Snapchat Plans Original TV Shows Lasting 3-5 Minutes Each, Partners Include ABC, HGTV, and More

Snapchat is gearing up to launch a slate of original television shows, using the social network’s unique, short-lived media hook as a means to create content that lasts between 3-5 minutes long. Snapchat has signed original show deals with a collection of companies over the past few months, including NBCUniversal, Turner, A+E Networks, Discovery, BBC, ABC, ESPN, Vice Media, Vertical Networks, NFL, and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

In a report by The Wall Street Journal today, sources familiar with Snapchat’s plans stated that the company is also discussing deals with CBS and Fox, and is ready to close a deal with Scripps Networks Interactive, which owns Food Network and HGTV. This latter deal is said to result in “offshoots” of current TV shows including House Hunters and Chopped for Snapchat.

Snapchat’s current goal is to have between 2 and 3 new episodes of original TV shows debuting every day by the end of 2017. The shows will be housed in the Stories tab of Snapchat, somewhere among the content users see from their friends and the existing media-created news posts.

As Snapchat has held meetings with its TV partners, the company is said to have given “extensive and detailed notes” in an effort to launch a unified slate of shows. Some versions of Snapchat’s TV initiatives have already launched, including an interactive audition experience themed after The Voice, but the company is said to now be “looking for scripted dramas, daily news shows, horror, documentaries, animated shows, and more.”

While media companies have had various disagreements with YouTube and Facebook, TV companies are flocking to create original shows for Snapchat. That is in part because Snap executives including Mr. Bell, a former News Corp. executive, embrace certain old media values like scarcity and promoting a select group of premium content above user-generated fare.

Mr. Bell says he wants to help grow TV audiences by exposing Snapchat’s young user base to their brands. “I don’t want to be a TV killer,” Mr. Bell says.

To this extent, Snapchat might change some fundamental aspects of the social network in order to encourage binging and catching up with its shows, instead of sticking to its ephemeral content strategy which removed some past shows from the service after 48 hours. For the new slate of TV shows, it’s still unclear when exactly Snapchat plans to begin the launch, but users can at least expect them to begin debuting by the end of the year.

Many social networks are looking to add original television content to their services, with Twitter just this week detailing its strategy for launching a 24/7 live streaming news network through a partnership with Bloomberg and various other companies. While Facebook hasn’t yet launched original video content of its own, it is building a social network that is more than ready to do so in the future, with multiple updates and app debuts centered around improving and prioritizing video-related content.

Tag: Snapchat
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Apple Sold Fewer iPads Year Over Year for 13th Straight Quarter as Tablet Market Shrinks to Five-Year Low

The worldwide tablet market declined for a tenth straight quarter on a year-over-year basis last quarter, according to IDC. The market research firm estimates tablet shipments totaled only 36.2 million in the first quarter, the fewest since the third quarter of 2012, establishing a nearly five year low.

While the iPad remains the world’s most popular tablet, it has been no exception. Earlier this week, Apple reported that it sold 8.9 million iPads in the quarter, down from 10.2 million iPads in the year-ago quarter, marking the 13th consecutive quarter that it has sold fewer iPads on a year-over-year unit basis.

“Apple’s results show that it is not immune to the changing dynamics of industry and consumer demand, part of which is due to the ongoing success of its other product lines,” said IDC in a press release today.

Despite costlier iPad Pro models driving up prices, which helped Apple end a nine-quarter slide in iPad revenue less than a year ago, the company’s tablet revenue has turned to the negative again. Apple reported earnings of $3.8 billion from iPads last quarter, down from $4.4 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Following tremendous growth in the tablet market in the first three years after the original iPad launched in 2010, IDC believes that consumers have become less eager to upgrade their tablets, more dependant on smartphones, and increasingly disinterested in purchasing tablets altogether.

“The rate at which the tablet market grew from 2010 to 2013 was unlike many other consumer-oriented device markets we’ve seen before,” said Ryan Reith, program vice president with IDC. “However, it appears for many reasons consumers became less eager to refresh these devices, or in some instances purchase them at all. We continue to believe the leading driver for this was the increased dependency on smartphones, along with rather minimal technology and form factor progression.”

Apple recorded an estimated 24.5 percent share of the worldwide tablet market in the first quarter, meaning that nearly one in every four tablets sold during the first three months of the year was an iPad. Samsung trailed in second with an estimated 6 million shipments for 16.5 percent market share.

