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.

Apple open-sources CareKit to help us better understand our health

Forget the iPhone SE and the smaller iPad Pro: Apple’s biggest surprise at its most recent keynote might have been CareKit, a software framework meant to help iOS users more easily monitor and manage their illnesses. Some of you might have felt your eyes glaze over at the sight of “software framework,” so let’s put it this way: Apple wants to make it easy to assess your own health data and share that data with the people who can help you get even better. And starting today, CareKit is available on GitHub for developers to start playing with.

In case you missed the news the first time, CareKit currently has four modules that developers can deploy in their apps. Care Card is a mobile care plan where people can check off recovery or treatment tasks. The Symptom and Measurement Tracker does what the name implies: You can specify the amount of pain you’re in or perform specific activities meant to assess the progress of an illness. (Someone might tap the screen repeatedly to express how bad their Parkinson’s feels that day, for example.) Your progress with Care Card items is reflected in another module, called the Insight Dashboard, which illustrates those treatment measures against your symptoms. Last, and arguably most important, a Connect module lets you share all of this information with loved ones and medical professionals.

There are a few important things to take note of here. First, I’m hearing that it’s not terribly difficult to bake CareKit modules into an existing iOS app; it’s apparently a couple days of work at most. And if used properly, CareKit-enabled apps could help people get a more comprehensive understanding of their own health. It’s hard to overstate how helpful that could be. How you’re feeling can be plotted over time against what meds you were on or how active you were. These more nuanced portraits of health should hopefully lead to more informed people and more informed treatments.

More importantly, the information that flows in and out of CareKit plays nice with existing electronic health record systems like Epic, so hospitals and research facilities shouldn’t have too much trouble keeping up with the data that patients are sharing. Since that flow of information can ebb and flow far more frequently than scheduled checkups, the end result is that caretakers and physicians will hopefully have a better sense of a person’s overall health. It’s almost Apple’s attempt to end a legacy of short, uninformative doctor’s appointments and post-op check-ins.

This whole thing isn’t without its potential problems. In light of the FBI’s successful cracking of an iPhone, some will worry about the security of their health data. (For what it’s worth, Apple says all health information is encrypted and unreadable to the company.) Generational differences could mean some of the older patients who could most benefit from a clearer dialogue about health might not be willing to use smartphones. Still, CareKit is a first step in the right direction.

Speaking of first steps, Apple gave a few developers early access to the framework, as it frequently does ahead of a wider release. Glow, a startup focused on female health, updated its fertility and maternal health apps, as did Start, an app that tracks whether antidepressants are working on people as they should be. Meanwhile, One Drop, a diabetes management application that lets people track their activity, food and medicine intake, also got a CareKit update. All four will be available today, but — with any luck — they’re merely a harbinger of what’s to come.

Most Pinterest users are now from outside the US

Pinterest says one of its most important challenges when it transitioned from desktop to mobile in 2012 was to become a global brand. Things are going well for the company then, since majority of its users are now from outside the US. Two-thirds of new sign-ups are from outside the country, and Pinterest expects its next 100 million users to come from outside the United States, as well. The service grew the most in Germany over the past year, where pinners tripled in number. Users in France, Brazil and Japan doubled, and the company observed a significant increase in sign-ups from Russia, South Korea and Mexico. In an effort to cater to a growing worldwide audience, Pinterest is launching a new section called Featured Collections.

When users tap the explore icon, it’ll show local boards, topics trending in their countries and boards that might be relevant to their interests. For instance, someone from the UK might see style ideas from Burberry, while someone from France could see pins about singer Benjamin Biolay. Featured Collections is now live in the UK, France, Germany, Brazil and Japan. The rest of the world will have to wait a few more months to explore what their countrymen are currently into.

HIV antibodies guarded monkeys from the disease for six months

There’s no known vaccine for HIV, but researchers have a temporary preventative treatment in the works. A team of American and German scientists tested a quartet of injectable antibodies in monkeys that staved off the human immunodeficiency virus for up to six months, according to a paper published in Nature. The antibodies were harvested from HIV-infected people, cleaned and then given to macaques before they were dosed with a strain of simian HIV.

