Gadgets

Qualcomm debuts latest flagship Snapdragon chip and a new AI platform • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 17, 2022Posted in chips, Gadgets, Hardware, Qualcomm, snapdragonNo Comments

It’s that time of year again. It can drop 20 degrees on any given day, and we’re stuck indoors watching people watch Qualcomm announce new chips and reference designs in sunny Hawaii. The Snapdragon Summit is the component-maker’s annual opportunity to map out its big plans for the next year, ahead of the holiday scrum and product deluge of CES and MWC. It’s an ideal time to pepper the industry with some timeline news items. Many of the major manufacturers are effectively finished announcing hardware for the year, and things won’t really ramp up for another couple of months. The big news is, naturally, Snapdragon 8 Gen 2. That’s the chip that’s going to power a majority of your flagship Android handsets next year — at least until the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 2 presumably starts rolling out at some point mid-2023. It’s likely not surprising for those who have been following the space for the last several years that Qualcomm is positioning AI/ML as the centerpiece of its latest system on a chip. With the new Hexagon Processor (that’s a Qualcomm trademark, mind) at its center, the new system on a chip promises up to 4.35x gains for things like natural language processing. “This is thanks to the industry’s only Micro Tile Inferencing technique so we can power features like real-time multi-language translation,” the company writes. “In other words, you can speak into a language translator and have it translated into multiple languages running these complex networks.” Computational photography is the other big piece there. The system is able to recognize and segment different aspects of an image before the photo is taken. It uses a portrait as an example — breaking up hair, clothes, the background and a face into different segments. It’s a feature that will no doubt be present in imaging products like Portrait mode, in which depth sensing is important. The first devices with Gen 2 are set to arrive before the end of the year. The list of phone makers signed up for the SoC includes ASUS, HONOR, iQOO, Motorola, nubia, OnePlus, OPPO, REDMAGIC, Redmi, SHARP, Sony Corporation, vivo, Xiaomi, XINGJI/MEIZU and ZTE. Image Credits: Qualcomm Also of note this week is the arrival of Qualcomm’s new augmented reality chip, the Snapdragon AR2 Gen 1. The component is designed to power a new generation of slim AR wearables. It’s a low-power solution that sits across different parts of the glasses in order to better distribute its weight. “We built Snapdragon AR2 to address the unique challenges of headworn AR and provide industry-leading processing, AI and connectivity that can fit inside a stylish form factor,” Qualcomm’s Hugo Swart said in a release. “With the technical and physical requirements for VR/MR and AR diverging, Snapdragon AR2 represents another metaverse-defining platform in our XR portfolio to help our OEM partners revolutionize AR glasses.” The list of manufacturers developing hardware with the platform includes Lenovo, LG, Nreal, OPPO, Pico, QONOQ, Rokid, Sharp, TCL, Vuzix and Xiaomi.

How the FirstBuild product co-creation studio is changing how new things are made • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 13, 2022Posted in consumer electronics, EC Hardware, EC venture capital, firstbuild, Gadgets, HardwareNo Comments

Crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and small-batch production for the win If you are running R&D at a large appliance manufacturer, you have a challenge. You typically make products in enormous quantities at pretty slim margins. In order to recoup your development, tooling and launch marketing costs, you need to create and sell a huge number of products. To ensure that that’s possible, you’d probably end up doing a bunch of user and market research to ascertain that you have the highest chance of success with your products. That makes sense, but the very business model itself means that it’s hard to do something truly risky, which in turn means that mainstream manufacturers rarely come up with anything genuinely innovative. If there was a mushroom fruiting appliance, would a lot more people regularly be growing mushrooms at home? There was only one way to find out: to build one and to try and sell it. That’s where FirstBuild comes in. If you’re a small appliances nerd, you may have seen its Opal nugget ice maker, the studio’s first big breakthrough; the Mella mushroom fruiting chamber; its indoor pizza oven; or the Arden indoor smoker. I spoke with André Zdanow, president at FirstBuild, to figure out where these ideas came from and how the studio is working to try to replicate those successes. “The most famous example is probably the Opal nugget ice maker. At first, it wasn’t actually a product at all — it was a technology being worked on in the refrigeration division of GE Appliances,” Zdanow said, explaining that it turned out to be a head-scratcher. They wanted to put the “nugget ice” into a fridge but weren’t able to figure out exactly what the market size would be for such a thing. “It’s actually really complicated to put the technology into a refrigerator. In other words, it was really a great idea that engineers had been toying around with for years, but in the context of the focus and economics of a multibillion-dollar company, it wasn’t something that they could focus on.” The Opal nugget ice maker was FirstBuild’s first commercial success. Image Credits: FirstBuild In a parallel universe, that tech would never have seen the light of day, but instead, the engineers came to FirstBuild and wondered what would happen if they put the tech in a separate appliance, rather than into a full-size refrigerator. “We see lots of people go to the store and buy this type of ice. They call it Sonic ice or hospital ice. We decided to develop a prototype and see if people want it to be just an ice maker,” Zdanow explained. That was the genesis of the FirstBuild lab’s success. “It started with crude concepts that looked like an ice maker but had nugget ice in it. From there, it progressed through industrial design and ultimately to a $2.7 million crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter back in 2015.”

Amazon eyes devices group as it undertakes broad cost cutting • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Alexa, Amazon, devices, echo, Gadgets, HardwareNo Comments

The Echo business has always looked like Amazon playing the long game from the outside. Above all, the company’s home consumer hardware is a convenient vessel for getting Alexa into millions of homes. But when a corporation is doing some serious belt tightening amid broader economic headwinds, no divisions are safe from cost cutting — certainly not one that is reportedly operating at a $5 billion a year revenue loss. The Wall Street Journal this week noted that Amazon’s devices group could be the latest to get hit with cuts as the company braces for further macroeconomic disruption. The paper notes that “Amazon’s leadership is closely evaluating its Alexa business, according to some of the people,” citing internal documents. Many of the cutbacks thus far have been focused on longer-tail products. Devices is a mature division for the company, however, encompassing a wide range of Echo home devices, Fire tablets and Kindles, among others. Amazon offered ZebethMedia a fairly boilerplate response to the report, while noting that the normal performance review is certainly being impacted by the overall financial climate. “We remain excited about the future of our larger businesses, as well as newer initiatives like Prime Video, Alexa, Grocery, Kuiper, Zoox, and Healthcare,” the company writes. “Our senior leadership team regularly reviews our investment outlook and financial performance, including as part of our annual operating plan review, which occurs in the fall each year. As part of this year’s review, we’re of course taking into account the current macro-environment and considering opportunities to optimize costs.” A second comment, meanwhile, highlights Alexa’s overall successes: Alexa started as an idea on a whiteboard. In less than a decade, it’s turned into an AI service that millions of customers interact with billions of times each week in different languages and cultures around the world. Even in the last year, Alexa interactions have increased by more than 30%. We’re as optimistic about Alexa’s future today as we’ve ever been, and it remains an important business and area of investment for Amazon. Andy Jassy has been tasked with cutting costs across the firm — not an enviable task in any economy. In his 2021 shareholder letter, the CEO took a trip down memory lane, beginning with the first Kindle in 2007, while highlighting the ups and down of the category, including a little insight into the life (and death) of Fire phone, noting, “The phone was unsuccessful, and though we determined we were probably too late to this party and directed these resources elsewhere, we hired some fantastic long-term builders and learned valuable lessons from this failure that have served us well in devices like Echo and FireTV.” Jassy also highlighted the division’s evolving future, writing: Our goal is for Alexa to be the world’s most helpful and resourceful personal assistant, who makes people’s lives meaningfully easier and better. We have a lot more inventing and iterating to go, but customers continue to indicate that we’re on the right path. We have several other devices at varying stages of evolution (e.g. Ring and Blink provide the leading digital home security solutions, Astro is a brand new home robot that we just launched in late 2021), but it’s safe to say that every one of our devices, whether you’re talking about Kindle, FireTV, Alexa/Echo, Ring, Blink, or Astro is an invention-in-process with a lot more coming that will keep improving customers’ lives.

