Apple to Provide Song Snippets for Music Video App Musical.ly

Apple is teaming up with popular music video app Musical.ly to promote Apple Music, reports Re/code. Apple will soon provide song snippets and clips to the service, which is designed to let users create and share their own music videos.

Apple Music content will be replacing content from UK-based provider 7digital as soon as tomorrow.

Through the partnership with Apple, and with Apple’s access to licensing deals, Musical.ly will be able to expand the number of countries where it is available from 30 to 120.

Musical.ly, which calls itself an entertainment social network, has been around since August of 2014, but has recently seen a surge in popularity among teenagers. In exchange for the right to use Apple Music content, Musical.ly will promote the Apple Music service to its users and will let Apple Music subscribers listen to full songs within the Musical.ly app.

Tags: recode.net, Apple Music
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Google iOS search now finds streaming movies, music and TV

Finding streaming content on your iPhone is getting easier. Google announced on Wednesday that the newest update to its search app on iOS devices will enable users to find TV shows, movies and songs on streaming services. That includes iTunes, Hulu, Amazon Video, Google Play, YouTube and Spotify.

The feature, which is already available on Android and the desktop, displays the icons of streaming services that currently offer the content you’re searching for. So, for example, if you look for Zootopia, the app will pop the “Knowledge Box” at the top of the search results. Below the screenshots, movie ratings and synopsis, you’ll now find links to Netflix, Hulu and wherever else it’s streaming. The same goes for music, though you’ll find links to Apple Music, Spotify and Pandora instead. The app will also show how much you’ll have to pay to rent or buy the content.

It’s not a huge addition, but a helpful one. As mobile culture moves from surfing the web to working within apps, this new feature will help users find what they’re looking for more efficiently, regardless of which service the content resides on.

Source: TechCrunch

Nintendo’s latest portable is the $150 2DS XL

Nintendo is dropping the NES Classic Edition from its lineup, but it has new hardware on the way with this just-announced New Nintendo 2DS XL. The portable system will cost $150 when it goes on sale July 28th, with the same large screen and features of the 3DS XL, but as its name implies, it will only display “Nintendo 3DS, New Nintendo 3DS and Nintendo DS” games in 2D. To keep expanding that library of games, Miitopia and Hey! Pikmin are releasing the same day as the new 2DS XL. In the US it will be available in the black/turquoise color shown above, however, in Japan it launches July 13th in two colors, adding a white/orange option.

Source: Nintendo (Businesswire)

Apple’s already been spotted testing its self-driving Lexus – see it here

Well that didn’t take long.

Apple received a permit in California earlier this month so it could start testing Lexus cars with self-driving technology, and already, Apple has been spotted driving around the Silicon Valley area. Bloomberg News posted footage of a white Lexus RX450h crossover outfitted with the usual sensors and hardware you’d see on a self-driving car. Most of it appears to be third party, including a Velodyne-made LIDAR sensor.

• Apple Car: What’s the story so far on Project Titan?

You can also see two radar units and several cameras, as noted by Bloomberg. We don’t know what Apple is doing with this car or what types of data it is collecting, but we imagine the vehicle is part of its secret Project Titan autonomous car unit. That project originally started with a lofty ambition: Apple wanted to develop its own self-driving car, but now, it’s scaled back and focusing on autonomous software.

Will Apple let car maker add its autonomous software one day? Who knows. All we know is that Apple declared in a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last December that it was “investing heavily in the study of machine learning and automation, and is excited about the potential of automated systems in many areas, including transportation”.

Here’s the car that #Apple’s using to test its autonomous car technology. Story with @mhbergen. https://t.co/jHLnJDRjoS pic.twitter.com/zTezUmcZwC

— Alex Webb (@atbwebb) April 27, 2017

There’s a lot of unknowns right now, but it’s still exciting nonetheless.

• Tim Cook on Apple Car: ‘It’s going to be Christmas Eve for a while’
• Apple’s self-driving car rolls on, meeting held with autonomous officials

Acer Switch 5 preview: The silent Surface killer?

If you’re in the market for a 2-in-1 device then Acer has just announced its new premier model: the Switch 5.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen this form clip-on-keyboard form factor – not least that it apes the Microsoft Surface to a reasonable degree – as last year’s Acer Alpha Switch 12 delivered a similar 12.2-inch design with liquid cooling that was, we thought, an ace on account of its price point.

