British Gas’ Boiler IQ will text you before it breaks down

While smart thermostats (supposedly) enable you to intelligently heat your homes and potentially save money, they only replace the dumb controls you had previously. Your boiler, the focal point of all the pipes that run across your home, hasn’t really enjoyed the same level of innovation. British Gas, maker of the Hive thermostat and various smart home sensors, believes it can change that with the launch of “Boiler IQ,” a new technology that can self-identify issues and alert engineers of a possible fault before things get really bad.

With 8,000 engineers making over 50,000 visits daily, British Gas already has enough people on the ground. Now it wants to deploy them in the most efficient way possible. Co-developed by the Hive Connected Home team and boiler maker Worcester Bosch, Boiler IQ connects to the internet via the Hive hub, a smart home router of sorts, and will send an SMS when a heating or hot water fault is detected. It’s a simple solution that doesn’t require any apps.

If you don’t get in touch with British Gas within an hour, a representative will then follow up to schedule a time for an engineer to come and fix it. In theory, Boiler IQ’s sensors will diagnose the precise fault, which enables an engineer to arrive with the correct parts and fix it the first time, reducing the need for a repeat visit.

The technology was inspired by ex-NASA scientist, Adi Andrei, who now serves as senior data scientist at British Gas’ Connected Home division. Andrei previously designed software to identify safety faults inside passenger aircraft. When installed, the system continuously sends live data back to British Gas, allowing the company to keep a fault history — useful if you’re experiencing a number of intermittent faults — and possibly detect manufacturer defects.

Currently, Boiler IQ is compatible with roughly 2 million Worcester Bosch boilers in the UK but the company is currently in talks with other manufacturers to expand the technology. It’ll go on sale to British Gas HomeCare customers (who own a supported boiler) from 21st March 2016 and will cost £49 for installation, with a £3 monthly fee on top.

Source: Boiler IQ

Lenovo launches the Vibe K5 Plus in India for ₹8,499

In a press event in New Delhi, Lenovo launched the Vibe K5 Plus in India. The Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus was unveiled at Mobile World Congress 2016 last month, and is essentially the international variant of the Lemon 3, which made its debut in China earlier this year.

At just 8.2mm thin, the K5 Plus weighs only 142 grams. On the software side, Lenovo continues to streamline its interface, and there really aren’t many functional changes from stock Android. The only problem here is that we’re looking at Android 5.1.1 Lollipop. Like recent Lenovo smartphones such as the K4 Note and Vibe X3, the dual-SIM Vibe K5 Plus comes with Dolby Atmos support and packs in TheatreMax technology for a virtual cinematic experience.

Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus Specifications

Available in three colors – Platinum Silver, Champagne Gold, and Graphite Gray – the Lenovo Vibe K5 Plus is priced at ₹8,499 ($125). The K5 Plus will be available exclusively on Flipkart in an open sale starting from March 23. Lenovo has once again priced their newest device aggressively, with the device packing a punch on the specifications sheet as well as in terms of user experience.

Be sure to take a look at our hands-on video from MWC to see what’s on offer with the handset:

These Microtugs weigh a chocolate bar but moved over a tonne of car

If the Ant-Man movie has taught us anything it’s that ants are super strong. Combining that power, in a robot equivalent, has allowed six bots that weigh just 100g to pull a 1,769kg car.

The robot ants were created by Stanford University researchers in a bid to show that the combined force of smaller bots can equate to massive real-world effect.

The Microtugs, as they’re called, have pulled the equivalent of six humans pulling the Eiffel Tower and three Statues of Liberty at once.

The feat is achieved by applying ant-like movements which use synchronised steady footsteps to create a powerful force. The Microtugs use ultra-sticky wheels which utilise glue that mimics the attractive force of gecko’s feet.

While ants are able to pull around 100 times their own weight these Microtugs managed to move 200 times their own mass.

Imagine carrying about a set of these Microtug bots in the boot of your car next to the spare tyre. No more getting stuck broken down in the middle of the road. They might even be able to pull a car out of a situation where it’s stuck in mud or snow.

The bots will be detailed in a science paper published in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters soon so don’t expect to buy your own just yet but this is a huge step forward – or lots of tiny little ones.

READ: Emicro One scooter review: Keeping up with the kids?

Racing drones could earn you $250,000… like this kid did

A British drone racing team has scooped the main prize of a quarter of a million dollars (£174,000) in the World Drone Prix in Dubai, and the team captain was a 15-year-old boy from the UK.

Point-of-view drone racing has exploded in popularity recently, with professional leagues and events held around the world. However, we’d not heard of such a massive prize fund before.

Britain’s Luke Bannister was suitably excited to lead his Tornado X-Blades Banni UK team to victory.

His team manager explained how younger racers can get to grips with the sport quickly. “Obviously, there’s a crossover with gaming, as you can see with the HD goggles.”

