Apple has now made support for digital driver’s licenses in Apple Wallet available in Maryland, just under a year after initially announcing the first few states it would be coming to. The Wallet app update launched in Arizona earlier this year, with Connecticut, Iowa, Oklahoma, Utah, Kentucky, Colorado, Hawaii, Mississippi, Ohio, and the territory of Puerto Rico expected to follow in the coming months.
Digital driver’s licenses are an effort to turn the Apple Wallet into a true wallet replacement. Rather than simply store just your payment cards, it has now been updated to work with state IDs and driver’s licenses. You’ll now be able to use your Apple Watch or iPhone to identify yourself without leaving your physical ID card at risk of being stolen. The rollout has been slow, however. Apple needs to work with individual states to bring it online, hence the crawling pace. Arizona was the first, and Maryland is the latest so far.
“The addition of driver’s licenses and state IDs to Apple Wallet is an important step in our vision of replacing the physical wallet with a secure and easy-to-use mobile wallet,” Jennifer Bailey, Apple’s vice president of Apple Pay and Apple Wallet said. “We are excited that the TSA and so many states are already on board to help bring this to life for travelers across the country using only their iPhone and Apple Watch, and we are already in discussions with many more states as we’re working to offer this nationwide in the future.”
Adding it to your Apple Wallet is fairly easy, and you won’t have to hand over your phone to nosy TSA agents either. Verification is contactless, and your phone doesn’t need to be unlocked for the process. At the same time, this is a new technology, and there are likely to be teething problems.
While Apple is currently the only company to have this kind of service live, Google at I/O 2022 announced plans to integrate digital licenses into the new Google Wallet app as a logical evolution of its mobile wallet concept. There have also been efforts by independent apps like the U.K.’s Yoti to normalize digitized ID services, but a more concentrated push from the juggernauts of Apple and Google in concert with government authorities stands the best chance of working,
The OnePlus Buds Clip are a new pair of open-ear earbuds built around a simple convenience. They join Sony’s LinkBuds Clip in the growing ear-cuff category, but either OnePlus bud can go on either ear.
Sensors recognize how the earbuds are being worn and route the audio channels accordingly. There’s no label to check before putting them on, and the feature also works when only one bud is used.
We buy fitness bands and activity trackers to keep tabs on our exercise, but it is easy to forget to start tracking or switch modes when moving between different activities. For Fitbit and Pixel Watch users, that could soon become a lot less annoying, as Google is rolling out a major upgrade to automatic activity tracking that can recognize more than 100 types of exercise, up from just 10 before.
Google first showed off the improved tracking earlier this month alongside the Fitbit Edge. It is now coming to Fitbit Air and the Pixel Watch 3, 4, and 5, and Google claims the added context behind the system makes workout detection nearly twice as accurate while cutting missed activities by more than half. Fitbit Edge will support it too.