Chinese company Huawei was the only tablet maker to experience growth in the quarter, shipping an estimated 2.7 million tablets, up 31.7 percent from a year ago. Amazon and Lenovo rounded off the top five vendors with an estimated 2.2 million and 2.1 million tablet shipments respectively in the quarter.

Beyond the iPad sales numbers, which are official, it’s important to acknowledge that these are estimated figures, and shipments within distribution channels do not necessarily reflect sales to customers.

Tag: IDC
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Big Data in Everyday Life

Data is never more important than how it is today. As the likes and dislikes of people continue to evolve, the data that comes from those decisions remain as important as gold for different companies and groups like the people at  ActiveWizards Data Science Lab and many others. They use that data to predict how you will be making decisions in the future to make the process seamless for you and make whatever you do much simpler. However, is it true that there is data in everyday life? Not just data, but big data?

Your decisions are immensely valuable data.

The moment you decide to post a status update on Facebook, a photo of you waking up on Instagram, or other activities in social media sites, you give out information. People study the facts before and after your posts. This is to track what made you buy what you bought that day or to see why you made the decisions you made. Did you take the highway or did you take the long way around? Did you choose to search with Google or with Yahoo?

These little things, when put together, become very big data for scientists to work on and create various data visualization that can help companies and groups make marketing a little better. They can also develop new tech by learning how you do things every day, why you do things every time you do them, and the reasons behind your decisions. With the data that can be mined from simple things, they can revolutionize the world and make it easier for you to live in.

The different departments that big data affects

Big data can be very useful in upgrading health care technologies because every day, new diseases and complications arise. In addition, economic development can be easier because they can understand and predict the rise and fall of commodities and adjust accordingly. Crime can also be predicted; the places where it happens most of the time, which type of crime happens most, and many others related to the statistics. Of course, it has the greatest impact on sales, as marketing agencies and companies develop more ways of getting their products prevalent in your minds and hearts.

Big data can also help infrastructure, and even provide the reason why you chose this presidential candidate over the other. Opinions, likes, dislikes, and many others flaunt themselves over the internet and these are very useful for many agencies to develop experiences for you to enjoy each time you surf the world wide web.

Big data can also be dangerous. This is why many agencies fight to keep your privacy top priority. There are limits as to what data can be gathered from different places, decisions, and other ideas that may be presented. Still, it proves essential to everyday life and it will continue to be one of the best pillars of information that can change the way people live their lives.

Sony announces entry-level XE70 series of 4K HDR TVs

Sony has announced a new range of XE70 4K HDR TVs that will enter at the affordable end of the budget spectrum when they’re released in July 2017. There will be four screen sizes available to choose from: 43-inch, 49-inch, 55-inch and 65-inch, so more choice than you get with the XE80 series, which only offers the first two sizes.

• Sony 4K HDR TV choices for 2017: A1 OLED, ZD9, XE94, XE93, XE90, XE85, XE80 compared

All screens in the XE70 series support 4K HDR images and content from both Amazon Video and Netflix, and all benefit from Sony’s very own X-Reality Pro image processing technology. This technology analyses every aspect of the image on screen, and matches it with an image database to provide the best possible textures, contrast levels, colours and edges.

Motionflow XR technology promises to keep fast moving scenes in check by creating and inserting frames between the original ones to minimise motion blur.

Sony

Soundwise, the XE70 series TVs are equipped with Sony’s ClearAudio+ technology which gives greater clarity to dialogue, music and sound effects and separates them enough so that each individual aspect can be heard. To add a bit of extra depth to your movies, Cinematic S-Force Surround technology aims to emulate a surround sound effect from just the left and right speaker channels of the TV.

Every TV in the XE70 series comes with Netflix and Amazon Video pre-installed, negating the need for a separate set-top box, unless of course you want to add Sky Q or Now TV. There’s also built-in access to YouTube and the Internet via the Opera web browser. If you want to play your own content on the TVs, you can thanks to three USB ports.

Pricing for the XE70 series has yet to be revealed, but we expect it to be revealed closer to the series’ July launch date.

