Jeopardy-winning Watson is getting better and better at designing cancer treatments. New data presented this week at the American Society of Clinical Oncology's annual meeting show that IBM's Watson for Oncology suggests cancer treatments that are of...ASUS hasn't given up on Android tablets — its latest ZenPad looks like a decent metal-clad slate, though you'll need have to contend with the company's typically odd software UI.
Once upon a time it seemed like everyone wanted to release a cheap, small Android tablet. But unspectacular tablet sales — in part fuelled by the rise of larger phones — has cooled enthusiasm for the form factor among device makers. Nevertheless, Taiwanese manufacturer ASUS continues to push out Android tablets; its latest, the ZenPad 8s 8.0, wasn't included in its glitzy Computex press conference, but it was on display on the show floor in Taipei this week.
The physical hardware of ASUS's new ZenPad draws inspiration from the company's Android phones, with a slim (6.9mm) aluminum unibody accented by diamond-cut chamfers. Up top there's a glossy cutout around the camera module — otherwise, it's all-metal, with pleasantly curved side walls.
ASUS knows how to make pretty metal gadgets.
The ZenPad's button setup takes its layout from the ASUS ZenFone line, which is to say it borrows it (vicariously) from Samsung's 2014-2016 Android phones, with capacitive back and recent apps keys flanking a physical home button. The home key was a little stiff on the demo units I played with, perhaps a consequence of the pre-production hardware on show at Computex.
The display itself looks great, though — it's a 2K panel that looks sharp, and provides ample pixel density at a 7.9-inch form factor. The only downside, it seems, is the tablet runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chip as opposedo something with a little more oomph, and UI performance wasn't exactly fluid on the units I played with. The 625 is a fine chip, with an Adreno 510 GPU at its disposal, but it feels out of its depth running a 2K panel.
An Android experience more fitting of a device from 2013.
On top of that, you'll have to deal with ASUS's hodgepodge ZenUI, which is feature-rich, but inconsistent. It manages to copy parts of Samsung's older Android UIs, but overall remains a mess of different visual styles. Combined with the ample lag I experienced, it's not a great look — which is a shame considering how nice the physical hardware is.
(A side note on software: The spec sheet on the show floor lists Android 7.1, however the units themselves were running version 7.0. Make of that what you will; obviously everything's still pre-production here.)
| Category | Specification |
|---|---|
| Operating System | Android 7.1 (currently 7.0) ZenUI 3.5 |
| Processor | Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 |
| RAM | 3GB/4GB |
| Storage | 32GB/64GB |
| Battery | 4,680mAh |
| Main Camera | 13MP f/2.0, 5-part lens, LED flash |
| Front Camera | 5MP ASUS PixelMaster |
| Audio | DTS headphone: X 7.1 channel surround 5-magnet dual speaker / Smart Amplifier technology |
| Display | 7.9-inch 2K LCD with ASUS VisualMaster |
| Chassis | 6.9mm aluminum unibody |
At least battery life should be solid, with a respectable 4,680mAh cell inside the ZenPad's svelte body. Given the Snapdragon 625's reputation for efficiency, you're likely going to be looking at multiple days between charges, particularly if you're mostly using it for streaming and web browsing.
So the hardware is nice, the software is weird, and on the latter point, ASUS is still its own worst enemy with a bewildering loadout of branded custom technologies and features like VisualMaster and PixelMaster. Hopefully future versions of ZenUI will show more polish and restraint.
The ZenPad 3s 8.0 isn't going to be a major release for ASUS — after all, it didn't even get so much as a mention in the company's Computex press releases. What we have here is another commodity Android slate that'll probably sell for a fairly cheap price, before being largely forgotten. That's a shame, because with the right software and perhaps a little more horsepower, this could've been a promising little gadget.
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The Silk Road network's creator Ross Ulbricht vowed to fight his lifetime prison sentence when it was handed down two years ago. But today, the US Second Circuit officially denied his appeal, sending him away for a long, long time.Workout detection and post-workout feedback are getting better on Samsung's fitness wearable.
