BMW shows off its all-electric Mini concept

The all-electric Mini could blow the bloody doors off the EV landscape, simply by making plug-in power more accessible. That’s why the prospect of a 3-door electric version of the iconic car is so exciting. And now, we’re finally being treated to a decent look at the car itself — well a concept, anyway.

Whereas the Mini Electric Concept retains the looks of its forebears (including the unmistakeable circular headlights), it also carries a bunch of design cues that signify its electric lineage. There’s the silver and yellow color scheme, passed down from the Mini E (an early experiment that formed the bedrock of the BMW i3). Plus, the Mini E badges on the radiator grille and exterior mirror caps are a dead giveaway of its plug-in perks. An additional “E” logo above the front wheel further gestures to its all-electric capabilities. Elsewhere, it winks at its British heritage with one half of an LED Union Jack inside each of its rear headlights.

Notably, the Mini Electric’s 19-inch wheels contain aerodynamic inlays that were made using a 3D printer. The same goes for the recessed surfaces in the simulated air intakes. BMW is not the first company to make 3D printed auto parts, with Daimler and Michelin both respectively tapping into the process. Meanwhile, McLaren’s F1 team is 3D printing everything from flexible radio cables to brake cooling ducts on the fly.

BMW’s been teasing an all-electric Mini (through tests and hybrids) for almost a decade now. Thankfully, the hype machine will roll to a stop in 2019, when the Mini Electric enters production.

Source: Mini

Western Digital’s wireless drives get a makeover

Western Digital’s wireless backup drives have had a makeover. The new My Cloud Home (opposed to the previous ‘My Cloud’) is sleeker, more angular and comes with a textured bottom half, perfect for those who’d rather their living room didn’t look like a server farm. According to Western Digital, people spread their data across an average of 14 different devices, totalling around 4.5TB of data per household in the US. My Cloud Home lets users dump all of their stuff in one central place, then access it from anywhere with an internet connection.

My Cloud Home also comes with a new, more streamlined app. This should be good news for My Cloud owners frustrated with the old app’s clunky design, but because the new drives were, according to the company, designed “from the ground up”, existing My Cloud users won’t be able to use it. Instead, they’ll have to get down to Best Buy tomorrow, where My Cloud Home will be on sale at prices ranging from $160 for a 2TB drive to $700 for a 16TB duel-drive.

Source: Western Digital

Apple Joins ‘Last-Ditch’ Bidding Effort to Win Toshiba’s Memory Chip Unit

Bidding for Toshiba’s much-sought-after memory chip unit was supposed to end in June 2017, after first kicking off in March, but the manufacturer is still fielding bids from multiple interested parties, most recently including a $17.4 billion offer from Western Digital. Likely due to Western Digital’s legal action against Toshiba’s decision to sell the NAND chip unit, talks surrounding that offer have reportedly “stalled” and now a new consortium of companies — including Apple — has entered a “last-ditch” effort to win the bidding.

Led by Boston-based global investment firm Bain Capital, the consortium also includes Apple and South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix (via Reuters). This group plans to offer Toshiba $18.2 billion for its memory chip unit, with a goal of reaching a final decision by Thursday, August 31 now “unlikely.” This is said to be due to bickering over exactly how much Western Digital might own of the memory chip unit after it’s sold, no matter who wins the bidding, because of the Western Digital’s business ties with Toshiba.

A consortium led by Bain Capital has made a revised last-ditch offer for Toshiba Corp’s chip unit worth about $18 billion, bringing in Apple Inc to help bolster its bid, sources with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The revised offer is worth some 2 trillion yen ($18.2 billion). Bain and South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix Inc will be responsible for 1.1 trillion yen, while Apple will provide up to 400 billion yen and Japanese banks will give around 600 billion yen in support, one of the sources said.

Many companies have entered bidding proposals for Toshiba’s memory chip unit this year, including TSMC, Foxconn, Amazon, Google, Broadcom, and multiple private equity firms. Apple has already been associated with bidding interest as well, reportedly willing to spend several billion dollars to obtain a “substantial stake” — potentially more than 20 percent — of the chip unit. If Bain Capital’s bid is the winner, Apple’s stake would likely remain around that percentage.

