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Audi adds Q7 SUV to its Silvercar on-demand rental service
Audi is hoping to attract families and groups of travelers to its Silvercar service, through which you can reserve and unlock cars with your phone, by adding its Q7 to the fleet. You can now reserve the SUV in Denver, Fort Lauderdale, Los Angeles, Miami, Orlando, Phoenix and Salt Lake City for rentals starting February 15th. Audi says it will make the Q7 available at its other Silvercar locations from June.
Audi and NVIDIA give an AI a crash course in driving
Many of the self-driving demonstrations at CES involved systems required months or even years of training. NVIDIA and Audi decided to see what they could do in four days.
Audi and NVIDIA work together on AI-powered cars
NVIDIA isn't content with making an artificial intelligence platform for cars and waiting for someone to use it. The company has unveiled a partnership with Audi that has the two working on AI-powered cars. You'll see the fruits of their labor in an experimental Q7 SUV that has learned to drive itself in three days (it'll be puttering around CES's Gold Lot), but their plans are much bigger. Ultimately, their goal is to have Audis with Level 4 autonomy (that is, full autonomy outside of extreme situations) on roads by 2020. That's only three years away, which is fairly aggressive compared to promises made by other German automakers.
Audi's Q7 SUV tries to make you a better driver
I'm sitting in the passenger seat of the new 2017 Audi Q7 as it prepares to turn left. Another car is barreling towards us in the opposite lane. An Audi engineer sitting behind the wheel assures me everything will be fine. Suddenly, at the last minute, the driver turns the wheel and punches the gas. We should have lurched into path of the oncoming vehicle and caused an accident. Instead, the car's onboard safety technology slammed on the brakes and alerted the driver to the mistake. This all went down on a closed course in Northern California, but it happens all the time to real drivers on real roads. Audi is hoping to reduce those incidents with an SUV that's not just smart, but actually fun to drive.
Audi's latest Q7 SUV and R8 sports car are powered by electricity
Audi has gone to this year's Geneva Motor Show with new versions of its Q7 SUV and R8 sports car in tow: electric-powered versions, that is. The new Q7 E-Tron Quattro looks very similar to the regular Q7, but it's actually a plug-in hybrid that has an electric-only range of 34 miles, thanks to its lithium-ion battery. It promises instant high-speed acceleration from 0 to 62 mph in just six seconds, uses a V6 diesel engine, and has a 166 miles per gallon potential, with speeds reaching up to 140 mph. The hybrid SUV has four driving modes: EV mode uses pure electricity, obviously, while hybrid mode automatically switches between electricity and diesel. Battery hold mode stores any electrical energy for later use, while charge mode is used while charging the battery. Audi plans to release it in the UK by the end of this year for a price that's yet to be announced, but it's still unclear if and when it will be released elsewhere.
Polaroid's Q-series Android tablets offer a taste of KitKat starting at $129
Polaroid isn't known as a technology vanguard, but it's showing a little forward thinking today with the launch of three budget tablets. The 7-inch Q7 (pictured below), 8-inch Q8 (above) and 10.1-inch Q10 all run Android 4.4 KitKat out of the box, giving them a slight edge over more advanced devices that are still running older software. Not that they'll be especially noteworthy otherwise. All three ship with unnamed (but likely low-end) quad-core processors, and HDMI video is the only real standout feature. You may forgive the modest specs when you see the pricing, however. The Q series will sell at prices between $129 and $179 when it ships in the spring, which makes it one of the cheapest ways to try Google's latest mobile OS.
Pentax intros K-50 and K-500 DSLRs, Q7 mirrorless camera
When it rains, it pours -- we knew Pentax was due for new interchangeable lens cameras, but it just surprised us by unveiling three of them at once. The mid-range K-50 and entry K-500 DSLRs at the front of the pack represent slight upgrades to the 16-megapixel K-30 on the inside, with both gaining a higher ISO 51,200 sensitivity and Eye-Fi card support. They mostly differ on the outside. The K-50 keeps the K-30's weather sealing, lithium batteries and extreme color customization; the K-500 caters to the budget crowd by going without weatherproofing, running on AA batteries and shipping only in black. Both bodies are available in stores this July, starting at $600 for a K-500 with an 18-55m kit lens and $780 for a similarly equipped K-50. The smallest camera of the bunch, the Q7, may be the most intriguing. While the mirrorless body still shoots at the 12.4 megapixels of the Q10, it upgrades to a larger 1/1.7-inch sensor that delivers a big performance boost -- sensitivity has jumped to ISO 12,800, and there's faster autofocusing to boot. Pentax also touts a faster shot-to-shot time, better image stabilization and Eye-Fi support. The Q7 will cost the same $500 in kit form as its ancestor does today, although photographers will have to be patient when the tiny camera doesn't hit retail until August.
