Pokemon Go: How to use battery saver
Pokemon Go’s biggest problem is battery drain. In a world where smartphones are notorious for eating battery really quickly anyway, it’s a double-whammy of battery carnage.
Fear not, for in the recent update to the Pokemon Go app, the battery saver feature was re-enabled. Here’s everything you need to know about saving battery when playing Pokemon Go.
How to find Pokemon Go battery saver
The battery saver feature sits in the settings menu. To access that menu, tap the Poke Ball on the main screen, and then “settings” in the top right-hand corner.
The Battery saver option is a simple tick box, so just tap to turn it on.
Pocket-lint
What does Pokemon Go battery saver do?
It doesn’t do a huge amount in reality. The Pokemon Go battery saver is only there to cut out one of the biggest drains on the battery when you’re just walking. It does this by dimming the screen.
It’s worth noting that it doesn’t turn the display off, but dulls to a very dark state with the Pokemon Go logo – as you can see above. During the day you won’t see it, but at night, there’s still a slight glow.
Importantly, the battery saver function only works when your phone is upside down. The idea is that you carry your phone upside down when walking, saving battery because the display isn’t then shining out at full brightness. It’s slick, fast, and definitely something you should use.
- Pokemon Go: How to find and catch rare Pokemon like Charizard, Blastoise and Alakazam
- Pokemon Go: How to raise your XP level, power up and evolve your Pokemon
- Pokemon Go top tips: Master the Pokemon mayhem
- Pokemon Go Gym tips: How to battle, train and win
How else can I save battery life in Pokemon Go?
You need to use your device to manage other battery drain. Even with Pokemon Go’s battery saver feature engaged, it’s still tracking location and you’ll still get vibration alerts.
If you want even less battery drain, then look for the power saving features on your handset. This will let you lower the brightness of the display when it’s on, as well as reducing the power used by your hardware, like the processor.
That might mean your phone is a little slower, but it’s not burning through battery trying to be the fastest phone on the planet. The game will still run exactly as it should.
On Android, head into your battery or power settings and look for power saver or battery saver (each manufacturer uses different names).
On iPhone, head into settings > battery and turn on low-power mode.
Pokemon Go: External batteries
Of course the long-term answer for power players is to have an external battery for your phone, or a phone with a bigger battery. Phones like the Huawei Mate 8 have huge batteries, but for many of us, buying an external battery is an easy answer. There are loads to choose from, but in reality, getting a battery pack that’s bigger will mean you can play for longer, as well as being able to easily charge your phone several times.
- Best smartphone battery packs: Pokemon power and more
UK grants new powers to remotely block illegal prison mobiles
Mobile phones have to be one of the most valuable kinds of prison contraband, where they’re used for keeping in touch with loved ones all the way through to running criminal empires from behind bars. According to the UK government, close to 15,000 handsets and SIM cards were confiscated last year alone. But thanks to new powers granted to prison and police officers, they can now be disconnected remotely, removing the need to physically find the things to take them out of circulation.
The new measures are being provided through the Serious Crime Act, and as long as there is evidence linking a phone number to a prison mobile, officers can apply for a Telecommunications Restriction Order (TRO). Should that be granted, the appropriate network will be obliged to cut the number off, rendering it useless.
This power, the government says, will cut down on crime being orchestrated from within prisons without the need for complex blocking technology. Earlier this year, the first official confirmation that sophisticated Stingray tracking devices were being used in the UK came from the Scottish Prison Service, not that they were proving particularly effective in blocking mobile traffic.
One thing the government has neglected to mention is how officers are expected to go about gathering the evidence they need to apply for a TRO. It sounds like the type of information that may crop up as part of a targeted investigation of someone on the outside. Not a daily occurrence, in other words. Also, disconnecting SIMs doesn’t takes handsets out of action, and smuggling tiny bits of plastic into prison must be much, much easier than sneaking in the devices themselves.
