Apple Watch will replace your car keys, charge faster than an iPhone

We still have plenty of questions about the Apple Watch, and although we'll have to wait until March 9 for most of them to be answered Apple CEO Tim Cook has let slip some new info about the wearable slip.

It seems the Apple Watch will have the capability to replace users' car keys and key fobs, Cook told The Telegraph.

Android Wear watches are capable of the same thing, although the feature requires cooperation from car makers as well and hasn't seen wide adoption yet.

Cook didn't say exactly how it would work on Apple Watch, or whether the feature will be available when the wearable launches or some time later, but nice to hear about a new Apple Watch feature even without the details.

Cook also touched on the Apple Watch's much-discussed battery life, saying that it will last a full day - something we've heard before - and that it will charge more quickly than the iPhone does thanks to a new magnetic charger designed by Jony Ive.

Unsurprisingly, Cook has been wearing the Apple Watch every day - and even less shocking is how much praise he had for it, telling the site that can't go back to living without health and phone notifications on his wrist.

With the Apple Watch hitting wrists in April, we'll soon find out whether consumers will agree.

Samsung's Gear S is a standalone smartwatch

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In Depth: iPhone through the ages: just how much has it changed?

It was January 2007 when Steve Jobs took to the stage of the Moscone Center San Francisco to announce the arrival of the iPhone, which went on sale worldwide later that year.

If you find it difficult to remember that far back, Leona Lewis was number one in the UK with A Moment Like This and people were flocking to the cinema to get teary-eyed at Will Smith in The Pursuit Of Happyness.

While our pop music and movie choices may not have improved much, smartphones were changed forever: from that point on, touchscreens, apps and digital media were the way forward.

Launched: June 2007 (US), November 2007 (UK)

Part iPod, part phone, part Internet device: the original 2007 iPhone.

Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone as three devices in one: a touchscreen iPod, a revolutionary mobile phone, and a truly mobile web browser.

Now we take touchscreens, digital media playback and Web access for granted, but in 2007 the iPhone was unlike anything that had appeared before. Its 3.5-inch screen had a 320 x 480 pixel reoslution (one of the best displays of the time), with a 2MP camera built-in, and up to 8GB of storage.

Third-party apps were not yet allowed on "iPhone OS". In the TechRadar review, we noted that despite several shortcomings, the phone had "changed the mobile device landscape... multitouch will prove to be a model for interfaces in the future."

Launched: July 2008

The second iPhone model brought with it 3G connectivity, but was very similar to the original

High-speed connectivity was big news in 2008, which is why the second generation iPhone included 3G in its moniker (rather confusingly, as this was the second generation iPhone). It also brought with it a thinner shape, a plastic back and - crucially - support for the newly launched App Store.

The app store model worked so well you'll now find it replicated in everything from your smart TV to yourWindows 8 laptop, and the change helped Apple's phone really start to gain traction.

We said in our iPhone 3G review promised that buyers would be "amazed by the function and feel of this handset." The iPhone era had begun in earnest.

Launched: June 2009

Video recording came to the iPhone with the launch of the 3GS model.

The iPhone 3GS upgrade was viewed as disappointingly minor at the time, but look at the detail and a different picture emerges: as well as faster performance, the new handset offered a better 3.2MP camera (that could now record video as well as take photos), extra storage options and voice control (the precursor to Siri).

The display was the same 3.5-inch 320 x 480 screen, and the device's appearance remained largely unchanged from the 3G model. TechRadar's take on the unit praised the multimedia and internet capabilities while still finding niggles with the camera, call quality and battery life – this was the first of the more iterative updates to the iPhone but did enough to keep users happy.

Launched: June 2010

The iPhone 4 transformed the look and display of Apple's flagship device.

If the 3GS was a minor upgrade, the iPhone 4 was a serious step up - a new, flat design with an integrated antenna (although questions were raised about how you held the device) a high-resolution Retina display (640 x 960 pixels) that showed the rest of the world how it was done and a superior 5MP camera (featuring HD video recording) on top of internal performance improvements.

The competition was catching up, and Apple had responded in brilliant fashion. We were certainly impressed, despite some reservations about the high price, saying "it's intriguing to see record-breaking numbers queuing up to pick up this device - but after playing with it for a few days, you can see why."

