LUSARAP

It feels like there is a secret law in Germany mandating that every domestic automaker there must offer at least one model with a four-door coupe bodystyle like the BMW Gran Coupes, Mercedes-Benz CLS and Audi A7. Several of the German brands even have the swoopy sedans in multiple sizes. So far, Lexus has stayed out of that fray, but maybe not for long, if a recently spotted test car makes it to market.

The brand is known to be testing a highly styled four-door coupe, roughly the size of the GS, under heavy camouflage. Little is known about the new model at the moment, but its existence makes sense. If it really wants to take the on Germans, Lexus is going to have to fight them toe-to-toe with competing models â€" especially with ones understood to have high margins.

Pictured above is a rendering from artist Theophilus Chin imagining a slightly smaller take on the genre based on the RC coupe, which he calls the RC GT. His design leaves the original shape almost untouched, but shortens the front doors to allow room for a rear doors under the arching roof. His GT would be aimed more against the BMW 4 Series Gran Coupe and rumored Mercedes-Benz C-Class four-door coupe, rather than the larger models Lexus actually appears to be targeting with its vehicle under development. His concept certainly nails the look, though, and while it might not have a basis in reality, we thought that its well-resolved enough that youd want to take a look, if only as a "what couldve been" flight of fancy.

The news that HP may make a return to the smartphone business is refusing to die down and we now have a render to cast our eyes over, although its origins are unclear.


HP hasnt exactly shied away from a potential return to the phone sphere, with the firms CEO revealing it was working on a smartphone last year. That was followed by similar comments from another exec in February and a senior director earlier this month.

PhoneArena has now got hold of a render which claims to show HPs Android smartphone, but the tipster who passed it over didnt present any information on the device.

In terms of design the handset in the picture appears to borrow its shape from the iPhone 5, while the centralised notification light below the screen is reminiscent of the Nexus 4.

Dock me

No clues were given as to how the tipster came about the render, or how well connected they are so were taking this leak with a sizable pinch of salt for now.

Another hint that HP is working on mobile solutions has come via a patent application picked up by Patently Apple, which documents an ultrabook with a dock for a mobile phone built into it.


This phone, however, is said to be powered by Windows and not Android allowing it to seamlessly integrate with the computer, suggesting HP may develop handsets to run on Windows Phone as well as Googles offering.

Well have to wait and see if these ideas really do come to fruition, but were intrigued as to what HP may be able to offer the already crowed mobile market.

With the smart accessories market continuing to increase in popularity, Archos has predicted that users’ smartphones will soon be used to control 10 completely separate smart devices.

Around the world, every day, a lot of people listen to a lot of music. In fact, more people are listening to more music than ever before.


Relatively speaking, only a tiny percentage of those people use Spotify for that listening, but its enough that the Swedish company has grown rapidly to become the second biggest music streaming service in the world (the biggest being YouTube, of course).

But theres another company that you might not have heard of which has an even deeper relationship with music listeners.

The Echo Nest was founded in a kitchen in 2005 by a pair of graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who were frustrated about how hard it was to decide what to listen to. In the nine years since, theyve built a database that covers 2,680,446 artists, 35,421,033 songs, and an astonishing 1,168,22,555,673 datapoints about the relationships between them.

Music intelligence

The company calls this data "music intelligence", and with good reason. For every song in its database, the Echo Nest knows a huge amount, from basic variables like artist, title, length, tempo, loudness and key signature to much deeper properties of music - like how "energetic" or "danceable" it is. It can even pair up similar listeners.

Armed with this information, the Echo Nest is better than anyone else in the world at predicting what youll want to listen to next.

Thatll be why Spotify has just bought the company for an undisclosed sum. Spotify has in the past used the Echo Nests services to power its music recommendations service (before it built its own algorithms), but more than 400 other companies around the world are using it today - including Spotifys direct competitors like Rdio, iHeartRadio, Deezer and Rhapsody, as well as others like eMusic, Twitter Music, Vevo and the BBC.

