What’s up with Engadget Expand?
We’re just two weeks away from our free Engadget Expand event, taking place at New York City’s Javits Center on November 7th and 8th and there’s still so much to tell you about. If you can’t join us in person, don’t worry — we’ll keep you updated throughout the weekend with dispatches from the show floor and our livestream here on Engadget.
‘Beam Yourself’ to Expand
How does winning a free trip to Engadget Expand sound? Thanks to our sponsors and JetBlue Airways, we’re flying one lucky winner and a guest to New York City for the big event. Also, the 10 first prize winners will get a block of time to roam around the show floor from wherever they are using Suitable Technologies BeamPro devices. Be sure to enter for your shot by 11:59 PM on Tuesday, October 28th.
Taking to the Stage
We’ve packed the schedule with some awesome folks including musician and producer RJD2, Paul Eremenko of Google’s Project Ara and DARPA’s Arati Prabhakar. Today, we’re adding a few more to the lineup:
- Matt Richardson, Contributing Editor, Make: Magazine
- Kate Hartman, Associate Professor, OCAD (Ontario College of Art and Design) University
- Jeff Branson, Educational Outreach Coordinator, SparkFun
- Sarah Grant, 2012 Artist-in-Residence, Eyebeam; Technical Lead, The Barbarian Group
- Craig Dalton, Co-founder and CEO, DODOcase
- Patrick Buckley, Co-founder, DODOcase; Co-author of The Hungry Scientist Handbook
- Benjamin Heckendorn, Master modder and host of element14’s The Ben Heck Show
- James Dietrich, Strategic Partnership/Developer Program Manager – Americas, Aldebaran Robotics
- Marte Roel, M.Sc., BeAnotherLab
- Niki Werkheiser, Project Manager for the 3D Printing in Zero-G Technology Demonstration, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
- Angela Ruggiero, four-time Olympic medalist
- Greg Sewitz, Co-founder, Exo
- Agnieszka Nazaruk, Co-founder and Biz Dev, Niwa
- William Woodworth, Project Coordinator/Content Developer, Geek Squad Academy
- Dr. Vaiva Kalnikaitė, Founder, Dovetailed
- Isaiah Kacyvenski, Head of Sports and Fitness Segment, MC10
You can find out who else is coming in the gallery below and know when they’re taking to the stage using our schedule.
Hands-on Workshops
To experience the future of technology, sometimes you have to get your hands in the mud (though we’re not planning on having anything that messy). We’ve lined up a bunch of interactive workshops that will keep guests of all ages fully entertained. Here’s some of what you can expect:
- The LEGO(R) MINDSTORMS(R) robot-building competition will come to life at Expand. Come watch folks build a robot that can either “take” Manhattan or “take care” of it and get a shot at a LEGO MINDSTORMS trophy and a $500 LEGO(R) gift card.
- DODOcase will let you build your very own VR headset using its simple cardboard kit and your smartphone.
- Make: Magazine will offer a couple of workshops including one where participants can create a wearable circuit that lives on multiple bodies and responds to a social interaction between two people — bringing social media to real life.
- Eyebeam will show you how to make a wireless network of your very own with the Raspberry Pi and BATMAN ADV protocols. It may sound complicated, but they’ll keep it simple.
- SparkFun will bring you up to speed on the Internet of Things (IoT), showing you how to make a connected object with low-cost materials. The workshop is designed for folks with little to no coding experience.
For more details, check out the schedule.
Showing off the latest in technology
We’ve announced OnePlus, Suitable Technologies, Matterport, Huawei, GizmoSphere and GIROPTIC as some of the companies ready to show you what they’re up to on the Expand show floor. Find out in the gallery below who you can hang out with and we’ll have many more to announce next week.
Insert Coin Semi-finalists
These 10 semi-finalists will show off their inventions onstage at Expand for a shot at our $10,000 Judges’ Choice and $15,000 Reader’s Choice awards. Find out more about these folks in the gallery below and get ready to cast your vote for the Reader’s Choice portion during Expand.
