Logitech’s latest MX mice are ready for your multi-PC setup

Most mice are designed with the assumption that you’ll pair them with one PC at a time. But that’s just not realistic these days — there’s a good chance you have multiple systems. And Logitech thinks it can do something about this with its latest flagship mice. It’s introducing the MX Master 2S (shown at left) and MX Anywhere 2S, both of which support new Flow software that lets you control as many as three computers with one mouse. You can even use that lone peripheral to copy files from one PC to the other, so this could be helpful if you want to flick a document to your laptop before you leave for coffee.

Of course, the mice aren’t just about software tricks. Both MX models are making huge jumps in precision (from 1,600DPI to 4,000DPI), and you’ll get longer battery life that promises up to 70 days of runtime on a charge. As usual, the biggest differences between the MX models comes down to where you use them. The Master 2S is built for your desktop with a huge ergonomic grip and speed-adaptive scrolling, while the Anywhere 2S is more for the portable crowd with neither of those frills.

The two mice arrive in June in a trio of colors (black, blue and white), with prices starting at $80/£80 for the MX Anywhere 2S and climbing to $100/£90 for the Master 2S. And to be clear, you don’t need one of these pricier mice to use Flow — the M585 and M590 offer similar control for $40. With that in mind, you’re probably looking for more than a basic input device if you have a multi-PC setup.

Source: Logitech

Adobe’s Document Cloud for mobile can now turn your PDFs into editable text

Why it matters to you

If you’re someone who handles a lot of papers and documents, Adobe Document Cloud can now make your workflow a little more streamlined.

Adobe is making some major changes to Adobe Document Cloud, its suite of tools aimed at increasing productivity levels on mobile devices, and the update should offer some pretty helpful new features.

Perhaps the biggest change to Adobe Document Cloud is the addition of Adobe Scan, which is aimed at allowing users to turn their phone into a scanner. Simply take a photo of a document, and the app will automatically crop the photo, fix the perspective of the document, and turn that image into a PDF.

You might be wondering what this tool has that third-party scanning apps don’t — and there are a few things. For starters, the app can capture scanned text, which can then be selected, copied, and edited before being converted into a PDF. It can be a pretty helpful tool, especially if you have a lot of loose papers that you wish you were in an editable digital form.

“The challenge is unlocking the intelligence that lives in those documents, and extracting meaning that can be searched, analyzed, and incorporated into digital workflows,” said Abhay Parasnis, chief technology officer for Adobe. “Adobe Scan, powered by Adobe Sensei’s intelligent services, represents a critical step toward our broader innovation imperative for Adobe Document Cloud.”

Besides scanning, Adobe Document Cloud will also now feature new signing tools through Adobe Sign. Users will be able to access digital signatures on any device and in any browser. There’s also cross-platform support — for example, if your computer isn’t touch-enabled, you can have the service send a text to your smartphone, where you can then sign the document with your finger.

The changes come in the form of updates to two of Adobe’s key apps — Adobe Scan and Adobe Sign. You can download the apps for iOS here and for Android here.

ASUS ZenPad 3s 8.0 hands-on

ASUS hasn’t given up on Android tablets — its latest ZenPad looks like a decent metal-clad slate, though you’ll need have to contend with the company’s typically odd software UI.

Once upon a time it seemed like everyone wanted to release a cheap, small Android tablet. But unspectacular tablet sales — in part fuelled by the rise of larger phones — has cooled enthusiasm for the form factor among device makers. Nevertheless, Taiwanese manufacturer ASUS continues to push out Android tablets; its latest, the ZenPad 8s 8.0, wasn’t included in its glitzy Computex press conference, but it was on display on the show floor in Taipei this week.

The physical hardware of ASUS’s new ZenPad draws inspiration from the company’s Android phones, with a slim (6.9mm) aluminum unibody accented by diamond-cut chamfers. Up top there’s a glossy cutout around the camera module — otherwise, it’s all-metal, with pleasantly curved side walls.

ASUS knows how to make pretty metal gadgets.

The ZenPad’s button setup takes its layout from the ASUS ZenFone line, which is to say it borrows it (vicariously) from Samsung’s 2014-2016 Android phones, with capacitive back and recent apps keys flanking a physical home button. The home key was a little stiff on the demo units I played with, perhaps a consequence of the pre-production hardware on show at Computex.

The display itself looks great, though — it’s a 2K panel that looks sharp, and provides ample pixel density at a 7.9-inch form factor. The only downside, it seems, is the tablet runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chip as opposedo something with a little more oomph, and UI performance wasn’t exactly fluid on the units I played with. The 625 is a fine chip, with an Adreno 510 GPU at its disposal, but it feels out of its depth running a 2K panel.

An Android experience more fitting of a device from 2013.

