Two concerned fathers temporarily lost their children – one in a parade crowd and the other in a crowd of shoppers. Both created a wearable tracking device to prevent this from happening again. The products are amazingly similar and are competing for attention at CES 2015 and on Indiegogo.

The companies sit on two sides of the world. Child Angel is out of Staffordshire in the UK. Kiband is out of Utah in the US. The companies base their technology on two different approaches. Child Angel tracks a child’s movements by combining GPS, GSM (Global System for Mobiles) and Wi-Fi hot-spot triangulation technologies. Kiband uses Bluetooth 4.1 and an audible alarm approach.

Kiband, named for the CEO’s four year old child Kimball, argues that coverage, accuracy, and cost of GPS are questionable. Their smartband technology covers 5 to almost 200 feet in any direction and you don’t need to interpret a map on your cell phone to locate a child who wanders too far. Kiband lets out an 85 decibel alarm alerting the parent and those around the child until it and the child are back with the parent. The band displays contact information for do-gooders trying to return the child to his parents.

Kiband smartphone display of child’s proximity.

Child Angel, on the other hand, has no distance limitations. It notifies parents via its cell phone app and displays the child’s location on a GPS map. The battle has begun with Child Angel adding comments on its project site regarding the limitations of Bluetooth … as we’ve noted is used by their competitor, Kiband.

Its exact pinpoint location is sent by Child Angel wrist band to smartphone.

Another differentiation is the ability to remove the band from the child’s arm. Child Angel sends an alarm to the parent if the band is removed and marks its location, whereas the Kiband cannot be removed until unlocked by the parent via their cell phone.

The free downloadable Child Angel app is compatible with Android, Samsung, Apple iPhone, and iPad. The band’s rechargeable battery can last for 48 hours. The band is “splash, sand, and sticky proof” and geared to those 3-13 years. Kiband is fashioned for children from 18 months to 7 years. Child-friendly Child Angel can be customized with a click-on image. It can also be imprinted with a licensed business partner’s logo.

Both provide boundary settings such as Geo Fencing on Child Angel. If your child goes beyond your pre-set safe zone an automatic alert goes to your cell phone. Kiband differentiates itself by claiming to alert you to your child’s location before they disappear, not after. Its goal is to prevent a lost child, rather than trying to find one after they go missing. The band involves the child in their own safety by vibrating when they wander too close to the perimeter set by their parents. It is not only water resistant, but if submerged will put out an alarm.

Child Angel’s wrist band design.

Spencer Behrend, Founder and CEO of KiLife Tech, claims a background in entrepreneurship, technology of an unspecified nature, finance, and corporate leadership. Heather Palmer has the unique title of CMO – Chief Mommy Officer – bringing a mother’s touch to the company. None of the bios of the rest of the team mentions any technology experience, leaning on backgrounds in operations, finance, and social media. However, the company profile claims to be “a diverse collection of tech entrepreneurs.”Andrew Purcell is the father and CEO behind Child Angel. His team consists of persons with financial, organizational, and sales skills. No one mentions having technology expertise, but their project site shows how the device was developed. Child Angel’s Indiegogo project has raised $2,572 USD towards its more aggressive $100,000 goal with 24 days left.

Kiband reveals its electronic composition.

Kiband on Indiegogo has raised $10,754 USD towards its $25,000 goal with 10 days left. Its sale price is pegged at $110.

As a parent, you have choices to make regarding your child’s safety. Child Angel and Kiband offer two slightly differing ways to keep track of a busy and mobile kid. Which would you choose?

The post Two Lost Kids; Two New Wearable Tracking Devices at CES 2015 appeared first on VR World.

If you were hoping to save $100 on an Apple iPad Air 2 Wi-Fi-Gold with its 9.7 inch Retina display, 8MP iSight camera, and 64GB of storage, you’re too late. Best Buy has posted it as Sold Out on line. It was priced at $499.99. It’s still available at Fry`s for full price.

Apple iPad Air 2 Wi-Fi-Gold is selling out fast.

If you are willing to settle for a 7.9 inch LED display and a 5MP iSight camera and only 16GB of storage, you can save $75 at Best Buy on the Apple iPad mini with Wi-Fi – 16GB, Space Gray/Black.
Not wanting to restrict bargain shoppers to a single day, Walmart has been having Cyber Week. They are offering a slightly better discount amount of $79 for the same tablet.

Best Buy and Walmart sell the Apple Mini iPad 16GB for $249.99 and $219.99 respectively.

Now here is the curious part: Walmart is quoting the list price as $299.00 which they are discounting to $219.99. Best Buy shows only their regular price is $249.99 or refurbished for $10 less. Now you decide which is the “best buy.” Seems like a simple mathematical problem at first glance. But Oh No. Let’s look closely. The Devil is in the Details. Both have the same Model Number: #MF432LL/A. Both tablets carry the same exact name with the only exception being the color. Best Buy lists Apple iPad mini with Wi-Fi-16GB, Space Gray/Black. Walmart has Apple iPad mini 16GB Wi-Fi, Space Gray or White. You can do your own comparisons from the data taken directly from their respective websites.

