Hasta La Gadget!

Recently you might have heard how Essential customers might be facing a phishing attack after there were reports that a few customers were receiving emails from the company asking them for additional verifying information about their orders. Given that this almost never happens, it did seem a bit suspicious even though the emails did seem to come from Essential themselves.

The good news is that this does not appear to be a phishing scam, but rather a little mix up on Essential’s part in which the company’s founder Andy Rubin has since posted an apology on their website. “Yesterday, we made an error in our customer care function that resulted in personal information from approximately 70 customers being shared with a small group of other customers. We have disabled the misconfigured account and have taken steps internally to add safeguards against this happening again in the future.”

Rubin goes on to add that customers who have been impacted by this will be given a one year subscription to LifeLock. “We sincerely apologize for our error and will be offering the impacted customers one year of LifeLock. We will also continue to invest more in our infrastructure and customer care, which will only be more important as we grow.”

The Essential smartphone has recently started to ship out to customers and while there are many smartphones in the market today, what makes the Essential particularly interesting is that it was created by Android’s Andy Rubin, which does carry some weight. Whether or not it’ll be able to compete with the likes of other Android phones remains to be seen.

Andy Rubin Apologizes For Essential Email Snafu , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Image credit – Tom Buehler/MIT CSAIL

If there is one thing that separates humans from robots is context. As humans we understand context and subtext, where if we drop something on the ground, we can tell a friend to “pick it up” and where our friend will know what “it” is. Robots unfortunately for the most part still lack contextual awareness, but that’s something researchers are trying to instill.

Recently researchers at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT have put out a paper in which they discuss teaching robots contextual commands, where robots will be aware of objects and the environment they are in so that users won’t need to be so specific when issuing commands.

According to CSAIL postdoc Rohan Paul, who is one of the lead authors of the paper, “Where humans understand the world as a collection of objects and people and abstract concepts, machines view it as pixels, point-clouds, and 3-D maps generated from sensors. This semantic gap means that, for robots to understand what we want them to do, they need a much richer representation of what we do and say.”

As it stands there are plenty of companies working towards making AI more contextually aware. For example with Google Translate, Google has worked at making its translation process take into account the context of the sentence as opposed to literally translating word for word.

Researchers Teach AI To Understand Contextual Commands , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

DSLRs take great photos, but the only drawback to the design of DSLR cameras is that even the smaller models can be rather bulky. This is versus mirrorless cameras which tend to offer up similar, if not sometimes better performance but in a smaller and more manageable package.

If you are in the market for a new camera that you can change lenses with but don’t want to deal with the bulk, Olympus has recently announced their latest mirrorless in the form of the OM-D E-M10 Mark III, which as the name suggests is basically the successor to the OM-D E-M10 Mark II which was launched back in 2015. Given that two years has passed since the launch, we guess a successor was to be expected.

For the most part the Mark III doesn’t seem like too huge of an upgrade over the Mark II, but it will come with more “modern” features for photographers who want a decent and affordable camera. For starters we’re looking at an upgrade in video to 4K, a five-axis image stabilization feature, increased ISO from 1,600 to 6,400, and a 121-point autofocus system. It will also see the addition of the TruePic VIII image processing engine borrowed from the E-M1 Mark II.

If you don’t own the Mark II then the Mark III seems like it could be a good buy, especially with a body-only price starting at $650. Alternatively it will also be sold with a 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6 and will be available this coming September.

Olympus OM-D E-M10 Mark III Camera Announced , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

It hasn’t been too long since Google announced the availability of Android 8.0 Oreo, but it looks like Google is wasting no time on the next generation of Android. According to reports it seems that Google has already started work on the next build of Android, which presumably will be known as Android P.

In a report from XDA, it has been noted that Google has recently opened up a new tag in the Android Open Source Project called “master-p”. While it was not explicitly mentioned, this has led to speculation that Google has already started work on Android P. It also seems that Google has started to test out Android P on devices like the Google Pixel and Pixel XL.

However like we said, we cannot confirm anything yet since Google has yet to officially announce or comment on it, but we suppose it isn’t that much of a stretch to think that Google has already started to plan the next major Android update. It should be noted that Android O’s developer preview was actually released earlier this year, so assuming Android P’s developer preview will be released around the same time next year, it makes sense that Google needs to start working on it.

It is too early to tell what kind of features or changes Android P will be bringing to the table, but this is a development that we’ll definitely be following.

Google Appears To Have Begun Working On Android P Already , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

When you think of smart and connected homes, maybe you might think of devices like the Hue smart lightbulbs from Philips. Now if you’ve been considering equipping your home with these devices, you’ll be pleased to learn that Philips has recently announced that they have updated the Hue lineup with more bundle options that are cheaper.

Prior to this if you wanted to get a Hue starter kit, you’d have to fork out $180 for the bundle which comes with the bridge and three bulbs. However with this update, Philips is now offering customers four A19 bulbs and the bridge for $200. Granted it is more expensive compared to the previous bundle, but an extra $20 for an additional bulb does make it more worth it, especially since one bulb by itself is priced at $50.

Alternatively if you don’t need that many bulbs, you can opt for the two-pack of White-only bulbs at $100, or the White and Color Ambiance starter kit at $150. This should make the Hue lineup more accessible to those who want to make their homes “smarter”, especially since Philips made them HomeKit compatible a couple of years ago which means that you’ll be able to control them via the Home app on your iOS device.

Of course Philips isn’t the only company making smart lightbulbs and you can seek alternatives, like those from IKEA, but if you’ve enjoyed the company’s products then hopefully these new prices will encourage more new customers to the company’s platform.

Philips Hue Smart Lightbulb Starter Kit Is Now Cheaper , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.