Samsung will limit Note 7 battery charge to 30% in the UK

Samsung is doing all it can to persuade customers to return the Note 7.

It’s been two months since Samsung officially terminated the Note 7, but an estimated 10% of devices sold in Europe are yet to be returned to the manufacturer. In a bid to further dissuade customers from using the phone, Samsung announced that it will roll out a software update to all Note 7 devices in the UK that will limit the battery charge to 30%:

As part of our absolute focus on customer safety, from 15th December, all Galaxy Note 7 devices will receive a new battery software update that will limit the maximum charging capacity to 30 percent. This software update is designed to further minimise customer risk and reinforce to customers to replace their device through the Galaxy Note 7 Replacement Programme as soon as possible.

Samsung is taking drastic measures to ensure that it retrieves the remaining Note 7 units in the wild. Note 7 devices in New Zealand, Australia, and Canada are being cut off from accessing cellular and Wi-Fi networks, and Samsung is rolling out an update to U.S. units that will prevent them from charging and connecting to networks, eliminating their ability “to work as mobile devices.”

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Android Auto app: Bringing connectivity to all cars

Until recently, access to Android Auto was at the whim of car manufacturers or else involved switching out your head unit for a system that would support Google’s in-car platform.

When Google released the Android Auto app for all phones in all cars in November, it changed the Android Auto game, liberating the platform from this prerequisite to be supported by the car. 

Here’s everything you need to know about the new Android Auto experience, which can bring connected features like navigation, calling and music, to any car, old or new.

For more information on Android Auto on your car’s system, read our sister feature on the in-car experience.

Android Auto app: Getting started

The Android Auto app is available to all Android devices and needs to be installed from Google Play, which is quick and easy.

The next thing you need (to be safe) is a mount for your phone. There are loads of options out there, from windscreen suction mounts to vent mounts, some are magnetic, some are clamps, but you can find lots of options for little money in most retailers.

We like the minimalist vent mount like the Mpow grip, and slipping the metal plate inside the phone’s case, but the choice is yours.

Essentially, that’s all you need to get started, as Android Auto will run as a car mode on your phone, without the need to do anything else.

This is a basic setup, but if you’re driving around in an older car with no other connectivity, this is all you need, except perhaps a charger for your phone.

Android Auto app: Car Bluetooth

Many cars come with Bluetooth and that’s what Android Auto is designed to be used with. Once you connect your Android phone to your car’s Bluetooth, you have the option to have Android Auto automatically launch when it connects to your car.

This is a really useful option, because it adds a seamlessness to the experience. You get in your car, attach your phone to the mount, fire up the engine and your phone opens Android Auto, ready to serve you on your drive.

It’s also worth adding your car as a “trusted device” (you’ll get this option on first connection). This means that you won’t have to then unlock your phone when you get in, it will be ready to roll as soon as you start your car.

It’s also worth making sure that your voice is a “trusted voice” in the Ok Google hotword controls. As the Android Auto app supports voice commands for everything, it’s the best way of using the system, so make sure it’s all turned on (open the Google app > Settings > Voice to find all the options you need, including Maps and car support).

What can your car’s Bluetooth do?

In many modern cars, Bluetooth will do everything with an Android phone.

It will allow you to make calls, it can also be used for media playback, letting your car access music on your phone, as well as taking your phone’s audio, so that everything comes through your car’s speakers and you can change the volume on your steering wheel and so on. 

Each car is different, so it will take some investigation to find out what you can and can’t do.

Android Auto and Bluetooth in older cars 

Older cars vary in support for different Bluetooth services and some won’t offer Bluetooth media support. That doesn’t necessarily matter for Android Auto, as you’ll still get navigation on the phone screen and the car will handle calling as normal.

However, for the full experience, you really want all the phone’s audio rooted through your car, which might mean a cable connection, perhaps a 3.5mm connection to an aux input.

There are lots of ways to do this, from something like the Pure Highway 600, which also adds a DAB receiver and separate controls, through to the Anker SoundSync Drive, which basically adds Bluetooth and gives you an aux in connection.

The long and short of it is that older cars will need a little more fiddling around to get everything working, but in most cases there is a simple way to do it.

Android Auto app: Functions and features

The Android Auto app looks the same and behaves the same on your phone as it would on a car’s system. The idea behind Android Auto is to give you the basic things you want when driving and this is how it breaks down. 

