A few people have taken up the challenge of bringing some kind of Vine support to Windows Phone, but so far all the ersatz Vine apps in the Windows Marketplace do is let people view those six-second clips. According to WPCentral’s Daniel Rubino, developer Rudy Huyn’s 6Sec is different — the third-party Vine app crossed a major milestone with a recent update so Windows Phone 8 users (well, ones that are part of the private beta anyway) can now upload their micro-films in addition to just watching them.

6Sec isn’t expected to shed its beta trappings for at least a few weeks, but it’s big news for folks looking to jump on the next big social bandwagon (as I write this, Vine is No. 4 on Apple’s Top Free app list, and No. 5 on Google’s). The app is a remarkably pretty one considering the fact that it was cobbled together by a single person, but that probably won’t come as a shock to Windows Phone app junkies. After all, Huyn’s Windows Phone development chops are well-established by now: He’s perhaps best known for whipping up an equally handsome Wikipedia app that won Microsoft’s curious Next Big App contest a few months back.

Of course, 6Sec may find itself pushed to the sidelines if the folks at Vine Labs actually decide to craft their own Vine app for Windows Phone. It’s become increasingly clear that Microsoft has no problem throwing its financial resources around if it means getting developers onboard. A recent report about iOS 7 from Bloomberg Businessweek points out that Microsoft has been shelling out plenty of dough (apparently over $100,000 in certain cases) to developers in a bid to get them creating for the Windows Phone platform. That’s not exactly a new story, considering that the folks at Redmond have been trying to sweeten that particular deal for years now, but it speaks to the level of importance Microsoft has placed on getting companies to create quality Windows Phone apps.

Hell, it seems to be working, too — I still see some of those infamous cr-apps pushing their way into the Windows Marketplace, but Microsoft has managed to land surprisingly good WP-specific versions of Zinio, Hulu Plus, and Pandora over the past few months. It wouldn’t be a shock to hear that Microsoft is attempting to tempt Team Vine into building a WP app, especially considering just how quickly Vine shares on Twitter surpassed Instagram shares. Until then though, talented developers like Huyn are working to fill that gap, and I’m looking forward to taking 6Sec for a final spin once it finally graduates from beta.

Simple has made some serious strides since it opened up to the public last year, but there’s one thing the service has just never been that great at: transferring money from one bank account to another. According to a post on the official Simple blog, those days are finally over — users can link their Simple accounts to existing bank accounts to move their money around.

Frankly, it’s about time.

Let’s back up a minute here first: why is this such a big deal? To answer that, we have to look at how the Simple onboarding process works. When you first set up a Simple account, you’re given the chance to make one initial funds transfer from your old bank account — that’s it. Before the external accounts feature was added, users who wanted to subsequently transfer funds from their existing bank account to a Simple account had to come up with some clever workarounds to get the job done.

My personal favorite: if you linked a Square account to a Simple bank account, you could swipe a transaction to the tune of however much money you wanted to move using your own debit card (and in case you were wondering, yes, I’ve done this a few times).

Last November, Simple made that process just a little easier by adding a mobile check deposit feature to its apps — then you could just write yourself a check and deposit it directly into your Simple account. Better, yes, but it still wasn’t as seamless as it should have been.

Now, at long last, the process is finally as simple as the company’s name implies. You’re prompted to punch in your account and routing number (you can do this for up to three accounts), after which you’ll have to keeps your eyes peeled for two small transactions to confirm that everything was copacetic. Once all that’s squared away, it’s all the fee-free fund transfers you can handle. Implementing the feature isn’t just a savvy move, it’s a downright necessary one. Simple has spent the few years trying to convince people that it’s a friendlier, more direct way for them to manage their money, and the company has so far managed to win over more than 35,000 users.

That’s not too shabby considering how carefully the team has been handling the invitation process, but if Simple really wants to win over the masses, it has to more effectively blur the line between what it can do and what more traditional banks can do. After all, Simple is still a startup — a smart, well-funded one with the support of a major bank, but a startup nonetheless. With this external accounts feature, Simple isn’t just giving a users a way an easier way to get started, it’s giving them an easier way to bail out if the service just isn’t right for them. Consider it a safety net for those wary of diving into the strange new world of app-centric banking.

For what it’s worth, this whole thing just about has me ready to take the plunge. Since launch I’ve been shunting a few bucks out of each paycheck into my Simple account for random geeky purchases, but now I’m seriously thinking of ditching my old bank entirely. Of course, this is exactly what Simple wants since it makes money in the form of interest margin — if more people get comfortable transferring all their money into their Simple accounts because the process is now so much easier, Simple may soon be laughing all the way to the bank.

Back during the heady days of 2012, before the Pebble raised a crazy amount of money on Kickstarter, Sony quietly released an Android-compatible smartwatch of its own. By most accounts it wasn’t very good, but that doesn’t mean that Sony has relegated it to the trash pile.

No, with hindsight being what it is, Sony is looking to breathe some new life into that curious little gadget with some help from the developer community. The company has kicked off what it calls the Open SmartWatch program to get developers cooking up custom firmwares for the thing.

In case you haven’t been keeping tabs on the wearable gadgetry space, Sony launched the SmartWatch in question last year to mixed reviews. The concept is a very familiar one — the watch syncs to an Android-powered smartphone and displays messages and notifications, as well as runs a slew of bespoke SmartWatch apps. Thanks to its Android underpinnings, you could easily think of it as a more robust version of the Pebble or any of the copycats that have sprung up in its wake.

As iffy as Sony’s second-gen SmartWatch was, most of the issues seemed to be rooted in its software (and to its credit, Sony keeps pushing out patches and updates for the thing). Sony’s is one of the prettier smartwatches out there, and the spec list has just enough oomph to make it an attractive choice for some frenzied late night tinkering. By stripping out Sony’s work and starting fresh, hackers are largely left with a blank slate, and the company is committed to highlighting some of the most novel firmware once they start popping up.

To help kick this whole thing off, Sony has also tapped Arduino to hold a hackathon in Malmo, Sweden, to get antsy developers more familiar with the SmartWatch and what it’s capable of. There is, as always, a caveat: you may be breaking new ground with a device that most people haven’t given a second thought to, but you’ll be giving up access to the nearly 200 or so compatible applications floating around in the Google Play store.