With $7M raised, Keyo launches a biometric palm verification network • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in biometrics, Enterprise, Gadgets, Hardware, KeyoNo Comments

Maybe you’ve heard of Keyo. Perhaps you saw the initial round of press the firm did in 2017 — roughly two years after its founding. Or maybe you saw it pop back in 2020, riding the wave of news around Amazon’s lukewarmly received hand-scanner tech. You may have wondered precisely what’s been going on with the Chicago-based firm in the interim. “I think we were probably a bit naïve in the beginning to underestimate the true complexity of this undertaking,” admits co-founder/CEO Jaxon Klein. “There’s a lot involved in building a global scale identity solution. We’ve been in deep engineering mode for several years now. We’ve put the last five years and millions of dollars into building what we really view as the first global scale biometric identity ecosystem.” It’s not a unique case, in that respect. And may well mean that your organization is on the right track, if members of the press are willing to discuss your technologies at such an early stage. But the kind of technology Keyo has been working on is the sort of thing it’s important to get exactly right, given the security, privacy and financial implications of its biometrics. Image Credits: Keyo “That early press coverage was us prematurely saying ‘hey, look what we’re doing,’” Klein adds. “It settled in what we were really doing and the reasons that no other companies were competing for the space and how just how long and hard the road were heading down. We then retreated from that and said, ‘okay, we have a lot to build and we need to go actually deploy this into the real world, work with real customers work with real users and make sure we’re doing it right.” This week, the company’s got something to show for that work. Fueled by an aggregate $7 million in seed funding, the Keyo Network had previously been in beta. It’s a combination of hardware and software designed to bring palm scanning to a broad range of different markets and services. Today it’s announcing the Keyo Wave hand-scanner hardware, Keyo mobile app, third-party partner program and the Keyo Identify Cloud, which “enables users to instantly and privately identify themselves based on a simple scan of their hand at any business participating in the Keyo network.” The Keyo team remains small, with 33 remote employees, though Klein says the firm has been hiring around an employee a week. Not huge growth, though he winkingly notes that at least the startup is bucking the current brutal trend in startup land. Image Credits: Keyo “One of the things we’ve gotten really good at is scalable supply chain deployment. We’ve deployed 15,000 devices just recently, and we manage our supply chain internally. Even pre-pandemic, we’ve been building out our supply chain in North America — largely in the U.S. We’ve built a lot of institutional knowledge and capabilities around operating and expanding supply chains. We are really unique in the hardware space — or part of a very small cohort — that designs and builds their own devices, that’s entirely distributed.” The notion of replacing more traditional payment methods like cards — or even phones — with hand scanning will continue to attract its share of critics. That will only increase as massive corporations like Amazon adopt such technologies, but there’s little doubt the interest is there, at least with the corporations fueling such change.

I guess you can (officially) use your fancy Canon camera as a webcam studio now • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in Canon, Gadgets, Hardware, webcamNo Comments

When the pandemic slammed into our shores a couple of years ago, many of us were shoo-ed inside, doomed to endless Zoom meetings. At the time, Canon released a beta of its EOS Webcam Utility, and then seemed to pretty much forget about it. Until today. In a ‘geez, Canon, this would have been helpful two years ago’ kind of move, the company released the EOS Webcam Utility Pro software, so you can finally show up crisply high-def with Canon’s blessing. Canon claims that ‘millions of users’ have already been using the EOS Webcam Utility for streaming and meetings, and its ‘pro’ installment of the software lets you give the company money (yay!) and ‘unlock exclusive features that take video communication and customization capabilities to the next level.’ Forgive the sarcasm; Canon’s EOS cameras are legitimately high-end and high-quality products and its lens lineup continues to be world-class, so if you really want to highlight every pore and every stray eyelash, Canon’s got your, er, front. The subscription version of the software will set you back $4.99 per month, or $50 per year. It enables you to hook up several cameras, unlocks wireless connectivity, and gives more camera and content control. It ups the framerate available to 60 fps, and you can push the video streams to multiple channels at once, such as YouTube, Facebook Live, and others. The new software also includes layout options, watermarking, scene transitions, and other stuff. Now, if those things were important to you, you have probably already discovered the free OBS software and a slew of other, paid-for solutions that have various degrees of sophistication and feature sets. But, you know. Canon.

