Samsung Galaxy X: What we know so far, in video

Foldable smartphones have been talked about for years, ever since the first foldable OLED prototypes were shown off at trade shows. But it’s only recently that they’ve started to become a reality.

One big name that everyone’s expecting to see in this space is Samsung, with its rumored Galaxy X. A name like “Galaxy X” really plays into the old narrative of Samsung as the iPhone copycat. But the rumored name actually predates the iPhone X by more than a year, with the first serious reports bubbling up in early 2016. And even years before that, there was plenty of rumor fuel around the idea of a Samsung phone with a flexible, foldable screen — a device that could fit in your pocket like a phone, and also fold out to provide a more expansive viewing area.

Check out our video feature above to find out what we know so far about what could be a revolutionary new flagship smartphone.

• More about the Samsung Galaxy X
• Android Central on YouTube
• Samsung Galaxy Note 8 review
• Samsung Galaxy S9 / S9+: What we know so far

Audi smart home battery grid creates a ‘virtual power plant’

Audi isn’t going to let rival automakers like BMW and Tesla corner the market on home batteries. The German badge is testing a Smart Energy Network where solar-powered batteries not only help your home minimize use of the electrical grid, but talk to each other. The result is, as Audi put it, a “virtual power plant” — households collectively feed power into the grid and help balance overall consumption.

The trial is limited to both Audi’s home of Ingolstadt as well as the Zurich area. There’s no mention of how long it will run or how likely it is the pilot will expand.

The strategy is a logical one for companies making deeper commitments to electric vehicles. It’s easier for Audi to sell you on the concept of an EV if it can promise to lower your power bill in the long run. Also, this makes the most of the VW brand’s work on batteries — it can venture beyond selling cars and make sure the batteries it makes find customers. It just so happens that this can both save you some money and, potentially, help the environment in the process.

Via: Electrek

Source: Audi MediaCenter

BMW to switch Apple CarPlay to subscription service

Apple CarPlay is being offered in more and more vehicles, often as standard equipment. BMW, though, charges for it. BMW currently offers CarPlay as a $300 option on cars equipped with navigation. This will change, though, as The Verge reports the German automaker will switch to a yearly subscription service.

CarPlay will be free for the first year, then cost $80 a year to continue the service. At the Detroit Auto Show, BMW technology product manager Don Smith explained that there’s actually a customer benefit to doing it this way. “This allows the customer to switch devices. A lot of people buy [CarPlay] and think it’s OK, but sometimes they stop using it or switch to Android.” If a customer decided to keep the service over the course of a three-year lease, they would end up paying less than the one-time cost of $300, as the first three years would cost just $160. Four would cost $240.

Autoblog reached out to BMW, and a spokesperson confirmed the details for the U.S. market, reiterating the benefit to lessees.

BMW currently doesn’t offer Android Auto. Late last year, the automaker announced (with a really slick video) that all new BMW and Mini models would offer Amazon Alexa as an in-car service in 2018. Smith told The Verge that BMW models will also offer Google Assistant later this year.

Related Video:

Source: The Verge

How to buy Ripple

While all cryptocurrencies are a little different from one another, Ripple stands apart with its backing by major banks. That’s lead to some interesting partnerships, which in turn helped boost Ripple and by extension its transactional protocol, XRP, to become one of the largest cryptocurrencies by market share in early 2018.

If you want to get some XRP for yourself, you need to know where to go and what to do. You need to know how to buy Ripple. As with our other guides on buying cryptocurrencies like Ethereum, we’ll walk you through the steps you need to take, as well as give you a couple of different options with the pros and cons of each.

Still not quite sure what cryptocurrencies are all about? Here’s our guide to help explain them.

Buying on an exchange

Although there are definitely better places to store your cryptocurrency than on an exchange, they still represent the easiest and most automated method of buying and selling them. There are tens of options out there, and popular ones like BitStamp and Kraken remain the easiest to recommend. Ripple Lab’s site has a list of exchanges that support the cryptocurrency, though when making your decision, make sure you choose one that is well established and has insurance should theft or hacks occur.

Each exchange will operate slightly differently, but most will involve several important steps. You’ll need to sign up for and verify an account, which in most cases will require some form of identification for fraud prevention, though it’s often a simple process.

