Taylor Swift Announces Dates for Her 2015 World Tour

Taylor Swift Announces Dates for Her 2015 World Tour

Taylor Swift may be coming to your city soon.

The singer, who released her first pop album, "1989," last week, just announced dates for her world tour, kicking off next year.

“Without a doubt, this [album] is the best thing I’ve done," she said during an appearance on "Good Morning America" last week. "So to have people able to finally have it now and to have the fans understand what I’ve been working on for two years, it’s just the most amazing feeling."

May 20, 2015 – Bossier City, LA – CenturyLink Center

May 22, 2015 – Baton Rouge, LA – LSU Tiger Stadium

May 30, 2015 – Detroit, MI – Ford Field

June 2, 2015 – Louisville, KY – KFC Yum! Center

June 3, 2015 – Cleveland, OH – Quicken Loans Arena

June 6, 2015 – Pittsburgh, PA – Heinz Field

June 8, 2015 – Charlotte, NC – Time Warner Cable Arena

June 9, 2015 – Raleigh, NC – PNC Arena

June 13, 2015 – Philadelphia, PA – Lincoln Financial Field

June 20, 2015 – Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia Germany – Lanxess Arena

June 21, 2015 – Amsterdam, North Holland Netherlands – Ziggo Dome

June 23, 2015 – Glasgow, Scotland United Kingdom – SSE Hydro

June 24, 2015 – Manchester, NW England United Kingdom – Arena

June 27, 2015 – London, England United Kingdom – British Summertime Hyde Park

July 6, 2015 – Ottawa, ON – Canadian Tire Centre

July 7, 2015 – Montreal, QB – Bell Centre

July 11, 2015 – East Rutherford, NJ – MetLife Stadium

July 13, 2015 – Washington, DC – Nationals Park

July 18, 2015 – Chicago, IL – Soldier Field

July 24, 2015 – Foxborough, MA – Gillette Stadium

July 25, 2015 – Foxborough, MA – Gillette Stadium

August 1, 2015 – Vancouver, BC – BC Place Stadium

August 4, 2015 – Edmonton, AB – Rexall Place

August 5, 2015 – Edmonton, AB – Rexall Place

August 8, 2015 – Seattle, WA – CenturyLink Field

August 15, 2015 – Santa Clara, CA – Levi’s Stadium

August 17, 2015 – Glendale, AZ – Gila River Arena

August 18, 2015 – Glendale, AZ – Gila River Arena

August 25, 2015 – Los Angeles, CA – Staples Center

August 26, 2015 – Los Angeles, CA – Staples Center

August 29, 2015 – San Diego, CA – PETCO Park

September 4, 2015 – Salt Lake City, UT – EnergySolutions Arena

September 5, 2015 – Denver, CO – Pepsi Center

September 6, 2015 – Denver, CO – Pepsi Center

September 9, 2015 – Fargo, ND – Fargodome

September 11, 2015 – St. Paul, MN – Xcel Energy Center

September 12, 2015 – St. Paul, MN – Xcel Energy Center

September 16, 2015 – Indianapolis, IN – Bankers Life Fieldhouse

September 17, 2015 – Columbus, OH – Nationwide Arena

September 18, 2015 – Columbus, OH – Nationwide Arena

September 21, 2015 – Kansas City, MO – Sprint Center

September 22, 2015 – Kansas City, MO – Sprint Center

September 25, 2015 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena

September 26, 2015 – Nashville, TN – Bridgestone Arena

October 2, 2015 - Toronto, ON – Rogers Centre

October 3, 2015 - Toronto, ON – Rogers Centre

October 8, 2015 – Des Moines, IA – Wells Fargo Arena

October 9, 2015 – Omaha, NE – CenturyLink Center

October 10, 2015 – Omaha, NE – CenturyLink Center

October 13, 2015 – St. Louis, MO – Scottrade Center

October 14, 2015 – St. Louis, MO – Scottrade Center

October 17, 2015 – Dallas, TX – AT&T Stadium

October 20, 2015 – Lexington, KY – Rupp Arena

October 21, 2015 Greensboro, NC – Greensboro Coliseum Complex

October 24, 2015 – Atlanta, GA – Georgia Dome

October 27, 2015 - Miami, FL – American Airlines Arena

October 31, 2015 – Tampa, FL – Raymond James Stadium

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Hilary Duff Shows Off Her Top Knot Hairstyle On The Set Of "Younger"

INSTAGRAM

Hilary Duff is about to return to TV with a brand new show titled Younger. The series will air on TV Land and also stars the following actors:

• Sutton Foster
• Debi Mazar
• Miriam Shor

The show is based on the novel "Younger" by Pamela Redmon Satran, and follows a single mom trying to get back into the working world. The woman runs into a guy who convinces her to lie about her age to find the perfect job.

