Bose’s first sound system for small cars will go in the Nissan Micra
Bose has used the Paris Motor Show to announce the Personal Sound System, designed specifically for small cars and the first recipient will be the Nissan Micra.
The system for the Micra comprises six speakers, the placement for which required Bose to work closely with Nissan, as well as keep it in line with the Micra’s styling. And it’s the driver that will get the best audio experience in the car thanks to the speakers being places close to their ears, coupled with Bose’s digital sound processing (DSP).
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Some of the speakers really are close to the driver’s ears, as they’re placed in the headrest, two 2.5in Bose UltraNearfield speakers to be precise. Bose says you won’t realise sound is coming from the headrest as they provide a wide, open soundstage around the car.
You can adjust sound settings through the built-in infotainment system and Bose’s PersonalSpace Control feature, which claims to make sound appear as though it’s coming from “places in the car where there aren’t any speakers”.
Bose has placed 6.5in ‘Super65’ speakers in both of the doors and 1in tweeters in each of the A-pillars. Martin Boutard, chief product specialist for the new Micra said: “The Bose Personal sound system is an important part of our fully re-designed Nissan Micra”
“Bose has been a trusted Nissan partner for nearly three decades, sharing our passion and commitment to delivering high-quality offerings to our customers, and this first-of-its-kind sound system further reinforces that spirit”.
“The new Bose Personal system rewards owners of the all-new Nissan Micra with unexpectedly big sound from a small package”.
The Bose Personal system will be available to specify on the new Nissan Micra in Europe from March 2017.
Huawei could ditch Android Wear for Samsung’s Tizen smartwatch OS
Huawei has rapidly become one of the top manufacturers of smartwatches over the last year or so and its always used Android Wear to run them.
However, that could change with its next device. It is tipped to be switching to the Tizen OS that Samsung uses in its Gear S2 and Gear S3 watches.
A report published in South Korean newspaper JoongAng Ilbo stated that Huawei is working closely with Samsung to adopt Tizen. The two companies are also said to be collaborating on the hardware of the watch too.
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Huawei has been a member of the Tizen Association from the beginning, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it would look at integrating the operating system into some of its devices. The paper also claimed that the Chinese manufacturer was on the hunt for a new watch OS as it was looking for a tighter relationship with the software development side.
“Huawei was looking for an operating system other than Google’s Android as the US firm had not been very collaborative,” the newspaper revealed.
Not being able to customise Android Wear in any significant fashion has been an issue for Huawei, it is said.
When the next watch might be announced is unknown at present.
The Renault Zoe can now go 250 miles, further than any other electric car
Renault has unveiled a new battery for the Zoe electric car that will let it go 250 miles on a single charge, further than any other mainstream electric car and double the range of the original Zoe. The Tesla Model S by comparison can go 240 miles on a charge.
Renault says real world use and traffic conditions mean the Zoe will actually do around 186 miles on a single charge. But the battery will charge up in the same time as the previous model, so around 30 minutes of charge will provide 50 miles worth of driving range.
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The Z.E. 40 has double the amount of useful energy compared to the old model: 41kWH compared to 22kWh, but hasn’t gained any weight. It’s been developed with LG Chem and has a an electronic management system to optimise energy use on the move as well as a new air circulation system to maintain the in-car air temperature at a constant level.
The new Zoe can be identified by a new naming structure to reflect its horsepower rating. A 2016-onwards Zoe with the 22kWh rapid charge battery will be known as the R90, while the 43kWh quick charge battery is the Q90.
To coincide with the launch of the new battery, Renault has developed and launched two free services Z.E. Trip and Z.E. Pass. Trip will show you all public charging points from within Renault’s R-Link navigation system, including whether the point is compatible with the car and if it’s free to use.
The Z.E. Pass app will let you pay to use charging points across Europe and show you the different prices of different points. Both services will be rolled out to the UK in the coming months.
The new Z.E. 40 battery for the Renault Zoe will go on sale in November.
Huawei Mate 9 launch date confirmed, 3 November in Munich
Huawei has announced a press event for what is widely expected to be the much rumoured Huawei Mate 9 smartphone.
It is taking place at 2pm CET on Thursday 3 November in Munich, Germany. There is bound to be a livestream, which we will have details on closer to the time.
