Tech round-up for August 25: Samsung reveals Galaxy Note8, new app forces your teen to acknowledge you, Bixby's ears are working now

Published
Comments None
Categories Consumer technology |

This week, a look at the new Samsung Galaxy Note8 handset, and Samsung’s Bixby digital assistant gets voice support. Also, a new app that forces message recipients to acknowledge it.

Samsung announced a new Galaxy Note8 mobile it hopes will make you forget last year’s disasters

At a press event in New York earlier this week, Samsung revealed the Galaxy Note8, a new version of the tech company’s phablet (smartphone/tablet).

In the past, what’s really distinguished the Note devices has been the screen size, but that’s no longer the case with the Note8. It’s got a 6.3-inch display with a similar tall and narrow form factor that Samsung introduced with the Galaxy S8 smartphone family. That makes the Note8 just a bit bigger than the Galaxy S8 Plus.

So what makes the Note8 different?

It has 6 GB of RAM, compared to 4 GB for the two S8 models, for one thing. And the Note8 is equipped with a S-Pen stylus that fans of the device love because they can use it to take notes and to draw. It also has two 12 megapixel rear cameras – one with a wide-angle lens and the other with a telephoto lens.

Other non-exclusive features include water and dust resistance and support for wireless charging.

Which brings me around to the battery. The Note8 has a 3,300 mAh battery, where its predecessor, the infamous Note7, had a 3,500 mAh battery.

That battery, you may remember, led to a worldwide recall of the Note7 because it was catching fire and exploding. Samsung has a new battery safety process in place that should prevent a similar design and manufacturing fail from happening again.

The new device, now available for pre-order at the usual places, will come in Midnight Black and Deepsea Blue. Pre-order before September 14 to get a free wireless charger convertible and a 128 GB Samsung microSD card.

Without a contract, the Galaxy Note8, which releases on September 15, is priced at $1,300. That seems very expensive, but it’s only a couple of hundred dollars more than the Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8 Plus were priced at when they were released six months ago.

Bixby digital assistant brings voice commands to Samsung mobile devices

Samsung’s other announcement this week was that its Bixby digital assistant will now understand you when you talk to it.

It’s the same voice command functionality that already exists with Cortana (Windows), Google Assistant, and Siri (Apple), although Bixby seems to be able to perform tasks that other assistants can’t (Although “Take a selfie,” is something I will never say to any phone ever.)

And you can program your own shorthand phrases for oft-repeated tasks, which is a cool idea. So instead of saying, “Remind me to pick up the kids at 4 o’clock,” you can just say, “Kids” and Bixby will do the rest.

New app makes sure your teen – or anyone else – has received your message

ReplyASAP is a unique idea. It forces people who are receiving a message from the app to interact with it, increasing the likelihood that they have actually processed the message.

It was developed by a dad in the UK who realized that he had no idea if the messages – some important, some not so much – were actually being read by his teenaged son.

Available for Android devices now, and soon for iOS, the app is quite overt. It appears over top of anything else that might be on the smartphone’s screen, and plays an alarm noise even if the phone is on silent.

The person receiving the message has to interact with the app in order to turn off the notifications.

Of course, you still can’t be sure that the recipient has read the message, but if they’ve had to look at the screen to turn everything off, there’s at least a greater chance that they have.

The cost of the app scales based on how many people you want to be able to send messages to. There is no cost to the smartphones that are receiving the messages.

There are bound to be some privacy and usage issues to be worked out as this kind of app becomes more popular – imagine what a stalker would do with this, for example, or a company or employer that doesn’t appreciate employee boundaries – but the core idea is not bad.

Especially if you’re a parent.

Comments

Commenting is closed for this article.

← Older Newer →