The next step is to link your bank account or another form of payment method. That can be handled through the exchange dashboard. In the case of some exchanges — BitStamp and Kraken for example — you will then need to deposit some fiat current, like USD, into your account. Once it’s there, you’re ready to buy.

What you’re then looking to do is make a new “buy order.” That may involve inputting a certain amount of XRP you want to buy, or a certain amount of USD (or equivalent) you’re willing to spend. Regardless, when you have settled on an amount you’re happy with, you hit the buy button and the money will be deducted from your deposit address and the equivalent XRP will be sent to your account.

Some sites employ additional terminology for transactions which is worth knowing. A “market” buy order will purchase XRP at the best market price, while a “limit” buy order will only make a transaction at a fixed, or better price.

Whichever choice you opt for, you should now be the proud owner of some Ripple cryptocurrency. Unless you plan to sell it again soon, we would recommend transferring it out to a more secure wallet just in case the exchange goes down, or becomes hard to use due to heavy traffic or DDOS attack.

Buying through direct trade

For those who don’t like the risk of having any currency stored on an exchange for any period of time, or just want more control over the price, direct trades are a better bet. Although peer to peer trades with XRP are no way near as common or as supported as similar trades with bitcoin, there are still some routes you can go down.

The only established site for trading fiat currency for XRP in a direct manner is Cointal. It supports a variety of payment methods, including Paypal, bank transfers, visa debit and credit cards, and gift cards, among others. To use the service you simply head to its homepage, input the amount of XRP you want, or how much USD you’re willing to spend, and then search for an offer. Relevant trades will be presented to you in list form, and you can filter the results by buy/sell orders, payment method, and local currency.

To select which trade to go for, you can look at prices, payment options, and seller feedback, to make sure you’re trading with someone reputable. Direct trades do have a little more trust involved than exchange trades, but the upside is that you are far less reliant on the website itself functioning. Were it to go down, you can still access your currency and/or XRP.

To complete a transaction, set up an account, login to it, and click the “buy now” button on the respective trade page. You will then be taken into a private chat with the seller, whom you can discuss the specifics of your trade. The short of it is that you make your payment, often into an escrow account for security reasons, and then once that’s been verified, the seller will send you the XRP to your specified wallet.

The only caveat to Cointal is that one Reddit thread recently appeared that suggested there was a security issue with the site’s deposit system. It does appear now to have been resolved with all parties happy, but it’s important to check the latest reviews of sites before using them, just in case.

‘Buying’ with other currencies

The above methods are the only current ways to buy XRP with your real-world money. If you already have cryptocurrencies like Ether or bitcoin, you can use “asset exchange” sites to trade one for another quite swiftly. For a full breakdown of the methods involved in that, check out our guide on how to trade cryptocurrencies, but for a quick recommendation, services like ShapeShift and Changelly have proved popular over the past year, and are even incorporated directly in certain wallets. Cointal and Paxful also have some direct trade asset exchanges with XRP, though that depends very much on the sellers.

Editors’ Recommendations

• How to trade bitcoin for other cryptocurrencies
• How to buy Ethereum
• How to buy bitcoin
• How to sell bitcoin
• The best bitcoin wallets

If tech addiction is screwing up our kids, what should tech giants be doing?

A strange thing happened when New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton interviewed Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2010. At the end of the conversation, Bilton asked Jobs what his kids thought of Apple’s new tablet, news of which was dominating websites, newspapers, and magazines. Jobs’ answer surprised him: it turned out Steve’s kids hadn’t tried the iPad yet. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” Jobs said.

Bilton, stunned, reached out to Walter Isaacson, Jobs’ hand-picked official biographer, to find out whether he believed this to be true. Isaacson said that it was. “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things,” he said. “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”

Teenagers who spend upwards of five hours a day are more likely to have a risk factor for suicide.

It would be easy to write off Jobs’ behaviour as being unique to him, among tech executives. After all, wasn’t Apple’s iconic co-founder famous for “thinking different?” But he’s not alone. In 2007, the year that the modern smartphone emerged as its own distinct entity, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates put a screen time cap on his 10-year-old daughter when he feared she was getting addicted to a particular video game. He also barred his own kids from getting cell phones until they turned 14: at least four years later than the average age of a child’s first cell phone.

