Making tea can be an art form – judging the perfect temperature for the water and allowing the leaves to infuse for just the right period of time. It doesn’t just depend on the type of tea you’re making, either – as any fan of a good brew knows, personal preference plays a huge part as well. One person’s perfect cuppa is another’s stewed disaster.
Teplo 2.0 (the successor to the Teplo portable tea maker) is a smart kettle designed to solve these problems, meaning the tea aficionado doesn’t have to linger over a teapot with an egg timer to get the perfect brew.
Not only does it adjust the brewing conditions for the type of tea you’re making, it also factors in environmental conditions and biometric data. The kettle gathers environmental data, including brightness, temperature, humidity and sound, and with a touch of a fingerprint sensor, it will measure your body temperature and heart rate.
If you’re stressed, the kettle will steep your tea at a lower temperature to produce a sweeter, more relaxing brew. If you’re tired, it can turn up the heat for a greater caffeine kick. It can even learn your preferences over time and make recommendations.
To get started, just spoon any type of loose-leaf tea in the infuser and add room-temperature water to the kettle. Pop the infuser into the rotating chamber, select a tea type using the Teplo app, and the machine handles the rest.
The leaves will be lifted out of the water when they’ve finished steeping to avoid stewing, and your tea will be kept at the ideal drinking temperature for hours.
Turn over a new leaf
Teplo 2.0 is the creation of startup Load & Road, whose founders Kazunori Kawanobe and Mayuresh Soni hail from Japan and India respectively – both countries with long histories of brewing, drinking and enjoying tea.
“Traditional tea masters change tea brewing conditions by seeing or feeling the drinker’s mental and physical state,” says Kawanobe.
“With the information they collect, they are able to brew a personalized cup of tea that the person can enjoy not only for its taste but for other factors such as intensity, sweetness, and warmth. Our goal with Teplo is to capture some of that ritual in a convenient, beautiful design that puts brewing control back into the drinker’s hands.”
You don’t need to worry about your smart kettle leaking your personal data, either; the data is transmitted securely to the tea maker’s own servers for processing, and if you aren’t comfortable with that, you can opt out of the biometrics entirely.
Teplo 2.0 is currently seeking backers on Kickstarter, with an early bird price of $279 (about £210, AU$400) and an expected retail price of $349 (about £270, AU$500).
With a prize pool of 1 crore INR, PUBG Mobile India Series 2019 began earlier this year. Registered players had to participate in the in-game qualifier round followed by the online playoffs. Out of 575,000 registrations for the India Series, Tencent Games has just announced the final phase of the tournament. The Grand Finale of PUBG Mobile India Series 2019 will be held on March 10 at GMC Balayogi Indoor Stadium, Hyderabad.
During the first round of the PUBG Mobile India Series 2019, teams had to play 15 rounds and the analyzing their gameplay, Tencent chose over 2,000 squads for the online playoffs out of which 20 made it to the final round.
From the prize pool of 1 crore INR, the squad to win the championship will walk away with Rs 30,00,000, the team to come second with Rs 10,00,000 and Rs 5,00,000 for the third place.
“With India Series 2019, we set out with the objective of making esports accessible to all segments of the PUBG MOBILE fanbase by keeping it open-to-all. After launching India Series in January, we received a massive 575,000 registrations who played 400,000 games across 4 rounds, out of which the top 80 have made it to the finals. The sheer dedication, skill and temperament of these players are commendable as they make the transition from being gamers to esports athletes. As such, we expect an extremely high level of competition on March 10th,” said Aneesh Aravind, General Manager, Tencent Games India.
The 20 squads which have qualified for the Grand Finals are S0UL, The Punishers, Gods Reign, Oxygen Alpha, Team INF, Maximus Alpha, Team FireFrost, SQUAD99, Team 2EZ4, IMT Immortals, NSD_, Funky Monkey, ARROW, No Mercy, The Dreamers, BSUD, BackFromSeverny, SL4Y, The Beast Squad and RIP Official.
