Google Search now delivering restaurant menus

We can already use Google to find information about just about anything – there’s nothing new there. But in recent years, where Google’s really been shining is in thinking up new ways to better present that information to us. That’s led to things like Google Now and its card view, and today we learn about another improvement that’s hitting Google Search, as it learns to display interactive menus. How many times have you been looking for a place to eat and struggled to find a conveniently accessible menu online? ...

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Would you quit the Internet if net neutrality dies? (Poll)

Net neutrality. If you’ve been a responsible Internet user in the last few months, you’re familiar with the term and what it means for us, the paying subscribers. For those unaware, it’s the movement (or set of rules, rather) that Internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all online activity equally. In other words, you pay your fees, and you have unadulterated access to the Internet, regardless of the sites you visit, the services you use, etc. Last month, a federal appeals court shot down the FCC’s net neutrality rules, and that opened the door for a Wild ...

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Touch ID may soon start working a lot better

About three months back, right at the start of December, we talked to you about some problems that had been coming to our attention concerning the performance of the Touch ID sensor in the iPhone 5S. What started off for many users as a relatively successful interaction with Touch ID started changing shape over time, and as the weeks passed some found the phones struggling to accept fingerprint authentication. We heard a number of theories for why this might be happening, as well as several idea for mitigating the issue, but ...

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Has Sony learned its lesson? Early analysis praises Xperia Z2 display quality

Sony makes some very attractive smartphones; there’s no denying it has a recognizable design language, resulting in some very sleek, smart-looking hardware. Its flagship Xperia models have delivered top-notch specs, and all the pieces have seemed like they’ve been in place for Sony to be a really strong competitor in the market… but then there are those screens. Perhaps the most recurring complaints we hear about Sony smartphones have targeted disappointing display performance. Luckily, it ...

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Pocketnow Weekly 085: MWC 2014 wrap-up from Team Barcelona

Anton D. Nagy chasing a taxi on foot. Jaime Rivera almost burning down a building with a power strip. A Honduran drinking palinca and a Romanian doing a Mexican accent. The tales from our leather-clad Barcelona duo are intense – but their intensity is matched by the hot mobile news that burst forth from this week’s Mobile World Congress, the most epic in recent memory. To wit, that news includes an MWC 2014 Samsung Unpacked event that gave the world the latest Galaxy; a Sony unveiling of similar proportions that built on the Xperia legacy; a press conference that saw the ...

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“Steve Jobs” to help Lenovo design Android phones

Smartphone fans should be quick to recognize Ashton Kutcher as the actor portraying Steve Jobs in last year’s much anticipated (though critically panned) biopic, but in real life Kutcher’s been helping out on the Android side of the fence. Last fall, Lenovo recruited him to help promote its Yoga Tablet (the second-gen version of which we just caught at MWC), and now we get word that Lenovo is increasing its involvement with Mr. Kutcher, ...

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The best of MWC 2014, from afar

Sadly, Mobile World Congress is now over. This year’s mobile show in Barcelona, Spain was one of the busiest, device-driven shows in recent years. We saw a boatload of handsets, a few tablets, some wearables, and a lot of future products that won’t be available for a while. Needless to say, there was plenty for just about everyone to be excited about at least something: a new Galaxy S smartphone, three new wrist-mounted Gear devices, a new Sony flagship, new additions to the HTC Desire lineup, new Huawei ...

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Nokia Lumia 630 specs leak; now when will it launch?

It feels like the Nokia Lumia 630 (and its partner in crime, the 635) have been hanging over our head forever. The codename Moneypenny first leaked back in November, and a month later we had the phones’ Lumia-series names. Multiple screenshots followed, and for a while that was it, up until the leak last week of the render you see above. ...

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New HTC One leak shows handset with AT&T branding, further name support arrives

We’ve seen in-the-wild shots of varying degrees of trustworthiness, we’ve seen apparent press renders in a variety of shades, and with less than a month to go until HTC’s launch event, the all new One is now starting to show up with some of the carrier branding it will sport as it descends on the US. With all those renders that have arrived already, how does this one compare? Remember late last week when a pair of images surfaced in gray and ...

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ZTE Nubia Z5S Mini hands-on (Video)

Technically speaking, the ZTE Nubia Z5S Mini is already getting a little old, having first gone official all the way back in November. Just because it was available in China, though, didn’t mean that we had enjoyed the opportunity to get familiar with it yet, so at the MWC this week we tracked down one of the handsets, looking to finally get some first-hand experiences with the mid-range Android. Sure, mid-range can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but the Z5S Mini is thankfully towards the top of that class, with ...

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YotaPhone 2014 hands-on (Video)

If anyone ever tells you that smartphones are all the same these days, that every manufacturer is copying everyone else to the point where all our phone are homogeneous, uninspiring slabs, you just point them on over to the YotaPhone, the handset that just has to do things a little differently. We saw the first YotaPhone debut last year, marrying a rear-mounted electronic ink to a typical full-color smartphone display, offering a persistent output, low power consumption, and great daylight readability.

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Is fitness the future of wearables?

Although the “wearables” category is somewhat new to Pocketnow, devices that are meant to be worn, rather than carried, have been around for quite some time. In the very early days they were called pocket watches. Eventually they evolved into timekeepers that we wore around our wrists. Original versions just kept track of time, but other features were added in: day of the week, day of the month, and even moon phases eventually came to wrist watches. Some got barometers, stopwatches, countdown times, calculators, even simple calendars. When Microsoft released its SPOT ...

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