Lego-compatible tape lets you stick your bricks anywhere you want

Why it matters to you

It’s Lego tape! Who wouldn’t love a tape that lets you build with bricks on any surface?

Nimuno Loops Toy Block Compatible Adhesive Tape is the hottest thing to hit IndieGoGo since the Pebble Watch. The tape is like nothing you’ve ever seen – it is designed with a series of bumps on the surface that are compatible with Lego, Mega Bloks, Kreo, and other toy brick building systems. The tape becomes a platform for your mad LEGO skills. Stick your bricks to your shoes, your bicycle or anywhere else your heart desires.

Cape Town Industrial engineers Anine Kirsten and Max Basler are the dynamic duo behind Team Nimuno and the Nimuno Loops adhesive tape. Working in their free time on their own computers, Kirsten and Basler brought the tape from concept to prototype in a workspace they carved out of Basler’s garage. Along the rocky road of research and design, the pair has been receiving guidance and advice from the talented folks at Chrome Cherry Design network. The engineers spent more than a year fleshing out the details for their innovative Lego tape.

More: These outrageously awesome Lego machines will knock your block off

Team Nimuno is turning towards crowdfunding to finish off the prototyping and begin production of their tape. The team set a goal of $8,000 for this final stage of development, but their campaign has blown this early goal out of the water, earning 10,101 percent of its original target.  As of March 15, the Nimun0 loop has been backed by more than 22,000 supporters who collectively have donated over $800,000 to the project. And with a month left to go, the project has a good shot at crossing the $1 million mark.

Available in a variety of colors, the Nimuno Loops cost $11 for two rolls of the tape (2 meters), $22 for 4 rolls (4 meters) and $34 for six rolls (6 meters). You get your pick of four colors — red, blue, green, or grey. The tape is expected to ship in July 2017.

Nexus 6 owners facing Android 7.1.1 to 7.0 downgrade

Downgrade required ‘to guarantee future OTA updates.’

The Android 7.1.1 Nougat update for the Nexus 6 hasn’t gone entirely smoothly so far, with the most recent March 2017 security patch breaking Android Pay on the device. And now in another bizarre development, Nexus 6 owners who updated to 7.1.1 are seeing an over-the-air update back to Android 7.0. Worse still, some are reporting that the downgrade back to 7.0 has caused issues with apps upon completion.

Over on Reddit, a Nexus community manager — listed a verified Googler on the side — said that the move was made “to guarantee future OTA updates.”

There was a recent OTA update for Android 7.0 that is causing confusion for some Nexus 6 users. For those of you that want to guarantee future OTA updates, you will need to get back on the 7.0 supported track. If you are experiencing issues after accepting the 7.0 update, please factory reset your device to help resolve any problems.

For any Nexus 6 users that want to continue flashing/sideloading future builds, you can stay on 7.1.1 and continue to do so.

It’s not clear whether this means all updates for the N6 will be based on Android 7.0 from here onwards, or whether there’ll be another 7.1.1 push at some point in the future. The second paragraph suggests more 7.1.1 builds will be forthcoming, though perhaps only available via sideload. It’s also not clear why the OS downgrade itself is necessary, but it’s possible it has to do with the March 2017 OTA breaking Android’s SafetyNet functionality, which was the root cause of the problems with Android Pay in that build.

The Motorola-built Nexus 6, released in late 2014, is no longer supported for OS updates beyond 7.1.1, and so future builds (whichever number they carry) will just include new security patch levels.

In the meantime, Nexus 6 owners are left in the unenviable position of having to decide whether to take an OTA which not only downgrades them to an older OS, but which may also break some apps when it’s done.

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Huawei P10 up for pre-order at Vodafone UK

On-contract prices start at £28 per month for Huawei’s latest flagship.

Vodafone is the first UK network operator to open up pre-orders for the new Huawei P10. The Chinese company’s latest flagship is available to pre-order in white or black (sadly not the eye-catching “dazzling blue” we’ve been using lately), with on-contract prices starting at £28 per month. (That’s for 500MB, with a £200 upfront fee.)

Vodafone’s has a wide range of plans going all the way up to 30GB at the high end, which will set you back £48 per month, with a £10 upfront charge for the phone. That’s bundled with unlimited calls and texts, 4GB of roaming data, and a free Spotify, Sky Sports Mobile or NowTV subscription. A similar deal at £42 gets you all of the above, but with 24GB of UK data and 2GB roaming.

Right now Vodafone doesn’t appear to be offering the P10 on PAYG.