Huawei hasn’t confirmed what it plans to unveil during the event, save for fact that it will be a “new flagship device”. We are almost certain it’ll be the Mate 9, especially as the Mate 8 launched in November last year, but an outside bet could be the also rumoured Huawei-made Nexus 7 tablet.
If it is the Mate 9, you can expect it to be a powerhouse and have a 2.8GHz Kirin 960 processor, 6GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage and could sport a 20-megapixel dual-lens camera.
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Other specs to have previously leaked include a 5.9-inch Full HD display and Android 7.0 Nougat out of the box.
Images have been circulating for a while, with the phone originally tipped for an IFA 2016 launch. However, it now looks like the Chinese firm will announce the handset in November, with an on-sale date currently thought to be early December.
We don’t yet know in what territories it will be available, but as an invite to the event was sent to Pocket-lint, it suggests the UK will get the phone at the very least.
Japanese inventor’s typhoon turbines harness storms’ energy
A Japanese engineer named Atsushi Shimizu has designed a new type of wind turbine that can harness energy from something more powerful than a strong breeze. Shimizu’s creation, which looks like a huge, upright egg beater, can withstand typhoons (or hurricanes, depending on where you live) and turn their destructive power into usable energy. Unlike ordinary turbines, it can stay standing even when assaulted by intense winds and rain, thanks to an omnidirectional vertical axis and blades with adjustable speeds. That makes them perfect for their creator’s home country, as well as other places frequently visited by storms, such as China, the Philippines and the US.
Shimizu says the energy from a single typhoon can power Japan for 50 years, and with the help of his turbines, the country could become a “super power of wind.” Even if his creation can capture all that energy, though, it will likely be tough finding a way to store 50 years’ worth of power at this point in time. We might not have the battery tech capable of that just yet. Shimizu’s company installed a prototype earlier this year in Okinawa, and it’s now gunning to build one either on the Tokyo Tower or at Japan’s National Stadium, where the Olympics will be held in 2020.
Source: CNN, Challenergy
Pacemaker’s shareable, editable ‘mixtapes’ make everyone a DJ
Ever since the original Pacemaker DJ device in 2008, the Swedish team has been rethinking how we mix music. Today, Pacemaker’s iOS app gets an overhaul that drags the mixtape well and truly into 2016. Pacemaker had long since moved on from being a facsimile of the DJ booth, instead allowing all music lovers to pick tunes from Spotify, and create seamless playlists stitched together by the app’s in-house AI DJ “Mållgan.” Today Pacemaker expands on that with a bunch of social features that blend elements of Soundcloud and Spotify with, of course, a little DJ twist.
Until now, Pacemaker only let you create basic mixes from Spotify tracks (you need a premium subscription), or music from your iPhone library. You could control how and when the songs overlapped, save your mix, and share the result. The update bakes in a bunch of social features so you can follow friends, see their mixes, and even edit them — so if you don’t like that dodgy Diplo mix in the middle, swap it out for some Jack Ü. These new, edited mixes (and of course your own), can then be shared back to Pacemaker for a never-ending stream of modern day mixtapes.
The new feed takes one of Soundcloud’s best features — the ability to follow or discover up and coming artists — making Pacemaker interesting to those that just want to enjoy music, even if they’re shy of stepping up to the virtual DJ booth themselves. Naturally you can comment, like and see what’s trending as per anything social these days. Of course, the Spotify integration also means all the performers involved get a digital penny for their troubles, too.
For those that do want to dust off their DJ skills, there are a bunch of audio effects like reverb and “8-bit” so you can add a bit more spice beyond a smooth transition from left to right. Some of these are free (as is the basic app), but expect to shell out a buck or two for some of the more fancy pants audio accoutrements. The updated Pacemaker is available in the App Store starting today.
Source: iTunes
Garmin’s Vivofit Jr. rewards kids for being active
Garmin has painted the Vivofit band in lively colors and shrunk it down to create its first activity tracker for kids. Vivofit Jr. can track steps and sleep, as well as how long your kid has been moving, just like the band for adults. And, yes, it can also be worn in the pool. However, since it was still made with children in mind, its companion app comes with some extra features: gaming aspects and the ability to monitor multiple kids’ activities.