Android Auto home screen

This presents big card-like notifications for each section, so you can access things with a tap. It also gives you “recent” activities, like recent destinations you navigated to or recent calls. This means that from home you can go back to those things without having to root around your phone.

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The home screen will also provide playback for messages, which we’ll talk about in a second.

You also get icons to tap into music, calls or navigation.

Android Auto messaging and calling 

Android Auto supports messaging, from services like WhatsApp, Messenger and Facebook, but in a way that’s safe for driving. That means you can’t read the text, instead it will read them to you.

When a message arrives a ping and a big shade will drop down giving you the option to listen to the message or mute it. You can also reply with a standard message (“I’m driving right now” is the default) and mute messaging services.

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Those messages will sit on the Android Auto home screen so that you can return to them later. Amusingly, emoji are spoken and once your friends know this, they’ll send you all sorts of rubbish. 

The best part, of course, is that you get Google’s voice recognition and this really is a step above most other systems that will attempt to listen to your voice and form a message. Replying or sending new messages is as simple as saying “OK Google”.

The same applies to calling, you can control everything via voice and this is a lot better than most in-car systems. There’s a tab for calling, so you can access recent calls with a tap, as well as voicemail and get a bigger dialpad for making calls.

It’s a little surprising that Android Auto doesn’t offer your “favourites” as a hit list, but in reality, voice control is by far the easiest way to trigger calls. 

Android Auto music

Music is pretty well supported by Android Auto, supporting a number of different apps and services, like Spotify and Google Play. You essentially get the option to pick your service and then when you talk to Google, it will play from that service.

This is where you really need a connection to the rest of your car, as playing through the phone’s speakers doesn’t really cut it.

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The interface lets you skip tracks or pause with a tap or head into playlists. Both Play Music and Spotify give you music to find with a few taps, but one thing you can’t really manage is relative volumes – you can’t adjust the music volume in relation to the navigation volume, so things can get a little disjointed as the music dips to let you hear navigation commands. 

Android Auto and Google navigation

For many, navigation will be the big sell of Android Auto, with the familiarity of Google Maps. While many in-car satnav systems will still cost you on the options list, Google Maps is free, apart from the data costs.

Google Maps navigation has been getting better. The mapping itself is good, but the real star is the close tie to Google’s search: “Ok Google, navigate me to the vet in Weybridge” is something that other systems won’t do and Google is much better at finding up-to-date locations, especially for businesses.

Navigation is clear with sensible map features and the voice commands are good. You don’t get the full run of features like lane guidance, but you do get traffic. This gives some scope for route selection and fairly accurate times. In many ways, Google Maps navigation is better than many of the in-car systems you’d have to pay for and certainly finding your destination is easier. 

The navigation experience isn’t as good as TomTom’s best, especially when it comes to route planning and the live handling of traffic, but you’re saving yourself a hefty initial outlay. Just bear in mind that you’ll likely be using data for mapping. 

Android Auto app: Conclusions

Giving all these connected car functions to your phone, rather than needing them to be displayed on a car’s screen, makes them a lot more accessible to a wider range of users. If you have an Android phone, you basically have a smart car experience too. 

For anyone in an older car, there’s likely to be a way that you can quickly and easily add the connectivity you’d need to your car for a seamless experience and even if you can’t, your smartphone can offer you an excellent in-car companion. 

Importantly, Android Auto is simple and the excellent support for voice control means you don’t have to touch your phone to do anything. If that saves people from fiddling with their phone when driving, then it’s a very good thing.

Lexus has turned a car into a giant LED lightshow

Thought having LED headlights was cool? Maybe they’re even adaptive to adjust to oncoming conditions. Lexus laughs in the face of your puny headlights and has decided to cover one of its IS cars in 41,999 LEDs instead. We’re not quite sure why one more couldn’t be fitted to round the number up to an even 42,000, though.

Lexus created the LIT IS car for a music video for British singer-songwriter Dua Lipa’s latest music video for ‘Be The One’, but there’s a lot more to it than just looking cool on screen.

The LED strips have three modes, the first can respond to gestures from the driver, a second can react the any music being played, to act as a visualiser of sorts, and a third mode can even respond to a connected games console.

It can’t have been easy to fit half a mile’s worth of LEDs to the car, but the strips use 1,209 watts of power to generate 175,000 lumens. A Lexus spokesman said of the LIT IS: “Through this responsive technology and the animations, an expressive car was turned into an actual vehicle for expression” and added it’s been created to be a “character and visual anchor for the Be The One music video”.

