Google Play introduces ‘Free App of the Week’ in the Family section

Google’s recently introduced Family section in the Google Play Store is bringing a first for Google—a “Free App of the Week” section. This time the PBS Kids’ app Daniel Tiger Grr-ific Feelings is the first app that’ll be free. Google previously only let app developers give discounts for their paid apps but they’ve never let them give it away for free before. Of course, it’s expected to go back to being paid next week. However, it would seem you’ll need to look for the free app banner on Google Play because it still shows as a US$2.99 app on its page.

Source: Android Central  

Twitter to lift 140 character limit for direct messages

The basic premise of what makes Twitter, well, Twitter is the brevity upon which you can impart knowledge or your useless brain farts on the Internet in under 140 characters. That’s about to change though but just for direct messages. You now don’t have to send truncated DMs to your Twitter followers as the social network plans to lift the limit and raise it up to 10,000 words (which is a lot). The changes will reportedly take place next month to give developers a chance to update their apps and make it ready for this change.

Source: Twitter | Via: Android Police

Google Slides gets AirPlay, Chromecast support for streaming presentations

Google is giving offices, particularly smaller companies and startups, a cheaper option to showing presentations. The Google Slides app now supports Chromecast and AirPlay, which means you can stream your presentations to a TV that has Apple TV or Chromecast attached to it. The Slides app also turns your device into a remote control so you can see your notes without it showing up on the TV and there are slide timers to help keep your presentation moving.

Source: ZDNet

Sony introduces professional-grade features to the new Cyber-shot RX series

Sony is bringing its advanced technology to its Cyber-shot line of cameras with the compact RX100 IV and the high-zoom RX10 II. These two new models come with the first 1.0 type stacked Exmor RS CMOS sensor with advanced signal processing and an attached DRAM memory chip, which allow for five times faster readout of image data. These shooters also support 40x super slow motion video recording of up to 960 frames per second as well as 4K movie capture. And they also feature an ultra-fast Anti-Distortion shutter with a maximum speed of 1/32000 second. For the 4K video recording, the RX10 II can shoot 4K video up to 29 minutes, while the RX100 IV can shoot 4K clips up to about five minutes at a time.

The RX100 IV maintains the pocket-friendly size of the RX100 family and it comes with a ZEISS Vario-Sonnar T* 24-70mm F1.8-F2.8 lens. The RX100IV also keeps the retractable EVF with ZEISS T8 coating. Meanwhile, the RX10 II has the same body design as the original RX10 and comes with ZEISS Vario-Sonnar T* 24-200mm F2.8 lens. They both come with a new high-contrast XGA OLED Tru-Finder display. The RX100 IV retails for $1,199.99, while the RX10 II goes for $1,599.99 and they’ll be available in July. Pre-sales for both cameras will start on June 17^th.