iFrogz Summit Wireless earphones review

The Summit Wireless are an affordable pair of Bluetooth wireless earbuds that promise 10 hours of battery life and a rugged, sweat-resistant design. Priced approximately $35, they’re positioned as the sort of headphones you’d want for running or working out.

The Summit Wireless feature three different sizes of ear tips as well as two sizes of wing adjustment pieces. In other words, you’ve got a wide variety of fits to ensure the earbuds sit comfortably in the ear and don’t fall out when moving about.

The iFrogz peg the headphones with “up to 10 hours battery life” but that is based on five hours of playback at average levels and five hours of standby time. We found that we could get to the five hours of play with no real problems, but they would not have another five hours of standby. After a few times, we found them dying after five hours of listening and around 2-3 hours of standby.

There’s something a little wonky about the standby in general; ours seemed to lose a fair amount of charge if we let them sit for a few days. After a week of not using them, instead of getting the normal amount of playback, we ended up with roughly half of that.

The iFrogz earphones were built well and seem to hold up to moderate wear and tear. Toss them in a bag, throw them on the counter, or stuff them in your pocket; you can be more that a little bit rough with them. The same goes for sweat and perspiration. The Summit Wireless showed no signs of breaking down and performance never suffered.

The battery is found away from the earbuds and is also where you’ll find the controls for taking calls and managing music. Buttons are somewhat limited, but you do have the ability to adjust volume as well as pause and resume playback.

There’s also a clip on the back of the battery and control unit. This lets you fasten the earphones to your shirt sleeve or collar. Do note that there’s not a ton of slack here. It doesn’t allow for much range so don’t put it too far from your ears. On the other hand, it never dangles or gets in your way when bending over or running at a decent stride.

Given the Summit Wireless’s $35 price tag, we didn’t expect too much for sound quality. The 8mm drivers put out an acceptable volume level, but the overall experience left much to be desired.

You won’t find too much range so don’t pick these up if you plan on really diving into your music. But, if you’re running or working out, you likely aren’t paying close attention to the sound. Pretty much everything we tried music-wise ended up sounding very average. The highs and treble didn’t differentiate itself from the bass and low end. It’s almost as if the audio was smooshed together.

If you’re in the market for headphones that sound great, you’ll spend at least twice what these cost. What you’re getting here is convenience, portability, and resistance to sweat.

The iFrogz Summit Wireless are affordable and well built; however, they’re definitely not music-first. If you’re generally rough on your earphones, you’ll like that these can withstand moderate abuse. Moreover, the Earbud Tips for Life limited lifetime warranty gives you free replacements of earbud tips should they get worn or damaged.

Pick up a pair of the Summit Wireless earphones for about $35 from iFrogz; several online retailers offer them for about the same price, if not a few bucks cheaper. Amazon was selling them for $31.99 at the time of publication of this review.

You’re not too old to play with Hot Wheels in ‘Forza Horizon 3’

The second Forza Horizon 3 expansion is coming out soon and it’s bringing a big dose of childhood nostalgia along with it. Hot Wheels and their iconic bright orange tracks arrive on May 9th as part of the Forza Horizon 3 Expansion Pass or as standalone DLC for $19.99.

Forza Horizon 3 Hot Wheels adds ten new cars to the game, including some of toy brands more famous models like Twin Mill, Boneshaker and Rip Rod. It also has a brand-new campaign set in Australia, where players can complete events and work their way towards the ultimate stunt-driving test: the massive new Hot Wheels Goliath circuit. For creative types, there’s an editing feature called Stunt Swap that lets you modify track sections. And, of course, the Hot Wheels tracks are available in online multiplayer, along with a brand-new Playground Arena.

Forza isn’t the first game to cash in on Hot Wheels nostalgia. GTA Online added Hot Wheels-style tracks in its Cunning Stunts expansion last year. Vehicular soccer game Rocket League added two classic Hot Wheels models as DLC earlier this year, and it’s coming out with its own line of collectible, real-life pull-back cars later this Spring.

