Smartoo lets travelers turn their suitcase into a smart desk for their laptop

Why it matters to you

If you often find yourself hauling around a suitcase — whether for business or leisure — the Smartoo might turn out to be a handy little addition to your luggage.

Whether you’re a frequent business traveler who works on the go or a regular globetrotter who always likes to have their laptop close by, getting comfy with your computer while you wait for your flight can be a tricky affair.

The ingenious Smartoo mobile desk hopes to change all that. No more balancing your computer on your lap. No more twisting and turning with the laptop by your side. And no more wasting time looking for a free table or ledge on which to perch your PC.

Currently an Indiegogo project and featured in the crowdfunding company’s “Team Favorites Colleciton,” the Smartoo is quick to install, and, thanks to its adjustable clamp system, fits pretty much any suitcase with a telescopic handle.

It copes comfortably with any 15-inch laptop and also includes a slot to prop up tablets and smartphones. A neat addition is a removable power bank to give your handset a juice boost while you wait for an update on your flight delay. When you’re done using it, you simply fold it in two and drop it in your bag.

Created by New York-based Enblue Technology, the Smartoo’s Indiegogo page features a nice set of images showing the device in everyday use. There’s a photo of a guy using it on a subway train, and another at a station. The same besuited fella is even shown sitting in a small rowing boat on Central Park Lake. With a suitcase. And a Smartoo. It looks a bit bonkers, but hey, you never know when a spot of urgent work might come your way.

Enblue Technology

Enblue is aiming for $20,000 in funding, and has another month left to reach its target. If you’re quick, you can take advantage of one of a number of early-bird offers. These include, for example, a $65 deal that scores you one Smartoo and one power bank, as well as a tasty 35 percent saving on the expected $100 retail price.

If all goes well for Enblue’s campaign and the team hits all of its target development dates, you could be plopping your laptop or mobile device onto the Smartoo as early as December, 2017.

OnePlus 5 vs. Honor 9: Beauty and the 8GB Beast

Two very different kinds of affordable flagships enter the fray.

OnePlus and Honor have always been rivals, but this year sees the two brands going head-to-head more directly than ever before. With the OnePlus 5, the company focuses on high-end specs, including a ridiculous 8GB of RAM, alongside a new dual camera setup. And the Honor 9 builds on its predecessor with a few meaningful upgrades of its own, including a beautifully curved glass back panel and an enhanced dual camera system.

Both phones hover either side of the £400 mark — the OnePlus 5 starts at £449, while the Honor 9 undercuts it at £379. So how do these two shape up? Let’s dive in with a first comparison, a day into using these two handsets side by side.

The front faces of both phones are pretty similar, with swappable capacitive keys flanking a fingerprint scanner, which doubles as your home button. But aside from that, the physical similarities are few and far between. The design of the OnePlus 5 could be described as generic. In photos it looks a little bit iPhone-esque, on account of the antennae bands and dual camera placement. But the in-hand feel is completely different from Apple’s: Whether you get it in grey or black, the OnePlus 5’s metal shell is slim, light, and just a little bit slippery.

OnePlus is svelte but generic. Honor is striking but slippery.

The Honor 9, on the other hand, is slippery in a different way. The smaller size and curved back panel make it less slick in the hand, but like its predecessor, it’s prone to sliding its way across (and eventually off) flat surfaces. Honor 9 owners may prefer to use the bundled plastic shell case to mitigate this issue. (While there are many OnePlus 5 cases available, none are bundled with the phone.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, the Honor 9 is clearly the prettier of the two phones. The OnePlus 5, slim and svelte as it is, can’t match the wow factor of Honor’s 15-layer glass back rear.

