Google Releases Android TV Remote App for iOS

Google has released an iOS app that enables Android TV owners to control their television using their iPhone or iPad.

The app’s migration to iOS means that Apple mobile device owners now have the same ability to control the smart TV Google platform as their Android mobile-owning counterparts, so long as both television and iOS device share the same wireless network.

The iOS app features a D-pad in the center of the screen for standard remote control operation, while users can also input text or perform a voice search via Google Now, both of which should be a welcome alternative to using a standard remote handset to input to an onscreen keyboard.

Multiple remotes can be linked to an Android TV, meaning iOS device users can also take part in multiplayer games alongside users of standard gamepad controllers.

The Android TV app is a free download for iPad and iPhone from the App Store. [Direct Link]

Tag: Android
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Indian Government Approves Single-Branded Apple Retail Stores

The Indian government is set to approve Apple’s request to open its own retail stores in the country and exempt the company from its domestic sourcing policy for foreign businesses.

Apple currently has no wholly-owned stores in India and sells its products through a number of distributors. Back in January, the company sent an application to the country’s Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) for approval of several planned Apple retail outlets.

According to The Times of India, a committee led by DIPP secretary Ramesh Abhishek will this week recommend exempting Apple from a state ruling that requires single-brand foreign stores to source at least 30 percent of their goods from domestic suppliers.

“The committee has found that the company’s products are cutting edge technology and state-of-the-art,” said sources familiar with the matter. “It has recommended to exempt them from the local sourcing norms.”

The source’s wording is significant, since under the rule, restrictions may be waived for retailers selling “state-of-the-art” and “cutting-edge technology” if local suppliers are unavailable. Since Apple manufactures most of its products in China, the precondition had thus far been an issue for the company as it tries to make headway into the Indian retail market.

Last summer, Apple announced its Authorized Mobility Resellers program in India, which focused on opening 500 retail store locations across 12 cities in the country. Apple CEO Tim Cook has praised India’s business environment and stated that the company is putting more energy into the country, which has the third largest smartphone market in the world with over 200 million users, despite only one third of the population being smartphone owners.

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Intel Wants to Replace 3.5mm Headphone Jack With USB-C Audio

Intel this week announced plans to usher in the adoption of an analog audio USB Type-C connector that would replace the standard 3.5 millimeter analog jack and eventually be capable of digital audio transmission (via Anandtech).

The plans were announced during the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) in Shenzhen, China, where the semiconductor manufacturer set out its project to develop USB Type-C Digital Audio. Intel remained vague about the digital conversion, but set out broad aims to update the USB Audio Device 2.0 protocol specifications to include up-to-date audio features, while simplifying discovery and improving power management, with plans to release the revised specification in the second quarter this year.

Intel hopes that the improved USB-C audio specification would eventually amount to a standardized connector replacement and eliminate the traditional audio jack from laptops, smartphones and tablets, eventually ushering in a transition to fully digital audio.

From a consumer perspective, this could mean higher-quality audio output, more remote control possibilities on headsets, potential biometric health data tracking (such as in-ear heart-rate monitoring), and supplied power for features like active noise-cancelling without the need for dedicated batteries.

The news comes amid iPhone 7 rumors suggesting Apple will look to remove the 3.5mm headphone jack on its future mobile devices, however speculation gravitates towards Apple replacing it with a proprietary Lightning port capable of transmitting audio. With no headphone jack, wired headphones would connect to the iPhone 7 using its Lightning port and Bluetooth headphones would connect wirelessly.

Either way, given that LeEco already offers smartphones with USB-C-only audio, and JBL sells noise-cancelling USB-C headphones, the 3.5mm audio jack appears to be nearing the end of its life in the consumer technology market.

Tags: Intel, USB-C
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Google Maps App Gains Travel Times Widget and Direction Sharing

Google Maps for iOS was updated with a number of new features yesterday, including a Notification Center widget for commuters on the move and an in-app option for sharing directions.

The new Travel Times extension for Google’s popular iOS maps app allows users to quickly check a live travel time estimation to their home or work with a simple pull down of the Notification Center.

The widget includes a toggle for switching between driving and public transit times, but only functions if users have saved their home and/or work addresses in Google Maps’ Settings menu. Tapping on either destination in the Notification Center starts direction navigation from the user’s current location.

Other additions in the new version of the app include the ability to share directions via the three-dot icon in the top right of the map navigation screen, and a new setting that allows users to select the unit measurement for distance shown during navigation.

