Netatmo Presence review – CNET
The Good Netatmo’s $300 Presence outdoor security camera and floodlight successfully distinguishes among motion from cars, people and animals (most of the time). Its push alerts are prompt, the built-in microSD card records locally for free and you can automatically save video clips to your Dropbox account or FTP server.
The Bad The Presence costs 100 bucks more than competing products. Its bold, modern design won’t appeal to everyone. I wish it worked with more smart home platforms. It wasn’t particularly easy to install, either.
The Bottom Line The Netatmo Presence shows a lot of promise when it comes to advanced motion detection, but it’s too expensive and its design is too distinctive for it to have broad appeal.
Visit manufacturer site for details.
I have conflicting feelings about Netatmo’s $300 Presence outdoor security camera and LED light fixture.
- The good stuff: It’s a highly capable 1080p live video streamer with advanced analytics that correctly labeled motion activity as a car, a person or an animal most of the time. Its internal 16GB microSD card makes event-based video recording a breeze.
- The not-so-good stuff: The Presence is really expensive and Netatmo went bold with its design — if you don’t fancy the modern aesthetic, you won’t like the way it looks. It’s also light on smart home partners, only featuring support for online connection service IFTTT at launch.
While I’m nearly sold on the Presence’s motion capabilities, I’m just not ready to drop 300 bucks on a single outdoor security camera — especially if it doesn’t have much overlap with the broader smart home market. Its design wouldn’t work with my more traditional-looking home, either.
If the price and strong design don’t scare you off, Netatmo’s Presence could work for you. I’d take a look at some other options before you buy, though.
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Netatmo’s outdoor security cam has a commanding Presence
Presence 101
Like the $200 Kuna Light Fixture, Netatmo’s Presence pulls double duty as both a security camera and a floodlight. Weatherproofed and rated for outdoor use, this heavy, rectangular hybrid device has to be hardwired to work properly. As always, be sure to reach out to a professional electrician if you have any questions.
The easiest install method is to ditch one of your existing outdoor wall lights and replace it with a Presence. For the 100-degree field of view Presence camera to work optimally, I’d only install it where you’d typically put a porch light and leave any security lights far above eye level alone.
If you’re familiar with this type of install, it should be fairly simple, but it works best with two people; you need someone to hold the camera and someone else to connect the wires. Netatmo provides a wire terminal so you can more easily connect everything, but the ports were much too small to fit the larger wires we had at the CNET Smart Home. So, I had to remove the wire terminal and use wire nuts to connect everything instead.
I ran into an issue with the length of the wires here — they’re extremely short and it was difficult to connect the wire nuts and tuck them into the terminal box without everything disconnecting. Eventually, I called for reinforcements and our technical editor, Steve Conaway, got everything connected in about 30 minutes. If you include my initial effort, the total time spent on the Presence install was close to an hour and a half.
More connected camera coverage
- This snazzy porch light doubles as a DIY security camera
- The Toucan fits the bill as a subtle outdoor camera
- Nest’s hardy outdoor camera watches over your roost
- Home security 101: Local vs. cloud camera storage
What’s next?
Once the Presence is installed, download the related Netatmo Security Android or iPhone app. Create an account and follow the step-by-step tutorial to pair the camera. Assuming everything is installed correctly, the app will scan for the camera, ask you to connect to the local Wi-Fi network and name your camera — then you’re ready to start live streaming.
This part only took about a minute.
Screenshots by CNET
Lifeprint Photo Printer Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET
Lifeprint is a mobile instant photo printer that simultaneously delivers the past and the future of how we experience pictures — still and moving.
The pocket-sized block isn’t too different from other small mobile printers like the Polaroid Zip or HP Sprocket. It connects to your phone via Bluetooth and pumps out 2 by 3 inch borderless photos using Zink zero-ink paper. Embedded with cyan, yellow and magenta dye crystals, the paper starts off colorless, but as the print is being made, heat activates the crystals, changing them into the appropriate colors.
The Lifeprint printer is even priced the same as those other models at $130 (approximately £100 or AU$170) with paper costs at about 45 cents a print if you buy in bulk. What sets the Lifeprint apart is what you’re actually able to print.
Joshua Goldman/CNET
You see, while the Lifeprint does a fine job of printing stills, it can also print video clips, Snapchats, GIFs or Apple Life Photos as what the company calls hyperphotos. For example, using the Lifeprint Photo app (available only for iOS at the moment), you can select a video clip, trim it down to a max of 15 seconds and then select a frame from the video for your printed picture. Then, using the player in the app, point your iPhone’s camera at your print and it will near-instantly start playing the clip you made on top of the photo as if it was a tiny TV.
