Huawei’s all-metal Honor 6A brings an iPhone-like design on the cheap

Why it matters to you

If it’s a small and inexpensive Android phone you’re looking for, Huawei’s stylish Honor line has got you covered.

Good, cheap phones aren’t easy to find. But phones that are good, cheap, and small are an even rarer commodity. Fortunately, Huawei’s budget Honor brand is looking to buck that trend.

The company announced the Honor 6A this week at an event in its native China. The phone features a 5-inch, 720p display and is powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 430 system-on-chip. At the back, there’s a 13-megapixel camera featuring phase detection autofocus, and a fingerprint sensor located underneath. There is also a 5 megapixel front-facing camera, and the battery weighs in at a hefty 3,020mAh — generous capacity that is sure to help that 720p screen last a while on a charge.

Best of all, the Honor 6A starts at 800 yuan, or the equivalent of $116 in the United States. For that price, you get 2GB of RAM and 16GB storage. Spend a little extra, and for 1,000 yuan, or $145, Huawei will give you an extra gigabyte of RAM and twice the storage. The phone also accepts MicroSD cards up to 128GB.

In terms of software, Android 7.0 Nougat is on board, with Huawei’s Emotion UI (EMUI) in tow. If you don’t know, EMUI is Huawei’s Android skin, and it’s a pretty drastic change from the stock operating system. There’s no app drawer, for example, and many of the icons are reshaped into rounded rectangles — making it, on the surface, something of a hybrid between iOS and Android.

Because of the heavy customizations Huawei has made to the interface, system updates do tend to take a bit longer to arrive on the company’s devices. However, security patches shouldn’t suffer quite as much.

The iOS/iPhone relationship does bleed into the Honor 6A’s design as well. Looking at it from the front, with the screen off, Huawei’s budget offering is a dead-ringer for Apple’s flagships, save for the lack of a physical home button. In its place, you have the Honor logo. However, the overall shape, speaker cutout, camera and sensors up top, and the hint of shimmering aluminum along the edges mean that, from a distance, you’ll have a hard time telling it apart from Cupertino’s latest.

Fortunately, it’s available in a few colors the iPhone isn’t. You have your pick of silver, gold, pink, and blue — all with a white front. And it must be said, derivative or not, this is a good looking phone, with an all-metal unibody construction that stands out among other low-priced offerings.

The Honor 6A will be available from Chinese online retailers, like JD.com and Vmall, starting June 1. U.S. availability is unknown at this time.

How to prepare your HTC Vive for Star Trek: Bridge Crew

Is my Vive ready for Star Trek: Bridge Crew?

Star Trek: Bridge Crew, the hotly anticipated game that many VR and Trek fans have been waiting for forever is finally dropping May 30, 2017. The ability to sit on the bridge of the USS Aegis and work as a team with your friends on Oculus Rift and PlayStation VR is bound to be popular, but how can you get your Vive ready for what promises to be an authentic Trek experience? Here are a few tips to ensure your bridge station is as good as possible.

Read more at VR Heads!

Fixing Play Music: How Google can improve its streaming music service

How can Google Play Music improve? Let us count the ways…

I’m not exaggerating when I say this: Google Play Music is the first app I use every morning and it is the last thing I see before I put my phone to sleep at night. And no, that’s not just because Google Play Music is my alarm clock. Music is what keeps me sane during chaotic work days, and it’s what cheers me up when life inevitably happens. Google Play Music always has been my most-used app, and it’s changed a lot in since it launched in 2011.

Not all of those changes have been good, and there are more that still need to happen. Here are the biggest things still missing in one of Google Play’s most important services.

UI Overhaul

Four years ago, Google Play Music went from Holo blue/black to a more retina-searing orange/white. Ever since, Play Music has been adding and adding features without any major UI changes, which has lead to the app becoming a bloated mess.

The home page was the portion of the app to most recently receive an update, showcasing recommended albums, artists, and stations. I’m all for recommendations, especially the way Play Music’s keeping improving, but nine times out of 10, we’re not looking for recommendations, but are instead looking to pick up where we left off in our last playlist, or returning to that artist we were listening to this morning. Recents are a relegated to a button below the search bar and in the main menu.

