From the Editor’s Desk: Saying sorry

Some Sunday thoughts from cottage country.

It’s hard to say sorry. Big companies especially need to get better at it. Hell, I’m Canadian and say it all the time and still need to get better at it.

What struck me about this whole Note 7 mess is that Samsung just hasn’t made people feel good enough about its response. It did all the right things — got the phones back en masse, issued new ones quickly, with sufficient (albeit strange) differentiation — but they missed the emotional impact that this recall had on people. And now, after several replacement Note 7s have reportedly exploded, the company has stayed largely silent, except to say the investigation continues. The trend is disturbing.

It’s akin to a relationship gone south, and all you see can see after the breakup is a totally different person staring back at you.

People are scared. They’re scared to buy Note 7s, they’re nervous to be around other people with Note 7s, and they’re especially hesitant to use one themselves. And that’s OK: It’s normal to be worried when you’ve been told a thing in your house — in your pocket— could explode without warning. The difference is that the Note 7, or any phone, is meant to stay near you most of the time, to be a companion. Even a friend. It’s akin to a relationship gone south, and all you see can see after the breakup is a totally different person staring back at you.

Despite the recent rash of fires from the new batch of Note 7s, the chance of an individual unit spontaneously alighting is still very low. And yet, when I peer at the replacement Note 7 on my desk, I can’t help looking at it a bit sideways. My response is as emotional as it is based in fact, but that’s the point: Samsung hasn’t adequately addressed the underlying human side of this very technical problem.

It’s also a side of tech that I don’t think we, as the media, successfully approach. No piece of tech has engendered more sustained discord, more animosity, more feigned us vs. them, than the smartphone, both inter- and intra-ecosystem. And yet we don’t really acknowledge the cause of this vitriol, since we generally only address it after it’s been expressed. I don’t want to play the role of armchair psychologist, so I’m just going to end with this: Phones are not phones, but extensions of ourselves, and our lives, over which we have considerably more control than most other areas. And when that control is upended in some way — by an errant software update, or the fear of an exploding battery — it becomes more distant from us.

Samsung hasn’t adequately addressed the underlying human side of this very technical problem.

It’s for those reasons that the Pixel’s announcement, that it was at once not a Nexus and too much like a Nexus, was so divisive. I was lucky enough to use the phones briefly at an event in Toronto, and came away impressed and confused. On one hand, the phones are objectively great — nicely-built, and conscientious of the way people use their phones today — but, in the hands of Google, they have limited carrier support in the U.S. and are being positioned as both Galaxy and Nexus. I want the Pixels to do well, but I also know how difficult that will be.

• Andrew and Russell did a great job on the Pixel hands-on, and both of them really understand where it fits in the Android
  ecosystem.
• Alex did better than most other sites reviewing the iPhone 7 Plus, giving it a fair shake from an Android user. It’s a great phone, with an amazing camera, but it’s no longer automatically the best phone, as evidenced by…
• …the results of the Blind Camera Test. I’m of two minds about the results: Samsung ramps up the color saturation of its photos, which is naturally pleasing to the eye, but there are also examples where the phone is objectively better. The iPhone 7 also holds its own, but Apple goes for a more natural look — #nofilter to Samsung’s Juno or Ludwig —which can turn some people off. Different strokes.
• The LG V20 goes on sale on October twenty days too late for most people. (October 28.) Seriously, LG, you had one job, and it was to get this phone into people’s hands two weeks after the September 6 announcement.
• Verizon ruins everything.
• But seriously, Verizon isn’t just a wireless network provider; it’s a services company, a content producer, and an enormous ad funnel. You think Google’s deal to sell the Pixel on Verizon was all about the company pre-installing a couple of apps and controlling software updates? No, it was all about Google promising to advertise the crap out of its new phones on every Verizon-owned publishing channel, including AOL.
• We’re approaching a time when the Note 7 will have to be recalled again, but this second round of problems has, I believe, damaged the Note brand’s reputation beyond repair.
• And if this text message can be verified as having come from a Samsung representative… wow. Just wow.
• Hurricane Matthew looked devastating. Hope all of you are safe and unharmed from the inundation.

If you’re in Canada, have a very happy Thanksgiving, and if you’re in the U.S., happy Columbus Day!

