OnePlus 3T is being discontinued to make way for the OnePlus 5

You’ll soon no longer be able to buy a OnePlus 3T, but that’s not a bad thing.

OnePlus is so, so ready to launch the OnePlus 5. The company has announced that the OnePlus 3T, its latest flagship, has reached the end of its production life, and will only be sold until current stock runs out.

A lot has happened since we launched the OnePlus 3T back in November of last year. We were thrilled by the response our device received both in the media, and by our users around the world. It’s been far and away our most successful device yet, and we’re incredibly proud of what we’ve accomplished together. Rest assured that we’ll continue to bring more software updates and support to the OnePlus 3 and 3T.

This is the last call to buy the OnePlus 3T before stock runs out. Only a few devices are left in our warehouse, so purchase yours before time runs out at onepl.us/3T

This doesn’t mean the end of software or security updates for the OnePlus 3 and 3T, just that, being a small company, OnePlus wants to focus its entire manufacturing line on the OnePlus 5, which is coming in June.

OnePlus is doing everything right lately

OnePlus 3T and OnePlus 3

• OnePlus 3T review: Rekindling a love story
• OnePlus 3T vs. OnePlus 3: What’s the difference?
• OnePlus 3T specs
• Latest OnePlus 3 news
• Discuss OnePlus 3T and 3 in the forums

OnePlus
Amazon

Freelancers wanted: This is your chance to join the value-obsessed Thrifter team!

If you have the gift for thrift and are passionate about finding innovative ways to save and make money, this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

You’ve likely noticed the Thrifter name accompanying tech deals content published on Android Central this year, but we haven’t really paused to talk about what Thrifter is and where it’s going. To be frank, that’s because we weren’t ready to. Now we are and we’re super excited to start spreading the word as we get closer to our official launch.

While Thrifter has primarily been in the pre-alpha stage covering daily tech deals to date, our ambition and vision for Thrifter is much, much grander. Behind the scenes we’ve been building a superstar team, attracting top talent from deals and recommendation sites like The Wirecutter and 9to5Toys. Our product and brand teams have also been hustling, and we’ll soon pull the wraps off our new brand and Thrifter.com website (of course Thrifter will also live on all the social media platforms you frequent).

The Thrifter mission is simple. We think wasting money is stupid and we want to make Thrifter the resource and community you trust when it comes to financial matters in your daily life or business. We also want to make the notion of being thrifty not suck. It’s not about being dirt cheap and never spending money – it’s about making sure when you do spend money that your hard-earned dollars are stretching as far they can. It’s about living a sensible and awesome life. To that, we also want Thrifter to be as fun as it is educational. After all, being smart with your money should be celebrated!

Join The Team!

We’re looking for freelancers and volunteers to join the growing Thrifter team. Various positions are available across a number of verticals – if you have a deep expertise in a subject as it relates to making financial decisions and want to share that expertise with others, we want to hear from you.

Hit the link below to learn more about the opportunities available. While being able to produce content for publication is part of the job, we’re really looking for people who are obsessive about living the Thrifter lifestyle.

Come work with us!

Learn More

Draft bill gives the government power to control your drone

Drones have been the focus of many security initiatives, like the “sky fence” in the Channel Islands that jams pilot signals to stop drones from bringing contraband into the prison. Remotely piloted aircraft can also be a force for good, like in Africa where drones are being used to stop poaching. In the US, you may not have to register your personal drones with the FAA anymore, but you might not want to fly them where they’re not allowed. New draft legislation from the Trump administration would authorize the government to track, take control of, and destroy drones that the government thinks pose a threat to specially designated areas. In addition, courts would be unable to hear lawsuits arising from such activity.

The 10-page document with proposed legislation obtained by The New York Times was reportedly circulated through various congressional committees this week. The administration also put together a classified briefing on the topic for congressional staff members, according to an aide. The draft bill is part of the National Defense Authorization Act and contains some sweeping language around what the government could do in these specially designated areas. The bill would allow the government to “detect, identify, monitor or track, without prior consent, an unmanned aircraft,” or system. It also includes language allowing officials to “redirect, disable, disrupt control of, exercise control of, seize, or confiscate” the aircraft as well as any cargo attached. The proposed legislation would also give the government the power to “use reasonable force to disable, disrupt, damage or destroy” a drone or it’s cargo, as well as to conduct research on any equipment to figure out ways to do all of the above.

