It's Going To Be A Big Problem If The Apple Watch Can't Even Last A Day (AAPL)

Source: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-watch-battery-life-2015-1

Imagine this scenario:

You wake up at 6 a.m. and go to the gym. Then it's off to work for eight or nine hours. Then dinner and maybe drinks. You're home by 11 p.m.

Is your Apple Watch dead?

Based on a report from 9to5Mac's Mark Gurman, the answer is probably yes, especially if you use the watch a lot.

Gurman reports that Apple has been targeting 2.5 to 4 hours of active use on the Apple Watch. (That means the screen is on.) If you include a mix of active use standby mode (when the screen is off), Apple is shooting for about 19 hours on a charge.

Gurman was careful to note that these were Apple's battery life targets as of 2014, so it's possible Apple has figured out a way to squeeze more out of the battery in time for the watch's launch in a few months.

Meanwhile, other smartwatches on the market can last a lot longer. For example, Samsung's Gear 2 watch can last up to three days on a charge with normal use.

When I brought this up on Twitter this week, a lot of people pointed out that you can just charge your Apple Watch midday at work, like many people do with their iPhones. But that defeats the purpose of what the Apple Watch is designed to do. 

As Apple's own promotional materials point out, the Apple Watch is first and foremost a watch. Everything else from fitness tracking to receiving texts is just gravy. But if Apple wants to replace your current watch, creating one that can't even make it through a full day of use isn't going to cut it. Regular watches last months, years, or forever (if you have a self-charging model). Based on Gurman's report, you'll be lucky if your Apple Watch is still going by the time you go to bed at night.

And removing your watch in the middle of the day to charge it means you're missing out on the device's fitness monitoring and other handy features.

Apple has been relatively quiet on the Apple Watch'! s batter y life so far. The official line is you'll have to charge it nightly. If you can truly make it the whole day on a charge, it probably won't be a problem for most people. But if the "active" usage is on the lower end of Apple's targets, battery life is going to be a big problem for the Apple Watch.

SEE ALSO: I Found My New Favorite iPhone Accessory

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NVIDIA's newest GPU crams in tons of power without a hefty price

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/22/nvidias-newest-gpu-crams-in-maxwell-power-without-a-hefty-price/

If you've been tempted by NVIDIA's high-end GTX 970 and 980 video cards, but couldn't justify their high prices, the company's latest entry is made for you. NVIDIA is rounding out its Maxwell family of video cards today with the GTX 960, a desktop GPU that it describes as hitting the "sweet spot" when it comes to price and performance. It's far more powerful than the entry-level GTX 750 and 750 Ti announced a year ago, but at $199 it's significantly cheaper than its high-end siblings (though some variations may be a tad more expensive). Just how powerful is the GTX 960? Enough for you to be able to play modern games like Watch Dogs and Assassin's Creed: Unity in 1080p with the highest settings and still get a silky smooth frame rate of 60 FPS -- at least, according to NVIDIA. Expect to see video card makers roll out their GTX 960 cards over the next few weeks.

The GTX 960 also delivers one of the more intriguing features from the beefier Maxwell cards: 4K-like gaming on 1080p screens. While it probably won't be powerful enough to play graphics-heavy games in 4K, it can run less intensive games like League of Legends at that higher resolution and translate the sharper textures into something usable for your 1080p monitor. The GTX 960 sports 1,024 CUDA cores (half of the GTX 980's cores, and a bit less than the 970's 1,664) with a base clock speed of 1.1GHz. NVIDIA's also left in plenty of overclocking headroom -- it claims you can bump the GPU up to 1.5GHz without much effort (assuming the card you're using has decent cooling).

In short, the GTX 960 is the NVIDIA card most gamers should be snapping up. It's replacing the three-year-old GTX 660, which is certainly due for an upgrade. And aside from just being more powerful, it also includes some features gamers might appreciate. It'll run MOBAs like League of Legends silently, and it only needs a single six-pin power connector, both on account of Maxwell's impressive power efficiency. And the GTX 960 supports NVIDIA's new MFAA (multi-frame anti-aliasing) feature, which delivers most of the benefits of traditional anti-aliasing without the performance hit. In a live demo running Far Cry 3, simply turning on 4X MFAA bumped the frame rate from 43 FPS to 53 FPS.

Filed under: Gaming, NVIDIA

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How small is an atom, really? (or how to make your head explode)

Source: http://sploid.gizmodo.com/how-atoms-are-so-weird-that-they-are-almost-impossible-1680999932

Kurzgesagt has a neat new explainer: "How small is an atom?" I watched it. It does a great job at giving you an idea of how small atoms are and how they work. But it doesn't matter, because my brain just plainly refuses to believe any of this. Hulk head hurt. Hulk smash atoms. Oops, Hulk make nuclear detonation.

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drag2share: Microsoft reveals the 'Surface Hub,' an 84-inch 4K all-in-one

source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/21/microsoft-reveals-the-surface-hub/?utm_source=Feed_Classic_Full&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Engadget&?ncid=rss_full

Today might be all about the next chapter in Windows, but there's something for the hardware-heads, too. Specifically the Surface Hub -- which joins Surface tablets, and Lumia smartphones on Redmond's roster of gear offerings. This beast is basically a large all-in-one PC (slash smart display) that is fully loaded with sensors, speakers, WiFi, NFC, microphones, cameras and more. The funniest thing? This huge device has been hiding in plain sight for the duration of Microsoft's keynote today.

While technically it's a regular Windows machine, it's fair to say that this is very much a business/collaboration tool. The most elaborate intelligent whiteboard you can imagine! No doubt, this is fruit from Microsoft's purchase of Perceptive Pixel, and of course, Redmond wants this to be the center of the modern workplace. For example, Hayete Gallot (senior director of business security), was careful to mention the special, large-screen apps that will come along with Windows 10 -- perfect for that 84-inch real estate. Naturally, Skype for Business is baked right in, too. And while business features can sometimes be a bit, y'know, dry... neat touches like being able to mark up presentations with a pen, and auto-sharing projects to attendees after a conference call do sound like a future of business we'd want to be part of. No details on when you can deck out your boardroom just yet though.

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Microsoft's HoloLens headset is a holographic display for Windows 10

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/21/microsofts-hololens-headset-gives-your-windows-10-pc-a-holograp/

Microsoft is building support for holographic displays into Windows 10, so it only makes sense that the company would make one of those displays, wouldn't it? Meet HoloLens, an official headset with see-through lenses that merges digital content with the physical. It includes spatial sound so that you can hear things happening behind you in the virtual world, and it even has a dedicated Holographic Processing Unit (HPU) to make sure everything works smoothly. The company is shy about just when it'll start selling HoloLens, but it should be available "in the Windows 10 time frame."

Filed under: Wearables, Software, Microsoft

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