“This study is the first one to show that a single administration of these monoclonal antibodies can prevent infection, prevent disease and might be a viable alternative for a vaccine against HIV,” the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ Malcolm Martin tells The Verge. Beyond that the methods used in the experiment apparently mimic how HIV exposure usually occurs: the monkeys were repeatedly given low doses of HIV rather than one large dose at once; infection in humans doesn’t typically happen upon first exposure.

One of the antibodies from this experiment is already being tested domestically and in Brazil and Peru, and will expand to Botswana, South Africa and Tanzania. The Verge writes that, should the results from the trial (due in 2022) prove promising, these antibodies could lead to a preventative treatment.

Via: The Verge

Source: Nature

Philips Launches New ‘Hue’ App With Revamped Look and Support for Rooms

Philips today launched a new Hue app for its range of Hue HomeKit-connected smart lights and lightbulbs, introducing a fresh, intuitive layout that makes it easier to organize and control multiple lights at one time. While the app does not support third-party HomeKit accessories, it does incorporate HomeKit-style features like organization into rooms and more expansive scheduling tools.

The Hue Gen 2 app now features a main overview screen that separates lights based on what room they’re in, making it easier to set scenes by room, adjust the color or brightness of the lights in a room, or turn off all lights in a room at once. Before today, organizing HomeKit-enabled Hue lights into rooms had to be done through a third-party HomeKit app, but now it is available to all Hue users and directly within the Hue app.

Tapping on a room offers up individual controls for each light, along with options for managing scenes. Individual light colors can be changed by tapping on the color avatar for each light and selecting a color, a white light, or a Light Recipe. Scene creation is done in the same way it was with the previous app, through photographs or specific light settings.

Also included in the app is a dedicated “Routines” section that makes it easier to set specific lighting scenes for waking up, leaving home, arriving at home, and more. A Notification Center widget, Siri voice control, and accessory support are all available and can be accessed through the Settings section of the app, which is also where Rooms and Lights can be organized.

Up to 10 presets that combine multiple rooms and scenes at once can be added to the Notification Center widget for quick access, and Siri voice control with the HomeKit-enabled bridge is unchanged.

“Philips Hue was the world’s first connected lighting system for the home a little over three years ago, and since then it has become the system of choice for consumers,” says Sridhar Kumaraswamy, Business Leader Connected Home Systems at Philips Lighting. “As the Philips Hue ecosystem has grown with products, apps and partnerships with leading smart home platforms, so have our consumers. They want to do so much more with our connected lights, and with the new Philips Hue gen 2 app they can. It was designed for them, tested by them, taking their feedback onboard, and today’s new app gives them more control and creative freedom than ever before.”

Overall, Philips’ new Hue app is a lot more intuitive when it comes to managing a large number of Hue lights, especially those organized into several different rooms. Changing colors, dimming, turning lights on and off, and setting routines are all features that are easier to access in the revamped app.

Philips plans to keep both the original Hue app and the new Hue app available in the App Store, so users will be able to use the app they like best.

The new Hue app can be downloaded from the App Store for free starting today. [Direct Link]

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Apple Launches CareKit Platform With Support for Four Health Apps

Apple’s new CareKit iOS framework goes live today, allowing app developers to create integrated software that helps patients and doctors to better track and manage medical conditions (via TechCrunch).

The open source platform was announced last month and aims to make it easer for developers to build health apps by offering a number of integrations, such as monitoring of medical symptoms, sending images of an injury, and keeping tabs on medication schedules. CareKit also offers two-way benefits, since it not only helps doctors monitor patients but also allows patients to observe their progress over time.

CareKit is made up of series of interactive modules. The Care Card can be configured to manage wellness tasks such as medication scheduling and exercise, while the Progress Card includes a Symptom and Measurement tracker for logging physical metrics like weight and heart-rate (with the potential for Apple Watch integration). The Connect module meanwhile lets users share their health data with medical professionals and family members, and can be viewed in tandem with Progress Card data in the Insight Dashboard module.

