Philips announces high-end series of TVs powered by Android

Philips is hoping to continue its success with Android on their TVs. Rather than try to develop their own proprietary software like LG and Samsung do with their smart TVs, Philips has decided to go the route with more customers by allowing Android to control the smart features like gaming and voice-control. All of the 2015 Philips TV range in 2015 will run Android L. Having Android L on your TV means better integration for your Android devices, more app availability, and more updates to keep your TVs current.

Here area few TVs from their 2015 lineup.

Philips 9600:

• 4K UHD 65″ display
• Ambilight Projection where it projects onto the back of your wall enhancing your viewing experience by creating a halo of light.
• Android L with the Google Play store
• Integrated slim soundbar
• New levels of brightness with capability of 4000-10000 Nit
• Contrast levels of 10,000,000:1
• Pixel UHD Engine to improve 4K quality further
• Upscaling to 4K from any source
• Hex core processing
• Remote with built-in QWERTY/AZERTY keyboard

Philips Ambilux:

• 4K with Ambilight technology 65″
• Like the 9600 the Ambilight TV has a row of LEDs on the back of the TV which project matching colors from the screen onto the wall to make a more enjoyable experience.
• Android L with Google Play Store
• Quad core processor
• Advanced remote control with QWERTY keyboard

Philips 8601

• 4K UHD with curved display, 65″
• Upscaling technology built-in to improve the quality of what’s on TV from any source
• Integrated curved soundbar to match TV Android L with Google Play Store
• Android L with Google Play Store
• 4 sided Ambilight technology
• Hex core processing
• QWERTY/AZERTY keyboard remote

If you want to read about the full lineup follow this link here. Let’s hope many other TV manufacturers follow suit so we can all have Android on TVs which is high up there on the list of electronic devices most of us use on a regular basis.

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Xperia Z5 and Mate S vs the competition

The start of IFA 2015 saw major smartphone releases from Huawei and Sony, both of which offer up some industry firsts and plenty of high-end features. Sony’s Xperia Z5 Premium boasts the world’s first 4K smartphone display, while Huawei has announced the first Force Touch enabled handset. But how do the phones’ other features compare and are they better than what is already on the market?

As both Huawei and Sony are targeting the upper end of the market with their latest releases, we are going to look at the latest large handsets from LG and Samsung, as well as the more reasonably sized HTC One M9 for our comparison.

It’s no suprise that Sony is now the big winner when it comes to pixel count, at least with its 4K Premium model. The 5.5-inch 4K display delivers a whopping 808 pixels per inch, trouncing the 518PPI of the Galaxy S6 Edge+ and the LG G4’s 538PPI. However, the benefits of a QHD display over a 1080p version are already debatable at this display size, so it seems doubtful that a 4K display will yield as large a boost to visual clarity as the huge pixel count would suggest.

Sony’s regular Xperia Z5 model sits more in the typical area of the market right now, with a 5.2-inch 1080p screen that closely matches the likes of the HTC One M9 for resolution. Thinking about it, it seems odd that Sony believes that a 0.3-inch difference in display size warrants a 4 fold increase in pixel resolution. The smaller Xperia Z5 Compact sticks with the 720p display resolution as previous generation models, resulting in an acceptable 323 PPI.

While the 5.5-inch 1080p display on the Mate S may not sound that ground breaking, it does come with an insanely high 1800000:1 contrast ratio, providing the crisps blacks and wide color gamut that we have come to associate with AMOLED displays.

If display clarity if high on your priority list, the Xperia Z5 technically tops the rankings, although you won’t be disappointed with a QHD resolution phone either. Just remember, native 4K content is going to eat into the Z5’s storage space too.

Speaking of which, the Xperia Z5 range comes with 32GB of internal storage, pretty much the minimum for a high-end model. This matches up with other handsets in this price range and the microSD card slot supports up to 200GB of extra storage if you need it. The Mate S and Edge S6+ offer options with the most built-in storage, but you’ll miss out on a microSD slot if you opt for a Samsung phone.

As for processing performance, the Xperia range features a high-end Snapdragon 810 that competes with other phones at this price segment. The Adreno 430 GPU looks like it would struggle to render native 4K games, so I imagine some form of upscaling will take place using Sony’s X-Reality PRO technology. The Xperia Z5 Compact still stands out as one of the few small form factor phones to offer flagship level performance.

Sony is promising notable camera improvements with its latest Xperia range.

