Google partners with Bharti Airtel and SK Telecom to improve connectivity

Why it matters to you

Google’s going to help Bharti Airtel and SK Telecom improve their networks. It could be the start of a trend.

Google’s making it easier for mobile networks to roll out improvements to their networks. At the Mobile World Congress conference in Barcelona, the search giant inked partnerships with India’s Bharti Airtel and South Korea’s SK Telecom to help the respective networks build out “next-generation” networking.

In a blog post, Google said that it would tap technologies like software defined networking (SDN), network function virtualization, and site reliability engineering to “deliver services reliably.”

More: Google’s simple and elegant Google WiFi makes home networking easy

“Over the year, we’ve built and managed networking infrastructure to help us provide Google services to people around the world,” Google Principal Ankur Jain wrote in a blog post. “As people increasingly access the Internet through their mobile devices, mobile operators are now designing their next-generation networks based on many of the same principles we’ve adopted to power our own networking infrastructure.”

The SDN framework will enable the networks to adapt to new services and traffic patterns, Jain said, and simplified workflow management and automated testing will provide network engineers with the tools to deploy and iterate on new features. New APIs, meanwhile, will hasten the development of subscriber-facing benefits like Smart Offline, a YouTube feature that lets users take advantage of cheaper overnight data rates offered by Airtel and Telenor.

More: Google’s dark fiber plan bucks trends, leases fiber lines from other networks

In addition to the new networking initiatives, Google’s joining CORD (Central Office Re-architected as a Datacenter), an open-source project that counts “leading mobile ecosystem” partners like AT&T, SK Telecom, Verizon, China Unicom, and NTT Communications among its active members.

“We look forward to collaborating with Google on this exciting initiative. It’s great to see Google bring the benefits of their networking technologies to carriers. This will bring greater efficiencies and capabilities to mobile networks and enable us to rapidly innovate on new user experiences.”

The news follows reports concerning Google’s other big telecom effort this week: Rich Communication Messaging, or RCS. Last week, the search giant said that Vodafone Group, Globe Telekom, Orange, and Deutsche Telekom will now support RCS, the follow-up to SMS and MMS that lets users send higher-quality pictures messages, participate in group chat, share their current location, initiate voice calls, see typing indicators, and read receipts, and share media and other information while in a telephone conversation.

More: Samsung doubles down on RCS, brings next-gen messaging to Marshmallow devices

They’ll adopt Google’s Jibe service, which aligns with the universal RCS profile to provide cloud and hub services to make it easier for carriers to adopt and roll out. About 27 manufacturers and carriers are launching RCS with Google.

Best app deals of the day! 6 paid iPhone apps for free for a limited time

Everyone likes apps, but sometimes the best ones are a bit expensive. Now and then, developers make paid apps free for a limited time, but you have to snatch them up while you have the chance. Here are the latest and greatest apps on sale in the iOS App Store.

These apps normally cost money, and this sale lasts for a limited time only. If you go to the App Store and it says the app costs money, that means the deal has expired and you will be charged. 

More: 200 Awesome iPhone Apps | The best Android apps for almost any occasion

Voice Recorder Pro

Ideal for students, business people, journalists, teachers, doctors, and anybody who makes voice notes and reminders. Taking lecture notes, conducting an interview or just immediately jotting down a good idea has never been easier.

Available on:

iOS

Moment Mix Pro

Moment Mix is a powerful and fast collage maker with a lot of customizing and editing tools, as well as import and share options.

Available on:

iOS

Adrian James High Intensity Workout

Adrian James High Intensity Interval Training is the fat-burning workout that has become an international hit. Download the app and take your fitness to the next level.

Available on:

iOS

Epica Pro

This isn’t like your other photo apps — Epica Pro is one of the funnier editing apps around. Create a collage and become an instant comedian.

Available on:

iOS

Vantage Calendar

Just a simple and easy calendar app. Built to be highly visual and customizable for the best possible view of your life. Welcome to a new perspective.

Available on:

iOS

Weblock

Not a fan of ads? This ad-blocking app will let you ban advertisements from any app you select, with multiple options for a personalized blocking service.

