Fitbit Flex Review: where tech and sweat meet
With all the different activity trackers on the market today it can be hard to decide which one to go with. Many questions race through my mind like, “Can I get it wet?”, “How long will it last on a charge?”, “Will it bother me throughout the day?”, “Is it really worth it?”. Well, I have gotten my hands on the Fitbit Flex and I will answer these questions plus many more.
At first glance, the Flex looks like bracelet with a black bar running across the top of it, but it is so much more. The Flex allows you to track your steps, calories consumed and burned, distance, and sleep. The Flex is “water-resistant” and can be submerged to 10 meters. Now the only information available on the Flex itself are 5 small dots that appear once you double tap the device. Which doesn’t sound like much, but the amount people use their smartphones these days, it is really no big deal. Well, lets dig into it and see what we got!
What’s in the box
- Flex tracker
- Large & small wristbands
- Wireless sync dongle
- Charging cable
- Free Fitbit.com membership – includes ability to log and track activity, food, sleep, water, body mass, weight, and more
Display
Now, you can only set the Flex to display your current status of a goal. So lets say you want to walk 10,000 steps a day, well double tap the screen and if you’ve walked say, 4,000 steps, two dots will glow solid saying you’ve completed 40% of your goal. This can also be applied to distance or calories burned. The display is small, but it is really all you need to get a quick update throughout your day. If you really wanna know how far away the mailbox is, just open the app and start walking. The app will update in real time how many steps you have gone, kinda cool!
Durability
The band is made of a high strength rubber material with a metal clasp holding the band together around your wrist. The tracker itself is removable from the band and is made of hard plastic. The tracker fits inside the band very easily and is highly unlikely to fall out. The band feels great and isn’t made of some crap you think is going to break. Fitbit has done an excellent job at designing the band for all the elements, I forget it is there most of the time.
Functionality
Like I said before the Flex is much more than a pedometer on your wrist. With its interactive app, I can track all sorts of data throughout my day from water intake, distance, steps, sleep and calories.
One of my favorite features that works really well is the sleep monitor. In order to put the Flex into sleep mode you just tap is five times and it will start vibrating letting you know you are in sleep mode. In order to bring it out of sleep mode you do the same thing and wait for the vibration. It is really neat to see how much “quality” sleep I get throughout the night and how many times I am restless or awake. The app allows you to see back one year of activity, which is nice to track how much sleep I received on a given night.
Battery life on the Flex is roughly 5 days, per Fitbit’s website. However, I have been getting about 6 to 7 days of life out it. Charging the device is easy as well, just plug the tracker into the adapter and about 75 minutes later you are good to go.
The syncing of the Flex is “ok”. You can set the app to update in the background, which uses more battery, but I don’t notice a difference on my HTC One M8. However, even when I have background sync enabled and I open up the app, it still takes around 20 seconds for the Flex to sync up. Now, this doesn’t sound terrible, but my wife has a Fitbit and on her iPhone 5s, it syncs in about 3 seconds every time. I’m not sure what the deal is with this, but like in every relationship and in technology, there is always give and take.
Software
The app is easy to setup and use. It took me about 2 minutes to setup an account and sync my Flex to my phone. The app itself is laid out quite nicely with your Dashboard as your main screen that lays out all the stats of the current day. 
You can then switch over to the device itself and add “Silent Alarms” which is a fantastic feature. The silent alarm will vibrate your arm for whatever time you set it and won’t wake up the entire household when it goes off. You can also edit your Fitbit profile, check your battery status or previous activity from past days. Fitbit will also send you an email when your battery is low, so nice!
Now, whatever you do, do not become friends with anybody on Fitbit unless, they are lazier than you. I have a few friends who are, lets just say, over-active, and they are constantly taunting me and cheering me on to do more steps. It is actually a nice feature, the app allow you to request friends that are in your contacts or who have a Fitbit account. Once they are your friends, they can see how many steps you have done throughout the week. This also allows you to cheer on your buddy who is doing great or to “taunt” your friends to pick up the pace. I get taunted daily, thank you honey!
BlinkFeed
Another last minute feature is the integration into BlinkFeed, if you’re not sure what this is check out my HTC One M8 review, which post onto your feed your best day or you can just see what Fitbit has to say by selecting it in your BlinkFeed.
