The Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 has been officially announced, just six months after the original Watch Active was launched.
One of the key new features included is a digital rotating bezel on the Super AMOLED screen. The original Galaxy Watch came with a physical rotating bezel, while the Galaxy Watch Active didn’t have any form of bezel UI.
It means that you will likely see a bezel around the screen on the new Watch Active 2, but it won’t physically move – it will be interesting to see how it works in practice.
Another big feature is the inclusion of an ECG (Electrocardiogram), allowing you to check the rhythm and electrical activity of your heart with the wearable. We’ve already seen the ECG feature in the Apple Watch 4 prove popular, so it’s no surprise Samsung has included it here.
You’ll be able to pick up the Galaxy Watch Active 2 in two sizes, with the smaller 40mm model coming with a 1.2-inch, 360 x 360 display and 247mAh battery, while the larger 44mm model has a 1.4-inch display and a 340mAh battery.
Both watches are 10.9mm thick, are compatible with 20mm straps, and will be available in two finishes: aluminum (with a Fluoroelastomer (FKM) Band), and stainless steel (with a leather strap).
As for its fitness features, the Galaxy Watch Active 2 “can manually track more than 39 workouts with seven of them automatically activated – including running, walking, cycling, swimming, rowing machine, elliptical machine and dynamic workout.”
Connectivity on the go
The watch runs Tizen, and for those who don’t want to have to take their phone out to get full functionality on their smartwatch, the Galaxy Watch Active 2 will also be available with LTE connectivity.
This will allow you to access the internet on the watch, without it having to tether to your smartphone, allowing you to make and receive calls, send messages and stream music all on the watch.
The Galaxy Watch Active 2 LTE comes with extra RAM (1.5GB vs 768MB) to help it cope with these additional tasks, and a higher price tag.
The Samsung Galaxy Watch Active 2 release date is set for September 27 2019 in the US, where it will be available from Samsung.com and major retailers. Pre-orders open there on September 6, but we don’t yet have release information for other regions.
As for the Galaxy Watch Active 2 price, the Bluetooth-only 40mm option starts at $279.99 (around £230, AU$410), and the larger 44mm watch starts at $299.99 (around £250, AU$440).
All Amazon Dash buttons will stop working at the end of August – and that’s a good thing. Dash Buttons made re-ordering everyday items like toilet paper and clothes detergent so simple, you didn’t even need to think about it – and that’s partly why they failed.
In January, officials in Germany ruled that the buttons didn’t give shoppers sufficient information about the product they were purchasing (including current pricing) before parting with their cash, and made them illegal.
That was inconvenient for German citizens ordering Ariel Colorwaschmittel directly from their washing machines, but it makes sense. If you’re a regular Amazon shopper, you’ll know that prices on the site often fluctuate (an effect you can see clearly with free browser extension The Camelizer, which displays price changes over time when you visit a product page).
The price of everyday goods can fluctuate significantly on Amazon over the course of a year
(Image credit: CamelCamelCamel/Amazon)
In its terms and conditions, Amazon reserved the right to change the prices for goods ordered through a Dash Button, and even substitute a different product entirely. Not a great experience for you, and one that could result in you paying more than you would elsewhere. For items you buy frequently (which is what the buttons were specifically designed for), that could make a big difference to your finances over the course of a year.
Not so fast
The German ruling isn’t the only reason Dash Buttons have fallen out of favor. The wealth of connected devices (including many made by Amazon) in our homes means there’s no shortage of other ways to purchase items than a single-purpose button glued to an appliance. Just ask Alexa to order you some kitchen towel, and it could be on your doorstep the same day (depending on where you live). There’s still very little to get in the way of consumption.
Friction isn’t a negative, though – as a consumer, it gives you power to choose and time to reconsider. Next time you’re shopping for non-essentials online, try putting them in your basket (or bookmarking them if you frequently clear your browser cookies) and leaving them for a week. Chances are, you’ll change your mind about some, if not all of them.
Lightning Deals and Amazon Prime Day push us to purchase quickly, without thinking
(Image credit: Shutterstock)
Amazon lets you skip the cooling-off period provided by the shopping cart entirely with its tempting ‘Buy it now’ button. With no need to enter any payment information, it almost doesn’t feel like spending money at all.
