If there is anything that can make our inner “nerds” very happy, it is the possibility of faster internet!
TELSTRA has tested their world’s first Gigabit LTE mobile network capable of unprecedented mobile broadband speeds.
LTE technology
Published on: Feb 2, 2017
The new LTE technology – which stands for “Long Term Evolution” and is a term used to denote improvements in mobile broadband – means Telstra’s network will soon be capable of download speeds of up to one gigabit per second. Now wouldn’t that be great!
At such speeds users could download an hour-long high definition TV show on their phone in less than 20 seconds.
In partnership with Netgear, chip maker Qualcomm and infrastructure provider Ericsson, the Telstra network will allow its customers to receive downloads speeds of up to 1Gpbs and upload speeds of 150Mbps over its 4G network.
By comparison, the top home broadband packages currently offered by the NBN reach speeds of up to 100Mbps, about one tenth of the peak speeds Telstra says its new mobile network can achieve in “laboratory-like” conditions. However the NBN’s fibre connections will soon boast reliable 1Gbps fixed line connections and be much cheaper than mobile broadband.
Telstra impressed media and industry members in Sydney when it tested the network and unveiled a new router to let customers tap into the super fast speeds.
Nighthawk M1 mobile router
Netgear and Telstra launched the world’s first Gigabit LTE device, the Nighthawk M1 mobile router.
According to Telstra, the pocket sized device will allow customers to download a 300MB hour long TV episode in as little as 16 seconds and a 3GB HD Movie in as little as three minutes.
The Nighthawk M1 device uses one SIM card and uses multiple 4G bands. It can connect up to 20 devices to the internet at once and will be available in late February for $360 upfront or on a range of plans.
The Netgear Nighthawk M1 device can be used to deliver download speeds up to one gigabit per second from the mobile network.
In a demonstration for assembled media on Monday to demonstrate the new technology, a computer was connected to Gigabit LTE and performed several tests on speedtest.net, reaching speeds of 900Mbps.
“We showcased the incredible customer experience a gigabit class LTE mobile device and network can deliver,” Telstra’s device management director Andrew Volard said in a blog post yesterday.
“It’s going help people further embrace a new breed of mobile applications and experiences including immersive virtual reality, connected cloud computing and rich entertainment,” he said.
“And it brings us one step closer to introducing 5G in Australia.”
However there is a few things to iron out. At this stage the speeds have only been delivered in “laboratory-like” conditions and, as Telstra admits, will likely be considerably slower in the real world.
It’s understood that Telstra has begun to launch part of the network in selected Australian capital city CBDs but it won’t be available throughout Australia for some time.
And mobile users will definitely need a bulked up mobile data plan if they intend on taking advantage of the improved broadband, as Telstra has indicated that mobile downloads may cost significantly more than those from a fixed line connection.
Telstra said it will look to make gigabit LTE technology available on more devices, including smartphones, sometime this year.
Users are advised to check the barcodes on their batteries. If they start with 6BZLU, 6CGFK, 6CGFQ, 6CZMB, 6DEMA, 6DEMH, 6DGAL or 6EBVA, then they should remove the batteries and contact HP for a free replacement.
Until a battery is received, users are advised to use the notebook by plugging it in.
United States Consumer Protection Safety Commission (CPSC) announced a massive recall of HP and Compaq computer batteries this week
Includes more than 100,000 laptops
Batteries inside the laptop are prone to overheating and causing serious fire hazards
US CPSC says this follows an earlier recall that included 41,000 batteries
This recall specifically relates to about 101,000 laptops sold with Panasonic battery cells in laptops under the HP, Compaq, HP ProBook, HP ENVY, Compq Presario and HP Pavilion brand names
Laptops were sold between March 2013 and October 2016
If your battery doesn’t pop right off the back of your laptop, you should be able to remove the panel underneath your laptop pretty easily
Affected batteries measure 8 to 10.5 inches long, 2 inches wide, and about 1 inch high
Will be print on each cell that says “HP Notebook Battery”
Along with a model number
If it reads: 6EBVA, 6DGAL, 6DEMH, 6DEMA, 6CZMB, 6CGFK or 6BZLU then that’s bad
Users should contact HP for a free replacement battery
How to identify a faulty HP laptop included in the recall
Finding Your Battery
If it doesn’t pop right off the back of your laptop, you should be able to remove the panel underneath your laptop relatively easily, usually with a Philips screwdriver. Then just look for the battery; the affected units measure “8 to 10.5 inches long, 2 inches wide and about 1 inch high,” the CPSC said. There will be print on each cell that says “HP Notebook Battery” along with a model number. If the number reads 6EBVA, 6DGAL, 6DEMH, 6DEMA, 6CZMB, 6CGFK or 6BZLU, then your unit is potentially very dangerous.
In fact, the CPSC said the laptop batteries can cause fires, resulting in melting and charring computers. One incident caused about $1,000 worth of damage, presumably not including the actual laptop that went up in flames.
Here’s the CPSC remedy: “Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled batteries, remove them from the notebook computers and contact HP for a free replacement battery. Until a replacement battery is received, consumers should use the notebook computer by plugging it into AC power only. Batteries previously identified as not affected by the June 2016 recall could be included in this expanded announcement. Consumers are urged to recheck their batteries.”