As for the hardware on the inside, the contrast is between the latest high-end specs from either Huawei or Qualcomm. The OnePlus 5 packs the just-released Snapdragon 835, along with 6 or 8 GB of RAM depending on which model you pick up. The 835 is based on new, efficient 10nm manufacturing process, whereas the Kirin 960 chip inside the Honor 9 uses an older 16nm process, paired with 4 or 6 GB of RAM. Performance in both phones is fantastic, with the OnePlus 5 having an ever-so-slight advantage in touch response.

OnePlus’s Snapdragon 835 is a generation ahead, but its performance lead isn’t enormous.

The OnePlus 5 also has a theoretical lead in gaming performance, thanks to its more capable GPU and more efficient manufacturing process. In practice, though, we haven’t noticed a huge difference between the two, even in high-end titles like Asphalt Nitro. (We’re also not losing any sleep over 4GB of RAM versus 6, or 6GB versus 8.)

It’s also a dead heat in terms of battery life. Both the Honor 9 and OnePlus 5 manage a full day comfortably, with around 4.5 hours of screen-on time on a heavy day’s use. The more tangible advantage for the OnePlus 5 isn’t how long the battery lasts, but how quickly you can refill it — OnePlus’s Dash Charge is still the quickest way to recharge a smartphone battery, running rings around the 9V / 2A quick charging supported by the Honor 9.

These two phones are worlds apart in terms of their software experience. EMUI 5.1 is very much a traditional “skin” of Android, replacing much fo the UI and offering a loadout of customized apps from the Huawei mothership. The latest version of EMUI is based on Android 7.0 Nougat, with a clean blue-and-white visual style running through Huawei’s own apps, and system elements like the lock screen and notification shade. Elsewhere, other bits of the interface can be skinned thanks to a wealth of themes available through a bundled app.

OxygenOS and EMUI couldn’t be any more different.

Handy features from Huawei include the ability to lock apps behind a fingerprint or pattern, and run multiple instances of chat/social apps like Facebook, WhatsApp and WeChat through EMUI’s “twin app” capability.

OnePlus’s OxygenOS takes a much more barebones approach to Android, building on stock Android 7.1.1 with a handful of useful tweaks and features. OnePlus’s launcher has an iPhone-style widget shelf, but otherwise mirrors the look of the Google Pixel launcher, with a vertical swipe revealing the app drawer. OnePlus is also big on customization, with endless gestures and shortcuts waiting to be discovered in the Settings app. These include double-tap to wake, raise to wake, ambient display, as well as a number of swipe gestures to control your music, or quickly get to the camera app.

It’s also possible to change up the way OxygenOS looks, with three base themes that can be tweaked to your liking through accent colors.

Two very different dual camera configs.

Both devices include dual cameras on the back, but there are vast differences in how the cameras are implemented, which means image quality also differs greatly. On the Honor 9, you basically get the Huawei P10 camera, minus OIS and the Leica camera app. That means a 12MP RGB sensor (1.25-micron pixels) plus a 20MP black and white sensor (1-micron pixels) behind f/2.2 lenses.

Like other Huawei phones, the monochrome camera captures fine detail, while the RGB sensor fills out color detail. And the results are pretty decent across the board, with areas of strength including dynamic range and capture speed. In well-lit scenes, the Honor 9 does a better job than the OnePlus 5 of bringing out fine detail, though colors are a bit subdued.

By comparison, OnePlus’s camera exposes images more evenly, with more vibrant colors, but seems to be more sensitive to hand motion in daylight shots.

Paradoxially, though, Honor’s camera is weaker in low light. In darker scenes, the OnePlus’s f/1.7 lens (helped along by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 835 ISP) does a better job of eliminating chroma noise from photos, whereas the Honor camera produces pics that look darker, noisier and a little over-sharpened.

Honor wins with its bokeh effects, but OnePlus pushes ahead with a superior zoom capability.

Both phones include much-hyped zoom functions, and OnePlus’s zoom lens produced clearer shots at 2X than the Honor camera, which uses a “hybrid zoom” function to take advantage of the extra resolution of the 20MP sensor. But Honor is the winner when it comes to depth effects — in early testing the Honor 9’s low depth-of-field mode was able to more accurately measure the edges of subjects in our photos, whereas the OnePlus 5 routinely over or under-blurred certain areas.

