Category: Hardware

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NASA’s X-59 supersonic jet will have a 4K TV instead of a forward window

NASA’s X-59 QueSST experimental quiet supersonic aircraft will have a cockpit like no other — featuring a big 4K screen where you’d normally have a front window. Why? Because this is one weird-looking plane.

The X-59, which is being developed by Lockheed Martin on a $247 million budget, is meant to go significantly faster than sound without producing a sonic boom, or indeed any noise “faster than a car door closing,” at least to observers on the ground.

NASA grants Lockheed Martin $248M contract to develop a quieter supersonic jet

Naturally in order to do this the craft has to be as aerodynamic as possible, which precludes the cockpit bump often found in fighter jets. In fact, the design can’t even have the pilot up front with a big window, because it would likely be far too narrow. Check out these lines:

The cockpit is more like a section taken out of the plane just over the leading edge of the rather small and exotically shaped wings. So while the view out the sides will be lovely, the view forward would be nothing but nose.

To fix that, the plane will be equipped with several displays, the lower ones just like you might expect on a modern aircraft, but the top one is a 4K monitor that’s part of what’s called the eXternal Visibility System, or XVS. It shows imagery stitched together from two cameras on the craft’s exterior, combined with high-definition terrain data loaded up ahead of time.

It’s not quite the real thing, but pilots spend a lot of time in simulators (as you can see here), so they’ll be used to it. And the real world is right outside the other windows if they need a reality check.

Lockheed and NASA’s plane is currently in the construction phase, though no doubt some parts are still being designed as well. The program has committed to a 2021 flight date, an ambitious goal considering this is the first such experimental, or X-plane, that the agency has developed in some 30 years. If successful, it could be the precursor to other quiet supersonic craft and could bring back supersonic overland flight in the future.

That’s if Boom doesn’t beat them to it.

Boom wants to build a supersonic jet for mainstream passengers; here’s its game plan

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Apple expands authorized repairs to ~1,000 Best Buy stores

Since 2001, Apple has staked its claim across the world with its own first-party brick and mortar locations. But the U.S. is a big country, and the 270 or so stores can only cover so much ground. In the past three years, the company says it has expanded repair coverage to three times as many locations in this massive country of ours, courtesy of third-party partnerships.

That list now includes almost 1,000 Best Buys, which now offer Apple certified repairs courtesy of 7,600 “newly Apple-certified technicians” capable of offering up same day repairs on iPhones and other products.

“At Apple, we’re dedicated to providing the best customer service in the world,” Apple Care VP Tara Bunch said in a release tied to this morning’s news. “If a customer ever needs to repair their products, we want them to feel confident those repairs are done safely and correctly. We’re always looking at how we can reliably expand our network of trained technicians and we’re excited to partner with every Best Buy store so it’s even easier for our customers to find an authorized repair location near them.”

It’s a deal that makes sense for both parties. For Apple, it means covering customers in locations like Yuma, Sioux City and Bismarck. This brings its total third-party authorized service locations up to 1,800 in the U.S.

For Best Buy, the deal means a partnership and blessing from another key electronics giant, with Apple joining the likes of Samsung, which currently has authorized Galaxy repairs from the big box store. More info on Apple repair services here.

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Amazon adds color adjustable lighting to its best Kindle

For e-reader devotees, it doesn’t get better than the Kindle Oasis. Amazon’s the last giant player standing in the category (unless you consider what Barnes & Noble is doing “standing”), and the Oasis is ounce for ounce the best Kindle device it has produced. I reviewed the last iteration of the device back in late 2017 and thoroughly enjoyed my time with it.

Amazon’s keeping the dream alive with an update to the device. Though be forewarned, like the recent standard Kindle upgrade, it’s pretty minor. From the looks of things, the new Oasis maintains all of the good bits with its predecessor, including the nice 7-inch, 300ppi display, coupled with physical page-turn buttons.

The big change here is the ability to adjust the color tone of the front light, to go easier on your eyes during the day — and to help you get to sleep better at night. There’s also a built-in option here that will automatically adjust the tone throughout the day.