Source: Home Office
Amazon chronicles Hugh Hefner’s life in upcoming original series
Like Hulu and Netflix, Amazon continues to add to its library of original content. Today, the online retailer announced a 13-episode show that will chronicle the life of Hugh Hefner. American Playboy: The Hugh Hefner Story will span the media mogul’s six-decade career at the helm of Playboy magazine. The show will take on a documentary-style approach, starting with the founding of the iconic publication in 1953. Using 17,000 hours of never-before-seen footage from the magazine’s archives and content over 2,600 of Hefner’s personal scrapbooks, there’s sure to be a wealth of info for the series to pull from.
90-year-old Hefner says he’s been looking for someone to tell the story of Playboy and now he feels like he’s working with “the right partners.” Stephen David Entertainment will handle the production duties with Stephen David (The Men Who Built America, The World Wars), Peter Jaysen (You Me Her) and Dick Rosenzweig (The House Bunny, The Playboy Club) as executive producers. The series is set to debut in US, UK, Germany, Austria and Japan sometime next year.
“Although Hugh Hefner is an iconic figure known worldwide, most people may not be aware of the impact he has had on some of this country’s most important social revolutions,” said Amazon Studios head of unscripted Conrad Riggs said in a press release. “We are excited to bring Prime members the untold story of Mr. Hefner’s remarkable life and his contributions to modern American history.”
Playboy has made some interesting moves over the last year. The magazine announced that internet porn had forced it to go PG-13, which meant that it would no longer feature fully nude models. It also launched a new model app last fall to feature its articles instead of its photography. Perhaps Amazon’s new show will chronicle the media landscape that led to those changes. Unfortunately, we’ll have to wait a while to find out.
BuzzFeed: Twitter secretly censored tweets during Obama Q&A
As part of a larger piece examining Twitter and its widescale user harassment problem, BuzzFeed News has reported that tweets were secretly filtered out and censored for President Obama in 2015. Ahead of a “town hall” question and answer session, Dick Costolo — then Twitter CEO — reportedly ordered staff to develop an algorithm that would strip out abusive language directed at the President. It was perfected, BuzzFeed claims, after analysing “thousands” of vulgar tweets. Citing anonymous sources, the site says a media partnerships team also manually censored tweets, due to a belief that the algorithm wouldn’t be up to scratch.
The decision to filter and censor #askPOTUS tweets would, if true, run counter to Twitter’s public position on free speech. The company is, for the most part, a vocal supporter of freedom of expression — arguably to a fault, as a growing numbers of users call on the company to take a stronger stance on harassment. (Twitter has admitted it needs to do more.) According to BuzzFeed News, what happened during Obama’s town hall was kept secret from “senior company employees,” as Costolo knew how they would react to the idea. Notably, Costolo stepped down from his position two months later, paving the way for Jack Dorsey’s return.
BuzzFeed says these actions are but one example of the company’s scattershot approach to harassment. On the one hand, Twitter is known as a place where users can speak publicly and honestly. (Similar to Reddit.) On the other, those freedoms have attracted trolls, who know they can write terrible tweets and tag a user’s handle, guaranteeing their attention. (Until they’re muted or blocked, that is.) Some of its biggest and most influential users — the people Twitter needs to grow and attract new users — have been driven off the platform due to vile comments. BuzzFeed’s reporting describes a divided company unsure of where to draw the line.
The decision to secretly filter the tweets visible to President Obama is, therefore, an intriguing one. The algorithm was implemented temporarily — perhaps for no more than a day — to ensure the Q&A session went smoothly. Anonymous sources have also told BuzzFeed News that the same algorithm was implemented during a Twitter debate with Caitlyn Jenner. One former employee described it as a “double standard,” protecting celebrities but leaving the average user to fend for themselves.
We’ve reached out to Twitter for comment.
Source: BuzzFeed News
BlackBerry DTEK50 review: Cheap, secure and better than expected
BlackBerry’s first Android phone was a curious, ambitious machine, so it’s funny that the company’s second turned out to be so … practical. The $299 DTEK50 is affordable from the get-go, lacks a physical keyboard and was basically tailor-made for corporations to buy in bulk. Seriously: BlackBerry has been pretty candid about the fact that this is a “fleet” device, a supersecure phone it hopes will attract companies trying to trick out their mobile workforce. BlackBerry is trying to pitch this to regular people too, though, and in the process, it’s hurling the DTEK into a crowded, crazy-competitive pool of midrange phones. Spoiler alert: It’s probably not for you.
