The best deals for Black Friday
Black Friday, the shopping mania that occurs the day after American Thanksgiving, may be more important than ever in 2016. Between 4K TVs, new game consoles, media hubs, mobile devices and wearables, there are many potential gifts this year — those discounts could be crucial to splurging on someone or treating yourself. But where do you go to find the best bargains? Never fear, as we’re rounding up some of the bigger deals you’ll see on and around November 25th. And many of these deals will be online, so you might not have to brave packed stores and shopping malls to save some cash.
New ‘Pokémon Go’ creature throws unpredictability into your game
That didn’t take long. Mere days after leaks hinted that Pokémon Go would get more monsters, Niantic and The Pokémon Company have rolled Ditto into the game. The critter is a shape-shifter that won’t reveal its true form until you capture it — in other words, the only reliable way to capture a Ditto is to keep playing until you find one at random. In the Gym, it’ll assume the looks and abilities of the first creature it sees and stay that way throughout other battles.
Ditto’s arrival may not be shocking, but it’s a reflection of the challenge the Pokémon Go team faces: how do they keep you playing now that the initial summer frenzy is over, and colder weather makes it harder to venture outside? While daily bonuses and themed events help, some trainers might not play unless there are more monsters and similar fresh content.
Source: App Store, Google Play, Pokemon Go
Lenovo Phab 2 Pro review: Stumbling out of the gate
I just spent 15 minutes wandering around the office, trying to shoot ghouls in the face with lightning. Before that, I dropped a virtual rococo sofa into the empty space next to my desk, just to see if it would fit. And before that, I measured… well, everything. Welcome to the augmented life, courtesy of Google and Lenovo. Google has spent more than two years taking its “Tango” technology from project to full-blown product. The goal: to help our gadgets examine the world around them and overlay information — or even whole new worlds — on top of the reality we already know. Along the way, Google tapped Lenovo to help craft the first consumer-ready Tango device: an enormous slab of a phone called the Phab 2 Pro. And now it’s here.
If the Tango stuff alone didn’t make the Phab 2 Pro a groundbreaking device, this is also the first Lenovo-branded smartphone to land in the United States. Too bad it’s not quite ready for primetime.
Hardware
I can’t emphasize this enough: The Phab 2 Pro ($500) is enormous. Then again, how could it be anything but? We have plenty of things to thank for that, from the phone’s 6.4-inch IPS LCD screen to the bank of capacitive buttons below it, to the massive 4,050mAh battery under the hood. Of course, the real reason the Phab 2 Pro is so big is because of all the Tango tech Google helped squeeze inside. It’s worth remembering that Google’s Tango reference device for developers was a tablet with a 7-inch screen, one of NVIDIA’s Tegra K1 chipsets and two — two! — batteries.
That Google and Lenovo managed to squeeze all the requisite bits into a mostly pocketable smartphone is a feat unto itself. There are, after all, plenty of non-standard parts here. Just look at the Phab 2’s back if you don’t believe me. Nestled between the 16-megapixel camera and the fingerprint sensor are two more cameras — one has an infrared emitter to determine how far things are from the phone, and the other is a wide-angle camera with a fisheye lens that works as part of Tango’s motion tracking system. Turns out, Lenovo had to punch a hole in the phone’s main circuit board to make room for all those sensors.
Those cameras and sensors work in tandem with a customized version of Qualcomm’s octa-core Snapdragon 652 processor. We’ve seen more conventional versions of this mid-range chip pop up in devices like ASUS’s new ZenFone, but the version we have here has been tuned to more accurately timestamp the data captured by all of the phone’s sensors. Why? To keep the phone’s location in lockstep with all the crazy AR stuff you’ll see on screen. Also onboard are 4GB of RAM, an Adreno 510 GPU, 64GB of storage, a micro-USB port and a tray that takes either two SIM cards or a SIM card and a microSD card as big as 128GB.
So, long story short, the Phab 2 Pro is massive, and for good reason. The last time I played with a non-Phab phone this big was three years ago, when Sony launched a version of its Xperia Z Ultra running a clean version Android in the Google Play Store. Since then, the market has coalesced around big smartphones with screens about 5.5 inches big. Years of similarly sized devices, then, means the Phab 2 Pro feels extra unwieldy.
It would’ve been more of a problem if Lenovo hadn’t done such a good job putting the Phab 2 Pro together; the body is carved out of a single block of aluminum and the screen is covered by a sheet of Gorilla Glass that’s ever-so-slightly curved around the edges for that subtle “2.5D” effect everyone seems to love. The aesthetic is pleasant enough if you’re into minimalist design, and big-phone fans are probably going to drool too. If you’re thinking of getting one, though, best if you can get hands-on before taking the plunge.
