Deal: ZeroLemon SolarJuice 10,000 and 20,000 battery packs 40%-50% off

You don’t want to be left stranded away from an outlet with no more battery power to keep your device alive! The industry is taking its sweet time improving battery technology, making power packs the best option around. There’s plenty of portable batteries out there, but very few will offer the right amount of juice for a reasonable price. And very few of them are powered by the sun, but let’s talk about that later on.

The larger power packs can get pricey, but you can always count on the AA Deals Store to get you some of the best deals online. Today we have some discounted prices on a couple ZeroLemon SolarJuice batteries. You can get yourself a 10,000 mAh version for only $29.99, or those who really need that extra boost can opt for the 20,000 mAh version at $49.99. That would account for a 40%-50% discount over common retail, and is even cheaper than what you’ll find them for at Amazon (at $60 and $80 respectively).

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To put that into perspective, a Samsung Galaxy Note 5 has a 3000 mAh battery, and that is considered a pretty large battery. This means the smaller of the two portable chargers is over 3 times larger than the cell inside the Note 5. That’s a whole lot of juice. And we can’t forget that 20,000 mAh one, which will last you for days! In addition, these can both charge a couple devices simultaneously, so you can even help your friend out or charge your extra devices.

But the best part about these? The portable chargers are not your usual ones. This thing has a built-in solar panel it can use to power up the battery within! While charging with the sun is slow going, it is still a nice option to have as a backup and one can easily take it on camping trips or road adventures, and not worry about running out of power indefinitely! Of course you can also plug these into an actual socket for faster recharging.

Buy the ZeroLemon SolarJuice 10,000 mAh battery!
Buy the ZeroLemon SolarJuice 20,000 mAh battery!

Here’s why I’ve stopped rooting my phones

I’m sure you’ve heard about the term “root’ several times while browsing the web, or you may even be the owner of a rooted device. In fact, ever since Android has been around there has always been some sort of way to gain elevated administrator access. In other words,  you are able to tweak your phone to greater levels than what would normally be accepted.

The first root came around on what was also the first commercial Android phone: The HTC Dream. Running Android 1.0, you could imagine that the software was very basic. There was no function to take screenshots, use VPN, set live wallpapers and a whole list of features that are now considered basic and standard. So naturally, people started making mods, tweaks, ROMs and all things customization.

Speaking of ROMs, a custom OS was a major aspect of rooting not too long ago. It could be compared to installing a whole new operating system, and go above and beyond normal Android.

And this is where I start reconsidering if I should root my phone today. You see, half-baked features and missing functions are mostly a thing of the past. I don’t have the need to speed up my phone as it’s sporting a capable processor that could only be dreamed of 3 years ago. Technology has improved so much that it is no longer necessary to make it better than it already is.

But let’s be fair. You want to root your phone. It is, however, no longer becoming a process of downloading an app and pushing a button. Instead, you’ll have to go though risky procedures that will void your warranty, possibly permanently damage your phone and disable apps, like Samsung Pay. Sure, for some Android devices it is a relatively simple process, but as they improve they’re also bound to get harder to root.

The Android community took several weeks to root the LG G4. When it finally came out, it was very risky and ended up bricking some phones. Is it really worth it? What are your opinions on rooting phones?

The post Here’s why I’ve stopped rooting my phones appeared first on AndroidGuys.

NASA successfully tests detect-and-avoidance system for drones

NASA’s Detect-and-Avoidance (DAA) system for drones is looking mighty promising. The agency has just finished its latest phase of of test flights using a remote-controlled Ikhana aircraft equipped with DAA sensors over the Mojave desert in California. NASA’s Dennis Hines says they still have to fully analyze the data they gathered from the flights — the third in a series — but they found that the drone successfully alerted it remote pilots and performed preprogrammed maneuvers when faced with obstacles. Frank Pace, the president of Aircraft Systems for General Atomics Aeronautical Systems said the flight tests’ favorable outcome “represents the maturity of [their] detect-and-avoid system.”

General Atomics created one of the DAA tech’s three sensors, particularly its radar system. A company called BAE Systems developed one of the other sensors: a satellite-based navigation tool that determines and broadcasts the drone’s position to ground control. The third sensor developed by Honeywell keeps an eye on aerial traffic and alerts pilots if a collision might take place. NASA’s researchers will now use the info they gathered from this round to plan for future flight tests slated to take place next spring.

[Image credit: NASA Photo / Carla Thomas]

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Source:
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Tags: detect-and-avoid, ikhana, nasa

Ofcom tells mobile networks to sort out their customer service

Mobile networks have a lousy reputation when it comes to customer service. The moment you walk into a store it’s all smiles and pleasantries, but once you’re an established subscriber the experience can quickly sour. If anything goes wrong with your account or network access, or you want to switch provider, calling a company representative can be a gruelling, stressful experience. Ofcom, the UK’s communications regulator, experienced an uptick in customer complaints between May and July this year. The numbers aren’t unprecedented, but they’re worrying enough that Ofcom is now meeting with carriers to “discuss their customer services practices and to drive improvements in behaviour.”

