GoPro Could Go Robo With Consumer Drones Launching Next Year

GoPro is working on a lineup of consumer drones to supplement its action camera lineup, according to the Wall Street Journal. The new product category would offer aerial drones like the Parrot Bebop and DJI Phantom and Inspire 1. The drones would reportedly retail in the $500 to $1,000 range, and come with GoPro action camera tech onboard, which is a natural fit given that outfitting drones with GoPros is already a popular option among hobbyists and videographers.

Drone sales could help GoPro diversify its product lineup, too – right now it has the majority of its eggs in one basket, with its action camera line. GoPro has done a terrific job of creating a vibrant first-party accessory lineup to accompany its core camera offerings, but many established camera makers are entering the market, or else focusing on improving their existing efforts. GoPro has made the right moves to maintain its leadership, with a new entry-level Hero camera that costs only $129.99, but achieving an early foothold in the burgeoning consumer drone market could make a lot of sense, given its existing popularity in that realm.

WSJ’s information pegs the launch window for these devices at “late next year,” which means I likely wouldn’t anticipated seeing them ahead of holiday 2015. GoPro will also have to offer something that differentiates it from the competition – both Parrot and DJI, two market leaders in consumer aerial drones, have launched next-generation hardware with advanced camera features, including advanced onboard software image stabilization and 4K recording. Drone-makers like DJI also seem to be increasingly interested in including their own camera hardware built-in to drones, which likely allows them to up the average asking price.

GoPro can stand out not only by promoting the use of its tried-and-tested industry-leading action cam tech, but also by offering price benefits compared to some of its potential competitors. The DJI Inspire 1 retails for $2,800, for instance, so if GoPro can offer optics with similar quality on drones that retail for less than half, it could stand to grab a much wider market.

We’ve reached out to GoPro for comment and will update if we receive any additional information.

Featured Image: Budi Nusyirwan/Flickr UNDER A CC BY-SA 2.0 LICENSE

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TC Droidcast Episode 28: Android Wear Weary, Go For GRID Gaming

On this week’s Droidcast, Chris Velazco joins us from a bathroom, Kyle Russell contributes from New Hampshire, Greg Kumparak rises from his sick bed, and Darrell Etherington hosts from the permanent midnight of Canada. Up for discussion are two new Android Wear devices, the LG G Watch R and the Asus ZenWatch, as well as Nvidia’s Grid streamed gaming service, and fashion watchmakers getting antsy about copycat Android Wear watch faces.

We didn’t get a chance to talk about HTC putting Lollipop on the One M8 or M7 – because that’s been delayed on HTC’s end, do fingers crossed for next week.

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Download it directly here: http://traffic.libsyn.com/droidcast/droidcast-28.mp3

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Amazon Fire Phone Gets Another Fire Sale: $199 Unlocked

Amazon has already admitted that it priced its Fire Phone much higher than consumers anticipated, and now it’s making a significant adjustment to the device’s price tag: A fully unlocked Fire Phone now retails for $199.00, instead of $449.00. The GSM device is still U.S.-only, which means it’ll work with AT&T and T-Mobile, though not Verizon and Sprint.

The $250 price drop puts the Fire Phone into a price range that might be more in line with what consumers were expecting to pay – Amazon’s decision to release a full-priced device, especially when paired with some of its less-than-stellar specs and odd 3D head tracking visual effects, clearly didn’t do a great job of attracting buyers.

This is actually the second fire sale for the fire phone, after Amazon reduced the price of the on-contract, AT&T exclusive version to just $0.99 with a two-year agreement. Originally, the retail cost was $199 on a contract, which is ironically now the price for a fully free and clear contract-free piece of hardware, just about four months into its lifetime.

No matter how you look at it, this is a sure sign that the Fire phone flopped in a very big way for Amazon. The high price tag at launch likely reflects Amazon trying to recoup the huge amount of R&D spend it put into developing the phone’s glasses-free 3D interface effects, but the fact is that what customers expected from an Amazon device was something cheap and basic, much like its Kindle Fire line of tablets.

Even at $199, reviewers found a lot of basic problems with the device that might make other options, like the Moto G or even some of last year’s flagship hardware discounted a better option, but it will be interesting to see if this helps Amazon move some inventory during the holidays.

