Fitbit updates help you meet fitness goals through your friends

Fitbit knows that maintaining a good exercise regimen is as much about motivation as anything else. That end, it’s launching multiple updates to help you stay focused. To start, its core mobile app now has a Community area that makes it easier to keep yourself going. There’s a social feed where you and your fitness-minded peers can compete with friends, find nearby workouts, join groups and share achievements. You’ll also get advice from Fitbit experts to help refine your routines, and there’s a Personal Goal Setting option in the app to help set realistic goals based on your activity.

The Fitstar Personal Trainer app, meanwhile, is receiving a major overhaul that’s aimed at giving you better (and more entertaining) guidance. It’ll recommend workouts based on your Fitbit device’s daily activity data, such as working on your upper body if you ran the day before. There are two certified personal trainers to coach you, and Fitstar Radio gives you a soundtrack for your runs and gym days.

If you happen to own a Blaze, you’ll get a pair of upgrades that first appeared on the Charge 2. You now have a better view of your cardio fitness level compared to others in your age group and gender, and there are guided breathing sessions to help reduce your blood pressure and stress levels.

The Fitbit updates will be staggered throughout the early part of the year. The new Fitstar Personal Trainer app is available right now, and Personal Goal Setting will arrive later in January. You’ll have to wait until February to get the Blaze features, however, and the Community update will arrive in March for the US, and everywhere else later in 2017.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Source: Fitbit (1), (2)

Apps that rely on Google Hangouts won’t work after April 25th

When Google launched Allo and Duo last year, it recast hangouts as a cross-platform chat app for enterprise customers. Now it’s making changes to help ensure that fate. A quiet update to the Google Hangouts FAQ reveals that the sun will set on the platform’s API in late April. Effectively, this means any consumer app that integrates with Google Hangouts will be dead in a matter of months.

“At the Google Horizon event in September 2016, we previewed a new experience for Hangouts focused on meetings,” The updated FAQ reads. “In order to streamline our efforts furhter, we will be retiring the Google+ Hangouts API.” According to Google, the integration simply isn’t needed anymore. “Hangouts is now turning to focus on enterprise use cases.”

This is hardly a surprise — Google outlined its vision for Hangouts’ new market early last year — but it is a bummer for apps that rely on the platform like PingPong Hangouts, Draw with your Face and Roll20. Still, some apps will still have access to Hangouts, but only if they qualify as enterprise communication tools, like Slack. Bummer.

Source: Techcrunch

GoPro CEO: Karma returning as the ‘ultimate GoPro’

2016 was a tough year for GoPro. I spoke with the company’s founder and CEO, Nick Woodman, about the challenges surrounding that Karma recall, how the company hopes to come back from that, and future plans for 2017. Woodman wasn’t shy about admitting the recall was “embarrassing.” But he’s optimistic that there’s still a place for Karma. The company is determined not just to put it back on the market, but make it more competitive than before with new features and updates — potentially as soon as its relaunch (likely in February).

Beyond Karma, Woodman spoke about his plans for VR video. People are already using GoPro’s to make 360 content, so unsurprisingly his focus is on making those videos easier to share. Woodman’s vision is a future where you record your activities with one, multi-lensed GoPro, creating a spherical video. You’d then simply watch that back on a phone. As you move the phone around, your motion would be tracked, and the app would spit out a matching, 2D video for sharing. “With VR, 360 video will be the ultimate GoPro” said Woodman. “And If I’m saying we’re calling this the ultimate, ultimate GoPro, you can imagine our focus and dedication on it.”

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

AirTV conveniently pairs streaming with over-the-air channels

With the plethora of TV streaming options, getting all of your content in one place can be a chore. At CES this week, Dish unveiled the AirTV: a 4K set-top box that handles Sling TV, Netflix, Android TV for other streaming apps and over-the-air channels. The $130 device also uses the Sling TV guide to organize all of that content. it also includes a remote with dedicated buttons for those aforementioned streaming libraries. I spent some time with the AirTV on the show floor to see how well it really works.

