Sky’s finally increasing the prices of its Now TV packages
It was back in May that Sky announced that Now TV bundles would cost you a little more each month, but never got around to implementing the rise. Five months later, and the company has now decided that the increases (£2 for Entertainment, £1 for Movies) will begin on October 16th. In exchange for more of your moolah, the £7 Entertainment bundle will offer Nickelodeon, Nick. Jr. and ITV Encore as well as an increased number of episodes to watch on catch-up and box-set services. Meanwhile, the £10 Movies package will now get a further 200 titles, as well as access to Sky Movies Disney, which shows around 150 extra titles from the House of Mouse. Hopefully some of that cash has also gone to resolving some of those long-standing reliability issues, too.
Filed under: Home Entertainment
Via: ISP Review
Source: Now TV
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EE scoops up 58 Phones4u stores
When Phones4u entered administration, it immediately shut all of its doors and put thousands of employees on notice. It didn’t take long for Dixons Carphone to secure 800 positions, with Vodafone sweeping in shortly after to buy 140 Phones4u stores and save another 900 jobs. Now, it’s EE’s turn. The UK’s biggest carrier has just announced that it’s reached a deal with administrators to buy 58 outlets and bring 359 employees onto its books. It’s moving quick too, confirming that it’ll open the majority of stores within the next week. Over a year ago, EE began reducing its retail presence after its stores began saturating high streets, but now that it’s joined Vodafone in pulling out of deals with Phones4u, the company will need to move quickly to fill the gaps left by its former partner.
Source: BBC News
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Researchers create a headset to turn your jaw into a tiny power plant
We’re no strangers to projects that try to capture the power of the human body, but here’s one with a peculiar twist. A pair of researchers from Montreal’s École de Technologie Supérieure have cooked up a headset that, while extremely goofy-looking, can harness the power of your mighty jaw muscles while you chew, gab on the phone and stress-grind your teeth into a fine powder.
The secret sauce here are piezoelectric fibers, strands of material that basically convert physical motion into electricity. Those fibers have been fashioned into a chin strap and are lashed to either sides of a pair of earmuffs, and as your mouth moves, the fibers streeeetch and generate power in the process. Alas, the total amount of juice your face will generate comes out to a whopping 10 microwatts a minute – to put that into perspective, that’s just a fraction of a fraction of the amount needed to use a bog-standard flashlight. If we’re being honest, it’s not like the theoretical maximum is all that lofty either. Assuming a totally pure conversation of the mechanical energy your molars make into electricity, we’re looking at 7 milliwatts, tops. Here’s the thing to remember, though: piezoelectric fibers aren’t exactly new, but scientists almost certainly haven’t finished pushing the envelope. This insane-looking contraption might not be terribly useful, but hey — there’s always the chance that it’s similarly awkward progeny might wind up charging our phones while we talk on them.
Via: Gizmodo
Source: Smart Materials and Structures
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Watch a tiny robot fly an aircraft nearly as well as a real pilot
Autonomous aircraft are likely to be the future of air travel, but we’re not quite there yet; even with autopilot systems in place, most airplanes are designed with human pilots in mind. South Korean researchers may have a clever robotic stopgap, however. Their tiny PIBOT automaton uses a mixture of flight data and visuals to fly using real controls. It still needs intervention shortly before touchdown, but it can otherwise take to the skies as well as many organic air crews — it may even be a bit better in a few areas, since it uses its camera to align neatly with the runway on takeoff and landing.
This pint-size machine is only flying a simulator right now, and it’s certainly not going to captain an airliner any time soon. However, its creators are only getting started. Besides giving PIBOT enough skill to tackle every stage of flight, they’re already translating its skill to real (if remote-controlled) aircraft. It’s not hard to envision a future where robots stand in for flesh-and-bone pilots in aircraft that can’t easily be retrofitted to fly on their own.
Via: Phys.org, Popular Science
Source: IEEE Spectrum
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HTC will mark its return to tablets with Google’s Nexus 9
Rumors of an HTC-made Nexus device have swirled for some time, but only recently have details of a possible next-generation tablet started to become apparent. Not long after NVIDIA inadvertently leaked that the Taiwanese company is linking up with Google to launch the Nexus 9, the Wall Street Journal has added even more credibility to reports by stating that HTC engineers have been regularly flying to Google’s Mountain View HQ in order to finalize the 9-inch device. As part of a patent lawsuit against Qualcomm and Samsung earlier this month, NVIDIA revealed that it would be providing the muscle for the Android L-powered slate, which is expected to feature its Tegra K1 processor and launch within the third quarter. However, we’re now just over a week away from the end of September, so it looks increasingly likely that we’ll see something official next month. Remember, Google has a history of scheduling events in October.
