Best Fitbit Versa Watch Bands

Fitbit’s been struggling to make a truly stylish smartwatch since it debuted the awkward-looking Blaze in early 2016, but with the Versa, the company’s finally found its footing.

The Versa is easily Fitbit’s best smartwatch design yet, but if you buy the standard version, you’ll only get a basic silicone watch band to go with it. It’s perfectly comfortable and looks fine, but its boring aesthetic can quickly leave you longing for something more.

Whether you choose to buy another watch band directly from Fitbit or go with one of the many third-party options that are available, these are the best ones you can get right now.

• Fitbit Saddle Stitch Horween Leather Band
• Fitbit Black Stainless Steel Metal Mesh Band
• Hooroor Milanese Loop Stainless Steel Band
• Patrohoo Adjustable Sport Strap Band
• Hagibis Fitbit Versa Sport Silicone Band

Fitbit Saddle Stitch Horween Leather Band

The first two watch bands on this list are official ones from Fitbit itself, and one of my personal favorites is the Saddle Sitch Horween Leather one. Fitbit sells a number of leather bands, but Saddle Sitch is the most eye-catching with a bright brown color and stitching all along the left and right sides.

You can get the band in both Small and Large sizes, and the leather is paired perfectly with a sturdy metal clasp that feels reassuringly sturdy every time you take the Versa on or off.

The price of $49.99 might be a lot for some buyers to swallow, but this is a watch band that should last you for years of use. There’s also a 45-day money-back guarantee, and since the band’s made by Fitbit, you know it’ll be a perfect fit for the Versa.

See at Fitbit

Fitbit Black Stainless Steel Metal Mesh Band

Along with leather bands, Fitbit also makes a variety of metal watch bands. The one that caught my eye the most was the black stainless steel metal mesh one, and it certainly doesn’t disappoint.

The metal that’s used feels excellent, and unlike some third-party bands, there’s not one sign of paint chipping.

This is a one-size-fits-all type of band, and while adjusting the clasp can be a tad tricky at times, the band stays securely in place once you’ve found the perfect fit.

Fitbit really knocked it out of the park with this band, but the $79 price tag may keep some customers at bay.

See at Fitbit

Hooroor Milanese Loop Stainless Steel Band

If you’d like to get a metal band for your Versa but aren’t ready to shell out 80 bucks for one, Hooroor has you covered. A magnetic clasp is used for holding the band in place, and not only does it feel just as secure as Fitbit’s metal band, it’s also a lot easier to use.

There are two sizes to choose from (Small and Large) and Hooroor has a lot of color options at hand — including black, silver, rose gold, lavender, and more.

The band is comfy to wear, and it makes the Versa look incredibly dapper when worn out to a nice dinner or formal gathering. The $12 price tag is more than reasonable, and you’re also covered by a one-year warranty after your purchase.

See at Amazon

Partohoo Adjustable Sport Strap Band

Metal and leather bands are great for giving your Versa a sophisticated look, but if you want something simple that’s a bit more casual, Partohoo’s sport bands are a great choice.

Made out of rubber and available in Small and Large sizes, this band is offers a classic look with a reliable clasp that just works. There are a variety of colors to chose from, including purple, pink, blue, gray, and black, and the $9 price is awesome.

Partohoo throws in a one-year warranty with your purchase, and if you want to really build up your collection, there are three different bundles to choose from that let you get 5 bands at once for an even cheaper rate.

See at Amazon

Hagibis Fitbit Versa Sport Silicone Band

The silicone band that comes included with the Versa out of the box works perfectly fine on a run or at the gym, but if you want something that’s a bit more striking and even more breathable, I’ve found the Hagibis sport band to be one of the best options currently available.

Hagibis’s sport band features a number of holes all over, and along with looking cool, this design also makes it one of the best fits for when you’re breaking a sweat. Add that together with a waterproof construction and secure clapse, and you’ve got the perfect workout companion.

You can get the band in Black/Gray, Black/Green, Dark Blue/White, and Red/Black, and the under $10 price is something I know a lot of you will be able to get behind.

See at Amazon

What are your top picks?

Are you rocking a fancy watch band on your Fitbit Versa that we didn’t mention on this list? Drop a comment down below and let us know what your favorite finds are!

Amazon recruits Best Buy to sell Fire TV Edition smart TVs

Best Buy has partnered with Amazon to sell voice-controlled Fire TV Edition branded TVs in its stores and on its website, the companies announced. CEOs Jeff Bezos from Amazon and Best Buy’s Hubert Joly said the retailer will sell 11 Amazon-powered TVs, including 4K and HD models, starting this summer with Toshiba models. At the same time, Best Buy will become a merchant on Amazon’s website and get exclusive rights to sell Amazon Fire TVs.