Amazon offers several choices on the same tablet: New from $229.99, Used from $203.95, and Refurbished from $199.99. Clicking on the Used or on the Refurbished category, you come to NYC Electronic Warehouse Storefront. A search of their site did not find the refurbished model. It must have been sold leaving Amazon out of sync with their reseller. Radio Shack offers what they refer to as Refreshed for $229.99 with free shipping.

The Apple Store itself is selling the tablet, Space Gray or Silver “beginning at” $249. . Extras they suggest you add to your purchase include: Lightening to USB camera adapter for $29, an Apple Wireless keyboard for $69, or Apple EarPods with remote and mic for $29. It is ready to ship in one day and you might have in store pick up possible. However, the site warns: “Quantities are limited and availability can change quickly. Items will not be reserved for in-store pick up until you’ve completed checkout.”

As a bonus, Apple offers 6, 12, or 18 months special financing. And they’ll laser engrave up to two lines on the back of your iPad for free. If you click that it’s a gift, you can add an Apple Gift Package for another $5 and a free gift message. One more plus, you can Live Chat with a specialist before purchase. Apple is the only company offering Chat help.

Best Buy provides free shipping if you want it by December 11. If you want it sooner, you’ll pay an escalating shipping fee. The company offers a 1-year Protection Plan from the Geek Squad for $49.99. They say “We Fix It Or Replace It” covering a No-Lemon Policy, Normal Wear & Tear, Power Surges, Screen Issues.

Walmart offers a 2-year Care Plan for $47, but they don’t try to sell you additional accessories other than a $25 savings if you open a Walmart credit card. The Plan indicates: “Drop, Spill and Cracked Screen Problems – We’ll repair or replace it. We cover 100% of the repair costs. There are no deductibles or hidden fees.” Hummm, so you should look for Catch 22’s when considering a protection plan.

A quick look at other on-line retailers showed that Target offers the tablet for $249. MacMall will save you $5 at $244. PC Connection wants you to login or call for pricing. MicroCenter an Authorized Apple Reseller is listing the tablet at $229, but you have to search their site for your local store and drive to the brick and mortar building, because they don’t offer shipping. And purchases are restricted to one tablet per household. Of course, there’s always eBay hawking a new tablet for $299.99 with a money back guarantee.

So, the old adage “Buyer Beware” holds true on Cyber Monday as at any time of the year. Don’t get enamored by a low price. Check out the details. If it sounds too good to be true … it’s worth making comparisons.

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Verizon (NYSE:VZ) is trying to get on the softer side of consumers. You could either consider this the more emotional side, or the software side, either would be applicable here. Verizon is deeming the day before Thanksgiving, November 26th, one of the busiest travel days of the year Connection Day. Connection Day is Verizon’s way of saying thanks to their customers and anyone that might need some help while they’re traveling home for the holiday.

The first thing they’re doing is that they’re giving existing Verizon More Everything plan customers a free, one-time gift of 1GB of data and another 1GB of data for the next billing cycle. In addition to Verizon’s own customers anyone and everyone can get in on Verizon’s Connection Day ‘gifts’ or ‘free offers’ by simply heading over to the Connection Day page.

Verizon FIOS is offering free mobile access to their popular movies and TV Shows on November 26th via their FIOS Preview mobile app.

Verizon has partnered with Amazon to offer a selection of 10 free/discounted apps, plus two free Audible.com book downloads (for new members) or $10 in Audible credit (current members). You will also get 10 free songs from Amazon Music and 10 curated playlists with Amazon Prime Music.

Apple has also joined the Connection Day gifting craze by offering a ‘special offer’ which will be revealed on November 26th, Connection Day.

Verizon also partnered with Condé Nast to offer free digital edition downloads of all 17 of the company’s publications which include Wired, Vanity Fair and GQ.

Verizon has also partnered with Boingo and GoGo to offer half an hour of free internet service in airports and planes on November 26th, Connection Day. And if you’re flying on Jet Blue, there will be free in-flight Wi-Fi for all flights between November 26th and December 31st.

Last but not least, Verizon partnered with Pandora to offer a free seven-day trial of Pandora One (Pandora’s premium subscription music service).

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With the holidays approaching fast and the sales that come with it many people will be getting new notebooks this holiday season.  Researching what the best notebooks out there are takes time and we though we could help out by giving you our choices in five different categories of notebooks.  They are gaming, ultraportable, Chromebook, business, and Apple MacBook.  With the latest computer parts in these notebooks it will be certain that they will be able to earn there keep for quite some time.  There are many things to consider when looking for a notebook and budget is a big one.  Most of these choices are going to be in the higher end range since they perform better.