The hyperphotos can be a combination of two unrelated pieces of media as well. With the app, you can select any photo you want to print and then attach whatever video you want to play when viewed in the app. The app is free, too, and you don’t need to sign up for anything in order to use the viewer.
Lifeprint created its own social network around sharing hyperphotos as well. You can post them and send them to family, friends and followers so they can print out your shots with their own Lifeprint printers. You can keep your hyperphotos private, too, though you’ll have to make that call before you share them the first time. Otherwise, you’ll have to delete them from your profile, which will turn a printed hyperphoto into just a regular print.
I don’t know if this is the future of photo prints, but it’s definitely cool to see still images suddenly spring to life. If you want to see it for yourself firsthand, the Lifeprint is now in Apple stores. There’s a sample image on the back of the box, so you’ll just need to download the Lifeprint Photo app and point your iPhone at the image.
Nanoleaf Aurora review – CNET
The Good Nanoleaf’s triangular light panels are bright, colorful, easy to assemble and downright cool to look at. The app makes it easy to create your own animated scenes, and you can control everything using spoken Siri commands, too.
The Bad Decorative, wall-mounted panels aren’t nearly as practical as smart bulbs are, and they won’t fit in with every aesthetic. Also, the lack of a music sync feature is a missed opportunity.
The Bottom Line These unique, color-changing smart panels are delightful to look at and easy to use, especially if you’re an iOS user.
Visit manufacturer site for details.
Triangular, color-changing LED light panels you can control on your Android or iOS device, or by using spoken commands: That’s the pitch for Nanoleaf Aurora, one of the most design-centric devices for the connected home that we’ve ever seen.
This isn’t your typical smart-home gadget. It doesn’t promise to make your life more convenient or your home more comfortable. It isn’t even a very practical light source. Instead, Nanoleaf Aurora is a design play for the connected living space. It wants your smart home to express itself.
And you know what? All of that is fine. People buy pretty things to hang up on their walls all the time — so why not a pretty-looking smart light setup?
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Nanoleaf’s new light panels want to color your smart home
At $200 (about £165/AU$260), the nine-panel Nanoleaf Aurora starter kit doesn’t come cheap. But it isn’t outrageously expensive, either, especially when you consider how eye-popping these panels are — or that the cost is roughly as much as you’d pay for a three-bulb Philips Hue starter kit.
Like those Philips Hue bulbs, the Aurora panels work with Apple HomeKit, the smart home standards built into iPhones and iPads that run the latest iOS software. HomeKit lets you toggle your lights and devices right from your phone’s Control Center or by using spoken Siri commands, and the Aurora panels do an outstanding job of putting it all to work. Compatibility with Amazon’s Alexa is coming by the end of this year, too, so you’ll soon have a second means of voice control.
All of it adds up to a cutting-edge in-home experience for out-and-proud smart home enthusiasts. You don’t need these things on your walls — nobody does — but it’s tough to deny that they make a pretty compelling case for novelty smart lighting.
Tyler Lizenby/CNET
A future we were promised
If you’re a fan of classic sci-fi, or if you just watched a lot of cartoons as a kid, then maybe these things look familiar. Color-changing light panels have been a mainstay of faux-futuristic pop culture for decades now, lighting up countless spaceships, alien bases, and dwellings of tomorrow. Now, Nanoleaf thinks it’s time these panels lit up your living room, too.
And why not? They look terrific, thanks to a design that leans on a modular build, geometric simplicity and bold, vivid colors, all of which combine to offer a wide range of display options.
You can connect any side of an Aurora panel to any other Aurora panel using these connector chips.
Tyler Lizenby/CNET
You can connect any panel to any other panel using an SD card-like connector chip to join their sides. Power flows through all of them from the base attachment, which can handle up to 30 panels. If you want more than the starter kit’s nine panels, extras are available in three-packs for $60 each (about £50/AU$80).
Setting everything up is a bit of a delicate process. Those connector chips don’t feel terribly sturdy and they don’t snap into place. As I hung everything, I worried that I wasn’t using enough of the included sticky tabs to keep everything snug and secure.
Nanoleaf doesn’t provide a whole lot of guidance as far as best mounting practices go; it pretty much just tosses you an envelope of those sticky tabs and say, “Have fun!” Everything stayed on the wall for the duration of my tests, but I still would have appreciated some more specific instructions.