Display and sound
The 6.4-inch screen on the Phab 2 Pro is indeed massive, but mostly unremarkable. Lenovo went with an “assertive” IPS LCD screen, which basically means the panel can optimize colors and contrast on the pixel level. It’s a handy trick for when you’re traipsing around outdoors — it’s excellent under direct sunlight — but the screen is otherwise forgettable.
Don’t get me wrong: Its 2,560 x 1,440 resolution means it’s still plenty crisp, even if it isn’t as pixel dense as other devices because of how big the panel is. Color reproduction is accurate too, though it’ll definitely feel a little flat if you’re coming from a device with an AMOLED screen like the Galaxy S7. What’s more, brightness is respectable — this screen is just a touch dimmer than the iPhone 7 Plus’ — and viewing angles are also pretty great. I half-expected the screen to be worse since it would have been a likely place for Lenovo to cut corners on a $500 phone.
The sound quality lags behind screen quality, but that’s no surprise. The Phab 2 Pro has a single speaker carved into its bottom edge, which makes for anemic, muddy sounding music, with bass notes utterly lacking in oomph. It’s fine for sound effects in Tango-enabled games, but headphones are otherwise a must. It helps that the Phab 2 Pro ships with a Dolby Atmos app that launches automatically when headphones are plugged in. Included are presets for music, movies, games and voices (say, for podcasts), and in general they added a decent amount of oomph to my audio. Music in particular felt a little punchier and more expansive, though the results seemed to vary from song to song.
Software
Motorola has long been a fan of near-stock Android, and I’m glad its parent company Lenovo seems just as fond of it. The Phab 2 Pro ships with a build of Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow that has been left almost completely untouched. Seriously, there are no extra widgets, no visual junk, no bloatware. If you put the Tango-specific stuff aside, there are but a few add-ons: an app for simple file sharing, another for cloud backups, a sound recorder, a Dolby Atmos app for audio tuning and Accuweather. The rest of Lenovo’s work on the software front is much subtler, and largely meant to make using such a big phone easier.
Rather than picking up the phone to see what time it is, for instance, you can toggle an option to wake the device by double-tapping the screen. Still another option causes the lock screen’s PIN input pad and the phone’s dialer pad to slide to the left or right depending on how the Phab 2 is tilted so you don’t have to stretch your thumbs across the screen.
And if you’re in luck if you’ve been looking for a smarter alternative to the traditional home button. There’s an option for a floating on-screen button that provides quick access to all three traditional Android navigation keys, plus the screen lock, calculator, audio recorder and flashlight. I don’t know about you, but I don’t need to whip out a calculator all that often, so the inability to change any of those shortcuts is a little frustrating. You can add a second page of app shortcuts too, though the resulting grid of icons looks pretty ugly.
Lenovo’s light touch with software is appreciated, but it’s far from perfect. Certain apps (here’s looking at you, Gmail) offer notifications that are hard to read because some of the text is too dark against the translucent gray notification shade. The problem is even worse when you’re using a dark wallpaper, and surprise: a good chunk of the included wallpapers, including the one that’s on by default, do indeed fall into that category.
Life with Tango
As I write this, there are 35 Tango apps available in the Google Play Store, and broadly speaking they fall into one of two categories: tools and games. I’m not going to dissect all of them — not unless you all really, really want me to — but there are recurring themes across these apps that speak to the larger experience of living with Tango.
Despite all the whimsical, weird stuff we’ve seen Tango do in the past, Google is making it clear the tech can help you get stuff done too. The Phab 2 Pro ships with Google’s Measure app, for one, which does exactly what its name suggests. Fire up the app, point at something, tap to drop an anchor, then tap to drop an anchor at that something’s endpoint. Congratulations, you just measured something without having to grab a tape measure. The Lowe’s Vision app has a similar trick, and when Tango’s sensors cooperate, the results can be very accurate indeed.
That’s definitely not a given, though. Let’s say you’re measuring the edge of a box or a desk. The depth sensor sometimes has trouble figuring out where the edge begins, and you have to maneuver just right to tap on the correct spot. (To Google’s credit, Measure says it offers estimates instead of hard numbers.)
Tango recurring theme #1: The Phab 2 Pro occasionally fails at figuring out what it’s pointed at, even in bright conditions.
