Sky Mobile throws in more data for the same monthly price

Sky Mobile’s plans are relatively easy to understand. You can either pay £10 per month for unlimited calls and texts (free for Sky TV customers), or 10 pence per minute or message on a pay-as-you-use basis. Rollover data and other perks are available to everyone, meaning your main concern is choosing how much data you might need for that particular month. As it stands, 500MB is £5, 1GB is £10, 3GB is £15 and 5GB is £20. From this Friday (September 15th), however, Sky is increasing the data allowances on the top two tiers: £15 will buy you 5GB, and £20 will get you 10GB to play with.

As Sky Mobile lets you jump between different plans each month, these higher data caps are available to both old and new customers. It’s pretty common for mobile providers to fiddle with their tariffs several times each year. No points for guessing why Sky Mobile might want its plans to look particularly attractive on new iPhone day, though.

Facebook is testing pre-loaded ‘Instant Videos’ on Android

Facebook has apparently begun testing a feature that would make it easier to watch videos on the go. According to TechCrunch the social network has given a small number of Android users access to an experimental feature called “Instant Videos.” It works by pre-loading videos while you’re connected to WiFi, so they don’t eat up your data if you need some entertainment while commuting or when going to places with no internet connection. Based on the screenshot shared by TheNextWeb’s Matt Navara, Facebook marks the videos you can play without using up your data with a lightning icon.

Facebook Instant Videos coming soon? ⚡️

h/t Devesh Logendran pic.twitter.com/rNZYkbeL2r

— Matt Navarra ⭐️ (@MattNavarra) September 11, 2017

The experimental feature is likely part of Facebook’s grand video plans. It’s no secret that the social network has been heavily investing in video these past years. Just recently, it announced earmarking a $1 billion budget for original programming. It even launched the dedicated Watch tab where you’ll be able to find all its programs.

With Instant Videos, Facebook will have a bigger chance of capturing a global audience. The feature sounds extremely useful for people living in developing nations where not everyone has data plans and where mobile internet could be slow or non-existent. By making its videos more accessible to people around the world, even those who only have access to the cheapest Android phones, Facebook has the potential to earn even more money from ads.

Source: TechCrunch

Samsung’s Gear watches will help with senior care and employee safety

Samsung is taking on the world of work via three new integrations with its Gear smartwatches. SoloProtect uses the Samsung Gear S3 to keep tabs on people who work alone, like real estate agents and home healthcare workers, while Reemo integrates with the Gear S3 and S2 to monitor the health of seniors in care facilities. Ability Wearables, along with Samsung’s Gear Fit 2 and S3 devices, helps keep track of people who work long shifts, like truck drivers, construction employees and healthcare workers. Samsung is spotlighting these and a VR solution for fitness centers at the Mobile World Congress Americas conference in San Francisco this week.

SoloProtect is a 24/7 monitoring and communication service that provides emergency alerts, geo-location and status checks to businesses that employ lone workers in higher-risk environments. “Safety and reliability are top of mind for all employers, but historically, it has been difficult to manage safety for individual employees operating outside the traditional office setting,” said SoloProtect CEO John Broady in a statement. “By equipping workers with a high-quality Samsung smartwatch integrated with SoloProtect, we can help businesses increase the safety of those operating alone in the field, and provide them with the ability to concentrate on their task at hand with greater peace of mind.”

Reemo’s platform tracks activity level, heart rate and sleep quality of seniors in care centers, which can help their caregivers provide better care. “We’re thrilled to join Samsung at Mobile World Congress Americas this year to further demonstrate mobile technology’s impact in the senior care industry,” said Reemo’s CEO, John Valiton, in a statement. “Samsung’s enablement of the Reemo platform through its wearable devices has made technology truly accessible to seniors by providing mobility, safety, awareness and connectivity to create independence in the aging experience.”

People at risk for falling asleep on the job can wear a Gear smartwatch that connects through Samsung’s GearUP platform to connect with Ability Wearables’ real-time health intelligence systems, letting employers both predict and react to employee fatigue on the job. “Samsung is pushing the envelope with its range of wearables,” said Ability’s CEO Shiv Madan in a statement. “By applying this collaborative solution to employees at high-risk of fatigue, we believe we can help solve many of the fatigue-driven challenges facing today’s workers.”