The Switch 5 does things a little differently: it’s more powerful than the Alpha (but retains the liquid cooling for silent operation), comes with a one-hand adjustable stand, fingerprint scanner and, as you might expect, a slightly higher price tag at €1,099 (UK price TBC). Is it the Switch to go for?

Acer Switch 5 preview: Design

• 12.2-inch, 2160 x 1440 resolution IPS LCD screen
• One-handed kick-stand control
• Side-positioned fingerprint scanner
• Keyboard and Active Pen stylus included
• 9.6mm thin (12mm with keyboard); 1.27kg all-in

To look at the Switch 5 is a lot like the Switch Alpha 12, then. Expect when you look up close: the metal has an almost serrated edge which looks, frankly, bizarre yet distinctive in equal measure. Otherwise it’s a well-built and good-looking piece of kit.

Pocket-lint

The kick-stand is perhaps the most interesting part of the design. It pops out into an initial position and then you simply push it with one hand and it’ll descend infinitely through its various non-click degrees and remain in position. The second you lift it from the surface it’s on, however, the stand will pop back into its upright position. It’s a really clever hold-in-place solution that stops stand adjustment being at all fiddly.

Other advanced features include a fingerprint scanner which, like with Huawei’s MateBook, is positioned around the side for a simple touch/swipe to login. It’s inconspicuous and a decent addition in an ever-more biometrically secure tech environment.

Pocket-lint

With a price tag of almost €1,100 (far more than the Stateside price of $799), the Switch 5 is keen to make an impression with its screen, which pushes a FHD+ resolution panel (2160 x 1440) to rival the Surface Pro 4. It’s certainly bright and the viewing angles – at up to 178-degrees – are excellent. Shame it’s not AMOLED for the price, but what Acer has used here is suitably high-end.

With both keyboard and Acer Active Pen stylus included in the box you’re getting even great value for money. That helps makes this Switch the do-it-all model, covering personal and business across all kinds of possible professions.

Acer Switch 5 preview: Performance

• LiquidLoop fanless cooling system for silent operation
• Intel Core i7 top-spec power
• Intel HD Graphics 620
• Up to 8GB RAM

Under the hood, the slender tablet – which measures 9.6mm, or 12mm with the keyboard attached and folded down – has Acer’s liquid cooling system, known as LiquidLoop, which means a fanless and, therefore, silent operation. That’s paired with up to 8GB RAM if you want to pay more, with on-board SSD storage catered for up to 512GB.

Pocket-lint

That silence is a killer feature. There’s nothing worse than a whirring or whistling fan to distract from use, so the Switch gets major points in this department. That it can offer this alongside the latest Intel Core i7 processor – making it more powerful than the earlier Alpha Switch 12 – is even more impressive.

All that adds up to claimed battery life of just over 10-hours, which seems like a fair stretch – but we’ll have to wait for a full review unit before we can confirm whether such double-figures ring true or not.

Pocket-lint

Connection-wise there’s a full-size USB 3.0 port, alongside a USB Type-C port, which doubles-up as the charging point. That makes this Switch future-proof when it comes to connectivity.

First Impressions

With keyboard and stylus included, along with silent operation and oodles of power to boot, the Acer Switch 5 certainly isn’t messing around. But then its price also asserts that: at €1,099 it’s a whole lot of money, making a stand against the Surface Pro 4.

The silent operation could possibly sway us Acer’s way, too, but we do feel the fine detail in the metalwork should have been left out of the design plan. That ignored, however, and as 2-in-1s go, there are few with as many features as this Acer. It’s about time the company showed off what it can do in the higher-end market.

Take a look at Apple’s self-driving test vehicle

Photos obtained by Bloomberg are giving us our first look at what appears to be a testbed for Apple’s self-driving car technology. An observer caught the Lexus SUV (looking similar to the demo vehicle above) rolling out of an Apple facility in Silicon Valley, rocking an extensive kit including Velodyne LiDAR units and radar sensors, which help the car observe the world around it. Apple picked up a permit to test its autonomous technology on California streets a couple of weeks ago, and it apparently isn’t waiting to get started.

According to an expert cited by Bloomberg, the kit observed appears to consist of “off the shelf” sensors from third parties like Velodyne, instead of custom hardware. It’s unclear what form the scaled-back Project Titan plans could eventually take, but getting time on the road is a big first step.