The Mate S and its Kirin 935 processor is the weakest link here, as the phone doesn’t feature any high-performance A57 cores for heavy lifting and the Mali-T628 MP4 is not particularly high-end these days. However, the octa-core chip is no slouch and will easily handle your day to day tasks and gaming on the 1080p display. It’s just not the choice for those who have to have the very fastest tech.

The Samsung Exynos 7420 is still the processor to beat this year, although it is only mildly faster than Snapdragon 810 handsets. The S6 Edge+ is the only phone on our list to come with 4GB of RAM, but again the real world performance benefits here are marginal, if any.

Moving on to extra features, and the Mate S comes with an improved fingerprint scanner, new camera technology and a renewed focus on build quality. The phone has a 13MP rear sensor, complete with optical image stabilization, and a high resolution 8 megapixel sensor on the front. Unfortunately, Huawei’s Force Touch feature is reserved for its 128GB model, which hasn’t been priced yet but will probably cost at least €750. However, there’s no Quick Charge, wireless charging or IP rating options here, which can be found on some other devices for a similar price.

Sony, by comparison, has gone all out with additional features in the Xperia Z5 range and it’s tough to find a competitor with so many extras, except for the Galaxy S6 range. Along with the new fingerprint scanner, the Z5 is IP68 rated for water and dust resistance, features Quick Charge 2.0 technology and comes with a relatively large battery. Sony has also upped its game in the camera department, with a new ExmorRS 23 megapixel F2.0 G Lens and some very fast auto focus technology and SteadyShot image stabilization.

However, additional megapixels don’t always produce better results, see the HTC One M9. The LG G4 and Samsung Galaxy S6 smartphones are the handsets to beat this generation if you’re looking for the best looking pictures, so we will have to wait for some hands on tests to truly decide which handset is the best here.

Huawei’s Force Touch looks like an interesting feature, but it is reserved for the 128GB premium model.

In conclusion, both of yesterday’s announcements from Huawei and Sony have resulted in very promising smartphones, although they are perhaps aimed at slightly different customers. Sony’s Premium 4K display may be a bit of a gimmick, but the rest of the Xperia Z5 hardware is very solid and certainly competes, and in some ways exceeds, other flagships on the market right now. I feel that more effort has been put in over the Xperia Z3+, but the improvements aren’t huge enough to automatically recommend an upgrade.

The Huawei Mate S doesn’t quite match up with other flagships when it comes to processing power, but its high contrast display, fingerprint scanner and range of storage options helps to set it apart from the pack. Which is important, as Huawei can’t claim to have a major price advantage with the Mate S this time.

How do you feel about the latest offerings from Sony and Huawei? Are you planning to pick up an Xperia Z5 or the Mate S?

How an insurance company is trying to craft eyewear of the future

I had just driven 85 miles north of San Francisco when I finally reached my destination: a bright red building with large floor-to-ceiling windows in downtown Sacramento. The structure’s high ceilings and spacious interior gave a subtle reminder that it used to be a former Chevrolet dealership. But instead of Camaros and Corvettes, the space was filled with desks, project boards adorned with Post-it notes and temporary work spaces separated by flexible cardboard walls. A hanging pirate flag and a Rubik’s Cube sculpture lent the office a startup vibe.Slideshow-317342 Slideshow-317343

Except I wasn’t in a startup. Instead, I was in the West Coast home of The Shop, a think tank innovation lab run by VSP, the nation’s largest provider of vision care insurance. It’s a little odd to think about an institution as stodgy as your insurance company having its own startup incubator, but that’s exactly what this is. In fact, I was here to find out about a product that aims to make an ordinary pair of glasses the next big thing in wearable technology. They call it Project Genesis.

“We’ve been providing vision care for our members for the past 60 years,” said Jay Sales, co-lead of The Shop and the person who originated the idea of Project Genesis. “It’s a natural step for us to take what is already the most successful wearable in history — a pair of glasses — and add some feature sets to it.”

The beginnings of The Shop and by extension, Project Genesis, came about because of what the company saw as a rise in personalized health care and data-driven fitness tech. “For the last two years and change, we took the time to do a deep dive into all the areas that could disrupt us,” explained Leslie Muller, who heads up the East Coast arm of The Shop over in New York. The fact that augmented and virtual reality — both wearable technologies that sit in front of your eyes instead of on your wrist — were up and coming was a big hint to Sales that the team was on the right track. “Google Glass really knocked a pretty big hole in the wall for us,” he said. “It became really obvious that we needed to make our own mark on this. Build our own platform, but put it in something that’s not only socially acceptable, but beautiful.”