In any case, those are just our first impressions: We’ll have a more detailed comparison between the cameras in the near future.

Both the OnePlus 5 and Honor 9 are excellent phones for the money. In the Honor 9, you’re getting a lot of phone for the relatively low asking price of £379, with caveats around the overall slipperiness of the thing, the camera’s low-light performance and EMUI itself, which through significantly improved of late, remains a far cry from Google’s vision of Android.

On the OnePlus side, your extra cash gets you more RAM, faster charging, a camera setup that’s more dependable in darker conditions and better for zoomed photography, and software that’s faster and easier on the eyes. But all that technology is packaged up in a fairly dull chassis, with a display that doesn’t match the daylight visibility of the Honor 9.

Which one is worth your cash? That’ll depend on your budget, and where your priorities lie.

OnePlus 5

• Complete OnePlus 5 review
• OnePlus 5 specs
• Which OnePlus 5 model should you buy?
• Camera comparison: OnePlus 5 vs. Galaxy S8
• The latest OnePlus 5 news
• Join the discussion in the forums

OnePlus

Honor 9

• Honor 9 hands-on preview
• Honor 9 specs
• Join the Discussion

How Philips rediscovered the lost art of TV sound

While there are many things to celebrate about the shift from hulking CRT televisions to sleek LCD and OLED TVs, sound quality is not one of them.

Having so little bodywork for audio engineers to work with has all too often led to today’s glorious TV picture quality being joined by audio so wafer-thin that it pretty much forces AV fans to partner their TVs with some sort of external sound solution.

One TV brand, though, has consistently found innovative ways of bucking this flimsy audio trend. From its very first plasma TVs in the 1990s through to its brand new LCD and OLED models, Dutch brand Philips has done everything it can to ensure that its TVs consistently sound as good as they look.

We’re not just talking about Philips’ most expensive, high-end TVs here either; even its relatively affordable models go the extra audio mile – as proved in impressive fashion by the ‘Visible Sound’ feature of its new 6000 series of televisions.

Philips

Visible sound: Because speakers have to be seen to be heard

Most TVs these days seem to be almost embarrassed by their speakers, hiding them from view, even if that means they have to fire down or backwards rather than straight out towards the viewer. Philips new Visible Sound concept, though, recognises that when it comes to sound, direct is best.

Visible Sound TVs all use front-facing speakers to ensure that you experience a much more crisp, detailed and impactful sound that’s especially good at making voices sound believable and clear.

Even better, their sleek dimensions and metallic finishes prove without doubt that front-firing speakers can actually enhance a TV’s design rather than spoiling it.

Philips

Triple Ring sound: Making a little go a long way

One of the biggest challenges to getting good sound from slim TVs is bass. Slim cabinet designs just don’t usually provide enough ‘air movement’ space for the delivery of convincing bass lines.

But Philips has managed to come up with an ingenious solution to this problem in the shape of the triple ring speaker design.

Triple ring technology – found in 2017’s Philips 7000 Series and up – involves creating a subwoofer speaker using three foam rubber suspension rings instead of the typical single ring construction, with a weighted ‘cap’ placed in the centre of the diaphragm. This proprietary approach enables the speaker to achieve much greater extension within a relatively confined space, and thus hit much deeper bass levels than you could ever hope to achieve from a single suspension ring design.

Philips

Detachable poles: Awesome sound never looked so good

While Philips has worked hard to make sound innovations such as Visible Sound and Triple Ring speaker design available well down its latest TV range, it’s also got some special audio treats in store for people who buy its more premium models.