Available on:

iOS

Zero to 100 in 20 minutes: Meizu’s new tech supercharges your smartphone battery

Why it matters to you

Charging a smartphone battery is a pain, but Meizu’s new Super mCharge technology may have taken a bit step toward making it a lot less painful.

Chinese smartphone maker Meizu made a lot of people stand around in a busy hall at Mobile World Congress and watch a battery charge from zero to 100 percent. That sounds like the tech equivalent of watching paint dry, and also, due to the usual amount of time such a process takes, a very long demonstration. Except this was Meizu’s new Super mCharge technology, and the cell went from zero to 100 in just 20 minutes.

It was never going to be the most visually exciting demo, but it was compelling for a simple reason — fast charge systems are usually promoted as giving a chunk of power in that same 20 minute window, rather than filling the entire battery up. The gathered crowds had no idea whether the Meizu charging system would just do the same. Instead, it rocketed to 30 percent in five minutes, and continued on. The chunky 11v/5A charging block feeds 55 watts of power to the phone.

More: Our review of the Meizu MX6

Now, you may be concerned about safety standards, given recent battery-related explosions in the smartphone industry. Meizu says Super mCharge uses some clever circuitry inside the phone and charger to maximize efficiency, and the temperature won’t go beyond 39 degrees Centigrade (102 degrees Fahrenheit). This means it’s safe, and more reliable, too. Additionally, pushing the battery so hard during charging can reduce its longevity, but Meizu says a 3,000mAh battery with Super mCharge still has a lifetime of more than two years, and will still have 80 percent of its capacity available after 800 cycles.

While systems like OnePlus’s Dash Charge and Motorola’s TurboPower make charging less of a pain, neither completely fill the battery. Meizu’s Super mCharge has the potential to beat both, but it’s still in prototype stage, and we were told to expect a phone using it to be released before the end of the year. Great news, but we have also seen these tech demonstrations at Mobile World Congress before — Oppo’s Super VOOC battery charging for example — and are still waiting for the final product to arrive more than a year later.

One other thing: While we watched a battery charge up in 20 minutes, it’s difficult to assess whether it really worked, because we didn’t get to use the phone at either time.

Like most other fast charging systems, Super mCharge requires you to use a particular charger and cable, plus the phone and battery have to be Super mCharge compatible, meaning it’s a complete package that will only be available on Meizu’s hardware.

T-Mobile is hoping to go all in on LTE by 2019, turning off 2G and 3G

Why it matters to you

Do you even remember 2G and 3G networks? T-Mobile certainly doesn’t want you to, and is seeking an all-LTE future by 2019.

T-Mobile wants to leave the past in the past, and that includes 2G and 3G networks. At an Ericsson press conference during Mobile World Congress, T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray spoke of T-Mobile’s all-LTE future, which could be happening as soon as 2019. T-Mobile and Ericsson are already joining forces to bring gigabit LTE to the Un-carrier’s customers, and as they invest more in this technology, they may be turning some other older tech off.

“By 2020, we’d love to have GSM turned down, if not before,” Ray said. “What do we do first, 3G or 2G? That’s primarily driven by what you can do on voice.”

Currently, around 70 percent of T-Mobile’s phone calls are made on voice-over-LTE (VoLTE), and all of T-Mobile’s newer phones support VoLTE. But of course, Ray doesn’t want to leave any customers who are still attached to their dinosaur handsets in the dust. That said, the CTO noted that the company will be looking at ways of getting their customers to make the switch to more modern handsets so they can provide more modern technologies across the board.

More: T-Mobile is handing out a free extra line to its customers, and it could save you $40

“With handset refresh cycles, you look at 2019, and I think it’s an opportunity to move to an all-LTE network,” he said. T-Mobile certainly wouldn’t be the first to begin moving away from 2G and 3G. In fact, PC Mag points out, AT&T has already disabled its 2G network, and eliminating 3G could have far-reaching benefits. Ray noted that some of the spectrum used by 3G could be used for LTE instead.

“We found a very cost-effective and low-taxing spectrum methodology to run GSM for more time,” he said.