Source: Microsoft

FaceApp takes heat for ‘hotness’ filter that appears to favor lighter skin tones

Why it matters to you

As artificially intelligent beauty filters grow in popularity, the programs may be reflecting their programmers’ biases.

The neural network app that edits selfies is now taking a lot of heat for its “hot” filter — FaceApp recently apologized after users noticed the filter designed to make selfies look “hot” was actually lightening skin tones.

After apologizing to users, FaceApp changed the name of the filter to “spark,” and the app says a complete fix is currently in progress. The app uses artificial intelligence to edit selfies, with capabilities extending from turning frowns into smiles to making people look younger or even switching gender.

Yaroslav Goncharov, the app’s CEO and creator, told The Guardian that the skin lightening was a result of a training bias in the neural network and not an intended effect. Neural networks are trained by feeding the computer thousands of images. If those thousands of images tend to be almost all one race, the resulting artificial intelligence platform is biased towards that race.

So I downloaded this app and decided to pick the “hot” filter not knowing that it would make me white. It’s 2017, c’mon guys smh#FaceApp pic.twitter.com/9U9dv9JuCm

— Shahquelle L. (@RealMoseby96) April 20, 2017

FaceApp only launched earlier this year, with the iOS release in January and the Android following a month later, but it’s currently seeing a surge in popularity and adding around 700,000 users daily.

The FaceApp fiasco isn’t the first time AI has become embroiled in skin-tone issues — recent MIT research showed that facial recognition systems have trouble identifying dark-skinned faces, for example. The issue is also exemplified when software engineers use the same open-source training data set for their own apps, moving the bias further into more programs, the research suggests. While FaceApp does use some open-source AI, the AI behind the “hotness” filter was reportedly developed by the company, so the skin-tone favoritism is likely a result of the company itself failing to use diverse images to train the platform.

Other facial filters have also come under fire for favoring certain races and stereotyping others — last year Snapchat removed the “yellowface” filter that turned faces into Asian caricatures with squinting eyes. While many users like the ability to enhance their selfies, the effects are leaving some users asking, who’s supposed to define what “hotness” looks like anyway?

Streaming video from Chrome to Chromecast is about to get a lot better

Why it matters to you

If you’re having trouble casting tabs from Chrome to your Chromecast, you’re not the only one. Luckily, there’s a fix.

Chromecast, Google’s affordable entertainment dongle, is one of the most versatile gizmos out there. It has Netflix and YouTube, of course, but also hundreds of apps, games, and integrations. Another nifty Chromecast trick is the ability to mirror videos from a Chrome browser tab, but historically, that feature hasn’t worked all that consistently — mirrored videos often lag and sometimes crash. Thankfully, though, a fix appears to be on the way.

On Wednesday, Google’s Francois Beaufort drew attention to a cast-related Chrome feature that vastly improves Chromecast tab stability. Before, videos mirrored from tabs had to pass through several encoding steps before they reached the target Chromecast — they had to be rendered, re-encoded, and then beamed over the network. The new system sends video to the Chromecast directly, trimming the overhead and improving performance.

You can test the improved tab casting now, if you aren’t afraid of a little elbow grease. Download and install the Chrome Developer channel, then type “chrome://flags/#media-remoting” (without quotes) in the address bar and hit enter. Hit the Enable button, and you’re golden.

Test it by navigating to any website with a built-in video player, like Vimeo, Ustream, Livestream, or Facebook. Play a video, and then click the Cast button in the Chrome Settings menu.

The new feature’s a boon for low-powered laptops and desktops, which often struggle to encode videos efficiently. And it’s good news for folks who use services unsupported by Chromecast, like Amazon’s Instant Video.

This move is all the more relevant in light of Chromecast’s continued expansion. This week, Nvidia’s Shield TV set-top box gained support for 4K casting from select apps. And last year, Google launched Chromecast built-in, an effort that saw casting capabilities being built natively into devices from Vizio, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, Philips, Polaroid, and Skyworth.

The experimental casting feature remains under development, and Beaufort didn’t provide a timeline. But here’s hoping it hits public airwaves sooner rather than later.

