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Samsungs neue Smartwatch Gear S2 zeichnet sich durch ein rundes Amoled-Display aus und kommt in zwei Modellvarianten. Die Gear S2 Classic richtet sich dabei an Liebhaber klassischer Chronographen.

Today Samsung announced the Gear S2 and Gear S2 Classic, the newest products in their line of smartwatches. The Gear S2 has what Samsung describes as a more minimal and modern design, while the Gear S2 classic uses leather and a black finish in an attempt to appeal to fans of traditional mechanical watches.In addition to WiFi versions, there's also the Gear S2 3G which includes cellular capabilities to allow the user to make phone calls from their watch. All three models of the Gear S2 are similar, but there are some differences to accommodate visual changes between the Gear S2 and Gear S2 classic, as well as to fit a larger battery in the 3G edition. I've laid out all the known specifications of the Gear S2 in the chart below.Samsung Gear S2 and Gear S2 ClassicSamsung Gear S2 3GSoC1.0GHz Dual Core CPURAM/NAND512MB RAM, 4GB NANDDisplay1.2" Circular 360x360 SAMOLED (302ppi)DimensionsGear S2: 42.3x49.8x11.4mm (47g)

Flying drones are all the rage right now. The latest DJI Phantom is smoking hot. But sitting in your very own one and flying it? That’s uncharted territory…until now. Check out this dude in the UK hovering above the earth in a contraption with “54 counter-rotation propellers and six grouped control channels with Hobbyking stabilization.” It’s hard to tell just… Read More

Despite Google's claim that the LG Watch Urbane is the only current-generation hardware that would be supported in Android Wear on iOS, it appears as though many other watches can connect as well. We have been able to connect a Moto 360, LG G Watch and others, with some issues along the way. For example, we have seen duplicate notifications on the Moto 360, some of which won't clear from the watch. Also, changing watch faces from within the app seems to be hit-or-miss right now.

Every parent knows that baby humans love to play peek-a-boo. But in this adorable video taken at the Columbus Zoo in Ohio, a toddler finds an enthusiastic baby gorilla to play the game with him. Read the rest

Well, 234 times to be exact. (more…)

Android fans wanting a touch of gold with their smartwatch — a la the Apple Watch — may be interested to learn of a fancy version of LG’s Watch Urbane. Read More

LG has announced a limited edition variant of the Watch Urbane smartwatch decked out in 23-karat gold, called Watch Urbane Luxe. Made in collaboration with REEDS Jewelers, the watch is priced at $1,200, sports a alligator leather band with a deployment clasp and is housed in an "exclusive piano-gloss lacquer case."

Our weekly app picks It's Appday Sunday and that means we're back with more of our favorites to share. Every week we bring a handful of great apps to the table and share them with everyone. Sometimes they are new apps, sometimes old standards, but every time they are apps we love to use. Give these a look and then take a minute to tell us all about the apps you are using and love so we can give them a try. We all find some of our favorites right in the comments on these posts!

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There are more Kickstarter watches out there these days than grains of sand on the beach. Everyone with a quartz movement and a NATO strap figures they can make and sell some kind of fashion watch to the masses, a concept that is as silly as it is flawed. That’s why the Tactico Geomaster GMT is actually interesting. First, it uses a mechanical ETA movement – an rare movement these… Read More

The Tesla Watch is an elegant steampunk-styled analog watch from ThinkGeek that features a “weathered-brass look on metal findings, a leather strap, and two light-up vacuum tube LEDs on top”. The Nikola Tesla-themed watch is available to purchase online. Tesla came up with all sorts of inventions and has sort of become the poster scientist […]

Withers was inspired by the film "Days of Wine and Roses," starring Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon. Read the rest

A listing for the Huawei Watch has made its way to Amazon, allowing customers to begin to pre-order the watch now. There are a few colors and styles available, ranging in price from $349 to $799, and the listing currently shows that the item is set to be released on September 2. There are four models being shown off, which are:

John Poppleton demonstrates how he creates eye-popping body-painted landscapes using fluorescent paint and UV light. Below are a couple of examples: Read the rest

It may not live up to financial analysts’ high expectations but sales are six times bigger than nearest competitor making it the best selling smartwatch in historyApple sold 3.6m Watches in the second quarter of this year, but compared to the 40m sales estimates, does that make the company’s first smartwatch a flop?