Samsung has just pushed out an update to the Gear Fit 2 right around a year after launch that makes a few solid upgrades to its tracking — because, after all, that is what it's designed to do. Building on the Gear Fit 2's automatic fitness tracking that auto-starts workouts when it detects certain sustained movement, Samsung says it has improved its ability to detect workouts.
For runners, you can now set custom pace targets for runs or set certain time or distance goals in Samsung Health to let the app build an appropriate workout for you. After your run is done, the Fit 2 will now give you a detailed color-coded graph of how long you spent in each heart rate zone over the duration. You'll also get more accurate information on a map of where you ran, right on the Fit 2's display.
Samsung has also improved its sleep tracking to give more details on how well you slept through the night, and changed activity reminders to give you some options for light activity instead of simply telling you to stand up. Finally, the Gear Fit 2 now has an "SOS" function that can be activated with a triple press of the home button to send your location and a message to specified contacts.
The update is available now through the Gear Manager app on the phone you have paired to the Gear Fit 2. Just visit the "About Gear" section to download the update, which comes in at a 47MB.
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Facebook has picked up on the fact that everyone thinks its security settings are confusing. So, it has rolled out a redesign based on user research to bring some much-needed clarity to its security page.Use Kodi playlists to binge your favorite shows or keep the music going at your party.
Kodi is a great way to organize and enjoy all your favorite media in one convenient place. Better yet, it's available on so many different devices, from PCs and Macs, Amazon Fire TV to Android phones and Android TV boxes.
For the sake of this guide, we'll be focusing on Kodi for Android because we're Android Central and that's what we do, so we'll be using touchscreen terminologies (tap, long press etc.), but the steps should be transferrable across all Kodi-supported platforms. For example, a tap will be a left-click on your computer or a press of the select button on your TV box remote, and a long press will be a right-click or a long press of the select button on your remote.
Without further ado, let's dive in!
Looking to binge through a whole season of your favorite show or have Kodi autoplay a series of videos like Netflix does? It's easy and doesn't actually require you to go into the playlist menu — we'll get to that later.
You're able to have separate queue playlists going for music and video content. We'll show you how to set one up using video as our example.
Tap Files.
Tap the source where you've stored your files. In this example, the media was stored on a microSD card.
Tap on the folder containing the files you want to queue up.
Long press on a video file to reveal the context menu.
This will add that video to your active queue playlist, which lives in the Music section of Kodi. You're able to add entire folders to your queue by following steps 6 and 7 with a folder instead of a file.
So you've added a whole bunch of awesome stuff to your queue playlist but now you want to remove some repeats and re-order things. Here's how to find and manage your playlist.
Tap the settings icon. It's in the bottom-right corner and looks like a gear.
Tap Current playlist. This will bring you to your queue playlist and display the order of all the content you've added.
To reorder or remove a file, long press to reveal the Context menu.
Tap Move up, Move down, or Remove
If you want to start from scratch and clear your playlist without removing each file individually…
Saved playlists will be found in the Music section even if they contain videos.
The queue content playlist is great if you're just wanting to quickly watch some shows back to back or throw on some music quickly, but if you want to build out some playlists to listen to at work or for a party. Here's how to create your own.
Tap Playlists.
Tap New playlist.
Tap Files to browse to where your music (or video) files are stored.
Long press on the folder or file you wish to add to the playlist
Tap Add.
When you've added all the songs you desire and you're ready to save, tap the settings icon. It's the gear in the bottom-right corner.
You can use that same settings menu to open an existing playlist for editing purposes.
Smart playlists use a set of rules to automatically scan your music or video database and create a playlist based on the parameters you set out. To use these you must first use a scraper addon for Kodi to retrieve standardized metadata information for all of your media. This is a great option if you've got a ridiculous amount of music or videos and want to sort them out in different ways, say a music playlist of a specific genre, or a movie playlist of your favorite actor.
Here's some quick info on some reliable scraper addons for movies, music, and tv shows, which include links to their respective repositories:
You have to sympathize with Android-loving Canadians. While Apple Pay has been available in the country since 2015, Android Pay has been a no-show -- you've had to pay for your Tim Hortons donuts the old-fashioned way. At last, though, it's here....The Wall Street Journal reports we won't see it until "at least late June."