Streaming video from Chrome to Chromecast is about to get a lot better

Why it matters to you

If you’re having trouble casting tabs from Chrome to your Chromecast, you’re not the only one. Luckily, there’s a fix.

Chromecast, Google’s affordable entertainment dongle, is one of the most versatile gizmos out there. It has Netflix and YouTube, of course, but also hundreds of apps, games, and integrations. Another nifty Chromecast trick is the ability to mirror videos from a Chrome browser tab, but historically, that feature hasn’t worked all that consistently — mirrored videos often lag and sometimes crash. Thankfully, though, a fix appears to be on the way.

On Wednesday, Google’s Francois Beaufort drew attention to a cast-related Chrome feature that vastly improves Chromecast tab stability. Before, videos mirrored from tabs had to pass through several encoding steps before they reached the target Chromecast — they had to be rendered, re-encoded, and then beamed over the network. The new system sends video to the Chromecast directly, trimming the overhead and improving performance.

You can test the improved tab casting now, if you aren’t afraid of a little elbow grease. Download and install the Chrome Developer channel, then type “chrome://flags/#media-remoting” (without quotes) in the address bar and hit enter. Hit the Enable button, and you’re golden.

Test it by navigating to any website with a built-in video player, like Vimeo, Ustream, Livestream, or Facebook. Play a video, and then click the Cast button in the Chrome Settings menu.

The new feature’s a boon for low-powered laptops and desktops, which often struggle to encode videos efficiently. And it’s good news for folks who use services unsupported by Chromecast, like Amazon’s Instant Video.

This move is all the more relevant in light of Chromecast’s continued expansion. This week, Nvidia’s Shield TV set-top box gained support for 4K casting from select apps. And last year, Google launched Chromecast built-in, an effort that saw casting capabilities being built natively into devices from Vizio, Sharp, Sony, Toshiba, Philips, Polaroid, and Skyworth.

The experimental casting feature remains under development, and Beaufort didn’t provide a timeline. But here’s hoping it hits public airwaves sooner rather than later.

Microsoft is changing how you buy and use its Office productivity suite

Why it matters to you

If you want to keep things simple and make sure you can always connect your Microsoft Office apps to the company’s cloud, then Office 365 is your best bet.

For most of its lifetime, Microsoft’s Office productivity suite was like most other applications in how you purchased it. You’d buy an Office license for each machine you wanted to run the suite, and that would be it. The advent of the Office 365 cloud productivity service changed things, however.

Now, you can either buy a license for Office or subscribe to Office 365. Either way, you get access to the Office suite of applications and you can connect those applications to Microsoft’s various cloud services. Exactly how this process works is changing, however, and Microsoft watcher Paul Thurrott provided an explanation of the changes.

To begin with, Microsoft uses the term “Office perpetual” to describe the licensed purchase of the productivity suite. This is the usual one-time cost that applies to a specific version of Office, which right now is Office 2016. The Office 365 subscription means that you pay an annual fee, for example, $99 for Office 365 Home, that allows you to install whatever version of Office is introduced while you’re subscribed.

You can connect to Microsoft’s cloud services, such as OneDrive, from Office via either method. And, there’s a version of Office 365, called Office 365 ProPlus, which is a version that installs on PCs, Macs, and mobile devices but that doesn’t provide any other Office cloud services. It’s a subscription, which means that you can fully use Office only while you’re subscribed; otherwise, Office reverts to a lower-functionality mode.

Where Microsoft is changing things up is in how Office perpetual can connect to Microsoft’s cloud services. Simply put, Microsoft has now limited to five years the length of time during which a version of Office purchased with a perpetual license can connect to those services. Put another way, Office perpetual can connect to the company’s cloud services for as long as it remains in mainstream support, which is five years.

That means that Office 2016, when purchased under a perpetual license, will no longer be able to access Microsoft’s cloud services after October 13, 2020. At that point, an Office perpetual user will need to buy a license for the current version of Office. As Thurrott points out, Office 2016 won’t stop working at that point, but it simply will no longer connect to Microsoft cloud services.

