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Airbnb makes it easier to find a place to stay on business trips
Airbnb wants to make it easier to find work-friendly listings, and its solution is fairly simple. Before, the company would ask if you were traveling for business at checkout. Now, it's offering a work trip toggle that you can select at the beginning of your search. The feature will bring up listings that are more relevant for business trips.
iOS 11's Control Center buttons don't fully turn off Bluetooth or WiFi
If you've updated to Apple's new iOS 11, you might have played around with the new Control Center. You also might think that toggling Bluetooth and WiFi "off" in the Center might actually, you know, turn them off. Turns out, you'd be wrong. As noted over at Motherboard, hitting these buttons really only disconnects you from any WiFi or Bluetooth devices you might be connected to.
AT&T creates virtual work partition for smartphone users
In today's BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) workplace, there's an issue that often arises. Many smartphone owners who are choosing to use their personal devices for work use find it obtrusive when corporate IT departments wish to manage their devices. Now AT&T has introduced a new technology called "Toggle" to allow employees to access work apps from their own smartphones without becoming a security threat. Toggle is similar to virtualization and can be installed after an AT&T customer buys an iPhone or certain models of Android smartphones. The technology also works on the iPad as well. To enter the "work side" of their phones, users tap a special application icon that is a portal to work-related email and text messaging. Any document attachments that are accessed through Toggle are encrypted, and Toggle even has its own secure web browser. AT&T will help corporate customers set up private app stores for custom business applications. For those apps, data is pushed to phones over SSL, and administrators can manage the work partition as much as they like -- all without infringing on the privacy of their employees. The cost to corporations is US$750 for configuration and training, plus $6.50 per device per month. There's also a support fee of $1.50 - $2.50 per month.
AT&T's BYOD effort coming to BlackBerry, iOS and Windows Phone with Toggle 2.0
If you work in a corporate environment, it's probably fair to say that you've at least heard of the trend known as BYOD (bring your own device). While the idea remains just that for many enterprises, AT&T is hoping to make the transition a bit more practical for everyone with its latest Toggle 2.0 platform. First and foremost, the app separates one's work and home life, and allows IT admins to ensure that work content remains separate, encrypted and secure. It also allows users to draw on their business wireless plan while in work mode, and then switch to their own personal plan while off the clock. AT&T first launched Toggle for Android late last year, but with its new Toggle 2.0 system -- developed in conjunction with OpenPeak -- it plans to extend the platform to iOS devices in the coming weeks. Versions for BlackBerry and Windows Phone are also in the pipeline, and are said to arrive by year's end. Businesses will need to pony up $6.50 per month, per device for the service, which is on top of any implementation fees and optional managed services. To learn more of what Toggle 2.0 might mean for you, check the full PR after the break.
OWC's Mercury Accelsior PCIe SSD is Mac bootable, strictly neutral
If you've ever tried to jam a regular SSD into your Mac, then you'll know that many off-the-shelf drives feel like they're tailored and tested for, ahem, someone else. Not so with OWC's Mercury Accelsior, which claims to be the only Mac bootable and Mac supported PCIe SSD on the market. Regardless of which platform you use it with, however, the dual-SandForce card promises some neat tricks with its 24nm Toshiba Toggle NAND. Sequential read and write speeds are around 50 percent higher than what you'd get from a regular SATA III drive, with the cheapest 120GB model ($360) offering 758MB/s reads and 743MB/s writes. Random performance is notched up too, with around 100K IOPS in both directions. The 960GB version costs a coldly precise $2,096, but still -- a potential side order for when the Mac Pro line finally gets another refresh?
Optional boss modes making a comeback in Mists of Pandaria?
Kaivax hit the forums to answer a player's question about Ulduar and talk about the fondness the dungeon has retained amongst the playerbase and where the optional boss modes have gone. Back during the first half of Wrath of the Lich King, "choose your own difficulty" encounters and in-fight hard mode triggers were staples of the encounters in Ulduar and the Obsidian Sanctum. When Trial of the Crusader launched, Blizzard implemented the UI-based difficulty toggle. Players have expressed desire to return to the old days, feeling that the toggle method is just too robotic when encounters could be designed around cool difficulty-swap mechanics. In his post, Kaivax hints that the design teams are thinking about bringing back these mechanics for some fights in the upcoming expansion, Mists of Pandaria. Rather than selecting a normal or hard mode toggle before pulling an encounter, Ulduar raid groups were tasked with completing different objectives during the encounter or defeating the boss mechanics in a different order to activate hard mode. Famously, players would press a large red button behind Mimiron labelled "DO NOT PUSH THIS BUTTON," activating the encounter and a rather angry Titanic watcher. Other fights during Wrath of the Lich King such as Freya and Sartharion featured a "choose your own difficulty" mechanic wherein the player's choices before the encounter increased or decreased the boss' overall difficulty. Harder combinations of abilities would yield more impressive items. Will Mists of Pandaria bring back our beloved "choose your difficulty" encounters and in-fight hard mode triggers? I know I'd like to get another Sartharion-style encounter, especially with mount rewards like the original provided. Read the full blue post behind the break below.
