5 SECONDS OF SUMMER

Michael Clifford Fires Back at Abigail Breslin's Diss Track

Stars Most Stylish Selfie of the Week

Stars Most Stylish Selfie of the Week

GMAIL BLOCKED IN CHINA

5-Minute Outfit Idea

5-Minute Outfit Idea: An Effortless, Polished Look to Try This Weekend.

Facebook suffers outage

Facebook suffers outage affecting users worldwide!! .

Wednesday, 5 November 2014

Is One Direction Signing Another Record Deal?

Is One Direction Signing Another Record Deal?


GETTY IMAGES
Even though One Direction's new album Four isn't out yet, there's already rumors that the band is being pushed to record more music! According to Daily StarSimon Cowell wants to extend their contract — and is offering them each £2.5 million to do it.
“One Direction are big business and Simon and [company] are desperate to keep the money-making machine going for as long as possible," their source said.
“The negotiations are already in the very early stages and are being kept top secret.”
Under their current contract, the guys are expected to release two more albums and a greatest hits record, but this new deal would mean two more 1D albums through Syco. We can't complain with that!
Of course, this is all still rumored. We just hope they do whatever makes them happy. Since theyhave been working like crazy, we wouldn't blame them for going on hiatus after they wrap up their current contract! Obviously, they have no plans to split for good.

Justin Bieber Releases Collector's Edition Perfume

Justin Bieber Releases Collector's Edition Perfume

Justin-Bieber-Collectors-Edition 
Justin Bieber has released a brand new perfume! The fragrance is titled Collector's Edition and it is dedicated to JB's loyal fans!
The description of the fragrance reads "Experience Justin’s most personal fragrance yet; Fans feel the connection like never before…"
The Collector's Edition perfume is "sparkling and bright with an energetic burst of mouth-watering fruits...The heart uncovers a blooming floral bouquet while the creamy and addictive dry down of sensual musks and warm amber leaves you forever thinking of Justin."
Justin also told PEOPLE about the perfume:
"It’s all about the personal connection I have with my fans."
He also added:
“You can tell when a woman feels confident by the way she carries herself, and I think fragrance has a lot to do with it. Collector’s Edition is meant to make my fans feel good. It has an amazing energy to it. When a woman feels good, she looks good.”
Sounds like this is a fragrance that all of Justin's fans will love! The perfume is available at a number of retailers, including:
  • Macy's
  • Sephora
  • Nordstrom
  • Dillards
  • Ulta
  • Lord and Taylor
  • Belk
  • Stage
  • Bonton
  • Boscov's
  • Target
  • Amazon

Monday, 3 November 2014

Selena Gomez Calls The Cops On Suspected Intruder

Selena Gomez Calls The Cops On Suspected Intruder

INSTAGRAM
Uh oh! Selena Gomez is known for not having the best luck when it comes to intruders in and around her homes. Earlier this year Selena purchased a home in Calabasas, California, and within the first few weeks of owning the property she called the police on an individual in her guest house. Now, Selena had to get the police involved again!
Selena called the cops last week when she found the front door to her house unlocked! Selena was concerned that someone had entered her home while she was away.
The police quickly responded to Selena's call, but deemed her property free and clear of trespassers. Thank goodness!
We think Selena should totally beef up her security team though!

David Henrie Shares Huge "Wizards Of Waverly Place" Secret

David Henrie Shares Huge "Wizards Of Waverly Place" Secret

DISNEY CHANNEL
David Henrie has just shared a seriously huge Wizards Of Waverly Place secret! Turns out the Disney Channel based Wizards Of Waverly Place on a planned pilot titled The Amazing O'Malley's.
David not only revealed the plot of the show - a family that owned a magic shop - but he also spilled that he and Wizards Of Waverly Place co-star Selena Gomez were set to play twins in the series!

Taylor Swift Takes Her Albums Off Spotify

Taylor Swift Takes Her Albums Off Spotify




Taylor Swift‘s music has been removed from Spotify and fans who use the service will have to find another way of listening to the singer’s albums.
The decision lead Spotify to release a statement on its website to notify fans.

