Facebook Timeline and Apps turn users off with over-sharing

Facebook Timeline and the Open Graphs “apps” are proving more turn-off than value-add to users, according to research by security firm Sophos and SlashGear, with many considering deleting their Facebook account after the recent profile changes. Over 51-percent of Facebook users told Sophos they were “worried” by Timeline, which lists all your activity on the site in chronological order; meanwhile, 45-percent of respondents to a separate SlashGear poll said they might abandon the social network in protest.

Sophos surveyed around 4,110 Facebook users, and discovered less than 8-percent actually like the new Timeline layout. Just over 8-percent said they thought they would get used to it, while a third said “I don’t know why I’m still on Facebook.”
In SlashGear’s own survey, just 3-percent of over 5,800 respondents said they were keen to take advantage of the new Timeline Apps. 5-percent said they intended to “try a couple of Facebook apps” but over a fifth of respondents said they were yet to be convinced.

Neither poll is scientific in its methodology, though both suggest that Facebook Timeline and the Open Graph Apps – which allow users to pull in more personal data culled from third-party services, such as when they eat at restaurants, travel or exercise – are still viewed with suspicion. Facebook made the new Timeline profile layout mandatory and will be forcing users to upgrade over the next few weeks, though early-adopters of the beta have been using it since mid-December and soon discovered that there was no way of turning it off.
Facebook maintains that Timeline shares no more information than the previous profile system, and that the Apps are accessible on a voluntary basis.

Tweaks to improve your phone's performance

For the average person, a smartphone is yet another piece of fancy technology that has a purpose – whether it's making phone calls, browsing the internet on the go, sending emails, or a bit of everything.
Oh, and you can download apps, but that's pretty much where it ends.

You see, the smartphone isn't treated in the same way as a PC because it doesn't feel like one, but essentially a smartphone is just a PC in a very small space.
What this means is that – like a PC – a smartphone can freeze and crash, get clogged up with rubbish after a period of installing apps and general use, and can slow down as a result. As with a laptop, the battery never seems to last even half as long as the manufacturer says it does.

Unlike computers, which we've been tinkering with for years in order to make them perform better, a smartphone is a relatively new beast and as such it doesn't get the same sort of attention.
However, with some simple tips and tricks, you can improve the performance of your phone, making it more responsive, and you can make the battery last twice as long as it does now. If you've got an iPhone or Windows Phone 7 mobile, read on.

The occasion when your battery is most at risk of going flat is when you're using it all the time. Sounds obvious – and it is – but short of turning your phone off altogether, which isn't actually a bad idea if you're not planning to use it for a few hours, you can optimise your time with it by adjusting the thing that drains it most: the screen.

It's a glorious thing to look at, but although it's certainly best at full brightness, you should tame this battery-drainer a touch. For starters, turn down brightness on the iPhone by going into 'Settings | Brightness' and setting it to about a quarter of the way from the bottom level. Leaving auto-brightness on will allow your phone to increase the brightness when you're in a bright environment, but again it will suck up more power, so it's up to you whether you go for convenience or maximum power.

On a Windows Phone 7 device, as well as reducing the brightness by going to 'Settings | Brightness', turning off auto adjustment and setting the level to low, you can optimise the screen further by making sure that the background theme is set to 'Dark'. This will use up less power than if it's set to a light coloured background.
With the brightness taken care of, the next thing you'll want to do is sort out your phone's sleeping habits. Like a laptop, a phone will give you a lot more if you make sure you're not leaving it to idle for minutes or even hours.

On a Windows Phone 7 device or an iPhone, all you need to do to quickly put it into standby mode is press the button at the top of the phone. It's a pretty basic thing to say, but it's all too easy to use your phone, chuck it in your pocket and wait for the screen to time out. If you tend to do this, you can stop it draining your battery by reducing the amount of time that should pass before your phone automatically goes into standby.
In the iPhone's case you can do this by going to 'Settings | General | Auto-lock' and adjusting it to the shortest period of time. On Windows Phone 7 go to 'Settings | Lock + wallpaper' and lower the amount of time it takes before the screen goes into standby. You can set it to 30 seconds, which is even faster than the iPhone.
Undoubtedly, the main reason you've got your smartphone is to do what the majority of us spend our time doing – going on the internet. Being able to visit any website and download what you need wherever you are is a great asset, thanks to 3G mobile data.

