Kalakshar US

Dutch solar car startup Lightyear started shipping its first vehicle — dubbed the Lightyear 0 — earlier this year. But while few people have driven this unique take on EV power, the company is already talking up its plans for the successor. At CES, Lightyear has announced that it is opening the waitlist for its second model — Lightyear 2 — which promises an even more radical take on a car powered by sunshine.

For the uninitiated, Lightyear makes an EV which was draped in panels, designed to get some of its charge from the sun as it travels. Its spacious-yet-aerodynamic liftback frame has a panel on the bonnet, as well as much of the rear roofline. The 782 solar cells on the body are, Lightyear claims, capable of adding more than 43 miles of extra range on a sunny day. But such cutting-edge tech does not come cheaply, with Lightyear asking for nearly $300,000 for the existing model.

The company says, however, that the newer model will be priced for less than $40,000, and is designed to offer an affordable way in for would-be EV buyers. Its super-efficient shape gives it a drag coefficient of around 0.175, slicing through the air far easier than most EVs on the market. That means Lightyear can reduce the size of the heavy (and expensive) battery to help make things more affordable. Although, naturally, it’ll work better in countries blessed with wall-to-wall sunshine for the longest period of time in the year.

Lightyear 2 is expected to start production in 2025, giving you plenty of time to look for somewhere warmer and sunnier to move to. 

 

Back in 2020, Ring announced a security camera for your car that connects to the company’s wider home security ecosystem. Now, slightly after its planned 2021 release date, Ring is opening pre-orders for Car Cam, the newest member of its security family. The unit is pretty small, but projects up and away on a cantilever arm mounted to your dashboard to give it the necessary height.

There are two cameras, one to keep an eye on the interior, the other facing out the front window to capture any insurance-worthy incidents. Should the system’s sensors be startled, it’ll trigger a recording, and alert you via the Ring app to show you what’s going on. Like pretty much every other Ring device, there’s a microphone and speaker, allowing you to watch (and communicate) with any unwanted visitors lurking in your vehicle.

In addition, Car Cam will automatically begin recording if you say “Alexa, record,” and has been designed to capture footage from traffic stops. (Which, when you think about it, speaks volumes about how little even a company with very close ties to law enforcement thinks about the integrity of what goes on at traffic stops.) The hardware is powered from the car’s battery, connected via the OBD-II port, and will use WiFi to communicate unless you opt for LTE by paying for a Ring Protect Go subscription.

Ring has added that, like its other products, you’ll have the option to activate end-to-end encryption, and won’t activate a recording unless triggered. It added that a privacy shutter will enable you to block the internal camera and microphone when closed. It’ll be available to pre-order from today, with shipping expected to begin in February, but there’s a hefty incentive to get your cash on the barrelhead now and not wait for the retail launch. Car Cam will retail for $250, but early pre-order customers can get theirs for $200 —while the Protect Go subscription will set you back $60 a year, or $6 a month.

 

Several years ago Amazon unveiled the controversial Sidewalk network, designed to connect outdoor smart home tech beyond your WiFi range using Amazon Ring, Echo and other devices. Now, the company has announced that Sidewalk finally has the needed “coverage and tools” ready to make the service available to third-party developers, and will be showing it offer with a number of products at CES 2023. 

Sidewalk uses not just your own Ring and Echo devices, but those from your neighbors as well. The devices on display are generally of the outdoor variety that can benefit from Sidewalk as they may not have easy WiFi access. For example, a company called New Cosmos USA will show off a natural gas sensor called DeNova Detect designed to protect homes from undetected leaks. It’ll use Sidewalk to “expand coverage for their gas alarms and eliminate network connectivity costs,” according to Amazon.

Another company called Browan will feature motion detectors, door and windows sensors, a water leak detector and a CO2 detector, all of which can send alerts using Sidewalk. Deviceroy uses Sidewalk to connect solar inverters to the internet, letting customers see how their solar equipment is operating and help them optimize efficiency. And finally, Meshify‘s leak and freeze detection device can connect to the internet and alert customers of damage using a Sidewalk connection. 

With its new third-party tools, Amazon is promising quick time to market and “live access to data and analytics,” to help developers track performance. However, the technology has provoked security and privacy concerns, as it uses not just your own Amazon equipment but others around you. Another issue is the Echo and Ring devices are automatically enrolled in the program, forcing you to opt out using the Amazon Alexa app. 

