Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung has a new teaser out for its “Next Galaxy,” which will be unveiled February 24 at an event during MWC in Barcelona. The short video, which clocks in at just over 35 seconds, features a series of vignettes and snapshots with overlaid text offering up one-word summaries of what the new hardware is all about.

Of course, whenever a company rattles off a string of buzzwords it’s probably best not to read too much into it, but there are some specific moments during this video that call to mind previously rumored features of the upcoming Galaxy S5, and some terms are given more focus and time than others during the montage.

There’s “Wet,” for instance, which calls back claims that the new S5 will be a rugged phone with water and dust resistance. Samsung previously released an iteration of its S4 called the “Active” that offered these benefits, but it would make sense to see the company turn this into a standard feature for its main flagship device, especially given that competitors like Sony already do this with their own top-tier devices.

Other focal terms include an “Alive” segment and “Outdoor” bit, both of which would seem to reinforce the idea of a smartphone ready for rugged use. There are also a number of suggestions that Samsung could bring improved camera features to the device, including some powerful selfie tricks.

The ultimate reveal is just three days away at this point, but for the impatient, that just means there’s still around 72 hours breaking down this clip frame by frame and evaluating all the editing decisions at a granular level for clues about what’s in store for Samsung’s next-generation flagship.

Your smartphone hosts a bevy of sensors that do many things within its sleek case. But thanks to a new project, dubbed Tango, by Google’s Advanced Technology And Projects (ATAP) group, your next one might have one more superpower: visual spatial awareness. As in, your next smartphone might be able to not only see, but also to understand its surroundings.

If that seems like something out of science fiction, that’s because it very much could be – the AI assistant in Her, for instance, manages to be so convincingly human because it shares an awareness of the user’s world, including recognizing the environment and putting that into the proper context. Google’s new prototype hardware and development kit, with its Myriad 1 Movidius Vision Processor Platform, is an attempt to give mobile devices exactly this type of “human-like understanding of space and motion,” according to ATAP Program Lead Johnny Lee.

This Isn’t Just A Fancy Camera

To be clear, this isn’t just a new camera for smartphones – it’s more like the visual cortex of the brain, made into a device component like any accelerometer or gyro currently found in smartphones. And to some extent, that’s the battleground for next-gen mobile technology; Apple has its M7 motion coprocessor, for instance, and Qualcomm is building advanced camera processing tech into its SoCs that will allow users to alter focus on pictures after the shot and do much more besides.

But Google’s latest experiment has the potential to do much more than either of these existing innovations. Computer vision is a rich field of academic, commercial and industrial research, the implications of which extend tendrils into virtually every aspect of our lives. Better still, the tech from Google’s partner used to make this happen is designed specifically with battery life as a primary consideration, so it’s designed to be an always-on technology, rather than something that can only be called upon in specific situations.

Contextualizing Requests

So what will these mean in terms of user experience? It’s trite but true to say “expect big changes,” but at this stage the push is to get developers thinking about how to make use of this new tech. So it’s still early to say exactly what kind of software they’ll build to put it into practice. One thing’s clear, though – context will be key.

Google Now has provided some hint of what’s possible when a smartphone has a thorough understanding of its user, and what said user’s needs might be, given time, location and inputs including email, calendar and other overt signals. Combined, those can present a pretty good picture of what we call ‘context,’ or the sum total of circumstances that make up any given situation. But ultimately, as they operate currently, your smartphones are effectively working within black boxes, with pinholes cut out sporadically across their surface, letting through shafts of light that partially illuminate but don’t necessarily truly situate.

With an understanding of surroundings, a virtual personal assistant could know that, despite being in the general vicinity of a bus stop, you’re currently shaking hands with a business contact and dropping your bag ahead of sitting down for coffee, for instance. In this situation, providing local bus arrival times isn’t as important as calling up that email chain confirming the meeting in question, for instance.

But the value of visual awareness to virtual personal assistants is just one example, and one that’s easy to grasp given recent fictional depictions of the same. Knowing where a phone is being used could also help to bring more far-out concepts to life, including games that change settings, surroundings and characters depending on where they’re played; situational advertising that interacts with nearby multimedia displays and addresses/engages a user personally based on where they are and what types of products they have to be looking at; even macro level settings change to make sure your phone is prepared to suit your needs given your current circumstances.