As people working on the cusp of technology, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates would more than qualify for the tastemaker status of what marketing expert Geoffrey Moore would call “early adopters.” Ten years later, however, it seems that a large number of other people are starting to catch up with their concerns about what technology is doing to us — and particularly to our kids.

In her book, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious,More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, and What That Means for the Rest of Us, psychologist Jean Twenge lays out some of her concerns about the impact that tech addiction, particularly smartphones, are having on the so-called iGeneration. For those keeping track at home, that refers to the post-millennial generation (also sometimes called Generation Z), born between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.

Exposure-response curve of hours of electronic device use and % with at least one suicide-related outcome, bivariate and with demographic controls, YRBSS survey of 9th to 12th graders in the U.S. (from Clinical Psychological Science article out today). pic.twitter.com/zjekXk6oyO

— Jean Twenge (@jean_twenge) November 14, 2017

“There are three primary concerns,” Twenge told Digital Trends, summarizing her arguments. “First, digital media use seems to be decreasing the time we spend socializing with people face-to-face. Second, screen time interferes with sleep. Third, there are the direct effects of digital media, such as the social comparison of social media where we all think other people’s lives are more glamorous than ours. All of these are linked to less happiness and more depression.”

The book is filled with statistics backing up these claims — such as the suggestion that teenagers who spend upwards of five hours a day are 71 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide than those who spend under one hour a day. While correlation is not necessarily causation, iGen nonetheless paints an unsettling picture of a generation whose ever-connected world, and the lack of real world socialization that comes with it, is having a significant negative effect.

What role do tech companies play?

The question, therefore, is what should be done about it. Exactly what responsibility do tech giants have to us, and to society as a whole? Ironically, tech firms are far more likely to cast their work in these terms than just about any other industry. We don’t hear Wal-Mart talking or ExxonMobil talking about what they do in utopian terms, but Google has no issues putting its work in moral terms (“don’t be evil”), while Apple’s CEO Tim Cook happily waxes lyrical about making Apple “a force for good” in the world.

Recently, we got a glimpse of the kind of shareholder pressure that may force tech companies’ hands. Two investor groups with a total of $2 billion shares in Apple sent the company an open letter, voicing their concerns about this subject. Activist shareholders are not, as a rule, vocal about social change — which means that this represents something of a momentous occasion. They want Apple to do two things: to develop software that lets parents limit their kids’ phone use, and to carry out a study investigating the impact of smartphone overuse on mental health. Apple quickly responded to say that at least the first of these two goals is in the works.

“It’s a social-validation feedback loop […]  you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Right now, it is still early days for this topic. Books like Twenge’s (and some notable others) have began to join the dots, but there are still accusations that examples are being cherry picked to suit an agenda. But people are speaking out. Recently, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, told the news website Axios that, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Expanding on the subject of social media addiction, Parker said that, “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

Should findings like Twenge’s be borne out in subsequent research, most notably with some form of attributed causation, tech giants could find themselves occupying a similar space to fast food giants or tobacco companies. True, both fast food and tobacco remain powerful industries, but they have also been subject to far more scrutiny. Tobacco advertising, for example, is now among the most heavily regulated forms of marketing. In the European Union, all tobacco advertising and sponsorship on television has been banned since 1991, and only Germany and Bulgaria allow it to be advertised on billboards. In the U.S., billboard and public transportation advertising of cigarettes is banned in 46 states, and there are stringent laws prohibiting advertising aimed at young people.

First co-founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker (Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

The fast food industry isn’t so stringently governed, but it is easy to see many of the concerns — particularly the promotion of sedentary lifestyles among customers — could be extrapolated to the tech world. The responses of both are certainly similar. Companies like Pepsi and McDonald’s have both attempted to counteract accusations by sending representatives to schools to promote the benefits of regular exercise. Coca-Cola, meanwhile, launched a fitness campaign depicting two people sitting together, cuddled up, on a beach. “Are you sitting on a solution?” the ad read. An article published on Alternet scoffed: “The thing is, they’re drinking the problem: Coca-Cola.”

