One of the coolest little tricks you can do to make your TV image look better is to add some bias lighting. That means your screen is backlit, usually with a gentle glow behind it, which makes colors pop more and makes blacks look deeper. It’s an old trick, but one that has some newer spins with smart lighting systems…
Garmin is launching the Venu 3 and smaller Venu 3S smartwatches today with a greater focus on sleep-tracking and personalization. In particular, it’s adding a proactive sleep coaching feature and nap detection. The latter is noteworthy, considering most modern smartwatches from companies like Apple, Samsung, and Google can track your sleep, but only at night. With the Venu 3 series, you’ll be able to rest easy knowing your daytime slumber can also be tracked, if that’s your kind of thing.
The company’s new sleep coach considers factors such as a user’s daily activity levels, sleep history, and heart rate variability (HRV) – which is a sleep metric new to the Venu series. The coach will provide recommendations on the amount of sleep you’ll need to make it through the next day. The naps that the Venu 3 detects will also go towards replenishing energy levels as tracked by the company’s “Body Battery” tool, which quantifies energy levels on a scale of 1-100 depending on activity expenditure.
Aside from sleep-tracking upgrades, the Venu 3 has a host of other improvements over its predecessor. Notably, it introduces a wheelchair mode that will track pushes rather than steps, as well as handcycle activities and pre-loaded workouts for wheelchair users, offering more inclusivity. The new watch also offers expanded insights on how workouts can affect a user and how much time is needed to recover after every gym session.
Additionally, Garmin is bringing a “rate of perceived exertion” feature, which enables users to report how challenging a workout felt. With this, the company is trying something new in the fitness arena. Instead of just crunching numbers, it’s dipping its toes into subjective data – the kind of information that’s all about personal judgment and individual experiences. The Venu 3 also introduces “interval creation,” which gives a runner or biker the option to build interval workouts from the watch face.
Beyond expanding health and fitness tracking features, Garmin says this watch will have a built-in speaker and microphone that will allow a wearer to make calls from the watch. The Venu 3 can also display photo messages on its AMOLED touchscreen. You’ll be able to make contactless payments using Garmin Pay and stream music from Spotify and Amazon Music, as well.
The Venu 3 will start at $449.99 and offers up to 14 days of battery life in smartwatch mode. It features a light stainless steel bezel and has silicone bands in either white or black, while five strap color options are available for the smaller 3S.
It’s still unclear if older Venu models will receive software updates that will bring these new features over. But for a mainstream smartwatch from a company that mostly caters to a fitness-focused audience, the Venu 3 appears to be a step forward.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/garmins-new-venu-3-smartwatch-knows-when-youve-been-napping-110009177.html?src=rss
Apple has set a date for its annual September iPhone event, so it’s almost time to see the iPhone 15. All models (save for perhaps a new SE) could ditch the notch and start using the Dynamic Island cutout that debuted in the iPhone 14 Pro and Pro Max. There’s no word on the return of the iPhone mini, and we may have to wait until next year to see the rumored iPhone Ultra.
Apple may finally phase out the Lightning port with the iPhone 15, making a long-awaited switch to USB-C. The company doesn’t have much of a choice there, since all tablets and smartphones sold in the European Union will need to use that charging port starting next year. Apple has also inched towards USB-C on its iPad device family. It might finally be time.
– Mat Smith
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Meta took down thousands of fake accounts linked to massive Chinese propaganda campaign
German Bionic’s latest exoskeleton helps healthcare workers lift elderly patients
Google’s new routines make it a lot easier for people to automate their smart home
TCL’s new budget phones are the first to feature NXTPAPER displays
‘Super Mario Bros. Wonder’ will have its own Nintendo Direct on August 31st
Sony’s two new A7C series cameras offer premium features for less money
When Foxconn announced its plans to open facilities in Wisconsin back in 2017, it promised to invest $10 billion into bringing production to the US, which was expected to lead to as many as 13,000 jobs. That never came to fruition.
In 2021, Foxconn massively altered the scale of the project and told the local government it would invest $672 million instead of the intended $10 billion. It also reduced the number of potential jobs to 1,454 from 13,000 positions. The Taiwanese supplier is selling two properties in Eau Claire and Green Bay, purchased for almost $12 million in 2018.
Based on an improbable true story, the movie follows Jann Mardenborough (Archie Madekwe), a 20-something Gran Turismo fanatic who wins a Nissan-sponsored contest to race professionally. Even more improbable, he manages to hold his own in the racing world. The film constantly reminds you it’s meant to sell you Sony products in a reality where Apple doesn’t exist. At one point, a character is inexplicably attached to his Walkman cassette player, and he only moves on when he’s gifted a modern Walkman digital music player. Yeah, you’ll wince.
