The Z10 is a good first step, but BlackBerry still has to fix its app problem

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BlackBerry, a.k.a., the Company Formerly Known as RIM, made good with its first two BlackBerry 10 smartphones on Wednesday. While the new devices are far from perfect, they will at the very least make long-suffering BlackBerry fans very happy and should provide a needed boost to a company in desperate need of growth. That said, BlackBerry still has a major problem that it will have to fix if it ever hopes to lure Android and iOS users away from their devices — it needs to improve the quality of apps that are available on its platform.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry Z10 review]






BlackBerry has done its best to spin its app situation as a positive, touting the roughly 70,000 apps that will be available for BlackBerry 10 at its launch. This number sounds impressive until you realize that the vast majority of these apps are ported from Android or from the BlackBerry Playbook. Even worse for the company, earlier reviews have indicated that many of these apps don’t at all function well, especially since a good portion of them were ported over from Android 2.3 Gingerbread or earlier.


[More from BGR: BlackBerry Q10 preview]


This is obviously not a sustainable situation for BlackBerry in the long term, and to the company’s credit it did announce some very important apps that are being developed directly for the BlackBerry 10 platform, including Skype, WhatsApp and the Angry Birds franchise. But there is a glaring absence that should give pause to anyone feeling optimistic about the platform’s ability to attract top developers in the future: Instagram.


Yes, Instagram is just one app, but it’s also one of the most popular in the world and it’s owned by Facebook (FB), the social networking giant that BlackBerry supposedly has a close partnership with. If BlackBerry can’t convince one of its close partners to develop an app that’s ready in time for its big platform launch, then it really calls into question how much clout the company will have with smaller developers that may not have the resources to build for more than two platforms.


And BlackBerry’s ability to attract the smaller developers is crucial to its future success because we’ve all seen mobile apps that come out of nowhere on iOS and Android and suddenly take the world by storm. If BlackBerry is constantly rushing around trying to get upstart app developers to make native BlackBerry 10 apps months after those developers have hit it big on other platforms, it will put the company at a perpetual disadvantage. This is a problem that BlackBerry desperately needs to fix by the time its next smartphones roll out.


This article was originally published on BGR.com


Gadgets News Headlines – Yahoo! News




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Let's Make a Deal's Tiffany Coyne Is Pregnant

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Celebrity Baby Blog





01/30/2013 at 01:00 PM ET



Tiffany Coyne Pregnant Expecting First Child Let's Make a Deal
Courtesy Monty Brinton/CBS


Behind door number one — a pregnant Tiffany Coyne!


The Let’s Make a Deal model, 30, and her husband Chris are expecting a baby together, her rep tells PEOPLE exclusively.


“I’m extremely excited with my husband Chris to be having our first child,” Coyne, who is 3½ months along, says.


A staple on the show since her debut in 2010 — Coyne cues the opening of the doors — the mom-to-be’s announcement couldn’t come at a better time.


“This has been a truly memorable year on the show celebrating our 50th anniversary, and soon my family will be adding to that celebration. I couldn’t be happier now,” she tells PEOPLE.


– Anya Leon


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APNewsBreak: EPA moves to ban some rodent poisons

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency is moving to ban the sale of a dozen rat and mouse poisons sold under the popular D-Con brand in an effort to protect children and pets.


The agency said Wednesday it hopes to reduce the thousands of accidental exposures that occur every year from rodent-control products. Children and pets are at risk for exposure because the products typically are placed on floors.


The agency had targeted a handful of companies two years ago, saying they needed to develop new products that are safer for children, pets and wildlife. All but Reckitt Benckiser Inc., manufacturer of D-Con, did so.


The company will have at least 30 days to request a hearing before an administrative law judge. If no hearing is requested, the ban will take effect.


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Manti Te'o hoax suspect 'in love' with football star

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The man accused of hoaxing Manti Te’o fell “deeply romantically
in love” with the Notre Dame linebacker and said he was “confused” about his
sexuality, TV’s Dr. Phil McGraw told the "Today" show in a clip that aired Wednesday.