Brooklyn-based MakerBot is a darling of the 3D printing community, and it recently moved into its new digs in Sunset Park, so the crew can more efficiently build and ship their shiny new Replicator 2 and 2X printers. Call it a classic case of growing pains — once demand for 3D printers started picking up, the MakerBot team soon found themselves aching for even more space to work in, and we got the chance to tour the new 50,000-square-foot facility when it opened last week.

All things considered, it’s a nifty operation, and the move should help MakerBot cope with growing prominence as the 3D printing movement slowly moves into the mainstream… especially as it attempts to make the printing process easier with its forthcoming desktop scanner. Of course, MakerBot’s position as a high-profile purveyor of 3D printing wares has reportedly made it an attractive target for a potential acquisition, with Minnesota/Israel-based Stratasys and even Amazon (which just recently opened a 3D printer section) being pegged as potential purchasers.

MakerBot’s ebullient founder Bre Pettis was keen to downplay that acquisition chatter, as he cut the ceremonial ribbon at the factory’s grand opening (using a partially 3D printed pair of scissors, naturally), but he did later note that they weren’t going anywhere. But while those conversations continue behind closed doors, the roughly 100 employees at MakerBot’s new Brooklyn outpost will continue assembling those printers by hand for a while to come — why not take a look and see what they’re up to?

Apple’s top brass has been busy these past two hours or so showing off OS X 10.9 Mavericks, a dramatically revamped iOS 7, and the gorgeous new Mac Pro, and the company has your back in case you missed watching the events unfold for yourself. As is now customary for Apple, the full 2 hour WWDC keynote address is now available on Apple’s events page for your perusal.

Of course, the usual caveats still apply. Apple still doesn’t seem very fond of third-party browsers, so attempting to watch the replay in anything other than Safari (or on a second or third generation Apple TV) may prove problematic. And if you decide that trying to get the stream working in your browser/platform of choice is just too much trouble, you may want to check out our full WWDC keynote coverage here.

“What if you could get iOS on the screen that is built into your car,” Apple SVP Eddy Cue asked on-stage at WWDC. Turns out he wasn’t just being rhetorical — Apple has confirmed that it is working with a slew of car manufacturers to bring the iOS experience into cars (the initiative is called, unimaginatively enough, “iOS In The Car”)starting with in 2014.

So far, that list of manufacturers includes Honda, Mercedes Benz, Nissan, Ferrari, Chevy, Infiniti, Kia, Hyundai, Volvo, Jaguar, and Acura. If Apple gets its way, users will be able to coax their iDevices into playing music, displaying maps, and dictating messages out loud, all while pertinent information (tricked out with the sort of light, ethereal style that’s now a hallmark of iOS 7) is shown on the car’s touchscreen. Naturally, since Apple has a vested interest in its users not dying in tragic, fiery wrecks, there’s little need to actually take your hand off the wheel to interact with that touchscreen — the newly-updated Siri will be there to field your requests.

Cue’s revelation at WWDC confirmed some curious reports from April that Apple had been pushing to bring its influence into cars within the next few months. Apple isn’t exactly new to the automotive space (it’s enjoyed a close relationship with Volkswagen dating back to the days of the 3rd generation iPod), and this new approach is much savvier than the notion of a completely distinct Apple iCar. After all, why limit yourself to enhancing the in-car experience of a single vehicle when you can influence a slew of them all at once?

While that other big tech press event soldiers on, Microsoft just recently wound down its E3 media briefing with a long-awaited bit of news: the Xbox One will launch sometime this November, and gamers in the U.S. will have to shell out $499 to get their hands on one.

Don’t live in the U.S.? No problem. Microsoft has said that the console will be available in 21 (currently unspecified) markets, and shared some pricing details for those living across the pond. Folks in the U.K. can claim their One for £429, while those in the rest of Europe will pay €499.

To no one’s surprise, Twitter is already lighting up with gamers who don’t agree with Microsoft’s pricing decision — the original Xbox 360 launched with a seemingly crazy $399 price tag back in 2005, a price point that some analysts figured Microsoft would revisit with the Xbox One. It’s hardly a shock to see that the new Xbox is a costly package though, especially since the console comes with an upgraded Kinect right in the box.

Now that Microsoft has laid its Xbox One cards on the table, all eyes are on Sony to pull back the curtain on its much-anticipated PlayStation 4. The company held a New York press conference back in February that was unfortunately light on the juicy details, and Sony is widely expected to out the console in a big way at its own E3 press event later tonight.

Well, Microsoft kicked off its big E3 media briefing today with a big middle finger to rival console player Sony. Starting on July 1, XBOX Live Gold members who still have XBOX 360s will get two free game downloads per month to keep — according to Microsoft SVP Yusuf Mehdi, Assassin’s Creed 2 and Halo 3 will be among the first titles to be available for Gold subscribers.

The big message? The Xbox 360 isn’t dead yet, even with the One on the horizon. Microsoft has made no bones about its ambitions to conquer people’s living rooms, and positioning the 360 as a platform with plenty of value should help the company move cheaper 360s even after its newfangled console has already launched.

Of course, this way of adding value will sound very familiar to a certain subset of gamers. Long time Sony fans already know about with the company’s PlayStation Plus service, which allows its subscribers to download a handful of recent and prominent games provided they shell out money on a continuous basis. So far the service has been well-received (disclosure: I’m a PlayStation Plus subscriber myself), but it comes with one prominent caveat: games you download for free while a Plus member can’t be played down the road if you let your subscription lapse. Microsoft’s Mehdi blasted through this little segment of the show (fair enough, considering all the XBOX One demos to plow through), but it appears that the company will take a similar path. Mehdi did use the phrase “for keeps” though, so it almost seems as though users will be able to hang on to them indefinitely — I’ve reached out for clarification and will update this post once I hear back.

This is a developing story, please refresh for updates…

It’s no secret that iRobot’s domestic cleaning machines can carry some interesting things while they putter around and wipe up your floors, and iRobot and Cisco have taken that notion to its next logical step. The two companies have just announced that they’ve taken this smart roving robotics platform and stuck this pricey enterprise video conferencing monitor on top, all to facilitate West Wing-style walk-and-talks with colleagues who couldn’t be bothered to schlep into the office.