Samsung announced a bigger 85-inch Terrace Full Sun set for an eye-watering $20,000. For the money, you’ll get a Neo QLED screen, which should remain bright in direct sunlight, as well as Direct-Sun Protection to keep the TV safe. Samsung claims it’s protected “up to six hours in sunlight at 700 watts and 104 degrees Fahrenheit,” but it may decrease brightness to deal with higher temperatures and sun conditions. The 65-inch Full Sun Terrace is now on sale for a relatively reasonable $6,500, while the 75-inch goes for $9,000.
It’s been nearly a year since Meta announced it’d give its metaverse avatars some legs to make them appear slightly more human. Now, Quest Home avatars sport extra limbs in the latest beta version of the Quest software, but you won’t see legs on your avatar when you look down, as UploadVR points out. They’ll only be visible in third-person or when you’re looking at a virtual mirror (much like in many first-person shooter games).
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/the-morning-after-apples-iphone-15-event-is-on-september-12th-111507037.html?src=rss
Former Proud Boys national leader Enrique Tarrio is scheduled to be sentenced for orchestrating the far-right extremist group’s attack on the U.S. Capitol.
I love the Fairphone’s ethos. It’s an Android-powered, modular smartphone that you can repair yourself. The company, same name as its product, launched its fifth-generation flagship, the Fairphone 5, and the device is Fairphone’s most polished product yet, with an OLED display, increased water resistance, and a bigger…
Google has published a photo of the Pixel 8 Pro before it has even unveiled the device… on the day Apple announced that it was going to launch the iPhone 15 on September 12th. An account on X (formerly Twitter) called Android Setting (via The Verge) has spotted a photo of a person holding a beige-colored phone against their ear on a page in the Google Store. We could no longer see the image on the page, which promotes Google’s subscriptions and services, but its alt text reportedly read: “A person takes a call on a Pixel 8 Pro phone in Porcelain.”
Here’s a look at the Google Pixel 8 Pro in Porcelain.
This image is from the Google Store website, which inadvertently published this image early in the promo page for “Google Subscriptions & Services”.
Thanks to @android_setting for the tip! pic.twitter.com/nARd4Hz8hk
— Mishaal Rahman (@MishaalRahman) August 30, 2023
The device in the image resembles the phone in previously leaked photos of the model’s prototype. Its rear cameras are inside one glass panel within a raised metal bar spanning the whole width of the phone. And, of course, Google’s “G” logo is at the center of the device. Based on other previous leaks — yes, there were many — the Pixel 8 Pro’s camera array is made up of a 50-megapixel main camera that lets in 50 percent more light and a 64-megapixel ultrawide Sony camera. It’s also rumored to have a flat display instead of curved ones similar to the Pixel 6 Pro’s and Pixel 7 Pro’s. In addition, it’s expected to come with a 5,000 mAh battery and a 27W max charging speed.
Google’s Pixel 8 Pro doesn’t have a launch date yet, but the tech giant unveiled the two previous generations during an event held in October 2021 and 2022.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/google-totally-didnt-mean-to-leak-the-pixel-8-pro-on-its-own-website-101528033.html?src=rss
As it promised last week, Samsung has launched Food, a “personalized, AI-powered food and recipe” app in eight languages and 104 countries around the world. It draws on the food database of Whisk, an app Samsung acquired a few years back — and resembles a version of Whisk the company revealed last year. Given Samsung’s large presence in kitchens with its smart fridges and other appliances, the release of a food and recipe app seems a logical step for the company.
The app allows users to search for recipes around the world, save them and make weekly eating plans. The company prepared over 160,000 recipes for launch, with that number set to increase down the road. Samsung Food can also be run on mobile phones and Samsung Family Hub smart appliances like refrigerators, while allowing users to manage ingredients, shopping, etc.
Users can save recipes anytime, and the app analyzes them, standardizes the format and organizes them to create shopping lists based on the ingredients. It can also provide recipe recommendations based on available food items as managed by the user. It even has a “personalize recipe” function that uses the AI to alter recipes recipes and create vegan or vegetarian versions, for instance. “Users will even be able to create fusion recipes, such as Korean versions of Italian dishes, and adjust cook time or skill level of recipes,” Samsung adds.