Each racer wears a virtual reality style headset which is fed by a camera mounted on the front of their respective racing drone. The course is like a rollercoaster with gates that must be passed through.

READ: Drone racing goes pro: Drone Racing League to kick off its first season in Feb

The Tornado X-Blades team was made up of 43 members during the tournament and they will share the prize money. Bannister revealed that he’ll be putting his slice away and hopefully add to it throughout 2016. “I’m going to save it I think,” he said. “There are a few more events this year to go to, but for me, I’m just going to sleep and go back to school.”

Apple iPhone 7 Plus dual camera module leak suggests advanced AR and 3D scanning capabilities

Apple’s iPhone 7 has been kept more or less under wraps, ahead of its expected reveal later in the year around September time, until now. This leak has shown off what’s claimed to be a dual camera module intended for the iPhone 7 Plus.

Dual cameras are expected to become the bar setting level in flagship smartphones this year. While Apple arguably takes it slow when it comes to upgrading its cameras, the iPhone 7 Plus may be ploughing ahead with an Apple smartphone first.

Sources of Pocket Now based in Taiwan have leaked the dual-lens camera module that they claim will appear in the iPhone 7 Plus. There is no word on it being in the standard iPhone 7 though. The source claims that the camera will be a first for the way it works.

The dual-camera will shoot one 12-megapixel standard focal length photo while the other lens will shoot a 12-megapixel shot in telephoto with up to three times zoom. That helps to explain the varying lens sizes shown in the module.

Apple recently bought Israeli start-up LinX which specialises in gathering camera depth information. This can allow for tricks like removing the subject from the background by gauging depth. It could conceivably also allow the phone the ability to scan real world objects into a virtual representation, or help to offer better depth for augmented reality applications.

Expect plenty more leaks before the likely September reveal of the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

READ: Apple iPhone 7: What’s the story so far?

Nest Cam review: The next level in home security?

Wi-Fi based home security camera options are everywhere at the moment, with the Google-owned Nest Cam not the first product with its foot in the door, so to speak. We’ve already seen Withings Home, Netatmo Welcome and Panasonic Nubo to name but a few.

Nest Cam records high-definition footage and, for a monthly/annual fee, can store 10 days of capture in the cloud. It’s possible to view what the camera sees in real-time from wherever you are via its mobile app (assuming a connection) for peace of mind, while notifications can alert you to any movement and sound action.

So far, so similar: that’s what other home security cameras offer too. Where Nest Cam tries to standout is with its communication tie-in with the wider Nest ecosystem, such as the Nest Learning Thermostat and Nest Protect smoke alarm (if, of course, you own such products). As of March 2016 the Thermostat can be made aware of your whereabouts by tracking your smartphone location, which can trigger the way Nest Cam works based on whether you’re home or away. This fixes one of the bigger issues we had with Nest Cam when first reviewed.

So has Nest now got the edge when it comes to home security, or is it just a big name with little extra to truly offer beyond its competition?

Nest Cam review: Design

Home security cameras range from abysmally unattractive to borderline pretty; no company seems to have quite cracked it yet. Nest Cam tries to stand out with its dark colour and teardrop-esque shape design but, actually, we think it looks rather average. It’s an industrial look, not a patch on the good-looking silver-edged Nest Learning Thermostat.

In the box Nest Cam comes with a screw-in stand and accompanying base, which can be adhered to the wall if desired. The stand can tilt up and down by 90-degrees each way, while the camera can freely rotate through 360-degrees to compensate for horizontal and vertical positioning as necessary. No vertical videos to be found here.

The 130-degree angle of view from the lens is ultra wide-angle, meaning even smaller rooms will fit into its all-seeing eye field of view. There’s a mic to listen for sound alerts (which are off by default) and a speaker on the rear which can be used to speak through if you want to shout at the dog for biting the sofa or, who knows, prank your house guest.

Pocket-lint

Nest Cam review: Setup

It’s supposed to take a single minute to setup Nest Cam, but it doesn’t. Not that it takes so long that you’ll be in tears or pulling out your hair, but there are a few steps that need to be taken to get everything sussed out.

First, plug the mini USB into the camera so it switches on. We wish this port and cable was hidden out of view as the white cable provided looks eye-catching, and not in a good way. The cable can’t be hidden within the stand stem either.

Next, download the Nest app on your smart device. As Learning Thermostat users we already have this, so it was just a case of adding a new product. On the back of the Cam is a QR code which can be scanned using your app-loaded device’s camera for a supposed quick setup through an associated Wi-Fi network. Setup failed via the app three times in succession for us, though, so we reverted to the browser-based setup on a laptop instead, which worked fine. But all that added to the setup time.

Once successful a new circle icon (complete with the name you’ve give it – ours is “Office”) will appear within the app, so it’s possible to toggle between Nest products as applicable. It’s a simple yet elegant solution.

