This $11 wall charger has two Quick Charge 3.0 USB ports for fast charging

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See at Amazon

More from Thrifter:

• How to get the most out of your Amazon Prime membership
• Here are some of the best AmazonBasics products to buy

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Uber’s more flexible driver policies promise fewer cancelled rides

If you’ve used Uber long enough, you’ve probably encountered drivers who’ve canceled trips simply because they weren’t convenient. They didn’t want to travel far or had an appointment to make, for instance. You might not have to put up with those surprise cancellations quite so often in the future, though. As part of its “180 days of change” initiative, Uber is providing drivers with more flexibility that promises to have a positive side effect for passengers — you should get more drivers who actually want to ferry you from point A to point B.

Most notably, declining trips won’t hurt a driver’s account standing or chance at promotions. Drivers shouldn’t be as tempted to accept a trip they can’t take and promptly cancel it. They’ll also get notifications whenever a trip is expected to take 45 minutes or longer, so you shouldn’t see your driver cancel just because you need a ride to the airport across the city. Uber workers can also set arrival times for their ultimate destinations, so they won’t be asked to take rides that would lead to missed appointments, and they now have up to six destinations per day instead of a mere two. Also, they’re not stuck offering services they don’t like or aren’t making much money, since they can easily switch to UberEats or decline to offer services like UberPool.

This is the third big change to Uber’s policies since the “180 days” effort began (tipping being the first move), and it reflects the company’s determination to improve its image since the ouster of CEO Travis Kalanick. It’s not just for the sake of appearances, though. Lyft has been growing quickly in part because of its reputation as the friendlier alternative to Uber, both for customers and drivers. If there weren’t changes, Lyft might have plenty of opportunities to lure people disaffected by Uber’s seemingly singular obsession with its bottom line.

Via: TechCrunch

Source: Uber (1), (2)

Verizon’s always-on throttling is an afront to customers and net neutrality

Well, it was nice while it lasted. Today, Verizon (the biggest carrier in the US) announced it was doing away with its simple and fair unlimited wireless data plan and complicating things by instead offering three plans. Two of those cost more, and all three come with compromise. Customers who pick the cheapest plan can have their data speeds throttled at any time. Video won’t stream above 480p and tethering data is limited to the ludicrously slow speed of 600Kbps. Meanwhile, opting for the more expensive plan limits you to 720p video on phones and 1080p video on tablets, and you’ll only be throttled if the network is congested and you’ve used more than 22GB of data in one billing cycle. (The third plan is aimed as business customers.)

This is a big change from what Verizon announced in February, when it surprised just about everyone by bringing back unlimited data. As a reminder, the big US wireless carriers killed unlimited data back in 2011 and started moving customers to tiered plans, wherein you paid for what you used. But Verizon’s new unlimited plan that came out earlier this year was blessedly simple: There was just one plan, your data speeds were only throttled if you both went over 22GB and Verizon’s network was currently congested, and you got a full 10GB of LTE tethering data every month. It wasn’t a cheap plan, but it probably was the most straightforward wireless option with the fewest compromises out there.

That’s all gone now. And, adding insult to injury, all Verizon customers will have streaming video quality downgraded. Whether you have a tiered plan or the unlimited plan that came out in February, Verizon will cap streaming video at 720p. Tablet video and tethered video tops out at 1080p. There’s nothing you can do about this, no money you can throw at this restriction. Verizon says that people won’t notice the difference. Perhaps that’s true, but most smartphones have screens with resolutions far higher than 720p. Why does Verizon care how we use our data? Why can’t I watch 1080p video (or higher) on a Galaxy S8 and blow through my 22GB of pre-throttling data in the first week of the month? If I’m on a tiered plan, let me chug down data, blow through my caps and pay the ridiculous overages if that’s what I want.

Ostensibly, this is about managing traffic and congestion on the network, which Verizon still claims is the best in the US. After six months with unlimited plans back on the menu, Verizon might be sensing a tipping point in quality that these plans will help head off. Indeed, as noted by The Verge, a recent OpenSignal report found that both Verizon and AT&T’s data speeds have slowed since they brought back unlimited data plans.