Hilary shared the photo above from the set of the show. We are loving her top knot hairstyle! 

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Kylie Jenner Gets a Spooky Gray Hair Makeover

Kylie Jenner's dramatic hair extensions are back, and they're spookier than ever! The stylish star kicked up her Halloween look by adding some shiny silver and black long extensions to her short 'do, and we love the shimmering style.

At first we thought her hair looked different because of the camera's flash, but Kylie's smokey new hair hue looks even more dramatic in the family photo she took while out trick-or-treating:

We hope that Kylie decides to keep her edgy gray style even now that when  Halloween is over, because the look is too cool to only wear once!

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Taylor Swift's '1989' Set for Biggest Sales Week Since 2002: 1.3 Million-Plus

Taylor Swift's '1989' Set for Biggest Sales Week Since 2002: 1.3 Million-Plus

As the days tick by, the sales forecast for Taylor Swift's 1989 album continues to grow.

As of Nov. 1, with only one full day left in the album's debut tracking week, industry forecasters now say 1989 could sell over 1.3 million copies through Nov. 2.

Thus, the album is now aiming to surpass the one-week sales record for an album by a woman, set by the debut of Britney Spears' Oops! … I Did It Again in 2000, when it arrived with 1.319 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan.

1989 is also set to earn the largest sales week for any album since 2002, when Eminem's The Eminem Show sold 1.322 million in its first full week on sale.

The album's official debut week sales figure, as tabulated by SoundScan, will be announced on Wednesday, Nov. 5.

1989 is Swift's fifth studio effort and was released on Oct. 27 through Big Machine Records.

A little over two weeks ago, forecasters pegged the new album to sell 750,000 in its debut frame. Then, about a week ago (Oct. 23), it was upgraded to 800,000. By mid-day Oct. 27, the album's release day, its projection grew to over 900,000. The next day: 1 million, followed by upgrades to 1.2 million on Oct. 29 and then 1.25 million on Oct. 31.

1989 will be Swift's third consecutive album to sell more than a million copies in its first week, making her the only act ever to sell a million copies of an album in a single week three times. (She was already the only woman to do it twice since SoundScan started tracking sales in 1991.)

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Prepare for the Self-Driving Car

Prepare for the Self-Driving Car

Jonathan M. Gitlin

Ars Technicia 

Self-driving AI cars have been a staple in popular culture for some time—any child of the 1980s will fondly remember both the Autobots and Knight Ride r’s KITT—but consider them to be science fiction no longer. Within the next five years, you’ll be able to buy a car that can drive itself (and you) down the highway, although transforming into a Decepticon-battling robot or crime-fighter may take a while longer. As one might expect, the journey to fully automated self-driving cars will be one of degrees.

Here in the US, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has created five categories of autonomous cars. The most basic of these are level zero, which might include your vehicle if it doesn’t have a system like electronic stability control. Fully autonomous cars, which can complete their journeys with no human control beyond choosing the destination, are categorized as level four. While level fours are still some way off, level three autonomous cars, which will be able to self-drive under certain conditions (say, an HOV lane during rush hour), are much closer than one might think.

A couple of weeks ago, Tesla wooed its fan base with the news that soon, its cars will be able to drive themselves. But the autonomous car may be one of the company's least innovative moves yet. Those who’ve been watching the industry closely will know that Mercedes, Volvo, Audi, and others have similar products waiting in the wings, ready to hit the streets as soon as the rules and regulations fall into place.