Samsung is also dabbling in exercise programs, too. VirZoom VR Fitness gives fitness center members the ability to hop on a stationary exercise bike from Life Fitness and play virtual reality games while getting fit. Users will move through a virtual world at the same rate they pedal, making for perhaps a more immersive experience. The resistance buttons on the stationary bike’s handlebars are also used in the gameplay as well.

Source: Samsung, Samsung VR

A11 Chip’s 6-Core Architecture Highlights Apple’s Continuing Push Into Heterogeneous Computing

In the recent leak of information from Apple, a device tree shared by Steven Troughton-Smith and containing information specific to the iPhone X was used to glean CPU code names, presence of an OLED display, and information on many other things. Contained within that information were also specific details regarding the architecture behind Apple’s new CPU cores, dubbed “Mistral” and “Monsoon.” From this, we know that the A11 contains four Mistral cores and two Monsoon cores, and it’s worth taking a technical look at what Apple might be up to with this new chip.

Leaked A11 chip
While the two Monsoon cores are clear follow-ons to the two large “Hurricane” cores in the A10, the Mistral cores double the small core count of two “Zephyr” cores in the A10.

September 2016 event slide on the two Zephyr cores in the A10
Annotated die shots ultimately revealed that the small Zephyr cores appeared to be embedded within the larger Hurricane cores, taking advantage of their geographic location by sharing memory structure with the Hurricane cores.

Chipworks/TechInsights annotated A10 die photo showing small Zephyr cores embedded within large Hurricane cores (right)
The Mistral cores appear to be a departure from the above scheme, at the very least in that they have doubled in count. Specific references in the device tree are also made to memory hierarchy, suggesting that they contain independent L2 caches, meaning the Mistral cores could be more independent than their A10 ancestors.

This independence is underscored by the fact that the Mistral cores share a common “cluster-id” property, while the Monsoon cores share a distinct cluster-id of their own. Immediate comparisons were drawn to ARM’s big.LITTLE heterogeneous CPU core scheme with the A10, and this seems to be going further down that path with distinct operating states for each cluster of cores. However, those leveraged shared resources in the A10 were to a certain benefit, namely die space and power consumption. The cores becoming more independent is more like a traditional big.LITTLE approach, which also entails more overhead.

This all may be an oversimplification, of course. After all, we know that each of these CPU cores is independently addressable, meaning that nothing revealed so far indicates an active Mistral or Monsoon core (or cluster) precludes the other CPU type from also being active, opening the door for mixed processor scenarios. Apple could have decided to spend effort, either in hardware, compilers, or both, to segregate instructions by complexity and ultimately forward them to the core that would execute them mostly efficiently.

Tackling problems in this manner would be another example in a long list of Apple’s attempts to improve instruction execution efficiency through microarchitecture enhancements.

Any architectural changes ultimately circle back to improvements in some way. If Apple is making a change that includes doubling the amount of lower power cores, it seems inevitable it’s ultimately spending more die space to do so, particularly if they have their own cache structures from L2 and down.

Yet, as pointed out by AnandTech editor Ian Cutress, ARM has begun allowing for configurable cache sizes for its offering of cores. In this specific case, a non-existent L2 cache is a valid configuration, meaning the increase in die space may not be as much as it initially seems with the small core count growth.

It’s important to remember that Apple is not bound to these ARM conventions, but they are an indication of where the industry is headed. It’s also important to remember that the shared L3 cache is always sitting above all of the cores, along with the GPU and image signal processor. Ultimately, these architectural changes likely boil down to a performance per watt increase, instructions per clock cycle increase, or perhaps both. Given that the small tasks a Mistral core might be activated for would likely not expose the parallelism needed for all four cores, it seem some interesting usage scenarios are a strong likelihood with Apple’s A11 SoC.

