Engadget Daily: Hot-rod Tesla Model S, adventures with a homemade standing desk and more!
Let us help you brighten your Monday a bit, yeah? Today we’ve got everything from a concert violinist playing a tune while surgeons fiddled with his brain, the unsurprising news that even North Koreans are accessing porn and a bit more! It’s all waiting for you in the gallery below.
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Sprint Announces New Data-Heavy Family Share Pack Plan With Incentives for New Subscribers
Sprint today announced the debut of a new Sprint Family Share Pack plan, aiming to draw customers by offering significant amounts of data. Sprint’s new plan provides customers with 20GB of shared data, which is double the amount that Sprint offered with its previous Framily plans.
For a limited time, customers who switch to Sprint will get the 20GB of shared data plus an additional 2GB of data per line for $100 per month until the end of 2015, with support for up to 10 lines (including a waived $15/month device fee). That equates to 40GB of shared data for 10 lines, up from the 1GB per line Sprint originally offered under its Framily plans.
The Sprint Family Share Pack, offering double the high-speed shareable data for smartphones, basic phones, tablets and mobile broadband devices, will be available starting Aug. 22. For example you can get four lines and 20GB of data for $160 compared to 10GB of data for the same price from AT&T or Verizon.
But wait, there’s more. To kick off Sprint’s “new day for data” campaign, Sprint is offering a limited-time promotion for the Sprint Family Share Pack: For a family with up to 10 lines, get 20GB of Shared Data and Unlimited Talk & Text for only $100 a month through 2015 – and, as an added bonus, customers will get an additional 2GB per line for up to 10 lines. For a family of four, that’s a savings of $60 per month better than AT&T’s and Verizon’s current pricing through 2015; double the data of Verizon; and more than double the high-speed data of AT&T and T-Mobile.
To further sweeten the deal and attract new users, Sprint is offering up to $350 (via Visa Prepaid Card) to cover early termination fees for users switching from other carriers. Sprint’s device fees are still applicable, requiring both Easy Pay users and those who sign up for subsidized phones to pay device fees in the range of $15 to $25 (minus the $15 discount).
While the promotional $100/month price is only for new customers, existing Sprint subscribers can get 20GB of shared data for up to 10 lines for $160 per month. Current subscribers cannot, however, get the 2GB of bonus data being offered to new customers.
Sprint’s website also promises to bring more “great announcements” in the near future. Sprint’s new CEO, Marcelo Claure, has pledged to bring more disruptive pricing to Sprint following its failed merger with T-Mobile.
Sprint’s new plans will be available beginning on Friday, August 22.
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LG’s new curved device is a 34-inch ultrawide display
Does anybody know if LG and Samsung are looking for a new tagline? Because we’d like to suggest “Real manufacturers have curves,” if so. LG, for one, is slated to unveil a 21:9 ultrawide IPS monitor (model 34UC97) at IFA 2014, which (unlike the flatter 21:9 screen the company released a year ago) is just as curved as the G Flex. The 34-inch QHD (3440 x 1440 pixels) LED display is just a bit larger than Asus’ similarly curved 32-inch one, touted the largest of its kind when it was announced in June. It’s compatible with both PC and Mac, supports Thunderbolt 2 connection, has a 7W speaker system onboard and promises the ability to easily handle heavy graphics and videos. As a plus for those who need a really large screen space, several of these assemble quite nicely into a large, curved multi-monitor set-up, as you can see after the break.
LG’s also showcasing two other monitors at IFA 2014, the first being a 31-inch 4K beast with movie/video editors in mind. The other one is meant for gaming rigs with its 144Hz refresh rate and an LG technology that cuts input lags. Sadly, the company doesn’t have release dates or prices yet (take note that its 55-inch curved OLED screen cost a whopping $15,000), but you can see all three from September 5th to 10th during the event in Berlin.
