It’s time to get excited about the Galaxy S6
and the S6 Edge, two gorgeous, powerful smartphones that aim to impress
with high-end specs and an attractive, brand-new design. Now, we
finally know what everyone’s been waiting to hear: The Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge will be available to buy worldwide and on every major U.S. carrier on April 10. Updated on 04-10-2015 by Malarie Gokey: Added in news of the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge arriving in stores.
You
can pick up a Galaxy S6 or S6 Edge in 32GB, 64GB, or a huge 128GB
configurations, which are all available in White Pearl, Black Sapphire,
Gold Platinum, and Blue Topaz. Pre-orders began on Friday, March 27,
which was also when visitors at participating AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile,
Verizon Wireless, U.S. Cellular, and Samsung Experience Shops could get
up close and personal with both handsets. Now, the phones are available
for purchase in retail stores across the country, including Staples,
most carriers, Best Buy, and other retailers.
Verizon’s pricing
Verizon preorders started on April 1, which was much later than everyone else. Verizon has
the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge in black, white, or gold. The 32GB model of
the S6 and Edge will arrive on April 21, but the 64 and 128GB versions
will be delayed until May 1. If you’re on a contract, you’ll have to pay
the following prices for the Galaxy S6: $200 for 32GB, $300 for 64GB,
or $400 for 128GB.
If
you don’t have a contract, pricing starts at $600 and goes up to $800.
You’ll have to pay installments of $25, $30, or $33 a month on the Edge
plan. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S6 Edge will cost $300, $400, or $500 with a
contract, or $700, $800, and $900 off contract. On the Edge plan,
you’ll pay $30, $33, or $37 a month for the Galaxy S6 Edge. You can
preorder the Galaxy S6 here and the Galaxy S6 Edge here.
Verizon’s
also got a few trade-in deals running, including a $100+ credit when
you trade in any smartphone, $150 for a Samsung Galaxy S4, and $200 for a
Samsung Galaxy S5.
Sprint’s pricing
Meanwhile, Sprint is
practically giving the Galaxy S6 away, in hopes of reeling in some new
customers. If you lease a Galaxy S6 with 32GB of memory on the Sprint
Unlimited Plus plan, which costs $80 a month, you’ll get the phone for
free after a $20 a month credit with the 24 month lease agreement. At
the end of that time, though, you either have to turn it back into
Sprint, or pay for it in full.
You can get the 64GB version of
the Galaxy S6 for just $5 more a month on the same program, or the 128GB
Galaxy S6 for $10 more. Meanwhile, the Galaxy S6 Edge with a 24-month
lease costs $5 after Sprint gives you the $20 per month lease credit.
That’s much cheaper than you’ll find the Galaxy S6 and Edge anywhere
else. Additionally, Sprint’s prepaid carrier Boost Mobile will have the
32GB Galaxy S6 on Friday, April 10, for $650 You can also get it in
stores now.
T-Mobile’s pricing
At T-Mobile,
the standard Galaxy S6 with 32GB of storage costs $0 down and $28.33 a
month for 24 months. Meanwhile, the 64GB version costs $100 down and
$27.50 a month for 24 months, and the 128GB model costs $200 and $27.50 a
month for 24 months. The Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge costs a bit more, with
the 32GB version costing $0 with 24 payments of $32.49. The 64GB model
will run you a $100 and 24 payments of $31.66, and the 128GB model costs
$200 with 24 payments of $31.66. Before you make your decision on where
to buy the S6, remember T-Mobile will tempt you with one free year of
streaming movies and TV from Netflix. You can now go get it at T-Mobile stores.
AT&T’s pricing
At AT&T the
regular, 32GB Galaxy S6 starts at $22.84 a month on AT&T Next 24,
while the 32GB Galaxy S6 Edge starts at $27.17 a month on AT&T Next
24. AT&T is also offering $50 off the Samsung Gear Circle Bluetooth
headphones when you buy a Galaxy S6, Galaxy S6 Edge, or another Galaxy S
smartphone on an AT&T Next plan. You can now get the phone in
AT&T stores.
Other carriers and retailer’s pricing
A
number of prepaid carriers offer the Galaxy S6, but not the Edge,
including Boost Mobile, Cricket Wireless, and MetroPCS. Among the
retailers that stock both handsets on launch day are Amazon.com, Best
Buy, Costco, Sam’s Club, Target, and Walmart.
