Microsoft unveils an ergonomic keyboard for Surface fans
Surface computers (plus the Surface Dial) aren’t all that’s new at Microsoft’s fall event. The company has quietly unveiled various Surface accessories, headlined by a Surface Ergonomic Keyboard. The wireless input device is effectively a cross between the earlier Designer Bluetooth Desktop and an ergonomic keyboard — you get a more comfortable typing feel with quiet, low-profile keys. There’s even a double-cushioned Alcantara palm rest (the same material you saw in the Signature Type Cover) that promises to be gentler on your hands even as it spruces up your desk environment. A pair of AAA batteries will power it for a full year.
There’s also backlit, minimalist (i.e., non-ergonomic) Surface Keyboard for people more concerned with desk space than wrist strain, and a Surface Mouse with a metal scroll wheel. You can even get a special version of the Surface Keyboard with a fingerprint reader to help you log into Windows 10 that much faster.
All of the new add-ons will ship November 10th, and you can pre-order them today. They’re definitely not the cheapest accessories you can buy, however. The base Surface Keyboard costs $100, and it’ll take $130 to get the ergonomic version. (There’s no price for the fingerprint keyboard as I write this.) Think of it this way, though: If you want peripherals that complement a Surface PC or just want that look and feel for a third-party system, you now have the option.
Click here to catch all the latest news from Microsoft’s big Surface event.
Source: Surface (YouTube), Microsoft (PDF)
Nissan’s latest EV conceals the hottest of hot desks
To prove the versatility of electric vehicles — and probably just for the heck of it — Nissan has transformed its workhorse e-NV200 electric van into a mobile office with a 106-mile range. UK-based design shop Studio Hardie took the humble delivery van/London taxi and loaded it up with all the slick amenities of a modern co-working space, from the minimalist leather-and-chrome desk chairs to the “barista quality” espresso machine.
Judging by the company’s buzzword-laden press announcement, Nissan sees the awkwardly named e-NV200 WORKSPACe as the future of office work — not just the future of transportation. The concept, “not only highlights the customizable potential of its electric van,” the release says, “it paints a picture of what desk-based employment could look like in the future as hot-desking and flexible working grows in popularity across the globe.”
To give digital nomads or office-free desk jockeys a comfortable place to work, Studio Hardie has built out the van’s cargo area with a fold-out desk with a touchscreen HP computer, smartphone-controlled LED lighting, a wireless phone charger, Bluetooth speakers, a micro-fridge tucked into a drawer and the aforementioned pop-up coffee machine concealed beneath a countertop. If the weather happens to be nice, there’s even a back deck that slides out from the rear bumper and a folding Brompton bike in a custom rack on the back door.
The e-NV200 gets just over 100 miles range on a charge, and Nissan says you can get up to 80 percent battery with just 30 minutes of charging. On the other hand, this is just a one-off concept, so the designers didn’t offer any estimates about how many hours of work you’ll be able to do before you need to plug in your whole office at an EV charging station.
Source: Nissan Newsroom
Nintendo expects to sell 2 million Switches in the first month
While Nintendo’s earnings didn’t look so good this quarter, President and CEO Tatsumi Kimishima apparently has a rosy outlook for the launch of his company’s next-gen Switch portable console. According to the Wall Street Journal Tokyo correspondent Takashi Mochizuki, Nintendo plans to ship 2 million Switch consoles when it goes on sale in March 2017.
Nintendo CEO says current FY financial guidance assumes 2 million units of Switch to be shipped this fiscal year ending in March
— Takashi Mochizuki (@mochi_wsj) October 26, 2016
Although we don’t have a firm March release date yet, the bulk of that 2 million figure will likely be made up of pre-order sales. For comparison’s sake, Sony had 1 million pre-orders for the PS4 and shipped another 1 million units at launch in the US alone. The original Wii was likewise a hot seller off the bat and even the Wii U moved over two million units in the US and Japan during its first six weeks in late 2012 — although Nintendo eventually fell way short of its plan to sell 100 million.
Via: Gamasutra
Source: Takashi Mochizuki/Twitter
Watchmakers think smart features will beat smartwatches
Fossil is the fourth-biggest watchmaker in the world, responsible for about 5 percent of global timepiece sales. The company produces watches for a variety of brands, including Armani, Kate Spade, Michael Kors and Skagen. This week, ahead of the holidays, all of those labels have launched traditional-looking analog watches that come with activity tracking, notification vibrations and automatic time setting. When a company feels this confident that its users want this tech, you know something’s going on. That’s because this is the moment that the future of wearables becomes a race to see how deep you can bury your geeky credentials beneath a pretty case.
