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According to a new report, Microsoft will be releasing two Windows 10 Lumia flagship devices this holiday season, both of which will include iris scanners and one of which will have Surface Pen tech.

Reportedly, the Lumia 950 will have a 5.2-inch QHD OLED screen, a 20MP PureView camera (5MP selfie cam) and come with Windows 10 Mobile pre-installed. The device will be powered by a 64-bit Hexa core Snapdragon 808, 3GB RAM, a 3000mAh removable battery, 32GB internal storage (expandable with microSD) and will also support USB Type-C and Qi wireless charging.

The Lumia 950 XL (codename: Cityman) will have a 5.7-inch QHD OLED screen, be powered by 64-bit Octa core Snapdragon 810, 3GB of RAM, a 3300mAh battery, Qi wireless charging support and USB Type-C support. Also different from its smaller brother is triple LED flash for the 20MP rear camera, aluminum side buttons and a 1mm silver ring inside the black camera pod.

On paper, both devices sound great for the operating system that is seriously lacking a flagship that people can remember.

Twitter followers are a commodity that can be turned into cash. So it is understandable that the fight for followers is fierce.

A lot of the Twitter accounts that have a tremendous amount of followers are celebrities and media who naturally have that kind of following, but it is possible to create a following for yourself even without much of a presence in the real world.

One of the ways is to have snarky commentary and witty jokes. However, since it is really hard to come up with original jokes there has been a surge of tweet thieves. Twitter is now removing the tweets on copyright grounds, The Verge reports.

A tweet by @runolgarun (Olga Lexell) has been stolen and removed at least five times, noted Twitter user @PlagiarismBad. Lexell also has confirmed on Twitter that she in fact requested the removal of these stolen tweets. She says that they were tweeted by spam bots that had also stolen other jokes, and that the tweets were removed by Twitter without further questions.

China has had an peculiar ban on video game consoles for 15 years. Since last year it hasn't affected companies registered in he Shanghai Free Trade Zone anymore, but now it's finally time to end the ban altogether, WSJ reports.

The Ministry of Culture revealed earlier this week that the ban will lift from the whole country. That means that manufacturing and selling video game consoles is again allowed. This obviously opens up the game market in a huge way.

Companies including Sony and Microsoft are surely looking to commit into China more now. Sony told Wall Street Journal this was "great news" for the company.

In 2000 China decided on the video game console ban to prevent possible harmful influences to its youth. Presumably China has noticed there hasn't been proof of such effect in other countries.

Google has decided to offer once again freebies for Chromecast users. To celebrate the second birthday of Chromecast Google is offering free movies and music.

The offers featured on this website include 90 days of free music courtesy of Google Play as well as a free movie rental from the same service.

There's no hurry to redeem the freebies though, as the movie rental will be available to redeem until the end of the year and the music pass until the end of January 2016.

One problem you wouldn't think Apple has is money. Well, it seems that that's exactly one of the problems the company has. However, it is not lack thereof but instead the location.

Apple holds much of its cash overseas where it is not as convenient as it would be in the US. Tim Cook and company have to find out a way to use it or transfer it without paying a huge amount of US taxes, Bloomberg reports.

The cupertino tech giant has now almost 90 percent of its cash stored in offshore subsidiaries. That makes this a 200 billion – yes, billion – dollar problem.

These subsidiaries are not required to pay the 35 percent corporate tax rate of United States but it also means that Apple cannot use them for acquisitions – or much of anything really.

Obviously Apple is trying to lobby a tax reform for the corporate tax that is the highest in the industrialized world while some want the cash overseas to be taxes in the same fashion as in the US.

Google has released a new version of the YouTube mobile app. The app gets a facelift in form of new three new tab layout.

The update features three new tabs: Home, Subscriptions and Account. It is now available for Android devices and iOS will get it "soon".

Home tab is for exploring the content that is customized with user behavior and other factors calculated by the recommendation engine. Subscriptions shows your favorite channels and Account tab lets you browse your playlists, history, and your uploads.

The mobile app has now also been updated to support full screen vertical video.

The Commodore Amiga 1000 (or A1000) was released on July 23, 1985, and is still considered to have been years ahead of its time.

It stood out from the crowd for several reasons. Firstly, it sported a color graphical user interface (4096 colors) at a time when Apple's Macintosh cost considerably more (~$1000 more or so) with a black and white display. Most Amiga 1000 units were sold with an RGB monitor, but it did feature a built-in composite video output to support other monitors.

AmigaOS was a truly multitask operating system too.

Under the hood, it packed a Motorola 68000 CPU (7.16MHz NTSC, 7.09MHz PAL) upgradable officially to a 68010 and to other CPUs via third party route. While the 68000 was common in 1985, the Amiga 1000 features three additional co-processors for multimedia operations.

The Amiga 1000 had 256 KB of Amiga Chip RAM, which was officially upgradable to 512 KB and further with third party upgrades. Further hardware upgrades were possible through the included 86-pin expansion port.

When the Amiga 500 model launched a couple of years after for a cut price of $700, it established Amiga as a popular gaming system, with sales of around 6 million units.

AT&T has confirmed that it will be the first wireless carrier to offer the Microsoft Surface 3 tablet with 4G LTE support in the U.S.

The device will go on sale this week on Friday.

