Lenovo has launched the anticipated K3 Note smartphone in India, priced at Rs. 9,999. It will be available to buy via exclusive retail partner Flipkart in its first flash sale on July 8, and will go up for registrations from 2pm IST Thursday.
The Lenovo K3 Note supports both LTE bands in India (FDD-LTE 1800MHz Band 3, and TDD-LTE 2300MHz Band 40). It runs Android 5.0 Lollipop that’s skinned with the Vibe UI. It features a 5.5-inch full-HD (1080×1920 pixels) display with a pixel density of 401ppi.
The dual-SIM smartphone is powered by a 64-bit 1.7GHz octa-core MediaTek MT6572 processor that is coupled with 2GB of RAM. The smartphone will be offered in Onyx Black, Pearl White, and Laser Yellow colour variants.
The K3 Note packs a 13-megapixel rear camera with dual-LED flash and a 5-megapixel front facing camera. Inbuilt storage on the handset is 16GB, which is expandable via microSD card (up to 32GB).
Connectivity options on the smartphone include 4G (TD-LTE/ LTE), Wi-Fi, GPS/ A-GPS, Bluetooth, and Micro-USB. The K3 Note measures 152.6×76.2×7.99mm and weighs 150 grams.
The large-screen Lenovo K3 Note packs a 3000mAh battery, which is slightly bumped up from Lenovo A7000’s 2900mAh battery. It is rated to deliver up to 39 hours of talk time on 2G and 16 hours on 2G, apart from 11 days of standby time.
The smartphone was first launched in China back in March. The K3 Note compares well with the recently launched Meizu m1 note. While both devices have almost identical specifications, the key differentiator would be the pricing for the Indian market. The m1 note is priced at a much higher Rs. 11,999.
Speaking on the launch, Sudhin Mathur – Director, Smartphones, Lenovo India, said, “We are truly overwhelmed with the positive response from consumers for our 4G portfolio. To further enhance our consumer’s experience we are launching a device with great multitasking capabilities and unrivalled features at an affordable price. The K3 Note is certainly a disruptive offering with its futur
When you’re preparing to meet the founder and CEO of a startup that makes myoelectricprosthetics — those controlled by the electrical signals that muscles produce naturally when tensed up — you probably expect to come face-to-face with an idealist. You can almost imagine the reply when you ask the million-dollar question, “So what inspired you to help others?” Surely there’s some backstory involving a loved one losing a limb and a lifelong desire to give them back their mobility.That’s not the case for Genta Kondo, the co-founder and CEO of Tokyo-based Exiii. When Kondo entered Tokyo University’s Yokoi Lab, a testing ground for rehabilitation-focused robotics, he wasn’t setting out on some idealistic mission to make the world a better place. Back in 2008, he was solely attracted to the science behind the lab’s prosthetic hands and power-assisted mobility devices.
“I was a basketball player and loved sports since I was a kid,” he tells Tech in Asia. “I had an interest in motor control — not motor as in engine, but the motor neuron, which is how the brain controls the body. In the beginning, I wasn’t thinking about the social aspect or helping people, just the science.”
Kondo would go on to spend a year at Berkeley, eventually earning a master’s degree from Tokyo University’s school of engineering. By the end of his tenure as a hardware researcher, he was unconvinced that robotic prosthetics would be accepted by the mainstream and adopted by amputees and those born with missing or partial limbs.
After graduating in 2011, he entered ubiquitous Japanese tech giant Sony to see if there was any true potential for bringing such devices to the mass market. Konda was sent to Sony’s now-defunct research and development division in Gotenyama — an area in Tokyo once nicknamed “Sony Town.” The firm officially exited the consumer robotics business in 2006, but Kondo was hired as a robotics researcher.
Though he admits to working on a robot — and having colleagues who had formerly worked on the AIBO robot dog and QRIO bipedal robot — Kondo says that he’s still bound by a confidentiality agreement with Sony that prohibits him from discussing exactly what he did in Gotenyama.
Sony would have been a dream job for many, especially given the unusual amount of freedom that Kondo was afforded as someone who was essentially working undercover. While he enjoyed many aspects of the job, including an opportunity to work with an internal startup called the Mesh Project, Kondo’s heart remained with the prosthetics that he’d tinkered with back in school.
High costs
It wasn’t until 2014 that the entrepreneurial bug swooped in and bit Kondo. Along with two friends from Panasonic, the trio sought to produce a bionic arm that disabled people would actually want to use.
Kondo’s apathy vanished when he realized how under-utilized modern technology was in the current prosthetics market.