Overall
The Flex is an awesome activity tracker that has a lot of functionality and you don’t have to worry about it getting messed up. Fitbit also has widgets that can be placed on your home screens, sorry iPhone users take that up with Apple. Overall, I highly recommend the Fitbit Flex because not only does it challenge you to be more proactive, but it makes it fun as well. The Flex comes in many different colors and would be the perfect gift this Mother’s Day! Check out the official Flex site here!
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Lyft’s new premium service hauls you around in high-tech style
So you’re out on the town with five of your best buddies, and you want a posh ride to the next party without paying a premium for Uber SUV or a limo. Are you stuck? Not after today — Lyft has unveiled Plus, a high-end service which promises luxuriant ridesharing that won’t hit your bank account quite so hard. Choose the new tier and a customized Ford Explorer will show up with room for six and one of the company’s better-rated drivers. It’s a technology haven on the inside, to boot. You get power outlets to recharge your gadgets, and drivers have Spotify Premium access to handle your song requests.
A pilot rollout is starting today in San Francisco, with fares costing twice as much as run-of-the-mill Lyft rides. However, Plus should be a relative bargain if you’re already planning to splurge: the company claims that its new service costs 40 percent less than Uber SUV, and 20 percent less than ordinary Uber Black. It’s still going to be overkill if all you need is a quick jaunt downtown, but it may be affordable enough to justify treating yourself every now and then.
Filed under: Transportation
Source: Lyft
London’s black cabs plan ‘severe chaos’ on city streets in protest of Uber
Uber’s no stranger to disputes with traditional taxi firms in Europe; it’s already been banned in Belgium and French lawmakers want to take its tracking tech and hand it over to regular cab firms. Discontent has been growing the other side of the Channel too, as drivers of London’s iconic black cabs appear set to cause “severe chaos and congestion” by blockading many of the city’s streets in June. For the Licensed Taxi Drivers Association (LTDA) the issue is simple: it says Uber’s drivers are using smartphone apps to calculate fares, which they believe is illegal because private vehicles are not permitted to be fitted with taximeters. Uber’s apps actually use GPS data to work out the distance travelled and time taken, which isn’t illegal, despite the LTDA’s groans. Transport for London doesn’t want to get involved as it doesn’t believe the law has been broken, but that won’t stop the LTDA from seeking a judicial review. Although TfL appears to back Uber’s presence in London, it says no final decisions have been made and the company’s model is “still under investigation.”
[Image credit: Justin Sneddon]
Filed under: Transportation
Source: BBC News
Snapchat settles with FTC for misrepresenting its ephemeral nature, gathering user data
Snapchat has been a popular choice for those looking to send temporary messages that will soon disappear forever. Well, the auto-erase feature wasn’t without flaws, and now the mobile outfit has settled with the Federal Trade Commission over it. The FTC has announced that it had reached an agreement with Snapchat for misleading users about the ephemeral focus of the app, after the commission found that users could easily save messages with third-party apps and other tricks. Despite claims to the contrary, the complaint alleges that the software gobbled up location details and other user info (like contacts) which allowed researchers to build a database of over four million user names and their matching phone numbers.
Snapchat was also accused of storing sent videos on recipients’ devices in a repository outside of the app’s auto-clearing sandbox, making them accessible when connected to a computer and searching the file directory. “If a company markets privacy and security as key selling points in pitching its service to consumers, it is critical that it keep those promises,” said FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez. “Any company that makes misrepresentations to consumers about its privacy and security practices risks FTC action.” As part of the settlement, Snapchat also faces monitoring from an “independent privacy professional” for the next 20 years.
Flickr struggles to capture the selfie generation
Flickr’s latest app is its best yet, but even that might not be enough to save it.
I posted my first-ever selfie on Flickr on July 11, 2004. Taken with the rear camera of a Sony Ericsson T616, the photo was horrendously grainy at a resolution of 288 x 352. But at the time, taking a picture with my phone and uploading it to a website (via MMS, no less) was a strange and wonderful thing. I would soon grow to use Flickr for photos taken with a regular camera as well, but it was that initial brush with mobile technology that drew me into its fold.
