coming up on tech news today the ipad air reviews are in twitter’s getting a lot more visual and is intel throwing in the tv towel all that and what happens when you drive with google glass next netcasts you love from people you trust this is twit bandwidth for tech news today is provided by cashfly at dot cachefly.com this is tech news today for wednesday october 30th 2013. tech news today is brought to you by squarespace the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website portfolio or online store for a free trial and 10 off go to squarespace.com and use the offer code tnt 10. and by gazelle the fast and simple way to sell your used gadgets find out where your used iphone ipad and other apple products are worth at gazelle.com welcome to tech news today i’m sarah lane amaya’s actor i’m jason howell and tom merritt is feeling a little under the weather today so he’s hopefully sleeping it off oh yeah i made it sound more scandalous wait a minute is is he in the chat room right now probably probably because he’s tom but we’re gonna go ahead and forge ahead with the stories of the day starting with the top 10 in the news fuse ipad air reviews have hit the internet and we’ve got some interesting specifications for example it’s clocking at 80 faster than the fourth generation ipod pad that’s according to primate labs who put the tablet through some geekbench tests the air has an a7 processor that’s running at 1.4 gigahertz which is 100 megahertz faster than the 5s although the 5s also has an a7 the new air is also 5 times faster than ipad 2 which makes the second generation ipad which is still selling for 3.99 just 100 less than the starting price for the ipad air more perplexing than ever there’s a new look for twitter the company announced it’s going to make timelines more visual and feature image and video previews in tweets on the web as well as on ios and android apps if you don’t like the auto expand feature you can turn it off in the app version but not the web internet comments you’re complaining at the arm developers conference intel partner altera announced that intel will fabricate its arm 64-bit chip starting next year intel has been trying to break arm’s stronghold on the mobile market but this move looks like the company has decided well can’t beat them so we might as well join them analysts say intel is even willing to compete with semiconductor foundry leader tsmc for the business of big rivals like nvidia and qualcomm so how long until apple ditches samsung for intel after a 110 million dollar settlement with the mpaa iso hunt is back well sort of the new site is at isohunt.to and it looks pretty much exactly the same as the old isohunt.com however the people behind the new site are not related to the old iso hunt in any way isohunt.to has restored about 70 75 of the original site’s database nintendo has announced it sold 460 000 wii u consoles worldwide in the six-month period ending september 30th overall sales of the wii u are about 3.9 million globally although nintendo still claims it’s going to sell 9 million before the end of its 2 2014 financial year the wii u is still having a negative impact on the company’s profits says the company because of the price reduction in the u.s and europe alongside advertising expenses but the company says it’ll drive manufacturing costs of the hardware down and improve the distribution of digital software to boost income lenovo can’t stop yoga in its whole lineup because the company just introduced two new android based tablets called the yoga tablet 8 and the yoga tablet 10. from the side the device is looking awful like the apple wireless keyboard it’s a little bit strange both tablets feature a kickstand and will last up to 18 hours on a single charge inside you’re looking at a quad-core 1.2 gigahertz cortex a7 processor and one gigabyte of ram the 8-inch tablet costs 250 bucks while the 10-inch version is 300 google showed off its second generation google glass and some images of the device we’ve got two really bored looking models showing off the eyewear complete with a new mono earbud the earbud would replace the bone conduction speaker system of the original google also said the new version of glass would make it compatible with prescription lenses as well as sunglasses the company will run an exchange program for google glass explorers if they bought their glass before october 28 2013. if you’ve got google glass you might want to do yourself a favor don’t wear them while driving in california google glass explorer cecilia bade just received a ticket for driving while wearing google glass the stated reason for the moving violation is quote driving with monitor visible to driver parentheses google glass end quote now there’s a question on the legality of the whole ticket issued court case anyone apple says it’s replacing a very limited number of new iphones after finding a manufacturing defect that has limited battery performance apple didn’t say how many phones have been affected by this issue but the company is apparently contacting customers by phone suggesting the problem is probably pretty limited the defect does not affect the safety of the iphone batteries yesterday google added some features to google plus coming soon as full resolution backups of images for ios photo enhancement tools and some new auto awesome features like auto awesome eraser to remove things like photo bombers from your beautiful images google plus also started sending out emails to plus users offering them custom domains the first set of custom domains were sent to those users who have a profile photo have at least 10 followers and an account that’s at least 30 days old you know i was really liking my old plus url of plus.google.com110385 i mean 583 never mind this episode of tech news today is brought to you by squarespace.com the all-in-one platform that makes it easy to create your own professional website portfolio or online store they’re constantly improving their platform they’ve