“According to clinicians I spoke with, about half of [arm and hand] amputees don’t use anything — they can still walk and do 90% of their daily activities,” Kondo says. “Within the other half,studies indicate that more than 90% are just using cosmetic, not functional, prosthetics.”
High cost is a major issue in the prosthetics industry, even for purely cosmetic items. The price rises exponentially when bringing sophisticated hardware into the mix, up to and exceeding JPY 1.5 million (US$12,100), according to Kondo. He realized that the burgeoning 3D printer movement was the answer.
Not only could someone print parts at home for a fraction of the cost, but repairs and upgrades would also be easier and cheaper.
Not only could someone print parts at home for a fraction of the cost, but repairs and upgrades would also be easier and cheaper.“3D printers have really accelerated the process of hardware development,” Kondo says. “When I was in the prototyping lab at Sony using 3D printers to make robotics components, I had a feeling they would change the hardware industry — and the world.”
Kondo and his team saw an opportunity to not only disrupt the prosthetics space, but to give actual movement, gestures, and handshakes back to those who’ve suffered a personal tragedy or birth defect. Their startup, Exiii, was born.
Form
IMAGE: TECH IN ASIA
Making its robotic prosthetic both functional and affordable was just one piece of the puzzle for Exiii. It also needed an appealing design. Kondo explains:
“People who’ve lost a hand or an arm generally want to hide it, that’s why most prosthetics are made to look like skin.
Our designs are different because we want people to show their disability in as positive a light as possible.
Our designs are different because we want people to show their disability in as positive a light as possible. Our designer wanted to integrate the warm feeling of a natural hand with a robotic look. If he had designed something completely robot-inspired, it would be too sci-fi for most people. He really took time to come up with smooth lines and curves that maintain a human aesthetic, without looking like Frankenstein.”The group moved fast, entering the first prototype in the James Dyson Award later that year. Out of 650 entries from across the globe, Exiii was awarded second place. Suddenly, what began as a side project (each of the three members had maintained their day jobs) was attracting international attention. DMM, a Japanese internet company that offers everything from on-demand porn to English lessons — and which also happens to run a state-of-the-art coworking space for hardware startups in Tokyo — invited Exiii to join its inaugural class in November 2014. Soon, the media were paying attention to the young startup.
DMM.make’s hardware lab.
IMAGE: TECH IN ASIA
After being featured on a nationally-syndicated television program, Exiii found its first evangelist — or, rather, the evangelist found them. Akira Morikawa, who lost his arm in an accident in 2013, contacted the team via Facebook wanting to give it a try. The team decided that SXSW in Austin, Texas, would be as good a venue as any to show their hard work to the world.
“It’s not strictly a medical device, but more of a wearable item,” Kondo says. “The Apple Watch is a wearable, but our prosthetic arm is the ultimate wearable.”
Function
There are currently five generations of Exiii robotic prosthetics, but it was the fourth version — dubbed “Coyote” — that stole the show at this year’s SXSW. Attendees queued up for a chance to shake hands with Morikawa, following him around the exhibition floor with curious eyes whenever he strayed from the startup’s booth.
Morikawa shakes hands with a SXSW volunteer.
IMAGE: TECH IN ASIA
Coyote uses six motors — one at the base of each finger and thumb and another to rotate the thumb — and uses an Arduino Fio V3 board. Juice comes from a non-rechargeable lithium battery, which gives the arm two to three hours of continuous use. The whole package weighs about 750 grams.
“SXSW was our first-year anniversary event, and the first time to test our prototype with real users,” Kondo says. “Morikawa’s response was really great, he told us it was exactly what he was waiting for. Up until then, people were skeptical. We talked to doctors, clinicians, and therapists — conservative types [when it comes to new tech] — and they thought the design wouldn’t satisfy the users on an emotional level.”
The startup’s fifth and latest version, “HACKberry,” is lighter and more compact than Coyote. It’s roughly the size of an actual human hand, and thus more appealing to female users who may have felt that previous versions were too imposing. HACKberry uses an Arduino Micro, has only three motors, and features a passive wrist joint — important when a user wants to hold a drink without spilling it. Apart from reducing weight to 650 grams, fewer motors also mean vastly improved battery life of up to 12 hours, with this iteration using a popular rechargeable and easily replaceable digital camera power pack.
HACKberry can be printed with a sub-US$1,000 consumer 3D printer, like MakerBot. The entire prosthesis can be assembled at home using roughly US$300 worth of parts.