Honestly, that’s the main new addition here. There’s also a new generation of E Ink tech, which maintains the same resolution as before, but should offer an increased refresh rate, resulting in faster page turns (I’ll report back more on that later). It’s all part of the tech’s slow creep toward faster speeds. I probably don’t need to go into the marked benefits of the technology here — that’s been pretty well documented over the years.

Other features from the earlier version include IPX8 water proofing (that’s up to two meters for up to an hour). There’s built-in Bluetooth for listening to audio books via Audible and a premium design with a metal backing.

Like the 2017 model, it starts at $250 for the 8GB version and $280 for the 32GB model (more if you want to get rid of special offers. That comes with six months of Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited service. It’s up for pre-order starting today and starts shipping July 24, along with a bunch of different covers.

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This $99 AirPower knockoff is available for order now

There are a number of key differences between Apple’s AirPower and lookalike knockoff, AirUnleashed. The most pertinent one, however, is that one of the two is actually available for purchase.

Apple gave up the AirPower ghost back in March, after having gone silent on the product for some time, citing an inability to “achieve [its] high standards.” The company released little additional information, but most reports came down to engineering problems with densely packed charging coils that could ultimately have caused the product to overheat.

Plenty of companies were no doubt planning their own off-brand take on the product, but Apple’s decision to pull out of the category ahead of launch has opened an AirPower-sized hole in the wireless charging mat market. And there are plenty of products waiting in the wings to fill it.

AirUnleashed is pretty shameless in its approach, right down to a minimalist white box that takes more than a few cues from the Cupertino design department. That’s doubly the case with the pad itself, which retains the same pill-shaped form factor, albeit with an off-white (cream? ivory?) coloring.

There are also two plus symbols flanking a small concave circle. The product’s designers designated three distinct spots for the three Apple products (iPhone, Apple Watch and AirPods). Rather than the numerous overlapping charging coils AirPower was said to have, this one sports three, with different wattages for the different devices (7.5, 2 and 5, respectively).

You can use these interchangeably to some degree, but for all sorts of reasons, it’s best to use the allotted wattage for the device category intended. Because the device uses the Qi standard, however, it’s compatible with a pretty broad array of wireless devices.

Both the iPhone and AirPods 2 started charging as soon as I placed them on the pad. The Apple Watch was a no go. I reached out to the company about that one — turns out it required updating to the last version of watchOS, which did seem to fix the issue. The fact that the pad just sports the three coils means you’ve got the position the devices correctly, and even after the OS update, I still had trouble getting the watch in the right spot.

At $99, it’s $50 cheaper than the rumored AirPower price. Weirdly, that doesn’t factor in the price of a wall charger, which is going to set you back another $14 if you decide to go with AirUnleashed’s version. Though given the fact that you’re already dealing with an Apple knockoff, I do’t see why you would.

A cursory look at Amazon finds a number of other AirPower-esque charging pads at a fraction of the price, and all appear to use a similar three-coil solution. I can’t vouch for those, but after a few hours, at least, AirUnleashed seems to be working reasonably well.

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Roli’s newest instrument, the Lumi, helps you learn to play piano with lights

There has been a longstanding gulf between the consumption music and the creation of it: not everyone has the time or money to spend on lessons and instruments, and for those in school, many music education programs have been cut back over the years, making the option of learning to play instruments for free less common. Still others have had moments of interest but haven’t found the process of learning that easy.

Now we’re seeing a new wave of startups emerge that are attempting to tackle those issues with technology, creating tools and even new instruments that leverage smartphones and tablets, new hardware computing innovations and new software to make learning music more than just a pastime for a select few.

In the latest development, London startup Roli is launching a new interactive keyboard called the Lumi. Part colourful, sound sensitive lightboard and part piano, the Lumi’s keys light up in a colorful array to help guide and teach you to play music. The 11-inch keyboard — which can  be linked up with one or two more of the same to add more octaves — comes with an iPad app that contains hundreds of pieces, and the two are now selling for $249 alongside a new Kickstarter to help drum up interest and offer early-bird discounts. The Kickstarter campaign blew through its modest £100,000 goal within a short while, and some of the smaller tiers of pledges now sold out. The product will start shipping in October 2019, the company says.