Hardware
If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you already know BlackBerry didn’t design the DTEK50 by itself. Instead, the company chose a reference design from TCL — the folks behind the Alcatel brand — that offered the level of performance it was after. That decision was… divisive, to say the least. CEO John Chen has long said that BlackBerry would stay in the hardware game as long as there was money in it, and by customizing an existing design, the company just saved heaps of money on product development. The flipside is that the finished device doesn’t really feel like a BlackBerry.
I’ll be the first to admit that sounds a little silly, but still, I was a little worried when I first heard the news. BlackBerry has historically taken pride in designing its devices, from pint-size beauties like the Pearl series to last year’s delightfully bonkers Priv. Pulling an existing design off a shelf and adding BlackBerry accents like a logo and a textured rubber back didn’t sit right with me at first, even though the company maintains it’s a pretty common practice.
Ultimately, though, it’s safe to say that these concerns only really matter to mobile wonks like me. Once I got down from my high horse, I was met with a device that’s respectably well built and even sort of handsome (in an understated sort of way). The company also says the DTEK50 is the thinnest BlackBerry ever, which helps explain the mediocre 2,610mAh battery squeezed in there. I’ll dig into that a little later; for now, just know that the DTEK50 manages to be very light without ever feeling cheap. Nice work, TCL.
Unlike last year’s premium Priv, we’re working with a midrange list of specifications: an octa-core Snapdragon 617 chipset with 3GB of RAM and an Adreno 405 GPU. Alas, there’s no physical keyboard this time; you’ll be typing your messages on a 5.2-inch, 1080p IPS LCD touchscreen. Flanking the display is a surprisingly capable pair of stereo speakers, an 8-megapixel front-facing camera and a notification LED up top. But don’t get too excited, BlackBerry loyalists: It only blinks white. Meanwhile, the DTEK50’s backside is home to a 13-megapixel camera (with phase-detection autofocus, no less) and a two-tone LED flash.
For a phone that’s so focused on security, it’s a little odd that the DTEK50 doesn’t have a fingerprint scanner. The reason is purely practical: BlackBerry had to keep costs down. That’s probably also why the DTEK50 comes with only 16GB of internal storage. (Thankfully, you can add up to 2TB of storage by way of a microSD card slot.)
What we got instead of said scanner is a convenience key that sits below the volume rocker on the phone’s right edge. The premise is simple, enough: You can set it to launch apps or perform specific actions like calling someone or turning on the flashlight. Alas, the convenience key isn’t always very convenient. It won’t work while the phone is locked — something its distant relative, the Idol 4S, does just fine — and you can’t use it to snap a quick photo or take screenshots. More important, that key sits where most phones have their power buttons, and it took me an entire week to get used to that tricky placement. (If you’d rather not reset your muscle memory, you can make the convenience key unlock the phone too.)
Display and sound
The Priv’s fancy, curved AMOLED panel obviously wasn’t going to make the jump into a midrange phone, but — surprise, surprise — the 5.2-inch LCD we got on the DTEK50 is pretty damned good. It runs at 1080p (that’s a pixel density of 424 ppi, if you didn’t feel like doing the math), making for plenty of crisp text and visuals. It lacks the sort of punchy colors and deep blacks we got from the Priv, but who cares? They’re accurate, and the screen and scratch-resistant glass covering it are laminated together, so viewing angles are great. (If the color temperature doesn’t do it for you out of the box, you can tweak it in the device’s settings.)
In fact, the only time the DTEK50’s display seems to fall short is when you look at it next to other devices that cost about the same. ZTE’s Axon 7 will cost only $100 more when it launches in the US in September, and it features a beautiful Quad HD screen. Would it have been nice to get a higher-res screen on the DTEK50? Sure. Would it have made any sense, considering BlackBerry is trying to sell these en masse to businesses? Not even a little.