Of course, that makes all the highfalutin language about how great Verizon is a bit hard to swallow. The reality of the matter is that, as of tomorrow, new customers will pay more money for lesser service and existing customers won’t get what they’ve been paying for all along. It feels like a bait and switch — get customers on board with the unlimited offering and then change up the terms of that agreement, with no recourse. Verizon telegraphed this move last month when some customers noticed YouTube and Netflix speeds being capped, but the carrier said that was only a temporary test.

It’s worth noting that Verizon didn’t actually start this terrible practice. T-Mobile has been screwing around with capping video stream qualities for a while now. That carrier has ended up restricting video to 480p unless you shell out an extra $10 a month per line for HD video. But your overall data speeds are only restricted if the network is congested and you’ve used more than 32GB of data in a month.

That’s much more reasonable than both Verizon and AT&T’s plans. AT&T now has an entry level “unlimited” plan that’s cheap at $60 per month, but video is capped at 480p and speeds are always limited to 3Mbps. That’s unacceptable, and slower than what you could get back in 2011 on AT&T’s pre-LTE, HSPA+ network. To actually get LTE-level speed, you’ll need to shell out $90 a month for a single line. At least that gets you HD video streaming. Sprint’s unlimited plan still offers HD video, but it caps music streaming at 1.5Mbps and gaming at 8Mbps.

It’s unfortunately now looking like a true unlimited plan is a complete pipe dream. Instead of nickel-and-dime-ing customers with data overages from their tiered plans, it looks like we’re hurdling toward a world in which we pay more for better speed, whether that means not getting throttled or having the ability to play back high-speed video. It’s not quite the same as what broadband internet providers sell, where you pay based on your upload and download speeds, but it’s not hard to imagine that happening a year or two down the line. Or maybe every service we use will get throttled. Imagine your web browser speeds being capped, or music limited to lousy, low-bandwidth streams — unless we pay up for each one.

As someone who pays attention to the complicated and compromised plans the US wireless carriers foist upon their consumers, you’d think I wouldn’t be so angry about what Verizon is doing. This is a classic move out of a playbook they’ve been using ever since unlimited data first went away, and even before that, if we’re being honest. But I am angry. This is unfair to existing customers, and new customers will pay more for less. That’s especially disappointing coming on the heels of the fair unlimited plan Verizon rolled out just six months ago. But Verizon can get away with it because the FCC isn’t likely to care about companies violating the principles of net neutrality under Title II that’ll probably be rolled back soon anyway.

I don’t really have anyone to blame but myself for being angry today. Given Verizon’s love for milking customers to death and the realities around net neutrality, I should have seen this coming. In the meantime, you can still sign up for Verizon’s existing unlimited plan today (though streaming video will still be capped at 720p resolution). But you can get a better deal elsewhere. The other carriers all have their own downsides, but their plans a little more reasonable — and they aren’t sticking it to you quite as obviously as Verizon.

Verizon did not respond to our request for comment.

One week with Alexa

My morning routine is simple: I wake up when my phone’s alarm goes off, I go back to sleep, wake up again, contemplate more sleep, get dressed, make coffee and listen to one of Alexa’s “flash briefings” before I start slinging words on the internet. Getting that first news blast of the day used to be a job for my trusty clock radio, but no longer: Alexa’s invasion has begun.

More precisely, it began this past summer, when I was dragged through a Home Depot, saw a spider-wrapped Echo, and said, “Eh, what the hell?” For a while there, in the early days, Alexa’s responsibilities boiled down to reading my Audible audiobooks and telling me what the weather was like so that I didn’t need to look out the window. I know: mundane. Since then, though, she’s become so enmeshed in the fabric of my household that I don’t consciously remember all the times I talk to her. She’s just there, always listening, always trying to be helpful, and mostly succeeding. Strangely, I’ve come to regard Alexa as a sort of cloud-powered child. One moment she’s hyper-capable and in the next, she can’t grasp what I’m saying.