In the near future, however, Ray is focused on moving phone calls completely to newer networks. “I want to get that last 30 percent [of phone calls to VoLTE],” he said. Look out, 2019. T-Mobile is coming in hot.

You can now apply to beta test the Honor 6X Nougat update in the U.S.

Be the first to try EMUI 5.0 on the Honor 6X.

Honor has announced that it will roll out the Nougat-based EMUI 5.0 update to the Honor 6X sometime in the month of March, and the company is now kicking off the beta test for those located in the U.S. If you’re using an Honor 6X in the U.S., you can sign up to test the update by sending your device’s IMEI number to huaweifut@huawei.com.

Wanna be the first to test out EMUI 5.0 on your #Honor6X? Sign up to be a beta tester now. Email your IMEI to huaweifut@huawei.com now. pic.twitter.com/dbquir7yey

— Honor USA (@Honor_USA) February 28, 2017

As we’ve seen on the Mate 9, EMUI 5.0 brings several much-needed improvements, including a notification panel that actually works, multi-window mode, and an optional app drawer.

Honor made its name on the back of its hardware prowess, but the software limitations with previous iterations of EMUI made it difficult to recommend its handsets. With the company now looking to expand its reach in Western markets, it finally pared down on customizations and is offering a cleaner implementation of its interface with EMUI 5.0.

Begin your Android development career with this professional bundle for $39

Ready to make a change in your career and start creating your own Android apps? Getting started can be a difficult task, there is a lot to learn, a lot of different ways to do things, and unless you have someone to chat with it can be hard to do on your own. There are a number of different ways you can begin your new path, and this bundle is one of the best.

Get started today for just $39 Learn More

Meet the Professional Android Developer Bundle, a great way for you to learn the basics and more advanced features of building Android apps. From an introduction to Javascript to the fundamentals of the operating system itself, there are countless hours of information here for you to move through at your own pace.

• Introduction to Programming & Coding for Everyone with JavaScript – $295 Value
• Fundamentals of Operating Systems – $295 Value
• Building Android Apps That Work – $295 Value
• Java SE 8 Programming Part 2 – $295 Value
• Java SE 8 Programming Part 1 – $295 Value

Save big for a limited time! Learn More

Best Screen Protectors for the LG Watch Sport

Keep your new LG Watch Sport protected with a quality screen protector.

The new LG Watch Sport is one of the first smartwatches running Android Wear 2.0, and it’s also our pick for the Best Android Wear Smartwatch you can buy right now. If you’ve ever worn a smartwatch before, you know how susceptible they can be to taking bumps against door frames or tables.

The last thing you’d want is a big ugly scratch or crack on your new smartwatch, so it’s wise to invest in some screen protectors for your wearable tech. Fortunately most come in value packs so you can really get your money’s worth while keeping your investment protected.

• Dmax Armor Tempered Glass Screen Protector [3-pack]
• Supershieldz Tempered Glass Screen Protector [3-pack]
• Skinomi TechSkin Full Body Skin
• iLLumaShield Anti-glare Screen Protector [3-pack]

Dmax Armor Tempered Glass Screen Protector [3-pack]

Tempered glass is the ideal material for a screen protector, so this 3-pack from Dmax is a great option. It features the 9H hardness that tempered glass is know for, which protects your watchface from scratches and high-impact drops and collisions. Each screen protector features hydrophobic and oleophobic coatings to resist sweat and oil residue from fingerprints and other objects.

Everything you need for a bubble-free installation is included in this package, and it also comes with a no-hassle lifetime replacement warranty, so you can buy with confidence.

See at Amazon

Supershieldz Tempered Glass Screen Protector [3-pack]

Supershieldz is a trusted name in screen protectors. These tempered glass screen protectors come in a three pack and provide you with a rugged screen protector that will take all the scuffs and scrapes life throws your way so your watch screen doesn’t. With 9H level hardness and hydrophobic and oleophobic coatings, your LG Watch Sport will be protected against pretty much everything.

