SanDisk’s wireless flash drive boosts your phone’s storage

Mobile storage is a bit of a mess right now.

Today’s top smartphone makers are quickly ditching microSD support, and not everyone is comfortable handing their cherished moments over to the cloud. And just how the heck are we supposed to manage with just 16GB of space, Apple? That may seem like more than enough initially, especially now that iOS 9 takes up less space. But snap a few Live Photos, shoot some 4K footage, and your phone will be filled up before you know it. So what is a smartphone user supposed to do?

Luckily, there are devices like the SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick, which is reinventing the flash drive game.

Designed to work both with your computer and mobile devices, SanDisk’s Wireless Stick makes it incredibly easy to transfer files between phone and laptop, tablet and phone, etc. And what’s great about the device is that barely any work is required on the part of the user. Just watch the above video and tell me that’s not easy?

With the Wireless Stick attached to your keys or in your pocket, all of your pictures, video, music and other important documents can seamlessly be backed up to free up space on your phone. And if there is an album of pictures you want to transfer between your computer and tablet, just connect to the Wireless Stick and you’re good to go. Easy.

In addition to freeing up space on your phone’s meager 16GB of storage, what’s great about the Wireless Stick is that you can do everything offline. So if you’re traveling in some remote part of the globe, SanDisk’s device will be there to help you secure your memories. Heck, SanDisk actually has an “extreme team” of professional photographers who swear by the new Wireless Stick.

I take an unhealthy amount of photos of my dog, which fills up my device pretty quickly. The SanDisk Connect Wireless stick makes sure I have somewhere to offload those photos without relying on the cloud, and it lets me free up space on my phone for apps and other stuff. It’s not just backing your content up, either. You can stream music and HD video up to three smartphones, tablets or computers at once, making it a pretty great travel companion, too. And if you’re in the sharing mood, the Wireless Stick is capable of sharing content with multiple devices at once, which is a great option for team meetings.

The Wireless Stick comes in 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB options—all there to help you free up space on your phone. And the great thing is you can use the Wireless Stick app to automatically copy photos and videos from your camera roll to the flash drive, turning it into a “set it and forget it” experience. The less our technology gets in the way, the better. You won’t even know the Wireless Stick is there, let alone have to worry about fiddling with backing up your media.

The Wireless Stick works with both iOS and Android through a Wi-Fi connection, and offers optional password protection to keep prying eyes away. With the device turned on, users should expect about 4.5 hours before it needs recharging, which can be done through the USB connection.

It’s getting easier than ever to eat up a phone’s storage, especially when companies insist on sticking with 16GB. If you’re not comfortable with using services like Google Photos, the SanDisk Connect Wireless Stick is the perfect way to back your media up. The device starts at just $29.99, and goes all the way up to $99.99 with a one-year warranty.

Google planning to design its own Android chip

Google is reportedly taking a page out of Apple's playbook and expressing interest in co-developing Android chips based on its own designs, according to a report today from The Information. Similar to how the iPhone carries a Ax chip designed by Apple but manufactured by companies like Samsung, Google wants to bring its own expertise and consistency to the Android ecosystem.

The report says that during discussions that happened this fall, "Google representatives put forward designs of chips it was interested in co-developing, including a phone’s main processor." The new chips are reportedly needed for future Android features that Google hopes to release "in the next few years."  Soon, Google was discussing the possibility of designing its own smartphone chips as well, the report states. One benefit of Google's strategy would be the ability to bake in cutting edge features into future versions of Android, like support for augmented and virtual reality, that would require more closely integrated software and hardware.

To do that, it would need to convince a company like Qualcomm, which produces some of the top Android smartphone chips today using its own technology, to sacrifice some of its competitive edge. Google did not respond to a request for comment.

Now Google wants to design its own VR and AR chips, presumably to power this new Android virtual reality OS and experimental devices like Project Tango. Augmented reality in particular is extremely hard on a processor. Overlaying a 3D image onto a video feed or a transparent display means constantly measuring the space in front of the display in 3D and rendering and positioning the objects in that 3D space many times a second. You're running the CPU, GPU, cameras, and accelerometers at full blast the entire time.

Google is also reportedly looking for an image processor design that can minimize the camera delay in between photos for a "video-like stream" of images. 

One curious point mentions "adding memory capacity inside the phone’s main processor so that the processor doesn’t need to reach into a separate memory chip to accomplish certain tasks." This is indefinite enough to fit the defination of cache, something every mobile processor already ship with.

Finally, the report mentioned that these talks originated "from Google’s efforts to find a manufacturer to make chips for an “enterprise connectivity device,” a plan that is still ongoing.

Now you can convert 2D videos into 3D instantaneously

By using a software that powers sports video games, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the Qatar Computing Research Institute (QCRI) have developed a system that automatically converts 2D video of soccer games into 3D.

The converted video can be played back over any 3D device - a commercial 3D TV, Google's new Cardboard system which turns smartphones into 3D displays or special-purpose displays such as Oculus Rift.

“Any TV these days is capable of 3D. There's just no content. So we see that the production of high-quality content is the main thing that should happen,” says Wojciech Matusik, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at MIT.

Today's video games generally store very detailed 3D maps of the virtual environment that the player is navigating.

When the player initiates a move, the game adjusts the map accordingly and, on the fly, generates a 2D projection of the 3D scene that corresponds to a particular viewing angle.

The MIT and QCRI researchers essentially ran this process in reverse.

They set the very realistic Microsoft soccer game “FIFA13” to play over and over again and used Microsoft's video-game analysis tool PIX to continuously store screen shots of the action.

For each screen shot, they also extracted the corresponding 3D map.

Using a standard algorithm, they ruled out most of the screen shots, keeping just those that best captured the range of possible viewing angles and player configurations.

Then they stored each screen shot and the associated 3D map in a database.

“The result is a very convincing 3D effect, with no visual artifacts,” the authors noted.

In the past, researchers have tried to develop general-purpose systems for converting 2D video to 3D but they haven't worked very well.

"Our advantage is that we can develop it for a very specific problem domain,” Matusik added.

“We are developing a conversion pipeline for a specific sport. We would like to do it at broadcast quality, and we would like to do it in real-time. What we have noticed is that we can leverage video games,” he explained.

The researchers presented the new system at the Association for Computing Machinery's Multimedia conference in Brisbane, Australia, last week.