It’s understandably tricky to teach a voice interface to grapple with spoken language, which is why Alexa isn’t much of a polyglot — she understands American English, British English and German. I only speak that first one, and in general, Alexa’s a great listener, thanks to the Echo’s seven microphones. Most of the time, she’s great at understanding me too; I can’t remember the last time she whiffed when I asked her to set an alarm or give me a flash briefing.

Devindra Hardawar/Engadget

Trying to control my rudimentary smart-home setup is a different story. I have three Philips Hue bulbs in lamps around my home, and Alexa can always understand when I ask her to turn them on. Anything more complicated than that is a crapshoot: Sometimes she’ll bring the brightness down to 50 percent, and sometimes she has no idea what I’m asking her. Same goes for leaving myself reminders. If I give Alexa a simple command like “remind me to buy eggs,” she’s fine. Almost anything more complex than that is hit-or-miss to the point where her mangled interpretations have become a running joke.

I don’t mean to make Alexa sound bad; most of the time she handles my commands just fine, so long as they’re reasonably simple. Every once in awhile, she’s even able to remember the context around what I ask so that I didn’t need to ask a slew of repetitive questions. When I asked her in which year John F. Kennedy was assassinated, she answered correctly; she then correctly answered the question “How many kids did he have?” That’s important: She knew “he” was “John F. Kennedy” without me needing to say it again. Alexa definitely still needs work as a conversationalist, though, and Amazon knows it: Alexa’s chief scientist has said prolonged chats are part of the company’s vision.

Beyond that, Alexa isn’t the best at answering general-knowledge questions. Sure, she can pull information from web searches, Wikipedia and more, but she’s still miles behind Google’s Assistant when it comes to scouting out answers to my inane questions. That almost doesn’t matter, though, because developers have come to embrace Alexa with surprising affection. As I write this, Alexa has over 15,000 “skills” — Amazon’s term for all the voice-controlled applets and services that make the assistant more than just a friendly voice in a tube. I’ve asked Alexa to order a pizza (and canceled because she doesn’t support good pizza places) and then played a streamlined version of Jeopardy.

So yeah, Alexa is a super-capable assistant that works best when you talk to her as if she were a toddler. If that dynamic isn’t odd enough, she’s also a shop assistant at the Everything Store.

Among my friends and colleagues, I have a reputation for being a pretty indiscriminate shopper. Do I need that three-pack of breathable running socks? Sure, but only if I upgrade my running shoes. You could call this a disorder, or perhaps, merely a lack of discipline. Either way, I was concerned that having an Amazon shopkeeper living in a black plastic tube with me would lead to many frictionless, frivolous purchases. I needn’t have worried. Alexa’s skill as a shopping assistant is well-documented: You can purchase almost anything from Amazon’s seemingly infinite store shelves with just a few commands. Thankfully, Alexa is terrible at idle browsing.

Let’s go back to those running socks. Unless I know exactly which ones I want, I would just ask her to “buy me some running socks.” Alexa thinks for a second and tells you all about the highest-ranking result for that search query. If that doesn’t work, well, she’s off to search result No. 2. It makes total sense that shopping with Alexa would work like that, but that doesn’t make it any less tedious.

For all the good that Alexa is capable of, she sometimes just freaks me out. She’ll just be sitting there, totally inert, when I notice her blue listening light come to life out of the corner of my eye. What the hell? Turns out, they’re false positives from the ever-present TV or YouTube video I have running, and they’ve thankfully become less common.

Now, I’m not vain enough to think anyone would want to spy on me, but it’s not like mass surveillance is impossible. I know that if Alexa were recording everything we said, a shitstorm of unholy proportions would land on Jeff Bezos’s doorstep. Still, part of my paranoid brain can’t help but wonder. Is it possible? Maybe? There’s also the conundrum of constantly referring to a technically sexless disembodied voice as a “she” like I have been. Based on her name and her voice, Amazon very clearly intended for Alexa to be female, but there are moments when bossing around a subservient assistant can feel paternalistic.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

Alexa isn’t just a homebody anymore, either. Thanks to some opportune partnerships, she’s now on phones too: You’ll find her on Huawei’s Mate 9 and the HTC U11. I spent my week with the latter because it’s the first phone that makes Alexa feel native; there’s no need to launch an additional app first — you just start talking to her. The thing is, Alexa still feels like she’s stuck inside the home. Typical requests I’ve been able to ask of Siri and Google’s Assistant, like calling or texting a friend, just don’t work here. At least Alexa is kind enough to explain: You can send recorded voice messages or actually even call people … as long as you have either an Echo of your own or have the Alexa app installed on your iOS or Android device.

