Roost Smart Smoke Alarm RSA-400 review – CNET
The Good The Roost Smart Smoke Alarm includes the easy-to-use Roost Smart Battery, which allows it to reliably send you push notifications when your alarm sounds.
The Bad The alarm itself adds nothing to the experience. You’d get the exact same functions by installing a Roost Battery in your own alarm.
The Bottom Line Think of buying the Roost Smart Smoke Alarm like buying a dumb alarm packaged with a smart battery. If you need both, it’s worth a purchase, but if you only want smarts, get the battery on its own.
Visit manufacturer site for details.
The Roost Smart Smoke Alarm is a logical step forward for the company that made the Roost Smart Battery.
The battery is a useful, Wi-Fi-connected 9-volt that fits in your existing alarms and sends push notifications to your phone when the alarm sounds or the battery runs low. The problem with the Roost Smart Smoke Alarm is that it adds nothing to connected smoke detection that the included Roost Smart Battery can’t do on its own.
Roost just put its name on a Universal Security Instruments (USI) alarm and called it smart. It’s not.
If you do need a new alarm, Roost actually has two options. We tested the $80 RSA-400, which senses smoke, fire, carbon monoxide and natural gas. You can also get the $60 version of the Roost Smart Smoke Alarm — the RSA-200 — which just senses smoke and fire. The RSA-400 is reasonably priced. A similar USI smoke and CO detector costs $50, plus the $35 Roost. The RSA-200 is less so, as a USI detector that just smells smoke is only $12.
Either way, I don’t recommend replacing a working smoke alarm with a Roost Smart Smoke Alarm just to add remote notifications. You can get that with a $35 Roost Battery and your existing alarm. If you want wholesale smart replacements, I recommend spending a little more for the $100 Nest Protect.
The Roost Smart Smoke Alarm plays it safe
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High hopes
I really liked the Roost Smart Battery when I reviewed it last year. It looks just like an ordinary 9V, so if you can replace a battery, you can install a Roost. Hidden in that familiar form are a Wi-Fi antenna, a microphone and a replaceable power pack that snaps free from the bottom of the battery. Supposedly, a Roost lasts five years. When that time expires, you’ll get a notification and you can buy a new power pack for $15.
The Roost App is simple and intuitive. Alerts arrived promptly when we tested it. Now, the Roost works with online rule maker IFTTT so it can integrate with a larger smart-home setup. For example, you can create a recipe that tells your smart lights to flash when your alarm sounds.
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The Roost springs into action when your alarm sounds.
Screenshots by Andrew Gebhart/CNET
Because of how much I liked the Roost battery, I had lofty expectations for the Roost Smart Smoke Alarm. One criticism I had of the battery is that the in-app silencing feature doesn’t work on hard-wired alarms. That’s understandable, as it’s just a battery and it silences the alarm by cutting the power. I thought the Roost Smoke Alarm would certainly address this problem, as well as close the gap between the Roost Battery and Nest in other ways by adding a light, a motion sensor or the ability to talk to other smoke detectors. Nope, nope and nope. The Roost Smoke Alarm adds nothing. In fact, Roost’s Smart Battery would be more useful in a different, battery-powered — app-silenceable — smoke detector.
All all-electric submarine, and more in the week that was
Are personal submarines the vehicles of the future? This week Ortega Submersible launched an all-electric sub that allows three divers to fly through the sea. In other transportation news, a Swiss pilot is testing the boundaries of solar flight by taking a sun-powered airplane to the edge of space. Public transportation is generally seen as safe and secure, but this week hackers broke into San Francisco’s Muni system and demanded a $70,000 ransom. A team of automakers is planning a fast-charging electric vehicle superhighway in Europe, and Copenhagen now officially has more bicycles than cars.
Nuclear waste is difficult to get rid of, but scientists just found a way to turn it into diamond batteries that last virtually forever. India just fired up the world’s largest solar plant, which produces enough electricity to power 150,000 homes. Energy-generating solar roadways are set to hit four continents next year. And Aarhaus, Denmark became the world’s first city to power its water treatment facility with sewage.
