How to turn an iPhone into a professional video camera

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By Chris Stone9:45AM BST 10 Jul 2013

The Telegraph used an iPhone to film, edit and upload instant video reviews from Glastonbury festival. Chris Stone reviews the accessories he used to do it.

Mention filming on a smartphone in professional video circles and you'll generally be met with a barrage of derision. While camera phone design has come a long way, the limitations are considerable when compared to a professional video camera.

However, a host of companies have developed some innovative solutions to these problems. For The Telegraph's coverage of Glastonbury 2013 I put some of those accessories to the test, to find out if it was possible to turn a smartphone into a professional journalism workhorse. With a few pieces of external hardware, I was able to shoot, edit and deliver instant on-the-ground video reports direct from the festival for immediate inclusion in our live blog and our YouTube channel I've Just Seen. Here's how I did it.

CAMERA – iPhone 5
While there are many excellent, arguably superior, smartphones on the market, most accessory manufacturers have geared their product line towards Apple's iPhone. Our decision was made for us.

LENSES – Olloclip (£59.99)
The Olloclip is a small, simple to use lens attachment which slides onto the corner of the phone. The current model features three lenses in one: a wide angle, a fish-eye and a macro. I found myself using the wide angle on almost every video I made, not just to counter the iPhone's ludicrously narrow image but also to capture the scale of the event – and it worked perfectly. The fish-eye and macro are much more stylistic, and therefore I used them less frequently. The Olloclip fast became one of my favourite pieces of kit, and I would now find it indispensable for iPhone filming and photography.

AUDIO – iRig Pre (£24.99) and iRig Mic (£49.99)
Audio was important because I was recording presenters speaking to camera and wanted to attach professional microphones with a 3-pin XLR connection. The iRig Pre is a handy little preamp which takes takes an XLR input and turns it into a 3.5mm TRRS jack which the iPhone will accept, while the iRig mic is a handheld microphone which plugs directly into the iphone itself. Both have a built in headphone socket allowing users to monitor audio when paired with the iRig Recorder app, which also allows you to control levels. The iRig mic was particularly impressive at eliminating background noise, while the iRig pre was quick and simple to use. I did find it tricky to get the input levels right with no markings on the unit's gain control, but with a bit of practice I was recording perfectly acceptable audio – far better than I would have expected on a phone.

STABILISATION – Steadicam Smoothee (£139)
The Steadicam was first created for the famous tracking shots in Stanley Kubrick's 1980 horror, “The Shining”. Three decades on and Steadicam have joined the smartphone accessories race with the Smoothee. An ingeniously simple balanced weight system holds the phone steady on a frictionless ball joint, meaning you can achieve wonderfully steady, gliding shots. After a bit of practice the Smoothee is deceptively simple to use, and incredibly effective. The unit relies on weight and balance, so unfortunately by the time I had attached all my other accessories it was impossible to get the steady glide I wanted. Despite this I used the Smoothee on every shot without fail, as even by gripping the base unit with my hand – which you're not supposed to do – I was achieving a much steadier shot than would have been possible by just about any other means.

LIGHTING – Manfrotto KLYP & 24 LED (£79.95)
With the iPhone's notorious inability to deal with low light situations, the KLYP was a piece of kit I was looking to rely heavily on for night-time reports. The LED lamp was certainly effective at delivering a blast of soft, white light where it's needed, and the on-board dimmer switch meant I had direct control of the levels. Sadly the iphone struggled with the contrast between the light from the LED and the dark background. It gave me a functional image, but not a pretty one.

360 STILLS & VIDEOS – Bubblescope (£49.99)
Part of my remit was to deliver “colour” to the Telegraph's Glastonbury live blog. Enter the Bubblescope. Using a clever system of mirrors and lenses, it enabled me to create 360 degree tableaux much like Google's streetview images. This is a wonderful concept which proved popular on the live blog, but the Bubblescope is not without its limitations. The 360 image is extracted from a small doughnut-shaped picture on the iphone camera, so it suffers from pixellation (and, unsurprisingly, warping) when blown up to its full scale. The Bubblescope would also benefit from a tripod attachment and timer function: currently the unit relies on being hand-held which makes it very difficult to frame out the photographer's grinning face. This might be fine for most users but for creative purposes it would be useful to not have to feature in every bubble.