Another pillar of the 'sharing economy' in the city's crosshairs Fresh from sending the Uber question* to the European Court of Justice, it appears the city of Barcelona is now spoiling for a fight with another tech disruptor – this time lodgings lister Airbnb.…

Während Apple weiter über den Absatz seiner Computer-Uhr schweigt, gibt es eine Schätzung vom IT-Marktforscher IDC. Sie fällt höher aus als die Erwartungen vieler Beobachter. Apple schleicht sich im Wearables-Markt an Fitbit heran.

If they can keep up with Usain Bolt, I guess Segways can go kind of fast after all. Read the rest

Here's the biggest superhero movie news of the last week. The post Cape Watch: Mad Max’s George Miller Might Direct the New Superman Movie appeared first on WIRED.

Cyril Takayama is American-Japanese magician who started his career as a teenager busking on the streets of Shinjuku in Tokyo. Today he is regarded as one of the best magicians in the world. The entire one-hour video above is worth watching, but I've queued it to his signature card-through-the-window trick.[via]

According to a new report out this morning from IDC, Apple is now the number two wearable maker, thanks to its Apple Watch, coming in just behind market leader Fitbit during the second quarter of 2015. And it’s a close race, the analyst firm found. Apple shipped 3.6 million units in Q2 2015, just 0.8 million units shy of Fitbit’s total 4.4 million units, the report states.… Read More

The Found Footage Festival has unearthed a 1980s-era modeling instructional video so tubular "you'll probably watch it several times over before you understand it all completely." Read the rest

Twitch meets a formidable competitor in YouTube Gaming, which works surprisingly well on its first day out. The post Watch Out, Twitch: YouTube Gaming Just Went Live appeared first on WIRED.

Molly Huddle was set to win the bronze medal in the 10,000 meter run at the IAAF Track and Field World Championships in Beijing on Monday, but as she approached the finish line she slowed down to savor her achievement and her teammate Emily Infield whipped by her to take third place. Read the rest

Samsung will launch three new models in its lineup of Wireless Audio 360 speakers. The R5, R3 and R1 models, which will go on sale in the fourth quarter of 2015, can be controlled by a smartphone app or via the upcoming Gear S2 smartwatch.

The Martian Voice Communicator tries hard make you think it’s not a smartwatch. The model I tested, a black faux diver with a non-working bezel and quartz movement, looks more like a drugstore Timex than a piece of precision electronics. However, hidden inside the normal-sized case is one of the better notification systems I’ve used. The company has been making smartwatches since… Read More

No longer content with hoarding human-made buckets, elephant seals are now trying to take our boats. Here's a recently stabilized version of the classic Powerboat Training UK vid. Read the rest

Smooth McGroove and his cat are back with a new set of lovely a capella versions of classic video game theme songs, including Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, Super Metroid, Final Fantasy X, and Kirby. Read the rest

Philo the Cat got a new cat door, but he prefers the human way. (more…)