always got new features new designs better support all the time but let’s talk about the designs for a second they have more than 20 new beautiful templates for you to start with i mean these templates are quite lovely lots of style options you can customize to your heart’s desire or kind of leave it as is and just add your content in there squarespace can can do all the work for you or let you do as much work as you want it’s very very easy to use squarespace also has amazing support for those times that you have a question here and there they’re working 24 hours a day seven days a week and it’s inexpensive starts at just eight dollars per month includes a free domain name if you sign up for a year mobile optimized too every design includes a mobile experience so your website’s going to look good no matter how anybody is getting a hold of you and it’s commerce ready you can you can build yourself a powerful and flexible e-commerce solution which is integrated to work with every squarespace template by the way this is something that you don’t have to choose some special ecommerce template it allows sales for physical and digital goods so let’s say you want to sell your new album in mp3 form or maybe you wrote a book or an e-book all of that stuff can be sold right from your squarespace website a single interface for order management as well so you can track your orders you can customize your customer email updates you can print shipping labels you can add coupons you can do it all global reach for your online store as squarespace commerce is now available in 10 countries the us the uk canada australia belgium france germany ireland the netherlands and spain are you hooked yet start a trial with no credit card required and just start building your website when you sign up for squarespace make sure to use the offer code tnt10 that’s tnt the number 10 to get 10 off and to show your support for tech news today we thank squarespace for their support and that squarespace everything you need to create an exceptional website all right back to some news and joining us to talk about some of this top stories of the day is jeff canada hello jeff hello thanks a lot for having me guys i well thank you for being here so much the host of newest latest best i love that it’s my new show about all things geeky video games comic books movies television shows novels really uh it is your ultimate guide to how to spend your free time and uh it’s on youtube at the moment on my youtube page uh that’s youtube.com kanata jeff with two n’s and one t sounds rad absolutely excellent yeah i mean i i would say you know maybe i’m going on a limb but you seem like you’re you know you belong here with us ah well i uh i would agree with the yeah yeah the source material all right let’s start off with uh talking about some of these ipad air benchmarks of course the review units that many of of of the reporters have have have the embargo has lifted and everybody got to to uh to write their stuff uh i think what’s going on over at primate labs was the most interesting to me john poole over at primate labs uh did a bunch of benchmarks and wrote up some stuff mentioned in the news views one of the curious things is that the ipad air has that a7 processor which is also running in the 5s but it is running at 1.4 gigahertz which is faster than the 5s’s a7 as well possibly you know a different battery larger battery type of a thing um or or you know some combination of stuff that’s going on under the hood uh he also says probably the ipad mini a7 processor will perform the same because it’s basically the same it’s the same tablet now just a little bit smaller ipad air over 80 faster than the 4th gen ipad which is a huge bump up to pretty much what apple said it was a 2x increase in speed and over five times faster than that ipad 2 which apple is still selling nobody really seems to understand why but they are okay uh even though that the the new air is over uh you know just uh about a hundred dollars more john gruber over at darien fireball who of course writes about all things apple has some interesting thoughts on you know really starts to come down to if you’re going to use a new ipad let’s call it the ipad air as a replacement for a laptop how much better is it than that 4th gen ipad or if you really kind of like the idea of a tablet to supplement a laptop does the ipad air make any more sense than the mini since the mini is still going to be smaller and more portable jeff what do you think well i’m a strange use case perhaps i have a long going love affair with my ipad i uh it’s my the first device i touch in the morning is the last device i touch at night it is a wonderful web browsing piece of hardware and uh i i adore using it i don’t have a mini i have a regular size ipad the fact that it is that much faster than my current piece of hardware makes me want to upgrade more than ever however i use it for very little other than surfing the web that’s really the only app that i’m using twitter and i’m using safari basically or chrome sometimes but yeah that’s really all i use my ipad for and 80 faster makes me go i want this but is it going to be that much different actually loading a web page slightly faster probably not i don’t use it as a replacement for a laptop and i actually don’t really use it as a portable device either i usually use it as the device that stays in my house and that i pick up most often during the day to browse the web or check email so for me it’s not going to it’s not even a discussion of is it going to replace my laptop if i’m traveling somewhere i take my laptop i don’t take my ipad just because there’s it simply has too few of the things that i need out in the field like being able to plug a zip drive into or you know a flash drive into it you know being able to get data from people easily those things are limitations um so i’m still using my laptop and just because it’s faster isn’t going to make me use my ipad instead of my laptop yeah i agree with