First steps

It all used to be so simple. A car was just a car; a mechanical contraption with an engine and wheels, controlled by a human being with a combination of pedals, levers, and wheel. Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication meant using turn signals or perhaps gesticulating rudely out the window to indicate displeasure at being cut off in traffic. However as semiconductors became cheaper, faster, and more rugged, they attracted the attention of the auto industry. Electronics began to infiltrate our cars, with fuel injection replacing carburetors in the name of performance and efficiency, for example, and anti-lock brakes (ABS) being added for safety.

By 1995, electronic stability control (ESC) systems started to appear, Mercedes-Benz leading the way with its flagship S-Class. Cars equipped with ESC are constantly monitoring their driver’s steering inputs and comparing them to the direction the vehicle is headed. If those two variables start to diverge beyond certain limits (because the car is either under- or oversteering), ESC will apply the brakes to individual wheels to bring things back under control. Stability control systems proved so effective at reducing both crashes and injuries that they became mandatory for any car sold in the US or EU by the end of 2011.

The mandate in effect made ABS and traction control standard features, too. So any car one might buy today will not only constantly be monitoring both its direction and where it’s heading, but also whether an individual wheel is spinning too much (because of a loss of grip) or even not at all (locked by a brake). These various safety aids aren’t sufficient for self-driving cars. They only take control during emergencies to slow a vehicle, but with the advent of drive-by-wire throttles and steering—something we explored recently—all that remains is for the vehicle to be able to ‘see’ the environment around it and have a ‘brain’ fast enough to make sense of that data to control where it goes. No biggie.

Eyes and ears

As it turns out, most of the technology needed for a car to sense the world around it already exists. Adaptive cruise control—as fitted to the Audi A8, for example—uses a mix of optical, radar, and ultrasonic sensors that keep a car from veering out of its lane and, by constantly checking the range to other vehicles, from hitting any of them. Image recognition software will even detect speed limits on road signs and alert the driver. All of this would seem like science fiction even a decade ago, but it really is just the beginning. Quite soon, those sensors will do more than just tell your car what’s around it, thanks to what’s known as V2V.

As Ars' Sean Gallagher found out early this year, V2V-enabled cars can communicate to each other, warning of upcoming road hazards. V2V is being built atop 802.11p, a Wi-Fi standard that uses 75 MHz of the spectrum centered on 5.9 GHz. 802.11p allows almost instant network connections and can broadcast messages without establishing a network connection first, both of which are extremely desirable when thinking about the safety aspects of V2V. After all, it’s no good telling another car about a road hazard if you need to spend precious seconds handshaking. V2V-enabled cars will be able to quite literally see around corners, since the technology doesn’t require line of sight.

The cloud

But wait, there’s more, and it’s coming from the cloud. More and more cars are coming equipped with LTE data connections, mainly in response to consumer demand for streaming media services. Passenger entertainment may seem trivial to some, but persistent data connections also enable in-car navigation systems to get a lot smarter. I’m probably not alone, for example, in ditching either a standalone or built-in GPS unit in favor of a smartphone app like Google Maps or Waze. And if you’re like me, you probably did it for the same reason: the smartphone apps are able to provide layers of real-time data (like traffic) on top of the cartography. Data-enabled cars mean we can ditch the smartphone holders and go back to using that onboard navigation system. That navigation data will also allow the car to know where it is in the world and, to a certain extent, what it’s likely to encounter.

That kind of map data is sufficiently informative for human drivers to use while they navigate, but even combined with GPS it’s not going to be accurate enough for a self-driving car (civilian GPS accuracy only has a 95-percent confidence interval of 7.8 meters). No, that’s going to require an extremely high-resolution map, and that map will need to be accurate, which means constantly updating. Writing for Slate, Lee Gomes identified this as a problem for Google, but other companies, particularly Nokia, think they might have this one licked.

Nokia’s HERE platform begins by mapping streets in the conventional 21st century way—with a small fleet of sensor- and GPS-equipped mapping vehicles, which it uses to create an HD map that’s machine (but not human) readable. But in addition to providing location data to HERE-enabled cars, Nokia will leverage them to continually update that map in near-real time. Those same cars will send sensor data about the road—things like the position of road lane markers accurate to a few centimeters—resulting in an always up-to-date map.

