Waze enlists A.I.-powered analytics company Anodot to improve driver experience

A.I.-derived business insight provider Anodot announced on Tuesday, June 5, that Waze will integrate its autonomous analytics system throughout the community-based traffic and navigation app. Anodot’s machine learning system will beef up Waze users’ driving experience by detecting and reacting to user-reported abnormalities and problems.

Based in Israel with offices in Europe and Silicon Valley, Anodot’s systems act as a business data safeguard. Anodot’s analytics engine continuously monitors company data. When the machine learning-driven system detects problems or anything out of the ordinary for that company’s datasets, it signals an alert for further action.

What that means in plain English is that when Anodot’s machine language-based artificial intelligence software analyzes vast amounts of new data, it can tell immediately if something unusual occurs. A wide variety of businesses use Anodot’s analytics. When Anodot’s system identifies a glitch, an error, or anything outside the norm, the new data is integrated with the primary business’ systems. For various client’s seamless recovery from abnormalities can mean more on-time deliveries, increased manufacturing line uptime, or financial systems reacting to errors before too much harm is done.

The data Anodot will monitor for Waze’ will be the reports from millions of Waze users who share real-time information while traveling. Drivers use the navigation app to report traffic and road conditions, gas prices, speed traps, road construction projects, and more to help others save travel time and fuel expense. Users can find the best routes to follow on the maps Waze map editors update based on community-reported information.

With Waze’s real-time, community-driven travel information model, Anodot will be used to keep drivers moving. For example, if Anodot detects Waze member messages about traffic accidents, suddenly slippery road conditions, significant gasoline price changes, or anything else that its A.I. system determines differs from the norm, that data is instantly used to adjust local driver recommendations or notifications.

“Waze needed a solution that could quickly identify and alert us on potential app performance and user experience issues, helping us to minimize user issues,” said Waze’s head of analytics, Dr. Orna Amir. “Anodot helps us fulfill our most important goal: To constantly enhance and improve the driving experience for our users. And it does so by seamlessly analyzing millions of hyper-localized metrics.”

The variety of data types Waze receives and the speed at which it reports to drivers is at once its greatest value and biggest challenge. Turnaround time is crucial. When you add the element of location — which is anywhere Waze users drive — the complexity multiplies.

According to Anodot CEO and co-founder David Drai, however, its autonomous analytics engine is up to the task of making Waze’s processes more efficient and effective.

“With traditional BI (business intelligence) tools, it can take days or weeks for companies to learn of issues that can hurt reputation and profits,” Drai said. “Anodot’s autonomous analytics technology is capable of handling the speed, volume, and variety of data Waze generates, and provide actionable insight from these huge data sets.

“Whether this means better-suggested routes or fewer app hiccups,” Drai continued, “Waze users will enjoy a better app experience with Anodot working for them behind the scenes.”

Intel throws down a gauntlet with its 28-core extreme CPU

The bar for what to expect from single-socket, consumer-facing processors has been raised once again with Intel demoing a 28-core monster at this year’s Computex show. Easily capable of outstripping its existing top-of-the-line Core i9-7980XE, the CPU is slated for release later this year.

The biggest change with both Intel and AMD’s latest generations of CPUs is that they bolstered the core counts of mainstream processors. With AMD leading the charge with its Ryzen lineup, Intel followed suit and increased its Core i3 CPUs to four cores and the Core i5 and i7 chips to six cores a piece. That core-count expansion is now impacting the top of the top-end too, with Intel’s 28-core CPU likely to be the most powerful single-socket chip Intel has ever released to the public.

Beyond its core count, there isn’t much we know about this chip. We don’t know what architecture it’s built on, or what its die size is. What we do know though, is that it can run at up to 5GHz and that it makes the $2,000, 18-core i9-7980XE look weak in comparison.

In a run of Cinebench’s CPU rendering test, the new 28-core CPU was capable of a multi-threaded score of 7,334. As PCGamesN highlights, multi-CPU systems might have performed better than that in the past, but this is the most powerful single chip score we’ve seen yet. In comparison, the best current Intel CPU, the i9-7980XE only managed a score of 5,029 when overclocked to 5GHz.

Intel hasn’t made it clear when this new high-end CPU will be released but did state that it would show up before the end of the year. Its eventual price tag was also elusive, but considering it competently outpaces even chips that cost a couple of thousand dollars, we wouldn’t expect this new CPU to retail for any less.

The most intriguing part of this story could be how AMD will respond. It seemed clear that Intel boosted the core counts of its eighth-generation CPUs in response to AMD’s original Ryzen release. Threadripper proved to be perfectly capable competition — and far more affordable — than Intel’s Core i9 CPUs. With this new benchmark hardware to contend with, Threadripper 2 may do something special once again.

