‘Tap’ Wearable Bluetooth Strap Turns Any Surface Into a Keyboard

A new wearable tech device revealed this week, called the “Tap,” aims to simplify typing methods on devices lacking traditional keyboards (via Bloomberg). Made out of a soft foam material, Tap slips onto each finger of your hand and can translate 31 different taps into letters and numbers that are then transmitted to a Bluetooth-enabled smartphone or tablet.

All Tap needs is any flat surface — “a table, a chair, or even your body” — and for users to overcome a slight learning curve. Each finger on Tap is designated with a vowel, so the rest of the alphabet, and the usual array of special characters and punctuation, can be input using a combination of various finger taps.

That might sound slightly complex, but its creators at Tap Systems, Inc say that it takes about one hour to master Tap thanks to the company’s TapGenius App. The app is described as a mnemonic-based learning tutorial that combines an educational system for users to wrap their heads around Tap’s new input style, with a gaming-style experience.

While Tap’s current market purpose lies in quicker texting and typing within smart devices, the technology’s creators see it as an evolving creation over the coming years. Possibilities include music creation, video game control, and other applications that could open up “a world of creative possibilities” for Tap’s users. As it stands, the device already has some interesting practicality for visually impaired individuals, who could possibly learn Tap’s new input system and become a nimble typist on a smartphone without the use of dictation.

“Tap brings an entirely new dimension to how we can interface with the digital world,” said Ran Poliakine, Tap’s co-founder. “Tap’s fundamental technology is applicable not only to language, but also to music, gaming and control. It is a new modality that opens up a world of creative possibilities. We are partnering with creative developers and select OEMs to help us unlock its full potential. Our goal is to create an ecosystem in which our partners utilize Tap to deliver new and exciting experiences for our users.

Tap is currently in a beta test in San Francisco, with an expected ship date for a consumer model “before the end of 2016.” The company will also be making a Tap Development Kit available to a few developers to begin implementing the technology in their apps, games, and even interactive AR and VR experiences.

Anyone interested can join Tap’s waitlist to be the first to receive new information about the device as its development progresses.

Tag: Tap
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WhatsApp Web now lets you share documents

After introducing a standalone desktop app for Windows and Mac users earlier this week, WhatsApp is bringing added functionality to its web client in the form of document sharing.

The web interface previously offered the ability to share local photos and videos, as well as a camera utility that lets you take photos from a webcam. The option to share documents is certainly a nifty addition, and puts the web client on par with the mobile apps. You can use the feature by heading to the attachment icon in the conversation window.

How are you guys liking the addition? Let us know in the comments.

How to use WhatsApp for Android

CREO rolls out first update to the Mark 1 with camera fixes, data manager, and more

CREO has rolled out its first update to the Mark 1. The vendor unveiled the handset on April 13, promising to deliver monthly updates through which the phone “runs like new.” This month’s update is geared at making the camera more responsive, while introducing more functionality to the vendor’s Sense and Echo software-based features. The update comes in at 15MB, and will be rolling out to all Mark 1 users today.

The camera has picked up a much-needed update that’s aimed at making it faster. There’s also a new photo editor that lets you lets you easily create and reuse filters. Selfie Flash, as the name indicates, lets you take selfies by turning up the screen brightness, effectively turning the screen as a flash unit when taking pictures from the front camera. Here’s the breakdown of all the new features in this update:

• Data Manager – Lets you save cellular data consumption by regulating data access. Informs the user of the size of the problem (how much background data is being used out of their total data consumption) and provides simple toggles to restrict unwanted apps from consuming background mobile data.
• Enhance – A Light and Quick Photo-Editor that allows for quick and easy photo editing such as Crop, Transform and Adjust images in addition to setting Vignettes and applying various Filters.
• Selfie Flash – Display lights up for a split second radiating a burst of light offering well-lit selfies using the front facing camera.
• Sense – Enter Calculations and get real-time results, WhatsApp any contact directly with a simple Double Tap on the Home Button, add a Phone number to contacts, search for Apps directly on the Play Store
• Echo – Free Echo Mode directs all calls to Echo without the involvement of the user, Smart triggers automatically turns on when the phone is on Silent Mode or when an upcoming meeting is detected on the user’s calendar, Allows users to set different Welcome Messages for different contacts in the phone, now welcomes callers in all new 6 Indian languages – Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada.

We’re testing out the new features in the update, and will share our findings in the Mark 1 review.

Amazon is offering a year of Prime for just £59

Amazon has rolled out a promotion to celebrate the naming of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond’s new motor show, called The Grand Tour. Available until May 16, this promotion sees the cost of Amazon Prime slashed to just £59 for the year. This is a great price for the amount of benefits included, not to mention if you were a massive Top Gear fan and will be checking out the new show on Amazon.

