Thursday Night Football streams free starting tonight with Amazon Prime Video

As though Amazon Prime members needed another benefit to brag about…

Tonight marks the first Thursday Night Football game streaming free on Amazon Prime Video. Last year, Twitter was the exclusive streaming partner of the Thursday night games, but that changes this year. There are already a number of other benefits to Amazon Prime, like free 2-day shipping, other exclusive video content, music streaming, and much more.

See what’s new on Amazon Prime Video this month!

You can stream the games using the Amazon Prime Video app on your Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Roku devices, Smart TVs, smartphones, and tablets. There are a number of big matchups that will stream, including the Patriots vs. Buccaneers, Seahawks vs. Cardinals, Broncos vs. Colts, and more.

Jeff Blackburn, Senior Vice President, Business Development & Entertainment, Amazon said:

Our focus is on bringing customers the best premium video programming, when and how they want to watch it. Streaming Thursday Night Football on Prime Video is a great step for us toward that vision, and offers tremendous new value for Prime members around the world. And we’re thrilled to extend our ongoing content relationship with the NFL — the gold standard for sports entertainment — on behalf of our Prime customers.

If you haven’t already subscribed to Amazon’s Prime service, now may be the time. You can sign up for a 30-day free trial to see how all the benefits work for you.

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For more great deals be sure to check out our friends at Thrifter now!

How to disable the Edge screen on Galaxy Note 8

If you don’t want the hassle of the edge screen, turn it off!

The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 gives you access to the Edge screen which can make it easier to access certain contacts and apps. However many people never take advantage of the Edge screen’s capabilities. If it does of a better job of getting in your way than it does of making things easier, then you may want to disable it. We’ve got the details on how to do just that right here!

How to disable the Edge Screen

Disabling the Edge screen is just a matter of flipping a toggle from within the settings. This means that turning the Edge screen off, or back on, just only take a few moments.

Open Settings.

Tap Display.

Scroll down and tap Edge screen.

Tap the toggle next to Edge panels to turn off the edge screen.

Questions?

Do you have questions about disabling the Edge screen on Note 8? Have you turned off the Edge screen on your Note 8, or do you prefer to utilize it? Let us know in the comments below!

Samsung Galaxy Note 8

• Galaxy Note 8 review
• Complete Galaxy Note 8 specs
• Galaxy Note 8 vs. Galaxy Note 5
• Which Note 8 color is best?
• Join our Galaxy Note 8 forums

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Alcatel Idol 5 brings subtle design tweaks, heads to Cricket Wireless for under $200

If there’s one thing we know by now, a solid Android doesn’t have to cost a fortune.

We’re seeing a lot of premium smartphones come in over $800, but you can also enjoy some premium features in a smartphone that costs less than $200. The Alcatel IDOL 5 is a VR-ready Android 7.0 Nougat phone with a 5.2-inch 1080p display and dual front-facing speakers. Under the hood is a (cost-saving) Mediatek Helio P20 octa-core processor, 2GB of RAM, up to 32GB of internal memory and a microSD slot for even more storage.

The most noticeable change on the Idol 5 compared to the Idol 4 is the metal back. Alcatel says the move to metal was in response to customer feedback that the glass back on the Idol 4S was fragile.

The NOW key on the Idol 5 replaces the BOOM key from the previous model (my word, those names). The key instantly launches your most commonly-used tasks. You can use it to turn the flashlight on or off, compose a message, take a screenshot, snap a photo, or launch your favorite apps.

Other notable features include the 12-megapixel camera with dual-tone flash, 8-megapixel selfie camera with LED flash, and fast charging for the 2850mAh battery. You can also find a 3.5mm headset jack located at the bottom of the phone.

The new Alcatel Idol 5 is available exclusively at Cricket-branded stores or cricketwireless.com beginning October 27, with the affordable price of $199. The UNI360 VR Googles, which is optimized for the Idol 5, is sold separately for $49.99, although it is compatible with other VR-capable smartphones with 5- to 6-inch displays.

Google Family Link is now invite-free for parents in the U.S.

After being announced as an invite-only service in March, Family Link can now be used by any and all parents in the U.S.

Back in March, Google officially introduced Family Link — a suite of parental controls that aimed to help make raising your kids in the 21st century just a little bit easier. Family Link could only be accessed with an invitation when it first launched, but today, Google is making the service available for everyone to try.

