Weekly recap: CES 2016, the Oculus Rift Debacle, No More Support for Old IE Versions, a Smart Bra and the New Amazon Processors
What you need to know from CES 2016
The Consumer Electronic Show (CES), which takes places every early January in Las Vegas, is little like the geek's Christmas after Christmas. Since so much is happening there and so many cool products are presented, Mashable presented its own "best of". Featured this year: the Samsung smart fridge, with an enormous touchscreen and two cameras, the SCiO food scanner, which provides live nutritional info for anything you're eating, the Hydrao shower head, which measures your water consumption and connects to a smartphone to indicate preset intervals, the Under Armour Gemini 2 sneaker, which come with sensors, the Fitbit Blaze, the Code-A-Pillar toy, which teaches coding basics to young kids, and the Thermo Wi-Fi Thermometer, which is used directly on the forehead. http://on.mash.to/1S6j10p
TheOculus Rift debacle
Also happened at CES, but worthy of its own review: the upcoming launch of the Oculus Rift virtual reality helmet was announced. And it's apparently an incredible product (especially with hand sensors that make it possible to "touch" within the virtual world), but that's not what made the headlines at all... Rather its $599 ($849 in Canada) high price, which was greeted with a lot of gripe everywhere in the world. Since it will only be accessible to the lucky few, will this thing end up revolutionizing VR, after the fans waited for it more than 3 years? We doubt it. Oculus is a Facebook subsidiary; the Rift will start shipping in March. http://bit.ly/1SB6lOg
MS to stop supporting older Internet Explorer versions
Microsoft announced that it will soon stop supporting IE versions 8, 9 and 10. Users are about to be invited to download IE 11, or the new MS browser, Edge. For Microsoft, this is of course a way of bringing users to its newer OS, especially Windows 10, the only operating system compatible with Edge. Will this move cascade into a whole slew of sites stating that they are also stopping the support of all these old versions? http://cnet.co/1OCsYjO
A smart bra
OMsignal, a Montreal company, will soon launch the first smart bra on the market, making it possible for women to monitor their heart rate as weill as numerous other biometric indicators during their workouts. The OMbra seamlessly records data such as pace, impact level, time, breathing rate, effort level and even stamina, which are then sent to an app. The bra could even replace cumbersome smartphones or watches during runs! OMsignal just signed a partnership with Ralph Lauren, which should help with distribution. Available in the spring and very likely to become a big hit! http://bit.ly/1JTDQUO
Amazon now sells its own processors
Annapurna Labs, an Amazon subsidiary acquired by the giant last year, just started shipping its Alpine range of chips. These processors, sold to manufacturers -not to the general public, are to be used with Wi-Fi routers, storage devices and smart domestic objects. The company indicated that they could also be used in data centers, but were more suited for data storage and networking than for high-performance servers (a realm where Intel still reigns as king). Another step toward the future dominance of the Internet of things? http://engt.co/1mIgZ9A
