Headworx

My ups and downs with the iPad Pro continue. The experience is far from smooth mainly because I'm having trouble getting adjusted to Apple's philosophy and the restrictions of iOS and iOS Apps. One of the reasons why I selected the Pro has been the screen. I knew it would be the best tablet screen money could buy and I wanted the best screen for portable photo viewing. Photos are also the reason I opted for the 128GB version - to have them loaded on the device and accessible all the time, especially on the road when Internet connections are neither fast nor stable. I was entirely surprised when I learned it was not possible to load photos on the iPad. Of course there are dozen or so apps dedicated to photos on an iPad. But none works offline with full resolution. They either require a cloud service available online when viewing or cache photos, but at reduced resolution. Suffice to say Apple's default way of transferring photos has not changed since the first photo capa...

Z-Wave has just announced an optional improvement patching the most severe security hole: the initial key exchange and initial device authentication. This move clearly shows Z-Wave wants to fight for survival and the chances are it will survive in residential implementations for some time. Mainly due to variety of products and backward compatibility. Which by the way makes the new security improvement weaker than it sounds. Yes my new, Z-Wave S2-enabled door lock may now be securely included in the network, but the moment I bring an older Z-Wave device, it may leak the network key during the inclusion process. This is the problem with security: making one door more secure does not increase the security of a house, as long as there are other doors and windows. And securing all of them is not possible, because, in Z-Wave's case, the products are not in-field upgradable. In-field software upgrade is the most wanted, the most praised and the least practiced IoT feature. Because ...

I'm writing this on a delayed UA99 flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles. The reason for the delay is the faulty A/C unit. The situation was nicely explained by the captain: "The Dreamliner is a fantastic plane but is fully computerized and sometimes computers report some errors and the usual way we deal with them is reboot. Sometimes it takes a couple of reboots and for some subsystems we are not allowed to reboot them once airborne. The unit is working fine now but we may have to turn off the entertainment system on the way, if the cabin temperature raises.". Yeah. Reboot. The new normal. The old joke of a developer fixing a broken car by getting out and getting in again is no longer a joke. Out / in has become the normal way to deal with things. From phones to planes. And chances are this system will soon cover door locks, lamps, kitchen white goods and other everyday equipment - thanks to the IoT. Only yesterday there was a discussion between on of our developmen...

I haven't bought an Apple product for years. The last one was the iPad 1, so you have it... it was a long time ago. The 64GB iPad 1 , 6 years back. I've been always thinking about larger display sizes... So here comes the iPad Pro A.D. 2015. It is a very mixed bag of feelings. Overall it is a great piece of hardware. The display is top-notch (although it would be even better if it was AMOLED not LCD, but hey...). It has a lot of horsepower too. Very snappy. It weighs the same as my 1st gen iPad. Which is reasonable. Many ask "what would I use the Pro for?". So here are my hints. It works very well as a secondary USB display when connected to my Windows-10 Lenovo Yoga. I love big screens and lots of screen real estate. The iPad pro helps here while traveling. It is my second monitor (thanks to the TwoMon App ). It is also the greatest reader for PDF and Microsoft Word documents, I've ever had. Successfully replacing my old Kindle DX that I will be retiring now....

It's been a long wait. My last Blackberry was the Torch in 2010 . I loved it and I loved every Blackberry before. I switched to Android for two reasons: I could not stand the philosophy of RIM playing against the users, ending up in frustrating user experience (more on this one here ) The selection and quality of Apps, compared with Android, was shrinking rapidly. But I was missing the Blackberry hardware ever since. And now it is back in an absolutely dream package. The Priv has the screen size identical to iPhone 6+, but in a smaller overall package. Yet it offers a physical keyboard. It is thinner than the LG-G3. The display is phenomenal. I had a Galaxy Note with AMOLED, then moved to LCD (LG-G3) and I'm so happy to have an AMOLED screen back again. I don't think anybody would go back from AMOLED to LCD and be happy. The LCD backlight is simply too aggressive on eyes and produces bleak colors. AMOLED is calm, almost matte, yet produces extremely vibrant color...

The news about the Bluetooth roadmap for 2016 are officially out so we can discuss them in public now. I've covered the Mesh many times already and the next thrilling (and many even say shocking) feature is the range increase. It will be four times what it is today. Which translates to extra 12dBm link budget (every 6 dBm increase in link budget results in a doubling of the possible distance that is achievable). Today, which means Bluetooth LE 4.0 A.D. 2015, the Bluetooth Smart modules we've designed at Silvair reach about 2000ft / 700m LoS (line-of-Sight) module-to-module range (using small omnidirectional λ/4 antennas). Our official figure is 1500ft / 500m, which is still shocking to many. The link budget we have is 108dB. In the near future we will be offering a new Bluetooth Smart module that can go up to 118dB link budget. 1500ft/500m will become 5000ft/1500m - almost a mile. And this is still WITHOUT the 4x range increase that will come later in 2016. Assuming every...

It is official now: Bluetooth Smart has reinforced the leading position among low power wireless protocols: It will offer 4x the range. Which means more than a mile line-of-sight with omnidirectional antennas and even more with directional antennas. Suddenly Bluetooth enters the turf of long range WAN technologies, not to mention its ability to cover entire buildings with a single hop. It will offer 2x the data rate. Bluetooth is already one of the fastest radios. Not for large transmissions but for many tiny transmissions. Today you can easily have 100 sensor nodes each sending a message to a gateway every second with very low collision rate. That is about 10x more than any 802.15.4 radio can do . With the upcoming speed increase, it will double that number. The double data rate also means the radio duty cycle is cut by half. Which means battery life is doubled. Yes, we are looking into battery powered devices that last 10+ years on a single coin cell. It will form a peer-to-p...