jeff when it comes to the the performance bump that actually got me from the switch from a three to a four the ipad 3 was the first ipad i purchased because i didn’t like that uh that low res screen i’m i’m very much a display snob when it comes to that why i have the new nexus 7 and why i have an ipad 4 now because the performance was better the new one’s supposed to be way faster the idea that it’s 100 megahertz faster than the the iphone 5s i think that makes a lot of sense considering you probably can have heat dissipation a lot better in a device that size a larger battery means you can have more performance and still have a larger battery compared to the iphone that is uh that means that you can have the performance of an ipad with a with the same processor i i actually use the device outside a lot i ended up my ipad was my only data connected device it was ridiculously large so i carried a purse effectively all the time so i just i the weird thing about apple is i don’t know how they’ve done this their deals with verizon t-mobile uh sprint and att the data costs are so cheap i don’t understand how this is the only device out there and the mini i guess that allows for this kind of data connection i’m on friday probably going to go to the store and go get this because this device has already been sold to gazelle for a couple of bucks so uh so long ipad hello ipad air maybe uh because the mini though the mini looks very attractive too it’s really cheap and it’s it’s got the same resolution yeah i mean that’s that’s the funny thing about it is too is it it’s it’s like no nobody’s gonna complain that that these these ipad benchmarks look really good uh i i guess somebody will complain about something but yeah it’s fast faster is better but let’s be honest what are we really using our ipads for most of the time does it really matter i think it matters if you’re the kind of person who says you know this is kind of my number one device i don’t really bring my laptop with me but i don’t know who those people are really i mean you’re still gonna have to use some sort of an external keyboard and well depending on what you’re doing well enough about enough about ipads let’s talk about twitter it’s gotten more beautiful is that right ours oh maybe it’s definitely gotten a lot more visual beautiful might be a whole other thing so twitter’s changed the way they’re displaying uh their website their apps so originally if you had like an image or a video that was embedded in a tweet you’d click it and it would expand and you would see it that way now twitter is going to be turning that on by default on the web and on their ios and android app so on the ios and android app you can turn that off as a default but when it comes to the web that’s going to be on all the time right now the only videos that’ll show up is a vine video there’s also at the bottom of a tweet they’re dedicated options for reply retweet and favorite before you have to click into the tweet and then you can hit reply and those other options so people are calling it a lot more like facebook and here in the video you can see that in the ios app on the bottom of these automatically expanded images you can see the little star the reply and retweet jack marshall over at digiday.com says this is effectively twitter’s answer to banner ads since brands could put images in their feeds that you can’t avoid and also if it’s a promoted tweet could be at the very top jeff does this change bother you well uh you know it’s funny i saw my twitter feed explode with all the what’s going on what’s going on with my twitter there’s all these pictures all of a sudden and i was like what really because i use a third-party twitter app i use tweetbot and it it doesn’t it didn’t happen for me so i went over to the website and checked it out and lo and behold yeah it looks like facebook now and i think that uh what has happened with facebook that’s so disturbing to me personally as a lover of language is that it’s just it literally is if anybody wants to say something they have to put it in a picture with helvetica font in the picture because no one actually reads the text that people are writing in their updates and i can totally see twitter going that way as well it’s like you know people just scrolling down and looking at their pictures i don’t particularly care about the ads thing you know ads are a part of life and i i think it’s strange when people get so upset that ads are invading their free service it’s like well just scroll past it it takes four seconds to scroll past it it’s not going to kill you um but i do see the the the de-emphasis on actual 140 character tweets and more emphasis on pictures if just it’s just going to be a row of pictures like facebook so that’s a little disturbing to me you know it’s funny i was uh somebody mentioned to me last night hey what do you think about twitter’s changes and i was sort of like i don’t know i use tweetbots so i never really see anything that people to get all upset about you know whether there’s a lot blue lines between tweets it’s like i actually i am sort of blissfully unaware most of the time but i went to the web version just to check it out and it’s like oh okay i see what’s going on i think it’s actually really really genius that uh we’re going to get used to seeing um images so that yes when advertisers want to push something at us we’re already like oh that’s along with all the other images there that is not too intrusive because i’m used to it it makes sense to me i’m not saying it’s you know awesome but i think it’s inevitable but i i really don’t i don’t get why there seems to be so much backlash or people saying it’s just like facebook you know if somebody’s uh if somebody’s sharing an image that you don’t like then you can unfollow them um you know i i’ve heard some people saying well what if it’s an image that you know could get me in trouble at work because it’s been it’s been blown up and i don’t have you know the option to expand it