Gaming Notebook: MSI Computer GT72  Dominator Pro with GTX 980M – $2,299

This gaming notebook is the top of the line from MSI, and it does not disappoint.  Equipped with Intel i7-4710HQ, 16GB of DDR3-1600, a 128GB SSD, and a Nvidia GTX 980M 8GB, this will tear through any recent and upcoming game.  The best thing about the GT72 Dominator Pro is that MSI has taken steps to ensure that you can update the graphics down the line when new and better GPUs come out.  This means that the investment made in this computer will last a lot longer than comparable notebooks that are stuck with their graphics for the life of the product. If you are wanting some more speed from the notebook then throw in four identical M.2 SSDs inside and put them in RAID 0 for read/write speeds of up to 1600MB/s.  From experience with MSI’s SuperRAID as it is called I can attest to how massive of an improvement that speeds like this can be, it makes using the notebook just so much more enjoyable.  You can even attach three monitors to the notebook with two mini-displayport and one HDMI outputs.  The keyboard feels like no other notebook keyboard and is made by the gaming company SteelSeries. Bottom line is that if this is in your budget and you are a gamer or even a power user, I have little doubt that you will love this notebook.

Apple Notebook: 15″ 2.5GHz MacBook Pro with Retina display – $2,374.99

There is no denying it, Apple makes good notebooks and they are arguably the best notebooks for running Windows on as well.  The Retina display will allow for better multi-tasking with various windows as the resolution gives lots of screen real estate.  The Retina display will be great for those who edit photos or video as the display will reproduce colors very well. The construction of the MacBook Pro is amazing and the fit and finish are things that other companies could learn a thing or two from.  The choice with the 2.5GHz Intel i7 was made for what would be the most capable and powerful option with a reasonable price.  At Apple you can customize the MacBook Pro with up to a 1TB SSD and a 2.8GHz Intel i7.

Ultraportable Notebook: Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro – $1,382.99

The 2-in-1 Lenovo Yoga 3 Pro is the latest model in the Yoga line and features an amazing watchband style hinge.  The hinge is made up of hundreds of individual pieces that allows the notebook to flex like no other and fold to use it in different positions.  The screen is a high resolution (3200×1800) IPS touchscreen that will reproduce colors very well and look much better than lower quality panels.  If needing something very light, portable, and a long battery life then this notebook should be on your list of ones to check out.  The stylish Yoga 3 Pro is one of the most stunning designs out now and is powered by the brand new Intel Core M processor.

 Chromebook – Toshiba Chromebook 2 1080p $329.99

Chromebooks are a new breed of notebook, and people are really loving them.  Chromebooks generally are affordable, light, and have long battery life making it an easy choice for those who need something portable.  The best thing about this model is likely the 1080p IPS panel that will look much better than panels that are in other models.  Powering the notebook is an Intel Celeron processor, and while not very powerful it will get the job done and sip power giving longer battery life.  The battery should be good for up to 8 hours and 45 minutes.  The audio has been fine-tuned by Skullcandy meaning that it should deliver much nicer sound than the standard Chromebook.  This will be useful if you enjoy listening to streaming music while you surf the web or do work.  The 802.11ac Wi-Fi is blazing fast and will allow you to get better coverage over other Chromebooks.

Business Notebook: Lenovo X1 Carbon – $1,619

When looking for a business notebook it is wise to choose something that is portable and light so you can easily get work done no matter where you are working.  The X1 Carbon also offers great battery life allowing up to 9 hours from a single charge.  Lenovo is the the most used PC maker for businesses and they sure do know what they are doing with its lineup that is geared for productivity.  The keyboard is surprisingly good and has back-lighting making it easier to get work done while on that red-eye to an important meeting or at home in the evening.  The integrated fingerprint reader should help simplify secure login by allowing you to simply swipe a finger over it.  When it comes to a business notebook, choosing Lenovo is a wise choice that millions have made before.

The post Top Five Notebooks of 2014 appeared first on VR World.

Today, at the Broadband World Forum Qualcomm announced their newest QCA9377 chipset which enables 802.11ac 2.0 including the MU-MIMO capbabilities and the company’s own MU|EFX 802.11ac 2.0 solution for delivering higher bandwidth to more devices simultaneously. At the Broadband World Forum, they announced a new FRITZ!Box router product from AVM in Germany that utilizes the QCA9980 chipset which was announced earlier this year that enables Qualcomm’s own MU-MIMO implementation as part of the 802.11ac 2.0 standard on the access point side of things. This router combined with a QCA9377-enabled device will allow for an end to end 802.11ac MU-MIMO experience.

Some of Qualcomm’s latest SoCs for smartphones already support MU-MIMO, which means that Qualcomm is one of the few companies on the market that can deliver end-to-end 802.11ac MU-MIMO solutions. While there’s no doubt that 802.11ac is still gaining traction in the consumer market, once it does, it will be absolutely critical that those router support MU-MIMO. This chipset can also be utilized for other applications like laptops and larger tablets, to enable those devices to also have 802.11ac connectivity with MU-MIMO. As homes become more and more dense, and internet connections get faster, people are going to want to connect everything at the same time and MU-MIMO is part of the answer to that problem.