EDIT SUITE – iMovie (£2.99)
After experimenting with a couple of different editing apps, I chose iMovie for its simplicity and ease of use. Of course it is limited, but it proved surprisingly efficient for making very basic cuts and very easy to pick up. I would have liked to be able to add more than one video track, or to make a cut in the middle of a clip rather than importing different parts of a clip then butting them together, but for the purposes of a quick chop job it more than sufficed. I exported my clip to the Photo roll, then uploaded to YouTube via the Capture app. Over a crowded 3G network this would have been intermittent at best, but on 4G I was uploading 90 second videos in approximately real time.

My video colleagues might laugh at me, but I am a convert to the use of smartphones for professional news gathering - under the right circumstances. With a few accessories it is possible to make the iPhone work harder than I thought possible, and the ability to shoot, edit and upload using just one little unit is incredibly beguiling. It will never be a professional camera, and I would always advocate shooting on the best kit available and editing properly when circumstances allow. But when you need to turn around short clips instantly and file from the - or indeed a - field, the technology is finally there to do so.

Dropbox wants to connect every app, file and device

Ruchi Sanghvi, vice president of operations, leads efforts to transform Dropbox into a full-blown developer platform. Previously, Sanghvi was the first female engineer at Facebook, where she co-created News Feed, among other major tools

Ariel Zambelich/Wired

In the vast San Francisco loft that Dropbox calls home, there's a Lego room, a life-size plastic shark, and a Golden Gate Bridge mosaic made from disassembled Rubik's Cubes. Chipper millennials who may or may not be worth millions of dollars zip by on scooters and Ripstiks. Coders dress in sneakers, untucked shirts, and ties, just to show how deeply they're submerged in their latest project. And if you wander into the cafeteria, you'll find a chef who once worked at Apple and Google.

There's even a music room, a glassed-in space that looks an awful lot like a recording studio. Ostensibly for "jamming" after a tough day of work, the room has long been a part of the Dropbox universe, and according to CEO Drew Houston, it gets upgraded each time the company moves offices, beefed up with real amps and instruments.

Houston is himself a musician, and he has an engineer's affection for musical hardware. "When I first got into guitar, I was terrible because I was just learning," he says. "But I had all the pedals."

And yet, since starting Dropbox in 2007, Houston and co-founder Arash Ferdowsi have taken the opposite approach to running their company. The pair set out to solve a simple, irritating problem and never got distracted. They didn't concern themselves with bells and whistles -- or the equivalent of effects pedals. They focused on finding the most elegant way to sync files across devices, so you wouldn't have to email them to yourself. Instead of letting groovy digital stompboxes dazzle them, they practiced their scales and chords until they laid a seemingly unshakable foundation in the fundamentals.

The result is a product used by 175 million people -- and a company valued at billions of dollars.

But after all that single-mindedness, Houston and Ferdowsi now want to let their baby sing. Today, at Dropbox's first-ever developers conference, the company is officially launching a new set of coding tools designed to push Dropbox into every corner of your digital life. Not content to stay sequestered inside the box, the company's co-founders are unveiling ways for developers to meld their service with every app on every device you own.

For the first five or so years of its existence, Dropbox was synonymous with its "magic folder." Save your files in the Dropbox folder on your computer, and they "magically" reappear in your Dropbox apps on your phone and tablet and in your Dropbox account on the web. Now, if developers take to the company's new tools, the service will escape the confines of this folder, fusing with third-party apps running on practically every computer and smartphone operating system.

Houston wants Dropbox to become the "spiritual successor to the hard drive." He says the hard drive needs to be replaced because so many of us are doing so much computing on devices that don't fit the traditional paradigm for working with files. Users don't interact with files on iOS, Android, or the web the way they do on PCs. Apps don't have "open" or "save" options that launch a separate window where you tap through a folder tree.

With its new Chooser and Saver options -- the first of a planned family of features the company calls Drop-ins -- developers can make Dropbox the "open" and "save" windows in their apps. (For now, the Chooser is available for iOS, Android, web, and mobile web. The Saver is just available for the web and mobile web to start, with other platforms to follow).