You’ll still need to live in the United States and have a Google account to get things started, but assuming you do, you can start using Family Link by either going to the Family Link website or downloading the official app from the Play Store. Once you’ve done this, you can start creating Google accounts for your children if they don’t already have one.

With your kids’ accounts made and connected to your account via Family Link, you’ll be able to set all sorts of limits and restrictions on what they can and can’t do with their devices. This means that you’ll be able to approve and block apps/games that can be downloaded from the Play Store, see how long your son or daughter’s phone screen has been on, set daily limits for how long devices can be used, and even remotely lock your kiddos’ gadgets when it’s time to go to do homework, play outside, or go to bed.

The Family Link app is automatically downloaded to your kids’ phones/tablets after you’ve got their accounts linked to the service, and for any of our readers that would like a helping hand for making sure your children are using their devices in a safe and healthy manner, Family Link looks like one of the best tools that you have at your disposal.

This security camera offers a sweeping view of your home for $40

Google’s longstanding search widget could add customization options soon

The Google Search widget might be getting a suite of new customization tools for changing its shape, color, and more.

Ever since its inception, one of Android’s strongest characteristics has been its ability to customize just about everything to your heart’s content. There are a ton of third-party customization solutions throughout the Play Store, but thanks to a teardown of the Google app, it would appear that Google itself will soon be giving users more options for changing up the look of their home screens.

Right now, the Google app has three widgets that you can add to your home screens: Feed, Google, and Google Sound. The Google widget is the rectangular search bar that allows you to quickly initiate typed and voice searches, and while it’s perfectly functional, you can’t really change the look aside from adjusting its length.

Going from fixed widgets to customizable ones would be great.

Within the latest beta for the Google app, there are numerous mentions for something called “Google Bar” within strings of code, and once these strings are activated, an updated Google widget can be added to your home screen. However, the real magic happens when you tap on the Customize tab within the overflow menu.

Upon doing this, you’ll see the Google widget on top of your wallpaper with four icons below for customizing the bar logo, bar shape, bar color, and bar shading.

Starting off with bar logo, this allows you to choose whether you want the full Google logo to be displayed or just a single “G.” The bar shape option has three different shapes to choose from, including a traditional rectangle, a rectangle with slightly rounded corners, and a round bar not unlike what’s found on the Essential Phone, Galaxy S8, and other 2017 flagships.

Bar color really gets the customization juices flowing, enabling you to turn the Google and other icons from white to gray, darkening the entire bar for a more stealthy look, and even two sliders for fine-tuning the color of the bar to your exact liking. Lastly, bar shading lets you adjust the transparency of the widget to choose whether you want it to be more solid or see-through.

Google has yet to comment on this latest discovery, and at this point, it’s entirely possible that it could get scrapped and never see a public debut. However, I think it’s safe to say that this is one feature most of us are chomping at the bit for Google to hurry up and release.

Google Assistant gains a search bar for easier app searching

‘Timberscrapers’ could soon dominate urban skylines

They just don’t make ’em like the Sakyamuni Pagoda anymore. Built from wood in 1056 in the Shanxi province of China, the building has remained standing to this day, despite seven earthquakes rattling the region within its first 50 years of existence. Since then, it’s held up against a slew of seismic events, even when more-modern structures have failed. Now, thanks to recent advancements in timber technology, modern architects are rediscovering the benefits of working with wood.

Wood was the go-to construction material from the dawn of time up until the late 19th century. However, it is far from ideal. For one thing, its cells can swell and shrink by up to 10 percent of their original size, depending on the humidity. Plus, if it stays wet for too long, the material rots. Imperfections in the grain weaken its structural integrity and can cause it to fail under loads that it should otherwise support. In its natural state, wood breaks more easily than steel and bends more readily than concrete. Wood’s biggest drawback is, of course, the fact that it burns so readily. That’s not what you want in a densely packed urban center, as the fires of San Francisco in 1851 and 1906, Chicago in 1871, and Boston in 1872 illustrate.

Still, while the 20th-century skylines were dominated by steel and concrete, the first two decades of the 21st have seen a rapid influx of wooden architectural designs. However, many are still little more than artist renderings. In 2012, the 10-story Forte residential block in Melbourne, Australia, became the world’s tallest timber building. It was quickly overtaken two years (and four stories) later when The Treet in Central Bergen, Norway, was completed.