Players who display advanced gameplay tactics will be awarded individually with a cash prize of Rs 50,000 in addition to titles. There’s an MVP Award for the player with the maximum points. The team with the most kills will be given the title of The Exterminators, while The Healers will be awarded to the team with the maximum amount of health restored. The player who survives the battlefield for the maximum time will be awarded The Lone Ranger award and the player with the most kills in a single round will be given the title of The Rampage Freak.
PUBG Mobile India Series Grand Finale starts on March 10 at 1 PM.
Google spin-off Waymo plans to sell the sensors it uses on its self-drive cars to other industries.
The technology behind them was at the heart of legal action last year, with Google accusing taxi app company Uber of stealing trade secrets.
In a blogpost, Waymo said it was targeting its Lidar (light detection and ranging) units at industries including robotics, security and agriculture not other self-drive cars.
It did not say how much it would cost.
Laser light
Lidar technology is seen by many as crucial to the success of autonomous vehicles.
The sensors measure distance via pulses of laser light and generate 3D maps of the world around them.
Head of Waymo’s Lidar team Simon Verghese said that his company, which has been developing the technology since 2011, had three different types of Lidar systems.
Initially, it will offer one Lidar unit – dubbed Laser Bear Honeycomb – to select partners.
The sensor is used around the bumper of Waymo’s self-driving vehicles and has a wide field of view.
“Offering this Lidar to partners helps spur the growth of applications outside of self-driving cars and also propels our business forward,” Mr Verghese said.
“We can scale our autonomous technology faster, making each sensor more affordable through economies of scale.”
Waymo and Uber battled very publicly over the technology last year, with Uber accused of stealing and using trade secrets related to Lidar.
The companies reached a settlement that saw Uber giving Waymo a 0.34% stake in its company, worth approximately $245m (£186m).
Uber agreed not to use the technology in its self-driving cars but also maintained it had never done so.
Vodafone has expanded its 5G launch plans to cover an additional 12 towns and cities, meaning 19 locations in the UK will soon be able to access next generation networks.
The mobile operator had already confirmed trials in seven cities – Birmingham, Bristol, Cardiff, Glasgow, Liverpool, London and Manchester – and has been working to upgrade sites ahead of a commercial launch.
The next tranche of towns includes Birkenhead, Blackpool, Bournemouth, Guildford, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Reading, Southampton, Stoke-on-Trent, Warrington and Wolverhampton, as well as the operator’s hometown of Newbury.
Vodafone UK 5G
In addition to the radio upgrades, Vodafone has already overhauled its core network so the majority of 4G sites are 5G-ready and is testing the performance of compatible smartphones, routers and processors to ensure the launch is as seamless as possible.
Specifically, Vodafone is promising speeds that are ten times faster than 4G and sub-20 millisecond latency for consumers and sub-5 milliseconds for industrial and business use cases.
“Our multi-billion-pound network investment and leading position in setting global standards will ensure our customers have the very latest 5G releases and technology,” said Vodafone UK CTO Scott Petty. “5G will also usher in a new era where everyone and everything is better connected, whether you are running a hotel in Portsmouth or broadcasting live at MediaCity in Salford.”
Separately, Vodafone has also become the first communications service provider to join a UK drone testing consortium. The National Beyond Visual Line of Sight Experimentation Corridor (NBEC) group is testing ways of allowing drones and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to fly in the same airspace as manned aircraft.
All four UK operators plan to launch 5G in 2019, and it is thought that 5G will account for a quarter of all mobile data traffic in Britain by 2022. A report from Deloitte suggests that 15 million Brits would switch to 5G as soon as they could but believes only 50,000 compatible handsets will be sold in the UK in 2019, rising to 2-3 million in 2020.
Welcome to the world of OLED TV. More manufacturers than ever are betting on OLED panels for today’s high-end television sets, and the premium panel technology is seeing wider implementation and improvement all the time, even becoming the display of choice for the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max. But what is OLED, and why should you care?
Standing for ‘Organic Light Emitting Diode’, the OLED acronym describes a type of panel that TVs use – like LED-LCD, plasma or CRT. It’s different from the other types of panels that have come before it, but the overarching idea is exactly the same: OLED panels help bring images and video to life in front of your eyes.
