Apple Watch will replace your car keys and its battery will last the whole day, Apple’s Chief Executive Tim Cook told the Telegraph in an interview. The watch is designed to replace car keys and the clumsy, large fobs that are now used in many vehicles, Cook told the newspaper.

Its battery will last the whole day, and will not take as long to charge as an iPhone, the report quoted Cook as saying. Apple Watch will also work as a credit card through Apple Pay, Cook told the paper, but did not mention how user verification will work with the watch.

The rollout of the watch might pose a challenge for Apple’s stores, which may involve “tweaking the experience in the store,” the Telegraph said, citing Cook’s conversation with the staff at Apple’s Covent Garden store in London.

Last March, Apple unveiled CarPlay, which lets drivers access contacts on their iPhones, make calls or listen to voicemails without taking their hands off the steering wheel. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that the iPhone maker is looking at making a self-driving electric car, and is talking to experts at carmakers and automotive suppliers.
In the interview, Cook said that the Apple Watch will operate a special rewards system, track the user’s activity and “be correct to 50 milliseconds”.

Apple was not immediately available for comment.

The company has scheduled a special event on March 9, where it is expected to showcase Apple Watch, which will be launched in April. While announcing Apple’s record-breaking earnings, CEO Tim Cook had revealed a rough launch date of April 2015 for the device.

The smartwatch was announced last year in September, but the company didn’t reveal much about its availability, except that it would come in ‘early Spring’. Later, Apple retail chief, Angela Ahrendts,was more specific and revealed the Watch would come only after the Chinese New Year. She had also disclosed how Apple had started planning marketing strategies and all retail employees would be trained to help customers try out the new watch and its features.

The Apple Watch sports a squarish design instead of a circular one popularised by Motorola’s Moto 360. The Watch is crafted from custom alloys of polished or space black stainless steel (Apple Watch), space gray or silver anodized aluminum (Apple Watch Sport) and 18-karat rose or yellow gold (Apple Watch Edition).

This Royal Danish Air Force pilot has elevated the art of the selfie. Literally.

Cruising high above the North Sea, the pilot, identified as Thomas Kristensen by ABC News, captured a selfie immediately after launching an AIM-9 Sidewinder missile. The shot also includes the complete wingspan of the F-16, an endless stretch of clouds and the blue sky.
We aren't entirely certain how the pilot managed to capture this unique shot, but there seems to be a GoPro reflected in his helmet visor, which would help explain Kristensen's seemingly impeccable timing. (The selfie is probably a capture from a video of the event.)

Though the selfie was originally posted to Facebook in October 2012, ABC speculates it has gained viral boost on account of Ellen DeGeneres' star-studded "Oscar selfie," which has prompted renewed interest in particularly epic self-portraits.

Google on Wednesday announced Chromecast, a $35 HDMI stick that streams web video to an HDTV. Chromecast will stream TV shows, movies and music, and anything in a Chrome browser, to your TV. It works with smartphones, tablets and PCs.

The surprising product announcement is the latest advancement in tech companies' growing battle over the future of TV. Set-top boxes like Apple TV and Roku already allow customers to stream web video on their televisions, and Amazon has been rumored to be launching a set-top box this fall.

The Google website notes that Chromecast works with Netflix, YouTube, Google Play and the Chrome browser. Pandora will be coming soon, Google said.

Each app that supports Chromecast will have a "Cast" button that sends content from your device to your TV. The Chrome browser will also be equipped with a "Cast" button that streams whatever is in your browser to your TV -- an option for things like HBO Go, Gizmodo notes.

Chromecast is Google's answer to Apple TV, the $99 set-top box from Apple that also streams content from digital devices to TV screens.

But unlike Apple TV, which outside of its own apps only streams content from Apple devices and computers, Chromecast allows streaming from most devices: Android tablets and smartphones, iPads, iPhones, Macs, PCs and the Chromebook Pixel all work with Chromecast. And, Chromecast is a third of the price of Apple TV.

Benedict Evans, a consultant at Enders Analysis in London, said that Chromecast threatens companies like Roku that build streaming devices.

"Third-party streaming boxes are dead," Evans said. "Why would you spend $100 to get basically the same thing when you can spend $35 to get something you can control with your phone."

Evans noted that one downside to Chromecast is that most of the content viewed on it comes from the cloud -- so if you use your iPhone to record a video of your child or your dog, you can't stream it to Chromecast without uploading it first to YouTube.