"Tom Cruise in Minority Report is not carrying around a thumb drive or logging into Gmail to pick up his attachment"

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston

For example, the much-hyped Mailbox email app -- bought by Dropbox for a reported $100 million shortly after launching -- will now be able to send attachments, which neither Apple's native iOS email app nor Google's iOS Gmail app can do (except for photos, in the latter case). In the new version of Mailbox, tapping the paper clip icon at the bottom of the new message window opens a list of Dropbox files in the same way clicking the paper clip in the PC version of Gmail opens a window for browsing files. (Yahoo has already incorporated a version of the Chooser in the web version of its email app).

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston

Ariel Zambelich/Wired

But Houston and company don't want to stop at files. In large part because mobile devices have spawned a less file-centric user experience, much of the data we generate and access doesn't have a separate life as a document. You don't play Angry Birds on your phone and then save your game as a ".ang" file. If Dropbox's gambit works, however, you will be able to pick up the game on your iPad where you left off playing on your Galaxy S4.

"Our dream is to be able to work across all of these walls," Houston says.

Dropbox may be in a unique position to do just that. For now, the company has no overarching obligations to Apple, Google, Facebook, or Microsoft. While pundits have recommended that some big tech company ought to snap up Dropbox while it's still relatively affordable, Dropbox is in a position where it can layer itself over competing operating systems while being beholden to none. Says Houston: "No engineer in Cupertino is thinking: 'How do I make this work with Android?'" Leave that thinking to Dropbox.

With something it calls Datastores, Dropbox says it's giving developers a way to make their apps truly cross-device and cross-platform. Datastores allow apps to write data about themselves into Dropbox from one device and read that data on another. At Dropbox's offices, developers showed Wired.com a simple drawing app they built as a proof-of-concept. When Ruchi Sanghvi, Dropbox's vice president of operations, drew a heart in the app on her iPad screen, the same heart appeared in near-realtime in a version of the app running on the web.

The time is near when the "pervasive data layer" becomes an expected part of the fabric of everyday life

"Nobody talks of their content anymore as 'my files and folders,'" Sanghvi says. Instead, she says, we talk in terms of the content itself: photos, videos, music, games. Taken together, she says Datastores and Drop-ins transform Dropbox into a platform that enables a "pervasive data layer" -- a way for all your digital stuff to follow you everywhere, regardless of device, operating system, or app.

"This is what's going to make the kinds of things like Minority Report possible," she says.

Of course, pervasive data in Minority Report powered a dystopian police state and creepily personalised advertising. But Sanghvi -- who oversaw the development of Facebook's platform for third-party developers as the social network's first female engineer -- says the company has no plans to leverage users' content.

"We essentially let users do what they want with their data wherever they want, however they want it. It's theirs," she says.

In Sanghvi's vision, Dropbox makes our data more ours than ever before. Take, say, an app for calorie-counting or keeping a to-do list. Today, the data generated in those apps tends to sit in isolation, cut off from the wider world beyond the app itself. Datastores give that data a home-away-from-home in Dropbox that the company says will provide a new measure of portability.

Sanghvi imagines a future in which users could extract the information housed in Datastores from, for example, a fitness-tracking app, combine that with data from a healthcare app, and hand the result to a doctor. In this scenario, Dropbox doesn't just free apps from iOS- or Android-dependence. Instead of just letting you work on that spreadsheet from your office desktop at home on your iPad, Dropbox becomes a data liberator, a transparency tool that finally makes your personal, app-specific information independent.

Whether Dropbox realises its dream of trans-app ubiquity depends on how well the company can sell developers on the power and possibilities of these new options. Every Dropboxer I asked insists that even the Apple borg isn't likely to block the kind of cross-platform utopia Dropbox envisions. The technical roadblocks would be complex to engineer, since the new Dropbox features operate purely on the app level, they say. Hindering harmony between iOS and Android would require hobbling Dropbox on iOS itself, which seems not worth the alienation.

"People are using these platforms to share and collaborate. They're going to need tools to do that," says Ferdowsi. "If Apple is going to ban tools that allow you to collaborate outside the ecosystem, I think that would end up hurting Apple."

In the meantime, Dropbox isn't satisfied to stay a handmaiden to other technologies, or other technology companies. Though employing only about 130 engineers, Houston and Ferdowsi have assembled a formidable technical team. The roster includes veterans of the key potential frenemies: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft. The  inventor of the Python programming language works there.