[Photo: Richard Levine/Alamy (Javits Center)]
Filed under: Announcements
Xiaomi to move data to new data centers in the US and Singapore
Xiaomi might be a name that you have heard a time or two here in the sates. It might register with you when Google’s Hugo Barra moved over to the Chinese based company. It might register more if you have ever used MIUI on any of your devices. A number of Xiaomi devices have certainly caught the Android communities attention this last year with the Mi4 and its high-end specs with a $400 price tag and the NVIDIA Tegra K1 toting MiPad for under $300. The company has done some great things, including taking out Apple and Samsung in a number of markets. One concern of users around the globe that want or have a Xiaomi device, is their data privacy. It is a concern simply because all the data centers have resided in Beijing China. I think I even remember a story where Xiaomi was accused of spying on the US through the devices.
Today Hugo Barra put out some details via his G+ page in regards to changes with the internal server infrastructure. The shift is happening in three phases.
- E-commerce migration – Earlier this year the companies E-Commerce Engineering teams started moving their global e-commerce platforms and user data for all international users from Beijing to Amazon AWS data centers in California. Completion is said to happen by the end of October this year.
- MIUI services migration – They have started to migrate MIUI services and corresponding data for all international users from Bejing to Amazon AWS servers in Oregon and Singapore. The migration includes Mi Account, Cloud Messaging, and Mi Cloud Services. Completion is expected by the end of this year (2014).
- Going Local – Next year Xiaomi will work to improve performance of their services in their fastest growing markets, such as India and Brasil. Amazon AWS is not available in those locales so they will work with local data centers to set up the service infrastructure.
All of this should ease current and would be owners of Xiaomi devices as well as ROM flashers of the MIUI OS.
Source: Hugo Barra G+ via AndroidCommunity
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Amazon working hard with AT&T, get a Kindle Fire HDX7 for $49.99 if you buy a Fire Phone
Have you been considering the Amazon Fire phone for AT&T? Even just a little? Well, AT&T is kicking off a new promotion to sweeten the deal a little. Starting today, October 24th, you have the opportunity to snag a Kindle Fire HDX7 tablet for $49.99 when you buy an Amazon Fire phone.
The Amazon Fire phone with AT&T will set you back $0.99 with a 2-year contract. If you opt for the Next 18 it is $18.75 a month and on Next 12 you will spend $22.50 a month. No matter which route you take, the Kindle Fire HDX7 will run you $49.99. Yes, that is also with a contract and a service plan. If you are more interested in the tablet by its self you are looking at $99.99 on a new contract or a $10 monthly installment plan option for 20 months.
The Kind Fire HDX7 brings you a 7-inch HDX display ( 1920 x 1200), 2.2GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 quad-core processor, 2GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage and approximately 11 hour usage time. Don’t forget Second Screen, Kindle FreeTime and Mayday live on-device support.
The whole deal is pretty good really if you think about it. You get a complete Amazon experience set up from the phone to the tablet for $51. Check out the Fire Phone and Kindle Fire HDX7 thought AT&T.
Source: AT&T
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iTunes Digital Music Sales Fall 13 Percent as Apple Prepares Beats Music Refresh
Apple’s digital music sales continue to spiral downward, falling more than 13 percent worldwide thus far in 2014, reports The Wall Street Journal. Last year, digital music sales dropped for the first time since iTunes opened in 2003, falling 5.7 percent year-over-year.
This continued decline is likely one of the reasons behind Apple’s $3 billion acquisition of Beats Electronics and Beats Music earlier this year. Apple may be hoping to offset this drop in digital music revenue with increased subscription revenue from Beats Music.
The plummeting download numbers help illustrate why Apple bought the $10-a-month subscription streaming service Beats Music earlier this year, as part of its $3 billion acquisition that included headphone maker Beats Electronics. Apple is rebuilding Beats Music and plans to relaunch it next year as part of iTunes, according to a person familiar with the matter.
To attract a broader customer base, Apple is rumored to be revamping Beats Music with an expected relaunch of the service slated for next year. The Cupertino company also is pushing for an industry-leading $5 monthly subscription cost that may increase the number of subscribers willing to pay for a premium service.
Apple is not new to the streaming music business, having launched iTunes Radio last year alongside iOS 7. The Pandora-like service has reportedly failed to achieve its goals of spurring listeners to purchase tracks from the iTunes Store despite being bundled on millions of phones in its available regions, and has yet to expand beyond the United States and Australia.