Fossil’s move has been coming since March, when it pledged that it would sell more than 100 types of smartwatches ready for the 2016 holidays. The majority of these devices, including the Misfit Phase and Skagen Hagen Connected, have analog dials that connect to your smartphone, offering activity tracking and notifications. In Skagen’s case, the watch can also be used as a physical button to control functions on your phone such as triggering your camera or playing back music. It’s a style of device that apes the sort of design popularized by Withings, which has been producing hybrid-analog watches since 2014.
Of course, you may be wondering why Withings’ Steel isn’t called a smartwatch, since it does so many of the same things. The line between a smartwatch and a watch that just happens to be smart is blurry — and getting progressively blurrier each day. The conventional wisdom is that devices that hew close to the smartphone experience — think Samsung’s Gear range, the Apple Watch or the Moto 360 — are smartwatches. That narrow definition excludes devices that lack a high-res display but otherwise do a similar job, like Garmin’s Fenix and the Pebble, surely the original gangster of the category. But that seems like a fair dividing line, with less-sophisticated devices falling into the more generic category of wearables or fitness trackers.
It looks as if customers aren’t too enamored with the idea of smartwatches, which offer a wide variety of features for little money. Perhaps it’s because they’re both highly power intensive and mostly operate as a companion device to your smartphone. IDC’s numbers bear this out, with only 2.7 million smartwatches shipping in the most recent quarter, of which the Apple Watch took the lion’s share of the sales. We’re in a lull in the device cycle, sure, but it seems crazy that Garmin, Samsung, Lenovo and Pebble — the rest of the top five — could only manage 1.2 million sales combined. By way of comparison, IDC believes that 41.8 million “regular” watches will be sold in 2016.
It’s here, in the gray zone between traditional watches and smartwatches, where companies like Fossil and Withings are hoping to make a killing. These companies can promise fashionable watches that don’t look geeky, are simple to operate and offer the core benefit of smartwatches: fitness tracking. Even Apple, which originally pitched its watch as a universal tool that could run apps like your smartphone, has had to concede that fitness tracking is the main driver of its sales. Sure, the Apple Watch is the highest-selling wearable, and that’s nothing to be sniffed at. But notice how the second-generation watch is marketed compared with the first, with an emphasis on helping people be fitter, healthier and more active.
We can also see this in the bleeding edge of smartwatch design, which has had to take several big steps backward in order to attract customers. Whereas the first generation of Android Wear devices were predominantly rectangular and futuristic, they’re now virtually indistinguishable from traditional timepieces. That’s not to mention that potentially as few as 100,000 Android Wear devices were sold in the past three months. It seems more obvious than ever that if a watch brand wants to go smart, it’ll have to do so by hiding its technological prowess from the user.
Video games are more important than ever
When Bob Dylan won the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, it shocked the humanitarian world. What’s more, Dylan himself hasn’t behaved like a traditional Nobel winner: he hasn’t commented on the honor and has yet to give an acceptance speech. At least one member of the Nobel panel has called Dylan’s silence “rude and arrogant,” and the public has been reminded that if he doesn’t give a lecture within six months, he won’t receive the $900,000 prize money. It’s a new kind of strange, in-fighting scandal for the Nobel community.
However, it’s not surprising. Selecting Dylan as a Nobel laureate may be contentious, but it’s mostly a sign of growth for intellectual society — at least in Literature, no one is off-limits, not even mumbling masters of wordplay and songwriting. Growing pains are expected as the world of mainstream politics, activism and academia is suddenly forced to consider the potential of new industries, and vice versa.
And songwriting might just be the beginning. With the growing accessibility of high-end living-room consoles and virtual reality headsets, it’s easy to imagine a video game on a list of Nobel nominees in the near future. Nowhere was that more apparent than at IndieCade 2016, an annual festival celebrating independent video games held in Los Angeles, California.
“Bob Dylan is an iconic cultural hero because he’s transcended his language — he’s actually in a more unique situation than, let’s say, a video game, because the video game has the ability to immediately be on your computer, be pretty quickly localized and then become your personal experience,” said Navid Khonsari, creator of 1979 Revolution: Black Friday, a powerful narrative-driven adventure game that puts players in the shoes of a photojournalist during the Iranian Revolution. “So I think that there’s great, great potential and possibility [for a game to win a Nobel].”
