AT&T unveils new low-cost family plan

As wireless carriers turn up the heat on competitive pricing plans, AT&T announces lower-cost shared plans with unlimited talk, text and 10GB of data.

AT&T chose Super Bowl eve to announce what the carrier insists is a new super pricing deal for families. Under the plan that kicks in on Sunday, a family of four can get unlimited text and talk, plus 10 gigabytes of shared data, for $160 a month. AT&T says that's a $100 monthly savings compared to a comparable family plan on Verizon Wireless.

Prices under the new AT&T plan actually start at $130 a month for a family with two smartphones, and climb to $175 monthly for a clan with five phones. Each additional line costs $15.

In all cases, you get the same 10GB of data with unlimited talk and text, with overage fees if you exhaust that data bucket. The plan extends to current AT&T customers (including small businesses with up to 10 lines), or folks who switch from rival wireless carriers. You can buy a new phone on a payment plan, AT&T says, with no annual service contract and nothing down, or bring your own device.

Though AT&T Chief Marketing Officer David Christopher says AT&T will not run a Super Bowl ad tied specifically to this new pricing deal, "we do think Super Bowl weekend is a great time for families and to launch an offer focused on families."

AT&T and BeatsMusic are teaming on an unrelated Super Bowl ad with Ellen DeGeneres.

AT&T's latest pricing deal comes at a time of forceful change in the industry. Rival T-Mobile in particular has been hammering away at AT&T with aggressive pricing plans and bold "Uncarrier" moves — doing away with contracts, paying early termination fees if you switch to their network, and so on.

"AT&T's change in pricing bucks the recent trend in the mobile industry by offering the best deal to existing customers," says Jan Dawson, an industry analyst with Jackdaw. "With all the effort currently going into getting customers to switch, AT&T's moves seem to be geared towards keeping existing customers first and foremost. This is clearly a response to the aggressive price moves from competitors, especially T-Mobile, over the last several months."

AT&T is not covering other carriers' termination fees to lure defectors as part of its new offering. But it is for a limited time issuing a $100 bill credit for each new line added under the offer, a promotion that extends beyond cellphones to tablets, mobile hot spots or AT&T Wireless Home Phones.

"We're building smartphones to be the remote control of your life on AT&T," Christopher says. "The ability to offer families a more affordable way than ever to be with AT&T with their smartphones is a great long-term play for us. And it sets us up really nicely to go into all these new businesses," including the connected home and connected car. "There's no question it's a competitive industry, and AT&T is going to compete aggressively. But it's about skating to where the puck is going."

Analyst Dawson says the move reflects "a continuation of several major trends in the U.S. mobile industry: more intense competition as the market saturates and the two smaller national carriers starting to become more aggressive, a shift to data rather than voice and messaging, and a move away from subsidies."

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Restaurant customer leaves $15K for three waitresses

Waitresses were talking about bills, student loans when woman approached them with checks.

Three waitresses at an Illinois restaurant got a nice surprise over the weekend - $5,000 tips for each of them.

"This very nice lady walked in today at the restaurant and gave $5,000 to each of my waitresses," the Boone County Family Restaurant in Caledonioa, Ill., posted on its Facebook page. "What a nice lady."

Waitresses Amay Sabani, 25, Sarah Seckinger, 23 and Amber Kariolich, 28, were working Saturday morning, organizing silverware and talking about student loans, bills and dreams of finishing school when the blonde-haired woman asked for their names and began writing something down, according to WIFR and the Rockford Register Star.

The restaurant said via Facebook that it would not identify the woman.

When Sabani saw the amount on the check and tried to return it, the woman refused to take it back.

"I want you girls to take these to help with school and everything else in life," theRegister Star reports the woman said to the objecting waitresses.

"Yes, you can take it," the news organization reports the woman said. "You put that in your pocket. God sent me here to help you."

Kariolich told WIFR that all three were touched.