We’ve seen plenty of curious telepresence rigs before, but this is one of the few that makes it a point to break away from the confines of a desk. Once everything is put together, the Ava 500 stands at about 5’5″ and artfully dodges office debris the same way the more janitorial units do. Meanwhile, those remote users also get to control that roving robot by way of an iPad app, though the process isn’t as hands-on as one might hope — the Ava 500 handles most of the control itself after the user selects a destination so it’s perfect for remotely touring dangerous corners of the factory floor, but not so perfect for doing donuts outside of Conference Room B.

In case the notion of buying one of these to remotely dick around with friends has you reaching for your checkbook, you may want to look into a less ambitious way to go. iRobot looks at the Ava 500 as a strictly enterprise device and it has a price tag to match: according to the Boston Herald, the Ava will cost companies in the neighborhood of $70,000 when it launches next year, or about $2,000-$2,500 if you lease it monthly.

There have been plenty of juicy (and unsettling) PRISM details making the rounds these past few days, and unsurprisingly the Office of the Director of National Intelligence doesn’t think the NSA’s surveillance practices have been cast in the most accurate light. In an effort to help do away with some pervasive misconceptions, the ODNI has issued a statement explaining why it thinks people are blowing this out of proportion.

“The surveillance activities published in The Guardian and The Washington Post are lawful and conducted under authorities widely known and discussed, and fully debated and authorized by Congress,” Director James R. Clapper pointed out in a widely emailed missive. “Their purpose is to obtain foreign intelligence information, including information necessary to thwart terrorist and cyber attacks against the United States and its allies.”

Some of the arguments that ODNI throws out there will sound pretty familiar. It states that PRISM can’t be used to “intentionally target any U.S. citizen, or any other U.S. person” (which President Obama pointed out the other day), and that the U.S. government can’t just collect information all willy-nilly — it needs judicial approval and oversight from Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court.

Perhaps most importantly, the ODNI says that PRISM isn’t “a data mining program,” which dovetails nicely with reports from a slew of publicly outed tech companies, including Google, Apple, Yahoo, PalTalk and (TechCrunch owner) AOL, that say they don’t give the NSA (or any body of the U.S. government) direct access to their servers. Still, the prevailing sentiment in certain privacy-sensitive corners of the web is that these companies are basically arguing over semantics: They may not be giving the NSA direct access, but it’s become clear that the information is winding up in the hands of those intelligence agencies anyway, and that has raised more than a few people’s hackles.

Of course, the timing of the statement isn’t exactly ideal. While the ODNI carefully laid out its arguments regarding the need for and efficacy of the PRISM system, The Guardian’s Glen Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill just recently published new information on yet another surreptitious snooping tool: the NSA’s so-called Boundless Informant. If PRISM is the system that harvests all of that ballyhooed metadata about your calls and communiques, Boundless Informant is the system that lets the NSA ascribe that metadata to different countries and drill down accordingly. Don’t expect this rigmarole to end any time soon, folks.

You can read the entire ODNI fact sheet below:

When I buy gadgets off of eBay, I’m lucky if half of them haven’t previously been gnawed on by dogs. Meanwhile, this redditor who picked up a second-hand Nokia Lumia 920 from the auction site seems to have gotten much more than he bargained for — he’s been posting screenshots from the device for the better part of a day, because the thing appears to run a previously unreleased build of Windows Phone 8.

The big tip off? Well, there’s a handful of UI changes (including the newfound abilities to kill apps from the multitasking screen and sort them based on frequency of use), to say nothing of a slew of curious pre-installed test apps that seem tailor-made for internal development use. Really though, the most notable addition to the device is a notification center, one of the features that’s notably missing from current versions of Windows Phone.

As the story goes, the notification center was being considered for inclusion in the initial Windows Phone 8 release but there just wasn’t enough to time to complete it, prompting the company to play up its ever-updating Live Tiles as a sort of replacement. Those sorts of sentiments certainly jibe with other accounts of WP8′s last frenzied days of development — one senior Microsoft official told me last year that the whole Windows Phone team was “coming in hot” just prior to the OS’ official reveal in October 2012.

Sadly, a centralized spot for app notifications may not be in the cards for Windows Phone after all. According to a follow-up from WPCentral, Microsoft’s WP team was indeed working on that notification center until it was removed in later builds for reasons that haven’t been made clear yet. Meanwhile, The Verge leaned on some unnamed sources to determine that these screenshots are actually from an early build of the Windows Phone Blue update (released on May 9 or thereabouts), so if the notification center really did get the axe, that decision should have been made very recently.

So Samsung’s Galaxy S4 Mini and Galaxy S4 Active have officially made the leap from unimaginative rumors to unimaginative reality, which leaves only one oft-rumored version of the popular smartphone left unaccounted for — the curious S4 Zoom.

As the name sort of implies, this Galaxy variant is said to blur the line between smartphone and camera, and we may now be getting our first look at the thing. A set of images from both SamMobile and TechTastic purportedly show off the photo-centric S4 Zoom ahead of a big Samsung press event in London later this month.

It’s hard to judge from the unflattering angles, but these images depict a device seems to be more camera than phone. The thickish frame, protruding lens obscuring a 16-megapixel sensor, and rounded butt are all design choices that are more reminiscent of point-and-shoots than they are of any standard smartphone. Too bad then that the supposed spec sheet that’s been attached to the S4 Zoom seems wimpy in comparison — that hefty sensor will supposedly be accompanied by a 4.3-inch qHD AMOLED display and a 1.6GHz dual-core processor.

If the S4 Zoom is indeed the real deal — and at this point it just about seems like a lock — Samsung may find that it’s not alone in using smartphones as a platform to show off their camera prowess. Persistent rumors of a Nokia Windows Phone sporting one of the company’s mind-boggling PureView sensors have been floating around for over a year now, and a handful of spurious “leaked” images of one such device (codenamed “EOS “)have been circulating these past days. Hell, just earlier this morning we were treated to what may be the smoking gun — a purported recording of the EOS’ gigantic rear camera pod blinking at us.

In case you missed the PureView hullabaloo from last year, Nokia’s EOS isn’t expected to feature the comparatively puny sensors seen in the company’s recent Windows Phones. No no, rumor has it that it will instead sport the same 41-megapixel camera sensor that first graced the chubby 808 PureView back in 2012.

But I think there’s a bigger question here that hasn’t been adequately answered yet — who do these companies think we’ll buy these things? I suspect I may be in the minority on this one, but I’ve always though that the camera-first approach that some OEMs fiddle around with is just sort of silly. Yes, there’s definite value in being able to capture compelling shots on the run, but really: do people really care how good their photos look once quality inches past a certain threshold?