Possible solutions to the problem

If we sympathize with the fundamental disconnect of a fast food or sugary beverage company also telling us to live a healthy life, should we apply that same skepticism to tech giants? What is the difference between the actions of Coca-Cola and, say, the Apple Watch’s regular notifications that we should go outside or stand up? Part of the reason we are sitting around looking at screens, instead of going out, is because of companies like Apple, which first helped popularize the personal computer and, perhaps more fundamentally, the smartphone.

“Ideally, Apple could integrate the age of the user into the set-up process for the phone”

Twenge said that she is not pinning the blame on tech giants, whether those are the companies which make the phones or the ones that run the social media platforms used on many of them. The right answer, she suggests, is a combination of parenting and, perhaps, a bit more social awareness on the part of today’s tech leaders. “To be clear, it’s not that companies are responsible for this,” she said.  “It’s that companies should give parents better tools for limiting their kids’ screen time.”

“Ideally, Apple could integrate the age of the user into the set-up process for the phone,” she continued, giving an example of one possible solution. “If you say the phone is for a 12-year-old, for example, it could give you the option to restrict the apps used, shut down the phone at night, limit the number of hours it could be used, and/or allow communication only with a short list of phone numbers. Parents might be more willing to buy their children smartphones if they were easier to regulate.”

It will be fascinating to see what happens next. Will tech companies offer tokenistic gestures to placate concerned parents, or will this represent the beginning of a bigger change? If tech figures like Mark Zuckerberg plan on a possible career in politics, we’d hope it will be the latter.

As Twenge’s iGen book points out, one of the most notable characteristics of today’s young people — in addition to their love of technology — is their emphasis on the importance of safety and mental health. When these two areas clash, which is going to win out? The question of how much responsibility tech companies actually have when it comes to shaping the world is a battle that is still being fought. From whether Facebook has any responsibility for the news it helps disseminate to whether iPhones play a role in depression among young people, these are complex issues to be unpacked.

We’d certainly like to see tech giants live up their world-changing ideals by addressing them head-on, though.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Rest in pieces: The biggest tech demises of 2017
• 5 tech trends you’ll be talking about in 2018
• Swing and a miss: 6 ambitious tech ventures that failed miserably
• Trends With Benefits podcast: Our favorite tech from CES 2018
• Weekly Rewind: Tech trends in 2018, what to expect from CES, an Apple refund

If tech addiction is screwing up our kids, what should tech giants be doing?

A strange thing happened when New York Times tech writer Nick Bilton interviewed Apple CEO Steve Jobs in 2010. At the end of the conversation, Bilton asked Jobs what his kids thought of Apple’s new tablet, news of which was dominating websites, newspapers, and magazines. Jobs’ answer surprised him: it turned out Steve’s kids hadn’t tried the iPad yet. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home,” Jobs said.

Bilton, stunned, reached out to Walter Isaacson, Jobs’ hand-picked official biographer, to find out whether he believed this to be true. Isaacson said that it was. “Every evening Steve made a point of having dinner at the big long table in their kitchen, discussing books and history and a variety of things,” he said. “No one ever pulled out an iPad or computer. The kids did not seem addicted at all to devices.”

Teenagers who spend upwards of five hours a day are more likely to have a risk factor for suicide.

It would be easy to write off Jobs’ behaviour as being unique to him, among tech executives. After all, wasn’t Apple’s iconic co-founder famous for “thinking different?” But he’s not alone. In 2007, the year that the modern smartphone emerged as its own distinct entity, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates put a screen time cap on his 10-year-old daughter when he feared she was getting addicted to a particular video game. He also barred his own kids from getting cell phones until they turned 14: at least four years later than the average age of a child’s first cell phone.

As people working on the cusp of technology, both Steve Jobs and Bill Gates would more than qualify for the tastemaker status of what marketing expert Geoffrey Moore would call “early adopters.” Ten years later, however, it seems that a large number of other people are starting to catch up with their concerns about what technology is doing to us — and particularly to our kids.

In her book, iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious,More Tolerant, Less Happy, and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, and What That Means for the Rest of Us, psychologist Jean Twenge lays out some of her concerns about the impact that tech addiction, particularly smartphones, are having on the so-called iGeneration. For those keeping track at home, that refers to the post-millennial generation (also sometimes called Generation Z), born between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s.