OK. I guess that helps. You can technically add these capabilities with third-party skills, but you still can’t, say, ask Alexa to navigate you to your local non-Amazon retailer. She’s also incapable of launching apps, changing settings or doing any of the nitty-gritty stuff where assistants come in handy on phones. And to be honest, phones — at least the ones we have now — don’t seem like ideal places for Alexa right now, anyway. They typically use simpler microphone setups, which explains why I had to occasionally had to yell at U11-Alexa for her to hear me. And when U11-Alexa failed to understand me, the little Alexa window that pops up just stays there, keeping the phone’s screen on and burning through its battery. Needless to say, phone makers primarily regard Alexa as an afterthought.

That’s fine, though — Alexa is great at home, and despite all of her little frustrations, I can’t imagine getting rid of her. Google Home’s slick design and improved tolerance for silly commands has made me think about making the switch, but I can’t tell Google to play my beloved Heinlein audiobooks, and besides, I’m already used to Alexa’s quirks. I can’t say I trust her completely, but whether I like it or not, she’s basically part of the family.

This week Engadget is examining each of the five major virtual assistants, taking stock of how far they’ve come and how far they still have to go. Find all our coverage here.

‘State of Decay 2’ forces you to pick who becomes zombie food

State of Decay 2 wants you to decide who lives or dies — and whatever happens next. The sequel aims to double-down on what made the 2013 original work: a more sophisticated game world, and bothy more elaborate skill trees and settlements, whether that’s medical facilities or just better zombie-deflecting defences. The invasion may be delayed, but you’ll be in charge of your own survival when it finally hits in 2018. I got to see the game in action here at Gamescom, and if you’ve ever wanted alternative to The Walking Dead where anyone and (nearly) everyone could die, this is for you.

State Of Decay launched on Xbox 360 back in 2013, part of the console’s Xbox Live Arcade exclusive lineup that eventually got a PC and Xbox One remaster. Despite that remake, it still had plenty of rough edges, and glitchy environments were de rigour as you battled zombies, fortified your home and explored the game’s measured-in-kilometers-squared world. However, it’s sequel time, and developer Undead Labs has the full backing of Xbox Studios to ensure its new world of zombies is a little less messy — and I mean that in a technical sense. There’s still plenty of zombies to run over, smash with a baseball bat, and the rest.

The original was lauded for the freedom it offered players, but it was just really, really glitchy. But the game is now on a new console and a sequel, and the 30-minute (admittedly hands-off) playthrough had none of the environmental graphics hiccups that State of Decay was notorious for.

Leaving technical upgrades aside, creator (and previously World of Warcraft lead programmer) Jeff Strain stressed how the game doubles-down on what made the first game so popular. Instead of focusing on one “hero” you can control anyone in your motley survivor crew. Each future zombie meal has their own strengths and weaknesses, ones that not only include medical skills or shooting proficiency, but the person’s effect on camp morale. Naturally, those individual talents will also affect how you play the game.

Microsoft

Morale is important when you want to keep each man and woman at your base, strengthening it, fixing it, or just ensuring there’s enough food to eat. The team stresses that SOD2 will better signpost what’s happening to your settlement, and what’s happening to your characters — important when you’ll have to balance home problems while inching forward with the story. Apparently the narrative will lightly blend together with your day-to-day settlement woes, so you might actually make it through the entire game despite distractions — I’m looking at you Fallout 4.

What pulls me in most is how players will bond with their survivors, and when it comes to hard decision time, what choices will you make? We recruit two new members during our playtime, but those new members come at a cost: our only medic is coming down with the zombie plague, and we didn’t have time to save him. Medic skills are rare; we made the wrong decision.

