Razer’s Power Bank keeps your laptop running

External battery packs are a dime a dozen, but you might want to pay attention to this one. Razer has unveiled the Power Bank, a 12,800mAh external battery designed primarily for laptops. It’s clearly intended as a companion for Razer’s own portables, and can extend the life of a Blade Stealth to as long as 15 hours. That’s more than a little helpful if you’re stuck traveling all day. However, its reliance on USB-C makes it compatible with any laptop that can charge using the newer connector. Yes, you could keep a MacBook running on this brick if you don’t mind the style mismatch.

Like some of these batteries, the Power Bank doubles as a phone charger thanks to two USB-A ports. It even supports Quick Charge 3.0 for those phones that can handle it. This definitely won’t be an inexpensive peripheral when it ships in March, at $150 (£170) — we’ve seen higher-capacity batteries that sell for less, like Mophie’s Powerstation XXL. Not all of those are designed to charge your phone and laptop at the same time, though, and the logo-emblazoned aluminum body might be worth it if you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Razer fan determined to coordinate the look of your gear.

Source: Razer

UK government finally draws up laws for autonomous cars

Ever since the idea of autonomous of vehicles began appearing on the roadmaps of major car makers, the UK government has made it clear that Britain can provide a strong platform for them to develop and test what they’ve built. Some projects, like the Lutz Pathfinder pod, are already underway, but questions have remained over who will be liable when autonomous modes are engaged on public roads.

The 2016 Queen’s Speech included a “Modern Transport Bill” that set out what needed to be done to support the introduction of driverless cars in the coming years. The document, which called for new and updated legislation, has now been worked on and finalised as the Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill. In it, the government lists a number of proposals regarding how self-driving cars should be insured and suggests new rules requiring petrol stations (like Shell) and businesses to install more charging points for electric and hydrogen-powered cars.

Most importantly, the government says insurance for autonomous vehicles in the UK will need to cover when the driver is in manual control and when the car is driving itself. It has been suggested that insurers will act as a middleman for manufacturers so that anyone injured by an autonomous car can claim against the owner’s insurance and not have to file a private liability claim against the car maker. “This will mean innocent victims involved in a collision with an automated vehicle will have quick and easy access to compensation,” the government said in a statement.

The Bill also lays out instances where the owner will be at fault, even after engaging autonomous mode. If the owner has decided to modify the software on their vehicle or has failed to install important updates when their policy instructs them to, they will be made liable for any damages. It’ll be down to the Secretary of State, by way of the Department for Transport, to decide which cars are covered by the new laws.

“Automated vehicles have the potential to transform our roads in the future and make them even safer and easier to use, as well as promising new mobility for those who cannot drive,” said Transport Secretary Chris Grayling. “We must ensure the public is protected in the event of an incident and today we are introducing the framework to allow insurance for these new technologies.”

To better assist the rising numbers of electric cars, the Vehicle Technology and Aviation Bill includes measures to increase the number of charging stations, but also force businesses to provide easy access to information regarding their location, hours of operation, fuelling options, cost (and methods of payment), charging methods (Tesla uses a different connector to Nissan, for example) and whether they are in use. Petrol stations and large businesses like supermarkets would be urged to provide points under the new proposals.

Although true driverless cars are perhaps a few years away, the government believes that by acting quickly, car makers and developers of driverless technology will position the UK a leader in autonomous transportation. The Bill will now pass through Parliament, where ministers and third parties like insurers and vehicle makers can share their thoughts on how the UK’s autonomous infrastructure should be built and maintained.

Via: Ars Technica UK

Source: Gov.uk

Google preps a 4K set-top box for Fiber homes

Google Fiber looks ready to release a new 4K set-top box with WiFi support, despite scaling back its operations and not having very many video subscribers at all. An FCC listing has revealed a “4K wireless TV box” from Google with Bluetooth 4.1 and WiFi bands operating in the 5GHz and 2.4GHz spectrum. If accurate, it would be the Google’s first TV streaming box equipped with WiFi and 4K for the latest generation of TVs.

According to an October 9 to 5 Google report, the new TV Box can connect with the Network Box over WiFi. Before, it had to be hooked up either by coax or ethernet, and Google has killed the coax connection on the back. The box reportedly supports 4K, HDR streaming from Netflix, YouTube and other companies.