In short: OLED TV truly is the next big thing in home entertainment. It offers better image quality (think blacker blacks and brighter whites), reduced power consumption, and faster response times over traditional LED TVs.
So why doesn’t everyone own one? Right now, they’re still prohibitively expensive and for years only a handful of companies used the technology in their TVs.
But that’s changing. Sony, one of the initial developers of the technology, got back in the game with last year’s Bravia A1E OLED and Sony A8F OLED TV. Philips has thrown its hat into the ring with the recent Philips OLED 803 and OLED+ 903; Panasonic has doubled its OLED range for 2019 – led by the GZ2000 OLED – while LG has carried the torch for the last five years with its B-, C-, G-, E- and W-Series OLED TVs.
So is OLED worth the hype? We’ve run you through everything you need to know about latest big screen buzzword in the article below.
What’s the difference between OLED TV and LCD/LED?
Everything. They might sound alike, but the processes are completely different.
OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode, with “organic” referring to the carbon film that sits inside the panel before the glass screen.
OLED panels emit their own light when an electric current is passed through, whereas cells in a LCD display require an external light source, like a giant backlight, for brightness.
This backlight is what separated LCD screens from their LED variants. A traditional LCD screen has a backlight (called a cold-cathode fluorescent light, or CCFL) which is uniform across the entire back of the screen.
This means that whether the image is black or white, it is being lit by exactly the same brightness across the panel. This reduces what we call “hotspots,” or areas of super bright light, because the actual light source illuminating them is uniform.
This all started a few years back when engineers at companies like Samsung and Sony introduced an array of LEDs as a backlight, which meant that if a certain part of the screen was black then those LEDs behind that portion could be turned off to make it appear blacker.
This is a better solution than a CCFL backlight, but it still has its problems. Since it’s a light behind the LCD producing the illumination rather than the LCD layer itself, the illumination is not entirely in-sync with the pixel in front of it. The result is an effect called ‘blooming’, whereby LED light from bright portions of the image bleeds over into areas of blackness.
This is what separates OLEDs from LCD/LED displays. In an OLED TV display, the pixels themselves are the things producing the light, and so when they need to be black they are able to turn off completely, rather than relying on a backlight to turn off on their behalf.
Image Credit: LG Display
What are the advantages of OLED TV?
The result is remarkably dark blacks in an image, and when you combine this with the brightness of the whites an OLED panel is able to produce you’re left with a fantastically vibrant image.
LG and Panasonic, pretty much the most consistent producers of OLED televisions on the planet, like to use the term “infinite contrast” to describe how the self-lighting pixels switch off completely when reproducing black giving it an “absolute” black color instead of a “relative” black that only describes how dark one pixel can get compared to the brightest pixel on the screen.
For years there was a question mark about longevity of OLED panels, while production lines have been impossible to make profitable due to high failure rates. But as companies like LG invest billions in development of OLED – with the likes of Philips and Sony joining the fray – its affordability is improving, although it’s still much more expensive than competing technologies.
The advantages of OLED go beyond simple static image quality to the responsiveness and smoothness of the display itself, meaning gamers and home cinema aficionados are going to absolutely love OLED TV. It’s capable of a refresh rate of as low as 0.001ms, which for reference, is around 1,000 times faster than a standard LED-backlit LCD panel, while also being superior to the now-discontinued plasma tech, too.
And, because the lighting source they use is so tiny, the depth of screen sizes has shrunk at the same rate. That means OLED TVs have awesomely deep blacks and bright, peak whites, improved color accuracy as well as smooth responsive motion – and all from a form factor that’s just a few millimetres in depth and much lighter than standard TVs.
Image Credit: LG Display
Which OLED TVs are out now?
OLED TVs have been on the market since 2012, and a variety of manufacturers have tackled the technology over the years. It used to be the case that OLED’s were produced by just Samsung and LG, but Samsung dropped the technology over its cost and how difficult it was to produce, and has no intention of restarting production any time soon.