TechCrunch reports that the launch is limited to support for four iPhone apps at present: Glow Nurture fertility tracker, Glow Baby maternity app, diabetes monitor One Drop, and depression medication tracker Start. CareKit is compatible with existing healthcare record systems such as Epic and should be available on GitHub later today.

Apple’s other open source framework ResearchKit was made available to developers in April 2015, enabling them to create their own iPhone apps for medical research purposes. The framework has led to some significant gains in epilepsy and asthma research since its adoption among medical professionals and contributing patients.

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Strong Galaxy S7 sales boost Samsung’s profits in Q1 2016

Strong demand for the Galaxy S7 and the S7 edge has allowed Samsung’s mobile division to record its highest profit in nearly two years. The South Korean manufacturer posted an overall revenue of 49.78 trillion won ($43.46 billion), an increase of 5.7% from the same period a year ago. Operating profit at 6.68 trillion won ($5.84 billion) was 12% more than what Samsung recorded in Q1 2015.

Profits from the mobile unit soared by 42%, with the business netting an operating profit of 3.89 trillion won ($3.4 billion) over revenues of 27.60 trillion won ($24.12 billion). Looking forward to the second quarter, Samsung is anticipating “softening demand in the smartphone market and negative growth in the tablet market,” and as such the vendor will focus its attention on the entry-level Galaxy J series and the budget Galaxy A series to drive up sales in emerging markets.

AT&T will shut down its 2G network by the end of 2016

AT&T has announced that it will decommission its 2G EDGE network by the end of 2016. CFO John Stevens told Wireless Week that the carrier has moved over 6 million subscribers off the legacy network over the last 12 months, with the remaining 2G userbase largely consisting of connected devices.

Stevens said that the cost played a major factor in the decision to shut down the 2G network:

There still is a lot of cost that is left just to operate even a piece of the 2G network. So we are anxious to capture that savings and use it to continue a strong EBITDA story for our wireless business.

AT&T has started repurposing the 2G network spectrum for LTE coverage, and will continue to do so over the course of the year.

Lenovo and Xiaomi pushed out of top five smartphone brands

Global smartphone sales figures for Q1 2016 are out, and it hasn’t been a great start to the year for Lenovo and Xiaomi. Both vendors have lost their sports as the fourth- and fifth-largest smartphone makers, conceding to Oppo and Vivo.

From IDC senior research manager Melissa Chau:

Along China’s maturing smartphone adoption curve, the companies most aligned with growth are those with products serving increasingly sophisticated consumers. Lenovo benefited with ASPs below US$150 in 2013, and Xiaomi picked up the mantle with ASPs below US$200 in 2014 and 2015. Now Huawei, OPPO, and vivo, which play mainly in the sub-US$250 range, are positioned for a strong 2016.

IDC says that Oppo netted over 18.5 million shipments in Q1 2016, a YoY growth of 153.2% that now sees the vendor in fourth place with a market share of 5.5%. With 14.3 million shipments and a YoY growth of 123.8%, Vivo clinched the fifth spot. Both Chinese manufacturers have set up a robust distribution network in emerging markets, catering to lower-tier cities. As the Chinese market is getting saturated, brands are looking to India for future growth. Both Oppo and Vivo have made large strides in the country this year, setting up manufacturing facilities and a strong retail presence.

Meanwhile, Samsung has maintained its lead as the number one smartphone vendor with 81.9 million shipments accounting for a market share of 24.5%, a minor decrease from the 24.6% the vendor registered during the same period last year. Apple is in second place with 51.2 million shipments, down from 61.2 million managed in Q1 2015. The decrease sees the vendor’s market share decline from 18.3% to 15.3%.

Huawei is in third place with 27.5 million shipments and an 8.2% market share, with a YoY increase of 58.4%.