The app is a bloated mess.

The main menu has ballooned over the years. Podcasts were added; Explore split into Top charts and New releases; Recents were added when Now Listening turned into recommendations. Want to open the app and go to a playlist that’s not in your recents? It’s at least three taps, to access a core feature of a music-playing app.

This overhaul extends to playback UI and playlist UI as well. The zoomed-in album art was originally meant to help fill the Now Playing screen, but let’s be real: it looks terrible. Give us that full square of album art. If Google wants to fill the rest of that space, make the controls bigger or space them further apart so that we don’t seek when we meant to Cast or thumbs down a track when we meant to fast-forward.

I’m not asking for Google to scrap everything and start completely over. I’m not asking us to go back to the old, simple layout, either — though I am going to ask for a dark theme ’til I’m blue in the face — but the current UI isn’t nearly as sleek and simple as it was pitched back at Google I/O 2013.

Device Policy Revisit

I accept having a device limit. I do. I even understand having a specific limit on phones, as much as it hurts someone like me who goes through a lot of phones. But the device policy on Google Play Music needs to be revisited for a few very important reasons.

• Your computer can be counted twice because both the web extension and Music Manager count as an activation. This means that if you want to download one song or a thousand, you need two different too that take a fifth of your account devices.
• Chromebooks can actually be counted more than that, as they can take a new activation every time you Powerwash them. I had a single Chromebook take up four activations at once when I was cycling between the different channels.
• Devices that can’t download/upload to your Google Play Library can still count against the ten device limit, like Android Wear 2.0 watches and Android TVs.
• Almost every device that ships Android has Google Play Music on it. There should not be a device limit on something that you have no choice in having. The first thing you do on your phone after setting it up should be something productive like syncing your text messages, not disabling Play Music before it activates itself.

That last one is important because you can theoretically get locked out of your own library. If you burn through your device authorizations with phones and tablets and watches and TVs, you could have ten devices and not have a way to upload new music or download what is already rightfully yours.

Let me repeat that: if you run out of device authorizations and de-authorizations, you can be locked out of downloading music you own.

So long as the de-authorization limit exists — a limit which is unheard of on any streaming service Play Music competes with — Play Music is going to be a service that we use while the Sword of Damocles hangs over our heads. Many of my co-workers at Android Central have sanely said screw this and moved on to other music streaming services, and other local music apps. I, myself, have a local music app that I keep handy for the phones on which I disable Google Play Music, because music is so important and I refuse to get caught by surprise.

Uploads/Downloads without a desktop computer

If we’re really living in a post-PC era where you can live on your phone and in the cloud, then I shouldn’t have to boot up my damn desktop just to add a couple of new songs that I bought on sale on Amazon, or that I had to buy on iTunes because of an exclusive, or that I was sent as a gift from a friend. I should be able to add them directly to my cloud library from my phone so that I can add them to playlists, rate them, and Cast them, because you can’t cast locally stored MP3s in Play Music. We shouldn’t need an old-looking and old-acting Music Manager. We shouldn’t need a Chrome extension.

So long as a song not being in your cloud library is considered a bad thing in Google Play Music, you need to be able to fix it right there in the app. And so long as there’s a chance of running out of devices and not being able to make room for more, any device you use needs to be able to download your library and let you get back what’s yours.

Gapless Playback

We’ve all been there: the music’s going strong, you feel the world drifting away as it overwhelms you. The passion, the elation, aaaaand- the song skips a second while Google Play Music goes to the next song. And that moment, that moment of elation… it’s tripped over itself and fallen face-first on the couch.

So many albums are gapless, and nothing will throw off the groove more than that second, second-and-a-half while Google Play switches off between tracks. I don’t know why Google Play Music haven’t implemented it as standard a feature as it is, even single-developer ‘indie’ music apps include gapless playback because they know how important it is. I don’t need five different crossfade settings, but gapless playback is long, long overdue, and it needs to come.

So, what are you still missing in Google Play Music? Want to upload from your phone while you’re out during the day? Want to ditch the pause in the middle of a ridiculously awesome gapless album? Are you just waiting for a dark theme and a way to set Google Play Music as your morning alarm without jumping through ridiculous Tasker hoops? Me, too, my musical friends… me, too.