The audio quality another pleasant surprise, given that BlackBerry has never paid much attention to it in the past. I always feel a little twinge of giddiness when a phone I’m reviewing has stereo speakers, and the DTEK50’s offer crisp highs and decent channel separation for immersive sound. Even better, the speaker setup is replicated on the phone’s back so the jams won’t stop even when the DTEK50 is lying face down. Still, they’re far from perfect: Most songs I tried sounded hollow. What’s more, the DTEK’s maximum volume isn’t terribly loud, though it’ll do fine for podcasts and YouTube videos. The DTEK50 also comes with Waves’ MaxxAudio tuner, but your mileage may vary. The app’s presets usually succeeded in making my songs sound different, but not necessarily better.
Software and security
Now that the company is willing to almost completely outsource hardware design and production, BlackBerry’s soul boils down to two things: software and security. Unless it nails both of those things, then, there’s little reason to buy into the company’s vision. As far as the former goes, there’s no point in hiding it: I dig BlackBerry’s take. Things haven’t changed dramatically since the Priv’s days — the company didn’t mess with Android 6.0.1 itself. Most of the same tricks are back and they still focus on getting things done fast.
Swiping up from the bottom of the screen, for instance, brings up shortcuts to the dialer, the Device Search app and BlackBerry’s Hub. Long story short, the hub acts as a one-stop shop for your messages, be they emails, BBMs, texts, Facebook messages or Viber pings. I typically prefer the rush of pseudo-productivity that comes with jumping in and out of multiple apps, but it didn’t take long to appreciate having a single place to triage all the stuff that flew into my inbox. (As a bonus, you can now download this app from the Play Store and use it on other Android devices too.)
Meanwhile, peer closely enough at the screen and you’ll see the edge of a tab all the way on the right. Swiping on that opens the Productivity tab, where you’ll find a rundown of the day’s calendar events, unread messages, tasks that need completing and favorite contacts (you know, just because). Just like Samsung’s Edge UX, it’s easy to forget the feature even exists, but it’s handy when you do remember it’s there.
If that wasn’t enough swiping, you can view an app’s widgets in a pop-up window (as opposed to finding room for them on your home screens) by swiping up on them. It’s a neat touch that gives you extra context without having to fully open the app, but I never really use widgets in the first place. That swiping continues when you use BlackBerry’s software keyboard. Fan that I am of Google’s in-house keyboard, I love what BlackBerry has come up with: It’s perfectly sized, it’s precise and swiping up on word suggestions to complete messages is actually pretty fun. It’s easily one of the finest keyboards available on an Android phone, which is only natural considering the company that made it. Curiously, though, one of the BlackBerry’s neatest software touches didn’t make the leap here: You can no longer set a Picture Password, which is puzzling because it worked fine on the Priv.
Obviously, the DTEK50’s biggest selling point is security, and I haven’t dwelled on it until now is because it’s almost completely invisible to the person using the phone. You can’t tell that a hardware root of trust was baked into the phone during manufacturing, just like you can’t tell the phone is fully encrypted by default. The only real reminder that the DTEK50 is more locked down than most is the namesake DTEK app, which offers an at-a-glance look at how secure the phone is. But here’s the rub: DTEK is what you make of it. You’ll get a rating and a checklist of things that are or aren’t going well on the phone upon launch, but after you take basic precautions like setting up a PIN, the app mostly just says everything is excellent.
It’s when you dig a little further that DTEK’s value really becomes apparent — it outlines which apps have access to certain parts of the phone and counts up how many times those apps try to gain access. As of this writing, for instance, Facebook Messenger has tapped into my device’s contacts nearly 500 times. In certain cases, you can even see where you were when an app tried to gain access. More important, permissions can easily be revoked and apps can be quickly uninstalled from within DTEK, making it yet another one-stop shop for functions that would normally be buried in settings menus.
Camera
I wasn’t expecting much from the DTEK50’s 13-megapixel camera. After all, BlackBerry hasn’t had the best track record with imaging performance, and on at least one occasion it didn’t bother with a camera at all. It turns out that fretting was for nothing: The DTEK50 won’t win any photography awards, but both its main and front-facing cameras were respectable performers. That main sensor around back has a f/2.0 aperture lens and a phase-detection autofocus system; too bad it lacks the optical image-stabilization offered on last year’s Priv.
