Huawei P9 leak reveals phone’s body and dual-camera system

The P9 is really starting to take shape now.

Although Huawei hasn’t yet announced its upcoming P9 flagship smartphone, a massive leak has revealed what it possibly looks like as well as what it might feature in the camera department.

VentureBeat’s Evan Blass has published photos of the phone’s body and a dual-camera system on its rear, the latter of which looks similar to the Honor 6 Plus’ similar camera setup. Reports have claimed the P9 should debut in the first half of 2016, though Huawei has remained tight-lipped on the subject. The phone will supposedly feature two 12-megapixel sensors. It might also come with Leica lenses to improve focusing.

This is not the first major leak involving the P9; recent photos showed a metal frame. Also, it is thought that this phone is just one of four variations of the line. We might see, for instance, Huawei unveil the P9 alongside a P9 lite, P9 Max, and a feature-enhanced version of the device with more RAM, increased storage, and a display size somewhere between the P9 and P9 Max.

You can expect to see more leaks this spring, including details on pricing and availability. Check out Pocket-lint’s round-up to see what else the P9 might feature or when it’ll likely appear.

VentureBeat

2015’s ‘Nobel Prize of computing’ honors encryption pioneers

Unless you’ve just finished an incredibly dedicated Rip Van Winkle cosplay session, you’re probably well aware of how hot a topic encryption is at the moment. To that end, the winners of the 2015 A.M. Turing Award have been announced. Whitfield Diffie and Martin E. Hellman, authors of 1976’s Diffie-Hellman Protocol, are the recipients of computing’s $1 million “Nobel Prize of computing.” Diffie is the former Chief Security Officer for Sun Microsystems, while Hellman is a professor emeritus of electrical engineering at NorCal’s Ivy League school, Stanford.

The pair’s encryption method is in use all over the web and relies on asymmetrical encryption, using a public key to encrypt data while a private key is used for decryption. It isn’t infallible, however, and you can probably guess pretty easily which government organization was able to crack it. The Turing Award’s governing body, the Association for Computing Machinery, says that (PDF) the obfuscation method is used daily to protect “trillions of dollars” in financial transactions, among other applications.

Should you want to attend the ceremony honoring the duo, make sure you’re in San Francisco on June 11th.

Via: The Verge

Source: Association for Computing Machinery (PDF)

Reduce eye strain when watching television at night with bias lighting – CNET

Taylor Martin/CNET

When working late into the night at your computer or binging your favorite TV show on Netflix, you’ve likely experienced some form of eye strain. Your eyes get scratchy and dry, you experience blurred vision, and you might even get a slight headache.

Surprisingly, fighting eye strain and improving the quality of your nighttime movies or work sessions is actually very simple. All you need is a properly placed light source.

Learn what bias lighting is and why it works so well.

Why bias lighting works

Backlighting of a television or monitor is called bias lighting. It works by giving your eyes a more neutral reference point for colors and contrast in a dark room.

Why does it work? Your eyes work on a system of averages, says Jason Fitzpatrick of How-To Geek. Staring at a bright display in an otherwise dark environment disrupts how our eyes measure the light:

When we watch television or use a computer workstation in a completely dark or significantly darkened room, we create a less-than-ideal viewing situation wherein our eyes are staring very intently at a small window of very bright light that is floating in a sea of darkness. Despite the fact that we accurately perceive the screen to be very bright in relationship to the rest of the scene our eyes take in, our eyes attempt to adjust based on the average brightness across the entire field of view and not the average brightness of the screen (or, conversely, the dimmer off-screen area).

In other words, your eyes do not properly dilate for the amount of light they’re taking in. This forces your eyes to work harder and fatigue more quickly than they normally would. This is what leads to dry eyes, dizziness and headaches.

By placing a light behind the television, you are raising the average ambient light in the room and reducing the strain on your eyes, meaning you can watch television or work for longer without all the negative side effects.

As an added bonus, your perception of the contrast on the display will increase. This works on the same principle as the simultaneous contrast illusion. Grays and blacks appear darker when against a lighter background.

How to setup bias lighting

All you need to set up your own bias lighting is a light source placed behind your monitor or television.