In our recent review, we found the P10 to be a solid flagship phone, with one outstanding weakness:

Huawei’s mainstream flagships for 2017 don’t necessarily look flashy — unless you opt for the exclusive “dazzling” color options — but they do deliver just about everything you could ask for in a modern Android phone. There’s one big catch, though. The lack of oleophobic coating on the display may be a reason for discerning buyers to skip this round of Huawei phones.

Were it not for my reservations over the screen, the P10 would certainly qualify as one of the best Android phones out there. And the P10 Plus comes with that extra bit of icing on the cake — a brighter lens for some amazing low-light captures, and the option to spec it out with oodles of RAM and storage.

More: Huawei P10 review

See at Vodafone

Black Galaxy S8 shows up once again in new leak

Black is increasingly looking like the best color option for the Galaxy S8.

A leak from earlier this week showcased the various color options that the Galaxy S8 will be available in, and now we’re getting a detailed look at the black color variant. As we’ve seen before, the black variant masks the various cutouts at the front of the phone, allowing them to blend into the background.

By contrast, the gold version of the phone highlights the bevy of sensors located at the front, which deters from the otherwise minimalist look of the phone. That doesn’t seem to be a problem on the black model.

The images show off the glossy back, which looks similar to the finish of the Pearl Black Galaxy S7. The design itself is identical to what we’ve seen in previous leaks, with Samsung eschewing the home button for on-screen keys that will likely be pressure-sensitive.

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Honor 6X vs. Moto G4 Plus: Challenging the status quo

Find out how Honor’s latest budget phone fares next to one of the best-selling devices in this segment.

Huawei has seen a meteoric rise in its smartphone business over the last two years. The company is now the third-largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, and is making inroads into European and North American markets, as well as India. Its online-only sub-brand Honor has been a major contributor to its growth, offering devices with compelling features like the Honor 8 with its dual camera setup or the more recent AI-focused Honor Magic.

The Honor 5X did remarkably well in 2016 on the back of affordable pricing and alluring specs. With the Honor 6X, Huawei is looking to build on that momentum by adding a dual camera at the back, and tweaking the overall design of the phone.

Meanwhile, Lenovo has seen its market share fall in China and global markets. The brand is increasingly turning to Motorola’s devices for future growth, a move that makes a lot of sense considering the Moto G series is still one of the best-selling product lines in this segment. Although the Moto G5 is on the horizon and offering several key upgrades for 2017, the Moto G4 Plus will continue to contribute to Motorola’s bottom line this year, and it’ll likely do well thanks to the inevitable price cut. Read on to find out if Huawei’s latest can take on the Moto G4 Plus.

Design and hardware

With earlier models in the Moto G series, Motorola focused on getting the basics right, and the result was a series of handsets that offered a great overall experience in spite of not featuring the best specs available. The same was true on the design front as well — although the phones were made out of plastic, they had great build quality that made them stand out from the hundreds of other handsets in this segment.

All that changed with the Moto G4 Plus, with Motorola shifting its focus to offering better specs to be more competitive in this category. The phone comes with a 5.5-inch Full HD display, and the increase in size has led to an abandonment of any form of design flair from the handset. Gone is Motorola’s personality, and in its stead we now get a phone with a plastic back that creaks if you hold it too tight.

In contrast, the Honor 6X has great build quality, and the aluminum chassis gives it an upmarket feel. The 6X also lacks any differentiating features that make it stand out, with its overall design language identical to that of its Chinese rivals Xiaomi, LeEco, and Lenovo. That said, the 6X does look much better than the Moto G4 Plus, and although both phones sport 5.5-inch panels, the Moto G4 Plus is wider, taller, and thicker than the 6X.

As was the case with the Redmi Note 4, that doesn’t translate to a larger battery. The Moto G4 Plus has a 3000mAh battery and an overall thickness of 9.8mm, while the Honor 6X comes with a 3340mAh battery in a chassis that’s 8.2mm thick.

Motorola also got rid of the IPX7 water resistance, but it has retained dual SIM card slots and a dedicated microSD slot. The Honor 6X also lets you use two SIM card slots, but the second slot doubles up as a microSD slot as well. If you want to extend the storage, you’ll have to resort to using a single SIM card.

On the hardware front, the Moto G4 Plus is running the Snapdragon 617, and the Honor 6X is powered by the HiSilicon Kirin 655. Motorola managed to eke the most out of the Snapdragon 617, but you will get the feeling that the phone is underpowered at times. That isn’t the case on the Honor 6X, and although it has the same cores as those used in the Snapdragon 617, they’re clocked higher. Furthermore, the Mali-T830MP2 GPU on the Honor 6X pulls slightly ahead of the Adreno 405 on the Moto G4 Plus, making the former a better handset for gaming.