“We love Taylor Swift, and our more than 40 million users love her even more – nearly 16 million of them have played her songs in the last 30 days, and she’s on over 19 million playlists,” the statement read. “We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone. We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That’s why we pay nearly 70% of our revenue back to the music community.”

“PS – Taylor, we were both young when we first saw you, but now there’s more than 40 million of us who want you to stay, stay, stay. It’s a love story, baby, just say, Yes,” the company added

Taylor Swift Announces Dates for Her 2015 World Tour

Taylor Swift Announces Dates for Her 2015 World Tour



Taylor Swift may be coming to your city soon.
The singer, who released her first pop album, "1989," last week, just announced dates for her world tour, kicking off next year.
“Without a doubt, this [album] is the best thing I’ve done," she said during an appearance on "Good Morning America" last week. "So to have people able to finally have it now and to have the fans understand what I’ve been working on for two years, it’s just the most amazing feeling."
May 20, 2015 – Bossier City, LA – CenturyLink Center
May 22, 2015 – Baton Rouge, LA – LSU Tiger Stadium
May 30, 2015 – Detroit, MI – Ford Field
June 2, 2015 – Louisville, KY – KFC Yum! Center
June 3, 2015 – Cleveland, OH – Quicken Loans Arena
June 6, 2015 – Pittsburgh, PA – Heinz Field
June 8, 2015 – Charlotte, NC – Time Warner Cable Arena
June 9, 2015 – Raleigh, NC – PNC Arena
June 13, 2015 – Philadelphia, PA – Lincoln Financial Field
June 20, 2015 – Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia Germany – Lanxess Arena
June 21, 2015 – Amsterdam, North Holland Netherlands – Ziggo Dome
June 23, 2015 – Glasgow, Scotland United Kingdom – SSE Hydro
June 24, 2015 – Manchester, NW England United Kingdom – Arena
June 27, 2015 – London, England United Kingdom – British Summertime Hyde Park
July 6, 2015 – Ottawa, ON – Canadian Tire Centre
July 7, 2015 – Montreal, QB – Bell Centre
July 11, 2015 – East Rutherford, NJ – MetLife Stadium
July 13, 2015 – Washington, DC – Nationals Park
July 18, 2015 – Chicago, IL – Soldier Field
July 24, 2015 – Foxborough, MA – Gillette Stadium
July 25, 2015 – Foxborough, MA – Gillette Stadium
August 1, 2015 – Vancouver, BC – BC Place Stadium
August 4, 2015 – Edmonton, AB – Rexall Place
August 5, 2015 – Edmonton, AB – Rexall Place
August 8, 2015 – Seattle, WA – CenturyLink Field
August 15, 2015 – Santa Clara, CA – Levi’s Stadium
August 17, 2015 – Glendale, AZ – Gila River Arena
August 18, 2015 – Glendale, AZ – Gila River Arena
August 25, 2015 – Los Angeles, CA – Staples Center
August 26, 2015 – Los Angeles, CA – Staples Center
August 29, 2015 – San Diego, CA – PETCO Park
September 4, 2015 – Salt Lake City, UT – EnergySolutions Arena
September 5, 2015 – Denver, CO – Pepsi Center
September 6, 2015 – Denver, CO – Pepsi Center
September 9, 2015 – Fargo, ND – Fargodome
September 11, 2015 – St. Paul, MN – Xcel Energy Center
September 12, 2015 – St. Paul, MN – Xcel Energy Center
September 16, 2015 – Indianapolis, IN – Bankers Life Fieldhouse
September 17, 2015 – Columbus, OH – Nationwide Arena
September 18, 2015 – Columbus, OH – Nationwide Arena
September 21, 2015 – Kansas City, MO – Sprint Center
September 22, 2015 – Kansas City, MO – Sprint Center
September 25, 2015 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena
September 26, 2015 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena
October 2, 2015 - Toronto, ON – Rogers Centre
October 3, 2015 - Toronto, ON – Rogers Centre
October 8, 2015 – Des Moines, IA – Wells Fargo Arena
October 9, 2015 – Omaha, NE – CenturyLink Center
October 10, 2015 – Omaha, NE – CenturyLink Center
October 13, 2015 – St. Louis, MO – Scottrade Center
October 14, 2015 – St. Louis, MO – Scottrade Center
October 17, 2015 – Dallas, TX – AT&T Stadium
October 20, 2015 – Lexington, KY – Rupp Arena
October 21, 2015 Greensboro, NC – Greensboro Coliseum Complex
October 24, 2015 – Atlanta, GA – Georgia Dome
October 27, 2015 - Miami, FL – American Airlines Arena
October 31, 2015 – Tampa, FL – Raymond James Stadium

