Wednesday, July 31, 2013
UK government considering fines for drivers wearing Google Glass
Wondering what West Virginia and Britain have in common? This. After hearing that a bill in WV would outlaw Google Glass for motorists in the state, a new report from Stuff suggests that the United Kingdom is considering something comparable. A Department for Transport spokesperson was quoted as saying the following:
"We are aware of the impending rollout of Google Glass and are in discussion with the Police to ensure that individuals do not use this technology while driving. It is important that drivers give their full attention to the road when they are behind the wheel and do not behave in a way that stops them from observing what is happening on the road."
He went on to affirm that a range of penalties already exist in order to punish drivers who aren't "paying proper attention to the road," and while a law has yet to be passed targetting Glass specifically, it certainly sounds as if that type of modification is on the table. Silver lining? North Korea has yet to issue a similarly depressing condemnation of the headset.
Filed under: Transportation, Wearables, Google
Via: Cult of Android
Source: Stuff
Source: Engadget RSS Feed http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/31/uk-government-fines-drivers-wearing-google-glass/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget
Xiaomi unveils Red Rice smartphone in China: $130 for 720p and a quad-core CPU
Xiaomi's talk about doubling smartphone sales over last year sounded a tad ambitious, but it turns out it had a secret weapon. The company just announced the Red Rice smartphone, a pretty decently spec'd model priced at a mere 799 yuan ($130). For that pittance, Chinese buyers will get quite a bit: a quad-core MediaTek CPU, 4.7-inch 720p screen (312 ppi) with Gorilla Glass 2, 1GB RAM, 4GB storage, China Mobile's TD-SCDMA 3G, dual-sim / dual standby capability, an 8-megapixel rear camera and Xiaomi's MIUI-flavored Android. Though it's lacking the WCDMA-3G used by other Chinese networks, China Mobile's 70 percent market share should give Xiaomi more than enough users to hit its targets, especially at that price.
Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile
Source: Engadget Chinese (translated)
Source: Engadget RSS Feed http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/31/xiaomi-unveils-the-red-rice-smartphone/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget
Yet Another Smartwatch Joins The Fight And This One's “Hot”
Pebble not meeting your needs? The Basis knows just a little too much about you for your comfort? Is the Metawatch too meta?
Well then meet the Hot Watch, out of Dallas. The company just launched the product on Kickstarter, and though the campaign is mostly bull shit (with arguments like: “your phone is too expensive to risk taking out of your pocket”), the product seems to be pretty fly for a new guy… in the smartwatch space. I’m funny, dammit. Laugh!
Anyways, the Hot Watch claims to be different from any of its competitors by offering more full-featured functionality when it comes to making calls, sending and receiving messages and emails, and checking up on your social world.
Like the Pebble, the Hot Watch has a 1.26-inch E-paper multi-touch projected capacitive display from Sharp, with a Cortex M3 processor running the show and a secondary DSP processor to handle things like Bluetooth, call control and various audio features. It uses Bluetooth 4.0 to connect to any Bluetooth-enabled phone, but the founders say it works best with Android and iOS phones.
You’ll also find an accelerometer, gyroscope, pedometer and vibration motor in there, and if that weren’t enough, the Hot Watch is water-resistant. Plus, it can detect when your phone is out of reach and will send you alerts that it may be lost or stolen.
But perhaps more interesting than the specs themselves is the fact that the Hot Watch allows for private calling. When you hold the Hot Watch up to your ear, the cup of your hand as it naturally holds up the watch will amplify the call into your ear.
This allows for entirely private calling, the same way it would be on a smartphone. Of course, the Hot Watch covers all the bases when it comes to calling functionality, allowing you to use speakerphone as well. Users can also receive and reply to messages, social feeds, and emails.
Also like the Pebble, the Hot Watch comes with customizable watch faces, as well as an SDK for third-party developers who want to build snazzy apps for the forthcoming watch.
The Hot Watch also has a number of gestures for answering calls, rejecting them, dialing, muting, ending a call, or even calling your favorite number. In fact, the sensors built in can detect when you’ve fallen down and will dial an emergency number if you haven’t responded in 30 seconds.
Plus, there are Hot Gestures that let you get straight to a feature from the lockscreen. For example, write a D on the screen and go directly from the lock screen to the dial menu.