Then there’s the fingerprint sensor: the Moto G4 Plus has one at the front, and while it does a good job of authenticating, the placement feels like an afterthought. With the Nougat update, Motorola added the ability to lock and unlock the phone with the fingerprint sensor, a much-needed addition that boosts its functionality. The Honor 6X has its fingerprint sensor located at the rear, and the minor indent allows you to easily find the scanner with your finger.

Both phones are sold unlocked on Amazon in the U.S., but the Honor 6X isn’t compatible with Sprint or Verizon. The Moto G4 Plus, meanwhile, works on all four major carriers.

Software

One of the major areas of focus for Huawei in 2016 has been on the software front, with the Nougat-based EMUI 5.0 no longer resembling a trainwreck. That said, the Honor 6X comes with the older EMUI 4.1 out of the box, and although Honor has started beta testing the Nougat update in the U.S., a stable update is still a month away.

As the phone is sold globally, timelines for the Nougat update vary based on region-specific requirements. In India, Huawei has mentioned that the update will be rolled out in the month of April, with the delay owing to the lack of Indic language support.

EMUI 4.1 has a lot to offer in the way of customization, but there’s a high learning curve involved.

The Moto G4 Plus does not suffer from any such limitations. The phone was first the outside of the Nexus lineup and the Pixels to receive the Nougat update, and Motorola has rolled out the update initially in India — its largest market. Although the update landed in India over two months ago, there’s little in the way of information regarding its rollout in other regions.

With Nougat, Motorola continues to offer a user interface that doesn’t stray far from Google’s Material Design guidelines, and the software experience is without a doubt the highlight of the phone. There are hundreds of phones sold in this segment, but none come close to the clean interface sported by the Moto G4 Plus.

Camera

The dual camera setup on the Honor 6X is certainly its differentiating feature, with the secondary 2MP lens acting as a depth sensor. When used in conjunction with the primary 12MP shooter, it results in creating a bokeh effect in certain shooting scenarios. That said, the secondary sensor is off by default — you’ll be able to take an image just fine even if you cover up the 2MP sensor — and it only kicks in when taking wide-aperture shots.

The camera app on the 6X makes it incredibly easy to shoot images, and you have quick access to various shooting modes, filters, toggles, and settings. There are plenty of modes to choose from, including one for food, time lapse, light painting, panoramas, and more. You also get a full-featured manual mode for both images and video.

In comparison, the camera app on the Moto G4 Plus is sparse. You get toggles for HDR, flash, timer, and the ability to choose the shooting modes — slow motion, manual, and panorama. It certainly misses out on the accouterments, but it doesn’t fall short when it comes to the image quality.

Honor 6X on the left, Moto G4 Plus on the right.

The Honor 6X takes detailed images in bright conditions, but it struggles when it comes to low-light scenarios — colors look washed out, and the camera fails to capture adequate detail.

That isn’t the case with the 16MP camera on the Moto G4 Plus. The Moto G series went from having one of the worst cameras in this segment to one of the best, and it looks like that tradition has continued with the Moto G5. Ten months after its release, the phone is still the one to beat in this segment when it comes to camera quality.

Battery life

The Honor 6X has a larger 3340mAh battery against the Moto G4 Plus’ 3000mAh battery, allowing the phone to last a day on a full charge. The larger battery combined with the more efficient SoC allows the 6X to take the lead when it comes to battery life, but the phone loses out when it comes to fast charging.

You get a 5V/2A charger in the box, which takes just over two hours to fully charge the phone. In this regard, Motorola’s TurboPower 15W charger fares slightly better, charging the phone in an hour and 45 minutes. The charger comes in handy when you need to quickly top off the phone in the middle of the day.

Which should you buy? Honor 6X

The Honor 6X offers a lot of hardware for its price, and although the current software situation isn’t ideal, Honor is poised to roll out the Nougat update shortly to the device.

The Moto G4 Plus isn’t far behind either, particularly when it comes to the camera, but it falls short in other areas. The design is underwhelming, and the phone lags behind the Honor 6X when it comes to the overall performance. Given Motorola’s stance with updates to older phones and the fact that the Nougat update isn’t widely available yet, you’re better off steering clear.

See at Amazon

Xiaomi Mi 6 launching with Snapdragon 821, SD835 variant to debut later

Snapdragon 835 shortages force Xiaomi to rethink its strategy with the Mi 6.