Also, along with Sanghvi, who was acqui-hired when Dropbox bought her startup, Cove, her co-founder and fellow early-Facebooker also joined the company. Aditya Agarwal, vice president of engineering at Dropbox, was formerly the director of engineering at Facebook. When Agarwal joined, the whole company consisted of Mark Zuckerberg and about four or five other engineers. During Agarwal's time at Facebook, the number of users on the social network increased at least 100-fold, to more than a half-billion users. Agarwal says he decided to join Dropbox because he wanted to be a part of the next thing that he believed had the potential to become as big as Facebook. He wanted to be a part of the next billion-user platform. So he asked himself: "Do one billion people need this?"

He believes they do, and that Dropbox has the chops to embrace them all. "I hope our product is strong enough that everyone in the world will want to use it," Agarwal says.

But what happens if they do? What does Dropbox become if it transforms into what Drew Houston calls the "fabric that ties your stuff together"? What's in it for Dropbox?

To hear the founders tell it, the plan is refreshingly simple and easy to understand for a Silicon Valley striver. The more places Dropbox touches people, the more people will put stuff in their Dropboxes. And the more stuff you put in Dropbox, the more you come to rely on your pervasive data -- the more likely you are to pay for more space. Dropbox doesn't say how many of its 175 million users are paying customers, though the company does say those users add 1 billion files to the service every day. Some of those people will need more space.

Still, storage is becoming ever-cheaper. To become the default place you put your stuff, Dropbox knows it has to be first and best. This means doing more than just storage. Becoming the default platform for every digital thing we make and consume isn't just an idealistic vision of the future. It's a business necessity.

"Tom Cruise in Minority Report is not carrying around a thumb drive or logging into Gmail to pick up his attachment," Houston says. The time is near, he believes, when the "pervasive data layer" becomes an expected part of the fabric of everyday life. It's just a question of which company builds the best loom for weaving that virtual tapestry. "It's going to work this way in the future. Why not us?"

Microsoft quietly shuts down msn tv , once known as web tv

Microsoft said that its MSN TV service will be closing down at the end of September, in a post on its website and in an email to users.

MSN TV, of course, was born of WebTV, which was thought up by well-known entrepreneur Steve Perlman. The software giant bought it at the height of the Web 1.0 boom in mid-1997, paying $503 million.

The service, which included a dedicated hardware device attached to a television, went through a number of iterations over the years, including being rebranded as MSN TV in 2001. Some of its technology went into the Xbox, but — in general — its recent history was one of dwindling users.

Microsoft’s TV unit also went on to do Mediaroom, software for set-top boxes used by AT&T for U-verse. That business is in the process of being sold to Ericsson (and probably explains the timing of this shutdown).

There are still a number of devices that hook to TVs and deliver content, including Roku and Apple TV.Apple’s Tim Cook said in an interview at the recentD: All Things Digital conference that the interactive TV arena “continues to be an area of great interest to us.”

“When you look at the TV experience, it’s not an experience that I think very many people love,” Cook said. “It’s not one that has been brought up to date for this decade. It’s still an experience much like 10 years ago or 20 years ago.”

But the business was over at MSN TV. Said Microsoft:

“WebTV (later called MSN TV) started in 1996 with the goal to bring new people ‘online’ and to give those already online an easy, hassle-free means of accessing the Internet from the comfort of their homes. Later, MSN TV 2 was released with vastly greater power and features. Since then, the Web has continued to evolve at a breathtaking pace, and there are many new ways to access the Internet. Accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to end the MSN TV service on September 30th, 2013. We are working with our customers to ensure the transition is as seamless as possible.”

And here’s an email sent to existing subscribers:

Dear MSN TV Subscriber,

For the past decade, we have been excited to build products that provided our customers with easy access to the Internet on TV. Unfortunately, all good things must eventually come to an end. Today we are announcing that we will be closing the MSN TV service. The last day of the MSN TV service will be September 30, 2013. We want this transition to be as smooth as possible for you. This letter explains what you need to do before the service ends if you want to have access to your email, favorites, Scrapbook photos, Page Builder pages, and any other data.

Before the MSN TV service ends, you need to make sure that all the users on your account have upgraded to Outlook.com (formerly called Hotmail), saved any favorites and Scrapbook photos to SkyDrive, and archived any published Page Builder web pages that you wish to save. We have created an MSN TV Closure FAQ that provides detailed information on how to do all of these. Please read it at http://www.msntv.com/msntv/ClosureFAQ.asp.

