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.

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...

Flexible Camera Developed That Can Be Wrapped Around Objects

A team led by an Indian-origin professor at Columbia University has created a novel sheet camera that can be wrapped around everyday objects to capture images that cannot be taken with one or more conventional cameras. "Cameras today capture the world from essentially a single point in space. While the camera industry has made remarkable progress in shrinking the camera to a tiny device with ever increasing imaging quality, we are exploring a radically different approach to imaging," said Shree K Nayar, computer science professor at Columbia University. "We believe there are numerous applications for cameras that are large in format but very thin and highly flexible," added Nayar who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Ranchi, in 1984. Nayar's team designed and fabricated a flexible lens array that adapts its optical properties when the sheet camera is bent. This optical adaptation enables the device to produce high quality images over a wide ...

Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) Leaked in Press Images

The anticipated successor to the popular Samsung Galaxy J1, tipped to be called the Galaxy J1 (2016), has once again been leaked in images on the Web. While in the previous leaks we have seen the unannounced smartphone in its Black colour variant, the new leaked image shows the handset in two additional colour variants. The image tweeted by @evleaks on Monday shows the Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016) smartphone in Gold and White colour variants. The design of the handset also fall in line with the models leaked in images previously. It is worth mentioning that the screen bezel seen in the image stay black in all the three colour variants. The smartphone is seen featuring a physical home button, along with a multi-window, and a back capacitive button on either side. At the back, the smartphone sports a camera at the centre with a LED flash and a speaker on either sides. Samsung is yet to announce the smartphone. The Samsung Galaxy J1 (2016)leaked in images last month as well...

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