In the middle of a bustling demo room at IndieCade, Khonsari discussed how 1979 Revolution was his story, even though he was a child during the actual political upheaval. Khonsari lived in Iran until he was 11 and in between motion-capture sessions and coding marathons, he sprinkled the game with grainy home movies of his family in the country. As much as 1979 Revolution is an attempt to humanize an uprising that forever changed Iranian society, its story remains near to Khonsari’s heart, almost as if he’s still trying to explain the revolution to his 10-year-old self.
It’s a personally relevant tale with an eye on broader social impact, much like celebrated books 100 Years of Solitude or The Grapes of Wrath (both Gabriel García Márquez and John Steinbeck were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature).
Khonsari spent years working for big-budget AAA studios, including six years at Rockstar Games where he crafted experiences including Grand Theft Auto III, San Andreas and Vice City, Red Dead Revolver and the Max Payne games. After finishing work on one of the Grand Theft Auto titles, Khonsari returned to Iran and spoke with people living there about their perspective of life in the United States. Their responses shocked him.
One woman based her views of life in the US on one of his titles, Vice City — a game where players can drive around, go shopping and listen to the music they choose, whenever they want. There’s an inherent freedom in the game’s sandbox design. It excited and enraptured this woman.
This conversation was a turning point for Khonsari and his view of video games’ role in social change.
“I was like, shit,” he said. “This has some serious impact. Far greater than films, far greater than books. This is the most powerful tool that we actually have out there and we’re not engaging with it in the [best] way that we could.”
One way that Khonsari believes video games can infiltrate mainstream social change is via virtual reality. VR can create a more immediate, intimate and powerful experience, he said.
“With a combination of virtual reality, which I think is really interesting, augmented reality — the ability to have influences in a collection of work that manifests itself to actually provide change is very, very strong, and more importantly, can have an appeal and an impact on an international audience,” Khonsari said.
We Are Chicago, Culture Shock Games
He’s not alone in this belief that VR and AR can change the public perception of video games. Cynthia Miller is the designer of We Are Chicago, a narrative-driven adventure game about real life on the south side of Chicago — gang violence, economic insecurity and all.
“Because of the way our brains are wired, being put in the virtual reality environment I think has a lot of impact on people,” Miller said. “I think that’s helping our case with social games, empathy games. And as more games come out talking about immigration or issues with abusive relationships and stuff like that — I’ve heard people talking about working on these games — and as these games come out, I think more people will understand it as an art form that can be entertaining, but also can change the world.”
We Are Chicago was part of the Gaming for Everyone exhibit at IndieCade 2016, where it was surrounded by other titles and organizations focused on influencing social change or supporting equality in the gaming industry.
Another title in the Gaming for Everyone exhibit was Blue Cat, a student project that puts players in the paws of a house cat named Blue who lives with Rose, an older woman suffering through a dark time of depression. It’s based on Pablo Picasso’s Blue Period, which was followed by his more influential and famous Rose Period, creator Simone Castagna said.
“Those two people seem so different; it’s completely different art styles, but they’re part of the same person,” she explained.
Blue Cat, Simone Castagna
Blue Cat isn’t only influenced by Picasso and classic art. It’s a personal story for Castagna — a way of working through real, tragic things that happened in her life. Just as We Are Chicago is based on interviews with people in the city and 1979 Revolution puts a human face on a massive upheaval, Blue Cat tells a deeper, honest and vulnerable story about the limits of human strength.
“My mother was suffering from schizophrenia and she seemed to regret a lot of her life,” Castagna said. “We had a very difficult time, we were very, very poor. And when the schizophrenia hit – the main character in this, she behaved very similarly. Repetitive actions. I guess she already thought of herself as dead. And unfortunately, she did end up committing suicide.”
Blue Cat is personal to Castagna but it offers a clear message for anyone who picks up the controller. The game manufactures empathy for someone who is giving up on life, live on the screen — for some players, it’s the first time they encounter mental illness in such a direct way. It can be an eye-opening experience.
It’s also soothing for Castagna herself. She and a small team made Blue Cat while they were finishing up school, but she’s now just left a job at Disney as a technical game designer and she’s considering whether to take a chance on developing Blue Cat full-time. She doesn’t want to re-enter corporate life, but there are drastic challenges in securing funding for full-time independent development.
“This game was me dealing with how I wish she could have forgiven herself, but also how I need to forgive myself for what I couldn’t change about her,” Castagna said. “Basically, the greatest gift that I could give myself and her legacy, is by trying to keep pushing forward and really living the best way that I can as a human, what I consider a human to be. And I think she would be proud of that.”
Blue Cat, Simone Castagna
IndieCade was packed with games tackling social issues or attempting to establish empathy with players, even outside of the Gaming for Everyone exhibit. Joining 1979 Revolution as a nominee in the IndieCade Festival Awards was Killbox, a simple yet poignant game about the dehumanizing aspects of drone warfare.
