Samsung introduces its first ever cord free earbuds - For ANDROID ONLY

Samsung showed off its first-ever cord-free earbuds Thursday, extending its line of wearable fitness gadgets.

The Gear IconX has built-in heart rate and distance monitoring that works by using an optical sensor and accelerometer.

The earbuds can play music with or without a phone, and they can take calls when paired with a phone by acting as a Bluetooth headset. They have 4 GB of internal storage and can stream Spotify, Google Music and Pandora (P) through a Bluetooth-connected smartphone. There's also a cool ambient sound feature that lets outside noise blend in with the audio.

I spent a little time wearing them and found the earbuds to be very comfortable and secure. I ran on a treadmill at about 6 mph for two minutes and they felt securely tucked in my ear -- after I found right size plugs. (One of the earbuds fell out about halfway through on my first attempt.)

The sound quality is rich and full, and volume and menu options are accessed through touch control.

The Gear IconX earbuds come in a charging case that can hold two additional full charges. Samsung says battery life should run around one and a half hours if the earbuds are paired to a phone and three hours if they're not.

Cordless earbuds aren't a new concept, but current models tend to be either too expensive with too few features, or inexpensive and questionable quality.

At $200, the Gear IconX isn't exactly cheap, but Samsung will likely offer promotions for the device in the third quarter when they become available. There are three colors -- black, white and blue.

I stopped listening to music at the gym last year after I crushed my iPhone between the pedals of an elliptical machine. Luckily, only the charging port was dented, but it was enough for me to understand that cords and swinging arms don't mix.

Still, cords and wires at least make it easier to find headphones in a bag, and if you lose one of these earbuds, you'll have to buy a whole new set.

Samsung also introduced an update of its Gear Fit activity tracker Thursday.

The Gear Fit2 now has GPS, a much wider screen that displays text vertically and a curvier shape for better fit. The Gear Fit2 also comes in a smaller size.

Like the Gear IconX, the new Fit has 4 GB of storage and Spotify is built in to play play music without a phone. The Gear Fit2 is also waterproof for up to half an hour.

Pre-orders for the Gear Fit2 start Friday for $179.

Raspberry Pi 3 to get official Android OS Support

It's fair to say the success of the ARM-powered Raspberry Pi computers have surpassed expectations and have been a godsend to hobbyists, hackers, and students.

If you're one of those people looking for unofficial hacks to install Android OS on a Raspberry Pi device, then stop and wait for the official release.

Raspberry Pi computers have largely been Linux affairs, as several Linux distributions have supported this tiny ARM computer.

Now, it seems like Raspberry Pi is ready to get official support for one of the most popular mobile operating systems out there: Android.

Google has recently registered the $35 Raspberry Pi 3 ‒ the newest version of the Raspberry Pi ‒ as a new device 'tree' in its Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository.

If you're not aware, Raspberry Pi is cheap, credit card-sized, single board ARM computer that looks and feels very basic, but could be built into many geeky projects.

What Google is planning for Android and the Pi is unclear. However, once released, Android support for Raspberry Pi 3 would give programmers access to more than 1.5 million apps, allowing them to mess around with their own custom projects too.

Last year at Google I/O developer conference, the company, announced Brillo OS, a lightweight Android-based operating system for low-power devices built on ARM or Intel i.e. the Internet of Things (IoT).

This might be possible that Android support for Raspberry Pi 3 could be part of Project Brillo.

Interested Raspberry Pi enthusiasts should keep an eye on Google’s Repository.

Mediatek’s Pump Express Can Charge a Phone to 70% in 20 Minutes

Samsung and Qualcomm have been busy bundling their newest smartphones with multiple fast-charging standards but none of them is as fast as the one MediaTek has just announced.

The company has just unveiled the new Pump Express 3.0 standard which will be coming out to its phones later this year. The standard will allow your phone to gain up to 70 percent of its battery life in just 20 minutes which is faster than the competition.

Qualcomm’s fast-charging 3.0 can manage to reach 80 percent of the battery in only 35 minutes although there have been faster standards in between from researchers.

Pump Express 3.0 will make an appearance along with the upcoming Helio P20 chipset phones which will start arriving later this year. MediaTek hasn’t announced the capacity of the phone it was charging though.

It claims to have taken 20 safety protection standards to manage security. It manages overheating through something called “Direct Charging”, a solution which bypasses circuitry by routing the current directly from the adapter to the battery.

This is the first time someone is using this solution through the new Type-C connector, which will provide 4 hours of talk time with just 5 minutes of charging. Pump Express 3.0 has the potential to be a good match-winner for MediaTek, though the company must announce details soon.