Missing out
Lightning Deals, meanwhile, play to fear of missing out (FOMO), with progress bars showing the percentage of stock sold and a timer displaying how many hours, minutes and seconds you have to grab a bargain before it disappears.
Lightning Deals are also a cunning way to surface products you’d never normally look for, or consider buying, turning them into impulse purchases. Hmm, 24% off a garden hose? Well the grass has been looking a bit parched lately. A Nintendo Switch toughened glass screen protector? Maybe I’m taking a risk without one of those – and a matching case. Buy it now.
The increasingly inaccurately named Amazon Prime Day (this year’s event spanned 48 hours) is FOMO at its finest, encouraging shoppers to wait until midnight for a Jeff Bezos-shaped Santa to drop down the chimney with a sack full of discounted electronics and dog DNA tests. There are some great deals to be found, but there’s a lot of chaff as well.
Seamless shopping is here to stay, but the failure of Dash Buttons have shown that there is a limit to how frictionless shopping can actually be, and perhaps help us make more conscious, mindful decisions.
If you have an Nvidia graphics card in your system, whether its for work or for play, and you’re running a Windows-based operating system, you’re going to want to update your drivers, as driver 431.68 fixes some glaring security issues.
Nvidia GeForce, Quadro and Tesla graphics cards are all affected by a total of five dangerous security exploits, which can potentially allow attackers to perform local code execution, denial of service or escalation of privileges. Nvidia has listed out these vulnerabilities, along with the CVSS V3 base score, which measures their severity. These scores range from 5.2 to 8.8.
Now, obviously all of these attacks have the possibility to be very dangerous, but luckily a driver update will patch the security hole, according to Nvidia’s security bulletin.
Now, the good news is that you need local access to take advantage of this exploit, so its unlikely that any widespread attacks will happen. However, if you’re a creative working in an office, it would be a good idea to update your drivers ASAP to protect your machine.
Luckily, even if you don’t manually fix the vulnerability, PC hardware manufacturers should issue a fix automatically through Windows Update, according to Bleeping Computer.
So, our advice: update your drivers as soon as possible. The fact that attackers need local access may dull the threat for some folks, but these are still serious security flaws that can have disastrous effects if exploited.
There have been some fantastic Now TV deals lately and this is a huge discount for TV fans keen to get stuck into a bunch of box sets and channels that can only be found via a Sky TV deal usually.
A Now TV Sky Entertainment pass would usually set you back £7.99 a month. How would you like a 5-month pass with a 45% reduction instead? Well if you’re quick, you can take advantage of a great deal at CDKeys.com where you can get one of these passes for £21.99 instead of £39.95.
Sports fans should also seriously consider the £140 saving on a Now TV Sky Sports pass too, especially with the Premier League season kicking off soon and there’s The Ashes happening right now too. Hint: Now TV app, office Wi-Fi, mobile phones. Need we say more?
Now TV Entertainment Pass
Now TV 5-month pass | £39.95 £21.99 at CDKeys.com This Now TV deal is easily the best price around for the Entertainment Pass and you can take advantage of it as both a new or existing customer. Promotional deals directly from the standard Now TV sites are usually new customers only, so voucher passes like this are a great option for current members.View Deal
The Now TV entertainment pass isn’t just about the box sets, you can also live stream excellent Sky TV channels live. We’re talking about Sky One, Sky Witness, Sky Atlantic, Gold, Comedy Central, SyFy, Sky Arts, Discovery Channel, MTV and Nat Geo Wild. And don’t forget, unlike signing up with Sky, there’s no contract.
The box sets are of course the main draw for us and the often-rotated selection means there’s always plenty of new material to enjoy. We’d seriously advise checking out the hype behind the Chernobyl mini series as one of the best shows on the service. Shows like Elementary, Agatha Raisin, Warrior, Big Little Lies and LA’s Finest are other big buzz shows.
We’re big fans of some of the older content too. You may have seen them years ago, or maybe you’ve always meant to see them. Either way, be sure to catch up on classics like 30 Rock, The Sopranos, The Wire, Dexter, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Blacklist, Fortitude and more.