you know if if i know that there might be questionable material well you know maybe you could follow that person i don’t i don’t really get why this bothers people so much i’ll tell you why or don’t check your twitter on a giant screen at work it’s because there’s more more scrolling involved this is the issue this is very hard to do okay because you have these expanded images and expanded video i know the reason why people are complaining is simple it’s a change anything that happens in twitter yeah let’s all freak out and then within what a couple of weeks people will forget that’s there uh i am concerned that we’re going to see lots of text written in images because that’s a good way to get around 140 140 characters as well so like thoughts continued in image but uh let’s continue to imagine see image for more info it wouldn’t be searchable that’s kind of an issue but i i’m i don’t think this is going to be so bad but it just screams something that twitter has to do before it’s ipo if they can say hey look this is how we can have advertisements that people see it’s on by default so start it slow now before it becomes a banner ad in the future because some if you’re using the third-party apps you’re not going to notice this right away but as twitter’s as twitter has done they basically want you on the web all the time their apps are kind of exactly the same the fact they even give you the option to get turn those things off in ios and android i’m curious how long that will last can i can i just i maybe i’m the one who’s uh overreacting to this a little bit but i do feel like maybe this gives it too much credit but i do see the difference between facebook and twitter as it stands now as the difference between maybe a news feed and a magazine i think the way certainly i experience facebook right now as i scroll through like i would a magazine looking at the pretty pictures and if there’s something that catches my eye then i go back and read i dig deeper and read the actual text of what’s going on and i think that’s the danger of what twitter may become instead of reading people’s tweets as i do now people just scroll through and look at the pictures and if something catches their eye they’ll then read the tweets i do think that’s bad and i’m trying not to overreact to just change but i do think that’s potentially bad all right well we’ll uh i don’t know we’ll we’ll have to see if it actually becomes a reality bad or stays as a potential bag but for now let’s talk about arm chips who’s in at the arm developers conference intel partner as i mentioned in the news use altera says intel’s going to fabricate arm 64-bit chips starting next year now i can’t pretend to get all up in arms about arm chips but i understand that this is a very big deal in the tech industry intel obviously has been competing very fiercely with arms you know supremacy in the mobile market nathan brockwood who’s a principal analyst over at inside 64 says it’s huge imagine arm’s most powerful and technologically advanced 64-bit processor built on intel’s leading edge fabs a duo that would be hard to beat so if intel is ready to open up to to arm based partners like altera well i mean it kind of opens the floodgates for other companies i guess my question is is anyone surprised was it was it only a matter of time before intel said all right we got to do this we you know arm’s the future and we can’t beat these guys jeff yeah it seems to make a lot of sense i’m woefully ignorant into the intricacies of fabrication centers and how they interrelate in the tech industry so i don’t really understand the magnitude with which this is being received i i mean i it seems to me like it makes a lot of sense and kind of a no-brainer but um perhaps you guys know better than i when it comes to processing or making chips that is intel’s yield has usually been better than a lot of these other fabrications and the thing is intel has been pretty close they used to just make its x86 chips they’ve licensed arm a long time ago uh before it got really big and mobile so they have experience when it comes to making chips that can have the higher yield so if you have a high demand product like an ipad or a samsung device or something out there if those manufacturers can’t get their fabrication in order intel would have the ability to do that the fact that intel could potentially be up for the highest bidder so if apple’s saying hey we want you to make our arm based a7s and intel says fine that’s just a huge revenue stream it looks like intel is diversifying a bit but it’s not intel they’re not licensing the arm architecture they’re just fabricating for other manufacturers so it’s kind of a lit it’s not exactly intel’s jump into arm but if they decided to if intel decided to actually make their own uh their own versions of arm chips that could be a little bit more intriguing but this just shows an openness for intel to be up for the highest bidders because that fabrication unit used to just be intel and that was closed off yeah exactly i mean you know we’re talking about chip prices potentially coming down you know the apple angle of it even though it’s a bit of a leap at this point because you’re right ayaz this is more of a potential partnerships rather than a huge shift in intel’s strategy but i i have to wonder how much of that is really the end goal here because you know apple would like to release itself from samsung completely i mean two companies don’t get along for a variety of reasons um and it just happens to have to depend on samsung at this point and uh you know the two companies apple and intel already have a good relationship in other areas though yeah intel would love that kind of partnership because there’s rumors of there’s lots of rumors of macbook airs running on arm architecture because the a7 was claimed to be a desktop uh class processor which had a lot of people thinking okay wait a minute apple’s going to move to arm for their portables which would actually be really