As most drone incidents happen in prohibited airspace by drone pilots who don’t abide by the FAA rules, such legislation isn’t too surprising. The currently proposed regulations would give the federal government much more leeway in dealing with remotely piloted drones when and if they find their way into protected air space.

Via: Giga Law

Source: The New York Times

Class-action suit alleges GM cheated emissions test

Yet another automaker has potentially been caught trying to cheat on its EPA emissions tests. Following VW’s “diesel-gate” SNAFU in 2015 and the Justice Department going after Fiat-Chrysler just last week, GM on Thursday found itself the defendant in a class-action suit over its alleged use of “defeat devices” similar to those used by VW.

The suit, filed in federal court in Detroit, is on behalf of more than 705,000 people who bought or leased Chevy “Duramax” Silverado and Sierra trucks between 2011 and 2016. It alleges that the company employed three different “defeat devices” to bypass state and federally mandated emissions tests and that these vehicles actually produce between two and five times the legal limit of NOx gas.

GM has denied the charges’ validity, calling the lawsuit “baseless”. A group of law firms, including Hagens Berman Sobol Shapiro (which was involved in the VW case), filed the suit.

Via: Business Insider

Source: Reuters

HTC Link promises a high-end VR experience with a smartphone

Consumers with an interest in VR currently have two options: The high-end systems, such as the Oculus Rift, have their own displays and are powered by a computer. The more portable systems, like the Samsung Gear VR, are powered by your smartphone and use it as a display. There hasn’t been much to bridge this gap in VR systems until now.

Enter the HTC Link, which stands in between the two types of VR that are currently available. It connects with a smartphone — the company’s flagship U11 — but has its own display. It also offers a full range of motion, promising six degrees of freedom (6DOF) in a two-meter by two-meter square space, which hasn’t been available in smartphone-powered VR devices.

The device promises to be “cableless,” though it will still connect to your phone and an external camera. Unlike the Vive’s system, the Link’s headset and controllers have PlayStation VR-style lights that will likely be tracked via an external sensor. For the screen, the HTC Link boasts two 3.6-inch AMOLED panels with 1080 x 1200 resolution and a 90-Hz refresh rate, which is the same as the Oculus Rift and the Vive.

The catch? As of right now, it’s only available in Japan.

Additionally, the specs and features of the HTC Link could be a challenge for developers, and it will be interesting to see the differences between this and the standalone HTC Vive Daydream VR headsets. The real question is what the debut of the HTC Link might mean for VR. Could this device be the answer to the tension between a high-end VR experience and the desire for affordability? We don’t have pricing details on the HTC Link yet, but it’s possible.

Source: HTC, Upload VR

Texas legislature overrules Austin, allows Uber and Lyft to return

When Austin citizens voted in May 2016 to require fingerprint-based background checks from ride-sharing drivers and ban passenger pickup in traffic lanes, Uber and Lyft promptly pulled out of the city. But both are scheduled to restart operations in the city next Monday thanks to legislation passed by the Texas Legislature this month. The bill overrides local ordinances like Austin’s that regulate ride-hailing services and only needs Governor Greg Abbott’s signature to become law.

Buckle up. Coming soon. https://t.co/AF34IVISL2

— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) May 17, 2017

While Lyft and Uber are celebrating, the city isn’t. The bill, HB 100, would override the state’s 20-plus local ordinances and require ride-sharing companies to conduct criminal background and sex offender checks for drivers — but allow them to use ones they prefer. Uber’s internal checks have failed to discover criminal records before, and when Massachusetts enacted tougher background research rules last month, over 8,000 current drivers were rejected for violent/sexual crimes or drunk or reckless driving. Doubtless these enhanced checks aim to weed out predatory chauffeurs — like Uber drivers who have sexually assault passengers, which the company has tried wiggling out of legal responsibility for.

Once Lyft and Uber activate their drivers, both ride-sharing titans will have to compete with local operators that sprung up in the interim. Companies like Fare and Fasten along with the nonprofit ride-hailing service RideAustin complied with Austin’s rules, which were passed by the city to raise the standards of ride-sharing drivers to match taxi drivers (who are required to submit fingerprints and pass background checks). Whether the homegrown services retain their lead once the industry-dominating Lyft and Uber return depends on the passengers — and how they’ll vote with their wallet.

