Author Archives: Chris Davies

Amazon's Echo has grown from a voice-controlled curiosity to being a legitimate home assistant, and now, with Echo Show, it's gaining a display. The latest iteration in the smart speaker series bucks the trend of spoken interactions only, adding a touchscreen so that Alexa can show & tell. At $229.99, however, it's the most expensive version so far, and at this early stage not everything has quite got to grips with the new abilities.

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Anki's Cozmo may have looked like a toy by way of Wall-E when it launched last year, but the personality-filled robot has bigger ambitions than mere entertainment. Launching today is Cozmo Code Lab, an incredibly simple way to unlock the many talents of the robot, even if you can't string together a single line of code.

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The next Tesla perk could well be the automaker's own streaming music service, with industry insiders claiming a rival to Spotify and Apple Music is being explored. The car company, which is readying for production of its most affordable model, the Tesla Model 3, currently leads the auto industry in the high-tech functionality of its dashboards. Now, so the rumors suggest, that might see an expansion from merely packaging other entertainment services to a completely independent version.

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The Range Rover Evoque Convertible's time in the autoshow spotlight may have faded to distant memory, but its oddball status remains. Even several months after they started showing up on dealer forecourts, usually sufficient time for the gloss to fade on all but the most unexpected exotica, the Evoque Convertible still turns heads. A reasonable part of that, I suspect, isn't so much because onlookers necessarily like the design, but because seeing an SUV with the top chopped off is still strange.

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Volvo is turning its tuned car division into an electrified performance car company, with Polestar set to create its own range of unique EVs. The decision will see Polestar operated as a completely separately-branded company, rather than sharing Volvo badging as is the case on current vehicles. In the future, its line-up will include both its own cars and performance versions of Volvo's vehicles.

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Jaguar is adding a new SUV to its line-up, with the Jaguar E-PACE promising both performance and compact dimensions. The smaller sports utility vehicle will join the larger Jaguar F-PACE in the automaker's line-up, following market trends away from sedans and instead toward SUVs and crossovers.

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It's tough to stand out on the increasingly crowded forecourt of a Mercedes-Benz dealership, but somehow the 2018 E400 Coupe manages it. Maybe it's not the most aggressive of the German automaker's cars, or the most powerful, or even the most expensive. Yet it's a coupe that draws a direct line back, all the way to 1968, through a rich seam of Mercedes heritage. Go figure, then, that when the company invited me out to British Columbia to try it for myself, this grand tourer turned out to perfectly encapsulate the thoroughly modern Mercedes.

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We knew two things about Dodge's 2018 Challenger SRT Demon: first, that with 840HP it would be crazy-powerful, and second, it would be in hot demand. Now, Dodge is spilling some details on how it plans to manage that demand, and there's surprisingly good news. Unlike most enthusiast-focused cars, which suffer sometimes shocking dealer price-gouging, the Demon may well be actually sold at its MSRP.

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You can't blame Samsung for being excited about the upcoming Galaxy Note 8: how else could you explain all the loose-lipped execs whispering details about the next-gen phablet. Following the aborted Note 7, the glowing reviews and then unexpected battery-related recalls of which proved to be one of the more impressive trajectories in gadget releases of recent years, the new Note 8 has plenty to prove. That, it seems, is making Samsung executives a little more talkative than normal.

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Goodbye Withings, hello Nokia Digital Health. As planned, the company best known as a phone-maker has fully rebranded its Withings acquisition, adding a few new fitness tracking gadgets to the mix in the process. It's another step in Nokia's reinvention, something the storied Finnish company is no stranger to.

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Chevrolet's Bolt EV may have divided electric car buyers with its hatchback design, but new safety testing suggests there's no need to worry about how it'll hold up in a crash. The all-electric car has become the first such vehicle to grab a 2017 award from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS), the independent agency which puts vehicles through their paces in crash testing that in many ways exceeds what the government-run NHTSA checks for. In recent years, the most tricky of those automotive trials has been the so-called small overlap front crash test.

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The driver killed in a high-profile Tesla crash last year repeatedly ignored warnings by the semi-autonomous Autopilot system to take control, US investigators have concluded. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) had been digging into the May 2016 incident in which Ohio resident Joshua Brown's Tesla Model S collided with a tractor-semitrailer truck near Williston, Florida, and has now released its accident docket. More than 500 pages of information have been revealed about the fatal crash, including technological reports, interview transcripts, and photographs.

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