It uses AI to create recommendations for individualized daily meal plans based on dietary preferences and favorite cuisine types. Nutritional ingredient breakdowns can be viewed at any time, and users can add items to shopping lists and then send them straight to a retailer’s e-commerce checkout. With connected cooking, it lets users preheat ovens, set timers and transfer cook settings to supported appliances via a step-by-step guided cooking mode.
Last week, Samsung said it hoped to secure a million users for the app around the world. While there are numerous recipe apps out there (Mealtime, Paprika, Yummly etc.), Samsung may have an edge with the millions of its smart appliances sold — making it a known quantity to consumers.
Samsung plans to add new features, like integration with Samsung Health to sync parameters like BMI and calorie consumption, while offering suggestions for diet management. The app will incorporate AI vision tech by 2024, allowing Samsung Food to recognize food items through the camera and provide details like nutrition information. Samsung Food is now available for download on Android and iOS.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/samsung-debuts-its-own-ai-powered-smart-recipe-app-104521190.html?src=rss
Elie Mystal, an attorney and justice correspondent for The Nation, said he had previously believed Trump would dodge trial before the 2024 election.
Now that the Tears of the Kingdom dust has settled like one of those Korok dandelion leaf puzzles, Nintendo is starting to ramp up its efforts for the holiday season. You know what that means. Another Nintendo Direct is scheduled for August 31st at 10AM EST, according to a social media post from the company.
Nintendo promises that the streaming event will feature an “in-depth look” at the forthcoming 2D side-scrolling adventure Super Mario Bros. Wonder, with around 15 minutes of gameplay and information. More Mario is never bad, but this is a themed-direct that exclusively features Wonder. In other words, don’t get your hopes up for any trailers for other games, surprise reveals or anything like that. You’ll get plenty of juicy tidbits, however, about the first 2D Mario in over a decade.
Super Mario Bros. Wonderhas been described as the “next evolution” in the 2D franchise. We’ve only gotten one trailer so far but it was packed with discussion-worthy moments. Mario can turn into an elephant and the game world changes by devouring a psychedelic flower. The appropriately-named Wonder Flower looks to be unpredictable, making pipes come alive, creating hordes of new enemies or completely shifting the overall look and feel of a level. I’m sure the power up does a whole lot more, which should be revealed Thursday.
Super Mario Bros. Wonder launches for the Nintendo Switch on October 30th, just in time for that oh-so-important holiday season. Beyond the sidescroller, the Switch’s holiday release schedule looks pretty dry, compared to other years. There’s Detective Pikachu Returns, a remake of the SNES classicSuper Mario RPG and some Pokémon DLC, and that’s pretty much it for first-party releases. This is the console’s seventh holiday season, which could have something to do with it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/super-mario-bros-wonder-will-have-its-own-nintendo-direct-on-august-31st-171530276.html?src=rss
It’s been years and years since the bleeding edge of the smartphone world was truly exciting. The industry may want us to salivate over its latest 5G, 108-megapixel, folding-screen masterpiece, but my mouth remains bone dry. To me, it’s because the ceiling of what’s possible hasn’t risen much in the last four or five years, but the floor has maintained its slow creep northward. On paper, the just-announced Fairphone 5 has the specs you’d expect from a mid-range handset. But now that’s not really a penalty since you’re also getting a modular, sustainably-made and potentially upgradeable handset built by people paid a fair(er) wage for doing so. It’s just a smartphone, like any other. On one hand, that makes the new Fairphone 5 boring, but from this perspective, boring can be good.
Ten years into its mission to build a “better” smartphone, it’s not clear if Fairphone still needs a full introduction. For the unaware, the Dutch social enterprise makes devices that are “fairer” than the competition. That means paying factory workers a living wage, sourcing “ethical” raw materials, using recycled materials and keeping the hardware out of the trash for as long as possible. To that end, each device is modular, easy-to-repair, sometimes upgradeable and often far longer lasting than its competition. It’s less fancy than, say, Google’s long-mourned Project Ara, but it’s a damn sight more real than that imagined dream of a modular, upgradeable phone. Here, it’s not just possible, but easy, to pick up a Philips 00-head screwdriver and fit a new component in a matter of minutes.
The Fairphone 5 doesn’t stray far from the template laid down by its immediate predecessor in size and style. It has the same hefty chassis intercut with antenna lines, the same camera housing, the same fingerprint-sensing power button and the same easily removable backplate. Like a lot of phones released in 2023, the changes are nips and tucks to reflect where the industry is at. So, the battery is more capacious, the display a little bigger, and the cameras are a hair more powerful now than they were a generation ago. Fairphone has also made it possible to swap out each camera separately, making it easier and cheaper to fix or upgrade one down the line.