Ten years later, and the landscape of mobile photography has changed dramatically. Not only can smartphones snap pics that rival the ones from point-and-shoot cameras, but also uploading those images to the web is as easy as using an app. Unfortunately, the rise of smartphones, and the subsequent fall of dedicated cameras, led to a decline in Flickr’s utility. Heeding the siren call of the iTunes App Store, the site released an iPhone app in 2009, but early versions were clunky, slow and woefully insufficient. Uploads took forever even though image quality was downsized to 600 x 450, and users were forced to log in via Safari.
As Flickr struggled to get its mobile act together, a serious competitor emerged in 2010: Instagram. It wasn’t perfect — you could only upload square pics and you couldn’t group them by album. But unlike Flickr, Instagram didn’t have to worry about integrating a photo behemoth into its mobile offerings — it could just be lightweight and nimble, as a mobile app should be. Under Marissa Mayer’s new leadership, Flickr attempted an app revamp in 2012. It introduced a whole slew of editing features and photo filters along with new sharing capabilities that put it more in line with the competition. But even that felt like an attempt to shoehorn the site’s sprawling web presence into a tiny screen. Pictures in the main welcome area looked small on mobile, and if you wanted to view them in full resolution, you had to tap them twice.
Which is why the Flickr 3.0 redesign that rolled in a couple of weeks ago struck me as so important. At last, it seemed, Flickr had finally gotten a clue and made its app more mobile-friendly. The main viewing area, for example, is similar to Instagram’s, with square images and the ability to seamlessly fave, comment and share a photo without ever leaving the river. Lest you think that all your Flickr photos are now forced into squares, don’t fret — they just appear that way in the feed. To view an image in its full resolution, you just tap the photo and it’s there in all its glory, in portrait or landscape. This, I felt, is what made it so much better than Instagram. No longer was I limited to square-shaped photos — they could be in any orientation or size I wanted, and the app could handle it just fine.
At last, it seemed, Flickr had finally gotten a clue and made its app more mobile-friendly.
Bernardo Hernandez, who currently heads up Flickr at Yahoo, said that it didn’t intentionally mimic Instagram’s layout. “We chose the square format because it was the most balanced way to display different aspect ratios for different pictures,” he said. He pointed out that you can even zoom in on photos, which you can’t do on Instagram. Further, with the new Flickr app, someone could upload a whole swath of photos without the images dominating your feed. Instead, a triptych or split images are used to indicate multiple pics, with a link inviting you to “View all” photos underneath. Fittingly, you can also upload several photos at once and add them to albums or groups.
At long last, Flickr 3.0 also adds video to the mix, allowing you to record and upload clips of up to 30 seconds, which handily beats the 15-second limit on Instagram. Another big differentiator is the choice to limit the audience of select photos. With Instagram, your entire stream has to be either private or public — you can’t mix and match different privacy settings within the same account. Last, but not least, you can also automatically upload every picture you ever take to Flickr. As the service offers one terabyte for free, that’s not an entirely bad idea.
On the whole, this is the best app Flickr has ever released, and in terms of design and features, it beats Instagram handily. With over 5,000 photos on the service, I was thrilled to be back on Flickr after a years-long affair with Instagram.
At first. After just two weeks delving deep into the Flickr app, I found myself going back to Instagram. As wonderful as the new app was, it was missing one key ingredient: my friends.
Back in the day, Flickr was not just one of the best options for storing your photos online. It was also a bustling community filled with amateur photography enthusiasts and early web adopters, many of whom were my friends. In many ways, Flickr was the reason my affinity for photography blossomed. I learned tips and tricks at Flickr meetups and photowalks. I wasn’t on Flickr just for the pretty pictures. I also wanted to see where my friends went on vacation and what they did over the weekend, and I’m pretty sure the feeling was mutual. Sure, it was a place for professional photogs to show their work, but the real appeal, for me anyway, was in a social network with photography as an entry point.
As wonderful as the new app was, it was missing one key ingredient: my friends.
Somewhere along the line, however, the community just dissipated. You could blame Yahoo for forcing its login system and not working harder to keep the community happy, or say that everyone just moved on to Facebook as their social network of choice. In any case, my friends who once used Flickr as their primary photo-sharing site are now sharing them elsewhere. Even those who still post to Flickr are cross-posting from Instagram.
Not everyone has given up. Longtime Flickr user and professional photographer Thomas Hawk still remains enthusiastic about the site. “My favorite place to store photos online is Flickr,” Hawk said. “As a grandfathered Pro account on Flickr, I can post an unlimited number of full high-res photos on the site.”