That said, I was beyond impressed with these panels once I had them up and running. They’re plenty bright (about 100 lumens per panel), the hues are vivid and true, and the preprogrammed, color-changing scenes look great (you can make your own in Nanoleaf’s app, too). They made a strong first impression on just about everyone who saw them, including co-workers of mine who think color-changing smart lights are kind of dumb.
Tyler Lizenby/CNET
Colorful smarts
With the Aurora panels affixed to your wall, your next step is to download the Nanoleaf app to sync them up with your phone. Doing so is pretty painless. The base station broadcasts a Wi-Fi signal when you plug it in. You connect to that signal in your phone’s settings, then sync it up with your own home network, all of which meet Apple HomeKit’s rigorous security protocols.
Focus your mind with a lifetime subscription to Brain.fm’s audio library, now 80% off
Life is busy and relaxing can be hard. Avoiding distractions isn’t easy, they are literally everywhere. Whether you need to avoid them to get some studying done or need help getting yourself to sleep, it can be a struggle to get it done. There are a number of different programs and options out there to tune out these distractions, but unfortunately they aren’t all cheap.
Luckily, Brain.fm is a great way to tune them out at an affordable cost. For just $39 you can grab a lifetime subscription that will help you boost your productivity and get that to-do list accomplished.
With this lifetime subscription you’ll be able to:
- Choose whether you’re trying to work, relax, or sleep, & experience an original composition specially generated for that scenario
- Adjust the stream to play for 30 minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours, or indefinitely until you turn it off
- Explore different recordings & audio tracks for each category on your own
- Access premium-only content & track your work progress
This huge 80% savings that brings the price to just $39 won’t last too long, so you’ll want to act quickly. Whether you need to buckle down and study for that upcoming exam or just need to relax after a long day of work, Brain.fm is the perfect option for you.
Don’t wait for the price to jump back up to $200 and instead grab this lifetime subscription for yourself right now.
See at Android Central Digital Offers
Android security chief: There’s no doubt Google Pixel is as secure as the iPhone
We’ve been saying it for years, but Android’s director of security, Adrian Ludwig, put it on the record.
At the O’Reilly Security Conference in New York City, Ludwig told Motherboard that there’s no doubt that the Google Pixel and the iPhone are on par when it comes to security. “For almost all threat models…they are nearly identical in terms of their platform-level capabilities.”
He added, “In the long term, the open ecosystem of Android is going to put it in a much better place.”
Ludwig also mentioned that although Android’s security may have improved overall in the last year, the onus remains on carriers and manufacturers to deploy timely software updates and security patches. “We got quite a bit of work left to do to get to a point where that actually happens on a regular basis across the whole the ecosystem.”
OK Google, where’s your Amazon Echo Dot competitor?
For some reason, Google is still playing catch up to Amazon.
While undoubtedly immature and arguably not ready for prime time just yet, Google Assistant is easily the best of the virtual assistant platforms you can get today. The natural language processing is amazing, handling accents is beyond compare, and when Google Home launches this will be the first assistant that actually works as a whole life platform. Being great on the go and being good enough for a beta in the home is an impressive step for Google, but it’s easy to see how Amazon’s shadow looms over the Google Home efforts for the foreseeable future.
More: Google Home vs. Amazon Echo: The battle to control your home
Step one in solving this problem isn’t a more complete software package, though that absolutely also needs to happen. Instead, Google needs to respond immediately to the thing that makes Amazon more compelling than Google Home — price. Specifically, the price of Amazon’s second offering in the Echo space, the Dot.
Echo Dot isn’t just a smaller, cheaper Echo; in many ways, it’s a compelling argument for being the only Amazon Echo you should buy. Many early adopters have the bit Amazon Echo in a centrally located place in the house, somewhere that everyone can call to and get a good response when needed. The impressive microphone and decent speaker in Echo makes this fairly easy to do, and so when Echo Dot was released those users started thinking about the kitchen, the bedroom, and anywhere else the first Echo didn’t quite reach. It’s a solid plan, but hardly one that needs to be followed by people who haven’t purchased the original Echo.
Basically, the creator of the $35 Chromecast Audio could easily step up and make a $50 or $60 Google Home Mini.
At $50, you can have three Echo Dots for the cost of one Echo. They’re cheap enough that Amazon will give you one for free if you buy six, and people are actually taking the company up on that deal. That’s seven Echo systems with the same impressive microphone system that are easier to hide in more discrete places around your home, and can be connected to speakers you already have. Not that you necessarily need to, mind.
See Dot at Amazon
If you’re not listening to music on Echo the speaker built in to Dot is more than enough to acknowledge commands or listen to flash briefings. An Echo isn’t required to power an Echo Dot, either, so it just makes sense in many homes to buy a couple of these smaller systems instead.
