HTC U11 debuts in India with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage for a sensible ₹51,990 ($800)

HTC is back to winning ways with the U11.

HTC made several questionable decisions regarding its strategy in India over the last two years, but it finally looks like the Taiwanese manufacturer is learning from its mistakes. The HTC U11 has made its debut in the country, offering hardware that can hold its own next to the likes of the Galaxy S8 and LG G6. Crucially, HTC got the pricing right this time around, giving the U11 a better chance than any other HTC device in recent memory.

The HTC U11 gets all the basics right when it comes to the hardware — you’re looking at a 5.5-inch QHD panel backed by Gorilla Glass 5, 2.45GHz Snapdragon 835, 6GB of RAM, 128GB storage, microSD slot, 12MP camera, 16MP front shooter, 4G with VoLTE, and a 3000mAh battery with Quick Charge 3.0. The phone also has IP67 certification for dust and water resistance, and runs Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box.

The highlight of the HTC U11 is a squeezable frame that offers a new way of interaction with your phone. With Edge Sense, you’ll be able to squeeze the sides of the phone to perform actions, like launching the camera, taking a screenshot, and more.

It’ll be interesting to see how the HTC U11 fares in India. For the first time in several years, there isn’t a major drawback with an HTC flagship — if you overlook the fact that it doesn’t have a 3.5mm jack, and the aggressive pricing gives customers a third option in this segment.

The phone will be up for sale on Amazon India during the last week of June, and HTC will also make the device available at thousands of retail stores across the country. You can also pre-order direct from HTC starting tomorrow to be eligible to receive a free flip cover.

Who’s looking to pick up the HTC U11?

HTC U11

• HTC U11 review
• HTC U11 specs
• Manufacturing the U11: Behind the scenes
• Join our U11 forums
• HTC U11 vs Galaxy S8
• HTC U11 vs LG G6

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Where to buy the HTC U11 in the U.S.

HTC U11 in the U.S.: where, when and for how much.

HTC’s relationships with the U.S. carriers have weakened, and with the launch of its 2017 flagship the U11 it has just one carrier on board. The HTC U11 is exclusive to Sprint at launch, but has other retail partners for a proper unlocked model. The pricing from Sprint is set at $0 down and $29 per month for two years, or a total price of $696. Sprint will be offering the U11 in black and blue colors, at least at launch.

Thankfully, you are only stuck going to Sprint if you want to buy the phone directly from your operator. HTC is also selling the U11 unlocked on Amazon and HTC.com, continuing an excellent trend of selling directly to consumers who want to bypass the carriers. It’s available immediately for order from both storefronts for $649, with an additional color choice of silver alongside black and blue.

Amazon

Amazon is selling the U.S. unlocked model of the U11, coming in black, silver and blue colors. The listing has a proper price of $649, plus free shipping for Prime members. Amazon offers special 12-month financing if you use an Amazon Store Card.

See at Amazon

HTC

It’s always a fine idea to buy a phone directly from the manufacturer. HTC sells the U11 directly for $649 in the same black, silver and blue color options — no word yet on when (or if) the red and white color options will be available. HTC offers 24-month financing from its website.

You’ll notice that HTC lets you select your carrier when buying, but don’t be confused by that — selecting AT&T, T-Mobile or Verizon gets you the same unlocked model. HTC is simply trying to explain that its unlocked phones work on all U.S. carriers. The Sprint model is indeed a Sprint-specific SKU, though.

See at HTC

Sprint

If you’re already a Sprint customer or perhaps switching and can get some incentives on a new phone, you may end up finding that getting a U11 directly from Sprint makes the most sense for you.

Sprint only offers the black and blue colors, and the price is a smidge higher at $696 (or $29/mo), so seriously consider buying the unlocked one for more options and a lower price.

See at Sprint

HTC U11

• HTC U11 review
• HTC U11 specs
• Manufacturing the U11: Behind the scenes
• Join our U11 forums
• HTC U11 vs Galaxy S8
• HTC U11 vs LG G6

Amazon
Sprint
HTC

HTC Vive: The Ultimate Guide

If you’re new to the HTC Vive or a VR veteran, this is your ultimate guide!

Earlier this year HTC debuted it’s first virtual reality headset, the HTC Vive. With the intention of providing high quality experiences to the masses, the headset has emerged as a consumer favorite as of late.

Whether you’re just starting out with the platform or been rocking a headset since launch, we’ve complied the best tips and tricks to take your experience that extra bit forward. From buyer’s guides, tutorials and troubleshooting, we’re sure to cover your needs!