In
the UK, Samsung opened preorders for both phones on March 20 through
its own Experience stores, online, and with retail stores such as
Vodafone, Carphone Warehouse, Three, O2, and EE. The April 10 release
date remained, but those ordering from Samsung’s Experience stores will
be able to pick up their phones on April 9.
We got our hands on both, and here’s what we think about the phones so far.
It’s been a while since Microsoft last released a flagship Lumia phone, but the wait may have finally ended. According to twin reports from the Verge and Unleash the Phones,
the company is set to unveil two high-end devices, codenamed Cityman
and Talkman, to showcase the headlining features of Windows Phone 10.
Unleash
the Phones disclosed the internals of each handset, and
they’re competitive. Cityman packs an unspecified Qualcomm octa-core
processor, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of internal storage, and a MicroSD card
slot. Talkman drops the processor core count down to six, but retains
the 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage with MicroSD card slot. Related: Best Windows Phones
The
displays are close in terms of resolution (Quad HD 2,560 x 1,440
pixels) but apart in size: Cityman’s measures 5.7 inches, while
Talkman’s is the smaller of the two at 5.2 inches. They both sport
20-megapixel rear-facing cameras, 5-megapixel front-facing cameras, and
batteries of nearly identical capacity — 3,300mAh in Cityman and
3,000mAh in Talkman.
That may all sound rather mundane, but
Microsoft’s got a few tricks up its sleeve. Cityman and Talkman are
equipped with “triple-LED” flash for more “natural colors,” for one, and
will also come with proprietary components that enable Windows 10’s
Continuum for phones. The feature — which Microsoft recently demoed at
its annual BUILD conference in Redmond, Washington — transforms the mobile interface
into a full integrated Windows desktop. You can use the Edge
browser and Office apps with an attached keyboard and mouse, but also
receive SMS and place calls. Related: Windows 10 can almost run Android and iPhone apps
The
delay of Windows 10 for phones reportedly won’t impact the release date
of the Cityman and Walkman. Microsoft is shooting to ship “later this
year,” but specifics beyond that vague estimate aren’t forthcoming.
Windows
Phone’s app ecosystem is still weaker than the competition’s, but
Microsoft’s made strides in courting developers. It introduced tools at
BUILD to easily port apps written for iOS and Android
to Windows Phone, and added support for carrier billing, in-app
purchases, and corporate environments to the Windows Store. Whether
these efforts will increase the number of apps in the store and the
number of Windows Phone users remains to be seen.
Facebook has launched its suicide prevention feature,
which it announced back in February. Although users could report what
they perceive to be suicidal content as early as 2011, the feature has
been made more prominent and accessible. In addition, those struggling
with thoughts of self-harm and suicide can also seek help.
Once a
post is reported as suicidal, the person experiencing suicidal thoughts
will get a notification saying a friend is concerned about their recent
post, and then they will be given options to either talk to another
Facebook friend, or to access resources for those experiencing suicidal
thoughts. If the latter option is chosen, the person is sent to a list
of resources regarding suicide prevention to help them figure out
what they can do about the situation immediately, contact a self-care
expert, or learn how to deal with suicidal thoughts.
Related: Facebook adds suicide alert system Now Matters Now, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, Save.org, and Forefront: Innovations in Suicide Prevention
are some of the suicide prevention organizations that Facebook has
partnered with in preparation for the launch of this feature. Currently,
the updated resources regarding suicide prevention are available to
about half of all Facebook users in the United States. Facebook
emphasized the need to connect with those who care, such as the user’s
family and friends, in its February post.
“One of the first things these organizations discussed with us was how
much connecting with people who care can help those in distress. If
someone on Facebook sees a direct threat of suicide, we ask that they
contact their local emergency services immediately,” they said.
There
have been many suicides that have originated as a social media post.
One of the most recent cases involved transgender game developer Rachel
Bryk, who committed suicide on April 23 because of excess cyber harassment. Also, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health,
suicide pacts via the Internet originated in Japan in 2000. The study
stated that out of 240 search engine terms containing the following
phrases (“suicide,” “suicide methods,” “how to kill yourself,” and “best
suicide methods”), around half were pro-suicide.
Although it
might be too early to tell whether or not it will make an impact, it is a
step in the right direction and allows Facebook users — both concerned
friends and family and those experiencing suicidal thoughts — to take an
active role in preventing suicide that might start off as a social
media post.