“Amazon and Best Buy have a long history of working together,” said Bezos, referring to Best Buy sales of Kindle readers. “Today we take our partnership to a new level.”

Amazon unveiled its first Fire TV Edition sets last year with TV maker Element, starting at $449 for a 43-inch model. The TVs expand on what you can do with a Fire TV stick, letting you see live TV alongside streaming options, detect devices connected to your TV, and consult a channel guide, to name a few features.

At the same time, you can use Alexa to control not just your TV, but also Hue lights and other smart home devices. Unlike with an Echo device, you have to hit a button to reach Alexa, as it’s not listening for a wake word.

At first glance, the partnership seems one-sided in favor of Amazon, but it appears to be a good deal for Best Buy, too. The retailer now has exclusive access to Fire TV Edition TVs, both at its stores and as a newly-minted Amazon third-party reseller. Best Buy will sell third-party brands along with its own house-brand Insignia Fire TV Edition smart TVs, both physically, on its own website and at Amazon.

Amazon will benefit, of course, by having its sets in physical stores. Customers might be more apt to grasp the benefits of an Alexa-powered set if they can try one out. At the same time, if you’re convinced, running to Amazon for a cheaper price will take you straight back to Best Buy. “What we’re doing is so deeply integrated,” Bezos told the WSJ. “It’s only possible because we trust each other.”

Under Joly, Best Buy has made a fairly miraculous recovery from its moribund state in 2012. It remains to be seen if both parties will benefit from the partnership, though, and Amazon has only just started selling the Fire TV Edition sets, so their popularity is not assured (see: the Fire Phone). We’ll soon find out, though, as the first Fire TV Edition smart TVs from Toshiba will go on sale this summer at Best Buy stores, BestBuy.com and on Best Buy’s upcoming third-party seller site on Amazon.com. Future models and manufacturers will arrive later on in 2018.

Source: Amazon

Use Chevy’s in-dash system to pay for your Shell gas

If you have a 2017-and-later Chevy with access to GM’s on-board marketplace, you might be able pay for gas without having to take out your wallet. The automaker has teamed up with Shell to roll out what it says is the first in-dash fuel payment in the US. If you’re fueling up at participating Shell station, simply tap on the brand’s icon in Marketplace and choose the station’s location to generate a code you can use to activate a pump. It will charge your payment to the method you have on file, and yes, you can still access your loyalty reward perks.

GM debuted its in-dash marketplace late last year, allowing you to buy coffee and even book restaurant tables and hotels from your car’s dashboard. Around 1.9 million vehicles immediately got access to it, but GM plans to make it available to millions more across its brands throughout the year. Shell’s in-dash payment itself is only out in select markets for now, but Chevy will roll it out across the country throughout the next few months, as well. It might not be easier than paying with a card, but it could be the first step towards having your car pay for tolls and drive-thru purchases.

Hyperloop TT plans to build a working line in Abu Dhabi in 2019

Hyperloop Transportation Technologies has announced that it has signed a deal to begin construction on a working Hyperloop in 2019. The company will work with Aldar Properties PJSC, an Abu Dhabi-based real estate developer, on both a route, innovation center and visitor center. The plan is to begin with a very small trip of track close to the border separating Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and growing from there. If successful, then it’s possible the United Arab Emirates will be connected by a network of high-speed vacuum tubes.

The initial route will be a ten-kilometer (6.2 miles) stretch on land owned by Aldar Properties, the Seih Al Sderiah landbank, to the new settlement of Al Ghadeer. That’ll put it within 20km of Al Maktoum International Airport and 40km away from the Dubai Expo site. At present, we don’t have details on the direction of the route, but it will likely need to run parallel to Dubai’s E311 or E611 highways to successfully connect to the two territories in future.

This isn’t the first time that the company has shaken hands with a property developer to begin work on a route. The first was HTT”s long-standing, and abortive, role in the Quay Valley eco-town project in California. The eco-town situated between LA and San Francisco would have had its own city-wide Hyperloop, but legal wrangling over water rights and cashflow scuppered the plan. And it appears that, much as we predicted, a cash-rich Emirati will be putting up most of the funding to bankroll the project.

Just last week, the company announced that it would begin construction of the first of two test tracks at its Toulouse HQ. But executives believe that construction on the Abu Dhabi project will begin in 2019 despite a lack of testing time in France. It’s claimed that the feasibility study the company previously carried out with Abu Dhabi has solved all of the potential roadblocks to construction. And, if successful, HTT could stand a chance of winning the Hyperloop space-race.

