Acer’s new enterprise-focused Chromebook 14 can survive a drop — and a spill

Acer’s latest Chromebook can withstand a lot more than a regular laptop, but the price is still the thing here.

It was less than a month ago that Acer unveiled its latest Chromebook, a machine that, for $299, packs a considerable amount of technology into its metal frame.

Now, Acer is back with an enterprise-grade variant of that same machine, dubbed Chromebook 14 for Work. Not only is it the company’s first laptop to be certified for Google’s Chrome for Work program, which allows deployments of the Chrome browser with IT-approved device management and security protocols, but it can withstand a considerable beating.

Indeed, Chromebook 14 for Work sports a spill-resistant keyboard and MIL-STND 810G Military Standard, which encompasses protection against water, wind, dust, vibration and many other forces that would bury an ordinary laptop. This Chromebook, in addition to featuring an Intel Core processor and 4GB of RAM, is also the first laptop with Corning’s new Vibrant Gorilla Glass around the case.

It’s unclear how much demand there is for such a robust Chromebook, but as more businesses replace aging Windows laptops with cheaper and often equally-capable Chromebooks (depending on the particular workload), Acer is in a good position to tap into that market.

First Priv Marshmallow beta update now available, invites for T-Mobile customers incoming

BlackBerry is now pushing out its first Marshmallow beta update for the Priv to those who signed up to help test it. Previously, only devices purchased from ShopBlackBerry were eligible to join the beta program, but that is about to change.

T-Mobile customers who signed up for the beta will begin receiving their invites to download the update in 24 hours, according to Nathan Webster who is the manager of BlackBerry’s beta program.

@BlackBerry #PRIVMarshmallowBeta check for an update as we have set you up with another build. @TMobile registrants: invites coming in 24h

— Nathan Webster (@NathanWebsterBB) April 21, 2016

So, if you are on the current beta be sure to check for an update. If you are a T-Mobile customer, keep an eye on your inbox in the coming days for your invite. The update weighs in at over 1.7GB, so you will want to make sure you have plenty of battery power and a good Wi-Fi connection to get it downloaded.

Android N Developer Preview is now available for Sony Xperia Z3

Sony’s Xperia Z3 is one of the first non-Nexus device to support the Android N Developer Preview. It was previously rumored that Google would allow other manufacturers to begin testing the software, and that appears to have proven true. You will need to flash the first image (of Developer Preview 2) and then Sony will push future updates over-the-air to the phones.

From Google’s announcement

The Xperia™ Z3 joins Nexus 5X, 6, 6P, Nexus Player, the Pixel C tablet and General Mobile 4G (Android One) in giving you an early look at the next version of Android. Sony has been working closely with us to bring you the N Developer Preview on Xperia™ for early testing and development.

To get started, you can download the latest N Developer Preview from Sony (currently Developer Preview 2, available at the link below) and manually flash it to your device. You’ll then receive future Developer Preview updates over-the-air, direct from Sony.

So, if you happen to have a Xperia Z3 laying around, and want a taste of the latest operating system before it is officially available to everyone, you can give it a go now.

Android N Developer Preview

The Android N Developer Preview is just that — a developer preview. It is not intended for daily use. That doesn’t mean it’s not cool, and that you shouldn’t poke around. But know that things will break. Tread carefully. (And have fun!)

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Sprint Galaxy S7 review: The start of your ‘Galaxy Forever’ journey

How does adding the Sprint network change the experience of one of the best Android phones around?

By now, most of us know the story on the Galaxy S7. Samsung really doubled down on everything that made its 2015 flagships great, while fixing a few of the main pain points like battery life, expandable storage and waterproofing. And since you can get the same basic Galaxy S7 from just about any carrier in the U.S., each one is trying to do things a little different to get customers in the door.

Thankfully for us the carriers haven’t customized the hardware on the Galaxy S7, and Sprint in particular didn’t even put its name or logo on the phone. Obviously the software differs slightly between the carriers, as do the pre-installed apps, but what really differentiates them is their offerings in terms of network, features and pricing.

If you haven’t done so already, it’s worth reading our complete Galaxy S7 review for the full take on the phone, regardless of which carrier you choose to go with. Beyond that, I’ve spent a couple weeks with the Sprint version of the Galaxy S7, seeing how it differs from the other carrier versions and where Sprint has made changes to try and differentiate itself. Here are all the details.