On top of that, you’ll have to deal with ASUS’s hodgepodge ZenUI, which is feature-rich, but inconsistent. It manages to copy parts of Samsung’s older Android UIs, but overall remains a mess of different visual styles. Combined with the ample lag I experienced, it’s not a great look — which is a shame considering how nice the physical hardware is.

(A side note on software: The spec sheet on the show floor lists Android 7.1, however the units themselves were running version 7.0. Make of that what you will; obviously everything’s still pre-production here.)

ASUS ZenPad 3s 8.0 specs

At least battery life should be solid, with a respectable 4,680mAh cell inside the ZenPad’s svelte body. Given the Snapdragon 625’s reputation for efficiency, you’re likely going to be looking at multiple days between charges, particularly if you’re mostly using it for streaming and web browsing.

So the hardware is nice, the software is weird, and on the latter point, ASUS is still its own worst enemy with a bewildering loadout of branded custom technologies and features like VisualMaster and PixelMaster. Hopefully future versions of ZenUI will show more polish and restraint.

The ZenPad 3s 8.0 isn’t going to be a major release for ASUS — after all, it didn’t even get so much as a mention in the company’s Computex press releases. What we have here is another commodity Android slate that’ll probably sell for a fairly cheap price, before being largely forgotten. That’s a shame, because with the right software and perhaps a little more horsepower, this could’ve been a promising little gadget.

Uber’s financials improve, but it really needs a new CFO

Uber has revealed that its losses for the first quarter of 2017 amounted to $708 million. Huge, but still smaller than the $991 million it lost in the last quarter of 2016. While the fact that it didn’t bleed as much money as it did last year could be considered a small victory, the company is now much too busy to celebrate: it has to find a replacement for Gautam Gupta, the head of finance who’s leaving the ride-hailing service for another startup. Uber is reportedly looking for someone with public-company experience, since it’s planning to launch an IPO as soon as next year.

Gupta is but the latest exec to leave what’s considered the biggest start-up in the world. A string of other execs packed up and left in the past few months, including its VP of Maps Brian McClendon and one of its self-driving project heads Sherif Marakby. Even Uber President Jeff Jones left in March after the company was hit by a number of sexual harassment allegations and other controversies.

In addition to losing its head of finance, the company also recently fired Anthony Levandowski, who’s the focus of Google’s lawsuit against the ride-hailing firm. Mountain View is accusing Levandowski of taking valuable LiDAR and autonomous driving tech with him when he left Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving car division.

While we don’t know if Uber will find a replacement for Levandowski, it’s definitely looking for a new finance head, especially since it also doesn’t have a CFO. Gupta actually started his career with the company working under chief financial officer Brent Callinicos. He wasn’t promoted to CFO even after Callinicos left Uber for Hyperloop One in 2015, so the company might be looking for two finance executives instead of one. The firm’s first-quarter revenue is already 18 percent higher than Q4 2016’s at $3.4 billion — it now needs people who can help it grow that number while also cutting down on its losses.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

IBM’s Watson is really good at creating cancer treatment plans

Jeopardy-winning Watson is getting better and better at designing cancer treatments. New data presented this week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting show that IBM’s Watson for Oncology suggests cancer treatments that are often in-line with what physicians recommend. The company also announced that the cancer care product, designed to help physicians diagnose and treat their patients, is being used by nine new medical centers around the world.

In a handful of studies being presented at ASCO, researchers show that Watson for Oncology is pretty dang good at recommending treatments for a variety of different cancers. From research done in India, Watson’s treatment recommendations were in agreement with those of physicians 96 percent of the time for lung cancer, 93 percent of the time for rectal cancer, and 81 percent of the time for colon cancer.

And there were comparable rates of agreement for colorectal, lung, breast and gastric cancer treatments in a Thai-based study. Additionally, Watson was able to screen breast and lung cancer patients for clinical trial eligibility 78 percent faster than a human, reducing screening time from 110 minutes down to just 24.

Watson for Oncology is a cognitive computing system trained by physicians at Memorial Sloan Kettering. It’s able to take a patient’s medical records, extract pertinent information about their health, and come up with a personalized treatment plan. Watson can also suggest which treatments should not be pursued and provides relevant studies to back up its proposals. All in all, it’s meant to help clinicians navigate each patient’s case with the help of the latest available research.

Watson’s healthcare successes aren’t new, but these additional findings make it that much more useful for doctors. Further, while Watson is already being used all around the world, it’s adding nine new hospitals to its client list, including medical groups in Australia, Mexico, Brazil and throughout southeast Asia. However, financial and functional issues have postponed a planned launch at the University of Texas’ MD Anderson Cancer Center.

The expanding list of cancers that Watson can evaluate will also now include prostate cancer, according to IBM. In a press release, Andrew Norden, IBM Watson Health’s deputy chief health officer for oncology and genomics, said, “These studies demonstrate that Watson technologies are doing what we expect them to do: helping physicians augment their own experience and expertise to deliver evidence-based care.”