      -Daniel

Mobile, sun-seeking gardens, and more in the week that was

The Fisker Karma was one of the world’s hottest plug-in hybrid supercars when it debuted in 2011 – and now its creator Henrik Fisker has announced plans to launch an electric sports car with a 400-mile range next year. Meanwhile, Mercedes is taking aim at the Tesla Model X with its new Generation EQ SUV, which touts 400 horsepower and an all-electric driving range of 300 miles. The International Space Station is getting ready to test a brand new ion thruster that can be powered by space junk, and teenage inventor Boyan Slat has modified a C-130 Hercules aircraft with high-tech sensors to spot plastic debris in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

Solar power is getting cheaper by the day – and two groundbreaking projects in China and Abu Dhabi have pushed the price down 25% in just five months. In other energy news, Poland just unveiled a glowing, bright blue bike lane that’s charged by the sun. The Water Seer is a new wind-powered gadget that pulls clean drinking water from thin air, and the Land Art Generator Initiative showcased a fog-harvesting, energy-generating boat that could collect 30 million gallons of water ever year. And an innovative algae-growing building took top prize in the Biodesign Competition.

In design and technology news, this week the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three scientists who invented the world’s tiniest machines. Gensler unveiled plans for a high-tech floating structure to house the UK Parliament on the River Thames, and we spotted a a futuristic Dutch community made from 50 spherical homes. You’ve probably heard of self-driving cars, but what about a self-driving garden? That’s the idea behind this crazy geodesic garden sphere that drives itself around in search of sunlight. And Sealtech has developed an innovative fabric that’s able to repair itself with just a touch.

Get ready to prove the skills on your resume in virtual reality

If you’re going to add skills you don’t actually have on your resume, make sure the employer won’t do everything in its power to make you prove it. Lloyds Banking Group, for instance, is putting potential employees to the test with the help of VR headsets. According to Wired, the British financial institution will ask applicants to perform tasks and solve issues they’re bound to encounter as the company’s employees, but in virtual worlds. By doing so, interviewers will have the chance to observe how they’ll handle problems they can’t recreate in an office instead of asking hypothetical situations.
Wired says the applicants will be placed in 360-degree virtual environments. Motion control sensors will track their actions, so they can move objects within those worlds. Lloyds plans to launch its high-tech job interview process at its recruitment drive this autumn, and we really wouldn’t be surprised if other companies follow suit. It’s only natural for people to find new uses for virtual reality the more common VR devices become, after all.

Source: Wired

Hive review: The British Gas smart system that’s the hub of all things

When British Gas called us in to the launch of Hive Active Heating, it was clear that this was the starting point for something bigger. Focusing initially where you would expect a heating company to focus, Active Heating was an easy first step. 

Thanks to a household name in British Gas, Hive has always had the advantage of being familiar and safe in a rapidly expanding universe of connected smarthome devices.

We originally reviewed Hive Active Heating at launch and updated it following the release of a much more attractive second-gen design. But Hive has continued to expand, fleshing out its offering, making any home smarter.

Here’s how the whole system plays together.

Hive review: A modular system

As the name suggests, Hive was originally conceived as a modular system. The app changes in recent times moved to open up more slots in the Hive dashboard where an expanding range of products will fit in.

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The entire Hive system relies on several things. The first is the Hive Hub. This is the part that connects to your internet router, giving it an online connection for access through your smartphone or laptop, wherever you happen to be in the world.

The second thing that Hive needs is an app or browser to control it. With Android and iOS apps your smartphone is covered, but Hive is also fully accessible through a browser dashboard, where you can do everything from adding new components to changing your heating schedule.

Hive review: Hive Active Heating

For many of us, Hive Active Heating is going to be the big piece of the puzzle. This is the starting point, the place where the internet of things has really found some traction and the area where you probably have to spend the most money.

• Hive Active Heating 2.0 review: Style meets connected practicality

Ditching the old thermostat and moving to a modern controller with smartphone controls makes a lot of sense. We won’t repeat all aspects of our review here, but jump across the highlights.

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Hive’s latest controller offers a modern design so it looks great on your wall, offering a range of coloured frames so you can dress it up. You can opt for British Gas installation, at £259, or get the kit only at £179. There is multi-zone support (at additional cost), as well as control over your heating and hot water.

It’s been designed for British homes, so works with the types of boilers and systems in most homes – and you don’t have to be a British Gas customer.

