Meet Amazfit Bip: The little smartwatch with long battery life

If you can live with its limitations, or just want the battery life an always-on display, then the Amazfit Bip might just be the smartwatch for you.

Apple Watch, while not an Android thing, is a success by any measure. One problem users consistently run into, though, is battery life. For the most part, you’re going to need to charge most smartwatches every day. That’s without features like an always-on display, which is something Android Wear users and others take for granted. And for the features you do get from Apple, you pay a premium because Apple Watch is a premium product and is priced like one.

Now, what if I told you about a smartwatch right out of the Apple design playbook, that could get 45 days of battery life? What if I told you it also had GPS and GLONASS, IP68 dust and water resistance, a barometer, compass, 3-axis accelerometer, and 190mAh battery? What if it could also track activity such as running, walking, and cycling? How about the ability to analyze your sleep? What if it also tossed in an optical heart rate system as well. And what if it were priced at about $79 or so on Amazon?

Meet the Amazfit Bip

Built by Xiaomi, the Amazfit Bip has been called the Chinese Pebble — after one of the first smartwatches to hit the market — and it’s now coming to the U.S. with support for both iOS and Android.

I’ve been using an Amzfit Bip for a few weeks and, while you do get what you pay for, it offers a lot of technology in a low-cost package and has some features Apple hasn’t gotten around to adding just yet. 

There is a 1.28-inch  always-on display with a resolution of 176 x 176. While the body is made of lightweight plastic the screen is made of Gorilla Glass 3. It’s also nice that it uses standard 20mm lugs, so swapping out bands is simple.

The Bip connects via Bluetooth 4.0 allowing you to receive calls, texts, emails, and other notifications. These are all one way, though. If you need more, you’ll need to look elsewhere. 

All about the basics

There are a ton of different watch faces included and a growing collection online that are pretty simple to get on the device. Some nice and useful, others… just bizarre. And there’s no way to tweak colors or complications.  

Fitness capabilities check all the boxes, including step counts and workout routines. It’s all synced back to the Mi app on your iPhone or Android Phone, but can also be synced to Google Fit.

There are also apps on the watch for weather, timer, stopwatch, and alarm, but there’s no app store and no ecosystem for adding anything else. 

The Chinese Pebble

Ever since the good folks at Fitbit bought and then promptly killed the Pebble, there’s been a void in the market for a simple, fitness-focused smartwatch that was more than a tracker but cost less than an Apple Watch.

If you can live with its limitations, or just want the battery life an always-on display, then the Amzfit Bip might just fill that void for you.

See on Amazon

Twitch clarifies its updated guidelines in new FAQ

Last month, Twitch announced that it would be updating its community guidelines in order to clarify its policies on harassment, hate speech and sexual content. But while they were initially set to go into effect on February 19th, Twitch decided to push that date back to March 5th in light of all of the questions it received over the new guidelines. At the time, Twitch said, “It’s important [the guidelines] are clear to everyone and we need to better explain some sections, so we’re pushing back enforcement to start March 5.” It also said it was working on an updated FAQ regarding the guidelines, and today, Twitch released it.

The FAQ clarifies what constitutes hateful conduct and what Twitch streamers are expected to do about hateful or harassing comments in their chats. Twitch says that it expects streamers to “make a good faith effort to moderate their chat” and suggests using tools like AutoMod, a moderation team or third-party tools. “So long as you are not turning a blind eye to content or conduct that violates the Community Guidelines, you should feel confident that no punitive actions will be taken on your channel,” says Twitch.

The platform also emphasizes that creators should do what they can to stop harassment in their community saying, “Twitch should not be used to incite, encourage, promote, facilitate or organize hateful conduct or harassment, whether on or off Twitch. We will suspend communities, organizations and individuals that do so.” It also explained how and why it would be moderating off-Twitch conduct and provided an expanded description of what clothing it deems appropriate for streams.

You can check out Twitch’s community guidelines here and the FAQ, including an explanatory video, here.

Source: Twitch

Arizona no longer requires safety drivers in autonomous vehicles

Arizona will now allow self-driving cars to operate in the state without a safety driver behind the wheel. Governor Doug Ducey signed an executive order this week making it legal for these vehicles to operate on their own as long as they abide by all federal and state safety standards. “As technology advances, our policies and priorities must adapt to remain competitive in today’s economy,” Governor Ducey said in a statement. “This executive order embraces new technologies by creating an environment that supports autonomous vehicle innovation and maintains a focus on public safety.”