These screen protectors also come with Supershieldz no-hassle lifetime replacement warranty,

See at Amazon

Skinomi TechSkin Full Body Skin

Skinomi’s screen protector offers not only protection for the screen, but also a back cover to keep the body of your watch protected as well. The back cover comes in metallic grey, so if you opted for the Dark Blue watch it might not match as nicely. The screen protector is made of plastic film — with only .1 millimeter of thickness it’ll be barely noticeable on your watch, but it also won’t provide as much protection as a tempered glass protector.

This package also comes with a lifetime warranty from Skinomi.

See at Amazon

iLLumashield Anti-glare Screen Protector [3-pack]

While iLLumiShield’s screen protectors are also made of PET film and not rugged tempered glass, it does aim to tackle a major issue that plagues wearables all too frequently — bad glare when trying to use your watch outside. This is accomplished with a matte finish that doesn’t compromise the crystal clarity of the watch screen.

You get three screen protectors in this pack, all featuring a self-adhesive backing and are resistant to bacteria, oil, and fingerprints.

See at Amazon

Android Wear

• Everything you need to know about Android Wear 2.0
• LG Watch Sport review
• LG Watch Style review
• These watches will get Android Wear 2.0
• Discuss Android Wear in the forums!

Best HTC Vive experiences for kids

What games can kids play on HTC Vive?

The HTC Vive is a wonderful VR system that has an incredible library of games and other experiences thanks to support through Steam. A lot of VR is based around shooting or scaring the pants off of you — blame it on the gun-like Vive controllers and the immersion level — but there are plenty of great experiences that are also suitable for children.

Remember, it’s never a bad idea to follow the recommended age guidelines set by the manufacturer. In HTC’s case, they recommend 13 and up, but that isn’t set in stone as long as you remain precautionary.

Read more at VR Heads!

The death of bezels isn’t as great as you think

A lack of bezels sure makes a phone look better, but does it affect usability?

I’ve been lucky enough to use an LG G6 for the past three days, and it’s great. The phone is well-built, it’s fast and stable, the extra-tall screen is wonderful, and it’s compact. So compact, in fact, that LG claims it fit a 5.7-inch phone into the same physical space as a typical 5.2-inch device from another company.

LG claims it fit a 5.7-inch phone into the same space as a typical 5.2-inch device.

How LG did this remarkable thing was by removing as much of the excess area around the LCD panel itself — typically known as the bezel — as possible, increasing the so-called screen-to-bezel ratio. The way the company pulled this off is quite ingenious, too: instead of sticking with a typical 16:9 aspect ratio, which forces the phone to get wider as the screen gets taller, it changed it — to 2:1.

The G6’s screen is exactly twice as tall as it is wide — 18:9 — which gives LG more breathing room to distribute the phone’s necessary parts while minimizing overall space. Everything that needs to be in the phone is still there — it’s just up higher, instead of wider.

So we’re left with a relatively narrow phone that has almost no bezel above and below the screen. This has proven popular with the vocal group of people who have decried that particular reality of phones since touch screens were invented, and based on the response from the release of the Xiaomi Mi Mix late last year, and the rumored near bezel-free Samsung Galaxy S8, the G6 is in good company.

I foresee a few days of unintended screen touches and awkward readjusting.

But buyer beware. I’ve been using the phone for the last few days, and all isn’t perfect in the world of infinity. For a long time, bezels existed out of necessity, as a way to hide various components underneath. We’re moving away from those physical constraints, so if bezels are to continue to exist, they need to be there for a reason. And not having them on a device like the G6 makes it pretty clear why they exist, aesthetics aside:

• On Android, bottom bezels force your thumb to rest at a natural point above the pinky, which rests underneath the phone in a cradle. Without that extra space, the pinky is thrust out to allow the thumb additional room to move lower, which either stretches the tendon or compromises the hand’s grip on the already-slippery device.

• The lack of bottom bezels also make it difficult to grip the phone from the bottom, as I enjoy doing while reading an article or watching a video in portrait mode. Granted, this isn’t a common occurrence, and I could merely wrap my hand around the phone, but I’ve always found gripping the bottom between thumb and forefinger a comfortable and stable way to hold a phone for long periods without tiring. On a device like the G6, the virtual buttons are so close to the bottom that such a grip isn’t possible.

