These smart headphones come with a Google Glass lookalike on the side
The unholy union between a pair of over-ear headphones and wearable display that bares a more than passing resemblance to Google Glass. That’s how we’re going to summarize the SiMe smart headphones. It’s a self-contained media player and by virtue of being attached to large, cushioned headphones, it’s one of the more comfortable headmounted displays this editor has awkwardly modeled in recent years. ChipSiP’s “SiME Smart Headphones” are the evolution of its existing (and more familiar-looking) smart glasses. Those are already on sale to developers for around $550) — and there’s a lot of overlap of the tech inside. A spokeswoman told us that ChipSiP hopes to launch in the next three months, although what we wore at Computex in Taipei this week remained prototype hardware.
The headphones run Android 4.4, steered by a touchpad integrated into the projection display arm. It’s pitched as an entertainment peripheral, combining headphones with a tiny screen to (just about) watch videos and navigate around online content. You can also use the headset to stream music and video directly from Android phones. (There’s a phone remote control function baked into the software — you just could use it as overly complicated music player if you wanted.)
The headphones looks a lot like a gaming headset, but wireless and without the neon-like-an-energy-drink color scheme. It also has an 180-degree hinge that articulates without hitting your face, meaning the screen can be raised out of the way if you’re only focused on audio. It also means the device can be flipped around to work on both eyes. Is it a little bit ridiculous? Yep. Is it comfortable? Well, yes. Are you going to be able to buy one in the States this year? We’ll see about that.
Filed under: Wearables
WSJ: Dish Network and T-Mobile are talking merger
Add one more (potential) communications company deal to the pile: T-Mobile and Dish Network. According to the Wall Street Journal, the two are in “close agreement” about the structure of a combined company, with Dish CEO Charlie Ergen taking over as Chairman and T-Mobile leader John Legere serving as CEO for the two companies. Dish tried and failed to acquire Sprint a couple of years ago, while T-Mobile has made its own passes at joining with AT&T and Sprint. There’s nothing final about the talks so maybe nothing will happen, but Verizon/AOL and AT&T/DirecTV could have company very soon.
[Image credit: Steve Sands via Getty Images]
Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, HD, Mobile, T-Mobile
Source: Wall Street Journal
California senate wants warrants to be required for phone searches
The California State Senate has passed the “Leno bill,” which aims to protect residents’ digital privacy. Officially called Senate Bill 178, it would require authorities to secure a warrant whenever they want to search phones, laptops or other devices in California. That would effectively keep residents’ text messages, emails, cloud storage, social media accounts and GPS data private unless a court issues a wiretap order, barring a few exceptions. The bill, authored by Sen. Mark Leno and Sen. Joel Anderson, has a solid list of supporters, including the EFF and major tech companies, such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Twitter.
Chris Conley, policy attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union (one of the bill’s co-sponsors) explained in a statement:
Californians should be able to use smartphones, email, social networks and any other modern technology without worrying about whether their personal lives will remain private. Especially after revelations of warrantless mass surveillance by the NSA, California needs to catch up with other states across the nation, including Texas and Maine, which have already updated their privacy laws for the modern digital world.
While the bill is getting loads of support, it’s also facing a lot of opposition, courtesy of California’s law enforcement agencies. The state’s prosecutors told lawmakers in a letter that it “undermines critical efforts to stop child exploitation, mandates the destruction of evidence by law enforcement, and violates the California Constitution.” Leno clarified, however, that exceptions could be granted if asking for a warrant hampers ongoing investigation, if the device’s owner grants authorities access and if searching someone’s device is necessary in case of emergency involving imminent danger of death.
SB 178 still has a ways to go before it becomes a law, though. It will first have to be approved by the State Assembly this summer, before it lands in the hands of the governor. Note that Gov. Jerry Brown already vetoed a similar bill Leno authored two years ago, so the senator and his team will have to be more convincing this time around.
[Image credit: LifeSupercharger/Flickr]
Filed under: Misc
Source: Mark Leno, LA Times, California Legislative Information
Brand new octa-core Exynos chipset leaks through GFXBench
So it seems that Samsung is not going to just stop at making their own chipset for their Galaxy line of smartphones. A recent GFXBench leak of an upcoming TCL phablet, the TCL P650M specifically, has shown that Samsung is actually providing their Exynos SoC to other phone manufacturers.
Like it wasn’t enough of a blow for Qualcomm, the leading mobile chipset provider with its popular Snapdragon line, in losing a major customer when the Samsung chose Exynos to power the Galaxy S6 this year. Now it looks like Samsung has chosen to be a straight-up competitor.