Filed under: Tablets, Software, Mobile, HTC, Google
Via: The Verge
Source: Wall Street Journal
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Almost all the sci-fi spaceships you know are on this massive chart
If you regularly follow geek culture, you’ve probably seen early versions of Dirk Loechel’s spaceship comparison chart, which shows the relative sizes of vehicles from science fiction games, movies and TV shows. Well, it’s finished — and it’s even more authoritative than the last time around. Get the full-size version and you’ll see Babylon 5‘s Vorlon Planet Killer, Mass Effect‘s Normandy and seemingly everything in between. The chart even includes a real vessel, the International Space Station — at 328 feet long, it seems downright puny next to its make-believe counterparts. Some story franchises have better representation than others (EVE is full of colossal ships), and you won’t see moon-sized spacecraft like Star Wars‘ Death Star, but it’s otherwise hard to imagine a more complete view of sci-fi transportation.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, Internet, HD, Alt
Via: Kotaku, Geekologie
Source: Dirk Loechel (Deviantart)
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How would you change ASUS’ Transformer Book TX300?
Dana Wollman is so well known as Engadget’s in-house laptop expert that, during Q&A sessions on the Engadget Podcast, people would call her “Laptop Lady.” Points off for not learning her name, but the honorific still stands to this day, and her opinion on all things portable is one of the most revered in the business. When we placed ASUS’ Transformer Book TX300 on her desk (before running away to a safe distance), she found that there wasn’t much point to owning one. For a start, a 13-inch slate-plus-keyboard combo isn’t really better than a transforming laptop like the Yoga 13 or XPS 12. The lack of a Wacom digitizer means that pen input was a no-go and launching just before Haswell seemed like bad timing. Still, the question we’d like to put to you is simple: if you bought one, what would you change about it?
Source: Engadget Product Forums
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The Samsung Galaxy S5 sales reach a million units in Germany
The Galaxy S5 went out of limelight since the announcement of the Galaxy Note 4 and the Galaxy Note Edge but Samsung has decided to bring it back to consumers attention by revealing the sales figure of the Galaxy S5. According to Samsung, the their flagship device is still doing pretty great as the Galaxy S5 sales have reached over a million units in Germany alone. These numbers do not belong to the units shipped to stores but the actual number of units which have been sold to consumers.
This should be a great news to Samsung, especially when Apple has announced the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 plus with 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch screens respectively. The Galaxy S5 got off to a good start after its release, though not as great as the Galaxy S3 and the Galaxy S4. Within 10 days of its release, Samsung had managed to ship over 10 million units throughout the globe, especially due to good carrier tie-ups and availability in more countries. We’ll have to see how the Galaxy Note 4 and the Galaxy Note Edge fare against the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus when they become available later this month.
Source: AllAboutSamsung | Via: SamMobile
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PlayStation Now’s creator explains how game streaming came to Sony
With the PlayStation Now beta just opening to a larger chunk of the gaming population, you might be wondering how the streaming service came to Sony in the first place. Why did Gaikai drop its entire PC audience to join a console maker? Thankfully for you, Gaikai chief David Perry has just shed light on that transition in an interview with GameInformer. Simply put, streaming on computers was becoming a nightmare for Perry’s team before the 2012 acquisition. The sheer number of compatibility problems was “massively reducing” the number of titles Gaikai could support, and the software required increasingly elaborate tricks (such as image recognition) just to run at all. The company wanted to escape these headaches by going to a platform with standardized elements like controllers and copy protection. When Sony came knocking, it quickly became clear that the PlayStation was a good match — it solved many challenges in one fell swoop.
Perry is more than willing to talk about game streaming’s present and future as well. He notes that the PlayStation Now test run has been going smoothly, and that it exists primarily to give his crew freedom to experiment with new techniques before Now is ready for primetime. It won’t just be a matter of refinement in the future, though. Besides introducing social features like Share Play, Perry is hoping to expand device and game support; he has already promised streaming for older PlayStation releases. He’d ideally support “every game ever,” so long as the technology allowed it. In the long run, he also sees the cloud enabling software that isn’t possible when you’re limited by the processing power of a box in your living room. “You could just completely let [developers] go wild and free,” he says. That’s not likely to happen soon, but it’s good to know that streaming could improve the quality of the games you play, not just how you play them.
Source: GameInformer
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Adobe Echosign releases for Android
Adobe, the company behind .pdf files and Acrobat, is bringing its e-signature solution to android devices. Adobe Echosign can now be used on all of your android devices to allow businesses to collect and track signatures across many devices in a business. Instead of getting the signatures with a pen and paper, you can just send the document and they can legally sign it and send it back to you all in a matter of minutes with Echosign.
Tablets are becoming very popular in many different types of businesses. With this new solution, they can safely get legally binding signatures effortlessly; which adds more value and productivity to the tablets for the businesses.
Source: Adobe
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AIVAnet 