And if your telly box is in need of an upgrade, we’ve rounded up the best cheap TV deals and sales for you too.
With electricity prices going up all over the country, it makes sense to track your home’s power consumption at a higher level than just looking at your monthly utility bill. While there are smart solutions for tracking usage for particular outlets, Blue Line Innovations’ EnergyCloud ($199) takes a whole-home approach to the task.
And unlike the Sense Energy Monitor we evaluated earlier this year, Blue Line’s wireless sensor doesn’t require access to your home’s circuit-breaker panel to provide real-time data about how much electricity you’re consuming and which devices are drawing the heaviest loads. It attaches to your service-provider’s meter, instead. The sensor sends readings to a second piece of hardware, which transmits those readings to your home’s Wi-Fi network and from there, to Blue Line’s servers in the cloud. You’ll use a mobile app and/or Blue Line’s web portal to configure and monitor the setup.
A metered connection
If the idea of touching your utility’s power meter makes you nervous, rest assured you don’t need to do anything dangerous. Where the Sense product involved placing clamps around the incoming high-voltage power lines located behind your circuit-breaker panel, Blue Line’s sensor straps around your electrical utility’s meter using an adjustable clamp. Blue Line says its sensor is compatible with most analog and digital meters used in North America, including smart meters (follow this link for examples). I found the most challenging part to be aligning the sensor with the meter’s data feed, but the instructions walk you through the whole process and it isn’t all that difficult.
Blue Line Innovations
This diagram illustrates how the EnergyCloud system operates.
The sensor runs on a single C-cell battery, and Blue Line estimates battery life at about two years. Over the couple of months I tested it, the battery life didn’t drop from 100 percent. Given that it’s sending a meter reading to the receiver every 15 seconds, that’s quite impressive.
EnergyCloud departs from Sense in another way, too: After two years, you’ll need to sign up for a subscription if you want to continue receiving detailed analysis. Fortunately, the cost of the subscription isn’t onerous: $15 per year.
I did encounter some hiccups while setting up Blue Line’s Wi-Fi module. Most importantly, I couldn’t get this component to connect with my Eero mesh Wi-Fi router—at all. Curiously, it didn’t have any problem connecting to any of the several conventional routers I tried, although I still needed to dntal feet from my router, plus one floor of elevation). I also discovered that Blue Line’s bridge was consistently unable to re-establish its connection to my network following a power outage. Ironically, I had to unplug the bridge and plug it back in again to get the system to resume working.
Jason D’Aprile / IDG
The EnergyCloud bridge needs to be within range of both the sensor mounted to your electrial meter, and your home’s Wi-Fi router.
Give it time
Connectivity quirks aside, the rest of my installation went smoothly. When you establish an account via Blue Line’s web portal (or via the mobile app, available for Android and iOS), you’ll inform the service about your major appliances, the type of heating and air conditioning system your home has, and the power-consumption or circuit amperage consumption specifications for those devices. The mobile app is clearly laid out, but Blue Line presents so much information that I found its web portal (viewed on a computer monitor) easier to use, especially for the initial configuration.
Blue Line has also developed an EnergyCloud Alexa skill, so you say to an Echo-compatible smart speaker “Alexa, ask EnergyCloud to tell me how much power I’m using,” or “Alexa, what is the current rate for electricity?” This is a quicker way of obtaining information compared to opening the mobile app or navigating the web portal, but the company does not yet have anything to offer Google Home and Apple HomePod users on this front.
Once you’re set up, EnergyCloud just needs time to analyze your power consumption. Ideally, it will take about a month to start seeing meaningfully detailed usage logs, but right from the start, you’ll at least be able to see exactly how much electricity you’re consuming at a given moment. Energy usage is tracked and graphed based on three categories: the nebulous “activities,” ‘always-on’ devices, and projected consumption.
Jason D’Aprile / IDG
The EnergyCloud sensor is powered by a C-Cell battery.
