Technology

The Casio Rangeman GPR-B1000 is comically large. Thatthe first thing you notice about it. Based on the G-Shock design, this massive watch is 20.2mm thick and about 60mm in diameter, a true dinner plate of a watch. Inside the heavy case is a dense collection of features that will make your next outdoor adventure great.

GPR-B1000, which I took for an extended trip through Utah and Nevada, is an outdoor marvel. It has all of the standard hiking watch features including compass, barometer, altimeter, and solar charging, but the watch also has built-in GPS mapping, logging, and backtracking. This means you can set a destination and the watch will lead you and you can later use your GPS data to recreate your trek or even backtrack out of a sticky situation.

This is not a sports watch. It won&t track your runs or remind you to go to your yoga class. Instead itaimed at the backwoods hiker or off piste skier who wants to get from Point A to Point B without getting lost. The watch connects to a specialized app that lets you set the destinations, map your routes, and even change timezones when the phone wakes up after a flight. These odd features make this a travelerdream.

The watch design is also unique for Casio. Instead of a replaceable battery the device charges via sunlight or with an included wireless charger. It has a ceramic caseback & a first for Casio & and the charger fits on like a plastic parasite. It charges via micro USB.

It has a crown on the side that controls scrolling through various on-screen menus and the rest of the functions are accessed easily from dedicated buttons around the bezel. The watch is mud- and water-proof to 200 meters and it can survive in minus 20 degrees Celsius temperatures. It is also shock resistant.

The $800 GPR-B1000 is a beefy watch. Itnot for the faint of wrist and definitely requires a bit of dedication to wear. I loved it while hiking up and down canyons and mountains and it was an excellent travel companion. One of the coolest features is quite simply being able to trust that the timezone is correct as soon as you land in Europe from New York.

That said you should remember that this watch is for &Adventure Survival& as Casio puts it. Itnot a running watch and itnot a fashion piece. At $800 itone of Casiomost expensive G-Shocks and italso the most complex. If you&re an avid hiker, however, the endless battery, GPS, and trekking features make it a truly valuable asset.

Eager to change the conversation from their years-long exposure of user data via Google+ to the bright, shining future the company is providing, Google has announced some changes to the way permissions are approved for Android apps. The new process will be slower, more deliberate and hopefully secure.

The changes are part of &Project Strobe,& a &root-and-branch review of third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data and our philosophy around apps& data access.& Essentially they decided it was time to update the complex and likely not entirely cohesive set of rules and practices around those third-party developers and API access.

One of those roots (or perhaps branches) was the bug discovered inside Google+, which theoretically (the company can&t tell if it was abused or not) exposed non-public profile data to apps that should have received only a userpublic profile. This, combined with the fact that Google+ never really justified its own existence in the first place, led to the service essentially being shut down. &The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement,& Google admitted. &90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds.&

But the team doing the review has plenty of other suggestions to improve the process of informed consent to sharing data with third parties.

The first change is the most user-facing. When an application wants to access your Google account data — say your Gmail, Calendar and Drive contents for a third-party productivity app — you&ll have to approve each one of those separately. You&ll also have the opportunity to deny access to one or more of those requests, so if you never plan on using the Drive functionality, you can just nix it and the app will never get that permission.

These permissions can also be delayed and gated behind the actions that require them. For instance, if this theoretical app wanted to give you the opportunity to take a picture to add to an email, it wouldn&t have to ask up front when you download it. Instead, when you tap the option to attach a picture, it would ask permission to access the camera then and there. Google went into a little more detail on this in a post on its developer blog.

Notably there is only the option to &deny& or &allow,& but no &deny this time& or &allow this time,& which I find to be useful when you&re not totally on board with the permission in question. You can always revert the setting manually, but itnice to have the option to say &okay, just this once, strange app.&

The changes will start rolling out this month, so don&t be surprised if things look a little different next time you download a game or update an app.

The second and third changes have to do with limiting which data from your Gmail and messaging can be accessed by apps, and which apps can be granted access in the first place.

Specifically, Google is restricting access to these sensitive data troves to apps &directly enhancing email functionality& for Gmail and your default calling and messaging apps for call logs and SMS data.

There are some edge cases where this might be annoying to power users; some have more than one messaging app that falls back to SMS or integrates SMS replies, and this might require those apps to take a new approach. And apps that want access to these things may have trouble convincing Googlereview authorities that they qualify.

Developers also will need to review and agree to a new set of rules governing what Gmail data can be used, how they can use it and the measures they must have in place to protect it. For example, apps are not allowed to &transfer or sell the data for other purposes such as targeting ads, market research, email campaign tracking, and other unrelated purposes.& That probably puts a few business models out of the running.

Apps looking to handle Gmail data will also have to submit a report detailing &application penetration testing, external network penetration testing, account deletion verification, reviews of incident response plans, vulnerability disclosure programs, and information security policies.& No fly-by-night operations permitted, clearly.

There also will be additional scrutiny on what permissions developers ask for to make sure it matches up with what their app requires. If you ask for Contacts access but don&t actually use it for anything, you&ll be asked to remove that, as it only increases risk.

These various new requirements will go into effect next year, with application review (a multi-week process) starting on January 9; tardy developers will see their apps stop working at the end of March if they don&t comply.

The relatively short timeline here suggests that some apps may in fact shut down temporarily or permanently due to the rigors of the review process. Don&t be surprised if early next year you get an update saying service may be interrupted due to Google review policies or the like.

These changes are just the first handful issuing from the recommendations of Project Strobe; we can expect more to appear over the next few months, though perhaps not such striking ones. To say Gmail and Android apps are widely used is something of an understatement, so itunderstandable that they would be focused on first, but there are many other policies and services the company will no doubt find reason to improve.