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Razer Nabu set to release on December 2 in US

Just in time for the holidays

Announced on Thanksgiving, Razer revealed the release date for its Razer Nabu, the company's first wearable in the form of a fitness tracker.

The Nabu will be available in North America on December 2 for $99.99 (about £63.97, AU$117.50) and globally some time afterwards.

Like most other fitness trackers, the Nabu will be able to notify you of emails, calls, texts and app alerts from your smartphone. It also logs activity data and has band-to-band capabilities for social discovery, multiplayer gaming and more.

The Razer Nabu will be available in two sizes: small-medium and medium-large. Black will be the first color to launch with three other colors - green, white and orange - following later.

The band is made from certified hypo-allergenic materials, is water resistant and has a battery life that can last between five to seven days on a full charge.

The Razer Nabu is compatible with iPhone 5, 5S, 5C, 6 and Android 4.3 and up smartphones, paired via Bluetooth Low Energy.

For those die-hard Razer fans that kept up with Nabu news from the beginning, Razer will be shipping 5000 wearables early via pre-orders through its new community platform "Insider" at a discounted price of $79.99 (about 51.18, AU$94.00).

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Will Windows 10 mean the end of malware?

You'll see new Windows 10 security features in a preview update next year

Think Windows 8 was a big step forward in security? So did Microsoft – at the time. Looking back though, Chris Hallum, who manages the security features in Windows and Windows Phone, now thinks it had incremental improvements tackling a subset of the problem.

That's not helped by the fact that PC makers didn't start putting the same kind of touch sensor fingerprint readers as seen on the iPhone on their devices the way he'd hoped they would.

He's still hoping to see fingerprint sensors become common, but he's also bullish about what's coming next. "In Windows 10," he says confidently, "you'll see we actually decisively address entire classifications of issues with solutions that maybe in some ways can eradicate the issue in its entirely."

The first issue to tackle is passwords. "We're no longer thinking about passwords as a problem," he admits freely. "Passwords are actually a real-time crisis. You have to move to something better."

And that would be the 'next-generation credential'. It's going to use two-factor authentication, with the second factor being either the Trusted Platform Module security chip which is in many modern PCs and will be in every single Windows device in 2015, or your phone (where the equivalent of the TPM is "pretty close to pervasive") – or, he suggests mysteriously, "devices we're not talking about yet".

When you first make your account, your PC will create a key that's stored in a secure container, protected by the TPM – you might have one key for your personal account, another for your online bank and another for your work account that has a longer PIN.

"The user unlocks their Windows container with an unlock gesture, which could be a PIN or a password or biometrics, and they get access to it," says Hallum. That PIN isn't the usual four digits – it can be up to 20 characters long and it can include numbers, symbols, spaces and upper and lower case letters.

Or you could use a fingerprint. Hallum expects readers that can tell whether your finger is a real finger and whether it's still alive, looking not just at the pattern but "the 3D image with the peaks and valleys" which flatten out on dead fingers and fake fingerprints.

He'd like to see a 9mm sensor that doesn't have a big chrome border around it so you can just press your whole fingertip on it once instead of multiple times like the iPhone, but OEMs may pick smaller, cheaper sensors. "We're going to get the cost down to where it can go mainstream," he says with cautious optimism. "We have an OEM signalling – not committing but signalling – that they may put it across their entire consumer range. Although I hope I don't get burned again because I talked about this for Windows 8…"

With or without fingerprint readers, the new password-replacing credentials are coming – not just from Microsoft but from fellow FIDO Alliance members like Google. Google's similar secure key proposal has already been ratified and Hallum says Microsoft is committed to getting its own system ratified by FIDO too.

Hallum believes the flexibility of the Windows 10 credential is an advantage. "The differentiator for us is you will be able to use existing devices to authenticate for this; you can use your PC or your phone.

"That means your phone – including Windows Phone, Android, an iPhone with its fingerprint reader and maybe one day a BlackBerry – could store your credentials and pair to your PC via Bluetooth to sign you in. That means two-factor authentication will become ubiquitous, without people needing multiple fobs and physical tokens."

He's confident the credentials will be adopted by a range of services, and says Microsoft is evangelising it to both business and consumer services. "This is going to succeed. You're going to see a lot of consumer services like Netflix. They see how important this is for banking, for content, for consumer services." Business apps that you log into with a Windows username and password today will just work with them too. "Every app should be able to take advantage of it, unless you've done something that is not best practice."

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