Leave your wallet at home, Iowa is implementing digital driver’s licenses

Here in the United States, we’re quickly hurdling towards a future where all you need to carry with you is a smartphone. No cash, no credit cards, and now no driver’s license needed. The state of Iowa will soon be releasing a dedicated app that will effectively serve as a complete replacement for the traditional plastic driver’s license, and other states will likely follow suit. Both police and airport security will accept this new digital license, so feel free to leave your wallet or purse at home.
Starting next year, this digital driver’s license will be an option for all Iowa drivers. It’s currently unclear as to which platforms will be supported, but it’s a safe bet that iOS and Android will be the priority. Will Windows Phone and Blackberry users be left out in the cold? That still remains to be seen, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see them get snubbed. Of course, Iowa will continue to issue old-fashioned plastic licenses, so even those of us without smartphones will still be able to properly identify ourselves.

Earlier this year, Apple introduced the Apple Pay system that enables secure payment transactions using only your iPhone and your fingerprint. It uses the built-in Touch ID fingerprint sensor to confirm your identity, and effectively shields your raw credit card data from merchants. Considering how often major security breaches happen these days, it’s clear that additional safeguards are desperately needed. Those same concepts could easily be applied to your digital ID card, but that doesn’t seem to be happening just yet.

 


Iowa’s DOT Director Paul Trombino claims that this “identity vault app” will be secure, but then proceeds to brag about the use of PINs. If we really want to up the ante on security, we need to be thinking much bigger than a JPEG of your driver’s license behind a 4-digit password. Why not partner with Apple and Google to use the biometric data stored on your phone? You could easily verify your identity without ever needing to hand over your fingerprints to the state. It seems like a no-brainer to me, but maybe in the current political climate, that would be perceived as a bit too invasive.
As it stands, this initiative is mostly focused on the convenience factor, but it could be so much more than that. Moving away from simple plastic cards opens up many opportunities to increase security and privacy, but it can also be abused by the powers that be if we’re not careful. These digital driver’s licenses in Iowa are a small step forward, but it leaves me hopeful for the future of digital IDs.
Extreme tech
 

China’s new microwave pain beam burns you from the inside out

Ever since Transmetropolitan’s bowel disruptor terrified a dystopian future and Minority Report made the movie-going world wonder — if only for a fleeting moment — if they’d rather be shot with a bullet than hit with the sick stick, there have been actual weapons developed in the real world that seem straight out of science fiction. While it hasn’t been used to win a war just yet, the beginnings of sonic weaponry already exist, and the US Navy already has laser weaponry that is controlled with a device reminiscent of a video game controller. China’s new weapon, dubbed the Poly WB-1, doesn’t make you uncontrollably poop or incapacitate you through induced vomiting, but it burns you from the inside out from over half a mile (or one kilometer) away.

The Poly WB-1 uses millimeter wave beams to excite the water molecules within a victim until they heat up, causing overwhelming — but non-lethal — pain. Basically, it’s like a household kitchen microwave turned into a long-range, targeted weapon.

 


As you can see from the image to the right, the beam is attached to a very conspicuous truck, complete with military colors and emergency lights — you don’t have to worry about someone sneaking it through a security checkpoint at an airport or concert just yet. Publicly, at least, the the Poly WB-1 isn’t slated for miniaturization just yet, but will instead be attached to ships.
While a pain beam sounds absolutely terrifying, it’s arguably a step in a safer direction for military conflict than the tried-and-true lethal favorites of bullets, bombs, and fire. It’s also a much safer alternative to weapons that use chemical or biological agents.


Though the Poly WB-1 sounds like it’s from the future, it’s not the first non-lethal pain beam that acts like a microwave. The US developed its own microwave pain beam back in 2007, the Raytheon Active Denial System, as a means of crowd control. It was deployed in 2010, but wasn’t ever used — reportedly because of a 16-hour boot time, and massive fuel cost if left in standby mode after boot — and recalled the same year. It was also a satellite-like object placed atop a truck.
Even if China has figured out the boot time and fuel cost, it may be keeping the weapon as insurance or a looming threat, rather than actually using it — the negative publicity of a long-range pain beam that microwaves people might be too much for China to handle if the rest of the world has a problem with it. For now, just be glad you can’t sneak that thing through a metal detector.
Extreme tech


 
 

Raspberry Pi, the original $25 PC, now smaller than a credit card and costs just $20

When the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced way back in 2011 that it would release a complete PC for $25, we were dubious — but hey, here we are in 2014 and Raspberry Pi has been a massive success story, with thousands of units sold at the promised $25 price point. Today, the Foundation is releasing the Raspberry Pi Model A+ — a smaller, cheaper version of the Model A. The A+ costs just $20, and you can buy it today from Farnell in the UK or MCM in the US. Amusingly enough, the A+ is now smaller than credit-card sized.
As you probably know, technology has a habit of getting smaller — we adopt smaller connectors, redesign board layouts, combine multiple chips into single packages, and process nodes step down from 90nm to 45nm to 28nm. Therefore, it stands to reason that the Model A+ is significantly smaller than the original Model A — the A+ is now just 65mm x 56.5mm, down from 85.6mm x 56.5mm for the Model A. With the size reduction and fewer components, the Model A+ is about half the weight (23 grams vs. 45 grams).


Raspberry Pi Model A+, side-on, with a too-shallow depth of field

 
Raspberry Pi Model A+, hooked up to a screen, playing HD video. (Cables, screen, etc. not included.)

While it’s nice to talk about the inexorable march of miniaturization, the main reason the Model A+ is smaller is that the Foundation removed some of the larger components. The composite video RCA jack has been removed (composite video is now available through the 3.5mm headphone jack), and the SD card slot on the back of the board has been replaced with a micro SD slot. Remove a few components, redesign the PCB a bit (the A+ looks a lot like the recently announced B+), and voila: You have a much smaller computer. The smaller parts list obviously helped the Foundation bring the price down from $25 to $20, but I’m sure the main Broadcom BCM2835 SoC costs significantly less than three years ago, too.