Tired of Play Music? Play it somewhere else

How to prepare your Galaxy S8 for Google Daydream

The countdown to Daydream with a Galaxy S8 has begun, are you ready?

Samsung’s Galaxy S8 will soon be the only phone capable of using both forms of high quality mobile VR, so if you’ve been eager to see if the grass really is greener on the other side you’ll soon be able to see for yourself.

Just like the Gear VR, you need to do a few things to make sure your phone is good to go for Daydream. Here’s what you need to know!

Read more at VRHeads.com

Microsoft Surface event in Shanghai: What was launched?

Microsoft held a special event in Shanghai on Tuesday 23 May, which it used to announce three Surface devices.

Two of them had been previously revealed at other recent events, the Surface Laptop and Surface Studio, although it was revealed that they will be coming to China too.

However, the new Surface Pro was unveiled for the first time globally.

• Microsoft unveils the Surface Laptop, a Windows 10 S device looking to take down the MacBook

So here’s everything that was revealed at the #MicrosoftEvent in Shanghai and how you can catch up on further details.

Microsoft

Microsoft Surface event in Shanghai: When was it?

Microsoft held its event in Shanghai, China on 23 May but didn’t livestream it (apart from a Chinese language version on a website there). However, you can read a timeline of what happened on its blog here.

Microsoft Surface event in Shanghai: What was launched?

Apart from confirmation that the Surface Laptop and Surface Studio devices will be available from 15 June – in China too – the main product revealed at the event was an all-new Surface Pro.

Upgraded, versatile, and exceptionally powerful, with iconic Surface design. Meet the new Microsoft #SurfacePro. #MicrosoftEvent pic.twitter.com/o1RQjzlySE

— Microsoft Surface (@surface) May 23, 2017

It has a 12.3-inch PixelSense screen and runs on a 7th gen Intel processor. There is also a new Surface Pen with a claimed 4,096 levels of pressure.

Microsoft

The biggest changes between the new Pro and existing Pro 4 is that the newer model is lighter, weighing just 0.77kg. It also has a bigger battery, with a claimed life of up to 13.5 hours between charges.

You can read more about the new Surface Pro here.

2017 Smart ForTwo ED is cheaper than its smaller, slower charging predecessor

The latest Smart ForTwo ED already has a bevy of advantages compared with its predecessor. It’s bigger, its motor is more potent with 80 horsepower and 115 pound-feet of torque, and it charges way more quickly. It’s on-board charger gets it to an 80-percent charge in just 2.5 hours when hooked up to a 240V charger instead of the 4.5 hours of the predecessor. Now it has price on its side, too. The coupe starts at $24,550, which is $1,200 less than the old model.

The convertible version doesn’t get cheaper, but it doesn’t get more expensive either. It starts at the same $28,750 as the previous drop-top version. When applying the $7,500 national tax credit for EVs, the Smart ForTwo ED looks even more affordable, with the coupe starting at $17,050, and the convertible starting at $21,250.

Both models come with additional standard features including cruise control and a warranty for the battery. Smart now offers a Climate Package that adds a heated steering wheel and seats, and also adds more insulation to improve the efficiency of the climate control system. This will likely be a good package for people looking to stay comfortable while maximizing the ForTwo ED’s 70- to 80-mile electric range.

The Smart ForTwo ED will arrive on dealer lots this summer. And, unlike some larger competitors such as the Kia Soul EV and Fiat 500e, the Smart ForTwo ED will be available nationwide.

Related Video:

Instagram is grouping Stories to make them easier to find

Seeing as Instagram’s Stories is fast becoming one of the app’s most popular features, the company is taking steps to make it even more visible. Instagram already had Stories on its Explore page, but today, it will feature two new kinds of Stories: location stories and hashtag stories. Location stories show you the photos and videos that have been tagged with your particular location, while hashtag stories center around a particular hashtag that’s relevant to your interests.

