Dell’s 2016 XPS 13 arrives with new Rose Gold finish

Dell’s XPS 13 laptop has always been a serious competitor to Apple’s MacBook Air and the latest version comes in a new Apple-like Rose Gold colour finish. One of our favourite features of the previous version, the virtually borderless display, makes a return and will be available in full HD or quad HD variations.

The new ultraslim laptop runs on Windows 10 and be specced with either an Intel 7th Gen i5 or 7th Gen i7 processor, both come with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of solid state storage. The i5 model comes with the full HD screen while the i7 gets the quad HD.

Dell claims battery life is better than ever, claiming 22 hours for i5 model and 13 hours for the i7. When we reviewed the 2015 model we found battery life to be some way off Dell’s claims, so we’re looking forward to finding out if things have improved.

Everything is housed in a machined aluminium casing with splashes of carbon fibre and a Gorilla Glass screen, should it should be able to stand up to a few knocks.

Dell’s new XPS 13 will be available from October 4th for $799, UK pricing has yet to be announced.

That’s not all…

It’s not just super slim and sexy laptops that Dell has for 2016, as there’s two new Inspiron models as well. There’s the Inspiron 15 5000 touch-screen laptop and Inspiron 17 5000 desktop. The 15 5000 has an infra-red camera letting you sign in using Windows Hello, which scans your eyes to unlock the computer.

Colours include such things as “Cosmic Purple” and “Tango Red”, alongside regular black and white. The new Inspiron models will also be available from October 4th from $550.

Epson’s $650 FastFoto scanner is ludicrously speedy

Even though the vast majority of people have switched to digital photography, someone in your family likely has a box of old pictures stashed away somewhere. Birthday parties, Thanksgivings, Bar Mitzvahs — you probably have some record of your childhood trapped in there. (My family certainly does.) Add in the fact that there’s less and less need to own a printer, plus the tedium of scanning, and it all means those memories are likely to stay offline. Epson is looking to unearth that treasure pile of moments with the new FastFoto FF-640, which can scan, sort and even post your entire photo collection at a rate of one photo per second.

Unlike an all-in-one printer, the FF-640 doesn’t try to do everything; it’s a scanner through and through. The document feeder can accommodate up to 30 photos at a time — a vast improvement over whatever you can fit on a flatbed. The scanner also captures both sides, so you can record all the tasty data that might be printed on the back, like date stamps from the development lab and handwritten notes. You won’t need to babysit the 640 to make sure everything fed into the machine correctly: The scanner can detect different photo dimensions, and also auto-corrects the angle the photo was scanned at. No more making sure everything is straight or the same size — the FastFoto is smart enough to figure out what’s what.

The FF-640 can lift the burden of organization as well. The included software makes it easy to automatically name and sort the photos into appropriate folders, and create searchable metadata for all of them, including the original date of the image. Even more impressive is the photo processing built in: Rather than drag your photos into dedicated image editing software like Photoshop, the FastFoto can do basic touches like red-eye removal and color restoration with a click. White Christmases of decades past will no longer be a sickly yellow — and mind you, my family has a lot of photos of beige Christmases and pinkish birthdays, making photo correction a time-consuming process. Once you’re done making your cousins look a little less demonic, it’s easy to send those photos to Dropbox, Google Drive, Facebook or Instagram. (Because there aren’t enough embarrassing pics of me on there already, mom.)

The FastFoto can also scan other types of documents, like bills and invoices and the random other little bits of paper I’ve accumulated over the years — which is great, because I have a lot of crap that I’d love to digitize, and I hate the flatbed scanner on my all-in-one printer. The FF-640 can scan 45 pages per minute, meaning I can make quick work of those file boxes clogging up my office.

It’s a good thing that the FastFoto FF-640 is versatile, at least: At $650, it’s priced a bit steep for something you might only use once. It might be worth it when you consider that you won’t have to pay someone else to scan photos for you, and the time savings are immense — one photo per second means you can theoretically polish off a box of 1,000 photos in under a half hour, so you’ll have to find some other way to spend your rainy days.

China will launch its second ‘Heavenly Palace’ space lab tomorrow

China’s space program successfully completed its first round in a new phase of space exploration back in September 2011 when it launched the “Heavenly Palace” Tiangong-1 space laboratory. That was just the first stage in a plan to put a large-scale station up in orbit in the mid-2020s for extended astronaut missions rivaling those of the ISS. The next milestone will happen tomorrow when they launch Tiangong-2 into orbit, their second “Heavenly Palace” lab at 10:04 AM ET that will get a visit from a pair of Chinese taikonauts in four to six weeks.

