Twitter—currently a company enduring more than one major headache—has a pretty bad data breach on its hands. It could impact hundreds of millions of users and lead to major security issues for the platform but, despite its severity, it’s been easy to miss amidst the flood of other scandals and controversies plaguing…
We’ve got some bad news if your New Year’s resolution was to be more fiscally responsible. Not only did January 1 mark the availability of a handful of new sets announced last year, Lego also rang in 2023 by introducing a mountain of new sets, barely giving us enough time to pay off all our Christmas bills.
Peloton is ready to end its battle with regulators over Tread+ safety issues. The fitness equipment maker has agreed to pay just over $19 million to settle Consumer Product Safety Commission charges that it broke the law through its response to both injury reports and the ensuing recall. The company started receiving reports of people, pets and objects being pulled under the Tread+ as far back as December 2018, but didn’t “immediately” report them as required by law, according to the CPSC. By the time Peloton filed a report, there were over 150 known incidents that included a child’s death and 13 injuries.
The firm is also accused of knowingly distributing treadmills after the recall began in May 2021. Couriers delivered 38 units, according to the CPSC. On top of the payout, the deal requires that Peloton institute a compliance program and provide yearly
In a statement to Engadget, a spokesperson said Peloton was “pleased” to settle with the CPSC and would cooperate on improving product safety. The representative added that the company was still seeking approval for a rear guard that would bolster Tread+ safeguards.
The settlement comes more than a year after a public fight over the Tread+ design. When the CPSC issued a warning against using the treadmill after reports of injuries, Peloton claimed the alert was “inaccurate and misleading” and insisted that customers could still use the exercise gear as long as they followed instructions. The company agreed to voluntarily recall its hardware weeks later, but that came after 72 reported incidents at the time.
Peloton has a clear incentive to call a truce. The brand had a terrible 2022, with plunging sales as the pandemic recovery saw would-be customers visit gyms or otherwise step outside. It turned to a number of tactics in a bid to trim costs and boost sales, including machine price cuts (offset by a subscription fee hike) and a switch to third-party manufacturing. The settlement both ends the threat of further legal trouble and lets Peloton focus on rebuilding its business, including the possible return of the Tread+ in question.
Zoom announced human avatars today for its video meeting app. Like Apple’s Memoji or the humanoid cartoons Mark Zuckerberg wants us to use in the metaverse, the customizable virtual characters mirror your movements and facial expressions. The idea is to inject zaniness into less formal meetings, letting you be present without appearing on camera as your (flesh and blood) self.
The human avatars follow Zoom’s release of animal avatars earlier this year. The company suggests using avatars when you are eating, don’t want to use a static profile pic or feel like livening up the mundane. The feature is available to beta testers, which requires a paid account. Zoom adds that it will roll out new facial features, hairstyles and customization options as the beta progresses.
Zoom also announced templates as shortcuts for various meeting types. You can now create your own templates or choose from three out-of-the-box setups. These include large meetings (automated captions and automatically recorded content), seminars (tighter crowd-control settings with screen-sharing disabled) and K-12 (enabled polls and quizzes while limiting distracting features). You can learn how to create templates by following these instructions.
The company is also soon adding threaded messages and reactions for in-meeting chats. Similar to what you’d see in Slack, Facebook Messenger or iMessage, message threads make it easier to figure out which message someone is replying to. Similarly, emoji reactions help clean up the chat and pair the response with the original message. Zoom says threads and emoji reactions will arrive later this month.
Finally, Zoom is adding Q&A in meetings. The idea is for meeting hosts to stay organized, confining group questions to one area of the app. The Q&A pop-out lets meeting hosts view, answer or dismiss queries. They can also choose whether participants can view all questions or only answered ones. However, hosts will need a premium plan to use the feature.
There’s finally an electric Ram truck — or at least a concept of one. Stellantis is the world’s fifth largest automaker with a stable of more than a dozen North American and European brands including Jeep, Ram, Dodge, Maserati and Fiat. The company has set extremely ambitious goals to drastically reduce its carbon footprint by the end of the decade, as part of Dare Forward 2030, with 100 percent of its European sales and half of its US sales to be of the fully-electric variety. As part of that effort, Stellantis has already teased us with an EV concept from Chrysler, came right out and showed us next year’s electric Jeep and, on Thursday, unveiled the Ram 1500 Revolution BEV Concept.
The Ram 1500 BEV will be available in the 2024 model year alongside the as-of-yet-unnamed Jeep (with which it also shares a STLA EV frame). The Concept shown off Thursday will serve as a design template for the upcoming production vehicle.