Even so, my photos contained plenty of detail, with nicely balanced colors in good lighting conditions. Don’t expect too much from the DTEK50 in low light; you’ll see grain and soft edges everywhere (even after the phone applies it multiframe low-light enhancements). I really shouldn’t have been surprised at the DTEK50’s performance here — midrange phones have become more impressive on all fronts, cameras included. That said, I still preferred the photos I took with the similarly priced Moto G4 Plus, which packs a 16-megapixel sensor and an additional laser auto-focus module.
BlackBerry still gets some credit for piecing together a good camera app, though. A shutter button lives on the right edge of the screen, with a handy exposure slider, mode selector and a panel of photo filter effects nearby for easy access. More serious photographers will get some mileage out of the included manual mode, which allows for finer control over focus, white balance, shutter speed, exposure compensation and ISO. It’s not the most polished camera app, but it’s enough to get the job done.
Performance and battery life
This is where things start to get hairy. The octa-core Snapdragon 617 (with four 1.5GHz cores and four 1.2GHz cores) is a well-known chipset at this point and has landed starring roles in phones like the fourth-generation Moto G line and the HTC One A9. For the most part, that combination of CPU cores and 3GB of RAM keep the DTEK50 running without issue. It’s certainly not flagship level, but launching apps, multitasking and generally just getting things done generally aren’t a problem. Graphically intense games sometimes threw the DTEK50 for a bit of a loop, but I could usually log plenty of time in Asphalt 8 with the visual settings cranked up before noticing any slowdown.
Once in a while, though, the phone would start to stutter, even during pretty basic tasks, before eventually returning to normal. I didn’t see hiccups this frequently while playing with other 617-powered devices, though that’s not to say they were immune to the occasional slowdown. I could usually clear things up by closing all running apps, and I suspect at least sometimes the problem was caused by using the DTEK50 out in the summer heat. Thankfully, these issues didn’t crop up every day, and with any luck a post-launch software patch will help smooth things out a bit.
HTC One A9
AndEBench
5,758
16,371
7,505
7,570
Vellamo 3.0
2,741
2,819
3,461
2,585
3DMark IS Unlimited
9,529
9,851
19,200
9,076
GFXBench 3.0 Manhattan Offscreen (fps)
N/A
6.6
15
6.6
CF-Bench
59,170
60,998
56,206
61,789
The battery, meanwhile, has been awfully hit-or-miss. BlackBerry and TCL fitted the phone with a 2,610mAh nonremovable cell that typically saw me through a full workday and then some before giving up the ghost. That’s about 14 hours of pretty consistent, mixed use — my days involve lots of phone calls, emails, Slack messages and card-slinging in Hearthstone, for the record. That’s in line with what we’ve seen from other midrange phones, which makes the DTEK50’s lackluster performance in our standard video rundown test so surprising. The phone looped a 720p video with screen brightness set to 50 percent and WiFi connected for just under eight hours, putting it well below the LG G5 (with a similar size battery) and either of this year’s new Moto Gs. In fairness, that’s not exactly a natural use case — I don’t know many people who’d watch videos on their phones for eight hours straight — but it’s still sort of a let-down.
The competition
BlackBerry clearly wants to sell tons of DTEK50s to businesses, and among corporate buyers, the company’s storied brand and devotion to security might give the phone an edge. The thing is, BlackBerry is trying to sell these to regular people too, and on that front, the DTEK50 faces a much tougher fight. Consider this year’s Moto G Plus, an enhanced version of the fourth-generation Moto G that launched alongside it. For $299, you’ll get a phone with the same Snapdragon chipset as the DTEK50 but with more RAM (4GB), more storage out of the box (64GB), a better camera (16 megapixels), a fingerprint sensor and an almost-stock version of Android. Motorola’s tight focus has wavered a bit — there are more Moto models now than ever — but the brand can still put out an excellent cheap phone.