Source: LG
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YouTube ‘Music Key’ leak reveals Google’s streaming plans
Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, Mobile, Google
Source: Android Police
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The 2015 Corvette has a video recording of everything the valet did in your car
The human body undergoes some weird physical changes when it hands the keys to a shiny new car to someone else; the pulse quickens, the throat dries out and the palms get unnaturally clammy. If that shiny new car happens to be a Corvette, though, the human body may be able to worry a little less – Chevy kitted the 2015 model out with a Valet Mode to help you lock down your ride when you’re not the one driving it. Once you key in your code and fire up Valet Mode (introduced in 2014), the system springs into action: the glovebox and the storage bin in the center console automatically lock themselves and the infotainment system gets disabled completely. There’s something new this year though: using the Performance Data Recorder tech, a built-in camera films where the car goes (complete with vehicle data like speed and engine RPM) while a microphone records what’s going on inside the cabin. Sure, using the feature may speak to an intense distrust of your fellow man (if you’ve seen Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), but really now — what have those randoms done to earn your trust in the first place?
Filed under: Transportation
Source: Chevrolet
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Giant crowdfunded darts will search for life on Mars
Is there life on Mars? Curiosity didn’t find any, but that’s hardly a conclusive answer. In fact, a handful of NASA scientists claim that the US space agency is looking for life in all the wrong places. The Mars rover explored the red planet’s dry, irradiated surface: if the planet still hosts life, it’s probably several meters underground. Now a team of scientists — including a few NASA veterans — are hoping to fund a mission to search for life under Mars’ surface. The project is called ExoLance, and its Indiegogo campaign hopes to pitch a series of high-tech darts at the red planet’s crust.
“It’s time to turn our attention to the search for life on Mars,” says NASA scientist Dr. Chris McKay. “Over the past few decades the missions have focused on geology. It’s time to turn our attention to biology.” NASA’s official missions have barely drilled into the planet’s surface, excavating only mere centimeters. The ExoLance team says we need to go deeper, and has designed a penetrator probe that uses the momentum of planetfall to embed itself two meters below the surface. The ExoLance probes would be distributed to multiple sites across Mars, reporting back to a host satellite that would relay their findings to the team back home.
The device has a clever design, but it’s untested — which is why the team has taken to Indiegogo. ExoLance needs $250,000 to test prototypes in the New Mexico desert, a site chosen for its Mars-like characteristics. If the delivery system and the darts themselves prove successful, the team will be able to pitch a real mission to NASA and commercial space programs. Want to help Earth’s brightest probe for new life? Check out the source link below.
[Image credit: Bryan Versteeg]
Filed under: Science
Via: Popular Science
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EA Access restricts early ‘Madden 15’ gameplay to six hours
Thanks to EA’s all-you-can-game subscription, early access to Madden 15 for those who fork over $5 per month is the closest thing the gridiron faithful will get to a demo this year. On top of that, gameplay for early access to the full title is capped at six hours according to the gaming service’s Twitter account. In the past, there hasn’t been a time limit for demos, but players were limited to options like one quarter of action at a time, and sometimes with a couple of pre-selected teams. Of course, EA Access is only available on Xbox One, so the PS4 faithful will have to wait until launch day for kickoff.
@KansasFF EA Access memebers will have six gameplay hours with the full Madden NFL 15 game.
– EA Access (@EAAccess) August 18, 2014
Via: NeoGAF, Steve_OS (Twitter)
Source: EA Access (Twitter)
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HP is building a $199 Windows laptop
Microsoft has been pushing hard for extra-cheap Windows computers that can take on Chromebooks, and it appears that HP is more than willing to hop on that bandwagon. Mobile Geeks has posted a leaked data sheet for the HP Stream 14, an upcoming $199 laptop that’s clearly meant to fight Google-powered PCs. The base 14-inch system should cut corners by using a low-powered AMD A4 Micro processor, 2GB of RAM, a 1,366 x 768 screen and 32GB of flash storage; apart from the capacity, it’d be a step down from the company’s $299 Chromebook 14. You’d have to pay more for brawnier parts like an A10 Micro chip, 64GB of space and a 1080p touchscreen. Not satisfied with the limited drive options? HP would try to make up for the shortfall by giving buyers 100GB of OneDrive cloud storage for two years, matching what you get with many Chrome OS devices. There’s no word on when the Stream 14 would make its debut, although the deluge of information hints that we could see this budget portable fairly soon.
Via: GigaOM
Source: Mobile Geeks (translated)
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AIVAnet 