Toshiba confirmed plans to sell its NAND flash memory unit in January 2017, as a way to raise funds that the company hopes will cover significant losses associated with its U.S. nuclear subsidiary Westinghouse. If part of the winning bid, Apple could obtain a stake in a unit that already provides flash storage to the Cupertino company, including 32GB, 128GB, and 256GB flash storage for the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus.

Tag: Toshiba
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Apple Informs Some Customers About Delayed Repairs Due to Hurricane Harvey

Apple appears to have informed some customers that its repair center in Houston, Texas is unsurprisingly closed due to Hurricane Harvey, which has caused catastrophic flooding and damage in the area since making landfall five days ago.

In a discussion on Reddit, one user said his Mac has been sitting at a FedEx shipping facility since Friday. FedEx, UPS, and the United States Postal Service have temporarily halted service in many areas of coastal Texas and western Louisiana.

Another user from Austin, Texas said he visited an Apple retail store and learned that Apple has supposedly been calling customers with repairs routed through Houston to inform them about the possible delays.

Apple appears to be diverting new repairs to its other service center locations elsewhere in the United States going forward.

Apple’s retail stores in the Houston area are also unsurprisingly closed, including its Highland Village, Houston Galleria, Memorial City, Willowbrook Mall, Baybrook, The Woodlands, and First Colony Mall locations.

In related news, accessory maker Twelve South said it will be donating 12 percent of all sales from Wednesday, August 30 through Monday, September 4 to the American Red Cross, in support of Hurricane Harvey relief efforts.

Harvey made another landfall in western Louisiana on early Wednesday as a tropical storm. Heavy rains continue to be expected along the Texas-Louisiana coast as the storm makes its way farther inland and eventually dissipates.
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Diesel’s first Android Wear smartwatch will set you back $325

The latest fashion house to launch its own Android Wear device is Diesel in the form of the On Full Guard smartwatch. The On Full Guard, which was first announced a few months back, comes packing Qualcomm’s 2100, IP67 water resistance and an AMOLED display. As Wareable explains, the company is hoping that its unique skin for the Android Wear 2.0 device will help it stand out in a crowd.

Set the device to Do Not Disturb, for instance, and the screen will go dark, save for the cracks that will appear whenever you get a notification. Similarly, an activity tracker will gradually fog up the display the more time you spend chillaxing on the couch. If that sounds like the sort of thing you’d be into, then the On Full Guard range is priced at $325, with the first model now available to buy from Macy’s — additional models with slightly different case options will filter through on September 25th.

Of course, the actual hardware has been produced by Fossil, which does the same for so many other high-fashion wearables. That company has also let slip that it will be pairing with several other fashion brands in the new year. At the start of 2018, five more names will be able signing on, although the company has yet to say who will slap their logo on the same basic hardware.

Follow all the latest news from IFA 2017 here!

Source: PRNewswire

Watch Acer’s IFA 2017 showcase in under six minutes

Didn’t get up early enough for the first salvo of new gadgets from IFA 2017? Don’t worry, we’ve got your back. Acer kicked things off with its press event this year, unveiling its latest all-in-one PCs, ever-evolving hybrid laptops and a new push into 360 cameras — including one for looking after your pooch. You can never get enough pet-gadgets, right? We’ve condensed everything worth talking about, all into a tidy six-minute package.

Follow all the latest news from IFA 2017 here!

Zepp’s tennis sensor now includes a highlight camera

Unless you’ve got a professional coach on hand, it can be tricky to determine how good your tennis skills really are — simply not slamming the ball into the net doesn’t count, unfortunately. But for those looking to up their game, sport sensor creator Zepp has a new gadget that could help you serve your best match yet. The Tennis 2 Swing and Match Analyzer, which looks not unlike a tennis ball, fits on the bottom on your racket and measures stroke type, spin, ball speed, ball spin and accuracy, then relays the info to its iOS or Android app via Bluetooth.

The app configures the data in a way that makes it easy to see where there’s room for improvement, and gives users access to Zepp’s tennis community leader board, so things can get competitive. The new device also includes Smart Capture technology so players can record videos of each rally and then create a “highlight” reel which can be shared with others. You can even add special effects to clips, if you’re so inclined. The package comes with a sensor, pro mount, flex mount, insert mount and USB charger, and costs $100/£100, which is probably cheaper than tennis lessons.

