Month: October 2022

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  The Pixel Watch colors, and their default bands. There are three watch body colors here: black, silver, and gold.

Google is clawing its way back into wearable relevance. Today the company took the wraps off what is officially its first self-branded smartwatch: the Pixel Watch. Google started revamping its wearable platform, Wear OS, in partnership with Samsung. While Wear OS 3, the new version of Google's wearable platform, technically launched with the Galaxy Watch 4 last year, this is the first time we'll be seeing an unskinned version on a real device.

First up: prices. Google is asking a lot here, with the Wi-Fi model going for $349 and the LTE version clocking in at $399. The Galaxy Watch 4, which has a better SoC, and the Apple Watch SE, which has a way, way better SoC, both start at $250. Google is creating an uphill battle for itself with this pricing.

Google and Samsung's partnership means the Pixel Watch is running a Samsung Exynos 9110 SoC, with a cheap Cortex M33 co-processor tacked on for low-power watch face updates and 24/7 stat tracking. This SoC is a 10 nm chip with two Cortex A53 cores and an Arm Mali T720 MP1 GPU. If you can't tell from those specs, this is a chip from 2018 that was first used in the original Samsung Galaxy Watch. For whatever reason, Google couldn't get Samsung's new chip from the Galaxy Watch 4, an Exynos W920 (a big upgrade at 5 nm, dual Cortex A55s, and a Mali-G68 MP2 GPU). It's hard to understand why this is so expensive.

Enlarge / The Pixel 7 Pro colors. The gold one on the end is called "hazel." (credit: Google)

The Google Pixel 7 and 7 Pro have been officially unveiled. While these phones were technically officially announced forever ago, Google came clean about all the details today. The big news is that the prices aren't changing: It's $599 for the Pixel 7 and $899 for the Pixel 7 Pro, which still makes both phones a very good deal. The devices ship on October 13, and Google is also doing a little better with the device's country distribution.

First, though, the phones. The Pixel 7 is an evolution of the Pixel 6, with the same sizes, prices, and basic design. That's actually a first for Google. The company's hardware division has dramatically changed phone hardware year to year, which often wasn't by choice since it would bounce from one manufacturer to another. Now, though, Google Hardware has matured to the point where operations are stable enough to make an iterative flagship, and that's probably going to be the story of the Pixel 7.

So what changes are there over the Pixel 6? The headline feature is the new aluminum camera bar, which replaces the old glass and plastic camera bar from the Pixel 6. The Pixel 6's one big sheet of glass over the camera lenses could lead to some light glare across your photos, so these smaller, more isolated lenses seem designed to prevent that. Google says the 7 Pro camera bar is polished aluminum, while the base model Pixel 7 has a sandblasted matte finish.

Enlarge / Matter promises to make smart home devices work with any control system you want to use, securely. This marketing image also seems to promise an intriguing future involving smart mid-century modern chairs and smart statement globes. (credit: CSA)

The specification for Matter 1.0 was released on Tuesday—all 899 pages of it. More importantly, smart home manufacturers and software makers can now apply for this cross-compatibility standard, have their products certified for it, and release them. What does that mean for you, the person who actually buys and deals with this stuff?

At the moment, not much. If you have smart home devices set up, some of them might start working with Matter soon, either through firmware upgrades to devices or hubs. If you're deciding whether to buy something now, you might want to wait to see if it's slated to work with Matter. The first devices with a Matter logo on the box could appear in as little as a month. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Samsung's SmartThings division have all said they're ready to update their core products with Matter compatibility when they can.

That's how Matter will arrive, but what does Matter do? You have questions, and we've got... well, not definitive answers, but information and scenarios. This is a gigantic standards working group trying to keep things moving across both the world's largest multinational companies and esoteric manufacturers of tiny circuit boards. It's a whole thing. But we'll try to answer some self-directed questions to provide some clarity.

Enlarge / This Kiwibot robot is waiting to be loaded with my muffin. Afterward, a worker carried it across the street on the scooter. (credit: Timothy B. Lee)

I’d been following the robot for about five minutes when it seemed to get hopelessly lost.

The four-wheeled vehicle, the size and shape of a large cooler, was navigating the campus of Howard University in Washington, DC. A digital display on the front showed a pair of pixellated cartoon eyes, but the robot was struggling to understand its surroundings.

The robot repeatedly stopped, turned around, retraced its steps, and turned again. When it reached an intersection, it seemed afraid to cross the street. Instead, it turned around and went back for some 200 feet before freezing once again.

Enlarge / Tech decommissioning businesses have been transformed from what some describe as a collection of "man with a van" outfits into a regulated industry. (credit: Lorne Campbell, Guzelian, and SWEEEP Kuusakoski)

Mick Payne remembers the moment the madness of the way we dispose of our data was brought home to him.

The chief operating officer of Techbuyer, an IT asset disposal company in Harrogate, was standing in a large windowless room of a data center in London surrounded by thousands of used hard drives owned by a credit card company. Knowing he could wipe the drives and sell them on, he offered a six-figure sum for all the devices.

The answer was no. Instead, a lorry would be driven up to the site, and the data-storing devices would be dropped inside by authorized security personnel. Then industrial machines would shred them into tiny fragments.