Specs-wise, the Model A+ is virtually identical to the A — the same ARM SoC clocked at 700MHz, the same 256MB of RAM, the same HDMI video output. The Model A+ massively increases the number of GPIO pins, though, from 26 pins to 40 — the same number of GPIO pins as the larger Model B+, and they’re in the same physical location along the top edge, which might be useful in some compatibility related circumstances. The other important improvement on the A+ is that it (reportedly) uses 1 watt — down from 1.5W for the Model A, and 3W for the Model B+. In the case of the Model B+, the additional power consumption is mostly due to the Ethernet socket — I’m not sure how the folks at Raspberry Pi axed the Model A’s power consumption by 50%, except for some updated components (maybe the BCM2835 went through a process shrink?)
The Model A+ should be fully cross-compatible with Model A, B, and B+ applications. The B and B+ have twice as much RAM, but as you can see in the videos above, the A+ still runs Minecraft: Pi Edition and HD video just fine. All in all, the Model A+ for $20 is a great deal — but its single USB port definitely makes it more oriented towards DIY hardware hacking, while the Model B+, with its four USB ports and Ethernet socket, is still a better option for a low-power Linux box or home-theater PC.
You can buy the Raspberry Pi Model A+ from Farnell in the UK, and MCM in the US — but more stockists will appear soon, I’m sure.
Extreme tech
  

Food: The rarely-seen robots that package what we eat

From pancakes to jelly beans, a new breed of intelligent robots are preparing our food, discovers Veronique Greenwood, and it can be a dazzling sight.



Last July, while touring a jelly bean factory, I came upon a startling sight. Over a conveyor belt, a large robot spider danced over packets of sweets, plucking each one up with human speed and precision and placing it in a carton. The packets were piled willy-nilly, but the machine and its colleagues – two others were also manning the line – seemed to know where each one was and worked together to collect them all in seconds. It was riveting, and not a little eerie.
It turns out these robots are based on a design by Swiss robotics professor Reymond Clavel of the Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne, called a delta robot. They are incredibly quick and can do jobs in food packaging that only humans used to be able to do, like sorting or stacking randomly arranged objects, without the repetitive stress injuries such tasks give people.


Automation in the food industry has moved far beyond the simple labelling machines and conveyor belts you may be familiar with. Now intelligent robotic arms perform dazzling movements and expert feats of coordination, getting everything from frozen fish chunks to cookies swiftly into their packaging. It's not a side of processed foods you see that much, but it is everywhere.

To find out more about how they work, I spoke to Klas Bengtsson, a product manager at ABB, a Swiss company which makes food-grabbing delta robots.
Here are the robots at work at a Honeytop Specialty Foods factory, with a soundtrack that sounds a bit “Mission: Impossible”:

Here they are in a salami factory. Wait for the part where they dance to the Enya-techno music.

So what's going on in that pancake video? First, the pancakes go through a tunnel where a camera takes stock of where everything is lying on the conveyer belt. The camera feeds that information into software that records each pancake's location. If the food item in question isn't lying flat, says Bengtsson, there's a spot for the software to record its angle of placement as well.


The software feeds that information to the robot, which deploys its arm to that location, turns on a tiny vacuum on the end of the arm, and sucks up the pancake, gently but surely. It whirls around to the centre conveyer belt, where it puts the pancakes in piles to be packaged, turns off the vacuum to release its payload, and whirls right back out to intercept the next one. If it gets a bunch of pancakes too close together to stack all of them immediately, it deposits extras in a little tray above the conveyer to use in the future when the pancakes are more spread out.




The robot picks up the pancake with suction (ABB)


The Honeytop set-up has four robots spread out along the conveyor belt, so if one robot doesn't have time to grab all the pancakes in its view, another robot will. Overall the robotic team can stack more than 400 pancakes per minute. “There's a lot of deep-down technology to get this accurate,” Bengtsson says. “You have this expression once in a million, but when you are picking pancakes in a line like this, if you had a failure or a problem once in a million, that would be quite often.”
The salami video shows a tougher situation for the robots, says Bengtsson. Four of them are working right in each others' elbow room, thanks to space constraints in the factory, and they are grabbing the salami in small mechanical claws and depositing them on plastic sheeting that will be sealed up around them. The claws – each robot has three – have more moving parts than a vacuum, and timing their opening and closing is trickier than just turning a vacuum on and off.  “I know this was a real challenge,” he says. “There are a lot of tricks in here.”

          Adjacent robot arms coordinate their activity and can handle more than just food (ABB)

You can package food without such agile machines. But the benefit of having robots this fast and flexible is that you don't have to install machinery that will, say, make sure all of the salamis are lying straight and equidistant from each other. So you can use the same assembly line for salamis of one length in the morning and an inch longer in the afternoon, and all you have to swap out is the packaging, not the robots. The pancake stackers, too, can stack pancakes in short or tall stacks, in as many columns as needed, without just a little reprogramming.
This kind of super-adaptable packaging set-up isn't limited to a particular kind of product. Just about any object can be picked up and placed with these machines, and they can do other delicate food tasks, including scoring lines on bread before it is baked.
So while a fleet of delta robots isn't cheap to design or install, they are appearing more and more in industrial food settings. An uncanny intelligence was one of the last things to touch some of the products you can buy in packages – an interesting picture to have in your mind as you reach out to put them in your shopping basket.
 BBC

SanDisk SD memory card 'largest ever'

SD card capacity has increased 1,000-fold in just 10 years

Memory specialist SanDisk has created an SD card with 512 gigabytes (GB) of storage space - the highest capacity ever released.

The card, which is the size of a postage stamp, will go on sale for $800 (£490).
The launch comes a decade after the firm released a 512-megabyte (MB) SD card with one-thousandth of the space.
Experts believe SD cards could eventually hold up to 2 terabytes (TB) of data, about 2,000GB.

The new card is aimed at film-makers shooting in the high-quality 4K format.
The 4K format - which is four times the resolution of HD - requires large file storage. Depending on compression, a single minute of 4K shooting will typically take around 5GB of storage space.
"4K Ultra HD is an example of a technology that is pushing us to develop new storage solutions capable of handling massive file sizes," said Dinesh Bahal, vice-president of product marketing at SanDisk.

The SD card format is one of the most widely used standards of flash storage, popular with digital cameras, camcorders and other mobile devices.
While camera types, resolutions and settings vary - a 512GB card could potentially hold around 30 hours of HD video.

Cloud worries
John Delaney, a senior mobile analyst from IDC, said innovation in physical storage was critical to the future of our devices - even if a lot of people are turning to cloud storage instead.
"The thing that is driving cloud storage is multiple devices usage - which solves the, 'Where's my stuff?' problem: if you use cloud storage for everything, whatever device you have with you can be used to access your content."
But he added: "So far there's still a strong preference for local storage.
"People just feel more in control and more able to rely on being able to access the content when they literally know where it is.

"Storing in the cloud means you literally don't know where it is."
Mr Delaney added that recent high-profile security issues around cloud storage - such as the celebrity picture leak last week - would play on the minds of consumers.
BBC




 

Panasonic launches Lumix camera phone with giant sensor

The big lens and sensor make the camera one of the thickest smartphones on the market

Panasonic has unveiled a hybrid smartphone-camera, at the Photokina trade show in Cologne.

