The Light Phone: A Phone To Disconnect.

Smartphones have become and important part of our lives with all the additional fearues and apps which makes it more than a device to make and receive calls. These additional features and apps could take hours off productivity, study time could be disrupted because hours have been spend perusing social media.

You could leave your smartphone locked up somewhere and go cold turkey, get a Light Phone, a credit card sized phone used only for phone calls. no apps, pictures, games nor text, just calls only.

The light phone, a phone away from your phone, is designed to function distraction free, yet still provide the basic functionality of phone calls.  It's a secondary phone built to be an extention of your existing smartphone and leave your with the basic funtionality of communication.

The phone would retail at $150 and would launch later this year.

Its cloud platform allows you to set up the phone to use your primary phone number to facilitate phone calls, just setup call forwarding on your primary phone and you are good to go.  It can also be used as a standalone phone. 

Light Phone FAQ

Light Phone: Unboxing and Review

SPECS

• Weight - 38.5grams
• Processor - Qualcomm 8028
• Display - OLED
• Battery - 3 Days Standby
• Sim - Nano Sim
• Connector - Micro USB
• language - English
• Connection - GSM 850/900 1800/1900 MHz
• OS - Stripped down version of Android

Having a extra phone sounds like a good idea especially when you want to get away, prehaps go on a retreat without being necessarily cut off.  It allows you to step away from all that text, social media and all the what nots that come with using a smartphone, just using a phone for what it was meant for in the first place, making calls.

Ford's Self Driving Cars To Be Powered By Blackberry Software

In case you're wondering what has become of our once beloved smartphone maker Blackberry with the days their handsets being a common sight far behind us.

The Canadian company is shifting its focus onto software, it has signed a new deal with automobile maker Ford to provide it with code that would most likely be used in their self-driving vehicles which will run their QNX Neutrino OS.

The OS can be used to highlight vehicles and objects on screen that are near an autonomous vehicle, provide navigation and in-car entertainment.  Ford's current cars already use a variant of the QNX code.  Blackberry's security will be introduced in Ford's cars as an anti-hacking measure.

In September, Blackberry said it was stopping its in-house smartphone manufacturing to focus on software.  This deal is one in a series where a car manufacturer has either purchased or gone into agreement with a software company with a view to advance their autonomous ambitions. GM acquired Cruise Automation, Hertz signed a deal with Uber and Ford invested $182.2m in code company Pivotal.

Ford hopes to launch a fleet of fully automated taxis by 2021 and a high volume, fully autonomous car working commercially in five years time offering a ride hailing service.  Wired tested one of Ford's Fusion driverless cars and found them
to be "reliable to the point of boredom".  These autonomous vehicles can now easily control themselves at night.

Personal transportation in the future will change to a point where person vehicle ownership would no longer be necessary.  All you need to do is hail a driverless vehicle and have it take you to a destination of your choice.

Coming From Japan: Synthetic Muscles In The Works

In the past few decades, humanity has been obsessed with making robots more human: first with voice communication, then AI and now synthetic muscles which is what researchers at Suzumori Endo Robotics Laboratory at the Tokyo Institute of Technology plans to do.

Rather that use motors or servos which we see in today's robots, the experinment uses bundles of fibers which contract and expand just like human mucles.  The robot legs has the same amount of muscle mass as a human leg but the Suzumori Endo humanoid cannot walk on it own yet.  This is because unlike human muscular contractions which takes split seconds, the humanoid robots are too slow to self balance now.

So where's all this going? Perhaps a race of tireless factory workers or janitors or the framework of a new generation of cutting edge prothetic limbs.  This among others tell us that the human body is a work of fine craftmanship and a blueprint for which robots can be made.

How To Prolong your Smartphone Battery Life

Are you suprised when your smartphone does not last longer than it used to after a full charge? Chances are, it is partially your fault because you have been charging it wrongly all this time.

We have this ingrained notion that charging our phones in small bursts would cause long term damafge to their batteries and we therefore have this preference to charge our devices when they are close to dead.  We have been wrong all the time.

A battery company Cadex states that the lithium-ion batteries in our smartphones are sensitive to their own form of stress which could be damaging to the battery's lifespan.

To keep your smartphone in top condition and go adout your day wihout thinking about battery life, you will need to change a few things.  First, do not keep your device plugged in when it is fully charged.

Leaving your phone plugged in when it is fully charged overnight is bad for the battery on the long run. This is because it gets trickle charge at 100% keeping the battery in a high stress state which wears the chemistry down.  This is like working out in a gym for hours on end until fatigue eventually sets in.

If you are trying to keep you smartphone charged throughout the day, it is best to just plug it whenever you can during the day. Your batteries are happier when you charge them ocassionaly instead of charging them from a near dead state.  Please do lug a power bank to acheive this.