Active Heating offers convenience features like geolocation (you’ve left the house, your heating doesn’t need to be on), holiday mode (you’re in Spain, you don’t need your heating on), as well as things like boost modes, so you can give the heating a blast if you’re feeling a bit chilly.

We’ve found Hive Active Heating to be getting progressively more stable, following the initial offering which was prone to disconnecting. A new hub and a new thermostat have made for a great system. That said, when Active Heating does disconnect, there’s little information: you probably won’t know until either the heating doesn’t turn on, or it doesn’t turn off. 

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An update we’d really like to see is some sort of self-diagnosis and alert through the app, because we’ve been lying in bed at night with the heating on full blast, wondering why it hasn’t turned off. Often, it’s because the thermostat has lost connection, but you’re unlikely to know that. Those sorts of incidents aren’t the norm, however, and generally speaking it works exactly as we’d expect it to.

It’s perhaps less sexy than Nest’s Learning Thermostat, but the reassurance of the British Gas name should bring some confidence.

Hive review: Hive Active Lights

The second area where smarthomes have made an impact is in lighting. Thanks to brands like Philips Hue, we’re all aware that lighting can now be a lot more high-tech than it once was. 

For Hive, the journey into lighting has only just begun, with an offering that only covers a few products. You get the option of screw or bayonet fitting (important for the UK market), but it’s all conventional bulb design at the moment: there’s no GU10 spotlight bulb, for example, which is a limitation.

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Hive Active Lights work on a simple plug and connect system, so long as you have a Hive Hub of course. You install the bulb, add it via your Hive app and then you have control. There are three options: dimmable, cool to warm light, and colour. 

The slight downside at the moment is that there are no switches to support the system. That means that once you’ve installed a bulb, you either have to turn it on and off with your regular switch (pointless), or you have to leave it on all the time and control it with your app (a faff).

That’s limiting for a number of reasons. Generally speaking, you don’t walk into a room in the dark and get your phone out to turn the lights on. So that makes Hive Active Lights currently better for routine lighting, rather than your main bedroom light, for example.

• Smart lighting solutions: Here are seven options to choose from

You can have the standing lamp or side lamps in a room on all the time and controlled via a timing schedule, which is an attractive option. But for your main ceiling lights it’s currently not as attractive as the range of solutions that Hue offers with the tap and dimmer switches. 

What you can do, however, is setup your lights to turn themselves on and off while you’re away on holiday so the house looks occupied, as well as tying in with Hive’s other devices, like the motion sensor or door/window sensors. 

At £19 the standard white 9W LED Hive bulb at is pretty cheap. The cool to white bulb is £29 and the colour bulb is £44. Compare that to Hue, priced at £14, £24 and £49 for comparable products, and it’s all closely price –  just the Hue currently has a lot more on offer in its ecosystem. 

Hive Review: Hive sensors

Hive currently offers two sensors: a door or window frame sensor; and a motion sensor. These are fairly standard offerings for smarthome systems and you’ll get similar from Panasonic or Samsung SmartThings within those systems too.

The sensors can be used as a soft security system, alerting you when your front door is opened, for example. If you’re still in Spain and someone opens your front door, you might be concerned about that.

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Equally, when you’re quaffing sangria on the beach and motion is detected in your garage, that could be a cause for concern. Alerts can be delivered through the app, but you also get the option to create recipes in the IFTTT sense so that actions can result from a detection. 

Hive sets up a number of options for you around your system so that, for example, you can open your front door and have the lights turn on, which is pretty smart. Or you can have the motion detector turn on a light or a Hive Active Plug, to switch on a conventional light, for example. 

Setup of the sensors is incredibly easy. You just have to slip in the batteries and sync them to the app. The battery power means you can easily place them wherever you like, with sticky pads making for easy mounting. The only thing you need to ensure is that they are within range of the Hub.

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We’ve found both the frame sensors and motion sensor to work well, but they do highlight a current omission from Hive’s portfolio: a home camera. However, with IFTTT support there’s the potential to expand the remit of Hive outside of the current system that is offered, although we can’t profess to have tried it all out. 

Hive review: Hive Active Plug

One of the simplest devices in the Hive system is the Active Plug. This is essentially a plug that offers remote on and off controls. That’s useful for a number of reasons. Within the Hive system, as we’ve mentioned, you can set up trigger actions – motion detection turns on a light, for example. 