Speaking of, we’ve seen Lowe’s app used in Tango demos for ages now. In fact, the Phab 2 Pro will even be sold in select Lowe’s stores. Even so, it’s still fun filling an empty room with virtual ovens, sofas and end tables. Online retailer Wayfair has a similar app, which generally seems to work much better; the dressers and couches and cabinets I’ve dropped into the world around me were faster to load and didn’t randomly appear right on top of me as in the Lowe’s app. In fact, the Wayfair app is a joy to use at least partially because it doesn’t try to do too much — just plop furniture down and that’s it. Same goes for Amazon’s Product Preview app, which lets you see how different TVs would look on your wall. It does one thing, and does it well.
Tango recurring theme #2: When it comes to augmented reality apps, the simpler the better.
Tango’s tools aren’t just about seeing how junk fits in your home, by the way. One of my early favorites is Signal Mapper, which prompts you to wander around and visualize how strong your WiFi signal is (future versions will support cellular networks too). Keep at it long enough and you’re left with a signal strength heat map that doubles as a rough blueprint of… wherever you happened to be. Then there are apps like Cydalion, meant to help the visually impaired get around more easily. In brief, these apps provide audio and touch feedback when they start getting too close to a nearby object.
Tango recurring theme #3: The technology might not be perfect yet, but the potential here is just astounding.
So yes, there are plenty of Tango utilities for you to play with. But let’s be real: The first thing I did after receiving the Phab 2 Pro was load up a handful of games. As it turns out, though, games are where Tango’s shortcomings become most apparent. We’ve seen some of these augmented reality games before, like Domino World, which scans your surroundings and lets you build convoluted structures out of those tiny tiles. But there’s a tendency for the app to think a flat surface like a tabletop goes on longer than it does, so you’ll often build a long string of dominos that jut out the air, just waiting to be knocked over.
Other games, like Woorld, are heavier on the whimsy. Designed in part by Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi, Woorld turns the space around you into a playground where the only real goal is figuring out how to find new pieces — like a sun, clouds, sprouts and picnic tables — to add your tiny domain. It’s cute, it’s fun and I blew the better part of an afternoon on it. Woorld is, by the way, the one game I played that really threw the Phab 2 Pro for a loop. It was the second time I had fired up the game, and less than 10 minutes after I started plopping cottages and clouds and sprouts on a conference room desk, the real-world view provided by the RGB camera nearly ground to a halt.
I’m not exactly sure what caused the issue — maybe a memory leak somewhere — but it hasn’t happened again. Suffice to say, this sort of laggy behavior was an exception, not the rule. I’m actually still surprised that the Phab 2 Pro performed these AR tasks as well as it did, but I probably shouldn’t have been: This phone was supposed to launch at the end of the summer, and it’s clear Google and Lenovo used the extra time to to tighten up
Even so, the software is buggy. Playing Phantogeist, the ghost-blasting game I mentioned in the beginning of this review, was great until said ghost spookily hunkered down inside a wall, rendering my lightning-gun-thing useless. When it wandered back into the field, I nuked it from a distance and continued doing that to all its nasty, non-corporeal friends.
Tango recurring theme #4: When everything works the way it’s supposed to, Tango can feel like magic.
These past two years have turned Tango into a functional product, but it’s a long way from seamlessly good. There were, however, plenty of those moments where everything came together just so and I felt I like I was playing with a tricorder pulled out of storage on the USS Enterprise. Some of these issues will be addressed in future Tango hardware — Google’s Tango program lead Johnny Lee has said more is coming — but here’s hoping software fixes patch up some of these early troubles. The potential benefits are just too great to give up on.
Camera
Since the Phab 2 Pro’s 16-megapixel camera plays such an important role in making Tango’s augmented reality work, you’d think Lenovo would’ve chosen a top-flight sensor. Not quite, but it has its moments. When the conditions are right — by which I mean there’s plenty of light — the camera yields detailed shots with colors that are mostly true to life. Pro tip: You’ll probably want HDR mode on all the time to give your photos a dose of verve that would otherwise be missing.
My biggest gripe so far has been the finicky autofocus, an issue that only gets more bothersome in low light. Our office already has a Christmas tree in the lobby, and it posed no problem for the iPhone 7 Plus or the Galaxy S7. The Phab 2 Pro, on the other hand, refused to lock onto the tree no matter how many times I tapped to focus on the screen. This doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s a pervasive enough issue that Lenovo should really issue a software update to address it.
I wish I could say the 8-megapixel front camera was better, but it has a lot of trouble accurately rendering colors in selfies. Take me, for example: Around this time of year I’m sort of a pale, milky coffee color, an observation backed up by selfies taken with the iPhone 7 Plus and the Galaxy S7. For reasons beyond comprehension, though, the Phab 2 Pro’s front camera made me a deep orange-brown. That’s with the face-smoothing mode off and everything else set to auto too. Seriously disappointing, Lenovo.