Source: ASCO (1), (2), (3)

Adobe Unveils Free ‘Adobe Scan’ Optical Character Recognition App

Adobe today announced the launch of Adobe Scan, a new Optical Character Recognition (OCR) app that’s able to scan documents and convert printed text into digital text in a matter of seconds.

Unlike most OCR apps on the market, Adobe Scan is free to use, with no watermarks or page limits, and it’s optimized for capturing multi-page documents.

The app works by capturing a picture of what a user wants to scan, from notes and forms to receipts and business cards. Adobe Scan detects the edges of a document, captures and cleans the image, fixes perspective, removes shadows, and then uses image recognition to detect and convert printed text.

Scans are converted into Adobe PDFs that can be searched, highlighted, copied, edited, marked up, and shared with other users.

“Adobe Scan represents a radical reimagination of how to capture your most important document content,” said Bryan Lamkin, executive vice president and general manager, Digital Media at Adobe. “Adobe invented PDF creation for PCs, and with Adobe Scan we’re doing the same for a mobile-first world. As part of Adobe Document Cloud, new apps like Adobe Scan integrate with services in Adobe Sign andAcrobat DC, offering a modern document experience with unprecedented value to our customers.”

Adobe Scan is powered by the company’s Adobe Sensei image processing technology. Scans captured by the app are stored in the Adobe Document Cloud, also free to use, and are accessible across desktop and mobile devices, and it works with Acrobat DC and Adobe Sign.

Adobe Sign is also gaining new features, including cloud-based digital signatures, cross-device signature capture, customizable email templates, and more.

Adobe Scan is available for download starting today on iOS and Android devices. [Direct Link]

Tag: Adobe
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Others can watch your VR adventures via Chromecast on your Samsung Gear VR

Why it matters to you

If you are a Samsung Gear VR user, then your virtual reality experience won’t be quite so lonely anymore.

If you are using a PC-based virtual reality system like the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR, then you might be accustomed to displaying your VR experience on an external display for your friends to follow along. If you’re using a phone-based VR headset, however, you have probably felt a bit more isolated.

That is because unlike the more expensive and powerful VR systems, phone-based systems have not supported streaming to an external display. As of Wednesday, that is changing as Oculus announced Chromecast support for the Samsung Gear VR headset.

Given the new capabilities, Gear VR users can now stream their VR experience directly from their headset to any TV with Google’s Chromecast player connected to it. All users have to do is open up the Oculus mobile app on Android, tap on the Cast button, and the select the appropriate Cast device.

Once things are set up, then whatever is in focus in the Gear VR environment will show up via Chromecast. According to Oculus, that adds a new social element to mobile VR, which is true to the extent that it allows others to take part in the fun but it does not quite yet allow external parties to interact within the VR experience — something that is coming in more powerful systems.

Chromecast support on Gear VR is just another example of companies working together to improve cross-platform VR support. Another example is Samsung’s addition of Galaxy S8 support for Google’s competing Daydream platform.

The new Gear VR Chromecast support requires Android 7.0 or later. The feature is not hitting everybody’s device at once and you will know if the feature is available for you if you see the Cast button in the Oculus app. Make sure that you are running the most recent version of the Oculus mobile app and that your device is fully updated and then be a little patient in waiting for the required bits to make it your way.

Senators ask FBI to investigate FCC’s alleged cyberattack

The FCC isn’t exactly forthcoming with evidence of the alleged denial of service attack on its servers, and that’s leaving some worried. Is it protecting privacy (as it claims), or stifling attempts to post comments supporting net neutrality? A slew of Senators want to find out — and they’re going above the FCC’s head to make sure they get answers. Senators Al Franken, Patrick Leahy, Edward Markey, Brian Schatz and Ron Wyden have sent a letter to FBI Acting Director Andrew McCabe asking his bureau to conduct a high-priority investigation of the FCC’s cyberattack claims. While they don’t directly accuse the FCC of dishonesty, it’s clear from the wording that they aren’t just taking the Commission’s word at face value.

As they put it, any cyberattack against a federal agency is “very serious.” It denied the public their chance to influence a major decision, however temporarily. That, in turn, could “call into question” the integrity of the FCC’s rule process. To put it another way: whoever’s responsible tried to undermine the American system of government, and that will always warrant a closer look.

McCabe has been asked to respond no later than June 23rd. It’s not clear how likely he is to take action, and it’s entirely possible nothing will come of this. Senators love to send letters expressing their concern about weighty topics, but it’s sometimes a purely symbolic gesture. Also, it’s safe to say that the security of the FCC’s comment system isn’t the most pressing issue on McCabe’s plate at the moment. If the FBI does agree to an investigation, though, it would be more than a little unusual. Effectively, the bureau would be tasked with calling the FCC’s bluff — it would be challenging the sincerity of a regulator that, to some, appears more interested in forcing a predetermined agenda through the pipeline than listening to the people it’s supposed to serve.

