Better Sleep, Through Bose Sleepbuds

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Bose starts selling a device claiming to provide customers with better sleep-- Sleepbuds, a pair of wireless earbuds designed to stay in the ears overnight, drowning ambient noise with soothing audio tracks.

Bose sleepbudsThe Sleepbuds cannot pair with external devices to play audio such as music or podcasts. They also do not feature the same noise cancellation technology found in other Bose headsets. Instead, Bose says the Sleepbuds “combine passive blocking of sleep-disturbing sounds with a choice of sounds engineered to mask what gets past the blocking by the eartips.”

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The Aquio Water Bottle/Speaker Combo

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Beach-going customers having to choose between carrying either a water bottle or a portable speaker have to choose no more-- the Aquio combines the two into a single device through a collaboration with iHome.

Aquio bottlesThe Aquio bottle features stainless steel construction, and carries 470ml of either cold and hot liquid. It is double-walled, and promises to keep the contents cold for up to 24 hours or hot for 14 hours. Meanwhile the speaker is IP-67-rated for protection against water and sand, and is covered in water-resistant acoustic fabric.

The iHome-powered speaker offers 5W of power, with digital echo cancellation and talk/end button for speakerphone and audio caller ID. It actually makes the bottom part of the bottle, and can be screwed off and used separately.

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IDC: AR, VR Headsets to Return to Growth

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According to IDC, Q1 2018 global shipments of AR and VR headsets are down by -30.5% Y-o-Y-- but despite such a poor start the analyst believes the market will see a return to growth during the rest of the year.

The Q1 2018 decline was brought about by the unbundling of screenless VR headsets. During most of 2017, vendor bundled such headsets for free with the purchase of a high-end smartphone, but the practice essentially came to an end by early 2018. However IDC insists the headset market still has potential for growth, since more vendors will target the commercial market.

IDC VR Market

In the meantime more low-cost standalone VR headsts, such as the Oculus Go, should start hitting shelves this year. As such, IDC forecasts the overall AR and VR headset market will total 8.9 million units in 2018, a 6% increase over 2017, before reaching 65.9m units by 2022.

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Oppo Hides Find X Camera With Mechanised Slider

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Oppo takes on the true edge-to-edge smartphone display with the Find X-- a motorised mechanism slides the backside to reveal a 25MP front-facing camera and a rear-facing dual-camera array.

Oppo Find XAs a bezel-free flagship device the Find X lacks buttons or a fingerprint button. Instead, it uses the sliding mechanism to reveal the camera in order face unlock the device via iPhone X-style infrared depth detection. Dubbed "O-Face," the system promises to work in nearly all lighting conditions and allows for portrait lighting effects and "Omoji," the Oppo take on Animoji.

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Bowers & Wilkins Audio for Philips TVs

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TP Vision, the current holder of the Philips brand for TVs, announces a "multi-year exclusive partnership" with Bowers & Wilkins-- one promising to bring about "new reference visual and audio performance standards" in TVs.

TP Vision PhilipsThe partnership has the two companies share engineering resources to "design and develop a long series of ground-breaking products" based on bespoke technologies. The two companies will also share engineering localities, with TP Vision currently holding an Innovation Centre in Ghent, Belgium while Bowers & Wilkins has recently expanded its UK-based R&D base.

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