After all, the way we visually memorialize things has changed since the dawn of smartphone epoch — most images don’t wind up printed and tucked away in photo albums any more. They get hastily MMSed to friends. They get marred by fugly filters and splayed up on Instagram. And in some cases (I’m looking at you Snapchat), the real value of these photos is knowing that they’ll quickly be lost to the ages, a pointed rejection of the archaic permanence of images chemically etched on dead tree material. Camera quality ranks pretty low on my list of criteria when it comes time to buy a new phone, and leaning too heavily on one aspect of a device could be… problematic to say the least.

The closest thing Samsung has had to the S4 Zoom to date is the Galaxy Camera, and the company has never broken out Galaxy Camera sales for we hardware business dorks to dig into. Still, the device was hamstrung by carriers requiring customers to buy a data plan along with the thing (a Wi-Fi version was announced just two months ago). And while Nokia has kept its PureView numbers a closely guarded secret, enthusiasts have estimated that the Finnish phone company managed to sell over half a million as of Fall 2012.

That’s a very solid number considering all the 808′s potential sticking points, and Nokia’s moving a solid number of Lumia phones these days so Nokia must be hoping that PureView and Lumia are two great tastes that really do taste great together. Thankfully, we probably won’t have to wait much longer to see these two duke it out — while the S4 Zoom is expected to be outed this month, the EOS could see the light of day as early as July 9.

Picture this: you’re traveling somewhere new and when it comes time to eat you want to get a feel for some local flavors. You’re not going to want to chow down at the nearby Applebee’s in that sort of situation, which is why South Carolina native Rich Winley and Philadelphian Dan Mall whipped up an iOS app called — creatively enough — NoChains.

NoChains has already soft launched in Austin, Texas and Winley’s native Greenville, SC, but the two-person team has just set their sights on a much more prominent target for their next public beta: New York.

“We originally thought about going to the Bay Area, but it’s very noisy.” That, plus the sheer volume of restaurants in New York City and across the bridge in Brooklyn convinced the small team to set their sights on the East Coast instead.

Winley admits there’s nothing wrong with chain restaurants, but when you’re out in a new place, chances are you don’t want to dine exclusively on familiar fare. And that’s the issue with services like Yelp, or so he says. They’ll show you exactly what eateries are within spitting distance, but hang out in certain parts of the city and you’re likely to see your list of results cluttered with repetitive names.

Not so with NoChains — right now, the app plays home to menu data for hundreds of restaurants across the city, which works out to between 400,000 and 500,000 menu items that the service keeps track of. The team’s approach was a simple one: the founding team leaned heavily on Elance and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to feed those menu items and prices into the NoChains backend.

All that would mean very little if the app itself wasn’t terribly easy to mess around with (not to mention rather handsome). Once you’ve selected one of the four launch markets, you’re immediately taken to a landing screen that cycles through different recommendations for notable nearby eats. Hankering for something specific? A small slider with common food choices (think pizza, burgers, barbecue, fish, dessert) sit just below those rotating recommendations, as does a search bar to help accommodate your more esoteric desires. One touch brings up a map of local eateries too, in case you’re hungry enough to settle for whatever happens to be close by.

The only real issue at this point is that the app is so new, there are very few user recommendations to be found for New York restaurants. It’s precisely that sort of social proof from native city-dwellers that will ultimately help NoChains become a trusted source for food recommendations, but the team still has a ways to go before it gets to that point. That said, there’s a strong case for using NoChains purely as a menu app for a large swath of the city’s restaurants (that’s how I’ve been using it these past few days), and as more people see that sort of value in it, the more likely they’ll stick around and drop hints about what’s good and what’s garbage.

It’s been just under a year since Y Combinator-backed Kamcord officially launched, and the young team has spent its time raising funding and quietly fleshing out its SDK for iOS games.

The team had seen its in-game screen recording tech implemented in over 100 games, and gamers have recorded 500 million videos since those very early days, but now the team has been working on a pair of new features they hope will get even more mobile gamers sharing videos of their exploits. Starting today, Kamcord has provided tools to let players trim down their videos on the fly and add their own vocal tracks into the mix… if game developers enable them, anyway.

The ability to edit game recordings is straightforward enough — the meaty bits of your video may come out to a total of 30 or 40 seconds, so why share the whole multi-minute clip? It’s the voice overlay feature that seems the more compelling of the two, since it demonstrates a pretty solid understanding of the kinds of game videos that get spread around most often.

Here’s the idea: once the feature has been enabled, your device fires up its microphone when the gaming session begins and records your fevered mutterings as you furiously paw at your touchscreen. It seems like a problematic way to go at first — I would’ve though the game’s sounds would drown out any input from microphone — but Kamcord CEO Matt Zitzmann noted that there’s a distinct lack of echoing or audio issues (though he still thinks users should use a separate microphone anyway).

But why even go this route in the first place? A quick look at the gameplay videos that populate YouTube and Twitch reveal that many of them lean on narration — after all, there’s only so much entertainment to be had while watching straight, untampered game recordings. There’s something very compelling about listening to someone as they submit themselves to the experience of a game, which perhaps explains the phenomenal popularity of the Let’s Play video genre.

“They’re just a lot more watchable,” Zitzmann noted in a phone conversation. The sort of human quality that adding voice tracks to a game recording is exactly what Kamcord needs if it wants developers to take the SDK seriously as a potential marketing tool. What better way is there for a would-be player to make up their mind about a game they haven’t taken the plunge on than by watching (and hearing) someone have a blast with it. In the end it’s up to developers to decide whether or not they want either of features enabled, but the team has already been in talks with a handful of interested parties and is slowly staffing up to tackle more challenges.

Heads up Android keyboard aficionados — if your handset runs Android 4.0 or later and you’re just not thrilled with the keyboard you already have, you can now download Google’s stock keyboard app from the Google Play store.

According to a post on the official Android Google+ page, the app has launched in certain English-speaking markets with a wider rollout to follow shortly. But that’s not to say that people in those launch markets are restricted to pecking out missives in English. The app comes with libraries for 26 languages, as well as the ability to select next word suggestions and swipe across the keyboard to form words. In the event you haven’t played around with it yet, it’s really quite good — far better than what I’ve experienced in Samsung and HTC’s custom skins, anyway.