"Well, we all want to go back to school," she said.

Sabani said the money would provide opportunities for her.

"I work two jobs and I have a little boy at home, so maybe spend more time with him and do more things with him and just get ahead of myself," she told WIFR. "I hope that one day I have the amount to do the same thing to somebody else."

Seckinger said she did not have the money to finish a final semester toward her associate degree in criminal justice, but she will not return to school.

Owner Matt Nebiu told the Register Star that he had seen the woman in the restaurant before but that she is not a regular. Nebiu's father and uncle opened the restaurant that serves up rib and shrimp combos and baked cod primavera in 1982.

"I've never seen anything like this in 30-something years here," Nebiu told theRegister Star.

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Samsung Galaxy S5 coming on February 24 at Unpacked 5: All you need to know

Galaxy S5 will be unveiled at Samsung's Unpacked event

Finally it’s official! After a string of rumours, leaks and speculations, Samsung will pull the curtains off its flagship Galaxy S5 on February 24 at the company’s ‘Unpacked 5′ event.  The company will be hosting the event at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Though Samsung has been tight lipped about its specs, a lot has already been said and written about the S5. Here’s what we know so far.

Design
Samsung is rumoured to be opting for metal over polycarbonate for the exterior of the S5. An earlier leak showed the metal frame of the phone, which led many to believe that Samsung is shedding its plastic roots. Of course just a metal frame does not tell us much about the materials for the exterior, but plastic build for high-end phones has been the biggest criticism against Samsung for many years. So it would make sense that Samsung is finally trying to change things around.

We also caught a glimpse of what the next Samsung flagship could look like thanks to a patent application. From the application, we can tell Samsung is retaining the rounded corners, but could be ditching hardware buttons for a more streamlined look. However, as we have seen in the past Samsung has shied away from changing too much of the look and feel of their phone, so we could be in for another itinerant update.

Samsung’s patent application for a phone’s design

Another report says Samsung will use a more durable material than metal for the exterior design of the S5. Reportedly, the company is researching a diamond-based surface treatment technology for the rumoured metal cases.

Display
By now there’s little doubt that the S5 will have a Super AMOLED panel, which is Samsung’s forte. Leaks and reports suggest the resolution will be an eye-popping 2560×1440, resulting in a pixel density of 560ppi. A leaked GFX benchmark listingfor a device codenamed SM-G900S reveals the same resolution, with many speculating that this is indeed the S5. With many other companies also looking at bringing such crazy high-res displays for their phones, Samsung would likely jump on to the bandwagon.

What kind of a display will Samsung go for?

Exynos 6 or Snapdragon 800?
In September, Samsung had promised to come up with a new 64-bit chip to compete with Apple. Speculation is rife that the next device in its popular high-end “S” series would feature this chipset. However, the leaked benchmark that pointed to the 2K display also lists a Snapdragon 800 chipset clocked at 2.4GHz along with the Adreno 330 GPU. Now, this is a tad disappointing as many tech enthusiasts expected the S5 to have the Qualcomm Snapdragon 805, or a 64-bit version of Samsung’s own Exynos 6 chip. We could be in for a surprise like last time around and have two configurations of the S5 – one powered by a Qualcomm processor and another by Exynos 6 chip. In terms of memory, the S5 is expected to have 3GB of RAM, going by the Galaxy Note 3.

16-megapixel camera
The Galaxy S5 is also expected to get a 16-megapixel camera module with optical image stabilisation. Both Sony and Samsung LSI are bidding to be the main supplier of the new CMOS image sensors for the company’s next high-end smartphone. It should be noted that the 13-megapixel camera currently seen in the Galaxy S4 is supplied by Sony. Reportedly, the company may end up keeping its existing suppliers for the camera module, lens and auto-focusing (AF) actuator, but Sony and Samsung’s System LSI division will be fighting to be the main CMOS image sensor supplier.