The number of commercially available kits for bias lighting is only growing, and they range from about $10 to upwards of $100 online. Many kits are even USB-powered, meaning installation is as simple as plugging in the USB end of the strip into the USB port on your television and attaching the lights to the back of the television or entertainment system.

Virtually any light behind your television or monitor will improve the contrast of the picture at night. That said, the main feature you’re aiming for, as explained by Fitzpatrick, is a light source with a temperature of approximately 6,500k. This is the industry standard white reference point for manufacturers of displays and content creators. Lights of a different temperature will alter your perception of the colors on the screen.

A quick and easy DIY solution for bias lighting is to use a smart bulb or LED strip behind your TV. This gives you the ability to tweak the color and brightness to your liking.

Power on the lights the next time you want to watch a movie at night and forget about dreaded dry eyes and headaches.

Weekly Poll: Have you pre-ordered a Samsung Galaxy S7?

It’s barely been any time at all since the announcement, but folks are already clamoring to get their hands on the new Samsung Galaxy S7. (And, in fact, some already have.) It made its debut at Mobile World Congress 2016 and immediately started turning heads. This gorgeous and powerful phone is definitely going to get attention all year long, and that’s not a bad thing.

In this week’s poll, we want to know whether you’re pre-ordering the new Samsung Galaxy S7. With that in mind we’ve given you five choices:

survey solutions

Are you itching to get your hands on a Galaxy S7, or are you giving it some time first? Let us know about it in the comments below!

Samsung Galaxy S7

• Galaxy S7 and S7 edge hands-on
• Galaxy S7 and S7 edge specs
• Here are all four Galaxy S7 colors
• Details on the Galaxy S7’s camera
• The SD card is back on the GS7
• Join our Galaxy S7 forums

AT&T Sprint T-Mobile Verizon

More than 15,000 HTC Vive units reportedly sold in less than 10 minutes

How hot is the HTC Vive? According to HTC’s Shen Ye (yes, the brains behind our Futurology series) tweeted Monday that more than 15,000 units of the virtual reality system were sold in less than 10 minutes on Day 1 of preorders. That’s in the neighborhood of 25 Vives sold every second.

And if you’ve gotten to go through a Vive Demo — it blew Russell’s mind, and Phil’s, too — you understand the excitement. It’s simply the most immersive VR experience you can get.

Woah, more than 15k units in less than 10min 😮

— Shen Ye (@shen) February 29, 2016

The only bad news here? If you shelled out $799 (or more, outside the U.S.) for a Vive, you still have to wait until April for delivery.

Slack planning voice and video chat, upping threat to Hangouts, Skype

Slack plans to roll out voice and video chat this year, making the popular messaging company even more competitive with incumbents like Microsoft’s Skype and Google’s Hangouts. That’s according to their 2016 product roadmap, presented to customers at a conference today in San Fransisco.

TechCrunch reports:

[Voice chat] on desktop will come first, and then the company will focus on making it work on all its devices and apps. Video will have to wait until after that. Underwood noted that you can already make voice calls via Skype’s Slack integration. But with its own feature, she says the use case will be “If I’m DMing someone in Slack and we want to switch to have a quick voice conversation, it addresses that problem.”

Slack also plans a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor that would allow for rich text formatting, a more approachable search system, and more.

Voice and video are a big deal though. Right now, if you want to shift contexts to voice or video, you have to switch out of Slack and launch Microsoft’s Skype or Google’s Hangouts. That’s not only a fragmented experience but chink in Slack’s armor — Skype and Hangouts both offer text and audio and video chat already. Even Apple’s iMessage makes it easy to switch to FaceTime audio or video and back.

That so many people are willing to use Slack even without those features shows how compelling the existing text and picture messaging system is. If Slack can deliver integrated voice and video that’s just as compelling, the competitive threat to Microsoft and Google — and perhaps to other enterprise communication tools — could be enormous.

Would you switch away from Skype or Hangouts for Slack voice and video chats? Let me know in the comments!

Google will finally roll out Android Pay in the UK this month

Android Pay is arriving for Brits.