Yeah, fine, I know — who gets hot and bothered about keyboards? Well, quite a few people if the number of replacement keyboard apps in the Google Play store is any indication. Nearly every Android OEM under the sun feels the bizarre compulsion to fiddle with the keyboard as they make their (arguably unnecessary) changes to the Android experience, and the end results aren’t always what the end-user had in mind. It’s no surprise then that some people have been clamoring for a cleaner way to type, and developers have been eager to fill that gap.

So what does this mean for the countless replacement keyboards that have already carved out their niches in the Google Play Store? Well, it depends on who you’re concerned about — prominent developers like Swype and SwiftKey already have deals in place with device OEMs like Samsung (and last year the latter started to focus on the health-care market of all things) so they’ll almost certainly continue chugging along just fine.

The picture gets hazier when you consider the smaller players in the space — at least a few developers (like this guy, or this guy, or this guy) have been selling replacement keyboard apps that aim to replicate the stock typing experience on non-Nexus devices, and Google has basically just made them all obsolete. Those guys weren’t exactly raking in the downloads to start with, and it’s obviously in Google’s best interest not to alienate developers that have pledged allegiance to their mobile platform, but I suspect some of those smaller keyboard app creators may soon feel the pinch.

As a brief aside, feel free to tweet at Darrell (@drizzled) to tell him to clean out his notifications shade (seen above). It’s just shameful.

Let’s say you’ve created an incredibly well-received smartphone and need to create another such device to send off into an incredibly competitive market. What do you do?

Well, if you’re HTC, the answer is to make another one… but slightly smaller. In line with rumors that have cropped up over the past few weeks, Estonian news site Delfi has obtained some seemingly authentic shots of a tinier version of the HTC One.

This smaller version is said to sport a 4.3-inch display (compared to the One’s 4.7-inch panel), 2GB of RAM, a dual-core processor, and the same sort of UltraPixel camera found in the big One. The battle of the not-so-mini Mini phones is heating up, or so it seems. Samsung just officially outed the Galaxy S4 Mini last week ahead of a June 20 press event in London. If all we’re doing is comparing spec sheets, then the mini One appears to have a leg up, but we all know that’s not all it takes to make a winner.

It’s not like we didn’t know this was coming, either. Noted phone scooper @evleaks pointed to the existence of a smaller One (known as the M4) in early May, and frankly it was only a matter of time before HTC tried to take the lauded One formula and apply it to a new spate of devices. Then again, that sort of strategy was what led the company to release a slew of rehashed, hard-to-differentiate phones a few years back, which certainly didn’t help HTC as much as its brass had hoped. Finding the balance between thoughtfully extending a product line and running said product line into the ground is a tricky feat to master, and HTC has never been very good at that.

For now though, the company has at least some reason to celebrate. HTC published its May revenues earlier this week, and they seemed surprisingly promising considering the rough seas the HTC has been navigating lately. Pushing out a smaller, hopefully more aggressively priced version of the One could help the Taiwanese OEM pick up some much-needed traction, but hardware is only ever part of the issue. It’s hard not to look at HTC’s executive exodus (news of COO Matt Costello’s departure broke just the other day) and not wonder what the hell is going on over there.

Freemium wireless data startup FreedomPop has been out to undercut traditional wireless carriers on data plan costs for over a year now, but now the company wants to up ante once more. In exchange for a recurring monthly fee of $0, users of the company’s forthcoming phone service will be able to get 500MB of wireless data access, 200 voice minutes, and unlimited messaging starting later this summer.

Oh, that’s not enough for you? For an additional $10, you get unlimited voice too.

FreedomPop COO Steven Sesar says that everything the company has done so far — from attempting to wrangle a deal with LightSquared to fine-tuning the value-add features of its currently data-only service — has all been so the company could eventually offer this sort of freemium mobile service.

“This is always been what our M.O. was about,” Sesar told TechCrunch. Originally the team (which has swelled to around 60 people over the past few months) was waiting for Sprint to launch its LTE network more widely before taking the plunge, but ultimately decided that VOIP quality over 3G was enough to warrant bringing the service to market sooner.

The company plans to release a handful of WiMAX-friendly Android smartphones when the service officially launches later this summer, and the lineup is surprisingly strong — Sesar said that the Samsung Galaxy S II and S III would be among the devices that would launch with the service, along with at least one more handset. The devices will retail for between $99 and $199, though at this point it’s unclear whether FreedomPop will sell the devices out right or hinge on a deposit method the company has mulled over in the past.

Thankfully, prospective customers can choose from a selection of devices that FreedomPop doesn’t strictly offer on it’s own. Sprint (FreedomPop’s more prominent network partner) pulled back the curtain on a bring-your-own-device program for MVNOs earlier this year, and FreedomPop confirmed to TechCrunch that their new phone customers will eventually be able to fire up existing Sprint devices on the company’s freemium phone service.

At this point though, FreedomPop is still being very cagey about how exactly the experience is going to work for its users. Aside from pointing out that this is a “purely data play” and that voice calls would be routed over a data connection, Sesar wouldn’t divulge any more details — I get not wanting to spread the secret sauce, but a little extra transparency could only help FreedomPop lock up more credibility as it gears up to take on carriers in a bigger way. FreedomPop announced a partnership with textPlus earlier this year to bring messaging and voice calls to the service’s users, but both parties have been keeping mum on the subject until then — it’s possible that this endeavor has been built on the back of that tie-up, but we’ll have to wait and see for now.

As always, it’s the company’s hope that customers who have latched onto their free monthly plan will indulge themselves with additional services (like that $10 voice bucket mentioned earlier). These past months have been a trial run of sorts for FreedomPop to work out the strange economics of its freemium services, and things seem to be going well — Sesar notes that there are “hundreds of thousands” of FreedomPop accounts and that gross margin on its services are over 50 percent. That doesn’t mean that this gutsy move will ultimately pay off, but the company appears to be on relatively firm footing for now and the lure of free service may be too much for some consumers to handle.

Remember the Wikipad, the Android-powered gaming tablet/hefty controller rig combo that was supposed to launch in 2012 before suffering delay after delay? Well, the wait is just about over — the company announced earlier today that the $249 gaming tablet will be available on U.S. store shelves starting on June 11, and that a global launch is being prepped for the summer.