Although I mentioned this in passing in the Apple Watch review, I’ve increasingly realized that it is difficult for both manufacturers and consumers to really understand what makes a wearable well-designed. Manufacturers are still struggling to figure out what the real market is for smartwatches, and as a result what kind of designs they should be chasing. Meanwhile manufacturers have also done a so-so job communicating the purpose, use cases, and abilities of their devices with consumers, and as a result consumers are unsure what makes one product better or worse than the next.After giving the matter some thought, I wanted to take a look at the subject of smartwatch design and by extension who manufacturers are designing for. Who is the real audience for smartwatches? Which features does that audience really need? How do those features mesh with consumer expectations? The market is broad - and that goes for both audiences and manufacturers - but there are several common threads across all smartwatches that can help everyone better understand who the primary audience is and what makes a good smartwatch for that audience.AssumptionsTo start things off, I think it’s worth talking about audiences, as there are two very different audiences that have to be addressed in the overall watch marketplace. The first audience is the audience that wears traditional watches. I don’t necessarily speak for this audience since I don't wear a traditional watch, but it’s clear that features like long battery life, always-on watchface, standardized bands, highly refined mechanical movements, and general craftsmanship are major points of focus.However, at the same time the traditional watch market is inherently limited because even the cheapest cellphone has already integrated timekeeping capabilities; if all one needs is a device to keep time, phones can already do this and more. As a result, the second audience can be defined in opposition to the former, as the people who don't wear watches on a regular basis and have very different needs an expectations from the first group. There's also increasing evidence to suggest that there are significant demographic shifts, as younger people tend not to wear watches as often.The problem with this sort of disruption by the cellphone in the traditional watch market is that in the end there will be a growing segment of the market that doesn’t necessarily see the value of a traditional watch. To me, a college student that has grown up with cellphones, a traditional watch is something that’s mostly unnecessary because I already have a way of checking the time, setting alarms/timers, and running a stopwatch. Combined with the discomfort of existing bands, I simply found it difficult to justify the need for a watch as there were issues with ergonomics on top of a general lack of utility. Although the discomfort aspect may be a personal problem, I suspect I’m hardly alone in the latter. As a result, as I see it the only real remaining “functional” purpose of a traditional watch is effectively a fashion accessory outside of niche use cases.ImplicationsIf we assume that people in general no longer wear traditional watches - and hence don't value the functionality provided by those devices - then the implications are significant for how the design of a smartwatch should be approached. The first, and perhaps most obvious change is that battery life is irrelevant when comparing to traditional watches. After all, current quartz-based watches last years between battery changes, but regardless of battery life someone that doesn’t wear a watch obviously won’t care how long a watch lasts. Battery life still matters in as much as hours versus days, but no amount of battery life a smartwatch could ever attain would be enough for someone who sets their standards based on traditional watches.Similarly, things like always-on display are surprisingly not strictly necessary. Even if a traditional watch has an “always-on display”, it once again doesn’t matter because our design assumes that the average person has already decided that they don’t need a traditional watch, that they don't need to be able to see the time at every second of every day. Of course, responsiveness to make sure that the display is on instantly/just in time for the user to see the display matters, but it certainly doesn’t matter if other people can see what’s on the display. Things like mechanical movements also become irrelevant because the people that care about mechanical movements are people that have already bought a watch. Accurate time-keeping does matter, but a precise quartz-based clock is sufficient for this.With that in mind, while there are a number of traditional watch features that are arguably unimportant to the audience for smartwatches, there clearly are other features that matter just as much to smartwatches as traditional watches. Probably the easiest way to turn users off is to have a smartwatch with an uncomfortable or otherwise irritating design. Even ergonomic problems that aren’t immediately obvious will compound over time. In some ways, this is like scratching skin as at first it might feel neutral or even soothing, but with enough time it will become painful and even harmful.The other problem here is also industrial and material design. I’m probably not the right person to consult regarding the “right” design choices in this regard, but even I can recognize when a design is just not particularly tasteful. Given that a smartwatch is inevitably even more personal than a smartphone, poor design is basically unacceptable here. In some ways, lessons can be drawn from the watch industry and applied to this problem, but regardless of the approach taken it’s important for the watch to be broadly appealing in design.Plastic watches in this context may have some appeal to the same people that like rubberized Casio G-Shock watches, but browsing for watches above 200 USD in price on Amazon shows that pretty much every watch is going to have leather and/or metal construction. Materials that aren’t authentic like pleather will inevitably affect the end user perception of value, even if polymers are enormously useful and often superior in some ways to metal or leather.Moving on, now that we’ve covered what doesn’t matter to our assumed audience and what will make this hypothetical watch easily abandoned or returned, we can start to talk about what is going to sell the watch. This is easily the hardest part of all three aspects discussed here, which is only obvious if you start with the assumption that a significant portion of buyers have already decided that they don’t care for a traditional watch. If your product is effectively a traditional watch but with extra smart functionality, it may end up in the uncomfortable position of being too “digital” for those that want traditional mechanical watches, and not particularly interesting to those that aren’t interested in traditional watches because the extra functionality isn’t enough to justify the expense.We can’t use traditional watches for a model of how smartwatches should function, but we can draw some inspiration from smartphones. This doesn’t mean that an OEM should try to cram a smartphone into a watch form factor and expect success, but the same sort of general model will help to create a solid foundation on which the rest of the user experience can rest upon. This means adding significant amounts of general purpose compute, which includes elements like a CPU, GPU, RAM, and NAND.However, it’s dangerous to assume that this means using smartphone SoC with some BSP-level changes, as just the difference in TDP and battery size between a smartphone and a watch means that it’s important to recalibrate expectations for clock speeds. The severe constraints to PCB size also mean that there is an even greater need for integration on an SoC relative to smartphones, especially because unlike smartphones there are hard size constraints based upon wrist size. No one wants to wear a wall clock on their wrist, so this is especially critical.We can also draw a lot of lessons learned from the smartphone industry for displays. As the display is going to be the main way the end user is going to receive information from the watch, it has to be extremely effective at this task. In order to do this, we need a display with high resolution, reasonably high frame rate, and an acceptably wide color range/grayscale.From the smartphone space, we’ve discussed display resolution before, and there’s a sliding scale of acceptable resolutions. However, smartwatch displays will inevitably have a much larger minimum viewing distance because no one is going to hold a smartwatch close to the eye unlike a smartphone, which could be used for reading in bed or VR which effectively holds the display as close as possible to the eye. Smartwatches as a result need less resolution, but the average distance from the eye is going to be similar to smartphones, so 300-400 PPI will be needed to maximize spatial resolution to allow for maximum information density.

