iFixit teardown reveals Amazon Fire Phone not designed for easy DIY repairs

The Amazon's new Fire Phone is not DIY friendly. Or so say the folks at iFixit, who published a teardown on the new smartphone yesterday, giving it a ranking of 3 out of 10 for repairability, with 10 being the easiest to fix.

The gadget repair experts warned that the phone is not modular, with components often sharing cables. Also, the four extra cameras on the front, that track a user's head movements to enable special screen effects, make things much more difficult, as they are difficult to replace individually.

iFixit noted that the construction of the Fire Phone is similar to the iPhone 5 because of its bottom screws. Also, there is no carrier logo, suggesting that more carriers, besides AT&T, will eventually sell the device.

The teardown reveals that the phone contains chips from Qualcomm, NXP, and Samsung Electronics. While the device's radio frequency, power amplifier, audio, and Wi-Fi chips are from Qualcomm, 32GB of NAND memory chips, used for photo, music, and media storage, and 2GB of DRAM memory chips come from Samsung.

NXP contributed a near field communication chip, enabling features such as mobile payments. The smartphone also includes a touch screen controller from Synaptics, and a communications chip from Skyworks.

Priced at $649 contract-free or $199.99 with a contract with AT&T, the 4.7-inch Fire Phone sports a Qualcomm 2.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon 800 CPU, Adreno 330 GPU, 2GB RAM, a 13-megapixel rear-facing camera, and a 2.1-megapixel front-facing camera. The device hit stores this week and has received lukewarm reviews.

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Jimmy Kimmel tells people this $20 Casio watch is Apple's new iWatch

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Amazon reports steep loss after launching bevy of new products, services

Amazon on Thursday reported poorer-than-anticipated second quarter results. The online retail giant posted a loss of $126 million, or 27 cents per share - far greater than the 15 cents per share loss that analysts had forecasted.

In the year-ago period, Amazon posted a loss of just $7 million, or 2 cents per share. Revenue, however, rose 23 percent to $19.34 billion and was spot-on with expectations of $19.33 billion. That's up from $15.7 billion during the same period in 2013.

Amazon launched a number of new products and services this quarter which is the primary reason why losses were so steep.

As Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos outlined in the earnings report, his company recently introduced Sunday delivery to a quarter of the US population. They also launched European cross-border two-day delivery for Prime, launched Prime Music, created three original kids TV series, launched the Fire TV set-top box, launched the Fire smartphone and launched Kindle Unlimited.

He said they are continuing to work hard to make the Amazon customer experience better and better.

Despite all of that, however, investors weren't pleased with Amazon's results. Share value plummeted more than 10 percent on the news, losing more than $36 of its value.

Looking ahead, Amazon expects third quarter revenue between $19.7 billion and $21.5 billion while analysts anticipate revenue around $20.81 billion.

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Microsoft explains quantum computing in this easy-to-follow video

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Samsung to host annual developers conference at Moscone West this November

A date and location have been announced for Samsung's next developers conference. The annual event will kick off on November 11 at Moscone West (the same venue Apple and Google used for their dev conferences earlier this year) in San Francisco, California, and will run through the 13th according to a post on the company's official global blog.

Last year's inaugural conference saw the introduction of a number of Samsung SDKs including the Mobile SDK, a Smart TV SDK, a Multiscreen SDK and the KNOX Enterprise SDK beta.

While Sammy didn't give any solid information on what we can expect that this year's conference, the company did drop a hint or two about updates to its Mobile SDK and well as its S Health SDK, Tizen SDK for Wearable and the Samsung Accessory SDK.

Those expecting to see some new hardware at the conference will likely be disappointed. As we've seen from others, these events are typically focused on the software side of things only. That's alright, however, as Samsung's next major hardware release, the Galaxy Note 4, is expected to arrive on September 3 at an Unpacked event just ahead of the annual IFA trade show in Berlin, Germany.

Interested parties are invited to submit their e-mail address to be notified when more information becomes available. No word yet on when registration will open or how many seats will be available.

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AT&T's Q2 earnings report misses expectations despite rise in revenue

AT&T announced that its earnings declined 7.2 percent, while its revenue was up 1.6 percent from a year ago. The announcement came as part of the company's second quarter earnings report, which it released yesterday, a day after Verizon posted strong profits in the second quarter.

The telecommunications giant posted a profit of $3.55 billion, or 68 cents a share, compared to $3.82 billion, or 71 cents a share, in the year-ago period. On an adjusted basis, the company earned 62 cents a share, missing analysts’ expectations by a penny. The revenue figure, which stood at $32.6 billion, also missed Wall Street’s consensus estimate of $33.22 billion.

The company said it added more than 1 million postpaid subscribers -- those who sign a long-term contract or pay toward the end of the month. This is the largest for the company in the last five years, bringing the total to nearly 117 million.

Out of these newly added postpaid subscribers, around 707,000 were smartphone customers, while 366,000 were tablet customers. Total wireless net additions were 634,000 amid the loss of 405,000 prepaid customers.

Speaking about the broadband and television side of the business, the company said it added 488,000 net new U-verse Internet customers and 190,000 net new U-Verse TV customers in the last quarter.

The company also announced that its proposed acquisition of DirecTV is steadily progressing. AT&T's CFO John Stephens said in a conference call that the deal had received approval from regulators in Brazil and several U.S. states.

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Get The Sims 2 for free on Origin this week

From now until July 31st, EA is giving away copies of The Sims 2 Ultimate Collection on Origin for free. To redeem your copy, open up Origin on your PC and log in, head to the Games tab, click on Redeem Product Code and enter the code "I-LOVE-THE-SIMS".

The Ultimate Collection bundles in every expansion pack and stuff pack alongside the original game, giving you access to 18 extra content packs for the game. Unlike Steam's free play weekends, after you've redeemed your copy of The Sims 2, it'll stay in your Origin library forever.

The Sims 2 launched in 2004 to critical acclaim, and continued to see content pack releases until late 2008. In 2009 EA released a sequel to the popular life simulator, The Sims 3, which as of today has a whopping 20 content packs available for it.

The next game in the series, The Sims 4, will launch on September 2, 2014. Despite the game containing new features, such as an improved Create-a-Sim tool and better representations of personalities, other features available in past games have been controversially removed, including swimming pools and the toddler life stage.

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