Chromebook Diaries: Figuring out what’s next

I’ve set up my new little 2-in-1 laptop. Now what?

I’ve officially been a Chromebook user for week — a full seven days. I’ve since downloaded the apps I needed to get some work done here at Android Central. I’ve also learned that even with the Google Play Store already available, the app story for Chrome OS continues to be a convoluted affair.

Before you continue, read the previous diary entries

• Part 1: How I learned to live with Chrome OS
• Part 2: Learning to work my way around Chrome OS
• Part 3: Chromebook Diaries: Chrome apps vs. Android apps

Chrome OS appears to be in a constant, almost perpetual state of change — even more so than Android’s transformation over the past few years. But despite that the platform has managed to thrive in education-centric communities. Perhaps with the new world of Android apps, there’s a chance to beat out the competition. Chrome OS is no longer a platform with an identity crisis.

Chrome OS appears to be in a constant, almost perpetual state of change

The Chromebooks that are coming out are adding to the appeal, too. This Chromebook Flip quickly starts up, offers a remarkable length of battery life, and hooks into the most important account in my online life: My Google Account. I mused about the learning curve for Chrome OS earlier this week, but now that it’s been a couple of days and I’ve managed to bring the Chromebook Flip with me to a few meetings, I see its usefulness in my life. Even when it’s offline, Chrome OS holds on to everything I’ve done and I can trust that all the information I need is right there. And since I use Dropbox, Google Photos, and Google Drive to store most of my files, every data file between my Pixel XL and MacBook Pro exist here. The Chromebook Flip is not an immediate replacement for my eons-more-powerful MacBook Pro, but now I have a perfectly functioning mobile computer that doesn’t weigh down my purse and flips into a tablet, too.

This app story is not appealing.

We’re all allowed wishlists, right? Dreaming keeps us going as people. My dream is that once the floodgates are released on pure, integrative Android app and Chrome OS compatibility, that the ecosystem will flourish — or at least become populated with more fellow Android users. There needs to be more functionality than simply compatibility, however, like the ability for Android apps to hook into Chrome OS and offer up features like SD card access. That simple tweak alone will do wonders to help ease the fears of trying Chrome OS — the fear that it’s too different than what you’re normally used to.

Once the floodgates are released on pure Android app and Chrome OS compatibility, the ecosystem will flourish

I’m ending the Chromebook Diaries here, for now, though I’m still on a transitional journey. I plan to follow up soon with the apps I’ve settled on, as I still need a couple of uninterrupted hours to explore both the Chrome Web Store and the Play Store — that’s hard to do during the work week. I’d love your suggestions. I’ve also fixed my choppy trackpad problem by buying a dongle to connect a USB mouse and simply working around its nuances (it would have been nice not to compromise, though).

The best part of being a new Chromebook user, though, is that with the permeating rumblings of some amazingly positive news on the horizon, I’m finally be able to get excited along with everyone else.

Chromebooks

• The best Chromebooks
• Should you buy a Chromebook?
• Google Play is coming to Chromebooks
• Acer Chromebook 14 review
• Join our Chromebook forums

Alto’s second birthday includes extra hype for his next Odyssey

Alto’s Odyssey is coming!

There are two types of people in the world — those who have lost countless hours to the hypnotic magic that is Alto’s Adventure, those who think the first group should see their therapist more frequently. Well, joke’s on you because my therapist also plays this simultaneously relaxing and stressful side-scroller. Alto’s Adventure has enjoyed remarkable popularity across Android and iOS over the last two years, and to celebrate the second birthday of the game we all get a very brief teaser of the next game in what is now a franchise.

Here it is!

That didn’t tell me anything but I still want to play it. Unfortunately, none of us will be able to play Alto’s Odyssey until later this summer. In the mean time, you can tell all of the people that haven’t bought this game and lost entire weekends to it that the price has been temporarily dropped from $4.99 to $1.99 as part of the birthday celebration.

Anybody else going to go play this game for the rest of the afternoon? No? Just me?