The Lexus LIT IS is a one-of-a-kind car and isn’t available to buy, but we can’t help but think LEDs could one day be adopted on a smaller scale for the likes of advertising.

Of course, it’s not the first time we’ve seen a bespoke car designed for a musician, as Nissan kindly gifted deadmau5 with a GTR wrapped in a Nyan Cat vinyl after Ferrari demanded he remove the wrap from his ‘Purrari’.

The Grand Tour more popular than Game of Thrones, to pirates at least

Amazon’s The Grand Tour is reported the most illegally downloaded TV show of all time, beating Game of Thrones to the unwanted pinnacle of the piracy charts.

Data analyst Muso told the Daily Mail that the first episode alone had been illegally downloaded 7.9 million times. In comparison, one of the previous record holders, Game of Thrones season four episode seven, was illegally downloaded 1.5 million times in a similar time frame.

Episode two of The Grand Tour was downloaded 6.4 million times, while episode three was pirated 4.6 million times.

Torrenters in the UK have been the most active, with the country making up 13.7 per cent of the overall download total.

Amazon is yet to reveal its official, legal viewing figures for The Grand Tour but did reveal that it the first episode was the “biggest show premiere ever on Amazon Prime Video, breaking records around the world.”

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Even just counting those who have seen it illegally, Clarkson, May and Hammond have trounced their old programme. The first episode of the new Top Gear was watched by 4.3 million viewers, with the second dipping to 2.8 million.

Muso chief Chris Elkins was taken aback by the figures. “It is the most illegally downloaded programme ever. It is off the scale in terms of volume,” he said.

“It has overtaken every big show, including Game Of Thrones, for the totals across different platforms. We monitor thousands of campaigns and this one really stands out.”

NASA is helping Stephen Hawking get a tiny ship to Alpha Centauri

NASA is helping Stephen Hawking and Russian venture capitalist Yuri Milner with the monumental task of getting a tiny probe to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to Earth. Project Starshot aims to propel a lightweight silicon “StarChip” to one-fifth the speed of light by hitting it with lasers from Earth, getting it to the star within 20 years. The space agency will help solve one of the thorniest problems — the intense radiation of interstellar travel.

To accelerate it a chip with lasers to 134 million mph — 1000 times faster than a regular spacecraft could go — it has to be feather light. That means that radiation shielding is out of the question, as it would add too much additional weight, NASA believes. Another option, changing the chip’s route to Alpha Centauri to avoid radiation, would add time without significantly decreasing the radiation problem.

NASA and researchers from the Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) think that the best option might be “self-healing” transistors. The team tested an experimental gate-all-around nanowire transistor to see if it could self-heal from radiation damage. Such chips can be used for both flash memory and logic transistors, and would be ideal for the project, according to KAIST researchers. That’s because they have very small 20-nanometer features, making them both lightweight and relatively impervious to cosmic rays.

On such chips, the logic gate completely surrounds the nanowire channel, so by adding an extra contact, you can pass current through the gate and heat it up. That causes a heating and cooling “annealing” effect, restoring the functionality of a chip that has been damaged by ionizing radiation. “Therefore, the lifetime of devices can be extended, which opens an opportunity for nano-spacecraft sustainable for more than 20 years of deep space exploration,” according to the paper.

There’s a lot more experimentation required to prove conclusively that it works, but it’s a step in the right direction. It’s also just one of a huge number of other potential problems that need to be solved before the chip can be laser-beamed on its way (see the animation video, above).

It’s worth the effort, however, as we’re lucky enough to have a three-star system (completely with a potentially habitable planet) so close to Earth. If they succeed, it would represent a huge breakthrough in space travel, and you might even get to see it in your lifetime.

Via: Independent

Source: Spectrum IEEE

Google Home now integrates with Netflix and Google Photos

You can now ask Google Assistant to play your favorite shows on Netflix.

Last week, Google rolled out third-party integration for Google Home through Actions on Google, giving developers the ability to build conversational interfaces and integrate their services with the Google Assistant.

With Google Home offering fairly limited support for third-party content, the goal with Actions is to boost the extensibility of the Google Assistant by enabling it to hook into more services. Google demoed Netflix integration on Google Home during the October 4 launch event, and now the integration is live on the device.

