NatulaRays Outdoor Bluetooth Speaker – A fantastic little speaker that can survive serious abuse! (Review)
In this ever burgeoning digital age, we as a society have become almost 100% dependent on technology. Most of us are incapable of leaving our homes without some form of technology on our person. This need and necessity we have for tech and gadgets drives our innovation as a people. As our needs grow, so does our technology.
With the advent of the MP3, portable music has become a mainstay. These days, we just load our music on our phone and go. But what if you want to take the music outdoors? The real outdoors. The elements can pose quite a problem for your pricey phone. On top of that, what if you want others to be able to hear your music? A phone is not going to have the sound capabilities to meet this need for you. Thankfully, a company in China that goes by the name, “NatulaRays,” has developed and offers a solution for you. They call it the “NatulaRays Outdoor Bluetooth Ultra-Portable Speaker.”
Technical Specifications
Product Size: 7.4″ x 2″x 2″
Bluetooth Compliance: Bluetooth V3.0
Playback time: 8-9 hours
Charging time: 3 hours
Battery: 3.7V/400 MAH
Connection range: up to 30 feet
Frequency Response: 80Hz – 20KHz
Voice Distortion: 5%
Output Power: 3W
Net Weight: 2.3 ounces
Water resistance level: IPX5
Design
The NaturalRay’s speaker is one of the more bizarre looking devices I’ve had the opportunity to lay my eyes on. The speaker itself is housed in a spherical, rubber coated shell with a stainless steel speaker grill on the front. Behind this sphere is a rubber tail with a loop on the end, that you can use to hang or attach the speaker to objects with.
The rubber that houses the speaker’s internals has a very smooth, soft feel that is pleasing to the touch. Despite how soft and pleasant it may feel, you also get the sense that this rubber can take a beating without any compromise in its structural integrity.
Under a small rubber cover, you will find a micro USB port used for charging the speaker, as well as a micro SD card slot that allows you to play MP3 files directly from an SD card, eliminating the need for connecting the speaker to a Bluetooth device.
On the top of the speaker (well, what could be considered the top, I guess) are three function keys. The two outside keys are for volume up, volume down, and are also used to skip tracks. The middle key is for play/pause functionality. The play/pause key also acts as the speaker’s on/off switch. Because this speaker has no display of any kind, NatulaRays has placed a blue LED in the base of its tail that will illuminate when you have successfully paired the speaker with a Bluetooth device. NatulaRays has also designed this speaker to automatically detect what mode it should be in, be it SD card mode, Bluetooth, Aux, etc. By default, the speaker is in Bluetooth pairing mode when you power it on.
Function
It’s all well and nice that a product looks good, but the real question is: “Does it work?” The answer is: YES!
On the Bluetooth side of things, the NatulaRays speaker was solid. Other than the occasional stutter (which I’ve found to be normal with most Bluetooth devices), the speaker stayed paired with my devices, even at great distances, with no issues.
Sound wise, the NatulaRays speaker is decent. It’s not anything to write home about, but for a speaker this small and this cheap, it sounds great. You won’t notice a great deal of punch in the sound this speaker produces, but it has the ability to play very loudly without a great deal of distortion. The highs, mids, and lows are pretty balanced with each other. You will find that the Bass this speaker produces is quite weak, but it’s easy to overlook when you consider what this device is designed for and how inexpensive it is. For a speaker that is this small, and this cheap, I have a hard time finding something to complain about with the sound.
Durability
What this speaker lacks in sound, it makes up for in sheer durability. NatulaRays claims that this device is water and shock proof. To be totally honest, I had zero confidence in this speaker surviving a dunk test. Thankfully, I was very, very wrong.
Water Testing
When it came to water, I put this speaker through its paces. My first test involved immersing the speaker in a 16oz cup of water for 60 seconds while the speaker was on and playing music. To my surprise, this didn’t kill it. Even while immersed in water, the speaker continued to play music with very little interference in its Bluetooth connection with my tablet. After removing the speaker from the water, it continued to play without a hitch and with no further hiccups in the Bluetooth connection.
I now had to take things to the next level. Would this speaker survive a shower? Surely not. I had to find out. I hanged the speaker from my shower head, connected it to my tablet, started blasting Queen over Spotify, and then commenced with taking a shower. It survived. This $30 speaker actually survived a 15 minute shower. Not only that, I let it play for 30 more minutes after the shower and it never skipped a beat. I was absolutely blown away.