Editors’ Recommendations

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• Intel’s 10nm CPU finally makes it to retail in a refreshed Lenovo IdeaPad laptop

Intel just showed how it can substantially increase laptop battery life

Intel offered an intriguing proposition at this year’s Computex show: How would you like to increase your laptop’s battery life by around 50 percent? That’s a question that few would answer in the negative and it could be the case for a number of new-generation notebooks in the near future, as Intel has already partnered with Sharp and Innolux to produce the new 1W LCD panels that make it a reality.

The biggest drain on any notebook is almost always the display. That’s why we so often recommend 1080P panels over the 4K alternative. With Intel’s new design though, that may no longer be the case. While it does add the caveat that the most battery savings will be in systems equipped with Intel HD graphics, rather than AMD or Nvidia graphics chips, the promise of such battery life extensions is certainly compelling.

It would be a bit of an ask to have journalists wait out the many hours it would take to drain a laptop battery on stage, but Intel did bring along a Dell XPS 13 fitted with the new Low Power Display Technology to Computex. It suggested that the already impressive battery life — 13 hours in our video loop test — could be extended by between four and eight hours depending on usage, as per The Verge.

As Intel suggests, this new technology’s effectiveness will depend heavily on how the system is being used. It doesn’t matter how efficient your screen is if you have it in standby while the CPU is grinding away at encoding a video. The limitations on graphics hardware are also a little disappointing, but then we want our gaming displays to be bright and colorful, unlike some of the budget gaming laptops out there. If we can have a new generation of mainstream 2-in-1s and lightweight laptops that can suddenly have more than a day’s charge, color us intrigued.

Perhaps we’ll even see a new generation of laptops that fit these displays with smaller batteries to maintain existing uptime but cut down on weight and size even further.

While it seems unlikely that any improvement seen by this kind of battery-boosting technology will lead to manufacturers being any less dishonest about the capabilities of their laptop’s batteries, it is at least a new recommendation we can add to our guide on how to improve your laptop battery life.

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Samsung may be developing a Snapdragon 850-powered Windows 2-in-1

Bill Roberson/Digital Trends

Qualcomm has hinted that a new Samsung device with a Snapdragon 850 chipset is in the works and considering the Korean manufacturer’s existing portfolio of Windows convertible tablets, it could well be a Windows 2-in-1. If true, this would put it in direct competition with the likes of HP, Asus, and Lenovo, all of which have their own Qualcomm-powered Windows laptops.

With battery life one of the main concerns of any new laptop buyer, a number of manufacturers have been looking to bring some of the highly efficient mobile processors produced by companies like Qualcomm to bear in the notebook space. The fact that its Snapdragon system on chips (SoC) happen to be pretty powerful also hardly hurts matters.

That’s doubly so with its newly announced Snapdragon 850, which is designed specifically to cater to the needs of modern, highly efficient laptops and convertible devices. Where the Snapdragon 835 was often found in smartphones too, Qualcomm claims that the Snapdragon 850 has been optimized for use with Windows PCs, including form factors that aren’t just your typical laptop.

Although Qualcomm hasn’t been drawn on what kinds of “innovative form factors” it expects its new 850 SoC to be used in, a new Samsung convertible tablet could be one of them, as per Engadget. If such a device were to make full use of the new Snapdragon chip’s capabilities, we could expect it to offer stellar battery life and full LTE data connectivity up to 1.2Gbps, as well as much greater performance than the Snapdragon 835.

Such features may be able to draw in more manufacturers to support the new chip design in their builds, as only a handful of Windows laptops were built on the Snapdragon 835 platform. With the likes of Intel touting new, battery-life extending technologies like low-power-draw displays, however, traditional laptops will be as competitive as ever with Qualcomm’s latest efforts. It will be interesting to see what Samsung and its contemporaries can do with the new hardware later this year.

Perhaps budgeting for better battery life is the best aim for those looking for laptop upgrades this year though, as Nvidia’s big announcement at Computex as that its new graphics cards aren’t likely to arrive until much later in 2018.

Editors’ Recommendations

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Google Lens is now available as a stand-alone app on the Google Play Store

Dan Baker/Digital Trends

If you’re looking for an easier way to access Google Lens, look no further than the new shortcut app now available in the Google Play Store. The stand-alone app allows folks to take advantage of the relatively new feature, even if your existing Android device doesn’t offer built-in functionality. (The LG G7, for  example, has a dedicated button on the handset that lets you go straight to Google Lens.) With the new Lens app, you’ll be able to access the same functionality as you would otherwise — and you can still access Lens via Google Assistant.