The Brock Commons, in Canada, currently serves as 18 levels of student housing for the University of British Columbia. And beginning next month, architects in Portland, Oregon, will break ground on a 12-story mixed-use structure dubbed the Framework, which will be the tallest wooden building in the US once it’s complete. That structure may not hold the title for long, however, as the Cambridge University Department of Architecture is looking at how it might construct twin 80-story residential towers — one on the Chicago River, the other in London.

This rapid proliferation of designs is all thanks to a kind of building material called cross-laminated timber (CLT), which was invented in Europe in the 1990s. It’s not that different from plywood, actually, just produced on a much larger scale. Long planks of two-by-fours are glued together side by side into sheets. Those sheets are then stacked three or four layers high, separated by fire-resistant glue and pressed together. By rotating the grain of each subsequent layer by 90 degrees, the composite material shows a structural strength that rivals steel and negates the imperfections that any one layer might have.

Wood structures offer a number of benefits over steel and concrete, especially in an increasingly carbon-conscious world. For example, it’s roughly a quarter of the weight of an equally sized concrete structure, which means that the foundations don’t have to be as large. That means you don’t need to use as many building materials and don’t have to expend as much fuel getting them to the construction site, which further reduces carbon emissions. That’s a big deal here in the States: According to the Department of Energy, a full 40 percent of the country’s total carbon emissions come from building construction and use.

“Carbon dioxide is the building block of wood,” Professor Arijit Sinha of Oregon State University told Engadget. “As the tree grows, more carbon dioxide is stored.” What’s more, Sinha continued, lighter wooden buildings — whether they’re made from mass timber materials or traditional wood — tend to withstand earthquakes better and dissipate the energy of the shaking more readily than steel structures.

According to a 2014 study published in the Journal of Sustainable Forestry, we’d be able to reduce global C02 emissions by 15 to 20 percent if we used CLT instead of steel. Additionally, CLT can be fabricated in a factory and flat-packed Ikea-style to the job site and then simply assembled, rather than constructed in the traditional sense. “This has huge time and financial savings implications,” Kevin Flanagan, a partner at PLP Architecture, told CNN.

But perhaps wood’s most valuable advantage is its ability to sequester carbon. A 2009 study by the University of Canterbury, in New Zealand, found that over a 60-year life cycle, “Increasing the amount of timber in the buildings decreased the initial embodied energy and GWP [Global Warming Potential] of materials and also decreased the total energy consumption and GWP.” Overall, wooden buildings can have a total carbon footprint a third smaller than similarly sized steel and concrete buildings.

“When you compare a wood building with a concrete building, wood wins every time,” Jim Bowyer, an emeritus engineer at the University of Minnesota, in St. Paul, told Nature in May.

But as promising as all of this carbon offsetting appears, whether that carbon remains locked depends largely on how the material is recycled. Unlike the Sakyamuni Pagoda, most modern buildings aren’t meant to be everlasting. Instead they’re routinely demolished and rebuilt every half a century or so as the needs of the city around them change.

So what do you do with the pile of lumber after you’ve knocked down the structure? You can’t dump it in a landfill and let it rot, as that slowly releases the trapped carbon back into the atmosphere, Sinha explained. Burning the wood for energy does the same thing, only more quickly. Responsibly recycling that wood for use in other construction projects or other products entirely is the only way to ensure that the sequestered carbon stays that way.

Another major challenge is wood’s sustainability. According to the World Wildlife Foundation, 58,000 square miles of forest are destroyed annually. That’s roughly the land mass of Georgia. However, with responsible land management, a number of experts believe that we can make it work.

“Wood is a renewable and sustainable resource so long as the forest is managed using good practices,” Sinha said. “If that is happening, then wood is an obvious choice for building ‘green.’”

Bowyer, who is leading an expert assessment on behalf of the American Wood Council, figures that the US timber industry is currently logging about a third of the country’s annual forest growth but has the capacity to double the amount of carbon sequestered in buildings annually. What’s more, his team found that wood construction could expand beyond residential (some 80 percent of American homes are made from wood) into commercial and industrial spaces, without reducing the amount of carbon locked away in America’s forests.

Researchers are already looking to “mix the the [wood] species and glue type and play around with the orientation of the laminate to optimize the engineering properties for the specific application,” Sinha said. Oregon State University is also partnering with a local timber company to develop CTL’s successor, dubbed Mass Plywood Panels. With maximum finished dimensions of 12 feet wide by 48 feet long by 24 inches thick, MPP can support the same amount of weight as CTL while using up to a third less wood. As Sinha concludes, “I think cross-laminated timber is just the start.”