Source: Austin American-Statesman

Your mall will basically have to be psychic to survive

Repeat after me: Shopping is therapy. Whether you believe it or not, the rush some of us get from buying a new dress or gadget can be cathartic. And in the not-too-distant future, real-world shopping will get so seamless that it could feel like the store is actually psychic. But it’s not just about flashy displays of bleeding-edge tech. Instead, expect a subtler approach that focuses on understanding your tastes to find you your next outfit while you’re in the fitting room, all in the right size. Stores will learn to recognize you as you browse and change dynamically to show things that matter more to you so you won’t have to be disappointed by missing sizes or sift through stuff you wouldn’t have bought anyway.

For instance, shelves of shoes will also show if each design is available in your size or if you have to go online to find it. In future fitting rooms, the mirror might welcome you back when you walk in, and it’ll already know your preferred fit, cuts, brands and sizes so it can predict what you might like to try on. If you’ve bought a particular shade of foundation, a screen on the shelf can show you looks that are mapped to that hue. When you drive up to a gas pump, it will already know which credit card you’ll be using because it detected and authenticated your license plate and identity.

These scenarios are just examples that form part of Healey Cypher’s vision of the retail store of the future. He’s the CEO of San Francisco-based startup Oak Labs, which calls itself a “retail innovation company” and has been working with brands like Ralph Lauren and Rebecca Minkoff to embed tech in their stores for unique shopping experiences.

“It’s not a lot of screens or holograms or robots taking your hands guiding you along,” Cypher told Engadget. He believes it will be tech that you can’t see but that works behind the scenes to show you information that you need.

That seamlessness extends to the payment process as well. With all the infrastructure that will have been embedded into various surfaces throughout the store, checkout counters could eventually disappear altogether.

“From the window of the storefront all the way to the fitting room environment… any surface could be a purchase interaction or counter,” said Stephane Wyper, senior vice president of new commerce and partnerships at Mastercard. You could pay for your goods no matter where you are in (or even outside) the store and that could eliminate the lines that have long been one of the worst parts of brick-and-mortar shopping.

To enable a smooth experience, companies are going to need data, such as your shopping history, your size and even medical details like your allergies or dietary restrictions. And if you want payments to be seamless, you’ll also have to provide your credit card information.

But are shoppers going to want to give stores access to personal information? Cypher and Wyper agree that they might — with the right benefits, anyway.

Wyper says consumers will share a certain amount of information if the convenience outweighs a loss in privacy. “Retailers have to figure out how to use [the data] and also ensure the consumer has control over the types of experiences and benefits they want in return for sharing their information,” he said.

To Cypher, the advantage is clear. “Time is increasingly the currency we value,” he said. “The extent to which you can save me time on the repetitive stuff is going to be a hugely important benefit.”

Cypher can think of two examples where consumers are happy to share personal information with companies in exchange for convenience and time saved. “We’re not far off from when someone comes in and they’re going to want the experience to be like Uber, where the payment is totally invisible.”

Amazon has also made it so convenient for users to stay logged in that people don’t think about signing out anymore. “Look at Amazon Go,” Cypher said. “It’s annoying to check in at first, but once you do that you’ll find that there’s the benefit in reduction of cognitive load too.” This sales model already works on the company’s “One Click Buy” service. “You know all the basics on Amazon,” he added. “It knows your credit card and shipping address. You know how fast it’s going to ship.” That convenience, Cypher says, makes people flock to Amazon even if it doesn’t have the cheapest prices.

In fact, that convenience has lured so many to shop online that it may seem like physical stores are on their way to extinction. Just look at Macy’s, JC Penney, Sears and KMart — all have announced closures of hundreds of outlets this year. But experts agree that brick-and-mortar stores are here to stay. As Brian Kavanagh, senior director of retail insights at The Hershey Company, puts it in an interview, “While technology will enable less friction, there are still core human truths that remain relevant: People place a high value on experiences, they seek social connection and want to avoid the routine and mundane.”

Wyper agrees. “Physical stores are still an important ingredient of the retailer playbook,” he said. They’re just due for a reinvention.