The Active Plug can also be controlled with on and off switching from your smartphone, as well as offering a large push-button on/off switch on the top, so you don’t have to use your phone to turn it on.

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That makes it ideal for anyone who worries about leaving the house with the hair straighteners left on. Now you can call up the app and cut the power to your GHDs, rather than worrying that you’ll burn the house down, or more importantly, burn out your straighteners.

Hive Active Plug connects into the system the same way that everything else does, meaning you can do things like connect something like a coffee machine to come on with a timer – or perhaps when you get out of bed in the morning.

It’s perhaps a little chunky, but like devices from Belkin’s WeMo, it does exactly what it says on the tin, with the advantage of offering seamless integration with Hive’s other devices.

Hive review: The Hive app

There have been a number of changes to the Hive app over the past few years as the system has evolved. The landing view gives you direct access to the different devices around your house, with the option to rename things, which is handy if it’s a bigger system.

The recent addition of recipes allows for custom use of the devices you have, but currently isn’t freeform. It adapts based on the devices you have, covering notifications, turning on plugs or lights based on detection from the motion or door sensor. You can’t, for example, turn on the heating from a door sensor, but then why would you?

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The app also lets you manage things like geolocation, letting you ring fence your house, with alerts telling you that you’ve left the house with the heating set at 25 degrees. Conversely, you get the same option on return.

The app also offers a holiday control mode. This will allow you set dates that you’re away so the heating goes into frost protection mode and you’re not wasting energy. What holiday mode currently doesn’t offer is integration into things like lighting. Having a sensible random lighting routine triggered by holiday mode would be a really handy addition.

Overall the app is stable enough and fairly easy to use. As we said that the start of this review, we’ve found connectivity to be getting more and more stable as Hive matures and with the expansion into a bigger system, we’ve had no problems connecting to or controlling more devices.

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That said, the app could be a little more intuitive, or a little more user friendly. Sometimes you have to head off into the settings to find something, while changing things like the heating schedule is a bit tedious – although the browser app makes things simpler.

As we said previously, we’d also like to see a little more information. If something isn’t going to work, we’d rather know in advance, so that we could do something about it. We’d even go as far as suggesting that there’s a soft reboot option added. If your thermostat has lost communication, a restart often fixes it and we’d really like to be able to do that remotely.

Verdict

Hive is making power moves to position itself as an all-inclusive smarthome system that’s primed for the UK market. With the familiarity of the British Gas badge on the box and an expanding collection of devices, it’s getting more compelling as an expanding ecosystem. 

The question is whether you want to put all your eggs in one basket. Hue currently offers a much wider range of lighting products, Nest offers cameras and smoke detectors in its system which are also very good.

This is the challenge that Hive will face: while we love the expanding options, there will also be independent market leaders, pulled together by services like Amazon Alexa, Google Home or Apple HomeKit that will allow you do a lot of the same. Amazon Alexa will already allow you control some Hive elements, but also works with Hue, so mixing and matching systems is already becoming easier. 

Hive keeps things in the family. It gives you a reliable name and there’s something decidedly British about the whole thing. What Hive really needs to do is to continue the aggressive expansion with more variety, to bring the sizzle of systems like Hue and Nest, so it stays ahead of the head of the smarthome curve.

Another Note 7 is involved in a fire in Kentucky

To add insult to injury, another incident where the Note 7 went up in flames has surfaced this late Saturday evening.

Michael Klering tells WKYT News in Lexington that he awoke early Tuesday morning to a hissing sound, and his bedroom was filled with foul-smelling smoke. He says his replacement Galaxy Note 7 was on fire. The phone, which he had for a week and said he assumed was safe, wasn’t plugged in or being used at the time.

Feeling ill later in the day he went to the emergency room. “I was vomiting black so it was very scary. It was a lot of black stuff and it didn’t look right,” Klering said. The hospital diagnosed him with acute bronchitis and the local fire department was contacted because this was a result of smoke inhalation. Klering produced the hospital records stating as such.

Image coutersy WKYT News

Klering says Samsung asked for the phone, but he declined. He did accept the request from Samsung that it be X-rayed. In the oddest twist of any incident yet, Klering then produced a text message he says was from Samsung that stated:

Just now got this. I can try and slow him down if we think it will matter, or we just let him do what he keeps threatening to do and see if he does it

Klering then decided to seek legal assistance and alert the press that it had happened. We’ve embedded the video showing the hospital records and text message below. It’s also worth noting that this incident happened before an incident on a Southwest plane during boarding and a child in Minnesota having her Note 7 overheat and burst into flames earlier Saturday.

