\ HP on Tuesday unveiled its latest challenger to Apple’s laptops at theInternational Luxury Conference in Versailles, touting it as the thinnest laptop in the world. At 10.4 mm, the HP Spectre’s chassis is as thin as a triple-A battery, the company noted. The Spectre is powered by Intel Core i5 and i7 processors and weighs in at 2.45 pounds. …
Hello friends, and welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that plays a chess game with the latest gadget announcements, knocking off the pawns to get to the kings and queens. In our entirely unplanned mostly food-focused edition this week are a smart pressure rice cooker, a cold-pressed juicer, a connected refillable wine bottle — and rollerblades for rough …
WhatsApp on Tuesday told its 1 billion users that their communications would be better protected from prying eyes with end-to-end encryption. The company always has made data and communication security a priority, according to Jan Koum and Brian Acton, the founders of WhatsApp, which Facebook bought for US$19 billion in 2014. “From now on when you and your contacts use …
A female Nintendo employee has been fired after months of harassment from gamers who blamed her for censorship—but the company says her firing has nothing to do with her being targeted by the “GamerGate” campaign, the Verge reports. “I am no longer a good, safe representative of Nintendo, and my employment has been terminated,” Seattle-based worker Alison Rapp tweeted on Wednesday, adding that the …
Kinba has only just started on the front desk of King’s College but the students are already in love with their new receptionist who can see, hear and have a stab at speaking. Under normal circumstances that would be unremarkable – but Kinba is a robot. Kinba, who has yet to be assigned a gender, took up its new post …
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said Friday that “pre-orders” for the Model 3 electric car had hit 198,000, an encouraging sign a day after the novel vehicle aimed at a mass market was unveiled here to an enthusiastic crowd. The Model 3 drove onto a stage through a curtain of fog at a lavish ceremony in a converted hangar adjoining the SpaceX factory in this …
The next step in regulating, and potentially expanding, drone use in the U.S. hit a deadline Friday, when the Federal Aviation Administration was slated to receive recommendations on very small drones. As consumers and the industry surge forward with ideas for what they want to do with drones, the FAA is still working on the details on how these new devices, …
Apple’s brand new iPhone SE only officially went on sale today, but the iPhone 7 rumors keep rolling in with the latest reported leak suggesting it may have an edge-to-edge display. A photograph of the reported handset has appeared on Chinese social networking site Weiboand shows a potential new design. It suggests there will be larger bezels at the top …
Heat isn’t the biggest enemy for the humble hard disk, rather humidity is what causes the most failures, a new piece of research has observed. The study, carried out by Rutgers University and entitled ‘Environmental Conditions and Disk Reliability in Free-cool Data Centres’, found that the most negative effects on drive controllers and adapters were felt when humidity levels increased. …
Music streaming company Spotify has raised $1 billion (£695 million) in debt financing to take on rivals Apple, Tidal and Google. First reported by the Wall Street Journal, the deal was later confirmed by Spotify according to Techcrunch. Unlike equity, debt financing allows Spotify to add to its resources without potentially accepting a lower valuation in the process. The move is thought to be …