LG, on the other hand, has been releasing OLED sets consistently over the last few years, and in 2016 introduced four easy-to-understand product lines – the G6, E6, C6 and B6 – featuring OLED panels. LG continued with the 7-Series and 8-Series TVs, while the LG 2019 TV range will include the 9-Series: the budget OLED B9, mid-range OLED C9, high-end OLED E9, and ultra-thin OLED W9.
You can also head to our best OLED TVs guide to see the top five OLEDs we’ve had the pleasure of reviewing on the site.
How much do OLED TVs cost?
OLED TVs are definitely getting cheaper, but they’re still a long way from what we’d call affordable. The prices of LGs sets start at $1,600 in the US and £1,200 in the UK, and Panasonic’s are more expensive still.
The scarcity of OLED TVs on the market means that those small number of players in the market are more or less free to charge exactly what they want. We’re not going to see prices drop until we get more competition.
That said, usually when one company starts to pull ahead, the others quickly catch up. Prices should come down when manufacturers can work out the kinks on the production line and demand increases for these phenomenal pieces of tech.
What’s the future for OLED TV?
OLED is an expensive panel technology that has finally managed to gain traction – after spending so long as an outlier than we wrote an opinion piece in 2014 about how the technology might be dead.
Obviously that didn’t turn out to be the case, and we’re seeing plenty of stunning OLED models hitting the market, even if price points are still taking an age to drop within reach of regular consumers.
But just because OLED isn’t affordable yet doesn’t mean it’s not getting better. An $1,600 / £1,200 price tag isn’t what we’d consider budget, but it’s a great deal cheaper than what OLED was retailing for even just a year ago.
If this trend continues, OLED could well become the go-to TV technology for mid-range wallets as well as high-end enthusiasts.
Original reporting in this article was by Jamie Carter.
Convinced? Head to our round-up of the best OLED TVs you can buy right now
Xiaomi keeps on adding new accessories for its products in its official Mi Store, and on Thursday it announced four new straps for the Mi Band 3. The Mi Band 3 was launched in September last year and along with the new straps, the company has also introduced the Mi Band 3 charging cable.
The new Mi Band 3 straps come in four trendy colours — Red, orange, Blue and Black. These are priced at Rs 249 while the Mi Band 3 charger is up for Rs 149.
Xiaomi Mi Band 3 boasts of up to 20-days of battery life, is water resistant by up to 50 meters, monitors your heart rate and allows you to view notifications on the OLED touchscreen.
The Mi Band 3 is priced at Rs 1,999 and is available on Amazon India, Flipkart and Mi India Store.
Mi fans, we can’t get over this madness. 200K+ units of #RedmiNote7 sold in a matter of minutes. A big thank you to all of you!RT to win F-codes!Get your #RedmiNote7 and #RedmiNote7Pro on 13th March at 12 noon on https://t.co/cwYEXdVQIo and @Flipkart. pic.twitter.com/qQtA9jyFytMarch 7, 2019
In other news, the Redmi Note 7 by Xiaomi went on its first sale in India on March 6. According to the company, over 200,000 units of the Note 7 were sold in just a matter of minutes. The next sale is scheduled for March 13 which is also the day Redmi Note 7 Pro goes up for its first sale.
Changes are afoot for HBO under its new corporate overlords at AT&T. But what those changes might be are still anyone’s guess.
After longtime HBO CEO Richard Plepler abruptly resigned last week, AT&T executives went on a media tour to talk about the channel’s future, take shots at Netflix, and hint at the streaming service AT&T plans to launch this year. Still, those interviews didn’t reveal much in the way of specifics. If anything, AT&T and HBO’s streaming plans seem even murkier than they did a week ago.
Here’s what I’m still scratching my head over:
Will AT&T launch a streaming service this year?
The timing of AT&T’s direct-to-consumer streaming service, which will combine content from HBO, Turner , and Warner Bros., seems a bit fluid. Last October, AT&T said it would launch the service in 2019. A month later, the company started describing the 2019 launch as a “beta” version, and it noted last month that new original programming won’t arrive until 2020. Earlier this week, Bob Greenblatt, the new head of AT&T’s WarnerMedia unit, told Variety that launching the beta in 2019 is “what we hope to do,” suggesting a lingering degree of uncertainty.