Update: We have received confirmation that the route will be pointed towards Abu Dhabi, and the idea is to use the pipe as the first stage in a link between

Buick’s offroad EV concept boasts an ambitious 370-mile range

Buick, a brand not known for adventurous styling, has unveiled an electric concept that, dare I say, actually looks cool. The Enspire crossover is like the love child of a Camaro SS and Cadillac XT5, but it’s more about what’s under the hood, or wherever they put electric motors and batteries. It packs a 410kW electric powertrain that can take it to 60 mph in four seconds, and a battery that will last up to 370 miles — pretty ambitious specs, even for a concept that will never be built.

Since GM is just playing anyway, it put in a lot of other tech, too. The Enspire is fitted with the Super Cruise semi-autonomous system from the Cadillac CT6 that we recently tested and said “fixes the worst parts about driving.” Other de rigeur techie features include multiple OLED screens to display vehicle, navigation and entertainment info, 5G connectivity and “suspended theater-type seating,” whatever that is.

Judging by the press photos, Buick is pitching the Enspire concept as a luxury EV than can also ford rivers and climb mountains. It is showing it off at the Beijing Auto Show in China, where the Buick brand is quite popular. The automaker has previously promised 20 electric vehicles by 2023, and if it uses the Enspire to, well, inspire those future EVs, then that’s a pretty promising start to its electrification shift.

Source: Buick

Wikipedia adds page previews to prevent endless link clicking

If you absolutely love spending your Friday nights going down rabbit holes on Wikipedia (don’t judge), then this week’s news from the Wikimedia Foundation may be a bit of a mixed bag for you. If you hover over a link on Wikipedia, you’ll now see a new page preview, which allows you to explore related topics on the site without leaving the entry you’re currently viewing.

Wikipedia rabbit hole jokes aside, this feature makes a lot of sense. It allows you to research a topic from a single Wikipedia page, rather than having to open multiple related pages in new browser tabs and move back and forth. Page previews display the first few sentences of the corresponding Wikipedia article, allowing readers to determine whether the topic is relevant to the subject they are currently researching.

The Wikimedia Foundation did extensive testing before deploying page previews to the general public, and they found some interesting (and extremely encouraging) results. For one, a negligible percentage of people disabled the feature, which means it wasn’t intrusive. But perhaps most interestingly, the number of regular page views on the site slightly decreased. As the Wikimedia Foundation notes, page views are an important benchmark, but they aren’t the end all be all. “For the Wikimedia Foundation, success is based on how we’re able to fulfill our free knowledge mission and make the Wikimedia sites more useful, relevant, and engaging for people around the world, even if it means our pageviews might go down as an effect,” the blog post says.

So, if you do love those Wikipedia rabbit holes, page previews won’t prevent you from embarking on that kind of journey. But they will streamline your Wikipedia experience, helping you research the topics you’re interested in without sending you on tangents that take you away from what you’re trying to accomplish. If you have any feedback on the feature, you can leave a note on the page previews discussion page.

Via: Venture Beat

Source: Wikimedia Foundation

Chrome now mutes auto-playing videos by default

Chrome will block autoplaying videos and ads with sound by default. Like VentureBeat notes, this was originally supposed to be added to Chrome 64 back in January, but it got delayed a few months. This should be enough to keep most sites quiet for you. However, if a website still manages to annoy you with un-muted, auto-playing videos you can block its audio privileges wholesale. Auto-muting a small touch, but an appreciated one, and it’s a lot more convenient than searching through two dozen tabs looking for the one with the “audio” icon. Happy (silent) surfing!

Via: VentureBeat

Source: Google

Iranian officials are no longer allowed to use Telegram

During protests and demonstrations back in December, Iran blocked messaging and social media apps such as Telegram and Instagram. The government claimed it was to “maintain peace,” but it became clear that they were trying to prevent the protestors from communicating and documenting what was happening. But now, it looks as though Iran has taken the campaign against Telegram one step further: The country has banned government officials from using the service.

It’s only for a limited group, but it’s an certainly interesting move. According to Reuters, an Iranian official in the judiciary said that Telegram could only operate domestically with the permission of the government. It’s quite possible that this could lead to a country-wide ban of the app.

This may also be a response to Russia’s move against Telegram. That country has been waging its own sort of war against the service after founder Pavel Durov refused to hand over encryption keys to Russian officials. Last week, the country’s courts granted the request for the app’s banishment from the country, and Russia has started blocking all possible IP addresses that Telegram uses (which are owned by Amazon and Google).