More camera than phone, the Android device has a Leica lens and a 1in, 20-megapixel sensor more often found in Panasonic's dedicated cameras.
The 2.5cm sensor will help the camera take snaps in low light conditions and shoot ultra-high definition video.
Panasonic said the Lumix DMC - CM1 would go on sale towards the end of 2014 in Germany and France.

The phone is expected to cost about 900 euros (£720) when it goes on sale.
It is widely seen as a rival to Samsung's Galaxy K Zoom, which also has a built-in large lens.
The lens and its metal ring, to control aperture and shutter settings, make the CM1 21mm thick - considerably more than contemporary smartphones.
The CM1 also has 11.9cm touchscreen and a dedicated switch that instantly flips it into camera-mode.

Reviewing the gadget at tech news site Pocket-lint, Mike Lowe said it was an "interesting experiment" that "impressed" him more than he had expected.
However, Marc Flores, at Tech Radar, was more critical, saying hybrids satisfied no-one.

"We've tried this before, and it didn't work out so well," he wrote, adding that anyone looking for a good camera should buy a dedicated device.
Anyone keen to take better pictures with a smartphone, he added, should just learn how the professionals did it rather than buy a CM1 and hope that would make all the difference to their snaps.
BBC



 

China introduces smartphone lanes to stop pedestrians bumping into each other

PEDESTRIANS glued to their mobiles are becoming a serious hazard to themselves and others on the street.
Now China has come up with an ingenious solution — the smartphone lane.
A footpath divided into two lanes for phone users and non-phone users has sprung up in Chongqing city.



Unfortunately, mobile phone users were most likely to take out their phones for a photo of the sign, or miss them completely, Yahoo reported.
In 2010, a group called Improv Everywhere chalked up separate sidewalk lanes for New Yorkers and tourists — the latter being more likely to walk more slowly.
Philadelphia introduced an “e-Lane” for electronic device users in 2012 — but as an April Fool’s Day prank.

The press release from Mayor Nutter’s office read: “Stand on any sidewalk in Philadelphia you will see fellow citizens with busy lives who can’t take the time to look up from their iPhones, BlackBerries and other electronic devices. The E-Lane is a safe and convenient option for those distracted walkers.”
So is the special lane a good idea, or just one big joke?

More and more of us are using our phones while walking. Source: AFP

News

US Military's New Laser Gun Zaps Drones

 Boeing's High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD).                  

The U.S. military is now one step closer to having a laser gun that can shoot down enemy drones in the blink of an eye.

Boeing recently announced that its mobile laser weapon, dubbed the High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator (HEL MD), successfully shot down more than 150 drones, rockets and other mock enemy targets in a third round of tests. The trials prove that the laser weapon is reliable and capable of consistently "acquiring, tracking and engaging a variety of targets in different environments," according to Boeing.

The most recent demonstration of the 10-kilowatt, high-energy laser took place at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida. The laser was installed on a military vehicle, making it the first mobile, high-energy laser built and demonstrated by the U.S. Army, according to Boeing. [7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]

Directed-energy technologies like the HEL MD could soon be used by the military to augment what are known as kinetic strike weapons, such as missile interceptors, that don't contain explosives but destroy targets by colliding with them at extreme speeds.
Kinetic strike weapons are expensive, and the HEL MD could offer "a significant reduction in cost per engagement," Dave DeYoung, Boeing's directed-energy systems director, said in a statement.

This push for laser weaponryis part of the U.S. military's Ground-Based Air Defense Directed Energy On-the-Move (GBAD) program. The goal of the program is to provide what officials from the Office of Naval Research call an "affordable alternative to traditional firepower," to guard against drones and other enemy threats.
The recent demonstration of Boeing's mobile laser weapon is just a prelude of things to come. By 2016, the military plans to have a 30-kilowatt laser gun ready for testing, according to the Office of Naval Research.

And Boeing isn't the only defense contractor working with the military to develop high-powered laser weapons. In August, the Office of Naval Research awarded Raytheon an $11 million contract to build a vehicle-mounted laser device capable of shooting down low-flying enemy targets. The system will reportedly generate at least 25 kilowatts of energy, which will make it more than twice as powerful as the laser recently tested by Boeing.
Live science

  

Entangled 'Photon Triplets' Could Speed Up Telecommunication

One of four chips used in the experiment that act as photon detectors. The chips are made of superconducting nanowires.
Physicists have entangled three particles of light faster than ever, creating triplets that stay connected no matter how far apart they are from one another.
In the bizarre world of quantum mechanics, particles can become entangled so that, even if they are long distances from one another, an action on one will affect the others — a phenomenon that Albert Einstein once called "spooky." In the new study, the researchers were able to record data on so many entangled triplets thanks to a new supersensitive photon detector developed at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

The new detector allowed the researchers to speed up the experiment, because it could detect photon triplets with a much higher efficiency than older detectors.
The new experiment has implications for quantum computers, which use qubits (quantum particles), rather than 1s and 0s, to store information. Because quantum particles can exist in more than one place at once — a phenomenon called superposition — qubits can store more information than the bits in traditional computers. [How Spooky Quantum Entanglement Works (Infographic)]

Such quantum computers would require multientangled particles, because the more entangled particles they use, the more information they can store and the faster that information can be computed, even compared with such particles being in more than one place at a time. Qubits can exist as either a 1 or a 0 in their superposition state. That means that two entangled qubits could compute four values at once, three qubits could compute eight values at once, and so on. And that's where the new experiment, which generated entangled photon triplets, comes in. (Photons are particles of light.)
"The more entangled photons you have, the more quantum resources you have and the more information you can store," Krister Shalm, a researcher at NIST, told Live Science.

Tangled triplets
Shalm and the team of researchers produced triplet entangled photons in a more stable and more technologically useful state than previous methods did.
The researchers first shot a blue photon through a special crystal that transformed it into two red entangled photons, dubbed "daughter photons," with half the intensity of the first photon. The system then sent one of the daughter photons through a second crystal that created a pair of infrared "granddaughter photons" that became entangled with the daughter photon.

However, quantum entanglement is rare, Shalm said. The two daughter photons only become entangled once out of every billion tries. Once that finally happens, the granddaughter photons from the daughter photon only become entangled with a daughter photon once in a million times. This makes it difficult to study quantum entanglement and apply the phenomenon to things like quantum computing and quantum communication.

The new detector recorded data from the photons 100 times faster than older detectors. The experiment pumped out entangled triplets at a rate of 660 per hour — a big improvement over the seven per hour produced in previous experiments.

Faster communication
The resulting triplet photons generated by the researchers with the new system are right around the wavelengths used in telecommunication, Shalm said. Quantum entanglement is useful in telecommunications, because one photon could be sent to New York, for example, while the other photon is sent to the other side of the world, but the two remain intimately connected and can quickly transfer messages.