Drop Testing
While not as exciting as the water tests, I also had resounding success with my drop tests. With the speaker playing music, I raised it above my head and dropped it two times onto my kitchen floor. That’s a drop of over six feet. During and after both drops, the speaker never once skipped or stuttered.
My next test was to literally just throw the speaker at a wall. Same result. It kept playing. Didn’t skip.
Conclusion
I was flabbergasted at how well this little $30 speaker performed. While it may not have the greatest sound quality, it’s not terrible by any stretch, and this speaker is capable of being quite loud. Above all of that, this thing can survive water immersion, a shower, six foot drops, and even being thrown against a wall. Something this durable for $30, with decent sound, is a steal! The NatulaRays Outdoor Bluetooth Speaker is that steal.
NatulaRays Outdoor Bluetooth Speaker – Amazon.com
1 of 5
Facebook is testing a ‘discover’ feature for Groups
Groups on Facebook have evolved from being things you joined because they had dumb names and you were in college, to being legitimately useful ways to find new information. As a reflection of that, The Social Network is apparently testing a new feature on the iOS and Android apps, International Business Times writes, dubbed “Discover.” That also lets you peruse public and private groups and see which friends are in local groups, according to Mashable.
The groups are cordoned off into categories for different interests like parenting, networking and food. The functionality is expected to roll out to more users over the next couple of weeks. We’ve reached out to Facebook for more info and will update this post if there’s a response.
Source: International Business Times, Mashable
NVIDIA brings in-game photography to the masses with ‘Ansel’
Taking in-game screenshots is great and all, but there’s so much more potential than just grabbing an image of what you see during gameplay. NVIDIA knows this and is addressing the desire for artistic screenshots on PC games with Ansel, a photo mode that’ll work across a plethora of games. The name, of course, is a nod to the legendary landscape photographer Ansel Adams. It’s a bit like what Dead End Thrills has been doing for ages, and allows you to adjust the angle and have a fully free-form camera. One photo from the stage weighed in at 61,440 pixel width. You can even take 360 degree stereoscopic images in one click.
Oh, right: there’s also support for these stereo images on mobile devices thanks to Google Cardboard. No Cardboard? No problem because you can use a mobile app and move your phone around with a 2D image, with motion tracking. Supported games include The Witness, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Lawbreakers, Paragon and No Man’s Sky.
NVIDIA Ansel enables high-resolution image capture, free-moving camera, image editing, and more – all in-game. pic.twitter.com/6PR421yDSB
— NVIDIA GeForce (@NVIDIAGeForce) May 7, 2016
NVIDIA says it can make VR worlds sound and feel real
Tonight at NVIDIA’s event in Texas, the company showed off some new tools that should help developers make VR experiences even more realistic. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang said its VR Works suite of APIs is getting a “major” upgrade, with the ability to connect haptic controllers to its Physx physics engine for more realistic feedback, and the “world’s first real time physically modeled acoustic simulator.” As he described it, the audio engine works on top of the optics API to help it match what you can see. “
Using VRWorks, we’ve created VR Funhouse – a new standard in audio, haptic, and physics in VR. pic.twitter.com/yE23l6R7qU
— NVIDIA (@nvidia) May 7, 2016
“When you walk into a hallway, it sounds like a hallway. When you walk into a stadium, it sounds like a stadium,” according to Huang. We haven’t tried it out for ourselves yet, but he showed bits of an NVIDIA VR Funhouse demo (above) that puts all the new abilities together, and it looks very interesting. You can watch the live stream of the event right here, and we’ll post any more announcements (GTX 1080) as they happen.
NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 GPU is twice as fast as Titan X, lands May 27
NVIDIA gave us a taste of its new Pascal architecture with the P100 graphics card last month, which is aimed at servers for heavy duty computing. Now, it’s ready to show off how that technology will be adapted for consumers with its new GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. As you’d expect, it’s fast: NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that it’s twice as fast as its current performance king , the Titan X, as well as three times as power efficient. Of course, those stats likely only come from certain gaming scenarios, like VR. The 1080 also faster than two GTX 980 cards running together using SLI technology. Like the P100, the 1080 is built with a new 16nm FinFET (a type of 3D transistor) manufacturing process, which makes it more power efficient, on top of just being faster.
