Apple releases iOS 10.1, adds Portrait mode to the iPhone 7 Plus
The Portrait mode for Apple’s iPhone 7 Plus has been in the works for months, and now it’s ready for the masses… sort of. 7 Plus users running beta software have been able to shoot photos full of artificial bokeh for over a month now, but Apple just pushed out its iOS 10.1 update and Portrait mode came along for the ride. Now, here’s the thing: even though you don’t need to be enrolled in the iOS beta program to use the feature anymore, the feature itself still isn’t completely done. Once the update is installed, the camera app asks if you’d like to “try the beta” when you swipe into the new Portrait position.
Our professional recommendation? Dive right in. Portrait mode might not be completely complete, but it’s still capable of producing seriously nice headshots. In case you missed it the first time around, the feature uses the iPhone 7 Plus’s two cameras in tandem — the primary 12-megapixel sensor captures the image as normal, but the second, wide-angle sensor is used to determine how far away the subject is. All of that data gets mashed up into a nine -layer depth map, providing the context needed to artfully blur out backgrounds while keeping faces and subjects closer to the phone remain crisp and intact. Apple’s goal was to build a dead-simple photography experience that yields pictures that look like they were shot on expensive SLR cameras, and for the most part, Apple’s work is very impressive.
This photo represents well the sort of quality you can expect out of Portrait mode: the focus stays locked on the face and hands, and the windows in the background are blurred pretty dramatically. Thanks to that nine-layer depth map, you can see areas where blurring is very subtle, like the top of the subject’s head and the bottom of her scarf.
You don’t need to take photos of people to get some mileage out of Portrait mode, either. Have cats prancing around? Or a sweet new mug you need to share? In my experience, as long as you’re within proper range (the app tells you when you are) and there’s enough contrast between the foreground and background, you’ll get that pleasant background blurring.
It’s when you’re in well-lit environments with lots of similar colors that Portrait mode seems to have trouble — that’s often when you’ll see edges blurred when they shouldn’t be. Just check out this photo of a cactus precariously perched on a railing. The camera didn’t have trouble differentiating between the cool blue of the pot and the trees in the background, but it obviously had trouble telling where the cactus ended and the trees began.
These disappointments are rare, though, and will probably get ironed out as people continue to put Portrait mode through its paces. Most of the big problems have been solved — now Apple just has to focus on the fine-tuning (which is obviously easier said than done). At this point, Portrait mode is still far from perfect, but there’s a lot to like about just how simple it is to use. It’s fast, it’s impressive and it’s only going to get better with time. Interested in taking it for a spin? Jump into your iPhone 7 Plus’s settings and mash that software update button — it’ll show up sooner or later.
‘Pokémon Go’ offering spooky bonuses for Halloween
If there’s one thing our (fictional) mom always told us, it’s that we shouldn’t go out walking at night with our smartphone on show. The folks at Niantic Labs feel differently, and think that poorly lit Fall nights around Halloween are the perfect time for everyone to catch some pocket monsters. The company is launching a “global in-game event” to encourage Pokémon Go players to go out and catch some spooky ‘mons.
From October 26th to November 1st, “spooky” Pokémon like Gastly, Gengar and Golbat will appear much more frequently. In addition, every monster you catch will net you double the number of candies — six, rather than the standard three. The game’s buddy system is also getting a Halloween tweak, with your buddy handing you four candies instead of one every time you walk a pre-set distance. Oh, and Professor Willow will give you two candies for every monster you give up. Best grab a scarf, it’s gonna be cold out there.
Vixole’s Matrix shoe puts an active LED display on your feet
Now that Nike’s Back to the Future-inspired high tops exist, and the famous self-lacing tech has arrived on a consumer product, even footwear is beginning to get smarter. With a little crowdfunding help, Vixole will be making its own contribution to the growing lineup of forward-thinking kicks, with its Matrix shoe. The startup’s Indiegogo campaign launched today and aims to put customizable LED displays for static or motion graphics on everyone’s feet. It’s not just for eye candy, however: The design includes an array of sensors that can adjust the visuals according to movement, GPS coordinates or even react to your playlist.
Vixole made its first announcement about the Matrix a few months back, providing mockups of its intelligent footwear and even surfacing its prototype on occasion. I met up with Ali Ma and Haidong Dong, two of the founders, to check it out and learn a bit more about their plans. This is the second footwear project for Ali, who previously launched Essential Marks, sneakers designed with LEDs circling a transparent sole. Haidong joined to help on the business side and this led the duo to take things one step further for their follow-up project.