Epix’s mobile app casts to smart TVs without a set-top box

Premium channel Epix is adding a feature to its mobile app letting users cast its shows and films straight to smart TVs, no set-top box needed. Where others like HBO have relied on casting through specific devices, like Chromecast or Roku, Epix has partnered with wireless tech provider Vizbee to stream content directly to smart televisions from LG, Sony, Vizio and others. It also syncs up to connected devices like Sony Blu-Ray players, while future platforms like TiVo and Xbox will get linked up in the coming weeks.

The new feature comes a month after MGM spent $1 billion to buy out its partners and take full control of Epix. The premium provider is the youngest of its ilk, launching in 2009 and bringing content from its founders Paramount, Lionsgate and MGM to Netflix a year later. It was quick to bring its library of films to Google TV in 2011, but Epix has a ways to go before it starts competing with the established streaming titans. The upstart premium network launched its first two original content series Berlin Station and Graves last October.

Source: Epix

EE is trying to take credit for the EU’s free roaming law

On June 15th, UK mobile operators will be forced to abolish roaming fees for customers travelling across Europe, thanks to a European Commission directive that’s been two years in the making. Britain’s biggest carrier, EE, must abide by the new law, but it won’t let that stop it from taking some of the plaudits. Today, the company announced that it will “launch European roaming for all customers at no extra cost”. The launch date? June 15th.

From next month, customers can utilise the calls, texts and data they enjoy at home while travelling in 47 European destinations. EE is doing a little more than necessary, adding a handful of European destinations that aren’t in the EU. For comparison, Vodafone offers 40 European countries, while Three includes 42 global destinations (O2 has yet to announce anything). Since August 2016, subscribers to EE’s Max plans have enjoyed worry-free European roaming, but thanks to the Commission, it’ll be available to all customers regardless of their tariff.

Instead of enjoying the same deal as everyone else, Max subscribers will gain access to their minutes, texts and data in 52 countries around the world. The operator includes popular destinations like the USA, Canada, Mexico, Australia and New Zealand. It’ll sweeten the deal for anyone signing up to its premium plans from May 10th.

The full list of European countries: Austria, Azores, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canary Islands, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, French Guiana, Germany, Gibraltar (UK), Greece, Guadeloupe, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Madeira, Malta, Martinique, Poland, Portugal, Reunion Islands, Romania, Saint Barthelemy, Saint Martin (French), San Marino, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and Vatican City, Iceland, Norway, Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Monaco, Isle of Man, Jersey & Guernsey.

The Cavs and Warriors will have their own ‘NBA 2K eLeague’ teams

The inaugural season of the NBA’s “2K eLeague,” featuring eSports teams owned by NBA franchises, is looking more promising now than when it was announced in February. Today, the NBA revealed that 17 of its 30 teams will participate in the eSports competition, which it created in partnership with Take-Two Interactive (developer of the NBA2K series) and is scheduled to begin in 2018. Earlier this year, the league had said it only expected about 12 NBA teams to join the project, but clearly it managed to get many more of them interested before launch.

As a result, the NBA 2K eLeague will have professional gaming squads from the Boston Celtics, Cleveland Cavaliers, Dallas Mavericks, Golden State Warriors, Miami Heat, New York Knicks and Toronto Raptors. You’ll find the full list below, but I can tell you right now that there are some major names missing, such as the Chicago Bulls, Los Angeles Lakers and San Antonio Spurs. That said, there’s a chance these teams could take part in a future season of the 2K eLeague.

Although each NBA team is going to be responsible for picking their own eSports players, it’s still unclear how that drafting and/or sourcing process will play out. An NBA spokesperson told Engadget those details haven’t been finalized yet. Whatever it may be, diversity is set to play a major role: In the NBA’s Commissioner words, “These athletes can be any shape or size, and any age, and from anywhere.”

• Boston Celtics
• Cleveland Cavaliers
• Dallas Mavericks
• Detroit Pistons
• Golden State Warriors
• Indiana Pacers
• Memphis Grizzlies
• Miami Heat
• Milwaukee Bucks
• New York Knicks
• Orlando Magic
• Philadelphia 76ers
• Portland Trail Blazers
• Sacramento Kings
• Toronto Raptors
• Utah Jazz

BlackBerry KEYone review: Vintage vibes and a modern OS

You’ve got to give BlackBerry credit for refusing to die. After the underwhelming launch and life of BB10, the company pledged allegiance to Android, whipped up a strangely cool slider phone, then farmed out production of all new BlackBerrys to external partners. The journey has been difficult to watch at times, but it seems like the transition is starting to pay off. After a pair of all-touch phones, BlackBerry and partner TCL have released the KEYone, heralding the return of the classic candy-bar-with-keyboard design.