The camera app itself isn’t much to write home about, either. Sure, there might not be much in way of manual controls, but there are eight scene modes, a “touchup” mode for cleaning up your face in selfies and some basic white balance and exposure controls. The thing is, they’re tucked away inside a settings menu making them easy to miss. It’s just bad design. (Then again, looking at the interface Lenovo slapped together, is another bit of bad design really a surprise?)
Since the Phab 2 Pro is all about augmenting reality, it’s no shock that there’s an AR mode within the camera app too. Tapping the AR button brings up a live view of what’s in front of you (duh) along with options to turn that space into some sort of bizarre fairy garden (complete with freaky child-fairy) or a playground for a kitty, a puppy or a chubby, oddly designed dragon. Sound familiar? These sorts of AR tricks figured prominently in Sony smartphones like the Xperia X line, where they were just as hokey. They’re good for a chuckle or two, but the novelty doesn’t last long (unless you have kids). At least the Phab 2 Pro does a better job dispelling the heat that tends to build up during intense AR kitty play sessions.
Performance and battery life
We’ve already established that, beyond the occasional hiccup, the Phab 2 Pro can keep Tango apps running at a decent clip. But what about everything else? Even though the Snapdragon 625 is specifically tuned for Tango, the Phab 2 Pro should be able to handle most people’s daily routines without issue. My days, for instance, are filled with lots of frantic app launching and multitasking; I’m constantly bouncing between Slack, Outlook, Spotify, Trello, Twitter, Instagram, Soundcloud and more for hours on end.
The Phab 2 Pro took that mild insanity like a champ, with occasional stutters punctuating long stretches of smoothness. Not bad. If your day features a lot of hardcore gaming, however, you might want to look elsewhere. Graphically intense games like Asphalt 8 (with the visual settings cranked to the max) sometimes proved to be a little much for the Phab 2 Pro. In other words, don’t freak out if you see the occasional jerkiness or dropped frame. Though this is an important device, you’re not exactly getting flagship-level power.
Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge
Lenovo Phab 2 Pro
AndEBench Pro
14,941
16,164
13,030
8,930
Vellamo 3.0
5,343
5,800
4,152
4,922
3DMark IS Unlimited
28,645
29,360
26,666
17,711
GFXBench 3.0 1080p Manhattan Offscreen (fps)
46
48
47
14
I was also expecting more from the Phab 2 Pro’s 4,050mAh battery — it’s the biggest I’ve seen in a recent smartphone, after all. The usage time skewed more middle-of-the-road than I expected, but that’s still sort of a win after all the time I’ve spent playing with Tango apps. Since seeing the sun for any appreciable period of time now requires me to be up early, I usually pulled the Phab 2 Pro off its charger at around 6:45AM, then put it through the daily wringer, with lots of time to get acquainted with Tango. I mean, who could resist?
Over the course of a few days like that, the phone settled into a predictable pattern: It’d power through 12-hour workdays just fine with about 10 to 15 percent left in the tank. On weekends where I spent much less time glued to the phone, it generally stuck around for closer to two days on a charge.
Things were a little less promising in Engadget’s standard rundown test, wherein we loop a high-definition video with the phone connected to WiFi and the screen’s brightness fixed at 50 percent. The Phab 2 Pro lasted for 12 hours and 8 minutes — 20 minutes less than the Google Pixel, and a full two hours less than the larger Google Pixel XL. Such is the downside of having to power such a big display.
Wrap-up
The Lenovo Phab 2 Pro is an incredible thing, and it’s just brimming with potential. It’s also unpolished and frustrating to use a lot of the time. When the hardware and software don’t come together as they should, it makes me wish Google and Lenovo spent a little more time ironing out the bugs. But when everything does come together — which happens frequently — I feel like I’m playing with something from the future.
Even so, there’s work to be done. Hardly any of the Tango apps available for the Phab 2 Pro feel like killer apps. As developers continue to get a feel for what Tango is capable of, we’ll see the platform become more useful — at least, I hope so. Part of that growth hinges on people starting to adopt Tango devices like the Phab 2 Pro, but it’s pretty clear that in its current form, no one needs this phone. For all Lenovo’s work cramming Tango into a well-built body, the Phab 2 Pro still feels like a proof of concept. If you’re a developer or an early adopter, then by all means, go get one.