With the help of its team of designers and engineers, the company has laid out the plans for the Vixole Matrix smart LED high top. The final design will wrap a 22ppi LED display around the rear of the shoe’s upper within injection molded thermoplastic polyurethane (TPU). This is a durable, flexible material, similar to what’s you’ll find on products like the Nike FuelBand SE.
Sensors including units to detect sound, light and bending, along with an accelerometer, gyroscope and magnetometer will be installed inside a specially designed insole. There will also be haptic sensors on board, so if you wanted you could get vibrating notifications and prompts for turn-by-turn directions. This set of features could be combined with LED blinkers on each shoe — a useful option, say, if you were riding a bike. There will even be a step tracker, which seems like a no-brainer for smart footwear.
Other potential uses could add some flare to a night on the dance floor; actively react to your skateboard stunts; or even connect to third-party apps to provide motion capture data. This is one of the reasons why the Vixole team is making the software open source. There will be a mobile app to help control and customize the illumination tech on Vixole’s shoes including the ability to capture and convert photos into displayable graphics. You’ll also be able to access the Vixole marketplace to download new designs or share your own creations.
Right now the team is at the proof of concept stage and the Indiegogo campaign will help take the product from prototype to the final market version. With all this tech on board, the estimated retail price of $345 seems reasonable enough (they’re smarter than Yeezy’s, after all), but if you take advantage of the crowd-funding deals you could score a pair for as low as $225.
Note 7 debacle forces Samsung to offer next-gen discounts in Korea
In an effort to retain Galaxy Note 7 customers in South Korea, Samsung is offering a big discount on the upcoming Galaxy S8 and Galaxy Note 8 models. The company will effectively offer 50 percent off the next-gen phone, provided that Note 7 customers upgrade to the current Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S7 Edge models. Samsung recently killed its Galaxy Note 7 smartphone because of fire and explosion problems. It initially misdiagnosed the problem as being battery-related, and issued replacement phones that were still defective.
While users in the US claim that Samsung isn’t making good on property damage caused by the Note 7, the company’s home base is no less pleased, either. Hundreds of users filed a class action suit over the defective device, Bloomberg reports. An attorney for the law firm handling the suit says it has gathered 500 Note 7 owners in just five days and said consumers are “very angry.” On top of that, a consulting firm has advised shareholders to vote against Chairman-in-waiting Jay Y. Lee from joining the board.
So far, Samsung has lost an estimated $5 billion in sales and up to $26 billion in market value. To stop disgruntled Note 7 customers at home from switching brands, Samsung is letting them join the Galaxy Upgrade program and pick up a Galaxy S7 or S7 Edge. They’ll just need to pay off half the price, either at once or by payments, and can then upgrade to the Galaxy S8 or Note 8 for free once they come out. The program will be offered until the end of November, but customers who already upgraded the Note 7 to a Galaxy S7 can apply for the new deal retroactively.
Via: Reuters
Source: Samsung Korea (translated)
Samsung’s hurried Galaxy Note 7 recall doomed the phone
You knew it was just a matter of time before some of the drama behind the death of the Galaxy Note 7 came to light, and what we’re seeing isn’t all that pretty. Wall Street Journal sources claim that Samsung’s mobile chief DJ Koh thought there was enough evidence (protrusions in the batteries from one supplier) to go ahead with the speedy initial recall. He thought it was best to do “the right thing” and start a recall, insiders say, even though there was incomplete evidence. The company didn’t want to leave people in the dark, worrying what was wrong. And while there was a debate about the seriousness of the issue (some even suspected the fires were fake), it’s not as if Koh was a lone wolf. Company heir and vice chairman Lee Jae-yong was also in favor of the hasty recall, possibly due to his push for greater transparency at a company known for its secrecy.
The company still doesn’t know what led to the Note 7’s propensity to catch fire, although both Koh and Lee are now known to have shared responsibility for cancelling the phone after facing pressure from carriers like Verizon. An unnamed executive echoes a previously mentioned theory that the battery housing might have been too small for the power pack’s capacity.
The consequences of the recall don’t just extend to Samsung’s reputation, either. The tipsters report that Samsung has delayed work on the Galaxy S8 by two weeks while it tries to pin down the nature of the Note 7’s battery woes. That’s not a huge gap, but it could lead to the company missing the S8’s originally intended launch schedule. Samsung has recently taken to introducing new Galaxy S models at Mobile World Congress in February or early March, but it may have to miss the event if it doesn’t have enough breathing room.