As you might already know, or have guessed by the reaction to the kickstarter, this is not Roli’s first rodeo: the company has made two other major products (and variations on those two) before this also aimed at music making. First came the Seaboard, which Roli described as a new instrument when it first launched. Taking the form factor of a keyboard, it contained squishy keys that let the player bend notes and create other effects alongside electronic-based percussive tapping, as you would do with a normal keyboard.

Its next product was Blocks: small, modular light boards that also used colored light to guide your playing and help you create new and interesting sounds and beats with taps (and using a similarly squidgy surface to the Seaboard), and then mix them together.

Both of these were interesting, but somewhat aimed at those who were already familiar with playing pianos or other instruments, or with creating and playing electronic music with synthesizers, FX processors and mixers. (Case in point: the people I know who were most interested in these were my DJ friends and my kids, who both play the piano and are a little nerdy about these things.)

The Lumi is in a way a step back for Roli fom trying to break new ground by conceiving of completely new instruments, with new form factors built with the benefits of technology and electronics in mind. But it’s also a step ahead: using a keyboard as the basis of the instrument, the Lumi is more familiar and therefore more accessible — with an accessible price of $249 to go along with that.

Lumi’s emergence comes after an interesting few years of growth for Roli. The company is one of the select few (and I think the only one making music instruments) to be retailed in Apple stores, and it’s had endorsements from some very high profile people, but that’s about as mainstream as it has been up to now.

The startup’s founder and CEO, American-born Roland Lamb, is probably best described as a polymath, someone who comes across less as a geeky and nervous or (at the other end) ultra smooth-talking startup founder, and more like a calm-voiced thinker who has come out to talk to you in a break between reading and writing about the nature of music and teaching a small philosophy seminar.

His background also speaks to this unconventional manner. Before coming to found Roli, he had lived in a Zen monastery, made his way around the world playing jazz piano, and studied Chinese and Sanskrit at Harvard and design at the Royal College of Art.

Roli has always been a little cagey about how much it has raised and from whom, but the list includes consumer electronics giants like Sony, specialist audio makers like Onkyo, the music giant Univeral Music Group, and VCs that include Founders Fund, Index and LocalGlobe, Kreos Capital, Horizons Ventures and more. It’s also partnered with a number of big names like Pharrell Williams (who is also an investor) in the effort to get its name out.

And while it has most definitely made a mark with a certain echelon of the music world — producers and those creating electronic music — it has not parlayed that into a wider global reputation or wider accessibility. After bringing out instruments more for a high end audience, the Lumi seems like an attempt to do just that.

That seems to be coming at the right time. Services like Spotify and YouTube — and the rise of phones and internet usage in general — have transformed how we listen to music. We now have a much wider array of things to listen to whenever we want. On top of that, services like YouTube and Soundcloud furthermore are giving us a taste of creating our own music: using electronic devices, we can go beyond what might have been limitations up to now (for example, having never learned to play an instrument in the traditional sense) to get stuck into the craft itself.

The Lumi is also tapping into another important theme, and that is of music being “good for you”. There a line of thought that says learning an instrument is good for your mind, both if you’re a younger person who is still in school or indeed out of school and looking to stay sharp. Others believe it has health benefits.

But realistically, these beliefs don’t get applied very often. Roli cites stats that say that only 10% of adults aged 18-29 have played an instrument in the past year, and of those that played as children, some 80% say they quit by age 14.

Putting this together with the Lumi, it seems that the aim is to hit a wider swathe of the market and bring in people who might want to learn something like playing an instrument but had thought previously that it would be too much of a challenge.

