Today is the last day of year 2021, as we continue our fight against COVID-19 and its Delta/Omicron variants.
The cover of the calendar is of the Lavender fields in Provence, France – hoping for a revisit when travel restrictions ease! Watercolour by @kkmakesandbakes.
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Calendars painted by @kkmakesandbakes.
Here’s wishing everyone who celebrates Christmas a very Blessed X’mas!
This watercolour painting of a X’mas Kitty was painted by my wife. Check out her other paintings on Instagram at @kkmakesandbakes.
May peace and love be with you always!
The second-generation Google Nest Hub (S$139) goes beyond being a speaker and display to monitoring your sleep with Sleep Sensing to help you get a better night’s sleep.
The Google Nest Hub (2nd gen) is available online for S$139 on Google Store, as well as Courts, Challenger, and Shopee.
I’ve been using the first generation Google Nest Hub at home for years, and it’s brought hours of entertainment to the family.
The second-generation Google Nest Hub reprises many of these same functionalities.
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Unboxing the Google Nest Hub (2nd Gen).
It is a speaker/display to stream music/videos from music services such as Spotify and YouTube Music, and shows from Netflix and Disney+ etc; or to cast music/videos from the smartphone.
Huawei launched a series of new products, headlined by its folding clamshell smartphone – the P50 Pocket – a direct competitor to Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 3.
Huawei joined forces with prominent haute couture designer, Iris Van Herpen, in a cross-industry collaboration to create the Huawei P50 Pocket Premium Edition.
The global launch event saw Huawei unveil a slew of new products in defiance to the two-year-old ban by the US which has deprived the Chinese company access to critical semiconductor chips and software.
The products launched include the following – all part of a smart and fully connected ecosystem based on Huawei’s HarmonyOS – the company’s substitute for Google’s Android OS.
More details below from the press release, on the Huawei P50 Pocket.
tech4xmas: Beautifully crafted aromatherapy diffusers for the home, with a wide selection of relaxing and fragrant essential oils for Christmas. S$218 with free delivery.
FLO Diffuser Home Christmas Bundle (S$218 with free delivery)
The essential oil nebulising diffuser is waterless and heatless, works silently, powerful enough to spread the scent up to 800 sqft within the first two minutes.
My own diffuser at home.
It is suitable for medium-sized areas such as the living room and bedroom.
There is an LED light with changing colours to serve as mood lighting.
I like how the knob allows me to control how strong a nebulising effect.
This is a fantastic Christmas for the home.
The FLO e-shop offers a wide selection of oils and nebulisers with some in the form of Christmas trees and angels.
tech4xmas: If you’re looking for an affordable pair of earbuds with good sound quality that’s synonymous with Sony, the no-frills WF-C500 true wireless earbuds will make a good Christmas gift.
The Sony WF-C500 earbuds offers good audio quality at an affordable price.
The WF-C500 offers good value-for-money in terms of sound quality but at the expense of features that are found in other earbuds of similar price range or higher.
At an affordable S$139, the WF-C500 has had to forego frills like noise cancellation, transparency mode, wireless charging and automatic pausing when you remove one or both earbuds.
The earbuds are IPX4 rated so they’re splash resistant.
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Freshly unboxed Sony WF-C500 True Wireless Earbuds.
Battery life is reasonable at 10 hours with full charge, plus an additional 10 hours from the pill-shaped charging case.
This is plenty long for me although it’s common for charging cases to provide twice the full charge of their earbuds.
I like that a quick charge of 10 minutes gave me a full hour of mileage.
In this two-part guest commentary, Carrie Browen and Kevin Kershner from Keysight Technologies share their insights into the future of high speed in-vehicle display and sensor connections. You may find Part 1 here.
Automotive display use-case. © 2021 MIPI Alliance, Inc.
For this second half of our commentary, we begin with an introduction of SerDes.
In today’s infotainment systems, it is common for in-vehicle cameras and displays to be connected to the image-processing electronic control unit (ECU) via a SerDes (serializer/deserializer) connection.
More cameras, more connections, and more sensors with greater accuracy, less weight, and increased safety.
Undoubtedly, there will be a need for an in-vehicle network to seamlessly handle these challenges.
Those in-vehicle networks will need to be tested, they will need to be interoperable, and they will need to be secure.
Today, they are delivered by individual vendors using closed, proprietary standards.
