You know the drill – you go through a ridiculously long and tiring day, just counting down the hours until you can head home and curl back into your bed. You finally turn in for the night and wait for the peaceful lull of a glorious night’s rest – but it never comes. In fact, when you wake up in the morning you feel even more tired than when you went to bed, and the vicious cycle repeats itself.
According to Philips, this is how most adults sleep. Around 40% of adults aged 25-54 get less than 7 to 9 hours of sleep each night. In the US, around 30% of adults suffer from insomnia, while in Europe the figure ranges between 15-27%.
It’s often not easy to get a good night’s rest for several reasons, which is why Philips wants to focus on people getting better quality sleep rather than sleeping in for longer periods. While you may think that getting in more hours of sleep will lead to you feeling more refreshed, that’s not always the case.
Which is what makes Philips’ SmartSleep headband so special – rather than trying to get you to sleep for longer periods, the headband works with your existing sleep patterns to improve the quality of your rest periods.
It sounds rather simple at first – sensors in the headband detect when you’ve entered a deep sleep, or ‘slow wave sleep’. Once in this mode, the headband triggers quiet audio tones through in-built speakers to boost these slow waves and improve the quality of your sleep. The headband monitors how you’ve been sleeping and adjusts its routine accordingly, and the soft foam material ensures that it doesn’t feel uncomfortable to wear while sleeping. A companion app then syncs up with the headband once you wake up to show you the quality of your sleep.
The system is designed for adults who typically get less than 7 hours of sleep per night, but won’t help you actually fall asleep or help with existing sleep conditions. It’s currently in a selective testing phase in US and Germany, with a selective launch happening on September 1st, followed by a larger global rollout. Interested users can answer a brief questionnaire on the Philips website to check if they’re eligible, and if selected can purchase the SmartSleep for $399 to participate in the feedback program.
Your own personal sunrise
Philips also realizes that loud alarms in the morning might not be the nicest way to wake up, and has come up with the Somneo. We’ve seen devices like these before, which aim to simulate the sun rising so that you wake up much more gently in the morning.
The Philips Somneo offers a number of features to aid in relaxation and a better night’s sleep. The light-guided breathing techniques help you to relax through breathing exercises before you fall asleep, while a sunset mode also helps your body to relax before tuning out.
You can easily customize the brightness levels, what sort of music or sound you want to wake up to such as nature, ambient music, or your favorite radio station. The Somneo also acts as a perfect nightlight if you need to get up in the middle of the night, illuminating just bright enough for you to see where you’re going rather than blinding you.
The Philips Somneo is available now from Philips for $199.99
If your 13-inch, non-Touch Bar MacBook Pro has been hit by a nasty issue of an expanding battery, Apple has got your back – the company has launched a battery replacement program for affected laptops, which apparently are only a few in number and were manufactured between October 2016 and October 2017.
“Apple has determined that, in a limited number of 13-inch MacBook Pro (non Touch Bar) units, a component may fail causing the built-in battery to expand,” says Apple. “This is not a safety issue and Apple will replace eligible batteries, free of charge.”
Just type in your computer’s serial number to see if your MacBook Pro is eligible for a battery replacement. If it is, you can send it off to Apple or take it into an Apple Store to get the battery swapped for free. You can even get a refund if you’ve already had the battery replaced. The offer was first spotted by 9to5Google.
Five-year scheme
This doesn’t affect the standard warranty of the laptop, Apple notes in its documentation, and if your computer has been damaged in some way that prevents the battery being replaced, that will have to be fixed first – and that repair may incur a cost, before you get your free battery swap.
You don’t necessarily have to rush to take advantage of the deal, though acting sooner rather than later is probably a good idea: Apple says the scheme is going to cover affected MacBook Pros for up to five years after they were originally bought.
The launch of the program comes just a few days after Apple initiated a similar replacement offer for the Apple Watch Series 2. Again, swelling batteries are the problem, but even if it’s disappointing to see some devices slip past Apple’s quality control procedures, at least it’s helping customers get a fixed sorted out quickly.
I realize the irony of publishing this in the week that Intel announced it was pulling the plug on its smart glasses project Vaunt (pictured) but I think that the smartphone’s days are numbered, and smart glasses are going to be the thing that kills it.
If you’re anything like me, you break out in a cold sweat whenever your phone’s battery drops below 10%. The idea of going without a phone would feel like losing a limb. An invisible digital limb, but still, a limb.
So the idea of not having a phone anymore seems like a totally alien concept, but I’ve seen some emerging technology recently that’s convinced me that we’re only a few years away from the end of the smartphone.
Now I don’t mean that in five years time the smartphone will be gone completely, that is madness. I just mean that the technology that is going to kill it is here already and in five years we’ll have heard the first death knoll. Let me explain.
