Android Wear 1.4 Update Brings 'Doze' Battery Saving Feature

Google last week detailed its Marshmallow update for the Android Wear operating system but seems to have missed one feature, Doze for the smartwatches. The update changelog by Google last week mentioned battery life improvements but failed to reveal anything about the inclusion of the Doze feature.

In the meantime however, v1.4 update release notes by Motorola for its new Moto 360 smartwatch reveal an Android 6.0 Marshmallow feature for smartphones has come to the wearable platform - Doze. It will improve the battery life on wearables like it does for handsets. The release note say that Doze "recognises when your Moto 360 is idle and automatically goes into a deep sleep state. How does it work? When your watch is not charging and not in use, Doze mode shuts down unnecessary background processes to optimise power."

The Android v1.4 update is based on API 23 and Android 6.0 Marshmallow, iterating over API 22. Wayne Piekarski, a Senior Developer Advocate at Google (Android), in a recent Google+ post said the update will be rolling out to all the Android Wear devices "over the next few weeks." It will also be reaching Casio Smart Outdoor Watch and Huawei Watch for Ladies.

Android Wear v1.4 will let users play sounds and take calls right from the smartwatch (for those watches with speakers) and allow users to type out and dictate messages on WhatsApp, WeChat, Viber and other instant messaging clients, amongst other changes. The update also supports six new languages -namely, Mandarin, Cantonese, Indonesian, Polish, Dutch, and Thai. More details, can be found on the company's Android Developer's blog post.

The update also brings the ability to expand a card, bring up apps, and return to the watch face with a push, lift or shake gestures.

Virtual reality set to transform filmmaking

Chris Milk stepped onto a TED Conference stage and took the audience on an awe-inducing trip into the future of movies. While much of the early attention on virtual reality has focused on use of the immersive technology in video games, Milk and his US startup Vrse are using it to transform storytelling and filmgoing. "We have just started to scratch the surface of the true power of virtual reality," Milk said. "It's not a video game peripheral. It connects humans to other humans in a profound way... I think virtual reality has the potential to actually change the world." He had everyone in the Vancouver audience at TED , which ended Friday, hold Google Cardboard viewers to their eyes for what was billed as the world's collective virtual reality experience. Google Cardboard gear is literally that -- cardboard

Explained: Camera Improvements in the New HTC 10

With the HTC 10, the Taiwanese company is promising to undo the past wrongs in the cameras of its previous flagship phones. The camera has long a weak point in HTC devices. At first, HTC sacrificed image resolution in the M8 and made the size of individual pixels larger to capture more light (what HTC called Ultrapixel). But the resulting 4 megapixel images were often fuzzy, especially when cropped or enlarged. To fix the issue, in its next flagship - the M9 - HTC went with smaller individual pixels in a 20-megapixel camera last year, but it still underperformed in extreme situations, such as indoors and close-ups. In the HTC 10, the company attempts to strike a balance with larger individual pixels (1.55µm), but not as large as before and a 12 megapixel sensor in its camera coupled with a ƒ/1.8 lens. HTC accepts that in the imaging performance in the M9 was not up to the kind of spec of what they really like to see in a flagship. HTC is giving a slight boost to the selfi...

Freedom 251: 30,000 Units Sold, Components for Up to 2.5 Million Will Be Imported

Ringing Bells, the makers of the Rs. 251 smartphone - the Freedom 251 - confirmed to Gadgets 360 on Tuesday that it has still only accepted payments for 30,000 units of the phone. It also added that the components for these phones will be imported, and only assembled in India, not made here. Ringing Bells stopped accepting orders on February 19, and claims to have received over 70 million registrations. The company President and Director both repeatedly stated that the price of the phone would be made possible through economies of scale, and making the phone in India to cut out import costs. Economies of scale? However, in a discussion with Gadgets 360 the company revealed that it had only sold 30,000 units of the phone on day one. The company has now confirmed that it has not sent out the payment emails to anyone else who registered - "we were working out details of cash on delivery, which we are announcing now, so we will be sending emails to the first 2.5...

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