However, he too admits that he has a much larger audience on Google+ and Facebook, adding that while Flickr is good for online storage, it’s not so great for community. Scott Beale, a founder of Laughing Squid who was once dubbed the “official photographer for Web 2.0,” agrees. He said there’s not much community there these days. Another popular photographer, Trey Ratcliff, hardly uses Flickr at all, preferring instead to share his photos on Google+.
Hernandez said Yahoo wants Flickr to be a destination for photography enthusiasts of all levels. “Ten years ago, only professional photographers could take really beautiful pictures. Now, everyone’s a photographer with the high-res cameras on phones,” he said. Flickr was built as a platform for photography, he continued, stating that the site has a community full of people who are passionate about the art form.
Flickr is a site for people who want to take great photos. Instagram, on the other hand, is a place for people who want to share goofy pictures of their everyday lives.
“We’ve made a really conscious effort in bringing the community back,” Hernandez said. “We have tremendous engagement — we have the largest photography community product on the web.” There’s a tremendous need to learn how to take a picture, he said, and Flickr’s community of photographers fulfills that need. While that may be true, the rise of mobile photography is proof that most people don’t really care about how good their photos look. Instagram is still the most popular mobile photo app after all these years. (It’s currently number two in the Photo & Video category in the iTunes App Store, second only to Snapchat.)
A random glance at Instagram’s Explore tab shows a blurry photo of someone playing the saxophone, a fuzzy white cat and a selfie of a teenager. Flickr’s Explore page, on the other hand, shows jaw-dropping vistas of beaches in Hawaii, a beautiful image of a farm in Tuscany and an artistic shot of streaks of light at a London bus stop. At a glance, Flickr is a site for people who want to take great photos. Instagram, on the other hand, is a place for people who want to share goofy pictures of their everyday lives. And when it comes down to it, most of us are the latter.
Sky News launches on-demand hub for Sky+HD boxes
News programming isn’t something you’d think a good fit for catch-up TV when up-to-date reporting is so readily available. That’s why we were a tad puzzled to hear about Sky News’ catch-up service launching today, probably because it’s better described as a news content portal accessed via your Sky+HD box. With videos split into several categories, you can quickly take in the day’s headlines and bulletins, visit the featured section for important stories and longer reports, and look specifically at happenings in the tech and “showbiz” worlds. You can also check on the weather, and delve into Sky News’ archives to revisit important events, as well as catching a variety of weekly round-up shows, including some new ones. All things considered, it sounds like a pretty good idea as long as the interface is slick enough, bringing the browsing style of news consumption websites afford us into the living room.
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Internet
Source: Sky
Remember Unreal Tournament? Epic’s making a new one and it’s free
Epic Games is known for a lot of things, the Gears of War game franchise and development tool Unreal Engine prime among them. But old-school game fans might know Epic Games for another classic franchise: Unreal Tournament. The long-dormant series is making its return starting today! Sort of. Epic announced this afternoon that the next Unreal Tournament game begins development starting today with “a small team of UT veterans.” The entire development is open source, which Epic characterizes as, “a collaboration between Epic, UT fans and UE4 developers.” As that line infers, the game’s being created using Unreal Engine 4. Best of all? When the game’s ready to play, it will be free. As Epic puts it: “Not free to play, just free.”
So, other than acting as a love letter to longtime Epic Games fans, how does the developer make money on this new endeavor? Epic’s creating a marektplace within the game for devs, mods, artists and players “can give away, buy and sell mods and content.” When goods are purchased, earnings are split between Epic and its creator. The marketplace won’t be in the first version of the game, though; Epic says it’s coming “eventually.”
First things first, creating a new Unreal Tournament. Given that work begins today, Epic admits it’ll take “many months” to produce a working product. Even that sounds like an overly optimistic deadline, as most games take several years to create. The developers at Epic are planning to interact with external devs and modders via forums and Twitch livestreams.
Of course, this is all completely new to Epic Games. It’s also new to the game industry in general; many games aren’t even announced until well into production. The new transparency will no doubt show more of the unfortunate sides of game development, but it’ll also offer a fascinating look into the creation of a game from a triple-A studio. And before we all know it, we’ll have a new (and free!) game to play. Sounds pretty sweet if you ask us.
