Steel HR brings brains, brawn, and battery to fitness smartwatches

More than a fitness tracker but not quite a smartwatch, the Steel HR fits a sweet spot for me during my daily sweat sessions.

SAVE 20% ON STEEL HR THROUGH MAY 31!!! The Steel HR activity tracker/watch/heart rate monitor retails for $199 for the 40mm version ($279 for the 36mm), but this month you SAVE a bunch o’ 💰💰💰. … Use this link to get on it!!!

I spent a lot of years wearing a lot of smartwatches. Until I didn’t. At some point, I just gave up having one more thing to charge every night. Or maybe being able to swipe away an email at a moment’s notice just wasn’t important anymore. And, so, I went analog. (Thanks to my lovely wife for this Christmas present.)

But I screwed up. I wore my Shinola (this one, since folks will ask) to the gym, twice, and very quickly ended up with sweat stains in the leather. (Let that be a lesson to you!) Time to be smarter about things. And one of the best pieces of advice I think there is when it comes to fitness tech is to try to stay in a single ecosystem. I was already using the Withings Body scale and Wireless Blood Pressure Cuff.

Time to try its fancy watch, too. This is the Steel HR.

See at Withings

The short, short version: The Steel HR is what I’d call a semi-smart watch. It’s got an analog face and an indicator for activity level gauge, dialing up from 0 to 100% (or beyond) as you go throughout your day. It’s also got a small digital display for basic notifications.

On the underside is a heart-rate monitor — the HR part of the Steel HR.

It’ll check your heart rate once every 10 minutes or so when you’re just walking around. But hold down the button on the side of the watch and you enter “workout mode,” and the watch starts taking heart rate measurements continuously. Press the button again and you can see how hard your pumper is pumping and how much time has elapsed in each session.

You’re forgiven if you look at the Steel HR and don’t see it as a smartwatch. I don’t. For one, it doesn’t have the telltale color display. That’s actually a good thing in this case, for two reasons. The first is that when I’m doing the fitness thing, I don’t want to be futzing with the watch all the time. Back when I was wearing full smartwatches, I was always swiping at the darn thing. The Steel HR, however, doesn’t bother me much, if at all. It tells the time, it tracks me in the background, and it notifies me of important incoming events — but those are pretty few and far between.

The other thing is that because it doesn’t have a big, color display lit up all the time, the battery lasts for what feels like forever. As I type this, I honestly couldn’t tell you the actual capacity of the battery, because I simply don’t care. I haven’t gone less than a week before I even thought about getting near a charger. Actual run time will vary a bit depending on how much you’re using the active workout mode. The literature says you get up to five days’ use in workout mode and up to 25 days in normal mode. And that’s really not an exaggeration. The only times I’ve charged is when I’ve felt like it — not because I had to. And the watch charges pretty fast, too, quoting up to 80% in an hour, with another hour to hit 100%.

Hardware is nothing without software, of course. And so this all (like the scale and BP cuff and other products) ties into the Health Mate app, available on Android, on iOS, and on the web.

When you use the “active workout” mode, the watch will sync back to the phone and try to figure out what it is you were doing. Walking and running are the obvious ones. Swimming, too. I usually have to edit things when I’m on the elliptical, but that’s sort of the point. It makes importing your workouts pretty seamless. You just need to double-check the activity and maybe calories expended. Elapsed time and heart rate are handled for you.

(The Nokia folks tell me the Steel HR also will try to automatically recognize tennis, ping pong, squash, badminton, weightlifting, basketball, soccer, volleyball, dancing, and boxing. And if it doesn’t figure those out, it’s got a bunch more you can select from yourself.)

If you work out without the Steel HR on your arm, did you actually exercise? OK, yes. But it’s just not the same.

I’ve been wearing the Steel HR for a few months now. Not 100% of the time (I don’t wear my Shinola 100% of the time either), but almost every time I exercise. I’m to the point where I kind of kick myself a little if I forget to strap it on in the morning when I walk — gotta have my steps counted!

But the Steel HR absolutely comes with me to the gym, every time I go to the gym. I love having a log of my exercises and how hard (or not) I was working.

But mostly I love having a semi-smart connected watch that can stand up to my sweaty body (I’ll let that visual sink in for a minute) and run for weeks at a time. That it looks decent — more than decent, actually — is an added bonus.

See at Withings

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Spotify has a new feature that lets you scan a barcode and play a song and it’s pretty f’ing cool!

This is how you go viral.