See at Google Play

House bills would ban warrantless use of fake cell sites

House representatives are making good on their plans to implement clearer cellphone surveillance laws. A bipartisan group (led by House Oversight Committee chair Jason Chaffetz) has put forward two bills that would keep the use of Stingrays and other cell site simulators in check. The most prominent, the Cell Location Privacy Act, would require that law enforcement get a probable cause warrant before using one of these fake cell sites to track suspects. There would be exceptions for “exigent circumstances” and foreign intelligence gathering.

The other, the Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance Act, would create legal guidelines for using location technology both by police and private outfits.

We don’t have access to the full text of the bills as of this writing, so it’s not clear how thorough the bills are and whether there are loopholes that undermine their effectiveness. Just what are “exigent circumstances,” exactly — a time-sensitive kidnapping case? If these bills become laws, though, they could still go a long way toward eliminating confusion over when and how cell site simulators get used. For instance, courts have had mixed opinions on whether or not cops need warrants for location data — these measures could settle that question once and for all.

Via: FCW

Source: Congress.gov (1), (2)

LG G6 to feature an advanced dual-13MP wide angle camera

LG has been drip feeding information about the upcoming G6 flagship ahead of its 26 February MWC unveiling for a while now. We’ve already learnt about its Full Vision 18:9 ratio display, and now it’s the turn of the rear-facing camera.

• LG G6: Release date, rumours and everything you need to know

LG has revealed on its Korean blog site that the rear-camera will feature two 13MP sensors, one of which will offer a 125 degree wide angle lens. LG says this is similar to the field of vision we see with our eyes, so users will be able to “capture the scene they see with their eyes without distorted edges”.

It’s not the first time LG has fitted a dual-camera to its smartphones, as both the G5 and V20 have them too, but the G6 will represent the first time both sensors are the same resolution. And like the V20, the G6 will have a wide-angle lens camera on the front too.

The G6’s dual lens camera will take full advantage of the 18:9 display too, with a new shooting mode that fills the entire display. With it, you’ll be able to see what you’re currently taking a picture of, alongside the most recent picture taken. You will also be able to split the screen into squares and take 1:1 photos, ideal for instantly sharing to social sites such as Instagram.

The front-facing camera gets a new ‘SELFI’ shooting mode, which has filters to help you take the perfect selfie and you’ll also be able to combine between 2 and 100 photos together to create an animated GIF.

• LG V20: Specs, release date and everything you need to know
• LG G5: Modular misfire?

Cho-Jun-ho, president of LG’s MC business said: “The LG G6 is equipped with a smartphone camera that goes from hardware to user experience,”

“We will continue to take advantage of LG’s premium smartphone’s distinctive strengths, We will continue to develop”.

12 best Alexa devices you can buy today

There’s no denying it, the smarthome is a brewing market coming to life, thanks in the most part to the companies seeking to unify all your smart connected products, letting you control them from a single hub. None caught our imagination more over the past year than the Amazon Echo and its built-in assistant, Alexa. 

Of course, to get the most out of Alexa and help it become more than just a Bluetooth speaker you can demand weather forecasts from, you need compatible products in your home, your work or even your car. Here’s a list of the most useful stuff out there. 

Our top recommendation…

1. Philips Hue white and colour ambiance starter kit

Buy the Hue starter kit for £149 from Amazon UK or for $199 from Amazon US

Philips has an impressive portfolio of smart, connected lighting solutions to kit your house out with. In fact, it’s arguably the most complete lighting system available.

The white and colour starter kit comes with the latest Hue Bridge, and can be programmed to offer all kinds of colours for setting the mood, or just for changing white temperature to suit morning or evening. The bulbs come with either a bayonet B22 fitting or E27 screw fitting. It’s a great place to start if you don’t have any smart lighting yet. 

Being Hue there are, of course, other bulb types to choose from. They offer spotlights, separate mood lamps, even designer lamps with built-in Hue support and LED light-strips. You even get the option of connected dimmer switches and motion sensors. All of which can be controlled by Alexa. 