When you're at home it's even quicker thanks to the convenience of easily being able to connect to your Wi-Fi network, but both means of accessing the internet can be huge contributors to your phone's battery usage. When you're not planning to go online, simply turn them off to maximise your battery life.
Don't forget about Bluetooth as well – if this is turned on it'll constantly be searching for Bluetooth-enabled devices within reach, which will eat your battery. Turning off these radios will also allow your phone to react more quickly to your inputs because it's not constantly dealing with other processing requests.
On a Windows Phone 7 device, you can access Wi-Fi, cellular data and Bluetooth through the Settings menu. Just open each one and turn it off. On the iPhone it's slightly more involved. Wi-Fi is in plain view in the Settings area, but to find Bluetooth you need to go to 'Settings | General'. To turn off data you have to dig deeper still – go to 'Settings | General | Network' and tap 'Enable 3G' to turn it off.
On both the iPhone and Windows Phone 7 platforms, you can easily turn off all these features with a single tap thanks to Airplane mode, found in the Settings menu. If you've got no signal anyway, you might as well.

BACKGROUND HOGS: Some apps that run in the background can have an impact on your phone's performance and battery life
While having lots of apps installed on your smartphone isn't a problem and won't degrade performance, keeping certain apps running in the background while you get on with other tasks isn't such a good idea, and can affect your phone's speed and battery life. Closing them may appear to fix this, but when you exit an app it won't fully close.
Instead, it sits in the background quietly sipping away at your resources – only you won't be able to see it. Some good apps are fully paused in the background so you needn't worry about them, but some bad apps like mapping services or VoIP will happily work away in the background.
Just pressing the home button doesn't actually exit the app, either. Instead you have to double-tap it, tap and hold down your finger on any of the background apps you want to close, and then press the red switch in the top-left corner of each one to remove it for good.
The thing is, not everyone wants to be constantly opening and removing apps as they're needed, and if you use your phone quite often this could become a pain. Instead, you should keep your most commonly used apps running in the background and only quit those that you rarely use. Then you can optimise your favourite open apps by changing exactly what they get up to behind the scenes.
Applications that use location services like Twitter, Camera or Maps, should have location services turned off at all times. If you don't do this, they will regularly check your location and eat into your battery life. In order to preserve precious juice, simply turn Location Services off.
On an iPhone you do this by going to 'Settings | Location services', with the option of either turning Location Services off on everything or just on individual apps by pressing the switch next to each one. On Windows Phone 7 simply go to a particular application, then 'Settings | Applications', click on the application and turn off 'Use my location' – or turn them all of by going to 'Settings | Location' and turning off location services.

TAME YOUR EMAIL: Email is great, but if you're constantly checking for new data it can impact heavily on your battery
Location services aren't the only feature that can affect your phone's battery life – push notifications and data fetching can have a significant impact on it too. Push notifications alert you when something happens in an app, like someone inviting you to an event on Facebook or an eBay auction coming to a close. Fetching data has the same sort of effect by downloading data at specific intervals, like when your mail application checks for new emails.
You can turn push and fetch off by going to 'Settings | Notifications' and turning push notifications off, or clicking 'Settings | Mail | Fetch new data' and choosing 'Manually'. On Windows Phone 7 you can achieve this by going into each application and setting whether you want to receive notifications or download information such as new emails within Hotmail, for example.
If you're using a Windows Phone 7 mobile, you'll be pleased to hear that you can turn off these draining notifications in one easy step if you don't want any interruptions. Simply go into 'Settings' and tap the 'Battery saver' option. You can either turn it on now, or you can select the option that only brings it on when your phone's battery is low.
Serial texters should know one thing: an inbox full of text or multimedia messages will eventually make texting much less responsive. All it takes is a little bit of good housekeeping to make sure that you keep your incoming and outgoing texts up to normal speed.
The quickest and easiest way of clearing all your texts on an iPhone is to select each of the recipients in your inbox and then delete the messages one person at a time.
Another great way to give your phone a spring clean is to remove all the information that you've picked up along the way while you're browsing the internet. Temporary files, cookies and other little cached trinkets can slow things down, so clean this regularly to keep things running smoothly.
It's easy on Windows Phone 7. Go to 'Internet Explorer | Settings | Delete history'. On an iPhone, go to 'Settings | Safari' and check 'Clear history', 'Clear cookies' and 'Clear cache'.
If you're a music lover, one easy way to improve your phone's battery life is to keep your sounds in check. First things first, make sure you're not listening to music while you're in the middle of other tasks, as this will reduce your battery's life. If you really must listen to some tunes, then turn down the volume a little.
More importantly, turn off the EQ settings if you've got an iPhone, or if it's a Windows Phone 7 device go into the Sound Enhancer app and keep make sure audio is set to 'No effects'.
Not listening to music? You can even get a little more battery juice by simply turning down the volume of the ringer and making sure that your finger inputs don't have a sound attached to them.
When your phone has become slow or – in a worst case scenario – completely unresponsive, you can try speeding things up once again by simply restarting it.
In the iPhone's case you can do a standard reset, which involves holding the power button down and flicking across on the Slide to the 'Power off' prompt. The same applies to the Windows Phone 7 device, but you need to flick down instead.
If that doesn't help, you can – on the iPhone at least – perform a more thorough reset that involves holding down the power and home buttons at the same time for about 15 seconds until it turns off completely. This will remedy a phone that is not only sluggish, but has completely frozen.
If your phone is still acting slower than a tortoise in treacle, your last resort is to perform a complete reinstall. Before you go to those sorts of lengths, remember to back up your phone so that you don't lose any precious data.