Software differences

In terms of superfluous changes to the software, Sprint has changed very little on the Galaxy S7. Its setup process doesn’t include a bunch of extra steps trying to up-sell you on features, which is refreshing. The settings menu is completely standard, aside from the few changes necessary for a Sprint device in terms of activation and managing the CDMA network. You’ll also find that you have no access to any of the deep cellular network settings, and there’s a new top-level settings entry for Wi-Fi calling.

Sprint also does something else the right way, as it doesn’t bake all of its pre-installed bloatware into the system. Instead, it triggers a download of a suite of apps once you’ve set up your phone on Wi-Fi. As you’ll see, that means you can uninstall a good portion of the bloatware on the phone.

Sprint’s slate of pre-installed apps (call ’em bloat, call ’em whatever you want) come down to three categories: Sprint’s own first-party apps, third-party partner apps, and third-party stub “apps” that are simply shortcuts to the Play Store:

• First-party apps: App Spotlight, Sprint Fun & Games, Sprint Voicemail, Sprint Zone, Tech Expert, Sprint TV & Movies, Sprint Music Plus, Sprint Caller ID, Sprint Wi-Fi Calling, Sprint Family Locator, Sprint App Spotlight.
• Partner apps: Amazon, Amazon Photos, Amazon Music, Amazon Kindle, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Lookout
• Stub apps: 1Weather, NextRadio

Interestingly, several of the first-party Sprint apps can be completely uninstalled, as can the two stub apps, but all of the Amazon and Facebook apps, as well as Lookout, can’t be uninstalled. In total you can uninstall eight of the pre-installed apps, but the rest are there for your to either keep or simply disable.

We have to give Sprint about a half of a thumbs-up here for letting users completely uninstall a good portion of the pre-installed apps, but unfortunately the apps that aren’t uninstallable are the biggest ones of the group. With just a rough calculation there’s over 600MB of pre-installed apps that can’t be removed, and even if you disable them they of course still take up space in the system folder. The largest offenders are the Amazon apps, of which many people are likely to use but that doesn’t mean we should all be subjected to having them stuck in our phones.

Call quality and network features

When it comes to looking at network quality on phones, there are an amazing number of variables that come into play. For our purposes, the entirety of this review was conducted in the greater Seattle, WA area, so with the caveat of “this is how it is here, but maybe not where you are” these are my findings.

Call quality and Wi-Fi calling

Believe it or not, people still make voice calls. I don’t really make them all that often, but in all of my testing the Galaxy S7 on Sprint handles them just fine. You don’t have any additional settings to deal with in terms of toggling on HD voice. The only big downside when it comes to Sprint voice calls is the lack of simultaneous voice and data (unless you’re on Wi-Fi), meaning that if you take a phone call, your data service will be suspended until the call is over. Needing voice and data at the same time may not be a big feature for most, but for those who use it often this is probably a deal breaker.

Like most other carriers, Sprint offers baked-in Wi-Fi calling support, which is useful both at home and when you’re roaming abroad. Unlike T-Mobile, Sprint doesn’t bother you with a persistent notification when Wi-Fi calling is turned on, and instead just uses the stock method of showing a small Wi-Fi calling icon next to the signal strength in the status bar when it’s connected.

You can toggle Wi-Fi calling on or off through a quick settings button, but Sprint also installs a Wi-Fi calling shortcut in your app drawer … which you can promptly uninstall without any effect on the feature. Calls made on Wi-Fi sound great, and the system has a nice feature of being able to choose which of your saved networks will have Wi-Fi calling enabled. For example if you often visit a restaurant or café with Wi-Fi that you use, but it’s not consistent enough for calling, you can just toggle that network off.

Data speeds

For the past couple of years, getting Sprint phones in for review in this area was a painful experience. After being one of the early launch cities for Sprint’s WiMax network, Seattle was way behind on deployment of LTE for the carrier. Today, things are leaps and bounds better, and I can actually test the Galaxy S7 on a network that’s up to par with the phone.

This area is covered in Sprint’s so-called LTE Plus network (a far better name than “Spark”), which means the phone can combine three different radio bands for faster speeds and better coverage. In using the phone for a couple of weeks in Seattle we didn’t find a single unexpected slowdown or network hiccup, and anecdotal speed test results backed that up.

Ping times were never over 75 ms, download speeds never under 10 mbps and upload speeds never under 5 mbps were good to see, with the lowest numbers coming in the busiest days in the population-dense areas. Of course my top observed speeds were much higher than this, though Sprint seems to be configured to favor downloads heavily — downloads were as high as 80 mbps and uploads as high as 20 mbps. These are of course the numbers that differ vastly depending on where you are using the phone, and you’ll know your area best based on experience and talking to friends with Sprint, but in my tests in this area Sprint has really upped its game.

