Al Plumlier | The Verge

Zuk Z2 Pro is an Android flagship worthy of the title

2016-04-21T15:00:21-04:00

Lenovo-owned Zuk just unveiled its new Z2 Pro Android phone, which ticks all the flagship boxes — plus a few extra, just to be safe. It’s a followup to December’s Z1, Zuk’s well-priced but generic first offering. The phone runs the top-of-the-line Snapdragon 820 chipset, includes 6GB of RAM, and has 128GB of storage. There’s an ultra-bright 5.2-inch 1080p Super AMOLED display, a 13-megapixel optical image stabilized camera, and a 3100mAh battery. Naturally, it plugs in over USB-C, with USB 3.1 support.

What’s even more fun is the phone includes a built-in heartbeat sensor, UV sensor, fingerprint sensor, and altimeter. Also, Zuk claims the phone syncs with iCloud, which will be neat to try out when it ships. The phone will be up for pre-order tomorrow in China for 2,699 yuan (about $416 US). A more modest edition with 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage will be available next month.

Skype Bots come to Mac

2016-04-19T13:51:17-04:00

Bots. Bots. Bots? Bots.

Now you can bot with Microsoft’s Bots over Skype even if you use Skype on a Mac. You can bot with famous Bots like “Murphy” and “Bing” and “Getty Images,” so you’re sure to have a great bot time. Bots are also now available on Skype’s web client, if you’re into that. Windows and mobile users? They’ve been botting with Skype Bots for weeks.

ZEI° time-tracking totem makes hourly billing a fun IoT activity

2016-04-19T12:54:06-04:00

A startup called Timeular is building a strange new Bluetooth paperweight for time tracking. The product is called ZEI°, and it’s sort of a cross between a Pomodoro timer and D&D dice. You can write different tasks on each side of the polyhedron, and then when you flip ZEI° to a new side, it tells your computer or phone to start a timer for that side’s task.

Time tracking is a classic bane of any desk worker who bills by the hour — graphic designers, lawyers, programmers — but it’s also useful for quantified self-pursuits. How much time do I spend on Facebook? What did I do today? How much time did I devote to improving my time-tracking workflow? Now there’s a polyhedron for that.

ZEI° is supposed to cost $99 when it ships, but it’s still a ways out — Timeular hasn’t even launched the Kickstarter campaign yet, though it’s already “closing deals” with manufacturers.

Harvard’s Root robot teaches kids how to code

2016-04-19T10:37:58-04:00

In order to build new human children who can compete in tomorrow’s post-work world, we must teach kids to code. Everyone agrees, even Obama. Unfortunately, coding is hard and often abstract. To that end, some researchers at Harvard’s Wyss Institute have built Root, a robot that “brings coding to life.”

Root is an app-ified update of the classic Turtle robot design: a Roomba-shaped bot that follows simple programs to crawl around the floor, draw crazy patterns, and avoid obstacles. What Root adds to that classic formula is a plethora of sensors — including sound and color sensitivity, and your mobile device’s own sensors. It’s also based on the new Scratch-like Square programming environment that runs on an iPad and is designed to transition kids from drag-and-drop coding to classic text-based coding. Root can also cling to a vertical whiteboard and draw with a dry erase marker, making it perfect for classrooms.

Root is still a research project, so there’s no info on when you can buy one for your own human child. Currently the researchers are working on a curriculum for Root and “seeking the right partners” to make Root a reality.

LaCie 12big Thunderbolt 3

2016-04-18T15:24:58-04:00

96TB at 2600MB/s: LaCie’s new ’12big’ Thunderbolt 3 RAID

2016-04-18T15:00:25-04:00

Regular people don’t need Thunderbolt 3. It’s wasted on us. We’re too weak to even look at that much bandwidth. We have to turn the page quickly past the peripherals section when perusing the latest copy of MacMall, for fear of seeing something too radical. Those video professionals, however… those are some bandwidth aficionados; dog-eared copies of MacMall under their arm, always looking through their viewfinders to see if there’s more MB/s off on the horizon. They want all the speeds, and all the storages.

LaCie put both speed and capacity in its new “12big” RAID, which it just announced at the video professional-centric NAB trade show. Basically, it’s a huge box with 12 drive bays, huge 7200RPM Seagate drives in those bays, and a Thunderbolt 3 plug out the back. In a RAID 5 configuration (people who own video cameras know all about “RAID 5”), you get 96TB of storage and 2400MB/s transfer speeds. If you tweak the settings a bit — RAID is all about finding a balance between speed, capacity, and safety — you can go as fast as 2600MB/s. Which means, basically, you can get through a lot of 4K uncompressed footage.

Because Thunderbolt 3 is just an “Alternate Mode” for USB-C, 12big will work with that new crop of Type-C USB 3.1 devices (it even charges them over the cable), in addition to the small cadre of high-end machines with honest-to-goodness Thunderbolt 3 built in. 12big is also USB 3.0 compatible, but that’s just plain boring.

LaCie will launch 12big this summer. No word on price.

Kangaroo Pro makes a tiny, portable PC less tiny and portable

2016-04-15T17:47:36-04:00

InFocus’s Kangaroo is a very small PC with an Atom processor and a battery for “portable” use — if you want to use your iPad as the touchscreen, or somehow have an HDMI display but no power plugs. The Kangaroo is kind of a sub-genre of those HDMI stick computers that started popping up a couple years ago, but the four hour battery and added connectivity makes it much larger and heavier than, say, a Chromecast.

It’s a weird value prop, and it only gets weirder with the new Kangaroo Pro, which is essentially a new dock bundled with last year’s Kangaroo model. It doubles the thickness of the device to make room for Ethernet, VGA, and a hard drive bay. The hard drive is sold separately, and if you buy the suggested 1TB bundle on NewEgg you’re already at $310 and perhaps wondering where this small PC obsession is taking you. For the same price you could get a much, much faster desktop computer, or maybe a $300 Windows 10 tablet that includes a touchscreen. You know, just thinking out loud here.

Kangaroo Pro

2016-04-15T17:46:40-04:00

New LG Rolly Keyboard 2 has five rows of keys

2016-04-15T12:35:45-04:00

The old LG Rolly Keyboard had only four rows of keys. We can’t even believe we lived through such primitive times. Because of math, the old keyboard rolled up into a square, but the new keyboard rolls up into a pentagon. Finally we can live all our cyberpunk fantasies of having five rows of keys in our rollup Bluetooth keyboards. Thank you, LG Rolly Keyboard 2. You cost 129,000 KRW, because you are only available in South Korea right now, but that’s roughly $112 USD. You have five rows.

Sling TV’s leaked AirTV box is almost like a DIY Aereo

2016-04-15T12:05:16-04:00

Cord cutters still can’t have it all, but the mildly successful Sling TV service might soon have a nice option: live local channels. A new box scooped by Zatz Not Funny!, dubbed “AirTV,” is basically a Slingbox with an OTA tuner. Local channels are, of course, all around us, broadcasting constantly at a high bitrate for free — but few people bother tuning in. A couple years ago, Aereo made OTA easy, but then got shut down by the Supreme Court. This AirTV thing apparently includes an antenna in the box to get you started, and it just pipes live TV to your Sling TV app — there’s not even an HDMI plug.

No word yet on when this will be launched, or even officially announced, but since the hardware doesn’t seem to be wildly different than existing Slingboxes, it hopefully won’t be long. It won’t fill the entire Aereo-shaped hole in our hearts, especially if it doesn’t include any DVR functionality, but it could at least be a good solution for existing Sling TV customers to see their local news anchor’s shining face for once in their lives.