This stream of data proved fascinating. Seeing precisely how much energy those ‘always-on’ devices are sucking up was a real eye-opener. In my case, they were on average responsible for between one quarter and one third of my overall electric bill. Over time, EnergyCloud will also be able to identify each of your major appliances and how much electricity they’re pulling down. In my case, I discovered that my clothes dryer consumed 40kHh (kilowatt hours) less electricity in July than it did in June, but that my water heater used 85kWh more during the same period. If you prefer a less abstract measurement, you can configure EnergyCloud to report your energy consumption in dollars spent instead of kilowatt hours.
Jason D’Aprile / IDG
With the EnergyCloud app, you can check your home’s energy consumption from anywhere you have access to the internet.
EnergyCloud is much less effective at identifying smaller devices in your home with specificity. If you tell the system your clothes dryer is on a 30-amp circuit, for instance, it can pick out that appliance and tell you how much juice it’s using. But its reporting isn’t sufficiently granular to inform you how much it costs to leave something like your porch light on overnight.
Blue Line says EnergyCloud’s reporting focuses on the items and activities in the home that consume the most amounts of power: Heating and cooling, cooking, heating water, washing and drying your clothes and dishes, as well as some of the more esoteric energy consumers, such as operating a spa or an EV charging station for an electric car.
Blue Line Innovations’ EnergyCloud isn’t as granular as the more-expensive Sense energy monitoring system, but it will accurately report your home’s overall energy consumption while identifying its biggest power consumers. EnergyCloud is also much easier for homeowners to install (Sense can be a DIY affair, but the manufacturer recommends hiring a professional electrician for the job because it involves placing clamps around the main lines supplying electricity to your circuit breaker panel.
“Cryosleep cycle complete. No casualties. Time since launch: 197 years. We’re finally back.” Jack Gelder stands on the deck of his ship, planning his triumphant return. An equipment malfunction meant they’d had to take the long way back, but at long last they’d made it to Star Union space, to the military border colony of Leave-6. Home.
A lot can change in two centuries though. As Gelder and his troops enter orbit around Leave-6 there’s…nothing. The fabled Elysium pleasure parks, gone. The lush greenery replaced with arid wasteland. And the former imperial soldiers?
Well, by the time this is over you’ll wish they’d disappeared too.
Prepare for Planetfall
Going over my notes for this review, I realized I have a lot of complaints about Age of Wonders: Planetfall—some minor, some not-so-minor. Planetfall is a flawed game and when I get too close to it, when I start digging into the details, those flaws loom large.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
Pull back a bit though, and I’m having a hell of a lot of fun with this space-faring strategy/tactics mashup. I know the flaws are there, I can enumerate them for you—and will, later on. But I’ve played 15 hours of Planetfall with no signs of slowing, in spite of the flaws.
That’s two-and-a-half campaigns, for the record. And I like that aspect most, I think! I like that I’ve been able to play multiple campaigns in the span of 15 hours. Story-driven strategy games are popular right now, but normally I feel like I’ll never see half of what they have to offer. Total War: Warhammer II is wonderful for instance, but I don’t have 20 to 30 hours to dedicate to each of its myriad campaigns. I just don’t.
Planetfall keeps it brief. I still won’t see half what it has to offer probably given there are 13 campaigns at release, unlocked in sequence. It’s a daunting amount of game, even averaging a mere seven hours per campaign.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
The ones I’ve finished, I’ve enjoyed though. They’re a creative pastiche, blending classic science fiction and pulp adventure novels to fill out the corners of this universe with recognizable tropes—and yet the familiar bits are smashed up against other familiar bits in surprising ways. Even the blandest faction, the introduction’s ex-imperial Vanguard, have this “200 years in cryosleep” hook, a very Forever War premise.
Planetfall ‘s strength is delineating between factions—and not only in writing. Sure, it happens there as well. The Kir’ko were the former slaves of the empire, and thus have a rather more dismal view of the fallen Star Union than the idealized home the Vanguard are trying to restore.