Amazon is now replacing customers’ discontinued Cloud Cams with new Blink Mini devices • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in Amazon, Gadgets, smart homeNo Comments

Amazon is now offering to replace customers’ discontinued Cloud Cam smart cameras with a new Blink Mini following its decision earlier this year to shut down its Cloud Cam line of products and end support for the device’s associated mobile apps. At the time of the retailer’s May 2022 announcement, Amazon said it would email customers with information on how to order their replacement products, which would also include a one-year Blink Subscription Plus Plan. However, those emails did not immediately arrive, worrying customers that Amazon had either misled them or perhaps they had missed the important email when it came. As it turns out, those emails have only now begun to go out. Over the past few days, Amazon Cloud Cam owners report they’ve received instructions on how to proceed to order their replacement Blink product. The email thanks customers for their support and informs them that, for every active Cloud Cam device they own, Amazon will offer users a complimentary Blink Mini and a one-year Blink Subscription Plus Plan which covers all the devices under a Blink account. The email then details which Cloud Cam products Amazon identified as active on the user’s account and explains how to make the purchase using a promo code. The company says customers have until January 26, 2023, to redeem their code. Each order only allows for one promo code, so customers with larger Cloud Cam setups will have to check out separately for each device they intend to replace. The replacement product, Blink Mini, offers an indoor security camera with 1080p HD video, 2.4 GHz Wifi connectivity, night vision, motion detection, and two-way audio. It also works with Alexa. Those specs are similar to Cloud Cam, which had also offered 1080p HD video, night vision and two-way audio. Amazon customers can also recycle their old cameras by requesting a free UPS shipping label through the Amazon Recycling Progam, the email notes. After purchasing the product, customers will then need to log into their Amazon account associated with their email and place the order for their Blink Subscription, which will show free at checkout. (A Blink account is required to activate your subscription plan — so wait until that’s set up first or you’ll be charged full-price). This subscription differs from those historically offered to Cloud Cam users, who had been able to choose from three priced tiers of $6.99, $9.99 or $19.99 per month, based on how many cameras they have (three, five or 10) and how long they want to store video clips — either a week, two weeks or a month, respectively. The Blink Subscription Plus Plan is a $10 per month (or $100/year) paid plan that offers a 60-day unlimited video history for an unlimited number of Blink devices, instead of just one. Of course, those former Cloud Cam customers who are replacing just one camera could downgrade to the $3 per month (or $30/year) Blink Subscription Basic Plan after their free year is up. The company is also giving its customers time to export their data from the Cloud Cam platform before it’s gone for good. Starting on December 2, 2022, customers will no longer be about to Cloud Cam or its associated apps. Up until then, customers can download their available video recordings if they choose. But after that date, all video history will be deleted, Amazon warns. To export their content, customers will need to click on each video from the “Recorded Clips” section in the app and then click the Download icon to save the recording. Amazon said its decision to kill the Cloud Cam, first launched in 2017, came about because the company’s smart home lineup of Alexa-connected devices had grown over the years and it’s decided to focus its efforts on other products. “With your help over the last five years, Cloud Cam has served as a reliable indoor security camera and a hub for Amazon Key-compatible smart locks that work with Alexa,” the initial email to Cloud Cam customers had explained. “As the number of Alexa smart home devices continues to grow, we are focusing efforts on Ring, Blink, and other technologies that make your home smarter and simplify your everyday routines.” To find the email about replacements, search your inbox for a message from “store-news@amazon.com” with the subject line “An important reminder about your Cloud Cam.”