Exposure-response curve of hours of electronic device use and % with at least one suicide-related outcome, bivariate and with demographic controls, YRBSS survey of 9th to 12th graders in the U.S. (from Clinical Psychological Science article out today). pic.twitter.com/zjekXk6oyO

— Jean Twenge (@jean_twenge) November 14, 2017

“There are three primary concerns,” Twenge told Digital Trends, summarizing her arguments. “First, digital media use seems to be decreasing the time we spend socializing with people face-to-face. Second, screen time interferes with sleep. Third, there are the direct effects of digital media, such as the social comparison of social media where we all think other people’s lives are more glamorous than ours. All of these are linked to less happiness and more depression.”

The book is filled with statistics backing up these claims — such as the suggestion that teenagers who spend upwards of five hours a day are 71 percent more likely to have a risk factor for suicide than those who spend under one hour a day. While correlation is not necessarily causation, iGen nonetheless paints an unsettling picture of a generation whose ever-connected world, and the lack of real world socialization that comes with it, is having a significant negative effect.

What role do tech companies play?

The question, therefore, is what should be done about it. Exactly what responsibility do tech giants have to us, and to society as a whole? Ironically, tech firms are far more likely to cast their work in these terms than just about any other industry. We don’t hear Wal-Mart talking or ExxonMobil talking about what they do in utopian terms, but Google has no issues putting its work in moral terms (“don’t be evil”), while Apple’s CEO Tim Cook happily waxes lyrical about making Apple “a force for good” in the world.

Recently, we got a glimpse of the kind of shareholder pressure that may force tech companies’ hands. Two investor groups with a total of $2 billion shares in Apple sent the company an open letter, voicing their concerns about this subject. Activist shareholders are not, as a rule, vocal about social change — which means that this represents something of a momentous occasion. They want Apple to do two things: to develop software that lets parents limit their kids’ phone use, and to carry out a study investigating the impact of smartphone overuse on mental health. Apple quickly responded to say that at least the first of these two goals is in the works.

“It’s a social-validation feedback loop […]  you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology.”

Right now, it is still early days for this topic. Books like Twenge’s (and some notable others) have began to join the dots, but there are still accusations that examples are being cherry picked to suit an agenda. But people are speaking out. Recently, Sean Parker, the first president of Facebook, told the news website Axios that, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

Expanding on the subject of social media addiction, Parker said that, “It’s a social-validation feedback loop … exactly the kind of thing that a hacker like myself would come up with, because you’re exploiting a vulnerability in human psychology. The inventors, creators — it’s me, it’s Mark [Zuckerberg], it’s Kevin Systrom on Instagram, it’s all of these people — understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

Should findings like Twenge’s be borne out in subsequent research, most notably with some form of attributed causation, tech giants could find themselves occupying a similar space to fast food giants or tobacco companies. True, both fast food and tobacco remain powerful industries, but they have also been subject to far more scrutiny. Tobacco advertising, for example, is now among the most heavily regulated forms of marketing. In the European Union, all tobacco advertising and sponsorship on television has been banned since 1991, and only Germany and Bulgaria allow it to be advertised on billboards. In the U.S., billboard and public transportation advertising of cigarettes is banned in 46 states, and there are stringent laws prohibiting advertising aimed at young people.

First co-founding president of Facebook, Sean Parker (Theo Wargo/Getty Images)

The fast food industry isn’t so stringently governed, but it is easy to see many of the concerns — particularly the promotion of sedentary lifestyles among customers — could be extrapolated to the tech world. The responses of both are certainly similar. Companies like Pepsi and McDonald’s have both attempted to counteract accusations by sending representatives to schools to promote the benefits of regular exercise. Coca-Cola, meanwhile, launched a fitness campaign depicting two people sitting together, cuddled up, on a beach. “Are you sitting on a solution?” the ad read. An article published on Alternet scoffed: “The thing is, they’re drinking the problem: Coca-Cola.”

Possible solutions to the problem

If we sympathize with the fundamental disconnect of a fast food or sugary beverage company also telling us to live a healthy life, should we apply that same skepticism to tech giants? What is the difference between the actions of Coca-Cola and, say, the Apple Watch’s regular notifications that we should go outside or stand up? Part of the reason we are sitting around looking at screens, instead of going out, is because of companies like Apple, which first helped popularize the personal computer and, perhaps more fundamentally, the smartphone.

