Samsung has introduced the new Galaxy S4 Zoom.

The S4 Zoom combines an Android smartphone with a 16-megapixel camera with 10x digital zoom, and comes stock with Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen. Inside, there’s a 1.5GHz dual-core processor, 8GB of internal memory, and a microSD card slot that can add up to 64GB of extra capacity.

In the camera department, the Zoom delivers an image-stabilized lens with a 35mm-equivalent focal length range of 24mm to 240mm. Its aperture ranges from 3.1 to 6.3. The sensor can shoot at ISO sensitivity ranging from 100 to 3,200. The zoom includes a 1.9 megapixel front facing camera for video chat.

The S4 Zoom will be available this summer, but Samsung has yet to announce the price.

Noooooo-kia! Don’t Say Goodbye!

Nokia is saying its final farewell to Symbian, with final shipments hitting the shelves this summer.

Their Windows Phone shipments only surpassed their Symbian shipments in Q4 of last year, and Nokia still shipped half a million handsets in the first quarter of this year. While many former Nokia users blame Nokia’s profitability problems on their Windows Phone transition, the shift to the new OS has helped Nokia move from a stagnant company to a very nimble one. They’ve released seven brand new Windows Phones over the last year.

An official at Nokia was quoted as saying, “It took 22 months to get a Symbian phone out of the door. With Windows Phone, it is less than a year. We spend less time having to tinker with deep-lying code and more time on crafting elements of the experience that make a big difference, such as around photography, maps, music and apps in general.”

Pandora Over The Air?

Pandora just announced the purchase of an actual FM radio station. The station, under the call letters KXMZ-FM, is a terrestrial radio station broadcasting out of Rapid City, South Dakota.

The acquisition allows Pandora to qualify for the same RMLC license under the same terms as their competitors. They can now broadcast their personalized experience to the community of Rapid City, an area where over 42,000 residents already use the service.

Pandora plans to apply their insights about listening habits to program music that accurately reflects local listeners’ evolving tastes. Certain powerful music incumbents see Internet radio as a threat to the status quo, but Pandora sees this latest acquisition as a transformative way to connect listeners with music they love.

No Waze! Google Maps Just Got Better.

Google is buying the popular map and navigation app, Waze, reportedly for around $1.2 Billion. Founded in 2007, Waze is an Israeli and Palo Alto-based developer of free mapping and turn-by-turn navigation apps for iOS and Android.

Since its launch, Waze has raised $67 million in outside funding from a number of prominent Silicon Valley firms.

Rather than map out every single road, lane and byway, Waze relies on its millions of users to act as traffic cops, field ops and cartographers, allowing them to flag and record updates on accidents, bottlenecks and traffic in realtime. It pulls in information from your phone on your driving speed and location to calculate the best routes and build out its own maps.

Waze CEO Noam Bardin commented on the buyout, saying, “We are excited about the prospect of working with the Google Maps team to enhance our search capabilities and to join them in their ongoing efforts to build the best map of the world,” Waze doesn’t consider itself a “Mapping Company,” but a “Big Data Company,” and considering Google’s plans to organize the planet’s information, Google is practically the definition of Big Data.

Thanks to this deal, Apple, Facebook and everyone else in the map and location business. have a tough road ahead.

BigQuery – Making Big Data Easy

In other Google news, the advertising and search giant just updated their BigQuery service. The new update comes with large results, window functions, query caching, and it even reduced monthly costs to 8 cents per GB.

The new pricing change will go into effect on July first. Google says customers with higher-volume usage will soon be able to opt in for tiered query pricing, providing “more economical and predictable cost interactive queries.”

The new large results feature can run queries that return large numbers of rows and save them as a new table for follow-up analysis. Users can now take advantage of built-in functions like Rank and Partition to create sophisticated statistical analyses with even less effort than before. In addition, recent queries return cached results when the underlying table is unchanged, providing more cost-effective analysis.

Google has also tweaked the BigQuery UI with instant information while writing a query depending on the validity of the syntax. If it is valid, the UI will inform you how much the query would cost to run, and if it’s not, you’ll be told where the error is.

Paying With Social Media

Chirpify is abandoning PayPal and adding its own payment processing to reduce seller fees for its service. The switch comes as the company is looking to expand, both in terms of the supported social media platforms and the brands it works with.

Starting Tuesday, customers will be able to accept credit and debit cards from both domestic and international customers, as well as send and accept automated clearing house payments through Chirpify’s system.

Previously, these transactions were processed through PayPal, and sellers would pay both a PayPal and Chirpify fee. Now, by cutting out the middle-man, users will only have to pay Chirpify’s fee. Chirpify is probably the best-known company that allows users to buy something by sending a single tweet or posting a Facebook comment. Once consumers create a Chirpify account and add their payment information, they can make purchases on social media.

There’s a major revolution going on in mobile and social payments right now, and currently, it looks like Chirpify is on track to become the de facto standard for payments over social networks.

Comcast – More Like Cloudcast!

Comcast’s new DVR ditches the hard drive and now stores all of your recordings on the cloud.

The X2, the latest version of its cloud-connected X1 entertainment platform, uses the new XI3 DVR, which utilizes cloud storage for your recorded shows. The device is so cloud oriented, that it doesn’t even have a hard drive for local storage. An advantage of this is that it is 3x smaller than other models, and it uses 50% less energy as a result.

Additionally, the cloud feature allows users to access their recorded shows from a variety of devices, including smartphones and tablets.

The XI3 is also said to be four times faster than the typical cable box in use today. Other features include personalized home screens that syncs across your TV and apps on mobile devices, and the device’s AI offers users recommendations for new shows and content. The device also offers the ability to start watching content on one device and then continue it on another. The X2 can even send video content from a user’s device to the set-top box for viewing on TV, essentially copying Comcast’s version of Apple’s AirPlay feature.

The X2 platform is scheduled to launch later this year, but it’s not clear exactly how many markets it will be available in at that time.

To keep up with this and more tech news, be sure to follow us every weekday morning on NewsDesk with Kristen Feledy.

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writing credit: Andrew E. Lowe