Devialet launches a high-end portable speaker • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 7, 2022Posted in audio, Devialet, Devialet Mania, Gadgets, Speaker, StartupsNo Comments

When you say portable speakers, most people think about cheap Bluetooth speakers that you can easily put in your backpack when you’re going to the park. But Devialet has something different in mind with the Devialet Mania. The French high-end speaker maker wants to make the most luxurious and best sounding portable speaker around. The Devialet Mania costs $790 (€790) and is available today. “We are launching a new product, the Devialet Mania. And it represents the end of a long process. We started with amps, then there were the Phantom speakers, the Gemini earbuds and the Dione soundbar,” Devialet CEO Franck Lebouchard told me. “We are entering a new market with this portable speaker.” When Devialet decided to build a portable speaker four years ago, the concept was quite simple. Devialet wanted to design a speaker that works on battery, but a hi-fi speaker. “Hi-fi means a lot of things. It means great sound quality of course. Hi-fi also means stereo sound or at least stereo rendering,” Lebouchard said. The Devialet Mania is a spherical speaker with no front or back. There is a handle at the top of the device that invites users to pick it up and carry it around. But you won’t put it in your backpack to go to the park as it weighs 2.3kg (around 5 pounds). You can take it with you when you go on vacation, but it has mostly been designed to carry around the house. Image Credits: ZebethMedia When you start playing music, the first thing that you are going to notice are the two woofers that are set up in a ‘push-push’ configuration to avoid unwanted vibrations. At the top of the device, there are four full-range speakers each pointing in a different direction. When you put the Devialet Mania on a table in the middle of the room, the full-range speakers alternatively broadcast the left channel or the right channel (clockwise: left, right, left, right). This way, wherever you sit, you mostly hear sound from the two full-range speakers that are in front of you — and you get stereo sound. There are four microphones in the device as well as an accelerometer. The Devialet Mania detects when it has been moved to a new location. Thanks to its built-in microphones, it can also detect when it’s next to a wall. In that case, the Devialet Mania determines the front and back of the device. The two full-range speakers on the left of the device broadcast the left channel, while the two speakers on the right broadcast the right channel. Using microphones to actively adapt the sound of the speaker was one of the selling points of Apple’s original HomePod. But Devialet insists on sound quality as well, such as its SAM proprietary technology (Speaker Active Matching). “We are the only ones that combine portable, hi-fi and automatic calibration,” Lebouchard said. The Devialet Mania works with Devialet’s own app and features both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. On Wi-Fi, it supports AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect. The battery is supposed to last 10 hours at a normal volume. There are some built-in buttons that let you pause the music, change the volume, activate Bluetooth and more. There’s a single USB-C port on the device for charging. And because the Devialet Mania has microphones, the company is integrating Amazon Alexa for the first time. You can disable the feature entirely with a physical slider button near the USB-C port. In addition to the base model that comes in black or white, there’s a $990 (€990) ‘Opéra de Paris’ model with gold-plated finishes and an optional docking station — the base can also be purchased separately. “If we want to become a global player in the audio industry, we need to have a product in each major segment of the audio market — wireless earbuds, soundbars and portable speakers,” Lebouchard said. According to him, portable speakers and soundbars each generate €6 billion in sales every year. Image Credits: Devialet As for the company’s older products, Devialet released an update to its Phantom speakers in January 2021 with newer components and a matte finish. “With Phantom, we release a big update every couple of years,” Lebouchard said. When it comes to amplifiers, the Expert Pro was the company’s first product but it hasn’t been updated in a while. “Amps aren’t a priority for us because it’s a very small market. But the Expert is an important product for our brand, for audiophile enthusiasts. We want to make the best amplifier in the world because we can’t say that we are the company with the best sound in the world without selling the best amplifier in the world,” Lebouchard said. So I guess it means “stay tuned.” Over the past year and a half, Devialet has shipped wireless earbuds, a soundbar and a portable speaker. Lebouchard told me that there’s one missing product in the lineup — and it’s headphones. But don’t hold your breath for Devialet headphones as the company is not sure it would be a strategic move. “When you go outside, people moved on from headphones to wireless earbuds,” Lebouchard said. Image Credits: ZebethMedia