Read more at VR Heads!

T-Mobile gets busy this summer rolling out new 600MHz network

The Un-carrier has a busy, busy summer ahead of it.

T-Mobile ran away with 45% of the 600MHz spectrum at the FCC’s spectrum auction earlier this year, and the time has come to start using it. T-Mobile is going to use its newly acquired licenses for 600MHz to beef up its high-speed LTE network this summer.

The FCC finally sorted out the last of the paperwork with the magenta-colored carrier this week, and now T-Mobile has announced its plans to beef up its network during the summer with this new bandwidth. It’s planning to develop the new spectrum and prep test sites this summer, with the hope of bringing that bandwidth to the average user later this year. Phones supporting 600MHz spectrum should also be available by that time.

The hope here is that with this low-band spectrum, which travels further and can penetrate thicker walls, T-Mobile can start really competing with AT&T and Verizon where it counts. Can it come back to school in the fall a whole new wireless network? Maybe, maybe not, but at least the work has started.

Apple hires the executives that brought ‘Breaking Bad’ to Sony

Apple’s push into television has been given a massive boost after the company announced it has hired two of the industry’s biggest executives. Former Sony Pictures Television presidents Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg have jumped ship to lead Apple’s video programming division and will report directly to SVP of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue.

While Erlicht and Van Amburg aren’t exactly household names, the shows they’ve helped produce are. The duo are responsible for bringing Breaking Bad showrunner Vince Gilligan to Sony studios and were more recently involved in the development of hit streaming shows like Netflix’s The Crown and Amazon’s Sneaky Pete (which is produced by Bryan Cranston).

“Jamie and Zack are two of the most talented TV executives in the world and have been instrumental in making this the golden age of television,” said Cue in a press release. “We have exciting plans in store for customers and can’t wait for them to bring their expertise to Apple — there is much more to come.”

Currently, Apple’s roster of original content is fairly small, with shows like Planet of the Apps and Carpool Karaoke only recently being made available. Earlier this year, reports suggested that Apple was in the process of acquiring Hollywood talent with the view to launch a small number of high-quality original concepts to rival shows like Westworld and Stranger Things.

With device sales beginning to slow, Apple has shifted some of its focus to software and services. Original TV series — and eventually movies — may be used to lure Apple Music subscribers. The company is currently playing catch-up to Spotify and is a minnow in the video streaming market, at least compared to Netflix and Amazon.

Variety reports that Van Amburg and Erlicht will formally leave Sony Pictures Television later this summer, meaning Apple fans will have to wait a little longer to see what their vision is for Apple’s video business.

Source: Apple

US Air Force launch costings give SpaceX all the marketing it needs

The US Air Force has revealed how much the government can save by having SpaceX launch some of its satellites instead of relying purely on United Launch Alliance. Launch prices used to be discussed in vague terms until the 2016 National Defense Authorization Act required the Department of Defense to include a budget for national security space programs in its annual reports. Now, the Air Force’s budget request (PDF) for the next few years, which Ars Technica got its hands on, finally has solid numbers we can look at: It shows that the division expects to pay as much as $423 million per launch by the year 2021 if it allows ULA — a Boeing and Lockheed joint venture — to have a monopoly on its launches.

The expected ULA launch prices for 2018 and 2019 are much lower at $202 million and $216 million, respectively. However, those amounts are still more than double the $83 million and the $96.5 million the Air Force is paying SpaceX to launch GPS satellites those fiscal years. SpaceX might raise its prices for 2020 and beyond, but it most likely won’t cost as much as $400 million for one launch. In response to Ars’ report, SpaceX chief Elon Musk tweeted that a price difference of $300 million per launch means its clients’ satellites are basically free:

$300M cost diff between SpaceX and Boeing/Lockheed exceeds avg value of satellite, so flying with SpaceX means satellite is basically free https://t.co/CaOulCf7ot

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 16, 2017

The best thing about being more transparent about launch prices? Lawmakers can now make more informed decisions about how and where to spend taxpayers’ money.

Source: Ars Technica

Engadget at E3: Checking in on indie game development in 2017

The indie-video-game industry is massive, churning out mainstream hits and padding the marketplaces on Xbox One, PlayStation 4, PC, mobile and even Nintendo Switch. But the one thing that makes indie development so flexible — true independence from outside companies or investors — is also what makes it so unstable.