On average Sprint still came up short of T-Mobile’s speeds here, when compared side-by-side on the Galaxy S7, but I still don’t have a single thing to complain about in terms of data speeds in our testing.

Pricing and financing options

Perhaps the most confusing aspect of buying a Galaxy S7 (or any phone, really) on Sprint is its pricing scheme. If you’re already a Sprint customer things are a tad better, but no matter the case Sprint offers multiple ways to buy the Galaxy S7 and it’s not always immediately clear which one is the best for people.

Off-contract / two-year contract

I’ll get the simplest purchasing options out of the way first. You can buy the Galaxy S7 off-contract outright for $649 — you’ll need service, of course, but you won’t be on the hook for any phone payments thereafter. You can also sign up for a traditional (and antiquated) two-year contract term and get the phone for $199 … after a mail-in rebate. Most folks shouldn’t go with a two-year contract at this point, but hey, it’s an option if you want it.

Financing choices

Then there are the financing options, where Sprint has two more buying choices that look similar but really aren’t. You can pay 24 months of “installments,” but you can also pay for a 24 month “lease” of the phone, and both land within about a dollar per month of one another. Here’s the distinction:

Installment plan

With the 24 month “installment” option, you’re just getting a basic 0% interest financing of the phone, as you can get with other carriers. You pay nothing up front, and simply make 24 equal payments — in this case $27.09 — to pay the same amount as the off-contract phone, $649. If you have low or no credit, you’ll have to pay $150 up-front and then the remaining $499 over 24 payments of $20.84. You can pay off the phone at any time, and you’re free to sell or continue to use it after that.

‘Galaxy Forever’ lease

Then you have the 24 month “lease” option, which also ties into Sprint’s “Galaxy Forever” promotion. With the lease option, you pay the same $0 or $150 up front (depending on credit) and a slightly lower monthly cost of $25.99 or $19.74, respectively. The total cost over two years adds up to a lower $623.76, but there’s a huge difference here: Sprint still owns the phone for the whole duration of the lease, so unlike the installment plan you don’t have an option to pay off the phone or do with it what you want.

The trade-off is having the option to return the device to Sprint — in good, working order — after 12 months in exchange for a brand new phone. With its other devices this usually costs an additional $10 per month, but because the Galaxy S7 is a “Galaxy Forever” device you don’t have to pay that additional fee — just make 12 normal monthly lease payments, or $311.88, and you’ll be able to upgrade to the next flagship Galaxy phone.

As is the case with leases of all kinds, the Galaxy S7 lease from Sprint isn’t what you’d call a good deal. But it is a convenient one, so long as you want to upgrade every 12 months. Paying $25.99 per month to Sprint and getting a brand new phone every year, without dealing with extra fees or trying to re-sell your used phone (Sprint phones don’t command high resale prices), is appealing. But remember, you really have to want that upgrade every year. Every month that you don’t upgrade, you’re just paying money to a lost cause, since Sprint owns the phone and you have to return it at the end of the lease period, or pay to retain the phone after 24 months.

For the sake of completeness, here’s how pricing breaks down for the larger (and more expensive) Galaxy S7 edge:

• Off-contract: $749
• Two-year contract: $299
• 24 mo. installments: $0 down + $31.25/mo. or $200 down + $22.92/mo.
• 24 mo. lease: $0 down + $30.50/mo. or $200 down + $22.17/mo.

The bottom line

As has been the case when we look at carrier-customized versions of this phone, the best part about them is that you get nearly the same great experience of using a Galaxy S7 no matter what. But of course that also means that subtle changes to the experience in terms of network and software can make or break your decision of choosing another carrier — as can the pricing and financing options.

Overall, Sprint respects Samsung’s vision for the Galaxy S7 pretty well. The carrier doesn’t put its logo or name on the phone, doesn’t add too many software changes, you can actually uninstall a good amount of the bloat, and its Wi-Fi calling is baked right into the system. While the decision about whether or not the Sprint network is good where you need it to be is completely personal, I came away impressed by how much the network has improved where I live and how nicely consistent the data speeds and call quality were.

Assuming the network works for you, the only thing that’s going to be confusing in this decision is the pricing model. The “Galaxy Forever” promotion sounds pretty great, but when you look deeper you realize it’s not going to save you any money. Having a two-year contract option also sounds enticing, but isn’t the best choice for most people. If you can sit down with a calculator and decide how to pay for the phone, give it a look.