Nokia also has other plans for using crowdsourced data to improve the self-driving car. We recently spoke with HERE's head of Automotive Cloud Services, Vladimir Boroditsky, who told Ars the company plans to use crowdsourced data from connected cars to create data sets of driving behavior that the company can use to train car software how to drive without terrifying or aggravating humans along for the ride. Compared to the alternative, it certainly sounds like an efficient solution.

How far off are we talking?

As one might expect, car makers have been working with tech industry stalwarts like Qualcomm and Nvidia to build the kinds of integrated systems that allow a car to make sense of its environment and then act on it. Kanwalinder Singh, a senior vice president with Qualcomm, told Ars that’s an area where his company, and its Snapdragon processor, excels. “As more sensors get added, you need massive sensor fusion. It’s a highly intensive problem as the data needs to be crunched very rapidly.” Meanwhile, Nvidia’s Tegra K1 is the brains behind both Audi’s and Tesla’s self-driving vehicles.
If all of this is starting to sound like vaporware, think again. Mercedes-Benz has been testing Bertha, a self-driving S-Class, on the roads of California for some months now. Meanwhile over in Sweden, Volvo has been demoing a self-driving S60 sedan. Then there’s Tesla, which showed off its self-driving autopilot feature earlier this month, along with the information that every Tesla Model S on the road already has the necessary hardware on board.

Perhaps predictably, our favorite self-driving car demonstration thus far involved a race track. Less than two weeks ago, an Audi RS7 entertained the crowds at the final round of the DTM (think German NASCAR) with hot laps of the Hockenheim track. The car lapped the track in just over two minutes, hitting a top speed of 149 mph without a human in control.
Finally, Google has also shown the world its idea of a self-driving car, although it’s one that was radically different, lacking any driver controls like a steering wheel or pedals. It’s interesting to note that Google’s car still requires a roof-mounted camera pod. By comparison, those Teslas, Audis, Mercedes, and Volvos look almost indistinguishable from their less-intelligent siblings.
All of the cars described above are capable of driving to NHTSA’s level three. The agency defines level three autonomous cars as vehicles that “enable the driver to cede full control of all safety-critical functions under certain traffic or environmental conditions and in those conditions to rely heavily on the vehicle to monitor for changes in those conditions requiring transition back to driver control.” In contrast to a car fitted with adaptive cruise control (level 2), the driver won’t need to constantly monitor road conditions. However, when Forbes went for a ride in a self-driving Audi, it reported that the car monitored the driver’s eyes, sounding alerts and then coming to a halt if they were closed for too long. Don’t expect to be able to sleep in your commute just yet.

According to Anders Eugensson, Volvo’s director of government affairs, the technology is fairly mature, and the Swedish company plans to have 100 test cars on the road in 2017. “It is more a matter of how to apply the technologies and properly link them up with the infrastructure. What is important is also to understand how this is working together with non self-driving vehicles and the acceptances of other road users. They also have to match the expectations of the end customers.” Level three self-driving Volvos should be on sale early in the next decade, he said.
Audi is even more optimistic, telling Ars it expects to have level 3 autonomous cars on sale in the US by 2017. Brad Stertz, an Audi spokesman, said the company’s confidence was down to computing power. “We announced our centralized driver assistance processor or zFAS would employ the NVIDIA K1 supercomputer on a chip announced at CES 2014. Our piloted driving pre-development work is being done in parallel with the development of the 192-core K1 chip to bring this technology out sooner.”

Is that legal?

Both of those predictions came with a big regulatory caveat. Cars won’t be driving themselves anywhere until it’s legal for them to do so. This, rather than the technology, will really determine precisely when you can go out and buy a car that drives itself. Eugensson told Ars that the liability issues have to be acceptable to their customers, and lawmakers will have to cooperate to avoid a regulatory patchwork. Sertz also pointed out the need for regulatory consistency, but he raised another issue. “One problem with regulations is that they are often considered and drafted from the perspective of fully autonomous driving capabilities, and every innovator is still a long way from reaching that level of capability. The concern then is that laws are written in a highly restrictive way that addresses a far into the future state, while slowing progress on driver assistance technologies that are the foundation for fully automated driving.”