In February, Spotify removed its in-app messaging feature, which instantly made it harder to share a song with a friend. What they have now totally makes up for it.

According to Techcrunch, more details are coming Monday May 8, but a feature that lets you scan a special barcode and instantly play a song is live and it’s pretty glorious.

Each song has a unique code attached to its album art (you bring that up the same way you always did) and using Spotify’s in-app camera you take a picture and the song plays. The feature works whether you’re scanning it from a friend’s phone or from a screenshot that you can send through any messaging app. It’s a simple feature that works just like it’s supposed to work, and we love it when that happens!

There are some great ways this might go viral, too (see Snapchat codes). Being able to post a small image anywhere on the web and it plays a song for you means sharing music becomes a lot easier. This is bound to be great for Spotify as well as everyone who likes listening.

Can the BlackBerry KEYone win back the mainstream? [#ACpodcast]

The AC podcast duo of Daniel and Jerry needed some reinforcements this week to dive into the new BlackBerry KEYone, so we called CrackBerry Kevin and Bla1ze of the CrackBerry team and MrMobile himself, Michael Fisher, to help us talk it out!

Is the BlackBerry KEYone a phone that everyone should be excited about, or just hardcore BlackBerry fans? And how come it took the company so long to make a phone like this? Get the inside scoop on why a phone like the KEYone took so long to come to market!

Show notes

• AC’s KEYone review
• CrackBerry’s KEYone review
• MrMobile’s KEYone review video
• BlackBerry KEYone beginner’s guide

Podcast MP3 URL: http://traffic.libsyn.com/androidcentral/androidcentral334.mp3

Turkish court backs censorship of Wikipedia

When Turkey blocked Wikipedia last week, its co-founder Jimmy Wales promised to push for a judicial review of the online censorship. Today, however, Ankara’s 1st Criminal Court of Peace rejected Wikimedia Foundation’s appeal, saying that popular crowdsourced site contained entries that link Turkey to terrorist groups. The court ruled that since the “offending” Wikipedia pages remain on the site, it would not remove the country-wide block.

“Turkey is a state of law,” said the president of the country’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority, Omer Fatih Sayan. “It is not possible to open access to Wikipedia so long as the decisions [country’s demands] are not implemented.”

The ban instated last Saturday, April 29th, isn’t the first time Turkey’s ruling party has tried to silence online dissent in the country. The telecommunications watchdog group Turkey Blocks confirmed last December that the government had blocked access to the Tor anonymity network for most users. The government also shut off internet service in 11 Kurdish cities, began investigating 10,000 social network users and used its internet censorship laws to block Reddit.

We’ve reached out to the Wikimedia Foundation for comment on this matter.

Via: Reuters

Source: Anadolu Agency

Twitch toys with the idea of chat-controlled TV shows

It sounds like Twitch doesn’t want its new sneaker show to be its only stab at interactive programming. In the eyes of chief operating officer Kevin Lin, the ideal TV experience on the platform would be one where the story changes from one episode to the next depending on user feedback. “We’d want to identify really progressive studios that are willing to take a gamble and not release something in a big dump like most digital platforms these days,” Lin told Recode. “[Someone who] will work with us and say, ‘week to week, we’re going to change this thing. We’re going to somehow make it a little more interactive.’”

Lin said that this might not ever come to pass, though, and if it did, we wouldn’t see it for at least a year.

“Will it happen? There’s a high probability. In two years, I’d say if we haven’t done anything yet, we probably decided not to.”

Apparently Twitch is in constant contact with Amazon Studios about programming ideas but understands that something like, say, Transparent wouldn’t be the best fit for the service.

“We need to go broader than that,” Lin said. He continued that aligning too closely with its parent company’s film-and-television wing might send the wrong message to viewers about its larger intent.

It’s something I’ve seen at least one aspiring filmmaker try on YouTube before, albeit at a much smaller scale. But even in the case of the interactive, episodic mafia movie that’s been lost to the annals of time, users chose between a few different options for the next episode rather than completely flipping the script. Like Recode notes, HBO and Netflix are apparently exploring interactive programming as well.

Of course, there’s the chance that this might backfire. Creative control from a show or movie’s writers is paramount to ensure the story makes sense — it’s a little more complex than the chat hive-mind playing Pokemon. And if you give the illusion of choice, that has the potential for some serious backlash.