These are not game-ending issues, and in the few days with the phone I’ve already grown accustomed to the new form factor. But I foresee, for early adopters of the LG G6 and Galaxy S8, a few days of unintended screen touches and awkward readjusting. I also wonder whether, after years of criticism against bezels, the industry is overcorrecting by eliminating a necessary tenet of phone hardware that people don’t realize they need merely because it mars the aesthetic.

One way to mitigate this problem is by ensuring that devices with slim bezels are not too wide, so they’re relatively easy to grip and manipulate with one hand. The 5.7-inch LG G6 is just narrow enough for my thumb to reach from one end to the other without strain; the 5.8-inch Samsung Galaxy S8, which is rumored to have a similar 18:9 aspect ratio, may be slightly too wide.

The end of bezels is surely coming soon, but there may come a time when we yearn for the simpler days of having a place to grip, and a respite from the endless screens we spend all day staring at.

LG G6

• LG G6 review!
• LG G6 specs
• These LG G6 features are exclusive to some countries
• LG forums
• Latest LG G6 news

Netflix learned how to stream good video on bad connections

This morning, a gaggle of journalists and I huddled around a table full of smartphones, watching a clip from Netflix’s Stranger Things. There was plenty of grain and blockiness to be sure, but it was sufficiently — even perfectly — watchable. The kicker: That surprisingly decent video is what Netflix told us to expect on a 100 kilobit/second data connection. That’s a fraction of a fraction the LTE speeds we’re used to in the US, but all too common in other parts of the world.

Netflix considers itself a global television service, and since its international launch last year, it has seen countries new to the service lean on smartphones and tablets for their streaming video fixes. It’s no wonder that finding a way to deliver decent video quality at low speeds is so important inside the company. As it turns out, Netflix seems to have cracked the code, and in a way that feels sort of obvious.

The thing to remember is that not all movies (or TV shows, for that matter) are created equally. Long, lingering static shots obviously aren’t as complex as fight scenes, but to date, Netflix has been encoding those videos as though they were the same. That’s where Netflix senior research scientist Ioannis Katsavounidis and his team of 10 come in. They’ve cooked up a way to encode videos with Google’s VP9 codec where static scenes and visually simple videos (say, an episode of Bojack Horseman) don’t require as much data as complex scenes.

“You don’t need that many bits to get high definition from Bojack when it’s simple animation,” Netflix VP of product Todd Yellin told reporters. “We started looking at the title and how complex the visuals were and how many bits we would need for high definition and standard definition. And we were able to take Bojack and decrease way down the number of bits we would do for an HD stream or an SD stream.”

Long story short: Your Netflix mobile queue will look better and your data usage should be smaller. The whole thing sounds sounds deceptively simple, and it is. Just nailing the basics of how watching videos on Netflix works requires a lot of juggling too, but it’s mainly behind the scenes.

As your network’s bandwidth fluctuates, you’ll switch from one encode of a video to another, sometimes even without knowing it. Katsavounidis says that, on average, a movie or a television show has 10 different encodes. Generally, if you started watching something in high quality, you won’t get bumped into a lower quality stream unless your network really takes a hit.

With this clever new encoding scheme, you might not see as many of those switches between different versions of the same video, and that video should look better to boot. Here’s the real problem, though: How do you scale that to work with Netflix’s entire library?

“We’re trying to make it as automatic as possible,” Yellin said. In this case, Netflix developed a machine learning algorithm and used research from two universities that ran studies on hundreds of people to build a general understanding of what quality video looks like. Those algorithms have taken into account that model, and will be used to determine how each of the videos in Netflix’s library are encoded. If all goes well, you won’t even notice the change (except for perhaps on your phone bill). Naturally, there’s value in this sort of on-the-fly quality control on desktops and on TVs too, but that will likely launch long after Netflix for mobile gets its big upgrade.

That order of operations seems a little backward, but some extra refinement to the quality model has to happen; you wouldn’t want to watch a movie optimized for a phone in your home theater. In any case, for a company that found its success on big screens, it’s clear the path to continued growth lies in small ones.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from MWC 2017.