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What if you could pay for groceries with a wave of your hand? Well, 7-Eleven has brought this convenience to customers in South Korea this week.

The global chain of convenience outlets opened a new store on Tuesday at the world’s fifth tallest building, Lotte World Tower. The store is testing a self-checkout system which allows you to pay with nothing but your hand. The news was announced on a blog post by Korea Seven, which manages the 7-Eleven franchises in South Korea.

If you’re looking to try it, however, you might have to get a job at Lotte or one of its affiliated companies. The beta run, which lasts till end of July, will only serve Lotte staff.

The tech industry has worked on various efforts to simplify the purchasing process in recent years. It’s previously focused on developing mobile wallets and biometric authentication methods such as fingerprint scanning and facial recognition.

The 7-Eleven Signature outlet will be the world’s first unmanned convenience store to be equipped with HandPay. It’s a biometric authentication method that identifies customers through palm scans. The system will identify the products being bought with a 360-degree scanning technique.

Only customers that have registered with HandPay will be able to enter the outlet. They’ll need to scan the palm of their hand at the entrance of the store to confirm their identity.

The shop will be monitored by CCTVs, although Nikkei Asian Review suggests that flying drones could guard the outlet in future. CNET has reached out to Lotte Data Communication — 7-Eleven’s partner in this scheme — to find out whether that’s true.

It is unclear whether 7-Eleven plans to introduce this system in other countries.

CNET Magazine: Check out a sample of the stories in CNET’s newsstand edition.

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Oh, thank heaven for drones.

7-Eleven, one of the world’s largest chains of convenience stores, has completed 77 delivers via drone to customers in Reno, Nevada.

The deliveries were made in collaboration with Flirtey, a commercial drone startup that began working with the retail chain over the summer. In November, Flirty made regular deliveries from a 7-Eleven store in Reno to a dozen select customers who used a custom app to place orders, the company said in a release Tuesday.

Popular items for drone delivery included hot foods, cold beverages and over-the-counter medicines, said the company. On average, orders were delivered in less than 10 minutes.

With 77 deliveries under its belt, 7-Eleven is flying in the face of tech giants like Amazon and Google. Amazon earlier this month delivered its first Prime Air order in the UK. Walmart, UPS and Google parent Alphabet are also testing out delivery drones. For instance, Alphabet has started a pilot program that delivers Chipotle burritos on the campus of Virginia Tech.

For all the momentum in this airspace, however, these unmanned aircraft still need to clear extensive regulatory and safety restrictions.

Flirtey and 7-Eleven plan to expand their drone delivery operations in 2017.

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samsunggalaxy-w.jpg
Would you hold the Samsung Galaxy W to your face?
Samsung

Bigger is better for the Samsung Galaxy W, Samsung’s biggest phone yet. The new 7-inch device looks like a tablet but makes calls, and enjoys LTE-A too for next generation 4G speeds.

Only set for South Korea at the moment, the W sports a 7-inch screen, with a 16:9 aspect ratio and resolution of 720×1,280. Flip it over and you’ll get an eyeful of a faux-leather effect, as first seen on the Galaxy Note 3 last year. The leather-look back comes in black, white or red. The W also borrows software features from the Note like split-screen effects, pop-up videos and other multi-tasking options for putting two apps side-by-side.

Under the W’s pleather jacket is a quad-core 1.2GHz processor backed by 1.5GB of RAM. There’s 16GB of storage for your music and movies, apps and snaps. Speaking of photos, the main camera is an 8-megapixel job snapper.

The giant screen is powered by a hefty 3200mAh battery.

One downside to the W is that it only has Android 4.3 software on board, a step down from cutting-edge Android 4.4.2 found in the latest devices like the Samsung Galaxy S5 .

The Galaxy W will cost 499,400 won ($490, £290, AUS $526)

It’s not Samsung’s only new device revealed in the last couple of days: the world’s biggest phone manufacturer has also confirmed the details of its first Tizen phone, the Samsung Z, which makes its debut in Russia later this year as a challenger to Android.

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Dell’s new 7-inch Android tablet will be launched next month, smaller than the 9.7-inch iPad and the same size as the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab and BlackBerry PlayBook.

The Texan company also intends to bring out a number of other new tablets in the next year, including 3-inch, 4-inch and 10-inch devices. Dell’s Greater China president, Amit Midha, confirmed the company’s future tablet plans in a Wall Street Journal report.

This news comes after Michael Dell flashed the 7-inch device at an event in the US. “It was showed off at Oracle World by Michael last week and we’ll be launching very, very soon — within the next few weeks,” said Midha.

The 7-inch tablet might well be the so-called Dell Looking Glass, reported by CNET.com back in April to be Android-based, potentially carrying an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor, 1.3-megapixel camera and 4GB of storage, expandable to 32GB. Considering it was reported around five months ago, those specs could well change.

It won’t be Dell’s first taste of the tablet game, either. The 5-inch Android Dell Streak was released earlier this year, a gadget that could just as well have been an oversized smart phone. The Streak recently got an Android upgrade from 1.6 to 2.1, though it wasn’t handled very well.

Another Dell device we are curious about is the Inspiron Duo, a Windows 7 tablet that gave us quite a shock when we saw it could transform into a laptop with a pretty nifty hinge mechanism.

If the 7-inch Dell tablet is forthcoming, it will be pitched against the Samsung Galaxy Tab, also expected out shortly. Both tablets will run Android, and will compete with the iPad for hearts and minds in the build-up to Christmas.

The BlackBerry PlayBook and next-generation iPad will also have a say, but they are some way off with expected releases around spring next year. Soon there’s going to be more tablets on the market than you can shake a memory stick at. Which one tickles your fancy?

Image credit: Engadget

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