It looks like the Snapdragon 835 shortage will continue for at least two more months, as the latest rumor regarding Xiaomi’s upcoming Mi 6 flagship suggests the phone will launch with a Snapdragon 821 initially. The Weibo leak says that Xiaomi will launch the model with the Snapdragon 821 first, with the Snapdragon 835 variant making its debut at a later date.

Samsung is said to have used up Qualcomm’s initial supply of the Snapdragon 835 for the Galaxy S8, and as a result other manufacturers are sticking to the Snapdragon 821 — like the LG G6 — or delaying the availability of their products, like the Sony Xperia XZ Premium.

As for Xiaomi, it looks like the Chinese manufacturer will position the Snapdragon 821 variant of the Mi 6 as the base model, with the Snapdragon 835 models commanding a premium. The company unveiled its in-house Surge S1 SoC last month, with the Mi 5C the first phone to be powered by the chipset. Xiaomi’s efforts in this area are said to be limited to the budget segment for now, and as such the company will continue to use Qualcomm’s chipsets in its high-end offerings.

Xiaomi is also likely to roll out a limited edition model of the Mi 6 with a ceramic back, much like what it did last year with the Mi 5. There’s no word on a launch date yet, with rumors suggesting the phone could be unveiled on April 6.

Android Pay on Android Wear 2.0 just isn’t that good

I can’t quite decide whether being able to pay with my Android watch is good or bad. (And that probably means it’s the latter.)

I was relatively late coming to Android Pay on phones, mainly because my bank was one of the last in the UK to adopt the payment service. But I’ve gotten in on the ground floor with Pay on Android Wear, and I return with tales from an almost-convenient future where it’s nearly really easy to tap and pay with a thing attached to the end of your limb.

Which is another way of saying Pay on Wear isn’t quite there yet, for a wide variety of reasons.

The process of setting up Android Pay on your Wear 2.0 smartwatch is a somewhat convoluted series of steps involving bouncing between your phone and your watch — and, in my case, an actual phone call to a human at your bank to finally approve everything.

Then you’re ready to go. Except… nope, not yet. You’ll need to set a pattern or PIN lock on your watch for security, which makes sense. This sounds incredibly onerous, but in fact you only need to re-enter your pattern when the watch breaks skin contact, so effectively it’s only a once-a-day chore.

Next you’ll realize that finding Android Pay in the app drawer each time you want to pay is kind of a pain in the ass, so you’ll inevitably assign your Watch’s custom button (on the LG Watch Sport or Huawei Watch 2) to this app. That’s because, unlike Android phones, the app itself needs to be open on the watch when you pay. Pressing a physical button is easier than tapping, swiping and scrolling.

Then comes the moment of truth — actually paying with your watch. The positive and negative outcomes from this endeavor are amplified considerably compared to paying with your phone. You’ll feel even more like a wizard from the future when it works. The occasional times when it doesn’t, you’ll feel like even more of an idiot. Here in the UK, contactless credit and debit cards have been around for the past few years, and the idea of paying with your phone isn’t completely alien either. (Though some cashiers still assume it’s Apple Pay or nothing.)

Paying for purchases with a smartwatch is still strange and alien to many.

NFC terminals are fairly common in the UK, but the experience of paying with a watch is still new and alien to many. Maybe that’ll change, as it has for contactless cards and phone payments. Then again, given the niche appeal of smartwatches, maybe not.

Aside from the conceptual awkwardness of explaining that you want to pay using your watch — and that, yes, that’s actually a thing you can do — there’s also the physical awkwardness of holding your watch face (on the Huawei Watch 2) or strap (on the LG Watch Sport) up to the terminal. If you’re right-handed, and thus wear your watch on your left arm, many payment terminals are on the wrong side for easy reachability. Same deal with NFC contacts for gates on the London Underground. You’re also dealing with a relatively small NFC target, so things need to line up just right.

Here’s where we run into the gap between theoretical convenience and actual convenience. It seems like it’d be way easier to pay with something that’s attached to your body at all times. In practice, it’s actually simpler to make the connection using an object you’re holding in your hand, because the motion of lining your wrist up just right with the terminal is unexpectedly clunky.

And again, you’ll look like even more of an idiot that one time it inevitably doesn’t work. Even when it does, the Android Pay app on Wear 2.0 can take its time loading, and occasionally hang altogether. Admittedly, I’m using it on a pre-release Huawei Watch 2, but my colleague Andrew Martonik has experienced similar bugs on a production-quality LG Watch Sport.