 

ASUS’ fondness for sticking small screens on devices now extends to gamepads. As part of its many gaming hardware introductions at CES, the company has unveiled a ROG Raikiri Pro controller with a built-in, customizable OLED screen. The 1.3-inch display on the Xbox- and Windows-ready peripheral can show useful information like the charging status, microphone mute and the active profile, but you can also use it for purely cosmetic animations, images and text. No one will forget that it’s your controller, then.

This is also the first licensed Xbox controller to offer “tri-mode” connections. You can use Bluetooth, RF or USB-C. You’ll only get to use the wireless functionality with a PC (ASUS only promises Xbox support through USB), but this is still handy if you’d like flexibility in how you connect to your gaming machines. Even the audio is slightly excessive, as the Raikiri Pro includes an ESS DAC to boost audio from the 3.5mm headset jack.

The gamepad unsurprisingly offers extensive controls. Beyond the familiar Xbox layout, you can program four rear buttons for hotkeys, sensitivity toggles and similar commands. Top buttons let you switch profiles mid-play, and trigger locks can limit the amount of travel. An app also offers control over dead zones, vibrations and other finer points.

ASUS hasn’t mentioned pricing, but you can expect the Raikiri Pro to ship sometime in the first quarter of the year. This isn’t the first controller with a display (hello, Dreamcast fans) or even the first with OLED (Hyperkin’s Xbox “Duke” revival had that). However, the technology might help it stand out in a crowded field where modular designs, wild colors and extra buttons are relatively commonplace.

 

One of the fun things about CES is a completely different approach to established tech norms. Displace’s 55-inch OLED TV not only runs on batteries and has a pop-out camera but also attaches itself with a vacuum seal to most walls and windows. There are even handles on the frame. Is this the end of wall mounts? Probably not.

It apparently keeps itself in place through multiple vacuum loops on the back. When the display detects a surface, the vacuums kick in, sucking the device to the surface of your choice. Displace TV can also do without a power cord because it doesn’t do much image processing onboard. It’s basically streaming media from a base station that performs the rendering. So no wires and no ports on the OLED TV itself.

There are more quirks. You could watch roughly six hours of content before swapping out batteries, and there’s no remote, so you’ll have to suffer the erratic method of hand gestures – which I don’t think anyone truly likes. At $3,000, though, the Displace TV is predictably pricey. Only 100 units are available for pre-order at the moment, and the company said shipping starts in December. And if you get four of them, apparently you can put them together to create a 110-inch 8K TV.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Sony Honda Mobility’s first concept car is the Afeela EV

The Vision-S 02 is now the Afeela.

In March 2022, Honda and Sony announced they were teaming up to build a battery-electric SUV. By June, the project was its own company. Less than a year after being announced, Sony Honda Mobility took to the CES 2023 stage to officially unveil its first prototype, the Afeela. Sony executives shared a few details about the upcoming vehicle: It has 14 exterior cameras – 45 in total – and a grille-mounted Media Bar to display vehicle information. Expect more details when the show floor opens later today and we get to take a closer look.

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Roku is finally building its own TVs

The Roku TV Select and Premium Series lines range from 24 to 75 inches.

At CES 2023, the streaming device company announced it’ll build its own smart TVs for the first time. When the Roku TV program debuted in 2014, the company was cramming its streaming software into TVs built by partners like TCL and Hisense. The TVs will range from $119 to $999, so don’t expect OLED panels or insane brightness levels. Roku also announced an OLED Roku TV reference design for its TV partners. So, there’s not going to be any shortage of options if you want a TV with Roku’s streaming capabilities.

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Tesla’s Model Y might miss out on new EV tax credit rules

Too light to be classified as SUVs and too expensive to qualify as cars.

Certain variants of Tesla’s Model Y may not qualify for the $7,500 federal EV tax credit based on the IRS’s latest guidelines, in a situation Elon Musk called “messed up.” It looks as though the five-seat Long Range version of the hatchback is too expensive as a car and not considered an SUV, so it falls outside the current guidelines. Only the seven-seat variants of the Model Y qualify as SUVs in the category up to $80,000, while the five-seat vehicles (Long Range, AWD and Performance) should be in the $55,000 section. However, all the five-seaters exceed that price, so they don’t qualify.

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Louisiana residents now need a government ID to access porn online

PornHub is already on it.