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Your iPhone Might Make You a Reality TV Star

Broadcasting everything your smartphone sees and hears could be the next trend in social media.

The first time I learned about live streaming was also the first time I realized you could play shuffleboard in Brooklyn, at the Royal Palms Shuffleboard Club.

As my friends and I learned the rules, my teammate, Kevin Porter, started talking to his iPhone. He’d just downloaded Yevvo, he explained. The premise was simple—everything his phone could see and hear, his followers could also see and hear. His girlfriend had stayed home that night, but she was (hypothetically) watching his every move, thanks to this app. He had become the star of his own reality television show, albeit with a very small audience, and we were all his cast mates.

It seems like just about everything you say and do might wind up on the Internet someday. But this was something different: with Yevvo, everything we said and did was on the Internet, right then and there. And after a few minutes, my shuffleboard teammate had a new follower. And then another. And then another.

Yevvo, which relaunched last year with new features and a new name—Air—isn’t the only app to allow people to broadcast their lives live. With the spread of high-quality smartphone cameras, not to mention camera-equipped wearable devices, the use of such apps is sure to become more common. And such personal broadcasting could start to change the social media landscape.

Back at the shuffleboard club, we weren’t really considering any of this. Air’s users notify contacts when they begin a broadcast, and then anyone following that feed can push-notify their followers to check it out too. Nothing is saved or stored for later. If you missed it in real time, you missed it. Our fans—my friend’s girlfriend, at least—rooted for us, via comments on the stream. We had a blast.

Air is not just about catering to attention-starved 30-somethings, one of the company’s Israeli co-founders, Ben Rubin, told me in an interview a while later. Rubin and two others founded Yevvo after trying to figure out which parties to go to at a tech conference in Austin, Texas. They decided it would be nice to be able to actually show each other what a given scene was like.

Since launching as Yevvo in August 2013, Air has raised more than $4 million. Rubin wouldn’t disclose how many people have downloaded Yevvo or its new incarnation, but it clearly isn’t threatening Instagram yet. The highest Yevvo was ranked in Apple App store, back in December 2013, was 223rd.

Still, there’s good reason to think live-streaming video could thrive. A service like Vine, which makes it easy to post short videos on Facebook and Twitter, is appealing because it reduces the amount of time between when something happens and when other people get to see it. Meanwhile Snapchat’s ephemeral promise makes it a medium for sharing even the most impulsive and unguarded moments, delivered to recipients instantly rather than crowded into a feed. Live-streaming apps offer a similar, even more colorful method for unfettered and unfiltered communication.

Josh Elman, a partner at the Silicon Valley investment firm Greylock, told me he’s considering getting involved with Rubin’s company because it is positioned at television media’s latest shift, from “being curated, and heavily produced, to tuning into who you want, based on who you know.”

This novel participatory medium also raises questions, though—about privacy, intimacy, and appropriate behavior on social media. Porter, the guy who first showed me Yevvo, told me several months later that he eventually deleted the app from his phone. As he continued to explore the service, he said, he increasingly found the whole concept gross.

“You can only imagine how many ‘take off your shirt’ requests an aspiring model received while streaming her photo shoot to a bunch of lonely teens,” he told me.

What ultimately convinced him to walk away was seeing older men following underage girls, something that basically creeped him out. “If only these poor parents knew that their child was upstairs being watched by (and responding to) creepy old dudes,” he wrote.

Ryan Cooley, the company’s community manager, acknowledges the “perv factor,” but he points out that Air has made many changes designed to reduce it substantially. Now you can only invite people to follow you via SMS; the app doesn’t promote particular users (and thus expose them to strangers); users have the option to approve everyone that follows them. “We won’t recommend anybody for you to follow unless we are confident you know them from the physical world,” Cooley says. “I don’t think the dirtbags are going to go away, but you’re going to see a lot more transparency.”

Despite these misgivings, I found live streaming a fascinating thing to try. It’s fair to imagine that live-streaming services could become compelling new forms of social connection. If that happens, I can’t promise I won’t ham it up on screen after a few cocktails, but at least my viewers might find it entertaining.

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