However, the experiment's potential application to quantum computing is further off. The setup of the experiment is not scalable, so the huge number of entangled particles needed for quantum computing is still a long ways off, Shalm said. In other words, it's not practical to generate more entangled particles by simply sending each daughter photon through another crystal, where the likelihood of quantum entanglement gets smaller and smaller.
Details of the experiment were published Sept. 14 in the journal Nature Photonics.
Live science






 

Failing students saved by stress-detecting app

EARLIER this year, two students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who were due to be failed for skipping lectures and not completing assignments were spared the academic axe.

Why the leniency? According to an automated analysis of their smartphone data, both had stress and health-related issues they hadn't told their professors about. So instead of F's and a term's suspension, they were given a chance to complete the coursework over the summer and have now returned to campus.

The students have Andrew Campbell, a computer scientist at Dartmouth, and his colleagues to thank. The students, and 46 others, were enrolled in an experiment to see if data gathered from their phones could be used to guess their state of mind.

Campbell's team set out to discover why, out of a group of students arriving at university with similar qualifications, some excel while others miss lots of classes or even drop out entirely.

The researchers suspected that factors like the amount of sleep students get, their sociability, mood, workload and stress levels all played a role. So they built an app, called StudentLife, that monitors readings from smartphone sensors, and then recruited volunteers to use it over a 10-week term.

The app recorded almost every aspect of life that it was possible to measure, including physical activity levels, frequency and duration of conversations, and GPS location. The camera even watched for when the lights went out each night.

By crunching this data, the app could infer each student's levels of happiness, depression, loneliness and stress. That's possible because "flourishing" students, as the team calls them, are often with other people and have longer conversations, while depressed students interact less with others and have disrupted, or excessive, sleep. Loneliness is marked in part by mainly indoor activity, the team says, and the combination of disturbed sleep and short conversations is a predictor of stress.

The researchers compared these mental states with each student's performance, including grades for assignments and their grade-point average for the term.

"We found for the first time that passive and automatic sensor data, obtained from phones without any action by the user, significantly correlates student depression level, stress and loneliness with academic performance over the term," Campbell says. It also let them see how behaviour like gym usage and sleep times changed when students were faced with assignments or exams.

The results showed that students generally started the term in chipper moods, with most having lots of conversations, healthy sleep levels and busy activity patterns. As the term went on, workload increased, stress shot up – and sleep, chat and physical activity all dropped off. Daily interviews with volunteers confirmed that the automated analyses were accurate. Campbell will present the team's results at UbiComp in Seattle this week.

He believes the results are good evidence that phones will be able to provide continuous mental health assessment – much better than occasional questionnaires filled out when someone feeling depressed visits a doctor. And the app could work for people from all walks of life.

But accessing data on someone's every move will be controversial, even if it saves them their university place or job. "Privacy is the big issue here," says Cecilia Mascolo, who studies mobile sensing at the University of Cambridge. "You need to constrain this to a very specific application that will benefit people, and with the user always in control of their data." Still, she says, with proper protections in place, stress or depression could not only be detected, but also mitigated using information derived from phone sensors.

"People won't be given a prescription," she says. "They will be given an app.
New scientiest

Microsoft acquires Minecraft for $2.5 billion; Notch moves on to greener pastures

Microsoft has announced that it will acquire the Minecraft franchise, and its Swedish developer Mojang, for $2.5 billion. Microsoft asserts that it “plans” to continue distributing Minecraft across PC, Xbox, PlayStation, iOS, and Android, but obviously the game’s cross-platform future is called into question by this acquisition. Markus “Notch” Persson, and Mojang’s other two founders, will not be staying with Mojang/Microsoft and will “move on to start new projects.”

Microsoft’s acquisition of Mojang and Minecraft is savvy for two primary reasons. First, Minecraft makes a lot of money (MSFT says the deal will break-even in fiscal year 2015). Second, Minecraft is the most popular online game on the Xbox 360 and Xbox One — and so having Minecraft in-house guarantees continuing support. I’m sure a big part of this was bringing Minecraft to Windows Phone, too — it’s the most popular paid app on both iOS and Android, and it’s one of the major apps that’s still missing from the Windows Phone ecosystem.

The big question now, of course, is how the acquisition will affect Minecraft in the long term. From a purely financial point of view, I seriously doubt Microsoft will withdraw support for iOS, Android, and PlayStation — Minecraft makes a lot of money, and Microsoft will be keen to recoup some of that $2.5 billion.

 

The other option, of course, is that Microsoft will use Minecraft as a carrot, to lead gamers towards Windows, Windows Phone, and Xbox. This could be as simple as discontinuing the other versions of Minecraft — but more there are “nicer” alternatives, though, such as releasing new content and DLC exclusively for Xbox and Windows Phone. Both Microsoft and Mojang make it clear that things should stay mostly the same, but that there’s certainly space for some maneuvering further down the line. With Windows Phone still struggling to make an impression in the smartphone market, and Xbox One lagging behind the PS4, some top-notch game IP could be exactly what the doctor ordered.

As far as Minecraft’s creator, Notch, is concerned, he decided to sell out to Microsoft because the game and the community simply became too big for him to handle. On his blog (mirrored on Pastebin), Notch laments that, “I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.” For a long time now he has been overwhelmed by the massive success of Minecraft — and indeed, he hasn’t been actively developing Minecraft for sometime. Moving forward, Notch says: “I will leave Mojang and go back to doing Ludum Dares and small web experiments. If I ever accidentally make something that seems to gain traction, I’ll probably abandon it immediately.”
EXtreme Tech     

DisplayPort 1.3 unveiled: 32.4 Gbps bandwidth, support for 4K @ 60 fps, 5K, 8K

4K monitors are only barely beginning to see adoption but VESA (Video Electronics Standards Association) is forging ahead with DisplayPort version 1.3, which will offer up to 32.4Gbps of single-link bandwidth. Even after allowing for bandwidth overhead, the new standard will deliver about 25.92Gbps, or nearly double HDMI 2.0′s best available bandwidth. This will be more than enough for 4K @ 60 fps, and it will also support 5K displays as well.


Here’s a quick rundown of DisplayPort 1.3′s capabilities:

• Dual 4K monitors on a single DP 1.3 cable
• One 8K monitor
• One 4K monitor @ 60 fps with simultaneous support for full-speed USB 3.0  

 Theoretically, DisplayPort also offers better support for high color applications at high resolutions. This would be a non-standard operating mode, and getting a Windows desktop into 10-bit color mode or higher requires specialized video cards and software support — but HDMI 2.0 tops out at 48 bits per pixel (16 bits of color per channel) at 4096×2160 @ 60 fps. This is the sort of feature that would only matter for video editing professionals, but could be of interest to that group.  