Ducey’s order comes just days after California announced that fully driverless cars will be allowed on its roads starting in April. And both states have played host to a number of self-driving vehicles tests in recent years. In Arizona, Waymo, Intel, Uber and GM are among those testing their driverless tech. However, while California will require remote operators and special permits, Arizona won’t institute such regulations.

Waymo is already preparing a driverless taxi fleet to operate in the Phoenix area. It plans to launch the service later this year.

Via: The Verge

Source: Governor Ducey (1), (2)

Apple hires another Sony TV exec to boost its streaming efforts

Apple sure likes to use Sony’s TV wing as a talent pool for its streaming video team — it just lured away another executive. Angelica Guerra, Sony Pictures Television’s production leader for Latin American and US Hispanic content, has joined Apple as its head of Latin American programming. It’s not certain how this will affect Apple’s online video strategy, but she’s reporting to Apple’s international creative development lead Morgan Wandell.

Guerra played a key role in Sony’s Spanish-language strategy during her tenure: she watched over big-name shows ranging from Metastasis (the adaptation of Breaking Bad) to Mary Magdalene.

The hiring spree started in earnest in June 2017, when Apple hired Sony presidents Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg to lead its fledgling original programming division. Three more vice presidents (Max Aronson, Kim Rozenfeld and Ali Woodruff) followed in September. It’s hard to say if this will continue, but it’s evident that Apple wants as much veteran TV talent as it can get as it prepares its big push into streaming video.

Source: Variety

Comcast xFi customers get push notifications for WiFi activity

Comcast is introducing a new feature for its Xfinity xFi customers. Starting this week, users will receive a push notification anytime there is a change in their network. That means that if your child hops on the Wi-Fi when they’re supposed to be asleep, now a push notification will rat them out.

The notification events include a new device joining the home network, a change to the WiFi name or password, any tweaking of security settings, if the WiFi network has been hidden or unhidden and if the home network’s IP address has been changed. It’s not clear whether users can customize these notifications. However, if you don’t want them pushed to your phone, then you can find all of them within the Notification Center of the xFi app.

Via: CNET

Source: Xfinity

Have a moment to spare? Try these quick and casual games

Not everyone can commit hours of their day to playing games on their phone. Fortunately, there are hundreds of casual games in the Play Store, perfect for when you want to unwind and waste some time.

We’ve rounded up some of the best games to be played on the go and you can download right now. These are games that you can pick up and drop at any time and then pick up again whenever you feel like it.

Cooking Witch

• Cooking Witch is an addictive time-management game in which you have to serve the customers of your magical restaurant
• As you go through the levels, you’ll be able to upgrade your restaurant by adding more and more enchanted items on the menu
• Decorate your restaurant and transform it into the best eating place in the kingdom
• The game manages to capture the colorful, bewitching vibe of fairy tales

Download Cooking Witch

The Trail

• You step into the shoes of a wanderer who is walking ahead on a fixed path from one camp to the next, attempting to survive the wilderness and ultimately make it to the big city
• Players collect resources as they go and use them to craft tools, clothes and other items
• The game features beautiful environments to explore and a town-building simulation hidden in the center to provide plenty of things to keep you entertained at all times

Download The Trail

Read more: Five new Android games you can try for free

Hello Yogurt

• The game has a fantastic story-line, in which a scientist tries to create a special strain of lacto-bacilli that would ultimately prologue human life
• You stand to learn a thing or two about science, as you take control of a lacto-bacillus that’s navigating through the human digestive system
• The inside of the human body has been re-imagined as a delightful playground for friendly lacto-bacilli that are trying to survive the hidden dangers of the human digestive system

Download Hello Yogurt

Atomas

• Atomas is a puzzle game that uses scientific elements to keep you entertained. Isn’t A bit counter-intuitive? Not at all. Atomas shows you that science can be lots of fun
• You step into the shoes of an aspirant alchemist as you try to create precious elements such as gold, platinum or silver. The game starts out with hydrogen atoms, which you need to fuse together to create energy-rich atoms that in turn, will help you create the more valuable elements.
• Atomas might look simple enough at first, but as you play you’ll find it’s quite difficult to master.