It unlocks a fun fact whenever your children achieve their 60-minute daily play goal, for instance. Your kids will also earn coins for every task you assign, which they can then use to redeem (pre-approved!) in-app rewards. In case your offsprings are procrastinators who can barely be motivated by virtual coins, though, you can also set a timer on their bands to make sure they don’t keep putting off their chores till later. If you don’t mind dropping $80 for something that looks much, much better than that free tracker McDonald’s bundled with its Happy Meals, check out your local Target, Best Buy, Toys R Us, Walmart and other electronics retailers.
Source: Garmin
Lose It app promises to log your meal just by taking its photo
Keeping track of what you eat has proven to be a pretty effective method in aiding weight loss. Studies show that food diaries not only help people manage their daily caloric intake, but it also just helps them be more aware of what they’re putting in their bodies. Unfortunately, noting down your every meal can be tedious and time-consuming. But what if you could do so just by taking a photo of your food? That’s exactly what Lose It, a food-tracking app, is trying to do with a brand new feature called Snap It. Using a combination of machine learning and Lose It’s own vast database, the app aspires to figure out what you’re eating based on your photo alone.
Now, the feature is still in beta, so it’s not perfect. For one thing, it’s not fully automated — you can’t just take a photo and it’ll know exactly what’s in the food. But for what it is, Snap It comes pretty close. What you do is take a photo of what you’re eating, and then the app will analyze the image and spit out a list of suggestions of what it thinks it is. Pick the option that fits it the most, and then you’ll be brought to a screen where you can add more details, like whether that piece of fried chicken was a thigh or a breast and how much of it you ate. If there are multiple foods on the plate or if the app just didn’t guess the food correctly, you can also just enter it manually via the Add Food button at the bottom of the photo.
I tried out the app for a week and while it didn’t always recognize the foods I ate, it did well enough where I was still impressed. I found that the list of suggestions based on the photos almost always brought up at least one correct answer. When I took a photo of a bucket of fried chicken, for example, the very first suggestion was “Fried Chicken”, followed by “Chicken Thigh” and “Pork Chop.” Sure, that last one wasn’t right, but it was still a pretty good guess. The same happened when I took a photo of strawberries — it got it right the first time.
Where it got a little tricky was when it was a photo of multiple foods. I snapped an image of a plate of chicken, collard greens and mashed potatoes. The app could only spot the chicken and the mashed potatoes, but not the greens. But in a photo of fried rice, spinach and chicken, the app was able to recognize all three instantly. In yet another picture of a culotte steak drenched in a cheese-based sauce, the app was pretty stumped as to what the sauce was, but did recognize that there was a steak. And it missed the arugula and tomatoes that were underneath the steak altogether, because, of course, they weren’t visible on camera.
It’s issues like this that make food tracking via photography such an inexact science. A photo of a bowl of curry won’t be enough for you to figure out exactly what kind of vegetables and spices are in it and just looking at a salad dressing won’t be able to tell you if it has any sugar. “That’s why we’re doing this semi-automated to start,” says CEO Charles Teague. “The idea that you could look at a picture and instantly know what it is, it just wasn’t going to work all the time.”
With the assumption that it was never going to be 100 percent accurate, the goal of the Snap It feature, at least for now, is simply to make it easier to log your diet. And I have to say I found to be true in my case. Prior to using the app, I wasn’t a fan of keeping a food diary exactly because it seemed like such a hassle. But using the camera to snap my food and having at least a little bit of automation made it easy enough that I found myself logging my diet all the time.
That, Teague says, is the point of Lose It in the first place. The company started around 2008 with only around 50,000 foods in its database. Now, it has millions of entries. Recently, Lose It added the ability to add foods by scanning a bar code. It even has location services to see if you’re within walking distance of a restaurant it recognizes — usually a chain — and when you go to make an entry in the app, it’ll instantly suggest the kinds of foods you can get at that restaurant. The next step is machine learning, and though the Snap It feature is still a little rough around the edges, it certainly has promise.
“I think our strategy is great because when we start getting all these photos of food, it becomes a dataset we can use,” Teague says. “We’ll have photo data, food data and eventually, location data. There’ll be a lot more context around the user that can make the app a lot smarter.” So even if a photo might not indicate that a dish is a curry, for example, the fact that it was taken in the vicinity of an Indian restaurant might teach the app to at least suggest it as a possibility. “It could be the combination of the photo and the location that could reveal very specifically what it is.”