It happens on a mechanical level too though, arguably the harder trick to pull off. The Vanguard are ranged soldiers and drones, space marines. The Kir’ko are insects, a ravenous hive that demands ever-more food but turns out cheap soldiers in return. And while their reliance on melee attacks puts them in harm’s way more often, they also gain the ability to regenerate health early in the tech tree.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
I’ve barely gotten to toy around with Planetfall’s four other factions, and only in the story-less Scenario mode. Thus I can’t speak to the strength of the character writing. They seem equally interesting though, again showing the range of influences Planetfall drew from. The Dvar are essentially space dwarves, complete with gas-mask “beards” and a love of mountains. The Amazons, which I played in our preview earlier this year, get to use dinosaurs. The Syndicate is focused on trade and covert ops.
The sixth and final faction, the Assembly, is the faction I’m most curious about. I’ve barely touched them, but they’re all cyborgs, and their gimmick is that some of your troops come back to life after battle. To me, the Assembly perfectly illustrates Planetfall’s strength, which is coming up with experimental 4X ideas and implementing them in a way that makes thematic sense, that’s couched in the lore of this universe.
It’s kept me playing. Planetfall does little to evolve the genre, but the writing is solid enough to give the same ol’ strategy game some structure, some manageable goals to propel the player forward and keep them invested. It’s hard to understate the effects, as I’ve found myself actually caring about the characters here, feeling disappointed when I lose a commander and they’re cut from the story, and proud of units who’ve stuck with me for an entire campaign.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
The character creation tool plays a significant role in that as well. You can fully customize the leader of your faction, even for campaigns—change their hair, their face, their clothing, any accessories. The options are limited, but I still noticed characters felt more “right” to me after I’d swapped components out. It got me over that first hurdle, helped me bond with what are usually personality-light archetypes in other strategy games.
The bad
I know you’re waiting for the “…But” though, the issues I hinted at above. And there are a litany of them.
Some are campaign-specific, and those seem hardest to fault because they’re part-and-parcel with elements of Planetfall that I like. The default maps are small-ish and the stories are tight, with little geographical or narrative fluff. The downside? It sometimes feels too directed, like you’re merely sending an army from waypoint to waypoint and ignoring whatever else is happening with your opponents. You can also accidentally end a campaign early by completing certain win conditions, thus cutting yourself off from parts of the story you’d left untouched.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
And since you’re starting a new campaign and a new faction every few hours, you spend a lot of time playing the beginning of campaigns. I don’t know if this changes later on, if the end-game campaigns start at a more advanced state, but it’s a bit tedious to start from scratch every time, especially the early-game research paths.
Speaking of which: Tech trees are a particular pain point in sci-fi and fantasy strategy games, and Planetfall suffers the same asTotal War: Warhammer, Civilization: Beyond Earth, Endless Space 2, and so forth. The problem is you just don’t know what the hell anything does. When you play a history-themed game like Civilization, you understand intuitively what researching “Paper” unlocks. But in Planetfall, you’re stuck meticulously mousing over every single entry to figure out whether you should research Heavy Laser Applications or Foreboding Darkness or Protective Grounding or what.
Those technologies are all available on the first turn in certain campaigns, by the way. These aren’t some arcane late-game techs. These are your introduction to Planetfall.
And that’s the problem, really. Planetfall, like Age of Wonders III before it, is dense, and it doesn’t do enough to onboard new players.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
There’s a tutorial campaign, but it mostly covers the absolute basics—movement, basic tactical combat, founding a second city. There’s also a contextual assistant, which provides early-game guidance. The advice is spotty though, and it still doesn’t do enough to encourage players to plow through Planetfall’s mountain of menus.
“Operations,” for instance. Unlocked through the tech tree, for a while I thought I was simply nabbing permanent upgrades for my faction. That’s how research works, right? Then I realized all these upgrades were only hypothetical, and had actually been dumped into the Operations menu, and that they required further buy-in to activate—with a limit on how many could be active at any given time.
If that weren’t enough, Operations are further subdivided. Strategic Operations are used on the overworld map to, for instance, summon unique units or devastate entire enemy armies. Tactical Operations are used on the battlefield, and are more likely to take the form of a bomb with a one-hex area of effect, or a healing station for your troops.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
All this makes the tech tree even more difficult to parse. The labels for Strategic Operations, Tactical Operations, equipment, buildings—all the different categories of stuff you can unlock—aren’t very eye-catching or unique, and many times I started researching what I thought was a game-changing technology only to realize it was borderline-useless to me.