“People are starting to realize that you can use games for more than entertainment,” Killbox programmer Albert Elwin said.
Elwin didn’t think much about UAV warfare before starting work on Killbox, but its development and the research involved revealed to him “the horrific things that have gone on and are going on today,” he said. After this experience, he believes that video games will absolutely reach a point of serious consideration in mainstream conversations — and even win a Nobel prize — some time soon.
“They’ll definitely reach that point,” Elwin said. “I’m not entirely sure when — it’s going to be, I’d say, at least 10 years, but it could be a lot more than that. It takes a long time for people to kind of — you need to get through all the generations of people, to get to the point where people have actually grown up with games and know what they are and be critical about them.”
In terms of approach, not much separates the creators of video games like 1979 Revolution, Blue Cat, Killbox or We Are Chicago and the author of a celebrated novel, book of poetry or portfolio of songs. The tools are different, but the message is clear.
Killbox, Biome Collective
“I’m not saying games can provide world peace because there’s a lot of other parts that need to move, but they can actually start a conversation that goes beyond the single dimension of how countries, regions, people, politics and conflicts are being portrayed in single, five-minute news pieces that generalize an entire nation or group of people,” Khonsari said.
In fact, 1979 Revolution is already getting attention from at least one major, traditional humanitarian organization: the United Nations. On top of being adopted in schools in the United States, Australia, Canada and Norway, 1979 Revolution will feature in a UN-commissioned paper as a case study on conflict resolution in digital experiences, written by teacher Paul Darvasi. Darvasi will present the paper to UNESCO, the UN’s educational, scientific and cultural organization, in the near future.
For Castagna, the creator of Blue Cat, nothing separates video games from any other art form. They’re created with the wider world — or even deeply personal experiences — in mind.
“I think that art is vulnerability,” she said. “In my opinion, one of the things that’s keeping us from growing faster is that we aren’t vulnerable with each other. I think somebody has to take that risk.”
23andMe stops work on advanced gene sequencing
The team at 23andMe is dialing back some of its grander plans for DNA analysis. Co-founder Anne Wojcicki has confirmed to BuzzFeed News that her company has stopped working on next-generation sequencing that would reveal much more about your genes, such as the potential for some diseases. The executive is quick to stress that this isn’t due to financial or regulatory trouble — rather, it’s a question of whether or not that data is useful enough to warrant 23andMe stretching itself thin at this point. The firm would rather focus on its “core business” right now, Wojcicki says.
The market for those next-gen tests is still in its “infancy,” she points out.
It’s true that 23andMe doesn’t have too much to worry about in the near future. Rivals who are betting on advanced sequencing, such as Color Genomics, Helix and Veritas Genetics, are only just getting started. Whether or not they succeed is still up in the air, and 23andMe hasn’t had trouble finding interest among scientists wanting to use its genetic data for medical research. There’s more of a concern for its long-term future: what if that next-gen data becomes extremely useful? BuzzFeed understands that 23andMe let go of key scientists as part of its strategy shift, and it might take a while to get back up to speed if the company needs to step up its sequencing game.
Source: BuzzFeed News
Apple delays AirPod launch beyond October
We hope you weren’t dead set on getting a pair of AirPods in the immediate future. Apple tells our TechCrunch colleagues that it’s delaying the launch of its self-branded Bluetooth earbuds past their original late October launch window. The company needs a “little more time” to make them ready for your ears, according to a spokesperson. It’s not clear what prompted the last-minute move, but early reviewers have occasionally noticed bugs — it may just be a question of polish.
You don’t strictly need AirPods if you just want some of the benefits of Apple’s W1 chip. The company is already shipping Beats headphones that take advantage of the hardware’s fast pairing with iOS devices. However, you will miss out on the clever Siri integration, not to mention a charging box that gives you extra battery life without some of the usual hassles of external batteries. We’d rather that companies ship late than deliver buggy products, but that won’t make you feel any better if you were really hoping to give the AirPods a try.
Source: TechCrunch
Native Union made a USB hub that blends into your home
If you’re reading this, chances are you’re a gadget freak and may need to recharge multiple devices on a daily basis. That’s when you’re greeted by a pile of messy cables plugged into a dull-looking and maybe under-powered USB hub. Cable boxes may hide the ugliness, but they’re bulky and don’t actually solve the issue. Not one to admit defeat, Native Union — the mad folks behind the marble iPhone case — came up with the ultimate solution: a stylish, cylindrical USB hub dubbed Eclipse. On the outside, it looks like a piece of home decor thanks to its wooden top, but it’s really the inside that got our attention: as you touch the top gently, the main body slowly rises up to let you uncoil the cables tucked inside, while the base emits a subtle halo for night-time usage. It’s rather mesmerizing to watch.