Here’s the car that #Apple’s using to test its autonomous car technology. Story with @mhbergen. https://t.co/jHLnJDRjoS pic.twitter.com/zTezUmcZwC

— Alex Webb (@atbwebb) April 27, 2017

Source: Bloomberg

The next generation of VR enhancements coming to HTC Vive

The first year of consumer virtual reality has been exciting, to be sure, but ask anybody in the industry, and they’ll tell you that it’s only the beginning. Engineers and developers are always chasing the next big thing in VR technology: wireless headsets, better walking simulation systems, eye-tracking and more. It’s a long road to getting that better VR experience, but there’s tons of room to grow — and Vive’s Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance is one group trying to help that happen. We stopped by the VRCA’s fourth member meeting to see how the next generation of VR is coming along, and some of it is closer than you might think.

Wireless VR, for instance, is already here — TPCast’s wireless HTC Vive adapter shipped earlier this year, untethering VR users from their PCs with without introducing any perceptible lag. Now the company is taking it to the next level by introducing an upgraded adapter designed specifically for multi-user applications. The TPCast “Business Edition” is designed to enable wireless, multiplayer virtual reality play. It’s a small tweak to an already existing technology, but it opens up new possibilities, and gives more freedom to users collaborating in a VR environment to also interact with the physical world around them without worrying about tripping over each other’s headset cords.

Having less physical barriers in the way of the virtual environment makes in-person social interaction a little easier, but other members of the VRCA are focused on merging the social spaces of disparate digital worlds — specifically, social network integration. Partnering with WeChat, one of China’s most popular social platforms, ObEN is building an AI-driven virtual environment that allows VR users to seamlessly interact with WeChat users on mobile.

Right now, that consists of creating a system that can make a realistic avatar from a selfie and using smart speech to text programs to make sure a user in a VR headset can respond to text conversations without picking up a keyboard. The company says it’s also working on an app that will allow WeChat mobile users to control an avatar in the VR world without wearing an actual headset, significantly lowering the barrier to entry for VR social experiences.

7Invensun’s aGlass eye-tracking upgrade kit was the most impressive VR add-on we saw at the meeting — both as a potential means for improving social VR and as a basic, quality of life feature. The aGlass kit consists of a pair of sensor rings that fit over the HTC Vive’s lenses that, after some calibration, keep track of where the user is looking at all times. Compatible software can use the data to create more life-like avatars that can actually look other players in the eye, enabling more intimate social experiences. More importantly, the technology has the potential to lower the bar for VR-ready PC hardware by enabling foveated rendering — a graphics technique that improves performance by only rendering the areas the user is actively looking at in high quality.

In practice, this means that parts of a VR experience in the user’s peripheral vision are given less processing power. In a short demo shown to Engadget, the technology was able to improve framerates on a low-end machine from 45fps in VR to 90fps. Better still, because the trick exploits the flaws of human vision, the visual difference to the user is almost imperceptible.

The technology on display at the VRVCA meeting is all still under development, but staff on hand told us most of it is due out sometime later this year as upgrades for existing HTC Vive users. Today, their applications and demos may be limited, but each piece of technology shined with potential. Unfortunately, Vive staff couldn’t say if any of the showcased technology would find its way to an upgraded consumer headset in the near future.

Caltech scientists develop a technique for turning bones transparent

Why it matters to you

A new technique allows researchers to examine a bone’s composition in greater detail and could help fight disease.

When scientists want to look at the inside of a bone for a purpose like observing the stem cells inside, they take a very thin slice of the sample and look at it under a microscope.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. The slices that researchers take are very thin, around 40 micrometers, in order to get the best out of the light microscopy technology used to examine them. But this can cause damage to the bone by shattering its edges.

A new technique developed at California Institute of Technology could help solve those problems and others like it. In the laboratory of Viviana Gradinaru, an assistant professor of Biology and Biological Engineering, investigators have come up with a method for making bones transparent.

Called Clarity, the technique can be carried out on postmortem bones with no living tissue. It was originally developed as a way to make soft tissues transparent but has now been extended to hard tissues as well. It works by first removing opaque molecules — called lipids — from cells, with the lost structural support augmented by adding a clear hydrogel mesh. A detergent is then flowed through the bone to leave it transparent to the eye.