Stellantis describes the Ram BEV’s exterior as “brutiful,” a portmanteau of “brutal yet beautiful.” I think that prominent split between the cabin and quarter panels just makes it look like an Autobot who hasn’t quite fully finished transforming yet.
Of course as a concept vehicle, Ram has affixed every bell and whistle it can to the vehicle’s exterior, from “grand saloon style” doors to an animated RAM grille logo and fully animated LED tail lamps and badging. The sideview mirrors are 3D-printed to reduce weight and drag.
You’re goddamn right it has a frunk. And a powered tailgate, flush-mounted door handles, power side and rear steps and why does your truck have to be so big it requires built-in step ladders. Hey so how much gravel are you planning on hauling in your luxury electric pickup truck, exactly. The one with a self-leveling suspension, 24-inch rims and little light up center caps.
Under the hood, the Ram will offer dual-motor AWD and four wheel steering with up to 15 degrees of articulation. The company hasn’t revealed the battery size yet but did confirm that the system will use an 800V architecture enabling it to add up to 100 miles of range in about 10 minutes on a 350 kW DC fast charger.
The Ram BEV Concept’s interior benefits greatly from its flat cabin floor. Ram’s “one space environment” theme centers on flexibility with a rail attachment/floor track system that allows the seats and consoles to shift and even be removed entirely. The concept vehicle also has space for a set of third-row jump seats — like a minivan but with lower utility. With the passthrough window open, the Ram concept can fit 18-foot items without needing the rear liftgate lowered. Yeah, all the bells and whistles.
The Ram concept’s center console consists of two 14-inch screens. The upper screen can be shifted between three positions as the driving situation calls for — or even be pulled off entirely and reaffixed elsewhere in the vehicle. The lower screen also slides around. An augmented reality heads-up display projects relevant driving details onto the front windscreen. It’s got an exterior projector that doubles as an outdoor movie theater. I feel bad for whoever breaks the rearview mirror in this truck because it houses “a smart backup camera with 360-degree views, speakers, and receivers compatible with voice assistants such as Alexa and Siri.” That’s not going to be cheap to replace.
The steering wheel is collapsible (a la Demolition Man) for when it engages its supposed Level 3+ ADAS. Remember, this is a concept vehicle, they can just make capabilities up. The wheel also incorporates capacitive controls while, “tactile swiping technology enables occupants to configure the sun visors or the entire electro-chromatic roof with the ability to adjust the opaqueness.” Why do some people have to sleep outside?
The BEV features an AI assistant because this is hell, we are in hell and we deserve our incoming highway HALs. It responds to voice commands. With a 3D RAM avatar which serves, per the release, “as the vehicle’s face.”
The driver doesn’t even have to be in the vehicle to issue verbal commands. The BEV concept has a dedicated subset of exterior controls like “close the windows, play music, take a picture” and “follow me,” which is literally ghost whipping that has somehow gotten past Stellantis’ legal department. It “allows the vehicle to automatically follow the driver walking ahead of the vehicle,” using a mix of voice commands, onboard sensors and cameras. The feature, RAM argues, “can be useful in situations where the driver needs to move a short distance and doesn’t want to get back in the truck.” So c’mon you lazy blockheads, show us your best Jeremy Renner impression.
Over the years, laptops have seen enormous evolutions cycles, and each overcame specific struggles. First, it was the size and weight. Then the ongoing computing power, display quality, battery longevity, etc. What a journey it has been, and with the new Lenovo YogaBook 9i, we’re onto the next challenge: increasing total display surface area.
Modern laptops have outgrown the screen space allocated to them in many ways. Many people, including us at Ubergizmo, use laptops as primary computers. At the very least, there’s a whole group of power users who use them as such during business trips. Until now, mobile displays such as the ThinkVision 14M have been one of the best options one has.
We’ve all been frustrated at some point by the cramped display real estate we have, and even a 16 or 17-inch display isn’t enough. Additionally, the horizontal aspect ratio of most laptops is not conducive to the best productivity, which often requires more vertical screen space.
The new Lenovo YogaBook 9i is designed to significantly reduce this pain point by integrating two display panels. The two 13.3” 2.8K OLED displays bring seriously more Windows desktop real estate and expand the vertical space available to your documents or code, thus boosting your productivity.
Although you may have seen concept laptops like this before, Lenovo is the first company to offer a commercial product.
I like both the 2.8K resolution and the OLED technology choices. For productivity work, these ensure excellent visual comfort and image quality. You can use the laptop as a dual monitor with two panels side by side or on top of each other. Lenovo includes a foldable stand that takes up minimal space.