Download Atomas

Read more: Seven awesome Android games that were inspired by Fantasy/Sci-Fi movies

Mandora

• Mandora takes advantage of an adorable art style, bright and warm that will win your heart immediately
• The little plant people in Moonycat Village have taken up farming in the hopes of being able to harvest the special Mandora plant (it has magical properties) and you have to help them grow it
• You’ll discover the various types of Mandora plans, as you try to figure out what the best time for harvesting is (harvest too late and you might end up with a simple potato)

Download Mandora

Find the differences

• A good old find-the-difference game with more than 300 levels to go through
• You can use the zoom in tool to get a better look at the images
• The game has no time limit, so you don’t need to hurry. Stuck? Request a hint, there are plenty of those available

Download Find the differences

TwoDots

• TwoDots is filled with creative illustrations and playful animations in the menus, which makes up for some of the super hard levels you will have to go through
• Connect dots of matching colors horizontally or vertically by clearing squares of corresponding colors out of the game board
• The game is a challenging experience as it limits you to a specific number of moves in which you have to complete the given challenges. For example, clearing 50 red dots, 50 blue dots and 50 yellow dots with 30 moves

Download TwoDots

Read next: Keep up to date with the 2018 Olympic Winter Games with these apps

Testing LG V30S ThinQ’s hit-or-miss camera tricks

The LG V30S ThinQ isn’t a completely new phone, but there are enough new goodies to warrant taking another look at its camera, ahead of a deeper dive on the phone in its entirety. We know it has a fantastic range of features for mobile videographers and vloggers — arguably the new 256GB storage option is aimed at these users. But how about these newly introduced camera features? Are they worth having? Is the AI cam better than my own judgement? And what about Bright Mode? Can algorithms save blurry night shots?

We went out on an (inadvertently) wet and chilly Barcelona walking tour one evening to test these new camera tricks. Are they’ enough to dethrone the likes of the Pixel 2, or at least reassess the V30 series when it comes to low-light photography?

Let’s start with the AI cam — I’d argue it’s more machine learning than AI, but I digress. It includes eight presets that run through the usual camera settings you’ll find since the dawn of the digital point-and-shoot: Portrait, pet, city/building, flower, sunrise, sunset, food and landscape. In short, it broadly encompasses most things people take images of with their phones. (I would have loved a high shutter-speed activity mode, or something for taking images of moving objects, but I can’t have everything.)

There’s a simple toggle inside the main camera app, and once activated, the phone tries to suss out what it’s looking at. During this, descriptive words appear and disappear on screen, as a neat little signpost of what the AI thinks it’s looking at. Once it’s come to its conclusion, a handy vibration lets you know that it’s calibrated for what the V30S has decided is in front of it. You’ll also see the presets in action, giving a live view of “food” mode before you press the shutter.

The correct shooting mode kicked in just about every time. Mistakes happened, but over a good day of shooting with the V30S ThinQ, I didn’t encounter many. During a low-light centered evening, the phone understandably took a little longer to figure out what it was looking at.

What does this “AI” Cam do then? It depends. Just like those presets from cameras of yesteryear, it might crank up the contrast or rein in brightness on city shoots, or boost colors for sunsets, portraits and food blogging. Judging from the images, there are no AI smarts here with regards to how it massages your pictures: the smarts are all baked into image, or scene, recognition.

Portrait mode on the LG V30S ThinQ

Mat Smith, Engadget

I really like the AI cam. It’s simple and eminently user-friendly. You don’t think about it and it leaves more time for doing things and less time fussing over camera settings and filters. During a night out where red wine may have been imbibed, I could grab more shots of co-workers, friends (and their food) without excess tinkering or labored posing.

That said, I wasn’t always happy with the results. Food shots often suffered from fuzzy edging — excess fake bokeh was the culprit. The colors were sometimes excessively ramped up, too. Usually, that’s what I do with my own food pics though.

So how about Bright Mode? LG’s attempt to improve low-light shooting is an algorithm-based one, aimed at improving photos the V30S would otherwise struggle with. According to the company, it squeezes image resolution lower, which allows for brighter, if less detailed, results.

With this test model V30S ThinQ, I didn’t glean any remarkable changes in results, toggling the mode on and off. I gave it the benefit of the doubt and tried it out a second night, and still saw barely any differences. Pixel binning is definitely at work, with both images shrinking to roughly four megapixels each. I wish I could see how images looked before and after, regardless of the resolution crunch. Which shot would have been better? I’ll never know.

We’ve reached out to LG after issues during our video shoot-out, to double check we were using the settings correctly. Bright mode doesn’t kick in for 4K and 60 fps video, nor when using the wonderful wide-angle lens on the V30S, but we weren’t using that when we took our low-light shots here. My suspicion is that the phone is always using the Bright Mode, even if the icon display (and menu toggle) says it isn’t. I would prefer a Bright Mode that wasn’t switched on by the whims of the phone’s own software. Let me decide, okay?

