Nubia brings flagship photography to a cheap phone

It was 10 months ago when we talked about how China’s Nubia was bringing its camera-centric Z9 smartphone to the US market, but if you check now, the store link on its official English website is no longer available. Instead, Nubia will be focusing on the Latin American, European and Indian markets, starting with its brand new Z11 Mini mid-ranger. This is a 5-inch 1080p device in a rounded glass-metal-glass sandwich that’s only 8mm thick, and its 16-megapixel f/2.0 main camera is powered by Sony’s IMX298, which is the same sensor inside other flagships like the Huawei Mate 8, Xiaomi Mi 5, Oppo R9 Plus and Vivo Xplay5. You also get 3GB of LPDDR3 RAM, 64GB of internal storage, microSD expansion and a fingerprint reader on the back. Given its 1,499 yuan price point (about $230), you’ll forgive Nubia for using the octa-core Snapdragon 617 chipset instead of an 820 here.

In fact, thanks to the Snapdragon 617, the Z11 Mini does Cat 6 LTE (up to 300 Mbps downlink), VoLTE, Bluetooth 4.1 and 802.11ac WiFi. In China, it also supports all three major networks to make things easier for local folks. As with previous Nubia devices, the Z11 Mini can take two SIM cards — one Micro SIM and one Nano SIM (software toggle for picking the main SIM for data), though the latter will take up the microSD slot.

The chipset uses two quad-Cortex-A53 clusters — one clocked at up to 1.5 GHz and the other up to 1.2 GHz, which has allowed Nubia to boldly claim that the phone’s fixed 2,800 mAh battery can last up to two days on normal usage. We’ll see about that. When it’s almost out of juice, you’ll have to recharge using the bundled USB Type-C cable, though there’s no word on whether the charger in the box does Quick Charge 2.0 or 3.0.

There are many other goodies as well. For selfie addicts, there’s an 8-megapixel front camera with large 1.4um pixels and a dedicated flash light, though the f/2.4 aperture is a tad slow compared to what other flagship phones are offering — at least you have the various beautification modes to patch things up, if needed. Both this and the main camera benefit from Nubia’s strong set of camera features, namely the separation of focus point and exposure point, quick exposure adjustment, local tone mapping (which is described as an advanced version of HDR), 3D digital noise reduction and ISO of up to 12800. The camera app also has dedicated capture modes for time lapse, light painting, star trail, raw photography and a fun “handheld stabilization” mode that lets you clone a person up to five times in a single photo (by merging multiple shots into one with automatic stitching).

The Z11 Mini runs on Nubia’s latest custom ROM based on Android 5.1, and it comes with some handy tools. There’s “Super Screenshot” which lets you take long screenshots and screenshots in various shapes, plus you can record your screen activity while doing a voiceover. Another useful one is the ability to virtually clone certain social apps — including WeChat and QQ — so that you can be logged into two accounts simultaneously. Nubia says many of its recent models will also be receiving this upgrade, and it’ll be releasing monthly incremental updates as well as quarterly major updates.

The Z11 Mini is already available for pre-ordering online in China, though this model might change in the near future. Facing tough local competition like Xiaomi and Huawei with their aggressive online marketing, Nubia will instead focus on the offline market in China, which is currently dominated by Oppo and Vivo. Local electronics retail chain, Suning, owns 33 percent of Nubia (the rest owned by ZTE), and its retail network aims to sell at least 10 million Nubia devices over the next three years.

As for overseas, Senior Vice President Ni Fei told Engadget that Nubia hasn’t quite given up on the US market, adding that even though the Z9 received positive feedback from reviewers, it was hard to work with US carriers as a relatively young brand. Which is why his company is instead prioritizing other parts of the world for the time being. “We just need to get more people to know us.” Ni is also not concerned about ZTE’s recent troubles in the US, since Nubia operates as an independent brand and apparently played no part in the investigation.

Source: Nubia

Yes, someone made a smart clothes peg

It seems nothing is safe from the Internet of Things revolution. The latest attempt to make a household object smarter is Peggy, a connected clothes peg by Australian detergent company OMO. A few basic components sit inside its orange shell, including a thermometer, UV sensor and humidity detector. These track the weather outside and, in the case of impending rain, trigger timely alerts to your phone over WiFi. So if the clouds roll in and you’re busy with something else — maybe you’re out of the house, but someone else is indoors — you won’t be left with soggy washing.