In the absence of either US-wide federal, or Europe-wide EU regulations, individual states (in the US) and member nations (in the EU) have started the ball rolling. California started issuing licenses for driverless test cars earlier this year, and the UK intends to follow suit in January 2015. Interestingly, neither the EU nor California seem set to allow Google’s steering-wheel free car onto the road any time soon. But even once the legal issues are worked out, it will still be quite some years before completely autonomous door-to-door journeys become possible. Qualcomm’s Singh told Ars that we should expect dedicated highway lanes first. “[Self driving] is complex enough on a highway, but it increases in difficulty as the setting becomes more urban and congested,” he said. No one we talked with thought that self-driving cars would be ready to tackle a dense urban environment (say, an intersection in downtown Mumbai) for at least a decade. Rest assured, it’s a topic that automakers (and Cars Technica) will be revisiting frequently between now and then. But we're well on our way traveling down the road toward robot cars

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The Internet Archive Now Lets You Play 900+ Classic Arcade Games In Your Browser

The Internet Archive Now Lets You Play 900+ Classic Arcade Games In Your Browser

Greg Kumparak

TechCrunch

Looking for a nice little burst of nostalgia on this fine evening? Don’t feel like going through the process of installing MAME and lurking for ROMs, but still want to get your classic arcade on?
Back in December of last year, the Internet Archive (in their effort to backup the entire digital world, one bit at a time) launched a “Console Living Room” that offers up browser-friendly emulators for a pretty shocking number of consoles from the 70s/80s. Want to play some Atari 2600? Here you go. Sega Genesis? Yup!)

This weekend, they’ve introduced a whole new category: The Internet Arcade. 900+ classic arcade games, no quarters required.

It’s all a part of the JSMESS project, an effort to emulate as many systems as possible… in Javascript, of all languages. As they put it, they want to make “computer history and experiences” as embeddable as “movies, documents, and audio”.

Do they all work seemlessly? Nah — you’ll almost certainly spot a bug or two. Many are missing sound. But it’ll get better in time — and for now, just the fact that they got MAME working in a browser, sans any hefty plugins/runtime environments, is damned impressive.
One of JSMESS’ developers, Jason Scott, outlined the work he put into the Arcade-centric leg of the project in a blog post here.

(Pro tip: it can be a bit weird to figure out a game’s controls in MAME some times. The 5 key lets you insert a coin; the 1 key is usually the Player 1 start button. Arrows are usually used for directional stuff, with CTRL/ALT/SPACE used for the three primary buttons. Beyond that, you’ll have to mash buttons a bit to figure it out [or hit TAB to dive into the key configurations

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It doesn't matter what your phone looks like

It doesn't matter what your phone looks like

David Pierce

The Verge

Phones are more beautiful than ever. Close your eyes and pick one: the sleek, rounded, comfortable iPhone 6; the stark, metallic Galaxy Note 4; the rugged, cohesive Xperia Z3; the curved, customizable Moto X. Walk into a carrier store or browse Amazon and you'll see nothing but remarkable feats of industrial design and engineering.

That moment, in the store, will be the last time your phone's design matters. Because you, like the overwhelming majority of smartphone buyers in 2014, are going to take your phone out of its box and put it directly into a case, where it will remain for the duration of your two-year contract.
It doesn't matter what your phone looks like. You'll never notice anyway.

If you buy a smartphone, there's an overwhelmingly large chance that you'll buy at least one case to go along with it. The NPD Group found in December of 2013 that 75 percent of smartphone owners use a case on the device — and seemed shocked to find that number wasn't higher. In the 12 months prior to the report, it found, phone case sales had grown 17 percent.

Almost everyone uses a case — and the numbers are growing

Apple, the bastion of good smartphone design, the company that has made beautiful smartphones longer than any other, is even more affected by this trend. 87 percent of iPhone users use cases, NPD found, and nearly half of those have used more than one case over the lifetime of their phone. After the launch of the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, the thinnest and most carefully designed iPhones yet, accessory makers sold more cases than ever. Hell, even Apple wants you to hide its beautiful new designs behind a leather case.

