Garmin Forerunner 35 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Garmin

Garmin is making it easier (and cheaper) to track heart rate while running. The fitness company on Monday announced a new entry-level GPS watch with a built-in optical heart-rate sensor. At $200 (£160, AU$259), the Forerunner 35 is the company’s cheapest running watch to offer the technology.

The Forerunner 35 does all of the basics: It has GPS to track pace, distance and speed when running or biking, and doubles as a fitness tracker and basic smartwatch. The watch will measure steps, distance, calories burned, intensity minutes and sleep throughout the day, and can display notifications and music controls when connected to an iPhone or Android phone.

Garmin

Other features include auto pause, auto lap, vibration and virtual pacer (a feature that alerts you when you fall behind a set target pace). The watch also includes sport profiles for running, biking, treadmill running (which uses the accelerometer to estimate pace), walking and cardio, and will keep track of your personal records (longest run, fastest run, etc.).

The battery will last up to nine days as a watch/activity tracker, and up to 13 hours with an active GPS signal, which is two hours longer than our favorite running watch, the Forerunner 235. The watch is also waterproof up to 50 meters (about 164 feet).

The Forerunner 35 will be available toward the end of September in black, limelight, frost blue and white.

LG InstaView Side-by-Side Refrigerator Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Door-in-door with Instaview — tap the glass and see what’s inside.

LG

LG’s expanding its Instaview line of fridges once again. After debuting it on the LG Signature Refrigerator at CES, the Korean company introduced the feature on standard four- and three-door French door refrigerators. Now, at the IFA trade show here in Berlin, LG’s showing off side-by-side refrigerators with the Instaview feature.

When it was first introduced at CES, I thought the panel built in to the LG Signature Refrigerator was a tablet a la the Samsung Family Hub fridge. Instead, for better or worse, LG took a simpler approach. The panel built into the door didn’t double as a touchscreen display — it turned translucent when you knocked on it, so you could see the contents of your fridge without opening the door and wasting the cold air.

Hopefully, since side-by-side refrigerators tend to cost less than their French door cousins, these newest Instaview fridges will make the feature more accessible. The French door variety costs upwards of $4,000 in the US. We’ll update this piece as soon as we hear more about pricing and availability.

At IFA, LG’s touting the Wi-Fi Eclipse Display built into the Instaview panel — it shows the fridge and freezer temperature while giving you control options. The new side-by-side model is on display next to the previously announced dual door-in-door fridges with pocket handles and hidden access buttons.

LG didn’t generate the same buzz with the Instaview that Samsung did with the Family Hub, but with a more robust lineup and hopefully more manageable prices, it could get its creative new features into people’s homes faster.

• Check out the rest of CNET’s coverage from IFA here

Miele Blizzard CX1 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Miele stood to the side while other home appliance companies began to roll out bagless vacuums in the 1980s. The German manufacturer decided that vacuums with bags got homes cleaner, and, at the time, Markus Miele, one of its executive directors, said, “Bagless vacuum cleaning is not an option for our company.”

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Miele sucked it up Wednesday, with its announcement of the company’s first bagless vacuum, the Blizzard CX1, at the IFA 2016 trade show here in Berlin. The Blizzard is a canister vacuum with an internal mono-cyclone design, which means it relies on one tornado-like tunnel of air to trap dirt and dust as it vacuums. The debris then goes through three stages of filtration so there’s less fine dust flying out of the vacuum when you empty the canister.

At a press conference, Miele executives outlined advantages that the Blizzard’s mono-cyclone design has over a multi-cyclone vacuum, such as less noise and more effective use of power. This appeared to be a shot at Dyson, the British manufacturer known for its line of high-end, multi-cyclone vacuums.

The Blizzard will begin selling in stores in October starting at €319 (about $355, £270 or AU$473). Miele has yet to announce a specific release date for the US — and it will continue to sell vacuums with bags.

• Check out CNET’s full coverage of IFA 2016 here

2016 Chevrolet Cruze review – Roadshow

The Good The attractive and efficient 2016 Cruze brims with the latest in-car tech.

The Bad The Cruze has some trouble getting out of its own way, and there are some ergonomic quirks.