Furthermore, as Microsoft pundit Mary Jo Foley explains, the only version of Office that will be fully functional after the October 13, 2020 date will be Office 365 ProPlus, along with the other Office 365 subscriptions. As she puts it, “Microsoft also is letting its Office customer base know that as of October 13, 2020, Office 365 ProPlus will be the only fully featured, most up-to-date client that will connect to Office 365 services. Anyone using perpetual Office apps and clients may not get all the features at the time they are available to Office 365 ProPlus users.”

The bottom line is that Microsoft clearly wants you to buy an Office 365 subscription in order to use its productivity applications. In addition to no longer needing to concern yourself with such licensing subtleties, you can install Office on multiple machines with some subscriptions and rest assured that you’ll never have to worry about whether or not you can connect to the Microsoft cloud.

It’s now easier than ever to find your Uber rating

Why it matters to you

It has previously been easy for you as a passenger to see your driver’s rating, but not your own. Today, that changes.

Admit it. You spend all day judging people, and if we’re honest, they probably spend all day judging you, too. Now, we can see exactly how those judgments manifest themselves in numerical form. At least the judgments made by Uber drivers.

Your days of embarking upon a wild goose chase to track down what your drivers think of you are finally behind you. Uber announced two updates to its rating system, both of which are rolling out across the world today, in order to “make [its] rating system fairer.”

Whereas you previously had to navigate through a number of different panels to find your Uber rating, you can now easily access this score (given on a scale of one to five stars). Starting today, your rating can be found directly underneath your name in Uber’s menu. “We hope this update will remind riders that mutual respect is an important part of our Community Guidelines,” Uber wrote in a blog post.

The decision to make ratings more visible, Uber suggests, is actually to help drivers. After all, if you see that your rating is slipping, maybe you’ll be a bit more gracious the next time you get in someone else’s car, and won’t slam the door, spill your takeout, or otherwise be an sub-optimal passenger.

In fact, both of Uber’s updates to the rating system are to the benefit of its contractors. The second update has to do with Uber Pool trips. Given that many of the issues with these sorts of rides are often “outside a driver’s control,” according to Uber, the rating system is being adjusted to allow for more passenger feedback. If you indicate that you had a bad Pool because of the route or co-rider behavior, the driver won’t be impacted.

“Ratings are a two-way street at Uber, and our 5-star rating system helps to create a positive experience for everyone,” Uber said. And hopefully, these updates will do just that.

TrussFab software lets people build boats and bridges using plastic bottles

Why it matters to you

TrussFab is software that lets you design and build anything from functional chairs to a real rowboat using 3D printing and recycled plastic bottles.

Whether you’re good at remembering to recycle or not, chances are that you’ve noticed the massive amount of plastic bottles you accumulate on a regular basis.

A cutting-edge, eco-friendly research project being carried out at Germany’s Hasso Plattner Institute aims to put those bottles to good use — by using them as building blocks for everything from chairs to a rowboat to an impressively large plastic dome structure.

“Our original motivation came from a desire to increase the capabilities of desktop 3D printers,” Róbert Kovacs, a PhD researcher at Hasso Plattner Institute’s Human Computer Interaction Lab, told Digital Trends. “In particular, we wanted to work out how to create large objects using these machines that normally print much smaller objects. We thought we could do this by creating connectors for joining larger pre-existing objects — and soda bottles seemed to be the perfect choice for that.”

With that in mind, the team developed software called TrussFab. TrussFab is an integrated end-to-end system that allows users to design their object of choice, and then works out the correct distribution of plastic bottles to create a structurally sound end product.

As it turns out, while plastic bottles are thought of as being pretty flimsy, they’re actually extremely strong when pushed or pulled along their main axis. Using 3D printing, TrussFab lets makers print the connecting pieces between the bottles to link them together in a honeycomb-type formation.

“Our other intention with the project was to encourage recycling,” Kovacs continued. “We wanted to make people more aware that the bottles they throw away can be a great source of material, and aren’t just trash. Even the 3D-printed connectors can be produced from recycled materials, which means that the entire structures can be made from plastic bottles in some way.”

