The foldable hinge of Lenovo's Yoga laptops has become a mainstay in the convertible laptop market since the original was launched in late 2012. Along with the MacBook Air and the Surface Pro 4, the Yoga has become one of the industry's most commonly copied designs. This week at Mobile World Congress, Lenovo has updated the originals with new features that check a lot of the boxes we're looking for 2017's PCs to check.
More than two years after stepping into the world of connected wristwear, Google finally started rolling out Android Wear 2.0. You’ll see it on watches new and old, round and square, big and bigger, ugly and uglier. Wear 2.0 offers many things, but this update mostly sharpens Google’s vision for smartwatches. It makes your watch a better tool for fitness and texting, makes the interface far easier to navigate, and puts Google Assistant on your wrist. Most importantly, it makes everything you do with it faster. Much faster.
In what feels like the first good use for an Amazon Dash Button, a programmer hacked his button to donate $5 to the ACLU whenever he wishes.
In a post published to Medium, Nathan Pryor detailed the process of building a custom charitable Dash Button, from writing a script that sends the money to designing its own official label. So, Pryor set out to build one.
With no donation API from the ACLU to work with, his wrote one that could automatically pull up the ACLU's donation form and instantly enter his personal information and credit card number.
Over in Sweden, Czech, Italy, and Belgium, Ikea is launching a new line of ‘smart’ light bulbs. These countries are apparently the test market for these bulbs, and they’ll soon be landing on American shores. This means smart Ikea bulbs will be everywhere soon, and an Internet of Light Bulbs is a neat thing to explore. [Markus] got his hands on a few of these bulbs, and is now digging into their inner workings (German Make Magazine, with a Google Translate that includes the phrase, ‘capering the pear’).
While we still don't officially know the new name of BlackBerry's forthcoming device (code name: Mercury), we will soon enough, as BlackBerry teased the announcement in a short video tweeted from the company's official Twitter account. The new device will be formally launched on February 25 in Barcelona, the Saturday before the official start of Mobile World Congress 2017 on the 27th.
Tiny drones could scout high-rise buildings and underground tunnels for possible threats to US troops in cities of the future. But instead of spending years cooking up the necessary drone technologies in military research labs, the Pentagon might be better off shopping for the latest civilian drones coming soon to stores.
Mike Snyder was clearing brush behind his brother’s western Massachusetts house, erecting a fence to keep deer from the blueberries, when the tick bit him. A few days later, on a flight to Norway with his family, his palms itched and his head grew woozy. So the Stanford geneticist dumped a bunch of wearable sensors on his tray table and began doing what he does best: measuring himself.
Back when Oculus first launched the Rift VR headset almost a year ago, buying the headset and a minimum-specced computer that could actually power it would run you at least $1,500. Now, the "entry-level" price for PC-tethered virtual reality is already down to $1,100 as part of a new bundle deal.
It's been 50 years since Captain Kirk first spoke commands to an unseen, all-knowing Computer on Star Trek and not quite as long since David Bowman was serenaded by HAL 9000's rendition of "A Bicycle Built for Two" in 2001: A Space Odyssey. While we've been talking to our computers and other devices for years (often in the form of expletive interjections), we're only now beginning to scratch the surface of what's possible when voice commands are connected to artificial intelligence software.
Now that Chrome OS users can get the millions of apps in Google’s Play Store, tech firms are developing entirely new kinds of devices for the platform. After months of speculation, rumors, and delays—which may have had something to do with the Note 7 battery scandal—Samsung announced the new Chromebook Plus and Chromebook Pro today at CES.