Echo Dot isn’t just a smaller, cheaper Echo. It actually makes a compelling argument for being the only Amazon Echo you should buy.
And that brings us back to Google Home, the $130 Google Assistant box that looks much nicer than Echo when positioned strategically, and is sold in multiples to make it easier to position around the house, but is still more than twice the cost of the Dot. It’s not hard to see why, after using one, Google worked hard to make sure the speaker not only sounds better than the big Echo but also works with other Home units to produce music throughout the house. That’s something Echo doesn’t do at all right now, and when combined with Google’s streaming partners has the potential to be a huge feature for music fans that don’t have a household stereo system already.
Basically, the creator of the $35 Chromecast Audio could easily step up and make a $50 or $60 Google Home Mini that speaks to me when I called. Something that doesn’t require me to walk around the house with my phone at all times, that my kids could use when I’m not around, and that was actually available in every room at an affordable price.
Unlike Amazon’s larger Echo, there’d still be a big reason to purchase one or more Google Home over this Mini strategy thanks to Google Cast, but it’d be a huge step toward offering a complete response to Amazon Echo instead of feeling like the biggest search company in the world was always weirdly one step behind taking over my home.
Troubleshooting your Samsung Gear VR starts with our Ultimate Guide!
Everything you need to keep your Gear VR running well!
There’s a lot of great things you can do inside of a Samsung Gear VR, but like any virtual reality system one small thing can take a great deal away from the experience. It’s not always easy to find a quick solution to one of those problems, so we’ve compiled a complete list of all the things you need to know if something happens. Troubleshooting your Gear VR is easy if you’ve got a guide handy,and that’s where we come in.
Here’s the ultimate guide to troubleshooting your Gear VR!
Read more at VR Heads!
L’Oreal turns to virtual reality to train hairdressers
Out-of-town trainings and classes can cost aspiring hairdressers a pretty penny. L’Oréal’s high-tech alternative could change that, though, and could even make learning more fun. The French cosmetics company teamed up with VR software maker 8i to create a new virtual reality curriculum for the Matrix Academy, L’Oréal’s training program for fledgling hairstylists. Together, the two developed an immersive, room-scale VR experience where trainees can walk around and observe a virtual hairdresser style a virtual client’s hair from every angle. They can even step into the hairdresser’s position to get a first-person view of the process. That sounds so much better than watching YouTube tutorials, doesn’t it?
Prior to teaming up with L’Oréal, 8i was having issues creating virtual hair, especially the frizzy type. But the two managed to find a way to fix that. 8i uses off-the-shelf cameras and automated software to record real hairstylists and models in order to create holograms out of them. The results, according to VentureBeat, are 3D photorealistic recordings, which they’ve presented at the Fast Company Innovation Festival.
This represents one of the many possible ways to take advantage of VR’s capabilities outside of consumer-related applications. Businesses are starting to tap the power of VR — a British financial institution, for instance, recently decided to interview potential employees by having them accomplish tasks in virtual environments. L’Oréal’s VR-based curriculum will initially be available in 25 Matrix Academies in the US, but the cosmetics giant has plans to deploy it worldwide.
Source: VentureBeat, Fast Company
Fove’s eye-tracking VR headset is up for pre-order
Last year, we took a look at Fove, a unique take on virtual reality that tracks your eyes in addition to your head for increased accuracy and realism. This doesn’t just reduce head movement — it also reduces the likelihood of VR sickness and introduces a whole new style of gameplay where you can simply look at certain objects to trigger an action. Back then, Fove was just a Kickstarter project, but now it’s ready for the masses. Units will finally start shipping to Kickstarter backers next month, and it’s also now available for pre-order on Fove’s website. It’ll retail for $599 but those who pre-order between now and November 9th can get it for $549.
Fove gets its name from “foveated rendering,” which is a technique used to render scenes in only the area where the eye can see. This, Fove says, is vastly more efficient than having to render the scene over a large area. It improves performance significantly and reduces strain on the system, according to the company. It also means that unlike other headsets such as the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift, you could use the Fove with lower-end PCs. The Rift’s recently announced Spacewarp technology allows for this as well, but Fove CTO and co-founder Lochlainn Wilson says the company still has the Rift beat when it comes to sharpness and quality. The Fove’s display has a resolution of 2,560 x 1,440, while the Rift’s is 2,160 x 1,200.
