Kickstarter takes in Outdoor Tech Rhinos, rugged wireless headphones [UPDATE]

The Rhinos are a pair of wireless headphones billed to withstand plenty of abuse from the elements including several forces of nature.

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Apple and Carl Zeiss might be gunning for joint release of AR smartglasses this year

Although virtual reality headsets have (moderately) taken off much faster than their mixed reality smartglasses counterparts, and Google’s commercial stumbles in the latter market may serve as a cautionary tale for fellow tech veterans and big-name rivals, it looks like Microsoft, Qualcomm and even Apple are still keen to give AR hardware a try.

Yes, that seemingly unfounded rumor about a Cupertino-made pair of augmented reality goggles a couple of months back picks up a little more steam today, thanks to the investigative work of blogger, technology evangelist, author, and consultant for the immersive media world Robert Scoble.

Scoble first sniffed there was something going on at Carl Zeiss’ CES 2017 booth last week, when the German company’s employees “smiled nervously” at a Tim Cook joke meant to justify the absence of mixed reality optics prototypes, despite the lens specialist’s occupancy of an exhibition space dedicated to AR.

After doing some digging, the journalist was purportedly able to confirm speculation that Apple and Carl Zeiss AG are working on a “light pair of augmented reality/mixed reality glasses that may be announced this year.”

An obviously unnamed Zeiss employee is cited as the “confirmation’s” source, and while Apple has a reputation for dragging out the R&D process of avant-garde products like this one sounds, all signs start to point to a 2017 release. No concrete evidence however, so let’s keep our expectations pragmatically low.

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CES 2017 wrap up on the road from Las Vegas | #PNWeekly 234

The CES show floor is closed for business. While we love Vegas, we also enjoy heading back home after a long week of covering tech. Jaime decided to hitch a ride back with Juan this year, and we thought it would be a great opportunity to capture our post show conversations, and turn them into this podcast you’re about to hear, so sit back, relax, and enjoy the inane ramblings of two exhausted tech editorialists.

For folks watching our normal shows live, you can comment and ask questions by using the #PNWeekly hashtag on Twitter during the broadcast. For folks watching later, you can shoot your listener emails to podcast [AT] pocketnow [DOT] com for a shot at getting your question read aloud on the air the following week!

Pocketnow Weekly 234


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iTunes Link

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Recording Date

January 07, 2017

Host

Juan Bagnell

Jules Wang

Jaime Rivera

 

Putting Las Vegas in the Rear View Mirror

We saw a lot of cool tech on the CES show floor this year, though pickings for mobile were a bit slim. Jaime and Juan share some of their favorite hits and misses from the show while driving back to LA!

See you next week!

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CES 2017 Recap: All you need to know

It’s an instant show and you’re in an instant world. After several days of true tech tomfoolery across a few hotels and a convention center in Las Vegas, Nevada, CES 2017 has finally come to a wrap. Gadgets of all sizes have come and gone right through our hands and we are so ready to finally just firm our grip with MWC coming up.

So let’s make this wrap-up post as concise as possible, huh?

Smartphones

While there may have been little to excite us during the event, there was definitely a decent volume of handsets for us to at least look at. Only a handful are destined to launch in the US, though.

Tablets and laptops

Convertibles are dominating the tablet format these days and with a new, seventh generation of Intel Core processors, manufacturers are trying to exploit the market for refreshed PC appetite. Here are the ones that we’ve covered:

If Chromebooks are your fancy, three of them came out on the show floor this year, all of them with differentiators.

  • The ASUS Chromebook Flip C302 is a much-needed update to the original 2015 model and gives users Chrome OS with Android apps in modes from tablet to laptop and anywhere in between.
  • The Acer Chromebook 11 N7 is a cheap but durable little demon, rated by US military standards for shock resistance up to 4 feet.
  • The Samsung Chromebook Plus and Pro takes ASUS’s Flip and adds a stylus and an option for more power (at a cost, of course).