To give the mixed-core ensemble of the A11 context, modern CPUs aggressively manage performance and power consumption by dynamically changing clock speeds, processor voltages, and even disabling entire CPU cores by gating clocks and powers to these cores. There are numerous references to all of these concepts in the software, in addition to several references of dynamic CPU and core control, as well as instructions per clock cycle, memory throughput thresholds, power thresholds, and even hysteresis to keep the cores from spinning up and down as the performance profile changes. No doubt many of these properties existed in the A10 as well, but the fact that Apple is increasing small core count shows Apple believes there’s more benefit to be had here.

Reference to “bcm4357” in iPhone X device tree
There are more details contained than just the CPU and OLED display, however. The software specifically calls out Broadcom’s BCM4357 as the Wi-Fi module. This is curious because the BCM4357 is actually a very old Wi-Fi chipset. It seems likely that Apple truncated the trailing 0 from the BCM43570, which fits the 802.11ac profile of the iPhone 7 (and thus, not an upgrade). However, Broadcom does have a BCM4375 chip on the horizon which supports the forthcoming 802.11ax standard. Unless the keynote specifically addresses the Wi-Fi speeds, we may not immediately get clarification here, given the Wi-Fi module is often embedded in a larger module, often by component integrator Murata.

Moving over to the display side, the peak brightness in nits property seems to be referenced to a full scale value, rather than an actual decimal nits value, unfortunately. This could have given insight into whether Apple sought to pursue any of the existing HDR standards on the market, which often require a peak brightness over 1000 nits.

In the audio realm, the CS35L26 reference confirms another Cirrus Logic win for the top and bottom speakers, and the CS42L75 is an undocumented audio codec. Finally, for pure trivia, there’s a reference to a ‘sochot’ property that curiously references the A6X chip identifier. It also contains an ‘N41’ reference in the baseband section, which refers to an iPhone 5 codename that introduced LTE to the iPhone families. These may, however, simply be references to old devices when features or properties were first introduced.

Apple will undoubtedly reveal some details on the new A11 chip and other internal upgrades for the new iPhones at its event that’s just a few hours away now, but other information will have to wait until teardown firms can get their hands on the devices and have a closer look at what’s inside.

Tag: A11 chip
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Software magic brings HDR support to the Pixel and Pixel XL

The first generation Pixel phones now include support for YouTube HDR.

YouTube began supporting HDR playback in late 2016, but there were not compatible smartphones to play back the HDR content. Since that time, the LG G6, Galaxy S8, Sony Xperia XZ Premium, LG V30 and Note 8 have all been released or announced with hardware-based HDR support. Now, it looks like last year’s Pixel phones will be joining the party.

Android Police reports that the Pixel and Pixel XL now use software-based decoding in order to process HDR content, at least from YouTube. This leaves off other services like Netflix, which has been adding more and more HDR content lately.

Hardware-based decoding would perform better (and work with other services), but software-based decoding is a good way to support current devices. Android Police notes the next generation Pixel devices will include hardware-based HDR decoding, so those would presumably work with Netflix and other services. YouTube doesn’t have a ton of HDR content, but there is a channel dedicated to HDR for those with the right hardware.

Have you tried YouTube HDR? Let us know down below!

Google Pixel + Pixel XL

• Google Pixel and Pixel XL review
• Google Pixel XL review: A U.S. perspective
• Google Pixel FAQ: Should you upgrade?
• Pixel + Pixel XL specs
• Understanding Android 7.1 Nougat
• Join the discussion in the forums!

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ASUS Zenfone 4 Max now available in Canada and the U.S.

ASUS’s latest flagship is now available to purchase in Canada and the U.S.

ASUS announced its Zenfone 4 range last month, and began releasing the devices in Asian markets. North American sales tend to lag a few months behind these initial releases — the Zenfone 3 Deluxe did not come to the States until four months after releasing in other markets — but it seems ASUS is doing things differently this year.