Qualcomm is conducting the industry’s first, over-the-air, end-to-end MU-MIMO demonstration featuring the company’s own MU | EFX 802.11ac 2.0 enabled networking and client devices at Broadband World Forum starting today. The QCA9377 is sampling now and will be available in production quantities later this year.

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Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM) continues to push on the robotics front after announcing its microrover project powered by Snapdragon.

Its new initiative is to pump $1.2 million into a robotics acclerator, which will host 10 companies and be located at the company’s headquarters in San Diego, while being run by TechStars which was recently featured in Bright Side of News’* ROAD to ROCKI Blog Series. This is all done through Qualcomm’s own accelerator initiative which is ‘powered’ by TechStars who provides their expertise in running their own accelerator program where they seed companies with $118,000 in seed funding as well as knowledge, advice and expertise.

Robotics Accelerator Timeline

In order to enter into Qualcomm’s robotics accelerator, powered by TechStars, you will need to fill out an application and then make sure you apply by February 22nd, 2015 at which point you will hear back from Qualcomm’s accelerator between then and May 26th, which is when the 16 week (4 month) accelerator program begins.

The program will end September 15th, 2015 and the ten companies that participated in the accelerator will then be out of the program and hopefully sealing up more funding and or releasing their products into the wild. Do keep in mind, however, that Qualcomm will take a 6% stake in the companies that participate in this program so there is something in it for them as well, especially if they can help make these robotics startups successful. They obviously don’t have the money that Google does, so they can’t just start going around and buying robotics companies left and right. So, they’re trying to do the next best thing and help foster new robotics companies that will very likely utilize their processors and wireless technologies in ways that will help Qualcomm ship more processors and hopefully improve the world as well.

Qualcomm MicroRover

The great thing about this program that Qualcomm is doing is that they could potentially help spark yet another large technology industry for San Diego in addition to the defense technology, biotech and wireless industries that San Diego already calls its own. The addition of a robotics industry could be huge for both Qualcomm and San Diego, as it could bring more very highly skilled jobs to the region and a potentially very high growth industry in the future.

The post Qualcomm Announces $1 Million Robotics Accelerator appeared first on VR World.

The world of wireless communications is generally dominated by a few companies, with some of them being hardware suppliers and others being chip suppliers.

Qualcomm, Broadcom and Marvell are some of the leading chip suppliers of wireless technologies for both the home and smartphones while Samsung, Cisco, Apple and Dell provide much of the hardware for consumers and enterprise. Recently, Qualcomm acquired a company called Wilocity which has been producing 60 GHz (as opposed to 5 or 2.4 GHz) frequency Wi-Fi systems. This 60 GHz technology is known as WiGig and is part of the Wi-Fi standard with the 802.11ad name. If you look up 802.11ad, in fact, you will see that 60 GHz Wi-Fi is marketed as WiGig (there is a WiGig alliance) which Samsung is even a part of and the alliance has existed since 2009.

WiGig is an interesting technology because it allows for much higher bandwidth (in the Gigabits per second) over shorter areas. So, you can put your phone down on a desk and WiGig will enable you to wirelessly stream/connect your phone to your monitor and keyboard so that you can dock it wirelessly. In fact, Wilocity has already partnered with Cisco to introduce WiGig into their enterprise products and with Dell to integrate WiGig into their laptops. WiGig is also on its way to consumer product adoption as Qualcomm, who acquired Wilocity, has already announced that their Snapdragon 810 processor will have WiGig built in. And if anything, there’s a very high chance that Samsung’s mobile products next year will be using a Snapdragon 810 with Qualcomm/Wilocity’s WiGig 802.11 Wi-Fi technology.

Today’s announcement is about the fact that Samsung has developed their own 802.11ad solution and are pushing it as such, they claim to have made vast improvements to wireless communications through their implementation. The WiGig 60 GHz WiGig standard has been finalized since 2012 and was initiated in 2009 and has not changed wildly since, which makes Samsung’s announcement seem a bit overblown. Samsung has not really announced anything about WiGig or any development of WiGig publicly until today, years after WiGig had been introduced so they actually seem a bit behind the curve. It will be interesting to see which Samsung products will have WiGig and whether they’ve developed their own chipset or are simply utilizing one from Qualcomm or someone else.

Also, in terms of WiGig the problem with 802.11ad is that it is very susceptible to interference from dense objects like couches and people. So, this technology is primarily used for ‘line-of-sight’ data transfers and wireless connectivity. But it does significantly reduce the amount of interference between different wireless access points as 802.11ad will rarely leave the bounds of the room it is installed in.

The post Samsung Announces 60 Ghz 802.11ad WiGig Solution appeared first on VR World.

This week Nikon (TYO:7731) announced the new Nikon D750, a successor to the Nikon D700 which has been discontinued since its introduction in 2008. The D750 is not quite as high-end as the company’s D810 or D4S, however, it does still have a fairly good 24 Megapixel sensor similar to that of the Nikon D610. What makes the D750 better than the D610, though, is all of the additional functionality that it brings to the camera outside of just pure photography.