DisplayPort 1.3 will continue to support the variable refresh rate concept AMD refers to as FreeSync, but no word on when we’ll see that feature debuting in AMD GPUs. The company announced with the Tonga launch that not all Radeon cards would be FreeSync-capable when the feature launches.

Finally, VESA is also pushing the idea of DisplayPort 1.3 as a solution for 5K video (5120×2880), despite the fact that 5K is anything but standardized right now.

When will GPUs support it?

 We don’t expect to see DP 1.3 support baked in to any GPUs in the near future. HDMI 2.0 has been out for over a year, and neither AMD or Nvidia supports it yet — though that could change in the very near future. Even so, we expect some lag — AMD has historically been more aggressive than Nvidia with DisplayPort, but has yet to announce plans for DP 1.3 — the company’s just-launched Tonga GPU sticks with DP 1.2.

 

 

 

AMD might refresh its products more quickly depending on what Apple intends to do with the Mac Pro — that system relies heavily on Thunderbolt for connectivity, and DisplayPort 1.3 offers more options for transferring high speed data across the Thunderbolt bus. It’s not impossible that GCN 2.0 could add DisplayPort 1.3 early in the cycle — but without any monitors to support the standard and no word on when GCN 2.0 might actually ship, don’t expect near-term support. 

Extreme Tech  

   

Google Must Make Android Safer (Op-Ed)

Over the past few months, the Android platform developed by Google and based on the Linux operating system has been having a difficult time. Hackers, with malicious intent and those without, have been investing time in finding out how weak this operating system is.

Android runs on more than four out of five mobile devices. It is popular because it is free and its terms do not dictate to device manufacturers what hardware it must be used on. 

The hacking seen so far is partly a result of this popularity. But there also seem to be inherent problems, which experts and hackers have discovered don’t exist on other mobile platforms.

What are the issues?

Android is getting the most attention from malware creators, because it has more than 40,000 different malware compromises. This is worrying especially as the same systems for Windows and Apple phones seem to have only handful such issues (on non-jailbroken devices).

 In June concerns arose about an SMS worm that could propagate via Android devices. One of the primary issues is the version control system these devices uses. As new and better versions of Android have been released, manufacturers having committed their development efforts to one version cannot always allow for upgrades. This is commonplace among the lower-priced devices, which tend to be fixed to a specific version of Android. Currently new devices are using the KitKat version of Android, but previous versions, such as JellyBean and IceCreamSandwich, remain in use.

In July researchers published their analysis of Android devices purchased on eBay. Even though these devices had had the information on them deleted, they could recover and analyse it. Naked Selfies among other confidential data were found, exposing a serious flaw in the encryption used by Android. The factory reset option, which should be able to permanently wipe any historical data from the device, seemed not to work well either. (This is the same issue, which was reported earlier in August, regarding the Tesco Hudl tablet, which uses Android as the operating system.)

Now researchers have found a flaw in the Gmail application on Android devices. The flaw makes it easy to create malware to obtain personal information, effectively using the email application as a route to extract all kinds of data from your phones. The researchers have claimed that this is also possible on iPhones and Windows phones. What they neglect to share is that Microsoft and Apple have app stores that undergo a range of stringent security checks before any app is allowed on their devices. This is unlike the Google Play environment, which is not the only source for apps on Android device.

There are many non-Google Android app stores – some legitimate but many not. Worse still, the security community has also exposed issues with the official Google Play store. We can trust almost all applications downloaded on Apple and Microsoft phones, but for any on the Android platform the risk is considerably higher. Unless you have up-to-date anti-malware software and are extremely cautious, chances are that your Android phone may eventually be compromised.

Should I be concerned?

Sadly, I think all Android users should be concerned. It is an excellent mobile operating system and has enabled low-cost smartphones and tablet computers to exist in the market place. But Google needs to tighten controls on how applications can enter this device as well as some of its underlying features.

Whenever I meet someone with an Android device, the first question I ask them is if they have any anti-malware installed. They often give me a quizzical look. The reality is that, if they don’t have such security apps installed, the data on their Android is not safe.
LIVESCIENCE

Atom-Sized Construction Could Shrink Future Gadgets

The U.S. military doesn't just build big, scary tanks and giant warplanes; it's also interested in teeny, tiny stuff. The Pentagon's latest research project aims to improve today's technologies by shrinking them down to microscopic size.

The recently launched Atoms to Product (A2P) program aims to develop atom-size materials to build state-of-the-art military and consumer products. These tiny manufacturing methods would work at scales 100,000 times smaller than those currently being used to build new technologies, according to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.

The tiny, high-tech materials of the future could be used to build things like hummingbird-size drones and super-accurate (and super-small) atomic clocks — two projects already spearheaded by DARPA. [Humanoid Robots to Flying Cars: 10 Coolest DARPA Projects] 

"If successful, A2P could help enable [the] creation of entirely new classes of materials that exhibit nanoscale properties at all scales," John Main, a program manager in DARPA's defense sciences office, said in a statement.

When materials are created with dimensions of about 1 to 100 nanometers (that's between one and 100 billionths of a meter), the materials' properties change significantly. At nanoscales, materials may have different melting points, electric conductivity, magnetic properties and different reactions with certain chemicals, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative, a U.S. government program.
Those nanoscale properties also offer advantages for larger materials, according to DARPA researchers.

And these atomic-scale properties can lead to certain advantages when it comes to building both military and civilian technology, DARPA said. The agency said it believes it can use tiny materials to make products whose parts stick together without glue or other adhesion methods. These materials could be used to build armorthat can withstand rapid changes in temperature.

DARPA also wants to explore what it calls "tunable" light absorption and scattering. "Tunability" refers to another quality of nanomaterials: By changing the size of the particles in a material, scientists can literally fine-tune certain properties of that material to better suit the researchers' purposes, according to the National Nanotechnology Initiative. DARPA has shown interest in using tunability to create technology, perhaps sensors or microchips,that only absorb or reflect certain wavelengths of light.
Tunability could also help researchers miniaturize materials, processes and devices that can't be miniaturized with current technology, Main said.

IDF: Intel Dives Into Wearables, IoT

SAN FRANCISCO—Intel is here once again to regale the world with its ambitious plans to install its computer chips in devices and systems of every shape and size, from the mightiest servers to the humblest connected switches in smart homes and wearables. 

 "We'll keep taking billions of transistors and placing them on processors. ... It's Intel end-to-end, going from the data center to the Internet of Things," CEO Brian Krzanich said Tuesday to kick off the Intel Developer Forum at Moscone West. "With our diverse product portfolio and developer tools that span key growth segments, operating systems, and form factors, Intel offers hardware and software developers new ways to grow, as well as design flexibility. If it's smart and connected, it's best with Intel."