In a press release, ASUS says that the Zenfone 4 Max is now available to purchase at select Canadian and U.S. retailers. Said retailers seem to only include Amazon and B&H Photo. Both of these come with full warranty support, which is nice for prospective buyers. No word on when or if the standard Zenfone 4, Zenfone 4 Pro, Zenfone 4 Selfie, or Zenfone 4 Max Pro will become available in Canada or the U.S.

The Zenfone 4 Max’s claim to fame is its 5000 mAh battery, and the ability to act as a battery bank for other devices. The phone uses Micro-USB instead of USB-C, so users will need an on-the-go adapter to actually use the reverse charging feature. There are also two rear cameras, a feature not seen at the $200 price range. The phone uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 430 processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage (expandable via microSD), and features full compatibility with GSM carriers in the U.S. and Canada such as T-Mobile, AT&T, Rogers, and TELUS. The device features Android 7.1.1 Nougat with ASUS’s newer, less bloated version of ZenUI on top. ASU expects to update the Zenfone 3 and 4 ranges to Android 8.0 Oreo by the middle of 2018.

Are you interested in the Zenfone 4 Max? Let us know down below!

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What’s on TV: ‘E.T.,’ Emmys, ‘Vice Principals’ and ‘Broad City’

As we transition from fall to summer TV, Preacher wraps up its season tonight and The Strain calls it a wrap for the series on Sunday. That’s the same night as the prime time Emmy awards, and when we’ll get the season premiere of HBO’s Vice Principals. Before that happens, however, NBA 2K18 and NBA Live 18 will both arrive later this week (the Prelude for 2K18 is already out so you can create your character early, as well as a Live demo). Cinema fans can get the anniversary edition of E.T., now available in 4K, or go for something new with Get Out, but the show I’m most excited to see return is Broad City. Look after the break to check out each day’s highlights, including trailers and let us know what you think (or what we missed).

Blu-ray & Games & Streaming

• ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (4K)
• Get Out (4K)
• The Mummy (4K)
• The Big Bang Theory (S10)
• Zero Dark Thirty (4K)
• Van Helsing (4K)
• Silicon Valley (S4)
• It Comes at Night
• Split (4K)
• Veep (S6)
• Event Horizon
• Orphan Black (S5)
• Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare – Retribution DLC (PS4)
• Happy Dungeons (PS4)
• Tooth and Tail (PC, PS4)
• Bloody Zombies (PS4, Xbox One)
• Time Recoil (PS4, Xbox One)
• Maize (PS4, Xbox One)
• Rayman Legends (Switch)
• Don’t Starve Together (Xbox One)
• Transcripted (Xbox One, PS4)
• Earthlock: Festival of Magic (Wii U)
• NBA 2K18 (9/15 – Xbox One, PS4)
• NBA Live 18 (9/15 – Xbox One, PS4)
• NHL 18 (9/15 – Xbox One, PS4)
• WRC 7 (9/15 – Xbox One, PS4)

Monday

• Saints/Vikings, ESPN, 8 PM
• Chargers/Broncos, ESPN, 10:15 PM
• WWE Raw, USA, 8 PM
• American Ninja Warrior, NBC, 8 PM
• So You Think You Can Dance, Fox, 8 PM
• Hooten & the Lady (season finale), CW, 9 PM
• Preacher (season finale), AMC, 9 PM
• American Dad (season finale), TBS, 10 PM
• Siesta Key, MTV, 10 PM
• Midnight, Texas, NBC, 10 PM
• Talking Preacher, AMC, 10:15 PM
• People of Earth, TBS, 10:30 PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11 PM

Tuesday

• Difficult People, Hulu, 3 AM
• The Mindy Project (season premiere), Hulu, 3 AM
• Jeff Dunham: Relative Disaster, Netflix, 3 AM
• Hand in Hand: A Benefit for Hurricane Relief Telethon, ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC, 8 PM
• 30 for 30: Year of the Scab, ESPN, 8 PM
• WWE Smackdown, USA, 8 PM
• Inside the NFL (season premiere), Showtime, 9 PM
• Fantomworks, Velocity, 9 PM
• Face Off: Game Face, Syfy, 9 PM
• American Horror Story, FX, 10 PM
• A Season with Navy Football, Showtime, 10 PM
• Somewhere Between, ABC, 10 PM
• Hollywood Game Night, NBC, 10 PM
• The Challenge, MTV, 10 PM
• Being Mary Jane, BET, 10 PM
• The Therapist, Viceland, 10:30 PM
• Dare to Live, MTV, 11 PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11 PM