Not much is known about this particular chip, the Exynos 7580, but that it has eight cores, runs at 1.6 GHz, and is paired with an ARM Mali-T720 GPU. The TCL P650M phone itself has a 5.6″ 1080P display, 12 MP rear and 4.7 MP front cameras, 2 GB of RAM, and Android 5.0.2.
Seeing how well the Exynos 7420 in the Galaxy S6 stood up to Qualcomm’s current Snapdragon 810 flagship, I suspect we might have giant battle stirring up.
The post Brand new octa-core Exynos chipset leaks through GFXBench appeared first on AndroidGuys.
Baidu caught gaming recent supercomputer performance test
Chinese search engine giant Baidu recently made headlines when its supercomputer reportedly beat out challengers from both Google and Microsoft on the ImageNet image recognition test. However, the company has had to back down from those claims and issue an apology after details emerged suggesting that its success resulted from a scheme to cheat the testing system. As such, Baidu’s accomplishment has been stricken from the books and the company has been banned from ImageNet challenges for a full year.
The issue began in Mid-May when Baidu claimed to have scored a record low 4.58% error rate on the test. This exam looks at how well computing clusters can identify objects and locations within photographs — basically the technology behind Google Photo’s auto-tagging feature — except on large-scale file sets. Microsoft and Google, on the other hand scored 4.94 and 4.8 percent error rates, respectively. That’s actually a bit better than the 5 percent average trained humans can achieve and a huge deal for the industry.
However on Tuesday, researchers who actually administered the ImageNet test called shenanigans on Baidu for setting up a series of dummy accounts to brute force a successful test run. The test rules state specifically that contestants are allowed to submit only two sets of test results each week. Baidu apparently set up 30 accounts and spammed the service with 200 requests in six months, 40 of which came over a single five-day period in March. Doing so potentially allowed Baidu engineers to artificially increase the recognition rate by “tuning” their software to the existing test data sets.
“This is pretty bad, and it is exactly why there is a held-out test set for the competition that is hosted on a separate server with limited access,” Matthew Zeiler, CEO of AI software company Clarifai, told the Wall Street Journal. “If you know the test set, then you can tweak your parameters of your model however you want to optimize the test set.”
In response, Baidu has issued a formal apology for its actions. If, you think apology is a good description for calling the incident a “mistake” and refusing to provide any additional details or explanation as to why it happened.
Statement from Baidu:
Dear ILSVRC community,
Recently the ILSVRC organizers contacted the Heterogeneous Computing team to inform us that we exceeded the allowable number of weekly submissions to the ImageNet servers (~ 200 submissions during the lifespan of our project).
We apologize for this mistake and are continuing to review the results. We have added a note to our research paper, Deep Image: Scaling up Image Recognition, and will continue to provide relevant updates as we learn more.
We are staunch supporters of fairness and transparency in the ImageNet Challenge and are committed to the integrity of the scientific process.
Ren Wu – Baidu Heterogeneous Computing Team
[Image Credit: Deep Fragment Embeddings for Bidirectional Image-Sentence Mapping]
Filed under: Science
Source: ILSVRC
Breaking News: Dish Network nearing agreement to merge with T-Mobile
The nation’s fourth largest carrier is once again on the table to be put under the control of another company. Dish Network, one of the largest television providers in the United States, has been engaged in talks to merge with T-Mobile. The merger, if successful, would assign both members’ leaders to familiar roles. Dish Network’s Charlie Ergen would remain chairman of the board of the new company while John Legere of T-Mobile stands as chief executive officer.
Although an agreement may be near, The Wall Street Journal reports that certain details remain unresolved. The purchase price and transfer of cash and stock have yet to be decided.
Dish Network and T-Mobile are both familiar with this kind of matter. Dish Network very publicly made offers for Sprint and failed. When Sprint was purchased by SoftBank, T-Mobile became a target to consolidate the wireless industry in the United States. A merger between Sprint and T-Mobile ultimately fell apart and each company moved on. Dish Network left without a carrier under its control and Sprint and T-Mobile remained separate. Now, at least two of those companies are seemingly going to be joined together.
Just over one year ago, AT&T announced its intent to acquire DirecTV. That deal could be closing rather soon. The government could always intervene between this transaction and the one that Dish Network seems to be nearing with T-Mobile.
