

If you're looking for an Android phone, do yourself a favor and check out the HTC One in a store. Samsung Electronics Co. will outspend HTC Corp. many times over in marketing when Samsung's Galaxy S 4 comes out shortly. But if you take the time to feel the One in your hand, it will probably be your One.

Sony launching more affordable UHD TVs

 New 55-inch and 65-inch models plus a media player

The Sony XBR-65X900A 65-inch UHD TV

 from Sony could bring ultra-high definition TV a step closer to the mainstream. Available for North American consumers to order from April 21, the TVs, which Sony first showcased at January's International Consumer Electronics Las Vegas, may still be a little expensive for the average consumer -- the 55-inch XBR-55X900A will retail for $4999 and its big brother, the 65-inch XBR-65X900A, for $6999 -- but both seem an absolute bargain compared with the selection of ultra-high definition sets currently available which, although offering significantly larger 80-to-85-inch displays, are also considerably more expensive, retailing for between $20,000 and $40,000.

Each of the new TVs offers a screen resolution four times greater than existing high definition (hence it is often referred to as 4K technology as it has 4000 pixels horizontally, compared with the 1000 found in current HD screens) and a conversion technology that can take non-native content and upscale it to fill the screen while increasing its perceived resolution.

There is no debating the stunning images that UHD TVs offer compared with anything already on the market. However, there are two drawbacks to the technology's more widespread adoption. The first is price: as this is an emerging technology early examples will come at a premium. These TVs, which also support native 3D UHD and ship with passive 3D glasses, plus integrated 65-watt front-facing magnetic fluid speakers (negating the need for a separate soundbar) and wi-fi connectivity, are a step in the right direction in terms of cost. The second constraint, available content, is the biggest obstacle. The first official UHD live TV broadcast is scheduled for July 2014. It will be the FIFA World Cup final and will only be available to UHDTV-owning viewers in Japan.

Which is why, as well as the TV sets, Sony has also announced that it will be launching a 4K Media Player, the FMP-X1 and a dedicated online ultra-high definition web platform for downloading native content to its TVs. Set to go on sale this summer for $699, the FMP-X1 will come bundled with 10 UHD-remastered feature films, including "Taxi Driver" and "The Amazing Spider-Man," and from this autumn will work as a hub for connecting to Sony's own UHD video library. A subscription or fee-based service, Sony claims the site will offer a wide selection of films from a number of studios, and not just its own content.

For owners that prefer not to pay subscription fees, Sony is also launching a a range of "mastered in 4K" Blu-ray discs that work on existing Blu-ray players and are optimized for the technology in its UHD TVs. And, as an added incentive, consumers who purchase either of Sony's new UHD TVs will also get a "mastered in 4K" copy of "Spider-Man" (2002), "Ghostbusters" and "Angels & Demons," free of charge.

Although Sony hasn't confirmed if the same offer will apply to consumers in other territories, it has confirmed that the 55-inch XBR-55X900A and 65-inch XBR-65X900A will debut in Europe this July.