Wednesday

• 30 for 30: Tommy, ESPN.com, 3 AM
• Big Brother, CBS, 8 PM
• Lucha Underground, El Rey, 8 PM
• America’s Got Talent, NBC, 8 PM
• Foreman, Epix, 8 PM
• Suits (fall finale), USA, 9 PM
• Salvation, CBS, 9 PM
• Marlon (season finale), NBC, 9 & 9:30 PM
• Are You the One (season preview), MTV, 10 PM
• You’re the Worst, FXX, 10 PM
• Sinner, USA, 10 PM
• Garage Squad, Velocity, 10 PM
• Blood Drive, Syfy, 10 PM
• South Park (season premiere), Comedy Central, 10 PM
• Younger (season finale), TV Land, 10 PM
• Broad City (season premiere), Comedy Central, 10:30 PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11 PM

Thursday

• Beat Shazam (season finale), Fox, 8 PM
• Penn & Teller: Fool Us, CW, 8 PM
• Naked & Afraid, Discovery, 8 PM
• Texans/Bengals, NFL Network, 8:30 PM
• Big Brother, CBS, 9 PM
• Whose Line is it Anyway?, CW, 9 PM
• Love Connection (season finale), Fox, 9 PM
• F*ck That’s Delicious, Viceland, 9:30 PM
• Better Things (season premiere), FX, 10 PM
• Zoo, CBS, 10 PM
• The Mist, Spike TV, 10 PM
• Bong Appetit (season premiere), Viceland, 10:30 PM
• The Guest Book, TBS, 10:30 PM
• Desus & Mero, Viceland, 11 PM

Friday

• Project MC2 (S4), Netflix, 3 AM
• American Vandal (S1), Netflix, 3 AM
• Strong Island, Netflix, 3 AM
• Veggietales in the City, Netflix, 3 AM
• Masters of Illusion, CW, 8 PM
• Tackle My Ride, NFL Network, 8 PM
• MTV Unplugged, MTV, 8 PM
• Big Brother, CBS, 8 PM
• Broke and Famous, Reelzchannel, 8 PM
• A Football Life: Dan Marino (season premiere), NFL Network, 9 PM
• Tough Guys, Showtime, 9 PM
• Room 104, HBO, 11:30 PM
• Comedy Central Stand-Up Presents: Chris Redd / Yamaneika Saunders, Comedy Central, 12 AM

Saturday

• Texas/USC college football, Fox, 8 PM
• Miami/Florida State college football, ABC, 8 PM
• Halt and Catch Fire, AMC, 9 PM
• Downsized, TV One, 9 PM
• Running Wild with Bear Grylls, NBC, 10 PM

Sunday

• The 69th Primetime Emmy Awards, CBS, 8 PM
• Outlander, Starz, 8 PM
• Orville, Fox, 8 PM
• Teen Wolf, MTV, 8 PM
• Top Gear America (season finale), BBC America, 8 PM
• Sunday Night Baseball, ESPN, 8 PM
• The Deuce, HBO, 9 PM
• Fear the Walking Dead, AMC, 9 PM
• Top of the Lake, Sundance, 9 PM
• Get Shorty, Epix, 10 PM
• Unsung Hollywood, TV One, 10 PM
• Ballers, HBO, 10:30PM
• $100,000 Pyramid, ABC, 10 PM
• The Strain (series finale), FX, 10 PM
• Survivor’s Remorse, Starz, 10 PM
• Vice Principals (season premiere), HBO, 10:30 PM
• Talking Dead: Fear Edition, AMC, 11 PM
• Rick & Morty, Cartoon Network, 11:30 PM

[All times listed in ET]

China might shut down the country’s bitcoin exchanges

China has never been a fan of digital currencies like bitcoin, and now the country appears bent on a major crackdown. In the wake of China’s recent ban on initial coin offerings (where you raise funds for a new cryptocurrency), Wall Street Journal sources understand that Chinese officials are ordering the shutdown of domestic bitcoin exchanges. The timeline isn’t clear — one says the closure decision had already been made, while another heard the process would take “several months.” If the scoop is accurate, however, the motivations are clear.

