Monday, October 28, 2013

Samsung's Galaxy Round ad compares its curved smartphone to avocados, Russian dolls (video)

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/28/samsung-galaxy-round-ad-curved-smartphone-korea/

Samsung's Galaxy Round ad compares its curved smartphone to avocados, russian dolls video

Thanks to Samsung Korea's new (soon to be viral) Galaxy Round commercial, we've learned that its new smartphone is curved. Like many other objects. In the world. We get that now. It's also got differently-curved competition coming very soon. The whole 30-second showcase is after the break.

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Via: Phone Arena

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LG G Flex announced with vertically curved 6-inch 720p screen, 'self-repairing' back cover

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/27/lg-g-flex/

LG G Flex announced with verticallycurved 6inch 720p screen, 'selfrepairing' back cover

LG's unveiled all the details for its often-leaked, curved screen smartphone. Weighing in at 177g with a 6-inch (but 720p) curved OLED display, it's powered by a Snapdragon 800 processor and 2GB of RAM, with a 13-megapixel camera housed above the two rear control buttons, which is now LG's thing. In comparison to Samsung's Galaxy Round, the screen on the G Flex arcs from top to bottom, not side-to-side, which at least makes a little more sense to us, hopefully fitting in better to the curvature of the users' face. We're yet to handle either curved phone IRL just yet, however, when we'll be able to offer up a better perspective on how both devices actually feel.

Like LG's recent G2, there's high-fidelity audio recording and playback, dual-window app functionality and tap-to-wake on that substantial touchscreen. There's also special animations, depending on where and how you unlock the phone. The Korean press release is also reporting that there's a self-healing coating that can repair hairline scratches on the rear of the phone. LG says they are repaired "within minutes." Korean smartphones with the power to control the elements are, however, still TBC. The G Flex will arrive on Korea's three major carriers next month -- but (again) there's no word on global roll-out, hinting that the smartphone could well be a test model for the company. We've added the confusingly Google-translated release after the break.

Update: We've now included the full English press release, below. %Gallery-slideshow102215%

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Via: The Verge

Source: Newswire, LG Newsroom

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Nielsen to add web viewers to future TV ratings, with a little help from Facebook

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/28/nielsen-mobile-digital-device-tv-ratings/

After several months of testing within the industry, Nielsen is finally ready to reveal its efforts to bake mobile viewing habits into its TV ratings system. In a wider roll-out of what the company already monitors, it'll launch an SDK for participating broadcasters in mid-November that will encompass both old-fashioned screens and those not-so-new upstarts (including DVRs, internet-connected TVs, tablets, smartphones and browsers). To work out which stream is being watched where, Nielsen will parse together "big data and a census-style measurement approach." This will apparently match demographic information through social networks, mentioning Facebook explicitly -- the ratings monitor is already involved with Twitter. It'll also know exactly which device viewers are watching content on thanks to "audio watermarks, metadata or tags associated with the content and related advertising." The aim, after all this work, is for Nielsen to accurately reveal who's watching TV ads and, concurrently, who's watching Scandal elsewhere.

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Source: Nielsen

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AIRO wristband tracks not just sleep, exercise and stress, but also what you eat

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/28/airo-wristband/

AIRO wristband keeps track of your eating, stress, exercise and sleep for overall health

There are fitness wearables that track steps, gauge your quality of sleep and monitor your stress, but few combine all three. As for keeping track of what you eat, most people still resort to old-fashioned food diaries and calorie counters. The AIRO wristband, however, aims to measure all of the above completely automatically. Launching today, the AIRO uses a special embedded spectrometer to track not just your heart rate, but also your sleep patterns, workout intensity and calories consumed. It's even able to break down the nutritional intake of your food.

Abhilash Jayakumar, co-founder and CEO of Airo Heath, tells us it's able to do this because specific nutrients have different light properties. "As your body breaks the food down, the sensor can detect the amount of light that passes through the blood based on green, red and infrared patterns." So, for example, if you just ate a candybar, you'll see a spike in sugar intake reflected on an accompanying AIRO app. The wristband is able to parse the nutritional value of food into protein, fat and carbohydrates. Jayakumar tells us that the app is right now not quite sophisticated enough to tell the difference between simple starches and complex ones, but the team still has more experiments to do, so don't rule that out just yet.

"We might be able to see a difference in waveform, that would show you whether something is better or worse for the body." Further, Jayakumar notes that the AIRO's caloric intake measurement might differ from that on food packaging, because different people process foods differently.

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Source: Airo

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Sunday, October 27, 2013

Alcatel's 7-inch OneTouch Pop tablets are colorful, and subject to leaks

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2013/10/27/alcatel-7-inch-onetouch-pop-tablet/

Alcatel's 7inch OneTouch Pop tablet could be the brightest leak this week

Way back in January this year, Alcatel trotted out some new tablets set for debut in Q3. Some we saw come to light in August. But, what's this we have here? Perpetual thorn in every product release's side -- @evleaks -- has just thrown up images of what are apparently new colorful 7-inch tabs from Alcatel. The difference here, to what we saw earlier, seems to be that they are part of the OneTouch Pop family, much like those recent budget handsets we saw -- which incidentally should start popping up in stores soon. As well as the hues you see above, we hear the covers are removable, and it will come in black, too. Plus there's word of a translucent flip-cover to keep it clean. Whenever it gets official that is.

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Source: @evleaks

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