The Priv was an ambitious attempt at a flagship,and the DTEK50 and DTEK60 were barely recognizable as part of the line. The KEYone, however, is the first BlackBerry in years to feel, well, like a BlackBerry. Surprise, surprise: It’s a pretty great little phone, too. Fans will be glad to know the KEYone is the best Android-powered BlackBerry to date, but I don’t expect this to move the needle for many others.

Hardware and design

The KEYone is taller than any traditional BlackBerry, with a four-row physical keyboard scrunched beneath a 4.5-inch IPS LCD screen. It’s almost the exact same size as a closed Priv, in case you were curious. There’s a fast and functional fingerprint sensor here too, baked into the keyboard’s spacebar. It might seem like weird placement at first, but it’s actually brilliant — my only problem was that I kept pressing the spacebar expecting it to act like a home button.

The top is a flat plane where you’ll find a headphone jack and, below that, you’ll spot the traditional notification LED near the 8-megapixel front-facing camera. All of that is wrapped in an anodized aluminum frame that gives the phone a reassuring feel without adding much weight, and its rounded edges make it comfortable to hold for long periods of time. Flip the phone over and you’ll find a soft-touch rubber back speckled with dots and a 12-megapixel camera wedged into the top-left corner. The combination of colors and textures make the KEYone feel classic in a way, sort of like an old camera.

Toss in a re-mappable convenience key, a USB-C port and a microSD slot and you’ve got the KEYone in a nutshell. I’ve really got to hand to TCL and BlackBerry on this one: They made a remarkably polished smartphone unlike any other on the market. The KEYone manages to feel professional and productive, and it’s proof that you don’t need to wedge metal between panes of curved glass to build something that feels premium.

The keyboard

Chris Velazco/Engadget

When we review a device with a keyboard, it’s Engadget tradition to write as much of the story as possible on it. I got three or four paragraphs in before giving up. For me, it all boils down to speed. As fast as I used to be on my trusty Tour, I’m orders of magnitude faster punching out text on a touchscreen now. You probably are, too. The only way to access a virtual keyboard on the KEYone is to rotate the phone sideways, and even then, you’ll then be reaching over physical keys to type on the screen.

If you put in the time, though, the keyboard is mostly excellent. The keys are small and have just the right amount of travel, and silvery bands separate the rows to keep your fingers from mashing multiple keys at once. Even better, every letter key on this keyboard can be mapped to two shortcuts — you can invoke them by tapping a key or holding it down. This just might be my favorite thing about this keyboard: I can just tap “I” to get my Instagram fix or hold “L” to hail a Lyft.

This isn’t any regular keyboard, either. For one, it doubles as a capacitive touchpad, just like the keyboards on the Passport and Priv. That means you can swipe on the keyboard to scroll through lists and web pages, but that doesn’t mean you should. The keyboard seems less adept at tracking fingers when held vertically since there’s less space for your finger to move, so you’re usually better off just using the perfectly good touchscreen.

In my experience, the swipeable keyboard only ever really comes in handy in two situations.The first is when you’re holding the phone sideways. In that case, one of your thumbs is naturally resting on the keyboard anyway, and swiping up and down on that sideways keyboard seems more accurate. You could do this on the Priv, too, but holding the KEYone horizontally with one hand is infinitely easier than trying to hang on to an open slider. The second, and less silly-looking, is when you’re pecking out messages.

A trio of suggestions automatically appear above the keyboard when you’re partially through a word, and a quick swipe up throws the correct suggestion into the text field. When you’re learning — or re-learning — how to use this kind of physical keyboard, these smart suggestions are crucial for bashing out messages quickly. Within hours of using the KEYone, the keyboard knew to suggest the word “Engadget” instead of “engage” and offered up correct spellings of names in my contact lists.

Display and sound

It’s a little weird to be reviewing this after using the G6 and Galaxy S8 — the KEYone’s display feels like the antithesis of those long screens. The KEYone’s 4.5-inch LCD has a squarish 3:2 aspect ratio to help accommodate that physical keyboard. BlackBerry argues the addition of the keyboard means more screen real estate while pecking out messages, and that’s certainly true. Whether that’s a worthwhile trade-off is up to you — I’m not bothered by the smaller screen, but bigger is almost always better as far as I’m concerned.

