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Today at Mobile World Congress, Formula 1 announced their new over-the-top (OTT) Grand Prix subscription service, F1 TV.  The service will cost between $8-12 per month depending on your subscription level and will provide fans of the racing series ad-free streaming of all event sessions.

Formula 1 fans will get commercial-free live streams of each race with multi language commentary. In addition, the service will provide exclusive access to all 20 driver on-board cameras throughout every race session. F1 TV Pro will have unique feeds not available on any other platform with the capability of multi-level personalisation.

One of the key Pro features of the service will be the ability for subscribers to select the on-board cameras they want to watch during a race.  If they want to watch the head-to-head battle between Mercedes’ Valtteri Bottas and Ferrari’s Kimi Raikkonen, they can do so while others watch Williams’ Lance Stroll battle McLaren’s Fernando Alonso.

Google has officially pulled the covers off the Google Clips, the AI-Driven camera that is aimed to take candid photos and motion pictures all in a self contained package.

With a 130° viewing angle, and 16GB of storage, the idea behind the camera was to set it up and let it capture random events with children, pets and in home events.  The device has Google’s AI built into it so it can recognize faces and and does all of the thinking for you on when to capture and what.

Clips is very centric on protection of your data and privacy.  Everything is on the device, including the AI, so nothing goes out until you share it.

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a loaner Google Clips thanks to Google and it is a mighty impressive little device.

While the focus at Mobile World Congress tends to be on new phones, that doesn’t mean that component manufactures aren’t there and making their own announcements.  Qualcomm is a good example with their announcement of the new Snapdragon 700 System-on-Chip (SoC) processors.

The best way to think of the new 700 series is that it brings all the best bits from the more expensive 800 series while giving a more budget friendly price like the 600 series.   The new series will have the Spectra image processing of the 800 series as well as the AI engine.  It will feature Quick Charge 4.0, Bluetooth 5.0 and, according to Qualcomm, will be 30% more power efficient over the 600 series.

Today at Mobile World Congress, Google introduced Flutter, their new cross platform mobile SDK.  The new development tool will allow for developers to create native UI frameworks for both Android and iOS that are native to each platform.

The beauty of Flutter is that it comes packing its own rendering engine and framework which, in essence, bypasses the native UI frameworks in both platforms.  This is not something new for developers, especially game developers who have used different rendering engines.  This allows for significant performance increases (particularly on Android).  When you compile the app with the available Android and iOS SDKs, you get the appropriate app & framework for the respective platform.