Sunday, 2 November 2014

Hilary Duff Shows Off Her Top Knot Hairstyle On The Set Of "Younger"

Hilary Duff Shows Off Her Top Knot Hairstyle On The Set Of "Younger"

INSTAGRAM
Hilary Duff is about to return to TV with a brand new show titled Younger. The series will air on TV Land and also stars the following actors:
  • Sutton Foster
  • Debi Mazar
  • Miriam Shor
The show is based on the novel "Younger" by Pamela Redmon Satran, and follows a single mom trying to get back into the working world. The woman runs into a guy who convinces her to lie about her age to find the perfect job.
Hilary shared the photo above from the set of the show. We are loving her top knot hairstyle! 

Kylie Jenner Gets a Spooky Gray Hair Makeover

Kylie Jenner Gets a Spooky Gray Hair Makeover



Kylie Jenner's dramatic hair extensions are back, and they're spookier than ever! The stylish star kicked up her Halloween look by adding some shiny silver and black long extensions to her short 'do, and we love the shimmering style.


At first we thought her hair looked different because of the camera's flash, but Kylie's smokey new hair hue looks even more dramatic in the family photo she took while out trick-or-treating:


We hope that Kylie decides to keep her edgy gray style even now that when  Halloween is over, because the look is too cool to only wear once!

Taylor Swift's '1989' Set for Biggest Sales Week Since 2002: 1.3 Million-Plus

Taylor Swift's '1989' Set for Biggest Sales Week Since 2002: 1.3 Million-Plus



As the days tick by, the sales forecast for Taylor Swift's 1989 album continues to grow.

As of Nov. 1, with only one full day left in the album's debut tracking week, industry forecasters now say 1989 could sell over 1.3 million copies through Nov. 2.

Thus, the album is now aiming to surpass the one-week sales record for an album by a woman, set by the debut of Britney Spears' Oops! … I Did It Again in 2000, when it arrived with 1.319 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

1989 is also set to earn the largest sales week for any album since 2002, when Eminem's The Eminem Show sold 1.322 million in its first full week on sale.

The album's official debut week sales figure, as tabulated by SoundScan, will be announced on Wednesday, Nov. 5.

1989 is Swift's fifth studio effort and was released on Oct. 27 through Big Machine Records.

A little over two weeks ago, forecasters pegged the new album to sell 750,000 in its debut frame. Then, about a week ago (Oct. 23), it was upgraded to 800,000. By mid-day Oct. 27, the album's release day, its projection grew to over 900,000. The next day: 1 million, followed by upgrades to 1.2 million on Oct. 29 and then 1.25 million on Oct. 31.

1989 will be Swift's third consecutive album to sell more than a million copies in its first week, making her the only act ever to sell a million copies of an album in a single week three times. (She was already the only woman to do it twice since SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991.)

Prepare for the Self-Driving Car

Prepare for the Self-Driving Car

Jonathan M. Gitlin
Ars Technicia 



Self-driving AI cars have been a staple in popular culture for some time—any child of the 1980s will fondly remember both the Autobots and Knight Ride r’s KITT—but consider them to be science fiction no longer. Within the next five years, you’ll be able to buy a car that can drive itself (and you) down the highway, although transforming into a Decepticon-battling robot or crime-fighter may take a while longer. As one might expect, the journey to fully automated self-driving cars will be one of degrees.

