Hasta La Gadget!

Pebble has been on a rapid cadence with smartwatch updates to justify those crowdfunded dollars, and it’s not letting up just because watch shipments are well underway. PebbleOS 1.10 has arrived with support for custom watch faces built using the matching (and newly available) SDK. The revamp will be especially helpful for iOS users — we see several fixes for crashes, permissions and power in store. Everyone gets options to disable backlighting and vibrations in certain conditions, too. As such, there’s every reason to fire up the Pebble app for an upgrade, even if it’s just for some visual variety.

[Thanks, Uday]

Filed under: Peripherals, Wearables

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Source: Pebble (1), (2)

Red’s clean room on the NAB show floor is typically no place for camera crews, but after adding a bit of protection, Red President Jarred Land gave us the green light to step inside the company’s sacred space for a closer look at operation Dragon upgrade. (The $8,500+ sensor swap gives Epic cams the gift of 6K shooting.) The view from behind the glass wall separating spectators from technicians isn’t significantly different, but we were able to get quite a bit more insight into how the process goes down, including stops at each of the workstations.

The temporary assembly center that Red built at the Las Vegas Convention Center is a miniature version of the company’s primary facility in Irvine, California — while Dragon upgrades are underway in Las Vegas, a structure that’s estimated to be 20 times the size of the one here in Nevada is processing the updates remotely, though admittedly with far less fanfare. Join us past the break for an exclusive look at the process, live from Red’s booth at NAB.

Filed under: Cameras

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Some Pebble owners were understandably perturbed when their smartwatches seemingly went dead after a shutdown — that’s not the best first impression of an emerging technology. Some credit is due for a rapid turnaround, however, as the Pebble team just delivered a 1.9.1 firmware upgrade that should tackle the problem. It fixes a bug that occasionally prevented the microcontroller from reconfiguring itself before the watch went dark, leaving the buttons unresponsive on wake and the Pebble more of a paperweight. You’ll still have to swap out for a replacement if your watch has already fallen ill and won’t recover, but the experience should be more reliable for already functional watches from here on out. Let fellow owners know how well the upgrade worked in the comments.

[Thanks, Daniel]

Filed under: Peripherals, Wearables

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Source: Pebble

The world is awash with tablets, but if you’re a nerd who likes to tinker, it’s important that you buy one that isn’t too tricky to take apart, repair and upgrade. Fortunately, iFixit has released a list which ranks tablets according to their repairability. More »

If you haven’t yet upgraded to Windows 8, you might want to do that today. Starting tomorrow, that $39 Windows 8 Pro upgrade deal will jump to $199, while a normal Windows 8 upgrade will cost $119. We gave you a fair warning a couple of weeks ago, so if you’ve been procrastinating, today’s the deadline before you’ll have to pony up even more money.

In the past, Microsoft offered a promotional deal when Windows 8 launched where users of Microsoft’s older operating systems, such as Windows 7 and Vista, could upgrade to Windows 8 Pro for only $39.99. Frankly, it’s pretty fantastic deal, not quite as good as Apple’s $19 upgrade to OS X Mountain Lion, but we’ll still take it. However, if you don’t take the deal today, you’ll suffer tomorrow.

$199 is definitely a steep cost for an upgrade, but the company will be offering a regular Windows 8 upgrade for $119 if it turns out that you don’t need all the Pro features. If you’re already on Windows 8 but want to upgrade to the Pro version, Microsoft will sell those for $99 starting tomorrow as well.

What’s perhaps even more of a deal, is that Microsoft is letting anyone who bought a Windows 7 machine between June 2, 2012 and January 31, 2013 an upgrade offer to Windows 8 Pro for only $14.99, which is the best deal yet for upgrading to Microsoft’s latest OS. We’ve warned you once, and we’re warning you twice. Take the deal now, or be subject to ridicule starting tomorrow.

Windows 8 upgrade discount officially ends today is written by Craig Lloyd & originally posted on SlashGear.
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