IMAGE: TECH IN ASIA
Both models connect the prosthetic to the user via a photo-reflective sensor that attaches to the residual muscle at the end of their arm. It converts muscle contractions to finger and thumb movements, which can be configured for different situations via Exiii’s companion smartphone app. Activating the index finger only, for example, allows a user to point. Activating all four fingers and the thumb is used for handshakes or holding objects.
“Coyote can grab a full bottle of water, which weighs about 500 grams,” Kondo says. “HACKberry uses even stronger motors, and is capable of pinching tiny objects like zippers or shoelaces firmly.”
Hardware that helps people
Several other high-profile robotic arm startups were born around the same time as Exiii. California-based Not Impossible Labs made headlines for “Project Daniel” in March 2014. After reading about a Sudanese boy who lost both his arms in an explosion, Not Impossible CEO Mick Ebeling illegally traveled to Sudan to build him a robotic prosthetic and teach his village how to 3D print similar prosthetics for others.
There’s also Easton LaChappelle, the American teenager who built a brain-powered bionic arm for US$250 back in 2013. LaChappelle’s motivation came from a young girl he met at a science fair with a US$80,000 prosthesis. Because she still had many years of growing to do, the spinal-implant controlled prosthesis would have cost her family a small fortune to replace with increasingly larger sizes.
E-Nable, founded in 2013, provides free 3D-printed mechanical hands to children around the world. In the UK, Open Bionics has been providing low-cost robotic hands as an alternative to traditional prosthetics since 2014.
“None of us knew each other at first, but we all kind of appeared in late 2013 and early 2014,” Kondo says. “I think there was just a sudden trend for hardware that actually helps people.”
On June 7, Exiii embodied that sentiment when a Japanese singer (Kondo asked that her name be kept confidential for privacy reasons) took the stage with her very own HACKberry. The singer, who was born with a partial arm, used the prosthetic to wave and point at the audience — something she had been unable to do while holding the microphone in her other hand.
Open source
After a domestic crowdfunding campaign netted Exiii JPY 3.5 million (US$28,300) in late 2014, Japanese hardware incubator Abba Lab provided the startup with an undisclosed amount of seed funding this January. The startup also added an 2015 IF Design Gold Award to its mantle shortly thereafter.
DMM.make, in partnership with Abba Lab, continues to provide Exiii with office space and aUS$4.5 million prototyping facility filled with 3D printers, and testing devices.
Kondo in his office at DMM.make in Akihabara.
IMAGE: TECH IN ASIA
Realizing that monetizing such a niche product would be difficult, Exiii embraced the “service model” favored by the startup’s peers in the prosthetics space and released HACKberry’s build data on Github last month.
“The effect of going open-source has been larger than we expected,” Kondo says. “We have seen makers from around the world posting pictures of HACKberry prosthetics printed and assembled by themselves.”
In collaboration with non-profit Mission ARM Japan, the startup received JPY 25 million (US$203,000) in prize money after winning the Google Impact Challenge in March. That initiative will further the availability of Exiii’s prosthetics for those in need.
“Our goal is to increase bionic arm penetration in Japan from 1% to 20% within three years,”
“Our goal is to increase bionic arm penetration in Japan from 1% to 20% within three years,” Kondo says of the partnership with Mission ARM Japan, noting that less than 1% of Japanese people who could benefit from a functional prosthetic are actually using one. “It’s a shame that that number is so low, and many [within that figure] are still using tech from half a century ago. We want to spread awareness that [advanced robotic prosthetics] exist in the first place.”Instead of charging forward with another funding round, the startup is more interested in seeing what the world will do with an open-source HACKberry.
“I want to invite makers from around the world to improve upon [it],” Kondo explains. “After SXSW, I received hundreds of emails asking to make it open source. With a small team, we couldn’t possibly cover all the feature requests that people had made, so going open source makes a lot of sense.”
HACKberry will be entering into clinical trials in Japan to see how it holds up during daily use and how it can be tweaked for patients with different conditions. Ever the scientist, Kondo hopes to eventually publish an “Exiii thesis” for the medical and scientific community.
He may not have set out to change the world, but Kondo’s prosthetics have as good a chance as any to do just that.
Strontium Nitro Plus On-The-Go USB 3.0 and Micro SDHC UHS-1 With OTG Card Reader Review
Strontium seems to have jumped into mobile storage in a big way. After our encounter with the Nitro iDrive for iOS, the company brought our attention to a couple of products aimed at Android devices which support USB On-The-Go. We’ve seen flash drives with Micro-USB connectors before, but we haven’t seen an external card reader.An increasing number of Android smartphones do not allow storage expansion, and some older ones don’t support high-capacity microSD cards. Putting new data onto a card and sharing large files with others is sometimes a pain, requiring you to take your phone apart and pull out its battery or plug your phone into a PC.