Even if Hyperloop fails, public transport will win

One hundred and fifty teams from around the world entered the third SpaceX Hyperloop Pod Competition. Of those, 25 made it to the company’s weeklong event in Hawthorne, California. And like the prior years’ events under the Southern California sun, after days of testing and dry runs, only a select few were chosen to do a proper vacuum-sealed run down the 1.25 kilometer track.

It’s been four years since SpaceX, Tesla and Boring Company CEO Elon Musk dropped his white paper about the Hyperloop: a vacuum-sealed tube-based transportation system that would get passengers from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a mind-boggling 30 minutes. Since then, a few companies have taken up the mantle to make Musk’s idea a reality. Perhaps more intriguing than entrepreneurs tackling the Hyperloop are the student teams that SpaceX has gathered together to solve the pod problem.

This year at the rocket-building company’s pod-building competition, the name of the game was speed. Whichever team was able to propel its pod down the track the quickest would walk away with a trophy signed by Musk and bragging rights.

The rules for the event were simple. The fastest pod on the 1.25 kilometer vacuum-sealed track wins. But not all 25 teams made it that far. The SpaceX engineers and judges ran a battery of tests for technology and safety on the vehicles to determine if they were worthy of time in the tube. Only three teams made it to the finals.

The winning team was the Warr team, from the Technical University of Munich, who pulled an impressive run reaching just over 200 miles per hour. But the team did it without fancy maglevs or air bearings. Instead, the small pod was powered by a 50-kW motor and held steady on the track by high-speed bearings and aluminum wheels. It was essentially a bullet-train-shaped electric car. “We focused on a lightweight design that accelerates really quick in the tube,” Manfred Schwarz told Engadget ahead their run at the event.

Schwartz still believes that the future of Hyperloop involves maglev, though. But for a student trying to win a competition and catch the eye of potential sponsors (building pods is expensive), it really comes down to creating a pod that works best for the given situation.

In stark contrast to the small missile built by Warr was the entry built by the Paradigm team. It used the opportunity to try out its air bearings (which the team says reduces the force necessary to propel its pod by 80 percent) and lateral movement technology. The 1,800-pound (yeah, it was huge) pod posted a very respectable speed of about 60 miles per hour during a run that involved using a vehicle provided by SpaceX called a “pusher” to get it up to speed.

Meanwhile, the Swissloop team used a jet-propulsion system to get its pod going with a great whoosh. Its entry got up to about 25 miles per hour after they were initially unable to connect to the pod after it was placed on the track. They pulled the vehicle out of the tube, swapped batteries and resumed their test.

The thing is, currently there’s no “right way” to get the hyperloop going. Hyperloop One, a commercial endeavor, conducted tests in July where its XP-1 pod hit 190 miles per hour with a maglev system. That’s the accepted future of the transportation system. Even Schwarz thinks that’s the long-term goal. Unfortunately, building a maglev system is expensive. Add that to the already Herculean task of building a series of vacuum-sealed tubes between destinations and the economics of the Hyperloop become the system’s largest obstacle.

Which brings us back to the pod competition at the SpaceX headquarters. Here students are figuring how to build systems on limited budgets and making tough decisions as to what they’ll focus on for each competition. Musk put out the idea and companies like Hyperloop One jumped on it focusing on the SpaceX CEO’s vision, but these teams, they’re looking at it from thousands of different directions.

Understandably, sometimes an initial idea needs some tweaking before it’s truly ready to take on the world. That’s where the Hyperloop Pod Competition shines. No two pods are the same and that’s exactly what this emerging technology needs. It needs teams of very smart people trying out insane ideas. Not every concept will yield something worthy, but at the very least it’s one more thing to tick off the “that doesn’t work” list.

While the original idea was for Musk to put his Hyperloop concept out there and let the world figure it out, the CEO’s latest grand scheme — the Boring Company — might need the Hyperloop or something similar to become a reality. Those sleds with cars on them need propulsion and braking systems, and that’s what the college teams are focusing on. So it’s unsurprising that another Hyperloop Pod Competition is slated for next year.

Maybe the Hyperloop will live up to the hype and passengers will be whisked from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 30 minutes via maglev pods in a few decades. But even if we never erect tubes up and down the countryside, what’s happening at these events could be applied to other transportation systems and that’s more important than any one man’s idea.

Dell’s Inspiron 7000 Gaming laptop comes with a GTX 1060 now

Dell’s Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming has always been a solid, if unexciting, option among entry-level gaming laptops. With its latest refresh, Dell is making things a little more interesting with some improved graphics options, ports and a refreshed design.