I tested the V30S alongside the wonderful Pixel 2, which takes stupidly good photos most of the time. The bigger camera sensors on LG’s new phone pulled in more detail but I preferred the results on the Pixel phone overall. It seemed to have a more pleasant distribution of light and contrast on these photos of Barcelona Cathedral. The Pixel 2, however, is a younger phone than the original V30 (the hardware, remember, is largely the same in the V30S), so it might not be all that shocking that it’s still the handier smartphone camera.

The V30S’s camera software upgrades add to the experience, but mostly help round out the phone’s weaknesses in still photography. Let’s see what LG does next: We shouldn’t have too wait too long.

Catch up on the latest news from MWC 2018 right here.

ESA hasn’t received an invite to discuss video games with Trump

Yesterday, White House press secretary Sarah Sanders claimed that President Trump was planning to meet with “members of the video game industry” to discuss violence in video games and how it might play into the spat of school violence that has plagued the country for years now. But it seems Sanders may have gotten ahead of herself — the Entertainment Software Association (ESA), which represents the US video game industry, released a statement last night saying that neither it nor non of its members received an invitation to talk with the president.

Here’s the full statement:

ESA and our member companies have not received an invitation to meet with President Trump.

The same video games played in the US are played worldwide; however, the level of gun violence is exponentially higher in the US than in other countries. Numerous authorities have examined the scientific record and found there is no link between media content and real-life violence.

The US video game industry has a long history of partnering with parents and more than 20 years of rating video games through the Entertainment Software Rating Board. We take great steps to provide tools to help players and parents make informed entertainment decisions.

Members of the ESA include Nintendo, Sony’s PlayStation division, Microsoft, EA, Activision, Take Two and a number of other companies.

In a briefing this morning, Sanders said that invites went out on Thursday, so it’s possible that they just haven’t reached the right people yet. We’ve asked the ESA to update us if and when it or the companies the group represents receive invitations to the White House.

NEW: President Trump to meet with video game industry executives next week as part of ongoing debate over school safety.

— Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) March 1, 2018

Japan’s cryptocurrency exchanges plan self-regulating committee

Government-registered cryptocurrency exchanges in Japan are setting up a self-regulation body in the region. The move, Reuters reports, is an effort to legitimize and establish trust in the area following the $530 million Coincheck theft in January. There isn’t a name for the body yet and similarly, there’s no word for when all the paperwork will be finalized. It follows Japan’s national oversight of the sector last year, and South Korea’s crypto regulation in late January.

News of the regulatory body’s formation started tricking out in late February, with reports that it could be a merger of two existing firms, Japan Cryptocurrency Business Association and Japan Blockchain Association.

The plan is to only allow government-approved exchanges, but that rule already seems a bit weak. Specifically, Reuters writes that “the body will later invite other cryptocurrency exchanges whose applications for registration with the government are pending, as well as those that plan to register in the future.” So, yeah, about that oversight.

Source: Reuters

Lego will soon make bricks out of sugarcane bioplastics

Over the next few years, select Lego pieces will start being made with plant-derived materials as part of the company’s pledge to create more sustainable products. Parts resembling leaves, bushes and trees will be made from a polyethylene created with ethanol made from sugarcane. And while these only make up between 1 and 2 percent of all the pieces Lego makes, it’s “a great first step in our ambitious commitment of making all Lego bricks using sustainable materials,” Lego VP of environmental responsibility Tim Brooks said on its website. These ‘green’ pieces will be released in sets starting this year.

Give your biggest “green” to the very FIRST #sustainable LEGO Bricks! LEGO botanical elements including leaves and trees will now be made from sugarcane-based plastic.The first “greens” are to appear in LEGO sets later this year. Sweeet🌿#PlantsfromPlants https://t.co/rZKijykjYO pic.twitter.com/yraEOLq5NM

— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) March 1, 2018

It’s part of the company’s pledge to transition to using sustainable materials in Lego products and packaging by 2030. Creating plastic parts from sugarcane — called ‘bioplastics’ — isn’t a perfect solution, as that crop still requires a lot of farmland, and growing more could cut into land allocated for food production. Further, the historical demand for sugarcane has degraded tropical forests and coastal wetlands; More demand could lead to further deforestation.

Changing the Lego recipe from acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (based on crude oil) to a plant-sourced plastic is certainly a more sustainable choice. And though sugarcane isn’t a perfect source for bioplastics, it’s a first step toward making your favorite building toys (and future domestic caltrops) a little greener.

Via: BBC

Source: Lego