The Hot Watch has just launched its Kickstarter campaign and already received $42,000 of its $150,000 goal. Head on over to the Kickstarter page to check it out.
It’s getting hot in here, so put down all your phones.
Source: TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/hSuHtewhyck/
ASUS MeMo Pad HD 7 review: a budget tablet that punches above its weight
To some extent, ASUS is a victim of its own success: it gave the budget tablet category a boost with the original Nexus 7, and it now faces a legion of competitors in that space. The company is taking a two-step approach to maintaining its relevance. The new Nexus 7 tackles the higher end, with top-tier specs that include a 1080p display and wireless charging. Right now, though, we're more interested in ASUS' low-end solution, the MeMo Pad HD 7. While it's one of the cheaper name-brand tablets at $150, it promises some of the quality we typically expect from more expensive products. But is the HD 7 good enough to fend off other entry-level tablets? And can it attract customers who'd be willing to pay the premium for a new Nexus 7'? Let's find out.
Source: Engadget RSS Feed http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/31/asus-memo-pad-hd-7-review/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget
ActiveReplay's Trace Wants To Bring Quantified Self Tech To Action Sports For Players And Spectators
New Kickstarter project Trace is like a Fitbit for your extreme sports needs, allowing people who skate, surf, snowboard and ski to track a lot more than just time, distance and pace while participating in the sport they love. The Trace is the latest from ActiveReplay, a company that created AlpineReplay, an app and network for skiers to track and share their stats on the mountain.
Both AlpineReplay and the Trace are the brainchildren of Dr. Anatole Loshkin, one of the founders of GPS company Magellan, and his team of seven engineers based out of Hunting Beach, CA. The waterproof and shockproof Trace is a small cylinder, roughly the size of a Reese Peanut Butter Cup, which can affix to your board using a separate mount (and it’s detachable so that you can use it on multiple boards in multiple sports).
It’s designed to gather data including speed, distance, jump height and rotation, and has specialized free apps on iOS and Android for surf, skate and snow sports. The apps not only collect your data and give you a history you can check at any time, but add in a social element, allowing you to share that info with other athletes in your field. Through repeated use, ActiveReplay says they’ll be identify more and more tricks, letting them know exactly when a user lands a kickflip, for instance, or a 360, etc.
I spoke to ActiveReplay VP of Products David Loshkin, who himself has a background in applied mathematics from Harvard and has been writing a lot of the code for ActiveReplay, and whose personal interest in and passion for surfing, skating and snowboarding drove a lot of the product direction for ActiveReplay.
“If you’re a biker or a hardcore runner you have all these really cool gadgets to tell you your mile splits, heart rate and so forth,” he said. “I grew up skiing and snowboarding, and surfing and skating, and none of this exists for those sports, even though I think the information is way cooler. You’re doing complicated tricks where the board is spinning in all sorts of directions around you, you’re getting air time, you’re not just going in a straight line. This is a product I’ve always wanted, and there’s no reason at this point why surfing can’t be measured, why I can’t know how many waves I’ve caught for the year, for the month, or for just that session.”
The Trace is definitely cool, but is it something that can scale? Action sports are already more limited in appeal than general fitness activities like biking and run, after all, and only a small portion of people who participate in those sports track their activity with a dedicated device. But Loshkin argues that there’s a very big market for Trace, and notes that huge brands like Red Bull and ABC invest a lot in action sports, and they make up a good chunk of marquee broadcast events like the Winter Olympics.
“There are two sides: There’s the athlete’s side, and we feel that this is definitely going to change everything for surfers and skaters and stuff, but there’s also that spectator side,” he said. “When Tony Hawk says that he did a tre flip for example, my friends don’t know what a tre flip is, but that trick could instantly populate on the screen and you could instantly know that that’s one rotation in the x-axis and one rotation in the y-axis, and we could show that with cool graphics.”
The ActiveReplay Trace campaign is seeking $150,000 to get the device to mass production-ready state, with funding set to close in September and a ship date of January for the first batch of devices. The Trace starts at $99 for an early-bird pledge, and the company is being smart and staging batches so that they only have to manage fairly small volume shipments with each. Dr. Anatole Loshkin has lots of experience shipping hardware at Magellan, and clearly knows that promising too much too quickly is a pitfall to be avoided with hardware startups.