The Antelope Valley man, Ronaiah Tuiasosopo, 22, is allegedly the person behind the Te’o fake-girlfriend affair. He is planning to
come clean and reveal the exact nature of his relationship with the football
player and his role in the hoax during an interview with McGraw to be aired Thursday, his
attorney, Milton Grimes, told The Times.


Grimes said Tuiasosopo was acting
when he portrayed "Lennay Kekua," the woman with whom Te’o said he
had fallen in love, but never met. Grimes said his client pretended to be
the woman in phone calls with the football star, disguising his voice to sound
like a woman, similar to what people do when they are role-playing or method
acting.


"I don’t think it’s so unusual
that a person could imitate the voice of a person of a different sex,"
Grimes said.


In a short clip of that interview
obtained by The Times, McGraw asks Tuiasosopo why he ended his relationship
with Te’o.


“For many reasons,” Tuiasosopo said. “There were many times where Manti and Lennay
had broken up before.... They would break up, and then something would bring
them back together, whether it was something going on in his life or something
going in Lennay’s life -- in this case, in my life. I wanted to end it, because
after everything I had gone through, I finally realized that I just had to move
on with my life. I had to get me, Ronaiah. I had to start just living and just
let this go.”


Grimes, the onetime lawyer for the
late Rodney King, said Tuiasosopo "feels as though he needs therapy and part of that therapy
is to ... tell the truth."


McGraw told "Today" that “Ronaiah
had a number of life experiences that damaged this young man in some very
serious ways,” and after speaking with Tuiasosopo, he believes that Te’o "absolutely, unequivocally" was not involved in the hoax.


Grimes insisted his client didn't
mean to hurt Te'o.


"He did not intend to harm him
in any way," Grimes said.


Te'o had spoken to reporters
repeatedly about his supposed girlfriend and her battle with cancer, a story
that captivated college football fans throughout fall 2012, when the
Heisman Trophy runner-up helped his team finish out the regular season undefeated and helped get them to
the national championship game.


A Deadspin.com report published Jan. 16 first
revealed that the girlfriend was fake, and identified Tuiasosopo as the man
behind the hoax.


Grimes said Tuiasosopo had chosen
Dr. Phil for his first public appearance because he felt that as a medical
professional, Dr. Phil "might be inclined to have better insight [than a
regular reporter] into what he’s going through ... the particular
condition," Grimes said.


Diane O'Meara, a Southern California
woman whose photos were apparently used in the fake girlfriend's social media
accounts, told The Times that Tuiasosopo repeatedly asked for photos and videos
from her in the weeks before the hoax unraveled. She called his actions
"kind of annoying," but added, "as a compassionate person, I
totally believed him."


Grimes said he had warned his
client, who is seeing a medical professional, that he could face legal
consequences for admitting that he falsified his identity on the Internet. But
Tuiasosopo insisted that going public was something he had to do in order to
move on with his healing process.


"His point is that he wants to
heal," Grimes said. "He knows that if he doesn’t come out and tell
the truth, it will interfere with him getting out of this place that he is
in."


"This is part of my public
healing," Grimes quoted Tuiasosopo as saying.


ALSO:


Listen to Lennay Kekua’s voicemails for Manti Te’o


Lance Armstrong and Manti Te'o get trapped in a good story


Manti Te'o hoax: Diane O'Meara says she was hounded for photos


--Matt Stevens, Kate Mather and Ann Simmons 



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The Lede Blog: Under Attack, Cairo Hotel Sends S O S via Twitter

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Video of unidentified men streaming into the lobby of Cairo’s Semiramis InterContinental hotel was shown live on Egypt’s ONTV early on Tuesday.

Last Updated, 2:56 p.m. As our colleagues Kareem Fahim, David Kirkpatrick and Mayy El Sheikh report, the mayhem on Cairo’s streets briefly spilled into the lobby of one of the city’s luxury hotels, the Semiramis InterContinental, during intense clashes between riot police and protesters along the Nile Corniche overnight.

Images of a mob streaming into the hotel, shown live on Egyptian television and then posted online, raised fears of further damage to the country’s already battered tourist industry. Coming at the same time as violence in cities on the Suez Canal, this week’s unrest threatened two of the main pillars of the Egyptian economy.