“Ideally, Apple could integrate the age of the user into the set-up process for the phone”

Twenge said that she is not pinning the blame on tech giants, whether those are the companies which make the phones or the ones that run the social media platforms used on many of them. The right answer, she suggests, is a combination of parenting and, perhaps, a bit more social awareness on the part of today’s tech leaders. “To be clear, it’s not that companies are responsible for this,” she said.  “It’s that companies should give parents better tools for limiting their kids’ screen time.”

“Ideally, Apple could integrate the age of the user into the set-up process for the phone,” she continued, giving an example of one possible solution. “If you say the phone is for a 12-year-old, for example, it could give you the option to restrict the apps used, shut down the phone at night, limit the number of hours it could be used, and/or allow communication only with a short list of phone numbers. Parents might be more willing to buy their children smartphones if they were easier to regulate.”

It will be fascinating to see what happens next. Will tech companies offer tokenistic gestures to placate concerned parents, or will this represent the beginning of a bigger change? If tech figures like Mark Zuckerberg plan on a possible career in politics, we’d hope it will be the latter.

As Twenge’s iGen book points out, one of the most notable characteristics of today’s young people — in addition to their love of technology — is their emphasis on the importance of safety and mental health. When these two areas clash, which is going to win out? The question of how much responsibility tech companies actually have when it comes to shaping the world is a battle that is still being fought. From whether Facebook has any responsibility for the news it helps disseminate to whether iPhones play a role in depression among young people, these are complex issues to be unpacked.

We’d certainly like to see tech giants live up their world-changing ideals by addressing them head-on, though.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Rest in pieces: The biggest tech demises of 2017
• 5 tech trends you’ll be talking about in 2018
• Swing and a miss: 6 ambitious tech ventures that failed miserably
• Trends With Benefits podcast: Our favorite tech from CES 2018
• Weekly Rewind: Tech trends in 2018, what to expect from CES, an Apple refund

This home robot will clean your house, find your keys, then bring you a beer

Unveiled at the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, the Aeolus Robot hopes to deliver the promise of Rosie the robotic maid popularized by The Jetsons. The prototype home robot showed off its skills at the show by mopping floors, moving furniture, and even retrieving drinks from the refrigerator on command.

Alexander Huang of Aeolus Robotics told the Washington Post that the household robot will learn its surroundings and the individual inhabitants of the home, adapting its behavior over time. “Right now it’s like a child, but we will continue to grow its capability so that it grows from a child to an adult,” he said. “The more people that use the robot, the stronger it becomes.”

The Chief Technology Officer of Aeolus was part of the team that brought IBM’s Jeopardy-winning AI program Watson to life.

One key feature of its machine learning is the ability to recognize thousands of different objects and return them to the appropriate place, so a child’s teddy bear won’t end up in the parents’ bedroom. The robotic arm allows it to pick up and manipulate objects with precision. It also connects to household IoT networks such as Google Home or Amazon Alexa, and it’s continuously updated.

The robot could even help find lost objects by remembering where it saw them last.

“This is the first multi-functional robot that can act like a human being,” said Huang. “You can say, ‘Hey, my room is clean now robot, so please remember this next time you clean and put all my things back in these exact same spots.’”

The robot may also be an invaluable companion for the elderly or handicapped. Using “posture recognition,” it could identify when a person has fallen or is facing a medical emergency such as a seizure and call for assistance.

Aeolus is somewhat evasive on the price, claiming the robot will cost less than a family vacation overseas.

About the size and weight of a 12-year-old child, the robot doesn’t yet have a name, but the company says it will be available later this year. “It’s our mission to bring together the latest in robotics, AI, and machine learning in an affordable in-home robot,” said Huang.

Editors’ Recommendations

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‘Destiny 2’ has another problem with diminishing rewards

Bungie previously promised to both tackle complaints about diminishing rewards in Destiny 2 and to be more transparent going forward, but it’s apparent the studio still has some work to do. Players have discovered that the game is throttling the number of tokens it hands out for Faction Rallies (where you pledge allegiance and collect tokens in hopes of scoring a rare weapon at a discount) when you loot Lost Sectors. The company had actually patched this in as of mid-December, but it wasn’t clear what had changed until the Rallies resumed weeks later, on January 16th.