The Bottom Line Sporting an impressive technical loadout, but packing a powertrain that’s not exactly eager, Chevrolet’s massively revised 2016 Cruze is a solid middle-of-the-road choice for folks who want a solid commuter that isn’t stuck in the 20th century.

Despite the growing ubiquity of crossovers, one of America’s most tried and true segments — non-premium, small sedans — is still a major battleground. If you want to do well with a group of cars that have been on this war-torn field since your author was in kindergarten, you need to bring your A-game.

The last Chevrolet Cruze did not bring its A-game. I thought it was frumpy and not that great of a driver. The 2016 Cruze, all new for this model year, rectifies that with an impressive technological loadout, attractive looks all around and solid fuel efficiency. It’s an impressive addition to a cutthroat segment, but it falls short of being a standout.

A makeover worthy of “She’s All That”

The old Cruze was blocky and clumsy. This time around, everything’s a bit smoother, a bit slipperier, a bit more contemporary. It adopts many traits from its stablemates, like the general shape of its grille and lighting elements. The side is suitably stylized along the rocker panels and just below the belt line. It’s a whole new car, truly, and it looks good, lacking the craziness of the new Civic but possessing a bit more soul than the uninspired Corolla.

It’s impressive what a little bit of edge-smoothing will do for a car.

Nick Miotke/Roadshow

Similarly, the interior looks like Chevrolet’s designers finally woke up from a decades-long slumber. The Cruze’s innards are properly handsome, with our Premier-trim tester sporting a handsome two-tone motif that looks more expensive than it actually is. Sure, the top-layer plastics are on the hard side, and the leather isn’t Mercedes-Benz supple, but with an MSRP south of $30,000, it’s damned impressive.

The interior continues its winning streak with ample storage locations — whether you like shoving old gas receipts in the door cards, the center console or under the infotainment screen, there’s enough space to accommodate plenty of accouterments.

Space for human cargo is equally ample. Despite a faster roofline than before, there’s enough headroom for folks measuring six-foot-plus. Legroom is decent — when in the back, sitting behind a seat set up for a six-foot driver, I had about two inches of space between my knees and the seatback.

The interior also features knobs and buttons aplenty, a welcome sight for buyers not yet ready to move to a future comprised of screens alone. The climate controls feel especially premium, with temperature readouts built into the knobs.

Not all is roses and daisies with the Cruze, though. There are some weird ergonomic niggles. The manual-shifting rocker switch rests on the side of the shift knob, which is unique to Chevrolet and for a good reason (it’s not at all intuitive). The piece of trim that peeks over the top of the infotainment screen hampers my ability to touch the top part of the screen. When I have to look this hard to find fault with something, though, I’d consider it a good thing.

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Tech is the Cruze’s strong suit

The Cruze flatters its owners with an impressive array of the latest in-car technology, so long as the right options boxes are ticked. This is where the Chevrolet gains an advantage over most of the segment, offering up a mix of creature-comfort and safety systems that tech-forward buyers will appreciate.

Want to know what the weather’s like? In the event you can’t just, you know, look out the windshield, there’s an app for that.

Nick Miotke/Roadshow

Chevrolet’s 8.0-inch MyLink infotainment system (a 7.0-inch screen is standard on lower trims) feels much snappier than before, and the addition of both Apple CarPlay and Android Auto gives the Cruze an edge over the competition, save for the Elantra and Civic. It lacks a full suite of built-in connected apps, but you get some basic ones, like Pandora, and it will also read out your text messages without having to use CarPlay or Android Auto.

It makes up for that lack of apps with GM’s OnStar connectivity. Its 4G LTE antenna and Wi-Fi hotspot gave me access to the internet when my mediocre phone provider could barely get its act together. OnStar’s smartphone app uses that antenna to remotely lock, unlock and start the vehicle, which adds another level of premium feeling, although not without a paid subscription.

Sadly, there’s only one USB port up front, which means you’ll have to balance charging phones with multiple folks in the car. But a USB port in the back seat helps make up for this front seat deficiency.