interesting because of ios’s ios and io and os tens convergence but it just this is just good for intel they’re going to make more revenue they’re diversifying and it could lead to crazy things crazy things speaking of crazy things ayah says he’s going to get he’s going to go get in line on friday and buy himself a new ipad air true and he mentioned gazelle waved around his current ipad let’s tell you a little bit about that in case you’re like hey what’s gazelle what is it how does it work if you’re thinking about getting that new ipad or maybe you just got a new iphone gazelle wants to buy your used iphone or ipad or smartphone or other kind of gadget what you can do is lock in a price right now send your gadget to gazelle when you get your new one because gazelle’s offer is good for 30 days it makes it really convenient because you’ve got some time to get your new gadgets set up and and and it’s a risk-free offer too so once you get that price you are good to go for 30 days you can take your time then you get paid fast by check paypal or for an extra five percent with an amazon gift card so here’s what you do go to gazelle.com right now to get an offer for that iphone or that ipad or that other gadget you tell gazelle the condition that it’s in yeah you just you know you choose your gadget it’s very very very easy then you get paid in cash payment is fast within a few days of the item being received those offers are good for 30 days because they’ll even wipe your data for free they make it really truly as easy as possible to get paid for your gadgets in fact they’ve paid more than 100 million dollars to over 700 000 customers already so it’s easy free shipping too iphone 5 4s ipad 3 maybe a samsung galaxy s2 or 3 whatever you’ve got gazelle wants to take it off your hands and pay you cash what’s your iphone worth take a minute and go to gazelle.com to find out do it now because your your gadget may lose value the longer you wait and we thank gazelle for their support of tech news today all right let’s talk a little bit about intel’s uh plans for tv domination yeah so while they’re opening up for arm chips they might be shutting down intel media so all things d is reporting that intel’s and talks to hand over control of intel media to verizon intel media is the division that was working on building a web-based subscription tv service on the web has been called on cue verizon already has a paid tv service now people familiar with the talk say the two companies earn advanced negotiations all things d says it’s unclear whether verizon would take control of the entire intel media unit or if intel would retain a piece of the web tv project or say in the operation so not really clear what’s going to happen there but it does look like intel’s web tv project might be dead at least under intel jeff do you think intel should give up on tv online or if if so would verizon have a better chance of bringing subscription tv to the web well it certainly sounds like intel was having a lot of problems brokering the specific media rights deals and certainly verizon has much more experience in that area they might have a better better odds of of creating another pay media service although do we need another pay media service it seems like continuing to splinter off all these things and not knowing where i’m going to be able to find my movie or tv show on which different crazy service is less convenient for the consumer rather than more but it certainly seems like verizon has a better angle than intel would i mean just on on name recognition alone it already sounds like it makes more sense to me yeah i’m not i’m not sure if verizon’s the right partner for for a company like intel to to really yeah bring something to the market that people want but we’ve been talking about this intel story you know every few weeks when it comes up in the news and we’re we all kind of scratch our heads like what what is it how’s that going to work exactly so it sort of seems like verizon would be a great partnership just because they’ve got they’ve got a certain media angle that intel just doesn’t have yeah the thing about the intel project that was intriguing to me because a lot of the discussions were you’re going to be paying the same amount of money for television on the web you’re going to have the same bundles you’re going to basically be having cable television on the internet nothing really exciting about it other than the fact intel was working on a ui that’s supposed to make it really simple to find stuff like jeff’s mentioning there’s services everywhere hard to find anything and especially with cable tv you’ve got this endless stream of all kinds of data at once intel was supposed to have a design on the ui that’s supposed to make the experience completely different if verizon gets its hands on that and they decide to put that into their television unit that might be really interesting because cable tv uis has been kind of slow to upgrade i know that there’s the new x1 service with a comcast supposed to be better verizon’s bios wasn’t horrible and time warner cable shouldn’t have one but i agreed but but i think that could be the intriguing angle here verizon can take that ui thing and also if intel still has a say in it verizon has a lot of these established partnerships with these content companies already maybe gives them a chance to do this i don’t know if they’re gonna bother but maybe yeah it sounds like they were really far down the road on this that that they were already having employees testing it internally in in their homes um so it sounds like they were the ui was was in a state of usability at least it wasn’t it wasn’t you know this wasn’t an early design phase this was this was pretty well uh incubated right yeah they couldn’t they had that they had a lot of the rumors or these the reports were intel internally testing it i think like 3000 or so employees trying it out but they just couldn’t get the content companies on board because they were asking