Despite scads of press, Google Fiber has failed to take off. According to some estimates, the service has under a million users (Google hasn’t released figures) and as of last year, video subscribers numbers were shockingly small. The reason, according to the company’s comments at a telecom trade conference held last week, is that competitors aren’t anxious to help them, and it’s just expensive to build broadband infrastructure.

In Nashville, for instance, Google Fiber had only set up 33 poles compared to 88,000 needed after 11 months. It requires approval from every other company with equipment on a pole and “no one does it in less than 60 days,” according to Fiber policy head John Burchett. When Nashville passed a “one touch” rule allowing a single contractor to do all the work, both AT&T and Comcast sued.

Because of all that, it reportedly costs Google $1 billion to bring Fiber to a new market, making it too expensive to be profitable. It has halted current plans for new cities and is instead considering a wireless system that can relay high speed data between antennas.

There’s no word on when the set top box is coming, but the FCC is keeping detailed files including photos and the user manual under wraps until August 8th, 2017, as Business Insider notes. As Google wouldn’t want its launch to be blown, the box will likely arrive before then.

Via: Business Insider UK

Source: FCC

Feed your appetite for gossip with new storytelling app Tap

Why it matters to you

We’re all a little bit nosy, and now, we can feed that desire to snoop without feeling guilty – with Tap.

Admit it — you love snooping. It’s OK, we all do. And social publishing platform Wattpad knows it. Tapping into our nosiest of desires is a new app from the company named Tap — it’s a new storytelling format that presents content in the form of text message-esque chat bubbles, so you always feel like you’re peeking in on someone’s conversation. And it’s surprisingly (or perhaps not so surprisingly) engaging.

The name “Tap” is a product of how you actually interact with the platform. In order to get to the next juicy bit, you tap your phone screen, revealing the next “page.” The app looks to engage readers with its novel format and diverse content. Already at launch, Tap boasts hundreds of stories across a number of different categories, including horror, romance, drama, and more.

More: How to clear your browsing history on your iPhone or Android device

And if you want to be an even more integral part of the action, you can contribute stories to Tap yourself. While initially, Wattpad is only allowing a subset of writers on its platform to contribute, the company promises that the publishing component of the Tap app will become more widely available in the coming weeks.

And if you’re particularly fond of what you’re reading, you can of course share these stories (or rather, text conversations), via social media.

Sure, Tap is far from the only bite-sized content provider, with apps like Snapchat and Instagram in the social media space, and plenty of other reading apps available as well. But Tap is certainly unique in its layout, which somehow creates intrigue by making its stories seem a bit … secretive, and perhaps thereby more exciting.

The app itself is free, though you do have the option to upgrade to a premium service which will grant you unlimited access to stories. You can choose from a number of payment options — $3 a week, $8 a month, or $40 a year.

Innit finds a link in digitizing the food chain with acquisition of ShopWell app

Why it matters to you

Right now, the onus is often on you to keep tabs on your food with manual entry, but Innit wants to make tracking nutrition more automated.

Let’s say you have a smart scale that gives you the nutritional breakdown of your breakfast. Chances are, you’ll have to use an app to tell the scale you’re about to weigh Cheerios, so it can give you an accurate picture of the sugar, fat, and carbs contained within. If you’ve just bought a bunch of groceries, there are apps that will let you scan your receipt to put all the nutrition information in one place. Innit, which aims to “digitize” food, wants to put these two functions together to make shopping and cooking easier.

Innit recently acquired ShopWell, makers of an app that helps you avoid certain foods and find healthier options. If the app knows you’re avoiding sugar and want to lose weight, it will send up a red flag when you scan a carton of ice cream and suggest fruit pops instead. “That whole food journey of plan, shop, prep, and cook, today there’s no one that has stepped up to really help users through that journey and to use the power of food information, so it’s sort of like driving with a paper map,” Kevin Brown, Innit’s CEO, told Digital Trends. He sees ShopWell as a bit like a GPS, guiding people to healthier choices.

More: Stop bouncing between other food apps, check out all your options with FeedMe

While Innit isn’t ready to announce other partners at the moment, ShopWell is just one piece of the puzzle. Innit’s not trying to change what the app does at the moment, but once the platform is in place, it will play one role in that plan, shop, prep, cook journey. If you snap a picture of your receipt with ShopWell’s app, it could then provide recipes based on what you’ve bought. But what if your fitness tracker pings in to say you’ve been slacking on exercise? The app could use the information and automatically recommend only low-calorie recipes. Eventually, once you pick what you’re making for dinner, your connected oven will set itself to the proper temperature.