Some case users do so to keep their phones safe. This impulse grows stronger as our phones get bigger, as the pane of glass ready to slide out of our hand and onto the floor gets harder and harder to hold. (I dropped my then-caseless iPhone 6 before I made it home from the store, and there's a ding that won't let me forget it.) It also grows stronger as our phones become more important to our lives; if my phone breaks I might lose my photos, my contacts, my notes, my high scores. My cellphone is now a precious object in every sense.

But cases have also appeared at fashion shows and in magazine spreads, designed by Marc Jacobs and Harris Tweed. In September, Vogue gave its recommendations of "the most luxe cases to buy now." We buy cases by Chanel and Louis Vuitton and Kate Spade, we bedazzle and be-tweed our simple metal rectangles. For many people, your phone isn't the fashion statement, the thing that says something about you as a person. That's what your case is for.

We lament the remarkable sameness of smartphones today, the fact that from across the room it's basically impossible to tell one big slab of black plastic from another. But maybe that's not a result of laziness on the part of manufacturers. Maybe it comes from an understanding that what consumers what is a blank canvas onto which to paint their personality. They may like one color now, but who's to say they'll still like it ten months into their two-year contract? What if it doesn't match my shoes?

Should you pick your case before you pick your phone?

You could almost argue that the way to shop for a phone is to pick the case you want and then find the phone that fits inside. Most smartphones work well anyway – you'd be hard-pressed to find one that doesn't do its job. Finding one that fits me, the way I see myself and want to be seen by others, is much harder.

Motorola was right to think that people want to customize their phones, but it missed the point: we don't want to customize our phones once, when we buy it. We want to customize them over and over again, redecorating our iPhones, the way we change our socks. When the New York Times talked to a bunch of hip teenagers about their shopping habits, the conversation kept coming back to the iPhone 6. "When you take pictures, people see your case," 15-year-old Caitlin Haywood told the Times.

That's why Verizon's new Droid Turbo is so interesting. This is not a well-designed phone: it's not sleek, not subtle, not terribly comfortable. It has a big DROID logo on the back that inexplicably also includes the amount of internal storage you selected, because apparently that's information you need to be always able to see. But it's an otherwise extraordinary piece of technology, and the real truth seems to be that Droid Turbo's success or failure won't hinge on how it looks with a case off, but what it can do with the case on. And it might also come down to whether or not Verizon has the right cases to go along with it.

Building a great smartphone is still really hard. Software matters. Durability matters. Camera performance matters. Battery life matters. But in the world we live in, the way your phone looks doesn't matter. Let's stop pretending it does.

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Microsoft Band vs. Apple Watch vs. Jawbone Up vs. Fitbit Surge

Microsoft Band vs. Apple Watch vs. Jawbone Up vs. Fitbit Surge

John Patrick Pullen

Time 

Microsoft on Thursday announced its entry into the already-crowded fitness tracker space with Microsoft Band , a full-color touchscreen bracelet driven by cloud-powered data smarts. Looking to beat the Apple Watch to market, Microsoft's wristband is already available in the U.S., but that still puts it months, if not years, behind other fitness devices.

With so many options on the market, it’s difficult to tell which wearable has the upper hand — or upper wrist. Here’s how the four biggest names in fitness tracking stack up:

Capabilities: With an entire app ecosystem in the works, the Apple Watch would be the clear favorite here, potentially providing everything from Snapchat-like disappearing scribble messages to telegraphed heartbeats right out of the box. But there’s one major caveat: the digital timepiece won’t be available until early 2015. Jawbone Up, meanwhile, has been around since late 2011, is used by hordes to track sleep, movement, and even limited notifications, but is hindered by the fact that it has no digital display. And even though Fitbit Surge can control music, display notifications, and take a pulse, it’s also not yet on the market (though rumor has it that could change any day).

That leaves the Microsoft Band, which, like the Surge, has GPS and heart rate monitoring, all sorts of notification tools and other features. It also has a cloud-based data engine, the king of intelligence that has made Jawbone Up so beloved by its wearers. But doesn’t have any user data, yet, so there’s only so much that engine can tell users thus far. Still, with a mobile payment feature (at Starbucks, at least), a UV sensor, and voice controls if you’re using it with a Windows 8.1 phone, Microsoft Band sets itself apart from the pack.