Iris scanner ditched for fingerprint scanner

Redesigned TouchWiz UI
Samsung is believed to redesign its TouchWiz UI for the Samsung Galaxy S5 and it looks like the company has taken a whole lot of inspiration from Google Now. T he leaked shot gives a closer look at the lock screen and home screen widget that will display contextual cards for the user, depending on your notifications and other settings. Another leak shows horizontal widgets that throw up contextual information like map routes, time and temperature and redesigned icons for messages and phone were seen.

UI gets a facelift

Fingerprint scanner
The latest news circulating the web claims that after several unsuccessful attempts, Samsung has ditched the eye scanner for a finger-print scanner. Samsung has reportedly given up on the “unintuitive user experience of iris recognition but has been testing different types of biometric scanners”. Earlier rumours suggested the Korean company is trying to one-up Apple by including an“Eye-Scanning” unlock capability. The S5′s front camera would scan your eyes to verify your identity before letting you use the phone and reportedly, this will work faster than the current face unlock technique found on Android.

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Samsung Electronics to unveil Galaxy S5 smartphone in late Feb

Samsung Electronics Co will unveil a new version of its flagship Galaxy S smartphone this month, but expectations are low that features such as a bigger screen will lead to a sharp jump in sales given intensifying competition.

Samsung sent out invitations on Tuesday for "Samsung unPacked 5" event on February 24 at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The launch has been brought forward by around three weeks after sales of Samsung's S4 came in weaker than expected, analysts said.

The world's biggest smartphone maker is bracing for its weakest mobile annual profit growth in seven years amid fierce competition from Apple Inc and Chinese vendors, and as growth for high-end smartphones eases due to near saturation in many markets.

The S5 is widely expected to feature a bigger screen, an improved rear camera and biometric functions such as iris recognition or a fingerprint scanner. It may also come with an improved Galaxy Gear smartwatch.

The launch at the annual industry gathering is set to reflect a new emphasis on costs, marking a departure from the glitzy marketing Samsung has deployed in the past, including the use of actors and a full live orchestra to launch the S4 at New York's Radio City Music Hall last year.

A bigger screen for the S5 may not become much of a selling point as Apple is widely expected to introduce large-screen smartphones - Samsung's mainstay products - later this year. Apple is also expected to gain ground in China after it began selling iPhones through China Mobile, the world's biggest mobile carrier by subscribers, last month.

More challenges may come from China's PC maker Lenovo Group which announced last week it would buy Google Inc's Motorola Mobility handset unit for $2.9 billion.

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'Hand of God' image captured by Nasa

A new image of the pulsar wind nebula known as the 'hand of God' has been captured by US space agency Nasa's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR).

The photograph captured by the telescope shows the nebula 17,000 light-years away, which is powered by a dead, spinning star called PSR B1509-58. The pulsar itself is just 19 kilometres long, but spins around nearly seven times every second.

As it spins, it throws out particles upheaved during the star's death, which interact with magnetic fields around the ejected material, causing it to glow with X-rays.

For Nasa, one of the biggest remaining mysteries surrounding the object is whether the pulsar particles are interacting with the material in a specific way to make it look like a hand, or if the material is in fact shaped like a hand.

"We don't know if the hand shape is an optical illusion," Hongjun An of McGill University, Montreal, Canada told Nasa. "With NuSTAR, the hand looks more like a fist, which is giving us some clues."

NuSTAR has imaged the structure in high-energy X-rays for the first time, shown in blue. In the image, lower-energy X-ray light previously detected by NASA's Chandra X-ray observatory is shown in green and red.

Fiona Harrison, the mission's principal investigator at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California said the telescopes unique viewpoint is allowing them to see "the highest-energy X-rays" and is "showing us well-studied objects and regions in a whole new light."

The telescope also produced another image of a range of supermassive black holes lit up. Nasasaid all of the dots in this image are active black holes tucked inside the hearts of galaxies, with colours representing different energies of X-ray light.

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