Everyone else should remember that Tango doesn’t end with this phone. It’s special, it’s immersive and I think it could be huge for the future of mobile computing. It just needs time. I’m glad the Phab 2 Pro exists, but if there were ever a phone that wasn’t meant for everyone, this is it. The race is on now, though, and who knows: Maybe the next device with this tech is the one that truly delivers on Tango’s promise
US proposes a phone ‘driver mode’ to reduce in-car distractions
Smartphones already have car-optimized interfaces like Android Auto and Apple CarPlay, and you’ll occasionally see safety measures that shut off features (and enable others) while you’re driving. However, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration wants to do better. It’s proposing voluntary guidelines that would both encourage phone makers to both include pairing with infotainment systems (much like Android Auto and CarPlay) and, crucially, a “driving mode” that cuts back on distractions. It would have a simpler interface that minimizes the time you spend looking away from the road, and either disables or downplays features that you don’t need while on the move.
Specifically, officials would like the driving mode to disable “manual text entry” (think keyboards), photo and video playback, non-essential text, social networking and the web. Don’t expect it to automatically kick in, though. While the agency would like the mode to launch whenever you’re moving faster than a crawling pace (5MPH), it knows that it’s difficult to tell the difference between a driver and a passenger. You may have to invoke it yourself until technology catches up, and there would be an override if there’s an app you simply have to use.
These aren’t binding guidelines, and they’re really just the second phase of an NHTSA effort to reduce distractions in the infotainment systems themselves. However, the proposal’s very existence could prompt Apple, Google and others to make anti-distraction features key to their platforms even in those cases where the phone can’t link to your car. After all, they don’t want to be seen as promoting dangerous behavior behind the wheel — a driving mode is as much a marketing point as it is a safety measure.
Via: New York Times
Source: NHTSA
Black Friday (2016) deals: here are the UK’s best
Black Friday is upon us, but that doesn’t mean that we’ll have to wait for deals. UK retailers don’t really care whether it’s Friday or not, they’re busy discounting products in an attempt to part you from your cash. If you’ve decided not to brave the inclement weather and are staying home to avoid the chaos, we’ve rounded up some of the best gadget deals available online.
As always, if you spot anything that we might have missed, drop us a note in the comments below and we’ll add it to our list as soon as possible. Some will be daily deals, so move quickly. They are targeted at Brits mind you, so we’re avoiding anything that forces you to pay in dollars, Euros or any other (probably stronger) currency.
Gaming and Streaming
Amazon Fire TV Stick
As expected, Amazon’s dimunative streaming dongle has been given a price cut. Amazon is selling it for £25, but you can get one for the slightly lower price of £24.95 at Argos.
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
Activision’s popular shooter has only been out a little while but Tesco is now offering the game for £29 on both PS4 and Xbox One. Be aware: this doesn’t include the remastered Modern Warfare.
Google Chromecast
Currys is currently selling Google’s updated streaming dongle for £18, a saving of £12, and the Chomecast Audio for £15.
HTC Vive
From 8am on Black Friday (November 25th) right through until 8am on November 29th, HTC is offering £100 off its VR headset. The deal will also apply to its Vive Ready HP Computer Bundle, which will set you back £1,399 instead of the usual £1,499.
PlayStation 4
Console deals are what most people are looking for on Black Friday and we’re happy to report that there are some good ones to be had. Very is offering the 1TB PS4 with Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, Ratchet & Clank and DriveClub for £250. If some of the games don’t float your boat, you can swap them for a spare controller or a PlayStation Network subscription. Zavvi has a similar deal, but you’ll get Uncharted 4, The Last of Us and DriveClub for £240.
John Lewis is offering the 500GB PS4 Slim and Uncharted 4 for £217.95. Add Titanfall 2 or Battlefield 1 and you’ll only pay an extra tenner. For November 23rd only, Tesco has the 500GB PS4 Slim 500GB with Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and Overwatch for £229.
Titanfall 2 and Gears of War 4
Another couple of games that haven’t been out long but have been given a drastic price reduction. HMV is selling Titanfall 2 for just £20 (on both PS4 and Xbox One) and Gears of War 4 for £23, but you can only get them in store.
Xbox One
Microsoft is teasing a sale on its official site, including products like the Xbox One S, but deals are only available from November 25th onwards. However, there are plenty of other good buys available at other UK retailers.
If you just want the a cheap Xbox One S, Zaavi is selling the 4K console with a copy of Minecraft for £220. For £200, Tesco is offering Xbox One 1TB console, Gears of War 4 and Rise of the Tomb Raider (you’ll need to add them all to your basket to see the discount). If you’re after A+ games, GAME is selling Xbox One S with FIFA 17 and Forza Horizon 3 for £250 or the Xbox One with FIFA 17, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare and NOW TV for £260.