Spotify has promised to keep the Echo Nests data feeds free and open for developers. "The developer community is crucial to the success of both Spotify and The Echo Nest and will remain a priority for the combined companies," said the company in a statement. But the acquisition will still cause significant ripples in the music streaming world, in two ways.

The first is that Spotifys competitors are going to need to find a new source of data. Spotify was cagey when TheNextWeb asked the company what will happen with its direct competitors, saying: "In the few cases where The Echo Nest does work with direct competitors we will work with them to understand these relationships and determine the next business steps."

Translated, that means dont rely on anything once contracts are up.

Fleeing the Nest

Thats bad news if your favourite music streaming service isnt Spotify. "Unless startups are willing to create highly skilled teams of musicologists, machine learning PhDs and engineers that know how to tap big data, a company isnt going to get close to what The Echo Nest can do," said digital music blogger Jon Maples in a blog post.

But no doubt some will give it a go, or follow Beats Musics lead in putting more emphasis human curation, which could spark a wave of innovation that ultimately makes music recommendations better for everyone.

The second way this changes the music streaming landscape is that it pumps up the value of Spotify in advance of its rumoured IPO. Bloomberg reports that the company is speaking to Goldman Sachs Group about raising a credit facility, a move that often precedes an initial public offering. With the Echo Nest under its belt, Spotify is worth considerably more to investors than alone.

If youre a Spotify user, you should be happy about the move - the company has inherited a treasure-trove of music data, which can only make Spotifys products better. "With The Echo Nest joining Spotify, we will make a big leap forward in our quest to play you the best music possible," said Daniel Ek in the companys statement.

But if youre not, you might find the musical rug being whipped out from underneath you. The music streaming market is bloated - there are too many companies trying to do extremely similar things. Analysts have long predicted a thinning of the ranks, but as yet it hasnt happened. We might be witnessing the first salvo in the great music streaming service die-off of 2014.

SanDisk says it is working on storage tech that will enable both 128GB phones and 128GB microSD cards.


SanDisk product marketing manager Ruben Dennenwaldt said that micro-storage capacity of “128GB is certainly something we’re working on”, and that the technology would needed to produce 128GB phones will “absolutely” be readily available within the next two years.

Although vague about exactly when the prerequisite tech will arrive, Dennenwaldt says SanDisk is “making very good progress in the next capacity point.”

Full-size 128GB SD cards are already available – Sandisk’s own 128GB Extreme SD card sells for just over £100 – but getting the size down to a level that will fit into microSD cards and today’s slim phones is “a significant challenge.”

Dennenwaldt explains, “for microSD, from a technology perspective, the maximum that can be done at this point is 64GB, purely because of the form factor.”

He added that the miniaturisation of flash storage used in phone memory “is pretty much the same challenge” as squeezing yet more storage into the thumbnail-size microSD form.

SanDisk is commonly regarded simply as a maker of memory cards, but it also produces a significant amount of the NAND flash wafers that go into the storage of phones, tablets and computer SSDs.

Dennenwaldt sees increased internal storage, including to the 128GB level, as “something consumers want, consumers demand.”

He says, “The massive amounts of data being created, people just need higher capacities.”

Will 128GB phones prove popular?

At present, the largest-capacity phones available have 64GB of internal storage – including the iPhone 5 and Samsung Galaxy S4.

However, there has been limited demand for such high-capacity phones that also have a microSD memory card slot.

For example, UK retailer Clove cancelled plans to stock a 64GB Samsung Galaxy S3 in late 2012 as “the number of pre-orders that we received did not meet the minimum required to bring stock into the UK.”

A company likely to be among the first to successfully pioneer an ultra-high storage phone is Apple – it was also the first to range a 128GB tablet, introducing the 128GB iPad in February 2013.

It has also never offered expandable storage in any of its iOS mobile devices.

The question is whether sufficiently tiny high-capacity storage tech will be ready for the iPhone 5S, due to launch later this year in September.

SanDisk teased that it has a big announcement to unveil on 22 July. Could such super-storage be what they have to show off?