The GTX 1080 is the “largest GPU endeavor, largest chip endeavor, largest processor endeavor, in the history of humanity,” said NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. He added that the R&D budget for the new card was “several billion dollars” over the span of more than two years. “I’m pretty sure you can go to Mars [for that],” he said.
NVIDIA is basically positioning the GTX 1080 as the gamer’s dream card. Prior to its unveiling, Huang showed off several new titles like The Division and Rise of the Tomb Raider running at max settings in a high resolution over 60 frames per second. He later revealed that all of the games were running on the new card, to the delight of the entire crowd.
The Tomb Raider demo made it clear just how fast the 1080 is. When Huang pulled up the GPU’s stats, it was running at 2.1 GHz and the memory was running at 5.5 GHz. That’s faster than any GPU today, except for one of its last generation cards with liquid nitrogen cooling. Most remarkable? The 1080 was just just relying on air cooling. (Of course it was also running at 67 celsius, which is far hotter than I’d like my video card to run.)
Among other new technology, the 1080 offers “simultaneous multi-projection,” which helps games look less distorted for triple monitor setups or ultra-wide 21×9 screens. It also makes the card more efficient at VR rendering (which is far less forgiving about low frame-rates).
The GTX 1080 will be available for $599 on May 27, and you can also snag a special NVIDIA-designed “founders edition” for $699 (which looks like it includes a stylish new cooler). Almost as an afterthought, NVIDIA also revealed that the GTX 1070 is coming on June 10 for $379 (the founders edition will run you $449).
NVIDIA didn’t have too many technical details to share about either card, but it gave out a few stats: The 1080 pumps out 9 teraflops and packs in 8GB of RAM. The 1070, which is also faster than the Titan X, spits out 6.5 teraflops and also has 8GB of RAM. For the smart gamer, it sounds like the GTX 1070 will be a pretty good deal (just like the 970 was).
But of course, NVIDIA won’t be alone with new hardware this year. AMD is expected to debut new cards with its Polaris technology this summer, which will focus on power efficiency as well. It sounds like Polaris is better suited for gaming laptops at the moment, but it could also be a way for AMD to deliver some powerful cards that you can actually afford (think under $300).
(Photo credit: GTX 1080;NVIDIA)
Tap into Alexa from your iPhone with a $5 app
We’ve seen support for Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant arrive on a variety of devices, and iOS gadgets are next. That’s by way of the Lexi app. The Next Web reports that the application mirrors Alexa’s functionality on the Echo speaker and lets you place orders, control smart devices and do other general stuff like ask about the weather and movie listings. Unfortunately, it sounds like you’ll still need an Echo if you want to take advantage of stuff like Amazon Prime Music or its book service.
Oh, and the whole thing costs $5. But even then, that’s at least $175 cheaper than Amazon’s original smart speaker, so if you’re budget-minded perhaps the trade-offs won’t bother you too much.
Via: The Next Web
Source: iTunes
Harvard researchers trial cheap, efficient paper-based Zika test
Based on the paper-based sensors they made to detect viral-based pathogens like Ebola, a Wyss Institute at Harvard research team created a version that checks for Zika. This prototype method could reveal the presence of the disease in hours instead of the days or weeks it takes for blood tests, but it needs more refining before it’s accurate enough to be deployed.
Put simply, the new test is strips of paper embedded with a synthetic biomolecular sensor made of genes and proteins that change color if they detect their target — in this case, Zika — and can tell the difference between that virus and other mosquito-spread illnesses like Dengue. But a crucial improvement over the previous version is the new one’s ability to detect traces of the* disease in blood, urine or saliva.
While the color change can be seen with the naked eye like a home pregnancy test, researchers also designed an electronic reader that can get faster results than eyeballing. After some developments, it could quantify viral loads.
Once they refine the test, the researchers see this method as a platform. By changing the target the test’s genes and proteins are hunting for, a new diagnostic can be designed, tested, validated and deployed in a week, say the researchers.
Source: The Wyss Institute
iOS 10 Likely to Include Standalone HomeKit App Designed by Apple
A unified, Apple-designed HomeKit app has been desired by HomeKit users since HomeKit first debuted, and it appears Apple is planning to introduce such an app in the near future, perhaps in iOS 10.