In some unknown warehouse presumably sits a pile of millions of beautiful, unused Surface RTs, the tablet computer that was supposed to resurrect Microsoft. Late Thursday, the company revealed for the first time that it has failed to entice many people to buy the product, and the software maker made an unexpected, $900 million writeoff on its unsold Surface inventory. The losses don't end there: On Friday morning, Microsoft shed $30 billion in value after its stock tumbled 10 percent.

According to one calculation, that loss translates to nearly 6 million sleek and rather stunning machines that consumers have decided they don't care to own. No matter how the math works out -- the company would not provide exact sales numbers -- that heap of Surfaces just burned a nearly $1 billion hole in Microsoft's pocket.

The irony of the Surface debacle is that Microsoft actually managed to design a product that many reviewers admired, but it failed anyway -- underscoring the degree to which this once-dominant technology company appears to be past its moment. Good, bad or mediocre, the Surface was apparently doomed on arrival because that arrival was way too late, with the market already claimed by Apple’s wildly popular iPad.

How did such a powerful company manage to engineer such a colossal loser?

A number of factors conspired -- each the result of a miscalculation from the company executives, which probably explains why CEO Steve Ballmer reshuffled leadership in Redmond and put one person, Julie Larson-Green, in charge of all hardware. Let's break down a few numbers on why this tablet bombed so badly:

    30 months, or the amount of time between the release of Apple's first iPad and that of the Microsoft Surface. That, apparently, was all the time Apple needed to extend its walled-off ecosystem of apps and music to tablets. Had Microsoft foreseen that the world was ready to use slabs of glass as computers -- and having made an ahead-of-its-time tablet in the early 2000s, it should have -- it could have beat Apple to the punch.

    $100, or the difference between the cheapest full-sized iPad and the cheapest Surface RT (with cover) when it first arrived. Say you're the sort of luddite who hadn't gotten around to buying an iPad, and had to choose between it and the Surface. Advantage still goes to Apple if you own an iPhone with a bevy of purchased apps or own an iTunes account full of purchased songs. Microsoft could have still swayed that customer with a lower price point -- but decided that its tablet should be significantly more expensive. It took until this month for Microsoft to finally lower prices and undercut the iPad.

    20 stores, or the number of physical retail locations Microsoft had open when it first announced the Surface. Taking a major cue from Apple, Microsoft now has a retail strategy of opening Microsoft-branded stores. Initially, the stores were going to be the only physical place where you could buy a Microsoft-branded tablet. But Business Insider counted only 20 Microsoft stores after the Surface was first announced. Even though the tablet could be ordered online, people often want to feel and test out something in real life before putting down hundreds of dollars to buy it.

A few days ago my colleague, Mia Aquino, put out the following call for urgent iPhone assistance on Twitter:

Mia's not alone: Complete home button malfunction is one of the more common maladies befalling iPhones, if Apple's support forums are any indication.

There are all sorts of suggestions for fixes in the link above: Recalibrate the home button; blow in the charging port like it's an old NES game; dab some WD-40 on the button itself. Or, the old reliable: Visit the Apple Store and cry helplessly until the Geniuses give you a new phone to make you leave.

Any of these might do the trick for you. Failing those, though, there is a sure-fire way to gain access to your home button without tinkering with or possibly damaging your hardware that I've had friends employ and enjoy in the past.

Fact is, you can get your home button on the touchscreen, available for you at any point that the screen is powered on. Go into Settings, and then General, and then Accessibility, and then Assistive Touch. Turn Assistive Touch on, and you'll see a persistent white dot in the top left corner of your screen.

This is your new home button, and more: Tapping it will open a menu that can take you home, launch Siri, lock your screen and turn the volume up and down, among other features.

You can drag that button anywhere on the screen you desire, pinning it down wherever you find most convenient.

It's a fantastic feature for those who find themselves with a malfunctioning home button, and also seems far safer to use while driving. Those who have difficulty with the iPhone's home or volume buttons -- men and women with arthritis, for example -- might also find it much easier to navigate their phones with an on-screen button.

Got any other tips to fix or circumvent a broken home button? I'd love to read them below. And if you have any other personal tech questions, drop me an email at captaingadget@huffingtonpost.com and I might just feature it on the site.