After you have upgraded to Outlook.com, your MSN TV email address, along with your existing email, will continue to be available for you to use. Outlook.com offers many advantages, such as accessing your email from a computer or smartphone that has a connection to the Internet. From a computer or smartphone, you can accessOutlook.com by visiting http://www.outlook.com.

If you would like access to your favorites and Scrapbook photos after the MSN TV service ends, you will need to copy them to SkyDrive before the service ends. SkyDrive provides storage in the cloud, so you can easily access and store your favorites and photos all in one place and sync with other devices. You can also share your photos on SkyDrive with family and friends. You can learn more about SkyDrive at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/overview from a computer or smartphone.

To ease the transition and help ensure you maintain Internet access, we will be providing some special offers for both the MSN Dial-up and Premium services. You will need a computer, Microsoft account, and active MSN TV subscription. Visit http://get.msn.com/msntv.aspx to view and sign up for one of these offers.

Many of you already have a computer for accessing the Internet. For those of you who do not, we recommend visiting the Microsoft Store for a wide variety of device options. Go to http://www.microsoftstore.com.

We want to sincerely thank you for your continued support of the MSN TV service over the years. We have enjoyed bringing this technology to such loyal customers.

If you have any questions that are not answered in the MSN TV Closure FAQ, you can contact Customer Support at 800-469-3288 between 6 am – 8 pm PST. Again, we want to thank you for your support and commitment to Microsoft products.

The MSN TV Team

Nokia Lumia 1020 leaked press image reveals a trio of colors

A few days after we saw it wearing AT&T livery, the Nokia Lumia 1020 appeared in yet another press image. This time around, the Windows Phone 8 imaging powerhouse appeared free of carrier branding, and showcasing three colors - white, black, and yellow.

Alongside the leaked press image, some fresh details about the handset's specs emerged, including its much talked about camera unit. The latter promises to be a smartphone photographer's dream when the handset goes official.

Reportedly, the 41MP camera unit of the Nokia Lumia 1020 will be capable of simultaneously capturing 32MP and 5MP images with 16:9 ratio, as well as a 38MP ones with 4:3 aspect. The 5MP image will be oversampled by combining seven pixels into one "super pixel." The camera will unsurprisingly feature optical image stabilization (OIS) and F2.2 aperture.

The Pro Camera app which left us wondering last time will bring proper enthusiast settings to the user. They include the option to manually tweak ISO, white balance, focus, shutter speed, and the flash settings.

Further leaked specs for the Nokia Lumia 1020 included never before seen on WP handset 2GB of RAM, 32GB of non-expandable storage, NFC, FM radio, flip to silence gesture, and optional wireless charging.

Nokia Lumia 1020 is allegedly expected to hit AT&T's shelves by the end of this month. No details have been spilled on international availability.

The Nokia Lumia 1020 will break cover this coming Thursday in New York City. We will be covering the event live from the spot, so be sure to tune in for the full scoop on the smartphone.

Facebook Patents Point To An All-Seeing, All-Hearing Instagram Video

Facial recognition, landmark detection, and even audio cues picked up through your phone’s microphone could let Instagram Video intelligently suggest a cover frame for mini-movies or even tag them, according to recent Facebook patents. The tech could route each video to the right people and put its best (motionless) foot forward so it gets viewed amongst the sea of more easily-consumed photos.

When I first discovered these patents a month ago, it was hard to envision how they’d be applied. Facebook hadn’t been putting much focus on recording video in its own app. The schematics described choosing a cover frame for videos you shot — something Facebook’s camera didn’t offer — while the patents imagined using every sensor possible to help you make that choice. It was all a little hazy.

The Instagram Video launch made it a lot clearer.

Why Cover Frames Matter

Currently after you’ve shot an video onInstagram, you can scrub your finger across a timeline to choose what’s shown as the video’s thumbnail. This is a costly extra step in the publishing process that makes Instagram Video feel more sluggish than Vine.

While picking a cover frame might seem mundane or annoying, it hugely important. Videos are just a much bigger investment to view than photos. You can gleam the beauty of a classic Instagram as quickly or slowly as you want. With video, you’re at the mercy of the director. Deciding to watch a video is a time investment. Maybe only 15 seconds, but on mobile that can feel agonizingly long if the content is boring.

The only clues to whether that investment will be well spent are the author’s reputation, the description, and the cover frame.