Judging by a series of urgent pleas for help posted on the hotel’s Twitter feed, the raid came just after 2:30 a.m. local time.

Within an hour of sounding the alarm on the social network, the staff reported on Twitter that the security forces had arrived.

Guards at the hotel told Bel Trew of the Egyptian news site Ahram Online that phone calls to the police and the army initially went unheeded as about 40 men armed with shotguns, knives and a semiautomatic weapon broke into the shuttered lobby and started looting.

An Ahram Online journalist who witnessed the attack, Karim Hafez, said that protesters had stopped fighting with the police to help secure the hotel: “When they realized these groups were trying to loot the hotel, protesters shot fire crackers at them as they attacked the building and tried to push them away from the area but these groups were armed with birdshot bullets.”

This reported cooperation of the protesters with the police officers they have been battling for days on the street outside the hotel prompted bloggers like the British-Egyptian journalist Sarah Carr to comment on the black comedy of the situation.

Another Egyptian blogger, Mohammed Maree, reported on his @mar3e Twitter feed that a police captain on the scene confirmed to him that the protesters who were fighting with the security forces when the raid took place were not responsible for the storming of the hotel.

Mr. Maree also reported that witnesses to the raid said it began after four people drove up in a car with no license plates and fired shots to scare protesters away, before storming the hotel. He later posted a photograph of some of the hotel’s guests leaving under the protection of protesters.

Nabila Samak, a spokeswoman for the hotel who posted the calls for help on Twitter, told The Times that the staff members had called Egyptian television stations for help earlier in the evening, well before the attack, after appeals to the security forces for protection went unanswered.

Ms. Samak told Ahram Online that the staff worked to secure the hotel’s guests but were not equipped to cope with the effective collapse of the police force, since, “no guards of hotels in Egypt are armed.” Later she thanked protesters for coming to the aid of the hotel’s staff and guests.

A Saudi women who identified herself as a guest at the hotel, Hilda Ismail, posted updates and photographs from a shelter the guests were taken to during the incident on her Arabic-language Twitter feed.

In one message, she wrote: “If there is no Egyptian security, and if Morsi is sleeping, where are this country’s men!! Come get these dogs, the Semiramis Hotel is being ransacked and we are there.”

Later, Ms. Ismail uploaded a brief video clip of a man attempting to reassure guests that they were safe after the arrival of special forces officers from the ministry of the interior led by a Captain Moataz.

In the clip, the man tells the guests that the police captain wants “to assure you that the hotel is secured and it is under the control of the ministry of the interior now. Within no time you will go back to your rooms and already are in safe hands.” The police, the man added, “will make sure that such thugs will not enter the hotel again. We are sorry.”

Ms. Ismail also posted an image of the ransacked lobby on Twitter.

Ms. Ismai’s claim to have been a guest at the hotel was supported by the fact that she had uploaded a brief video clip, apparently shot from a high floor of the hotel, showing the fighting on the Nile Corniche below.

The luxury hotel chain, which was created in 1946 by Pan American World Airways, did not immediately reply to a request for comment, but an executive in Cairo told Al-Masry Al-Youm, an Egyptian newspaper, that “more than 45 clients insisted on leaving despite the hotel’s offer to relocate them to higher floors, away from the clashes.”

Although the hotel then announced that it would be closed for security reasons, the staff posted another urgent plea for help on Twitter late Tuesday.

Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Cairo.

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Apple announces iPad with double storage capacity

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(Reuters) – Apple Inc said on Tuesday that it will sell a version of its iPad tablet computer with 128 gigabytes of storage, which is twice the capacity of its existing models.


Apple, which has sold more than 120 million iPads so far, said that the new iPad will go on sale February 5, in black or white, for a suggested retail price of $ 799 for the iPad with just Wi-Fi model, and $ 929 for the version that also has a cellular wireless connection.