Mind you, this is the same company that launched its “Next-Generation” version of DirecTV Now a half-year later than originally intended, that still hasn’t expanded DirecTV Now’s DVR options (after saying it would do so last summer), and hasn’t delivered on promised DirecTV Now features such as 4K resolution and mobile video downloads. The idea that this new streaming service might also fall behind schedule isn’t unthinkable.
Is the three-tier pricing plan set in stone?
While AT&T hasn’t announced exact pricing for its direct-to-consumer streaming service, executives have described a three-tier system that includes movies for a low price, originals and more films (presumably from HBO) for a medium price, and a bundle of additional films, comedies, and kids programming from Turner’s and Warner’s catalogs for a higher price.
This approach is without precedent in the on-demand streaming world, and it’s reminiscent of the kind of setup people are trying to leave behind with cable. Maybe that’s why Greenblatt hedged a bit when Variety asked him for details on those plans. “How it will be tiered and all of that is still in the working stages,” he said. Perhaps he’ll impress upon AT&T that its original vision isn’t the wisest idea.
Can AT&T get good at making apps in nine months?
Software has never been a strong suit for either HBO or AT&T. The former’s HBO Now apps are a chore to navigate, and they still lack table-stakes streaming service features such as personalized recommendations and user profiles. AT&T’s DirecTV Now apps also lack profiles and personalization (again, even though AT&T put those features on its public roadmap mid-2017), and every part of its app besides the grid-based channel guide feels clunky.
It’s unclear whether AT&T will roll its new service into those existing apps or start from scratch. Either way, the company has a lot of work to do in not much time.
How much content will AT&T pull from other platforms?
John Stankey, the head of AT&T’s WarnerMedia division, has previously suggested that Netflix and other rivals will see their catalogs shrink as AT&T pulls licensed movies and TV shows back to its own services. But while those moves might make AT&T’s service more compelling, they also represent a huge risk for a company with $180 billion of debt that’s trying to pay off $20 billion of it this year.
The need for short-term revenues might explain why AT&T took $100 million from Netflix to exclusively license Friends through 2019. It could also explain why, as Redef’s Matthew Ball points out, AT&T executives have started to waffle on whether they’d give up that kind of easy money in the future. “Part of me would love to have [Friends] exclusive on the service but I’m not sure that is the right answer yet,” Greenblatt told The Hollywood Reporter this week. AT&T might be realizing that the reason Friends is popular right now is because it has Netflix to lean on, not vice versa. That mentality could certainly extend to other movies and shows that are even less of a draw.
How much of a liability is AT&T’s financial situation?
The underlying issue with all these questions is AT&T’s aforementioned debt, accrued largely from buying DirecTV for $48.5 billion in 2015 and Time Warner for $85 billion earlier this year. AT&T’s immediate goal is to focus on profitability, so it can pay down that debt, which is why CEO Randall Stephenson told the Wall Street Journal in January that “2019 candidly is the money year.”
At the same time, AT&T’s John Stankey recently told The Hollywood Reporter that he wants the company’s services to be in 60- to 70 percent of U.S. homes. Growing a streaming service to that level of adoption will require major investments in content and aggressive pricing, which means AT&T’s growth and profitability goals are fundamentally at odds.
What does all this mean for you?
To bring it home for cord-cutters, all these questions amount to lots of uncertainty over how you’ll access HBO and other AT&T content in the future. Will HBO Now exist as a standalone $15-per-month streaming service next year, or will prices change as AT&T rolls that content into its new service? Will you still be able to add an HBO subscription to Amazon Prime, or will AT&T pull the channel’s content back into its own siloed apps? And if you enjoy watching WarnerMedia-owned shows like Friends, or movies like The Dark Knight on Netflix, how much longer will that be an option?
Right now, AT&T doesn’t seem to have the answers.
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