And then there was that oddball Razer laptop that was codenamed “Project Valerie“. How did one not exist as a blubbering pile of garbage before today without experiencing a 4K screen beside another beside another on the same damn device? And they fold in, too.

Wearables (of all sorts)

  • Starting off in the wearables category, Lenovo was the first to detail what its Windows Holographic VR headset would look like and cost.
  • Qualcomm and manufacturer ODG are promoting what may become better versions of Google Glass.
  • Not much has changed with Casio’s second Smart Outdoor Watch. Except for the addition of cellular connectivity and GPS.
  • The Garmin Fenix 5 brings in sporty stats-keeping in three sizes.
  • We were impressed with the LG Tone Studio… speakers? Headset? Those are some really directional drivers.
  • The HTC Vive headset gets several new peripherals introduced to the US this springtime, including a wireless transmission adapter and a strap-on headphone kit.
  • ZTE is openly talking about an Android Wear smartwatch with LTE and “good battery life” coming this year to the US.
  • Some new brand blood is getting into Android Wear with New Balance’s Intel-powered RunIQ.
  • It runs into a relative newcomer in the touchscreen smartwatch business with Misfit launching its new GPS-integrated Vapor.
  • Ironically, TCL’s MOVEBAND BT takes on Misfit’s typical offering of a screen-less fitness tracker.
  • We got one of Lofelt’s Basslet around our wrists and felt something above and beyond what you’d think a typical haptic motor could do.
  • Need some headphones with their durability as beefy as their sound? We tried on the Outdoor Tech Rhinos.

Other products

Kodak Super 8

  • Lenovo’s Smart Assistant and Mattel’s Aristotle debut as two new and refined Alexa speakers.
  • NVIDIA finally one-upped its Shield TV with 4K HDR support and Google Assistant integration. Google Assistant is also found on the NVIDIA Spot remote.
  • T-Mobile launched Un-carrier Next — really, things like wrapping fees and taxes into the billed service price and locking in prices for continuously-held plans are jimmies to the ice cream, here.
  • Kodak got us excited for film once more with a new Super 8 Camera (and the subsequent throwback to Ektachrome film) and a new 360-degree action camera that records in 4K resolution.

Overall, we’d say that our haul for CES 2017 hasn’t been so bad. And with HTC supposedly launching a phone “for U” of some sort this week, we’re still riding off the vapors of trade show fulfillment. We just wish MWC would come a bit sooner.

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CES 2017 ends on a sour note for Razer with the theft of two unnamed prototypes

With Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress just around the corner, it certainly was disappointing, but not at all surprising, to see very few exciting new smartphones unveiled and demoed in Las Vegas for the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show last week.

The timing didn’t feel right for sequels to any of 2016’s big VR headset releases either, so instead, we witnessed a flood of Amazon Echo copycats, Surface Pro 4 contenders, the occasional Android Wear 2.0 smartwatch, and… a three-screened laptop.

More like a laptop concept, to be fair, with no availability information or price tag attached to its tentative moniker. Which probably made Razer’s Project Valerie all the more appealing for as-yet unidentified burglars who managed to illicitly snatch two unnamed prototypes from the company’s CES booth.

In an understandably angered social media post, Razer CEO Min-Liang Tan voiced suspicions of industrial espionage, highlighting “cheating doesn’t sit well with us”, and “penalties for such crimes are grievous.”

Of course, it is up to law enforcement officers and investigators to identify and apprehend the culprits, as well as determine their motives and intentions for the two stolen pre-release products. They may not want to copy their designs and technologies, but merely sell them to the highest bidder. And trust us, both Project Valerie and Project Ariana, the world’s first projection system aimed at immersive gaming, are worth a fortune right now.

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Kodak Orbit360 4K VR Action Camera: CES 2017 Hands-On (Video)

We love seeing companies improve their products. The Kodak Pixpro SP360 was one of the first cameras to properly support 360 degree horizontal video, but only in a vertical half dome. The next camera fixed that, but only if you bought two cameras and bolted them together, but now we arrive at the Orbit 360 4K. Properly including two twenty megapickle image sensors, each with an ultra wide angle lens, capable of producing fully spherical 4K videos.