(Reporting By Sinead Carew; Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)


Tech News Headlines – Yahoo! News





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Jenny McCarthy's Super Bowl Plans: 'Have Fun' with Boys

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By Dahvi Shira





01/30/2013 at 03:35 PM EST



Jenny McCarthy is on a mission. Aside from fulfilling her duties as co-host of the 10th annual Leather & Laces pre-Super Bowl soirée in New Orleans on Feb. 1, the sexy starlet also wants to meet some arm candy for the night.

"I'm going solo," she told PEOPLE on Friday. "Hell no, [I'm not bringing] any dates. I'm not looking for a boyfriend, but I am looking to have fun. What that entails, I don't know, but it is fun to talk to boys when you're single. I want just a sweet, nice – someone who isn't a slime ball."

Adds McCarthy, 40, "It's a really fun party. It attracts the adultsters. I love that term for them. People who grew up because they had to, but still want to go out and have a good time. It's a really, really, really lively group and the party always goes until at least three o' clock in the morning."

Something else she's looking forward to during the outing is reconnecting with fellow co-host and former Playboy star, Kendra Wilkinson, 27.

"She is also a mom and a really, really, really, really nice girl," says McCarthy, who will be clad in Herve Leger on the big night. "I'm looking forward to catching up and seeing how she's doing and having a mom's night out on the town."

As for what that "mom's night out" means, McCarthy expects, "We'll probably have dinner before we go and dance as much as possible. We have the night off. If you're going to host a party, you can't really sit there like a bump on a log. I want to look like my section is having the best time of their life because that kind of sets the tone of the party."

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Soldier looks forward to driving with new arms

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BALTIMORE (AP) — A soldier who lost all four limbs in a roadside bombing in Iraq says he's looking forward to driving and swimming with new arms after undergoing a double-arm transplant.


"I just want to get the most out of these arms, and just as goals come up, knock them down and take it absolutely as far as I can," Brendan Marrocco said Tuesday.


The 26-year-old New Yorker spoke at a news conference at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was joined by surgeons who performed the operation.


After he was wounded, Marrocco said, he felt fine using prosthetic legs, but he hated not having arms.


"You talk with your hands, you do everything with your hands, basically, and when you don't have that, you're kind of lost for a while," he said.


Marrocco said his chief desire is to drive the black Dodge Charger that's been sitting in his garage for three years.


"I used to love to drive," he said. "I'm really looking forward to just getting back to that, and just becoming an athlete again."


Although he doesn't expect to excel at soccer, his favorite sport, Marrocco said he'd like to swim and compete in a marathon using a handcycle.


Marrocco joked that military service members sometimes regard themselves as poorly paid professional athletes. His good humor and optimism are among the qualities doctors cited as signs he will recover much of his arm and hand use in two to three years.


"He's a young man with a tremendous amount of hope, and he's stubborn — stubborn in a good way," said Dr. Jaimie Shores, the hospital's clinical director of hand transplantation. "I think the sky's the limit."


Shores said Marrocco has already been trying to use his hands, although he lacks feeling in the fingers, and he's eager to do more as the slow-growing nerves and muscles mend.


"I suspect that he will be using his hands for just about everything as we let him start trying to do more and more. Right now, we're the ones really kind of holding him back at this point," Shores said.


The procedure was only the seventh double-hand or double-arm transplant ever done in the United States.


The infantryman was injured by a roadside bomb in 2009. He is the first soldier to survive losing all four limbs in the Iraq War.


Marrocco also received bone marrow from the same donor to minimize the medicine needed to prevent rejection. He said he didn't know much about the donor but "I'm humbled by their gift."


The 13-hour operation on Dec. 18 was led by Dr. W.P. Andrew Lee, plastic surgery chief at Hopkins.


Marrocco was being released from the hospital Tuesday but will receive intensive therapy for two years at Hopkins and then at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda.


After a major surgery, human nerves regenerate at a rate of an inch per month, Lee said.


"The progress will be slow, but the outcome will be rewarding," he added.


___


Associated Press Writer David Dishneau contributed to this story from Hagerstown, Md.


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Woman who drowned autistic son gets prison time

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Autism
A 37-year-old San Diego woman who told police she killed her son because of the burden of caring for an autistic child was sentenced Monday to 15 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree murder.