And the chip giant certainly has a lot of balls in the air these days, the result of a multi-year strategy to salt computing systems up and down the stack with its x86 processor architecture. Intel chips now dominate the data center—new server chips codenamed Grantley were released earlier this week—as well as the PC market. Meanwhile, the company's belated efforts to challenge ARM in mobile devices appears to be picking up steam, especially with the release of its first 14-nanometer, 4.5-watt chips in the new Core M line, which enable fanless tablet and 2-in-1 PC designs.

  We've already seen a handful of new ultra-thin 2-in-1s powered by Core M chips from the likes of Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, and Dell. Here at IDF, Michael Dell joined Intel to unveil a new Atom Z3500-based tablet line, the Dell Venue 8 7000 Series, pictured at right. These new 22nm "Moorfield" slates feature Intel's RealSense 3D photography technology and will be the "world's thinnest tablets" when they're released later this year, according to the two companies.



Intel also launched a new reference design program for makers of Android tablets using Intel chips, which will "help scale the deployment process of Android for tablet manufacturers by providing software engineering work [and] streamlined access to Google Mobile Services, as well as support for updates and upgrades to future Android releases," the company said.

  Sticking with the theme of an expanding mobile portfolio, Intel announced that its second-generation LTE platform, the XMM 7260 modem is now commercially available and shipping in Samsung's Galaxy Alpha smartphones sold in Europe and elsewhere. Building on its acquisition of Infineon Technologies, Intel has been pouring significant resources into RF in an attempt to take on ARM licensees like Qualcomm for positioning in smartphones and tablets.

 The Next Big Thing

 But in a sense, all of that PC and mobile device stuff is already old hat for Intel. Krzanich and his colleagues clearly have their eyes trained on another burgeoning market with tremendous opportunities for growth—namely, the Internet of Things (IoT) and wearables.

There are currently about 2.2 billion x86-based devices out in the wild in 2014, according to the Intel chief, but there could be 50 billion by 2020. That's how explosive the growth of demand may be for connected computing systems in our homes, our cars, and even in the clothes and jewelry we wear. 

Krzanich spoke of what he called the "maker's world," Intel's burgeoning ecosystem of developers building creative new IoT devices and wearables. About a year ago, the company released a tiny, very low power, single-core, 32-bit x86 System-on-a-Chip (SoC) called Quark to address this market. The first Quark board for Krzanich's makers was dubbed Galileo, offering developers a platform for building simple, connected IoT devices.


On Tuesday, Intel announced that the follow-up to Galileo, Edison, is now available. Edison, pictured below, features a dual-core SoC, Wi-Fi and other comms capabilities, memory, support for expansion boards to bring in USB and more, in a package "only slightly larger than a postage stamp," the company said.
Edison is priced at $50, down from Galileo's $70, Krzanich noted.



Of course, Intel already has some goodies to show in the wearables department, namely the MICA smart bracelet it unveiled at Fashion Week in New York.

Short for "My Intelligent Communication Accessory," MICA is both bejeweled and digitally enhanced, the product of a "landmark" collaboration between Intel and fashion house Opening Ceremony, the company said. 

"This is something you want to wear independent of the technology inside and when you realize what the technology inside is, you've got to have one," Krzanich said.

Intel hasn't revealed a ton of information about the technological functionality of the smart bracelet, but the company has said it will allow wearers "to stay connected via SMS messages, meeting alerts, and general notifications delivered directly to the wrist, with additional features and functionalities to be revealed at a later date."

MICA, which features a curved sapphire glass touchscreen display, per Intel, will come in two versions—one with a strap of black watersnake skin and adorned with Chinese freshwater pearls and Malagasy lapis, while the other sports a band made of white watersnake skin and is accented by tiger's eye gems sourced from South Africa and Russian obsidian.

Starting later this year, MICA will be sold in the United States exclusively through AT&T, Intel said.

The chip giant demoed a number of wearable reference designs at CES earlier this year. Krzanich highlighted some of the real-life products that have emerged in the nine months since that Las Vegas showcase, including MICA and SMS Audio's battery-free BioSport heart rate-tracking, smartphone-syncing earbuds.

And as it is doing for Android tablet makers, Intel is throwing some cash and expertise at makers of wearables with its new Analytics for Wearables (A-Wear) developer program. The A-Wear program, which is free to access for all developers of Intel-based wearables, "will accelerate development and deployment of new wearable applications with data-driven intelligence" leveraging Cloudera CDH software and Intel's cloud infrastructure, the company said.
PC MAG      

The first human brain-to-brain interface has been created. In the future, will we all be linked telepathically?

International researchers are reporting that they have built the first human-to-human brain-to-brain interface, allowing two humans — separated by the internet — to consciously communicate with each other, with no additional sensory cues. One researcher, attached to a brain-computer interface (BCI) in India, successfully sent words into the brain of another researcher in France, who was wearing a computer-to-brain interface (CBI). In short, the researchers have created a device that enables telepathy. In the future, rather than vocalizing speech — or vainly attempting to vocalize your emotions — your friend/lover/family member might just pluck those words and thoughts right out of your head.

Over the last few years, researchers have started to get quite good at reading your brain activity — your thoughts. Commercial brain-computer interfaces that you can plug into your computer’s USB port have been around for a good four or five years now, and in the last couple of years we’ve seen advanced BCIs that can be implanted directly into your brain. To create a brain-to-brain connection (i.e. telepathy) you also need the other side of the equation, however: You need to be able to take some data and input it into someone else’s brain — and that, as you can imagine, is proving to be a bit harder

 
USB-connected BCIs, like the one here by Emotiv, have been around for years.

Now, however, a team of international researchers have cracked it. On the BCI side of things, the researchers used a fairly standard EEG (electroencephalogram) from Neuroelectrics. For the CBI, which requires a more involved setup, a transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) rig was used. TMS is somewhat similar to TDCS, in that it can stimulate regions of neurons in your brain — but instead of electrical current, it uses magnetism. The important thing is that TMS is non-invasive — it can stimulate your brain (and thus cause you to think or feel a certain way) without having to actually cut into your brain and use some electrodes (see: deep brain stimulation).

    

This is how the brain-to-brain system works. The BCI reads the sender’s thoughts — in this case, the sender thinks about moving his or her hands or feet. Thinking about feet is equivalent to binary 0, while hands is binary 1. With a little time/effort, whole words can be encoded as a stream of ones and zeroes. These encoded words are then transmitted (via the internet or some other network) to the recipient, who is wearing a TMS. The TMS is focused on on the recipient’s visual cortex. When the TMS receives a “1″ from the sender, it stimulates a region in the visual cortex that produces a phosphene — the phenomenon whereby you see flashes of light, without light actually hitting your retina (when you rub your eyes, for example). The recipient “sees” these phosphenes at the bottom of their visual field. By decoding the flashes — phosphene flash = 1, no phosphene = 0 — the recipient can “read” the word being sent.