The standard set of tricks is of course included. NFC pairing, with Bluetooth and wifi radios to pair with android and iOS devices. Micro SD card support for up to 128GB cards, and the Orbit will have a mic input and HDMI output, adding quite a bit of flexiblilty to the built in hardware and phone based app control. Kodak will also be selling an optional Bluetooth controller which can be mounted to Steadicam mounts or selfie sticks.

 

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Xiaomi won’t be in the US by 2018: will it be too late?

Xiaomi wants to do it right. Not like how LeEco did it. What is it? Expanding the brand to a US audience.

While the young Chinese manufacturer did debut a new color of its pioneering Mi MIX phone at CES 2017, it made sure to disappoint its foreign followers by making it clear that sales of the phone was still exclusive to China. Not America.

“Eventually we’ll make our way over here,” said Xiaomi global vice president Hugo Barra. “There’s a huge audience of tech enthusiasts here. Brands in the US become global brands.”

He told CNET that the company isn’t “comfortable” sharing a specific plan for migrating smartphones over the Pacific anytime soon, never mind what the rumors have said about an end-of-the-year launch.

Why abstain? Because of how the competition didn’t.

“We don’t want to go anywhere near the half-hearted efforts to launch a brand in the US just to say we’re in the US,” Barra said.

He pointed out that the company’s TV boxes are seeping into the country to help establish its brand, though we aren’t sure if regular ‘ol consumers will go browsing for off-brand smart whatchamacallits from this weird “showme” from China.

But how long will it take before Xiaomi has fully tilled its bed for flowers? Or will the company wait for too long before ultra-saturation takes place, squeezing even the niche that it hopes to target in the states?

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Xiaomi Mi MIX Hands-On: now in white (Video)

All we can say is… meh… it’s damn good.

The Chinese-exclusive Xiaomi Mi MIX is not coming to the United States in the foreseeable future. But if you’re at CES 2017, you did get to play around with something that few have in the Middle Kingdom: a white trim of the Mi MIX.

You can almost feel that 91.4-percent screen-to-face ratio coming right towards the corneas, right? And it definitely helps that 6.4-inch screen fit (somehow) into a fairly slim frame.

Check out Hayato Huseman’s small paws on this large phone right here.

 

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Casio WSD-F20 Hands-On: Finally the real deal (Video)

The Smart Outdoor Watch, take two.

Casio is taking a second shot at making something on your wrist that beeps, buzzes, has a compass and tells you about a new Facebook friend request. The WSD-F20 doesn’t change much from its sibling, the WSD-F10, but it is chunkier, has cellular access and integrated GPS.

The Android Wear 2.0 watch is able to figure out where you like to fish and give you time charts for when the best traffic is. It’s coming out in April.

You can bide your time with Jaime Rivera’s quick look from the CES 2017 showfloor.

 

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Samsung Galaxy A3 and A5 (2017) Hands-on at CES 2017 (Video)

Samsung brought what used to be its Alpha game to CES 2017. Now it’s called the Galaxy A-series, but we at Pocketnow tend to think of these devices as phones that strayed from Galaxy S Mini name. And it’s especially the case with the apparently much-rumored Galaxy A3 (2017) and the Galaxy A5 (2017).

We see tighter curves, compact dimensions and IP68 water resistance. Also, a side-mounted speaker (what?). Nonetheless, we see new mid-range silicon on the A3 (2017) and A5 (2017) and a very decent hardware load for the rest of the specs.

Check out Jaime Rivera’s hands-on video of these new, globally-targeted handsets.

 

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Outdoor Tech Rhinos: Rugged Headphones at CES 2017 (Video)

You wanna go outdoors? You wanna listen to some outdoor jams? Outdoor Tech may have your solution.

The Laguna Hills, California-based company has designed and manufactured a slate of tech products from power banks to Bluetooth speakers to this new Rhinos walkie-talkie/headset hybrid. It has a beastly battery and an IPX6 rating and it’s at CES 2017.