The company has since acknowledged the throttling and updated the December patch notes to reflect the throttling that’s taking place. It had made the change after discovering that players were earning ridiculous token counts without having to fight anyone — up to 500 an hour. The throttling is “too disruptive,” however, and it’s now exploring changes that would properly reward players without opening the door to token farming.

This isn’t a make-or-break flaw for Destiny 2 (Faction Rallies are strictly optional, and there are other ways to get tokens). However, it’s another case of Bungie making a decision that affects dedicated players without telling them what’s going on until after there’s an uproar. Why didn’t the December patch notes mention this from the start? While the fate of the game isn’t in jeopardy after an incident like this, Bungie may have to be more explicit about changes going forward if it’s going to maintain (or regain) gamers’ trust.

Via: Reddit, Kotaku

Source: Bungie (1), (2)

Recommended Reading: Please bring back ‘NBA Jam’

How the silver anniversary of ‘NBA Jam’ could resurrect the franchise
Law Murray,
ESPN

Will the iconic basketball game NBA Jam be revived for its 25th anniversary? EA already rebooted the franchise once, but the original voice of the game wants to bring it back once more. ESPN caught up with Tim Kitzrow, the man behind the legendary “BOOMSHAKALAKA!” catch phrase, to get the latest details — complete with additional backstory from creator Mark Turmell.

Here are the best flight-tracking apps for travelers and airplane enthusiasts

Air travel can be stressful, but you can take some of the pain out of it with one of the best flight-tracking apps for Android or iOS. For plane enthusiasts keen on identifying what’s passing by overhead, travelers on trips, and loved ones at home waiting to meet incoming relatives and friends, these apps can prove invaluable.

Most airlines offer their own apps, which can be used to check in, get boarding passes, and track flights up to a point, but the apps below take things further with real-time tracking of planes in the air and a host of additional features you may find useful.

You may also be interested in the best travel tech and tips, and, just in case you run into trouble with a flight, you should read up on what to do when your flight is canceled.

Flightradar24 (Free)

Our top pick is absolutely packed with flight-tracking features. The free version enables you to watch aircraft in the skies in real time, check on estimated departure and arrival times, and search by flight number, airport, or airline. For enthusiasts, the app includes photos, historical flight data, and even a 3D pilot view. If you need a greater depth of data, then you can spring for the Silver ($1.50 per month or $10 annually) and Gold ($4 per month or $35 annually) versions, which give you more flight history, live weather overlays, aeronautical charts, and more. There’s also support for the Apple Watch and Android Wear.

Download now from:

iTunes Google Play

FlightStats (Free)

If you want something more straightforward, then this app offers real-time flight tracking and the ability to search by flight number, airport, or route. There’s a simple status page that shows scheduled and actual times of departure and arrival, a map view with the position of the plane in question, and additional information on weather, gates, and possible delays. This flight-tracking app is completely free, but you will have to put up with some ads and, sadly, there’s no option to pay for an ad-free version.

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ADSB Flight Tracker (Free)

Plane spotters and aviation enthusiasts are the intended audience for this flight-tracking app. ADSB stands for automatic dependent surveillance broadcast, which picks up on aircrafts broadcasting their positions. This app has ADSB receiver functionality, so if you plug the right hardware into your phone, you can get live data from the skies. It shows the positions of planes with flight numbers on a 2D top-down map, or you can opt for a 3D view. This one is just for Android devices.

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Plane Finder – Flight Tracker ($5)

If you’re an iPhone owner and a plane spotter, then this app could be what you’re looking for. It employs ADSB and MLAT (multilateration) to pinpoint real-time plane positions. It also sports a nifty augmented reality mode, so you can hold your iPhone up to the sky and identify the planes overhead. You can search by flight number, location, airport, airline, and aircraft,  as well as create and save your own search filters, and even set up custom alerts so you’ll know when a particular plane is nearby. With a simple status page and real-time updates, it’s also capable of simple flight tracking. You can get versions of this app for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and iMessage.

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