A Long March 2-F rocket will launch from China’s Jiuquan center in the Gobi Desert and carry the Tiangong-2 into orbit. A Shenzhou-11 spacecraft will ferry the taikonauts up for a monthlong stay on the lab. While aboard, they will perform experiments related to medicine, physics and biology, such as quantum key transmission, space atomic clocks and solar storm research, according to a press release. The Tiangong-2 will then get restocked by the country’s first robotic resupply mission Tianzhou-1, “Heavenly Vessel,” in 2017.

China hopes to get its full space station up in the next decade, which will be about 60 tons. That’s far smaller than the 420-ton ISS, points out Ars Technica, but with that colossal station’s fate uncertain after 2024, there might be a future where China’s is the only one in the sky.

Via: Ars Technica

Source: Xinhuanet

Apple Quashes Rumors of Potential Tidal Acquisition

Apple has moved to quash rumors that it is interested in purchasing rival music streaming service Tidal, according to BuzzFeed.

Back in June of this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Apple was “in talks” to acquire Tidal, which has fiercely competed with Apple Music for exclusivity rights to top list artists.

However, pushed on the subject in a forthcoming interview, head of Apple Music Jimmy Iovine told BuzzFeed that “We’re really running our own race. We’re not looking to acquire any streaming services.” Iovine didn’t deny that discussions had taken place, but said that no acquisition deal was currently in the works.

Irvine’s remarks are the first time anyone from Apple has commented on the alleged talks, which some believed indicated Cupertino’s hardened resolve to catch Spotify as the leader in the streaming market. Yesterday, Spotify announced that it now has over 40 million paying subscribers, compared to Apple Music’s 17 million as of early September.

Buying Tidal would have landed Apple Music an additional 4 million subscribers, all things remaining the same.

Theoretically, acquiring the company could have also aided Apple’s relationships with some big names in the music industry – Tidal is owned by various artists including Beyoncé, Rihanna, Kanye West, Alicia Keys, and Madonna. Back in June, Kanye West suggested the company wanted to partner up with Apple Music to heal the schism between the rival services, which he said was harming the industry.

In March 2015, Jay Z acquired Tidal parent company Aspiro AB for $56 million, but it has struggled to find stability. The company has moved on three chief executives in the last year, and last week it reported a net loss of $28 million for 2015, more than double its losses from the year before.

Apple released a redesigned, more streamlined version of its own streaming service on Tuesday as a part of the new iOS 10 release.

Tags: Jimmy Iovine, Apple Music, Tidal
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Ford previews the future of self-driving vehicles

This week, Ford invited members of the tech and automotive press to check out the latest developments, including the first rides in its autonomous vehicles. CEO Mark Fields already revealed the company is targeting 2021 for the release of a “Level 4” vehicle that’s fully self-driving, without contrivances like steering wheels or pedals. For now, it’s testing vehicles like these Ford Fusions on its Dearborn, MI campus, the Mcity test track in Ann Arbor, and on public roads in Arizona, Michigan and California.

The video above gives you a taste of what the vehicle actually “sees” on its test route, thanks to a combination of cameras, radar and LIDAR units. Like other self-driving car demonstrations I’ve experienced, the Fusion could navigate the test route without much of a problem, responding to both simulated and live situations easily. The reason the company is waiting until 2018 to deploy its on-campus autonomous transports is partially due to the risk of the unexpected. Besides the scare stories of Tesla Autopilot crashes, in some of the demos the cars hesitated because of situations they weren’t quite ready to handle.

As Business Insider’s Henry Blodget noted while interviewing Fields, in one circumstance a pedestrian being too-police and waving the car through resulted in a standstill. The car wasn’t ready to move on its own, and people that aren’t used to seeing self-driving vehicles on the road that might not read a wave-through.

Still, Ford is going heavy into self-driving tech, with Fields saying he expects it to have as big of an impact as the assembly line did. That video of the data its cars are producing in real-time could even mean more to the future of Ford than the usual HP ratings, as customers increasingly value information and services, in addition to manufacturing and technology Similar to Uber’s self-driving test vehicles, Ford plans to make its first self-driving cars available as part of some type of ride-sharing/ride-hailing. CTO Raj Nair said in an interview that he was surprised by how quickly that market grew, but clearly, the economics are appealing as automakers get ready for a future where people might put more miles on cars that they don’t own.

Source: Ford