Amazon just announced that Spotify Premium subscribers in the US will now have the option to stream their favorite music with Amazon Echo – Amazon’s own voice-controlled home assistant/speaker .
Echo owners can take advantage of this new integration simply by uttering the phrase ‘ Alexa , play Spotify’.
Additionally, Echo also supports Spotify Connect which will allow users to effortlessly transfer and control their listening experience from the Spotify app to Echo.
Besides Spotify, Echo customers can also play music from Amazon Music, Prime Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora as well as TuneIn.
➤ “Alexa, Play Spotify”: Spotify Now Available on Amazon Echo [Amazon]
LG’s G5 is the company’s first modular smartphone, sort of
LG has announced its newest flagship smartphone today at Mobile World Congress 2016, and it’s the first model from the company to use modular elements in its design.
While other modular smartphone projects take a plastic approach to design, the G5 has an aluminium chassis and a ‘slide-out’ battery that you can swap out for a fully charged one in a matter of seconds, the company says.
It doesn’t quite make it a full ‘modular’ smartphone in my book- being able to upgrade core components is a better way to future-proof a device – but it’s a good start for a mainstream audience.
Two other modules that can plug in are a Bang and Olufson unit that is 32-bit digital to analogue converter (DAC) and the other is a camera controller designed to make it easier to take photos with one hand – it also contains a bit more power to boost battery life by around 40 percent.
On the hardware front, the LG G5 offers a 5.3-inch Quad HD display (with a curve, like previous models), 64-bit Snapdragon 820 processor and an unusual dual rear-facing cameras – one a wide-angle 8-megapixel sensor and one 16-megapixel.
On the front, there’s a 8-megapixel snapper, and you also get 4GB RAM and support for microSD cards up to 2GB.
While there’s software-based quick charging features, the power pack itself offers up 2,800mAh – though, of course you can just swap it out when it’s depleted.
Credit: LG
LG has also launched a range of companion devices for the G5 that it calls ‘LG Friends’ – these include a 360-degree camera , the LG 360 VR headset , and the LG Rolling Bot – a smartphone controlled drone that moves alongside you capturing video and still images.
Pricing and specific release details haven’t yet been confirmed.
Regardless of the modular components of the G5 not being essential hardware, the ability to swap out modules is a clear differentiator against other flagship handsets.
Amazon announces a 300 DPI Kindle Paperwhite, still $119
The Kindle Paperwhite is about to get a lot easier to read. Amazon today announced the successor to its best-selling Kindle, with an improved high-resolution display, Amazon’s new font and an advanced typesetting engine.
The new model takes a page out of the Voyage’s book with a 300 DPI e-ink panel, or twice the resolution of the previous panel. That should make text look a lot clearer, with the pixel density we now typically expect of smartphones.
It also includes a new font specifically designed for reading on digital screens, called Bookerly. Amazon says it’s great for reading at any size, and takes advantage of the improved screen so that you can read with less eye strain. Bookerly was first introduced in May, and is already available on mobile.
Amazon also created a new typesetting engine that helps keep the reading experience more akin to a physical book. It’s now able to hyphenate to keep layout edges sharper, for instance, while new kerning automatically adjusts character spacing to remove distracting whitespace.
The company says its new engine also improves the overall page layout, with better support for dropcaps and images while still allowing you to change your font size and line spacing. Your layout, indents, and and margins will dynamically change as you edit either of those parameters.
The font and layout improvements will be available on “over half a million books,” and Amazon will be converting more every week. The features will arrive through an over-the-air update, and older Kindle models will be upgraded to the Bookerly font as well.
Thankfully, Amazon was able to introduce the new features without changing the price; it still costs $119, with pre-orders starting today and the first units shipping June 30.
➤ Amazon Introduces New Kindle Paperwhite: The Most Popular Kindle, Now Even Better—Still Only $119 [Amazon]