He was wearing a Project Genesis prototype when I met him, but I couldn’t tell at first that he had on anything out of the ordinary. They look like an utterly normal pair of black rim glasses. Unlike Google’s Project Glass, it doesn’t seem even remotely Borg-like, and I could easily see myself walking down the street wearing this without feeling like I would get stared at by strangers.

It was only when Sales took off the glasses that I could see that the left temple was ever so slightly thicker than the right. He removed a small black panel, revealing to me what he said are the brains of the Genesis. This included an accelerometer, a Bluetooth chip, a gyroscope, a magnetometer, a CPU and a small 32mAh battery that’s said to last about three days between charges. Right now, all it does is track your steps, calories burned, activity time and distance traveled, similar to what a Fitbit and other activity trackers already do. But unlike something like a watch, which you have to remember to wear, for many people glasses are a necessity without which they’d feel naked.

Additionally, Sales said there’s another advantage glasses have over a watch: their position on the body. “Because of the positioning of eyewear on the head — the center of axis of gravity — we can get a whole different set of telemetry,” said Sales. “It can provide a whole lot more context versus something that’s on the wrist.” This, he added, can lead to different applications. “We can get a lot more information about gait and posture.” For example, with the elderly population, one of the biggest issues is fear of falling. If they were wearing a pair of these glasses during a fall, it could potentially sound an alert to a care provider. It could also see if you started favoring one leg over another, which could be a sign that you need a hip replacement.

Jay Sales, co-lead of The Shop and the creator of Project Genesis.

Sales and his team at The Shop have been working on Project Genesis for a little over three years now, but it’s only recently that they’ve started to build real working prototypes. They’ve also just announced a partnership with the University of Southern California’s Center for Body Computing to help bring the Genesis from prototype to a consumer product. “The eyes are the next frontier beyond the wrist,” said Dr. Leslie Saxon, the founder and executive director of USC’s Center for Body Computing. “Project Genesis provides a whole other level to engage people, to educate them on their health care story.”

The idea here is that Project Genesis will be much more than just a Fitbit for your glasses; Sales and his team want it to be an entire platform. They want to build even more sensors into it — perhaps a heart rate sensor or a galvanic skin-response sensor to measure sweat. They also want the components to be smaller and thinner. Right now, Project Genesis only really works with thick-rim glasses. Eventually, Sales wants the CPU to fit even in the thinnest of frames — perhaps in that little tip that fits over the ear.

As for how Project Genesis will fit into VSP’s core insurance business, that’s still up for debate. “To be honest, we’re not sure how it’ll really fit into the equation of insurance,” admitted Sales. “We’re not looking to add cost to glasses or add complexity. This could be a separate business for VSP.” Yet, from the company’s perspective, Genesis can still be seen as a value-add for its member base, which is around 65 million strong. Muller said that a lot of this information could be sent directly to your doctor, for example, so that they’d have a fuller picture of your health. “I’ve been wearing frames since I was 14,” she said. “Imagine that landscape of data that would’ve been created for me if I had worn them since then.”

“We want it so that a generation from now, a little kid would look at an old pair of glasses like this,” said Muller pointing to her own set of specs, “and say, ‘What, it only corrected your vision? That’s weird.’”

Still, The Shop has a ways to go before making this dream a reality. It’s still busy putting together what it wants the final consumer product to look and feel like — shrinking the design, improving the battery life and recruiting more biomedical engineers to help it all make sense. More importantly, it also wants the device to be easy to use. “It’s not just about giving you the data,” said Sales. “It’s how you present that data in a meaningful manner that’s the tricky part.”

“We see this as just the tip of the spear,” he added. “This is the beginning of the next 60 years of innovation for us.”

Filed under:
Wearables

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Tags: ActivityTracker, eyeglasses, fitnesstracker, genesis, glasses, projectgenesis, vsp

Watch the trailer for Netflix’s first original film ‘Beasts of No Nation’

Netflix has found great success with its move into original content over the past few years, and the company isn’t content with just producing TV-style series. Beasts of No Nation, Netflix’s first original feature-length movie, is set for release on October 16th, and now the first trailer has been released. It’s an appropriately dark and intense affair given the subject matter; the film follows the tale of a boy who joins with mercenary military fighters in a West African country in the midst of civil war; it sounds like it sticks close to the plot of the 2005 novel of the same name.