Here in the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has created five categories of autonomous cars. The most basic of these are level zero, which might include your vehicle if it doesn’t have a system like electronic stability control. Fully autonomous cars, which can complete their journeys with no human control beyond choosing the destination, are categorized as level four. While level fours are still some way off, level three autonomous cars, which will be able to self-drive under certain conditions (say, an HOV lane during rush hour), are much closer than one might think.

A couple of weeks ago, Tesla wooed its fan base with the news that soon, its cars will be able to drive themselves. But the autonomous car may be one of the company's least innovative moves yet. Those who’ve been watching the industry closely will know that Mercedes, Volvo, Audi, and others have similar products waiting in the wings, ready to hit the streets as soon as the rules and regulations fall into place.

First steps


It all used to be so simple. A car was just a car; a mechanical contraption with an engine and wheels, controlled by a human being with a combination of pedals, levers, and wheel. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication meant using turn signals or perhaps gesticulating rudely out the window to indicate displeasure at being cut off in traffic. However as semiconductors became cheaper, faster, and more rugged, they attracted the attention of the auto industry. Electronics began to infiltrate our cars, with fuel injection replacing carburetors in the name of performance and efficiency, for example, and anti-lock brakes (ABS) being added for safety.

By 1995, electronic stability control (ESC) systems started to appear, Mercedes-Benz leading the way with its flagship S-Class. Cars equipped with ESC are constantly monitoring their driver’s steering inputs and comparing them to the direction the vehicle is headed. If those two variables start to diverge beyond certain limits (because the car is either under- or oversteering), ESC will apply the brakes to individual wheels to bring things back under control. Stability control systems proved so effective at reducing both crashes and injuries that they became mandatory for any car sold in the US or EU by the end of 2011.

The mandate in effect made ABS and traction control standard features, too. So any car one might buy today will not only constantly be monitoring both its direction and where it’s heading, but also whether an individual wheel is spinning too much (because of a loss of grip) or even not at all (locked by a brake). These various safety aids aren’t sufficient for self-driving cars. They only take control during emergencies to slow a vehicle, but with the advent of drive-by-wire throttles and steering—something we explored recently—all that remains is for the vehicle to be able to ‘see’ the environment around it and have a ‘brain’ fast enough to make sense of that data to control where it goes. No biggie.

Eyes and ears


As it turns out, most of the technology needed for a car to sense the world around it already exists. Adaptive cruise control—as fitted to the Audi A8, for example—uses a mix of optical, radar, and ultrasonic sensors that keep a car from veering out of its lane and, by constantly checking the range to other vehicles, from hitting any of them. Image recognition software will even detect speed limits on road signs and alert the driver. All of this would seem like science fiction even a decade ago, but it really is just the beginning. Quite soon, those sensors will do more than just tell your car what’s around it, thanks to what’s known as V2V.

As Ars' Sean Gallagher found out early this year, V2V-enabled cars can communicate to each other, warning of upcoming road hazards. V2V is being built atop 802.11p, a Wi-Fi standard that uses 75 MHz of the spectrum centered on 5.9 GHz. 802.11p allows almost instant network connections and can broadcast messages without establishing a network connection first, both of which are extremely desirable when thinking about the safety aspects of V2V. After all, it’s no good telling another car about a road hazard if you need to spend precious seconds handshaking. V2V-enabled cars will be able to quite literally see around corners, since the technology doesn’t require line of sight.

The cloud


But wait, there’s more, and it’s coming from the cloud. More and more cars are coming equipped with LTE data connections, mainly in response to consumer demand for streaming media services. Passenger entertainment may seem trivial to some, but persistent data connections also enable in-car navigation systems to get a lot smarter. I’m probably not alone, for example, in ditching either a standalone or built-in GPS unit in favor of a smartphone app like Google Maps or Waze. And if you’re like me, you probably did it for the same reason: the smartphone apps are able to provide layers of real-time data (like traffic) on top of the cartography. Data-enabled cars mean we can ditch the smartphone holders and go back to using that onboard navigation system. That navigation data will also allow the car to know where it is in the world and, to a certain extent, what it’s likely to encounter.