So far, the team has used TrussFab to build an 8-foot bridge strong enough to carry a human, a table and chair set, a functional boat that seats two, and a 16.5-feet dome consisting of 512 bottles.

The team next plans to make TrussFab freely available over the next several weeks, which will no doubt result in a whole new wave of creations. Keep watching this space — and drink an extra bottle of Coke here and there to start building up your supplies!

Huawei Honor 8 Pro review

Research Center:
Huawei Honor 8 Pro

The Honor 6X is a phone we should talk about more. It’s good looking, has a good camera, and doesn’t cost much at $250. It embodies what Honor, a brand that shares technology with Huawei, does best. But what happens when Honor goes all-out and creates a phone with high-end specifications, ready to take on Huawei Mate 9, and other big-screen phones like the LG G6, and Samsung’s new Galaxy S8?

The Honor 8 Pro — technically adept, while still reasonably priced. It does almost everything well, though the phone’s camera is a little lackluster compared to competitors, and it’s not eye-catching like the Galaxy S8.

We’ve spent a week with it, and this is what we found.

Uninspired design

While immediate comparisons will be drawn with the iPhone 7 Plus, the Honor 8 Pro is closer to the new Huawei P10 Plus in design, right down to the placement of the buttons and the microphone, to the shape and curvature of the body. Meet them going down the street, and you’d think they were twins.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends

The body is made from aluminum, which has a very pleasant soft textured touch to it, and the large 5.7-inch screen is covered by a 2.5D curved Gorilla Glass 3. The fingerprint sensor is on the back — its main deviation from the Huawei P10 Plus — because it uses on-screen Android navigation buttons. It’s comfortable to hold, but it’s slippery. The rear also attracts nasty smudges if your hands are anything other than squeaky clean.

This is a large phone. It’s essentially the same overall size as the iPhone 7 Plus, and comes close to matching the Mate 9. It’s almost impossible to stretch your thumb across the display, so you’ll regularly use two hands, or resort to Honor’s software and fingerprint sensor tricks to make the phone usable with one hand. But the phone’s size doesn’t affect its placement of the rear fingerprint sensor — unlike the Galaxy S8 Plus. The Honor 8 Pro rarely required me to shift my finger around to reach the sensor immediately. What helps is how the phone is unbelievably thin at less than 7mm.

The phone is unbelievably thin at less than 7mm.

While the Pro will come in black or gold, we love the blue variant. It’s great to see a colorful alternative to the usual black, white, and golds we usually get to choose from. It’s not “dazzling,” like the blue Huawei uses on the P10, but is considerably more matte and extends all over the phone, so you don’t have a white or a black bezel around the screen.

The Honor 8 Pro isn’t a heart-pounding beauty, but it offers strong build quality, premium materials, and if you choose the blue, it nicely separates itself from other more generic smartphones.

Slick interface, too many pre-installed apps

The Honor 8 Pro isn’t exciting to look at, but the same can’t be said for its software experience. It runs  Android 7.0 Nougat with the EMUI 5.1 user interface on top, which will be familiar to anyone who has used, or followed our coverage of, the Huawei Mate 9 and P10.

What was once a messy, often unpleasant piece of software, has become a coherent, slick, and attractive user interface over Android. Yes, some people will prefer regular Android, and for them, phones like the Pixel or Moto G5 exist. Everyone else — those who buy Samsung, LG, HTC, or any other Android phone — will have no problem with EMUI 5.1. There’s even an option to add an app drawer, if spreading app icons across multiple home screens isn’t your thing.

Honor’s software brings a few extra features with it, including Knuckle Sense, where using a knuckle rather than a finger to draw shapes on the screen activates certain features. These include taking screenshots, or opening the music app. Honor also has a few ways to make the large phone easier to use with one hand. Minimizing Android to one corner is activated with a swipe across the menu, back, and home buttons, for example. The fingerprint sensor also has multiple uses — a swipe down drops the notification shade, and a left or right swipe in the gallery scrolls through your pictures.