Case in point: the outrage levied at developer BioWare for how the studio ended the original Mass Effect trilogy. Players were upset that despite the choices they’d made, that ultimately BioWare dictated how the narrative ended. Let’s hope that the studio Twitch recruits knows what it’s getting into.

Source: Recode

Let’s hope this isn’t Amazon’s touchscreen Echo

Rumor has it Amazon is about to introduce a touchscreen version of its Echo speaker. Bloomberg was the first to report about this last November, although no images of the purported device were shared back then. But today, thanks to AFTVnews, we may be getting an idea of what Amazon has been working on. The original gossip suggested the new Echo would come with a 7-inch touchscreen, and this leaked photo certainly fits the bill. You’ll also notice what appears to be a front-facing camera above the display, which makes you wonder whether Amazon could port over some of the fashion features from the Echo Look.

Meanwhile, the speaker grill looks to be right underneath the touchscreen, and there’s probably a microphone somewhere around there as well. It’s not the best-looking Amazon hardware by any means, unless you’re into things that look like a shrunken big-screen TV from the 1990s. But that’s assuming this is even the final product, of course. Our friends over at AFTVnews do have a good track record on Amazon leaks, however, since they were the ones who knew the Look existed weeks before it was official.

If this is the touchscreen Echo, let’s just hope it looks better in person. Or, at the very least, in higher-resolution renders.

Update: Ask and you shall receive, as Evan Blass has surfaced higher-res pictures of the device in both black and white.

@AFTVnews Here, let me help you with that. pic.twitter.com/9YokBj4pXQ

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) May 5, 2017

Via: The Verge

Source: AFTVnews

The enduring myth of the hacker boy-band

Last week, Wired magazine published a sprawling feature on a group of young hackers the magazine claimed would “make us or break us” with their “exceptional talent.” The article fawningly profiled each member of a group of Northeastern University college students that would “soon dominate technology — and shape our future.”

The hackers on Wired’s hotlist got an impressive amount of editorial padding for their resumes, and each had a photo and stat card, naming their “tech hero,” “last hack,” what they’d do with a trillion dollars, and their “dream job.” It was exposure on high, and a setup to a bright future for each hacker in what was quickly noticed to be a strangely homogenous group.

Bc only (mostly white) men are hackers. And only (mostly white) men will shape the world. @WIRED Brilliant Hackers https://t.co/il1HVIDUUR

— Cindy Gallop (@cindygallop) April 27, 2017

You see, every single one, down to a man, was … a man.

Hack just as much, get 100% less press

This seemed odd to the infosec community. And the hackers and researchers, and actual makers and breakers, said so.

Why are you just reinforcing all the stereotypes of who world-changes are and aren’t, @WIRED? Do better. https://t.co/ZYEP3vedmF

— Laura Weidman Powers (@laurawp) April 28, 2017

This @WIRED story is so depressing https://t.co/qUuscHuidu no women *at all*…how is that even possible these days?

— ʎɐʍollɐפ ʇʇoɔS (@scottgal) April 28, 2017

BTW they were only able to find mostly wm 🙄 The Brilliant, Candy-Loving Hackers of Stetson West https://t.co/H1hMznKWVq via @WIRED

— Christina M. (@divinetechygirl) April 28, 2017

Hearing the outcry, the magazine’s editor took to the pages of his personal Facebook account — not the magazine itself — to make an apology. Editor in Chief Nicholas Thompson admitted that “many readers have pointed out” that “none of the seven people is a woman. It’s not the most racially diverse collective either.”

If it had seemed to infosec that the magazine might’ve had to go out of its way to find such an un-diverse group of hackers … turns out, it did. Thompson’s social media post revealed that during the course of reporting the story, there was “a meeting with the woman who runs the college’s official hacking group.”

Now, we can all bag on Wired and be annoyed at the lack of female and black editors everywhere, or lament infosec’s wider problems with attracting a diverse workforce. Because Wired definitely didn’t learn anything after their boob-tastic cover disaster. And have you ever tried to pitch a piece on women or people of color in hacking? Even cybersecurity CEOs have been hitting infosec over the head about hiring a diverse workforce to keep them from being “weak.”

But Wired hit the zeitgeist in a way it didn’t plan to. The article explained that “…ours is a culture fascinated, and terrified, by teenagers who know computers better than most of us will ever…” What it actually described is that ours is a culture fascinated with erasing women from the hacking narrative altogether.

It’s the same thing that happened when the Washington Post profiled hacker collective L0pht in 2011. The article featured at length the men — and the guys who hung around them — who could’ve saved us from our current security doom if only people had listened. And indeed: Members from the Boston collective testified to Congress about the dangers we currently face.