As  we’ve previously reported, Google Lens, which made its initial debut at Google’s I/O 2017 event, lets you extract text and hyperlinks from images, and can also identify a number of landmarks around the world. It first became available to Google Pixel phones at the end of 2017, and then was launched across all Android phones in March of this year. And on March 16, it finally made its way to iOS users, too.

More recently, Google announced a few  updates to Lens that make it more useful still. At I/O 2018, the tech giant revealed that Google Lens is now built into the camera app on phones from 10 manufacturers: LG, Motorola, Xiaomi, Sony, Nokia, Transsion, TCL, OnePlus, BQ, and Asus. And when you open the camera app on one of these phone makers’ handsets, you’ll be able to point your camera at an object and find similar products. So if you see a dress you like, you can get Google Lens to show you the same or a similar garment, and if it’s available, buy it directly through Google Shopping. There’s also Smart Text Selection, which allows  you to point your camera at a chunk of text and then copy it, translate it, or send it to someone.

With all of this functionality, it’s no wonder that folks are looking for easier ways to access the feature. However, we should point out that even though Google Lens is now a stand-alone app, it’s not necessarily compatible with all Android devices. For example, while it will work with the Samsung Note 8, it won’t play as nicely with the Samsung Galaxy S8 Plus. Other users have noted that the app doesn’t work on the Moto Z Play, Nokia 7 Plus, and the Xiaomi Mi A1. You’ll have to be running Android Marshmallow and above in order to access the app.

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Meet PanoClip, the $50 lens clip that turns an iPhone into a 360 camera

Most 360 smartphone cameras add both dual lenses and dual sensors in order to capture a spherical view — but one new brand has managed to do all that with just lenses and software. Announced June 5, PanoClip is an iPhone lens add-on that uses the front and rear facing cameras to shoot and stitch immersive 360 content. The $50 lenses are compatible with the iPhone 6 and up, including Plus models, and the company says an Android version is in the works.

Instead of adding an entirely new camera to the iPhone, the PanoClip adds on two wide-angle lenses to the phone’s front and rear-facing cameras. The PanoClip app then stitches the video together. 

The PanoClip uses an app to create a handful of different effects from the clip-on lens. Along with the traditional scroll around 360 format, the app can also capture in Tiny Planet mode which wraps the immersive view into one frame, creating a circular sphere that looks like, well, a tiny planet. 

The app also houses a handful of other edits for the immersive content. Spin View flattens the footage to a traditional aspect ratio, but automatically pans in every direction to keep that 360 feel. The developers say the mode is designed for sharing on platforms that don’t support the 360 format.

Sky View mode intelligently analyzes the scene to detect the horizon. The user can then swap out the sky for something else. The sky replacement options even move and change to music, creating an effect that the developers call “trippy” and “fun.” The app also includes filter-based edits and stickers for spicing up your videos even more.

The PanoClip brand comes from Arashi Vision, the same company that owns Insta360, the brand behind another connected 360 cam. The PanoClip isn’t part of the Insta360 family, apparently to differentiate what is essentially just a pair of add-on lenses from a true 360 camera.

Using an add-on lens rather than an add-on camera is one of a handful of attempts to bring 360 photography and video to more users at a lower price point. The Fusion Lens (not to be confused with the GoPro Fusion, a 360 action camera) uses a similar concept by modifying the built-in cameras to capture spherical perspective, but hasn’t launched off of Indiegogo yet. The Fishball uses only the rear camera and instead relies on mirrors to capture an immersive view. Besides being a more affordable option, using add-on lenses means devices like the PanoClip don’t need to be recharged, although running your phone’s front and back cameras simultaneously likely means you’ll want to keep a USB battery handy.

Editors’ Recommendations

• GoPro Fusion review
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Is it worth buying the Galaxy S8 in June 2018?

Over a year later, the Galaxy S8 is still a solid buy.

The Galaxy S9 is currently Samsung’s latest and greatest flagship around, but unless you’re willing to spend at least $720 for the privilege of owning one, you’re going to want to look elsewhere for your next smartphone purchase.

For some folks in the market for an upgrade, last year’s Galaxy S8 can be an enticing option. It offers about 80-90% of the features found in the Galaxy S9 and costs a great deal less.

One of our forum users asked if they should consider buying the S8 if they can get it for £480 in the UK, and this is what our community had to say.

