Month: December 2016

Amazon has begun a commercial trial of its Prime Air autonomous drone delivery service, beginning with a single fulfilment centre in Cambridge, England. The first delivery, which took place on December 7, took just 13 minutes from the customer placing an order. There's a promotional video of the first Prime Air delivery embedded below.

To begin with, just two Amazon customers have been invited into the Prime Air trial, and they both live near the fulfilment centre. The customers can request drone delivery seven days a week, but only during daylight hours, and the weather has to be within certain limits. The first Prime Air delivery, in case you were wondering, was an Amazon Fire TV stick and a bag of popcorn.

Amazon has begun a commercial trial of its Prime Air autonomous drone delivery service, beginning with a single fulfilment centre in Cambridge, England. The first delivery, which took place on December 7, took just 13 minutes from the customer placing an order. There's a promotional video of the first Prime Air delivery embedded below.

To begin with, just two Amazon customers have been invited into the Prime Air trial, and they both live near the fulfilment centre. The customers can request drone delivery seven days a week, but only during daylight hours, and the weather has to be within certain limits. The first Prime Air delivery, in case you were wondering, was an Amazon Fire TV stick and a bag of popcorn.

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Recently I had the dubious honour of watching Late Shift, which bills itself as "the world's first cinematic interactive movie." As the movie unfolds, the cinema audience decides—using a smartphone app—how the protagonist responds to various situations, affecting how the story plays out on the big screen. There are about 180 different decision points that produce both big and small storyline branches, with seven different endings in total. The movie is being released at Vue cinemas in the UK in March 2017.

The actual running time of the movie is about 90 minutes, depending on the decisions you make, but the total amount of film, including all the endings and branches that you don't get to see, is about four hours. When I watched Late Shift, the audience's decisions led to an extremely quick and brutal ending; later, the UK distributor of the movie told me that, if we'd made another choice, the movie could've run for another 20 minutes.

A new short video gives us a sneak peak into Microsoft's hardware plans to take on Amazon's Echo and Google's Home. The company is partnering with audio giant Harman Kardon to debut what appears to be a cylindrical speaker device equipped with Cortana in 2017. The teaser shows a disembodied voice using the "Hey Cortana" command to play music through the speaker, while the top of the device shows what looks like a circular display glowing with blue light.

In a Windows blog post, Microsoft says this is just one of the hardware solutions to come equipped with Cortana next year. Although the video is short, the uncanny resemblance to Amazon's Echo is hard to deny. Amazon recently updated the Echo to include better speakers, but Microsoft apparently decided to go with the audio experts at Harman Kardon to emphasize the music-playing ability of the device.

The Echo also has a blue ring of light at the top of its cylindrical body that glows when you speak to Alexa, and Microsoft appears to be going for the same kind of functionality, except with a display. Over the past week, Microsoft has detailed its plans to bring Cortana across a number of devices, including Internet of Things products, but have a screen is a requirement. Depending on when Harman Kardon's device debuts next year, Microsoft may beat Amazon to the punch by coming out with a screen- and voice assistant-equipped speaker; rumors states Amazon may be working on something similar.

Enlarge (credit: Flickr/kennejima)

Apple has pulled the latest watchOS 3.1.1 update, after some users reported that it bricked their Apple Watch .

Unfortunate users that installed the update—which launched on Monday and promised various bug fixes—were left with watches displaying a red exclamation mark on the screen and a link to www.apple.com/help/watch. The issue appears to mostly affect the Apple Watch Series 2, although not every user has experienced problems with the update.

While it's not yet clear what has caused the issue, Apple's support page suggests trying to force restart the watch by pressing and holding the side button and the Digital Crown at the same time. Several Reddit threads on the update suggest that this rarely works, with many users forced to return the watch to an Apple Store, or mail it to Apple directly for fix or a replacement.