According to The Telegraph, Google will launch Android Pay in the UK sometime by the end of March, following an initial launch in the US last September. It’ll work with all NFC-enabled Android devices running KitKat 4.4+. It also supports any mobile carrier and tap-and-pay locations.

Android Pay is Google’s new mobile wallet that can store your credit cards, debit cards, loyalty cards, etc. If that sounds a lot like Google Wallet, it’s because Android Pay is the new Google Wallet (only it’s supposed to be better, more convenient, and secure). Google unveiled the new service during its I/O developer conference last year and began gradually rolling it a few months later, kicking things off in the US.

The system works similarly to Apple Pay in that you simply load your Visa and MasterCard credit or debit card details onto your NFC-equipped smartphone, and then you can checkout at retailers with contactless payment terminals.

You must verify both your identity and purchase with a scan of your finger via your smartphone’s fingerprint reader. Android Pay also accepts a PIN code, password, or pattern in order to authenticate a transaction.

You can read more about how Android Pay works from here, where we’ve detailed which US banks support it and more.

Watch the Space Station’s one-year crew touch down on Earth

The astronaut and cosmonaut who lived aboard the ISS for almost one whole year are on their way home. Scott Kelly and Mikhail Kornienko, along with another cosmonaut Sergey Volkov, boarded their ride back to Earth (a Soyuz TMA-18M spacecraft) a few hours ago. It undocked from the ISS at 8:02 PM ET. Kelly is slated to undergo NASA’s Functional Task Tests as soon as he gets back to the Johnson Space Center.

NASA senior research scientist Jacob Bloomberg once described these tests as “very operation-oriented and […] related to different aspects of the mission and activities an astronaut would need to do after landing on the surface of Mars.” The scientists will study how Kelly’s body changed after spending one straight year in space in an effort to understand the impacts of long duration, deep space missions on the human body. His results will most likely be compared with his twin brother’s who stayed here on the ground as part of the agency’s “Twins Study.”

NASA TV is airing Soyuz TMA-18M’s landing starting at 10:15AM ET. You’ll be able to watch everything, from the spacecraft’s deorbit burn and module separation as it enters the atmosphere to the moment it touches down. If all goes well, the Soyuz spacecraft will land in Kazakhstan at around 11:25PM ET.

Source: NASA, NASA TV

Energizer intros rechargeable batteries made from recycled cells

Energizer broke fresh ground when it made the first disposable batteries from recycled cells, but that immediately raised a question: where are the rechargeable versions? As of today, they’re here. The company has introduced new Recharge AA and AAA cells that are the first to be made using old batteries. About 4 percent of their material comes from used power packs, including those from hybrid cars — yes, the leftovers from your Prius could one day power a kid’s toy.

The figure is still a long way from Energizer’s goal of using 40 percent recycled material by 2025. You aren’t exactly saving the planet when you pick up batteries for your wireless mouse, then. Regardless, this is probably the most eco-friendly option you have — and anything that helps fight e-waste and excessive mining is good in our book.

Source: Energizer, PR Newswire

Facebook to push live video to top of News Feed

What’s the point of live video if you don’t watch it when it’s, you know, live? That’s the reasoning behind a new shift in Facebook’s algorithm that’ll push live video streams to the top of your News Feed. This comes a few days after Facebook announced that its Live Video feature is finally rolling out to Android users, while it’s been available to iOS users since January.

If you need a bit of a reminder, Facebook’s Live Video feature is essentially a way for users of the social network to broadcast live video from their phones. There’s no need to download a separate app like Periscope or Meerkat; the feature is baked right into the main Facebook app itself. Similarly, users of the social network can watch those video streams right on their Facebook feeds.

We’ve ragged on Facebook’s algorithm before for prioritizing certain content over others, but surfacing live video when it’s actually live makes a lot of sense. In a blog post, Vibhi Kant and Jie Xu wrote: “People spend more than 3x more time watching a Facebook Live video on average compared to a video that’s no longer live. This is because Facebook Live videos are more interesting in the moment than after the fact.”

As for when you’ll see them, live streams should appear at the top of your feed starting today. Don’t forget to react appropriately when you do.

Source: Facebook