A spokesperson didn’t comment on the backroom reports other than to tell the WSJ that Samsung is “committed to finding the root cause” and recalling every last Note 7 still in the wild. However, it’s reasonable to expect that Samsung will take its time on the S8, even if it means missing out on potential sales. The Note 7 is already going to cost Samsung billions, and that’s before you count the damage to its reputation. The S8 has to show that Samsung is back to its usual self, and can make a top-flight phone without compromising on safety.
Via: The Verge
Source: Wall Street Journal
After Math: Let’s get nasty
It’s been quite the week for everything going to hell in a handbasket. This viscous election cycle is seriously stressing out half of Americans. Videogame voice actors are on strike, the cops are growing their facial recognition databases of US citizens, Twitter hired and fired a manager after discovering evidence of his past asshattery. And worst of all, it looks like we’re going to have a Cubs-Indians World Series, which can only be explained as a sign of the imminent apocalypse. Numbers, because how else will we measure how far we’ve fallen?
Doctors relax rules on letting babies watch screens
Ever since 1999, many pediatricians have clung to one main recommendation about kids and gadgets: you shouldn’t show screens to any child under 2 years old. However, they’ve just loosened that once-firm policy. The American Academy of Pediatrics has softened its guidelines to permit screens for the under-2 crowd in the right circumstances. If your little ones are 18 months or older, they can watch “high-quality programming” (think PBS and Sesame Workshop) so long as you’re there to help your kids understand. Any younger than that and you should limit them to video chat, the AAP says.
The new advice also comes with tips for older kids. Those between 2 and 5 years old shouldn’t use screens for more than an hour per day, and then only for carefully-screened programming. And if they’re older, it’s still important to both set “consistent limits” and make sure that device time doesn’t affect physical activity, play or sleep.
The AAP is quick to acknowledge that it’s keeping up with the times. The media world is “constantly changing,” it says. The trick is balancing technology with babies’ developmental needs. A tablet can help your children expand their budding vocabularies or learn new concepts, but they still need to be old enough to process what they’re seeing.
Via: NPR
Source: American Academy of Pediatrics
AT&T to buy Time Warner for $85.4 billion
After no small amount of anticipation, it’s official: AT&T has announced that it’s acquiring Time Warner for the equivalent of $85.4 billion in cash and stock. The move gives one of the US’ largest telecoms control over some of the biggest names in movies and TV, including HBO, Turner and Warner Bros. That includes rights to broadcast MLB, NBA and NCAA March Madness games, we’d add. If you ask AT&T, this is a “perfect match” that mates top-tier content with a ton of distribution points. It can easily deliver quality shows over the internet (particularly on mobile), conventional TV or in theaters — it won’t have to jump through hoops to license material for playback on your platform of choice.
Developing…
Source: AT&T
The bottom line: Our quick verdict on the Lenovo Yoga Book
There’s nothing quite like the Lenovo Yoga Book. It’s a small, lightweight clamshell device running your choice of Android or Windows 10 as an OS. Take a tour of the hardware and you’ll find a 360-degree hinge, a screen and, uh, no keyboard. That’s right, instead of where the keyboard deck would be is a flat-touch sensitive surface that doubles as a digital notepad and sketchpad. It works as a keyboard too, except the buttons, as it were, are all virtual, ready to disappear when you’re done using them.
The design is nothing if not inventive, and Lenovo deserves credit for that, but it’s almost ahead of its time. That or just not very well executed. While digital artists might enjoy the doodling features, our reviewer was never able to master the keyboard. Even when she learned to type accurately, she could never do so quickly. And that’s a problem for a $500-plus device designed for being productive on the go. For that, you may as well buy, you know, a laptop.