According to one of the tipsters, China is worried that virtual currencies are creating “too much disorder.” That’s not entirely without merit: people were buying up bitcoin and selling the yuan in 2016 on the belief that the conventional currency’s value was going to tumble. And it’s no surprise that China would be nervous about money that it can’t fully control. It’s relatively easy to skip the bank system and trade money beyond China’s borders, and that’s nightmare-inducing for an authoritarian government.

If China does shut down the exchanges, it could be a severe blow to bitcoin at large, and would certainly cause anxiety for people holding other formats like Ethereum. As The Verge explains, three Chinese exchanges represented 45 percent of bitcoin’s market share in the past month. It wouldn’t be the end of bitcoin trading, even in China (informal trades can still take place), but it would cause chaos at time when confidence in the technology is otherwise at an all-time high.

Via: The Verge

Source: Wall Street Journal

Apple Working With Stanford to Determine If Apple Watch Can Detect Abnormal Heart Rhythms

Apple is planning to work with Stanford and telemedicine vendor American Well to determine whether the heart rate sensor in the Apple Watch can be used to detect abnormal heart rhythms and common heart conditions, reports CNBC.

An Apple Watch, if able to accurately detect arrhythmias, or abnormal heart patterns, could identify patients that are at a high risk of atrial fibrillation or similar conditions. Heart arrhythmias aren’t always symptoms of a serious disease, but Apple Watch owners could find out about a problem from the Apple Watch and then get it checked out at a doctor if the device is determined to accurately predict heart problems.

“Atrial fibrillation is a common rhythm disorder and knowing someone has it is medically useful because those people might need specific treatments,” said Bob Wachter, chair of the Department of Medicine at the University of California San Francisco.

A study conducted by the University of California, San Francisco and the team behind the Cardiogram app previously determined that the Apple Watch was able to detect abnormal heart rhythms with 97 percent accuracy. Apple could get even better results as it has access to raw data.

Just today, Apple CEO Tim Cook talked about Apple’s health interests in an interview with Fortune. He said Apple is “extremely interested” in health, and that it represents a major business opportunity.

If you look at it, medical health activity is the largest or second-largest component of the economy, depending on which country in the world you’re dealing with. And it hasn’t been constructed in a way where the focus at the device level is making great products from a pure point of view. The focus has been on making products that can get reimbursed through the insurance companies, through Medicare, or through Medicaid. And so in some ways we bring a totally fresh view into this and say, ‘Forget all of that. What will help people?’

Cook also said that Apple has been surprised to learn how the heart rate monitoring in the Apple Watch has already been helping people. Many people collect data with the Apple Watch, notice something amiss, and then go to the doctor to get it checked out. “A not-insignificant number have found out if they hadn’t come into the doctor they would have died,” said Cook.

Apple’s study in partnership with American Well and Stanford is set to begin later this year, according to CNBC’s sources.
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Thermo-sensitive sweaters change color in the cold

Stone Island likes to bring technology to its fashion lines, like the strangely compelling AirPod pockets sown into its Fall/Winter collection we saw last month. Now the fashion concern has a new sweater that changes color depending on the temperature. The garment is called Ice Knit, with an outer layer made of thermo-sensitive yarn and an inner layer of pure wool to keep you warm (and maybe keep your body from messing with the color change).

The sweaters, available in yellow-to-orange, emerald-to-military-green and ivory-to-anthracite, are only available via Stone Island’s mobile app between September 11th and September 13th. They’ve got an interesting heat-map look, for sure (especially the yellow and orange sweater), which could make for some enthralling conversations if you wear one out into the colder weather this fall.

Via: HighSnobiety

Source: Stone Island