The D750 brings an articulating LCD screen that would normally be found in consumer-level cameras like the D5000 and D3000 series and brings it to the professional FX full-frame family. This feature isn’t necessarily something that you will find many traditional DSLR photographers using because they’re so used to looking through the viewfinder to take their photos. However, the D750 is clearly a mixture between consumer and professional with the addition of this feature and gives more to photographers looking for a full-frame camera than what the D610 offers.

The Nikon D750 also offers dual SDXC memory card slots, like the D610, but still does not offer any CF connectivity like the D810 or D4s. The lack of CF connectivity calls into question Nikon’s professional branding and naming of this camera and really puts it more into the realm of prosumer. However, the addition of built-in Wi-Fi functionality into an FX camera, a first for any Nikon full-frame FX camera. The Wi-Fi functionality allows for the D750 to feed photos direct to a photographer’s smartphone or tablet via Android or iOS app and to also use that device to take remote photos much like many consumer cameras already have. In addition to that, the Wi-Fi functionality allows for uploading photos over Wi-Fi straight to FTP to allow for some serious workflow improvements and data backups.

The D750 shoots at up to 6.5 FPS, a slight improvement over the D610 which shoots at up to 6 FPS. It also has 51 focus points, improved from the D610’s 39 focus points, which should allow for quicker and more precise image acquisition and focus. And like the D810, the D750 brings 1080P 60 FPS video to the Nikon FX-family of cameras, being only the second to bring such a frame rate to the company’s professional cameras.

For full specs of the Nikon D750, head on over to Nikon’s brand new page for the camera which details every single possible detail you could want to know.

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As T-Mobile (NYSE:TMUS) continues on the company’s attack on its competitors, the company held its Uncarrier 7.0 event, representing the company’s next move to help consumers while sticking it to the company’s competitors. During the Uncarrier 7.0 event in San Francisco, the company’s CEO John Legere introduced a multitude of Wi-Fi enabled technologies that will help improve the quality of T-Mobile service.

As a part of Uncarrier 7.0, T-Mobile is going to be enabling Wi-Fi calling on all of the phones that they sell in store, which means that they very likely will not be carrying devices like the Nexus 5 in-store. Most Nexus 5 users will still be unable to make use of T-Moble’s Wi-Fi calling feature, even though it is quite awesome and enables you to make calls using Wi-Fi as if you were connected to a tower. This is perfect for areas with poor to no reception as well as to help improve call quality in areas like your home if you spend a lot of time in your home but still use your smartphone a lot. T-Mobile will also be creating a small JUMP window for any current T-Mobile customers that don’t have a T-Mobile branded device with Wi-Fi hotspot to enable to them to get one if they’d like (costs associated must still be paid). T-Mobile really wants people to leverage Wi-Fi connectivity more, especially when they have pretty decent home connections. They want to expand their network beyond just cell towers.

Part of that is T-Mobile will also be supplying, with a small deposit, home Wi-Fi hotspots. T-Mobile is calling these CellSpots but they’re really just home Wi-Fi networks dedicated for phone connectivity and use regular off-the-shelf ASUS routers with some custom firmware to give voice data priority over all over data. The CellSpots themselves use 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac wireless technology, so there’s nothing really special about them other than the fact that they’re technically free and will help you get better voice coverage in your home.

In addition to that, T-Mobile has also struck up a deal with GoGo in-flight Wi-Fi service to deliver free texting and voicemail service on any GoGo enabled flights. Since calling is effectively banned on all airlines, T-Mobile is only enabling the ability to text your friends for free from 30,000 (or more) feet. While this may not be a huge factor for many, the reality is that GoGo’s Wi-Fi service only enabled internet chat and smartphone internet connectivity, but no text messaging or voicemail.

The post T-Mobile Uncarrier 7.0 – Leveraging Wi-Fi appeared first on VR World.

On day one of the 2014 San Diego International Comic-Con we got a chance to check out some of the off-site events going on around the show as well as walk some more of the show floor and take a look at what people are doing. On Day 1 there were a lot more people dressed up in costumes than during Preview Night, but there were also a lot more people in general. Day 1 was a pretty great success because we got a chance to play laser tag with people from Nerdist and 2K in the Borderlands the Pre-Sequel laser tag. They also had people from 2K games on hand showing demos of the game on PCs and there were prizes  (t-shirts) for those that participated in laser tag. It was a lot of fun and as we had stated earlier, the event is totally free and open to the public. No Comic-Con badges are required.

We also ran into some interesting characters throughout the day at the Comic-Con and were overall amused by some of their characters as many of them were in-character when they were dressed up for their cosplay. The really great thing about Comic-Con is that virtually anyone doing some sort of cosplay will stop for you if you ask politely and let you take a picture. Obviously, when there are huge groups this isn’t going to be as possible, but it is still a possibility. We also checked out Microsoft’s Xbox Lounge and were able to see a plethora of Xbox Titles either already out or about to come out on the Xbox One, this event is at the Hyatt hotel on the bay and is also open to any members of the public, and is very well air conditioned as Comic-Con this year is for some reason much hotter than years before.