In the Caltech study, the team tested the technology with bones taken from postmortem transgenic mice. “These mice had been specially engineered to express a red fluorescent molecule that allowed us to label their stem cells within the bone marrow,” Gradinaru told Digital Trends. “It was important that the clearing method we used allowed us to preserve that fluorescence, so that we could preserve the identity of the cells without needing any additional labelling.”

While this is a good proof of concept, however, the real hope is to be able to use this clearing technique to analyze human bones.

“This would be very informative,” Gradinaru said. “Using the clearing method, it would be possible for us to look at the composition of bones, as well as the effect of different drugs or exercise on them. The challenge with human bones is scaling up our work. They’re larger bones, so it will take longer to clear them. It is possible, though.”

The goal is to use the technique to test new drugs that could help fight diseases like osteoporosis, a condition that weakens bones, making them fragile and more prone to breakages.

Intel will bolster high-end processor lineup with Xeon Gold and Platinum series

Why it matters to you

If you’re building a high-end server, then you might want to wait until you can pick up Intel’s next generation of Xeon processors.

Intel’s Xeon processor line is dominant at the very high-end of the CPU market, and is aimed at powering the most system-critical server-class machines. Now, the company has sent out a Product Change Notification (PCN) to its partners that introduces its latest and greatest offerings in the Xeon line.

Specifically, Intel is launching the Xeon Gold and Platinum lineup, which will represent the company’s high-end flagship processors. There are quite a few new processors being announced, but what they have in common is high clock speeds and high core counts, as Wccftech.com reports.

According to Computerbase.de, the new processors range from the Xeon Gold 5122, which starts out at 3.6GHz with between 14 and 22 cores, up to the Xeon Platinum 8180, which clocks in at 2.5GHz and offers between 22 and 28 cores and a maximum of 56 threads. The 8180 boasts 38.5MB of L3 cache and a thermal design power (TDP) rating of 205 watts.

The new chips will sport new six-channel memory interface with up to three memory modules per channel, for a total of 18 memory modules. In addition to the new Xeons themselves, Intel is also introducing a new LGA 3647 socket that will support hexa-channel RAM and Intel Optane modules.

The new Xeon line will have four CPU families, with Bronze and Silver levels joining the just-announced Gold and Platinum series. Numerical designations will be 3000 for Bronze, 4000 for Silver, 6000 and 5000 for Gold, and 8000 for Platinum. The platform designation is Skylake-SP, which will support up to eight CPU sockets, and the Xeon naming conventions will be changing accordingly.

Intel hasn’t yet provided pricing or availability for the entire Xeon processor lines. However, given that pricing for the current high-end option, the Xeon E7-8890 v3, is set at $8,898, it’s likely that the newest Xeon options will be incrementally more expensive. For anyone who needs it, however, this level of power will likely be well worth the investment.

We crack open the Samsung Galaxy S8 with the help of iCracked CEO A.J. Forsythe

Why it matters to you

Got a Samsung Galaxy S8? If you’ve already shattered the gorgeous Infinity Display, iCracked’s team can repair your device for $200.

So you’ve got your hands on a shiny, Galaxy S8 or S8 Plus from Samsung. You’ll probably need a case, because one drop can do all sorts of damage to these all-glass phones.  But in case the S8 does take a tumble, how easy is it to repair? iCracked CEO A.J. Forsythe did a teardown with us to find out.

iCracked, if you’re not familiar with it, is a repair service company that has thousands of certified technicians in more than 600 cities in the United States. If you’ve shattered the glass on your device, you can set up an appointment for a technician to come to your home or work to repair your phone.

The company also has do-it-yourself guides, though Forsythe suggested the S8 might be best taken care of by someone who knows what they are doing. That’s mostly because the rear glass cover is prone to break during the teardown process.

One difference we found in the teardown is the battery — it’s housed in a “battery bay” to protect it from the rest of the electronics. This new change is likely an extra precaution after the massive recall of the Galaxy Note 7 last year, which spontaneously exploded due to battery defects. The battery on the S8 also has extra adhesive, so it’s incredibly difficult to remove.

From the vibration motor, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, and the internal storage, Forsythe points out all the cool components that make up the Galaxy S8 in our video, in case you’ve never seen what the inside of a smartphone looks like.

iCracked technicians will be able to repair the S8 and S8 Plus within the next two months, and the estimated cost will be $200. The price is expected to go down as S8 parts become more prevalent.