The problem is, you could do so much better if you’d be willing to spend just a little more cash. ZTE’s Axon 7 and the OnePlus 3 can be had for as little as $399, and they offer full-on flagship performance in impeccably built bodies. None of these options offer the same level of hardened security as the DTEK50, but if you’re dead-set on a BlackBerry, you could find a Priv online for around $300. It might be a little older, but the Snapdragon 808 chip inside it is still no slouch, and you’ll get a great physical keyboard, to boot.
Wrap-up
It’s been more than a week, and it’s still hard to judge the DTEK50. As a ploy to appeal to those crucial business customers, it’s brilliant. For them, the DTEK50 is a solid, not-very-expensive option with the security chops to put IT paranoiacs at ease. As a phone for regular people, though, the DTEK50 is a much a tougher sell. Make no mistake: The DTEK50 is a perfectly good handset, and I’ll always appreciate BlackBerry for trying to keep security in the front of people’s minds. Still, it takes more than that to make a smartphone great, and BlackBerry’s approach won’t be for everyone. Unless you’re a BlackBerry loyalist or you take your security very, very seriously, you’re better off setting your sights elsewhere.
Apple Re-Hires Flipboard Co-Founder Evan Doll for Continued Push Into Health Initiatives
Apple has re-hired software engineer Evan Doll to help the company “develop more health-related software,” according to information spotted by Bloomberg on Doll’s LinkedIn account. Specifically, Doll is now a director of health software engineering at Apple, a position which he began sometime in July, but his profile information doesn’t provide any further details into his role at the company.
The software engineer worked at Apple from 2003 to 2009, helping create and develop the software operating system for the iPhone. In 2009, he left Apple and co-founded magazine app Flipboard with Mike McCue. Similar to Apple News, Flipboard curates content and stories tailored to each user’s personal tastes and preferences, and has even been endorsed by Apple in the past.
The launch of Apple News was reported as a steep competitive challenge for the small company, resulting in a majority of its executives leaving the company — including Doll himself — in September 2015. Despite his background in the news curation space, Doll’s new placement at Apple has him focused on potential new health initiatives, an area that the company has slowly been building upon lately.
Apple has been beefing up its engineering team for health-care applications, hiring Sage Bionetworks founder and Merck & Co. veteran Stephen Friend and former Nest Labs technology chief Yoky Matsuoka earlier this year. Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook is increasingly positioning the Apple Watch as a wellness accessory as he tries to win a slice of the $4.6 trillion U.S. health and fitness industry.
A report from earlier in the week suggested that Apple is working on a new health-tracking piece of hardware to launch alongside the 10th anniversary iPhone in 2017. Although details are still lacking for a product launch over a year away, the product is said to collect heart rate, pulse, and blood sugar changes, which could be describing a next-generation Apple Watch if it’s not an entirely new addition to the company’s hardware lineup.
Earlier in the year, Apple CEO Tim Cook spoke with Jim Cramer on “Mad Money,” discussing Apple’s initiatives in the health landscape. Cook described services like ResearchKit and the Health app as “significantly underestimated” sections of the technology market. Ultimately, when asked what the “next frontiers” in product development, Cook described health, and all the inroads taken by Apple to provide detailed analysis of a user’s well-being, as “the biggest one of all.”
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CVS Launches Barcode-Based ‘CVS Pay’ in Lieu of Apple Pay
Apple Pay holdout CVS today introduced CVS Pay, a new barcode-based mobile payment solution that integrates payment, prescription pickup, and its ExtraCare loyalty program into a single scan at checkout. CVS Pay is built into the newly updated CVS Pharmacy app for iOS and Android devices.
CVS Pay works with all major U.S. credit cards, including MasterCard, Visa, Discover, and American Express, in addition to debit, Health Savings Account, and Flexible Spending Account cards. All verifications for prescriptions and payment like a signature or PIN occur within the CVS Pharmacy app.
After adding their credit or debit cards to the app, customers can show the store associate a barcode, or pickup number at drive-thru locations, to initiate payment. The associate will scan the barcode, ring up the purchases, let the customer choose a stored payment method, and then process the payment.