Accessibility is the issue. Operations give the player a lot of options and a lot of flexibility, which is an objectively good thing, but only if the player knows about it and can use the system to their advantage. There’s a tutorial text early on, and an occasional reminder to check in on available Operations, but it’s still all-too-easy to neglect that menu, at your own peril.
More options also generally means more micromanagement, another issue Planetfall struggles with. For instance, every unit can be upgraded, which I love because it means your starting army’s Troopers are just as viable five hours in as they were at the beginning, given the right equipment. It’s one more hurdle though, one more menu to painstakingly pore over. Are you losing because you don’t have the right composition of troops? Or because you haven’t unlocked advantageous unit mods? Or are you just bad at tactical combat?
There are so many variables, it can be hard to tell sometimes.
IDG / Hayden Dingman
And while I like Planetfall’s combat, it has a particular sweet spot that often disappears in the late game. Planetfall’s tactical battles draw in units from the central hex plus the six surrounding hexes, for a maximum of 42 units per battle. This doesn’t happen often, but when it does it’s a slog. Even two or three armies per side can be tedious, slowly moving each individual unit into cover, setting each of them into Overwatch. In larger battles, a single turn can take upwards of minutes to prep, and I occasionally found myself turning to the Auto-Resolve option even when I didn’t want to, just to save some hassle.
Finally, diplomacy. It’s the Achilles heel for a lot of strategy games, and Planetfall is no exception. Planetfall adds a casus belli system wherein settling a new colony or taking over land that another faction lays claim to—even if they haven’t settled it yet—gives them reason to go to war with you later. It’s led to some bizarre behavior in my campaigns, with the most annoying being that I secured an alliance with one character only for him to break the alliance the very next turn and claim I was the aggressor. Why? Because I’d annexed one disused province near him.
What a greedy bastard. I wiped him off the face of the planet.
Bottom line
Age of Wonders: Planetfall has its issues. I confess I haven’t cared very much though. The jank is usually a result of over-ambition, of Planetfall trying to let the player do too damn much where another game would’ve gone for a simpler (or “more elegant”) solution. I can’t fault Triumph for that, even if the holes are obvious when listed out.
I’m already looking forward to my next campaign. I may never make it through all 13, but I’m going to try my best with what little time I have—at least until I get to play as the Amazons and their dinosaur soldiers, right?
Face ID is a great technology and one so good that the iPhone X, XS and XR don’t have a fingerprint sensor. Touch ID last appeared on 2017’s iPhone 8 but reliable analyst Ming-Chi Kuo’s latest report states we might see it return in 2021 on an iPhone that also has Face ID.
As reported by , Kuo says that Apple will wait until 2021’s iPhone to integrate in-screen fingerprint technology so that it meets its incredibly high user experience bar. This is very usual for Apple – it isn’t normally first to introduce cutting edge tech into its phones but when it does you can bet it’ll work very, very well.
Face ID is a case in point. Face unlock on Android phones predates it but the 2017 iPhone X’s 3D face mapping tech was so much more reliable and more secure. Even now in 2019 we think it is the best face recognition technology on any consumer device after it made its way to the iPad Pro too.
So why would Apple need to bring Touch ID back and under the screen? It could be that it thinks some users miss the fingerprint sensor, iconic as it was to the iPhone design for a decade. Maybe Apple wants to bring back the famous, nostalgic circular home button icon in software form.
More likely is that Apple feels having both options on the device will make for an even more secure user experience. Two forms of biometric authentication are better than one after all.
Current Android phones that have in-screen fingerprint sensors for biometrics often cannot use the facial recognition to authenticate as it uses the front facing camera in an insecure 2D fashion. Apple’s reported solution would bring two forms of secure ID to the iPhone and could potentially allow for two-factor authentication via face and fingerprint rather than the current Apple method of a code displayed on your other Apple devices.
Of course, we are a long way off from the 2021 iPhone, with much more in our minds. We’ll have to wait and see if this latest rumour proves to be true – but it does make a lot of sense.