These other steps are expected to roll out later in 2017, said Brown. By digitizing food, you’ll not only be able to keep track of what’s in your pantry and what you’ve made for dinner the past week, but you could get an alert to your phone if, say, you bought frozen vegetables that were recalled because of a listeria outbreak. “We’re really excited about a bunch of use cases like that,” said Brown. “Even the name of our company is Innit, like, what’s in it.”

The success of all this depends on what companies Innit manages to partner with, and it’s already working with Whirlpool to make its smart appliances a link in the digitized food chain. But it also depends on people giving up their data to the company, their grocery stores, and so on. Grocery stores already know how many boxes of cookies they sell a month, but apps such as ShopWell also let them know just how many of those boxes go to you.

Korean media says LG G6 will launch on March 10, Galaxy S8 debuting globally April 21

We now have launch dates for this year’s biggest flagships.

A report out of Korea’s ET News suggests Samsung and LG have finalized the launch dates for their upcoming flagships. The publication states that the Galaxy S8 — which is rumored to be unveiled in New York on March 29 — will be launching globally on April 21, while the LG G6 is slated to become available on March 10 following an unveil at Mobile World Congress later this week.

An earlier report said that the LG G6 will launch on March 9 in South Korea, with a U.S. debut planned for April 7. With Samsung skipping MWC this year and launching the Galaxy S8 at a later date, LG has a 42-day head start, and the potential to steal much-needed market share away from its fiercest rival.

ET News also states that Samsung originally intended to launch the Galaxy S8 on April 14 in its home market following a week of pre-orders, but ultimately moved the date to April 21 to ensure adequate stock of the device is available at launch. The latest estimates suggest the Galaxy S8 will be going up for pre-order in Korea on April 13.

Both handsets have leaked extensively in recent weeks, giving us a detailed look at what to expect from the South Korean manufacturers this year. The LG G6 will feature a 5.7-inch QHD+ 2:1 display, 13MP dual cameras, water resistance, 32-bit Quad DAC, and a Snapdragon 821 SoC.

Meanwhile, the Galaxy S8 is likely to be offered in two variants: a standard 5.8-inch model and an S8+ with a 6.2-inch display. The phones will feature thin bezels up front, with Samsung getting rid of the home button to make room for the “infinity” display. The phones will instead sport on-screen navigation buttons, a 12MP dual pixel camera at the back, IP68 dust and water resistance, and will be the first to run Qualcomm’s latest 10nm Snapdragon 835

Samsung’s 10nm Exynos 8895 chipset is now official

Samsung’s high-end SoC for 2017 gets detailed.

Samsung announced last year that it was partnering with Qualcomm to build the Snapdragon 835 on its new 10nm FinFET manufacturing process. The company is now introducing its own chipset based on the new node, the Exynos 8895. The SoC falls under the Exynos 9 Series, and the node shift along with an improved 3D transistor structure means that the Exynos 8895 delivers 27% more performance while consuming 40% less energy when compared to 14nm chipsets.

The Exynos 8895 offers an octa-core CPU with four Samsung’s second-gen custom cores taking care of the performance, with four energy-efficient Cortex A53 cores handling low-power tasks. The SoC has an ARM Mali-G71 GPU that offers “next level 3D graphic performance” while minimizing VR latency. The chipset also features a Gigabit LTE modem with 5CA (five carrier aggregation), delivering download speeds of 1Gbps and uploads of 150Mbps.

Samsung is also touting improved video capabilities with the Exynos 8895, which include 4K video recording and playback at 120fps as well as a video processing technology that upscales images for immersive VR experiences in 4K. Other highlights include a dedicated processing unit for iris and fingerprint recognition, and a Vision Processing Unit that recognizes objects for better video tracking and improved panoramas.

The chipset supports 28MP front and rear cameras, as well as 28MP+16MP dual-camera setups. The Exynos 8895 is currently in mass production, and is likely to make its way into the global variants of the Galaxy S8.

How to set up Kodi profiles

Your family can have their Kodi their way. It’s as easy as setting up some new Kodi profiles.

Your kids want to watch something on your Kodi system, but you’re not so keen on filling up your add-ons list with child-friendly channels. That’s fine, because just as you can with popular services like Netflix, you can create profiles for your kids to keep their stuff separate.