Let’s start with the remote. The accessory connects to the main box via Bluetooth and offers built-in voice controls. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to test those voice cues at a noisy CES booth. Since Dish owns Sling TV, it’s not surprising that there’s a dedicated button for that service at the top of the remote. It also makes sense given that the Sling TV interface is the main menu for the AirTV Buttons that provide direct access to both Netflix and Android TV are down at the bottom. All the usual controls for guide, info, volume, play/pause and navigation are here. There’s also a button to activate the voice feature.

The AirTV box itself is about the size of an Apple TV or Roku box so it won’t take up much space near your television. There’s a button for pairing the remote up top, easily accessible when you need it. Around back you’ll find ports for power, Ethernet, HDMI and USB. That USB socket is where you’ll plug in the OTA adapter to pipe in those free channels you receive. There’s a bundle that includes that add-on for $130 or it can be purchased separately for $40. An AirTV box on its own costs $100 and is available now. The 4K compatibility means you can pull in content from Netflix and YouTube in addition to any Android TV apps that support the standard.

Having all of that content in one place is great, but it only adds to the headache if it isn’t neatly organized. The Sling TV guide on AirTV does just that, putting Netflix-like rows of options divided up by service. For each one, horizontal scrolling allows you to flip through each service’s options. What’s more, the OTA channels are listed in the guide as well, so you can easily jump from The Crown to the local news when the time comes.

You won’t need a paid Sling TV account to use the device despite it using the cord-cutting service’s interface. You will need a a free account, though, and even if you aren’t interested in Sling’s lineup, you can still access OTA channels and other streaming apps. Of course, Dish is hoping you’ll commit to its service as that makes the device more compelling. It also adds a monthly subscription fee that varies based on the package(s) you select.

From our short time with the AirTV, the only real criticism is the color scheme. While most streaming boxes look to blend in on shelf with simple black or white outer shells, Dish’s new television gadget looks more like something Nintendo would have made a few years back with the combination of white and bright blue. If you don’t mind the look, the AirTV is a handy hub for your streaming and OTA content.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

LiquidSky streams your games to any device for free

LiquidSky has been quietly building up a base of players to test out its cloud gaming service, and now it’s ready to roll out for real, with a few added surprises.

First, let’s cover the basics: LiquidSky promises to let anyone play any PC game on Mac, Windows, Android or Linux devices via the magic of cloud streaming. It’s a promise we’ve heard before from companies like OnLive, a service that racked up $40 million in debt by 2012 and finally folded in 2015. Cloud gaming services like PlayStation Now exist today, but they’re still not exactly mainstream.

However, at the beginning of 2017, the world — and its technology — might finally be ready for cloud gaming. More than 1 million people signed up to participate in the LiquidSky beta and the service is more open than its predecessors’, allowing players to run absolutely any PC game, including League of Legends, Overwatch and every title on Steam, Battle.net, Origin or any other provider.

As LiquidSky goes live for the public, it’s adding a feature that aims to make cloud streaming as popular as mobile gaming: free-to-play.

The company’s business model mirrors music streaming services like Spotify. You can play games for free, provided you’re willing to watch some ads before hand. It’ll change from country to country, but typically in the US you’ll watch between one and six minutes of advertising to gain enough credits for an hour’s gameplay, with a cap on three hours of credits per day. While that’s not going to satiate the desires of the most ardent gamers, they would likely have a gaming PC already.

The system is all based around the virtual currency of “SkyCredits.” That one-to-six minutes of advertising will earn you 60 of them, which is good for a virtual machine with a 2GB GPU, three vCPU cores, and 8GB of RAM, which LiquidSky says is good to run most games at 1080p/30.