Best of the rest…

2. Logitech Harmony Home Hub

Buy the Harmony Home Hub for £96.45 from Amazon UK or for $96.00 from Amazon US

Logitech’s Harmony Home Hub is regarded as one of the best hubs for controlling your home entertainment system. Plug it in to your existing TV, Blu-ray player, set-top box and then plug an Echo in to the back of it, then have it control your TV and a host of other smarthome products without having to pick up a remote. 

Pocket-lint

3. ZeroTouch Air Vent car mount

Buyt the ZeroTouch air vent mount for £39.99 from Amazon UK or for $59.99 from Amazon US

ZeroTouch Air is a smartphone mount that not only lets you control your Android smartphone just using your voice, but also now has Alexa support built in. That means you can tell Alexa to turn on your heating, lights or any other connected product while you’re on your way home from work. 

Pocket-lint

4. Neato Botvac Connected

Buy the Neato Botvac Connected for £609 from Amazon UK or for $699 from Amazon US

“Alexa, tell Neato to start cleaning.” There’s nothing more satisfying in life than being able to have clean, dust and debris-free floors without having to lift a finger. Neato’s Botvac Connected offers this, and has Alexa support so you can tell it to start, stop, pause or resume cleaning whenever you like.

Read the full review: Neato Botvac Connected review

Pocket-lint

5. Nest learning thermostat, 3rd generation

Buy the Nest 3.0 smart thermostat for £199 from Amazon UK or for $249 from Amazon US

There’s a whole host of smart connected thermostats on the market and, undoubtedly one of the better ones with Alexa compatibility is the third generation Nest learning thermostat. It has a big, colourful display, and is very easy to control thanks to a rotating frame and intuitive smartphone app. 

Read the full review: Nest 3.0 review

6. Netatmo Weather Station

Buy the Netatmo Weather Station for £129 from Amazon UK or for $149 from Amazon US

Perhaps not one for everyone, but the Netatmo Weather Station gives you accurate weather and air quality measurements in real-time. It can measure temperature, CO2 concentration, air pressure, humidity, noise polution and more; inside and outside your home. All you need is a smartphone.

With Alexa support, you can ask your Echo for the current outdoor temperature by saying “Alexa, ask Netatmo to get the temperature from the Outdoor module”.

7. Blink home security camera system

Buy the Blink home security camera system from £109 (1 camera) on Amazon UK or from $99 (1 camera) on Amazon US

In years gone by, home security was hideously expensive. Now, thanks to the rise of internet connected cameras, anyone can install their own camera system without shelling out too much of their hard-earned money.

There are many cameras out there, including the indoor security camera from Blink. You can buy kits with one, two or three cameras, and you can arm them by speaking to your Echo. 

Pocket-lint

8. Honeywell Lyric T6R smart thermostat

Buy the Lyric T6R for £198 from Amazon UK

As smart thermostats go, the new Lyric T6R is a compelling option. It’s easy to use, Apple HomeKit enables and has location-based services for multiple members of the family. Geofencing lets you define a perimeter for your home, and any time one of the users enters that zone, the thermostat treats your heating like you’re at home and kicks back on.

Read the full review: Honeywell Lyric T6R review

Pocket-lint

9. Fitbit Charge 2

Buy the Fitbit Charge 2 from £114 on Amazon UK or from £129 on Amazon US

With Alexa’s Fitbit skills, you can ask your Echo to give you a run down on your performance, how well you slept last night, how many calories you’ve burned or flights of stairs you’ve climbed, among many others. To really make the most of that, you’re going to need one of the company’s fitness trackers, and the Charge 2 is comfortably the best available at the moment. It’s accurate, has a large display and lasts a long time on one charge. 

Read the full review: Fitbit Charge 2 review

10. Fitbit Aria

Buy the Fitbit Aria for £89 from Amazon UK or for $128 from Amazon US

As well as tracking fitness and activity, Fitbit’s Aria smart scales will also let Alexa in on how your weight progress is going. Just ask Alexa what your weight is, and it’ll use your last-tracked weight measured by the Aria scales. 