Brain-like memory gets an AI test drive

Humanity just took one step closer to computers that mimic the brain. University of Southampton researchers have demonstrated that memristors, or resistors that remember their previous resistance, can power a neural network. The team’s array of metal-oxide memristors served as artificial synapses to learn (and re-learn) from “noisy” input without intervention, much like you would. And since the memristors will remember previous states when turned off, they should use much less power than conventional circuitry — ideal for Internet of Things devices that can’t afford to pack big batteries.

It’s still early days for this technology. If you wanted AI that could replicate the brain in its full glory, you’d need “hundreds of billions” of synapses (if not more). The far-simpler memristor array in this test was limited to looking for patterns. However, the Southampton group is quick to note that you wouldn’t need to go that far for narrower purposes. You could have sensors that know how to classify objects and identify patterns without human help, which would be particularly helpful in dangerous or hard-to-reach places. You might just see IoT gadgets that are not only connected to the outside world, but can make sense of it.

Via: ScienceDaily

Source: University of Southampton, Nature

Germany calls for a ban on combustion engine cars by 2030

Germany isn’t content with relying on financial incentives to usher in an era of pollution-free cars. The country’s Bundesrat (federal council) has passed a resolution calling for a ban on new internal combustion engine cars by 2030. From then on, you’d have to buy a zero-emissions vehicle, whether it’s electric or running on a hydrogen fuel cell. This isn’t legally binding, but the Bundesrat is asking the European Commission to implement the ban across the European Union… and when German regulations tend to shape EU policy, there’s a chance that might happen.

The council also wants the European Commission to review its taxation policies and their effect on the “stimulation of emission-free mobility.” Just what that means isn’t clear. It could involve stronger tax incentives for buying zero-emissions cars, but it could also involve eliminating tax breaks for diesel cars in EU states. Automakers are already worried that tougher emission standards could kill diesels — remove the low cost of ownership and it’d only hasten their demise.

Not that the public would necessarily be worried. Forbes notes that registrations of diesels, still mainstays of the European car market, dropped sharply in numerous EU countries in August. There’s a real possibility that Volkswagen’s emission cheating scandal is having a delayed effect on diesel sales. Combine that with larger zero-emissions incentives and the proposed combustion engine ban, and it might not take much for Europeans to go with electric or hydrogen the next time they go car shopping.

Via: Forbes, Gizmodo

Source: Der Spiegel (translated)

Alleged replacement Note 7 catches fire in Minnesota

A report from St. Paul’s KSTP News says another replacement Galaxy Note 7 has been involved in an incident in Farmington Minnesota.

According to the report, Thirteen-year-old Abby Zuis was holding her Note 7 when she felt a strange burning sensation. She dropped the device which began smoking and melted the protective case. Images of the phone show the typical split body and rectangular burn markings we’ve seen from other Note 7 phones that have exploded. Thankfully, Miss Zuis was uninjured other than a small burn on her thumb.

Photo courtesy KTSP News

The girl’s father explains that they had originally purchased the phone in August and had exchanged it on September 21 in accordance with Samsung’s recall of the Note 7. He provided receipts of both transactions to KSTP news.

A Samsung representative told KSTP “We want to reassure our customers that we take every report seriously and we are engaged with the Zuis family to ensure we are doing everything we can for them and their daughter.” They then confirmed that the incident is under investigation.

This is the second high-profile case of a replacement Note 7 doing the very same thing they were all originally recalled for. A passenger boarding a flight from Lousiville to Baltimore had a similar incident with his Note 7 on Wednesday. An additional report from Taiwan says a replacement Note 7 had exploded.

We’re not sure what to make of this. We only hope any issues are resolved before anyone is hurt or any further property damage happens. Stay safe.

Thanks, Spencer, for the heads up!

Samsung Galaxy Note 7

• Galaxy Note 7 recall: Everything you need to know
• Samsung Galaxy Note 7 review
• The latest Galaxy Note 7 news!
• Here are all four Note 7 colors
• Complete Galaxy Note 7 specs
• Join the Note 7 discussion in the forums!

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