Sad news for fans of Google's fantastic Pixel line. Google confirmed today that the Pixel and Pixel XL won't be getting any software or security updates past October 2019. What does that mean for you? Well, your Pixel might start acting a little ... weird soon. Should we run to Georgia and join the ricktatorship before that happens? Get the Pixel 2 when it's ready for launch? Or maybe ... we wait things out and grab the next Pixel after that?
Bugs are usually bad news for phone owners, ranging from mild annoyances to downright dangerous. Sometimes, the patch released to fix the problem messes things up even more. An iOS bug discovered Monday might not fit into any of these categories, as it is difficult to activate. Nevertheless, it will still freeze your iPhone.
One thing you don't see often in the driverless industry are partnerships. When automakers are in the news together, it usually means drama. However, an important partnership between Nissan and Mobileye was announced today. One that has the potential to make driverless cars on the road better and safer.
The ability of one microbe to adapt is giving it a whole new career as a sexually transmitted disease. Usually content with the back of the throat and nose of those who carry it, the dangerous pathogen Neisseria meningitidis has adapted to cause an illness that looks a lot like gonorrhea.
Anyone who needs to use their iPhone hands-free knows how useful Siri can be. If you can't look at your iPhone, but still need to read and reply to messages, Siri has your back. Third-party applications have traditionally been unable to utilize this feature, but now that luck has turned for Facebook's other popular messaging service, WhatsApp.
Every Friday, Next Reality reviews the latest headlines from the financial side of augmented and mixed reality. This weekly Market Reality column covers funding announcements, mergers and acquisitions, market analysis, and the like. This week's column starts with a stock price that's performing well for one company — one that HoloLens developers should know quite well.
Bose Corp is the latest company trying to make another dollar off of you without your permission. Bose Connect, the companion app to the swag $350 Bose headphones, is not the Jane to your Jack that maybe we all hoped it to be.
It's about time people acknowledged that judging drug users would do nothing productive to help them. In the US this week, two new programs are launching that should help addicts be a little safer: Walgreens Healthcare Clinic will begin offering to test for HIV and hepatitis C next week, and Las Vegas is set to introduce clean syringe vending machines to stop infections from dirty needles.
During his opening address on April 18 at F8, Facebook's developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg launched the company's augmented reality platform centered on artificial intelligence-powered cameras.
It be would the ideal morning commute—sit back, drink some coffee, and read the news as your car drives you to your destination. That reality isn't quite here yet, but Cadillac is offering something close with "Super Cruise" on the CT6.
Texas has become only the latest state to face an unfortunate outbreak of mumps, but so far seems to be the hardest hit. On April 12, two days before the CDC's report was released, the Texas Department of State Health Services released a health advisory indicating this is the highest instance of mumps reported in 22 years.
Update Feb. 2020: Google has removed the feature flag to move the address bar to the bottom of the screen. We've out to see if they have plans to bring it back, but received no comment. In the meantime, you can use the new Chrome Duet bottom bar instead.
Mercedes-Benz's parent company, Daimler, announced their intention today to put self-driving taxis on the road in three years or less in a partnership with Bosch.
Every time Donald Trump tweets about a stock you own, Trigger Finance, or just Trigger—the app founded on the "if this, then that" rule to track and invest in the stock market—alerts you with a notification for real-time analysis of financial data.
HTC is working on another flagship device that's expected to be released in mid-April. After the disastrous reception of the recently released HTC U Ultra and HTC U Play, this new model could be the true HTC 10 successor we've all been waiting for.
Amazon has been toying with the idea of opening physical retail stores for some time now, even opening old-fashioned bookstores in select locations and teasing cashier-less convenience stores. But the online retailer has some new ideas in the works, including implementing virtual and augmented reality into retail home stores.
Facebook Messenger has now incorporated a live location sharing feature, one week after Google Maps revealed its own real-time location tool. On Monday, the social media giant announced the new feature, which will allow users to share their live whereabouts with friends at the press of a button.
T-Mobile just unveiled two new services—Scam ID and Scam Block—which specifically target those pestering robo-calls that reach out to 2.4 million Americans every month.
Tremendous strides have been made in the treatment and outlook for patients infected with HIV, the human immunodeficiency virus. Treatment with a combination of antiretroviral drugs can keep patients with HIV alive for decades, without symptoms of the infection. The trouble is, if HIV-infected people stop taking their medications, the virus takes over in full force again—because the virus hides out quietly in cells of the immune system, kept in check, but not killed by the treatment.
Sony offers a set of free games to its PlayStation Plus subscribers every month, but it's easy to miss out if you're not constantly around your console. Perhaps you're traveling, or maybe you've stayed up one too many nights playing Uncharted, leading to a period of PlayStation detox. No matter what the case is, the good news is that you can use the PlayStation app for Android or iOS to claim these monthly free games without getting up from your seat.
Future mothers hoping to use donated semen might want to think twice before using any samples from the Miami-Dade Country area of Florida. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is warning that sperm from as far back as June 2016 may be infected with the Zika virus. Damn those mosquitoes.