Winner: Microsoft Band (until Apple is actually in the game)

Price: Microsoft seems to be using its vast riches to sell its band at a cut-rate price, because $199 is a heck of a deal for all the features the Band packs. In comparison, the Fitbit Surge is priced at $250, making it the company’s most expensive fitness tracker to date. The Jawbone Up, meanwhile, costs just $130, and the Apple Watch starts at $350 — but that’s the price for the Sport model, which lacks the sapphire crystal face and packs a rubber watch band. Apple hasn’t announced how much its mid- or high-end smartwatch will cost, yet.

Winner: Jawbone Up

Looks: Of course, this is completely subjective, but with 18-karat gold cases at the high-end and the same eye-popping graphic interface on the low-end, no other wrist-worn fitness tracker comes close to Apple Watch. For people who want a more subtle bobble, the Jawbone Up completely and totally lacks flash, which makes it go with just about any outfit. But come on, Apple’s effort even reinvented the watch band, for goodness sake. It’ll be as close to electronic jewelry as we'll have to date.

Winner: Apple Watch

Compatibility: For all Apple’s category-conquering successes over the past ten years, they will come up as a big loser when it comes to wearables, but that’s partially by design. Apple's wristwatch is only designed to work with its iOS ecosystem, nothing else, which means only iPhone owners would buy it, and even then, most of them won’t. Meanwhile, Jawbone isn't in the phone business, so they’ve made the Up compatible with Android and iOS so they can rope in as many smartphone users as possible. The Fitbit Surge boasts compatibility with more than 120 phones across Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. And in a new strategy for Microsoft, it's making its wearable compatible with Android and iOS, in addition to Windows Phone, of course. Determined to ensure Microsoft Band doesn’t meet the same fate of its doomed Zune media player, Microsoft hopes to woo users on competing platforms while rewarding Windows Phone users with additional features like Cortana, its voice-activated assistant.

Winner: Microsoft Band

Durability: Despite the fact that these wearables are aimed at active users, none of them are water- or dust-proof. They are all water-resistant, but that’s the difference between wearing them in the rain or dropping them in a puddle. Other wristbands that boast better durability than these four are on the market, so if that’s a concern, steer clear of all of these. But of the devices covered here, at least (some models of) the Apple Watch have sapphire crystal watch faces. This material is supposed to be hard and scratch proof, though that’s yet to be seen as it hasn’t gone through real-world testing by a wide range of users.

Winner: Apple Watch

Battery Life: The harder they run, the faster they burn — that’s not an official law of computing, but it should be. The Jawbone Up, which charges via USB and a little headphone jack on the bracelet, last up to 14 days. The Fitbit Surge holds a charge for up to five days after charging by its USB cable. The Microsoft Band boasts up to 48 hours of battery life with normal use, but activating its GPS functionality will suck down its juice much faster. And Apple’s only comment on the Apple Watch's battery life, so far, has been “charge nightly.” So take those times under advisement, because there’s nothing more useless than a dead wearable.

Winner: Jawbone Up

Smarts: From heart rates to calories burned, these wearables all collect scads of data, but it’s how they use the information that makes them valuable to users. For the Apple Watch, which again is not yet available, its forthcoming app ecosystem will likely make the device the smartest of them all. Until then, the Fitbit Surge, also not yet available, seemingly has that app ecosystem in place by connecting to many popular apps — possibly even ones already on your smartphone. The Microsoft Band hooks onto Microsoft Health, the company’s continuously-improving intelligence engine that also harvests info from other apps. Meanwhile, the Jawbone Up — which already has one of the smartest apps already on the market — is teeming with user data, telling its users what kinds of food to eat based on their energy level or last night’s sleep. In a way, the giants like Apple and Microsoft are relying on the smarts of Jawbone (and other companies like it) to drive their own devices. Jawbone is playing along for now, but don’t expect to get the full experience while wearing anything other than an Up.

Winner: Jawbone Up

As you can see, the fitness tracking race is moving so fast that this primer only scratches the surface. There’s no doubt that things will have change again, soon. But one thing will remain the same: The best fitness band is the one you’ll actually wear and use. Just ask any friend who’s already bought one, where is their band right now? Sadly, chances are it’s in a drawer somewhere tracking nothing at all.

