With lots of smartwatches in the market today, Garmin sets itself apart with multiple offerings specific for every niche and budget.

For instance, their Venu 2 and Venu 2S, which were introduced last year, are excellent everyday wearables. The hybrid design of traditional meets modern is a stylish and unique choice. And they’re packed with multiple functions that support overall health and fitness.

This year, Garmin is introducing another addition to the Venu Series, the Venu 2 Plus. It somehow looks the same with previous Venu watches, but with upgraded features to support a busy lifestyle.

Answer calls and control options on your wrist

Perhaps the biggest upgrade from the past Venu series is the built-in intelligent voice control. The Venu 2 Plus features a combination of speaker and microphone made for easier voice calls and commands.

The Venu 2 Plus Voice Assistant is compatible with Siri, Google Assistant, or Bixby. This way, users can utilize their smartphone’s voice assistant to send texts, ask questions, control compatible smart home devices, and more.

The voice feature is especially helpful when you don’t want to stop mid-workout just to set controls. It’s also a lifesaver when running errands, and you want to limit touching your screen.

The battery life can last up to nine (9) days in smartwatch mode and up to eight (8) hours in GPS + Music mode.

24/7 monitoring of your health

Maintaining our health while dealing with work and other things can be quite hard especially in this pandemic. But the good thing is, we are more mindful of our wellbeing now more than ever.

Garmin’s Venu 2 Plus is a great companion to track your whole day of activities. There’s no need to write on your planner or create separate trackers in Notion. Most health trackers you need are packed inside this timepiece conveniently slapped on your wrist.

It features all-day monitoring and data analysis of your overall health including heart rate (with user-configurable alerts for high or low readings), advanced sleep with sleep score and insights, breathwork activities, fitness age, respiration, Pulse Ox, all-day stress, hydration, and women’s health (menstrual cycle tracking and pregnancy tracking).

Price and availability

The Garmin Venu 2 Plus retails for PhP 25,695.

It is available in 3 colors: Black, Ivory, and Powder Gray. You can purchase through Garmin Brand Stores, kinetic.com.ph, Lazada, Shopee, and Garmin PH Viber Community. They currently have an ongoing promo: the first 75 customers can get a free Garmin Tote Bag for every purchase.

Computer company HP on Wednesday announced the opening of the HP Experience Hub (X-Hub) flagship store in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

The X-Hub is a seamless online-to-offline (O2O) experiential retail experience for tech consumers.

The physical store in Malaysia is combined with an integrated O2O platform to create a seamless omnichannel commerce journey across six Southeast Asian countries.

More immersive retail experience

The Experience Hub unifies the retail experience across the Southeast Asia region, connecting the Kuala Lumpur flagship store to 82 online stores spread across Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, with Thailand and Vietnam to follow in March 2022.

Online consumers may be able to personally interact with HP Live Advisors, a team of dedicated experts based on the X-Hub via real-time video calls and chat functions.

These will be made available in preferred local languages, while live streams on the latest HP products is also made possible via the HP Virtual Showroom.

This way, consumers will be able to continue shopping without having to be in Malaysia physically.

Interactive ‘Test Drive’ stations

As for customers who want to visit the physical store in Malaysia, there are interactive ‘Test Drive’ stations to experience all of HP’s technology.

These stations include:

• Premium (High-end consumer devices)
• Gaming (Laptops, desktops, and monitors)
• Commercial (Business-grade devices)
• Print (Home and office printing)

Visitors can also access personalization services such as custom engraving and printing, or connect to in-store or online HP Live Advisors for real-time inquiries.

Location

The HP X-Hub flagship store in Malaysia is located at Pavilion Bukit Jalil (level 4) in Kuala Lumpur.

The flagship store was created in partnership with Thunder Match Technology Sdn Bhd, Malaysia’s largest tech retailer. HP also partnered with Shopee and Lazada. Both of which support the online experience.

Samsung’s newest flagship mobile processor has just been announced. It’s the Samsung Exynos 2200 and it comes with Xclipse GPU Powered by AMD RDNA 2 Architecture.

The new processor promises “ultimate mobile phone gaming experience, as well as enhancing the overall experience in social media apps and photography.”

Ray Tracing on mobile phones

The Xclipse GPU equipped on the Exynos 2200 boldly claims it will achieve accelerated ray tracing (RT) and variable rate shading (VRS) on mobile phones. These are high graphics features previously only available on PCs, laptops, and consoles.

Ray tracing is a rendering technique that uses rays of light to project images or objects onto your screen. These show more accurate, more realistic images as the rays trace back to any source of light in the surrounding. For more, read: The future for all games: Ray Tracing explained

Enhanced 5G and fortified security

The Exynos 2200 integrates a fast 3GPP Release 16 5G modem supporting both sub-6GHz and mmWave (millimeter Wave) spectrum bands. With E-UTRAN New Radio – Dual Connectivity (EN-DC), which utilizes both 4G LTE and 5G NR signals, the modem can boost the speed up to 10Gbps.

It also comes with Integrated Secure Element (iSE) to store private cryptographic keys as well as to play a role as RoT (Root of Trust). Also, an inline encryption HW for UFS and DRAM has been reinforced to have user data encryption safely shared only within the secure domain.

Better image processing

As with any brand spanking new chip, the Samsung Exynos 2200 also promises better image processing — moving or otherwise. It’s designed to support the latest image sensors for ultra-high resolution of up to 200 megapixel (MP). At 30 frames-per- second (fps), the ISP supports up to 108 MP in single camera mode, and 64+36 MP in dual camera mode.

It can also connect up to seven individual image sensors and drive four concurrently for advanced multi-camera setups. For video recording, the ISP supports up to 4K HDR (or 8K) resolution.

It decodes videos up to 4K at 240fps or 8K at 60fps and encodes up to 4K at 120fps or 8K at 30fps. he advanced display solution features HDR10+ adding more dynamic range and depth to the picture and offers refresh rates of up to 144Hz.

The Exynos 2200 is currently in mass production.