This tester also came equipped with the full loadout of safety systems, by way of the $790 Driver Confidence II package. The forward collision warning was not overly sensitive, but a lack of adaptive cruise control and autonomous emergency braking is a bit of a surprise, and not a positive one. The combination of rear parking sensors and a legible backup camera makes parking a breeze, although blind zone monitoring feels a bit silly on a car this small. I would have gladly taken auto-braking over the blind spot system.

Bosch Twinguard Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

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Bosch breaks into smart home security with three new gadgets
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Bosch is refining the sense of smell on its Twinguard smoke detector with the goal of reducing false alarms. The Twinguard not only includes photoelectric smoke detectors, but senses air quality to help determine when there’s a real emergency.

When the alarm sounds, the Bosch Twinguard will send you a push notification on your phone, and it can trigger other smart devices in the Bosch Smart Home system. You could have your Philips lights blink when the smoke alarm sounds, for example.

Chris Monroe/CNET

Outside of emergency situations, the Twinguard monitors temperature, humidity and general air quality by detecting volatile organic compounds (VOCs), so it stands to be the most knowledgeable smoke detector on the market. The Nest Protect similarly offers app-enabled smarts, and both the Nest and Bosch detector distinguish between different types of smoke to help make an informed decision about when to sound the alarm. The Nest Protect, however, doesn’t monitor VOCs.

Bosch’s Twinguard is one of three new smart home products Bosch introduced today at the IFA trade show here in Berlin. The company best known for its dishwashers is clearly making a concerted push into the fully connected home. When Bosch first announced the Bosch Home Connect app, the goal was to encompass everything. Now, with a wider variety of devices, we’re starting to see that plan come to fruition.

Gadgets galore from Bosch at IFA 2016
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• Security system buying guide
• DIY security offers smarter peace of mind
• Internet-connected homes open the door to hackers

My main concern for the smoke detector is implementation. The First Alert OneLink Smoke Detector showed what can go wrong when a company throws half-baked smarts onto a safety product. The Bosch Twinguard looks to be taking a simple approach, with the app serving as a monitor and a notifier. I’ll be keen to test its responsiveness once it launches in the US.

The Twinguard will debut in parts of Europe at the beginning of 2017, though a representative promised me it would make its way to the US shortly. Expect more details on when it’ll come to the US at CES. The recommended price in Europe is €150, which converts to roughly $165, AU$225 or £13o.

• Head here for loads more new tech from CNET at IFA

Asus ZenWatch 3 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The new Asus ZenWatch 3, pictured here in rose gold.

Asus

In today’s moment of zen, meet an Android Wear watch with no less than three buttons: the Asus ZenWatch 3.

The ZenWatch 3 was announced at trade show IFA in Berlin on Wednesday. It will cost 229 euros. International pricing wasn’t initially available, but that converts to about $255, £195 and AU$340. It comes in gunmetal, silver or rose gold colours with a choice of leather or rubber straps in dark brown or a lighter beige.

This year it’s all about luxury. Gone is the large, blocky display, which has been replaced with a circular 1.39-inch AMOLED screen, displaying 287 pixels per inch, and measuring 9.95mm thick. It’s covered by gently curved Corning Gorilla Glass, which as well as protecting from scuffs and scratches gives it a more traditionally watchy feel than smartwatches with flat faces. The display is also a complete circle and doesn’t include the “flat tyre” black bar that we’ve seen in the Moto 360 and other watches.

On the screen you have a choice of more than 50 unique watch faces, some of which support widgets to show you useful information such as the current weather, the number of steps you’ve walked or missed call notifications. You change the watch face using the ZenWatch Manager app on your phone.

Where most Android Wear devices have just one or two crown buttons, the ZenWatch features a third button that can be assigned to open your favourite app. By default, for example, it opens the fitness tracker app.

Asus said the 340 mAh battery will last for up to two days, which is pretty standard compared to the Apple Watch and other smartwatches, but Asus is also doing something unique. If you want more, or you’re a heavy watch user, there’s a 200 mAh battery pack accessory that snaps on the back of the ZenWatch 3. The extra power makes the watch a little chunkier but doesn’t make it too chunky to wear.