Iran’s government controlled media reported that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei stopped using the service “in line with safeguarding national interests and removing the monopoly of the Telegram messaging app,” according to Reuters. It remains to be seen whether Iran will take any further steps against the service in the future.

Source: Reuters

Analyst Predicts Apple Music Will Average 40 Percent Growth Per Year Through 2021

Apple Music has seen a consistent rise in subscriber numbers over the past year, with the streaming music service’s fastest growth yet — hitting 40 million subscribers — coming just this month. According to Macquarie Capital analyst Ben Schachter, Apple Music will keep up its progress and average 40 percent growth each year over the next three years (via The Wall Street Journal).

With this projection, Apple Music would see subscriber numbers reach about 56 million within the next year, 78 million in two years, and break the 100 million paid subscriber milestone in under three years. For comparison with previous growth, Apple Music sat at 10 million subscribers in January 2016, 20 million in December 2016, 30 million in September 2017, and 40 million in April 2018.

Schachter explains that while Apple Music will continue to be a solid performer for Apple, music streaming royalties will prevent it from becoming Apple’s most profitable service.

The rub, of course, is that music streaming isn’t a terribly profitable business, due mostly to the royalties streamers must pay to labels and artists. Mr. Schachter estimates that Apple Music commands a gross margin of around 15%. That is actually lower than the 24% that Spotify projects for this year. But even if Apple’s margins in music equaled that of its rival, they remain well below what the company makes by selling apps made by other developers. Mr. Schachter estimates that the latter commands gross margins of about 90%.

In other words, while music may be a key component to Apple’s growth, apps are far more vital to the company’s healthy bottom line. When it comes to services, Apple needs to get its playlist mix just right.

Still, the analyst’s projections mark Apple Music as the “fastest-growing” service in Apple’s services segment, which includes platforms like iTunes, the App Store, iCloud, Apple Pay, and AppleCare. In the company’s upcoming quarterly earnings report on May 1, total services revenue is predicted to hit $8.3 billion for the second fiscal quarter, up 18 percent year-on-year. In the first fiscal quarter of 2018 Apple’s services saw revenue of $8.5 billion, up 18 percent from 2017 and setting an all-time quarterly revenue record.

Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty said earlier this year that Apple’s services category will be the company’s main revenue driver over the next five years. While iPhones will make up 22 percent of revenue growth through 2023, Huberty predicted that services will contribute more than 50 percent of Apple’s total revenue growth over the same time period.

For Apple Music, the service’s growth is believed to soon eclipse Spotify within the United States in terms of paid subscribers. A report from February said Apple Music was growing at a pace of about 5 percent monthly (which would total a faster annual growth than Schachter’s prediction), compared to Spotify’s 2 percent clip. According to these growth rates, Apple Music is expected to surpass Spotify in paid U.S. subscribers as soon as this summer. Spotify last updated its paid subscriber count in December 2017, marking 71 million users.

Tag: Apple Music
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Opera VPN iOS App Will Be Permanently Discontinued at the End of April

Just under two years after launching on the iOS App Store, Opera this week announced that its free “Opera VPN” app will be permanently discontinued as of April 30, 2018. Opera’s virtual private network app masks the user’s true IP address and allows them to bypass firewalls, block tracking cookies, change their virtual location to unlock geo-specific content, and more.

At the end of April, the app will be shuttered on both the iOS and Android App Stores, but the company noted that it aims to “make sure your privacy is still looked after” following Opera VPN’s discontinuation. This mainly refers to users who were paying for Opera Gold on mobile, which introduced a Tracker Blocker, 10 additional regions, increased speeds, and dedicated customer support for $29.99/year.

These subscribers will have the option to redeem a free one year subscription to SurfEasy’s Ultra VPN and migrate all of their data from Opera to SurfEasy, a company that Opera acquired in 2016. Even those who don’t have an Opera Gold plan will have the chance to obtain an 80 percent discount on SurfEasy’s entry level Total VPN tier. In terms of pricing, SurfEasy’s Ultra plan is currently priced at $6.49/month and the Total plan is $3.99/month.

This is a free upgrade for Opera Gold users, as SurfEasy Ultra offers unlimited usage on up to five devices, access to 28 regions and a strict no-log policy. SurfEasy is also available on more platforms, currently supporting Windows, Mac, iOS, Android and Amazon devices. Users will be able to enjoy world-class customer support, too. Opera Gold users will be able to migrate within the latest version of the Opera VPN iOS app.

In regards to the closure, Opera said: “All of us here at Opera VPN (including Olaf) are sincerely grateful for all your support over the last couple of years, and we’re sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.” Opera will still have its main web browser available for Mac users, including a built-in ad blocker and VPN.

Tags: Opera browser, VPN
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