Human development is changing the face of the planet, and a new Google timelapse shows just how much havoc we’ve wrought in the last 32 years. Meanwhile, a team of scientists confirmed that a long-feared, catastrophic climate feedback loop is causing greenhouse gases to rise from the ground beneath our feet. In other science and technology news, scientists have found a way to make water freeze at boiling temperatures. Ukraine has built the world’s largest moveable metal structure, and this week they used it to seal Chernobyl’s critically damaged reactor number four. And a petal-shaped pod transportation station offers an elegant mobility solution for Dubai.
Pros and cons: Our quick verdict on the NES Classic Edition
The NES Classic is an easy sell: It’s a $60 device that looks and feels like the original Nintendo Entertainment System, with a library of 30 popular games pre-loaded. It’s also easy to set up — all you need is a spare USB port on your TV. The problem? The device is such a great proposition that it’s either sold out everywhere, or only available through resellers for five times the price. We’re not sure we recommend spending $300 on this, especially given a few flaws like the too-short controller cables and the fact that you can’t download any additional games. But if you do resort to desperate measures to get one this holiday season, we won’t judge.
NFL loosens its policies on teams posting GIFs and videos
The NFL’s current rules social media posts have been rather draconian, even after a recent rethink. Football teams couldn’t post any video during the game window until the NFL made a sanctioned clip available on its servers, and they couldn’t create any GIFs during game time. They couldn’t post more than 8 clips on game day, either. However, the league appears to be changing its mind. Yahoo Finance has obtained a memo revealing that the NFL has once again loosened its policies. Teams can now post non-highlight GIFs and videos (that is, no on-the-field action) on their own, right up to a newly expanded 16-video cap. If they want to celebrate fans or the halftime show, they don’t have to wait for the NFL to act first.
That’s just the start. Teams can post five clips to Snapchat during a game, and stream three non-game day press conferences on Facebook Live. The memo also reveals a “test agreement” that will have Giphy serve as a source of “ancillary game and historical/iconic” GIFs. You won’t visit Giphy to relive an epic touchdown from the weekend, but you won’t have to search the whole web just to find a classic moment. The dry run lasts until June 2017.
A spokesperson confirmed the move to Yahoo and noted that it was a response to “feedback” from teams.
As you’ve probably gathered, the NFL isn’t exactly flinging the doors wide open. It’s still barring anything that might give you a reason to skip those oh-so-lucrative TV broadcasts and official live streams. All the same, it’s clear that the league is acknowledging reality — it can’t pretend that it’s always as quick to react as the teams themselves, or that it can downplay services like Snapchat in the modern era. If it’s going to drive interest in football, it has to capture the moment-to-moment thrills wherever viewers happen to be.
Via: Mashable
Source: Yahoo Finance
Trump defense secretary pick serves on Theranos’ board
President-elect Trump’s rapidly growing circle of advisers and cabinet members continues to raise eyebrows among the tech-savvy. The incoming leader has picked retired General James Mattis as his Secretary of Defense, and the Marine has been a devoted champion of Theranos — you know, the blood testing firm facing both a criminal investigation and a slew of lawsuits over its technology claims. He’s on the company’s board of directors, but email obtained by the Washington Post shows that Mattis bent over backwards to support Theranos in the years when he was leading US Central Command.
Mattis was determined to give the rapid blood testing a field test in Afghanistan, and told Theranos chief Elizabeth Holmes that he was “kicking this [plan] into overdrive” back in 2012. He’s known to have personally called a Major General at the US Army’s medical research headquarters, as well. And when military regulations expert Lt. Col. David Shoemaker raised concerns that Theranos’ testing wasn’t FDA-compliant, Holmes appealed to Mattis to correct the “blatantly false information,” and he swung into action by telling Shoemaker and others that there needed to be a comparison study in Afghanistan “ASAP.”
There aren’t any indications that Mattis broke rules, but he came close. Near the end of 2012, Col. Kent Kester claimed there was an “intentional effort” to “short-cut” procedures and get Theranos on the battlefield. Shoemaker even got email from an unnamed military staffer who said the Navy Attorney General was annoyed by Theranos’ attempts to circumvent the rulebook.