CVS Pay is the pharmacy chain’s first official mobile payments solution. CVS officially disabled Apple Pay shortly following its U.S. launch, prompting a response from Apple and even a potential class action lawsuit. At the time, CVS was committed to MCX and its indefinitely postponed payments solution CurrentC.
CVS Pay launches today in select markets, including New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, and a nationwide rollout to its over 9,600 pharmacy locations in the U.S. is expected to begin later this year. CVS Pharmacy is free on the App Store [Direct Link] for iPhone, with a companion Apple Watch app available.
Top Image: CVS Health via Fortune
Related Roundup: Apple Pay
Tag: CVS
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Tesla rival LeEco building $1.8 billion EV factory in China
China’s EV industry hasn’t produced many vehicles yet, but thanks to strong government incentives, it’s on an explosive growth curve. One of the main players is electronics giant LeEco, which backs EV builder Faraday Future and recently showed off its own electric car, the LeSee. It unveiled plans for a $1.8 billion EV factory near the Chinese city of Hanzhou that will pump out 400,000 EVs per year. The new plant “will be open to all LeEco’s strategic partners including Faraday Future,” says CEO Jia Yueting.
The factory will only produce EV vehicles with connected and self-driving features. It’s just first phase of what will eventually be a $3 billion auto “Eco Experience Park” complete with with a theme park, EV facilities and offices, according to LeEco. The company plans to strengthen ties with partner Faraday Future, which is also building its own $1 billion EV plant in Nevada. Faraday recently announced plans to build a second plant in Vallejo, California, too.
The Faraday Future FFZero1
All of this growth is exciting, but while LeEco and Faraday have both shown off futuristic prototype EVs, neither has actually built or sold any yet. Faraday did say that sales of its first electric car will launch next year, based on its prototype FFZero1 supercar platform, and LeEco plans to launch self-driving versions of its LeSEE. Meanwhile Tesla, which also built its $4-5 billion Gigafactory in Nevada, is selling two vehicles and recently launched a third, the Model 3.
Via: Engadget China
Source: Reuters
Spotify launches a cartoon to teach you about music
Spotify is more than a music streaming app. Podcasts, video distribution — the company has tried everything to broaden its appeal and stop subscribers from defecting to Apple Music, Tidal and Google Play Music. Its latest effort is “Deconstructing,” a new animated series by short-form video specialist ATTN:. The first episode, which premieres today, explains the history of EDM with some colorful characters and a documentary-style voiceover. It’s a short, but informative overview of the genre, designed for mobile users who want a quick break from their favorite playlists.
In addition to Deconstructing, Spotify is working on 12 original shows right now. These include “Rush Hour,” a light-hearted competition that challenges two hip-hop artists — one legend and one rising star — with remixing a well-known track in the back of a van. Once their driver has weaved through LA’s traffic, they’ll perform their new collaboration to a group of restless fans. There’s also “Landmark,” a documentary series with a complimentary longform podcast, and “Trading Playlists,” which encourages celebrities to exchange their personal mixtapes for a day.
Video is a difficult medium for Spotify to crack. It’s not known for that type of content, and is competing directly with services such as YouTube, Facebook and Snapchat. Apple is in a similar position — its Music app was the exclusive home of Taylor Swift’s 1989 tour video last year, and will soon host 16 new episodes of Carpool Karaoke. It’s yet to be proven, however, that people actually want these original videos, or are willing to pay for them. That lack of clarity is why Spotify is still investing in its core music product, specifically with smart playlists such as Release Radar.
Source: Deconstructing (YouTube)
ICYMI: Hop on a bike and tour the world
Today on In Case You Missed It: A British man was the first to bike the length of the UK, all within the world of Google Maps and his virtual reality headset. If you’re intrigued, his blog is really the best place to get the details.
Gaming fans will want to know about this Kickstarter project for a mouse that can pivot, tilt and roll, manipulating players within games using pressure sensitive buttons.
Finally, YouTuber styropyro is off to grad school and made an explosions video to celebrate; don’t miss it. As always, please share any interesting tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
AIVAnet 