There are too many pre-installed apps — Tripadvisor, Opera, booking.com, Asphalt Nitro, Huawei’s Vmall to name just a few — and SwiftKey is the default keyboard, which I find frustrating to use. Thankfully, the third-party apps can be uninstalled, and Gboard can be used instead of SwiftKey if you prefer.

Great performance, two-day battery

Considering the Honor 8 Pro is internally very similar to the Mate 9 and P10, both of which are solid, reliable phones, it’s no surprise to find it’s just as competent.

We played a variety of games, and all ran without a problem. We did find the phone got quite warm to the touch. Never too hot, but you certainly know when the octa-core Kirin 960 processor is working hard. It’s the same chip found in the Huawei Mate 9 and P10, but in the Honor phone it’s backed up by 6GB of RAM, rather than 4GB. There’s 64GB of internal storage space, and a MicroSD card will fit in the tray alongside the SIM.

Putting the Honor 8 Pro through the AnTuTu 3D benchmark test returned a 143,237 score, slightly higher than the number achieved by the Mate 9 and the P10. Gaming performance using SlingShot Extreme on 3DMark returned a 1943 score, lower than the Mate 9 and the OnePlus 3T. Don’t read too much into these results though.

Inside the Honor 8 Pro is an almost unfeasibly massive battery for such a slim phone — 4,000mAh. We only had the phone for a week, but during that time a recharge was needed every two days, and that’s with comprehensive use. We got the similar results from the Huawei Mate 9, but we’re disappointed that Huawei’s effective SuperCharge fast-charging system is missing on the Honor 8 Pro. Recharging stretched beyond 90 minutes and towards 120 minutes.

Fun bokeh effects

Any modern smartphone, flagship or not, needs a respectable camera. The big trend at the moment is for dual-lens cameras, and the Honor 8 Pro jumps aboard with a pair of 12-megapixel sensors. One shoots in color and the other in monochrome, and used together the phone can create a cool blurred background bokeh effect. This can be manipulated in the gallery after you take the shot.

If that sounds similar to the P10 Plus and Mate 9, then it should, but there are one or two key differences — Leica isn’t involved with the Honor phone, the aperture is smaller at f/2.2, and it doesn’t have the excellent Portrait mode introduced on the P10. The results are middling. In the right environment, the camera takes good pictures, but it tends to overexpose, and overcast skies get washed out. Colors don’t always pop the way we expected either.

It’s the same story in monochrome mode, and no amount of forcing the camera to adjust the aperture produced pictures we really adored. It’s close, and all the pictures were filled with detail; but we’d regularly turn to editing the images to get them just right — something many people won’t want to do. Low-light suffered too, especially without optical image stabilization.

The bokeh mode, or wide aperture as it’s called here, saves the day and is way more successful. It’s effortless to take the shot — just activate the mode with a single button — and it’s just as easy to change the focal point afterwards. The effect looks amazing, and generates something we always look for in cameras: creative inspiration. Once you get the hang of what looks good, you’ll be looking for opportunities to use the wide aperture mode more.

The camera app is intuitive, and easy to use. Swipe to the left or right to access menus, which have large, clearly labeled icons to guide you through the different modes. There’s a pro manual mode for stills and video — which can shoot up to 4K resolution — and modes for HDR, taking pictures at night, and shooting videos in slow motion. Swap to the front camera and you’ll take 8-megapixel selfies, and get to use the subtle beauty mode. Results are satisfactory, and improved when you play around with the solid image editing tools.

The small aperture lets the Honor 8 Pro’s camera down, which is unfortunate when elsewhere, it’s a strong performer producing pictures we want to share.

Vibrant screen, gimmicky VR

The 5.7-inch LCD screen has a 2,560 x 1,440 pixel resolution, and it looks superb. It’s bright, colorful, and the details are pin sharp. But because it’s not an AMOLED panel, Google won’t certify the Honor 8 Pro for Daydream VR use. Not to worry, because the box that packs the Honor 8 Pro’s box actually turns into a VR viewer! Is it good? No, not really.