That kind of map data is sufficiently informative for human drivers to use while they navigate, but even combined with GPS it’s not going to be accurate enough for a self-driving car (civilian GPS accuracy only has a 95-percent confidence interval of 7.8 meters). No, that’s going to require an extremely high-resolution map, and that map will need to be accurate, which means constantly updating. Writing for Slate, Lee Gomes identified this as a problem for Google, but other companies, particularly Nokia, think they might have this one licked.

Nokia’s HERE platform begins by mapping streets in the conventional 21st century way—with a small fleet of sensor- and GPS-equipped mapping vehicles, which it uses to create an HD map that’s machine (but not human) readable. But in addition to providing location data to HERE-enabled cars, Nokia will leverage them to continually update that map in near-real time. Those same cars will send sensor data about the road—things like the position of road lane markers accurate to a few centimeters—resulting in an always up-to-date map.

Nokia also has other plans for using crowdsourced data to improve the self-driving car. We recently spoke with HERE's head of Automotive Cloud Services, Vladimir Boroditsky, who told Ars the company plans to use crowdsourced data from connected cars to create data sets of driving behavior that the company can use to train car software how to drive without terrifying or aggravating humans along for the ride. Compared to the alternative, it certainly sounds like an efficient solution.

How far off are we talking?


As one might expect, car makers have been working with tech industry stalwarts like Qualcomm and Nvidia to build the kinds of integrated systems that allow a car to make sense of its environment and then act on it. Kanwalinder Singh, a senior vice president with Qualcomm, told Ars that’s an area where his company, and its Snapdragon processor, excels. “As more sensors get added, you need massive sensor fusion. It’s a highly intensive problem as the data needs to be crunched very rapidly.” Meanwhile, Nvidia’s Tegra K1 is the brains behind both Audi’s and Tesla’s self-driving vehicles.
If all of this is starting to sound like vaporware, think again. Mercedes-Benz has been testing Bertha, a self-driving S-Class, on the roads of California for some months now. Meanwhile over in Sweden, Volvo has been demoing a self-driving S60 sedan. Then there’s Tesla, which showed off its self-driving autopilot feature earlier this month, along with the information that every Tesla Model S on the road already has the necessary hardware on board.

Perhaps predictably, our favorite self-driving car demonstration thus far involved a race track. Less than two weeks ago, an Audi RS7 entertained the crowds at the final round of the DTM (think German NASCAR) with hot laps of the Hockenheim track. The car lapped the track in just over two minutes, hitting a top speed of 149 mph without a human in control.
Finally, Google has also shown the world its idea of a self-driving car, although it’s one that was radically different, lacking any driver controls like a steering wheel or pedals. It’s interesting to note that Google’s car still requires a roof-mounted camera pod. By comparison, those Teslas, Audis, Mercedes, and Volvos look almost indistinguishable from their less-intelligent siblings.
All of the cars described above are capable of driving to NHTSA’s level three. The agency defines level three autonomous cars as vehicles that “enable the driver to cede full control of all safety-critical functions under certain traffic or environmental conditions and in those conditions to rely heavily on the vehicle to monitor for changes in those conditions requiring transition back to driver control.” In contrast to a car fitted with adaptive cruise control (level 2), the driver won’t need to constantly monitor road conditions. However, when Forbes went for a ride in a self-driving Audi, it reported that the car monitored the driver’s eyes, sounding alerts and then coming to a halt if they were closed for too long. Don’t expect to be able to sleep in your commute just yet.