Source: Epic Games
Jony Ive Wins Lifetime Achievement Award From SF’s Museum of Modern Art
Apple’s design chief Jony Ive is set to be honored with the Bay Area Treasure Award, given by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Ive will receive the award for his long history of designing innovative products for Apple.
“Ive is our generation’s most innovative and influential figure in the field of industrial design–no other design mind has done more to transform the way we visualize and share information,” said SFMOMA Director Neal Benezra. “SFMOMA was the first museum on the West Coast to establish a department of architecture and design, and we’re thrilled to celebrate Ive’s revolutionary achievements.”
Ive, who has designed products for Apple since 1992, has been responsible for many of the company’s flagship products, including the iPod, iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, and iOS 7.
The award will be given to Ive at a dinner and presentation set to be held on Thursday, October 30, 2014, where Ive will speak with SFMOMA Curator of Architecture and Design Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher. Tickets for the event will range in price from $400 to $1,250 and can be purchased via the Modern Art Council.
In the past, SFMOMA’s Bay Area Treasure Award has been given to famed artists and creators like architect Lawrence Halprin, filmmaker George Lucas, media artist Jim Cambbell, and painter Wayne Thiebaud. In a statement, Ive said he was proud to be recognized by the museum.
“I’ve always enjoyed visiting SFMOMA, and I think it represents exceptional contemporary art and design,” said Ive. “I’m very grateful to the museum and proud to be recognized among such an amazing list of past recipients.”
Ive has received several other awards for his work at Apple, including a 2007 National Design Award for the iPhone and a 2009 honorary doctorate from the Rhode Island School of Design. Ive was also appointed as a Commander of the Order of the British Empire back in 2006 and in 2012, he was elevated to Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, where he was knighted by Princess Anne.
Adaptxt promises to prevent Mom’s embarrassing AutoCorrects [App of the Day]
Ever received that odd text from your mom? Remember that one word that was changed and scarred you for life? Chances are she was victim of some sort of AutoCorrecting feature on her device creating the awkward conversation. Adaptxt is a solution that can help eliminate your mother’s frustrating AutoCorrects just in time for Mother’s Day.
Adaptxt for Android is an app that learns the typing style of your mother as she interacts with her apps, emails, and text messages. The app also touts a learning ability to help do a “smart” prediction of the next word which would help reduce errors. The app does this by using location-based suggestions like street names and landmarks, application-based suggestions for specific topics and writing style, and the ability to learn from your general writing style via Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter. Silent dictionary updates have also been included so that she won’t be left behind on the newest trending words. God knows Mother needs to spell “twerking” right.
In addition to the smart features, Adaptxt also comes bearing 93 languages, 44 industry-specific dictionaries including medicine, law, business, sports, and entertainment, tape and glide, 12 key layout, language-specific layouts (QWERTY, QWERTZ, AZERTY, etc.), and other customizations that put you in control and make typing easier on mobile devices.
One feature missing from the app would be the ability to recognize two (or more) languages at once. For people who frequently type in multiple languages, it can be annoying to switch between languages. Despite that one feature lacking this is a solid keyboard that promises to make it easier to type smarter by correctly predicting words based on your specific writing styles, location, and interests.
This is a paid app at the cost of $2.98, but for those of us that would like to test it out before your purchase, you can also grab a 30 day free trial. Both are available on the Google Play Store.
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AT&T’s Muve Music could potentially be up for sale
Did you know that AT&T is connected to a music streaming service other than Beats Music? Muve Music has flown under the radar for quite some time now, ranging back to around the time that Beats Music came in to play. Cricket Wireless, an AT&T company, is the carrier that deals directly with Muve, and markets it to lower-income users. After quite some time, AT&T may finally be doing something with the streaming service according to sources that were briefed on the company’s plans.
In a report from the New York Times, AT&T is looking to sell Muve Music to another company, and a bidding process has already began. Not much has been said from the sources, but Alejandra Arango, a spokeswoman for Cricket, had some interesting things to say in a recent statement.
After a careful review, we’ve decided to explore alternative music options to Muve. For now, nothing changes for our Muve customers. They’ll continue to enjoy their Muve experience at this time, as we evaluate alternative music options.
It’s not really clear as to why Muve Music is being sold. Maybe we’ll see some more Beats Music integration into Cricket Wireless, or maybe it’s just not doing so well. We’ll have to wait and see if anything official comes from this in the near future.
Source: The New York Times
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AIVAnet 