Author Archives: Chris Davies

Google's Project Fi always seemed like a great deal if you wanted to avoid the complexity of traditional carriers, but one group of potential users had been inexplicably left out in the cold. G Suite customers may be some of the few to actually pay Google for a service, but they were left unable to use Project Fi with their accounts. While they might be coughing up cash for the privilege of using Google services on their own domain, the virtual carrier wasn't one of them.

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If you're of the mind that a good time is all about the girth, then the 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Hellcat Widebody should satisfy. The latest iteration of Dodge's two-door muscle car, the Widebody looks to its horsepower-blessed sibling, the SRT Demon, for inspiration. No, it might not have the same potency under the hood, but it certainly looks the part.

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All eyes may be on the upcoming launch of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, but the phone maker's ill-fated Note 7 will beat it to shelves as it gets a post-recall rebirth. Samsung was forced to make a costly and complex turnaround and demand back every single Galaxy Note 7 sold, after a number of the flagship smartphones burst into flames. The problem was subsequently blamed on the battery design, and now Samsung has a fix.

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Listen to the critics, and Amazon's Echo Show represents be a honeypot of privacy intrusion and creepy surveillance. Though Alexa, the retailer's virtual assistant, isn't new, the addition of a camera to the Echo Show smart speaker gives her eyes in your home for the first time. It's the circumstances around when those eyes are open - and who can turn on that camera remotely - that is triggering privacy fears.

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Forget powering smartphones and tablets: NVIDIA's big target is being the brainpower behind autonomous vehicles. The chip company has announced a trio of deals today which see it push aggressively into the automotive space, inking a deal with Volkswagen to work on artificial intelligence, with Volvo to commercialize self-driving cars in just a few years time, and with some of the biggest existing suppliers to get its silicon into their ranges.

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Aston Martin is joining the EV world, confirming that it will build an all-electric car, the Aston Martin RapidE. The car will, as the name suggests, be based on Aston Martin's existing four-door model, the Rapide. However, don't expect this to be anything like a mass-market play for the electric segment, with the British car company warning that it'll be severely limited in numbers.

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When you're Alfa Romeo, and a decent chunk of your appeal is that you're not the mainstream option, building an SUV like the 2018 Stelvio presents a tricky balance to strike. After all, Alfa drivers may not want a predictable car in their garage, but Fiat Chrysler Automobiles shareholders want mainstream sales. The Giulia sports sedan may have found favor among passionate drivers, but crossovers and SUVs are where the widest wallets are. Alfa Romeo had a choice, therefore, and the Stelvio is the answer, born of the Giulia but out hunting mutineers from the mainstream.

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Crossovers and SUVs continue to be the stars of the auto industry, at least when it comes to sales, so there's plenty riding on the 2018 BMW X3. Now in its third generation, BMW's midsize SUV promises more luxury, more technology, and - for the first time in the X3 line-up - an M Performance version. Compared to the old X3, the new SUV gets bolder, chunkier styling.

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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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