Gadget Ogling: Magnificent Mics, Intriguing E-Ink, and Compact Computers

I've tried dipping my toes into the world of podcasting with a friend this year. We haven't found it easy to get together to record, but for the two trial runs we've had, I bought a Blue Snowball mic. I'm very pleased with the sound quality, so I'm fairly certain I'd be happy to have Blue's latest microphone, Raspberry. It's a gorgeous, portable little thing.

Microsoft's New Tech Targets Human Creativity

Microsoft made a slew of announcements at its New York City event Wednesday, focusing on the idea of user as creator. Among its new offerings: the Surface Studio, an all-in-one desktop computer with a touchscreen that's 12.5mm thick; the Surface Dial, a new input device that provides haptic feedback; the Surface Book i7; VR headsets for Windows 10; and a revamped Paint app with 3D capability.

Xiaomi Debuts Magical Mi Mix

Xiaomi on Tuesday fired another shot in the shrinking bezel wars, as it announced a smartphone with a front that's more than 90 percent display. The Mi Mix is a 6.4-inch phone that's stylishly crafted by French designer Philippe Starck. It sports a feature set that indicates Xiaomi wants to compete at the high end of the smartphone market. The Mi Mix has a screen-to-body ratio of 91.3 percent

Microsoft Open Sources AI Toolkit

Microsoft has released an updated version of its Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit as an open source Beta. The deep learning system is used to speed advances in areas such as speech and image recognition and search relevance on CPUs and Nvidia GPUs. It also works with Microsoft's Azure GPU offering. The toolkit's developers initially were looking for a tool to speed up and improve their own research.

Apple Brings a Surprising Touch to MacBook Event

Apple on Thursday unveiled two new MacBook Pro laptops, adding a touch more power to the line. Both the new 13-inch and 15-inch models will be offered in silver and space gray. They have a Touch Bar that replaces the row of function keys found on laptops, as well as a Touch ID fingerprint scanner incorporated into the power button. They sport a Force Touch trackpad that's twice the size of the trackpad in previous models.

Sprint will support next-gen texting on Android next year

Ah, RCS: it stands for “Rich Communication Services” and it’s meant to replace SMS as the default way most phones send text and multimedia messages. It’s more powerful than SMS — without that silly 160 character limit and with better support for images and video and group chat. But like SMS, it’s a carrier-based solution, which means that it has to prove that it can overcome historical problems that SMS has had, including crazy pricing models and weird interoperability problems from carrier to carrier.

Google has been working on getting carriers on board since at least February of this year to prove that very thing, and today it finally has something to announce: Sprint is switching over to RCS on its Android devices. Everything that ships next year will support it, and “select LG and Nexus phones” will get software updates.

SPRINT JUMPS ON DEFAULT ANDROID RCS FIRST

Sprint uses Google’s solution for supporting RCS, called Jibe, but it should be able to send and receive messages with any phone because it comports with the “Universal Profile” for messaging put out by the GSMA. That profile should mean that any RCS-compatible phone should be able to send multimedia messages to any other RCS-compatible phone (and fall back to SMS if that fails). But “should” and “will” are two different things, and even though it’s 2016 we still don’t fully know how all this stuff will really shake out just yet.

AT&T supports RCS on a pretty big array of Samsung and LG phones — using their custom-built Messenger apps — but we don’t know if its solutions will work with Android’s default Messenger app yet. T-Mobile announced support for RCS back in July 2015.

On Sprint, RCS will work — blessedly — through the standard Android Messenger app. That’s one of three messaging apps that Google ships on phones (the other two are Allo and Hangouts), and that lack of messaging clarity is a sore point for Android users.

VR eye tracking could shape your relationships with virtual people

Well over a year ago, I tried a Kickstarter-funded virtual reality headset that could track not just your head, but your pupils. It was called Fove, and it’s now open for preorders, with a price of $599 and a shipping date of early 2017. (Kickstarter backers will get their versions toward the end of 2016, and people who preorder in the first week will get a discounted price of $549.) At the VR Developers Conference in San Francisco, I was able to test out the latest version, and it’s come a long way — even if its creators admit that it’s ready for everyday use just yet.

Outside VR, eye tracking in entertainment is usually an aid for aiming and navigating in video games, whether that’s shifting the camera in an action game playing Asteroids with your eyes. Inside VR, it’s most practical for foveated rendering, where a headset saves processing power by rendering the part of a screen you’re directly watching in fine detail and blurring everything else. This could let people make more complex and beautiful VR experiences, or drive down the cost of VR-ready PCs, and multiple companies are working on it.