CyanogenMod 9 may feature a 4G LTE toggle switch for the Verizon Galaxy Nexus
We were slightly disappointed when we discovered the Verizon-branded Samsung Galaxy Nexus didn't come with an easily-accessible LTE toggle switch, but we had a feeling it wouldn't be long before the development community came in with an acceptable solution. Thanks to Gregory Sarrica, we may be seeing a fast toggle button for the next-gen internet connectivity included in a future build of CyanogenMod 9. According to Gregory, it's getting tested right now and still needs to be reviewed before it gets accepted into the build, but he hopes it'll show up in builds as early as next week. There's no guarantees yet, of course, but he's provided us with video evidence of the new functionality to whet our appetites for now.[Thanks, @gsarrica]
AT&T Toggle separates your mobile work and play, allows for IT meddling
Having trouble separating your bird slingshotting from your mergers and acquisitions? Have no fear, AT&T has announced its new Toggle service, which promises users the ability to keep their work and home lives apart on a single Android smartphone or tablet. The feature keeps business information secure and lets IT admins manage access to company resources, add or delete business apps and even wipe corporate info off of a device, in the event the employee leaves the company. The app is coming later this year and will be compatible with devices running Android 2.2 or higher. There's no word on pricing yet, but more info can be found in the press release after the break.
Hanwha unleashes HDMI / USB adapter for iPad, iPhone 4, and fourth-gen iPod touch
Feel the desire to watch your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch (fourth gen) videos on the big screen, but looking for something with a little more girth than Apple's HDMI solution? Hanwha's latest dongle might do the job. As you can see above, in place of the original adapter's dock connector port is a USB 2.0 socket -- compatible with cameras supporting mass storage connection -- alongside the 720p-friendly HDMI port, but you'll have to use the switch to toggle between the two modes. And that little mini-USB port on the far right? Well, it's there to provide some juice to "reduce battery drain," but probably not enough to charge up your iDevice. If you're still interested and have a friend in Japan, Hanwha's charging ¥5,980 (around $73), which is almost double that of Apple's $39 connector. Is USB support worth such a price jump? Your call.
Samsung and Toshiba double-down on 400Mbps DDR 2.0 NAND flash memory standard
Our Peter Cetera album collection isn't exactly getting any larger, yet despite the progress of technology every time we get a new smartphone pulling over all those soothing hits never seems to get any faster. Even a fool can see laggy NAND flash memory is the culprit, and Samsung and Toshiba have a fix with a new DDR NAND flash standard. It offers 400Mbps transfer rates thanks to what they're calling "toggle DDR 2.0," similar to the tech in Samsung's latest SSD, effectively boiling down to a 30nm asynchronous design that's three times quicker than current DDR 1.0 NAND chips. Both companies are opening this standard for others, and hoping that their work will be the inspiration for faster devices and SSDs worldwide.
Swap full-screen Cover Flow and video in iTunes
Here comes the community at Mac OS X Hints with yet another cool trick which, in this case, should help us waste just a little more time in iTunes 7.1.1. I specify that latest version because this hint concerns Cover Flow's new found ability to run in full-screen mode: as it turns out, you can command-tab between a full-screen video and Cover Flow. This is enabled by the apparent fact that that cmd-tab doesn't toggle Mac OS X's app switcher when in iTunes is full-screened; you have to hit Escape to get out of this environment for cmd-tab to get back to its normal duties. This is a slick, very eye candy feature that, in a way, I am surprised Apple didn't do at least a little bragging about with the latest iTunes update.
XCM unveils Multi-Component Cable v2: console connections unite
We're all about keeping things nice and well kempt, and if you're the type who's sporting a house full of consoles, you know precisely how difficult a clean wiring solution is to maintain. Helping to clear out that rat's nest of cabling is XCM -- those same folks who brought us the XFPS -- which is delivering the Multi-Component Cable v2 to simply that cord conundrum. Sporting a trio of connectors, this single device can simultaneously connect to your Xbox 360, Wii, PlayStation 3, and reportedly your dusty PS2 as well, and plugs into your TV set via component outs. As you might expect, a simple flip of the toggle switch changes the console you see on screen without you having to risk your life climbing atop the television. Currently, the device is still stuck in "preview" mode, but XCM promises to have a full list of specs and availability details ready soon, and if you can catch a video sneak peek after the jump.