Via: CNET

Source: Senator Schatz

Gear VR now supports Chromecast: Here’s how to stream VR to your TV

Oculus has added Chromecast support to the Samsung Gear VR headset.

That means, if you own a Gear VR, you will be able to use Chromecast to stream (or “cast”) your virtual reality experience to your TV so that your friends or whoever else is nearby can join in on the fun by being able to see what you’re doing inside the VR world. Such options have been available for tethered headsets like the Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR but not phone-based mobile VR headsets.

Tethered headsets are already indirectly connected to a monitor or TV and essentially mirror the headset display, for instance. But Oculus said that Samsung’s Gear VR will be the first headset to officially support Chromecast – or at least the first one you can use right now. Remember, Google plans to add Chromecast support to a Daydream VR update, but that’s not due until sometime later this year.

Here’s everything you need to know about Chromecast support for the Gear VR, including how to set it up.

• Samsung Gear VR Consumer Edition review
• Land’s End review: Glimpsing the future of VR gaming
• HTC Vive preview: An experience that’s out of this world

What is Chromecast?

Chromecast is a Google platform you can use to send things from your VR headset to your TV, which must either have built-in Chromecast technology or be hooked up to a Chromecast dongle. The Chromecast platform also lets you send anything from a supported app, such as a YouTube video on your phone, to a TV. Or, you can send a desktop website on your computer to your TV.

And that’s just three possibilities. Either way, all you have to do is hit the Cast button on your mobile device, then sit back, and watch your stuff appear instantly on your TV. For more information on Chromecast, including how the Chromecast dongle works and how to set up Chromecast to work with a range of devices, check out Pocket-lint’s in-depth guides here and here.

What is Samsung Gear VR?

The Gear VR is a mobile VR headset developed by Samsung, in collaboration with Facebook-owned Oculus, and manufactured by Samsung. It requires a compatible Samsung device, such as the Galaxy S8 or Galaxy S8+, which acts as the headset’s display and processor. It therefore works differently from the Rift, a more powerful, full-fledged, Oculus-made headset that’s tethered to a PC.

To access VR content and apps on the Gear VR, you need to use the Oculus app on your Samsung device. From using head movements for games to watching Netflix in a virtual mansion, there’s plenty to experience. See our favourite experiences here.

How do you Chromecast with Gear VR?

Set up

You need a Gear VR headset, a compatible Samsung phone, the Oculus app installed on that phone, and a modern, flat-screen TV that either has built-in support for Chromecast or is hooked up to a Chromecast dongle. If you have all that, you’ll be able to share your Gear VR experiences directly from the headset by streaming to your TV. Your friends can therefore experience it in real time too.

Casting

Once you have the latest version of the Oculus mobile app running on your Android (which also needs to be up to date), just hit the Cast button in the app, and then select your nearby Cast-enabled TV. You’ll then be able to “step inside Gear VR while your friends sit back and enjoy the ride”, according to Oculus, which also thinks Chromecast support is a “great way to introduce new people to VR”.

Want to know more?

Check out Oculus’ blog post for more details.

Bamboo Sketch and Ink are Wacom’s new styluses for iOS and Windows 10

Wacom has announced new pricey, precision styluses specifically for iOS and Windows 10 devices.

The first one, called the Bamboo Sketch, works similar to other styluses, meaning it allows you to draw and sketch on both an iPad and iPhone through a Bluetooth connection. It copies a pen-and-paper experience, thanks to its shortcut buttons, which you can customise, as well as the included interchangeable pen nibs (in soft and firm). Sketch can be used in apps like Bamboo Paper, Autodesk SketchBook, etc.

• New Apple iPad (2017) review
• Apple iPad Pro 9.7 review
• You can now try Windows Ink, and here’s how

The Bamboo Sketch offers 2,048 levels of pressure sensitivity – even on iPads other than the iPad Pro, so you can essentially use it on iPads that don’t support the Apple Pencil. But it charges over a custom magnetic connector and USB. Simply connect the magnetic charging port on the pen to a USB dongle accessory, which can then hook up to a USB 3.0 port. It’ll last for up to 15 hours on one charge, Wacom claimed.

As for the second, Windows 10-specific stylus, which is called the Bamboo Ink, it is optimized for Windows 10 devices (see the compatibility list here) and works with Windows Ink. It’s also designed for writing and comes with soft, medium, and firm nibs. You can not only use the pen with Windows Ink, but to interact with the Edge browser and to navigate. It can write in text boxes, scroll, and select.

Both styluses will cost $79.95 (about £62) and be available on Wacom’s website and other retailers starting in June. We’re checking into UK pricing and availability and will update this post when we know.