HP and designer Michael Bastian prepping a luxury smart watch

HP is no stranger to collaborating with designers to create special edition notebooks. This time around, HP's going with designer Michael Bastian to create a luxury smart watch. The working outline for this device, which is an Android Wear compatible watch, goes as follows, " it will feature a circular, 44mm stainless steel case and three swappable bands: black rubber, brown leather, olive green nylon and a limited edition black."

Interesting to see HP, which doesn't do smartphones anymore, try and capture some of that sweet wearables market buzz. The design inspiration for this as of yet unnamed watch will be taken from automobile industrial design and interiors and HP  apparently differentiate the experience by adding to, "the watch's smart features, which will include notifications like email, text and calls, along with user controls for music and other apps." The HP smart watch is earmarked for a fall release.

Source: Engadget

LG unveils Android-powered, notebook-sized Tab Book 11 in South Korea

Want an Android-powered tablet that can easily pass off as a notebook? LG recently unveiled the Tab Book 11 in South Korea. It is an 11.6-inch Android Jelly Bean tablet that runs on an Intel Core i5 Haswell processor, Intel HD 4400 graphics, 4GB of RAM, and a 128GB solid state drive. It has a Full HD 1920x1080p IPS display and includes two USB 3.0 ports, an HDMI port, and a microSD card reader. It’s quite a hefty device though at 2.3 pounds due to the non-detachable keyboard hidden underneath the tablet. We’re not sure if this thing will make its way out of Korea but if it does, would you get one?

Source: Ubergizmo

Apple to flip the switch on its own Content Delivery Network resulting in faster transfers

Apple has reportedly flipped the switch on its own CDN which means it can more quickly and efficiently deliver files to iOS and Mac users running Apple cloud services or accessing any of the conten from iTunes or the App Store.

Apple has historically relied on CDN's like Akamai but is now renting bandwith from various ISPs in order to speed up various transfers. This means Apple customers should experience faster downloads, software updates, backups and file transfers. This also bodes well for the upcoming iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite releases which will rely heavily on cloud transfers for their continuity features.

Source: Streamingmediablog

Google releases source code of its I/O 2014 app

Google is hoping to help developers create the best Android apps they can. The tech company just released the source code of its I/O 2014 app. They want it to serve as a template of sorts for any app development. According to Google, some of the features, design approaches, and APIs used in the app include “fragments, loaders, alarms, notifications, SQLite databases, Action Bar, Navigation Drawer, Google Cloud Messaging, Google Drive API, material design, etc.

They also rebuilt the app to work with JSON files instead of a specific API to allow it to be repurposed for other conferences. They also plan to release the technical articles related to the source code as well as update the app in the coming months.

Source: The Next Web