Android 5.0 Lollipop: Coming to a phone near you
We’ve had iOS 8, it’s time for Android to step up right? And boy has it. Rolling out on Nexus 6 and 9 in November as the first design, Android Lollipop is finally here and with a whole host of new features, next month can’t come around quick enough.
Android L for short, the operating system will be first to the Motorola devices, before being updated on HTC and released on other yet-to-be-announced smartphones and tablets.
For the Android purists, there are a fair few changes compared to the previous KitKat system, making it sleeker than ever before. Announced in June this year, Nexus 5 and 7 owners can already install previews on their handsets, and what they’ll find is pretty special.
Lollipop has over 5,000 new APIs working behind the scenes, but it’s perhaps in the visuals where the changes will be most noticeable. The display is set to be much more animated with Google taking inspiration from pen and inks, with every icon having a definition.
The makeover continues with the home screen, and pull-down menu matching the new look and being much cleaner in their approach, whilst every Google app will also eventually mirror the new sophisticated look.
A major upgrade is in the notification area. Where now you have to unlock your devices to check, respond, or dismiss notifications, but with L, they’ll appear as Google Now type cards which can be dealt with directly from the lock screen.
Which makes the system much more efficient, and when looking at its new features it’s exactly the same. The Google Now-style cards will allow you to jump between between open apps, whilst its personalised locking is perhaps one of the standout new elements to Lollipop.
The system effectively searches for familiar Bluetooth gadgets, Wi-Fi networks, or locations, letting you jump straight into your phone when you’re nearby, making it quicker and easier to get into your phone.
Performance wise there are some big changes. The move from Dalvik runtime to ART means Android now speaks a lot more languages and will work on more CPUs than previous operating systems, which will massively improve how it works.
And that implies to the DirectX 11-level graphics too. Making its way onto Android for the first time it’s going to improve gaming unbelievably whether that be on racing games such as Asphalt 8 or Royal Vegas Canadian online casino games. Which is a major bonus. Gaming has become a key selling point in smartphone sales over the last few years and with a smoother performance it’ll be right up there competing toe-to-toe with iOS devices when it’s released next month.
Google have also gone and improved battery life too, developing a battery saver mode which will see the system disable certain features when your battery is low to preserve it, meaning we’ll get an extra 90 minutes life without changing how we use our phone at all. And that in itself is well worth the Lollipop update.
The post Android 5.0 Lollipop: Coming to a phone near you appeared first on AndroidGuys.
U.S. Cellular now offering $100 LG G Pad 7.0 LTE
U.S. Cellular, in winding down the work week, announced the immediate availability of the LG G Pad 7.0 LTE. Sold for $99 with a two-year service agreement, the tablet runs Android 4.4 KitKat and features a 7-inch WXGA display. Internally you’ll find a 1.2GHz quad-core Snapdragon processor, 16GB storage, and a 4000mAh battery. The rear houses a 5.0-megapixel camera while the front-side has a 1.3-megapixel shooter. In terms of connectivity, the G Pad 7.0 LTE offers Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and 4G LTE support.
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BACtrack Vio mobile breathalyzer review
It’s Friday, time to hit the town with friends. If you’re going to be drinking you might want to consider adding the BACtrack Vio to your keychain. The BACtrack Vio is one of the smallest personal breathalyzers I have ever seen, it’s just about the same size as a Bic lighter. The Vio can be added to a keychain or ride in just about any pocket. When paired with your smartphone, the Vio is a powerful tool that is easy to carry anywhere.
Setting up and using the Vio is a simple matter of downloading the BACtrack app and pairing the device with your smartphone of choice via Bluetooth. When you’re ready to test your BAC (Blood Alcohol Content), you fold out a tiny tube that you then blow into. The app gives you directions that are easy to read, understand, then follow. Even after a few drinks the Vio is easy to use.
After blowing into the Vio you get a reading that is big, bright and full of information. A clever feature that the BACtrack app offers is something called ZeroLine. ZeroLine estimates, then tells you what time you should be sober. I wouldn’t rely on ZeroLine to tell you if you’re able to drive, but it’s useful information none the less.