The road to an official release has been nothing if not eventful for the Wikipad team. The Android gaming device was originally touted as a 10-inch tablet that was shown off at CES last year and a media tour ahead of a launch slated for the end of October… a deadline that was ultimately pushed back a few times. For a while there it seemed as though the Wikipad might have met its demise, but the tablet re-emerged earlier this year with a 7-inch display running at 1,200 x 800 and the same quad-core Tegra 3 chipset under the hood.

Make no mistake: that 10-inch version is still in the works, but the company hasn’t yet said when it hopes to push the thing out the door save for a vague “Christmas 2013″ window. For better or worse, this more portable 7-inch model will be the vanguard of the Wikipad product line, and some early impressions haven’t exactly been bullish on the tablet’s prospects.

To make things worse, the Android gaming scene just isn’t what it was when Wikipad first decided to take a stab at a game-centric tablet. Sure, the quality of these games has only gotten better as time has passed, but the prospect of churning out dedicated Android gaming hardware has been embraced by some prominent hardware players. Take NVIDIA for instance: it recently joined the fray with the ambitious (if pricey) SHIELD handheld, which will feature (among other things) the ability to stream select PC games, as well as play the usual slew of Android titles. If anything, the Wikipad’s big advantage is the relatively small price tag attached to it, but we’ll soon see if it’s enough to enthrall the masses.

The cellphones were stacked up high in the Gumi factory yard and more were coming out every minute. Phones, TVs, fax machines, and other gear shattered as it hit the concrete and Samsung CEO Kun-hee Lee and his board cracked the screens and cases with heavy hammers. Then they lit a bonfire and threw everything in.

The 2,000 workers began to cry. And still the hardware kept coming. The CEO was disgusted by the low quality product coming out of his factories in the early 1990s and, in a blaze of anger, ordered it all destroyed.

In all, something like $50 million worth of hardware burned on one day in 1995 when Samsung hoisted its “Quality First” banner and began its slow march towards world domination in earnest. Samsung Electronics emerged from those ashes a very different company, but the road leading to that cleansing fire was a long one.

To most of the western world the name “Samsung” is inextricably linked with smartphones and televisions and refrigerators and microwaves — with the consumer electronics that have turned Samsung into a global force. Go back far enough though and it becomes very clear that Samsung Electronics was only ever part of the equation. A massively successful part, yes, but still just a part.

Before Samsung Electronics there was merely Samsung Sanghoe: a small trading company founded by Lee Byung-Chull in 1938 that dealt mostly in dried seafood, produce, and its own noodles. Its bread and butter, so to speak, was shipping those comestibles all around the region. Business was good, and Lee went on to open Samsung Mulsan (now known as Samsung Corporation) in 1948, but that prosperity was ultimately short-lived. After diligently growing Samsung Mulsan, Lee was forced to abandon his holdings in Seoul when the city was invaded and occupied by the republic’s communist neighbors to the north.

He nearly lost everything.

Samsung’s story almost ended there, but Lee made his way south to Busan to recoup from his losses and bring Samsung Mulsan back from the brink of death. The war economy treated the fledgling trading corporation well, and within a few years Lee was able to parlay the proceeds into a handful of prominent subsidiaries.

And thus, Samsung’s chaebol era began. Korea’s chaebols are curious things — they’re very large, very diverse commercial conglomerates, not entirely unlike a GE or a Dupont, save for one little difference. Rather than divvying up the leadership of the chaebol’s subsidiaries and interests among a slew of external candidates, all that power is saved and meted out to members of the family. If you think of them as Asian analogues to family-driven empires like the Rockefellers you wouldn’t be completely off-base, but even that would be underestimating the amazing amount of political clout and influence these corporate bodies exhibit. In later years, the sort of influence chaebols had on national matters was even a little scary.

Lee Byung-Chull sat in the throne, and over the years to come, most of his six daughters and four sons would occupy positions of great power with the carefully-cultivated chaebol. But none would be as prominent as Lee’s youngest son Kun-hee, who officially joined the chaebol in 1968 after studying economics at Japan’s prestigious Waseda University and getting his MBA from George Washington University.

1969 saw the founding of Samsung Electronics, the subsidiary that would ultimately go on to become perhaps the world’s most powerful electronics brand. But that’s a long way off — its first products were mostly modest home appliances. Samsung’s inaugural black-and-white television set rolled off assembly lines in 1969 by way of a joint venture with Sanyo since the Korean subsidiary had no experience putting TVs together, and refrigerators, air conditioners, and electric fans soon followed.

It didn’t take long for Lee to figure out that the growing demand for consumer electronics of all stripes could mean very big things for Samsung down the road, but there was a problem — many of the components that went into Samsung’s products came from overseas, and Japan in particular. Considering that Japanese companies like Sony had been churning out well-received gizmos for years at that point, nascent Korean electronics companies had grown dependent on imports of foreign components and technological know-how.

Samsung decided to do something about that. In 1974 it nabbed a majority stake in Korea Semiconductor in a bid to help wean itself off of foreign tech. Not everyone within Samsung’s brass agreed with the decision — granted, going from piecing together consumer electronics to building components seems slightly backwards — so Byung-Chull decided to settle matters with his own checkbook with some prodding from his son Kun-hee. Korea Semiconductor was renamed Samsung Semiconductor in 1978 and Samsung would soon begin to sling its own silicon, a move that would pay off handsomely in the decades to come.

The rest of the 1970s would see Samsung Electronics making strides abroad with its inexpensive wares. One of its earliest international hits was a cheap color television — it first made a splash in Panama of all places before making its debut in the United States. It was a slow start, but a start all the same. Black and white sets hadn’t gone completely out of style yet though, and Samsung Electronics had manufactured almost 10 million of its cost-conscious sets by the end of the decade.**

By the time 1980 rolled around, the Samsung Group had grown to become one of the most prominent chaebols in South Korea, with a construction company, a petrochemicals division, and a ship-building arm supplementing the conglomerate’s sugar, paper, and newspaper businesses.

While the Samsung Group broadened its scope and grew into an economic powerhouse, Samsung Electronics slowly became more proficient at churning out consumer gadgetry. Even so, pure production power just wasn’t enough — even though Samsung had become a notable electronics exporter, foreign customers still passed over their products because of poor marketing and positioning. Who would buy a off-brand Samsung television when a proven Sony set sat right next to it on store shelves? Even worse, foreign and domestic consumers who did take a chance on Samsung products often found that they just didn’t work the way they were supposed to. The quality just wasn’t always there.

