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HP's new touchscreen Chromebook is ready for Android apps
It's no secret that HP loves making Chromebooks, and today the company is expanding its lineup with the future of Chrome OS in mind. Enter the HP Chromebook 11 G5, an 11.6-inch laptop which features a touchscreen, meaning it'll support Android apps when Google rolls that service out later in 2016. Additionally, the new lightweight (2.51 lbs) Chromebook comes with an Intel Celeron N3060 processor and, according to HP, up to 12.5 hours of battery life. But the best part, perhaps, is that the 11 G5 will only cost $189 when it hits stores in October.
Pixel C review: Google's first tablet makes rookie mistakes
All of a sudden, pretty much every computer maker wants a Surface-like convertible of their own. Apple's got the iPad Pro, of course, but Lenovo, Dell and HP are getting in on the action too. And now there's the Pixel C from Google, a premium hybrid tablet built in-house (just like the Chromebook Pixel), with a keyboard accessory that attaches via frickin' magnets. Much like the iPad Pro, the Pixel C seems like an experiment to see just how far you can take a mobile OS into productivity territory typically handled by desktop platforms. But while it certainly feels like an obsessively designed device, it's a bit too clunky to recommend, especially compared to the Surface 3 or other Android tablets.
Use your Xbox One to try on clothes at home
High-tech fitting rooms have been around for quite some time, but most of the gear stays inside a retail location. However, Xbox One owners can now have a personal setup in the comforts of their living room. Thanks to a new shopping app called The Mall, the console's Kinect motion-tracking camera and the software's virtual wardrobe tech drives the in-home fittings. Launching with the help of Von Bismark, a Dublin-based television e-commerce company and veteran of Microsoft Ventures, the shopping platform allows Xbox users to browse for new clothes before standing in front of their TV to try them on in real time.
Amazon lets you attach other video services to your Prime account
Those rumors of Amazon letting you attach other video services to your Prime subscription? They're true. The internet giant just kicked off the Streaming Partners Program, an alliance that makes it easier for you to sign up to multiple video services. So long as you have that Prime subscription, you only need your one Amazon account to handle everything. The option even gives you a multi-service watch list and integration with other Prime features, like ASAP playback, voice search and X-Ray. You also receive a discount on pricing, such as the $9 per month you'll pay for early launch partners Showtime and Starz.
Most e-cigarettes have chemicals that will hurt your lungs
Electronic cigarettes are ostensibly safer for you than conventional cigs (you're not inhaling tar and other elements of tobacco smoke), but it now looks like they might not be much better at all. Researchers have found that 75 percent of flavored e-cigs contain diacetyl, a flavoring chemical that can produce "popcorn lung" disease when inhaled over the long term. To boot, many of the tested flavors had other related chemicals (like 2,3-pentanedione and acetoin) on top of known risky ingredients, such as formaldehyde.
Move over Mophie, Apple has a $99 Smart Battery Case
When I reviewed the iPhone 6s and 6s Plus earlier this year, I lamented the fact that companies like Apple seemed more eager to build thinner phones than improve the battery life. That industry-wide trend made battery cases a near-necessity, and now Apple wants a slice of that market too. Enter the Smart Battery Case, a $99 (£79) add-on for the iPhone 6 and 6s that packs an extra 1,877mAh battery into a... curious-looking silicone frame. You can nab one for yourself starting today, but before you do that, let's take a closer look at the company's handiwork.
Researchers use ultrasound to activate cancer-killing drugs
Since your liver is surrounded by delicate blood vessels and bile ducts, cancers are tough to treat with toxic chemotherapy drugs and usually require surgery. However, researchers from the University of Illinois have pioneered a new "triple attack" treatment that kills cancer cells with a standard lymphoma chemo drug. "Nanobubbles" of it are injected into a cancer mass, then "popped" using ultrasound, releasing medicine directly into cancer cells during critical cell formation. "The probability of its undesired systemic release is minimal due to this highly selective activation mechanism, which helps to spare the healthy cells," says lead researcher Dipanjan Pan.