Phones, Tablets and Laptops
Amazon Fire
As expected, Amazon’s going pretty hard this year, with discounts across its whole range of own-brand tablets. The Fire tablet sells for £30 (normally £50), the Fire HD 6 is £60 (normally £100) and there’s £5 off both the Fire HD 8 (£85) and the Fire Kids Edition (£95). If you’re looking for something bigger, the Fire HD 10 has been reduced to £152.
Amazon Kindle
If tablets aren’t your thing but e-readers are, Amazon is also running a couple of promotions on its Kindles. The standard Kindle and the Kindle Paperwhite are on sale for £57 and £80, saving you £3 and £30 respectively.
BlackBerry Priv
BlackBerry phones might soon be a thing of the past but some people still love them. If that someone is you, why not grab the BlackBerry Priv for £288, saving £261 in the process?
Chromebook
Chromebooks are already pretty cheap but Currys is running a deal on the 11.6-inch Acer CB3-131, which now costs just £140. The retailer also has the 2-in-1 Chromebook R for £200, saving you £50.
Honor
Between 8am on 25th November to midnight on 28th November, Huawei’s budget phone brand is reducing the price of the Honor 8 by £70 to £299.90, the cheapest it’s ever been. The Honor 5C has also been given a slight discount, meaning you’ll now pay £130 instead of £150.
Microsoft Surface
Currys is selling Microsoft’s impressive Surface Pro 4 with Intel i5 processor, 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage and detachable keyboard cover for £699. Microsoft is also hosting its own deals, with prices starting at £599 (which include the keyboard cover and pen), and will give you £10 off your next purchase if you use the code BlackFriday2016 at the checkout.
Motorola
Lenovo’s got a wide selection of discounts on Moto phones, wearables and accessories, starting with the offer of a free Incipio OffGrid Power Pack if you buy a Moto Z. If you buy a Moto Z Play, the free gift is JBL’s Soundboost accessory. Both are Moto Mods, which are designed to bolt onto the phone and, in this case, give them better battery life and sound output.
There are also discounts across the Moto G4 range. The Moto G4 Plus (normally £229) is now £209 and the standard Moto G4 (normally £169) is £159. Both come with a free back cover and free shipping. The Moto G4 Play is now almost £10 cheaper at £119.98 (with free shipping).
There are two deals on the Moto X, but one is time sensitive. On Black Friday (November 25th), waterproof Moto X Force will be reduced by £50 to £429. If the Moto X Style is more your bag, you can save £40 on the £309 phone between now and November 28th.
Samsung Galaxy S7
With the Note 7 no longer available, Samsung needs to sell more Galaxy S7 handsets. Carphone Warehouse might be able to help with a £100 reduction on the Galaxy S7 Edge, which is now £530.
Gadgets and Wearables
Sphero BB-8
Love Star Wars: The Force Awakens? John Lewis is selling the Sphero’s loveable BB-8 droid for £99.95.
B&O Play
When it comes to headphones (or earphones), it can be hard to know which models will deliver high-quality sound at a fair price. Amazon’s selling the bestselling B&O Play H3 ANCs for £109, meaning you’ll save £90.
Fitbit
Amazon’s slashed the price of the original Fitbit Flex by half, meaning you can get the fitness wristband for £40.
GoPro
Argos has the GoPro Hero+ for £150, complete with two-year guarantee.
Moto 360
The slightly aged Moto 360 is now £20 cheaper at £219 (with free shipping).
Nest
For Black Friday, Google’s Nest is cutting the price of its smart thermostat and indoor security camera. They now cost £219 and £129, respectively.
TVs
Black Friday often sees UK retailers clear their TV inventory and this year is no exception. If you’ve been holding off buying a new 4K set, now might be the time to jump.
Currys has taken £420 off the price of the highly-rated 55-inch Samsung EU55KS7000 Smart 4K LED TV, meaning you’ll pay just £979. The retailer is also offering £200 off the 60-inch Samung UE60KU6020 4K LED TV, which now costs £799.
If you’ve got the budget, Argos has slashed £1,430 off the 65-inch OLED65B6V 4K OLED TV. For £2869, you’ll enjoy deeper blacks, more vibrant colour and it doesn’t look that bad either.
Google’s Pixel phones get lift-to-wake and double-tap features
Google’s well-reviewed Pixel and Pixel XL are the Android phones to have right now, but they’re still missing some much-liked features from the Nexus 6P and 5X. Namely, the models lack the “Moves” that let you double-tap or merely lift the phone to wake it up. However, some Canadians are reporting that those functions are available in the latest OTA update, so folks in other regions should see them soon, too.
iPhone owners received a “raise to wake” feature with OS X, though Apple arguably borrowed the idea from earlier Moto “Active Display” models. While the Motorola brand is no longer in Google’s hands, Lenovo is giving Moto owners the latest Nougat updates pretty quickly, including features like Daydream VR. The Pixel models, however, are still the ones to have if you want all of Google’s newest treats first.