Omkar ist acht Jahre alt, programmiert Mikrocontroller, seit er sechs ist, und startet jetzt eine Kickstarter-Kampagne für seine eigene Smartwatch auf Arduino-Basis, die sich an andere Kinder richtet.

The Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch is not a rumor; it's definitely going to be announced soon. But we still know very little about the smartwatch. Today, a Samsung mobile executive fueled the teasers for the Gear S2 by showing the smartwatch off on his Instagram account.

I use my beloved Aeropress coffee maker every day when I'm at home. Cory actually travels with his! Filmmaker and photographer David Friedman profiled the inventor of the Aeropress, Alan Adler. Read the rest

It's fun to watch a skilled person doing their thing. In this case, it's a Thai ice cream vendor, who expertly chops fruit and mint into liquid cream poured on a cold metal surface, then shapes it into rolls that he places into a paper cup.[via]

Developed by an 8-year-old maker named Omkar, the O Watch is a 3D printable, programmable, smart watch kit for kids. Omkar has launched a Kickstarter to scale up the O Watch so other kids can use the platform "to learn programming, 3D printing and crafts." Support it! Read the rest

A 12-year-old boy visiting a Taipei art exhibition tripped, pushing his fist through a 350-year-old painting by Paolo Porpora. The exhibition organizers say they won't charge the boy's family for the restoration and that the painting was insured. (more…)

We've seen them all, Ubuntu running on virtually anything, Ubuntu powering all sorts of devices, from mobile phones to embedded and industrial PCs. Today, we want to show you Ubuntu MATE 15.04 running on Banana Pi BPI-M1.

Pyro-Trombonist Valentin Guérin performs Arthur Pryor's Fantastic Polka, accompanied on piano by Valérie Guérin-Descouturelle. Wonder how they lit the candelabra? Read the rest

IT expert Nathan Haines published a tutorial instructing users of the Ubuntu Linux operating system about how to watch movies and TV shows on the American streaming service Hulu. If you're using Ubuntu Linux and want to watch TV shows and movies on the Hulu platform, you must add the third-party HAL PPA using the first command listed below, and then install the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) software using the second command.

Silicon Valley 'eats away at our freedom every day' Switzerland's top data cop says Microsoft has “gone too far” in abusing people’s privacy.…

Vote Brexit and keep your telly free of Bulgarian Top 40 Europe’s Digital Commissioner wants to know what you think about copyright rules for satellite broadcasters and cable companies.…

Sony has given the world the first peak of its upcoming drone project. Cool though it is — the craft takes off vertically in this YouTube video — consumers shouldn’t get too excited as these drones are for enterprise and business usage rather than the gadget-buying public. Read More

“We taught Bluey the budgie how to do R2-D2 and now he drives us crazy! He has two other budgies in his cage, and I think he's driving them crazy too!”(more…)

Internets Celebrities, with hosts Dallas Penn, Rafi Kam, and director Casimir Nozkowski, have a fun new NYC street foodie episode out. Read the rest