Microsoft tries its hand at a news bot with Rowe

Like everyone else these days, Microsoft sure loves its bots. Now, the company has rolled out its own news-finding bot called “Rowe,” which lives inside the latest version of Microsoft’s Bing-powered personalized news reading app, News Pro. Rowe is an experiment with helping you keep up with the news that matches your current interests. You can ask the bot to show you news by typing in a topic, view today’s headlines, ask for other personalized suggestions or read the stories the bot has surfaced for you already.

Rowe, however, seems more like an assistive search engine, rather than a true AI-like bot, as its “personalized” suggestions are not as good as its ability to return articles on a given subject. And even then, its results are a bit limited. For example, if you type in a popular, but broad, subject like “U.S. Elections,” the bot returns just three top stories, one of which currently appears to be more of an op-ed/thought piece rather than hard news. That’s not a great experience.

Below its recommended stories, buttons appear that let you pull up more news articles on the subject, like those focused on “election predictions” or “polls,” in this case.

Meanwhile, if you type a news topic that’s a bit more specific, the selection of stories may improve. For instance, asking Rowe about “Twitter 140” — a reference to Twitter’s plans to distance itself from its strict 140-character count rule — the bot returns popular stories from well-known sites like Yahoo, CNET and PCMag.

Rowe has one other weird and not entirely practical trick, too — if you upload a picture of yourself, it will surface news articles where the person in the story looks like you. Why? Uh, because it can? (Oh, and prepare to be either very flattered or very insulted by its results.)

The bot — initially spotted by the blogMSPoweruser.com following Microsoft’sannouncement — is the latest development from Microsoft’s News Pro app, which first debuted this January. A sort of standard news-gathering app, News Pro is Microsoft’s own take on something like Apple News, or the third-party app Smart News, perhaps.

The app offers users a customized experience by connecting to your Facebook and LinkedIn in order to better understand your interests.

In practice, News Pro doesn’t do a great job at personalization yet, I’ve found. While it accurately suggests stories from areas like “computer hardware” and the “Internet” for me, it misses a number of possible suggestions that could be easily pulled from my ever-growing set of Facebook likes.

Similarly, the bot feels rough around the edges, too. But this is not an “official” Microsoft product, we should point out — it’s an app from the company’s internal R&D incubator, Microsoft Garage.

Microsoft is hardly the only company experimenting with new ways to deliver the news via bots, however. Other efforts in the space include those running on Facebook Messenger’s bot platform, like bots from CNN, The WSJ, Business Insider or even yours truly; Telegram’snews bots; or independent efforts like Quartz’s app, and many more.

The updated app also introduces other features, including groups for discussing the news with others, for example.

Rowe is available in the updated News Pro app on iTunes here.

Nanomaterials could double efficiency of solar cells by converting waste heat into usable energy

An experimental solar cell created by MIT researchers could massively increase the amount of power generated by a given area of panels, while simultaneously reducing the amount of waste heat. Even better, it sounds super cool when scientists talk about it: “with our own unoptimized geometry, we in fact could break the Shockley-Queisser limit.”

The Shockley-Queisser limit, which is definitely not made up, is the theoretical maximum efficiency of a solar cell, and it’s somewhere around 32 percent for the most common silicon-based ones.

You can get around this by various tricks like stacking cells, but the better option, according to David Bierman, a doctoral student on the team (and who is quoted above), will be thermophotovoltaics — whereby sunlight is turned into heat and then re-emitted as light better suited for the cell to absorb.

Sound weird? Here’s the thing. Solar cells work best with a certain wavelength of light — perhaps ultraviolet is too short, while infrared is too long, but let’s say 600nm (orange visible light) is perfect. Only some of the broad-spectrum radiation emitted by the sun is at or around 600nm, which limits the amount of energy the cell can pull out of that radiation — that’s one of the components of the Shockley-Queisser limit.

What Bierman and the others on his team did was to add a step between the sun and the cell: a carefully engineered structure of carbon nanotubes. “The carbon nanotubes are virtually a perfect absorber over the entire color spectrum,” said Bierman in the MIT news release. “All of the energy of the photons gets converted to heat.”

Normally heat is undesirable in a solar cell, as it’s just waste energy that can interfere with normal operation. But in this case, the heat is not allowed to dissipate; instead, the carbon nanostructure converts the heat back into light — at the exact optimum wavelength of the photovoltaic cell.

The result is a huge increase in efficiency, and that’s not the only benefit. Heat, unlike light, is easy to store and move. If the day’s sunlight was entirely converted to heat and stored away, it could be converted to light on demand — like, say, at night. In other words, this technique essentially allows sunlight to be saved for later.

Experimental results bore out the theory, and a prototype TPV cell performed as expected. But the tech still needs to make it out of the lab, and manufacturing the complex carbon nanomaterials in bulk is no simple task. So you won’t be using thermophotovoltaics next year or the year after — but the technique is a tremendously promising one and unlikely to be left on the shelf.

The team’s research was published in the journal Nature Energy.