Some
men are born great, others have greatness thrust upon them. Levi
Charles Reardon is neither of those men. Reardon, who was wanted for
theft and forgery in Cascade County, Montana, was perusing Facebook when
he stumbled upon his own wanted poster on the local Crime Stoppers
page. He then decided the best course of action would be to “like” his
own wanted poster, chuckle to himself (speculation), and keep scrolling.
Wanted Ad for Mr. Reardon.
Reardon
was subsequently arrested without incident Friday morning and had his
initial court appearance on felony forgery and theft charges earlier
this week. According to the Great Falls Tribune,
Reardon was held on $2,500 bond and in fact had not one but two
warrants out for his arrest.His arraignment is scheduled for May 7.
It
seems Reardon was a suspect in a recent case involving a stolen wallet
and personal checks. Again showing his intelligent side, Reardon
attempted to cash four of the stolen checks after making them out in his
own name. He had spoken previously with an officer regarding the theft
after having been notified that checks made out in his name had been
reported as fraudulent.
Levi
has found himself among the ranks of the great Internet geniuses. Just
last year we covered the astute abilities of one Roger Ray Ireland, who
boasted on Facebook that the police would never catch him and of course
was swiftly arrested.
Obviously Mr. Reardon did not read our article or he would have known
not to interact with social media posts related to wanted criminals in
his county.
People
can’t seem to stay away from Facebook kerfuffles, as is evidenced by
this woman who posted a selfie of herself in a stolen dress and was …
you guessed it, arrested.
A PSA from Digital Trends: If you have committed crimes, or are wanted for crimes, stay off social media.
Google+
is having a bit of an identity crisis while its Mountain View owner
works out exactly what it wants to do with it. Until recently, the most
significant news about the struggling social network was that its
excellent Photos component was going to get spun out into a standalone project. It turns out Google+ now has a new sharing feature called Collections, and it looks a lot like Pinterest.
First uncovered by DroidLife tipster,
the new Collections feature, described as “part Pinterest, part
blogging,” enables users to create groups of photos, videos, and links
and then share them with other people in their Circles.
Google+
officially began rolling out Collections today. It lets any user
dedicate a Google+ page to the topic of their choosing, which others can
then follow. You can check out some of Google’s favorite new Collections
here. Google+ could certainly use a boost as it looks to make up ground
on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and the various other social sharing
apps. Although Google hasn’t shared any user numbers publicly, recent
estimates suggest the network has between 4 million and 6 million active users.
Compare
that to the 1.44 billion active monthly users that Facebook boasts, and
you can see the problem. Still, Google is unlikely to abandon Google+
completely — It’s a useful way of giving every Gmail and YouTube user an
identity on the Web, even if no one’s actually paying much attention to
the stream of posts that go alongside the profiles.
A splash page indicates Collections will reach all corners of the social network in time, but users on Twitter have reported seeing a few
public Collections. Now that it’s been released, it will be interesting
to see whether the Pinterest-style feature brings users back to
Google+.
Apple just released what history might say is its most important product ever.
And guess what? Hardly anyone even knows it exists.
It’s called ResearchKit. It’s a software toolkit that lets researchers write iPhone apps for medical studies.
Yawn, right?
No. This is a huge deal.
Every
year, people buy 1 billion smartphones and 70 million wearable health
trackers. These devices monitor how much we move and sleep, and where we
are in the world. Some of them track our pulse, stress, posture,
sunlight exposure, perspiration, and so on.
Yet
how much of this data is available to scientists? None of it. These
phones and trackers spew out terabytes of useful data a day — and
scientists can’t get at it, analyze it, or parse it to draw conclusions
about medicine and health. We’re conducting the biggest clinical trial
in human history, and we are throwing away the results.
How studies are conducted now
What
is science, anyway? It’s “the systematic study of the structure and
behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and
experiment.”
Without observation and experiment, science doesn’t move forward. That’s why medical studies are so important.No medical breakthrough ever came about without one.
Today,
studies on disorders, medicines, and treatments are conducted the same
way they have been for 50 years. To get research subjects, a researcher
seeks participants by putting up fliers or taking out an ad in a
newspaper. It’s low-tech and absurdly inefficient.
Probably
the most quoted line from Apple’s ResearchKit promotional video is this
one, from Kathryn Schmitz, PhD, of the University of Pennsylvania
Health System: “We have sent out over 60,000 letters. Those 60,000
letters have netted 305 women.”
Once
you’ve found your subjects, you sit them down and go over the risks and
benefits — a paperwork nightmare that takes at least half an hour per
participant. Right there, you’ve limited the scope of your study, and
limited it to people who live nearby.