The Honor 8 Pro is hard to beat for the price.

The Honor 8 Pro comes with Jaunt VR’s app, which has some great content, and the viewer is pretty similar to other Google Cardboard viewers out there. But it doesn’t have a manual control button, so it won’t work with the Cardboard app, and bugs in the Jaunt VR app made life extra difficult. The only way to exit a movie was to remove the phone, reset the app, and start again.

Get the Jaunt VR app working and the experience will improve, and when we did get videos playing it looked fantastic on the high resolution screen. It’s a fun introduction to 360-degree video. It’s not a reason to buy the Honor 8 Pro, and you’d probably get more benefit from grabbing one of the many Cardboard headsets with an actual button on it.

Price, warranty, and availability

The Honor 8 Pro hasn’t been announced for the U.S. at the time of writing, but is on sale in the U.K. and parts of Europe. In China, the 8 Pro is known as the Honor V9. It’s priced at 480 British pounds or 550 euros through the Vmall online store, which is about $590 depending on the exact exchange rate. This is more expensive than the majority of phones we see from Honor — the 6X is $250, for example. It also puts it right in-between some highly desirable hardware. It’s more expensive than the OnePlus 3T, but less than the Huawei Mate 9, and the Huawei P10 Plus.

Huawei Honor 8 Pro Compared To

LG G6

HTC U Ultra

Meizu Pro 6 Plus

Xiaomi Mi5S Plus

Xiaomi Mi Mix

Huawei Mate 9

ASUS Zenfone 3 Deluxe Special…

Samsung Galaxy Note 7

LG V20

Samsung Galaxy Note 5

Huawei Nexus 6P

LG V10

Motorola Moto X Style Pure Edition

Samsung Galaxy Note 4

Samsung Galaxy Note 3

For the specification and its performance, the Honor 9 Pro is superb value for money. It has genuine flagship phone performance and features, for considerably less money than you’d expect. Honor would have to drastically adjust the price if the phone launches in the U.S., because the Huawei Mate 9 can be yours for $600 — and the camera’s ability makes it the better buy.

Without a U.S. release date, we’ll have to quote the U.K. warranty details, which covers the phone for 24-months, the battery and charger for six months, and the included headphones for three months. If there is a problem you have to visit a registered Honor/Huawei service center, and you won’t be covered if the phone has taken a bath or damaged through misuse.

Our Take

For once, spending less doesn’t mean making a compromise. The Honor 8 Pro’s dual-lens camera makes it trendy, the fast processor makes it usable, the massive screen looks great, and the battery is long-lasting. Give it a U.S. release date, and we’ll be very happy.

Is there a better alternative?

The Honor 8 Pro is hard to beat for the price in the U.K., where our three favourite dual-lens big-screen phones — the LG G6, the Huawei P10, and Huawei Mate 9 — both cost more than 600 British pounds. They’re better phones, but you’ll spend at least 150 British pounds more to get one in your hand. It’s toughest challenger is the OnePlus 3T. It has a smaller, lower resolution screen at 5.5-inches, but is a great looking phone with at least as much (if not more) power and performance. However, you’ll miss out on the dual-lens camera.

If you’re eyeing Huawei and are in the U.S., we’d recommend buying the Huawei Mate 9 instead given the outstanding price it’s available for, plus it comes with a U.S. warranty unlike an imported device.

The DT Accessory Pack

Official Google Cardboard

$15.00

Huawei Watch 2

$299.99

Samsung 128GB 80MB/s EVO Select Micro SDXC memory card

$109.99

How long will it last?

The Honor 8 Pro isn’t water resistant, but the metal body is arguably more durable than a completely glass smartphone in the event of a fall. The device is very thin though, so we’d be careful about accidentally putting too much pressure on it in a pocket.

Honor, like Huawei, doesn’t have the best track record with Android updates. Our review model runs Android 7.0 Nougat and has the March 1, 2017 security patch installed, so it’s relatively close. How long that will remain the case isn’t certain. The only way to be sure of the latest Android software and patches is to buy a Google Pixel phone.

