Samsung prepared to bring 128GB flash storage to mid range phones

While we’re waiting for most flagships to get off the 16GB, 32GB and 64GB trends, Samsung is already looking to bring mid-range devices up to the new 128GB standard. The company has announced the development of a new 128GB NAND flash module based on 3-bit eMMC 5.0.

It’s a low-cost, low-power technology that delivers a level of performance acceptable for mobile devices without sucking your battery dry. This is opposed to the advanced UFS 2.0-based NAND flash found inside the forthcoming Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge.

Samsung’s intentions for this stick to hit mid-range might not make much of a difference in terms of actual availability. They might use it in a few of their own mid-range options down the line, but if this module is more expensive for an OEM than, say, a traditional 16GB or 32GB option then they’re likely to go with that to keep costs as low as they can. It’s cool that it’s here, though, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed that it makes its way into some decent smartphones once Samsung begins sampling.

[via BusinessWire]

LG G4 users will get 100GB of Google Drive storage for free

LG made sure to mention many times that the LG G4 has expandable storage, but that hasn’t stopped them from catering to cloud lovers. All G4 owners will get 100GB of Google Drive storage for free. This is on top of the 15GB of storage Google already gives users. With all of these storage options you should have plenty of space to save the full-size RAW photo files. Will this convince you to give the LG G4 a shot?

LG G4 announcement

Full specs

SanDisk was able to stuff 200GB of storage space inside their latest microSD card

You thought SanDisk’s 128GB microSD cards were insane? The company has just announced another huge milestone — a whopping 200GB of data inside a chip smaller than the size of a nickle. It’s a UHS-1 Class 10 chip, which means it can transfer data at up to 90 megabytes per second.

So why not 256GB, the natural step up from 128GB? It’s likely SanDisk was unable to physically fit enough circuitry, doodads and whatever else makes these things tick inside such a compact form factor. It’s possible that could change with refined engineering techniques in the future, but for now this is as high as it gets.

You shouldn’t bat an eyelash at 200GB. It’s absolutely insane, and it’s even crazier to know that it can work in any device that supports microSDXC cards of 64GB or higher (which includes the newly-announced HTC One M9, but unfortunately not the just-as-fresh Samsung Galaxy S6).

Of course, you’d have to be willing to spend the 0 that this thing will cost to start so if you have that sort of money to throw around on micro storage chips you’ll likely be able to afford a smartphone that can utilize it. The chips are due Q2 2015.

[via SanDisk]

Amazon Fire TV is getting support for Bluetooth headsets, expandable USB storage and more

Amazon’s announced a great new update for their TV products, which include the Amazon Fire TV and Amazon Fire TV Stick. The two biggest features users will care about is support for expandable storage via the device’s USB port, as well as the ability to listen to your content using Bluetooth wireless headphones.

There’s also a neat feature that’ll easily allow you to bypass web authentication processes when you connect the Fire TV and TV Stick to certain public WiFi hotspots (such as those found in hotels, universities and coffee shops). Here’s the full list of what’s coming:

• Expandable USB storage on Amazon Fire TV—You can now use a connected USB mass storage device to expand your Fire TV storage for downloaded apps and games—this enables you to have more games downloaded for easy access.


• Connect to your hotel or dorm room Wi-Fi with captive portal support out of the box—Take your favorite movies, TV shows, games, and more with you away from home—Amazon Fire TV and Fire TV Stick are the first streaming media devices to enable you to connect to Wi-Fi that requires web authentication—this includes Wi-Fi at most major hotels, as well as some universities.


• Private listening on Fire TV—Enjoy favorite movies and TV shows after the kids go to sleep, without worrying about waking them up. Support for wireless Bluetooth headphones to Fire TV lets you listen to your movie, TV show, or music without bothering others in your household.


• Browse and search Prime Playlists—Prime members can now take advantage of hand-crafted Prime Music playlists directly from Fire TV and Fire TV Stick—there are hundreds of expertly curated Prime Playlists to choose from based on your mood, activity or even artist or decade of choice.


• Hidden PIN entry—With the new PIN entry screen that hides the numbers selected, you can now make sure your kids (or freeloading friends) can’t see your device PIN as you enter it on-screen to confirm a purchase on Fire TV or Fire TV Stick.