The Morning After: Weekend Edition
Letter from the Editor
Welcome to the very first edition of The Morning After, Engadget’s revamped newsletter. First, I’d like to congratulate you for subscribing to what is undoubtedly the greatest newsletter you’ll ever read. Thanks are also in order for giving us some of your precious inbox real estate each day. You’re hearing from me, Editor in Chief Michael Gorman, because this is the Weekend Edition — in which I’ll be putting context around the most interesting and important stories we published over the past week. Come Monday at 6 AM ET, and every weekday after, the daily version will hit your inbox with summaries of the biggest stories from the previous day, delivered with Engadget’s trademark wit and insight. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s dive into the week that was…
Odds are you woke up to many of your favorite websites being nonfunctional on Friday, and you can thank the Internet of Things for the inconvenience. We’ve been sounding the alarm about the inadequate (and nonexistent) security of the IoT for some time now, and yesterday’s attacks — using a bunch of hijacked connected things to shut down one of the internet’s biggest domain name servers — shows just how dangerous that lack of security can be. It’s not hard to imagine a day when the entire internet is brought to its knees by a bunch of smart bulbs, DVRs and security cameras. While the perpetrator in this isn’t believed to be governmental, you may be surprised at who’s doing the hacking next time. In her latest column, Violet Blue says we’re in a new cold war with Russia, only now it’s about the threat of cyber war, not nuclear — and our sitting president can be counted among its victims after Putin’s people hacked Obama’s personal email account.
Of course, it’s not all doom and gloom this week, as gamers got some great news. Nintendo finally revealed its next console, the Switch, and the Engadget team has some strong (mostly positive) feelings about it. As is Nintendo’s way, when the rest of the industry zigs, it zags, and the Switch is no exception. While Sony and Microsoft’s recent efforts focus on more graphically powerful yet mostly traditional hardware, Nintendo’s newest offers something completely different: a home console that turns into a mobile one. We won’t know how good it is until its release in March, but as a child of the ’80s and ’90s within whom powerful Nintendo nostalgia resides, my interest is piqued. Nintendo could have another Wii-esque hit on its hands.
What happens when Google entirely designs its own smartphone?Review: Google Pixel and Pixel XL smartphones
After years of Nexus-themed experiments, Google’s made two great smartphones that — sadly — look a little dull. Both Pixels work as showcases for Google’s software and online service chops, and that’s where they truly shine, with an excellent camera and snappy performance thrown in for good measure. If only they were a little cheaper — and water-resistant.
‘sWiitch’ was right there for the takingNintendo’s new video-game system is here: Meet Switch
The console/handheld’s first trailer shows off some grown-up-looking hardware with no lack of peripherals and play use cases. What games are coming at launch? Well, there will be a Zelda game. How much? No idea. When? March 2017.
An Autopilot in every TeslaTesla doesn’t build cars without self-driving hardware
Thursday, Tesla said every new car it builds will be capable of driving itself without human intervention, and a new demo video shows what that looks like. With only the lightest touch to the steering wheel from its human “driver,” a Model X goes from home to office, then parks itself. Other than a few odd gaffes in the parking lot, it’s pretty impressive stuff, but even without any more hysteria-inducing accidents, it could be a while before regulations catch up with the technology.
No more keyboardsReview: Lenovo’s Yoga Book swaps the keyboard for a huge digitizer
You can’t fault Lenovo for trying something very different. Its Yoga Book does away with the keyboard altogether, swapping it for a touch-sensitive surface that pulls double duty as both keyboard and digital sketchpad. It’ll even magically pull your real-paper scribbles into the digital world. As you might guess, however, the typing experience is atrocious on the flat slate. It’s novel, but the Yoga Book isn’t reliable enough to be the go-to productivity machine.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?Your security camera is screwing up the internet
For much of Friday, internet services like Twitter, Spotify and Reddit were inaccessible, because of a DDoS attack on their DNS provider, Dyn. Not sure what those words mean? Allow us to explain the day the internet fell apart, and why the real culprit is the Internet of Things.
Not-quite-4K is still OK?Mark Cerny explains the strategy behind the PS4 Pro
If you still need to be sold on Sony’s upgraded PlayStation 4, take a look at our talk with its architect. Mark Cerny explains how the PS4 Pro will use its extra memory (to hold background tasks), and why software tricks like checkerboard rendering will help games look better even if you don’t have a brand-new 4K TV.
It’s about timeDon’t buy a new Mac in the next two weeks
Apple finally sent out invites for an event where we expect to see some new computers. At this point, everything from the MacBook Pro to the MacBook Air is painfully out of date and in need of a refresh, if not a rethinking. Rumors suggest we’ll even see some touch-sensitive OLED strips on new MBPs, so stay tuned, and remember: Don’t buy a new computer yet!
But wait, there’s more…
- By accident, scientists found a way to turn carbon dioxide into ethanol
- WikiLeaks’ latest drop reveals Barack Obama’s personal email address
- Exoskeletons, prosthetics and implants for athletes: A robot-assisted parathletes’ championship pushed the frontier of bionics even further
AIVAnet 