Month: March 2017

Enlarge / New Balance's $299 RunIQ Android Wear running watch. (credit: Valentina Palladino)

Nearly two months after Android Wear 2.0 launched, some smartwatches are finally getting the update. According to Android Wear Google forums, the Fossil Q Founder, Casio Smart Outdoor, and Tag Heuer Connected smartwatches have started receiving updates to Android Wear 2.0. Those are the only three devices being updated right now, and the official rollout for those devices should be completed by April 4.

Not every Android Wear watch will be updated to 2.0, and the process to get all the devices updated will likely be long. Starting with these three particular devices is interesting, mostly because the Huawei Watch and LG Watch Urbane 2nd Edition, which have been running the Android Wear 2.0 developer preview since mid-2016, aren't included.

According to the forum, manufacturers have to green-light the update, so we'll be waiting to hear from each smartwatch maker on a timeline for its devices. The update also isn't across the board based on manufacturer, either. Fossil is slated to update its Q Marshal and Q Wander smartwatches to Android Wear 2.0 as well, but only the Q Found is included in this wave. Until now, most manufacturers have said their devices will be updated sometime in spring 2017.

Enlarge (credit: Dunkin' Donuts)

Google wants to make your morning commute as easy as possible with a new feature in its navigation app Waze. The company added an "order ahead" feature to Waze and teamed up with Dunkin' Donuts to let users order coffee and breakfast from within the Waze app. Now you can place an order with Dunkin' Donuts on your way to work and pick it up immediately, skipping the long and tedious drive-through line.

The caveat is that you need to have the Dunkin' Donuts mobile app installed on your device as well, and you need to be a Dunkin' Donuts Perks member. If that's you, all you need to do is connect the Dunkin' Donuts app with your Perks account information to the Waze app, and then you'll be able to place an order with one tap in Waze. Dunkin' Donuts already has an order-ahead feature in its own mobile app, and requiring both apps to have this feature work in Waze is disappointing. However, the feature is mostly about streamlining the process of getting coffee and breakfast during your morning commute in which you're already using Waze for navigation and traffic information.

According to a report by the Chicago Tribune, you won't pay more for coffee when using the Waze-Dunkin' collaboration feature. Dunkin' Donuts agreed to spend more in Waze advertising rather than get a commission off the food and drink orders made with Waze. Ordering ahead has become a popular perk for many companies, including Taco Bell, McDonald's, and Starbucks, so it's not surprising that Dunkin' Donuts would want to expand this feature by partnering with Google and Waze.

Blue Origin

Even as Blue Origin has talked up its ambitions to build a larger New Glenn rocket this year, the company also continues to finalize work on its suborbital space tourism vehicle, New Shepard. On Wednesday, Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos released some illustrations of what the experience might look like from inside the capsule.

The images show six leather, recumbent seats arranged around the interior of the spacecraft, and each seat features a large window view and a small personal view screen to track the flight. Passengers are wearing Blue Origin pullovers, apparently their "launch suits." The images also show a brightly lit console in the middle of the capsule—but this isn't a table or an in-flight service bar; it's the capsule's escape motor. The company demonstrated the functionality of this feature with a dramatic in-flight escape test last October.

Enlarge / The announcement of the Creators Update in October 2016.

Although it has been available to Insiders for a few weeks, today's the day that the Windows 10 version 1703, the Creators Update, is hitting Windows Update. The first automatic upgrades to the latest Windows 10 version will start happening at about 10am PDT, and over the next few weeks, the upgrade will be pushed to more and more Windows 10 systems. Here's our review of the update, taking a look at the biggest changes that the Creators Update contains.

The next big update to Windows 10 is nearly upon us: Windows 10 version 1703, known as the Creators Update, will be published to Windows Update next Patch Tuesday, on April 11th.

The final build is—probably—15063. That build is already available to insiders and should soon become available for the Windows 10 Media Creation tool, but we also know that there are going to be some patches materializing some time between now and when that happens. There's a small chance those patches will bump the build number; more likely, they will instead bump the patch number, which is currently a pristine and perfect 0 on the desktop. The mobile build has already been bumped to 15063.2 to handle an installation problem when upgrading from version 1607.