Nest Cam review: Quality and notifications

Nest Cam captures footage up to Full HD (1920 x 1080 resolution) so there’s ample detail, with the ability to temporarily enhance (which is just digital zoom) into areas of the image as desired. Nigh Vision is automatic (or can be manually toggled on or off) delivering an impressively clear greyscale image.

That’s one of the big sells for Nest Cam: the quality of its footage is really good. So whether you’re sharing a funny clip of your pet going bananas, or catch a break-in, there’s sufficient detail whatever the brightness conditions.

Within the full frame if anything moves then Nest will send out a notification alert via the smartphone app (it’s not possible to receive email alerts). This is Nest at its simplest, but there are additional ways to detail notifications, including the option to add drawn-on and named Zones (it’s only possible to create these polygonal sections from a browser on a computer, though, not within the app). It’s then possible to toggle these Zones on and off for notifications, but Nest will always record when it sees motion, it’s whether or not you’ve told the system to notify or not.

There’s a 2-second lag between live events and when you’ll see the image if you’re watching live via the app or a browser, while automated recorded sections of footage can be opened and viewed as you please – although the inability to scroll through long clips from the History section with ease is frustrating and not very “Nest” in an app that ought to be more refined. Opening a clip directly from a notification pulls it up fullscreen with enough on-screen controls to scrub through a clip, but this doesn’t translate to older historical clips for some reason.

Pocket-lint

Nest Cam review: The Nest big thing?

It’s possible to schedule when Nest Cam is on and off, in a similar way to the Nest Learning Thermostat. It’s even possible to have the Nest Cam come on when the thermostat knows when you’re away, putting itself into Away mode.

The integration of smartphone GPS tracking for Auto-Away/Home also activates a privacy mode: the Cam symbol in the app now reads “OFF” if it knows you’re at home and want some privacy, rather than always (creepily) being recorded. You can deactivate this privacy mode as you please, but we’ve found it works just fine – typically if our heating is on then we’re at home and, therefore, the Cam is now off.

Nest Cam is also said to automatically record if the Nest Protect smoke alarm triggers, although that may not be of use if placement of the two devices are in different rooms (and we don’t have that product connected to verify this).

According to Nest, from its own in-app setup notes, there’s also advanced motion sensing which, to quote, “looks for faces while filtering out light, shadows, leaves and trees”. That didn’t work for us: it’s still never identified a face that we’re aware of, while changes in light from passing cloud cover have caused repeat alerts while away on holiday (causing frantic, “what the heck is going on in the office?” moments, only to see nothing but the sun lighting up a patch of wall).

With devices such as Netatmo Welcome offering users face registration so they can be recognised and alerts dished out accordingly, Nest isn’t necessarily the most advanced home security cam out there. Furthermore the one main issue we’ve had is outages. These may be network related, or may be overheating related (it runs fairly hot), but if the Cam is offline for a long time it can completely switch itself off and not be remotely accessed. A full-on unplug from the wall to reset it is typically required to solve this.

Pocket-lint

Nest Cam review: Cloud cost implication

Like so many home security cameras, Nest Cam is only really useful if you subscribe in order to store 10 consecutive days of capture in the cloud. There’s a free 90-day trial with each purchase, so you’ll get almost three months of use.

When that trial time is up, it’s still possible to plug into the live view of the camera, but clips aren’t going to be stored in the cloud. And with no on-board microSD storage option, those hoping to use Nest Cam as a simple pet monitor, for example, are going to be disappointed. Although we’ve often called out with other products how on-board recording would be as good as useless if someone broke in, spotted the camera and took it with them.

Nest Cam costs £159 in the UK, so it’s relatively competitive in the wider order of things. The cloud storage, called Nest Aware, is priced at £8/month of £80/year, so that ongoing cost is the thing to really consider.

Verdict

As home security cameras go it’s a familiar tale: Nest Cam has got all the necessary notifications and back-up cloud storage options for a decent core experience, one with great quality Full HD video capture and Night Vision options.

There’s a lot to be said for expectation though. And with Nest being, well, Nest, we anticipated it was going to be a five-star home security camera. But it’d be a stretch to call it the out-and-out best option going, given the advances other manufacturers have made in facial recognition and related notifications and, in our review situation, recurring outages.

It has advanced over time, though, and its real sell is now the ability to communicate better with the wider Nest ecosystem, such as Nest Thermostat, which can even utilise positional data based on smartphone activation (of you and up to 10 family members with separate accounts) to determine whether it’s on or off or set to private mode. 

Overall Nest Cam lays down a solid product; it stands out for the way it looks (whether you’re a fan or not) and will only continue to get better over time as the wider Nest ecosystem evolves. 