Lastly, users now have control over Google Maps’ color scheme, with a night mode toggle as well as an “Automatic” setting that transitions between day and night mode depending on the time of day.

Google Maps is a free download from the App Store for iPhone and iPad. [Direct Link]

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Sony records huge net profit in 2015 even as mobile sales decline

Sony has announced its earnings for the financial year 2015, and the vendor has recorded its largest increase in profit since 2007. Net profit increased by 666.7% to ¥304.5 billion ($2.7 billion), and operating profit shot up 329% to ¥294.2 billion ($2.6 billion). The spurt in profits is due to continued demand for the PlayStation 4, with the games division witnessing an 84.3% increase in operating income to ¥88.7 billion ($785 million) and a 11% increase in sales netting ¥1.5 trillion ($13.2 billion).

Revenue was down 1.3% to ¥8.1 trillion ($71.6 billion), which is largely attributed to falling sales in the smartphone segment. Sales from the mobile division declined by 20% as Sony took “a strategic decision not to pursue scale in order to improve profitability.” Revenue from the mobile division was at ¥1.1 trillion ($9.7 billion), with an operating loss of ¥61.4 billion ($544 million).

Sony’s image sensor division also failed to live up to expectations, posting an operating loss of ¥28.6 billion ($253 million) on account of a ¥59.6 billion ($528 million) impairment charge. Sony’s imaging sensors are used in most flagships available today, and the manufacturer was setting its sights on this division for long-term growth. That doesn’t look likely anymore, as Sony is now forecasting a decline in demand for its camera modules.

In the camera division, operating profit rose 72.7% to ¥72.1 billion ($638 million), with revenue declining by 1.7% to ¥711.2 billion ($6.29 billion). Sony was able to offset the declining revenue by focusing on the high-end models in the camera segment.

Sony is also postponing its quarterly earnings forecast to May following recent earthquakes in Kumamoto, where the vendor has a semiconductor plant and imaging sensor production facility.

Philips rolls out an awesome app update for its Hue lighting

Philips has rolled out an update for the official Hue lighting app on both iOS and Android. This latest release completely revamps the experience with a brand new UI. As well as much-needed design improvements, the Philips Hue app has also received some new functionality, making the release a welcomed one to pump some life back into the official app.

The design and layout refresh now organizes connected bulbs by room to make it even easier to quickly configure specific lights. You’ll now be able to enter commands to control all the Hue lighting throughout your home at once. A handy addition is called “Routines”, which is essentially a timer for Hue lighting that will toggle connected bulbs depending on the time of day. An example would be a wake-up routine that would gradually modify the color of bulbs to emulate a sunrise.

The color matching feature of the app has been upgraded to automatically pick out the five most vibrant colors from any provided sample and create a customized lighting setup. More than 16 million colors and every shade of white light can be selected from to create your perfect scenes. While it’s possible to further tweak any given scene, it’s a vastly improved system over what was previously available. Home & Away provides peace of mind by controlling lights automatically to turn them off when you’re away from home and back on when you return.

Give the app update a download and let us know how you’re getting on with 2.0 in the comments.

LeEco LeSee preview: See what all Le fuss is about

The star of the Beijing Auto Show isn’t a Volkswagen, or a Porsche, or a Mercedes. It’s something most people have never heard of before: the LeSee, a car from LeEco (formerly LeTV).

You might be thinking, “so what?”. But this car is significant for a number of reasons, so we went hands-on in Beijing to get a closer look at China’s latest exciting car.

We say “went hands-on”, the truth being we simply couldn’t get near the LeSee, because every time we went to look at it, we had to battle through crowds 10-deep — which tells you all you need to know about how interested the Chinese are in this car. They’re interested because it comes from a company that over the past few years has become a massive player in the electronics and media sector in China, rivalling the likes of Xiaomi, in a bid to become the “Chinese Apple”.

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LeEco’s CEO is a man called Jia Yueting, and while the world is looking at Apple and Google to disrupt in the car space, they might be looking in the wrong direction. Yueting is worth billions, and he’s already backing Sino-American start-up car brands, Faraday Future and Atieva. The latter hasn’t show its hand yet, but Faraday’s FF-Zero concept caused a huge stir at this year’s CES (read our hands-on preview, link below) and it is working on a series of autonomous production cars, to be built in a Tesla Gigafactory-like operation in Nevada. Apparently the guys behind it, also designed LeEco’s latest.