You would be right in thinking that this is a rather complex and long-winded way of sending messages from one brain to another — but for now, this is truly the state of the art. As you can see, this method very neatly sidesteps the fact that we really don’t know how the human brain encodes information — and so, for now, instead of importing a “native” message, we have to use our own encoding scheme (binary) and a quirk of the visual cortex. [Research paper: doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0105225 - "Conscious Brain-to-Brain Communication in Humans Using Non-Invasive Technologies"]

    
The actual brain-to-brain setup. Sender/EEG on the left, receiver/TMS on the right


Still, even if it does seem a little bit like hard work, there’s no denying that this is a conscious, non-invasive brain-to-brain connection. While the recipient isn’t going anywhere fast (the TMS is bulky), it’s not hard to imagine a small, lightweight EEG that allows the sender to constantly stream thoughts back to the receiver. I’m sure we’re not more than a few years away from a setup that allows the receiver to walk around, too — at which point, assuming we make some progress in decoding the brain’s activity, you basically have a persistent brain-to-brain link that would allow you to always know what your friends/family/loved ones are thinking. You might use such a telepathy system for sending simple thoughts from a distance — I love you — or maybe it could be useful for truly getting inside someone’s head when they’re struggling to voice their emotions.
The future is going to be a fun and/or scary and/or amazing place to live in, friends.
EXTREMETECH
 

Apple unveils Apple Pay, a digital wallet for your iPhone 6 and Apple Watch

Apple has announced its new mobile payments system: Apple Pay. As expected, it will allow you to use your iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, or Apple Watch as a digital wallet, paying at one of the 220,000 contactless payment locations across the US. Furthermore, though, Apple Pay also simplifies online payments, allowing you to buy things with just a single tap of the Touch ID sensor (your fingerprint). Apple Pay will also work with the Apple Watch.

While digital wallets and mobile payments aren’t a new idea, Apple Pay sounds like it will be a very slick, fast, and private solution. Out of the box, it will work with your credit card details stored in iTunes, but you can add more credit cards. (Apple seems to have partnered with most US banks, and the underlying providers: Visa, MasterCard, and AmericanExpress.) All told, Apple says it can now account for 83% of credit card transactions — so not total coverage, but pretty good.

  


Using Apple Pay is as simple as you’d think. Load up a credit card in the Passbook app, approach a contactless payment point, put your finger to the Touch ID fingerprint scanner — and boom, you’ve paid. To make Apple Pay very secure, every transaction actually generates a one-time “payment number.” Rather than using your actual credit card number and security digits (CVV), Apple Pay creates a card number and security digits that only work one time. That way, if your iPhone or Apple Watch gets stolen, you don’t have to cancel your credit cards. Apple says your name or other identifiable data is never revealed to the store clerk, either, which is nice.

  

Along with contactless payment, Apple Pay can also be used to simplify online payments. Details are a little vague, but it looks like third-party app developers will be able to integrate Apple Pay, so that you can pay with your stored credit card details by tapping “Pay with Apple Pay” and scanning your fingerprint on the Touch ID sensor.

Apple has announced lots of big partners for Apple Pay. Disney, Staples, Subway, McDonalds, Walgreens, Macy’s, and many more, all of which are dedicated to rolling out support for Apple Pay in some form or another. By Christmas, you’ll be able to walk around one of Disney’s theme parks and pay for everything with Apple Pay (or, indeed, another contactless credit card if you have one).

Apple Pay will be available in October for the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, and only in the US to start with. It will also be available for the Apple Watch when it’s released in 2015. Will Apple Pay kill off cash or the real-world leather wallet?
EXTREME TECH
   

Google faces new stand-off in Europe

Google faces a fresh probe into its mobile operating system  

The European Commission is seeking fresh concessions from Google on how it displays search results on web pages. 

 The long-running investigation aims to settle concerns that the search giant has abused its dominant position in the European search market.
Competition commissioner Joaquin Almunia revealed that he could also open a probe into Google's mobile operating system Android

Google said it continued to work with the commission to resolve the matter.
The dispute has been running since 2010, after rivals, including British price-comparison site Foundem, complained that the way Google displayed results was anti-competitive.
In Europe Google has a 90% share of the search market.

 Toll road
 In a deal hammered out in February, Google agreed to reserve space near the top of its European search pages for competitors, which would be open to rivals to bid for via an auction.
This auction could generate an extra income of up more than 300 million euros for Google, said rivals.

"Under the auction system Google would get another massive revenue stream. It's a bit like telling a robber than he can't rob any more but instead can set a toll on the High Street," said David Wood, a lawyer that represents iComp (Initiative for a Competitive Online Marketplace) of which Foundem and Microsoft are members.

"The real remedy is for Google to use the same algorithm for third-party sites that it applies to its own," he added.
He urged the European Commission to push this solution as part of its powers.


Writing on the Google Europe blog, executive chairman Eric Schmidt quoted Mr Almunia saying that imposing "strict equal treatment could mean returning to the old world of Google displaying only 10 undifferentiated search results".
"We're trying to get you direct answers to your queries because it's quicker and less hassle than the 10 blue links Google used to show," he said.

"Nor is it true that we are promoting our own products at the expense of the competition," he added.
Mr Almunia had previously indicated that he was happy with the changes but had changed his mind in the wake of "very, very negative" feedback from rivals such as Microsoft and Expedia, he said in an interview with Bloomberg TV.

"Some complainants have introduced new arguments, new data, new considerations. We now need to to analyse this and see if we can find solutions, Google can find solutions, to some of these concerns that we find justified," he told reporters.
This represents the third rejection of Google's solutions and experts think that it is now unlikely that an agreement will be reached during Mr Almunia's term in office, which finishes at the end of October.
If no agreement is reached, Google faces a heavy fine.
BBC

Paypal unit to 'embrace' Bitcoin crypto-currency

 Braintree's work on bitcoins will make it easier for online retailers to take payments made in the virtual currency

Paypal subsidiary Braintree has started working on ways to process payments using the Bitcoin virtual currency.

The work is due to be completed within "the coming months", said Braintree boss Bill Ready in a conference speech.
It means that firms such as Uber and Airbnb, which use Braintree as a payment processor, will also be able to accept bitcoins.
So far, there is no indication that bitcoins will be accepted directly by Paypal and eBay.