Somewhere along the line balls were being dropped, but the senior Lee didn’t have enough time to address the matter.

The skies over Seoul were peppered with clouds when Lee Byung-Chull died of lung cancer on November 20, 1987. Just two weeks later, Byung Chull’s youngest son, Kun-hee, took his place on the family throne to become the Samsung Group’s second chairman.

Kun-hee’s installment as chairman was agreed upon by Byung-Chull’s survivors and Samsung Group’s board, but it seemed like a peculiar move to some who peered in from the outside. The late Lee was no fool though, and didn’t suffer them lightly either. When his two elder sons proved ill-suited for duty he dismissed them outright. “They were unfit for executive positions,” Lee remarked to Time Magazine in 1976. “The life of a man is short, but that of a corporation must never be.”

The Confucian patriarchy that was a hallmark of the chaebol power structure meant that Kun-hee Lee would be the one to ultimately succeed Byung-Chull, though the patriarch may have wished otherwise. He was very fond of his eldest daughter Lee In-hee, and reportedly mentioned to his confidants that she would be a shoe-in as his successor if only she was male.

Kun-hee’s first few years as chairman were marked by relative prosperity for the Samsung Group, and Samsung Electronics in particular. Samsung Semiconductors, the purchase which you’ll recall both senior and junior Lees coordinated, had already begun to pay off thanks to the popularity of its DRAM memory chips and became the market leader in 1992, and Samsung Electronics had begun to focus more on research and development in addition to production prowess. That said, there were some problems.

To say that Kun-hee Lee is a character is putting it awfully mildly — his tenure as chairman of the Samsung Group was peppered with overzealous but defining moments that changed the course of the chaebol’s growth. The first took place in 1993, when Lee the junior found himself facing an electronics division that simply wasn’t doing its best work. Lee’s vision was of a Samsung that sat on top of the world’s industries, a vision that didn’t jibe with the slipshod products and careless practices that he saw day in and day out. So what did he do?

He talked, and talked, and talked.

It was a lengthy, impassioned demand for change. His initial, hour-long phone outburst took place on a flight to Frankfurt, and he had his rant recorded so others who weren’t present would be able to heed his words. Upon his arrival in Germany, Lee gathered up some 200 Samsung executives in a hotel and laid out his vision over the course of three days.

“Change everything but your wife and kids,” Lee famously proclaimed. Lee would later prove to be full of such soundbites, but the message was clear — Samsung Electronics was in trouble and the people in that room needed to fix things fast.

His message may have seemed like a powerful one, and some execs surely took it to heart, but it didn’t seem to stick for very long. As the story goes, Lee sent out some of Samsung’s newest mobile phones as New Year’s gifts in 1995 only to be embarrassed when he was informed that they didn’t work the way they were supposed to. Quality had began to slip once more, and Lee was intent on making his earlier edict crystal clear.

With the help of a few of his generals, Kun-hee Lee took it upon himself to play the perfectionist pyrophile. Invoking the flaws that paved the way for the bonfire likening product defects to “cancer,” a grim but fitting metaphor for a subsidiary whose fate could be sealed if its employees and brass didn’t enact some dramatic changes.

After the flames were put out and the debris cleared, Samsung Electronics redoubled its investments in research and development. The installation of a new Electronics CEO, Yun Jong-Yong in December 1996 was meant to put the errant subsidiary on a more ambitious, profitable path.

The shrewd Mr. Yun, a graduate of Seoul National University who also studied at MIT’s Sloan School of Business, also helped navigate Samsung Electronics through one of its most desperate periods. 1997 saw South Korea’s massive chaebols take considerable losses thanks to the Asian financial crisis. In retrospect Samsung weathered the storm better than most despite carrying loads of debt, but Yun was faced with a hell of a task — and was forced to streamline the subsidiary’s operations by selling off nearly $2 billion in corporate assets and temporarily shutting down factories to help Samsung Electronics move through its inventory.

To many of its employees, working for Samsung is a mark of pride. In an effort to further trim costs, Yun laid off 24,000 of them.

It was a trying time for Samsung Electronics. Yun’s efforts helped to solidify the subsidiary’s transition from being a producer of cheap, me-too products to a herald of the bleeding edge. One of the keys, according to Yun, was sheer speed. Without it Samsung Electronics could fall prey to any number of major rivals set on out-innovating and out-producing them. Between that focus on aggressive turn-around times and the thoughtful reinvestment of fund in products and divisions that were seen as potential long-term winners, Samsung Electronics had set the stage for the next decade.

Samsung’s early interest in the nascent semiconductor business allowed it compete in ways that other consumer electronics firms — like Sony — weren’t prepared to. The subsidiary didn’t focus just on finished products, it concerned itself with the electronic building blocks that went into them.

That M.O. speaks to another trait of Samsung Electronics: it doesn’t do much pioneering in unproven spaces. Rather, it picks out markets that have clear traction and try to consistently outperform the players that are already there. Consider the humble TFT-LCD display. Samsung Electronics’ first was produced in the mid-90s, and in the years to come the subsidiary would dump considerable amounts of money into improving production quality, clarity, size, as demand for flat-screen displays grew from the late 90s onward.

And of course, mobile was another one of the those big opportunities. If a strategy based on weighty investments and rapid development helped Samsung stay ahead of its Japanese display rivals, then it helped Samsung take on the world with its mobile devices.

The approach would best be described as “scattershot.” Be they feature phones or Android smartphones, Samsung Electronics has always seen to fit to churn them out at an astonishing rate to see what clicks with consumers. That’s led to a considerable number of one-off devices meant to stand on their own and then disappear after mere months on the market, but hits are inevitable and so are their sequels.

Consider the company’s flagship Galaxy S series, for instance. First introduced in 2010, the Galaxy S was one of the first Android devices to become a runaway success, despite companies like HTC and Motorola having a considerable head start. From there, the typical Samsung drive to iterate kicked in and now, after less than three years, Samsung is already preparing to push its Galaxy S4 out the door and into the world marketplace. One could argue (and some already have) that Samsung’s Galaxy S4 is little more than a software-centric rehash of the model that preceded it, but that’s not really the point.

It’s better than the model that came before it, and it’s being released less than a year since the Galaxy S III came out. Samsung is fighting to maintain its position at the head of the curve through production and development speed — don’t expect that to change any time soon.