Roli isn’t the first — nor likely the last — company to reconsider how to learn playing the piano through technology. The Chinese company ONE Music Group makes both smart pianos with keyboards that light up, as well as a strip that you overlay on any keyboard, that also corresponds to an iPad app to learn to play piano.

An American startup called McCarthy Music also makes illuminated-key pianos, also subscribing to the principle that providing this kind of guidance to teach muscle memory is an important step in getting a student acquainted with playing on a keyboard.

The Lumi is notable not just because of its cost, but its size — the single, lightweight keyboards have a battery life of six hours and can fit in a backback.

That said, Roli is hoping that there will be a double audience to these in the longer term, bridging the divide between music maker and listener, but also amateur and pro.

“Many people would love to play an instrument but worry that they don’t have the talent. Through our research, design, and innovation at ROLI, we’ve come to believe that the problem is not a lack of talent. Rather, instruments themselves are not smart enough,” said Lamb in a statement. “What excites me most is that the intelligence of LUMI means that there’s something in it for everyone. On one hand my own kids now prefer LUMI time to movie time. On the other hand, several of the world’s leading keyboard players can’t wait to use LUMI in the studio and on the stage.”

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The Geesaa automates (but overcomplicates) pourover coffee

Making pourover coffee is a cherished ritual of mine on most mornings. But there are times I wish I could have a single cup of pourover without fussing about the kitchen — and the Geesaa, a new gadget seeking funds on Kickstarter, lets me do that. But it’s definitely still a ways from being a must-have.

I’m interested in alternative coffee preparation methods, low and high tech, so I was happy to agree to try out the Geesaa when they contacted me just ahead of their Kickstarter campaign going live (they’ve already hit their goal at this point). I got to test one of their prototypes and have used it on and off for the last couple weeks.

The Geesaa is part of a new wave of coffee makers that make advances on traditional drip techniques, attempting to get closer to a manual pourover. That usually means carefully controlling the water temperature and dispensing it not just in a stream powerful enough to displace and churn the ground coffee, but in a pattern that’s like what you’d do if you were pouring it by hand. (The Automatica, another one with a similar idea, sadly didn’t make it.)

Various manufacturers do this in various ways, so Geesaa isn’t exactly alone, though its mechanism appears to be unique. Instead of using a little showerhead that drips regularly over the grounds, or sending a moving stream in a spiral, the Geesaa spins the carafe and pours water from a moving head above it.

This accomplishes the kind of spiral pour that you’ll see many a barista doing, making sure the grounds are all evenly wet and agitated, without creating too thin of a slurry (sounds delicious, right?). And in fact that’s just what the Geesaa does — as long as you get the settings right.

Like any gadget these days, this coffee maker is “smart” in that it has a chip and memory inside, but not necessarily smart in any other way. This one lets you select from a variety of “recipes” supposedly corresponding to certain coffees that Geesaa, as its secondary business model, will sell to owners in perfectly-measured packets. The packet will come with an NFC card that you just tap on the maker to prompt it to start with those settings.

It’s actually a good idea, but more suited to a hotel room than a home. I preferred to use the app, which, while more than a little overcomplicated, lets you design your own recipes with an impressive variety of variables. You can customize water temperature, breaks between pouring “stages,” the width of the spiral pattern, the rate the water comes out, and more.

Although it’s likely you’d just arrive at a favorite recipe or two, it’s nice to be able to experiment or adjust in case of guests, a new variety of coffee, or a new grinder. You can, as I did, swap out the included carafe for your own cone and mug, or a mesh cone, or whatever — as long as it’s roughly the right size you can make it work. There’s no chip restricting you to certain containers or coffees.

I’m not sure what the story is with the name, by the way. When you start it up, the little screen says “Coffee Dancer,” which seems like a better English name for the device than Geesaa, but hey.

When it works, it works, but there are still plenty of annoyances that you won’t get with a kettle and a drip cone. Bear in mind this is with a prototype (3rd generation, but still) device and app still in testing.