You can now link your Netflix account with Google Home and play TV shows and movies to a Chromecast or a Cast-enabled device by issuing voice commands. Google Photos is also integrated with Home, allowing you to see your photos on your TV. To set up the integration, you’ll have to navigate to the Videos and Photos section under Google Home’s settings.

Even though I was able to link my Netflix account with Google Home, I didn’t have any luck getting Assistant to stream content to my TV. It looks like Google is yet to enable server-side integration, so it may be a few days before you can ask Google to stream The Crown on Netflix using your voice.

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Researchers digitally reconstruct the face of a legendary Scottish king

Robert the Bruce, a medieval warrior and hero-king of the Scottish people, is something of an enigma. While his exploits in battle against both domestic rivals and British occupiers have been well-documented, descriptions of his physical appearance have long been lost to history. But thanks to a collaborative effort between researchers at the University of Glasgow and Liverpool John Moores University (LJMU), we may finally know what he looked like.

The research team, led by University of Glasgow professor, Dr. Martin MacGregor, based its CGI reconstruction on a skull cast from the Hunterian Museum at London’s Royal College of Surgeons. This skull purportedly once belonged to Robert the Bruce. “The skull was excavated in 1818-19 from a grave in Dunfermline Abbey, mausoleum of Scotland’s medieval monarchs,” Dr MacGregor explained in a statement. “After the excavation the original skeleton and skull were sealed in pitch and reburied, but not before a cast of the head was taken.”

Using this cast, the researchers were able to accurately reconstruct both the muscle structure and determine the overlying facial features — much like the LJMU team did when English King Richard III’s skull was discovered under a parking lot in 2012. Unfortunately, since the teams were working with a cast rather than the actual bone itself, they could not extract DNA from it to establish hair, eye or skin color. Still, this is the most “realistic appearance of Robert the Bruce to-date, based on all the skeletal and historical material available,” according to Professor Caroline Wilkinson, Director of LJMU’s Face Lab. “There have also been a number of advances in facial reconstruction techniques since previous depictions of this Scottish hero, including better facial feature prediction and more advanced CGI.”

The reconstruction shows that Robert the Bruce would have been a powerfully-built man but not altogether healthy. Historians have long suspected that Robert suffered a chronic ailment, possibly leprosy, given the disfigurement to the cast’s the upper jaw and nose. So, the research team worked that affliction into their CGI reconstruction as well.

“The case of Richard III revealed how far the technology had advanced,” Dr. MacGregor explained. “I saw an opportunity to apply the technology to the Hunterian skull held here at Glasgow: first to test the credibility of its connection to Bruce, and then to try to add to our knowledge of Scotland’s greatest king.”

Source: University of Glasgow

Apple Reseller B&H Says BeatsX Earphones Delayed At Least 2-3 Months

Apple’s new BeatsX wireless earphones remain listed as “coming this Fall” on its website in the United States, despite just nine days remaining before the first official day of winter in the northern half of the world.

Now, we have reason to believe Apple may miss this target. In an email to a customer this weekend, authorized reseller B&H Photo Video said Apple has informed them shipping will not begin for at least 2-3 months.

This email is being sent in regards to your order for 1 of the Beats by Dr. Dre BeatsX In-Ear Headphones (Black).

We regret to inform you that the manufacturer has informed us that they still do not know when they will begin shipping this item but they do know that it will take at least 2-3 months. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this delay has caused you.

If the timeline holds true, BeatsX shipments would not begin until around February or March. Apple could still release BeatsX earphones on its website ahead of time, before providing shipments to B&H Photo Video, but a 2-3 month gap before third-party sales begin would be unusual for an Apple product.

Apple announced the BeatsX at its iPhone 7 event in September alongside its AirPods, which were also delayed beyond their planned late October launch and have yet to become available. Apple pundit John Gruber cited manufacturing issues at scale with AirPods, so perhaps Apple is facing similar issues with BeatsX pairs.

In terms of AirPods, Gruber loosely said he has heard from at least one source who pointed to a launch in the next week or so, although Gruber is not ruling out a launch in January or later. Listen to the latest episode of The Talk Show podcast, where he and guest Glenn Fleishman discuss the topic around the 76:35 mark.

New versions of Beats Solo3 and Powerbeats3 headphones powered by Apple’s new W1 chip were released in September and October respectively.

(Thanks, Christian!)

Tags: Beats, BeatsX
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