As a former (very) amateur skateboarder, I’m very interested in the kind of data the Trace can gather and report. Action sports may have a smaller user base than more broad activities like running, but it’s not as small as you might think, and it’s also a much more dedicated and invested group, so something like this makes a lot of logical sense for that market.
Source: TechCrunch http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/pWi8GAQD8M4/
Commercial Break: an app that tells you exactly when the ads are over
When we're raiding the fridge during a Vikings game, what'd be nice is a push notification just before Adrian Peterson runs into the end zone. Seeing as that's probably not feasible given current tech, we'll settle for an iOS app that alerts us when a timeout or commercial is over. Commercial Break was designed to do just that: you tell it what channel you're watching and it uses DSP and some algorithms to analyze audio and video cues, delivering a push notification to your mobile device once what you were watching comes back.
As of right now, it's in public beta with 10 compatible channels in New York City: ABC, CBS, CNN, ESPN, ESPN2, FOX, NBC, TNT, TBS and USA. Outside of the Big Apple, CNN, ESPN and ESPN2 are compatible nationwide, with a few of these channels also available to others along the East Coast. The developers said that once the test run is over, they plan to expand to other markets and port the app to Android. We just wish it worked with AMC too -- missing any of Heisenberg's return because of a fried chicken craving would be tragic.
Filed under: Cellphones, Home Entertainment, HD, Mobile
Source: Commercial Break
Source: Engadget RSS Feed http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/31/commercial-break-app-beta/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget
Hey, Microsoft Office is out for Android now, too.
Hey, Microsoft Office is out for Android now, too. Now you can work even more. It's not optimized for tablets, though, so stick to the Office web apps if some deranged kidnapper is forcing you to work on a tablet. [Google Play]
Source: Gizmodo http://gizmodo.com/hey-microsoft-office-is-out-for-android-now-too-now-974544355
Microsoft brings Office Mobile to Android smartphones
The once-mythical Office Mobile for iPhone has been available for a while, but what about that rumored Android version? As of today, it's equally real: Microsoft has launched Office Mobile for Android. Its cloud-focused approach to editing Excel, PowerPoint and Word documents will be familiar to those who've tried the iOS release, including SkyDrive storage support. What differences exist are there primarily to accommodate Google's Holo interface guidelines -- as on iOS, there's no tablet-native interface. The pricing certainly hasn't changed. While the core app is free, you'll need an Office 365 subscription to start working.
Filed under: Cellphones, Internet, Software, Mobile, Microsoft
Source: Google Play
Source: Engadget RSS Feed http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/31/office-mobile-for-android/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget
Microsoft Office for Android now available, but not for tablets
Microsoft is extending its Office mobile software to Android this week, bringing basic editing to smartphones running Android 4.0 or higher. Following the release of Office for iPhone, the Android variant is almost identical in what it provides and its requirements. You'll need to sign into the application using an Office 365 subscription to view or edit documents, and Microsoft isn't providing a standalone or free version.
Much like the iPhone version, Office for Android includes a recent documents tab and access to create Word and Excel documents. Microsoft is optimising the Word, Excel, and PowerPoint apps within this application for phones. There's no plans for an Android tablet version, and Microsoft is recommending users make use...
Source: The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2013/7/31/4571912/microsoft-office-for-android-features-screenshots
Quip: a word processor built for the mobile generation
The humble word processor is a pillar of continuity, in a maddening world of change. Or rather it was. Quip is a the latest app that hopes to drag the old-boy of DTP kicking and screaming into the mobile generation. If that sounds like potential hot-talk, then know that the project is a collaboration between former Facebook CTO Bret Taylor and founder of Google App Engine, Kevin Gibbs. What happens when these two re-write the writing tool? You get docs that adapt to the screen you're working on, a slew of collaboration tools (in app messaging, change notifications, image sharing and more,) plus all the usual cloud feature an app of the present day demands -- such as work offline, sync when connected. If anything, perhaps it's a little too modern, with one big lack: no support for Word docs in either direction. Quip can only export PDFs, but will preserve formatting, letting you cut-and-past your way around that minor bump in the road. How much for the word processing revolution? Free for personal use, or $12 per month if you're in business. It's iOS and desktop only at the minute, but the ink is just about to dry on an Android version any time now.
Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Quip blog
Source: Engadget RSS Feed http://www.engadget.com/2013/07/31/quip-mobile-word-processorn/?utm_medium=feed&utm_source=Feed_Classic&utm_campaign=Engadget