Pocket-lint

11. Hive Active Heating and Hot Water

Buy the Hive Active Heating and Hot Water thermostat with installation for £249 from Amazon UK

Hive was one of the earliest smart thermostats available in the UK, and with the latest version, you get more control than ever. You can use it to control your hot water, protect your pipes from frost and even send a command to it by SMS. And, if you want to, you can get it installed by a British Gas engineer, regardless of who actually supplies your energy. 

Read the full review: Hive Active Heating 2.0 review

12. TP-Link Wi-Fi Smart Plug

Buy the TP-Link Wi-Fi smart plug for £24.99 on Amazon UK or $29.99 from Amazon US

For all those non-smart products you have lying around, there’s a simply solution: a Wi-Fi Plug. Simply plug your regular lamp, kettle, coffee machine or whatever in to one of these, and have it switch on as soon as you give the command to Alexa. As long as it’s a simple on/off device, you’ll just need to tell your Echo to switch on that specific plug. 

HBO will stream its Sunday lineup early to make room for Oscars

You won’t have to choose between following the Oscars this Sunday and catching up on your favorite HBO show. The network just announced that it will stream the next episodes of Girls, Big Little Lies and Crashing on HBO Now/Go two days early on Friday, February 24th. Additionally, the episodes will also pop up early on the network’s on-demand offerings.

It’s a pragmatic move by HBO — TV networks typically avoid airing new episodes of shows during the Oscars. But thanks to its many different platforms, HBO can be a bit more flexible about how it releases things. It turns out streaming video isn’t just good for the likes of Netflix; it also allows traditional networks to break old rules.

Source: HBO

Watson-based cancer project paused after running aground

It’s tempting to treat IBM’s Watson as a cure-all: just throw some cognitive computing at the problem and you’ll make everything better. That can only happen if it’s well-implemented, however, and we’ve just seen what happens when things go awry. The University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center has put its highly-touted Watson project (the Oncology Expert Advisor) on hold after an audit discovered both spending issues and an unfocused strategy that didn’t meet goals.

Where tech companies often foot the bill for projects like this, MD Anderson paid the $62 million for the project itself, ducking around usual procedures in the process. Former genomic medicine chair (and wife of MD Anderson’s president) Lynda Chin reportedly didn’t get approval from the center’s IT department, and ensured that payments to IBM were just low enough to not require board approval. To make matters worse, payments were made from donations that hadn’t been received, and didn’t hinge on meeting tangible goals.

The actual technology, which mines patient and research databases for recommended treatments, wasn’t necessarily at fault. While the audit says Watson is “not ready” for full-fledged use, doctors also said they were impressed — the main issue is one of constantly switching focuses and technology. The emphasis switched from leukemia to lung cancer, and a change in medical record software rendered Watson incompatible without an overhaul. Moreover, the info used to feed Watson is outdated.

This doesn’t mean that the project is dead. Even though MD Anderson tells Forbes that it’s soliciting competitive bids to “see where the industry has progressed,” its audit stresses that this isn’t an opinion on Watson’s abilities. However, it’s clear that a lot of work is needed to make this system useful in the real world. And regardless of whether or not that happens, MD Anderson is learning an expensive lesson in using AI wisely.

Source: Forbes, University of Texas (PDF)

Smartphone problems? Space particles may be to blame

Here’s a new one. Space particles from the sun and even distant black holes are affecting microelectronic devices more than ever, according to a recent study from Vanderbilt University. Chip manufacturers are packing in more transistors, increasing the chances a high-energy particle will strike one. While rare, such “bit-flips” may have caused a Qantas aircraft plunge and voting machine failure. With electronics devices all over the place, it’s forcing designers to take the phenomenon into account.

Outside the protective cocoon of the Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, cosmic radiation from solar and galactic cosmic radiation can cause illness and death, as astronauts know. When they strike the atmosphere, they can generate secondary particles like neutrons, muons and alpha particles. Millions of those bombard us per second without any effect, but a few are strong enough to push electrons around in chips, causing “single-event upsets” (SEUs) and data failures.