READ: Faraday Future FFZero1 concept preview

What we know about that LeSee is that mother brand LeEco sees the car as an important part of the future digital landscape. With cars likely to become autonomous in many markets — the LeSee can move autonomously, up to 130mph — you’re going to often be doing different things in the car, other than actually driving.

The company would very much like your car to be part of its wider media-electronics portal. So the LeSee’s steering wheel is unlike others — it’s sort of solid, with digital elements and retracts in and out of the dashboard.

Pocket-lint

The interior features a number of digital displays — a high passenger side dash interface, a floating centre-screen tablet, and digital displays built into the exterior surfaces and the rear seat zone. We say “zone” because you could hardly call the rice-paddy-field-inspired contours in the rear area of the car “seats”. But they do show us that LeSee is bothered about its Chinese heritage (it doesn’t just want to ape western approaches), and it’s following the Chinese way of putting much greater emphasis on the comfort and experience of those in the rear of the car.

While most brands looking at autonomous driving are trying to hide their sensors, we liked that the LeSee had stuck a kind of antenna in the middle of its glass roof, which flashed and strobed when in the autonomous mode. But perhaps while the interior is a wild, digitally focused design, we found the most intriguing thing about the car to be the well resolved, yet distinct exterior design.

The LeSee is about the size of a Porsche Panamera. And we mention that car because it’s the one which the LeSee’s roofline is most similar to. But the LeSee is sleeker, less hunchback. It features clean surfacing which is punctuated by break-aways for the A-pillar (which becomes the door surround) and the sill. Just enough variation to keep things interesting.

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The front and rear aspects are similar too: a big, closed-loop lamp graphic, no grille and those hologram-style digital animations just visible if you look closely enough.

It’s a concept, though, so what it previews in reality is open to debate. But Yueting is ambitious and powerful and there’s a will here to get things done in a much quicker way than we would in Europe. So don’t expect to have to wait for long before LeEco makes its next move. We’re fascinated to see what that is, and whether one of China’s richest billionaires can truly disrupt the 100-year old car market…

READ: Beijing Auto Show in pictures: The best cars from the China show

Porsche 718 Cayman preview: Firing on all (four) cylinders

Twinned with the new 718 Boxster that we drove a couple of weeks back, Porsche’s new model offensive continued at the Beijing Auto Show with the launch of the 718 Cayman. The hard-top coupe twin version to the Boxster’s drop top, the 718 Cayman holds no huge surprises for those paying attention to what Porsche has been up to recently.

This means, bar potential future special models, the Cayman loses two cylinders compared to before — this is now a turbo-charged four-cylinder zone. The Cayman comes in two specs: standard and S. The standard car uses a 2.0, four-cylinder engine, producing 300 horsepower; the S kicks out 350bhp from 2.5 litres. Interestingly, the Cayman for the base Chinese market runs just 250bhp.

All engine options are more torquey than the earlier model, meaning the Cayman will feel quicker and quite different to before: you won’t need to rev the nuts off it to make serious progress any more. Whether or not that’s a bad thing will depend on your driving disposition. Still, with the optional PDK auto gearbox and sport chrono pack, the base Cayman can run 0-62mph in 4.7-seconds, the S in 4.2-seconds. That’s seriously fast for a mid-range sports car.

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As with the Boxster, most of the Cayman’s exterior panels are redesigned and the details — most notably things like the lamps — get a new design with a greater emphasis on showing off technology. The Cayman has always been a pretty car, with this redesign sticking to Porsche’s “evolution over revolution” philosophy. Although we think it just looks a little fussier than before, which is a shame.

The more welcome news comes in the interior. The Cayman was previously behind-the-curve in-car tech gets a bump with the same equipment seen in the Boxster and the new 911, too. That means a thin, hollowed-out steering wheel that feels great in your hands, and — so long as you tick the Sport Chrono pack option (our advice: do) — you get Porsche’s new mode selector wheel to twist between normal, sport and sport+ modes. And in cars equipped with the PDK, the sport response button in the middle, which you hit for a 20-second hit of “everything the car can give you” fromthe engine, gearbox and suspension.

Thankfully, Porsche now fits its PCM, navigation and communication system as standard. With it you get bluetooth, 150W sound package plus and a touchscreen that’s got a glass surface which supports multi-touch operation. You still need the Connect module option to get Apple CarPlay, USB and real-time traffic info, plus support for the Porsche App. After Sport Chrono, this is probably the second box that we’d tick.

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Expect to pay around £50k for a lightly specified Cayman. Noteworthy is the fact that it’s now cheaper than the equivalent Boxster; Porsche has flipped the pricing strategy of the models to align them with the rest of the car industry, meaning you now pay extra for the convertible.

