Samsung's latest smartphone monitors your heart

[Karan rocks]

Samsung's latest smartphone monitors your heart​

Korean company's new flagship Galaxy S5 packs a heart rate monitor and will track your motions and monitor your steps

A customer gets to grips with his new Samsung Galaxy S5 in Jakarta. Photograph: Beawiharta/Reuters​

• Samsung's last smartphone watched your eyes; its new one will also listen to your heart. The Korean company's new flagship Galaxy S5 packs a heart rate monitor and will track your motions and monitor your steps, as part of a push into the health and fitness market. The innovation comes after Samsung introduced eye-tracking technology last year to pause your phone when you looked away. Samsung's new Gear smartwatches will also measure your heart rate and order you to step up the pace when out for a run. The future, it seems, will not only be watching us closely but will also be nagging us into better health.

• Recharging your smartphone could stop being an overnight process and become a sub-minute one. Israeli startup StoreDot has demonstrated a charger the size of a laptop power supply capable of fully juicing a smartphone in just 30 seconds, and reckons it will be able to offer a $30 (£20) charger in just three years.

• In the spirit of making everything tech smaller or faster, the desktop printer has not been pronounced dead: mini-robot printers are the future. A little bot from Zuta Labs looks like a small puck shuffling across a piece of A4 leaving a trail of ink, but will autonomously print a full page in about 40 seconds. It takes its orders from an iPhone over Bluetooth and costs £120 from Kickstarter.

• Hearing aids have become smart. The ReSound Linx hooks up to an iPhone and will not only pipe the phone's audio from calls, music, navigation and videos to the hearing aid, but also allows users to tweak their audio settings. Bass, treble and volume can be altered and associated with a specific location so that it automatically adjusts to the right settings as a user enters their favourite coffee shop.

• The end of struggles with wrong-way-up USB connectors is nigh. A new reversible USB plug is on its way. It is identical at both ends, so it does not matter which way up it is or which end goes in where. The new "Type-C" connector the one connector to rule them all, eventually.

Samsung's latest smartphone monitors your heart | Technology | The Guardian