As highlighted by Hot UK Deals, this deal is only for the first year only and is open to those who aren’t already members. As well as access to Amazon’s on-demand video streaming service, for the £59 you’ll also unlock unlimited next-day deliveries, Prime Music, eBooks, early access to Lightning Deals, and more.

• Sign up to Amazon Prime

Doom is back: How has it changed over 23 years?

The long-awaited, next generation Doom is out today, or Doom 4 as it has previously been called. It’s in shops and available as a digital download for PC, PS4 and Xbox One and ahead of a full review, we’re looking back at the history of the first-person shooter series that essentially started it all.

For the last 23 years, almost every major game out there has a lot to thank Doom for – the FPS titles at the very least. It wasn’t the first FPS, but it introduced elements to gaming we’d really never seen before. And had us all battling each other over LAN connections at work, much to our bosses’ dismay.

READ: Doom Collector’s Edition in pictures: See what you get inside the box

Now, with the 2016 version being true to its origins, we take you through a pictorial history of the main games in the Doom series. You can see how much it’s changed graphically, although we’d argue that many of the originals are still cracking games today.

We’ve also thrown in a load of screens of the latest Doom for good measure. So click through the gallery above and we hope it whets your appetite to once again go to hell!

Dell Latitude 7000 review: Design means business, battery life doesn’t

For years we’ve heard tablets are killing laptops. But would we trade in our MacBooks for an iPad and an on-screen keyboard? Only if the alternative was having to ram an Apple Pencil down each fingernail.

The Dell Latitude 7000 2-in-1 is a 12.5-inch device that, like the Microsoft Surface family, suggests a different outcome. It wants the relationship between tablet and laptop to be more a case of a merger than a hostile takeover.

Parts of the Latitude 7000 design are spot-on, but serious issues like poor battery life make this a less practical and more pricey take on the hybrid. Is it worth a look?

Dell Latitude 7000 review: Design

The Dell Latitude 7000 is a hybrid out to solve the main problem with this kind of device: how do you make something that feels like a laptop but isn’t a ridiculously huge and heavy tablet when the screen is used solo? It goes a good way to solving the issue.

Its tablet part is iPad-thin, only possible because it takes no responsibility for keeping itself upright. It simply slots into a frame the keyboard is part of.

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There’s very little screen surround to the display, and while the Dell Latitude 12 7000 design is plainer than what you get from Samsung or Apple, it’s well made. You might mistake it for a plastic tablet at first prod because it uses soft-touch paint, but the shell is magnesium. It’s tougher than aluminium, yet lighter.

The keyboard stand part is plastic but sturdy, and is what gives the Latitude 7000 its off-kilter teaspoon of style. This is intended as a device for business folk primarily, but it also needs to compete with an iPad Pro. Its solution is to use grey fabric on the outside, making it look as though the tablet base is actually a tablet case.

It doesn’t quite reach the same skinny heights as the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S, though. Tablet and keyboard together are actually a bit chunkier than a MacBook Pro. That’s right: it’s not really skinny.

But does it matter? When you’re using this Dell it’s much more important that it feels right when you’re using it as both tablet and laptop takes. No surprise for a 12.5-inch Windows 10 device, though, the Latitude 7000 is a bit better at the laptop side of things.

It takes more than a few cues from the Microsoft Surface, using a free-moving hinge on the back of the case rather than a folio arrangement that only allows you to rest the screen at a couple of different angles.

The difference between this Dell the Microsoft Surface is that the stand is built onto the keyboard part, not the screen.

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Dell Latitude 7000 review: Keyboard and trackpad

One of the Latitude 7000’s successes is just how sturdy its base feels. The keyboard surround is very stiff for something just a few millimetres thick, and the keys feel a lot like those of a normal skinny laptop. Someone at Dell must have written “must not feel like naff iPad accessory keyboard” somewhere in the mission statement. It even has a backlight.

The Dell Latitude 7000’s trackpad is small, but feels fantastic, using a glass panel with a surface just like that of an UltraBook that might cost you the same money. There’s an even chunkier keyboard/pad combo too.

Dell makes Slim and Premier keyboard modules – we’re using the Slim one for this review. The Premier model has a bigger trackpad and deeper keys. Both have a little loop to hold an Active Pen stylus, but you don’t get one of those for free (the stylus costs £40).

The Latitude 7000 is a hybrid you could happily work on all day, as long as your job doesn’t involve plugging too much into your computer. Like the MacBook 12-inch, the Latitude 6000 only features USB-C ports, and there are just two of them.