It’s a bit of a PR stunt. Most of this information could be obtained with a decent weather app or home weather station, after all. To sell the idea, OMO has developed some scheduling tools for the companion app which tell you the best time to put on a wash. Plug in the time it usually takes for your washing machine to complete a load, and it’ll explain how many hours (or minutes, if you’re unlucky) you’ll have afterwards before the next downpour. It’ll even send a notification when your washing machine is done, just in case you need an extra reminder to take out your digs.

OMO’s Peggy is currently in testing — if you’re curious and live in Australia, you can submit your details to ensure you’re “first in line” when it’s actually available. Otherwise, you can do what homeowners have been doing for, well, centuries, and keep one eye on the sky when your washing is hanging outside. Inefficient maybe, but it does save managing yet another device that needs to be charged up and connected to the internet.

Via: CNET

Source: Peggy

Apple Wins Patent for Texture and Temperature Simulating Touch Surface

Apple has been granted a patent today for an invention that enables a touchpad or touch surface to simulate textures like cool metal and hot cement.

The patent, originally filed in 2013 and called “Touch Surface for Simulating Materials” (via Patently Apple), appears in a series of 62 others published today by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, and includes details on the mechanisms that would allow the touchpad to vibrate and change temperature.

An “actuator” would allow at least a part of the surface to vibrate and simulate the tactile sensation of the texture, with rougher surfaces simulated by stronger vibrations. By varying the vibrations over time in response to a finger moving over the touch surface, the control actuator would even be able to simulate irregular textures such as wood grain.

In combination with the actuator, a temperature control device could control the heat or coolness of the glass touch surface relative to the temperature of the detected contact. In one example, a layer of diamond material in the touch surface provides extremely high thermal conductivity, exceptional wear resistance and optical transparency.

As with any filed patent, the technology is unlikely to appear in any product soon, if at all. But it does offer some insight into Apple’s ideas about how it might innovate upon haptic technology in its devices with simulated touch.

Last-minute rumors prior to the release of the third-generation iPad in 2012 suggested that the device could include haptic technology that would give on-screen objects texture, but the feature never appeared.

Tag: patents
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Monster Adidas Sport Adistar In-Ear Wireless Headphones review – CNET

The Good The Monster Adidas Sport Adistar is a well-designed in-ear wireless sports headphone that offers a comfortable, secure fit and decent sound (for Bluetooth). Battery life is good for this type of headphone, cord length is easily adjustable and you charge via a micro USB port conveniently located in the inline remote. A protective carrying pouch is included.

The Bad The headphone is sweat resistant but not waterproof, and the sound can distort at higher volumes.

The Bottom Line Monster’s Adidas Sport Adistar is one of the better-fitting and -sounding in-ear wireless sports headphones for the money.

Monster has created several Adidas-branded headphones and this wireless in-ear sports model, the $100 (£90; AU$150) Adidas Sport Adistar, is a particularly good one.

This is a noise-isolating headphone, which you means you have to jam the tips into your ears to get the best sound. If you don’t get a seal, you lose a lot of bass, and the sound will come across as thin. But one of the key design features is Monster’s SportClip wings that lock the bud in place and help create a secure, tight seal.

I did a couple of runs with these headphones and they worked very well, with a stable Bluetooth connection for the duration. I had to to make minimal adjustments as I ran and the cord length is easily adjustable with the integrated cord shortener.

A couple of caveats. I’d have preferred if they were rated as waterproof (and washable), not just sweatproof. Although they held up fine during the week I auditioned them, I can’t tell you how well they’ll hold up over several months of use. You should also be aware that you won’t be able to hear traffic noise if you’re playing your music at moderate to high volumes due to their noise-isolating nature.

Like virtually all Bluetooth headphones, this one’s equipped with an inline remote and microphone for making cell-phone calls. The call answer/end button doubles as as a pause/play button, and if you tap it twice quickly it calls up Siri on iPhones for voice control operation. To advance tracks forward you hold down the volume up button. Hold the volume down button to skip back a track.

What you get in the box.