These observations wouldn’t matter if the KEYone’s display sucked, but it doesn’t. It’s adequately bright even outdoors, and colors pop nicely. Viewing angles are solid too, no matter if you’re holding the phone upright or horizontally. Is it the best screen you’ve ever seen on a BlackBerry? No (if that’s what you’re after look at the DTEK60), but it’s more than good enough for checking your photos before throwing them on Instagram.

The KEYone’s two speakers (one on the bottom next to the USB-C port and one up top) were similarly just alright. I spent the past few days using the KEYone as my primary music and podcast machine, and to my surprise, the phone pumped out respectable sound. The KEYone is roughly on par with the Galaxy S8 — raucous rock tends to get muddy on both but songs with brighter highs come out relatively clear.

Software and security

This is the fourth time in two years we’ve seen an Android-powered BlackBerry, and honestly, little is new on the software front. Sure, the requisite updates are in place — the KEYone runs Android 7.1.1 — but just about all of the features and flourishes BlackBerry is so fond of are still here. Being a purist, I’d normally take exception to all the stuff BlackBerry shoehorned into the KEYone’s software. Thankfully, it’s mostly helpful.

The interface looks stock at first blush, but there’s some serious customization going on. Firing up the app launcher, for instance, reveals three tabs that offer access to your installed software (duh), widgets and shortcuts to specific actions like “compose text message” and “add task”. There are more than just system-level actions, too; with the right apps installed, you can add shortcuts that create new notes in Evernote or kick the KEYone into driving mode. To make things even more fun, you can map any of those shortcuts to the keyboard’s letter buttons. Strangely, you can only map BlackBerry’s first-party shortcuts to the convenience key that, well, just isn’t very convenient. To our friends in Waterloo: Fix this.

The changes only get more pronounced from there. There’s a Productivity Tab lurking on the right side of your home screen; tapping it brings up a handy view of upcoming calendar events, incomplete tasks, unread messages and favorite contacts. It’s not quite as useful as Google Now, but I grew to rely on it for triaging work-related deadlines and conversations. The BlackBerry Hub is great for that too, mostly. It’s basically just a unified inbox that collects messages and updates from across all your mail and social accounts.

Unfortunately, the Hub can get overloaded pretty quickly when you’ve got Twitter mentions, Instagram likes, emails, texts, BBM messages, missed calls and more occupying a single space. The ability to quickly sift through all your interactions at once is neat, but there’s no simple way to clear these events in one shot. The best you can do is prevent certain apps from adding notifications to the Hub or creating a separate “view” that selectively funnels messages from specific apps to you.

At this point, we’re mostly left with little tweaks. Swiping up on certain icons lets you view its associated widget in a pop-up window, which is way more useful than it sounds. You can install and manage different icon packs right out of the gate. The only major omission is a virtual assistant — there’s no Google Assistant or Alexa or even a crappy proprietary BlackBerry assistant. Here’s hoping that changes, and soon.

The list of little touches goes on and on, affirming BlackBerry’s love for power users. For the folks who need that extra level of flexibility, the KEYone has you covered. That goes for security, too. According to the company, each KEYone has a hardware root of trust baked into it during the production process, and the devices are fully encrypted by default. You’d never be able to tell just by looking at the KEYone, though — to wrap your head around the phone’s security, you’ll have to pop into the DTEK app.

As always, it’ll give you a rating that signifies how secure your BlackBerry is. My KEYone mostly hovered in “Excellent” territory and yours will, too… unless you hate PINs and install apps from outside the Play Store. More importantly, DTEK lets the really paranoid see how often apps access things like your contacts, microphone and location. And the results are often not what you’d expect. It’s no surprise that Google Maps and Twitter have checked my location more than a thousand times in the past week, but I didn’t think the DTEK app itself would have checked my location nearly twice as much. In the event you do find something funky, DTEK makes it dead-simple to manage app permissions. Will the average person ever do this? Probably not, but DTEK is a surprisingly understandable crash-course in mobile security, and it’s absolutely worth a look.