for actually a higher rate than they were for cable companies because intel has an unproven model now verizon has a proven model maybe they can do something with that but it’s it’s still who knows what’s going to happen with this yeah it kind of it kind of just it sounds like it’s sort of like oh intel becomes a hardware partner for something else you know i mean it’s it’s it’s it seems like it’s kind of trudging along you know with a whimper i don’t know all right well let’s uh let’s move on to uh sort of a sad day for a a a a gal who was pulled over uh her name is cecilia abadi uh who was pulled over for not just driving 10 miles over the speed limit but also wearing google glass while driving now so there’s two violations but she posted this uh she posted her her citation uh to google plus got a lot of attention and you know it’s kind of making the rounds and in the google glass uh circles apparently she violated california vehicle code section 27602 which addresses television use inside motor vehicles now of course you could say well there already are television side motor vehicles and yes there are workarounds if it’s a navigation screen or something that can display a navigation screen so this is the officer’s explanation says driving with monitor visible to driver so that’s google glass well a lot of people are saying this is probably a really good time to talk about whether or not google glass should be a ticketable offense uh right now you can’t text you’re not supposed to be watching anything on a monitor but there are certain situations where let’s say you’ve printed out directions on a map the map is you know a piece of paper that’s sitting in your passenger seat next to you and you’re looking down i mean is that that’s not a ticketable offense but google glass is because it’s assuming that you’re not paying attention now you know we’re not going to change any laws by talking about it here but jeff what do you what do you think should be the case going forward because this is probably the first of many tickets to come yeah well first of all what kind of person when they get pulled over and the cop starts walking up to their car doesn’t remove the google glass from their face and put it in that you know come on uh because because clearly this woman was pulled over for driving 10 miles over the speed limit and when he walked up he’s like what the hell is that on your face you know um i don’t think he was like wow there’s google glass i’m going to pull that lady over but that being said uh i think that uh isn’t there maybe i’m making this up but wasn’t there some talk about google glass knowing when you’re going over a certain speed and then restriction restricting functionality in that case maybe i’m making that up but no no i mean i’ve heard i’ve heard of that kind of thing but i haven’t heard of it specific with with uh google glass operation right now i i have glass i haven’t noticed it but i don’t drive with glass so i don’t think that there’s any any reasonable person that would think that no one wearing glass is not is going to be not checking twitter or their email or whatever when they’re driving i think it makes it way too easy and convenient to not have to hold your phone up to and to do what people seem to be unable to not do anyway um so i think this is a problem i think that those of us who are tech enthusiasts and excited about glass want to kind of defend this lady and say well she was probably just wearing it or you know you can use navigation on it but let’s be honest it’s going to be problematic and i think that we need to figure it out right quick because a whole bunch of people you know going like this to check their email as they’re driving is not a good thing yeah i mean it’s it’s kind of tricky in this situation she does say that it wasn’t on when she was driving and then some people are like okay well then why are you wearing it well you’re wearing it because being able to do a voice command to do something that you’d otherwise look down to do or whatever like having it on means that you have access to that without well yeah kind of distracting yourself they’re supposed to be you know kind of cool looking i mean we talked earlier about how the you know the google glass is getting a different uh a different look and people are gonna be able to use it with prescription lenses but the point is that you wear all the time whether you’re using it or not right it’s always on that’s that’s the point and the screen isn’t always on the tricky thing here is that the policeman you’re right jeff probably pulled her over obviously because she was speeding and then the glass was a secondary thing uh no matter what distracted driving is distracted driving whether you’re fiddling with a paper map if you’re doing that while you’re driving yeah you can get pulled over because your eyes aren’t on the road if you’re staring at your radio for a long period of time and swerving because of it you’ll get pulled over for that too it’s just distracted driving um it’s it’s hard to peg a ticket though on this screen that may or may not have been on i think this will be an interesting case because it’s going to really come down to proof right was the screen on and if it wasn’t then why does she get a ticket for it because the ticket is all about a screen that’s in within view and that’s awesome i could say the same thing about my phone yeah the cop pulls me over and he’s like i’m giving you a ticket for texting while driving oh my screen wasn’t on right right but there’s no but the difference can be in that case is if you’re texting the cops are very tuned to seeing you you go like this and do it repeatedly over a short period of time looking down and everything that’s what they clue into with glass it’s much different right you don’t see the head move you see them just looking straight ahead how do you prove that well how about history logs i mean yeah and then that’s what it will probably come down to i’ve heard of cases where someone