Scientists are well aware of the issue and have been studying it for years. Vanderbilt researchers have looked at the last three generations of chips with 28-nanometer, 20-nanometer and, most recently, 16-nanometer transistors. To test them, they expose chips to radiation in a special lab called the Chips and Electronics (ICE) House at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

With smaller traces, the latest chips require less electrical charge to make a bit, so the odds of one flipping from 0 to 1 (or vice-versa) when struck by a particle have shot up. That’s offset by the fact that smaller transistors are less likely to be hit, but there are a lot more packed into the same space. As a result, failure rates of devices as a whole has gone up with the latest chips, as shown above. On top of that, there are more devices than ever, so the odds of one failing with an SEU are higher.

Phones are one thing, but in another case, a single bit flip on an election voting machine gave 4,096 votes to one candidate, more than the number of registered voters. A similar event may have also glitched a Qantas A330’s autopilot, causing a dive that seriously injured 11 passengers and a flight attendant. “Our study confirms that this is a serious and growing problem,” says Vanderbilt researcher Bharat Bhuva.

Luckily, firms in aviation, medical, IT, transportation and other critical sectors are addressing the problem by using backup systems, error correction and other measures. The consumer electronics sector is lagging behind, but companies like AMD, ARM and Qualcomm, which sponsored the latest study, are at least aware of it. And if your phone does get zapped by a stray particle, the worst that can happen is a glitch or “blue screen of death” — annoying, but not dangerous.

Source: Vanderbilt University

Samsung’s future Gear VR will come with a controller

Now that Google’s Daydream View is giving Gear VR a run for its money, how is Samsung going to respond? By implementing one of Daydream’s best features, of course. Both an FCC filing and an apparent scoop from Roland Quandt indicate that this year’s Gear VR will include a one-handed controller — no more reaching for a touchpad on the headset itself. That’s a big deal for games and any other apps that involve more than rudimentary controls.

There’s precious little else known, but Quandt understands that Samsung’s new headset would (to no one’s surprise) have a new cover to accommodate both the Galaxy S8 and its upsized S8 Plus counterpart. As for an unveiling? Samsung is believed to be unveiling the S8 on March 29th, so you’ll likely get the full story before long.

Via: SamMobile (1), (2), The Verge, GalaxyClub

Source: FCC, Roland Quandt (Twitter)

‘Hot Wheels Track Builder’ is an AR den for your creations

Hot Wheels is best known for its extensive line of die-cast model cars, as well as some racing video games for younger kids. However, at this year’s Toy Fair the brand is aiming to combine the best of both in its new Tango augmented reality game. Track Builder gives you a virtual play area to construct custom tracks for your cars. The only limit is what you can imagine, and not the amount of physical space in your home.

Most AR apps focus on taking images of the real world and overlaying graphical effects using your device’s screen. Track Builder eschews the camera tricks and instead focuses on creating a boy’s playroom for you to explore physically. You move the phone up and down and even walk all over to look at all the furniture and decoration in the space, though most of your focus will be on the Hot Wheels track you can construct on the long table in the center.

The app gives you plenty of bright orange track to build with, and also allows you to place ramps and obstacles for your virtual course as well. To get a good look at your work, you’ll have to actually walk around the table, just like if you had put together a plastic Hot Wheels set in your house.

There don’t seem to be any plans to create any real world overlays just yet, so you can’t pretend to put together a course on your coffee table or bedroom rug. But the app does incorporate the best part of building any Hot Wheels track: the testing phase. You can pick out classic Hot Wheels vehicles and pit them against your creation. And, just like the real world version, you do need to use a little finesse when racing; too much power can send a car flying off course. The good thing about Track Builder is that because the cars aren’t real, you don’t have to worry about younger brothers or sisters getting hit in the face with a flying Ferrari.

With Tango still in its early stages — there’s only one phone available right now that even supports it — it will be a while before we see Hot Wheels Track Builder on our devices.