As for that last example, it could help usher in the type of dynamic mobile OS that Firefox, Google and others have clearly been toying with. Contextual launchers, I argued on a recent TechCrunch Droidcast, aren’t ready for primetime because too often they get the context wrong; again, they’re working inside a black box with only brief and sporadic glimpses to make sense of the world around them, and this new tech stands to bring them out into the open. The result could be devices that don’t need to be manually silenced, or that automatically serve up the right home screen or app for what you need without having to be told to do so.

Immense Data Potential

Of course, Google wouldn’t be doing Google if this project didn’t have a data angle: The type of information that could potentially be gleaned by a device, carried everywhere by a user, that can not only see but also make sense of its surroundings is tremendously powerful.

Google’s entire business is built around its ability to know its customers, and to know what they want to see at any given time. The search engine monetized on the back of extremely targeted web-based text ads, which return highly relevant results whenever a user types a query into their engine – an almost foolproof sign that they’re interested in that topic. It sounds like a no-brainer now, but at the dawn of search, this simple equation struck the entire ad industry like a lightning bolt, and it continues to drive behemoth revenue for Mountain View.

Even Google’s famously ambitious “moonshots” all have a thread of that original goal behind their impressive facades of consumer potential, and Tango is no exception. Stated intent, like that expressed by people Googling things, is only one part of the equation when it comes to sussing out a consumer’s desires – anticipating needs before they arise, and understanding needs that a person might not even be aware they have, make up the broader blue sky opportunities for a company like Google. In that context, having a contextually aware smartphone that can observe and interpret its surroundings is almost like putting a dedicated market researcher in the room with any given shopper, at any given time.

As with every single noteworthy mobile tech development of the past decade at least, Project Tango will seek greater access to a user’s life in exchange for more and better services rendered. And once developers start showing us what’s possible once a smartphone can understand where it is and what’s going on, I’m willing to bet users find the cost in data perfectly acceptable.

Google’s Not Alone

Google isn’t the only company that’s working on perceptive mobile devices, and it won’t be the only one that helps bring gadgets with visual intelligence to market. Apple acquired PrimeSense last year, a company that builds motion-sensing tech and helps map 3D space. Qualcomm purchased GestureTek, a similar company, back in 2011.

Location-based tech seemed sci-fi when it was first introduced to mobile devices, but now it’s de rigueur. The same will be true of contextual awareness with the devices we buy tomorrow. Google is the first one to start putting this power in the hands of developers to see what that might mean for the future of software, but it won’t be the only one. Expect to see development come fast and furious on this new frontier in mobile tech, and expect every major player to claim a seat at the table.

Illustrations by Bryce Durbin

Mobile gaming company Pocket Gems is taking a new approach to telling stories on smartphones with the launch of a new platform called Episode.

CEO Ben Liu hinted at this last month when he talked about the company’s growth, saying that this year would see a big launch focusing on what it means to “experience a story on mobile.” Apparently, Episode is what co-founder Daniel Terry has been working on since he stepped down as CEO and became the company’s chief creative officer at the end of 2012.

Terry told me that he saw a big opportunity in mobile storytelling. After all, stories drive many forms of entertainment media, and even at Pocket Gems, when the company added story elements to its games, he said, “Players just love it, and it really enhances engagement.” Yet stories are either minimal or nonexistent in mobile games.

With Episode, Terry and his team have taken an approach that’s really focused on stories, to the extent that some might not even consider the app to be a game at all. At points in our conversation, Terry compared the approach to an interactive, animated TV show and to a “modern, mobile-first Choose Your Own Adventure.”

The demo that he gave me was pretty simple. Two animated characters were having a conversation at a club, which the player mostly just watches, but at one point the other character offered to buy me a drink and I got to choose what kind.

More exciting than the individual story is the platform that Pocket Gems has built. Using Episode, story writers can choose their settings, customize their characters, then use a simple scripting language to determine what happens, what choices the players will face, and how those choices will affect the rest of the story. Each individual chapter should only take a few minutes to finish, but as the name implies, they’re usually just pieces of a larger narrative. Users can what chapters are available in the Episode smartphone app, which functions as a sort of library.