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Do any of your computer gadgets use USB-C yet? Your mouse? External hard drive? Didn’t think so. But it’s future-proof. And Dell supplies a USB-to-USB-C adapter in the box, but it’s still a bit of a faff, for the time being. The USB-C early adopter tax is about testing your patience, although if you’re looking at these machines hoping for a desktop-replacer, what are you thinking? This is a machine that wants you to embrace wireless working, but that’s not going to work for everyone.

It doesn’t have a full-size SD card slot either, just a microSD one. Camera fans take note.

Dell Latitude 7000 review: Screen

Where the 7000 continues to win is with its screen. It has a very tablet-like display, with vivid colour and plenty of pixels, at least in the version we’re looking at. Dell’s starter models have 1080p displays, but if you can cough up around £1,500 all-in then you can get the 4K (3860 x 2160 pixels) version.

This is an LCD screen, but has colour to rival the OLED display used in the Samsung Galaxy TabPro S. It’s seriously saturated, but well-calibrated enough to avoid looking like a radioactive Charlie and the Chocolate Factory nightmare.

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Contrast is good for an LCD screen too, with both viewing angles and top-notch brightness. The one downside of using a touchscreen tablet-style display is that the surface is pretty glossy, but that comes with the territory and the Dell Latitude 7000 can cope outdoors anyway thanks to its bright backlight.

The problem is that unless you spend big you’re going to end up with a Full HD (1920 x 1080) screen and that’s a little low for a tablet of this price. Apple offers higher-res tablets for a few hundred quid, after all.

We’ll admit 1080p does work well with Windows 10, though. We bumped into a few apps with text that looks like it was made for ants to read on the 4K 12-inch, but that’s not a problem specific to this machine.

Dell Latitude 7000 review: Performance

A few lingering scaling issues aside, the Dell Latitude 7000 is a surprisingly adept day-to-day PC. Intel has really cracked this with its latest Core M processors, the famously tiny series of CPUs so efficient they don’t need fans for cooling.

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The version of the 7000 we’re using has the top-end Core M7-6Y75, a dual-core 1.2GHz CPU that doesn’t sound too powerful but is well up to the job. The funny thing about how computer performance pans out these days is that for a lot of people the Latitude 7000 will feel faster than a quad-core Intel Core i7 machine running off a 5400rpm hard drive. The Core M7 is super-nimble for lower-demand tasks like the stuff most of us do day-to-day. The 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM are important parts of this equation too, of course.

What the Dell Latitude 7000 can’t handle is gaming. We tried a few higher-end 3D titles out, and the results aren’t great. While you can just about scrape by with Skyrim on minimum settings, something newer like Thief just doesn’t run fast enough. The Intel HD 515 CPU simply doesn’t have the juice.

Gamers need to look for a Skylake Core i-series processor, and preferably a dedicated GPU to actually get recent games running properly. There’s better competition at the price on this front, even among hybrids. You could get a Surface Pro 4 with a Core i7 for the same money. It’s not a gaming beast, but is significantly better than this Dell.

Dell Latitude 7000 review: Battery life

There’s nothing wrong with a low-power hybrid that feels fast most of the time, though. The only place Dell really trips up is in providing really quite bad stamina for a hybrid with such efficient components. You’re looking at around 4-5 hours between charges, and that’s without doing anything taxing like playing games.

This must be the price of making the bit with the battery in so skinny, but then mobile master Samsung manages to pull much better battery life out of the similarly-skinny TabPro S.

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That the Dell Latitude 7000 lasts only about as long as a performance-obsessed laptop is a killer issue for something we want to be able to use for a full day’s tapping. It should be the perfect fit for days working away from the office, but it just isn’t.

The skinny frame also seems to result in the speakers distorting a bit at max volume, which is disappointing when on the surface the Latitude looks so well designed.

Verdict

The Dell Latitude 7000 gets a lot right for a 12-inch 2-in-1 device. A full-size keyboard, high-quality trackpad and a tablet that doesn’t make your feel like you’re wielding a computer monitor are all things we want in a hybrid.

A sky-high price and that the battery will only get you through one of the Lord of the Rings movies make it seem more like a first try effort with limited mainstream appeal (despite this not being the case, Latitude is well established).

The Microsoft Surface Pro 4, while more awkward in some respects, is a better all-round pick, not to mention cheaper. The Samsung Galaxy TabPro S only highlights the Dell’s flaws too, lasting twice as long between charges.

You’ll need to care a lot about the laptop-grade keyboard for the Dell Latitude 7000 to make sense.