According to Anders Eugensson, Volvo’s director of government affairs, the technology is fairly mature, and the Swedish company plans to have 100 test cars on the road in 2017. “It is more a matter of how to apply the technologies and properly link them up with the infrastructure. What is important is also to understand how this is working together with non self-driving vehicles and the acceptances of other road users. They also have to match the expectations of the end customers.” Level three self-driving Volvos should be on sale early in the next decade, he said.
Audi is even more optimistic, telling Ars it expects to have level 3 autonomous cars on sale in the US by 2017. Brad Stertz, an Audi spokesman, said the company’s confidence was down to computing power. “We announced our centralized driver assistance processor or zFAS would employ the NVIDIA K1 supercomputer on a chip announced at CES 2014. Our piloted driving pre-development work is being done in parallel with the development of the 192-core K1 chip to bring this technology out sooner.”

Is that legal?


Both of those predictions came with a big regulatory caveat. Cars won’t be driving themselves anywhere until it’s legal for them to do so. This, rather than the technology, will really determine precisely when you can go out and buy a car that drives itself. Eugensson told Ars that the liability issues have to be acceptable to their customers, and lawmakers will have to cooperate to avoid a regulatory patchwork. Sertz also pointed out the need for regulatory consistency, but he raised another issue. “One problem with regulations is that they are often considered and drafted from the perspective of fully autonomous driving capabilities, and every innovator is still a long way from reaching that level of capability. The concern then is that laws are written in a highly restrictive way that addresses a far into the future state, while slowing progress on driver assistance technologies that are the foundation for fully automated driving.”

In the absence of either US-wide federal, or Europe-wide EU regulations, individual states (in the US) and member nations (in the EU) have started the ball rolling. California started issuing licenses for driverless test cars earlier this year, and the UK intends to follow suit in January 2015. Interestingly, neither the EU nor California seem set to allow Google’s steering-wheel free car onto the road any time soon. But even once the legal issues are worked out, it will still be quite some years before completely autonomous door-to-door journeys become possible. Qualcomm’s Singh told Ars that we should expect dedicated highway lanes first. “[Self driving] is complex enough on a highway, but it increases in difficulty as the setting becomes more urban and congested,” he said. No one we talked with thought that self-driving cars would be ready to tackle a dense urban environment (say, an intersection in downtown Mumbai) for at least a decade. Rest assured, it’s a topic that automakers (and Cars Technica) will be revisiting frequently between now and then. But we're well on our way traveling down the road toward robot cars

The Internet Archive Now Lets You Play 900+ Classic Arcade Games In Your Browser

The Internet Archive Now Lets You Play 900+ Classic Arcade Games In Your Browser

Greg Kumparak
TechCrunch


Looking for a nice little burst of nostalgia on this fine evening? Don’t feel like going through the process of installing MAME and lurking for ROMs, but still want to get your classic arcade on?
Back in December of last year, the Internet Archive (in their effort to backup the entire digital world, one bit at a time) launched a “Console Living Room” that offers up browser-friendly emulators for a pretty shocking number of consoles from the 70s/80s. Want to play some Atari 2600? Here you go. Sega Genesis? Yup!)

This weekend, they’ve introduced a whole new category: The Internet Arcade. 900+ classic arcade games, no quarters required.

It’s all a part of the JSMESS project, an effort to emulate as many systems as possible… in Javascript, of all languages. As they put it, they want to make “computer history and experiences” as embeddable as “movies, documents, and audio”.

Do they all work seemlessly? Nah — you’ll almost certainly spot a bug or two. Many are missing sound. But it’ll get better in time — and for now, just the fact that they got MAME working in a browser, sans any hefty plugins/runtime environments, is damned impressive.
One of JSMESS’ developers, Jason Scott, outlined the work he put into the Arcade-centric leg of the project in a blog post here.

(Pro tip: it can be a bit weird to figure out a game’s controls in MAME some times. The 5 key lets you insert a coin; the 1 key is usually the Player 1 start button. Arrows are usually used for directional stuff, with CTRL/ALT/SPACE used for the three primary buttons. Beyond that, you’ll have to mash buttons a bit to figure it out [or hit TAB to dive into the key configurations

It doesn't matter what your phone looks like

It doesn't matter what your phone looks like

David Pierce
The Verge


Phones are more beautiful than ever. Close your eyes and pick one: the sleek, rounded, comfortable iPhone 6; the stark, metallic Galaxy Note 4; the rugged, cohesive Xperia Z3; the curved, customizable Moto X. Walk into a carrier store or browse Amazon and you'll see nothing but remarkable feats of industrial design and engineering.