If you fire up Instagram’s Explore page some time today, you’ll see a new story ring marked with your location. Tap it and you’ll see photos and videos from folks who have chosen to add location stickers to their stories. Hashtag stories will look the same way.

What’s particularly interesting is that location and hashtag stories can be found not just in Explore, but through search as well. If you search for “San Francisco” for example, your results won’t just be of photos of San Francisco; you’ll also see a story ring for the city at the top. Similarly, if you search for a hashtag, you’ll see a story ring of that hashtag if other people used it in their stories.

That sounds pretty similar to what Snapchat is already doing with a Stories Search feature that it rolled out a couple of months ago. Search for a keyword on Snapchat, and you’ll see snaps featuring that keyword. The difference here, however, is that on Snapchat, you have to opt in for the snap to be viewable in search. (You’d select “Snap to Our Story.”)

On Instagram, however, any time you add a location sticker or a hashtag to your story, that photo or video could very well show up in that larger story ring on Explore or search. You’ll know it’s there if there’s a line at the top of your viewer list that show the number of people who saw it in the larger story (as in the above image). If you want to keep using those location stickers and hashtags without putting your story on Explore, you have to opt out by hitting X in your stories viewer list.

The problem here is that photos and videos posted to Stories are often a little more intimate and personal than the ones on someone’s regular Instagram feed. The fact that location stickers and hashtags will be indexable and searchable by default won’t sit well with everyone, especially as Stories are often posted quickly without too much forethought. Of course, those photos and videos will disappear after 24 hours anyway, so it might not matter much. Still, I’d probably think twice going forward about adding those location stickers and hashtags in personal Stories.

Instagram says that location stories will roll out to iOS and Android starting today, while hashtag stories will arrive in the coming weeks.

Microsoft’s new Surface Pen should feel more like writing on paper

A new Surface Pro just wouldn’t be the same without improvements to its companion pen, and Microsoft is going all-out with the upgrades this time around. It’s introducing a new Surface Pen that it claims is the “fastest pen ever” on any platform — with a 21ms latency, it’s supposedly fast enough that it’ll feel more like you’re writing on paper than glass. There’s also a whopping 4,096 pressure points (up from 1,024), reduced parallax (the mismatch between where your pen is and where input appears onscreen), and an Apple Pencil-style tilt feature that lets you apply artistic flourishes like shading.

The new Pen will be available in black, burgundy, cobalt blue and platinum colors (to match your Surface Pro or Surface Laptop, naturally). Microsoft hasn’t disclosed stand-alone pricing, but it’s promising that its upgraded stylus will be available in the “coming weeks.”

Hardware isn’t the only star in this show. There’s also a new Whiteboard app for Windows 10 (currently available only as a private preview for the Surface Hub) that gives Surface device owners a collaborative drawing space. If you want to brainstorm a new design with your coworkers, you just have to invite them. The software includes smart object recognition features, too, such as geometry recognition and table conversion.

And there’s more even if you’re happy to draw by yourself. Windows 10 is adding a virtual pencil case that syncs your favorite tools across devices, while Office 365 users will see new ink and texture effects in Excel, PowerPoint and Word in June. Office will support the new Pen’s tilt function as well. If you treat your PC as a canvas, you might be in for a treat in the near future.

Via: The Verge (1), (2)

Source: Microsoft

Snapchat’s custom Stories put you in control of curation

Sure, Facebook and Instagram have been copying the crap out of Snapchat’s Stories feature, but the ephemeral messaging app still remains one step ahead. For now, anyway. Snapchat is maintaining its lead by continuing to tweak its service and today unveiled a new custom Stories tool that will let anyone create a collection and control who sees it.

Right now, Snapchat users can only post to their own Stories with no way of sorting them, and clips are arranged chronologically. With the new custom feature, you can create a collection after taking a Snap, by selecting “Create Story” on the screen where you choose where to send it. Then, you can pick who gets to add to and view the story, and you can also choose to geofence the Story to a location. Stories disappear if no one has contributed to them in the past 24 hours.

The updates should roll out in about a day to iOS and Android users, according to a Snapchat spokesperson. The company said in a blog post that custom Stories will be perfect for special events such as baby showers and weddings or, based on a video for the tool, that incredibly spontaneous girls’ trip with your impossibly glamorous squad.