Forget Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, wire-free Sulon Q VR doesn’t need a high-end PC

When we met Oculus’ vice president of mobile Max Cohen in January, he explained that wireless virtual reality headsets of the calibre of the Oculus Rift are a long way away.

It will be 15 years before we get something approaching the Star Trek holodeck, he told us.

“It’s currently not possible to get the Rift experience with a wireless head-mounted display,” Cohen said.

However, new company on the block, Sulon, aims to prove him wrong. Its Sulon Q virtual reality headset is indeed “tether-free” and, unlike mobile solutions such as the Samsung Gear VR, it is powerful enough to run “console-quality graphics” and powerful applications.

That’s because, like the Microsoft HoloLens augmented reality headset, the Sulon Q features the PC and processing inside the device. That enables it to be a “wear-and-play” unit, which can be taken wherever you go and does not need to be connected to a separate computer.

The Sulon Q is powered by AMD and was therefore unveiled on stage during an AMD event at GDC in San Francisco.

READ: Best VR headsets to buy in 2016, whatever your budget

It will run using the AMD FX-8800P processor, with Radeon R7 Graphics which utilise AMD’s Graphics Core Next architecture. The processor runs four cores, while the GPU has eight. This means it is capable of running DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs, so is capable of high-performance visuals.

Inside, the screen is a 2560 x 1440 OLED display, 1280 x 1440 for each eye. Audio is supplied through built-in earbuds with 3D spatial audio processing. There are also noise-cancelling embedded microphones for voice communication. And lenses on the front of the headset mean it can be used with augmented reality applications, such as HoloLens, as well as VR.

Sulon claims that it is lightweight – essential for an “all-in-one” VR headset and it is planned for launch in late spring. Pricing details are yet to be revealed.

Lyft has a new carpooling service for the Bay Area

If you’re in the Bay Area, you can add Lyft’s upcoming carpooling service to the list of ridesharing options you can use to get around. The company has joined forces with the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) and SF Bay’s 511 Rideshare program to launch a new carpooling service separate from its other products. Based on the info available on its website, it’ll work just like any other similar offering: simply tell the app your route, and it will match you with people going the same way. You save money, and so will they.

Lyft is asking for people’s routes on the website to determine the most popular ones, which it plans to launch first. You also automatically sign up to get notified when the service is live if you share yours. That’s about all we know for now, though. The company promises to reveal more details in the coming weeks, hopefully including how it differs from its Line carpooling option.

Source: Lyft

‘Cyborg heart patch’ combines electronics and living tissue

One of the latest inventions out of Tel Aviv University can patch up broken hearts. We’re talking about the real organs here, especially those damaged by myocardial infarction or heart attack. A team from the Israeli university created a “cyborg heart patch” that combines both living tissue and electronic components to replace the damaged parts of the organ. “It’s very science fiction, but it’s already here,” says one of its creators, Prof. Tal Dvir. “[W]e expect it to move cardiac research forward in a big way.” The patch can contract and expand like real heart tissue can, but it can do much, much more than that.

The electronic components allow doctors to remotely monitor their patients’ condition from afar. A physician could log into a computer and see if the implant is working as intended. If he senses that something’s amiss, he could release drugs to, say, regulate inflammation or fix the lack of oxygen. That sounds dangerous to us, since computers can be hacked. But the researchers are aiming to develop the patch further so it can regulate itself with no human intervention.

Dvir warns that the “practical realization of the technology may take some time.” For now, those suffering from cardiovascular diseases will have to rely on current treatment methods. The team is still in the midst of refining their cyborg heart patch. Plus, they’re looking at how to create bionic brain and spinal cord tissues using what they’ve learned so far to treat neurological conditions.

Source: Tel Aviv University, Nature

Samsung’s Entrim 4D headphones will let you experience virtual reality in a whole new way

At SXSW, Samsung’s C-Lab — the secret projects division within Samsung that develops new products and technologies — has announced the Entrim 4D headphones, a VR accessory that delivers electric signals to your inner ear, giving you a sensation of motion.

Entrim 4D uses a combination of Galvanic Vestibular Stimulation and algorithms to deliver synchronized “electric messages to a nerve in the ear” in tune with the corresponding movements on-screen. Samsung describes the technology thusly:

Electrical signals—like the ones used to help restore balance in stroke patients—are delivered via headphones equipped with electrodes that correspond with movement data input by engineers. Users thus feel as if they are a part of the on-screen action, and can also sense direction and speed of movement.

And, when paired with the team’s Drone FPV, which utilizes data from the drone’s motion sensors, they can even feel like they are flying.

Steve Jung, the creative leader of the project, said that in addition to enabling “whole body” VR, the goal with Entrim 4D is to eliminate motion sickness by simulating movement to the visuals experienced from a VR headset. For now, the technology is still in developmental stages, with no word on when we’ll see a consumer-ready variant.

Source: Samsung