As Droid Life details, you’ll need to activate the new features once you get the OTA update (or if you’re brave enough to sideload it). To do so, just go to “Moves” in the general settings, and flip on “double-tap to check phone” and “lift to check phone
Via: Droid Life
Source: Reddit
Maliciously crafted video can freeze your iOS device
If you thought last year’s iOS text crash bug was a headache, you’d better brace yourself. EverythingApplePro and other users have confirmed that at least one maliciously crafted video is guaranteed to trigger a memory leak and freeze iOS devices, even if they’re running something as ancient as iOS 5. All you have to do is play the linked video file in Safari — your iPhone, iPad or iPod will lock up within a few seconds, forcing you to hard reboot to regain control of your gear. It’s so far useful only for cruel pranks (you should be fine afterward), but these kinds of quirks can occasionally be used as part of security breaches.
The trick is limited to unaltered files, so you don’t have to worry about a YouTube link or other processed video bringing your device to a screeching halt. And of course, the immediate precaution is to avoid tapping direct video links (particularly from known hosts like vk.com and testtrial.site90.net) if you don’t know that you can trust them. The problem, as you might surmise, is that attackers may use link shorteners or otherwise try to hide the nature of the video.
We’ve reached out to Apple about its plans for a fix, and we’ll let you know if can outline plans. It won’t be surprising if there’s already a patch in the works. Don’t be surprised if it’s focused strictly on iOS 10 users, though. The latest version already had 60 percent adoption as of late October, and many of those running iOS 9 can upgrade. An iOS 10-only fix would (eventually) cover the vast majority of users.
Via: 9to5Mac, MacRumors
Source: EverythingApplePro (YouTube), Reddit
New battery tech lasts for days, charges in seconds
Scientists from the University of Central Florida (UCF) have created a supercapacitor battery prototype that works like new even after being recharged 30,000 times. The research could yield high-capacity, ultra-fast-charging batteries that last over 20 times longer than a conventional lithium-ion cell. “You could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn’t need to charge it again for over a week,” says UCF postdoctoral associate Nitin Choudhary.
Supercapacitors can be charged quickly because they store electricity statically on the surface of a material, rather than using chemical reactions like batteries. That requires “two-dimensional” material sheets with large surface areas that can hold lots of electrons. However, much of the research, including that by EV-maker Henrik Fisker and UCLA, uses graphene as the two-dimensional material.
Yeonwoong “Eric” Jung from UCF says it’s a challenge to integrate graphene with other materials used in supercapacitors, though. That’s why his team wrapped 2D metal materials (TMDs) just a few atoms thick around highly-conductive 1D nanowires, letting electrons pass quickly from the core to the shell. That yielded a fast charging material with high energy and power density that’s relatively simple to produce. “We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can very nicely integrate the existing materials with the two-dimensional materials,” Jung says.
The research is in early days and not ready for commercialization, but it looks promising. “”For small electronic devices, our materials are surpassing the conventional ones worldwide in terms of energy density, power density and cyclic stability,” Choudhary said.
Jung calls the research “proof-of-concept,” and the team is now trying to patent its new process. While it could go nowhere like many other battery developments, it’s worth looking at new supercapacitor research closely. If commercialized, it could allow for longer-range EVs that can be charged in minutes rather than hours, long-lasting (non-explosive) smartphones that can be charged in seconds and grid or home energy storage solutions that drastically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels.
Source: UCF
NHS to use Google DeepMind AI app to help treat patients
Google and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust have announced a fresh five-year collaboration today, which will see the former’s DeepMind AI used to improve patient care across the trust’s various hospital sites. The partnership will focus on Streams, a mobile app the pair have been working on since late last year that’s been approved as a medical device by the UK’s health regulator. DeepMind will analyse blood test results as they come in and flag when patients might be at risk of acute kidney injury, proactively alerting carers through the Streams app.
It’ll go live across the trust in early 2017, and there are plans to expand the blood analysis to look for signs of sepsis and other causes of organ failure. The pair hope to add messaging and task management features over the course of the collaboration too, and Streams is said to be built on open standards that will allow other developers to easily add new services. The general idea is to significantly speed up response times, improving the treatment of kidney injury before it progresses any further.
Streams should also free up time for carers to do what they best — over half a million hours per year, apparently — which would otherwise be dedicated to admin and jumping between multiple paper-based and aging computer systems.