says i wasn’t texting and the cop goes well let me see your phone that’s never happened to me but i mean it’s it’s sort of like did you just send a text because there is going to be a time stamp on your phone somewhere you know we can tell if you’re lying and then you kind of get into some like privacy issues and i i don’t know how it’ll shake out but it seems like something we ought to uh we ought to figure out sooner than later because yeah i mean if she wasn’t doing anything wrong this is a this is a this is a crappy ticket well she’s like one driving test one clear there’s a very clear solution to this guys what’s that self-driving cars let’s do it let’s bring it on google’s interesting google yes totally wants that give me the passenger seat while you’re wearing your google wrist watch that’s another thing as wearables become more and more a product category if you’re going to have these uh the theorized google now watch that’s supposed to come out google glass is going on your face if you’re gonna have all of these things there’s gonna have to be laws written to respond to this but like jason’s saying distracted driving or reckless driving can you can get a ticket for that if this if for some reason you’re the world’s best google glass driver it doesn’t mean that you’re supposed to be doing that anyway you’re supposed to be paying attention to the road you’re driving a vehicle that could kill people you might want to pay attention to that so while as a nerd i would love google glass if i just have to take it off while i’m driving that’s fine i mean i don’t really see the big deal on that other than like and there are people like what’s different between this and heads-up display on on these windshields these days yeah i don’t really know and that’s where it becomes also kind of complicated because google has built-in driving navigation functionality in the glass when else are you going to use it if if you’re not driving if you can’t wear them while driving so there’s a little bit of murky water there all right let’s finish up with a story about yet another company possibly interested in buying blackberry yeah this is an oddball one so the wall street journal is reporting that blackberry executives met with facebook to determine if facebook has any interest to buy blackberry right now blackberry is undergoing an acquisition there’s like a six-week period where fairfax financial the company is trying to take over blackberry gets to blackberry still gets to shop itself out for six weeks while the fairfax looks at the uh the books the journal says it remains unclear whether facebook is interested in placing a bid facebook and phones obviously have a history there’s been a rumored facebook phone for years uh the closest thing we’ve ever come to that is the htc first i think which had that facebook home launcher uh mark zuckerberg has publicly said building a phone is the wrong strategy and facebook if they wanted to buy this blackberry still has got a patent portfolio valued in the range of one to three billion dollars also has about 2.6 billion of cash no debt and that somewhat popular blackberry messenger service which is picking up i think another 20 million since uh 20 million users since uh it came out for ios and android all right jeff simple question should facebook buy blackberry no simple answer i mean have there ever been two companies more at cross purposes than these two i mean first of all i believe zuckerberg when he says it’s a bad move to have a facebook phone i i think that’s to me that’s true but also blackberry is holding on with their little fingers on a market that is business people and serious users and facebook is pretty much the antithesis of that right it’s frivolous it’s fun it’s social so i think one of those you know if facebook buys blackberry it turns blackberry into something that it never was and maybe they just want to get into the phone game and they’re going to abandon any any kind of vestige of what blackberry has been and they’ll you know and reinvent it and use patents to create their own phone but i don’t i don’t understand anybody clamor i don’t understand why anybody would clamor for a facebook phone we have facebook on our phones like what what does a facebook phone do that having a facebook app on my phone doesn’t that silence yeah the actual answer there is i feel like this is like one of those stories where it’s like yeah facebook took a meeting and we’re polite to some people and now we’re talking about the fact that facebook considered buying blackberry it doesn’t make any sense to me either i don’t think even if there was going to be some branded facebook phone that was more of a facebook phone than htc first let’s say you know facebook home is that that certainly in the iteration that everyone saw was not a hit so you know is blackberry hardware the answer i don’t think so um and no facebook should not buy blackberry if they’re still considering it i don’t think that makes any sense i would think if playing devil’s advocate here if there’s any reason to buy blackberry any part of it it would be for the bbm service because facebook has a history of a lack of privacy and if you could say that they have enterprise level security that’s been going back to blackberry days back when they were rim you could say you have something that is very very hard to crack if not damn near impossible that could be a interesting play for facebook to say look your life’s on facebook and now it’s super secure because we’ve integrated this technology that being said i think it’s generally a terrible idea to buy the hardware unit of blackberry all right well you heard it here bad ideas all around uh another bad idea we’re gonna talk about in the randomizer oh i’m just kidding i don’t know if this is a bad idea or not that ashton kutcher has joined lenovo as a product engineer what the what the i’m more scratching my head than thinking it’s a bad idea yeah apparently uh kutcher told usa today that uh he is is