This brings us neatly to the question of backing up the data stored on your device – an important area of smartphone maintenance that will make many a mobile user run for the hills due to the sheer amount of time it usually requires. You can dramatically reduce time taken to perform a backup by saving photos manually and placing them on your computer's hard drive before you start backing up.
On the iPhone you'll need to plug in the device, browse to the photo location and copy and paste them. Then, in iTunes, select the device, click the 'Photos' tab at the top menu and enable 'Sync photos from'. Choose the location that you saved your photos to and click 'Apply'.
Beyond this, all you have to do is just make sure you back up regularly – that way your computer only has a small amount of extra data to back up each time.

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Review: Motorola Xoom 2 Media Edition

The best-selling tablet on the market might be the 9.7-inch iPad 2, but that hasn't stopped manufacturers differentiating themselves using by going with a smaller screen size than Apple's offering. We've seen the likes of the original Samsung Galaxy Tab and the HTC Flyer in the past, but the Amazon Kindle Fire is the first seven-inch tablet to really make an impact.
Now we have the new Xoom tablets from Motorola, and not content with just releasing the 10.1-inch Xoom 2 to compete with the iPad, we've also got the 8.2-inch Xoom 2 Media Edition, which will end up head to head with the likes of the Kindle Fire.
If you're wondering what the difference is between the Xoom 2 and the Xoom 2 Media Edition other than size, the answer is pretty much nothing. Both are Android 3.2 tablets, with a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, a 1280 x 800 screen (yep, it's the same despite the different sizes) and 16GB of storage.

Well, there are a couple of other differences, we confess. As you might expect, a reduction in size also means a reduction in weight, and the Xoom 2 Media Edition weighs just 388g – even lighter than the Kindle Fire, which weighs in at 413g, and a lot lighter than the 599g of its big brother.
And, being smaller, the battery has had a big reduction in size in the Media Edition. In fact, it's been nearly halved from 7000mAh in the Xoom 2 to 3900mAh in the Media Edition, a drop that's reflected in the quoted battery life of 6 hours browsing over Wi-Fi.
There's also one notable loss when it comes to software: the impressive Floating Notes app is absent from the Media Edition. We realise that Motorola is making a point that the smaller tablet is more for home media use (hence the name), but since apps such as Citrix and Evernote are still present, we don't see why Floating Notes couldn't also have been including.

As you might expect, the price is different between the two models, too. The Media Edition comes in at around £319 – a marked saving over the 10.1-inch Xoom 2, or the likes of the iPad 2 or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.
Like the bigger Xoom 2, there's a five-megapixel camera on the back, capable of recording 720p HD footage, and a 1.3-megapixel camera on the front.

Unlike the bigger Xoom 2, though, it's pretty clear the Media Edition is intended to be used in portrait mode most of the time. Where the 10.1-inch version had its cameras, ports and infrared transmitter on the long edges of the device, with the controls on the short edge, the opposite is true here. The front-facing camera sits at the top short edge, like the iPad 2, with the controls on the long edge to the right.
Apart from this subtle change, the design of the Xoom 2 Media Edition stays really rather close to the 10.1-inch version. It's the same shape, with the same cut-outs in the corners.
They're as good as the same thickness, with the Media Edition coming in at 8.9mm thick (0.1mm thicker than the Xoom 2) and made of the same matte plastic, meaning that Media Edition is just as comfortable to hold the big Xoom 2, except it's much lighter – a winning combination.

Unfortunately, the front screen is still an appalling fingerprint magnet. The Xoom 2 was one of the worst we've seen for picking up smudges and grease, and things are no different here.
On the top edge of the Media Edition, you have the infrared transmitter and 3.5mm headphone jack, as well as a couple of speaker grilles. On the bottom of the device are the micro-USB and micro-HDMI ports, and another speaker grille. You've also got a flap that opens, but like the flap on the big Xoom 2, it goes nowhere. No SIM card slot and no microSD slot.