Not all frames of a video are ripe for being paralyzed, pulled out on context, and put on display as the defining moment of a moment. Right now Facebook automatically gives you about 15 frames from across your video to choose from ,though you drag your finger to choose frames in between. There’s no suggestion of which is best and it defaults to the first frame of the video.

But with these patents, Facebook and Instagram could pick out the most interesting moments of your video, determine who and what is in them, and recommend tags or what to use as your cover frame.

Instagram Sees Your Smile, Hears Your Laugh

The patents were granted in April 2013 and filed for in October 2011 by Facebook and its employees Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, David Garcia, and Soleio Cuervo. The patents are for Automatic Photo Capture Based on Social Components and Identity Recognition (’80), Preferred images from captured video sequence (’00), and Image selection from captured video sequence based on social components (’65).

Essentially, they describe technology for looking at each frame of a video as if it were a photo. Detection algorithms can then be used to identify people, written words, brands, and landmarks through facial and pattern recognition.

“The image capturing process may analyze frames of the sequence of video frames to identify…a place (e.g., Eiffel Tower, Golden Gate Bridge, Yosemite National Park, Hollywood), a business or an organization (e.g., a coffee shop, San Francisco Giants), or a brand or product (e.g., Coca-Cola, Louis Vuitton).”

This could let Facebook suggest formal tags of people, places, and brands in a video, or just quietly log that information as metadata to be used for determining who to surface the video to in the news feed. For example, the video could be shown more prominently to people nearby, who Like those landmarks or brands, or who are friends of those who appear in the video. Though Instagram uses an unfiltered feed, it recently added a tagging system that could take advantage of this kind of detection.

That same information could also be used to suggest the best possible cover frames, such as ones featuring people or famous places. The patents also outline picking the best frame by detecting good lighting or contrast, and even detecting preferred facial expressions. If you pan over a couch full of friends, Instagram could suggest a cover frame where they’re all well let and smiling. The patents also describe using data from a phone’s accelerometer to pick a still, stable image for the cover frame rather than a blurry one.

What most excites me, though, is the potential use of microphone for determining the most interesting moment of a video:

“The image selection process may analyze content of the voice segments (e.g., by using a speech recognition algorithm) for indication of importance (e.g., “Say cheese!”, “Cheese!”, “This is beautiful!”, “Amazing!”)

That means Instagram could potentially *hear* you shouting with joy when your camera lens hovers over a beautiful sunset, skyline, or smile, and then make it easy to choose that part of the video as the cover.

As the battle to be the premier social video app rages on between Instagram, Vine, and other competitors, serious technology like this will become a factor. The apps need to stay lightweight with a minimum number of steps before publishing. While extra features and editing tools might appeal to power users, it’s the elimination or simplification of core flow that may turn the tides for one developer or another.

Lucky for Instagram, its parent company Facebook has spent years envisioning how to smooth the media capture and sharing experience. Boz, Garcia, and Soleio seem to have had foresight that technology would eventually make recording video almost as easy as snapping a photo. If there patents bear fruit for Instagram, consuming video could get easier as well. and we might actually watch more of the moments our friends are capturing.

     

White Motorola Droid Ultra alleged photo shows up

An alleged image of the Motorola Droid Ultra has hit the web well ahead of the phone’s official announcement.

After just seeing a picture reportedly showing the new Droid MAXX, we’re now looking at the white version of the Droid Ultra, at least according to xda-developers user xavierk75. However, the user has not specified where he got the image from or other details of the device. In case it matters, we’ll also notice that xavierk75′s forum photo post is his first and only post on xda – is it a controlled leak by any chance?

The phone is said to be the XT1080, a device that has already been spotted at the FCC – at the time, we wondered whether the XT1080 model stood for one of the new Ultra models.

Moreover, we’ve already seen the Ultra listed on Motorola’s website, so it’s probably only a matter of time until we see the company announce this particular device.

The image reveals an Android smartphone that packs a large display with rather thin bezels, a front-facing camera near the top speaker and sensors, three capacitive buttons, and a on/off button and volume rockers on the right side of the device.

The device also features a Motorola logo on the top left corner, a logo that’s similar to the one spotted on other leaked Motorola handsets – including a rumored Moto X prototype – and is clearly marked as a “Motorola confidential property.”