We don’t know yet know exactly how retailers will customize their experiences for shoppers and what they’ll do with customers’ data. But in many ways, the future of shopping is already here. We already willingly hand over personal information to the likes of Uber, Amazon, Seamless and iTunes, all for the sake of convenience. Targeted advertising already exists online and arrives in our mail, too. Putting all the pieces together thoughtfully isn’t an easy feat, though, and the road to a coherent, secure and useful experience is long, and fraught with both legal and technological challenges. Still, when that happens, real-life shopping is going to feel a lot more like it does online.

Welcome to Tomorrow, Engadget’s new home for stuff that hasn’t happened yet. You can read more about the future of, well, everything, at Tomorrow’s permanent home and check out all of our launch week stories here.

Images: Oak Labs (Onscreen selection); Gabe Souza/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images (Checkout line)

Instagram Direct doesn’t care about your photo orientation

Instagram Direct debuted in 2013 as a way to send photos and videos, well, directly to your friends on the photo sharing service. The Facebook-owned company has added more features to the system over the intervening years, like threaded messaging, disappearing messages and live video. Instagram Direct’s latest update adds two more features aimed at creating a more robust messaging service: non-square images and links.

When you send a permanent, non-disappearing photo to a buddy with Instagram Direct, you don’t have find the perfect square crop anymore. Simply grab a portrait or landscape oriented photo from your camera roll and let fly. Sounds a lot easier than uploading non-square photos in the regular Instagram feed. Also, when you send a link, phone number or address in Direct, your friend can tap through to launch the appropriate app to handle it, like Safari, the phone app or your contacts.

Instagram added more Snapchat-like features — disappearing photos and live video — to its Direct service in November 2016. It also bundled permanent and disappearing photos together this past April. These new additions might further encourage users to stay within the walled Instagram garden when chatting, instead of hopping over to apps like Snapchat. Landscape and portrait uploads are available on iOS now with Android to come later. Links, however, are available with the update on both platforms.

Source: Instagram

Robot uses machine-learning to grab objects on the first try

Training robots how to grasp various objects without dropping them usually requires a lot of practice. But a new robot, designed by researchers at UC Berkeley and Siemens and described in an upcoming paper, can learn how to grip new objects just by studying a database of 3D shapes.

The robot is connected to a 3D sensor and a deep-learning neural network to which researchers fed images of objects. They included information about the objects’ shapes, visual appearances and the physics of how to go about grabbing them. So, when a new object is placed in front of the robot, it just has to match it to a similar object in the database.

In practice, when the robot was more than 50 percent confident that it could grab a new object, the robot was able to grip and not drop it 98 percent of the time. If it was less than 50 percent confident, the robot would give the object a poke and then decide on a gripping strategy. In those cases, the robot was successful 99 percent of the time. A quick little inspection is all it needs to overcome a lack of confidence.

This method of robot training can shave a lot of time off from machine-learning processes and can produce robots with greater dexterity. “We can generate sufficient training data for deep neural networks in a day or so instead of running months of physical trials on a real robot,” Jeff Mahler, a postdoctoral researcher working on the project, told MIT Technology Review. The robots currently used in factories are very precise and accurate with known objects but can’t adjust well when faced with new ones. The efficiency of this training strategy and the reliability of the robot’s grip sets this method up nicely for commercial use in the future.

Via: MIT Technology Review

Source: Arxiv

Baidu’s text-to-speech system mimics a variety of accents ‘perfectly’

Chinese tech giant Baidu’s text-to-speech system, Deep Voice, is making a lot of progress toward sounding more human. The latest news about the tech are audio samples showcasing its ability to accurately portray differences in regional accents. The company says that the new version, aptly named Deep Voice 2, has been able to “learn from hundreds of unique voices from less than a half an hour of data per speaker, while achieving high audio quality.” That’s compared to the 20 hours hours of training it took to get similar results from the previous iteration, for a single voice, further pushing its efficiency past Google’s WaveNet in a few months time.

Baidu says that unlike previous text-to-speech systems, Deep Voice 2 finds shared qualities between the training voices entirely on its own, and without any previous guidance. “Deep voice 2 can learn from hundreds of voices and imitate them perfectly,” a blog post says.

In a research paper (PDF), Baidu concludes that its neural network can create voice pretty effectively even from small voice samples from hundreds of different speakers. All of which to say, it might not be long before we start hearing digital assistants that are more representative of the voices users encounter in their day-to-day lives.

To hear how far the tech has come and for more information of how the team got to this point, hit the source links below.

Via: The Verge

Source: Baidu (1), (2) (PDF)