 Price crash

During his speech at the Techcrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, Mr Ready said Braintree's work should be seen as its "first foray" into using bitcoins.
Braintree processes payments on mobiles and websites and said it would work with Bitcoin payments site Coinbase to process transactions carried out with the crypto-currency.

Bitcoins are a form of money that use unique numbers instead of notes and coins as a store of monetary value. In November 2013, the value of one bitcoin hit $1,000 (£620) but it has fallen sharply and now each one is worth about $470 (£290).
Braintree's work meant that tens of thousands of merchants would soon be able to accept the digital cash too, said Mr Ready.

Gil Luria, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, told Bloomberg that Braintree's announcement was a "very substantial development". He added that it might also speed up adoption by Paypal which would mean "millions of retailers will de facto be accepting bitcoin overnight".
Paypal spent about $800m (£500m) in September 2013 to buy Braintree, largely because of its role in mobile payment systems.

Braintree's announcement comes as Wired reports on an attempt to unmask Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto. The tech news site said a hacker has claimed to have take control of an email account known to be used by the reclusive inventor who has never revealed their true identity.
The hacker said they would supply information that would lead to the identification of Mr Nakamoto if they were paid 25 bitcoins (£7,300). Wired was sceptical of the claim to have information about Mr Nakamoto as little evidence was provided by the hacker for his assertion.

An earlier attempt to unmask Mr Nakamoto was made by Newsweek which claimed an American called Dorian Prentice Nakamoto was the elusive inventor. He denied being the creator and interest in the claim led to the real Satoshi Nakamoto issuing a short statement refuting any link with Dorian Nakamoto.
BBC

Dyson launches a robot vacuum cleaner, the Dyson 360 Eye

Dyson has announced that it's launching a robot vacuum cleaner, the Dyson 360 Eye.
Somewhat late to the robot party, with Samsung and LG having been through several generations of the autonomous cleaners, Dyson is looking to do things differently.
The camera on the top, for example, scans the room at 30fps so it knows where it is and where objects are. Rather than just using it hit-and-avoid system, it tries to figure out the most efficient route for cleaning the room.

The Dyson 360 Eye packs in the same motor Dyson Digital Slim DC59, so although it might not be as small as some rivals, unable to get under furniture, it should offer plenty of suck.
There's also a different design for the beater brush, extending the full width of the vacuum cleaner, it should be better at gathering dirt right up to the skirting boards.
Launching initially in Japan, the Dyson 360 Eye will be coming to the UK some time in 2015.
Tech uk

Samsung unveils virtual reality headset Gear VR – but it works only with its new phone

Switched on: TV host Rachel Riley tries out Samsung’s Gear VR device at the IFA tech show (Picture: Reuters)

It’s the sci-fi inspired gadget that is set to be the latest must-have item for gamers.

But Samsung’s bold move into the emerging market of virtual reality is likely to cost fans a fortune.
Not only will they need the new Gear VR headset to play games – it will work only with Samsung’s new Note 4 phablet.
Users will slot the new smartphone into the wireless headset to see fantasy worlds come alive, says the tech giant. Developed by Samsung and Facebook-owned software developer Oculus, the devices go on sale next year.

 Samsung unveiled both gadgets at the IFA 2014 electronics show in Berlin yesterday, along with its new Galaxy Edge smartphone – which boasts a screen that curves around the edge of the handset.
But it is keeping the cost of the devices a closely guarded secret, for now.

The firm faces fierce competition in the VR gadget market from Sony’s Project Morpheus and Google Cardboard.
At the same event, Sony unveiled new smartphones – the Xperia Z3 and Z3 Compact – and the Z3 Compact Tablet, which allows users to play PlayStation 4 games from mobile devices
Metro uk

We give Panasonic's new 5-inch Toughpad phablets a kicking

At IFA in Berlin , Panasonic put on its own spin of the ice bucket water challenge, but instead of dowsing charitable folk, it dunked its latest diminutive Toughpads. On show were the new rugged 5-inch HD (1280x720) FZ-E1 Windows 8.1 and FZ-X1 Android 4.2.2 tablets, both featuring data and voice capabilities.


Water sports: FZ-EX1 and FZ-E1 Toughpads submerged

The rugged credentials include MIL-STD-810G and IP68 certification, so it can withstand 3m (9.8ft) drops to concrete (El Reg tested the FZ-E1 on granite and it survived) and will stay functional when submerged in water at a depth of 1.5m for up to 30 minutes. A Panasonic staffer said tests of several hours had gone by without a hitch.

Needless to say, it’s fully sealed against dust and humidity and can operate in temperature ranges from -20°C to 60°C. To keep it cosy in extreme cold, there’s even a battery warming element.


Panasonic FZ-X1 Toughpad – ruggedised Android after a soaking

Given the casing reinforcements, these Toughpads measure up at 165 x 87 x 31mm thick. Yet despite the chunky appearance – and packing a 6200mAh battery with a duration of 23 hours talk, 14 hours data and 1,000 hours on standby – in the hand, they don’t feel overly weighty at all at 426g or 432g with a barcode reader.


FZ-E1 battery bay and seals

Panasonic’s thinking is to provide devices with familiar features but to meet exacting requirements in the field and for enterprise. So instead of all the fun stuff getting ripped out, you get an 8Mp snapper with flash and a 1.3Mp front facing camera too which will both prove their worth in the field or logistics.


8Mp camera and flash on the back as standard on both models

Voice isn’t just an afterthought either, as there are three mics on these devices to enable noise cancelling and there’s a pretty robust sounding speaker too – with Panasonic suggesting military and police uses here, with its various cradles and numerous add-ons. Also integrated into these Toughpads is a high accuracy GPS that pinpoints locations to within 2m to 4m.


Panasonic FZ-E1 Toughpad with the optional barcode reader

Inside, the FZ-E1 Windows 8.1 Toughpad relies on a Qualcomm MSM8974AB 2.3 GHz Quad-core processor, whereas the FZ-X1 Android model gets away with a slightly slower Qualcomm APQ8064T 1.7GHz Quad-core chip. Both feature 2GB of RAM and 32GB of eMMC storage with microSD expansion for up to another 64GB.


Adam Ant? No it’s Mark Thorne MD, Panasonic Computer Products Europe

So what are you getting as a phablet here? As Microsoft’s Senior Channel Exec, Goran Mataic, explained on the day, the Toughpad FZ-E1 is simply Windows Phone 8.1 plus industrial and enterprise features – security being top of the list. It all boils down to what Microsoft describes as Windows Embedded 8.1 Handheld OS. Yet beyond enterprise grade security and the Toughpad’s rugged accessories, the main area things differ from the standard WinPho or Android OS is in the touchscreen response.
Register uk