Juan Carlos Bagnell brings us a closer look.

 

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Kodak Super 8 Camera and the Return of Ektachrome Film (Video)

“Super 8” is no longer just a memory for indie film makers of old or those who grew up with old film cameras, like our own Juan Carlos Bagnell. It’s not even just a filter inside custom camera apps you can download to your smartphone. The Kodak Super 8 Camera makes a comeback at CES 2017, and, while this is definitely not our main scope of coverage, we do have a lot of photography enthusiasts (and experts) among the members of our team, and our kick-ass readers and viewers.

This camera combines the old with the new: it uses Super 8 film cartridges — each with 50 feet of film inside — while at the same time it is rocking an articulated LCD to frame your composition, a jog dial for mode selection, SD card expansion, HDMI output, as well as line-in for audio input.

Included in the price of processing, Kodak will produce 4K video scans for editing or sharing footage, because not everyone will use a projector to show off their creations.

If you think that capturing moments on a new Kodak Super 8 camera is cooler (or just different) than using a smartphone in your pocket, you’ll love this. Check out our video and tell us what you think: what’s old is new again? Is retro back?

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TCL MOVEBAND BT Hands-on: the company’s take on the Misfit? (Video)

TCL’s new BlackBerry and Alcatel A3 XL aren’t the only new products on display at the 2017 CES in Las Vegas. Check out the TCL MOVEBAND BT, an IP67-rated fitness tracker wearable that lacks a display, but that doesn’t cripple its functionality.

Relying on wrist gestures to control functionality, the MOVEBAND BT has a single sensor in the middle. It varies in color depending on the band you choose, and thankfully there are a lot of color options to choose from.

Being an activity tracker, battery life should not be a problem, and the official wording mentions that the MOVEBAND BT should only require charging after 30 days of continuous usage (activity tracking).

Despite not announcing pricing yet, the company will make the TCL MOVEBAND BT available around March. Until then, make sure to check out our hands-on to decide on your purchase decision.

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Alcatel A3 XL hands-on: Nougat on modest hardware (Video)

TCL’s “new BlackBerry” stole the spotlight in the first days of CES 2017, but that doesn’t mean the company is neglecting the Alcatel brand. Part of a new ‘premium’ low-cost series, the Alcatel A3 XL is an interesting take on entry-level smartphones. While there’s no pricing yet, and the phone won’t even make it to the US stores, it’s good to see Alcatel simplifying its naming convention for the smartphone line-up.

Modest is the word best describing what you’ll find under the hood. Sure, it’s powered by Android 7.0 Nougat, but we won’t judge you if you don’t become excited about the Alcatel A3 XL specs: a six-inch 720p display, 1GB of RAM, 8 GB of storage, eight- and five-megapixel cameras, and a quad-core Mediatek MT8735B processor, and 3,000mAh battery.

What could really make this an appealing smartphone would be a very low price tag. However, the company didn’t make any announcements on how much this phone will set you back, but, until it does, check out our hands-on video to see whether this is something that could interest you.

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Samsung Chromebook Pro and Chromebook Plus Hands-on: It’s not an S-Pen (Video)

Even though laptops, notebooks, and convertibles, are not really our main scope of coverage, we couldn’t just walk past the next generation Chromebook that Samsung and Google introduced at this year’s CES. Designed for Google Play, both the Samsung Chromebook Pro and Chromebook Plus sport a “pen”. Yes, it’s just a pen, not an S-Pen.

Despite looking almost identical to the S-Pen inside the defunct Samsung Galaxy Note 7, this Digitizer Pen is different. Check out our video hands-on from Las Vegas to find out what the differences are. You’ll also learn what the difference between the Chromebook Pro and Plus are (hint: processor), and find out about the specs — out of which we have to mention the 12-inch Quad-HD display, 4GB of RAM, and 32GB of storage.

If you think the Chromebook is a device that will suit your needs, you can already pre-order the Plus (not the Pro yet) over at Amazon for $449. But before you hit the Pre-Order button, make sure to check out our video tour of the product.

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