Samsung Announces Galaxy S6 Edge Iron Man Limited Edition

About a week ago, I wrote an article about how Samsung teased a limited Iron Man edition of the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge through Twitter TWTR -0.22% . Now Samsung has officially announced the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition as part of a collaboration with the action-packed Marvel’s Avengers: Age of Ultron film.

The metal of the Galaxy S6 edge sports a red color on the front and back with a gold trim around the sides — which are Iron Man’s signature colors. The Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition also has 64GB storage, a matching wireless charger and a 

clear cover. The back of the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition has Iron Man’s face etched in the center (just like the box it was packaged in). The Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition also has a custom Avengers theme preinstalled. And the wireless charger in the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition was designed to look like the Arc Reactor.

“We are excited to be able to offer our world-class Galaxy S6 edge smartphone designed especially for Iron Man fans through our continued collaboration with Marvel,” said Samsung’s Executive Vice President of Global Marketing of the IT & Mobile Division Younghee Lee.

Samsung said that the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition will be available in Korea on Wednesday, May 27, 2015 and it will be rolled out in China and Hong Kong next month. Unfortunately, Samsung did not indicate whether the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition will be launched in the United States. The Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition will start with a limited run of 1,000 units, which all have special edition packaging. The price of the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition is not yet known, but I will update this article once I find out more information.

Samsung and Marvel have partnered on multiple projects over the last few years. For example, Samsung gave away four limited edition Avengers cases for the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 in the past. There is also a Battle For The Avengers Towerexperience available for the Samsung Gear VR virtual reality headset. Samsung also offers anAvengers: Age Of Ultron theme for the Galaxy S6, which includes a set of wallpapers, lock screens and icons.

It sounds like the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition has most of the same hardware 

specifications as the original device. This means it has a 5.1-inch Quad HD display, an Exynos 7420 processor, a 16-megapixel rear camera, a 5-megapixel front-facing camera and 3GB RAM. What makes the Galaxy S6 edge distinguishable from all the other smartphones on the market is its dual edge display. By curving the display on both sides of the device, the Galaxy S6 edge is able to show its users social media notifications, text messages, e-mails and call history even when the phone is face down.

Want to see the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition getting unboxed? Below is a video that Samsung Mobile uploaded on YouTube of the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition unboxing:

What are your thoughts about the Galaxy S6 edge Iron Man Limited Edition device? Let us know in the comments section!

Can Technology Help Citizens Focus On Policies, Rather Than On Squabbling Politicians?

In a time were more often than not, politics seems to be all about people, rather than ideas, one project is trying to help citizens focus themselves on policies, rather than on squabbling politicians.

It’s based in the Uk and is called The Voting Project, the brainchild of human rights expert Will Baker and designer and developer Nick Hurley.

It basically works like this: first policies proposal are collected through a form on the project’s website. Then they are ‘curated’, deleting duplicates, gathering similar discussions under the same headline, and they are later submitted to the general public for voting (polls open tomorrow, Wednesday 27th, the day of theQueen’s Speech after the General Election, and will close on Sunday 31st).

Sounds easy, doesn’t it? So easy that you may wonder why nobody has tried to do something similar in the past. Well, perhaps because it’s not as easy as it seems. First of all: how do you get people to participate? For an established media company, or a party, this could not be a problem, but how do you do that if you’re not a big name?

Hurley and Baker tried to use the virality of social media to overcome the hurdle.

“Ahead of launching the project we did an unofficial sort of collection process, just to get people talking about it. We got people to pose with a selfie, with them holding a placard of a policy that they believe in, and post it on Twitter TWTR -0.22%. And we collected those messages using the hashtag#policiesnotparties,” Hurley tells me.

“We’ve tried to be as open as possible to attract as many people as possible. But, we have had a couple of suggestions that are so deeply contrary to fundamental human rights, that if we were to include them, we would probably in ourselves get into trouble with the law, just for including them as suggestions people put there,” Baker says.This helped the platform, which has received almost no coverage from mainstream media (aside fromRT), capture some people’s attention. Then enters the gatekeeping problem: when all the policies are collected, how to decide which ones to include in the poll?

In those cases, at least, the process was pretty straightforward. In others, things were more nuanced. One suggestion the team had, for instance, wascalled the ‘Mandatory Cat Ownership.”‘

“Somebody said: every person should be made to own a cat, because everyone’s life would be better with a cat. We thought, ‘OK, that sounds ridiculous to me, and it would be almost unenforceable, but who am I to decide that that shouldn’t go in?,” Baker says.

Luckily, most comments, concerned far more serious topics from the reform of the electoral system, to ways to make MPs more accountable, passing through austerity, wages, benefits, and human rights. “One thing that was very noticeable,” Hurley adds, “is how much people were concerned about the National Health Service’s future. There’s been a lot of fear about privatization being introduced.”

One aspect worth mentioning is that due to the way the audience was initially reached, using social media, and things like Google GOOGL -0.34% Ads, and Twitter Ads, and Facebook ads, some sort of liberal bias was potentially introduced. In the future, a next version of the project will probably make use of cross lateral mechanisms to bring different types forward instances and more broad audiences in.

The Voting Project is not the first initiative that’s trying to help ideas regain centrality. An older, still ongoing experiment, is called VoteForPolicies and is also based in the UK. take the parties’ manifesto pledges, anonymise them and ask the public to select which they most agree with.

“Our approach is less of an aid to voting in the General Election itself and more of an experiment in a completely different type of democracy, in which party political machinery does not figure at all. I suppose this means that we have a great deal more to design and curate, as we are not routing people back into established political mechanisms,” Baker says.It’s a great tool to help citizens make informed decisions, but is different from The Voting Project in that the public themselves do not contribute ideas and there are no opportunities to vote on individual policy suggestions – rather a set of policies on offer from an established party.

Have Americans Learned Their Lesson With Credit Cards?

The Great Recession drastically impacted personal finances of many households. During the credit meltdown, family budgets were reduced and deleveraging became a top priority. The recession technically ended in the summer of 2009, but Americans are still showing some financial restraint as they continue to slow their addiction to credit cards.

Consumers are not returning to their plastic-charging ways as fast as originally thought. In the third-quarter, Americans added $11.9 billion of credit card debt, down 30 percent from the $16.9 billion increase in the prior quarter, according to the latest report from CardHub.com. Compared to the third-quarter of 2012, the net amount of credit card debt added was down 8 percent.

In six out of the past seven quarters, consumer credit card debt figures have improved relative to the year before. Furthermore, the 3.19 percent credit card charge-off rate is at its lowest point since the first quarter of 2006. Other than that single quarter, there are now fewer charge-offs than at any point since the beginning of 1995. However, the total debt load has continued to increase and the average household owes more than they did in the prior quarter.

“It’s encouraging to see demonstrable improvement in the economic landscape after all that we’ve endured in recent years,” said CardHub CEO Odysseas Papadimitriou, a credit card industry veteran. “More jobs mean fewer families struggling to pay the bills, less uncollectible debt on bank balance sheets, and light at the end of the economic tunnel. Now, we just need to shift our mindset away from accruing debt at a slower pace and toward paying down what we owe as well as developing sustainable habits moving forward.”

As the chart below shows, the average household owes $6,690 to credit cards, up from $6,658 in the second quarter. Looking ahead, CardHub.com estimates that Americans will add $33.4 billion in credit card debt for 2013, revised lower from their $41.2 billion estimate made earlier this year.