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Clubhouse's Wave feature makes it easier for users to create private rooms
Less than a week after developer Jane Manchun Wong discovered Clubhouse was working on a new feature called Wave, that functionality is now available to all users on both Android and iOS.
Clubhouse is developing a new way to invite friends to chat called 'Wave'
Clubhouse is working on 'Wave' feature to invite friends to chat, Jane Manchun Wong has discovered.
This wearable MIDI controller can control Zoom calls too
Now you can control Zoom and Powerpoint with Genki's wearable MIDI controller.
LG's MWC teaser hints at phones with more touchless gestures
Besides the potential of foldable/expandable devices and 5G, what else can we expect to see at Mobile World Congress next month? According to LG's invite to its Premiere event on February 24th, we'll say "Goodbye Touch." The video clip shows a hand summoning and dismissing text with a simple wave, similar to things we've seen from tech like Samsung's Air Gesture that arrived in the Galaxy S4. Presumably LG's implementation will be far more advanced than what we experienced back in 2013, but we'll have to wait and see.
'Wave' ring is the latest to turn your hands into MIDI controllers
Ring-shaped music controllers aren't anything new. IK Multimedia released the iRing back in 2014, and the Enhancia made its debut at CES this year. Now we've got the Wave, an adjustable MIDI controller ring that can adjust sounds and effects with gestures and taps. Genki Instruments has a working prototype of the device, and is looking to fund a final version on Indiegogo.
HTC Vive Focus is a standalone VR headset with ‘world-scale’ tracking
After a couple of teases earlier this year, HTC has finally unveiled its upcoming standalone VR headset at today's Vive Developer Conference in Beijing. Dubbed the Vive Focus, this all-in-one device features inside-out 6-degree-of-freedom (6DoF) "world-scale" tracking, meaning it doesn't require external base stations nor sensors, so you can get positional tracking anywhere at any time -- even on a train or plane, should you wish to. While at least a couple of Chinese manufacturers have announced standalone 6DoF VR headsets before, HTC claims that the Focus will be the first of such kind to actually hit the market.
Seattle enacts broadband privacy rules where the FCC won't
Just because the FCC and White House have rolled back broadband privacy rules doesn't mean internet providers are free to sell your data without permission... if you live in Seattle, they'll still have to ask nicely. City mayor Ed Murray has implemented a rule requiring that cable companies obtain your consent before sharing your web browsing history and other data whenever it's needed for something besides essential service. As he explains, the city "will act" when it sees the national government stripping "critical consumer protections" -- it's filling in the gap the FCC has left open.
Facebook won't flag your friends on a map anymore
Facebook is making some significant changes to its Nearby Friends feature that lets you see where pals are, Techcrunch has noticed. Most significantly, it has eliminated the precise tracking feature that tells you exactly where friends are by pinpointing them on a map. Now, you can only see them in a list along with an approximate distance away. While the original feature made it easy to check someone's progress or tell you when they arrive, for instance, it's also a bit of a privacy nightmare if you forget to turn it off.
MIT builds an early warning system for sailors
MIT believes that it's developed an early warning system for rogue waves that could save the lives of sailors. Currently, predicting when a ten foot high wave is going to crash across a ship takes a room full of supercomputers. That's not helpful for the scrappy fishing boats you see on Discovery Channel shows like Deadliest Food Grabbers and Gruff Seamen at Sea. That's where this new method from Themis Sapsis and Will Cousins comes in, which spot impending trouble and alert crews to batten down the hatches.
Alcatel OneTouch wants to be the Zara of smartwatches
Alcatel OneTouch wouldn't be the first company to bring us a round smartwatch (well, near-circular, in this case), but with its eyes set on the sub-€100 and sub-$150 price points in Europe and North America, respectively, the company clearly has ambitious plans. Previously known as the "Wave," this device is now simply dubbed the Watch and features a much prettier UI than what we saw back in September. In addition to the aforementioned updates, Alcatel's added two slightly different designs to go alongside the original sporty black-and-red look: a feminine all-white version and a premium all-metallic version. While these two will cost a little more, we understand that they likely won't exceed €150 (about $180), which should still encourage more folks to give them a spin.
