Samsung Says Green Charging Light Hallmark of Safe Note7 Handsets

Today’s topics include Samsung’s advice to users on how to tell they have new Note7 phones with safe batteries, Oracle’s introduction of enterprise cloud applications integrated with artificial intelligence capabilities, Twitter’s long-awaited improvements to the social media platform, and GoPro’s new Hero5 cameras and Karma drones.

Now that Samsung will start issuing replacement Galaxy Note7 smartphones available to consumers under a U.S. recall starting Sept. 21, the company is advising customers how they can determine that the replacement phone they receive does not have the original defective battery that caused some Note7 phones to burn or explode.

All newly corrected Note7 handsets that are safe for use include a green battery charging light on their displays, in contrast to the white charging light indicator that was included in the original Note7, which had the battery problems, according to a Sept. 19 announcement from Samsung.

Oracle kicked off its Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco Sept. 19 with news of a major artificial intelligence initiative that enables enterprise cloud applications to “learn” as they gather new data.

Oracle said its Adaptive Intelligent Applications are based on insights gleaned from within Oracle’s Data Cloud, a collection of more than 5 billion consumer and business profiles, with more than 45,000 attributes.

These new apps use Oracle’s web-scale data and apply advanced data science to learn and process anonymized data about an organization’s users and their behaviors.

Managers and executives can use the apps to get targeted information to customers and employees. The enterprise applications company identified five business verticals that can directly benefit from these new applications—finance, human resources, marketing, commerce and supply chain.

Twitter is giving members of micro-blogging social network more to do than try to post trenchant comments within a 140 character-limit. Twitter’s latest changes, implemented as of Sept 19, simplify tweets, including what counts toward the entire 140 characters.

For example, “@names” in replies and media attachments—such as photos, GIFs, videos and polls—will no longer use up valuable characters. Twitter has also enabled the Retweet button on users’ own tweets, so they can easily Retweet or Quote Tweet themselves when they want to share a new reflection or feel like an earlier comment went unnoticed.

These are just the latest improvements Twitter has made to the social network’s user experience. Over the past few months, Twitter has added the ability to poll a community, react quickly with GIFs and share Periscope broadcasts in tweets.

GoPro has brought voice control and increased performance to two of its popular action camera models, while also unveiling its first-ever drone, the GoPro Karma.

The new products, announced Sept. 19, include the $399.99 GoPro Hero5 Black action camera, which includes a 2-inch touch-screen display and a 12-megapixel camera; the $299.99 Hero5 Session action camera, which has a 10-megapixel camera; and the $799.99 Karma Drone, which comes with a game-style controller and folds up into an included backpack for easy portability.

The flagship Hero5 Black action camera also gets simplified controls to make it easier to use, along with automatic transfer of photos and video to a cloud-based subscription service while the unit is charging.