The BACtrack system really shines when you use the social features. You can share your your BAC, location and photos with friends who might not be out with you. This turns the Vio into something that you WANT to use, rather than something that you HAVE to use. By keeping track of your alcohol consumption you can be safer when you’re out, so any feature that promote use of the Vio is good in my book.
There are a couple negative things to consider before buying your own Vio. This breathalyzer is not as accurate as others on the market. I was able to compare the Vio to a portable police issue breathalyzer. The Vio consistently read several points higher than the professional unit, but the police unit was much bigger. In the past I had played with personal or mobile breathalyzers and the readings were all over the place. Not so with the Vio, while it read high, it was at least consistently high.
The only real problem I had when I was testing the Vio was with the app. Sometimes the app would tell you it was warming up, but then would skip straight to the result page. Restarting the app fixed the problem, but the same problem would pop up occasionally. Not a big deal, but it could be something that gets annoying, especially if you’re trying to test yourself while intoxicated.
If you want a personal breathalyzer that is easy to carry the BACtrack Vio would be a great choice, especially for only $49.99. The social features make this something that is fun to use when out with friends. The size of the Vio means that it won’t be as accurate as larger units, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful. The Vio could definitely help make a night out with friends more safe, you just need to be aware of the shortcomings. The police don’t even rely on their mobile breathalyzers for exact readings, so you shouldn’t either. Just remember that if you are impaired, in anyway, leave the driving to someone sober.
You can buy your own BACtrack Vio here
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New OPPO teaser hints at second device
OPPO has scheduled some press events for next Wednesday, October 29th, for the launch of the new OPPO N3 smartphone. A new teaser image posted to OPPO’s Weibo account suggests the company may have a second device to announce at the same time. The image is accompanied by text indicating “One More Step.” The use of “more” could be a subtle suggestion that OPPO has more than one device to announce.
That possibility is bolstered by the image that shows a theater-like curtain being pulled away to reveal not one, but two smartphone devices. The two devices appear to have different heights and materials. We have not seen rumors or information leaking out about a second OPPO device in addition to the N3. However, there were several leaks showing different devices from OPPO that were believed to be possible variants of the N3. It may be possible some of those images were actually a second device.
We should find out more next Wednesday when OPPO holds their big event.
source: Weibo
via: G for Games
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Samsung Galaxy Mega 2 now available in India
Starting today, residents in India can purchase the unlocked variant of Samsung’s largest smartphone, the Galaxy Mega 2, from the manufacturer’s online store for Rs.20,900 — approximately $340.
In terms of performance, this configuration of the Mega 2 is slightly different to the International version we saw launch in Europe earlier this month. The Indian model packs a 1.2 GHz quad-core processor, 1.5 GB RAM, 16 GB of internal storage (with microSD support), an 8 MP rear shooter and a 2,800 mAh battery.
Straight out the box, the handset runs the latest build of Android 4.4 KitKat skinned with Samsung’s famous TouchWiz user interface — which incorporates tons of fantastic software tweaks, such as, Smart Scroll, Smart Pause, Air Gesture, Group Play and more.
If you like the sound of the Galaxy Mega 2 and want to pick one up from Samsung India — hit the source link below.
Source: Samsung India
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Inbox by Gmail shows up in Chrome Web Store
Earlier this week Google introduced a new alternative to email clients, and their Gmail platform in particular, with the launch of a new product called Inbox. The app is supposed to represent a new way for processing email and tasks and has been described as a melding of Gmail and Google Now. Inbox has also proven to be very popular with technology early adopters as people clamor for invites to be able to try out the new platform. If you are fortunate enough to already be in on the Inbox fun, you may want to head over to the Chrome Web Store to grab the desktop web client for Inbox.
With the initial release of Inbox, users had to load the app on their smartphone or tablet. To help users continue to test out the new email experience, Google has now released a desktop web client through their Chrome Web Store. The Chrome app can be installed by anyone. However, if you do not yet have an invite for Inbox, using the app just takes you to the homepage for Inbox and directs you to request an invite.
If you already have Inbox and want to check out the new client, hit the source link.
source: Inbox by Gmail (Chrome Web Store)
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