[Image credit: University of British Columbia (Brock Commons); Gisling / Wikipedia (Sakyamuni Pagoda)]

The latest ‘Super Mario Run’ update is available for download

The update to Super Mario Run has arrived. We heard about the new features planned for the game last week, a main one being the introduction of Remix 10 — super quick courses that include Bonus Games and one Super Bonus Game that can get you some new buildings for Kingdom Builder mode. Super Mario Run will also now include Daisy as a playable character who has the ability to jump while she’s already in midair.

Some additional features include the new World Star that brings courses like a forest and an airship armada, and you’ll also be able to listen to your own tunes while you play. Mario and the gang will sport headphones when you do. And finally, your Toad Rally opponents will now have Toad populations that are more inline with your own.

The update is available now and new players can snag the game for half of the regular price between now and October 12th.

Via: Alex Seedhouse

Source: App Store, Play Store

Amazon’s confusing new Echo lineup: There’s a method to the madness

Amazon’s overstuffed Echo event yesterday made one thing clear: it’s not afraid of doubling down on smart speakers and its virtual assistant Alexa. The company announced a smaller $100 Echo (just as we reported in July); a $150 Echo Plus with smart hub features; and an Echo-powered alarm clock called “Spot”. And that’s not even including the truly strange stuff: Echo Connect, which turns your Echo devices into speakerphones for landlines; and a tiny Bluetooth button for games. Amazon’s also bundling an Echo Dot with the new Alexa-powered Fire TV dongle for just $80, as well as with the Fire TV stick for $60. Whew.

As impressive as this new lineup is, it’s easy to see how it could also be confusing for consumers. Which Echo device do you really need? It’s hard enough to decide if you’re just dipping your toes into Amazon’s smart speaker world. It’s even tougher for the Echo faithful, who now have a bevy devices to choose from as they bring more smart speakers into their homes. Previously, you only had to choose from the “big” Echo and “small” Echo Dot (the portable Echo Tap always seemed superfluous).

Even as someone who’s been living the Alexa life since the original Echo, I’m a bit confused about what to upgrade to. Maybe it’s not worth upgrading at all? The new model should sound better, thanks to improved speakers. And it also has a refined microphone array, which means it’ll be more effective at actually hearing your voice commands. That’s something the original Echo still occasionally has trouble with. The new model is much smaller than before, and its cloth covering should make it easier to fit into your home decor.

And then there’s the bigger Echo Plus, which does everything the smaller version does, but adds a smart hub. I’m the ideal customer for that model, since I already have four Phillips Hue lights in my apartment. (I also wouldn’t mind the extra Hue light that comes with the Echo Plus.) Since it has its own hub built in, it also means you wouldn’t need to run a separate device to hook up other connected gadgets. At the moment, you need to have a Hue Hub connected to your router to get those lights working. Amazon could encourage more people to adopt smart home devices by removing the need for additional hardware, and simplifying the overall experience.

AOL

Your Echo choices get even more confusing as you start thinking about bringing more than one speaker into your home. The adorable Echo Spot seems like it’d make a decent connected alarm clock — you can even watch a bit of video and take calls on its tiny 2.5-inch screen. But at $130, it also seems indulgent. For $30 less, you could get the new Echo with its improved speakers. The Spot is basically a cuter version of the $230 Echo Show, but that device’s bigger screen makes it much more useful. You could, for example, watch Amazon Prime videos, or see responses from your Alexa queries.

Amazon’s $50 Echo Dot is a far cheaper way to bring Alexa into your bedroom, or you could just buy it together with Fire TV devices for an additional $10. At this point, it’s almost like the company is giving the Echo Dot away (something it actually did in August). It’s understandable why. It’s more important for Amazon to expand its Echo system than it is for it to make a huge profit on hardware. And the Dot is ideal for making existing Echo users even more reliant on Alexa (and consequently, all of Amazon’s services).

The Echo Connect is the most curious new device from Amazon. It plugs into landline phones and instantly turns all of your Echo devices into speakerphones. Sure, it’s pretty useless for people without landlines, but for users that just can’t give up a physical phone line, it makes things like checking up on family much easier. It’s intriguing to see Amazon innovating for users who rely on older technology — how often do we see that as tech companies chase what’s new? At the same time, that’s also a crowd that might be less inclined to try out new gadgets. It seems like a gamble to expect landline users to adopt something as advanced as a voice-powered speakerphone.