One thing I’ve noticed is that the temperature seems too low in general. Even the highest available temperature, 97 C (around 206 F), doesn’t seem as hot as it should. Built-in recipes produced coffee that seemed only warm, not hot. Perhaps the water cools as it travels along the arm and passes through the air — this is nontrivial when you’re talking about little droplets! So by the time it gets to the coffee it may be lower than you’d like, while coming out of a kettle it will almost always be about as hot as it can get. (Not that you want the hottest water possible, but too cool is as much a problem as too hot.)

I ran out of filters for the included carafe so I used my gold Kone filter, which worked great.

The on-device interface is pretty limited, with a little dial and LCD screen that displays two lines at a time. It’s pre-loaded with a ton of recipes for coffee types you may never see (what true coffee-lover orders preground single-serve packets?), and the app is cluttered with ways to fill out taste profiles, news, and things that few people seem likely to take advantage of. Once you’ve used a recipe you can call it up from the maker itself, at least.

One time I saw the carafe was a bit off-center when it started brewing, and when I adjusted it, the spinning platform just stopped and wouldn’t restart. Another time the head didn’t move during the brewing process, just blasting the center of the grounds until the cone was almost completely full. (You can of course stop the machine at any point and restart it should something go wrong.)

Yet when it worked, it was consistently good coffee and much quicker than my standard manual single cup process.

Aesthetically it’s fine — modern and straightforward, though without the elegance one sees in Bodum and Ratio’s design.

It comes in white, too. You know, for white kitchens.

The maker itself is quite large — unnecessarily so, I feel, though I know the base has to conceal the spinning mechanism and a few other things. But at more than a foot wide and 8 inches deep, and almost a foot tall, it has quite a considerable footprint, larger than many another coffee machine.

I feel like the Geesaa is a good coffee-making mechanism burdened by an overcomplicated digital interface. I honestly would have preferred mechanical dials on the maker itself, one each for temperature, amount, and perhaps brew style (all at once, bloom first, take a break after 45 seconds, etc). Maybe something to control its spiral width too.

And of course at $700 (at the currently available pledge level) this thing is expensive as hell. The comparisons made in the campaign pitch aren’t really accurate — you can get an excellent coffee maker like a Bonnavita for $150, and of course plenty for less than that.

At $700, and with this thing’s capabilities, and with the side hustle of selling coffee packets, this seems like a better match for a boutique hotel room or fancy office kitchen than an ordinary coffee lover’s home. I enjoy using it but its bulk and complexity are antithetical to the minimal coffee making experience I have enjoyed for years. Still, it’s cool to see weird new coffee making methods appear, and if you’re interested, you can still back it on Kickstarter for the next week or so.

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Simone Giertz’s converted Tesla Model 3 pickup truck is wonderful

YouTuber Simone Giertz, celebrated DIY inventor, roboticist and general maker of cool stuff decided not to wait for Tesla’s forthcoming pickup truck. Instead, she bought a Tesla Model 3 direct from the company new and then used elbow grease, ingenuity, some help from friends and power tools to turn it into a two-seater with a flatbed.

The amazing thing is, unlike some of the robots Giertz is famous for making, the final product looks terrific – both in terms of the detail work, and in terms of its functionality. Giertz also installed a cage over the truck bed, and a tailgate that can double as a work bench. Plus, as you can see from this fake commercial for the so-called “Truckla,” the thing still rips both on and off-road.

Along with her crew, Giertz rented a dedicated workshop to do the build, which took around two weeks and a lot of sawing at the metal chassis. The team had to rebuild crucial components like the roll cage to ensure that the finished product was still safe.

There’s still work to be done in terms of waterproofing, lifting up the vehicle, giving it a paint makeover and more, per Giertz, but the finished product looks amazing, and potentially better than whatever sci-fi nightmare Elon Musk is putting together for the actual Tesla pickup.

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GoTenna is ramping up public sector mesh networking with a $24M C round

GoTenna is best known for its outdoors-oriented consumer products that let you text and share locations between smartphones off the grid. But the company has found that government work — military, fire, rescue — is the real market, and is pursuing it with a vengeance on the strength of a $24 million funding round.