That’s the world of medical research right now. Slow, small-scale, inefficient.
Consent and privacy
Apple
worked with five medical institutions, associated with places like
Harvard, Stanford, and Mount Sinai in New York City, to come up with the
first five ResearchKit-based apps. They represent studies of asthma,
diabetes, heart disease, Parkinson’s, and breast cancer. (You can enroll
in the heart, breast cancer, and Parkinson’s studies even if you don’t
have those diseases. The researchers will use your data as a control.)
The
first time you open a ResearchKit app, you encounter the first huge
breakthrough: The sign-in process is electronic. No more researcher
sitting across from a table asking you questions and going over
paperwork.
Ordinarily,
that sort of enrollment process would never fly with the hospitals’
notoriously conservative IRBs — the institutional review boards whose
job it is to approve every step of a medical study, making sure it
complies with all medical, ethical, and legal concerns.
But
by choosing five institutions to help launch ResearchKit, Apple wound
up creating competitive pressure. “No institution wanted to be left out
because its review board wouldn’t approve it,” says Dr. Eric Schadt of Mount Sinai, whose team created the Asthma Health app. The result: All five institutions’ IRBs approved an electronic consent-granting process within the app. With just this one advancement, the world of medical research has changed forever.
In
any case: After you read the consent forms, you’re told exactly who
will get to see your data and for what purpose it will be used. You can
opt out of any part of the data collection at any time. Indeed, you can
drop out of a study at any time, although you agree to let the
researchers use the data you’ve generated up to that point.
In each app, you’re also asked: Do you grant permission for us to share your data with medical researchers at other institutions, conducting other studies?
Incredibly, Schadt says that 75 percent of the people who’ve signed up for his asthma study have agreed to let their data be shared more widely. They truly want to help.
So, no question: The consent and sign-up process is complete and thorough and patient. If you ask me, it’s too much
so. You’re shown the details of the study, your privacy, and your
freedoms, one screen at a time. Then you take a quiz to confirm that you
get it. Then you get an email saying the same thing for a third time. We get it!
By the way: Apple says that Apple never gets your data. I asked Dr. Schadt if that’s true.
“Apple
never touches the data,” he confirmed. “The data’s collected in the
app, and the data goes to what we call a bridge server. It’s maintained
by Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit medical research institute in Seattle.
It’s all encrypted and very secure, meets all the industry standards for
shipping sensitive data, HIPAA compliant. From the bridge server, it
goes into the server we access. The only people who have access to the
data are the investigators of the study.”
Size and scope
By now, you realize why ResearchKit is such a big deal: Because it hugely amplifies the size and scope of a study. Instead of generating some data, it generates big data. You can sign up a lot of people for your study, fast.
Using
traditional recruitment techniques, “you’re lucky if you get 300 or 500
over the course of a year,” Schadt told me. “If you’re super lucky, over many years, you’ll get a thousand enrolled in a study — and they’ll be geographically limited.”
But he got 7,500 asthma sufferers enrolled in his study within the first month. “That’s astonishing — it just blew us away.”
Furthermore, the data they generate is continuous. In
traditional studies, Schadt says, “You’re lucky if those individuals
come in once a year, for a 30-minute visit. But with the app, we can
collect that data continuously over time, providing a much deeper
characterization of what’s going on.”
The
other first-wave ResearchKit researchers told me similar stories. For
example, the breast-cancer app, Share the Journey, had 6,000 downloads
and 2,500 enrollments in the study within three weeks.
For the Stanford heart study, a mind-blowing 30,000 people enrolled through the MyHeart Counts app in the first month of availability.
And
even that is just the beginning, says Dr. Mike McConnell, whose team
created the app. “We exceeded the 10,000 threshold the first 24 hours,
but with the number of iPhone users around the world, we’d really like
to reach many more people. There is clearly a process of how to make
them as user-friendly and engaging as possible, to encourage and
maintain engagement.”
2-way studies
I
visited Schadt and his team at Mount Sinai in New York, to get a better
idea of how his app works — and what the data looks like when it comes
to him.
The
app itself is very simple. Each day, it prompts you to answer three or
four questions about how you feel, if you used your inhaler today, and
if you took your medication. Behind the scenes, it’s also recording your
GPS location. From that, the app can figure out the local pollution
levels you are exposed to: pollen count, ozone, heat index, and other
asthma-triggering conditions.