It shows that Ofcom has an appetite to do its job and hold the telecoms industry to account. Already, the regulator has penalised a number of mobile networks over their handling of customer complaints. Three UK was fined £250,000 in October 2014, followed by EE to the tune of £1 million earlier this summer. Ofcom is now in the middle of a third investigation, this time with Vodafone, over the way it’s been dealing with customer disputes. The financial penalties might be meagre for these monolithic companies, but at least they’re something. Ofcom’s boss Sharon White wants to give “real power to the elbow of consumers,” and based on recent evidence, she’s starting to do just that.

[Image Credit: Kevin Foy / Alamy]

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Networking

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Tags: carrier, CustomerComplaints, CustomerService, ee, mobilenetwork, network, ofcom, three, vodafone

Hello Barbie has some career advice for your child

There’s a new Barbie-on-the-block. She’s chatty and she comes with a charging station. She’s dressed in a cropped, metallic leather jacket, dark skinny jeans and a white sweater vest with the word “HELLO” printed thrice on the front. Within seconds of switching her on, her chunky necklace lights up as it searches for a WiFi connection. When the LED goes from red to green, you know she’s ready to play. A shiny round belt buckle doubles as a button. You press it down to activate speech-recognition for your child’s first two-way conversation with the iconic, inanimate doll.

Now that play time includes light-as-air gadgets and power-packed game consoles, Barbie’s historically staggering sales have been in a constant slump over the past three years. But with this talk-back feature Mattel’s premier product might have a fighting chance. Hello Barbie blazes into the world of interactive toys as the first doll equipped with artificial intelligence.

The first time I hear her talk, she sounds perky, friendly and even strangely familiar. The voice seems to fit the character. “What do you want to be when you grow?” She jumps right to it. Depending on the response she gets, she offers some career options. For instance, if you say you want to be a scientist, she’s quick to compare your aspirations to Marie Curie or Albert Einstein. As she continues to prompt and control the conversation, she leads you to your interests. So if you point out that you like animals, she responds with one of her pre-set options — “Do you want to take care of them like a vetrenarian or study them like a zoologist?”

Mattel believes eliciting a conversation in this way encourages children to think and communicate, but it also allows them to get to know Barbie a little bit better. This doll has clearly gone from being one of many passive objects on your child’s shelf to a conversationalist who wants to know more about her playmate. Through that process, she reveals a fully fleshed out personality that was always in the background. (Who knew her full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts?)

As a character that’s been around for 56 years, she certainly has a solid backstory to dip into. If asked, she can talk about her own life, including her seven siblings. But she mostly comes equipped with opinions about pets, professions, food, or some such, and asks questions. She also slips in a bunch of enthusiastic comments that range from affirmations (there seems to be no wrong answer when you’re chatting with Barbie) to factual snippets like “did you know a cat can see six times better than a human?”

It starts to feel like she might be able to respond to every conversational need a child might have and that’s unsettling. Does a child need a digital assistant wrapped up in a doll? In Barbie’s defense, though, she’s nothing like Apple’s Siri or Microsoft’s Cortana. She doesn’t trawl the web for answers, and isn’t designed to address every question. There are things that she doesn’t know and that’s supposed to be a part of her character. When that happens, instead of an awkward pause that was already ruled out during the testing rounds, this almost ready for the market Barbie will swiftly steer the conversation back to the things that she does know — or at least is pre-programmed to talk about.

Every response is part of her “content library” that is currently capped at 8,000 predetermined dialogues. Her voice, recorded by a voice artist, is overtly animated yet carefully directed to be relatable for six to eight-year-old girls, the target group for the talking doll.

It’s precisely this target audience — an impressionable and vulnerable age group — that had privacy advocates raise concerns over Hello Barbie’s communicative ways. The doll picks up the child’s audio and pushes it through the servers where the conversation is stored. The makers of the doll, including San Francisco-based ToyTalk (a company that develops voice-recognition software for toys and apps), point out that the audio is stored specifically for parents to access at any given time. Through an accompanying app (available for both iOS or Android), parents can log in to listen or choose to delete the child’s personal conversations with her doll. They’re also quick to add that it isn’t an “always-on” product — a child would need to press down the belt buckle to be “heard” by their servers.

Issues like privacy and security against hacks are deeply troubling when it comes to A.I. toys. But neither of those concerns seem lost on the company that is in the business of delivering dolls to suit every generation. Whether those concerns have been fully addressed will be seen in November when the doll hits the shelves.

Technology isn’t perfect, neither is this doll. Like any other mundane device, even the stylized Barbie can have trouble connecting to a WiFi connection. The necklace continues to blink and search for a network as you, or in this case an excited child, might impatiently look on. The doll is also another product in the ever-increasing list of things that need constant charging — “My battery needs to be recharged, please connect me to the charging station” isn’t the ideal response from a doll when it’s time to play. But for a generation that’s starting to integrate swift swipes on a high-definition screen into their play routines, perhaps these glitches won’t get in the way of their next $75 Barbie purchase.

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Tags: AI, Barbie, hands-on, HelloBarbie, Mattel, speechrecognition, TalkingBarbie, ToyTalk