Apple Watch Series 3 can track skiing and snowboarding

Thanks to watchOS 4.2 apps like Slopes, snoww, Squaw Alpine, Snocru and Ski Tracks  can now accurately report metrics like vertical descent, distance, number of runs, average speed and calories burned thanks to the built-in altimeter which can develop elevation.

More importantly, this information is gathered and reported towards a user's fitness performance. Being able to track calorie burn, run count, and speed make use of hardware like the altimeter elevation readings, accelerometer and GPS.

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Sonos Song Series celebrates 20th anniversary of seminal 'Northern Touch' hip-hop track

Rascalz, Thurst, Kardinal Offishall and Choclair celebrate 'Northern Touch' at the Sonos Song Stories event in Toronto

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Toronto - Sonos has sponsored various Song Stories events across the world and in downtown Toronto yesterday, it celebrated 'Northern Touch', a collaborative hip-hop track by artists Rascalz, Kardinal Offishall, Choclair, Checkmate and Thrust, which put the Canadian hip-hop scene on the map even if it got very little airplay or support at home.

The song, which represented various locales in Canada, blew up on American and International radio stations and its video was one of the first works by Little X, who is now known as Director X and is one of the most sought after musiv video directors as well as a feature film director working on a Superfly reboot this year. The Northern Touch video also launched the career of model Melyssa Ford.

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BlackBerry shutting down BB10 store, paid apps to disappear on April 1

BlackBerry OS 10 has hung around longer than expected even after developers and top-tier apps have long moved away from the failed platform. While many intrepid and loyal BB10 users have tried to get by with sideloading Android APKs just to get by.

The inevitable is coming to pass, however, as paid apps on the BB10 will be gone by April 1. BlackBerry will continue maintainance and support until 2019, but it really is time to let go and transition to another platform. BlackBerry transitioned to Android way back in 2015, and then effectively sold or licensed off its hardware business to various players, the most notable of which is TCL whose revivalist KEYOne handset brings the best of BlackBerry's design and security while offering the Android ecosystem and all the apps and services that come with it.

Source: The Verge

Vivo pushes boundaries again with Apex concept phone

Vivo made a pretty big splash at CES early last month with its work with Synaptics by putting the fingerprint reader on the phone’s OLED display. The Chinese company looks to steal the spotlight yet again at Mobile World Congress with the new concept phone it’s showing off. Called the Apex, this nearly bezel-less phone has what Vivo is describing as a “half-screen in-display fingerprint scanning technology.” However, as The Verge points out, it’s more like taking up a third of the screen, which still isn’t bad idea. For extra security, sometimes you can enable the input of two different fingerprints to have it unlock the screen.

But what happens to the other key sensors you find out the phone? Vivo’s decided to make this come out at the top of the device like a periscope or pop-up flash when you turn the selfie camera on. A pretty nifty move. It takes less than a second for it to get ready for use. As for the earpiece speaker, Vivo’s approach is to make the entire screen vibrate itself like a speaker so you can hear calls even without completely holding the device close to your ear. Vivo says it doesn’t have plans to release an actual device based on this form but it does show us the possibility of this happening and almost completely bezel-less phones being in our near future.