A new Louisiana state law went into effect on January 1st, requiring websites containing “a substantial portion” of “material harmful to minors” to ask users to prove they’re 18 or older. “Substantial portion,” according to the new law, is more than 33.3 percent of a website’s content. Websites that host adult content have to implement “reasonable age verification methods,” including asking users to present a government-issued ID or a digitized form of it. Major sites including PornHub, YouPorn and RedTube ask visitors to prove their age by using their LA Wallet app, which is the state’s digital wallet app for drivers’ licenses.

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Track Ember’s heated Travel Mug 2+ in Apple’s Find My app

The new model won’t cost more than the current version.

A new version of Ember’s heated travel mug, dubbed the Travel Mug 2+, is on the way, with an upgrade that makes it appear in Apple’s Find My app. The Travel Mug 2+ also has a speaker, so if you lose it, you can make it play a sound – as you would for lost AirPods. Ember’s current model, the Travel Mug 2, with a 12-ounce capacity, is available for $199.95 and keeps beverages hot for up to three hours. The company says this upgraded version will stay at this price and eventually replace the Travel Mug 2.

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​​AMD’s Ryzen 7000 mobile CPUs feature up to 16 cores and 5.4GHz speeds

Powerful laptops are incoming.

AMD is confronting Intel’s powerful HX laptop CPUs head-on and, once again, they’re called “HX.” That won’t be confusing. The company’s new Ryzen 9 7945HX processor is its premium mobile offering, with 16 cores and 32 threads, as well as speeds between 2.5GHz and 5.4GHz. The Ryzen HX CPUs will run at 55 watts and above (also like Intel’s), meaning they’ll focus more on raw power than battery life. AMD claims the 7945HX is 78 percent faster than the previous top-end Ryzen chip in Cinebench’s multithreaded benchmark, and 18 percent faster in the single-threaded test. Compared to Intel’s 12900HX, its high-end chip from last year, the 7945HX is 169 percent faster in Handbrake encoding and 75 percent faster with Blender rendering.

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Amazon is cutting more jobs than it had previously planned, CEO Andy Jassy has admitted in a blog post. Back in November, reports came out that the e-commerce giant was eliminating 10,000 jobs, just as other companies in the tech sector had announced layoffs of their own. Now, the company is expanding its job cuts, and between the employees who’d already lost their jobs and the ones losing theirs in the near future, Amazon will be eliminating over 18,000 roles in the company. 

Jassy said majority of the upcoming layoffs would be from its retail and recruiting divisions. As The Wall Street Journal notes, Amazon benefited from the COVID lockdowns over the past few years, since people had to shop online more often than before. The company reportedly added hundreds of thousands of employees to keep up with the surge in demand — and then launched cost-cutting reviews to see which units weren’t making profit. It then froze hiring, closed brick-and-mortar stores and shut down business units.

When news broke that Amazon was planning sweeping layoffs, Meta had also just revealed that it was letting more than 11,000 of its employees go. Like Amazon’s executives, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg significantly increased Meta’s investments following a large revenue growth due to the pandemic. However, people’s spending habits eventually went back to pre-pandemic trends, leading to a smaller revenue for the company. More recently, Slack owner Salesforce revealed that it’s cutting 10 percent of its workforce and closing down offices. The company also grew rapidly during the pandemic and can’t sustain its bloated workforce in the current economy. 

Amazon will be cutting more jobs than Meta did by the time it’s done. Jassy said the company will reach out to impacted employees starting on January 18th, so the layoffs will likely take place over the coming weeks. He added that Amazon will offer them packages that include a “separation payment, transitional health insurance benefits and external job placement support.”

 

Robot delivery firm Ottonomy has unveiled a new Ottobot model called the Yeti with a new automated package delivery mechanism. That could allow it to do last mile drop-offs directly to a locker or remove the need for someone to receive a package, TechCrunch has reported. 

As shown at the end of Ottonomy’s latest video, the Yeti uses a simple tilting mechanism and rollers to dispense the packages. That would allow it to drop packages onto a doorstep or transfer them to a locker, making it fully independent from humans. It may also allow for easy returns, as TechCrunch noted. 

The Brooklyn-based firm operates in multiple cities including Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Oslo and Madrid, with plans to expand across north America and Asia. It recently unveiled the Ottobot 2.0 with modular delivery bins, a navigation engine that merges data from lidar and cameras, and a new four-wheel drive “crab mode” system for extra maneuverability in tight spaces. The company works in partnership with Verizon in the US.