“We’ve been busy!” said Daniela Perdomo, founder and CEO of the company, in an interview. “We have a good problem, which is a technology that can be so foundationally enabling for so many use cases.”

GoTenna’s core tech is mesh networking over radio frequencies normally used for walkie-talkies: long range but low bandwidth. Yet if all you need to send are GPS coordinates or a short message, it’s perfectly sufficient and works great where mobile and satellites connections are impractical. Just on the device, smaller than a deck of cards, and you can chat over miles in the middle of nowhere with your climbing partners or back country ski pals.

In the last couple years the company has shifted its priorities from consumer tech — the GoTenna and Mesh series of gadgets — to filling the needs of public sector clients that have been asking for something like this for years.

Firefighters, military operations, local law enforcement, search and rescue — many were using bulky, over-engineered, expensive solutions that haven’t changed much in decades. GoTenna works with nearly any smartphone and instantly creates a mesh network that can span miles, making it perfect for off-grid communications.

GoTenna Pro meshing radio aspires to deploy next to rescue, fire and security teams

Perdomo said this was actually more or less the plan from the beginning.

“It was in my first ever pitch deck when we raised our seed in 2013, there was this blue-sky vision of how the technology would be used,” she told me. “But it was simpler to launch an MVP to consumers. We always felt that product was going to bring in the public sector. And that’s exactly what happened — when we launched our first generation product, I think within 24 hours we had a variety of different public sector customers reach out to us.”

“We now have some federal agencies that have been customers through every generation of the product. We sill have our consumer product, and people love it, but it’s a small part of our business compared to the public sector,” she said.

An example of how the interface might look in use. It can relay the locations of other GoTenna devices at intervals, helping teams keep in touch automatically.

While disaster response crews could of course just buy a couple dozen of the regular GoTenna products, they were quick to ask for “pro” versions with features prized by advanced users and military customers.

Longer range, more programmable wireless parameters, compatibility with various legacy systems — the Pro and new ProX versions of the GoTenna system hit a lot of sweet spots. As Perdomo told me when the Pro first came out, legacy systems are powerful in some ways but can also be horribly expensive, incompatible with foreign wireless systems, or even have legal restrictions on where they can be used.

For a cash-strapped NGO that goes around doing global aid, a $100-$500 gadget that turns an ordinary phone into a versatile mesh node is potentially game-changing. (You can also use them to temporarily replace destroyed communications infrastructure.)

A mesh network spontaneously erupts in the US and helps connect Puerto Rico

But deep-pocketed federal agencies and military branches are also shelling out for the devices, and increasingly for the software support contracts that go with them. GoTenna’s Aspen Grove is a proprietary mesh network protocol that they’ve engineered to be faster and more robust than anything else out there. I’d exert a little skepticism here normally, but from what I’ve seen the systems GoTenna is replacing or augmenting aren’t exactly competitive.

In fact GoTenna’s next major hardware project is to create a mesh networking board that can be integrated right into existing hardware, simplifying the systems and baking its protocols in even deeper.

“We have a long list of companies that want to integrate our tech into vehicles, aircraft, anything you can think of,” Perdomo said. “So you can put one of these babies on a UAV and let ‘er rip! Our record range, point to point from a UAV, is 69 miles.”

Meanwhile the company is also releasing a broader open source mesh platform called Lot 49 that’s meant to be capable of supporting a global messaging infrastructure without relying on any wireless providers. That could be a big deal for internet of things type devices as well.

Interestingly, Perdomo doesn’t feel threatened by the new and rather scary kid on the block: communications satellite constellations like Starlink and OneWeb. If the idea is that GoTenna lets you communicate where the grid doesn’t reach, what happens when the grid is global?

“No matter how many satellites you put up, repeaters you put up, cables you lay down, you always have that last mile. You need resiliency, access, and I believe neutrality as well,” she said. And indeed you’re not going to take a Starlink ground station with you on a covert operation or into an active wildfire. And having an existing, ongoing business agreement with a satellite communications provider may not even be desirable in the first place.