Smartwatch payments aren’t inherently a bad idea, but it’s still early days here. Things aren’t as magically convenient as you might expect, and the real world hasn’t yet adjusted to the idea of waving your wrist over things. As a taste of the future, Android Pay on Android Wear is neat. As a real-world convenience, not so much.

Android Wear

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

Microsoft trials speech-to-text translation for Xbox One and PC games chat

Voice chat is a mainstay in most online multiplayer games, and while it can be abused by trolls and other immature idiots, it can often also be vital to progression, especially in co-op sessions.

But what if you’re deaf? Or you don’t want the whole house to hear the chatter coming from other players’ mouths?

Microsoft is rolling out something that can help. It is piloting live speech-to-text and text-to-speech translation for in-game chat, first in Halo Wars for Xbox One and Windows 10.

It overlays players’ conversations as text onto your screen if you choose the option in settings. And if you want your own text inputs converted to speech for others to hear, you can even choose the voice that will be used.

• Xbox One S review: Great console and 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray player, what else?
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Microsoft says there could be lag in transcription at times, which might make it a little hard to use to implement fast tactics in a first person shooter, but a strategy game like Halo Wars 2 should work well.

It is being rolled out to the Xbox One and PC versions now, but could appear in other games in time.

We wonder if Microsoft will be keeping logs of what is said using the tech, or has plans to allow you to download full transcriptions after a gaming session. Would be one way to report trolls and other offensive comments.

T-Mobile ‘ghost calls’ to 911 linked to two deaths in Dallas

911 outages as a result of cellphones have been a problem before, especially for T-Mobile, and it looks like the issue still hasn’t been resolved. In the past week, an infant and an adult male died as a result of calls to 911 not being handled promptly, according to the Dallas Morning News. When a T-Mobile customer calls 911 in Dallas, the publication says that the phone will continuously dial 911 and the call center registers them as hang-ups. The 911 dispatchers need to then call the numbers back to verify the calls, which in turn means legitimate callers are placed on hold.

Six-month-old Brandon Alex died when his babysitter couldn’t reach 911 in a timely fashion. Phone records show that Alex’s babysitter was on hold for 31 minutes. It took 20 minutes for 52-year-old Brian Cross’ husband to get through to a dispatcher, and an hour after Cross arrived at a hospital, he was pronounced dead.

Regional news station WFAA reports that this past Saturday, 442 callers were put on hold for an average 38 minutes. CBS DFW says that T-Mobile engineers arrived in Dallas Wednesday morning to fix the problem. Reports aren’t clear if this is exclusively T-Mobile’s fault, but CEO John Legere told Dallas city manager T.C. Broadnax that the engineers would “stay in the city until the issue is resolved.”

We’ve reached out to T-Mobile for additional information and will update this post should it arrive.

Via: SF Gate

Source: Dallas Morning News (1), (2), CBS DFW, WFAA

AMD claims its Ryzen 5 is better value than Intel’s Core i5

AMD made a big comeback with its high-end Ryzen 7 CPUs, and it’s now ready to take on Intel’s Core i5 mid-range chips with the Ryzen 5. It’s offering four chips in the family ranging from the $169 Ryzen 5 1400, a 3.2 GHZ 4-core, 8-thread chip, to the 6-core, 3.6Ghz Ryzen 5 1600X. At $249, the latter is taking on Intel’s $242 4-core/4-thread Core i5-7600K, but offering two more cores and three times the thread count.

The chips support all flavors of DDR4 RAM and allow the same number of “lanes” as the Ryzen 7 and Core i5 for things like graphics, peripherals and M.2 SSDs. All the chips are unlocked for overclocking, so users can push the performance higher than stock settings. They also support the B350 “performance” motherboards, which are a bit less expensive and easier-to-find than the X370 “enthusiast” chipset models for the Ryzen 7.

Other than niggles about gaming performance, reviews have been largely positive for the top-shelf Ryzen 7 chips. For instance, the Ryzen 7 1800X performed a bit better than Intel’s 8-core i7-6900 chip on a Premiere CC 2017 4K export test, but costs less than half as much. The Ryzen 5 chips, on the other hand, cost around the same as Intel’s Core i5 chips, but will have “tremendously more computational power” than the Core i5, says AMD Corporate VP Kevin Lensing.

As such, the company believes that the chips will bring a “disruptive price and performance ratio,” to the majority of PC gamers who don’t have high-end gear. However, it hasn’t released any performance numbers yet, so interested users, especially gamers, would probably do well to wait until the first reviews come in.

Source: AMD