There is also an obstacle course and gaming area that Assassin’s Creed is running that also features a high drop and a T-Shirt if you complete the course. There are also complimentary shavings like last year, but not a boat.

Also, the internet situation near Comic-Con and the convention center is horrific and the City of San Diego needs to work with AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile to build cellular towers inside the convention center as well as bring in COWs (Cell on Wheels) into the area to alleviate the network traffic because there are easily 150,000 people on any given day (think about all of the off-site events and people supporting them). Also, if you are having trouble connecting to the internet because the network is dying, we recommend you check out Nerd HQ or the Nerdist (above Nerd HQ) and connect to Padres Wifi and you should have a pretty fast and stable connection (thanks to Qualcomm and Verizon).

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As if Comcast couldn’t get even more evil, they just have. The company is turning people’s home routers and internet connections (that they pay for) into public Wi-Fi hotspots for their customers. One might ask, why would an ISP be doing such a thing in an age where we already have fantastic 3G and 4G coverage on most carriers in the US? Well, its all part of Comcast’s evil new plan to compete with the wireless carriers and deploy their own wireless service using Wi-Fi, something akin to what  RePublic wireless is doing with their most basic plan.

However, Comcast has quietly built this feature into their routers and has made it an opt-out program rather than an opt-in one (because who in their right mind would opt-in?). When plans for this service were initially discussed, there was talk that they would utilize their Wi-Fi networks to enable them to essentially run a competitor to Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile. They have already tested roll outs of this public Wi-Fi in cities like Chicago and The Twin Cities and have been running these in addition to a 100,000 user test in New Jersey for the past year or so. Comcast already claims 1 million free Wi-Fi hotspots for their customers and would eventually roll it out to all of their internet customers, much like their dreaded data caps.

Their latest test includes a 150,000 deployment in Houston, where users are discovering that their comcast routers are becoming Wi-Fi hotspots. Initially, I expected Comcast to monetarily incentivize customers to enable this feature for Comcast’s benefit if they wanted to roll out their Wi-Fi based mobile network, but I guess they figured they could get away with doing it for free.

What makes this all the more interesting is that Comcast is constantly claiming that they have to charge the prices they do because they need to be able to pay for the bandwidth on their network. Yet, they’re clearly giving away bandwidth for free on the very same lines that their customers are paying for and probably getting less service than they should be (in terms of speed, and probably uptime, too). Sure, Comcast will probably be more concerned about the uptime of users’ routers if an entire wireless service depends on it, but I just don’t see how Comcast can justify this without allowing customers to know its happening or at least giving them a discount on their service for doing so. Also, if you use your own router and modem, this service won’t work so you can always be sure to opt out of it that way.

However, the thing that concerns me most about this whole ordeal is what the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger could mean for Comcast’s plans for such a network. The combined company would have tens of millions of internet customers (31 million at the end of 2013, to be exact) and would effectively be able to run an entire nationwide Wi-Fi network purely off of customers’ own wireless routers and the public Wi-Fi that they provide. There are also questions about how secure such a feature would be and whether or not a free public Wi-Fi would be an invitation for people to attack individual people’s routers to try to access their network. Currently they operate on separate radios, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have vulnerabilities. In the end, the roll out of this service just makes me more weary (as a Time Warner Cable internet customer) of what Comcast is trying to do.

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You don’t hear every day that Facebook is collaborating with a networking hardware manufacturer like D-Link to provide a “Facebook Wi-Fi” service. Facebook Wi-Fi is a service that Facebook has been promoting for the past year as a way for businesses to connect with their customers and to encourage them to connect to their free Wi-Fi network in order to check-in and get offers from the business (and let the business and Facebook gather their info). Facebook Wi-Fi currently only works on three different hardware vendors, two of whom are actually the same company now.

Meraki wireless products (now a subsidiary of Cisco)
Cisco ISR G2 and ASR 1000 Series routers
NETGEAR R6300 Smart WiFi router
D-Link Facebook Wi-Fi AC1750 Router (DIR-865L)

D-link’s router is the first to officially be branded as a Facebook Wi-Fi router even though there have been others before that were already capable of supporting Facebook Wi-Fi. Ultimately, D-Link’s router is already a pretty good one as it support 802.11ac and up to 1.7 Gbps maximum throughput. While we haven’t actually reviewed this router itself, there isn’t much doubt that it would suffice as a free Wi-Fi hotspot for people looking to use Wi-Fi instead of their own dataplans. Just remember that Facebook Wi-Fi requires you to check in so that you can use the free internet, but at the same time it helps the business get a better idea of who their audience is or at least who’s walking by to steal their Wi-Fi and how they can market towards them.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Facebook’s advertising or their promotional systems because they simply don’t work on a large scale. But, for smaller businesses with much more focused and geographically isolated audiences, there is a much better ROI and something like a Facebook Wi-Fi hotspot may totally make sense to them. The one thing that Facebook doesn’t clarify, however, is whether or not the business owners are being forced to use their own already existing internet to supply bandwidth or if Facebook Wi-Fi is being run by and paid for by Facebook itself. Judging by Facebook’s own FAQ it looks like you’d be running this Facebook Wi-Fi hotspot off of your own network, meaning that there’s a possibility your customers using free Wi-Fi could actually bog down your network if too many of them make use of it.