In an early morning blog post, Microsoft announced the expansion of the Microsoft HoloLens Agency Readiness Partner Program. This announcement comes on the tail of an expanded HoloLens release over the last few months to many countries outside the initial US and Canada.
We live in a marvelous age, a time where technology is driving us forward as a species at a rapid pace, and tech-driven miracles are becoming more and more commonplace. While the human race may not be focused on building the largest wonders of the world, as it once was in history, the current order of wonders are much smaller in scale—even internal.
ProtonMail has long been the favorite of journalists and security-conscious professionals, with Edward Snowden the most famous example. But these days, everyone cares about anonymity, so it's no surprise that ProtonMail currently has over 2 million users. And now the service is even better.
As fun as it is to see Fido's face light up when you feed him table scraps, American dogs are getting fat. The good news is that research is homing in on nutritional strategies to boost canine capabilities to maintain a healthy weight.
With the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Fransisco just a few weeks away, Microsoft Senior Program Manager Vlad Kolesnikov has announced via Channel9 (Microsoft's developer news outlet) that not only will new low-cost virtual reality headsets be coming in March to developers, but that they will be at GDC, too.
Meta's long-awaited Meta 2 development kit finally began shipping in late-December last year, after having been delayed about six months. While very few have received a dev kit at this point, some more information about the headset has just been announced; Depth-sensing technology from pmdtechnologies is included in the dev kit headset.
Every day the young world of mixed reality is creating new ways for people to work with with computers. We are looking for, and finding, new ways for these head-worn computers to understand what we tell them. Sometimes it is with our hands, sometimes it is where we turn our head, sometimes it is what we say. In the case highlighted below, it's where we walk.
In recent weeks, thousands of Nexus 6P users have reported that their devices are shutting down with 30% or more battery life remaining. The phones won't start back up until they're plugged into a charger, so it's as if the battery completely dies even though there is plenty of juice left.
Earlier this week, a mysterious tweet appeared on the HTC Twitter account of a picture containing the letter "U" topped with a tiny "for" and the date "01.12.2017" at the bottom. It is a pretty solid teaser, but for a company that has had a solid year with their Vive virtual reality headset, and all of the other technological appendages they have, it seems a bit ominous for them.
Thanks to live-streaming video and social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, we're all on camera nowadays. Unfortunately, though, we don't have a script to work with when we're shooting selfie videos, so it's hard to come off as perfectly eloquent when you're just freestyling off the top of your head.
This week, Dr. Sung-Hoon Hong, Vice President of Samsung Electronics, announced at the Virtual Reality Summit in San Diego that not only does Samsung have a new virtual reality headset coming, but that Samsung intends to enter the field of augmented reality, too. In fact, Hong talked very little about virtual reality and instead spoke at length about Samsung's move into augmented reality.
The Note7 fireworks bonanza was unprecedented in scope. A recent report suggests that Samsung could lose upwards of $20 billion in lost profit due to this fiasco.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who's the smartest of them all? Since Max Braun's Medium post went viral back in January of 2016, smart mirrors have been appearing on tech blogs in all shapes and sizes. Some are technically sound, some incredibly easy, but all are visually compelling. However, we've never seen one with a fully functional operating system and gesture support—until now.
Today at the Unite '16 conference in Los Angeles, Unity's Timoni West and Amir Ebrahimi showed off its new virtual reality authoring and world editor, EditorVR, using the HTC Vive. Coming in December to Unity is a version of its editor that works inside a VR headset, which will change the way developers interact with the worlds they build—even if they aren't building for VR.
It seems that fans of the Android open-source operating system are a bit peeved by some of the choices Google has made regarding the new #MadeByGoogle Pixel phones. And with good reason. The new phones are expensive, the Nexus line is dead, and some Redditors are speculating on whether or not the Pixel bootloaders may not be unlockable at all.
The one big question remaining about Google's upcoming Pixel phones has finally been answered: Yes, the Pixel and Pixel XL have unlockable bootloaders—at least, if you buy directly from Google.
If you've ever built a piece of IKEA furniture, you're familiar with the confusion that some 2D instruction booklets can create. But neuroscience suggests that they're cognitively overloading, as our brains have to translate their basic flatness into physical reality and that's pretty hard to do. Fortunately, augmented reality has come to the rescue.
A company known as Cyanogen, Inc. has been in the news numerous times over the past year, and almost every time their name is brought up, it's amid reports of an impending doom. The writing is on the wall for the makers of Cyanogen OS, as it appears that there is little that can be done to prevent the company from going belly-up in the near future.
If you just can't wait to see the Pixel and Pixel XL, the new Google-branded smartphones expected to be announced tomorrow, you're in luck. After weeks of rumors and blurry images, a smartphone sales company called Carphone Warehouse just accidentally dropped the entire ball. The UK business accidentally set the product pages for the Pixel and Pixel XL live a couple days early, and for just long enough for them to be archived before they were taken down.