That moment, in the store, will be the last time your phone's design matters. Because you, like the overwhelming majority of smartphone buyers in 2014, are going to take your phone out of its box and put it directly into a case, where it will remain for the duration of your two-year contract.
It doesn't matter what your phone looks like. You'll never notice anyway.

If you buy a smartphone, there's an overwhelmingly large chance that you'll buy at least one case to go along with it. The NPD Group found in December of 2013 that 75 percent of smartphone owners use a case on the device — and seemed shocked to find that number wasn't higher. In the 12 months prior to the report, it found, phone case sales had grown 17 percent.

Almost everyone uses a case — and the numbers are growing

Apple, the bastion of good smartphone design, the company that has made beautiful smartphones longer than any other, is even more affected by this trend. 87 percent of iPhone users use cases, NPD found, and nearly half of those have used more than one case over the lifetime of their phone. After the launch of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the thinnest and most carefully designed iPhones yet, accessory makers sold more cases than ever. Hell, even Apple wants you to hide its beautiful new designs behind a leather case.

Some case users do so to keep their phones safe. This impulse grows stronger as our phones get bigger, as the pane of glass ready to slide out of our hand and onto the floor gets harder and harder to hold. (I dropped my then-caseless iPhone 6 before I made it home from the store, and there's a ding that won't let me forget it.) It also grows stronger as our phones become more important to our lives; if my phone breaks I might lose my photos, my contacts, my notes, my high scores. My cellphone is now a precious object in every sense.

But cases have also appeared at fashion shows and in magazine spreads, designed by Marc Jacobs and Harris Tweed. In September, Vogue gave its recommendations of "the most luxe cases to buy now." We buy cases by Chanel and Louis Vuitton and Kate Spade, we bedazzle and be-tweed our simple metal rectangles. For many people, your phone isn't the fashion statement, the thing that says something about you as a person. That's what your case is for.

We lament the remarkable sameness of smartphones today, the fact that from across the room it's basically impossible to tell one big slab of black plastic from another. But maybe that's not a result of laziness on the part of manufacturers. Maybe it comes from an understanding that what consumers what is a blank canvas onto which to paint their personality. They may like one color now, but who's to say they'll still like it ten months into their two-year contract? What if it doesn't match my shoes?

Should you pick your case before you pick your phone?

You could almost argue that the way to shop for a phone is to pick the case you want and then find the phone that fits inside. Most smartphones work well anyway – you'd be hard-pressed to find one that doesn't do its job. Finding one that fits me, the way I see myself and want to be seen by others, is much harder.

Motorola was right to think that people want to customize their phones, but it missed the point: we don't want to customize our phones once, when we buy it. We want to customize them over and over again, redecorating our iPhones, the way we change our socks. When the New York Times talked to a bunch of hip teenagers about their shopping habits, the conversation kept coming back to the iPhone 6. "When you take pictures, people see your case," 15-year-old Caitlin Haywood told the Times.

That's why Verizon's new Droid Turbo is so interesting. This is not a well-designed phone: it's not sleek, not subtle, not terribly comfortable. It has a big DROID logo on the back that inexplicably also includes the amount of internal storage you selected, because apparently that's information you need to be always able to see. But it's an otherwise extraordinary piece of technology, and the real truth seems to be that Droid Turbo's success or failure won't hinge on how it looks with a case off, but what it can do with the case on. And it might also come down to whether or not Verizon has the right cases to go along with it.

Building a great smartphone is still really hard. Software matters. Durability matters. Camera performance matters. Battery life matters. But in the world we live in, the way your phone looks doesn't matter. Let's stop pretending it does.