See at Sprint

Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 edge

• Galaxy S7 review
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LG releases official bootloader unlock for European LG G5

LG has released an official bootloader unlock for the European variant of the G5. That’s right, if you have the H850 variant of the LG G5, you can now unlock the bootloader thanks to LG. Keeping in mind that this isn’t for everyone, it is still great to see the company release these tools for those who want to get in there and customize things further, and really push the limit of their new phone.

The tool, which was spotted by XDA, makes the unlocking process easier.

Since this is the official method for unlocking the bootloader, the process is not extremely convoluted, but is not Nexus-like straightforward either. The steps involve obtaining the device ID of your phone, and copying the two character strings under the bootloader header.

If you have the European LG G5, which is model number H850, this is what you have been waiting for. Keep in mind, this will not work on any U.S. carrier variant of the G5, and attempting it could cause serious damage to the phone. You can get started now by heading over to LG’s Developer site and creating an account.

LG G5

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Facebook will adjust your News Feed based on how long you look at articles

Facebook has started rolling more changes to its News Feed. It will now take into account how long a person spends looking at an article.

Facebook stated:

We are adding another factor to News Feed ranking so that we will now predict how long you spend looking at an article in the Facebook mobile browser or an Instant Article after you have clicked through from News Feed. This update to ranking will take into account how likely you are to click on an article and then spend time reading it. We will not be counting loading time towards this — we will be taking into account time spent reading and watching once the content has fully loaded. We will also be looking at the time spent within a threshold so as not to accidentally treat longer articles preferentially.

Facebook says this change will, it hopes, result in more stories popping up in News Feed that users will actually want to read. In addition, the company is also taking steps to cut down on the number of posts users see in the feed from the same source. These changes will be rolled out in the coming weeks, and Facebook says most users won’t see any major changes to their Pages.

Sega to support modded Genesis games on Steam

Sega’s Mega Drive console (or the Genesis, depending on where you lived at the time) still boasts an impressive library of 16-bit games. Many of those are now available on Steam and Sega, hoping to attract some new collectors, has developed a virtual playground for them called the Mega Drive Classics Hub. Notably, this also comes with Steam Workshop support, allowing PC players to share “modified versions” of their favorite games from the early 90s. That’s pretty unusual, given most developers and publishers are opposed to fan-driven emulation and modification of classic games — no doubt because of its relationship with piracy.

When you load up the Mega Drive Classics Hub, you’ll be dropped into a virtual bedroom that depicts the average Sega fan back in the day. Posters for Golden Axe and Streets of Rage are visible on the walls, while a double-headed axe prop sits in a corner. The Mega Drive itself is hooked up to a CRT TV, along with a small bookcase stacked with chunky cases for equally chunky cartridges. You can move around the room to browse your game library and also change how they’re presented from an audio and visual standpoint. (Some people just really need those scan lines, okay?)

The announcement was made from Sega’s UK PR division — hence the Mega Drive branding — so it’s unclear whether the hub will also be available in the US. At least in Europe, it’s due on April 28th and should be a novel way to build a digital Genesis library. We can’t count the number of times Sega has repackaged its old games like this — there have been countless bundles over the years — but if you’re still looking for a way to play Shining Force II or Ecco the Dolphin, this is another option.

Via: Ars Technica

Source: Sega

Esports will be a $500 million industry in 2016

The eSports industry is poised to make a cool $463 million in revenue in 2016, according to a new report from PwC (the financial services firm formerly known as PricewaterhouseCoopers). As testament to the rapidly expanding industry, that’s a 43 percent rocket jump from 2015.

Revenue numbers aside, PwC’s report includes some interesting data about the eSports industry’s audience. As the Daily Dot gleaned, the most popular game by viewership was League of Legends, but about 63 percent of viewers said they were tuning in for first-person shooters. Also of note: about 57 percent of those polled describe themselves as “hardcore” gamers, but the women surveyed were slightly more likely to describe themselves as “involved in eSports” than the guys. Meaning the world of eSports could be less male-centric than most people tend to think.

With a young, diverse, media-consuming audience, it’s no surprise major media outlets are getting into the game with offerings like Yahoo’s eSports hub, the forthcoming cable TV league on TBS or Twitch’s own efforts to lend the industry the same legitimacy as traditional sports.

And on that last note, former National Basketball Association commissioner David Stern has some words for the naysayers: “Of course it is a ‘sport.’ It fills arenas and stadia, has an OTT network built on it (Twitch), and there is a robust market in team purchases that seems to be developing.” And one more thing eSports shares with the NBA? Sanctions against Mark Cuban.