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Google wants you to easily share files between Android and iOS

Google wants you to easily share files between Android and iOS

Jon Fingas

Engadget 

As handy as services like AirDrop or Android Beam may be for shuffling content between nearby devices, they're platform-exclusive.
That's not much help if you want to share photos from your Android phone to an iPhone, or vice versa. However, Google may soon overcome that barrier. Android Police, Techaeris and GigaOM all have evidence of Copresence, a service that would let Android and iOS devices swap content over WiFi.
Reportedly, it uses location data (including Bluetooth) to set up the connection; after that, you can send directions, photos and other info without having to either bump devices or rely on cloud storage options like Google Drive or Dropbox. The technique shouldn't require a Google account, either.
It the details are accurate, Copresence should be available within a matter of weeks. Having said this, you shouldn't expect a file sharing Utopia. The feature is most likely to be limited to Google apps at first, and it's probably not going to be a system-wide feature on at least iOS -- you may have to be satisfied with exchanging files through a handful of programs. Still, that's better than the walled-off sharing you likely deal with today.

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The iBox Nano 3D printer is almost as cheap as it is tiny

The iBox Nano 3D printer is almost as cheap as it is tiny

Timothy J. Seppala

Engadget

We've seen our share of 3D printers 'round these parts, but the iBox Nano could be one of the smallest yet. Its creators claim that the gizmo is not only the most diminutive resin printer, but also the most affordable in addition to being the word's quietest and lightest 3D printer to date. It achieves these bullet points in a few ways, namely by using LEDs instead of a DLP bulb for light (cuts down on size and noise) and acrylic parts for the actual printer body. The end result is a box measuring 4 x 3 x 8 inches and weighing in at three pounds. What's with going small, though? Well, the inventors say that, statistically, folks who buy bigger (and costlier) 3D printers tend to only print smaller objects anyway -- this is a matter of calculated efficiency.
Taking that theme even further, you can print without installing any software; everything is handled via WiFi and your web browser -- you can even print from Android and iOS devices. And if you're wondering what's actually possible with the Nano, like Gizmodo notes, the pitch video and Kickstarter page are rife with things like high-res chess pieces, rings and even a velociraptor head with individual teeth. Want one for custom trinkets of your own? All it takes is a $269 pledge and for the project to raise the rest of its $300,000 funding goal (about $92,000 as of this writing).
Kickstarter

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A Halloween party where the costumes are 3D-printed

A Halloween party where the costumes are 3D-printed

Mat Smith

Engadget

Tokyo's FabCafe is a creator space dedicated to laser-cutting, 3D-printing and other things that give off the faint smell of burnt plastic and hardboard. It also just held its annual Halloween Party, but this year decided to add a new element: 3D-printed costumes. The "GRUE" projected accepted costume and headwear designs over the last month and a half (see some entries here), and then proceeded to print them out over the last few days. The results are pretty broad, but most of them share a common theme, aside from them all being spun out of a machine -- they're all white. Most were also pretty heavy -- and they're not really the kind of costumes you can wear a long time. Things get warm inside. We took a peek behind the preparation, and then got dressed up to attend.
Fabcafe

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Formula 1 is testing a 'virtual safety car'

Formula 1 is testing a 'virtual safety car'

Jon Fingas

Engadget 

Safety vehicles are sometimes as dangerous to racing drivers as actual competition -- Formula 1 driver Jules Bianchi recently crashed into a recovery tractor sent out for an earlier accident, for instance. They may be less of an unintentional threat if a virtual safety car (VSC) trial at the US Grand Prix pans out. Instead of using a lead car to slow things down during yellow flags, the system relies on dashboard displays that tell racers to stay under a given speed limit; they face penalties if they go over. The technology is only being used in practice sessions this weekend, but the FIA is working with teams to determine just when VSC is viable for honest-to-goodness races.
That may take some time. While VSC is tentatively a success, some drivers are complaining that it's too difficult. They spend a lot of time staring at their dashboards rather than the road ahead, and they have to manage speed very carefully if they want to keep up when race organizers give the all-clear. Even so, the dash-based limit might be worth the hassles if it prevents one collision from leading to another.
[Image credit: Clive Mason/Getty Images]
BBC

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