This ensures your battery's optimal performance for longer  and keepsit topped throughout the day.  Periodic topup also ensures that battery dependent features are not lost when the phone goes to the low battery state.

Batteries are sensitive to heat and it is recommended that you remove certain cases that insulate heat during charge. Keeping your phones covered in the sunnt outdoors.  Ocassionally I notice that my phone gets warm when plugged to the cigarette phone charger, especially in the low battery state.  When this happpens, I simply hold my phone in front of the airconditioner vent till it is cool.

Enter the Strati: A 3D Printed Electric Vehicle That Can Be Built In A Day

If you spot this vehicle on the road or at an auto show, it might attract your attention for all the wrong reasons, being of an unusual shape and being electric.  It would definitely attract your attention if you had seen it from inception in a 3D printer.  Meet the Strati (Italian for layers), the world's first 3D printed car.

This is the result of a four and half month process, from design to printing.  Timescales could be reduced to six weeks and 3D printing is just 24hrs.  Thats a quick turnaround for a car.  Imagine paying for a car to have it manufectured to spec in 24hrs? That's amazing!

The key to this is simplification. An average car contains thoudsands of parts compared to the Strati's 49 because it is made from one material.  With exception of the engine tyres and suspension, the majority of the car, from the chassis to the seats was created using a carbon-fibre reinforced thermoplastic which is claimed to have the same strength as midgrade aluminium.  The manufacturing process is being refined so that parts of varied flexibilities could be produced (softer seats, compression bars for increased saftey).

The makers would in the future like to see localised factories producing cars suited for their environment.  For example, a small factory in Alaska could produce vehicles suited for the cold while the other in Neveda would produce for hotter climes.  The other advantage would also be from the business angle where vehicle parts dealers do not need the space to store vehicle parts.  All they would need id a 3D printer to print replacement sparts for customer collection in 24 hours max.

As 3D printer technology improves, the large scale assembly plant model of vehicle manufacture with their large numbers of shift workers might just become a thing of tthe past.  All you might just need is a small piece of land or less to start a factory.

Project ARA: Google's Modular Model For Smartphones Could Be A Game Changer.

Have you had the bad experience of buying this new shiny smartphone only to be hit by the bad news that the parent company is closing shop, stopped app support of discontinued the phone outright? Did you just buy a phone just because of its camera or speakers and find out that it lags in other features?  This has happened to me on two occasions with the Palm phones and most recently Blackberry.

I have for quite some time wondered if we could build our phones like desktop computers (back in the day) and make improvements on its components like installing a better camera, speakers etc which was exactly what the guys at Google thought when they established Project ARA.

The idea from inception was to let you build your phone from scratch choosing all the parts yourself.  Ara could have been the last phone you'd ever need as it gives you endless possibilities of swapping out the processor and cellular radios when newer ones come along, and you'd be up to speed. Google would provide the "endoskeleton" -- the equivalent of a PC's motherboard -- and an ecosystem of hardware partners would have done the rest.

Fast forward present day ARA, core components such as the processors are not swappable.  So instead of letting you build your own future-proof phone, the new Ara is about giving you a phone with mix-and-match features you can't get anywhere else.

The ARA Developer edition shipping later this year will initially come with four modules: a speaker, camera, E-Ink display and an expanded memory module which are some things high-end smartphones don't do so well.  The ARA team believes its modular platform opens the floodgates for third party hardware that never would have made it to smartphones before: from wireless car keys, one use pepper spray, glucometer for diabetics and the list of applications is endless.

The Project Ara team has already modularized the battery technology with hot swappable batteries                                          

       

Project ARA presents the advantage of future proofing your mobile phone where the user need not replace his/her mobile phone because a hardware became obsolete, only the module needs to be swapped out,  ARA procudes very little e-waste making it an environmentally friendly option.

Other phone models have started to adopt this modular model such as the LG G5 as we anticipate this model would definitely be a gamechanger in the smartphone business,

Machine Wash Your Laundry Off-Grid With Pedal Power and 10 Liters of Water

Your laundry does not have to take an entire day to do, as is the case when you let your clothes pile up for weeks.  This is the angle Toronto based startup Yirego is utilizing as basis to pitch its unique portable washing machine which uses little water and works off the grid.  Putting your foot to work, churning your clothes in water and detergent around in a bowl, the Drumi mixes old school washing with modern-day eco-consciousness.  The idea is not to replace bigger washing machines but to rely on them a lot less by reducing the amount of water and energy needed and the volume of clothes per cycle.  Drumi is a time saver capable of churning out batches in 10 minutes compared to its bigger on-grid cousin's 30 minute minimum and 50 liter water consumption.

Standing 22inches tall with a 10 liter capacity, the Drumi can handle a maximum of 2.2kg laundry load, which is equivalent to a pair of jeans, 3 sweaters, 6 t-shirts or 8 pairs of boxers.  It is portable enough to be stowed away in a corner of the home after use.