Source: The Wall Street Journal
Come comment on this article: Breaking News: Dish Network nearing agreement to merge with T-Mobile
Microsoft’s dedicated ‘Gears of War’ studio has a new name
Microsoft’s done it again. After buying the Gears of War franchise last year, it’s tasked one team to focus exclusively on that franchise and change its name in doing so. Sounds familiar, right? Canada’s Black Tusk Studios is now known as The Coalition (a nod to the series’ Coalition of Ordered Governments’ hulking soldiers) and, you guessed it, the developers have one job: making Gears of War games. In a post on Xbox Wire, studio head Rod Fergusson says that like 343 Industries and Halo, he wants you to immediately associate The Coalition with musclebound meatheads wielding machine guns with chainsaw bayonets. So, a “real” game every few years with plenty of less-than-awesome output to fill in those gaps. Got it!
He also teases that we’ll see what the team’s been up to come E3 in a few weeks. Whether that’s the Gears reissue that knocked a handful of testers offline or something else entirely, we won’t have to wait too long to find out.
Filed under: Gaming, Home Entertainment, HD, Microsoft
Via: Polygon
Source: Xbox Wire
The DEA’s eavesdropping has tripled over the past decade
A federal agency eavesdropping is nothing new — even if sometimes they do it with controversy. But, aside from the NSA, there’s one in particular that has been quite active in the past few years: the Drug Enforcement Administration. According to records obtained by USA Today, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the DEA more than tripled its use of wiretaps (and other electronic tools used for snooping) over the last decade. As of last September, it had recorded 11,681 intercepts, compared to 3,394 made 10 years earlier. That’s not the most interesting part about the report, however.
The problem, as noted by USA Today, is that the DEA bypassed federal courts and Department of Justice lawyers when filing for these surveillance requests. Instead of doing that, the administration is taking the majority of its petitions — 60 percent, to be exact — to local prosecutors and judges from states like New York and California, who are said to be more lenient in the approval process of requests. A DEA spokesperson told the news outlet that the increase in wiretap requests stems from “the proliferation of communication devices and methods.”
US federal law specifies that wiretaps must be approved by senior DOJ officials, even before agents can seek permission from a federal court to conduct one. On a state level, that’s not the case, hence why the DEA chooses to go this route. “That law exists to make sure that wiretap authority is not abused, that it’s only used when totally appropriate.” Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Hanni Fakhoury said to USA Today. “That’s a burden. And if there’s a way to get around that burden, the agents are going to try to get around it.”
[Image credit: Tony Webster/Flickr]
Filed under: Cellphones, Misc, Software
Source: USA Today
Watch Synaptics’ touch-sensitive space bar in action
Earlier today, Synaptics announced its SmartBar technology that adds a touch input area — enabled by a sub-0.2mm-thick PET film — onto the space bar, which then lets you perform certain tasks without having to touch the mouse or trackpad. We went over to the company’s show room at Computex to check this out, and we came away impressed. In the first demo, we looked at how you can quickly select text while typing by simply swiping to the left on the space bar. We were then shown how you can scroll with two fingers on the space bar: hold down one on the left and swipe with another on the right for vertical scrolling, and vice versa for horizontal scrolling. This will take some getting used to, obviously. You can also zoom in and out by swiping both fingers inwards or outwards — a bit like pinch-to-zoom but on a space bar.
Last but not least, in the companion desktop software, you can assign up to five zones (you can adjust the size of each) on your space bar with different macros. This is basically why gaming peripheral maker Thermaltake wants in on this, because apparently having dedicated macro keys dotted around a gaming keyboard isn’t ideal. Well, we’ll let the professional gamers be the judges here; they’ll be able to buy a SmartBar-enabled keyboard from Thermaltake in early Q4 this year.
According to Synaptics, it’s also looking into the feasibility of adding SmartBar to the backspace key and shift keys, as well as finding out if keyboard makers have interest in implementing a two-dimensional SmartBar on an oversized space bar, thus effectively turning it into a trackpad to accommodate more advanced gestures.
The company also showed off an upcoming Thermaltake mouse that has an integrated fingerprint reader, which allows super fast Windows login authentication. Much like the keyboard, this mouse is expected to launch some time in Q4. Looking further ahead, Synaptics is developing an under-glass fingerprint sensor solution for the sake of aesthetics on mobile devices, though this won’t be ready for another 10 to 12 months.
Filed under: Peripherals
Android Auto Review – Hyundai Sonata 2015
In Google’s attempt to be a part of almost every aspect of your life, they are now moving into the automotive realm, and while it took more than a year, if the recent mention at Google I/O 2015 is any indication, we can expect to find Android Auto in a slew of vehicles by the end of 2016. Last week, Hyundai announced that they were the first car manufacturer to feature Android Wear on production vehicles, starting with the Hyundai Sonata 2015, which is what we have on hand today.
We find out exactly what it brings to the table, or rather, to the car, in this in-depth Android Auto review!
