BMW introduces new camera surveillance tech

Perhaps to help keep watch of your car when it’s parked in relatively sketchy places or to help you park the car while you’re outside of it, BMW is developing new camera surveillance technology for its vehicles. The German automaker sent out a photo showing off a user making use of the Remote View 3D from a smartphone. But they didn’t really release other information on it. What it has also given us though is a quick peek at the upcoming BMW 5 Series. This tech makes use of multiple cameras expected to come to the new BMW 5 and possibly more of BMW’s automobiles.

And while we don’t know much about it yet, it might be able to work like the Cadillac CT6’s camera, which makes use of different vehicle sensors to turn the car into a dashcam that’ll be able to record what happens when the vehicle is disturbed.

Source: CNET

Are two new Nokia smartphones on their way?

The Nokia XL is one of the few Android-power devices the company was able to put out

Spotted on mobile benchmarking tool Geekbench are two Nokia devices that could’ve possibly made it out of Nokia’s stable had they continued on making phones for Microsoft. And while people may speculate that these could be new Android-powered devices from Nokia, which is now being licensed to HMD Global Oy (for mobile devices), the specs are too old to warrant a new release. The first one is the Nokia 5320. It runs on Android 4.4 KitKat, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset, and 2GB of RAM. The second one is the unusual Nokia RM-1490 that runs on an AMD A8-5545 APU quad-core chip, Android 4.2, and 2GB of RAM. We haven’t seen an Android device run on AMD before. And GSMArena is speculating this could’ve been a laptop.

But while we might not be getting these, there are Nokia devices in the works. According to Nokia executive Mike Wang there will be three to four Nokia-branded mobile devices (encompassing smartphones and tablets) running on Android that will come out in the fourth quarter of this year. The announcement might be made before the year ends with a launch date set for early next year, depending on how testing and development goes.

Play solitaire and tic-tac-toe in Google Search

Just in case you didn’t have enough distractions on the internet, Google goes ahead and hides more Easter eggs into its search engine. The web browser now has solitaire and tic-tac-toe embedded into it. If you type in either words into the search bar—while you’re on your PC, doesn’t work on mobile—the game will boot up there and just let you play right from the search results.

Aside from that you can also decide things with an automated coin flip, simply type “flip a coin” or “coin flip.” You can even search for what sounds a number of animals make. You can start it off by asking “What does a cat sound like?”

Source: The Verge

WhatsApp to share user data with Facebook

While we would’ve thought WhatsApp was the more privacy conscious alternative to Facebook Messenger, it looks like that has changed. WhatsApp will now be sharing user data with its mother company, Facebook. And yes, this information will be used to sell more ads. While they won’t be seeing your messages as WhatsApp employs end-to-end encryption, what Facebook will be seeing is your metadata, or the data about your messages. So yes, they might be able to see your phone number and from that bit of information find out where you live and target more ads to you.

We already know Facebook collects as much data as it can from us, so it really was bound to happen that WhatsApp, which the social network bought for US$16 billion in 2014. Aside from phone number, though, both companies are pretty vague on what information WhatsApp will be sharing. But if you see the data points Facebook collects, you sort of get an idea what they might get from WhatsApp.

Source: Gizmodo