USB-OTG can come in handy in some of those situations. While a flash drive sticking out of your phone is no substitute for a tiny microSD card, it can be really handy. You can store large files such as movies that you don’t need immediate access to all the time, without filling up your phone’s limited storage space. You can transfer files between PCs and Android devices and share them with friends. Most importantly, you can always be sure that your files are accessible no matter what kind of device you have at your disposal.
Strontium Nitro Plus USB On-The-Go 3.0
We’ve tested dual-interface flash drives from Kingston and SanDisk in the recent past, and this one is no different. It’s really tiny, with a design that won’t get in the way too much when plugged into a phone. It supports USB 3.0 on the PC side which is a huge speed improvement over USB 2.0.
The body looks metallic but feels like plastic. The gunmetal finish is quite nice and didn’t seem as though it would wear off soon. A large red Strontium logo and the capacity of the drive are printed on the front of the swivelling lid. We received a 32GB unit for review.
This drive would be really easy to lose – the company does not provide a lanyard or tag and there’s no hook for you to attach one of your own. The two ends are pretty much always exposed, so you might want to check the larger USB-A plug for pocket lint now and then. Other than these things, we have no issues with the design or construction quality.
We tested the Nitro On-The-Go’s USB 3.0 speeds and found it to perform quite well. SiSoft SANDRA and CrystalDiskMark both reported consistent speeds. Sequential read speed, which is the best-case scenario for such drives, averaged at 144MBps which exceeded Strontium’s own claim of 120MBps. Sequential reads were of course slower, averaging at 26.68MBps. Random speeds were measured at 133.71MBps for reads and 6.65MBps for writes. These scores were all a bit higher than those of theKingston DataTraveler microDuo 3.0.
Strontium Nitro Micro SDHC UHS-1 With OTG Card Reader
The second product we’re looking at is something quite unique. It is essentially the same sort of dual-interface drive but with a removable microSD card instead of built-in flash memory. This of course allows for added flexibility when copying photos or making backups – both the card and the reader could be very useful on their own and when used together.
We aren’t really impressed with the card reader’s build quality. The plastic feels relatively low-quality and the USB A plug is of the flat variety with exposed contacts. A red LED shines through the bottom of the body when it is plugged in. The unit is around the size of a standard flash drive if not longer, and won’t be easy to misplace.
The microSD slot doesn’t have any eject mechanism so you’ll have to pry a card out with your fingernail, which is less than ideal. The bundled microSD card in particular was difficult to remove because Strontium has used an unusual coating process for its label which either makes it thicker than usual or makes the grip on the end shallower. The print quality is not very good and the label was easily scratched off just by using the card in its own reader. The overall finish reminded us of CD-Rs with stick-on inkjet labels which never look as good as professionally printed discs.
Strontium advertises a free app called MyBackup Pro, which it values at $4.99 (approximately Rs. 317). You’ll have to download it from Strontium’s own site, which means modifying your Android device’s security settings to allow apps from third-party sources to be installed.
In terms of performance, we’re limited to USB 2.0 speeds here. Strontium advertises the speed of the card as “70MB/s 466X”, though it’s more clear to note that it is a Class 10 card which guarantees sustained speeds of 10Mbps and makes the card suitable for full HD video recording and bursts of still images. We recorded an average sequential read score of 18.84MBps and an average sequential write score of 16.3MBps. Random reads and writes came in at 18.28MBps and 8.25MBps respectively.
Verdict
Both of Strontium’s products offer mobile device users new and interesting ways to manage their data. Of the two, the Nitro MicroSDHC with OTG Card Reader is certainly more flexible, but less refined. We can’t think of many situations that call for having an external microSD card reader handy – perhaps if you need to copy lots of files between multiple phones and/or tablets, some of which don’t have microSD card slots. We would have liked the product to have been better built, and of course USB 3.0 would have been most welcome, but it still enables some interesting functionality.
On the other hand, the Nitro Plus On-The-Go USB 3.0 is plainer and simpler, with a clear purpose. Dual-interface drives are becoming more and more common, which is a great thing because you don’t lose any functionality compared to a standard flash drive. Eventually USB Type-C will make such products redundant but until then we’re glad to have options.
Connectivity options on the smartphone include 4G (TD-LTE/ LTE), Wi-Fi, GPS/ A-GPS, Bluetooth, and Micro-USB. The K3 Note measures 152.6×76.2×7.99mm and weighs 150 grams.
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