• New shortcuts—Quickly put your Fire TV or Fire TV Stick to sleep or enable display mirroring by pressing and holding the Home button on your remote.

There’s no exact date for the update’s release just yet, though Amazon promises it’ll be along within the coming weeks. Oh, and folks in the UK and Germany who prefer the stick-shaped variant will be happy to know that you can now order one, but it won’t be shipping until April 15th.

[via Amazon]

 

New Google Photos app offers unlimited storage for infinite photos

Today during Google’s IO keynote, it unveiled the long-rumored standalone photos service, Google Photos. The biggest perk of the new standalone app isn’t all of the cool new features Google unveiled for Photos, but rather the fact that the service will offer unlimited cloud storage of all your photos and videos. That’s a huge departure from services like Apple’s iCloud, which only offers 5GB of space for free.

So what’s the catch with the free unlimited space? Any pictures that are over 16MP will be compressed. You’ll also be able to store 1080p videos for free, but any 4K recording you take with your phone will be downsized on the service as well.

If you’re a photographer who doesn’t want to opt into the free option with compression, when you install the app you’ll be able to choose the “original” Google Photos option. This will store all of your photos and videos that you select at the original resolution, but you’ll need premium Google Drive space. For a month, you can get 1TB of space for all your uncompressed photo and video needs.

For everyone else, backing up and finding your photos just became a whole lot easier.

UPDATE: It’s live!

Flickr 4.0 brings another major redesign, improved search, Auto-Uploadr, and 1TB of free storage

In case you haven’t been keeping track, almost every year now Flickr undergoes a dramatic redesign in hopes of enticing fans of photos sharing services like Instagram or even Google+. It was almost 2 years Flickr 2.0 introduced its biggest changes, offering up new Android apps and giving users 1TB of free storage to store all their photos. Around this same time last year, the photo service fine tuned their apps’ design with Flickr 3.0, aiming for something more akin to Instagram (but with much higher quality uploads).

Today, Flickr is announcing another big change, one that sees yet another complete UI overhaul to both their online site and mobile apps. Because Flickr knows you’ve got thousands of photos and videos spread across multiple devices — and 1TB of space to store them — they wanted to make easier than every to store and organize them online.

That’s why Flickr is introducing their new Auto-Uploadr, a little something built into their new Android and iOS apps (there’s a desktop app too) that simply auto uploads all your photos and videos to Flickr. The photos are all marked private by default, so you don’t have to worry about anyone viewing them (unless you choose to share them). The best part is Flickr’s new editing tools are no longer permanent, meaning the original unedited file is always available.

Once uploaded, Flickr’s new unified search features — which can find photos based on landmarks, location, or even color palette — make it easier than ever to keep everything nice and tidy. They can even detect and avoiding uploading duplicate photos, so don’t worry about backing up everything all over again.

You can find the new Flickr 4.0 update right now on the Google Play Store. As always, it’s completely free to use is a compelling option for those looking to backup and share their photos online.

Flickr (Playboard) | Flickr (Play Store)

Only 1.26GB of the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua’s 8GB of storage are usable

It’s become an industry expectation to have less available storage than what’s advertised on the box, but we’re not sure the Sony Xperia M4 Aqua’s case can be excused. The phone apparently comes with just 1.26GB of usable storage out of 8GB.

8GB of storage isn’t a lot by today’s standard, mind you, but it should be enough to have at least 4GB of freely available storage, if not more. According to the storage analysis on Android 5.0, the phone’s system is taking up roughly 4GB alone, while pre-installed apps account for over 2GB.

Even more damning is the fact that the device’s user manual suggests there should be as much as 3GB of usable storage, which is double of what is actually available (but still a pretty pathetic expectation). Some will point out that you can expand storage thanks to the device’s microSD card slot, but that does nothing for things that can only be placed on internal storage such as apps and cache.

The crime here isn’t that the phone has 8GB of storage. It’s a budget phone that will naturally come up short in this area. The problem is Sony (and probably Google with all of the apps these companies are required to include as part of their Android license) are not doing proper optimization of their user experience to give as much of that storage to users as they can, and we hope they’ll address it in a future software upgrade. We’ll be reaching out to the company for a comment on whether this is an error, and whether they have plans to eradicate it at some point.

[via XperiaBlog]