USPS will email you images of what's in your mailbox
We've all done it. Take a few minutes to walk to the mailbox only to discover it's either empty or filled with junk that immediately goes in the trash. The US Postal Service is testing a new tool that will save you a trip if there's nothing interesting to be found. The feature is called Informed Delivery and it sends up to 10 images a day of what's in your physical mailbox to your email inbox.
Being a reviewer has made me dread gadget shopping
I, Dana Wollman, reviewer of laptops, have not purchased a laptop for myself since 2008. In the years since, I've tested 92 computers for Engadget, and who-knows-how-many for my old employer Laptop Mag. I've answered countless emails from readers asking which PC they should buy. I bought my dad a Lenovo ThinkPad, and came to the rescue years later when he botched his Windows 10 install. Helping other people is easy. It's myself I hate shopping for.
8 gifts for design nerds
Winter is coming. And with it also comes the need to show the loved ones in your life just how much you care for them by spending, spending, spending on gifts. Trouble is, there are just so many options to choose from. What you really need is someone, some outside force to hold your credit card-holding hand. And boy, do we have some suggestions for you. Happy Holidays! You're very welcome.We've all got that one "cultured" friend, family member or lover, what with their finely tuned tastes, who makes shopping for gifts somewhat of a chore. Hopefully, this round of selections will ease that burden and get their upturned noses to turn down in appreciation.Image credit: Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy
Twitter's 2015 was defined by activism and its own tough luck
Twitter has posted its year in review, and it's clear that some things are truer than ever in the social sphere... including for Twitter itself. More often than not, the 2015 trends were a continuation of what you saw in 2014: activism dominated tweets even more than in the past thanks to the Black Lives Matter, LGBT equality and pro-refugee movements. Straight-up politics mattered as well given crucial elections in countries like Canada, India and the UK.
Spotify's 'Year in Music' recaps your streaming in 2015
Spotify loves to make lists, and recently gave a global rundown of the year's most-streamed artists, topped by Rihanna and Drake. It's latest recap is more personal, however. The "Year in Music" page shows your top songs, artists and genres, first played song, top artists by season and total minutes of music listened to. It then summarizes all of it by showing the total number of songs and artists you played, and produces a playlist of songs it thinks you'll want to hear next year. If you're satisfied with your musical cred, you can share a snapshot of it across your various social networks (below). That way, your friends can see all the times you listened to Taylor Swift and Adele ... oh, wait.
PlayStation VR is a few games away from being ready for prime time
The PlayStation Experience event in San Francisco this weekend is one of the biggest opportunities to date for the public to check out PlayStation VR -- more than a dozen titles are on display here, including titles from Sony, Harmonix, Capcom and more. Unfortunately, it hasn't been easy for those at the show to actually try those games out. Attendees were able to sign up ahead of time and reserve a slot to try the PlayStation VR experience, but a glitch in Sony's database erased all those reservations, leaving a bunch of excited fans figuratively out in the cold.
Samsung Galaxy S6 reportedly drops bloatware in favor of Microsoft apps
Quite a few smartphone fans will tell you that a Samsung phone's Achilles' heel is its software -- you'll find a ton of (frequently unwanted) apps and features that do little besides chew up space and slow things down. You may get to wave goodbye to that cruft when the Galaxy S6 shows up, however. A SamMobile source claims that Samsung is yanking a lot of its usual pre-installed bloatware, making the GS6 "amazingly fast" compared to a weighed-down phone like the Galaxy Note 4. The titles wouldn't go away forever, but you'd have to download in-house apps if you did want them. Instead, the focus would be on a host of included Microsoft apps: Office, OneDrive, OneNote and Skype would give you some solid productivity out of the box. It's not clear if the Microsoft deal has any connection to a recent truce with Samsung over patent royalties, although it wouldn't be surprising.
Nest is now officially a part of the Google family
Prepare for a world of Google-controlled thermostats, smoke alarms and no doubt other mysterious projects we don't know about yet. Shortly after receiving the green light from the FTC, the search giant announced that its $3.2 billion acquisition of home automation company Nest is now a done deal. Google's already touting Nest as the perfect partner to "enhance its suite of products and services," and is allowing founders Tony Fadell and Matt Rogers (both ex-members of the original iPod team) to continue operating the company under its own brand. Google's involvement brings its fair share of privacy concerns, but Fadell says Nest doesn't intend to change its current privacy policy, and that any future changes will be both transparent and opt-in. While we don't fully know what Google has planned, now that it has swapped smartphones for smart homes, we guess it could make a good start simply by making Nest's existing products available in more countries, as they're barely known outside of the US.