Sarah Tew/CNET

Another noteworthy feature is the dual battery design (presumably one in each bud) that boosts battery life to as much as eight hours, depending on the volume level. And I liked how you charge the battery through a Micro-USB port in the inline remote, where the electronics live, rather than the bud. This is a new design feature for wireless in-ear headphones for 2016 and you’ll find it in several models later this year, including the Sol Republic Relays Sport Wireless and Jaybird Freedom.

Monster also makes the Monster Clarity HD Wireless for $20 less. It’s the same headphone but doesn’t come with the SportClip wings and ships with a different carrying pouch. But the two headphones sound the same.

Performance

As long as you can get a tight seal, the Adistar’s sound quality is quite decent though not exceptionally good for Bluetooth. The headphone offers strong, fairly tight bass and reasonable clarity up to about 75 percent volume. But it distorts a bit when you push the volume to the top, especially with more complicated tracks that have a lot of instruments playing at once.

LG’s interactive website lets you play with the LG G5 and Friends

LG has created a website that’s designed to showcase the LG G5 and its “Friends”. Called Play More, the site lets you pair an accessory and a toy, following which you get a video with the two in action.

Videos that feature the LG 360 CAM have 360-degree views. Combine the Tone Platinum headset with bouncy balls and you get this. There are a few combinations that are goofy, and this one’s downright strange.

Head down to the link below to check out the site, and let us know what combinations you’ve come up with in the comments.

LG G5 Play More

Feds begin criminal investigation against Theranos

In a letter addressed to its partners, the once-promising blood test startup Theranos has admitted that it’s under criminal investigation. According to multiple sources, the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the US Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California have started looking into whether the firm misled its investors about the state of its technology. The prosecutors even subpoenaed Walgreens, which offers the company’s blood tests, and the New York State Department of Health within these past weeks. They asked both organizations for testimony on how Theranos described its tech to them, as well as for any document the company submitted. The Wall Street Journal says the criminal investigation’s still in its very early stages, and it doesn’t automatically mean the company will be indicted.

Theranos promised lab test results with just a tiny amount of blood collected in minuscule vials called “nanotainers.” It raised $700 million and was valued at $9 billion before The WSJ published a piece revealing problems with its proprietary technology’s accuracy. Since then, it’s been under constant scrutiny from various agencies, including the State Departments of Health in Pennsylvania and Arizona, The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid (CMS) and the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The FDA spotted issues with its nanotainers and quality control procedures when it inspected the company’s labs in 2015. More recently, reports said the CMS found out that Theranos knew it was sending faulty test results to customers. The agency reportedly wants to ban company founder Elizabeth Holmes and president Sunny Balwani from the blood testing industry for at least two years.

Holmes hopes to save her company from total destruction, though, as evidenced by this part of the letter obtained by Business Insider:

“The company continues to work closely with regulators and is cooperating fully with all investigations.

We welcome further review of our technologies, performance, and data, which is why we voluntarily engaged with FDA years ago. We recently hosted three scientific review sessions in Palo Alto with leading laboratory and medical experts, many of whom joined our Scientific and Medical Advisory Board as a result, and are now working with us to introduce our technologies through peer reviewed publications.”

Source: Bloomberg, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, USA Today, Business Insider

Google Drive saves individual Slides, Docs or Sheets offline

Google introduced offline access to Sheets, Docs and Slides for Drive back in 2013, but once you select the option, it stores a large chunk of files on your device. Starting today, however, an update to Drive lets you select individual documents to save offline. To use the new option, go to the home screen for either Docs, Sheets or Slides, select the overflow menu for the file you want to make offline (the three dots) and toggle the “available offline” switch to “on.” Bear in mind that it only works in the Chrome browser on the desktop for now.

If you use Google Drive’s documents sporadically, the current system that syncs most of your files is probably fine, and you can still work that way. However, corporate users of Google’s paid “apps for work” service may generate hundreds or thousands of files that eat up space on their machines. In that case, it makes sense to only keep working files offline and stow older files safely on Drive. It’s also a way for Google to keep up with Microsoft, which has always had local file storage and vastly improved file sharing and online access for Office 2016. Google’s new app features start rolling out today.

Via: 9to5Google

Source: Google

‘World of Warcraft’ keeps growing with ‘Legion’ in August

Blizzard will launch World of Warcraft’s sixth expansion, Legion, on August 30th, unleashing hordes of hellish beasts and fresh quests into the game world. Legion adds the Demon Hunter hero class, customizable artifact weapons and a new continent called the Broken Isles, among other updates.