I had a chance to try on the latest iteration of the Fove headset and it looks a little different from the concept art used in the company’s Kickstarter pitch. Instead of a white plastic enclosure, there are velcro straps holding your head in place. “It was just too hard to make sure it fit on different-sized heads,” Wilson said. The current iteration doesn’t allow for thick-rimmed glasses like mine so I had to take them off, but Wilson says the company hopes to have a more spectacle-friendly version next year.
Like my co-worker Roberto Baldwin described when he tried on an early version of the Fove, you first have to go through a calibration process where your eyes follow a floating green dot for a few minutes. After doing that, I found myself facing an army of tiny triangle-shaped spaceships. Just looking at them was enough to trigger gunfire, though I had to make sure the crosshairs lined up correctly with my targets. Next, I saw a demo where the depth of field changes depending on where I look at an image — focusing on the foreground will blur out the background, for example, while staring at an object in the background will fuzz its surroundings, creating a bokeh effect.
I also played a demo of Project Falcon, an on-the-rails first-person-shooter that was a collaboration between Fove and RewindVR. I used an Xbox controller to blast away enemy robots, using only my eyes to aim. I still occasionally had to turn my head to pinpoint those that were slightly out of view, but otherwise I kept relatively still, letting my gaze wander. Which was a good thing, because once eye-tracking was turned off, I found that moving my head around gave me a bit of motion sickness. Wilson also showed me another game where you’re a bound captive, unable to move your arms. As you confront your interrogative captor, you can look around the room at different items in order to prompt him to take certain actions, like, say assassinating an informant.
But even though Fove is a full-fledged VR headset that works with a variety of Steam VR games, Wilson made it clear that the device is still very much for developers. “We’re coming at VR from a slightly different angle,” he said, adding that he’s not trying to compete with Oculus or HTC. Instead, he really just wants to develop the eye-tracking tech as much as possible.
Yuka Kojima, Fove’s CEO and co-founder, added that while eye-tracking has an obvious use case in games, it could also be used in other applications too, like in avatars for social VR. Indeed, Fove is even working on mouth tracking so that you could interact with your friends’ in VR in a much more realistic way.
“I believe eye-tracking is going to be in every headset by 2018,” Wilson said. “But we can get it to you today.”
Source: Fove
Microsoft’s Teams is its Slack competitor for Office 365
Because Yammer isn’t quite enough to take on Slack, Microsoft is launching yet another business chat app: Teams. It’ll be part of the Office 365 suite, and from the video below, it looks like it’ll differentiate itself from Slack and Hipchat with threaded chats, Office document collaboration and multi-person video chat. Basically, the company is trying to bring all of productivity strengths together in a single app.
“How to assemble a high performance team and setting them up for success is one of the central pursuits for any organization,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said on stage. “No two teams are the same, no two projects are the same. There’s no universal tool for teams, but rather a universal toolkit we call office 365. Empowering teams is more than just solving any logistical challenge of bringing people to the same place.”
Nadella described Yammer as a “bulletin board for the entire company,” and noted that plenty of teams are already collaborating using Skype for Business chats, as well. But there’s still a need for a single, cohesive app to bring all of that together. Teams is a “chat-based workspace” designed around real-time collaboration, Nadella said. It won’t be replacing Yammer immediately, though it’s easy to see how it could eventually do so. On the mobile front, there will be Teams apps for Windows Phone, iOS and Android.
Teams is akin to an “open office-space environment,” according to Office 365 corporate vice president Kirk Koenigsbauer. It brings in all of the features you’d expect, like group messaging, and Skype integration for video and voice calls, along with things Slack doesn’t yet offer, like the aforementioned threaded chats. And yes, there will be plenty of emoji integration to spice up your boring work chats. You can also move between different teams pretty easily, something that’s much more difficult with Slack.
It’s hard not to view Teams as yet another entry in a crowded collaboration market. But it packs in some thoughtful features that might tempt over users of other apps. The main screen for each team has a tabbed interface that lets you quickly locate other files, tasks that need to be completed and even third-party apps. In an on-stage demo, a Microsoft rep showed off how a Zendesk tab could let you quickly access tickets associated with the Team. The helper bot for Teams, “T-Bot,” can also help you figure out the app with simple conversational language.
Teams wasn’t exactly a secret. It’s been rumored for months, and Slack went so far as to take out a full page ad in the New York Times to welcome Microsoft as a direct competitor (with a health amount of posturing, naturally).
If you’re eager to try out Teams, you can access it today as part of a customer preview in Office 365. It’ll be available in 18 languages across 181 countries. Moving forward, Microsoft plans to include it with all Office 365 Enterprise and Small Business Suite subscriptions starting in the first quarter of next year.
AIVAnet 