 

Sony has focused its CES efforts of late on electric cars, now in partnership with Honda, and this year was more of the same. Sony Honda Mobility unveiled its first prototype called Afeela, replacing the previous Vision-S 02. Its laden with sensors (radar, ultrasonic, cameras and more), uses Qualcomm’s new automotive chip and promises “interactive communication between mobility and people” via the so-called Media Bar. Pre-orders will start in mid-2025 with deliveries scheduled for spring of 2026.

Sony also provided a first look at its Neill Blomkamp-directed Gran Turismo movie, revealed that the Gran Turismo 7 game would be getting PlayStation VR 2 support and announced that Beat Saber was also coming to PSVR 2. The PlayStation 5 console has now passed 30 million units sold, and from now on, anyone who wants a PS5 should be able to get one.

Finally, the company revealed Project Leonardo aimed at building controllers that are easier to use for people with limited motor control. Taking a page from Microsoft’s gaming accessibility efforts, it uses a set of customizable circular gamepads. There’s no release date window or price yet. 

 

Samsung introduced new QD-OLED TVs and a 57-inch 8K gaming display, the 2023 Freestyle projector and new Bespoke smart appliances at this year’s CES. During the company’s keynote, it also talked about its products’ new features and upgrades in detail, including a new wash cycle for washing machines that can reduce microplastic pollution. 

Presenters talked about SmartThings Workspace, which lets you connect to linked devices remotely, and SmartThings Pet Care, as well. Samsung’s pet service can send you alerts when your dogs bark and put on a show or video on a connected display to keep them entertained. Plus, it enables the camera on the brand’s robot vacuum to recognize dogs and cats. 

In addition, Samsung introduced the latest SmartThings hub, which is its smallest yet. The SmartThings Station, as it’s called, has a button that you can use to program smart lights, air conditioner or other home devices like smart blinds. It’s the first Samsung product to come with built-in Matter support, giving it the capability to connect with Matter-enabled devices from other manufacturers.

Any content played on the latest Samsung smart TVs can now sync with Philips Hue Lights for immersive lighting effects. The company also talked about the Knox Matrix, its security solution that acts as your private blockchain system for its smart home devices. Finally, Samsung presented the in-cabin car technology it developed in partnership with Harmon, as well as a new display technology called Relumino mode that can help people with low vision to see images more clearly. 

You can watch a condensed version of the event to get the gist of Samsung’s announcements in the video above.

 

The market for percussive massage guns is pretty packed. So is there space for another? Symbodi hopes so. Its Vertigun is a quiet-running massager that locks into a patented suction-cup wall mount. While massage guns might feel great, it’s often hard to get to tricky nooks and tight areas without someone else controlling the device for you. Symbodi even claims that because you’re not reaching or straining to get a massage gun in place (and put pressure on it), your body should be further relaxed when coming into contact with the percussive massage.

The Vertigun certainly runs quieter than the competition. Vertigun says it tops out at 48dB, comparing favorably against rivals like the Theragun (75 dB) and Hypervolt (60 dB). In a demo – Engadget was sent an early model – the hardware seemed a little clunky compared to the competition, but the size of the Vertigun’s battery ensures it can last a while between charges. The company claims it should be able to massage away for up to eight hours. It’s roughly the same weight as similar massage guns, too, but what makes it different is that you can use it without holding it.

That’s accomplished with the help of a solid, substantial airlock mount. With a sizable rubberized cup, you pull a lever to lock the mount to the wall. I assumed I might need a flat, polished surface, like glass or tile, to mount the Vertigun. However, the airlock mount attached to my apartment’s painted doors and walls pretty easily, without scraping or affecting the surface. Symbodi warns that it won’t stick to textured drywall, brick, concrete or wallpapered surfaces. The massage gun itself slides and locks into the mount, and can be removed by pressing the lever inwards. The mount occasionally fell off the wall, so I eventually got into the habit of removing it after use.

The six speeds seem perfectly functional – I’m not sure I need more than three settings – but the inclusion of several different massage attachments is definitely welcome. The Vertigun sample I received ahead of CES included an angled head, which did wonders for the side of my thighs and a pinpoint head for digging into shoulder blades. Three heads will come packaged with the Vertigun.

The challenge could be standing out from all the other percussive massage guns, including the aforementioned Therabody and Hypervolt, not to mention cheaper options. It’s probably why the company is launching at CES 2023. Symbodi has also signed several athlete ambassadors, including former professional US soccer player (and two-time Olympic gold medalist) Carli Anne Hollins, Dallas Cowboys’ Ceedee Lamb and Steelers All Pro Minkah Fitzpatrick. The Vertigun will become available online later this month for $400.