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Qualcomm has been fairly quiet about their high-end ambitions after what is expected to follow the soon-to-launch Snapdragon 805 chipset. The Snapdragon 805 is Qualcomm’s chip that will likely ship in devices next quarter and is marketed by Qualcomm as their 4K chip with the Adreno 420 GPU.

Now, even though the Snapdragon 805 (APQ8084) is a very powerful chip, it lacks 64-bit capability and doesn’t have an integrated modem, requiring a separate modem like Qualcomm’s 20nm MDM9x35 to enable cellular capability. It also sports an improved Krait CPU with a Krait 450 CPU compared to the Snapdragon 801 and 800’s Krait 400. However, it still doesn’t quite satisfy Qualcomm’s need for a very powerful chip that looks into the future. The Snapdragon 805 is the chip for now.

That leads us to today’s announcement of the Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 chips. The Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 mark the first time that Qualcomm has ever announced a high-end 64-bit chip and the first time they have implemented ARM’s own cores into their SOC. Both the Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 will feature ARM’s A57 and A53 64-bit cores with the Snapdragon 810 being a 4 big + 4 LITTLE and the 808 being 2 big + 4 LITTLE in a big.LITTLE configuration. This marks a pretty big shift in the company’s attitude towards big.LITTLE when you consider that they were saying that their cores were good enough that they didn’t need to do a big.LITTLE configuration. And the fact that Qualcomm now has a high-end SoC that supports the ARMv8 64-bit instruction set architecture. Keeping in mind that they are already shipping the Snapdragon 410 to the middle of the market with an A53-based 64-bit CPU.

To me, and many others, it seemed like Qualcomm was poo pooing what Samsung and others were doing, and now they’re effectively doing the same with these two chips’ CPU cores. However, Qualcomm explained that they were reacting to market demand for 64-bit capable chips and that they wanted to deliver them to their customers as requested. They said that because their own custom 64-bit ARM CPU cores weren’t necessarily timed for what the market has demanded, they have adjusted and are delivering a 64-bit solution as quickly and effectively as they can with ARM’s cores. This can all be traced back to Apple’s release of the A7 64-bit chip in the iPhone 5S and how much they fundamentally shook the foundations of the mobile SoC world and what people were demanding.

In addition to the 64-bit ARM A57 and A53 cores, Qualcomm is integrating their modem directly into the SoC’s die, bringing the SoC and modem into one chip once again. Because they are integrating their 20nm MDM9x35 chip, they already know what they can expect to see from the modem side of things in terms of performance and power savings. Additionally, because Qualcomm has been working on 20nm with their modem, they could proof and tweak the process in anticipation for these Snapdragon chips. Because they both share the same modem, they will both be capable of Cat 6 LTE enabling LTE Advanced features globally with a single design. When paired with Qualcomm’s RF360 front-end solution, both chips will be capable of 3×20 MHz Carrier Aggregation, resulting in up to 300 Mbps download speeds in various spectrum scenarios.

The Snapdragon 810 will also be one of Qualcomm’s 4K-focused chips with the introduction of a 4K HEVC hardware video encoder as well as a 14-bit dual ISP (image signal processor) capable of 1.2 GP/s and supporting image sensors up to 55 MP. And because Qualcomm wants to focus on 4K so heavily with the Snapdragon 810, they once again bumped the GPU to an Adreno 430 which should bring 30% faster graphics performance when compared to the Adreno 420 in the Snapdragon 805. They also took a very serious look at the GPGPU compute capability of the Adreno chip and improved it by 100% all while reducing power consumption by 20% when compared to its predecessor. The Adreno 430 will also support OpenGL ES 3.1 which was recently announced as a standard, even though I suspect many of their currently available OpenGL ES 3.0 capable hardware could be updated to 3.1 via driver update as well. In addition to OpenGL ES 3.1 support, the Adreno 430 will also support hardware tessellation, geometry shaders and programmable blending. The Snapdragon 810 also will be Qualcomm’s first SoC to support LPDDR4 memory which means better performance and lower power consumption for high-end devices utilizing this SoC.

One of my biggest complaints about many SoC vendors as they’ve started to try to attach themselves to 4K is the fact that none of these GPUs, no matter how powerful, are capable of 3D graphics in 4K. The amount of horsepower it takes to do 3d graphics in 4K is absolutely insane and is far outside of the realm of these mobile SoCs, for now. As such, we were given clarification that most gaming in 4K on these devices will be done at 1080P and upscaled to 4K on whatever display it’s being played on. So, whenever you hear 4K gaming being mentioned, that’s likely what you are going to be seeing, even though its really 1080P gaming being upscaled to 4K. After all, almost all of the mobile games are built for 720P or 1080P and not anything much higher.