We sat down with a trio of veteran indie developers — Dennis Wedin (Hotline Miami), Erin Robinson Swink (Gravity Ghost) and Ben Ruiz (Aztez) — on the Engadget stage at E3, where we were surrounded by the crushing noise and lights of gaming’s largest publishers. It made for a fitting juxtaposition: The state of indie is strong even when creators are being ignored by companies like Sony and Microsoft. And the industry is becoming more secure by the day, thanks to a supportive community of developers.

See that part of the conversation right here:

One tasty tidbit that came up during the on-stage conversation (but didn’t make it into the edited video): Wedin, the man responsible for one of the most unapologetically bloody games of the past 10 years, was planning on becoming a kindergarten teacher just before Hotline Miami really caught fire.

Follow your dreams, kids.

Follow all the latest news from E3 2017 here!

Netflix will join net neutrality ‘Day of Action’ after all

After being on the front lines of net neutrality action for years, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings recently declared that it is no longer its “primary battle … because we’re big enough to get the deals we want.” That caused a lot of consternation among foes of the FCC’s plan to roll back consumer internet protections, but apparently the streaming giant has changed its mind. Organizers say Netflix will participate in the July 12 “Internet-Wide Day of Action to Save Net Neutrality,” and the company tweeted that it “will never outgrow the fight for #NetNeutrality.”

Prior to the implementation of current net neutrality rules by former FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler, Netflix was one of the primary lobbyists for new net neutrality rules. That’s because its video streams take up a big chunk of internet traffic, and carriers like Verizon or Comcast have incentive to limit its services in favor of their own cable and streaming options.

Netflix will never outgrow the fight for #NetNeutrality. Everyone deserves an open Internet. https://t.co/iHfQUjfq2x

— Netflix US (@netflix) June 15, 2017

As such, Netflix’s new stance likely seemed hypocritical to “Day of Action” backers, a large group ranging from consumer organizations like Demand Progress to journalist group Center for Media Justice to large website like Reddit to retail giant Amazon.

Net neutrality rules implemented in 2015 reclassified internet service providers as public utilities, putting them under closer regulatory scrutiny. Specifically, the laws prohibit ISP actions like paid prioritization and slowdown of lawful content. However, new FCC chairman Ajit Pai wants to gut the rules, believing that ISPs can regulate themselves and won’t take advantage of lax rules to screw consumers — even though they’ve proven that they’re willing to do that over and over again.

Other notable groups involved in the July 12th protests include Y Combinator, Mozilla, Kickstarter, Vimeo and Pornhub. “Net neutrality is vital to a healthy Internet: it protects free speech, competition and innovation online,” said Mozilla’s Denelle Dixon. “It’s also something a majority of Americans support — 76 percent, according to a recent Mozilla-Ipsos poll.”

Via: Ars Technica

Source: Netflix (Twitter)

Ai Weiwei’s ‘Hansel & Gretel’ is a surveillance playground

Should you Instagram an art exhibit?

Taking an art selfie might mean participating in the aesthetic experience, hacking and remixing it with your presence. Then again, maybe commoditizing the affair for likes detracts from art’s ability to make us slow down and be immersed in something outside ourselves.

At Hansel & Gretel, an interactive installation about modern surveillance by Ai Weiwei, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, selfies are part of the experience.

The installation begins in a 55,000-square-foot dystopian playground. Set within New York’s Park Avenue Armory, the hall is cool, dark and quiet, giving the illusion of privacy. But everyone who enters is tracked relentlessly from above by 56 computers with infrared cameras, projecting bird’s-eye images of visitors onto the ground next to them, outlined with red boxes. Start walking and these ghostly portraits remain, leaving a digital trail. The spying feels aggressive when whirring drones survey the area, but they’re just a distraction when everyone is already being tracked in silent, subtle ways without escape.

Yet people are overwhelmingly having fun. They spin around, strike ballet poses and make snow angels on the ground, then whip out smartphones to capture the imprint.

The more fun you want to have, the more you have to step into the light.

The floor is lighter in several areas, which create more snapshots of your movements. People gravitate toward them. The more fun you want to have, the more you have to step into the light.

The juxtaposition of an imposing environment with carefree enjoyment is disconcerting but understandable. While visitors share the pervasive feeling of being watched, they don’t know who’s watching, or to what ends. It’s hard to care. Besides, everyone else is consenting to being monitored too, and look at the fun they’re having.

This is the heart of the installation: how we trade our privacy for fun.

“We also are actively involved in this,” said Jacques Herzog on a panel at the installation’s opening. “It’s not just that we are victims.”

Every time we use services like Instagram or Snapchat, we voluntarily give up our data in exchange for entertainment. The more we give — adding geolocation, tagging friends, linking other social media accounts — the more we’re rewarded with interesting features.