This doesn’t mean that Mattis will start cheerleading for Theranos in his Defense Secretary role. An ethics official warned the General against representing the company in front of the military once he had retired, for one thing. Also, Theranos’ dream is rapidly falling apart between lab closures and intense legal scrutiny. However, Mattis may have to rethink his board role if he wants to avoid conflict-of-interest accusations, even if he has no intention of hawking Theranos as a defense chief.
Via: ProPublica (Twitter)
Source: Theranos, Washington Post (1), (2)
Microsoft hopes your Windows PC can replace an Amazon Echo
If rumors are true, Microsoft may be one of the few major consumer tech giants that doesn’t have a smart, voice-guided speaker in the works… but that doesn’t mean it’s sitting on its thumbs. In an expansion of recent code discoveries, Windows Central sources claim that Windows 10 is getting a Home Hub feature that will turn supporting PCs into rivals for the Amazon Echo and Google Home. You’d have a shared, login-free desktop that shares family resources like calendars and shopping lists, and a smart home app that would make it easy to control all your connected devices. And as you might surmise, the Cortana voice assistant would play a much, much more important role.
Under Home Hub, Cortana would have access to both shared content as well as that of individual users who are signed in. That would tackle one of the biggest issues with devices like Google Home — that they’re frequently limited to supporting a single user’s account. Supporting PCs would also be much more Cortana-friendly. You could use voice commands from a greater distance, and wake up the PC with voice alone. Home Hub-ready systems could even tout light and motion sensors to wake up whenever someone enters the room.
Provided the leak is accurate, it could be a while before you see every element of Home Hub. It’s reportedly scheduled to arrive through three significant Windows 10 updates (nicknamed Redstone 2, 3 and 4) that would start arriving in 2017. And if you want a PC designed for the feature from the ground up, you may have to wait until the very end of the year. Microsoft is said to be asking vendors (including HP and Lenovo) to step up with Home Hub-optimized all-in-one PCs in late 2017.
There’s no certainty that everything will pan out as planned. WC is quick to warn that delays and cancellations could change features and timelines, assuming Home Hub ships at all. However, it’s easy to see the incentive for Microsoft to make this a reality. In some ways, Echo-like speakers reduce the need for a family computer — you can’t do your homework through a speaker, but you can accomplish tasks that would normally require breaking out your phone or sitting at a desk. Home Hub would keep the PC relevant for homes where a shared machine makes sense, and might even provide an edge over smart speakers by offering the visual, multi-user info that you don’t get right now.
Source: Windows Central
Panasonic’s OLED-fighting LCD is meant for professionals
Panasonic’s salad days in the consumer TV space are in its past, but today the company announced a new IPS display technology that might help it win back some of the professional market. Essentially, it’s making an LCD panel with the precision backlighting capabilities of an OLED. Thanks to a new backlight technology, these panels can turn off the backlight on a per-pixel basis, granting them an advertised ” over 1,000,000:1″ contrast ratio. Meaning that blacks will be absolutely black while whites could be eye-searingly bright — within the same image — and HDR and colors should look incredibly life-like.
The company says that these are perfect for use in video production work, while one of the provided sample images shows a 31-inch panel being used to display an x-ray image. Sony has dabbled in the medical display space, as well. What’s more, the new light-modulating cells help the screens hit a maximum (and stable) brightness of 1,000 cd/m2. For context, Samsung’s KS8000 TV hits 137 cd/m2, and 766 cd/m2 with HDR on, out of the box. So yeah, this could be pretty impressive.
Whether we see this tech hit a TV you can grab from Best Buy is anyone’s guess. These types of panels are usually incredibly expensive and not meant for folks like you and me.
Source: Business Wire
All the reveals from PlayStation Experience 2016
It definitely feels like Sony showed off more games during the PlayStation Experience keynote today than it did at E3. Which is pretty impressive, when you think about it. The show started out with a glimpse at the next chapter of the Uncharted saga and ended with, well, the next chapter in the The Last of Us.
Both were extremely unexpected treats from developer Naughty Dog, but in between those bookends were a ton of other teases and announcements from the company’s 20-plus years of gaming history. If you wanted fresh versions of Parappa the Rapper and WipeOut, or even an updated take on the obscure Windjammers, you’re all set. Oh, and how about the next game from Housemarque, the Robotron-esque Nex Machina? Now, let’s get to the videos.