The Movo Wave is a stripped-down fitness tracker that costs just $30
These days, there are only two reasons for us to write about fitness trackers: Either they pack an impressive number of sensors, or they're really, really cheap. The Wave, from a new startup called Movo, definitely falls into the latter category. The device itself is unremarkable in every way -- design, functionality -- but it's nonetheless worth a mention, thanks to its super-low price of $30. In setting the price so low, Movo has managed to undercut out already-affordable devices like the Jawbone Up Move and Misfit Flash, both of which sell for $50. We say, considering how disposable fitness trackers are -- how easy they are to set aside and stop wearing -- these price cuts can't come fast enough.
Alcatel OneTouch's new device family has a pretty tempting smartwatch
Samsung might have started the phablet frenzy trend of announcing large smartphones at IFA, but it's not the only company to exhibit their jumbo technology at the trade show nowadays. In fact, Alcatel is the latest in a long line of outfits to whip out 6-inch-plus hardware, and this year it's following up the Hero with the unsurprisingly named Hero 2. The 7.9mm-thin device has a curved aluminum body, a reasonably light 175-gram weight and a 6-inch, edge-to-edge display. Sounds rather tempting, non?
'Tractor beam' for water can pull boats in any direction
It can be difficult to get waterborne objects to go in the right direction -- just ask any boat captain who has had to fight waves on a choppy sea. However, researchers at the Australian National University have developed a "tractor beam" (really, a wave generator) that would make it trivial for you to float anything to its intended destination. The system creates complex 3D waves that have their own currents, letting you pull a target simply by adjusting the waves' frequencies and sizes. In fact, you can produce any flow you like; scientists in the lab made vortices on demand.
Samsung's concept printers don't need Bluetooth, come with built-in sound
Printers aren't the most interesting to use or look at, but we've got to give Samsung credit for at least trying with its latest concept mobile printers. The oval device in the pic above is called Wave, and it can access files saved on a phone directly through the dock, letting you print even without WiFi or Bluetooth. Audiophiles might want to cast their eyes upon the other machine in the pic, however, as it's not just a printer but also a sound system that can charge phones. Samsung's scheduled to showcase both of them along with its other, less avant-garde printing tech on September 6th at the IFA 2013. Sadly, we don't believe the Korean company has immediate plans to bring them to market, so you'll have to make do with the usual fare for now.
Republic Wireless now issuing invites for summer beta program: is your name on the list?
Republic Wireless is now issuing the cellphone equivalent of Willy Wonka's golden tickets: an invite to its forthcoming beta. When you've been assigned a wave, you'll then be placed on a wait list, only told a week before you have to place cash on the barrel for a handset. Our tipsters have told us that the company is pitching (via a survey, of course) to hit three price points for customers, each fee buying a smartphone and the first month's service. All they could supply were the specs, so we've suggested some handsets that could fit the bill: Entry Level: $199 gets a phone from an "unknown" manufacturer with a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 600MHz CPU, 0.5GB of storage and a 5-megapixel camera -- which puts us in mind of the ZTE Libra or the iNQ Cloud Touch. Mid-range: $299 will buy a handset from a "well known" manufacturer, 3.7-inch touchscreen, 1GHz CPU, 1GB storage, 5-megapixel camera and a VGA front-facer, similar to the Galaxy U, HTC One V or Huawei Vision. Top Line: $499 gets you a 4.3-inch touchscreen phone with a 1.2Ghz dual-core CPU, 8GB storage and, weirdly, a 7-megapixel camera. We hope that last stat is a typo, since it rules out the vast majority of handsets at that level. If it was 8-megapixels, for example, we'd be thinking about phones like the Galaxy S II. We reached out to the company for more details, and were told that it's simply in a discovery phase of sorts -- it's still trying to get a better grasp on exactly what phones would be desired. Unfortunately, that means that there aren't any concrete handset decisions to be shared just yet, but we'll be sure to pass those along as soon as we find out ourselves. [Thanks, Matt]
Google Wave inches toward the grave, becomes read-only
Google won't shutter Wave entirely until April 30th, but the once clamored-for service is now seeing restrictions imposed upon it, as it prepares for its eventual rendezvous with the grim reaper. It's now read-only, which means new Waves are strictly verboten and those with anything of value in Mountain View's ocean, ought to look into the existing PDF-export functionality, or consider a migration to another open-source alternative -- like Apache Wave or Walkaround (which we've conveniently linked below). And with that folks, an era slowly draws to a close. Sayonara Wave, we hardly knew ye -- but find solace in knowing you'll always live-on in our hearts, our hands-on and inside other Google services.