There are so many features the Samsung Galaxy S8 has going for it; it's almost bezel-less, it has the best display on the market, and it's a wondrous performer. But one thing it does not have going for it is its own virtual assistant. It's been two months since the launch of Samsung's big phone release and there's still no Bixby in sight.
The Wall Street Journal reports that Samsung will miss the "later this spring" window it had originally promised. From the article, which is behind a paywall:
The English-language version of Samsung Electronics Co.'s new voice-activated virtual assistant won't likely debut in the U.S. until at least late June, according to people familiar with the matter, more than two months after the launch of the South Korean tech giant's latest high-end smartphone.
The report states that the reason Bixby is delayed is because the English-speaking version is actually struggling to understand its syntax and grammar. In turn, a Samsung spokeswoman told the WSJ: "Bixby Voice benefits from time to further enhance natural language understanding and we are currently growing our user testing in the U.S. to prepare for launch."
Samsung's Bixby isn't entirely useless at present. You can still use Bixby Vision for quick image recognition in the camera app. Or you can use Hello Bixby as your daily contextual feed. It's highly customizable, and if you prefer to have more immediate hooks into the apps you have installed, Hello Bixby is pretty good at that.
It's unlikely that the delayed Bixby snafu will affect sales of the Galaxy S8 and S8+. The two handsets are worthy sellers in their own right and it's highly doubtful that the record-breaking number of preorders were a result of the addition of a proprietary virtual assistant. Perhaps the only bummer of owning a Galaxy S8 at this point, however, is that there's this extra hardware button that isn't as useful as you'd hope. Fortunately, you can remap that button if you so please with an app, at least until Bixby's full arrival.
You can even set it to launch Google Assistant.
Amazon's Echo speakers give you voice control over calendars from Google and Microsoft, but there's long been a notable exception to that rule: Apple. Thankfully, Amazon just filled that gap. The internet giant has quietly added support for linking...Knowing where Twitter's images come from is a good thing.
With the rampant and almost revolutionary spread of fake things across the internet, TweetDeck has announced it's added a feature that lets you verify the source behind an image before you react.
New! Click the 🔍 icon in the top right corner of an image in detail view to verify the source via Google. http://pic.twitter.com/w2gLXKuegC
— TweetDeck (@TweetDeck) May 31, 2017
It's easy to use: hover your mouse pointer over the image in the TweetDeck web app and then click the little magnifying glass icon to jump to a Google Search in another window. Google will fetch results related to that image and verify whether it's an original photo or a copied one.
This is what the search icon looks like on top of a photo when you hover over it with your mouse pointer.
This is what the Google Search page looks like after you ask for verification from TweetDeck.
The feature is not available for your smartphone yet, but it should be since you can view images through the Twitter app, too. It's possible that since the ability was originally announced by Twitter's own account feed, perhaps this is an indication that it's someday meant to be a part of the Twitter mobile app. This sort of feature could be greatly beneficial to those who only view Twitter through an app, or even through Twitter Lite.
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To hear Samsung's Galaxy S8 ad campaign tell it, the company's Bixby digital assistant was already fully featured and ready to go at the handset's launch. The reality is quite a bit different, however. Bixby Voice, the would-be competitor to Siri and...Get an unlocked Galaxy S8 ... for a considerable amount of money.
After a few weeks of pre-orders, Samsung has fully opened sales for the U.S. unlocked versions of the Galaxy S8 and S8+.
Samsung had previously confirmed around the time of the S8's launch in April that it would eventually offer an unlocked model in the U.S., and now we have specific details.
See at Best Buy
See at Samsung
See at Best Buy
See at Samsung
While Samsung doesn't have a great track record for keeping its unlocked phones up-to-date, the company has said that it will do better this time around. It's unlikely the carrier and unlocked versions will receive updates at the same time, or the latter with as much frequency, but at least there's hope. And buying the unlocked model does ensure there's no carrier bloatware, which is nice.
Are you planning to pick up an unlocked Galaxy S8? Let us know in the comments below!
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