The Eclipse offers three standard USB ports — one of which can be flipped to USB-C — which total up to 7.8A of current, and each standard port can go up to 2.4A while the USB-C port maxes out at 3A. There’s no Quick Charge 2.0 or 3.0 magic here (so the voltage stays at 5V), but the high current output is already plentiful for office hour or night time charging. And don’t worry, all the essential electrical protection mechanisms are in place. The device itself supports 110-240V variable voltage input so you can use it anywhere around the world, and it’s attached to a 4-foot long power cable with an electrical plug of your choice in the Kickstarter campaign.
While Native Union makes its own USB cables, the Eclipse is designed to house any cable that are up to 8-foot long. All you have to do is plug one end into the ports on the inside, then wrap each cable around one of the three slots on the cable management part, pop the part back into the cylinder and you’re good to go. To grab a cable, simply tap the top, let the body rise (powered by a motor), unwind your desired cable, and then tap the top again to let it slowly sink back down. This works even if you choose to hang the Eclipse on the wall — because it’s that good-looking — using the bundled wall mount. There’s a 4mm gap between the outer case and the wooden top, which should let most types of USB cables go through.
The Eclipse is already proving to be quite popular on Kickstarter, as it reached its $50,000 goal within the first couple of hours after launch. For those who don’t mind waiting until April 2017 for delivery, early birds can grab an Eclipse for $49 while everyone else will have to pay $50 — which is still a bargain considering that it’ll retail for $80 next year.
Source: Kickstarter
Comcast sues Nashville over law that helps Google Fiber
The Google Fiber team isn’t having a good week. Comcast has filed a lawsuit against Nashville in a bid to overturn a city law, One Touch Make Ready, that was primarily designed to help speed Google’s fiber optic rollout. Much as with an AT&T lawsuit filed in September, Comcast maintains that AT&T-owned poles fall under the jurisdiction of the FCC, not the city — Nashville can’t let internet providers add their own wires without having AT&T move wires first, the cable giant says. The suit also claims that the city’s Metro Council isn’t allowed to regulate poles owned by Nashville Electric Service, and that the law violates Comcast’s contracts with both pole owners.
Comcast insists that this isn’t about protecting its market dominance. It’s about the cableco’s ability to oversee its network, “customer relationships and public safety,” according to the company’s Andy Macke. Google and other internet providers could theoretically cause damage or otherwise interfere with existing service. In the lawsuit, Comcast adds that One Touch Make Ready is “so intrusive” that Metro Nashville exempted its own poles from the new rule.
To no one’s surprise, Nashville isn’t taking the legal action lying down. Mayor Megan Barry tells the Tennessean that the law has already been vetted “in the court of public opinion,” and that the city “overwhelmingly supports” the measure. As it stands, Comcast’s argument doesn’t entirely hold water. The company only just started deploying gigabit internet in Nashville, and dismantling One Touch Make Ready would force Google to wait months per cable before it could go ahead. Comcast will clearly benefit from the lawsuit by delaying Google Fiber and snapping up customers that would otherwise have considered an alternative.
Via: Ars Technica
Source: The Tennessean
Apple Delays AirPods, October Launch No Longer Happening
When Apple debuted its AirPods in September, the company said the wireless earbuds would launch in late October. Now that it’s late October, people have been wondering if a release is imminent, but as it turns out, the AirPods are delayed.
Apple today told TechCrunch that it needs “a little more time” before the AirPods are ready for a public release, without specifying the reason behind the delay.
“The early response to AirPods has been incredible. We don’t believe in shipping a product before it’s ready, and we need a little more time before AirPods are ready for our customers,” an Apple spokesperson said to TechCrunch.
Apple did not provide TechCrunch with updated launch information, so it is no longer clear when the AirPods will be available for purchase.
AirPods are Apple’s premium headphone solution for the iPhone 7 and the iPhone 7 Plus, which do not include a headphone jack. AirPods, powered by Bluetooth and an Apple-designed W1 chip, are entirely wireless with no cords between them.
They include advanced features like infrared sensors to detect when they’re in the ear, beam forming microphones to reduce external noise, and accelerometers to respond to touch gestures.
AirPods have been in the hands of reviewers since September and have garnered largely positive reviews for the fit, the features, the simple setup, and the easy recharging.
Tag: AirPods
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