Google is hoping you’ll like the new, second-generation Nest Hub enough that you’ll take it into the bedroom, with the third outing for its Soli sensor promising sleep tracking without anything on your wrist. Still $100, the new smart display aims to replace your old clock-radio and give some fresh insight into how restful your night was, though when the lights go out there are still some questions to be answered. For 2021, the design has changed, subtly, with edge-to-edge glass across the same 7-inch, 1280 x 800 touchscreen. There’s now a new Mist (aka pale green) color alongside the…
Author: Miley Selena
Xiaomi is joining the foldable phone club, revealing the new Mi Mix Fold that opens out to reveal what the company says is the largest folding screen on a smartphone so far. Similar in design to the Galaxy Z Fold 2, Xiaomi’s foldable eclipses Samsung’s with its 8.01-inch WQHD+ internal screen, though that’s not the only special detail here. The inner screen is a 4:3 aspect panel with a 60Hz refresh rate and 120Hz touch sampling rate, supporting HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. Peak brightness is 900 nits. On the outside, meanwhile, there’s a 6.52-inch display for using the Mi Mix…
Apple has announced the dates of WWDC 2021, with the next Worldwide Developers Conference sticking with the online format that we’ve seen the Cupertino firm use to such good effect. The event will begin on June 7 and through through June 11, Apple said today, and be free for all developers to attend. Traditionally, WWDC has been an in-person event, bringing together thousands of app-makers to meet up with Apple’s own engineers and developers for a week of in-depth sessions. That’s also had its downsides, of course. Demand for tickets far outstripped supply, even with a fairly hefty price tag.…
Xiaomi claims to have achieved where Apple failed, with a new multi-coil wireless fast charging pad capable of charging multiple devices simultaneously – just as Apple AirPower was meant to do. Apple’s decision to pull the plug on its AirPower charging mat was a rare public admission of fallibility by the Cupertino firm, but that hasn’t dimmed the desire among users for a smart charging pad that doesn’t care whereabouts you place your phone. It’s something Xiaomi says it has figured out, unveiling the new charging mat alongside the Mi 11 Ultra, Mi Smart Projector 2, and other devices at…
Apple is currently experiencing outages of the App Store and issues with iMessage, iCloud, and other services, the company has confirmed. The problems have seen some users unable to access the App Store and Mac App Store altogether, while the two download stores are still available but much slower to respond than normal for others. The issue with both stores was acknowledged at 1:05pm EST, according to Apple’s System Status tracker, where the Cupertino company makes note of problems that might be affecting its paid and free services. There’s currently no indication of what might be causing the problem, and…
Xiaomi has revealed its newest flagship phone, and as expected the Xiaomi Mi 11 Ultra is enough to give Samsung some nightmares. Packing a huge 50-megapixel camera sensor, a periscope zoom, wildly-fast 67W wireless and wired charging, and a tiny rear touchscreen for notifications and selfies, it’s basically everything we’ve seen Xiaomi working on over the past year or so, rolled into one phone. On the front, there’s a 6.81-inch WQHD+ (3200 x 1440) AMOLED display, in 20:9 aspect with quad-curve design. It’ll hit up to 1,700 nits of peak brightness, Xiaomi says, and has both a 120Hz refresh rate…
Xiaomi’s Mi 11 Ultra flagship Android phone isn’t the only Google-powered product the company has today, with a new Mi Smart Projector 2 Pro combining reasonably portable projection with the Google Assistant. The nondescript gray and white box looks more like an oversized smart speaker than a traditional projector, and indeed that’s because it’s one of those too. The projector runs at Full HD resolution, with HDR10 support. It’ll crank up to 1,300 ANSI lumens in brightness, Xiaomi says, and supports 60- to 120-inch screen sizes. Usefully, there’s also omni-directional keystone correction for automatic adjustment when you’re projecting off-angle. That…
Boston Dynamics has a new robot to simultaneously wow and terrify, with Stretch moving away from the human or animal body style of the company’s other ‘bots with a far more practical design instead. Unlike Spot, Boston Dynamics’ robot dog, which has been designed to be as flexible as possible in how it can be deployed, Stretch is focused on warehouse automation, and specifically for moving boxes around at speed. It’s a growing segment, accelerated in particular over the past 12-18 months as online retail picked up some of the slack during the pandemic. Getting reliable human workforces – and…
Although a proprietary closed-source operating system, Windows also plays host to a suite of popular open source software, many of them providing functionality that’s hard to find from proprietary solutions, especially for the price of free. Not all open source programs, however, are always free of shady behavior and, depending on who’s in charge, some may start taking questionable actions to keep the lights on. One recent example is the popular FTP program FileZilla that has now resorted to a somewhat deceptive strategy to put adware on Windows computers. Most Windows users probably won’t need an FTP client but for…
One of the first hurdles that nations around the world faced at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic was how to keep track of people that patients came in contact with before testing positive for the coronavirus. Contact tracing became almost the perfect opportunity for technology, especially mobile and cloud, to make things easier. Now that vaccinations are underway, a new need has risen, the need to keep track of who has gotten their shots already. Again putting technology to use, New York State just launched the Excelsior Pass, perhaps one of if not the first COVID-19 “passport” to be…