Camera

Chris Velazco/Engadget

Great image quality has never been BlackBerry’s forte, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how good the KEYone’s 12-megapixel main camera is. We’ve mostly got BlackBerry and TCL’s choice of sensor to thank — it’s one of Sony’s IMX378s, which got rave reviews when it was included in Google’s Pixel smartphones last year. Of course, part of the reason the Pixels’ photos look as good as they do is because of some sophisticated image processing. The KEYone lacks those clever tricks, but it doesn’t matter much: For the first time in forever, you can feel confident that whipping out a BlackBerry won’t mean taking photos that suck.

Under decently lit conditions, the KEYone’s main camera captures natural, well-detailed photos with all settings left on Auto. It occasionally struggles with exposing scenes automatically, mostly when you’ve got a lot of moving subjects on screen, but it’s easy to mitigate with the always-there exposure slider. The sensor’s 1.55-micron pixels make the KEYone a decent performer when things get dim too, though you’ll notice a quite a bit of noise. Exposure aside, there are a few other issues to note.

The phase detection autofocus here locks onto subjects very quickly, but the option to have the camera focus before taking a photo is off by default. The end result? More motion-blurred shots than I wanted. Presumably, the company wanted to keep the camera working as quickly as possible, but the extra wait is definitely worth it. Having the camera pointed at a scene with multiple light sources also makes the focus system act slower than usual. It doesn’t seem to happen all the time, though, and hopefully this’ll get ironed out in a future software update.

The 8-megapixel front-facing camera is a capable selfie shooter, and its wide-angle lens makes it easy to squeeze multiple people into a single shot. Alas, it too has trouble nailing the exposure, leading to plenty of selfies with blown-out backgrounds. (In fairness, the color of my skin might make this more of a “me” issue.)

The KEYone also shoots video in a host of resolutions and bitrates, ranging from 720p at 24fps to 4K quality at 30fps. The resulting footage comes out crisp and clean if a little on the dark side. It’s not enough to make me want to give up the Galaxy S8 Plus, but it’s damned good for a BlackBerry.

If you’re into artsy photos, BlackBerry’s camera app offers a handful of photo filters and effects, but serious shooters will get more mileage out of the manual mode. Fiddling with ISO, shutter speed, focus and more is instantaneous and quite helpful; I just hate that the option is hidden in the camera’s settings menu rather than being a selectable camera mode.

Performance and battery life

The BlackBerry KEYone isn’t a flagship-level device, so you shouldn’t expect it to perform like one. After all, it’s a very specific addition to the BlackBerry lineup, and squeezing extra power into a device this niche doesn’t make much sense. Instead, BlackBerry and TCL tried to build a phone that doesn’t skimp on performance while retaining the battery life of older models. They succeeded. Nestled inside the KEYone is a Snapdragon 625 chipset, an Adreno 506 GPU and 3GB of RAM — together, they helped the phone tackle my daily routine without trouble. This won’t come as a surprise to some of you; mid-range chipsets and phones are getting better by the day, and we’ve seen this combination of components come together really well in devices like the Moto Z Play.

There’s the occasional wait for an app to pick up where it left off, but it’s never enough to make the phone feel sluggish. Things take a turn when it’s time to fire up graphic-intensive games like Asphalt 8, though, where you’ll notice frames dropping here and there. This is hardly a surprise; devices like the KEYone lend themselves better to productivity rather than play.

The upside of that modest chipset is excellent longevity. There’s a 3,505mAh battery wedged inside the phone; that’s just a hair bigger than the one you’ll find inside the Galaxy S8 Plus, so there’s little chance of being disappointed here. On average, I’d pull the KEYone off its charger at around eight in the morning, and it would often have close to 30 percent battery left by the time I tucked myself into bed. On nights when I neglected to charge the phone, I could squeeze close to another full workday out of the KEYone if I was careful about what I was doing. This is where Qualcomm’s QuickCharge 3.0 tech comes into play — it wasn’t quite as fast as advertised, but a half-hour charge typically got the KEYone back to 40 percent.

The competition

If you’re looking for other smartphones with physical keyboards, your choices are limited. BlackBerry’s design sensibilities were at their most ambitious with the Priv, which pairs a nice big touchscreen with a slide-out physical keyboard. The phone’s build quality still holds up, but you’d have to deal with dated performance — the Snapdragon 808 running the show is years old at this point.