Apple letter offers a clue to its self-driving car plans
Apple’s hopes of developing self-driving car technology have been a poorly kept secret for a while, and now it’s coming clean. The company has sent a letter to the US’ National Highway Traffic Safety Administration acknowledging that the company is “excited” about automation in numerous fields, “including transportation.” It wants to test self-driving car tech, and it’s hoping to address both ethical and regulatory issues. It believes the industry should share crash (and near-crash) data to improve safety, for example, but this “should not come at the cost of privacy.”
Crucially, Apple also believes that incumbent automakers might have an unfair edge. It wants newcomers to have the “same opportunity” to test self-driving vehicles that more “established” companies do, without having to chase after regulatory exemptions like it would today.
In a statement to the Financial Times, Apple confirmed the letter’s core message: the firm wrote to the NHTSA because it’s “investing heavily in machine learning and autonomous systems,” and it wants to help shape the “best practices” for self-driving cars. It’s not confirming what it’s making, however, including reports that it scaled back its automotive plans to focus on an underlying tech platform instead of building vehicles. There’s no longer any doubt that Apple is interested in driverless cars, but there’s also no guarantee that its technology will reach production cars in the first place, let alone that you’ll see something Apple-branded on the road.
Via: VentureBeat, Financial Times
Source: Regulatory.gov (PDF)
Android and Chill: I almost miss everything being broken
Android is a lot better than it used to be, but those early days were really fun.
I waited in line to buy the G1 at an Alexandria, Virginia T-Mobile store. Yes, there was a line — in San Francisco and New York there were even people camping out. The phone I was buying wasn’t going to replace whatever beat-to-hell BlackBerry I was using back then, I didn’t even have T-Mobile service where I lived (though paying for it anyway proved to be worth it and I’ll never give up this ancient plan) and the G1 wouldn’t even be able to be activated in the DC area for three weeks because it wasn’t a 3G market on launch day. I wanted the Google phone because I like to mess with stuff.
Fast forward eight years and all the assorted electronic crap I’ve gone through since and the G1 was still one of the best things I ever bought. All because of how fun it was to try and fix the broken mess that was Android back then.
Everything is better now. That means we don’t have to try and fix it.
The Nexus 5X is the modern version of the G1 because it’s cheap, easy to do “stuff” with, and other fun people have one. But it’s not the same because Android isn’t the same. Now that everything works — from the build tools to the compiler chain to the finished software — I don’t spend the time I used to spend building and fiddling with it. Don’t get me wrong, this is good. I’ve since ditched other platforms and want/need phone software that works and the last couple of Android versions have been just that, minus a few cases for a handful of people that we would see with any software. I know my phone will work when I get a call or a message or just want to challenge some crazy word that was played in Scrabble. But I find myself missing the days when it was all brokenAF and the feeling that came with hours of fooling with it and making it work. Even the latest Android beta for 7.1.1 mostly just works without building or flashing anything.
Part of the reason is how my job has changed. Six years ago Dieter Bohn and Phil Nickinson had the insight to know what was going to happen to Android and found me to come work here. Having a dude who could put Android on a toaster or make a broken build for an ADP (Android Developer Phone, the precursor to the Nexus and Pixel) work again was a smart move. My writing skills were borderline because the only things I ever wrote and got paid for writing were technical manuals for automation equipment and reading one of those is as bad as you think it would be. I think that got better (I hope it did) but my job was to pick something that was broken, figure out how to fix it or find someone who already fixed it and write about it. It was a fun and easy way to make a living.
There are plenty of other fun things to do, but I still miss fixing broken things once in a while.
What I do now has drifted away from phone stuff a little, and while it’s still fun (and as easy as I can make it be) it’s different. It’s better most of the time because I get to look at some cool shit that I didn’t get to look at before. Right now, I’m modding Skyrim because I’m writing something about the Havok engine. Next week I’m going to try Daydream View while under the influence of different substances. I have no complaints and know that this is the best job on the planet. But I still miss being a code-monkey just a little.
Android has come a long way. I see plenty of faces in the comments and in the forums that have been here long enough to know what I’m talking about and were along for the ride helping fix things and break new stuff. I think all of us know that things are much better the way they are now, but we also miss having to prod and coax things into submission every now and then. At least a little bit.
AIVAnet 