Otherwise, the Honor 8 Pro can be considered a flagship phone, and has more than enough power and ability to last for several years.

Should you buy it?

Yes. If you have a maximum budget of 500 British pounds (~$590), the Honor 8 Pro represents astonishing value, with better features than you’ll find on phones at or around the same price. Its build quality as well as the software experience are also excellent. We don’t suggest importing one to the U.S.. Instead, wait to see if Honor announces a U.S. version, or just opt for the Huawei Mate 9.

Western Digital crammed 12TB of storage into a helium-filled hard drive

Why it matters to you

Western Digital is pushing the hard drive limits with the release of a new helium-drive drive for data centers packing 12TB of storage and very low power consumption.

Western Digital released a new hard drive for the enterprise market under its HGST umbrella: the Ultrastar He12. The drive packs 12TB of storage capacity using the company’s helium-based HelioSeal technology. This tech not only enables higher capacities than standard air-filled drives, but reduces power consumption in the process.

As a brief explanation, hard drives resemble enclosed record players where a needle/head reads the information from a spinning disc. In this case, data is stored on a magnetic disc, which typically has a physical limit to its storage amount. To increase the overall capacity of a hard drive, manufacturers stuff more spinning discs and readers into the drive. But all that high-speed spinning causes friction due to the “weight” of air, limiting the number of discs used in a 3.5-inch form factor.

But because helium is a lightweight gas (1/7 the density of air), there is less resistance as hard drive platters spin round and round like a record (baby). So not only can hard-drive makers cram in more magnetic platters, the motors spinning those platters meet less resistance, consuming less energy than the standard air-filled hard drive. The arms holding the read/write heads suffer less turbulence, too.

That said, Western Digital managed to cram eight platters into its new helium-filled hard drive, up from seven used in previous Ultrastar models. It’s a “world’s first,” indicating that each spinning magnetic platter can hold approximately 1.5GB of data. The platters are thinner than what’s found in air-filled drives, too, while “maintaining a stable recording interface.”

Here are the hardware specs of the new Ultrastar He12 drives:

Form factor:
3.5 inch
Number of platters:
8
Maximum areal density:
864Gbits per square inch
Sector sizes (SATA):
4Kn – 4,096
512e – 512
Sector sizes (SAS):
4Kn – 4096, 4112, 4160, 4224
512e – 512, 520, 528
Data buffer:
256MB
Rotational speed:
7,200RPM
Latency average:
4.16ms
Interface transfer rate:
600MB/s (SATA)
1,200MB/s (SAS)
Sustained transfer rate:
255MB/s (typical)
Seek time:
8.0ms read, 8.6ms write
Power rating (SATA):
5.3 watts idle, 7.2 watts operating
Power rating (SAS):
6.1 watts idle, 9.8 watts operating
MTBF:
2.5 million
Dimensions:
1.02 (H) x 4 x 5.78 (D) inches
Weight:
1.45 pounds

Now here are the differences between all four variants:

Model
Interface Type
HUH721212ALE60y
512e SATA 3 (6Gbps)
HUH721212ALN60y
4Kn SATA 3 (6Gbps)
HUH721212AL420y
4Kn SAS (12Gbps)
HUH721212AL520y
512e SAS (12Gbps)

Outside the 12GB storage capacity, some of the highlights include Instant Secure Erase (ISE) and Self-Encrypting Drive (SED) options, 24×7 continuous availability, and an annual fail rate of 0.35 percent. All four models ship with a five-year limited warranty.

“It encompasses a low-power design without compromising performance, which helps reduce overall cost of ownership,” the company said on Wednesday. “The Ultrastar He12 HDD is perfect for any application that requires massive amounts of cost-effective storage.”

Unfortunately, Western Digital did not release any pricing information, as the helium-filled drives are shipping to distributors now. Eventually they will make their way onto Amazon, Newegg, and other online retails and sit alongside Western Digital’s other Ultrastar products.