You can probably tell where this is going. There was a glaring omission in WaPo’s glowing piece: The women of L0pht.

You would never have known from reading about the amazing male hacker club that it was also where famous contemporary female hackers were hacking, too. Ones like Katie Moussouris, Chief Policy Officer of the HackerOne bug bounty clearinghouse and founder of Luta Security. And open source pioneer, engineer Limor Fried, CEO of Adafruit (photo).

There are more — if anyone decides to look. I have. “The women of L0pht” is a story I’ve pitched many times. It is odd arguing the relevance of this kind of story to (usually nontechnical) male editors. Clearly no one is questioning pitches for articles about “men who hack.”

I’m starting to think we need a Bechdel Test for this sort of thing.

Even pronouns are more inclusive now

It’s not even a new trend. Wired and WaPo are simply part of a tradition. The erasure of women in hacking has a historical precedent. In a stunning coincidence, the documentation comes from Northeastern’s own Professor Meryl Alper.

Her academic paper “Can Our Kids Hack It With Computers?: Constructing Youth Hackers in Family Computing Magazines (1983–1987)” analyzes where our modern hacker narrative came from. Spoiler: it’s all about fetishizing brilliant young men. She points out, “We should further scrutinize though who is missing from these narratives: girls and youth of color.”

Of @wired’s seven hackers who will change the world, all are men, all are Americans, and 5 are white https://t.co/63kdYxbXfS

— Nate Hoffelder (@thDigitalReader) April 28, 2017

For nearly 40 years, in popular media boys are never described as being nontechnical before they acquire the skill of hacking. Nor do “stories about male hackers portray this transformation from novice to nerd.” Alper notes that “when female hackers are made visible, discussion is primarily limited to either their social exclusion or their initial lack of “natural” technical skills.”

So it’s just the way things are done. It’s also, you know, lazy.

It’s really too bad that Wired’s editor didn’t actually change anything with his Facebook apology. Like all good apologizers, he said he was sorry that it happened, and that it wasn’t the right thing to do. And he gets props for not ignoring the hackers who called him out. But what a missed opportunity! He could’ve told us why it wasn’t the right thing to do. And no, not because we have to show diversity now or we’re a magazine of influence so we should pretend to be socially responsible.

It was wrong because their “here are the people who are the future of hacking” article was inaccurate. That’s not what the future of hacking looks like and we all know it. It’s not even the present of hacking. That was an old fantasy of hacking’s future, following a template set in motion by magazines from the 1980s, whose editors were men born in the 1940s and 50s.

It’s actually not what the future of hacking ever looked like.

Photograph by Rayon Richards for Distro Magazine – Issue 75 (Limor Fried)

Intel positions itself as the heart of autonomous vehicles

Intel’s computer chip manufacturing and marketing is amazing. It’s hard to read the company’s name without hearing those iconic four tones in your head. But outside of making silicon faster and shoving it in nearly every computer on the planet, the company has had a pretty shoddy record of diversifying its business. Just a cursory look back at history will reveal a trail of missed opportunities.

The company’s mobile business launched too late. Its wearables business is virtually nonexistent, and for some odd reason (actually it’s because CEO Brian Krzanich wanted to focus on smartphones and tablets), Intel sold its OnCue streaming video service to Verizon. With autonomous cars looming large on the horizon, the chip maker is once again striking out on a new venture. Yet unlike a watch that tracks your steps, whose need is questionable, cars aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Based on what I saw at an event this week, it seems like Intel actually has a chance to finally have a secondary business that thrives.

The company jump-started its autonomous road map with the acquisition of vision-based-driver-assistance company Mobileye, back in March. In buying Mobileye, Intel inherited the company’s existing relationships with 25 automotive partners, making it a shrewd purchase. One of the biggest Mobileye partners is tier-one automotive supplier Delphi, and that collaboration has already yielded results.

At the launch of the Silicon Valley Innovation Center for Autonomous Driving, Intel, along with BMW and Delphi, showed off the first highly automated vehicles the companies will be testing. For Intel — a company that’s been serious about autonomous driving for only about nine months — working with the German automaker is huge.

But it’s not just partnerships that look promising. The chip manufacturer has also launched an AI division of its own, is poised to launch 5G vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications, and is working on the “big data” problem of processing all that cross-platform sensor data. Intel even played to its technical advantage and put together an SDK so automakers and suppliers won’t have to change their code when they switch from testing on a low-cost Atom to graduating to a high-power Xeon processor.