In contrast to the Snapdragon 810, the Snapdragon 808 is a very similar chip to the Snapdragon 810 but it takes more of a smartphone focus rather than a 4K tablet one. Even though, either chip can be used for a smartphone or tablet, it would just be more cost prohibitive to put a Snapdragon 810 in a smartphone. The Snapdragon 808, as we stated earlier is a slightly differently configured chip with a dual ARM Cortex-A57 plus quad Cortex-A53 CPU configuration, so technically it’s a sexacore or hexacore chip rather than an octocore like the 810.

The Snapdragon 808 takes more of a focus on future smartphone resolutions with a targeted design for WQXGA resolution of 2560×1600 (close to the Oppo Find 7) even though that phone has a 2560×1440 resolution, it’s essentially the same resolution. It does, however, have an Adreno 418 GPU, which actually puts it below the Adreno 420 and Adreno 430 which are both targeted towards 4K resolutions. The Adreno 418 claims to deliver 20% faster 3d graphics than the Adreno 330 in the Snapdragon 800, giving a slight performance boost to smartphones even though they’ll be handling much higher resolutions. In fact, the 2560×1600 resolution is double the pixels of the current 1920×1080 on most smartphones, which in my eyes, should justify more than a 20% improvement over the current generation. The doubling of pixels is especially important when you consider exactly when this SoC is expected to be shipping in devices.

The Snapdragon 808 will also support 12-bit dual ISPs as opposed to the Snapdragon 810’s 14-bit dual ISPs, resulting in less performance available to the image sensors to utilize. It will also support LPDDR3 rather than LPDDR4 support in the Snapdragon 810.

Now, if you take into account the Snapdragon 810 platform as a whole, you would be looking at an 8-chip solution, assuming that you were to go with Qualcomm’s RF360 RF front-end (WTR 3925 and WTR 3905) as well as their PMICs (power management integrated circuits) and their 2×2 WLAN chip (QCA6174A) that enables 802.11ac and MU-MIMO. They also have an NFC chip (QCA1990) and an audio codec that round out their full Snapdragon 810 platform, which is if you want to go Qualcomm the whole way.

Based on what I see here, I would say that the Snapdragon 810 will likely be a pretty attractive part for many looking to win the spec wars against their competitors and that we’ll probably see it used in both phones and tablets. I say this primarily because of the fact that even though the Snapdragon 808 is a slightly dialed down version of the 810, I’m simply not convinced that it will be powerful enough to deliver a smooth experience at 2560×1600 and to enable what I’d expect to be upscaled gaming (in the short term). The Snapdragon 810 really looks to be a great part, but it will be interesting to see where it will fit in their stack once Qualcomm eventually shows off their own custom 64-bit CPU cores, the successor to Krait. Judging by Qualcomm’s own marketing they really seem to be focusing on the Snapdragon 810, and I can totally see why. I think we will see more devices launching with the 810 than we will with the 808, even though the 808 will be in a more affordable price range. A flagship chip is a for flagship devices and manufacturers want to make sure they are putting in the best possible at that time.

Both the Snapdragon 810 and Snapdragon 808 are expected to be sampling in the second half of 2014 and shipping in devices in the first half of 2015.

The post Qualcomm Announces 20nm Snapdragon 808 and Snapdragon 810 64-Bit Chips appeared first on VR World.

WH-5420CPE and WL-5470POE feature no less than eight operation modes with power output reaching 26 dBm. That is the highest power output in the industry (at this moment). Clear Signal Tech combines this high output with advanced filtering methods of cancelling out signal interference. WL-5470POE comes with a detachable 2 dBi dipole Antenna, while WH-5420CPE is an outdoor AP with water-proof enclosure and 14dBi Antenna.

All in all, interesting products coming from Taiwan…

The post AirLive launches interference-resistant Access Points appeared first on VR World.

If you’re outta finances to buy a new notebook that has dual-antennas and is able to enhance the reception on its own (for instance, I own HP’s tabletPC – tx1000 – and it has a single sucky antenna), option B is most likely.

The number of Wi-Fi USB adapters on the market is huge, but there are only several worth mentioning. My attention was caught by AirLive’s WL-1600USB. This small stick comes with 20 dBm for minimum transmission power. The device has integrated small antenna and external 5dBi Omni antenna for maximum coverage.

Two possible configurations... for maximum range ;)

In a land of wooden houses (US), that means you can reach the distance more than a mile away, with an average bandwidth of 12Mbps. Not too shabby. For cement-happy Europe, I’d be more than happy to have the device that captures Wi-Fi from one office to another. In case you want to share data, this device also can work as a Wi-Fi AP (through software, of course).
All in all, useful device.

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