SpookDroid
06-03-2018 12:38 PM

“

It’s definitely still a good phone, but at that price… I’m not sure. Don’t know if the same offers are around in the UK or not, but in the US you can find a lot of offers for the S9 that peg it for about the same price or less, and definitely cheaper S8s. IF the deal you can find is absolutely the lowest and no upcoming sales are in the horizon (don’t know about UK holidays), then it’s…

Reply

Khronus Titanicus
06-03-2018 07:37 PM

“

I would recommend you to actually get a OnePlus 6, it is better optimized than the S9 (more powerful) Has an excellent camera, a great screen, is splash proof, and has a bunch of other things that makes it a better phone than the S9 plus for the price….

Reply

Wbutchart1
06-04-2018 04:51 AM

“

The s8 still runs great. It’s got two more years of support. Mines still runs super fast after 13 months, no lag or issues. I would say if you can get it on a bargain it’s well worth it. Design still amazing.

Reply

TerryFalcon
06-04-2018 05:45 AM

“

Yeah Definitely S8 is such a great phone to buy. Camera Quality and software experience, Speed, Gaming performance everything thing is damn awesome I think S8 is still worth to buy

Reply

What do you think? Is the Galaxy S8 still worth buying?

Join the conversation in the forums!

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This is what the BlackBerry KEY2 looks like [Update]

June 7 can’t get here soon enough.

Updated June 5, 2018: Shortly after Evan Blass shared the original renders, he came back to showcase the KEY2 in an all-black paint job. Check it out below 👇

…in black. pic.twitter.com/iC6fhDA44y

— Evan Blass (@evleaks) June 5, 2018

This Thursday, June 7, BlackBerry will be hosting an event in New York City to unveil the KEY2 — the successor to last year’s excellent BlackBerry KEYone. Just a few short days before that event, Evan Blass has taken to Twitter to share a few press renders of the upcoming phone.

Similar to what we’ve seen from previous renders and hands-on photos, they KEY2 shares a very similar form factor compared to the KEYone.

The front is home to a large touchscreen display and below that is a full-fledged physical keyboard. In between those are capacitive navigation buttons for making your way around Android, and the fingerprint sensor appears to reside in the spacebar once again.

Around back is a textured finish with the BlackBerry logo and dual cameras, with the bottom frame being home to a USB-C port and two speaker grills. Along with that, the right side of the frame looks like it’ll be home to an extra button along with the volume rocker and power/wake button.

We still don’t know what kind of specs the KEY2 will come equipped with or how much it’ll cost, but those fine details will soon be set in stone later this week.

How are you liking what we’ve seen so far of the BlackBerry KEY2?

Why I’m still using a BlackBerry KEYone in Spring 2018

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OnePlus 6: Do you really need 8GB of RAM in a phone?

Nope. But it opens a lot of possibilities.

You can buy a OnePlus 6 that has 8GB of RAM on board. That’s 4GB more than most other high-end Android phones (and Chromebooks and cheap Windows Laptops) have and about 6GB more than the absolute bare minimum you can get away with. We’ll answer the question right here in the first paragraph: no, you do not need 8GB of RAM in a phone.

But it does mean some really cool stuff could happen.

Read our OnePlus 6 review

What your phone does with RAM

We all know that more RAM means more apps can be kept running at the same time (sort of at the same time, anyways) but that’s just one thing your phone does with the RAM inside of it. In fact, a portion of that RAM gets used before Android even starts running.

Without getting too nerdy and injecting ideas like compcache into the mix, your phone uses RAM like this:

• The kernel-space: Your Android phone runs on top of the Linux kernel. The kernel is stored in a special type of compressed file that’s extracted directly into RAM during the device power-on sequence. This reserved memory holds the kernel, drivers and kernel modules that control the hardware and room to cache data in and out of the kernel.
• A RAMdisk for virtual files: There are some folders and files in the system tree that aren’t “real.” They are pseudofiles written at boot and hold things like battery levels and CPU speed data. With Android, the whole /proc directory is one of these psuedofile systems. RAM is reserved so they have a place to live.
• Network radios: Data about your IMEI and radio settings are stored in NVRAM (Non-Volatile memory that’s not erased when you power off your phone), but get transferred to RAM along with the software needed to support the modem when you first turn on your phone. Space is reserved to keep this all in memory.
• The GPU: The graphics adapter in your phone needs memory to operate. That’s called VRAM, and our phones use integrated GPUs that have no stand-alone VRAM. System RAM is reserved for this.
• Available RAM: This is what’s left over, minus any extra reserved for file-system cache and minfree settings. This is what the apps you run can use.

Having 8GB of RAM means any or all of these different ways RAM is used can use a lot more of it if it needs to. Or if a person writing the operating system wants to try something new and different.