Extending the reach of feature-rich SerDes links can require operating at lower Baud rates and higher order modulations (e.g. PAM-4).
In addition, it will require higher bandwidth Ethernet links as primary interconnects between zones, perhaps with 802.3ch support up to 10 Gbps throughput.
Emerging SerDes standards like mobile industry processor interface (MIPI) A-PHY (MIPI A-PHY is a physical layer specification targeted for ADAS/ADS surround sensor applications and Infotainment display applications in automotive) and Automotive SerDes Alliance (ASA) will be implemented by multiple silicon vendors.
This will create a competitive market that acts to drive down the cost while delivering application specific features.
In this two-part guest commentary, Carrie Browen and Kevin Kershner from Keysight Technologies share their insights into the future of high speed in-vehicle display and sensor connections.
A conceptual diagram of a zone-based in vehicle network architecture. Image: Keysight Technologies.
It is no secret the pace of innovation in the automotive industry is exploding.
If the last 20 years have been linear in the development of electrification, the last two to three years have been exponential.
To get a better understanding of the bandwidth requirements, remember that the approximate bit rate of a video stream can be calculated as follows.
So, for an ADAS camera capturing a 1080p image, with a color depth of 24-bits and transmitting at 30fps, the bit rate to be supported equals:
It used to be that a car was a means of getting from A to B.
Now, we can safely say that is not true for the vehicles of today and certainly not for the new vehicles of tomorrow.
Just about every new car on the market has a backup camera, park assist, and blind spot monitoring.
Some offer a 360-degree view.
Other features offer real-time traffic updates, cellular connection to potential hazards, other road users, vehicles, or pedestrians.
There are features that can detect if a driver is distracted or tired.
Meanwhile, the people in the car are often unaware of driving conditions, while they enjoy infotainment systems.
These features are delivered through a mixture of sensors, cameras, and networks.
As demands go up, next-generation advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS) require camera and radar systems with increasingly high resolution.
Homegrown company Oaxis has launched their latest smartwatch for kids – the myFirst Fone R1s, as well as their latest wireless bone conduction headphones. Price and availability below.
The new myFirst Fone R1s helps parents remain connected to their kids and provides sheltered connectivity for the kids, as well as health features.
myFirst, a Singapore-based tech brand for kids has launched the myFirst Fone R1s smartwatch and myFirst Headphones BC Wireless Lite.
The myFirst Fone R1s will retail at S$269 with six months of free data access SIM card and is available for purchase online and all authorised retailers or for S$28 per month with a one-year contract.
Pre-order for the myFirst Fone R1s is available on the myFirst online store from 15 December 2021, with deliveries commencing on 5 January 2022.
The R1s will also be available at authorised retailers at a later date.
Designed for young children in today’s world of smart devices, the R1s features 4G LTE connectivity to chat, video, and voice-call their families and peers under supervision of their parents.
The R1s ships with 8GB storage for music files, a heart rate monitor, a find-my-watch feature, GPS tracking, lift to wake sensitivity and more.
Built to provide ease-of-use, the myFirst Fone R1s auto-detects myFirst’s Bluetooth headset for seamless pairing, while also utilising a simple-to-use watch and app interface for both young children and parents.
Users of the R1s will be able to mix-and-match the watch in various trendy colour combination for its watch face and straps.
More details below from the press release.
Tech-U-Can-Use (TUCU): Need a wireless charging stand to charge your iPhone 13 or iPhone 12 so you can continue using the phone while it’s still charging? Guest reviewer Jennifer Lee checks out the 7.5W BoostCharge magnetic wireless charger stand from Belkin for her iPhone 13 Pro Max.
#tech4xmas: This BoostCharge wireless charger stand from Belkin makes a suitable Christmas present for iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 owners. Photo credit: Jennifer Lee.
The magnetic wireless charger stand is MagSafe compatible for iPhone 13 and iPhone 12.
The wireless charger stand is available in black or white.
With MagSafe, it was easy to place my iPhone 13 Pro Max onto the stand – it snaps into place and there is no worries that the placement is misaligned.
There is an LED safety indicator that comes on when the charging commences.
The magnetic attachment is strong enough to hold the iPhone securely.
The stand is great for zoom calls or FaceTime – it holds the phone upright either in portrait or landscape mode.
A 20W USB-C Power Delivery 3.0 power adapter is included in the box.
In addition, the charge pad is protected by a Belkin Connected Equipment Warranty.