Still not convinced? The ZenWatch 3 is one of the first smartwatches to be powered by the new Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor. It comes with a new technology called HyperCharge, which essentially takes the fast charging feature we’ve seen in phones and brings them to watches. In short, the ZenWatch 3 can be charged very fast: It takes only a 15-minute charge to replenish 60 percent of the watch’s battery life.

As with other Android Wear watches, the ZenWatch 3 carries a water resistance rating of IP67 and is compatible with both iPhones and Android phones. Google’s watch operating system isn’t our favourite, although it is slated to receive a massive update later this year.

The ZenWatch 3 is slated to arrive in the US and other countries, likely including the UK and Australia, sometime in October.

Asus ZenWatch 3 specs

• 316L-grade stainless steel
• Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 2100 processor
• IP67 water-resistance
• Android Wear software
• 512MB of RAM
• 4GB of internal storage
• 1.39-inch AMOLED screen with 400×400-pixel resolution (287ppi)
• Bluetooth 4.1
• Wi-Fi
• Curved Corning Gorilla Glass
• 340 mAh battery

Bosch OptiMUM Kitchen Machine Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The OptiMum Kitchen Machine has a built-in digital kitchen scale.

Bosch

More Bosch News

• Bosch pushes into the smart home with three new products and IFTTT
• False alarms be gone — Bosch’s smart smoke detector hopes to reduce annoyances

A good baker knows that weight, not volume, is a more precise way to measure ingredients in a recipe. Bosch wants to save that baker some counter space and time with the OptiMum Kitchen Machine, a stand mixer with a digital scale built into the base so you don’t have to move your mixing bowl to weigh out ingredients. The German appliance manufacturer introduced it Wednesday at the IFA trade show here in Berlin.

Prices for the OptiMum Kitchen Machine start at 700 euros — roughly $780, £595 or AU$1,040 converted. This is more than double the cost for the cheapest stand mixer from KitchenAid, a brand that has become synonymous with luxury stand mixers. Various models of the OptiMum will start appearing in stores in September. It’s unclear if the appliance will be available in the US.

Small countertop appliances that use digital scales have become an easy way to introduce precision, along with technology, to cooking. Smart scales such as the Perfect Bake and the Drop scale connect to apps that provide recipes, detect the weight of your ingredients and make sure you’re adding the right amounts. It’s worth noting that Drop announced it will provide Bosch the software for the appliance maker’s Series 8 connected ovens.

Unlike the smart scales, you have to use your own recipes and know how much of an ingredient you’ll need to use the OptiMum. You enter your target weight on the scale, and it counts backward as you put your ingredients in the mixing bowl. The machine also includes sensor features to help with mixing, such as automatically stopping when creams, egg whites or yeast dough reach the right consistency.

• Check out CNET’s full coverage of IFA 2016 here

Acer Swift 7 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Apple MacBook Air used to be the very pinnacle of slim laptops. But today, the 17mm-thick Air feels hefty compared with the HP Spectre (10.4mm) or Apple’s own 12-inch MacBook (13mm). Acer is joining the super-slim club with the new Swift 7, a 13.3-inch clamshell laptop that measures just 9.98mm thick. Acer says that makes the Swift 7 the first laptop to get below the one-centimeter mark.

While it’s hard at first glance to see the difference between laptops mere millimeters apart in size, the Swift 7’s black-and-gold design is especially striking. The body is machined from a single piece of aluminum, and the 13-inch display is a full HD (1,920×1,080) IPS panel, so it’ll look good even from side angles. Like the next-slimmest laptop we can think of, the HP Spectre, this isn’t a touchscreen laptop, which apparently would require a thicker display panel.

Inside, this is one of the very first laptops to be offered with Intel’s new seventh-generation Core i-series processors (sometimes known by the code name Kaby Lake), which Intel says will provide extra power for video decoding and playback, while operating more efficiently for better battery life.

Having had a chance to handle a Swift 7 recently, I can say it feels impressively thin in the hand, and gives the Spectre and other super-slim laptops some real competition.