Source: Snapchat

Alexa can control your dumb AC unit using Ambi’s smart hub

Some of you may recall that back in October 2014, Hong Kong startup Ambi Labs unveiled its Ambi Climate as a gateway between your smartphone and your dumb air conditioner at home. But it isn’t just about replacing your infrared remote control; what makes Ambi Climate unique is its machine learning capability, so that over time it learns your comfort preferences by way of various sensors, while also saving up to 20-percent energy according to user feedback. Now, almost 2.5 years later, the company is back with the Ambi Climate 2, which is essentially a prettier version of its $179 predecessor and with a lower retail price of $129; and you can grab one for as low as around $80 on Kickstarter, with shipments expected to begin in June this year.

Compared to the original Ambi Climate, this new version sports a similar yet more minimalistic black-and-white design, which is topped off with a shinier finish plus a touch of wood at the bottom. The three old LED indicators are now combined into one in the form of Ambi Labs’ logo: it blinks yellow rapidly when booting up, pulses yellow when ready for setup, glows teal when connected and blinks when responding to a command.

Gone is the old infrared motion sensor — it was intended for detecting people in the room — on the side, which was actually long disabled on the previous version as it turned out to be less useful than expected: it could get false readings from the air conditioner’s air flow, and it’s apparently still a challenge for existing motion sensors.

The Ambi Climate 2 consists of the same set of sensors as before to monitor temperature, humidity plus sunlight, and it also collects local weather data. That’s right, temperature alone isn’t the only contributor to the feel of a room, so when the user taps in feedback — on a scale of “freezing” to “hot” — in the companion app’s Comfort Mode, the device will remember all of these parameters to better understand one’s preferences. It also tracks the time of day, as it will make slight adjustments to suit our metabolic cycle; I’ve definitely noticed that my unit raises the temperature a little late at night, since this is taking into account of the fact that our body temperature drops during sleep.

After some learning, Ambi Climate will be able to automatically adjust the air conditioner for the user, as opposed to the user having to find the remote control or tap the app every time. Ambi Labs starting shipping its original product in late August 2015 and it’s now present in various markets (US, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia and more), so it’s no surprise that the company has some fun stats to share. Personally, I was most intrigued by how people across various regions can have very different comfort preferences.

For instance, users in New York have a wider range of preferred temperatures, whereas users in Singapore peaked at around 77 degrees Fahrenheit (about 25 degrees Celsius) — which is actually very close to what I prefer here in Hong Kong. Interestingly, on the “Freezing” end, New Yorkers peaked at 67 degrees Fahrenheit (about 19 degrees Celsius), while Singaporeans appeared to find a broad range of temperatures to be “freezing.” I suspect the latter has something to do with Singapore’s relatively higher humidity.

On top of Comfort Mode, Ambi Climate also offers a Temperature Mode, an Away Mode (it only turns on the air conditioner to suit your settings) and a Manual Mode, as well as a timer and a scheduling feature. While the more tech-savvy users can already use IFTTT to add automation, and Ambi Labs will soon be adding Amazon Alexa support in Q3 2017 (with beta trials starting soon), meaning you’ll be able to give feedback just by voice. In fact, according to CEO Julian Lee, some of his colleagues have even stopped using the app and switched to using voice input full-time.

Another interesting upcoming feature is multi user geo-location. Since each Ambi Climate supports multiple users, this new feature will soon be able to automatically turn off the air conditioner when it knows that absolutely everyone has left the household. Similarly, it can automatically turn on the air conditioner when one of the members is almost home. Again, this is expected to arrive in Q3 this year.

It’s worth noting that all of these features will be backward compatible with the original Ambi Climate, and the same goes for the support for 50 air conditioner brands plus 1,200 models. After all, the startup’s bread and butter lies within its A.I. power, so its current goal is to get its devices into more hands, and then perhaps contemplate premium features in the future. Lee said he’s also been in talks with property developers to explore potential collaborations, and I can see how it would make sense to have Ambi Labs-powered devices installed in hotels, serviced apartments and even offices one day.

Source: Kickstarter