If you’re a big fan of old-school BlackBerry battery life but don’t actually need physical buttons to mash, there’s always Motorola’s Moto Z Play ($449). It packs the same Snapdragon 625 chipset and pairs it with a 5.5-inch 1080p screen and a 3,510mAh battery. BlackBerry’s software tweaks are nice, but there’s plenty to like about the Z Play’s almost stock Android experience. And if you’re more concerned about power than security but still absolutely need a physical keyboard, you might want to consider something like Samsung’s Galaxy S8 ($750) when its official keyboard case ($60) becomes available. I’m honestly not sure why Samsung keeps making these cases, but hey — the S8 and S8 Plus are the best Android phones you can buy right now.

Wrap-up

I really, really didn’t expect to like the BlackBerry KEYone. Sure, I have a lingering attachment to this once-great mobile brand, and I do like a good underdog story. Putting those highly personal things aside, though, and we’re left with an objectively great smartphone. Of course, given the years of experience nearly all of us have when all-touch devices, I have to wonder if anyone accustomed to tapping glass would make the move back.

That’s not really BlackBerry and TCL’s concern, though. This phone won’t make a BlackBerry believer out of anyone who wasn’t already. For these two companies, the mission was to build a device that blends the best of Android with the hallmarks of BlackBerry devices long past. And you know what? They did it. If you’re hunting for a new smartphone and you’ve ever loved — and I mean loved — a BlackBerry before, the KEYone is well worth considering. If that doesn’t sound like you, feel free to move on.

23andMe study focuses on why we experience pain differently

We all experience pain differently, and what’s excruciating for you might not even be worth mentioning for another. There are studies that looked into the difference in pain tolerance between individuals and some even found associations between people’s pain tolerance and their gender and ethnicity. 23andMe wants to have an even deeper understanding of pain tolerance and to finally figure out what role genetics play in both temporary and chronic pain. That’s why it has teamed up with German-based pharmaceutical company Grünenthal to conduct one of the largest studies of its kind.

The researchers plan to recruit 20,000 people as test subjects, all of whom will undergo a “Cold Pressor Test” that requires them to submerge their hands in cold water for three minutes. That will give the team a way to gauge each person’s pain threshold. The participants also have to answer questions about drug tolerance and how sensitive they are to pain, as well as to assess how much pain they think they’ll be in for a bunch of theoretical scenarios.

In addition to figuring out the role of genetics in tolerance, Emily Drabant Conley, 23andMe’s VP of business development, said that results from the study may also “help advance the use of precision medicine in pain management.” Hopefully, being able to tailor treatments for every person could also prevent addiction to pain killers. It has become a serious problem in recent years, affecting millions of people not just in the US, but around the globe.

Source: 23andMe

Apple’s First Retail Location in Singapore Close to Opening as ‘Apple Loves Singapore’ Mural Revealed

Construction barricades have recently begun disappearing around Apple’s first retail location in Singapore, revealing a large mural and 12 smaller pieces of artwork that showcase the Apple logo, a heart, and a little red dot, referencing Apple’s love for Singapore.

Inside each of the little red dots Apple has personalized the barricades further, changing the artwork to represent illustrator Kristal Melson, photographer Aik Beng Chia, app developer Hon Cheng Muh, and more creatives.

The company has also listed quotes under each Apple Loves Singapore sign, with Muh’s reading: “It’s crazy that what I’m doing now did not exist 10 years ago. It took a lot of patience getting past the steep learning curve. But change is possible when there’s passion.”

According to The Straits Times, these 12 pieces of art represent 12 Creative Pros — or “Red Dot Heroes” — hired by Apple who will work at the store to be the “liberal arts equivalent of Apple technical geniuses.” The workers will be part of Apple’s just-announced Today at Apple retail initiative, which is expanding worldwide this month.

The Apple retail store will be located on Orchard Road, an entertainment and shopping hub of Singapore, and officially be known as Apple Orchard Road. The location has been talked about since the fall of 2015, but Apple never gave a clear timetable for the store’s opening once it missed its original late 2016 debut.

It remains unclear exactly when Apple Orchard Road will open, but progress on the store appears to be nearing completion. The retail location will be run on 100 percent renewable energy, as does all of Apple’s operations and facilities within Singapore.

(Thanks, Kenneth!)

Tags: Singapore, Apple retail
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