If you’re the type that likes long strolls on the beach with your significant other – who may or may not eventually become your spouse or partner – then Facebook wants you to feel the love. With everything that’s been going on with Facebook as of late, you’d think some sort of mea culpa from Mark Zuckerberg, or the Oculus Go or the M Translations feature or some of the other… notable announcements from F8 would be the big news. Well, you’re wrong.
Yes, Facebook will indeed launch a “dating” channel that Zuckerberg said will be designed for “relationships” and not just hook-ups. While the Facebook matchmaker feature doesn’t have a name yet (although we kind of like that one), Zuckerberg said it will allow users to create a separate profile and matches will be based on interests, dating preferences… and mutual friends. Perfect, because that always turns out so well. Zuckerberg said the feature will roll out later this year.
Some smartphone news and reviews now: We’ve been putting the new LG G7 Thin-Que to the test, and so far we’re impressed. And also, not so impressed. It’s a cool phone to be sure, with a great display that has a notch at the top, and pretty much all the features you’d expect from a $650 handset: A capable camera, four or six gigabytes of RAM, and the new Snapdragon 845 processor. Good stuff, but also, it’s expected stuff.
What was unexpected? The sound quality of the built-in speaker. LG calls it a “boombox” speaker but we actually remember how boomboxes sounded, so while it doesn’t quite rise to that level of quality, it does sound really, really good – for a speaker built into a phone. And depending on what surface the phone is sitting on, it can sound even better. Find out what kind of trickery LG used to scale up the sound of the G7 Thin Que in our full review.
Smart watches continue to orbit fairly far away from the hot center of the techie universe, but we’ll just predict that, eventually, everyone is going to be wearing one. Why? Because of stories like this one: a teenager in Florida got an alert from her Apple Watch that her heart rate was soaring to near 190 beats per minute, and she wasn’t running a marathon or rocking some cardio at the gym; she was sitting quietly in church.
The Apple Watch recommended she seek medical attention and when she did, doctors figured out her kidneys were close to failure and that she needed a transplant, and soon. Doctors think that if the watch had not given her a heads up, her condition could have gone unnoticed until it was too late. The teen’s mom fired off a thank-you email to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who responded that incidents like that “inspire us to keep pushing.” Apple has said since the debut of the Apple Watch that it could prove to be a valuable medical diagnostic aid. Looks like they’re onto something.
We’ve got more news on our Facebook page and YouTube channel, and be sure to tune in to this week’s DT podcasts: Trends with Benefits (general tech shenanigans) on Thursdays, and Between the Streams (movie and TV topics) every Friday.
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.