The FCC is working on a plan to fix net neutrality, save the internet
Remember when Verizon skewered the FCC's net neutrality rules? It may have won the battle, but Tom Wheeler doesn't believe that the carrier has won the war. The FCC chief has let slip that he's working on a plan to reinstate provisions for a free and open internet in the near future. He's backed by five Democratic senators, who are urging the head to be swift in restoring balance to the force US communications business. The belief is that, in order to get around the loophole Verizon used to such good effect, the commission will simply reclassify broadband providers as common carriers, liable to the same regulation covering phone companies. It wouldn't go down well with Big Red and the like, but at least it'd hamper their evil plans to penalize you for that Netflix subscription.
Nintendo Wii production to cease 'soon,' at least in Japan
Manufacturing of the aging Wii game console will end "soon," Nintendo of Japan says. Kotaku spotted the note on a product page for the Wii on Nintendo's website, which reads "Manufacturing is scheduled to end soon." It's unclear if this affects worldwide production or just Japan, but we've asked Nintendo for more info. The news doesn't come as a huge surprise, though, as Nintendo's new game console comes with the ability to play Wii games built-in. A recent update even added the ability to play said Wii games directly on the Wii U gamepad screen -- the main selling point of owning a Wii U. It also doesn't hurt that tens of millions of Wiis are already out there in the world, Nintendo having finally sated the years-long demand for the seven year old console.
Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 review (2014 edition)
If you want your product to sound like it belongs in the future, why not name it after the future itself? Taking a page from the auto industry, Samsung named its new Galaxy Note 10.1 for the coming year, dubbing it the 2014 edition. And, judging from what we've seen of the new Note so far, it's clear Samsung has greatly improved upon many of the original's shortcomings; it even added more storage space! Unfortunately, though, Samsung also boosted the base price by $50 as a result. So how does it hold up? Does the new Note 10.1 trick us into believing it came from the future, or is it too easy to look through Sammy's "futuristic" marketing campaign? Gaze into the Magic 8 Ball with us to find out.
AT&T brings 300Mbps fiber internet to Austin in December, gigabit by 'mid-2014'
Now that AT&T is actually laying down fiber-optic line in Austin, we have yet another reason to be jealous of Texas' weird city. According to Ma Bell, "tens of thousands" will be getting 300Mbps downloads (and uploads), the "fastest internet speeds available" in town to the general public, come December. Those subscribers can snag a free upgrade to gigabit service -- GigaPower, as the company calls it -- when it's available in the middle of next year. Oh, and if you want a say in where the ultra-fast service travels, make your neighborhood proud by voting at AT&T's website. For some reason though, we don't imagine Google will be casting any ballots. [Original image credit: Adriano Aurielo Araujo / Flickr]
Japanese carrier DoCoMo demos 'Intelligent Glass' wearable at CEATEC 2013 (hands-on)
Wearables are coming and DoCoMo wants to be involved from the start. Here at CEATEC, the carrier has dedicated a quadrant of its booth to prototype wearables (at least some of it was Vuzix hardware), with several different demo sessions offering glimpses into how it all might work. First, however, the wearable itself. We saw several different models and many had Vuzix written somewhere on them. It appears that NTT DoCoMo has been working more closely on the software interfaces and real world applications, and so it didn't really push (or even mention) technical specifications. On the "Space Interface" demo, however, the headset paired a camera with an infrared sensor, both in the middle of the device, to gauge where your hands are. You could then interact with characters on screen, poke, push and pick them up and move 'em around. These are very early concepts, but DoCoMO's already working to make these virtual objects shareable, allowing multiple people to manipulate the same thing. Darren embarrasses himself while playing with a virtual bear after the break. Oh, and we've got more on the wearable too.
