Review: Fitbit Ionic

 

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Fitbit is the leading wearable company in the world. It has outlasted the competition in the entry-level and mid-range with a succession of truly transformative fitness trackers backed by the industry's best analytics and most comprehensive apps.

The only area where Fitbit has seemeed lacking has been in the higher end. The Fitbit Blaze was sorely lacking many of the touchpoints that made smartwatches popular. While it had the tracking aspect nailed, it didn't offer much in terms of apps and other functionality. Now we have the Fitbit Ionic, which leapfrogs its predecessor in many ways.

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Amazon now offers a waterproof Kindle Oasis eReader

Amazon.ca announced its most advanced Kindle ever – the all-new Kindle Oasis.  It is the first-ever waterproof Kindle, boasting an IPX8 water resistance rating. Designed so readers can take their favourite stories even more places, it is protected against immersion in up to two meters of fresh water for up to 60 minutes. Plus, it’s designed to withstand getting splashed at the beach or dropped in the bath tub, hot tub, or pool.

With a larger 7-inch and 300 ppi display, it also fits over 30 per cent more words per page for fewer page turns. Plus, it has the fastest page turns of any Kindle. Despite an even larger display, the all-new Kindle Oasis weighs only 194 grams, 10 grams less than the best-selling Kindle Paperwhite.

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Google tries out autoplaying videos on YouTube app

While I’m personally not a fan of autoplaying videos in my apps, some prefer to have this as a matter of convenience. That’s why we aren’t surprised Google is experimenting with this feature in its YouTube app. Videos will start to play when you scroll through the Home section but you don’t have to be worried about being startled by audio as these videos will play without sound but will have subtitles overlaid. And if you’re worried about this eating up your data, only one video will play automatically at a time and you have the option to turn this feature off or have it work only on Wi-Fi. It must be noted that this feature isn’t available to all users as YouTube is just testing the feature out. Whether they roll this out to all users is something we don’t know right now.

Source: Android Authority

OnePlus has been collecting user data without permission

OnePlus seems keen on getting on the bad side of its users. This time, a software engineer named Christopher Moore discovers that the company has been sending not just analytics data of its phones’ users but other personally identifiable pieces of data like IMEI numbers, MAC addresses, mobile network names and IMSI prefixes, serial numbers, and many more. Moore discovered this activity while participating in a hack challenge. His OnePlus 2 was sending time-stamped information about locks, unlocks, and unexpected reboots, too. The code responsible for collecting this data is part of OnePlus’ Device Manager and Device Manager Provider.

Addressing this issue, OnePlus claims you can turn this activity off on your own saying, “We securely transmit analytics in two different streams over HTTPS to an Amazon server. The first stream is usage analytics, which we collect in order for us to more precisely fine tune our software according to user behavior. This transmission of usage activity can be turned off by navigating to ‘Settings’ -> ‘Advanced’ -> ‘Join user experience program’. The second stream is device information, which we collect to provide better after-sales support.” We’re not sure why OnePlus didn’t make this an opt-in feature if all they’re really after is analytics data and supposedly better after-sales support (which we might want to point out is something people have been complaining about). It frankly leaves a bad taste in our mouths. 

Source: Android Authority + Android Police