Patricia Corby drowned her 4-year-old son, Daniel, in the family bathtub March 31 while her husband was at work, according to evidence submitted in court.


"I hate you with all my heart and soul," Duane Corby told the woman before San Diego County Superior Court Judge Charles Gill sentenced her for the death of the boy.


After killing her son, she tried to commit suicide but failed, according to evidence.


She wrapped the boy in a blanket and took his lifeless body to a police substation responsible for their Carmel Valley neighborhood.


Under Gill's sentence, Corby will not be eligible for a reduced sentence due to good behavior while in prison. Corby's husband told investigators that he had never seen any signs of mental illness in his wife.


The family had spent $70,000 trying to find help for their son, according to evidence in court.


Corby kept her head bowed in court as relatives told the judge about the pain caused by the boy's death, including an aunt who said the boy is probably looking down from heaven and asking, "Mama, why did you kill me?"


ALSO:


Manti Te'o hoax: Diane O'Meara says she was hounded for photos


Latino kids disproportionately victimized by teachers, lawyer says


Frank Ocean wants Chris Brown prosecuted in clash over parking spot

-- Tony Perry in San Diego


Photo: Patricia Corby at arraignment. Credit: Fox-5 San Diego




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The Lede Blog: Fire at a Nightclub in Southern Brazil

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Medics in Brazil rushed to care for the victims of a deadly fire at a nightclub on Sunday.

Last Updated, Monday, 3:36 p.m. An intense fire ripped through a nightclub crowded with university students in southern Brazil early on Sunday morning, leaving behind a scene of horror, with bodies piled in the club’s bathrooms and on the street. At least 233 people were killed, many of them students in the agronomy and veterinary medicine programs at a local university, police officials said. By Sunday evening, the authorities had released a preliminary list of the dead.

As Simon Romero reports, a flare from a band’s pyrotechnic show ignited the fire in the nightclub, called Kiss, in the southern city of Santa Maria. Rescue workers continued to haul bodies from the still-smoldering building on Sunday.

Extremely disturbing video uploaded to YouTube by witnesses showed scenes of chaos in a makeshift morgue and on the street outside, as medics scurried over the bodies of victims who appeared to be unconscious, checking for signs of life.

Victims of the fire are attended by medics — this video contains very disturbing images.

Officials and witnesses say that security guards at the club had locked some exits, sowing panic as people attempted to flee the flames and smoke.

“Only after a multitude pushed down the security guards did they see the crap they had done,” Murilo de Toledo Tiecher, 26, a medical student who survived the fire, said in comments posted on Facebook.

Shortly before the fire, a club D.J. posted a photo on Facebook from inside the crowded club apparently showing the pyrotechnic display on stage.

A short time later, another photo that was said to be taken outside the club and widely disseminated through social media showed smoke billowing from the front entrance.

The fire quickly engulfed the building.

Firefighters and volunteers who used T-shirts to protect themselves from the smoke struggled to pull people from the burning building.

Firefighters and volunteers tried to pull people from the burning building

Photos from the scene showed frantic friends and family members gathered outside the club and a hospital.

As Mr. Romero reports, witnesses said the fire started about 2 a.m. after the band, Gurizada Fandangueira, took the stage. At least one member of the five-person band, which is based in Santa Maria and advertised its use of pyrotechnics, was said to have been killed in the fire.

In a statement posted on its Facebook page, the nightclub said that its operations are on hold and that it would assist the authorities with an investigation. “We would still like to reiterate that our staff has the highest technical qualifications and was properly trained and prepared for any contingency,” it added.

Overcrowding and a disregard for fire safety codes have led to deadly blazes at nightclubs in the past, though Sunday’s tragedy in Brazil is among the worst.

In 2003 in Rhode Island, also fire set off by a pyrotechnic display at a club killed about 100 people. A fire that erupted under similar circumstances in Russia left almost as many dead in 2009.

And in Luoyang, China in 2000, 309 people were killed in a fire that broke out at a dance hall, forcing some to leap from high-rise windows.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 28, 2013

An earlier version of this post included video of a fire that was not recorded in Brazil on Sunday, but had been mislabeled and uploaded to a fake BBC News channel on YouTube.

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