It’s hard to make heads or tails of the Echo Button until we get our hands on it, but like the Echo Look camera, it seems more experimental than something Amazon truly expects to take off. It makes sense for the company to play around with what the Echo devices can do. Third-party companies are also throwing Alexa into things like portable radios, so why not try new things? Back at CES, it was clear that the Alexa ecosystem was exploding. It’ll only have more room to grow if Amazon manages to bring the virtual assistant into new territory.

Ultimately, a wider variety of Echo devices is a good problem for Amazon. It may get tougher for consumers to figure out what they need, but it also gives the company more ways to fit Alexa into their lives. It’s also important that Amazon doesn’t lose it’s ability to experiment. The Echo was a risk when it debuted in 2014, like the Kindle before it. Sometimes those experiments leads to failure, like the Fire Phone. But Amazon, like most tech companies, won’t truly innovate if they’re playing it safe.

FCC Chairman wants Apple to enable FM in iPhones for emergencies

You might think of radio as an archaic form of listening to music, but it’s still one of the more effective ways to get information to people, especially when cell networks go down. Most smartphones already have an FM chip baked right into the chipset, but they tend to be inaccessible, especially in the US. Now FCC Chairman Ajit Pai is asking Apple to activate these FM chips already in iPhones. “Apple is the one major phone manufacturer that has resisted (activating the chips),” said Pai in a statement. “But I hope the company will reconsider its position, given the devastation wrought by Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria.”

This isn’t a new push by Pai to get FM enabled in smartphones, either. “In recent years, I have repeatedly called on the wireless industry to activate the FM chips that are already installed in almost all smartphones sold in the United States,” he said. “And I’ve specifically pointed out the public safety benefits of doing so.” In his first public speech as FCC chairman, Pai notes, he said that “you could make a case for activating chips on public safety grounds alone.”

As The Verge notes, many companies, including Motorola, LG and Samsung (among others), have allowed for FM access in their smartphones. Many are on the list of supported devices provided by NextRadio, a smartphone app that provides FM broadcasts to smartphones. AT&T already asks manufacturers of Android phones to enable the FM systems, too. “I applaud those companies that have done the right thing by activating the FM chips in their phones,” said Pajit.

Source: FCC

The Hero 6 and ‘GP1’ is GoPro’s chance to grow again

“When I first was listening to our team’s desire to make a chip, I felt a bit of anxiety, like, are we getting a bit ahead of ourselves? This might be beyond what our capabilities are,” Nick Woodman, GoPro founder and CEO, told me in a rare break from his boyish bombast.

His anxiety stems from a narrative in the media over the past year or two that GoPro can’t seem to shake. Share prices slid sharply in 2015, divisions closed and staff were let go. Since then, the message has been clear: GoPro is in trouble. Except apparently Woodman didn’t get that memo. Either that or he knew what his company has been working on over the past three years: a custom image processor called the GP1. It’s a chip that makes the Hero 6 the first GoPro built to the company’s own specification, and it could change everything.

“We’ve finally been able to make a GoPro without compromises. We haven’t had to work around somebody’s else chip design and chip limitation,” Woodman said, returning to form. The “somebody else” in that sentence refers to Ambarella, the company that’s made the processor for almost every GoPro up to this point — and the processor for most other action/drone cameras on sale right now, for that matter. Woodman is enthused about GP1 for a number of reasons I’ll soon learn, but key among them all is the fact that GoPro is no longer sharing technology with its rivals.

GoPro fans might not be too excited about the GP1 right now. After all, it’s not a feature that easily translates to an in-store display. Some cynics might also dismiss the divorce from Ambarella as a mere cost-saving move. Woodman would partly agree with them.

“People are sometimes confused about how much it costs to build a GoPro,” he said. “How much it costs to design, engineer, manufacture, distribute. It’s an expensive business, and unfortunately, over the last couple of years, it’s not always easy to run profitably.” The GP1, then, is also part of the reason why his company stands a good chance of getting back in the black. “If we didn’t design the GP1 chip ourselves, Hero 6 Black would be much more expensive than it is today.”

Whether that will appease the GoPro faithful who are being asked to pay $100 more for the Hero 6 ($499) at launch than the Hero 5 when it came out remains to be seen. The Hero 5 ushered in a new design, after all. It was waterproof without a case and had a slew of usability improvements. The Hero 6 is trading on improved image quality, better dynamic range, enhanced slo-mo and higher frame rates. These are less-tangible concepts to the average person reading the box in Target, even if they matter a lot more.