Android Auto Features
Before getting started, it has to be mentioned that there are two versions of the Hyundai Sonata that can be seen in the video above. The silver car is the one that features Android Auto, but I was also sent a white version about a month ago, which didn’t come with Android Auto, but helped me familiarize myself with the other features of the Sonata that were already built-in.
Android Auto isn’t an independent system, and does require the phone to be connected to the in-built system in the car, which is done using a microUSB cable, and not Bluetooth as some might expect. Pairing the phone to the system is very simple via the Android Auto app that can be downloaded from the Google Play Store. The Play Store also features a list of apps that work with Android Auto, and is also the case with Android Wear, if an app you already have installed on your phone is compatible, it will automatically show up on the dashboard menu.
The Android Auto interface is fairly simplistic, taking on the familiar form of Google Now cards. If you have searched for any locations using Google or Google Now, or have any locations, such as Home or Work, already saved, those particular cards will show up, tapping on which will begin navigation to that destination. Of course, the full functionality of Google Now isn’t there, but apart from navigation, other key information such as missed calls, messages, and weather at your location are all available.
Jumping over to the media side of things, any compatible apps that are installed on your phone will show up on the list, which in my case, include Google Play Music, HeartRadio, NPR One, and Pocket Casts, the interfaces of which are also in a more basic form. For example, opening Google Play Music gives you direct access to player controls, with a menu on the left corner available to navigate through the various options such as Playlists, Albums, Listen Now, and more.
When it comes to the call functions, tapping on the phone button shows you a list of contacts, with the most recent call information at the top, followed by all the Starred contacts, giving you quick and easy access to anyone you might want to get in touch with. The menu gives you the option to access your call history, view missed calls, dial a number, or listen to your voicemail. Tapping on the microphone icon at the top right corner allows you to use voice commands to call a person as well, just as you would using Google Now on your phone.
Performance
When the car is parked, you can type out and search for a destination, but voice control is available here as well. Just say the name of the location, and once Google finds out, you can start navigation. The Google Maps section has a menu as well, with sections including categories, suggestions, and traffic information.
As mentioned, making a call is very simple, and the call quality is as good as expected. What is interesting though, and very useful, is how Android Auto handles text messages. When receiving a message, it shows up as a heads up notification, and when you click on it, the messages will be read out to you, including, hilariously, emoticons. Tapping on the microphone button and saying reply will let you answer the last message you received, using voice dictation to do so.
As you may have seen in the video, using Android Auto can lead to some frustration, because of the dependency on your phone and its internet connection. If you’re phone isn’t working, or you are in a location with a spotty wireless connection, the functionality of Android Auto is severely limited as well. That said, when it does work, it works really well, and sending a text message is also fairly uncomplicated.
Is it worth it?
The big question with regards to Android Auto is whether it is that much better than the navigation and infotainment systems already in place, which is honestly a very difficult question to answer. When it comes to the built-in system of the Sonata, you can connect your phone to it via Bluetooth, giving you easy access to the media on your phone. Also useful is the steering wheel integration, letting you control everything from it.
Android Auto does let you change the application you are using, so if you were listening to music and wanted to switch over to a podcast, that can easily be done using Android Auto. Answering and making calls is also very easy to do, but text messaging isn’t possible with the Hyundai system, which is a plus for Android Auto.
The navigation system also seems more robust with the built-in system, with a lot more options available within easy access. Similar options are available with Android Auto as well, but does require a few extra taps to go into the menu and find the various categories, and the implementation on the built-in system is a lot better. Android Auto is wholly dependent on your Google searches, while the Hyundai system is a lot more fleshed out, with maps that can be updated using SD cards, and location searches also powered by Google, without having to rely on your phone to do everything.
Car manufacturers have spent years building robust navigation and infotainment systems for their vehicles that do a great job. Android Auto doesn’t seem to bring much more to the table, and for now, isn’t much more than a very nice add-on. If you’re looking to do everything the Google way, the option is available to you, but if you’re already having a good time with the built-in navigation system, Android Auto, in its current iteration, isn’t yet ready to completely replace what is already available.
Galleries
Android Auto
Hyundai Sonata
Final Thoughts
So there you have it for this in-depth look at Android Auto! The version that is seen in the video is what you’ll get with all other car manufacturers as well, and that is a nice feature of Android Auto. While Android Auto isn’t quite ready to be a complete replacement for what is already available, it does bring some useful features to the table, such as media app integration and text messaging using voice dictation, which can be great tools while on the road. Some polish is certainly required, but Android Auto is still in its very early stages, and will only get better over time.
AIVAnet 