This
is typical for a ResearchKit app. The patient supplies some of the data
by answering questions. The rest is generated automatically from the
phone’s sensors: microphone, camera, accelerometer, GPS, gyroscope, and
so on. If you have an external health device that talks to Apple’s HealthKit protocol —
a fitness-tracker band, digital thermometer, Bluetooth scale, Bluetooth
blood-pressure cuff, Bluetooth inhaler, and so on — that data can
become part of the ResearchKit app’s data, too.
(Schadt
notes that Bluetooth inhalers are already available. As they become
popular and HealthKit-compatible, more of his app’s data can become
auto-generated — and more reliable than the patient’s memory.)
The
mPower app for Parkinson’s is a great example. Each day, it asks you to
participate in certain activities. One asks you to say “ahhh” into the
microphone for as long as you can on a single breath. One asks you to
tap the screen alternately with two fingers as fast as you can. One
tracks your short-term memory by testing to see if you can remember a
pattern of flowers lighting up.
Once
the researchers start collecting data from their apps, they can slice
and dice the results in astonishing ways. At Mount Sinai, for example,
Schadt showed me a very visual graphic dashboard program on his laptop
that displays all of the data from his 7,500 participants. With a click,
he can view subsets of data — by state, age, ethnicity, smoking status,
asthma medication, and so on.
(One
example I loved: His dashboard includes an aggregated graph that shows
what events have triggered the participants’ asthma attacks each week.
In states like California and Texas, common triggers include heat,
exercise, and feathery animals. But in New York and New Jersey — and
only those states — a frequent trigger turns out to be anger.)
We
already know that pollution and pollen can trigger asthma attacks, of
course. But we know only that those triggers affect the population of
asthma sufferers. “What may be very severe for one person may be mild
for another,” Schadt says. “We know it on a population level, but we
want to get to a precision-based medicine. If we could start stratifying
the patient population into different groups, we would then monitor
them differently, inform them differently, and manage their care
differently.”
In other words, these apps could hurry us along into the next generation of medical care, where your treatment is tailored to your DNA,
geography, and bodily responses — instead of blindly trying one drug,
then another, in hopes of eventually finding something that works.
All
of the researchers I interviewed said the same thing: that a huge
advantage of using an app to conduct the study is that it can become two-way. In a regular study, you provide data to the researchers — and then you never hear from them again.
But ResearchKit apps can begin to give you advice based on your medication situation.
For
example, McConnell’s app, MyHeart Counts, is part of a study that
examines relationships between activity, motivation, risk factors, and
heart health. The app tracks your activity, either from the phone’s
motion sensors or HealthKit-compatible wearables, for a week. You also
take a six-minute walking test four times a year.
After three months, the app starts giving you personalized motivational prompts to get you to move more.
Apple’s motivation
This is great and all — but why is Apple doing it?
Your first assumption might be: “to sell iPhones, of course.”
But here’s the thing: Apple has made ResearchKit open source. Apple invites anyone to use it or even modify it — even Apple’s rivals, like Samsung, Google, and Microsoft.
In fact, Apple assisted with the writing of those first five apps on the conditionthat the apps themselves also be open-source. So they are.
This is a gigantic move. It means that Apple gets nothing out of this — except the rosy glow of doing something good for humanity, and maybe a little good PR.
Room for improvement
All
of the researchers are positively giddy about ResearchKit’s potential.
“Sage, Stanford, Harvard — we all talk pretty regularly,” says Schadt,
referring to the institutions that made the first five ResearchKit apps.
“Everybody is just over-the-top blown away at the response. Everybody’s
going, ‘Wow, this is really changing the mindset of research.’”
That
doesn’t mean there aren’t critiques, however. One example jumps out
pretty quickly: These studies won’t include any data from patients who
can’t afford a smartphone.
Some of the apps, like Asthma Health and GlucoSuccess (for diabetes), require that you actually have that
disease to participate. But the app has no way to confirm that you’re
not just a merry prankster, skewing the data by faking it.
ResearchKit
apps currently can’t incorporate genetic information, either, and they
don’t integrate with patients’ electronic medical records. Furthermore,
plenty of external medical sensors still don’t work with HealthKit and
so can’t generate data for ResearchKit.
And, of course, ResearchKit apps can’t do things like scan your body or analyze fluid samples. Maybe in version 2.0.
The ResearchKit future
Still,
taking medical research digital with ResearchKit promises to be just as
disruptive a change as when music went digital. We can answer questions
now thousands of times faster, with much bigger test samples, than we could in the posting-fliers age.