Another one bites the dust as Google closes Picnik
Given the spate of closures, abandonments and wound-up projects, we can't help but suspect Google's mantra switching from "don't be evil" to "sic transit gloria mundi." Mountain View's winding up online-image editing site Picnik in preparation for integration with Google+, joining Wave, Knol, Friend Connect, Gears, Health, Powermeter and at least ten other services that have been shuttered as part of Larry Page's "spring clean." In a statement on the site, the guys are moving over to the Google+ team to "focus on even awesomer things," so expect to see live-editing of your photos appear there before the end of summer. In the meantime, you can enjoy Picnik's premium service until the doors close on April 19th and those who previously stumped up (with, you know, cash) for the added features will receive a full refund.[Thanks, Henry]
Google sets execution dates for Wave, Knol, Friend Connect and more
In what Google is calling its "off-season spring cleaning series," the mega company is finally setting some end dates for many of its lukewarm services, most notably the once-hyped Wave, Knol and Friend Connect. Sitting on Death Row for some time now, Mountain View has slowly phased out the less-than-successful products, most recently announcing that it would kill seven APIs including Translate and Video Search. The sweep is part of Google's VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz' overall plan to "[do] less of throwing things against the wall," focusing instead on "doing fewer things well." Besides the aforementioned services to receive the axe, Google will also be putting an end to Bookmarks List, Gears, Search Timeline and its Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal initiative. The company says the overhaul is part of the effort "to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience" -- in other words, "it's not me... it's you." Check the source for more details.
Mobile Miscellany: week of September 12, 2011
This week was packed with news on the mobile front, so it was easy to miss a few stories here and there. Here's some of the other stuff that happened in the wide world of wireless for the week of September 12, 2011: Vodacom South Africa has joined the data throttling club, though this carrier is taking a slightly different spin: BlackBerry users consuming more than 100MB of data each month will find their download speeds downgraded to GPRS or EDGE. The company claims this will only affect less than five percent of its BlackBerry customers. [via N4BB] Bada fans: the Samsung Wave 578 is featured on Orange's site as "coming soon." [via The Inquirer] Motorola announced the availability of the Fire and Fire XT in India this week. [via Motorola] The Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray is now being sold at Vodafone UK. [via Vodafone] Parrot announced the most recent addition to its lineup of Bluetooth products, called the Minikit+, a refresh of its popular hands-free speakerphone. The new model offers simultaneous pairing and voice commands. [via Parrot] Research in Motion is hoping to put the NFC functionality in OS 7 to good use, as it announced that the BlackBerry Bold 9900 / 9330 as well as the Curve 9350 / 9360 will support HID's iCLASS digital keys, which means corporate folks will able to use their smartphone as an access card. [via PhoneScoop] While digging through the Droid Bionic's webtop app, the names of two unknown Motorola phones were discovered: the Edison and the Common. Little is known about the Common, but a recent FCC filing mentioned the Edison and is speculated to be the follow-up to the Atrix, albeit sans LTE as originally hoped. [via Droid-Life] The manager of the Windows Phone 7 Marketplace, Matt Bencke, wrote a post pleading developers to submit their Mango-compatible apps as soon as possible, as the new update is coming to existing phones soon and it's obviously very important to have Windows Phone 7.5 run as smooth as possible. [via WMPowerUser] A leaked Radio Shack roadmap indicates the HTC Vigor should be available in stores by October 20th, and the QWERTY-packing Samsung Stratosphere will be up for online ordering as early as October 6th. As this is a third-party retailer, we can't say with surety that these dates reflect the carrier's official release. [via Droid-Life]
Samsung Wave 3 hands-on (video)
Had enough Samsung this morning? Well, how about a little more Samsung, then. Also on the company's laundry list of new devices is the Wave, which was announced earlier this week. The Wave 3 is the highest end of the three new devices carrying that name, packing a zippy 1.4GHz processor, which seems to handle tasks with ease. Like most of the rest of the products introduced here at IFA, the screen is the centerpiece of the device, a brilliant 4-inch WVGA unit. Also like the rest of Samsung's handsets, the hardware is really terrific on the Wave, glossy screen complimenting a brushed aluminum back. The handset runs Bada 2.0, which means that we're not likely to be seeing the thing in the US any time in the near future -- Samsung has largely backed away from US support for the mobile operating system, though it promises to expand its selection of applications from third-party app developers. Also new on the software front is ChatON, a mobile messaging service which we were unfortunately unable to give a spin here in Berlin. Click on past the break for a hands-on video. %Gallery-132288%