You’ll be able to grab plenty of spare parts, with only the main chassis frame not being available separately. The product list includes the 90Hz, 6.46-inch LG-made POLED display, 4,200mAh battery and all three cameras. You can also get a spare earpiece, loudspeaker, USB-C port and a top unit containing the Time of Flight sensor, as well as the SIM and SD-card slots. If a part on this phone breaks, you’ll be able to pick up almost everything you could need for not that much cash. The priciest component is the display, priced at €99.95 (around $108), which is about half what Samsung charges, and almost a third of what Apple asks for.
To make good on its promises of sustainability and longevity, Fairphone 5 uses Qualcomm’s octa-core QCM6490 SoC. It’s an industrial-grade IoT chipset that, far as I can tell, is used in only one other phone: AGM’s thermal-camera equipped G2 Guardian. There’s only one SKU here, with the Fairphone 5 coming with 8GB RAM and a very generous 256GB storage, expandable to 2TB with the right microSD card. Fairphone says the choice was dictated by the chipset’s blend of premium features like 6G, WiFi 6E and on-chip AI processing. Not to mention Qualcomm promises to support its industrial grade silicon for longer than it does its mobile chips. To that end, Fairphone is committing to support the (almost) stock install of Android 13 and “at least five operating system upgrades after.” (Given Android 14’s forthcoming launch, you should expect that to be heading to your phone in the near future.) The company says it expects to offer software support until 2028 at the very least, but hopes it’ll keep things running until 2033.
And Fairphone has now established a track record of being able to keep its phones going for a fair old while. The Fairphone 2 was launched in 2015 with Android 5.1 and got its final security patch in March 2023 with an Android 10 update. Seven or so years of software support is a good reason to switch, especially when Samsung pledges four years of software and five years of security updates for “select” handsets.
In my limited time playing with the new model, I’ve found the performance to be a lot snappier than on older Fairphones. Animations and transitions in the OS itself don’t appear at this early stage to be laggy, and Fortnite on Epic mode played perfectly at 30fps. I certainly noticed how much faster it is to unlock this phone compared to the last one, both using my face and my fingerprint. At first blush, this appears to be more than capable of meeting your expectations for normal phone use. Well, if your idea of normal phone use is texting, emails, social media, YouTube, TikTok and the odd deathmatch.
I’d describe the Fairphone 5’s imaging as solid, although I’m worried that to do so is to damn it with faint praise. The primary 50-megapixel, f/1.88, OIS-equipped camera backed by Sony’s IMX800 sensor is more than enough for most people’s photography needs. It may not have the software smarts of some devices in its class, but it’s no slouch, especially with video. Glance at the Fairphone 5’s back and you’ll spot a circle the same size as the camera lenses, which is the ToF sensor. It’s this phone’s secret weapon, especially when it comes to the lightning-fast autofocus when you’re shooting video.
It’s not all good: The phone gets a little warmer than I’d like when running heavy load, but that feels par for the course in the 5G era. The built-in speakers, meanwhile, are so tinny I’d never recommend using this for audio if you have headphones to hand. I also think the solid black cover will be far better at resisting smears than the transparent edition in my loan unit. And I wish, as well as the black, transparent and sky blue colorways, the company had offered the same green and orange paint job that is so wonderful on the Fairbuds XL.
It’s also a shame we’re not yet seeing a wide release for the Fairphone 5 in the US, at least not at the same time as it comes to Europe. The Fairphone 4 is available to buy in the States with a “deGoogled” OS courtesy of privacy-focused startup Murena. I’m sure the 5 will make a similar journey in future, but it’d be nice to see a simultaneous release so people aren’t left waiting for a year or more to get the updated hardware.
I’ve said before that Fairphone has always carried the whiff of a compromise choice, the cork and hemp sneaker you buy to assuage your guilt over all the sweatshop-made kicks you own. But, both thanks to Fairphone’s efforts to improve its product, and the general stagnation in the mobile industry more generally, the delta between what’s hot and what’s not has closed by a lot. If you’re looking to pick up a mid-range handset that you can keep going for twice as long as any other phone on the market, and you want to do a bit of good in the process, this is probably the phone for you. It’s not often the view from the moral high ground is this comfortable.
The Fairphone 5 is available to pre-order today, August 30, from the company’s website and a number of major European carriers. It is priced at €699 (around $750), with shipping expected to commence September 14 from Fairphone and the majority of its carriers.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/fairphone-5-is-boring-how-exciting-094530738.html?src=rss
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