Stanford’s
McConnell sums it up well: “ResearchKit solves a number of the current
challenges to clinical research. How do you reach/recruit a large number
of people? How to do help bring down the costs of large clinical
research studies? How do you reach a broad geographic population? How do
you make it easier and more engaging for people to participate? How can
you collect more continuous, real-world, quantitative data? How can you
give participants more feedback about their data, and the choice to
share their research data broadly?”
Dr.
Patricia Ganz, whose Share the Journey app is part of a UCLA
breast-cancer study, agrees. “This is a proof of principle,” she told
me. “It’s a new way to conduct research. It’s also amazing that Apple
has donated the resources to make it happen.”
Mount
Sinai’s Schadt already has 10 more apps in development for other
diseases. I’ll give him the last word: “You’re not only going to
maintain a much healthier, more productive person, but you’ll save the
health system a lot of money as well. That’s where I think this is all
going to have a really dramatic impact on public health.”
The next big thing in tech: The desktop computer (yes, really)
(CNN)You
will see plenty of smartphones in the developing world and you'll see
plenty of TVs; but you're unlikely to see desktop computers in remote
areas.
Poor internet
connectivity, uncertain power supply and a simple lack of money have
meant that billions have been locked out of the knowledge economy.
Matt
Dalio, CEO of Endless Computers, wants to change all of that with the
first simplified, robust and affordable desktop aimed at emerging market
consumers.
Dalio told CNN he got the
idea to create a $169 computer while he was traveling and noticed that,
while most homes did not have a desktop computer, they often had an HD
screen.
"It was one of those
micro-epiphanies," he said. "I was in India and I looked over at a
television and then I looked at my hand and there was a phone in it and I
thought why not connect the two?
"While
smartphones may be sweeping through emerging markets, a computer is
still the thing that you and I sit down to every day to access the
knowledge economy," he said. "The only difference between a smartphone
and a computer is the monitor, the keyboard, the mouse and the operating
system."
Reinventing the wheel
Despite the best efforts to bring affordable technology to the developing world, from radios powered by clockwork to water pumps with few moving part, designing new systems from scratch is like reinventing the wheel.
And like most designs for new wheels, they often end up being round.
"If
I'd known then what I know now," Dalio said of the three-year journey
to develop possibly the world's most pared back desktop.
"Initially
I thought we're going to take Android, put it on a smartphone processor
and how hard could it be?" he said. "And when we went into hardware how
hard could that be? We're basically taking an off-the-shelf board and
slapping two pieces of plastic around it.
"The real challenge we found was that no existing operating system worked."
Software a hard problem to solve
Windows,
he said, was too expensive and doesn't run on cheap processors, Android
is fundamentally a mobile system, Chrome requires connectivity, and
Linux is too hard to use.
"We realized we had to build an operating system, but ignorance is a powerful tool."
After
searching for the right development team (Endless eventually came up
with a Linux-based operating system equipped with a new and
easier-to-use interface) and launching a Kickstarter campaign that
raised more than its $100,000 target in record time, Endless plans to go
on sale in Mexico in May.
Equipped
with app-based software and hardware that can cope with an uncertain
power supply, Endless comes in a 32G and 500GB version both powered by
2GB of RAM.
The idea is to effectively
encapsulate the internet for consumers beyond the range of the net.
Each unit comes pre-loaded with a full encyclopedia, recipes,
educational lectures and health information.
"The
single most popular application is Wikipedia," he said. "We are
planning on adding software with a focus on farming; in many places
people are cash poor but that doesn't mean they don't have assets.
"When
a cow, for instance, gets sick it's a real problem. That cow's health
can sometimes be more important than their own child's because the
fortune of the whole family rests on that cow.
"Information
is so powerful ... what we want to do is to fill this product with the
information that's relevant to their lives," Dalio said. "No one in San
Francisco is building a how-to-manage-your-cattle app, that's for sure."
Computer access for billions?
With
an estimated 5 billion people without access to computers, Endless say
the potential for their computers is enormous and, while it may not be
the cheapest on the market, Dalio says it is the best that money can
buy.
Consumers in the developing world,
he says, are no different to consumers anywhere else in the world and
want something functional but also slick.
"People
are like you and I, they want the best that they can afford," he said.
"They want something unique and beautiful and exciting and different.
"People
here in the West will say they want a flat top on their desktops so
they can stack their books on top of it, it's just a commodity, but
there it's an object of art, of luxury, of pride.
"They want the round top that we produce specifically so their kids can't stack their books on top of it."