Fitbit formally announces that it is buying smartwatch maker Pebble
Digital health and fitness-tracking company Fitbit has just officially announced that it is buying key assets from smartwatch startup Pebble, after reports emerged last week that a deal between the two was close to being completed.
The acquisition excludes Pebble’s hardware products
Fitbit co-founder and CEO James Park said in a release that the company “sees an opportunity to build on our strengths and extend our leadership position in the wearables category.”
“With this acquisition, we’re well positioned to accelerate the expansion of our platform and ecosystem to make Fitbit a vital part of daily life for a wider set of consumers,” Park continued. The deal was closed yesterday, December 6th.
According to a report yesterday from Bloomberg, Fitbit bought Pebble for less than $40 million, and has offered jobs mostly to software engineers at Pebble. Pebble founder and CEO Eric Migicovsky will not be staying on with Fitbit after the acquisition.
The acquisition is largely a grab for Pebble’s software assets and smartwatch platform, and comes at a time when the consumer wearables industry is showing serious signs of weakness. Fitbit itself said it a recent third-quarter earnings call that it is seeing signs of softening in the market, and lowered its forecast for the usually critical holiday quarter. Tech companies like Motorola, LG, and Huawei have declined to release new smartwatches this fall; while Microsoft is no longer selling its health-tracking Band.
And, while Apple has said that the Apple Watch just had its best week ever in terms of sales, new numbers from global research firm IDC suggest that shipments of Apple Watch were actually down more than 70 percent year over year.
The IDC report also says that “smartwatches will continue to struggle in the near term,” but that clearly hasn’t deterred Fitbit from buying up one of the smartwatch companies that it could.
Who wouldn’t love to have a phone watch fitness tracker all in one eliminating all the things we have to carry around!
Pebble
Based in Redwood City, California, Pebble first launched back in 2012 on Kickstarter and gained fame for being a wildly successful crowdfunded project. Its open-sourced, utilitarian smartwatches, with their “e-paper” displays and relatively long battery life, won over the early tech adopter crowd, as well as app developers who wanted to build apps for Pebble.
More recently, the company announced the Pebble 2 and Pebble Time 2, successors to its earlier watches, along with the Core, a pocketable, display-free wearable that was supposed to offer GPS tracking and offline music listening. And Pebble had focused more and more on health and fitness tracking in its recent product launches.
But Pebble has been struggling to stay afloat financially for the past year, according to three sources, and the new Pebble Time 2 had been delayed. In a statement released on its website this morning, Pebble said that it is “no longer able to operate as an independent entity” and that it had made the difficult decision to shut down the company. It will no longer make hardware. Its newest products, the Pebble Time 2 and Core, are canceled, with refunds expected to go out to Kickstarter backers in the next four to eight weeks.
Existing Pebble smartwatches will continue to work, the company said, but functionality will be reduced in the future due to a lack of support.
Microsoft is planning to build a HomeHub feature into future Windows 10 updates to better compete against devices like Google Home and Amazon’s Echo. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the feature is currently in the planning stages, and the software maker is expected to introduce a “HomeHub” in updates due in 2017 and 2018, and not the upcoming Creators Update.
HomeHub is designed to be a service and feature that will run on any Windows 10 PC and turn it into a machine where Cortana can be summoned from the lockscreen to provide useful information.
The primary focus for HomeHub is to create a family environment for a PC. Microsoft has tried a variety of different methods to enable family accounts, privacy controls, and app sharing over the years, but HomeHub is part of a new Family team in the Windows group at Microsoft.
Microsoft is planning to enable Cortana to be the center of its HomeHub initiative, and the integration will allow the assistant to provide HomeHub-like features across iOS and Android. This will include extending the assistant to control smart devices and manage them from the Windows 10 HomeHub feature.
Microsoft’s HomeHub plans are currently in the planning phases, so many features will likely change and the interface itself could be entirely cut out of future Windows 10 updates.
Microsoft has largely been last to develop the smart home features, despite having Cortana running on the Xbox One. The HomeHub is Microsoft’s bet to try and control the ecosystem before any of the other big players provide the best framework to manage devices in your home.
Windows 10 HomeHub Welcome Screen concept by Windows Central
Now if this is not indicating where 3D virtualisation is going, I don’t know what is. We found this article very interesting and want to hear your ideas for Virtual Reality.
Microsoft Research has demonstrated a new mechanically-actuated hand-held controllers that render the shape of virtual objects through physical shape displacement, enabling users to feel 3D surfaces, textures, and forces that match the visual rendering.
They have published the results of their investigations in the Proceedings of the 29th Annual Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology and demonstrate two such controllers, NormalTouch and TextureTouch, which are tracked in 3D and produce spatially-registered haptic feedback to a user’s finger.
NormalTouch haptically renders object surfaces and provides force feedback using a tiltable and extrudable platform. TextureTouch renders the shape of virtual objects including detailed surface structure through a 4×4 matrix of actuated pins.
By moving the controllers around while keeping your finger on the actuated platform, users are able to obtain the impression of a much larger 3D shape.
MSR found their controllers significantly increases the accuracy of VR interaction compared to the two de-facto standards in Virtual Reality controllers: device vibration and visual feedback only.
NormalTouch and TextureTouch: High-fidelity 3D Haptic Shape Rendering on Handheld Virtual Reality Controllers
Netgear and Telstra launched the world’s first Gigabit LTE device, the Nighthawk M1 mobile router.