Sometimes the nefarious ways our data is used comes to light — advertisers used to be able to exclude Facebook users on “ethnic affinity,” and Uber bought anonymized Lyft receipts pulled from the email inboxes of Unroll.me customers. But for the most part, the knowledge of what personal information we’re giving up is hazy.

A post shared by Ai Weiwei (@aiww) on June 6, 2017, at 10:18 p.m. PDT

“As a New Yorker, or somebody in the city, you expose yourself to surveillance all the time, no matter where you go,” said Ai Weiwei at the panel. “Even if we know there’s a camera there, we don’t even know what is being recorded and how later [it] would become something which is useful.”

Ai knows these issues intimately. While Hansel & Gretel uses surveillance for fun, the iconoclastic artist has also made fun of surveillance. In 2012, while under state monitoring in Beijing, he wryly broadcast four live webcams from his house to weiweicam.com until the government shut it down in less than two days.

While we seldom get a peek behind the panopticon, the second part of Hansel & Gretel provides the viewpoint of the person doing the watching. In a separate area, visitors use iPads to watch feeds from the security cameras, drones and infrared cameras following those in the main hall. They can take a picture of themselves and facial recognition will identify grainy photos of them wandering the building earlier.

“The first part was physically disconcerting — I couldn’t see where I was walking,” said Yvonne Caruthers, a fellow visitor. “The second part was alarming.”

Yet, like tech companies, the exhibit made public only a sliver of the insights they potentially could have harvested. With all that motion tracking and video footage, perhaps other inferences could be made: who a visitor interacts with, how rapidly they move through the exhibit, which areas they spend the most time in. If the exhibit showed people just how much big data thinks it knows about them, the cost of their earlier fun would be more apparent.

A lot of what art institutions are doing is surveilling their population. They’re trying to figure out how to get young, hip people to come back to their spaces.

Elizabeth Losh

Chelsea Beroza (R + A)

The irony of an installation spotlighting intrusive surveillance is that museums — like many institutions — already monitor their visitors via social media.

“A lot of what art institutions are doing is surveilling their population. They’re trying to figure out how to get young, hip people to come back to their spaces,” said Elizabeth Losh, an associate professor at the College of William and Mary, in Virginia, who studies the relationship between digital and traditional media.

Every hashtag of an installation or museum creates data that curators can use to analyze what features of an exhibition a visitor fixated on and whether those people are social influencers who could attract an even larger audience.

Vast, immersive exhibits like Rain Room encourage the most social media posts and, therefore, the most data. Visitors to Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirrors have reportedly waited in line for over three hours, while Wonder, at Washington, DC’s Renwick Gallery, brought 732,000 viewers in eight months to an institution whose prior annual attendance was 150,000.

“It has privileged certain kinds of blockbuster shows, certain kinds of optics,” said Losh. “For example, there’s no way you’re going to be able to shoot something selfie-appropriate if you’re looking into a microscope at tiny miniatures. It requires certain aesthetic features in order for that combination of the art and social network platforms to work.”

Hansel & Gretel has those aesthetics features. The stylized reflections it creates are made for the art selfie, and visitors start snapping because of how they’re conditioned to interact with this genre of installation.

The photos that result help to market the exhibition and feed into the data banks of Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter. Ai, Herzog and de Meuron have made an installation with a watchful Big Brother at its center, but it’s not because of the ominous drones or cameras. The real monitoring devices are the smartphones we voluntarily point at ourselves. We’re creating our own surveillance.

The CIA has been rooting around in your WiFi router

A recent Wikileaks document dump revealed that the CIA has been hacking wireless routers. The documents suggest it has been going on for years and as many as 25 devices from 10 different manufacturers were targeted.

This latest leak included user manuals and installation guides for a number of hacking tools. One of them, dubbed CherryBlossom, let the CIA monitor a target’s internet activity, redirect their browser and scan for information.

The list of compromised router brands includes, but is likely not limited to, Asus, Belkin, Buffalo, Dell, Dlink, Linksys, Motorola, Netgear, Senao and US Robotics. Apple is not on the list, but it’s unclear how many other devices might have been targeted after these documents were created.

The weak security of WiFi routers is well documented and this is just the latest device revealed to have been hacked by the CIA. Past Wikileaks reveals have included smart phones, laptops and Windows computers.

Whether these implants are still in use or if the CIA has moved on to something else isn’t yet clear. But we’ll surely be seeing some frantic updates from the affected router brands very soon.

Via: 9to5Mac

Source: ZDNet