For 120 SkyCredits per hour, you get the Pro level, which has double the specs and can run pretty much any game at 1080p/60. Or, for 240 SkyCredits per hour, the Elite level offers 8GB of GPU VRAM, 12 vCPU cores, and 32GB of RAM. Since it’s all based around NVIDIA’s GRID technology, it’s hard to compare to a regular PC, but the top tier is on-par with a very high-end gaming setup.

Unlike PlayStation Now, LiquidSky gives you a virtual computer, complete with cloud storage for your games. If you own a game on pretty much any online store, you’ll be able to download it to your virtual machine (at up to 1Gbps) and start playing. The amount of storage you get depends on whether you’re paying or watching ads, ranging from 100GB to 1TB.

Paid tiers start from $9.99 per month, which will grant you 80 hours of the lowest-power gaming setup, 40 hours of the Pro, or 20 hours of Elite. That’s very competitive with NVIDIA’s GeForce Now, which costs $25 for 20 hours of GTX 1060-level performance or 10 hours of GTX 1080.

The list of compatible devices is pretty comprehensive, with support for Windows, Mac or Linux PCs, as well as Android phones and tablets. You’ll also need a good internet connection. Three to Five Mbps will be enough to send you a 1080p, 30-fps stream, while the top-end requires between 15 and 20mbps.

Responsiveness has always been a huge issue with streaming services, ruling out twitchy shooters or driving games. LiquidSky claims its service offers the lowest latency experience around, with 30-ms response times. That’ll obviously depend on your internet connectivity at home, but on what the company’s CTO Jason Kirby described as “garbage internet” here at CES, we were still seeing response times max out at 40ms.

From what we’ve seen, LiquidSky seems like an interesting proposition for those that can’t afford or don’t want a gaming PC. It will launch worldwide to “tens of thousands of users” by early March, expanding from there.

Aaron Souppouris contributed to this report.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

The first Hyperloop test is now just months away

2016 was a big year for Hyperloop One as the company inched ever closer to proving its near-supersonic travel tubes work. At the same time, the business tweaked its plans, intending to become more of a platform and less of a train company. As 2017 approaches, it’s readying its a three-kilometer test track in North Las Vegas and pushing forward with its Global Challenge. To tell us the state of the company and what innovations we can expect, Co-founder Josh Giegel, CEO Rob Lloyd and Global ops chief Nick Earle joined us on the Engadget stage.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

NVIDIA’s GeForce Now let me play ‘The Witcher 3’ on a MacBook Air

Apple’s MacBook Air is known for being sleek and portable — but not so much for being a hardware powerhouse. Even the latest Air still relies on weak integrated graphics, so it’s not exactly the sort of machine you’d expect to run a modern title like The Witcher 3. And yet, that’s exactly what I managed to do with NVIDIA’s GeForce Now, its game streaming service (recently expanded from the Shield devices) that lets you rent a virtual gaming PC in the cloud.

Being able to play The Witcher 3 on such an underpowered system is intriguing enough, but I was also surprised by how well it ran. I tried as hard as I could to make the game stutter, but even when I moved the mouse around like a madman, there was surprisingly low latency between my movements and what was on screen. I also tried hard to find compression artifacts in the stream, but they simply weren’t there. It looked as if I was playing the game in 1080p with “Ultra” quality settings locally, and not streamed from some super-powered server.

I also had the chance to play Rise of the Tomb Raider on an iMac, which uses slightly faster hardware than the MacBook Air, but it’s still not fast enough to run high-end PC games. I was also surprised by the low latency in that game, and even on a large monitor there weren’t any compression artifacts to be found. GeForce

Based on my short demo, GeForce Now seems like the game streaming service many of us have been waiting for. NVIDIA says it’s learned quite a bit since its GRID cloud gaming service. Its servers are now powered by Pascal GPUs, and while the company isn’t divulging the details of its virtual system hardware, reps say it’s the equivalent of a $1,500 gaming PC.