joining the team and that it’s sort of a dual role as a product engineer and obviously to spread the gospel about lenovo products in this article on usa today they point out that that kutcher studied biochemical engineering at the university of iowa although he did not graduate but he certainly is becoming more and more of a name that you hear uh synonymous with with venture capital and tech investments i don’t know jeff stranger things have happened i guess yeah i think this is a headline designed to elicit snarky comments i think it’s one of those like throw it out to the group and come up with your you know your ridiculous joke headline like uh i don’t know uh lenovo uh only needs one and a half more engineers you know something like that um so and that was obviously terrible no one left but i’m just on the top of my head guys come on give me some time no but i i think that these are these are the types of stories where it’s like well ashton kutcher i’ve determined and and uh everybody seems to agree with me he’s an idiot so he can’t possibly be an engineer but i i think this is a a public relations thing obviously and clearly the guy loves technology wants to have some input into making these more more consumer-friendly and maybe he’ll have in infuse them with some interesting ideas i don’t know i’m not willing to just poo-poo on it because aston kusher has a sort of negative public persona i i think this could be you know it’s it’s i don’t think he’s actually in the lab engineering with them he’s probably giving ideas looking at stuff you know he seems like a passionate guy maybe he’s got some good ideas usa today the article actually mentions that the kutch is the co-founder of a great investments i didn’t know this invested in or worked with airbnb foursquare spotify path uber that these are pretty successful in as long as this isn’t like the alicia keys blackberry thing where like she was still tweeting from her iphone like as long as he’s actually using lenovo products and a lenovo phone and those kinds of things as long as they lock that down that might be a good idea but if it’s those embarrassing things like oprah’s tweeting about the surface from our ipad right yeah just you know as soon as we see the first photo of ashton kutcher holding an ipad you know we’ll know it was just a publicity stunt all right let’s see what’s on the calendar we’ve got a monstrously full calendar with one item november 6th nike is bringing new features to the original fuel band it’s gonna have a firmware upgrade that will bring better tracking algorithms double tap for time and sessions support excellent let’s see what’s incoming incoming message got an email from laurentii who says on yesterday’s show you gave the impression that people might not want modular phones and to a certain degree you might be right but i’ve come across a few laptops and i don’t mean the gaming ones that have removable memory graphics module or in fair number of cases even cpu modularity hasn’t gone the way of the dodo just yet no matter what intel wants you to believe what lies there between phones and tablets aren’t tablets just phones without voice capabilities except three of their components screen battery and case they’re basically the same they have a little logic board the big case there is just to fit the battery and the screen couldn’t you fit in there some 802 dot something module that’s not really wi-fi for using special wireless networks inside warehouses say or some sort of payment provider startup module tracking module or an upgradable model of a very low powered wireless video transmission thing that’s paired with its counterpart on a tv or a gazillion other useless things that will never see the light of day if tablet modularity doesn’t really become a thing different than the asus russian doll pad phone phone pad approach gosh i feel like lauren has some pretty good ideas yeah but practically speaking this could be a nightmare yeah that’s what we talked about yesterday but i like the idea of okay maybe i could see the a lot of these manufacturers getting on board with that especially the mobile payment thing where we talked about and there’s all these square dongles or the paypal dongle it just makes the phone and devices uh more cumbersome if they had a modular phone and you could have that to be swapped out that could be really interesting jeff you got an opinion on the modular phone project project ara from motorola well it’s certainly not a product i’m interested in i don’t think i i think it uh it’s a product searching for a use case and and uh lauren here um certainly invents some interesting ones but they’re super niche right i guess we’ll have to see maybe on that note we’ll we’ll have to we’ll have to come back to modular tablets another time but that we’ve come to the end of our show jeff kanata you’ve been a wonderful guest i’m i’m glad that i was here on the show the same day that you were because we missed each other last time tell folks where they can see everything that you’re up to online and otherwise oh easiest way is to follow me on twitter it’s at jeff kanata that’s with 2ns and 1t or jeffkanata.com uh also keep an eye out for newest latest best every week i just came out with the halloween episode it’s super fun oh you can see me there lit squiggly for halloween yeah uh and that’s on youtube uh kanata jeff is my youtube channel excellent uh thanks everybody who submitted stories to our subreddit technewstoday.reddit.com is where you can not only submit stories that you’d like us to talk about but vote them up or down so we get you know you get you get enough people who really uh care about something well we tend to put it in the show you can also email us tnt at twit dot tv you can call us at 260 tnt show you can subscribe to our youtube channel at as well at youtube.com tech news today and of course subscribe to the podcast and get your show notes at twit dot tv slash tnt tomorrow we’ve got tom crazet of gigaom see you then you