The hint on Apple’s HomeKit plans comes from an Amazon reviewer who works in the marketing department at Apple. The name of the reviewer coincides with the LinkedIn profile of a marketing employee at Apple, and we have confirmed that the Amazon review was indeed created by the Apple employee.
As I work in marketing for Apple, we test many Smart Home devices, especially for iOS HomeKit integration. […]
Some advice, there are many third party applications, most free, that offer more control and customization(s) with many Smart Home devices. “Yonomi” is a free app that I often use, “Home” is another which cost $14.99. Both offer support for many devices with more added daily (including Amazon “Echo”). The next version of iOS due this fall will have a standalone “HomeKit” app as well.
While we verified the source of the information, there’s always a chance that Apple’s plans could change ahead of the release of iOS 10. There have been several past rumors suggesting Apple would debut a public HomeKit app, but such an app has not materialized even though Apple has long used a HomeKit app internally.
Apple has previously trademarked a HomeKit app icon (pictured above) that could potentially be used for a standalone HomeKit app and rumors have suggested it could be called “Home.”
A cohesive, Apple-branded HomeKit app would go a long way towards improving the HomeKit experience. At the current time, HomeKit users with multiple products must use several different product apps, many of which offer different features, or rely on third-party apps.
Related Roundup: iOS 10
Tag: HomeKit
Discuss this article in our forums
iTunes 12.4 Update to Feature Minor Redesign With New Sidebar, Improved Navigation
Back in February, iTunes chief Eddy Cue promised a new version of iTunes would be coming out with OS X 10.11.4, featuring a simpler design that makes Apple Music easier to use. That update wasn’t included in OS X 10.11.4 and has been delayed, but a source has shared some screenshots of the upcoming iTunes 12.4 update with MacRumors, giving us a look at the changes Apple plans to introduce in the near future.
A redesigned dropdown media picker will be used to switch between Music, TV Shows, Movies, and other content, replacing the existing navigation icons. Like the current menu, the new menu is customizable, so sections of iTunes that are not used can be hidden from view. Forward and back buttons can be used to navigate between different sections.
A persistent sidebar located on the left side of the app is being added, which will make it easier to access different portions of an iTunes Library like specific songs or albums. The sidebar, like the menu bar, can be edited to show desired content, and songs can be dragged and dropped to playlists.
Menus in iTunes 12.4 are being simplified to make them easier to use, and the available content in Library can be customized using the redesigned View menu. Menus will be “easier to use” updated with new navigation options.
The mini player will also get some slight design changes, with the Up Next song feature being relocated to the right side of the player where it is more clearly visible.
It is not clear when Apple will debut iTunes 12.4, but our source says it should be released within in the next few weeks, putting a launch date in late May or early June.
Rumors have suggested Apple is also planning to introduce significant changes to Apple Music in the iOS Music app in iOS 10, and additional tweaks could be made to iTunes in OS X 10.12 to mirror changes being introduced in iOS 10.
Related Roundups: WWDC 2016, OS X 10.12
Tags: iTunes, iTunes 12.4
Discuss this article in our forums
Watch the trailer: Battlefield 5 is actually Battlefield 1 and set in World War I
Electronic Arts has announced a name for the next Battlefield game, and it debuted a trailer for the wartime first-person shooter.
The game, which follows Battlefield 4 but is confusingly titled Battlefield 1, will release for Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC on 21 October. It is set during World War I, allowing you to fight in the air and on the ground in countries like France, Italy, and elsewhere. If you recall, the Battlefield franchise began as a World War II fighting game when it was first launched in 2002, so EA is basically taking things back with Battlefield 1.
In a blog post, EA described why it chose World War I as the setting for the game: “With Battlefield 1 we set out to create some of the largest create, most dynamic battles in FPS history while continuing to tap into what fans love most about the franchise. One of the things that makes World War I such an amazing era is just how advanced it really was […] Tanks, planes, machine guns, artillery – a lot of the tech you’ve used in other Battlefield games was perfected during this era, letting the classic Battlefield DNA shine through.”
Battlefield 1 has a single-player mode as well as online multiplayer, and it will let you join 64-player battles. Watch the game’s first trailer below to see all sorts of World War I goodness featured throughout, including global-scale conflict, tanks, trucks, and plenty of zeppelins.
AIVAnet 