Google’s DeepMind AI has famously beaten a Go world champion, improved data centre efficiency, been trained to mimic human speech, and is currently learning how to play Starcraft II. In the UK, the DeepMind Health initiative was set up earlier this year to work with the NHS on healthcare applications. In addition to the Streams project, DeepMind is being used to improve the treatment of ocular diseases and head and neck cancer at Moorfields Eye Hospital and the University College London Hospital, respectively.
Google and the Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust may have partnered with the best of intentions when they originally started working on Streams, but the pair have drawn flak over the sheer amount of data being shared between them. Earlier this year, it came to light that DeepMind had access to the personal data and medical history of the trust’s 1.6 million patients. This makes sense because healthcare is complicated, and all that information is necessary to evaluate treatment options.
It wasn’t just the wealth of information being shared that inspired criticism, though, but also that the data-sharing agreement was established with implied consent from patients, and with little oversight. Ethical, privacy and data protection concerns have all formed part of the discussion, and the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office confirmed it was looking into the agreement earlier this year.
The debate continues, and the DeepMind website attempts to explain at length how data security and privacy are protected. Within the Streams announcements today, both parties also describe how seriously they are taking data protection under the new five-year collaboration. DeepMind’s data centres have already passed NHS audits, and will be subject to more carried out by independent experts, who will also look at the Streams software.
Everything will be logged for the benefit of the trust, too, so there will be transparency around who, when, where and why patient information is accessed. “The data can never be combined with any Google services or accounts under any circumstances,” the trust’s release states, and in order to satisfy staunch skeptics, the new data-sharing agreement with DeepMind will also be published for all to scrutinise.
Via: BBC
Source: DeepMind, Royal Free London NHS Foundation Trust
The Morning After: Tuesday, November 22, 2016
It’s Tuesday, which means Facebook and Instagram have nicked another feature from Snapchat. Meanwhile, the Snapbot has landed in NYC, Apple has a battery problem of its own to deal with and the HTC Evo name makes a triumphant return.
Yo, I heard you liked the OnePlus 3Review: OnePlus 3T
Even though its predecessor is just six months old, Cherlynn Low found the OnePlus 3T “a refinement that not only feels timely, but also well-planned and executed.” It’s missing Android 7.0 Nougat and expandable storage options, but adding an upgraded processor to match the Google Pixel, a slightly larger battery and a new front camera for just $40 extra makes this phone a pretty good deal.
Stop us if you’ve heard this one beforeInstagram adds live video and Snapchat-style disappearing photos
Facebook’s quest to offer a version of every Snapchat feature continues with the latest Instagram update. Now, users can send disappearing messages through Instagram Direct, potentially making your next headfirst slide into the DMs less risky. There’s also built-in support for live video, which works a lot like Facebook Lives, except inside Instagram.
Choose the Mad Max: High Octane Collection — trust usHoliday Gift Guide 2016: The Movie Buff
Friends don’t let friends struggle with their home theater setups. Whether you’re ready to spend a lot or just a little, we have a few ideas about what gifts to put in your favorite videophile’s stocking.
Snapbot sightedSnapchat Spectacles have arrived in NYC
So far, Snapchat’s camera-infused sunglasses have been a West Coast-only thing, now they’re in the Big Apple. If you’re willing to try your luck, head to the Spectacles pop-up shop at 5 East 59th Street in Upper Midtown Manhattan and prepare to wait in line. The store will be open through New Year’s Eve (but closed 11/24, 12/24 and 12/25) so you will have a full month of opportunities.
At least they’re not explodingApple is replacing some iPhone 6s batteries
Just last week, Apple announced a repair program for the iPhone 6 Plus and its “touch disease,” and now it’s facing a problem with the iPhone 6. The company says a “small number” of handsets have a battery fault that causes them to spontaneously shut down. If your device was manufactured between September and October 2015, then you may be in line for a replacement or a credit.
Not what you’d expect for the holidays.Jony Ive and Marc Newson’s latest project is a… Christmas tree?
It doesn’t have a headphone jack or Christmas lights.
The missing detailNTSB is investigating the first flight of Facebook’s Aquila drone
When Facebook announced its “successful” first flight of the Aquila internet drone on June 28th, it mentioned a “structural failure” just before landing. That may have been worthy of more than a footnote, however, since the NTSB has classified it as an accident.
But wait, there’s more…
- The HTC Evo is back! (If you live in Europe)
- 4K Netflix streaming comes to Windows 10
- What’s on TV this week? Try Netflix’s Brazilian sci-fi series “3%”
- To battle fake news is to battle brain chemistry
AIVAnet 