“I think that’s one of the things it’s got going for it: [The Hero 6’s footage] looks much less ‘GoPro-y,’ than in the past,” said Abe Kislevitz, GoPro’s senior creative director, when I asked him about it. “[That] GoPro look, where it’s a little yellow, or it’s a little soft.” He’s referring to those telltale signs that GoPro videos can have. “[When testing the Hero 6] I didn’t have to touch the color at all.”

You shouldn’t trust Kislevitz though. Search Google for his tutorials and you’ll realize he could probably wrangle a beautiful image out of a sheet of paper and a cardboard tube. Kislevitz likely sensed my speculation and showed me unedited images of the same scene taken with the Hero 5 and Hero 6. The color and dynamic range in the Hero 6 was undeniably improved, but I still had to learn why this was so.

Sandor Barna, VP of Hardware Engineering, was able to share why. “We’re able to study the scenes as they’re coming [into the camera] and adjust the mapping of color and mapping of exposure to what’s displayed to really make it more pleasing,” he said. It’s a process called tone mapping, and it’s one of the many benefits that GP1 allows. Another is bespoke HDR. With the camera able to shoot 12-megapixel stills at the rate of 120 per second, you can capture multiple exposures just fractions apart in time (so no motion or blur).

The Hero 6 isn’t lacking in marquee features though. There’s a new “wake on voice” mode so you can rouse your camera from its slumber many hours after switching it off. There are those aforementioned HDR photos as well as improved image stabilization (it’s still EIS, but it can now stabilize in more directions, so less warping). And don’t forget the usual slew of things that are faster/better (file transfer speed, frame rate, low light performance, et cetera).

What’s especially telling is how GoPro weathered its recent stormy years. The drone problems, the ambitious media aspirations, the constant tap on the shoulder from shareholders. All the while it knew it was working on something different. Something potentially make-or-break. To make such a fundamental change with so much noise going on requires a lot of faith. Or bravado. Possibly both.

GoPro is in good company. Making your own processor gives a level of ownership to your product that few can deny. Samsung makes its own silicon. So does Apple. Apple in particular has been relying on its own silicon for years in the iPhone, and it’s doing fine by most standards.

Much like GoPro, Apple has been the company to beat in its respective market. Excited fans therefore have high expectations each time there’s a new product and complain when older technologies are positioned as state-of-the-art features (wireless charging? mobile payments?). GoPro suffers the same expectations and criticisms (just read this subreddit for more than five minutes), yet it’s still the action-camera brand that most people reach for.

“I think what’s most exciting about GP1 is we’ve yet to tap its full potential,” Woodman told me. “With every new release of a new GoPro, we come out with firmware updates that unlock new features, new performance. That’s especially true with Hero 6 Black.” The difference this time is that these updates can be much further reaching. When someone else controls your processor, your limits are defined by them. GoPro has an opportunity here to make its cameras work with its other products (Karma, most notably) in new ways.

“No, you’re onto something,” Woodman told me when I asked about exactly that (Karma integration). “GP1 is a major step toward us being able to optimize the GoPro ecosystem.”

Kislevitz thinks it can even go beyond the drone. “I think in the future, and I don’t want to speak for what engineering’s planning, but [with] customizations in terms of dual streams you can film in high resolutions, and you could potentially stream to the web at the same time.”

Livestreaming isn’t something GoPro has fully capitalized on yet, although it’s starting to. “We now think of a GoPro as an untethered lens for your phone, and we recognize that,” said Woodman. “A really important area where we’re going to iterate and update the Hero experience is through software enhancements that enable it to connect to your phone faster and more easily.”

But it’s not just streaming we can hope for. A lesser-known feature introduced with the GP1 is machine learning. The camera analyzes images as they come in, looking not only for the best lighting options but also for faces. GoPro will leverage facial recognition to improve QuikStories and its automatically generated video clips.

Of course, Woodman and his team are keen to extol the virtues of the GP1, but this is new ground for the company. New ground is usually unfamiliar and often brings fresh challenges. So how does Woodman think his team will navigate it when companies like Ambarella have been making processors for years?

It was at this point in the conversation that Woodman looked to the past: “When we produced the first Hero camera, even the 35mm film wrist camera back in 2004, we’d never done that before. Were people going to like it? I didn’t know.”