The food identification might be semi-automated right now, but Teague ensures me that he’s pretty ambitious in what he thinks the technology will eventually be able to do. “Our expectations are that this will generate huge amounts of data that we can use to continue training and improving the machine learning,” he says. “That’s going to drive more accuracy in what we recognize, and the ability to recognize even more things.”
“Each photo that you log will become a piece of data that we use to train the next generation of the app,” he says. “We might even be able to estimate serving sizes.”
Mercedes will put an ‘EQ’ badge on its best electric cars
After confirming that it has quietly been working on a new sub-brand that will host a contemporary line of EVs, Mercedes today unveiled at the Paris Motor Show what it believes is the future of electric mobility. It’s called Generation EQ and the first we’re seeing of it is the new 402bhp SUV coupe concept pictured above, complete with twin electric motors, zero-emission drivetrain technology and a range of up to 311 miles. Like VW, Mercedes is putting it cars firmly in Tesla territory.
Mercedes says all of its new electric vehicles will share one overall architecture, allowing it to build SUVs, saloons, coupes and other models using its “modular building-block system.” It’s a scalable approach that allows the company to support “a wide variety of wheelbase and track measurements as well as electric motors and battery combinations.” Put simply, batteries and power outputs can be switched quickly, allowing customers to tailor an EQ car to their own specifications.
According to Mercedes, the EQ name stands for “Electric Intelligence” and is aimed at making its electric sports cars more mainstream. “The mobility of the future at Mercedes-Benz will stand on four pillars: Connected, Autonomous, Shared and Electric. ‘Generation EQ’ is the logical fusion of all four pillars,” remarks Dr Dieter Zetsche, CEO of Daimler AG and Head of Mercedes‑Benz Cars. “The emission-free automobile is the future. And our new EQ brand goes far beyond electric vehicles. EQ stands for a comprehensive electric ecosystem of services, technologies and innovations.”
To boost the efficiency of the new SUV, Mercedes ensured the Generation EQ has tightly-joined body panels, hid the windscreen wipers underneath the top edge of the bonnet and concealed the door handles in favor of remote opening. Models will be constructed from a mixture of high-strength steel, aluminium and carbon-fiber, and the lithium-ion batteries — manufactured by Deutsche Accumotive, a battery company owned by Mercedes parent Daimler — are mounted low in floor of the of the frame to increase performance (the Generation EQ can do 0-60mph in under five seconds) but also make its cars safer.
As you would expect, Mercedes’ EQ range will also feature the latest technology inside the cars. They will utilize HERE’s mapping technology in its driver assistance systems, which will underpin its autonomous driving technology. The software will interact with intelligent sensors located all around the car that feed back data its own systems but also other vehicles on the road that have Car-to-X features installed. This system intelligently exchanges information with other cars on the road to further prevent accidents.
Mercedes says that the “electro-look” SUV is expected to go into production from 2019, putting it in direct competition with the Audi e-tron quattro and Tesla Model X. Like Tesla, Mercedes will offer branded “wallboxes” that can be used for fast charging but also plans to introduce wireless induction charging. The German automaker already builds its own home batteries, which it says can be used to store excess energy from a customer’s existing solar setup and provide a “green” source of power for their vehicle.
Source: Mercedes
‘The Revenant’ director is making a VR short with Lucasfilm
While the jury is still out on whether virtual reality is the future of film, some of Hollywood’s biggest filmmakers are dedicating a lot of time to the medium. Deadline reports that two-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is teaming up with three-time Oscar winning cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki to work on a new VR short.
It will focus on “the intense and excruciating experience of a group of immigrants and refugees crossing the border between Mexico and the United States” and sees Inarritu and Lubezki reunite after have previously worked together on the critically-acclaimed The Revenant and Birdman.
The virtual reality piece has been four years in the making and will utilize the smarts of Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB team, who will build the world and characters. ILMxLAB is the new immersive entertainment division inside Industrial Light & Magic that previously created the Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine VR experience for HTC Vive.
The new project is due to be released next spring, after the presidential elections. It’s not yet known how it will be viewed — whether it’ll get a theatrical release or shown at smaller VR-specific events — but having so many big names attached to the short can only build interest in the emergent virtual reality movie scene.
Via: VR Focus
Source: Deadline
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