On the back you'll find the main camera and a shinier backplate that's actually held on with screws. Screws! We can't remember the last time we saw them so prominently on… anything, really, but they suit the look of the materials Motorola's used.

We only really have one issue with the Xoom 2's design, and that's the ridiculous placement of the Lock key and volume buttons. The big Xoom 2 has them hidden on the device's curves, much like the iPad 2, but on the Media Edition they're effectively on the back of the device.
This means that if the Xoom 2 Media Edition is on a table with it's screen off, there's no way to turn it on without picking it up. It may not seem like the biggest deal, but it really annoyed us, especially since it's compounded by the fact that these buttons actually aren't that easy to find and press without looking at them even if you are holding the tablet.

Tablets should be pick-up-and-go devices. There should be no fumbling to get the screen on or off, especially since the screen is all there is. It's still not quite a deal-breaker, but when other tablets manage to avoid this problem, it's definitely a mark against the Xoom 2 Media Edition.

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MySpace: more unique visitors than Google+ and Tumblr

MySpace shows there's life in the old dog yet by garnering more unique visitors a month than Tumblr, Google+ and Pinterest, in the US at least.
Once the homepage of every emo kid with a passing knowledge of HTML, a digital camera and nothing to lose, MySpace has fallen on hard times having been usurped by Facebook and sold by its previous owners at a huge loss.
But if you thought the newly rebranded social network was down and out, you were wrong; although Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all see more unique visitors a month, according to ComScore's latest figures, MySpace is ahead of every hipster's fave, Tumblr, and even Google+.
There's a case to say this is down to residual traffic, but the network is also carving a niche as an online music destination.
MySpace still has pretty impressive search rankings for specific search terms – for example, any band that uses MySpace as its surrogate website is likely to come top for that search term, and there are plenty of pockets of people searching for plenty of medium-sized bands, and those visits all add up.
But if you look at the time spent on each of these sites, it's a very different story: Facebook is far and away the clear winner, racking up an average of 394 minutes per visitor each month, but Tumblr comes in second at 141.7 minutes.
MySpace gets a relatively measly 12 minutes on average – but it's still ahead of Google+, which manages to capture each visitor for an average of only 5.1 minutes a month. Ouch.
Although ComScore hasn't released the relative UK or global figures, we suspect they may be slightly less pleasant reading for MySpace fans - Hitwise last year revealed that MySpace is out of the UK's top ten social networks, while Tumblr came in seventh (albeit using different metrics).
The less-awful-than-expected figures coincide with the following comments from Rupert Murdoch, the site's previous owner: "Many questions and jokes about My Space. Simple answer - we screwed up in every way possible, learned lots of valuable expensive lessons."
Let's hope the new owners, which include such web moguls as Justin Timberlake, have learned from News International's costly screw ups.
Via The Next Web, Hypebot

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Best iPhone and iPad photography apps

Price: Free/ Available for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad
Long-exposure photography fanatics will know that an ND filter can be essential when it comes to extending exposure time for those all-important open shutter shots.
Longtime Exposure Calculator by HPR-Solutions is a free iPhone, iPad and iPod touch app that enables you to dial in a projected shutter speed to one column and then 'add' an ND filter as graded in both f/stops and filter names (eg 3 stop or ND8) in the other column. The app then calculates the adjusted exposure.
While it is, in part, possible to TTL meter with an ND filter attached to the front of a camera's lens, the results won't always be accurate, and there's a point where things get so dark that it's not possible - especially with in-vogue super-dense filters. Having an off-camera calculation method such as this makes it quick and easy to figure out exposures without so much as needing to put those brain cells into overdrive while scrawling workings-out on paper.
The Longtime Exposure Calculator app has exposure in-put values that range from 30 seconds to 1/8,000th of a second, which encompasses the range of even a professional DSLR.

The ND filters list is detailed too, covering from ND2 (1 stop) all the way down to ND1,000,000 (20 stops) and even puts in useful references for filter stacking, such as '2x ND8' or 'ND2 + ND3' to enhance that connection with reality.
A variety of filter types that could be dragged and dropped to create customised user stacks would improve the app, although this could complicate things for the more casual user.
On the downside, this app isn't going to be particularly helpful to film users, because it doesn't take into account film types or reciprocity failure (which varies depending on which film you're using).

The app also resets when it's exited (even with iOS 4), which means you'll have to remember the given exposure value. And, seeing as that can range from 1/8,000th of a second all the way up to a year, there could be a lot to remember if you have a lot of filters.
Hey, it's a free app, so it's hard to complain. Longtime Exposure Calculator performs a calculation task, and it does it well.
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