What can you do with extra RAM?

I’ll start by saying it’s not entirely clear what exactly OnePlus is doing with the extra RAM or what plans it has for the future. On the face of it you have to expect it won’t do too much more on a system level considering the base OnePlus 6 model still comes with 6GB of RAM and uses the same software.

But there is one thing that OnePlus (or any custom ROM developers) can do that would be a great way to use an extra 2GB of RAM: store the entire system home launcher in it.

8GB of RAM means more could be set aside for the user interface or a game mode.

Think back to the HTC M7 if you’ve been around Android that long. It was the first phone that used Android and was super-responsive when you were zipping around the OS. It was because a good portion of the system RAM was “reserved” for HTC Sense and wouldn’t be freed when another app asked for more memory. In the M7’s case, that meant it couldn’t hold as many apps open as other phones. Most companies making Android phones do something similar now and set things up so that parts of the launcher are never removed from RAM, and Android feels much better to use because of it. With 4GB of RAM, getting a balance that offers good performance without upsetting users who want to keep apps open in the background can be tough.

With 8GB of RAM, the whole user interface can not only be kept in RAM, but done with a real reserved block outside of the system memory parameters.

Writing a device driver that enables DMA (Direct Memory Access) for the user interface means RAM can be set aside for use by only the user interface. The operating system still controls the i/o, but no other application can overwrite any part of it so everything needed for “instant” scrolling and swiping is held in RAM where it’s fast and ready at all times.

OnePlus may not have anything planned for the extra RAM, but I’m sure developers at XDA will.

This is a little different than the memmap kernel parameter that reserves space outside the operating system for the radios and VRAM, but it lets the OS manage the RAM so data can move in and out and a buffer can be written when you shut the phone down to prevent data loss. It’s a more robust solution than using the standard Linux LMK (Low Memory Killer) system to keep important processes running. The end result is a user interface that’s fluid and responsive all the time, without affecting the way other apps run or stay alive in the background.

And that’s just one example I thought of without digging too deep into it all. Perhaps imagine a tweaked minfree settings so we can leave every app we love open in the background all of the time.

Don’t forget the cool factor

The OnePlus 6 can have 8GB of RAM to do crazy stuff with the OS for better performance, but it likely has it simply because it can.

RAM isn’t expensive. At least not component RAM used on a phone mainboard. Spending a few dollars more per unit (which can be a lot if you sell millions of units) to give the OnePlus 6 something the Galaxy S9 or iPhone doesn’t have is a real selling point in parts of Asia and for a lot of enthusiasts. Plenty of people are obsessed about the specs of a phone because they understand how they could be used, or simply because more is always better. Double the RAM of other flagship phones makes the OnePlus 6 more futureproof.

I’m sure someone at OnePlus did the math and figured that through a combination of all these factors, it was beneficial to sell an 8GB RAM model.

We’ll end this the same way we started: by saying no, you don’t need 8GB of RAM in a phone. But it doesn’t hurt anything, and the creative freedom it gives to Android developers, both at OnePlus and third-party devs, could very mean some cool things will be coming.

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• These are the official OnePlus 6 cases
• The OnePlus 6 doesn’t work on Verizon or Sprint
• Join the discussion in the forums

The ‘bezel-less’ Lenovo Z5 has been announced — with a notch and chin

At least it’s cheap, right?

Last week, Lenovo sent out a press invite for an event in Bejing where it would be announcing its latest Android phone — the Z5. The Z5 was being promoted as a truly all-screen phone, with teaser images from Lenovo showing a gadget with a front that was all display with no bezels in sight.

Lenovo just announced the Z5, and sure enough, the phone has both a notch at the top of its screen and a chin at the bottom.

The Z5 that we have is quite a bit different from what Lenovo was hyping up, with the final product looking like every other Android phone from 2018 instead of a magical glimpse into the future of mobile tech.

What Lenovo was teasing (left) vs. what we actually got (right).

Even with that being said, the Z5 does have some redeeming qualities. For what it’s worth, the notch is narrower than the one found in the iPhone X and the 6.2-inch 19:9 display boasts a screen-to-body ratio of 90%.

Under the hood, the Lenovo Z5 is packing an unnamed Qualcomm processor, 3,300 mAh battery, 6GB RAM, and 64GB or 128GB of internal storage. Around back, you’ll find dual 16MP cameras.

You’ll be able to purchase the Z5 in China starting June 12, with the 64GB model costing around $200 and the 128GB version going for about $280.

Vivo’s Apex concept phone has tiny bezels, pop-up camera and in-display fingerprint sensor