Pre-orders are live now in two flavors: the $50 Standard Edition or the $70 Digital Deluxe Edition, which includes an adorable demon dog as a pet, the Illidari Felstalker mount, and in-game goodies for Heroes of the Storm, StarCraft 2 and Diablo 3 (all of which are Blizzard properties as well).

Pre-ordering the Standard or Digital Deluxe versions of Legion grants players the ability to boost one character up to level 100 and early access to the Demon Hunter class. Plus, there’s one more way to give Blizzard your money: The $90 Collector’s Edition includes everything from the Digital Deluxe version plus a hardcover art book, a two-disc behind-the-scenes Blu-ray / DVD set, a CD soundtrack and a Legion mousepad. This bundle will be available at retail only.

World of Warcraft is an MMO that debuted in 2004 and quickly evolved into one of the most popular video games in the world. It hit a player-count high in 2010 with 12 million subscribers, but that number fell to 10 million in 2014 and finally 5.5 million in September 2015. That’s still millions of players, but the decline has fueled whispers of WoW’s demise — something that Blizzard will surely try to silence with Legion. Starting in 2016, Blizzard will no longer report subscriber numbers for World of Warcraft, so we’ll have to rely on gut feelings going forward.

Source: BusinessWire

‘PS4.5’ report: 4K output, will play nice with older console

The PS4.5 rumors have gotten a bit juicier. The “NEO,” as it’s being referred to internally, features upgraded specs (an 8-core processor running at 2.1 GHz versus the standard model’s 1.6GHz, a stronger GPU and faster RAM) and 4K image output, according to documents obtained by Giant Bomb. But from the sounds of it, Sony is adamant that the NEO should not divide the 35 million-plus userbase of the original PlayStation 4. Specifically, that means the console will use the same PlayStation Network store, same user interface and any purchases made on the base system will carry over.

There apparently won’t be NEO exclusive games or features within games, either, nor will there be a separation between when playing the system online against folks on the standard PS4. That first bit is a direct contrast to how Nintendo has handled the incremental 3DS hardware updates. If a game offers four-player local co-op on PS4, however, it could double that on the NEO thanks to the improved specs. More than that, by this October, every game released for PS4 will have to support both consoles, with games launching the month prior requiring a patch to run on the new hardware.

However, developers can release any NEO-ready games well before that if they so desire, and any previous game could take advantage of the stronger internals too. That’s so long as the developers release a patch for the software. So, perhaps playing Need for Speed at 60 FPS like you’ll be able to on the PC version could actually happen.

The beefier specs come with a mandate from Sony to developers: Games running on the NEO need to “meet or exceed” the frame rate of the game when it ran on the standard PS4 hardware. Pricing is unknown, but the possibility of this releasing for $400 while the base model finally gets a price cut to match the Xbox One doesn’t seem too far fetched. With E3 coming up in June, we likely won’t have long to wait for official details (release date, how this will affect PSVR, Ultra HD Blu-ray support) to fill in the gaps from this report. This has been your PS4.5 update for the day.

Would you upgrade to a PS4.5?

Source: Giant Bomb

Harvard-made robot can teach kids how to code

If you want to get kids’ full undivided attention, you’ll have to think of a fun way to do things. That’s why a group of roboticists from Harvard’s Wyss Institute created Root: a small hexagonal robot designed to ignite their interest in coding. Root was designed to crawl on a white board, using the markers and erasers it carries on command. Kids can control it by moving icons around in its accompanying app called Square (get it?). They simply have to make if-then statements using the icons, so even very young children can make the robot draw doodles and erase them afterwards. Older kids (and adults), however, can easily switch to the app’s more advanced, text-based interface.

Since the robot can show what coding can do in real time, it could spark a genuine interest in pursuing a career in the field. Wyss Institute’s lead robotics researcher Zivthan Dubrovsky said:

We’re in the digital world, but schools don’t teach coding. America needs computer programmers to be competitive — 71 percent of new jobs in STEM are going to be centered around coding. If we can solve this problem, this will be a big step forward for our country.

The team’s still looking for partners that can bring Root to classrooms at the moment. If and when they succeed, they plan to develop a curriculum that will get children exploring all the robot’s capabilities.

Source: Harvard Gazette, Harvard Wyss Institute, Wired, Root robot