The most visually striking of these audio innovations has to be the detachable speaker ‘poles’ featured in Philips’ 8000 series of televisions. These gorgeous looking speakers are hewn from seamless dark chrome, and can be attached to the left and right sides of the 8000 TVs’ metallic bodywork via built-in magnets. Or you can wall-mount them away from the screen – even place them into floor-standing bases.

These speakers are wireless too, so if you decide to separate them from the TV screen you don’t have to worry about ugly speaker cable trailing all over the place.

Tucked inside those gorgeous towers are no less than 18 speakers (16 micro drivers and two neodymium subwoofers) all working together to pump out 50W of beautifully detailed, well-separated and powerful sound.

As if all this wasn’t already enough, the optional floor-stand attachments for the detachable pole speakers are equipped with built-in powered subwoofers to give your bass a boost.

Philips

Built-in Multi-channel sound: Because the best pictures deserve the best sound

Philips rewrote the TV picture quality rule book with its spectacular 901F OLED TV. But this incredible TV’s cutting edge abilities don’t end with its stunning contrast-rich pictures. It also boasts one of the finest sound systems ever built into a TV.

Responsible for the 901F’s stunning audio are an integrated multi-channel soundbar and a triple-ring subwoofer built into its rear.

The soundbar uses six incredibly compact but also powerful and precise micro drivers to deliver a huge but immaculately controlled soundstage tailor-made for action movie soundtracks. And the triple-ring subwoofer underpins the front-firing soundbar with the sort of deep, well-rounded bass you’d normally only expect to hear from a separate bass speaker.

Philips

Philips: Putting the A into AV

Philips’ unique devotion to improving TV sound as well as picture quality is delivering ever more impressive results. In fact, since Philips is managing to deliver its sound benefits without compromising the designs of its consistently beautiful TVs, it’s starting to make the apparent decision by many rival brands to treat audio as a second-class citizen look increasingly hard to sustain.

Check out the Philips 55POS901F OLED TV and other excellent Philips televisions with Ambilight and superior sound at Philips.co.uk.

Now Apple TV has access to all the cartoons on Boomerang

Parents tired of watching Moana on repeat, listen up: there’s a new streaming service on Apple TV that just might catch your kids’ attention. Boomerang, which offers a variety of classic Saturday morning cartoons from your youth, has finally arrived on Apple TV. It was originally a Time Warner cable channel until it re-emerged as a streaming service for the web, iOS and Android devices in March. Now that it’s also out for Apple TV, you can stream all the Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo, Tom & Jerry, The Jetsons and The Flintstones you want if you fancy going on a nostalgia trip. Boomerang has around 5,000 episodes from Hanna-Barbera’s, Looney Tunes’ and MGM’s libraries on offer, so you won’t quickly run out of things to watch either.

In addition to launching on Apple TV, the service has also debuted its first original series, Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz. It’s celebrating the event by giving Kansas residents (naturally) a free 30-day trial if they sign up from today until July 4th. Once that’s up, they’d have to pay $5 per month or $40 per year like everyone else, because there might no place like home, but Boomerang still has to make money.

Via: Apple Insider

Source: iTunes

Elon Musk’s first tunnel should be up and running next week

Elon Musk recently announced that his tunnel-digging operation, The Boring Company, is done carving out its first segment. He bundled the announcement with a declaration of love for tunnels — which he totally loves more than floors, by the way — but didn’t talk about the first tunnel portion’s location. Musk’s latest tweets, however, are rife with clues about its location, and by the looks of things, The Boring Company’s Godot machine has begun digging right across the SpaceX building in Hawthorne, LA County.

Perspective pic.twitter.com/4DW9csSmtl

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2017

Across the road and below the ground pic.twitter.com/E2DG8EzaXg

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2017

The location makes sense, considering the company transported Godot to SpaceX’s Hawthorne offices in April. Musk even submitted plans to local officials, asking permission to build a pedestrian tunnel from the SpaceX building to its parking lot across the road. By that time, The Boring Company was already done digging a vertical shaft for it.