The 718 Cayman is available to order now. It goes on sale in Europe and the UK in September 2016.

READ: Beijing Auto Show in pictures: The best cars from the China show

Samsung Gear VR 2 could work without needing a phone

Samsung has confirmed that it is working on a virtual reality headset that won’t need a phone to provide the screen. It could even be completely self-contained, offering wireless VR without needing any separate device or PC at all.

The current Samsung Gear VR requires a Galaxy phone to operate.

Speaking at the company’s developers conference in San Francisco, Injong Rhee, Samsung’s head of R&D for software, revealed that work has started on next generation Gear VR headsets.

“We are working on wireless and dedicated VR devices, not necessarily working with our mobile phone,” he said.

READ: Samsung Gear VR Consumer Edition review: The stepping-stone to Oculus proper

After the success of its first consumer VR device, the Gear VR, and the imminent release of its Gear 360 VR camera, Samsung is keen to establish itself as a forerunner in the emergence of mass market virtual reality.

“We think 2016 is shaping up to be the year of VR,” said the company’s director of software development, Andrew Dickerson.

READ: Samsung Gear 360 camera preview: Gear VR-friendly virtual reality video recorder

Variety reports that he also revealed plans for a VR Upload SDK, which will help developers integrate easy-uploading features to Samsung’s own Milk VR service in their apps and hardware.

As for the prospective Gear VR 2, it is not know whether it is continuing to work with Oculus on its next generation virtual reality headset. From its comments, Samsung might be taking development in-house and rivalling the Facebook-owned firm. Time will tell.

Philips’ Hue 2.0 app adds a host of new ‘smart’ features

Philips unveiled an app update for its Hue smart lights on Thursday. The iOS- and Android-ready program has been completely revamped, including a new UI.

This is a welcome and significant step up from the existing program. The first iteration was so bad that it spawned an entire cottage industry of third-party apps. The Hue 2.0 version does not offer much new functionality beyond what the first one did but the way the new UI is organized makes it feel like a brand new system.

When you’d fire up the original Hue app, you’d immediately be confronted by a grid of oddly-named “themes,” basically complementary color sets for specific groups of bulbs. That doesn’t happen anymore. The new app’s focus on grouping lights by rooms is way more intuitive. The new homescreen welcomes you with a list of rooms and displays the Hue lights in each one. With the new system you can adjust the color or brightness of every bulb within three taps of launching the program.

Organizing bulbs by rooms is definitely a helpful feature, especially for people who are already deep into the Hue ecosystem, but it isn’t the only design tweak. “Routines” finally brings a usable timer to the Hue that automatically toggles your lights throughout the day. For example, you’ll be able to set a “wake up” routine that modifies the color temperature of the bulbs and slowly ramps up their output, mimicking the rising sun. “Nightlight”, on the other hand, minimizes the amount of blue wavelength light the bulbs put out, which can make it harder to fall asleep. The Hue 2.0 app also offers a “Home and Away” function that works like conventional light timers.

Setting up timers and geofences is way easier as well. You just tap the Routines tab at the top of the screen, choose between “Home and Away,” which dictates how the lights respond to your geofencing and Wake Up, which determines when your lights will turn on in the morning. The geofencing services worked as you’d want them too during my testing, automatically turning the lights off when I left my apartment and turning them back on when I returned. The timer mode, however, worked way better than the origina. The first Hue app took my settings more as suggestions than rules. Some days they’d turn on 30 minutes early, some days they’d turn on 45 minutes late, some days they wouldn’t turn on at all. With the new app, my house lights up at 6:30 am without fail.

The Hue also upgraded its color-matching system with the new “Scenes” feature. Originally, you’d have to load a sample image into the app then manually select individual color swatches from it. It was a pain and often felt like more work than it was worth. Now, the Scenes tool will automatically pick the five most vibrant colors from the sample and create a custom lighting scheme from those. Of course, users can tweak individual colors (either by wavelength, temperature or luminosity) within a scene.

Finally, Widgets! Hue is dramatically expanding the scope and scale of its widgets. Now users can control up to ten sets of lights from the OS’s dropdown home screen without launching the Hue program itself.

Overall, the Hue app 2.0 is a huge improvement over its predecessor. The first version of the app always felt rather unpolished — as if Philips poured all of its energy into building the bulb hardware and just threw the app together as an afterthought. But this new version is more stable, more intuitive, and does its duties without getting in your way.