You might switch between these two positions depending on your webcam location preference. The Webcam has an FHD resolution and an IR sensor for securely logging in using face identification. There’s a privacy shutter when you don’t use it.
From a technical standpoint, the 60Hz OLED displays have a 400 NITs brightness, which is more than your average thin & light. They cover 100% of the DCI-P3 color gamut, which will please photographers and designers. Finally, there’s a Dolby Vision certification.
Alternatively, you can use the laptop in clamshell mode with a virtual keyboard. Can PC users transition from physical keyboards to virtual ones, as we did with phones? It partially depends on the keyboard app’s quality, but at the very least, it should perform as it does for large tablets.
In clamshell mode, the included ePen is remarkably comfortable, and that’s a potentially formidable way to sketch on one screen while having tools, etc., on the other. We’ll have to try it long-term, but this seems extremely promising for Creative users.
Lenovo included Pen gestures. If you go from the bottom-left corner towards the center, a screenshot will be captured, and you can create annotations on it immediately. That sure beats the default Windows screenshots or apps like Greenshot.
When closed, the YogaBook 9i looks like an ordinary laptop and occupies a standard footprint (minus the included keyboard). Lenovo even included their 2x 2W + 2x 1W Bowers & Wilkins soundbar, one of the industry’s best speaker designs.
The dual-screen setup should work like a regular two-monitor system from Window’s point of view. However, Lenovo has added extra software to make things even more convenient. If you touch one screen with five fingers, the current Window will expand to both screens and take up all the available space.
An eight-finger touch will make the virtual keyboard appear. Above the virtual keyboard, you can display Windows Widgets to show information you care about. Like Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold, you can put your physical keyboard on top of the bottom touch screen and still see the Widgets.
The laptop is powered by an Intel Core i7 U-series CPU (U stands for Ultra-low-power) paired with 16GB of RAM. Buyers can choose 512GB or 1T SSD (PCIe Gen4). Lenovo included a large 80 Whr battery to support the large display surface area, and we can tell the overall system power was balanced to provide a relatively normal battery life.
Still, having two screens will take a toll on the battery life, and Lenovo says that you should expect ~7 hours of use with two screens but ~14 hours with a single screen. The U-series processors are more optimized for power than raw performance, so we’ll keep an eye on the benchmark numbers.
Three USB-C ports support Thunderbolt 4, giving you access to a wide array of ultrafast docking and storage. I tend to use a TB4 travel dock with a multi-card reader, USB-A ports, Ethernet, etc.
The YogaBook 9i is a fascinating laptop evolution and one of the best things we’ve seen at CES 2023. We’ll have to wait until it becomes available, probably in late October or November 2023.
Lenovo YogaBook 9i: First True Dual-Screen Laptop
, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
EcoFlow, the company that aims at reinventing the way people access energy by providing reliable renewable power solutions, is coming to CES 2023 with two award–winning smart devices for the home and the outdoors.
The EcoFlow Blade is a robotic lawn-sweeping mower for people who hate to mow (including myself). Like many people, my aversion to mowing may stem back to my childhood when it was included in my chore list. Mowing the lawn the old-fashion way offers the benefits of physical activity, and it was perhaps beneficial during the pandemic when gyms were closed.
The gyms have now re-opened, so I would love to own the EcoFlow Blade since it is fully automated via its app-operable programs. The smart garden robot features automatic leaf collection, virtual boundary navigation, automatic route planning, and precision lawn mowing.
Users can control the Blade via an app, and the intelligent device has obstacle avoidance and climbing capabilities. The cherry on the cake: there is an anti-theft system enabled by the 4G SIM.
The second smart device is a sustainable next-gen portable refrigerator equipped with a plug-in battery and a direct solar charging option. The EcoFlow Glacier also offers an embedded ice maker that produces about 18 ice cubes every 12 minutes.
The chassis made of green materials features a handle and two wheels for easy transportation. The company claims that the EcoFlow is capable of high-speed cooling while providing efficient energy saving, thanks to its 297WH battery that allows the fridge to run up to 24 hours on a single charge.
The EcoFlow Blade and the EcoFlow Glacier will be available in Spring 2023.
EcoFlow Blade Robotic Lawn Mower and EcoFlow Glacier Portable Refrigerator
, original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.
A new policy to reject Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans at the border could lead to “horrific abuses,” one immigrant rights advocate said.
Lowrider culture first exploded in Los Angeles and carried over to the rest of the world. These cars helped the movement gain traction.
The Gamevice Flex is a controller that attaches to your phone to allow you simple and robust control of games of many sorts — and it should look familiar.
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