CES 2018: GoPro exits the drone business lays off hundreds of employees

GoPro is ceasing production of its drone line while laying off hundreds of its employees. Drones are extremely competitive and fall within a wide range of prices and GoPro can't compete in the current climate. GoPro's Karma Drone will be the last product to come from GoPro, although there's little confidence to buy the device now that there will be no continuity and questionable support and service.

Source: The Verge

CES 2018: Samsung brings S Pen to its new Notebook 9 Pen laptop

Edgar Alvarez/Engadget

If you’re a fan of Samsung’s S Pen and want to bring that experience to your laptop, you’re going to be interested in one of Samsung’s newest laptops. The Notebook 9 Pen is an ultralight laptop made with a magnesium alloy called Metal-12, which keeps the 13.3-inch laptop at 2.2 pounds. It won’t turn heads looks-wise but that isn’t its selling point anyway. The Notebook 9 Pen, as we mentioned, supports the S Pen, making this a good tool for artists who want to use this convertible laptop for sketching or if you prefer jotting down notes by hand. The S Pen now offers 4,096 pressure levels and has a 0.7mm nib. The laptop also comes with a new Voice Note feature that captures conversations around you and lets you take down notes as the app records audio. You can also make GIFs by using the S Pen to capture snippets from the video it sees on your screen.

Specs-wise, the Notebook 9 Pen is powered by an 8^th-generaion Intel Core i7 processor with up to 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 512GB SSD. It has a 1080p display and unfortunately a limited number of I/O ports (one USB-C port, one USB 3.0 port, a microSD slot, and an HDMI out). No word yet on pricing and availability of this device.

Source: Engadget

Report claims Google keeps getting its Gbikes stolen, loses between 100 and 250 a week

The Pancake of Heaven/Wikimedia

Google deployed over 1,100 bicycles or “Gbikes” for its employees to use on its sprawling campus but it seems those bikes have been making more and more trips outside of the company’s campus—with both employees and locals of Mountain View using these outside of Google’s grounds. The company reportedly loses between 100 and 250 of these bikes a week. The two-wheelers showing up everywhere from local school grounds to neighbors’ lawns, to the bottom of the town creek, and even on the roof of O’Malley’s Sports Pub. One was even seen in a TV commercial for the cosmetics brand Garnier and another made it as far as Mexico.

According to the Wall Street Journal report, it seems like locals feel comfortable “renting” these bikes from the company like the tech giant owes it to the community or something, even Mayor Ken Rosenberg admitted to have used one of these bikes. Google is trying to lessen the loss of its Gbikes though by installing GPS trackers on the bikes or toying with the idea of locking the bikes with an app. The company even hires a team of 30 contractors to help retrieve these missing bikes.

Source: Gizmodo

CES 2018: LG’s new 65-inch OLED TV concept can be rolled up like a poster

LG showed off is Wallpaper TV at last year’s CES. This time around, the company is going thinner and is showing off a new concept that makes that TV look bulky. This new concept is a 65-inch 4K OLED TV that is basically like a giant poster. It comes with a giant, block-like base where the TV rolls back into when not in use. Why would anyone want a TV like this, you ask? LG argues that this will be a space saver and boost portability (not that we’d want to lug around a 65-inch TV, but we get the idea). We don’t know when this concept might actually be seen in stores but as BGR points out, it does give us hope that those “electronic newspapers” that you can stow away might be in our future sooner than we think.