Most of the spec options are identical to the last model. There’s a choice of Intel’s 7th-gen i5-7300HQ or i7-7700HQ, anti-glare 1080p and 4K panels, between 4GB and 32GB of RAM and various hard and solid state drives for storage.

The main improvement is graphics: While the current 7000 Gaming tops out at an Nvidia GTX 1050 Ti, the latest adds the option for a 6GB GTX 1060 Max-Q, a more-powerful card. Although the full-fat GTX 1060 is marketed as “VR-ready,” the Max-Q edition with its reduced energy draw (6OW versus 80W) may struggle with some titles. Inside there’s also 2×2 802.11ac WiFi as standard, an improvement over the 1×1 chipset in the previous model.

To keep that new graphics card from burning through the chassis, Dell has made the bold and some might say odd decision to decrease battery capacity by 25 percent. The new spec sheet lists a 4-cell 56WHr battery as the only option, which is not going to last as long as the previous 74WHr model. Dell claims it got between 7 and 10 hours of use on a Mobile Mark 14 battery life test, with the 7 being the GTX 1060 model, and the 10 the GTX 1050 base. These tests are often very friendly towards laptop manufacturers, with a lot of idle time. Expect real-world results to be quite a bit lower.

You could argue that no one should be using a gaming laptop away from a power outlet anyway, but the 7000 Gaming is the sort of laptop that parents buy their kids as they go away to college — it’s always served as a work-and-play kind of machine. By cutting down the battery without swapping in lower-power components, that dual use-case becomes harder to justify. At least it’s a “quick-charge” unit, which can go from 0 to 80 percent with an hour of charging.

Aside from the upgraded graphics and downgraded battery, the most notable change is visual. The 7000 Gaming has had its share of gnarly vents over the years, and this time around the entire rear of the machine is covered in horizontal lines, with the front edge mirroring the look. In matte black, it almost looks subdued. In bright red, it doesn’t. It’s got the usual array of HDMI, USB 3.1 and ethernet ports, along with a an SD card reader and, for the first time, a Thunderbolt 3 USB Type-C port. At 0.98 inches thick, it’s a hair thinner than the outgoing model, but retains the same 5.82-pound (2.65KG) weight, which increases to 6.28 pounds (2.85KG) if you opt for the GTX 1060 model.

The Inspiron 15 7000 Gaming is out September 12th starting at $1,000 for the 1080p display model and $1,500 for 4K. While $1k for a quad-core i5 and GTX 1050 is pretty good, it’s going to be a far tougher sell at the higher end, where brands with more gaming cachet like ASUS and MSI have similar options in the same price range.

Follow all the latest news from IFA 2017 here!

IBM’s Watson is creating US Open tennis highlight videos

When it’s not busy healing America’s broken criminal sentencing system, Watson is creating highlight videos of tennis matches. That’s probably one of the things one could say if IBM’s AI system were human. The tech titan has just launched a suite of Watson-powered AI solutions for its enterprise customers, and the US Open is already using one of them to generate highlights of its matches. IBM calls the suite “Watson Media,” and the US Tennis Association is using one of its features called “Cognitive Highlights.”

This particular solution finds the most exciting parts of a match by analyzing the crowd’s cheers, as well as the players’ gestures and facial expressions. It then automatically generates videos of the most thrilling moments, which are then posted on Facebook and published on the US Open apps.

Noah Syken, IBM VP of Sports & Entertainment Partnerships, explained that USTA turned to Watson for help, because there could be as many as 18 matches going on at the same time. Even the fastest video team will have a hard time analyzing matches and stitching the best moments together as they happen. It probably also helped that IBM tested Cognitive Highlights as a proof of concept at the Master’s Tournament earlier this year, and Wimbledon also used the technology to generate some videos.

In addition to Cognitive Highlights, the US Open is also using Watson’s Conversation API to power its Cognitive Concierge app. Just like Wimbledon’s Watson-driven assistant Fred, it can help guests find dining and shopping options, as well as other services, around the venue.

Watson Media has more to offer besides these two, though: the other solutions can transcribe audio for closed captions, can identify violence and adult language in videos that need to be screened more closely and can provide more informed content suggestions for video platforms. Since any company can avail of all these solutions (and more), we’ll likely come across the Watson-powered capabilities often in the future.

Source: IBM