Musk’s main goal is to dig tunnels under all of LA that can be used to transport cars, bikes and even people in order to reduce traffic congestion aboveground. If the first segment truly is located on SpaceX property, though, the company could begin by building a 500-foot-long, horizontal pedestrian tunnel for the space corporation’s employees. We’ll definitely know soon enough, since the SpaceX chief said the segment’s car/pod elevator “should be operating next week.”

Just installed steel skeleton of the car/pod elevator. Should be operating next week. pic.twitter.com/DIZW7zuWaA

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 30, 2017

Source: Elon Musk (Twitter)

Nike confirms ‘pilot’ partnership with Amazon

Nike’s Q4 earnings report is notable today because CEO Mark Fields confirmed reports that the company will start selling some items directly on Amazon.

In the US, we’re executing a new pilot with Amazon with a limited Nike product assortment. As we do with all of our partners, we’re looking for ways to improve the Nike consumer experience on Amazon by elevating the way the brand is presented and increasing the quality of product storytelling. We’re in the early stages, but we look forward to evaluating the results of the pilot.

For Nike, part of the reason for the arrangement is so that it can help fight the distribution of counterfeit items, however, his comment about a “limited product assortment” leaves me wondering what exactly will be available on Amazon.

While we wait to find out more about that deal, Fields also mentioned more about what’s in store for Nike later this year, including that its SNKRS app and Nike+ experience will be available in Europe and China. While the company’s revenue topped $8.7 billion in the fourth quarter alone, the company made some $2 billion last year via its apps and website — more than double the year before.

Products we’ll see soon include HyperAdapt 2.0, a “delivering new forms in adaptive technology at more accessible price points,” “never-before-seen technology in NBA apparel” and, of course, some new Air Maxes.

Source: Nike Q4 earnings call transcript (PDF)

If you are brave enough, you can now give the MacOS High Sierra beta a try

Why it matters to you

If you’re brave enough to give the MacOS High Sierra beta a try, you can install it now for faster disk access and a better Safari.

While Apple continues to put much of its attention on the iPhone and iOS, it hasn’t completely given up on its Mac hardware and it introduced a long-awaited update to its iMac line at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) 2017 event. To go along with the new hardware, Apple is also going to introduce the newest version of MacOS, High Sierra, later in the year. Until now, only developers have been able to get their hands on the earliest beta versions of the new desktop OS, and that is changing with the availability of the first public beta, MacRumors reports.

Available on Thursday, the MacOS High Sierra preview gives the bravest users the first glimpse at the update’s various new features and functionality. While the response to the High Sierra introduction was a bit muted due to a lack of exciting new capabilities, there are nevertheless some nice refinements and performance enhancements that should make for a smoother MacOS experience.

For example, Safari will gain some significant speed improvements, which Apple promises will make it 80 percent faster than Google when running JavaScript content. Safari will also block video autoplay, and provide Intelligent Tracking Protection to help protect user privacy.

The Mail app will be enhanced with new compression functionality that will reduce disk space up to 35 percent, and Spotlight will gain the ability to determine which email is important and assign it the highest priority. The Photos app will also be improved, with better facial recognition and category synchronization across devices.

Otherwise, MacOS High Sierra will provide for some under-the-hood performance updates that will not be highly visible to users but should work behind the scenes to make storage and video faster and more efficient. Apple will finally be implementing its 64-bit Apple File System (APFS) that will significantly speed up saving and accessing files and also provide built-in encryption. HVEC video compression will catch MacOS up with the rest of the market by providing hardware acceleration.

High Sierra is expected to be released to all users this fall. If you want to give it a try on your Mac, then you can sign up to be a MacOS beta user. Be sure to back up your system before installing the beta build — as with all OS previews, this one could be buggy.

Need to cut down your phone’s rampant data usage? Google wants to help

Google is testing a new app in the Philippines aimed at helping users keep better tabs on their data.

