Technology - Google News

Beats announces Fit Pro earbuds with wing tip design and $200 price - The Verge
Apple Wants iPhones to Detect Car Crashes, Auto-Dial 911 - The Wall Street Journal
'5D' storage could fit 500TB on a CD-sized glass disc - Engadget

Beats announces Fit Pro earbuds with wing tip design and $200 price - The Verge

Posted: 01 Nov 2021 07:00 AM PDT

Beats today announced its latest wireless earbuds, the $199.99 Beats Fit Pro. The new product slots into the Apple-owned brand's lineup between the Studio Buds, which were released earlier this year, and the Powerbeats Pro / Powerbeats. The Fit Pros have active noise cancellation, IPX4 water and sweat resistance, and up to seven hours of continuous playback (or 30 hours of total listening when you include case recharges).

The most noticeable thing about the new earbuds are the wing tips that are a permanent part of their design. Beats says it did a ton of research and user testing to land on the right material and level of flexibility. The wing tips are intended to help the Fit Pros stay locked in your ears no matter how strenuous your workout routine might be.

Unlike the Studio Buds, which lacked Apple's usual silicon inside, the Fit Pro buds include the H1 chip and thus come with the entire suite of features like one-step pairing, automatic syncing across your iCloud devices, auto switching between Apple hardware products, and more. They also include dynamic head tracking for spatial audio, and Beats even integrated the brand-new skin detect sensor that only just debuted on the third-generation AirPods.

The noise cancellation system is essentially the same as what's on the AirPods Pro, so it should prove rather effective at quieting the outside world. When ANC and transparency mode are both off, the Fit Pro buds still use Apple's Adaptive EQ to optimize audio performance based on your particular ear shape.

Beats will offer the Fit Pro earbuds in four colors: black, white, gray, and purple / pink. Preorders start today and they ship on November 5th. You don't need to wait long to read the verdict on the latest Beats buds: I've been testing them for several days now and have found that they're the company's best, most focused product since the Powerbeats Pro.

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Apple Wants iPhones to Detect Car Crashes, Auto-Dial 911 - The Wall Street Journal

Posted: 01 Nov 2021 06:00 AM PDT

Beginning next year, iPhone users who are in a car accident could have their phone dial 911 automatically.

Apple Inc. plans next year to roll out a product feature called "crash detection" for iPhones and Apple Watches, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and people familiar with the feature.

Crash detection uses data...

Beginning next year, iPhone users who are in a car accident could have their phone dial 911 automatically.

Crash detection uses data from sensors built into Apple devices including the accelerometer to detect car accidents as they occur, for instance by measuring a sudden spike in gravity, or "g," forces on impact.

The feature would mark the latest move by Apple and its competitors to use motion-sensor technology to build safety functions into their devices. Apple introduced a fall-detection feature in its smartwatch several years ago that senses when wearers have taken a hard fall and dials 911 if they don't respond to a notification asking if they are OK. The company this year added a feature to the newest version of its iPhone operating system that assesses the walking steadiness of users.

The timing of the new feature could change, or Apple could choose not to release it, people familiar with the company's development process said.

Apple has added more health and safety features to its iPhones and other products.

Photo: carlos garcia rawlins/Reuters

An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.

Apple has been testing the crash-detection feature in the past year by collecting data shared anonymously from iPhone and Apple Watch users, the documents show. Apple products have already detected more than 10 million suspected vehicle impacts, of which more than 50,000 included a call to 911.

Apple has been using the 911 call data to improve the accuracy of its crash-detection algorithm, since an emergency call associated with a suspected impact gives Apple more confidence that it is indeed a car crash, according to the documents.

The documents don't specify how Apple users are sharing information with the company so it can test its new crash-detection algorithm.

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How helpful would you find a 'crash-detection' feature on your iPhone or Apple Watch? Join the conversation below.

Apple wouldn't be the first company to roll out a crash-detection feature for its smartphones. Google added such a feature to its Pixel smartphone in 2019. A number of apps on Apple's App Store also offer automatic car crash detection, which they say is possible through AI and location tracking.

General Motors Co. 's OnStar subsidiary has offered "automatic crash response" since 1996 in vehicles equipped with OnStar. That service responds to more than 6,000 crash notifications a month, according to a GM spokeswoman. OnStar recently introduced a subscription smartphone app that can be used in any vehicle and provides a service called "mobile crash response."

Apple wants to offer more health and safety features with its devices, the Journal has reported. Those include a blood-pressure measure and thermometer in the Apple Watch, algorithms to detect depression and cognitive decline in the iPhone, as well as posture monitoring and a thermometer in AirPods.

Write to Rolfe Winkler at rolfe.winkler@wsj.com

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'5D' storage could fit 500TB on a CD-sized glass disc - Engadget

Posted: 01 Nov 2021 02:54 AM PDT

Using high-speed lasers, researchers have created "5D" data storage technology that could allow 500 TB of data to be written to a CD-sized glass disc, according to the Optica society. The technique uses higher writing speeds that might finally make it feasible to use the technology for archival and other purposes.

With 5D optical storage, each file is uses three layers of nanoscale dots. The dots' size, orientation and position within the three standard dimensions, make up the five "dimensions." The dots change the polarization of light travelling through the disc which is read using a microscope and polarizer.

We've seen 5D optical storage before, but there were a number of problems — particularly the slow writing speeds that made the technology impractical. It has huge upsides for (extremely) long-term storage, though. It's been estimated that the storage medium could withstand temperatures up to 1,000 degrees C and last 13.8 billion years at room temperature without degrading.

To overcome the speed problem, researchers used a femtosecond laser with a high repetition rate. Rather than writing directly in the glass, they used the laser to produce a phenomenon called near-field enhancement, that creates tiny structures using a few weak light pulses. Those can be used to enhance the circular voids generated by a more powerful, single-pulse "micro-explosion." This technique "minimized the thermal damage that has been problematic for other approaches that use high-repetition-rate lasers," according to the paper.

Using the new technique, the team was able to write 5GB of text data ono a silica glass disc the size of a conventional CD with nearly 100 percent readout accuracy. "With the writing density available from the method, the disc would be able to hold 500 terabytes of data," the researchers said. They were also able to write at speeds or around a million voxels per second, or about 230 KB per second.

That might sound slow, but by introducing parallel writing, you could feasibly fill a 500TB disc in about 60 days. That could provide a way to backup reams of valuable data, essentially forever. "With the current system, we have the ability to preserve terabytes of data, which could be used, for example, to preserve information from a person's DNA," said research team leader Peter G. Kazansky.

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