“There’s a reason why certain incumbents in the tactical radio space as well as carriers are partnering with us,” Perdomo pointed out — and indeed Comcast Ventures is a new face among the investors. “We’re creating a new layer in the communications stack, mesh networks with a focus on bursty data. I think of us as perfectly complementary to every other communications company.”

As for that funding, it will go towards easing the rapid growth the company is experiencing, finishing the pro and embedded options, hiring up, and expanding operations to support their growing services business. The $24M round was led by Founders Fund, with participation from Comcast Ventures and existing investors Union Square Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Walden VC, MentorTech, and Bloomberg Beta.

“We’ve been in R&D for a really long time,” Perdomo said. “It’s exciting now to also be becoming a business. All of the most impressive mainstream telecommunications technologies we use today, things like the internet or GPS, they hit it out of the park with the public sector first. If you can win there, in life or death situations, you know you can win everywhere else as well.”

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Xiaomi’s latest products for Russia include its smart TVs and flagship Mi 9T

Xiaomi, best known for its smartphones, is making serious inroads into Russia as it launched a collection of products in the country where some 145 million people live. That includes its smart TVs featuring 700,000 hours of content, smart wristbands, wireless earbuds, and flagship phone Mi 9T, which is identical to its recently announced Redmi K20 for China under a different identifier.

Customers can find these products online on Xiaomi’s website and offline at its 31 authorized retail stores across the country. Xiaomi aims to boost the number of Mi Stores to 100 this year, a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. Russian news outlet Kommersant first reported the plan last week.

Xiaomi began shipping to Russia back in 2017 by introducing three handset models and its offering has since broadened. Russia marks the third international country following India and Indonesia — its biggest markets outside China — where it has rolled out smart TVs, a new area of growth for the Hong Kong-listed company.

The three Mi TV models will be available from June 25th with prices ranging from 11,990 rubles ($186.56) to 33,990 rubles ($528.88).

The TV push comes as Xiaomi copes with a global slowdown in smartphone shipment. TVs, like phones, can be an important channel for Xiaomi — which has long billed its software as a differentiator from conventional hardware companies — to sell app services and ads. It came as no surprise that Xiaomi recently bought a small stake in TCL, the world’s third-largest LCD TV maker, to ramp up its production capability in building next-gen connected TVs.

The expansion in Russia also reflects Xiaomi’s ambition to grow its overseas markets, which in the first quarter made up 38% of its overall revenue.

The three TV models it rolled out in the country “are a symbol of our sincere devotion to Russian consumers,” said Janet Zeng, vice president of international development at Xiaomi Mi TV. “I’m sure you all see how much we worked to combine our technical development and localized content. By [doing] this we emphasize our devotion to the Russian market and its priority for us.”

In major TV push, China’s Xiaomi buys 0.5% stake in TCL

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Palm’s tiny phone is available unlocked at $350

The first time I showed the Palm phone to the TechCrunch staff, they were excited. At the very least, it was a unique take on the category, designed to be a second phone for those moments that didn’t require a larger, bulkier device.

But reality set in pretty quickly. The device’s capabilities were severely limited by a number of factors, including size. The biggest issue, however, was a Verizon exclusive that only let users purchase the device as a second handset tied to an existing account.

Back in April, the company announced that the 3.3-inch phone could be purchased as a standalone device — albeit still through Verizon or US Mobile. Today, it’s expanding that, making the handset available unlocked, so it will work with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and MetroPCS SIMs.

Palm phone review: an idea whose time may never come

The phone’s available “at only” $350. That’s cheap compared to many full-sized, mid-tier handsets, but cheapness is certainly a relative concept. It still seems like a lot for a second phone, and while it’s certainly adorable, I’d strongly advise against anyone using it as a primary handset. Heck, it’s not even all that great as a standalone MP3 player.

If you’re still interested, you can pre-order it today — and Palm will throw in a $30 leather case with neck and wrist lanyards. It starts shipping in six to eight weeks.