Pricing might become a problem, though: When it launches in March, it will cost $25 for 10 hours of GTX 1080-class gaming (which would be ideal for complex games like The Witcher 3) or 20 hours of GTX 1060-class gaming. That will add up quickly, especially as you dive into large open world games. I could see GeForce Now being a nice secondary solution for gamers who don’t get to travel with powerful rigs. And it might even introduce some newcomers into the world of PC gaming. But at its current price, it probably won’t become anyone’s primary gaming solution.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2017.

Hello Egg Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Hello Egg is part timer, part Amazon Echo and part crystal ball.

Chris Monroe/CNET

If you’re a crappy cook, the Hello Egg might be the kitchen assistant to guide you pass burnt grilled cheese sandwiches.

Makers of this smart speaker-like gadget showed off the Hello Egg’s skills, which include voice recognition and video projection, at CES in Las Vegas Thursday. The Hello Egg, which will cost $150 (about £120 or AU$205) when it’s released later this year, is like an Amazon Echo designed just for your kitchen. It looks like the crystal ball the Wicked Witch of the West used to spy on Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” with an eye that looks like an egg yolk that moves around the screen. You can ask your Hello Egg for a recipe, and it will project videos that how to complete each step. And, true to its name and egg-timer-like shape, it can act as your kitchen timer, too.

You can preorder a Hello Egg online. Its creators also plan to launch an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for the product in March.

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Nvidia Spot Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Nvidia Spot.

James Martin/CNET

The Google Assistant’s expanding its repertoire as an entertainer. At CES, Nvidia showed off the new Shield TV. Say the word and you can search for content, pause or rewind with your voice, all powered by Google’s software. The Shield TV will even display information if you search the internet, and it works with SmartThings to control your home. If you buy the $200 streamer, you won’t even have to be in the same room to talk to Google, thanks to a $50 add-on called the Nvidia Spot.

The Shield TV is out later this month. The Spot’s release date hasn’t been specified. An always listening controller with the Google Assistant built-in, the Nvidia Spot sure sounds a lot like a Google Home. The Spot looks different — a round orb as opposed to a white cylinder. You’ll also be able to easily move the Spot from room to room and even attach it to walls.

Otherwise, a lot of the functionality sounds the same as Google’s own product — you’ll be able to command your TV, search the web and control your smart home via voice command. Nvidia specified SmartThings integration for Spot and Shield, but Google Assistant works with more platforms than that on Google Home — so I wonder if Spot has a more limited version of the Assistant.

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Nvidia’s platform will offer more streaming options than Google’s products can do on their own. With a Google Home and a Chromecast streamer plugged into your TV, you can control Netflix and YouTube with your voice. Shield’s promised those platforms, plus Amazon Video, Google Play movies and Vudu.

We’ve been looking for Google Home to expand its functionality at CES. The Shield TV is a nice step — if somewhat redundant. The Spot itself looks to serve the same purpose as Home, and the integration expands upon something the Google Assistant already did. Still, I’m glad to see the Google Assistant gaining new partners — it needs to in order to keep up with Amazon at CES.

Stages Hero Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Stages line includes two products: noise-canceling headphones called Hero, and a device called the Sidekick that lets you retrofit your headphones of choice.

Chris Monroe/CNET

It’s great to have a set of headphones to block out the world. But what if you want to let a few voices in? That’s the concept behind the Stages Hero, a set of noise-canceling headphones we spotted at CES in Las Vegas on Thursday. The headphones include a circular mic that lets you choose a specific direction from which to hear ambient sound. So if you’re talking to the co-worker who sits in the cubicle across from you, but you want to block the co-workers on either side of you, you can select to hear ambient noise from your left and right sides, but not your front. You can also set key words (“Hey, Ashlee”) and program specific voices that will break through the ambient sound.

Stages will launch an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign for the headphones on January 12. They’ll cost $299. The campaign will also include the $199 Sidekick, a device that looks like an Amazon Echo Dot that connects (with a jack or Bluetooth) to your existing headphones and retrofits them with the same skills as the Hero headphones.

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