Apple warns of lower iPhone 14 Pro models shipment due to Covid-19 restrictions • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 6, 2022Posted in Apple, Gadgets, Hardware, iphone 14, iPhone 14 ProNo Comments

Apple warned investors and customers on Sunday that it expects to ship fewer iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models as the world’s most valuable tech firm grapples with ongoing Covid-19 restrictions in China. The company said it continues to see strong demand for the pro models of the new iPhone 14 lineup, but has slashed its earlier shipment estimates. “The facility [located in Zhengzhou, China] is currently operating at significantly reduced capacity. As we have done throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we are prioritizing the health and safety of the workers in our supply chain,” the company said in a blog post. (More to follow)

Darkroom brings high-end photo smarts to your iCloud Photo Library • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Gadgets, photo editorNo Comments

It’s been around for a hot minute, but Darkroom just got a pretty major update that makes it a lot more interesting for photo enthusiasts who don’t want, or can’t afford, to use more specialist tools. The fast and intuitive photo editor gives you access to your photo library, essentially giving you a Lightroom-like experience natively on your phone or Mac. The company just introduced highlight and shadow recovery to its tool, which enables users to make the most of the ProRAW files captured by the latest-generation iPhones. In another recent update, the company added Preset Sharing, which makes it possible to create a stylistic edit you enjoy, and then share those edits with the world as a preset; much like a filter in Instagram, except customizable. Recovering details from “blown out” highlights or “overgrown” shadows is one of the primary reasons for shooting in RAW (as opposed to JPEG). The issue with JPEG, primarily, is that the file format discards a lot of the information the camera captured. Not a problem if you shoot perfect photos every time, but not great if your images need a bit of an edit. The functionality added to the tool adds five sliders that will seem familiar to users of high-end photography tools; Exposure, Whites, Highlights, Shadows and Blacks. “This is among our most consequential updates to Darkroom’s rendering engine since 2018 when we added RAW editing support,” notes Majd Taby, the co-founder of Darkroom. The coolest thing about Darkroom — a boon for those who primarily shoot with their phones — is that the tool is specifically designed for managing and editing your existing iCloud Photo Library. It’s as fast and easy to use as the Photos app, with many of the same powerful features as Adobe’s Lightroom. The quirk: Because of the deep integration with the iOS ecosystem, you don’t have to import photos, or pay for storage in a second library. Darkroom is a free app, but certain premium features are available only to Darkroom+ customers, paying $30 per year or $5 per month for the additional features.

Amazon details Matter rollout for Alexa devices • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 3, 2022Posted in Alexa, Amazon, Gadgets, Hardware, matter, SamsungNo Comments

We’re still in the very early stages, but thus far Matter has proven to be a fairly peaceful collaboration between the biggest competitors in consumer electronics. Apple, Samsung and Google are among those that have detailed their plans to embrace the universal smart home standard following its recent launch. Today Amazon is offering some insight into its own approach. The company noted in a post this morning that 30 Echo and Eero devices are set to embrace the standard, accounting for around 100 million devices (give or take) across the globe. The company is starting the roll out with 17 Amazon devices (including Echos, plugs switches and bulbs), starting with an Android-based setup. That’s set for next month, with iOS availability following after and support for its Eero devices arriving at some point in early 2023. The company is also using the opportunity to announce Works with Alexa (WWA) for Matter devices, as a continued effort to ensure compatibility across devices. Amazon notes: As part of WWA for Matter requirements, devices will need to be Matter certified by the CSA, which if not already obtained can be started in parallel with the WWA certification process and maintaining the high quality bar customers rely on. For existing Works With Alexa certified devices that will receive over-the-air updates to support Matter and pass Matter certification, we will not require these devices to undergo re-certification. The company is also teaming with Samsung to simplifying the customer’s device setup experience using Alexa or SmartThings. Here’s Amazon again: This collaboration is built upon upcoming Alexa APIs enabling bi-directional multi-admin simple setup and Thread credential sharing for Matter devices. These cloud-based APIs are designed to make complex technology fade into the background, allowing customers to effortlessly add Matter devices to their preferred services, realizing Matter’s promise of simplifying our customers’ smart home experience.