The story of Samsung’s humble birth, growth, and dominance of multiple industries reads something like a creation myth, a rags-to-riches story for the ages. Samsung Electronics in particular hit its stride in the years that followed that famous fire, but there’s one more factor that helped propel the subsidiary into the stratosphere and keep it there: the Samsung chaebol’s tremendous stature.

If defects are “a cancer” just as Lee famously proclaimed, then what about the flagrant, repeated violations of the law that seem to punctuate Samsung Electronics’ history? Product defects are one thing, but what of defects of character and ethics? After all, Samsung has flouted its share of Korean and international regulations over the years, often with the help of some prominent chaebol buddies.

Consider this small selection of legal imbroglios that Samsung has been engaged in over the years:

• In October 2005, Samsung Electronics plead guilty to charges of taking part in a conspiracy to illicitly manipulate the prices of its DRAM memory chips. It was stuck with a $300 million fine for its role in the scheme.
• In March 2012, Samsung Electronics was fined 14.2 billion won for engaging in a mobile price-fixing scheme (along with LG, Pantech, and others) that saw manufacturers inflating phone prices, and was later fined another 400 million won for obstructing Korea’s Fair Trade Commission investigation of the matter one week later.
• In August 2012, a California jury found Samsung Electronics guilty of infringing six of Apple’s patents with a variety of mobile devices. Despite vigorous appeals from both sides (Samsung wanted to have the case reconsidered, Apple wanted more money), Judge Lucy Koh upheld the original $1.05 billion fine.
• In February 2013, Samsung Electronics was found to have delayed reporting a hydrofluoric gas leak at a chip plant in Hwaseong until after one employee had already died. The fine? A scant 1 million won ($923).

And those are just the some of the cases that directly involve Samsung Electronics — the other subsidiaries and the Samsung Group as a whole was responsible for much more. It’s easy enough to ascribe some of these incidents as the work of unscrupulous loners, and that may be the case at least some of the time, but Lee Kun-hee was no paragon of virtue himself. The world would soon discover that the revered chairman had pinned his name to a hefty list of transgressions while helping Samsung become one of the world’s most prolific conglomerates.

Kim Yong Chul, who served as Samsung in-house counsel before leaving the company to write a tell-all tale of corruption, leveled some of the weightiest accusations at his former employer. In late 2007, he participated in televised press conference in which he claimed that Samsung and Chairman Lee had secretly cultivated a 200 billion won slush fund meant primarily to bribe government officials.

An investigation ensued and while the bribery claim didn’t stick, in 2008 Lee stepped down from his inherited post as chairman after being indicted for dodging roughly $120 million in tax payments. At the time he was required to pay a small (for him) fine of $100 million, and was sentenced to three years in prison, a punishment that was quickly suspended. He was ultimately pardoned by President Lee Myung-bak in 2009 so that the Samsung Group chairman could remain a part of International Olympic Committee, and Kun-hee eventually reclaimed his place atop the chaebol in 2010.

The kicker? That’s the second time Lee Kun-hee has received a presidential pardon. The first was back in 1997 for yet another slush fund scandal, this time involving plans to pay off presidential hopefuls.

Despite all that, Kun-hee Lee, Samsung Electronics, and the whole of the Samsung Group walked away with minimal (if any) lasting damage. Its size now is one of Samsung’s greatest assets — it employs hundreds of thousands around the world, and the sheer amount of money it brings in (the Samsung Group accounts for around one-fifth of South Korea’s GDP) it has more than enough financial and political resources to handily deal with whatever comes its way.

In spite of all that Samsung Electronics (and by proxy, the Samsung Group) has grown to truly massive proportions.

Though it needed some swift kicks in the proverbial pants along the way, Samsung Electronics’ rise to the top of the consumer electronics industry is one based on nearly as many questionable practices as good ones. Tremendous production power, a devotion to speed and efficiency, a modicum of measured craziness in its leaders, and the willingness to throw around its amazing weight have all contributed to Samsung’s domination of nearly every industry it’s involved with.

For Samsung, it’s all about thoughtfully applying its brawn, which becomes all the more important when you reach the heights Samsung has. Once you reach the top, you become a target.

There’s a very fine line between being ruthless and being effective, and Samsung seems to have mastered its balancing act.

The potential creep factor of Google Glass is something that the search giant has to mitigate as best it can if it wants that kooky head-worn display to become a mass-market sensation (and even that may not be enough), but a recent announcement highlights the search giant’s commitment to, well, do no evil.

Google confirmed on its official Glass G+ page earlier this evening that it won’t allow developers to create applications for the head-worn display that are capable of recognizing the faces of people the wearer encounters.

It’s no surprise that Google has been keen to downplay the idea of first-party face recognition features — Google Glass director Steve Lee gave the New York Times a near identical statement earlier this month — but now the company has made it clear that developers are subject to that same code of conduct.

That’s not to say that Google is throwing out the possibility of face-recognizing Glass apps in the future — the company just has to lock down a firm set of privacy protocols before letting developers run wild. As you’d expect, there’s no timetable in place yet so it’s still unclear when Glass will be able to chime in our ears with a long-forgotten acquaintance’s name. It may be a big win for privacy advocates, but the news doesn’t bode all that well for some of the early-stage startups that are angling to turn Glass into an ever-present recognition device. Consider the case of Lambda Labs — earlier this week the San Francisco team talked up its forthcoming facial and object recognition API that would allow developers to create applications with commands like “remember that face.” At the time, Lambda co-founder Stephen Balaban sought refuge in the fact that the Glass API didn’t explicitly bar the creation of face-recognition apps, a shelter that no longer exists. To quote the updated Glass developer policies:

Don’t use the camera or microphone to cross-reference and immediately present personal information identifying anyone other than the user, including use cases such as facial recognition and voice print. Applications that do this will not be approved at this time.

For now, though, Google seems all right with the prospect of using Glass to recognize individual, people so long as their faces aren’t the things being kept track of. Back in March, news broke of a partially Google-funded project from Duke University that saw researchers create a Glass app that let users identify people not by their faces but by a so-called “fashion fingerprint” that accounts for clothing and accessories. All things considered, it’s a neat way to keep tabs on individual people with a privacy mechanism baked into our behavior — all you need to do to be forgotten is change your clothes.