Pocket Gems has been testing out Episode on iOS, and the company says users have already read 10 million chapters. Today, however, marks the official launch, which includes the release of an Android app and the opening of the scripting platform to anyone who wants to use it. For now, Terry said user-generated chapters will only be shareable with friends, while the public content will still come from professional writers paid by Pocket Gems. But eventually, the company could create a tiered system and start recruiting paid writers from the broader user base.

Players can read a limited number of chapters every few hours, and will have to pay to consume more. However, Terry suggested that the business model is still very much in the experimental phase. He added that the Episode platform could potentially be used to create content for other Pocket Gems games, though there are no specific plans in that area.

HTC is working on three wearables which it’s planning to preview privately to carriers at next week’s Mobile World Congress tradeshow in Barcelona, according to a report in Bloomberg.

The three devices are said to consist of two smartwatches, one focusing on Google Now’s cards based recommendations feature, and another device based on Qualcomm’s Toq smartwatch, which was really just a hardware showcase for OEMs. (The Toq link tallies with a January report by ReadWrite’s Dan Rowinski that reported HTC had licensed Qualcomm’s Toq hardware and designs.)

The third wearable HTC is working on is apparently an “electronic bracelet that plays music”.  Teenagers on buses are going to get considerably more irritating if the latter device becomes a successful commercial reality.

The news agency said the device details come from “a person with direct knowledge of the plans” — and that person also told it HTC has not decided if it will publicly demo any of these wearables next week, or simply allow carriers to have a sniff.

HTC declined to comment on the report when contacted by TechCrunch.

The mobile maker has been fighting sliding marketshare in the smartphone space for more than a year — so it’s likely viewing the rise of wearables, and the opportunity a nascent device space provides, as a potential lifeline for its business, over and above its stated aim of making more affordably priced phone slabs, targeting the $150 to $300 price range.

Earlier this month chairman, Cher Wang, told Bloomberg HTC would release its first wearable device by Christmas, although she did not provide details on exactly what form the device would take — so today’s report puts some more meat on those bones.

She did say HTC has spent ”years” on wearable development and tackling technical challenges such as ensuring a smartwatch has long enough battery life to be useful.

“Many years ago we started looking at smartwatches and wearables, but we believe that we really have to solve the battery problems and the LCD light problems,” she told the news agency. “These are customer-centric problems.”

These latest wearable hints follow some leaks around HTC’s forthcoming new smartphones. Yesterday a leaked image of an update to HTC’s flagship One was tweeted by the @evleaks Twitter account — sporting a new gold colourway (with silver and grey named as the other colour options for the flagship), and with camera enhancements apparently on board.

@evleaks has since tweeted an image of the charcoal grey version of the handset — along with specs for what sounds like a more mid-range forthcoming HTC smartphone, painted in a range of brighter colours:

HTC A5: MSM8928 (1.6GHz x4), 5.5" 720p SuperLCD2, 1.5GB/8GB (+microSD), 13MP/5MP, Sense 6.0, BoomSound, black/white/red/yellow/purple.—
@evleaks (@evleaks) February 20, 2014

Last October, Microsoft announced that it would roll out an LTE-enabled Surface 2 for AT&T’s network. Sometime. The announced time frame was early 2014, and, sure enough, the device has just been found in the public FCC database, which means it’s nearing release. This will be the first Surface tablet that ships with built-in cellular connectivity.

When a device hits the FCC database, it often means that it has passed the commission’s battery of testing to make sure it’s safe for consumers. Among other things, the FCC tests devices that transmit wirelessly. Some of these documents are released while others, often the docs that contain specific information, are held under confidentiality agreements for several weeks until the device is officially released or announced.

Around the announcement of the LTE Surface 2, there was talk of a so-called Surface Mini with a 7- to 8-inch screen hitting the market in early 2014, as well. Info on this model is still MIA. Chances are, with a device of that significance, Microsoft isn’t going to let it hit the FCC database and ruin the surprise.