Data is currency in the developing world, and with so little of it, your time on the internet is relative to your ability to top off. That’s why Google’s launched an experimental app to help those particular users in regions of the world where data is most crucial. The app is called Triangle and it’s being tested in the Philippines.

Per TechCrunch, the app is, in essence, a data saver suite. You can use it to check on current data usage and ban certain apps from even logging on to your connection in the first place. You can also check your prepaid balance, or use the app to try new apps without it counting against your allowance. Google is also offering extra data if you choose to use only certain apps. Note that some features are limited by carrier.

Google knows that for Android to be considered the de facto mobile operating system in the developing world, it has to offer an edge over its competitors. In this case, it’s providing a helping hand to guide those with severe data limits towards a more smartphone-reliant, connected life.

You can check out the app in the Play Store, but you can only download it if you’re in the Philippines.

Google hires former Intel exec as its new VP of diversity

Google has been investing big money and launching various projects to diversify its workforce, but its latest diversity report shows that it still has a long way to go. While female personnel now compose 31 percent of its employee population, they only make up 20 percent of the company’s tech workforce. In addition, only one percent of its tech roles are filled by Black Googlers, who make up a mere five percent of the company’s full employee count. Sure, the number of women in tech and the number of Hispanic Googlers grew one percent from last year’s, but it’s clear that the company is still overwhelmingly white and male.

Mountain View at least knows it has a lot more work to do, and that may be the reason it hired Danielle Brown as its new VP of Diversity. Brown used to be Intel’s VP and Chief Diversity & Inclusion Officer and will manage Google’s diversity and inclusion strategy. Intel isn’t exactly more diverse than the big G — according to its 2016 report, women only make up 25.8 percent of its population and Black employees are very few (3.73 percent of population). However, Brown will provide fresh eyes, which might be what Google needs to achieve bigger results.

To highlight why diversity is necessary, Eileen Naughton, Google’s VP of operations, told the story of how Pixel’s creative lead was inspired by Mexico City to design the “Really Blue” edition:

“For all of our communities of color, we’re working to make sure our culture is rewarding and welcoming through events, town halls, employee resource groups, and ensuring fairness in the promotion process. We know this is critical to making it safe for everyone to bring their best and most innovative ideas to the table. For example, the idea for our Really Blue Pixel came from Alberto Villarreal, the phone’s creative lead and industrial design manager, who derived the color from the Mexico City of his youth. The phone was released in October and sold out within minutes. Alberto is part of a vibrant community of Hispanic Googlers, whose contributions are essential to our ability to reflect the world around us, especially here at our California HQ.”

Via: Fast Company

Source: Google

The Army is flight testing helicopter-mounted laser weapons

The US military’s experiments shooting lasers from vehicles continue with another important milestone: Laser-equipped attack helicopter fired at targets for the first time. The US Army keeps getting better at nailing UAV targets with ground-based truck lasers, but it’s harder to fire accurately from helicopters. Not only does their position fluctuate with airborne conditions, but their whole frame vibrates as their rotors spin fast enough to keep the whole vehicle aloft. Hitting a target almost a mile away from the air, as the Army just accomplished in a New Mexico tests series, is a big deal.

Raytheon works with @USArmy and @USSOCOM to prove high energy laser systems are viable on rotary aircraft. https://t.co/6Zfr9SLpI4 pic.twitter.com/qVqFrQ5PPr

— Raytheon (@Raytheon) June 26, 2017

Arms contractor Raytheon coupled a targeting array with a High Energy Laser (HEL) system and strapped them to AH-64 Apaches, the US Army’s main attack helicopter. During tests at New Mexico’s White Sands base, the vehicles hit targets from a variety of conditions, altitudes and air speeds. These experiments will help researchers factor in vibration, dust and rotor downwash into their laser-aiming tech so that one day our military can field the beam-shooting gunships we’ve been dreaming of since GI JOE.

Via: NY Post

Source: Raytheon