Of course, there are confusing pricing tiers but thankfully AT&T kind of broke it down:

"Beginning on Friday, July 24, you can purchase the Surface 3 for $0 down and $30 per month with an AT&T Tablet Installment plan. In addition, for a limited time, you can purchase a Surface 3 for $399.99 with any Lumia smartphone purchased on AT&T Next. Additionally, a commercial version of the Surface 3 will be available to business customers in the coming weeks."

The installment plan is for 20 months and has 0% APR.

After months of small leaks, we finally have a complete leak of the upcoming OnePlus 2 flagship including specs and pictures.

The handset will be officially unveiled on July 27th during a special VR event but for now we can thank Chinese regulator TENAA for publishing the details.

According to the post, the OnePlus 2 will feature a 5.5-inch display with QHD 2560 x 1440 resolution, a custom Qualcomm Snapdragon 810 processor, 4GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, a 13MP main camera, an 8MP front-facing camera and a 3,300 mAh battery. The phone's design is metal and will feature a USB Type-C port.

Additionally, there appears to be a real home button on the front of the phone, which could suggest the rumored fingerprint sensor.

OnePlus's founder confirmed the price tag would be under $450, but with specs like that we can't expect it to be much lower than $450.

Microsoft has revealed the life cycle for its upcoming Windows 10 operating system, hoping to clear up some confusion regarding support and updates.

The software giant says that as long as you have a legit Windows 10 build installed, you will get free updates for 10 years, ensuring you stay patched and updated for the next decade.

As with past operating systems, the original "mainstream" support is five years followed by "extended" support for five years after that.

The U.S. FCC has greenlighted AT&T's proposed acquisition of DirecTV, the $48.5 billion merger that will now create the U.S.' largest pay-TV company.

For the deal to pass, it still needs approval from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) but the DOJ has already said the deal does not pose risks of an anti-competitive nature, suggesting the deal should be able to close soon. The FCC's approval will be put into writing within weeks.

The approval will require conditions. AT&T must build out broadband Internet connections for 12.5 million new customers and it must also share all "traffic exchange agreements it strikes with content and web transit companies" with the FCC.

AT&T also agreed to offer Internet in more rural areas and offer at least 6Mbit speed Internet for its customers.

FCC boss Tom Wheeler is also looking to set up an independent office to ensure AT&T complies with the conditions, a first for the consumer protection group.

Google has officially killed the Chrome browser extension Streamus, leaving its 300,000 users in the dark.

Streamus first launched two years ago and allowed users to stream music, for free, right from their Chrome browser. The service used YouTube as its catalog but didn't display any of the actual videos (or their ads).

"We encourage people to leverage the power of our open API to embed YouTube videos in creative and innovative ways that comply with our terms of service," said YouTube in a statement, suggesting that Streamus was in violation.

Of course, Streamus was in violation as it split the audio from YouTube videos from its video, which is not allowed. Google has removed the app from its Chrome Web Store, as well.

Google has been testing their own service for those that like music through YouTube, with beta users having access to YouTube Music Key since earlier this year. The service costs $10 a month, has less ads, higher quality audio and allows for background playback on mobile apps.

Source:
Variety

According to a new report, Nokia is expected to unveil their first virtual reality (VR) project at an event next week in LA.

So far there is very little known about the device although we know it is coming from Nokia Technologies, the advanced product division left behind after Nokia sold its consumer handset division to Microsoft.

Nokia Technologies has been behind the Nokia N1 tablet and the Z Launcher software but otherwise has been quiet since 2013. The division did also confirm earlier this year that they will be getting back into the handset business, sort of, via licensing agreements with OEMs.

Nokia's decision to try VR follows decisions from HTC, Sony and of course, Facebook to try the new frontier of gaming and immersive experiences.

We will know more next week.

Major German automakers Daimler, BMW and Volkswagen have all agreed in principle to purchase Nokia's HERE digital mapping service, beating out a handful of bidders that included Uber.

The car makers will pay $2.7 billion for the service and sources say the companies will invite other car makers like GM, Toyota, Ford and others to invest in HERE.

Despite the nice buyout on paper for HERE, the price is a far cry from the $8.1 billion Nokia bought mapping service Navteq for in 2008. Navteq served as the foundation for HERE maps.

For the auto industry, purchasing HERE was a make or break proposition. All the other bidders were from the tech world and the automakers feared that a company like Google or Apple could then own all the information systems inside their cars as well as the future of cars: self-driving autos.

Self-driving cars will need the most accurate maps possible to avoid potential mishaps, and we are still in the early innings of mapping software and self-driving tech.

Toshiba president Hisao Tanaka, Vice Chairman Norio Sasaki and adviser Atsutoshi Nishida have all resigned this week after it was discovered that Toshiba fraudulently inflated their earnings by $1.2 billion over the last 6 years.

An independent investigation found that the Toshiba executives set profit targets that were impossible to reach, which led to the inflated accounting. The investigators say the accounting scam was "skillfully hidden" from investors and others.

"I was shocked by the fact that one of the leading companies organizationally conducted such a thing," said Koichi Ueda, who led the investigating committee. Ueda was a former investigator with the Tokyo District Public Prosecutor's Office.

Since Toshiba announced the investigation in May, shares have fallen 18 percent and the company suspended its dividend and all quarterly forecasts.