Daily Tech Briefing: July 29, 2014

Samsung is delaying the launch of the Samsung Z, its first smartphone to run the Tizen operating system. Samsung issued a statement saying that it needed to “further enhance” the OS.

Samsung was originally scheduled to release the phone in Russia this quarter before introducing it in additional markets. So far the company has offered no updated launch date.

The smartphone was originally introduced to the public in June, during the Tizen Developer Conference in San Francisco. The Samsung Z has a 4.7-inch HD Super AMOLED display and a 2.3GHz quad-core processor.

T-Mobile has announced a new deal aimed at families: four lines, sharing 10GB of LTE data, for $100 a month. People can take advantage of this deal starting July 30 until September. AT&T, Verizon and Sprint offer four-line family deals for roughly $160 a month, though details vary.

T-Mobile Simple Choice includes unlimited talking, texting and data. However, once a user exceeds the 10GB data cap, the user’s service is bumped down to a slower network.

In an effort to help Java developers increase their skills and development toolkits, Google is offering a new online course on how to build scalable apps on the Google App Engine platform.

The class is called “Developing Scalable Apps with Google App Engine,” and it’s being offered through the online education service Udacity.com. Jocelyn Becker, a Google developer advocate, explained on the Google Cloud Platform Blog that the course will start with an introduction to platform-as-a-service and will continue with discussions on the evolution of server-side computing and more.

The Food and Drug Administration has launched a new initiative from the Office of Informatics and Technology Innovation called openFDA. The goal of this initiative is to make it simpler for the public to access the important health data collected by the agency.

This information has always been available to the public, but it has been difficult to search. The openFDA service makes the data accessible in a structured, computer-readable format.