While getting into the auto game is clearly an opportunity for Intel, it’s easy to surmise that the end goal is to sell more silicon. As was already pointed out, the company makes cellular radios, so it has the chops to bring 5G communication to vehicles, and all those computers either on the server side or inside the cars will need something to crunch all that data. Really the only thing Intel needs to do is build up its AI technology. It won’t be too difficult to start getting chips ready for the new autonomous vehicle division.

“It’s taking things we already know but making them automotive-grade,” said Kathy Winter, vice president of Intel’s automated driving group. Winter came to Intel nine months ago. Previously she was Delphi’s vice president of software and services for automated driving. So it looks like the company is making all the right moves.

Intel may have been late to mobile and missed out on a huge business, but autonomous driving still has a ways to go before any of us will be chauffeured around town by our cars. If Intel can stick with it and pull this off, it won’t feel left behind, and it may actually be able to boast that self-driving cars have Intel inside.

Kanye West just deleted his Twitter and Instagram

People are freaking out because Kanye West just deleted his Twitter and Instagram accounts. Not surprisingly, there’s no explanation as to why the producer-turned-rapper-turned-designer decided to shut down his social media pages, but don’t be surprised if it’s part of a sneaky marketing plot. Yesterday, his wife Kim Kardashian revealed that the two were collaborating on a children’s clothing line named Kids Supply, so the timing of Kanye’s decision may be tied to that.

Of course, it could be something else altogether. Late last year, West was hospitalized in Los Angeles for what doctors referred to as “temporary psychosis,” which led to the cancellation of 23 dates from his Saint Pablo tour. Over the years, Kanye’s had some of the best (worst?) Twitter rants, including the time he said he wouldn’t attend the Grammy Awards unless The Recording Academy promised him album of the year.

It’s worth noting that Kanye hasn’t always been a fan of Twitter or Instagram. In 2009, he took to his now-defunct blog, KanyeUniverseCity, to say he didn’t have “a fucking Twitter” because he was too busy “being creative most of the time.” He added that even if he was “just laying on a beach,” he wouldn’t tell the world about it. As for Instagram, Kanye tweeted in 2013 “I DO NOT HAVE AN INSTAGRAM,” but he eventually gave in last September. We’ll see how long it takes him to come back.

We’re reaching out to Kanye’s representatives and will update this story if we hear back.

Source: The Fader

Walmart eyes a future Dash replacement that could reorder for you

When Amazon’s Dash buttons first debuted two years ago, many thought it was an April fool’s joke. A device you could press just to order toilet paper? Isn’t that the height of laziness? As it turned out of course, it wasn’t a joke at all. From surprise chocolates to Calvin Klein underwear, there are now well over 250 brands that have joined the one-button-press bandwagon. It’s no surprise then that Walmart wants to get in on the action too. The retail giant apparently filed for a patent back in October (though it was just published today) for what looks like an Amazon Dash rival, but with an IoT hook. Instead of having to press a button to replenish an order, the Walmart version would do so automatically.

According to the patent application, Walmart’s system would require you to add some kind of internet-connected tag on products in order for it to monitor its usage — the tag would probably use Bluetooth, RFID, infrared, NFC or some other technology. Once you’re down to, say, the last four rolls of Bounty, Walmart’s system would just automatically order a new batch. Interestingly, the Walmart patent also describes a way to track expiration dates and product recalls.

Aside from just providing a quick fix for its customers, Walmart would also use this shopping tech to gain valuable insight on consumer behavior. So for example, it would know how frequently you use a certain product and at what times of day. The application goes on to say that based on this data, Wal-Mart could then “cross-sell” you products that better fit your lifestyle. So if you’re constantly buying shoes for example, it might suggest a more durable brand the next time around.

We should note that this isn’t the first time Walmart has tried to take on Amazon Dash. Two years ago, the company partnered with Hiku, a small voice-enabled shopping button that would let you add items to a shopping list just by speaking or scanning bar codes. Of course, the issue with Hiku is that it was third-party hardware that could be used with more than just Walmart. Oh, and it was also $79, which is definitely way more expensive than the typical Dash button ($5, and you often get the money back after the first order).

It remains to be seen if Walmart will actually bring this patent application to life, but it does at least indicate that the company is well aware of its online rival and is doing all it can to beat it.

Via: Reuters

Source: CB Insights