The movie stars Idris Elba and child actor Abraham Attah (in his first major role)
and is directed by Cary Fukunaga (who directed every episode of True Detective‘s first season). Early reviews have been overwhelmingly positive; it looks like Beasts of No Nation will certainly help Netflix extend its reputation for hosting high-quality exclusive content. (The less said about those upcoming Adam Sandler movies, the better.) And it seems like Netflix will probably be the place most people watch this film — huge movie theater chains AMC Cinemas, Carmike Cinemas, Cinemark and Regal Entertainment are boycotting the film because of its simultaneous Netflix release. That’s a shame, because this looks like a movie worth watching — but for most of us, watching it in the comfort of our own homes will work just fine, thanks.

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Source:
Netflix (YouTube)

Tags: beatsofnonoation, netflix, trailer

Free playlist: ‘The Very Best Of’ albums from Incubus, NAS, 311 and more on Google Play Music

The long holiday weekend is fast approaching. Some have the a fantastic 4 day weekend, others get a nice little 3 day weekend while others don’t get any weekend. No matter your work schedule is, there is still one thing most of you will probably enjoy this weekend; Music. Right now Google has a slew of ‘The Very Best of’ albums through Play Music for free. Check out the list that Kyle Salewski was kind enough to share.

The Very Best Movie Music Of Elvis Presley:  http://goo.gl/HDKsq2
The Very Best Gospel Of Elvis Presley:  http://goo.gl/EaCjww
Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits:  http://goo.gl/YHtPkB
The Very Best Of Destiny’s Child:  http://goo.gl/bIquqW
The Very Best Of Britney Spears:  http://goo.gl/Jrgivq
The Very Best Johnny Cash Duets:  http://goo.gl/URtiBX
The Very Best Gospel Of Johnny Cash:  http://goo.gl/G0V7u6
The Very Best Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash:  http://goo.gl/8hh0zG
The Very Best Of Frank Sinatra: http://goo.gl/VyoGJG
The Very Best Of Bill Withers:  http://goo.gl/Xb7kb0
The Very Best Of Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson:  http://goo.gl/104toI
The Very Best Gospel of Willie Nelson:  http://goo.gl/fDX1ku
The Very Best Of Sam Cooke:  http://goo.gl/CDbJK4
The Very Best Of Roy Orbison:  http://goo.gl/Cnbw4Z
The Very Best Of Tony Bennett:  http://goo.gl/g7yIfN
The Very Best Of Incubus:  https://goo.gl/sr3b0r
The Very Best Of Nas:  http://goo.gl/GH1oOC
The Very Best Of 311:  http://goo.gl/UCbx6i
The Very Best Of Sly & The Family Stone:  http://goo.gl/gbLiZJ
The Very Best Of Three 6 Mafia:  http://goo.gl/t2VdI3

I assume the playlist special has something to do with the holiday weekend, but I haven’t seen a banner or anything appear just yet. It also seems to be US only. Regardless, hit those links above  and bolster your music collection as you see fit. If you run across any others, be sure to let everyone know in the comments.

Via Kyle Salewski G+

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Internal memo points to September 16 for Android Pay’s launch

The launch of Android Pay is scheduled for this year but the exact date of the service’s arrival is still unknown. It is widely believed that the mobile payments platform will arrive very soon considering Google Play Services was recently updated to support features that Android Pay will offer. Even McDonald’s has started promoting Android Pay alongside Apple Pay.

Now, a leaked internal memo from Verizon could indicate that Android Pay is coming this month.

The following is what the leaked internal memo, which was obtained by Phandroid, reads:

Introducing Android Pay

On 9/16, Google releases Android Pay, a simple and secure mobile payment app for NFC-capable Android phones. Android pay is a free digital payment app that offers choice, simplicity and a secure way to pay for in-store, in-app and online purchases.

So mark your calendars for September 16. Just remember that these types of launches can always be pushed back if something goes wrong and the service isn’t ready for showtime.

Attached to the document is a little note, presumably for Verizon salespeople, that highlights Android Pay’s availability in more than 1.5 million locations.

Google’s mobile payments platform will be dueling with Apple and Samsung’s offerings this fall, easily making for an even more competitive holiday season.

Source: Phandroid

Come comment on this article: Internal memo points to September 16 for Android Pay’s launch