The following decision isn’t made for us, though. We approached the guy and were given two options: end his life, or send him out into the open to fend for himself / try to find a cure. We did the latter, and the gamemakers said that there is the (small) chance that these people will recover and return back to the fold — which sounds both supremely tempting and a mid-season TV plot-twist.

I also got a glimpse at how cooperative play will work inside the game, with a flare gun used to summon your Xbox buddy (or random stranger) to your side. Like in the standard game, if you die while helping your friend and that person stays dead, but you’ll also get to keep any supplies and materials you find. High stakes, but possibly worth it too.

It’s been played out and debated in excess, but zombie movies, books, TV shows and games are at their best when its focusing on the humans, less the undead threat. That is the interesting part. State of Decay 2 hints at a game system that could make the definitive zombie game for me — and there’s still plenty of time until Spring 2018.

Follow all the latest news live from Gamescom here!

‘Stranger Things’ is already headed for a third season

Netflix is releasing the second season of Stranger Things on October 27th, but the show is already set to come back for a third season. In an interview with Vulture, Matt and Ross Duffer, the creators of Stranger Things confirm that a third season is in the works and that the whole series will likely end with the fourth season. “We’re thinking it will be a four-season thing and then out,” said Ross.

The duo compared season two to a movie sequel and said that they “wanted to push things a bit.” “If you have a successful movie, number two is always a little bit bigger,” said Ross. You can watch a trailer for the upcoming season below.

Along with working on the show, the Duffer brothers are also tinkering with a sci-fi film that they said will be very different from Stranger Things but is still a ways off. “I think the goal right now is to focus on elevated genre with a focus on characters,” said Matt. “And no more kids on bikes.”

In the meantime, those kids on bikes are surely in for wild times in season two, season three and presumably season four. “They’re going to have to get the fuck out of this town,” said Ross. “It’s ridiculous!”

Source: Vulture

Tencent becomes the exclusive Chinese home of the NFL

The NFL has signed a deal with Tencent that’ll see the Chinese giant becoming the exclusive home of the game for the next three years. As well as most pre and regular-season games, Chinese fans will be able to watch both the Pro Bowl and Super Bowl. In addition, Deadline Hollywood says that ancillary shows, such as the Draft, Hard Knocks, Game Day and A Football Life are all included in the deal.

Tencent is a Chinese conglomerate that makes several American tech giants feel tiny by comparison, being Amazon, Facebook and Google all wrapped into one. But even though American Football’s not a huge deal in China, the deal is a big win-win for both the NFL and Tencent. The former gets its content in front of up to a billion new potential customers, while the latter gets the prestige of a top-tier global sports brand.

The NFL’s toe-dipping didn’t begin with Tencent, however, and experimented with streaming live games on Sina Weibo last year. That limited trial saw it broadcast six regular season games, one edition of Sunday Night Football, three playoff games and the Super Bowl. Less than a year later, however, and the league has switched allegiances to Tencent, Sina’s wealthier and more popular local rival.

Yes, you should have a nagging sense of deja vu, because it’s the exact same playbook the league used in the US. Before the 2016 season, the NFL brokered a deal with Twitter that saw the microblog live stream Thursday Night Football. A year later, and the league chose to work with Amazon Prime instead, although Twitter still has a 30-minute news show that it’ll broadcast as a consolation prize. Not to mention Verizon’s longstanding deal with the league to handle streaming video and apps for its users.

As we looked at last year, however, there is one issue with the current plans to bring sports broadcasting online: it doesn’t get the ratings regular TV does. Although if Tencent and others are prepared to spend big to bring the rights to their platforms, it may not matter that only a couple of million people tuned in.

Source: Deadline Hollywood

Astro’s email app packs a virtual assistant you can talk to

Virtual assistants have been quick to invade our phones and our homes — is it any surprise that they’re creeping into our email accounts, too? A startup called Astro built a chatbot (imaginatively named “Astrobot”) into its email app earlier this year, and now it’s taking things a step further: as part of a new update going live today, users can talk to Astrobot when they want to sift through their emails sans hands.