Pentax Q7 purportedly leaks with three color options, larger sensor than Q10
Pentax camera launches always seem to be colorful affairs, and if new images are to be believed, a multi-hued mirrorless model with a retro bent will soon arrive from the outfit. According to serial leaker Digicame-info, a new Q7 model will be unveiled with a larger 1/1.7-inch sized sensor than the 1/2.3-inch CMOS-packing Q10, and come with a kit zoom or optional standard prime lens on July 5th. Until we hear it from the source, though, it'd be wise to hold off on buying matching silver, black or yellow outfits.
Audi's Sound Concept cabin defines auditory excess: 62 speaker surround-sound
If you've been bragging about your all-encompassing 7.2 surround-sound system to of your friends, prepare for a mighty dose of humble pie. Audi has hand-crafted what it calls the Sound Concept, an in-car sound system so excessive it should be able to cause your soft, fleshy bits to pulsate in new and exciting ways. There are five tweeters scattered across the dash and the doors, five woofers (four in the doors and a monster in the back), and then a whopping 52 mid-range speakers encircling the entire enclosure, creating a package that's not likely to show up in the options catalog anytime soon. All these have been wedged into the interior of a Q7 SUV in the interests of Wave Field Synthesis, minimizing a user's ability to hear specific speakers -- and blowing Audyssey's paltry 11-speaker DSX system right out of the water.
Smart Q7 reviewed, deemed fairly useful for fairly basic tasks
The folks over at UMPC Portal have gotten a hold of the SmartQ 7 internet tablet for a nice, long review. The MID, which has a 667MHz Samsung ARM S3C6410 CPU, 128MB of RAM, and 1GB of flash memory, seems to handle its basic tasks -- MP3 playback, light browsing, PDF viewing, and viewing / editing documents fairly well. It also apparently has a pretty great battery life, and can stay juiced in standby mode for over three days. The tablet (which is somewhat reminiscent of the yet to appear in the wild CrunchPad) does, however, have plenty of drawbacks -- a touchscreen that often responds incorrectly, limited RAM and storage, and a bunch of other limitations we're used to associating with MIDs in general. There's a video highlighting some of the SmartQ 7's apps after the break; hit the read link for the full review.
Nextlink's Invisio Q7 finally sees FCC approval
Wow, we'd darned near forgotten about this thing. Remember the Invisio Q7, Nextlink's hot little bone conduction number from mid '06 that was promised for delivery by the end of the year? Yeah, it never showed up -- until now. It may not be for sale just yet, but at least a few folks at the FCC have had a chance to check it out (ick, we hope they changed earbuds as they passed it around), giving us hope that it'll finally show up in stores in time for the holidays. The $200 price point still puts a sour taste in our mouths, but considering how much smaller it looks than the similarly-spec'd Jawbone, it may end up being worth every penny.
Nextlink's new bone-conduction headset goes Bluetooth
It's hard not to love the concept of bone-conduction headsets: government-funded technology (much like the iPod), fairly positive reviews on sound quality in noisy environments, and most importantly, they represent the closest most of us will ever get to bionic implants. The tech is still fairly young, though, and previous entries from Nextlink and Aliph have come up short in the size and, uh, wire departments. Nextlink's at it again with their latest entry, the Invisio Q7, and both issues appear to be solved. The Q7 takes the shape of Nextlink's well-liked Bluespoon line, adding Bluetooth and a send/end button for good measure. At $200, the headset is a bit steep when it looks to drop toward the end of the year, but if it means we can hold a phone convo in the middle of a raucus Engadget reader meetup, we're all for it.[Via phoneArena]
