Amazon is diving deeper into the connected home space… by preparing to move just outside your home. Amazon Sidewalk will use a combination of wireless technologies to let your security cameras keep sending alerts even if your WiFi is out, or let your connected lights or other sensors work even if they’re beyond the range of your WiFi router.
According to the company, the network will be “operated by Amazon at no charge to customers,” but you’ll need to buy new hardware to make use of the service, which is set to launch later this year.
In addition to Amazon’s Echo and Ring products, Amazon Sidewalk will work with some third-party hardware, starting with Tile’s Bluetooth trackers.
Here’s a roundup of tech news from around the web.
- Amazon Sidewalk: a new way to stay connected [Amazon]
Amazon Sidewalk aims to keep your connected devices… connected, even when out of range of your WiFi router. Coming later this year, it uses Bluetooth Low Energy, 900 Mhz spectrum and “other frequencies” to extend the range of low-bandwidth devices. - Samsung Developer Conference 2020 has been canceled [SamMobile]
Samsung has cancelled its 2020 Developer Conference. While COVID-19 is probably at least partially to blame, Samsung’s decision not to move the conference online as other major companies/groups have suggests other motives as well. - 3 Onyx BOOX eReaders hit the FCC [The Digital Reader]
Onyx just introduced two new E Ink tablets, But that’s not all that’s on the way from the company. 3 more Onyx BOOX eReaders pass through the FCC (Poke 3, Nova 3, and Note 3). - NVIDIA GeForce NOW on Linux can run without user agent spoofing [GamingOnLinux]
NVIDIA GeForce Now now works with Linux (assuming you’re using the Chrome or Chromium web browsers). - Peacock Launches on Roku Across the U.S. [Variety]
NBC and Roku reach a deal, and you can now use the Peacock streaming app on Roku devices. - Geniatech XPI 3128 RK3128 SBC [CNX Software]
This $25 single board computer looks like a Raspberry Pi, but it’s powered by a Rockchip RK3128 processor and a wireless module with WiFi 5 and BT 4.2 support. - Microsoft to acquire ZeniMax Media, Bethesda Softworks [Microsoft]
Microsoft is acquiring ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion. ZeniMax is the parent company of Bethesda, maker of games including Doom, Quake, Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls. - This could be our first look at Sony’s canceled Xperia Play 2 [xda-developers]
The Sony Xperia Play 2 never saw the light of day, but if Sony *had* released a 2nd-gen gaming smartphone, this alleged prototype gives us an idea of what it would have looked like.
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Ahh… GeForce Now does not work with Firefox. Apparently people are having better luck with Chromium-based browsers.
I was eyeing MS’ Project xCloud for game streaming but if NVIDIA’s platform works on Linux too, then I’ll probably use that since I’d like to stream games both on Windows and Linux.
For subjective reasons, anything Google are non-options for me.
Hopefully, they can get it to work on Firefox.
Since people have gotten it to work on Vivaldi and similar, it seems that something about the Blink engine, or more likely some kind of media decoder only present in upstream Chromium, is required.
Seeing as Chromium is open source (and BSD license), in principle the required code could be copied into Firefox. But the Firefox devs might be reluctant to copy in non-standard extensions to the web protocols into their browser.
I’d be surprised if xCloud did not have the same issue, as well.
So basically, this is up in the air. Which for me is super annoying, because my current distro of choice has no Chromium-based browsers in its repo.
Thanks for the warning.
You know, when I first heard of what 5g was supposed to be and how short range it is, I imagined surveillance corporations taking solar powered cameras/mic bugs and literally lining the sidewalks with them with permission of building owners. Amazon could just drop them off on the roof with the delivery drones. The name of this mesh net thing sure makes it sound like they didn’t want to wait for the rollout and just wanted to lay the bugs down (but make you pay to get spied on instead).
And not like this is going to stop anything, if at any point in this creepy spyware mesh network, some device has to be connected to someone’s router, that counts as “reselling the services”, something most ISPs I know of don’t allow. But of course, they’d change the rules for somebody like Amazon.