Getting to where we are now
It was 2007 when Steve Jobs first walked out on stage in his black roll-neck, comfortable trainers, iPhone 1st gen in his hand (albeit not a fully functioning one) and changed the industry. That’s just over ten years ago. To put it another way, that’s the year Pixar’s Ratatouille came out.
And 2007 wasn’t even when it went mainstream; ‘You don’t need a smartphone,’ I thought, ‘a phone only really needs to be able to make calls, send texts, and play these sweet sweet polyphonic ringtones.’
What a long way we’ve come. The first iPhone next to iPhone 7
And so, clutching on to my Nokia 3510 (yes, I know, it could access the internet, but this was back in the days that internet on a phone cost four million pounds a minute) and my strongly held beliefs, I stared down the oncoming wave of smartphone adoption and dug in my heels.
Little did I know that in a few short years, everything I’d known about phones, about connecting to the internet, about socializing, and most importantly about ringtones would be totally changed.
Over those years, phone screens have got bigger and bigger, taking up more and more of the real estate on the handset, until we reached the point where we are now, that manufacturers are creating a ‘notch’ to house essential components rather than have a thin bezel.
Where we’re going
The only reasonable way to go from here is a screen beyond a screen. Where there is no physical object creating a confine for the visual platform. And the easiest way of achieving that is by having the screen closer to your eye, creating the illusion of size.
Now, I know what you’re thinking: ‘Andrew, we already have smart glasses. And they’re not good.’
Our very own Matt Swider sporting Google sun-Glass-es
And you’d be right, mostly. I’m not some loon that thinks everyone should be wearing Google Glass, or Hololens (don’t even get me started on Snapchat Specs), I think they’re just early versions.
The AR glasses that we’ve had so far have undoubtedly proved useful (admittedly more on the business than consumer side of things) and have taken the bold first steps. The first ever smartphone wasn’t widely adopted either.
But the building blocks are there, and not just in terms of the display. We’ve got bone-conduction audio being included in running headphones that allow you to listen to music while clearly hearing the world around you, and EEG headsets that could allow you to control your smart glasses using just your brain.
Now, EEG control is the bit of the equation that is the furthest away from a technology that we’re used to using, but that doesn’t mean it’s a long way from being a commercially available product.
I was recently in Dubai for the GESF education conference where I flew a drone with my brain using a commercially available EEG headset. A version of this headset was used to control a Formula One car, so the idea of controlling an electronic device that plays Spotify and makes calls really isn’t that far-fetched.
Fly my pretty, fly
And this ties into a current wave that we’re experiencing in electronics; the move away from the unnatural method with which we interact with our phones. Tapping, swiping and typing may feel natural, but so does driving stick if you’re used to it, and there’s nothing more unnatural (and 20th Century) than pulling levers, pushing pedals and twisting wheels just to make a machine work.
There’s a reason that talking to a voice assistant is more satisfying than tapping on a screen (when it works), as it’s a more natural process.
Imagine if the next step of that was just thinking what you want to happen and it happens. A notification pops up in the corner of your field of vision and you’re able to ‘think’ it away. It sounds sci-fi, but the truth is, we’re really not that far away.
Emotiv, the makers of the drone-brain EEG headset mentioned above are currently working on a version of the headset that could well take the form of glasses.
“The research headset, it’s not the most convenient thing to put on your head. But there are a couple of things that people don’t mind putting on their head. And it’s going to come out soon.”
Just a little Moore of Moore’s law
While the last few years have seen people claiming we’ve seen the end of Moore’s law (that the number of transistors per square inch on a circuit doubles every two years), we are undoubtedly still seeing rapid development in technology, while phone improvements seem, well, iterative.
It’s been years since a phone came out that was a genuine game-changer, and that doesn’t match up with the progress of technology. The rate of technological development we’re currently experiencing means the gap between the laughable and the commonplace is shrinking.
A robot vacuum cleaner? Hahahaha…. oh
The difference between ten years ago and tomorrow is the same as the difference between tomorrow and three years from now. Then that gap again will basically be a year. Then a few months.
Before you know it we’ve had generations of industry-changing technology in five years. My numbers are rough, but you get the point.
With rumors that Apple is working on smart glasses,Facebook confirming it’s thinking about using EEG control to send messages, and Microsoft filing patents for a mind-controlled Windows app, it’s entirely possible that the next big leap in this tech is only a couple of years away.
MIT’s ‘mind-reading’ device
Current EEG allows you to control a cursor with your brain, which would make for a pretty laborious texting process, especially if you’re just wanting to fire off some swift banter, but a research headset recently created by MIT could fix that problem by monitoring ‘subvocalizations’ – the imperceptible muscle signals made from your brain to your mouth when you speak in your head.
I’m aware these technologies aren’t ready yet, but let’s not forget, neither was the iPhone. I’m certainly excited about the possibility of a new game-changing technology, especially with all the advancements being made in computer vision, meaning smart glasses could be able to identify what you’re looking at, and turn you into a real-life RoboCop.
