Month: January 2016

Misfit has announced its newest device, the Misfit Ray, at CES 2016. The thin, tubular tracker is the first device to come from Misfit since the company was acquired by Fossil last year, although it's unclear how much input the fashion company had in the development of this device.

Until now, Misfit's trackers have been extremely minimalist: disks with small LED lights attached to thin bands, ideal for drawing as little attention as possible. The Ray shows a different approach, as it is designed in a longer, more narrow fashion, but it remains subtle and unassuming at 38mm long and just 12mm thick. Rather than many LEDs, there's just one on the Ray, which will display different colors to alert you to text, call, and alarm notifications from your phone. The Ray has a tri-axis accelerometer inside and will track everything the Misfit Shine can, including activity and sleep. It has a vibration motor as well, so it will buzz when you've been inactive for too long or when you have an alert coming in.

There's nothing terribly unique about the band, other than the fact that you can take the module off of it so you can wear it as a necklace or use it in different accessories. The module itself is water-resistant up to 50 meters, so you won't have to worry about damaging splashes or accidental dunks. Like many of Misfit's other trackers, the Ray's battery is non-rechargeable and only needs to be replaced every six months.

The UHD Alliance (UHDA), a who's who of the TV and movie industries, has unveiled Ultra HD Premium, a new standard for UHD (4K) TVs that arrives just in time for everyone to regret picking up a new 4K TV for Christmas.

While the core resolution of UHD remains unchanged at 3840×2160 pixels, any device bearing the UHD Premium logo will have to meet minimum specs for high dynamic range (HDR), peak luminance, black levels, and wide colour gamut, among others (full specs below). Effectively, the UHD Premium logo guarantees that the TV, device (such as a UHD Blu-ray player), or content fully supports HDR, and will work with UHD streaming services from the likes of Netflix and Amazon.

That's not say that a device without the shiny new logo won't be up to scratch—LG has already announced that its 2016 OLED 4K lineup "exceeds" the specification—but it should help clear up consumer confusion surrounding various standards like UHD and HDR. The UHDA promises that certified devices will be be put through their paces via "independent centres around the globe."

As with last year's CES, Nvidia devoted its keynote this year to machine learning and self-driving cars, unveiling a new version of its Drive PX system. But while Drive PX 2—which Nvidia describes as a "self driving supercomputer that fits nicely in your trunk," with the "processing power of 150 MacBook Pros"—will no doubt help partner Volvo with its first public trial of autonomous driving, it's what's under the bonnet that's exciting.

Drive PX 2, which consists of two SoCs paired to two graphics cards, is the first device from Nvidia to feature its new Pascal GPU and the first to be fabricated on TSMC's 16nm FinFET process. Not only that, but the new SoC is also quite exciting, mashing together two of the company's custom Denver CPU cores (as used in the Nexus 9 tablet) with four ARM Cortex A57 cores. The two GPUs are connected to the SoCs via a pair of discrete MXM (Mobile PCI Express Module) cards.

This configuration is a marked departure from the original Drive PX, which sported dual Tegra X1 SoCs with four Cortex A57s cores and four Cortex A53s cores along with an integrated Maxwell GPU.