Here are some of the best apps and games that came out this week. Read more »

Google has been working on reducing the load times for websites. The company already serves more streamlined version of search results when you are on a slower connection but wants to do that for web pages as well.

For this they started a new program that compresses websites when you are on a slow connection. This is supposed to load websites 4x faster, consume 80% less data, and because of these two things, increases website traffic by 50%. Read more »

If you used Chrome on Windows and then on Mac, you’d notice there is a sea of difference between the two. While it is arguably the best browser to use on Windows, on OS X it feels like a bloated mess that just burns through your battery at an astonishing rate for no good reason.

It seems Google is well aware of this issue, so it is working on improving the efficiency of the OS X version. In a Google+ post, Google engineer clarified on a few things the company is doing to improve battery life on Mac. Read more »

Disney is offering a bunch of its mobile games for free on Windows Phone for a limited amount of time. If you have a Windows Phone 8.1 device, you can download nine of the company’s titles at no cost till June 17.

The list includes Where’s My Water?, Where’s My Perry?, “Where’s My Water?” Featuring XYY, Where’s My Mickey?, Temple Run: Oz, Temple Run: Brave, Disney Solitaire, Lost Light, and Disney Checkout Challenge. Read more »

Leica has announced the newest member of its rangefinder-style of cameras, the Leica Q. The camera comes with a full-frame sensor and a fixed lens matched to the sensor.

The Leica Q has a 24 megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor with a sensitivity of up to ISO 50,000. The sensor is matched to a fixed 28mm F 1.7 Summilux lens. The camera has an electronic viewfinder on the back with a resolution of 3.68 megapixel resolution. The viewfinder allows the photographer to select 35mm and 50mm focal lengths and save the photos with that focal length. Read more »

Google is working on an updated version of Hangouts for Android but before it gets released Android Police has some hands-on screenshots of the messaging application.

The focus here is on overhauling the entire interface design and pretty much every aspect of the UI has been changed even if it doesn’t seem to be the case at first glance. Read more »

Since the first time the website was introduced several years ago, Instagram has updated the design. The new design is extremely minimal, with a lot of white space and large, full-size images.

The new design gets rid of the grey textured background and the blue top bar, replacing it with a clean white everywhere. The top bar just has the Instagram logo, your account name and a logout button. Read more »

After recently adding support for 5K resolution, YouTube will now let you watch videos uploaded in 8K resolution natively. That’s 7680 x 4320 pixels at 30fps.

Currently there’s just one video that supports this resolution, and that too is mostly shot using two RED Epic Dragon in 6K in portrait orientation and then stitched together in Adobe After Effects to form the final 8K video. Some of the scenes are shot at 6K in landscape and then upscaled and sharpened for the higher resolution. Read more »

Yesterday, Apple announced a new app in iOS 9 called Apple Wallet, which replaced the previous Passbook app on the iPhone. The previous Passbook app was a place to keep all your coupons, gift cards, boarding passes, and tickets but with Wallet Apple now allows you to have merchant rewards and store-issued cards as well.

This means that you can have your, say, Starbucks card in your phone’s Wallet app just like you would a credit card or debit card and the next time you use Apple Pay at Starbucks the Wallet app would use the Starbucks card instead of your credit or debit card, so you can avail of any reward points that may come with using that card without having to actually use the physical card. Read more »

While Project Volta was mostly a colossal failure, it seems Doze is actually doing its job. Reports suggest the Nexus 5 running on the developer preview of Android M is seeing noticeable improvement in battery life.

According to tests by Computer Base, the Nexus 5 running Android M consumed 1.5% power in 8 hours of standby, 4.5% in 24 hours, and 9% in 48 hours. In comparison, the same phone running Android 5.1.1 Lollipop consumed 4%, 12%, and 24%, respectively. Read more »

Here are some of the best apps and games that came out this week. Read more »

Remember those sniper missions in some of the action games? Now imagine doing that for the entire game. That’s essentially Hitman: Sniper in a nutshell. The game features Agent 47 perched atop a vantage point raining hell down on bad guys with his high powered sniper rifle.

Like Hitman Go before, Hitman: Sniper is made from the grounds up for the mobile platform and it shows. The game is now available on iOS and Android for $4.99. Let’s take a look. Read more »

We have already seen a teardown of the Samsung Galaxy S6 and the Galaxy S6 edge before from iFixit. But now Samsung has released its own teardown of the two phones, for some reason.

Samsung’s teardown doesn’t show anything new that we haven’t already seen or learned from iFixit’s and is decidedly less detailed. We do get some high quality images of the insides of the phone, however. Read more »

Google recently showed off its machine learning skills at Google I/O, but this is likely to blow even Google’s socks off. Presenting Hound, from the people who made SoundHound, the music recognition app. Hound is an app that uses voice search to find you relevant information, just like Siri or Google Now. Just that it’s way, way better at it.

Hound gives you quick search results for all your queries. You don’t have to mollycoddle it with specific queries that won’t fall within its search parameters. We already got that to quite an extent with Siri and Google Now, both of which can understand natural language fairly well, but they can still only deal with one query at a time. Read more »

After two years since Thunderbolt 2, Intel has taken the wraps off the new Thunderbolt 3 protocol, and there are some major and exciting new features here.

By far the biggest improvement is the switch from the standard DisplayPort that we saw for Thunderbolt 1 and 2 to the more modern USB Type-C. Along with making it more modern and infinitely easier (since there is no wrong way to plug in a USB Type-C cable) it also provides Thunderbolt access to the USB protocol with Intel’s new Alpine Ridge controller, which was absent in the previous versions of Thunderbolt. This means Thunderbolt 3 has support for USB 3.1, Thunderbolt, DisplayPort, and PCI-Express protocols. Read more »