The process for creating Kodi profiles is not immediately obvious, because it’s not exactly user-facing. But it’s also not very difficult, as long as you know where to look.

For this guide we’re using Kodi 17 with the stock skin. If you’re on a different build, things might be slightly different.

Select the settings cog on your home screen.

Click on the box labelled profile settings.

Select add profile.

Give your profile a name and hit OK.

Each profiles set up on your Kodi system can now have its own individual settings and add-ons. You can set up the new profiles to transfer everything from the main profile, just select “yes” instead of “no” when you’re given this option after creating a new one.

To switch between profiles you need to log off the current one. To do so, hit the power icon and select log off. You’re then taken to a screen that presents all of your profiles, and it’s as easy as selecting the one you want and going in to enjoy your content.

Kodi is already a terrific media center, but little touches like this one make it your media center.

Download Kodi 17 (free)

Sony’s 1,000fps camera touted for new Xperia XZs and XZ Premium smartphones

Earlier this month, Sony revealed details about a new camera sensor that it had been developing. It’s a new CMOS sensor, but has an extra third layer of DRAM built into it, as opposed to the two-layer construction of conventional smartphone CMOS cameras.

• Next Sony Xperia flagship: What’s the story?

It means Sony’s new sensor will be capable of shooting 1080p video at a maximum of 1,000fps, far quicker than anything else on the market.

XperiaBlog

Because of the announcement, many analysts expected the sensor to make its way into Sony’s 2017 flagship, and that’s now thought to be the case. The new camera is being called Motion Eye, according to an alleged official Sony presentation slide, and according to the source, it’s expected to be fitted to two Sony smartphones, the Xperia XZs and Xperia XZ Premium.

This is the first time we’ve heard about possible names for Sony’s flagship phones. For some time, we went with the name Xperia X2, because Sony’s naming convention isn’t the easiest to predict. However, considering last year’s flagship was called the Xperia XZ, XZs and XZ Premium do at least make sense.

The Xperia XZs will likely be successor the XZ, while the XZ Premium will fill the shoes of the Z5 Premium, and as such should come with a 4K HDR display. The Z5 Premium will be two years old this year, as it was unveiled at IFA 2015, so it’s due for a refresh, and the Xperia XZ was unveiled last year, also at IFA.

• New Sony smartphone camera comes with built-in DRAM, promises 1,000fps slow-mo
• Sony could go all out at MWC with five new smartphones
• Mobile World Congress 2017: Nokia, Sony, Huawei, smartphones and more

Because of these unveilings, it’s likely they’ll show up in September at the Berlin-based show, so we may just have to make do with the five mid-range phones predicted to be launched this weekend at Mobile World Congress.

Qualcomm and Leap Motion partner to bring natural interaction to mobile VR devices

Qualcomm and Leap Motion have announced that they are partnering, bringing the advantage of bare hands interaction to VR worlds. 

There’s a lot happening in VR at the moment and on the cusp of Mobile World Congress and the Game Developers Conference, there’s a lot of talk about VR coming from Qualcomm. A big part of this comes from the company pushing its new Snapdragon 835 chipset as a natural choice for standalone VR headsets. 

VR is only as good as the interaction, however. The days of being a static observer in a virtual world are gone and the pairing with Leap Motion is designed to bring natural user interaction with worlds, using bare hands, rather than having to rely on a controller, tracked gloves or other hand-held devices. 

Leap Motion has been in the hand-tracking game for some time, demonstrating and integrating the technology into a number of different devices, allowing you to use your hands to manipulate content. That translates naturally into a VR world where you’re fully immersed so this pairing makes plenty of sense.

We’ve seen Leap Motion working with tethered VR headsets before – like HTC Vive – however Qualcomm’s VR vision is slightly different. Qualcomm’s approach is to provide an untethered solution, rather than being connected to a super computer in a room full of sensors.

• Best VR headsets to buy in 2017, whatever your budget

“Technology works best when technology disappears,” said David Holz, chief technology officer at Leap Motion. 

“Untethered, mobile VR headsets with intuitive, hand-based interaction and position tracking bring a level of quality, immersion, and accessibility to VR unlike anything that’s been seen before.”

We’ll be looking to get our bare hands on this new VR experience at Mobile World Congress, so stay tuned for more information.