The Droid Ultra in this image is looks like the Droid MAXX that we’ve seen the other day, although we’re yet to confirm any of these two devices. According to known leakster @evleaks, the Droid Ultra is the XT1080 while the Droid MAXX is the XT1080M.

That said, considering the variety of Motorola-related leaks and reports, we expect to see the company announce these devices sooner rather than later.

Microsoft quietly shuts down msn tv , once known as web tv

Microsoft said that its MSN TV service will be closing down at the end of September, in a post on its website and in an email to users.

MSN TV, of course, was born of WebTV, which was thought up by well-known entrepreneur Steve Perlman. The software giant bought it at the height of the Web 1.0 boom in mid-1997, paying $503 million.

The service, which included a dedicated hardware device attached to a television, went through a number of iterations over the years, including being rebranded as MSN TV in 2001. Some of its technology went into the Xbox, but — in general — its recent history was one of dwindling users.

Microsoft’s TV unit also went on to do Mediaroom, software for set-top boxes used by AT&T for U-verse. That business is in the process of being sold to Ericsson (and probably explains the timing of this shutdown).

There are still a number of devices that hook to TVs and deliver content, including Roku and Apple TV.Apple’s Tim Cook said in an interview at the recentD: All Things Digital conference that the interactive TV arena “continues to be an area of great interest to us.”

“When you look at the TV experience, it’s not an experience that I think very many people love,” Cook said. “It’s not one that has been brought up to date for this decade. It’s still an experience much like 10 years ago or 20 years ago.”

But the business was over at MSN TV. Said Microsoft:

“WebTV (later called MSN TV) started in 1996 with the goal to bring new people ‘online’ and to give those already online an easy, hassle-free means of accessing the Internet from the comfort of their homes. Later, MSN TV 2 was released with vastly greater power and features. Since then, the Web has continued to evolve at a breathtaking pace, and there are many new ways to access the Internet. Accordingly, we have made the difficult decision to end the MSN TV service on September 30th, 2013. We are working with our customers to ensure the transition is as seamless as possible.”

And here’s an email sent to existing subscribers:

Dear MSN TV Subscriber,

For the past decade, we have been excited to build products that provided our customers with easy access to the Internet on TV. Unfortunately, all good things must eventually come to an end. Today we are announcing that we will be closing the MSN TV service. The last day of the MSN TV service will be September 30, 2013. We want this transition to be as smooth as possible for you. This letter explains what you need to do before the service ends if you want to have access to your email, favorites, Scrapbook photos, Page Builder pages, and any other data.

Before the MSN TV service ends, you need to make sure that all the users on your account have upgraded to Outlook.com (formerly called Hotmail), saved any favorites and Scrapbook photos to SkyDrive, and archived any published Page Builder web pages that you wish to save. We have created an MSN TV Closure FAQ that provides detailed information on how to do all of these. Please read it at http://www.msntv.com/msntv/ClosureFAQ.asp.

After you have upgraded to Outlook.com, your MSN TV email address, along with your existing email, will continue to be available for you to use. Outlook.com offers many advantages, such as accessing your email from a computer or smartphone that has a connection to the Internet. From a computer or smartphone, you can accessOutlook.com by visiting http://www.outlook.com.

If you would like access to your favorites and Scrapbook photos after the MSN TV service ends, you will need to copy them to SkyDrive before the service ends. SkyDrive provides storage in the cloud, so you can easily access and store your favorites and photos all in one place and sync with other devices. You can also share your photos on SkyDrive with family and friends. You can learn more about SkyDrive at http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/skydrive/overview from a computer or smartphone.

To ease the transition and help ensure you maintain Internet access, we will be providing some special offers for both the MSN Dial-up and Premium services. You will need a computer, Microsoft account, and active MSN TV subscription. Visit http://get.msn.com/msntv.aspx to view and sign up for one of these offers.

Many of you already have a computer for accessing the Internet. For those of you who do not, we recommend visiting the Microsoft Store for a wide variety of device options. Go to http://www.microsoftstore.com.

We want to sincerely thank you for your continued support of the MSN TV service over the years. We have enjoyed bringing this technology to such loyal customers.

If you have any questions that are not answered in the MSN TV Closure FAQ, you can contact Customer Support at 800-469-3288 between 6 am – 8 pm PST. Again, we want to thank you for your support and commitment to Microsoft products.

The MSN TV Team