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

Besides the Swift 7, Acer is also introducing a few other new laptops. The Swift 5 is under 15mm thick and has a 14-inch display, despite being closer in size to most 13-inch laptops. The Swift 3 is a mid-priced 14-inch laptop, about 18mm thick, with both sixth- and seventh-gen Intel CPUs. The budget-priced Swift 3 is another 14-inch laptop, but with only Intel Pentium and Celeron processor options, and a low-res display.

Exact configurations, dates and prices will vary by region, but the Swift 7 is coming to the US and Europe in October starting at $999 and €1,299 (which works out to £1106).

Acer Spin 7 Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

Last year Acer launched the R14 convertible notebook just one week after the debut of Windows 10. Now the company is building out the lineup with the new Spin series notebooks, all equipped with a 360-degree dual torque hinge that lets users alternate between four different usage modes (tablet, display, tent and laptop).

Announced this week at IFA 2016 in Berlin, the Spin 7 is the flagship model of the offering that also includes the Spin 5, Spin 3, and Spin 1. It’s equipped with Windows 10 and Continuum, a software tool that helps the OS detect what type of device the user is on and configures itself accordingly.

It’s 0.43 inch (10.98mm) thin and weighs 2.6 pounds (1.2kgs), which means it’s slightly more svelte than the Apple 12-inch MacBook. If it helps to compare that to an item close at hand, Acer tells us the Slim 7 is thinner than a standard DVD case, but the 14-inch touchscreen is wrapped in Gorilla Glass for extra durability.

Checking out the inside, the Slim 7 is powered by an Intel Core i7 processor, 8GB of memory and a 256GB solid-state drive (SSD). Notable features also include dual USB 3.1 type-C ports and a glass touchpad.

The Spin 7 will be available in October starting at $1,199 (£920 or AU$1600).

Other models also announced in the Spin family:

Spin 5

Available in October starting at $599 (£500 or AU$800)

• 16GB DDR4 memory
• 512GB SSD
• 10 hour battery
• 13.3-inch HD touchscreen
• Optional Acer Active Pen with Windows Ink
• HD Webcam with HDR imaging

Spin 3

Available in October starting at $499 (£385 or AU$665)

• 15.6-inch HD or Full HD IPS display
• 12GB DDR4 memory
• Comes with both solid-state drives (up to 256GB) and hard drives (up to 1TB)
• Backlit ergonomic keyboard
• HD webcam with HDR imaging
• 9.5-hour battery

Spin 1

Available in October starting at $249 (£190 or AU $335)

• 13-inch or 11.6-inch Full HD IPS display
• 9-hour battery
• Gorilla Glass display

Acer Predator 21X Release Date, Price and Specs – CNET

The Acer Predator 21 X is insane.

It weighs 17 pounds, or around 8 kilograms — a serious bit of heft, as we can attest from getting our hands on it at IFA here in Berlin.

It’s the world’s first laptop with a curved screen…not to mention two (2) GeForce GTX 1080 GPUs and a built-in mechanical keyboard.

A look inside the Predator 21 X’s case. So many fans. So many heatpipes.

Acer

It requires two (2) power supplies to run, and needs five (5) system fans and eight (8) heatpipes to stay cool. It holds up to 64GB of memory and five (5) storage drives at a time.

There’s a Tobii eye-tracking camera so you can aim at foes just by looking at them. (Supported ones, anyhow.)

Oh, and this laptop has four (4) speakers and two (2) subwoofers. So you can blast while you blast, of course.

The curved screen measures 21 inches diagonally. (Typically, laptops top out at 17 or 18 inches). It’s an Nvidia G-Sync screen, too.

The mechanical keyboard uses Cherry MX switches and has an RGB LED under each and every key…because who doesn’t like colors?

Lastly, I’d like to bookend this article by reminding you: The Predator 21 X weighs 17 pounds.

In short, it’s the most ridiculous gaming laptop ever conceived. It’s more powerful than our CNET Future-Proof VR Gaming Desktop, and probably weighs as much. It likely costs a good deal more.

17.6 pounds, to be precise. 8 kilograms.

Andrew Hoyle/CNET

We need one in the CNET offices yesterday. But you’ll have to wait until the first quarter of 2017 to own one.

Start packing away those pennies, people.

• See all our coverage of IFA here

It’s a monster! See Acer’s ludicrous curved-screen…
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