LA cops aren’t ready to switch to Teslas

After using two Tesla Model S cars as police cruisers for a year, the LAPD has reached a verdict. It’s not ready to transition to an all-electric fleet just yet, but it’s not closing its doors on EV cruisers. LAPD Administrator Vartan Yegiyan told CNBC that electric vehicles aren’t practical for police use at the moment due to their costs and the availability of charging stations.

The cars they tested were on loan from Tesla, but each Model S would cost the department $100,000 — much, much more than the $30,000 it pays for one Ford Explorer. ​Further, authorities are worried that an all-EV fleet could prevent them from responding to situations in the middle of natural disasters, which could knock out charging stations.

Yegiyan remains optimistic about EVs’ future with law enforcement, though. Tesla’s Model 3 has an expected retail price of $35,000, after all, and other companies could follow suit with similarly priced electric cars. He told CNBC:

“[over] the next three to five years… not only will the industry push toward electrification, but prices will drop on vehicles. More models will be coming out, and the electricity and electrical grid will become more robust, and more charging stations will be available. While that’s occurring, we be in the space learning and contributing to the process.”

Via: Mashable

Source: CNBC

Put your name down for London’s driverless pod trials

Driverless pods are headed to the London borough of Greenwich, and the public is invited to sit inside and experience the technology first hand. The Transport Research Laboratory (TRL) opened sign-ups today for the first public trials, which will take place inside its UK Smart Mobility Living Lab — a test area that covers the entire borough. The exact routes are still being finalised, but the focus will be around the Greenwich peninsula, in places where the pods are likely to encounter cyclists and pedestrians. We don’t know when the trials will start, however, beyond “later this year.”

The project is using repurposed Ultra Pods, which are already in operation at London’s Heathrow Airport. There, the electric four-wheelers run on tracks, shuttling passengers in relative safety. To help make them road-ready, TRL has teamed up with Westfield Sportscars, a classic car builder based in the West Midlands, and Oxbotica, a research-based offshoot from Oxford University’s Mobile Robotics Group. The group’s mission is to see how the public reacts to driverless vehicles, especially in urban environments where there are plenty of motorists and pedestrians.

Successful applicants will be asked to give some feedback about their driverless adventure. Some of these will take the form of recorded interviews both before and after the trip. “It gives the public a chance to experience what it’s like to ride in an automated vehicle and to make their own mind up as how much they like it, trust it and could accept it as a service in the city,” Nick Reed, Director at TRL said. The public can also sign up for workshops, scheduled for next month, which will include debates and “creative activities” developed by the Royal College of Art.

The project is one of many the UK government is funding to develop driverless car technology. Most of them are research based, however, or restricted to private land. TRL says its Greenwich trials will be the first “public driverless vehicle trials” in the UK — an important milestone, both for the technology and the government’s attempt to make Britain a self-driving research hub. Politicians are no doubt hoping that such a gesture will also encourage Google to bring its driverless cars across the pond.

Source: TRL

Mac Users Reporting Widespread System Freezes With OS X El Capitan 10.11.4 Update

A large number of MacBook Pro owners running OS X El Capitan are reporting widespread system freezes since installing the 10.11.4 update to Apple’s Mac OS.

Hundreds of MacRumors forum members have been posting to a dedicated thread to discuss the issue, which spans 20 pages at the time of writing. The problem appears to be concentrated on 13-inch Retina MacBook Pros (Early 2015) running 10.11.4. Users report that their system becomes totally unresponsive at seemingly random times, with no way to regain access to their Mac other than to force a hard reboot.

The issue was initially reported by MacRumors forum member Antonnn on March 25, four days after Apple released what is the third update to the Mac OS. In Antonnn’s case, the freezes have been occurring “about once a week”, first when browsing in Safari, but then also during the use of other Mac apps, including Adobe Photoshop and several third-party browsers. The freeze seems to affect not only the screen and mouse cursor but also the Mac’s Force Touch trackpad, which completely loses feedback.

Many other users have since reported similar freezes after updating to 10.11.4, with some 15-inch MacBook Pro (Mid 2015) owners also experiencing issues. One potential cause has been identified from crash logs as a system framework or an Intel Graphics driver bug. The issue is also being reported after installing Safari Technology Preview Version 1 and OS X 10.11.5 Public Beta 1.

Video by MacRumors forum member appleofmy”i” experiencing the freeze issue.
Apple Support is apparently aware of the issue but have so far offered no concrete solution. Meanwhile, some users have resorted to downgrading their system to 10.11.3 by restoring from a Time Machine backup or performing a clean install.

We’ll update this post throughout the day as we learn more.

Related Roundup: MacBook Pro
Tag: OS X 10.11.4
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