Well, mostly: you can’t invoke it with a wake-word like “Ok, Google.” Once installed, you’ll have to long-press the little Astrobot button that lives in your inbox. Then, you just gab away: asking if you have any emails prompts Astrobot to read through your most recent messages out loud, and telling it to archive, snooze or mark as unread worked consistently well. I’ve been testing the feature on iOS and Android for a few days now, and while I wouldn’t call it a game-changer, it has definitely shaved a few minutes off of my morning routine.

For me, the most valuable part of talking to Astrobot was being able to work with specific subsections of my inbox — say, emails that were routed into my priority inbox, or emails from people either I or Astrobot had previously flagged as VIPs. As you might imagine, a considerable chunk of the email that flows into my account each day is utter trash, and right out of the gate, Astro does a very good job figuring out which ones were worth completely ignoring.

Astro’s biggest selling point, though, is its ability to draw conclusions and modify its own behavior to treat certain emails as more important than others. The more you interact with specific people and the more you ignore others, the more nuanced Astro becomes. Over time, this came to be a sort of mild obsession: it was always a little fun firing up Astrobot to see who it thought it should ignore today. Given the hype around conversational assistants, it was only a matter of time before Astro CEO Andy Pflaum and his team wrapped those interactions up into a package worth talking to.

Still, as useful as Astrobot is, I have to wonder whether the team’s vision is sustainable over the long term. After all, Apple has a perfectly capable virtual assistant and a perfectly capable mobile email app. Ditto for Google. There’s very little (short of some patent defenses) keeping a bigger player from executing what Astro does, and reaching many more people in the process. That said, Astro in its current state is such a smart alternative that I’d pay to see Pflaum and his crew continue to fight the good fight in the war on junk mail.

‘Final Fantasy XV’ comes to your phone this fall

Square Enix is bent on bringing Final Fantasy XV to every platform imaginable, and that includes the phone in your pocket. It just unveiled a Pocket Edition of the road trip role-playing game that will hit Android, iOS and Windows 10 (yes, despite its dwindling influence) this fall. Its first episode will be free to play, while you’ll have to fork out an unspecified amount to continue the tale of Noctis and crew. The title includes the “main story” and characters, but don’t expect a carbon copy of the game you can buy on your console.

For one… well, look at it. The studio is adopting a “cute” art style that it believes will appeal to both newcomers used to mobile games as well as series veterans (that’s debatable — we’d say it’s just adapting to the reduced processing power). The Pocket Edition also adopts “casual” touch controls, and it adopts more of a top-down perspective than its console counterpart. It looks like many of the core mechanics are still present, though, including cooking.

There’s no question that Square Enix is trying to wring as much as it can out of its investment in Final Fantasy XV with the phone-friendly version. At the same time, it also speaks to the importance of mobile: the developer sees mobile gaming as big enough that it can justify bringing an expansive RPG (even if it’s a streamlined version) to platforms it might have ignored in the past.

Source: Final Fantasy XV (YouTube)

Medium is letting some users hide their posts behind a paywall

If you come across a piece on Medium you can’t read without an account, don’t be surprised. Medium has expanded its Partner Program to give users a way to earn money from their articles by publishing behind a paywall. The company has been testing the feature since March, but it has just sent out its first batch of invitations to a small group of writers and publishers who can now take advantage of the option. Every time they push a post a live, they can choose to make it visible to everyone or make it exclusive to the platform’s subscribers. Even if you’re not a subscriber, you’ll still be able to read up to three free articles every month that are behind the paywall.

As the image above states, participants’ payments will be based on member engagement, especially the number of “claps” you give them. You know how you can leave Reactions other than Like on Facebook? Well, Medium has its version of Reactions and Like called “clap.” Writers and publishers get a bigger percentage of your membership fee the more claps you leave their locked posts.

In his announcement, Medium head of product Michael Sippey said they’re at the “early days of what [the company] consider[s] a grand experiment.” Medium will send out more invites in the future, and anyone interested can sign up to be part of the waitlist.

Source: Medium