M&S is tentatively trialling one-hour food deliveries

Marks and Spencer (M&S) is finally coming round to the idea of letting customers order food online for speedy home delivery. The upmarket retailer has confirmed it’s taking some very tentative first steps with a home delivery service in the Camden area of London, and a collection option in Woodley, near Reading. This is only being offered to “selected Sparks members” for now, though, making it a particularly limited and exclusive trial.

Participants in Camden can order ready meals, pizzas and the like for home delivery within an hour (handled by courier service Gophr). Add some more general grocery items to your virtual basket and you’re looking at waiting up to two hours for it to arrive, with the minimum order value set at £10. The situation is exactly the same in Woodley, though you have to pick your order up from the store yourself.

It would appear that M&S is toying with a few different ideas here. You could consider the one-hour option, specific to that night’s meal, a counter to UberEats, Deliveroo and other takeaway services. Two-hour delivery of other foodie items, on the other hand, is more similar to the services Sainsbury’s and Tesco have begun offering over the past year — themselves an attempt to compete with Amazon’s Prime Now one-hour deliveries.

M&S first said earlier this year it was going to launch a delivery trial right about now, admitting at the time that it hadn’t made sense previously. M&S has sold party food and alcohol online for a while now, but CEO Steve Rowe said a broader grocery delivery option wasn’t financially sound. Customers don’t tend to spend that much on food at M&S at any one time — not in the same way they might hit up Tesco for a substantial weekly shop, anyway.

That’s why these trials are so limited. M&S is just testing the waters “as we explore what works for our customers.” Angling one-hour deliveries as more of a takeaway food option is interesting, and where the retailer might find an untapped niche. Perhaps a hungry belly might want a nice ready meal from M&S instead of normal takeaway fare, especially when those seductive Christmas food adverts start making the rounds.

Via: The Independent

Source: Marks and Spencer

BBC is putting hundreds of classic TV programmes on iPlayer

Over the years, the BBC has amassed an astonishing trove of classic TV and radio programming. Accessing it all can be tricky, however, because iPlayer has always been positioned as more of a catchup service. Some series are available permanently, but most, especially older shows, are not. You have to buy them digitally, on DVD or Blu-ray, or hope they’re accessible somewhere on the BBC website. Not anymore. The BBC is launching a section on iPlayer called ‘From the Archive,’ which, as you probably guessed, will be a home for BBC classics. Roughly 450 programmes are available at launch, with more being added “in the coming years.”

The old-but-new additions includes the Louis Theroux UFOs episode from his Weird Weekend series in 1998, the gripping 2010 documentary Leaving the Cult and Killing for Love, a six-part murder-mystery series that aired earlier this year. Documentary episodes from science and philosophy series Horizon, international showcase Storyville and arts programme Imagine will be available too. The BBC is also promising content that “hasn’t been shown since first broadcast,” including the Great War Interviews, a series of conversations filmed in the 1960s with World War One veterans.

The launch follows the closure of the BBC’s own digital store. When it was launched in November 2015, the broadcaster put a heavy emphasis on classics such as Dad’s Army and Morecambe & Wise. Clearly, the move didn’t pay off. Two years later, when BBC Store closed, a spokesperson admitted there was a larger demand for its shows “on SVOD and other third party platforms.” While it’s still possible to buy BBC programming through iTunes, Google Play and physical media retailers, it’s clear the BBC is putting more focus on iPlayer. With growing competition from Netflix and Amazon, it needs a strong library to keep Brits from streaming elsewhere.

Via: BBC

Swarovski’s VR shopping app is glittery virtual decadence

Mixed reality apps from the likes of Ikea and Edmunds already let you preview things like furniture and cars. Keen to jump on an emerging trend, Swarovski is releasing its own VR experience. The crystal maker’s bizarre new app offers a virtual shopping excursion through a random home stocked with insanely overpriced items. It’s as escapist as VR gets, because there’s no way anyone in their right mind would drop thousands of dollars on one of these faux-luxury products in real life.

No, that’s not virtual reality causing your head to spin, it’s the ludicrously priced $5,500 vase planted across the room. You can even buy it on the spot, using your MasterPass account. Is this the future of shopping, now? Not likely. It’s not as cool as Nike’s in-store projection tech that assists in designing your next pair of sneakers. Nor is it as useful as Ikea and Edmunds’ respective apps that help with practical issues (like personalizing large and costly items). We doubt anyone is losing sleep wondering whether a $600 Swarovski night light will fit on their bedside table. But, if you’re still keen, the Atelier Swarovski Virtual Showroom app hits iOS and Android in October.

Facebook knew about Russian meddling well before the US election

Despite once saying that it was “crazy” to believe Russians influenced the 2016 election, Facebook knew about a possible operation as early as June, 2016, the Washington Post reports. It only started taking it seriously after President Obama met privately with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ahead of Trump’s inauguration. He warned that if the social network didn’t take action to mitigate fake news and political agitprop, it would get worse during the next election. Obama’s aids are said to regret not doing more to handle the problem.

At the time, Zuckerberg admitted the social network knew about problems, but told Obama that it wasn’t widespread and that there wasn’t a lot Facebook could do in any case. In June 2016, Facebook’s security team found suspicious accounts set up by the Kremlin-backed APT28 hacking team, also known as Guccifer 2.0, the Post says.

However, it found no solid proof of Russian disinformation and turned over everything it found to the US government. Reportedly, neither US law enforcement nor national security personnel met with Facebook to share or discuss the information.

After Obama pulled Zuckerberg aside, Facebook starting taking the problem more seriously, but again failed to find clear links to Russian operatives, the WaPo says. On July 20th this year, Facebook actually told CNN that “we have seen no evidence that Russian actors bought ads on Facebook in connection with theh election.”

It finally uncovered proof of suspicious activity after tracking a firm called the Internet Research Agency, a known Russian hacking operation. By working backwards, it discovered over 3,000 ads around social and political issues it had posted between 2015 and 2017.

Right now they are operating in an arena where they have some, but very few, legal responsibilities. We are going to keep seeing examples of this kind, and at some point the jig is going to be up and the regulators are going to act.

Putin-backed Russian groups paid up to $100,000 to buy the ads, and boosted anti-immigrant rallies in Idaho, among other activities. Facebook recently turned over the ads to the US Intelligence Committee and congressional investigators, who say the findings are likely just “the tip of the iceberg.” Facebook executives will also testify before a Senate Intelligence committee.

While it appears that Facebook turned over any evidence to US law enforcement as soon as it found it, ads and fake news are filtered mostly by algorithms. Facebook’s human content gatekeepers, often contractors, are mostly on the watch for violent or sexually explicit materials, not foreign propaganda.

In response the latest report, a company spokesman says that “we believe in the power of democracy, which is why we’re taking this work on elections integrity so seriously, and have come forward at every opportunity to share what we’ve found.”

However, many observers think that Facebook can’t be trusted on the problem. “It’s rooted in their overconfidence that they know best, their naivete about how the world works, their extensive effort to avoid oversight and their business model of having very few employees so that no one is minding the store,” Professor Zeynep Tufekci from UNC Chapel Hill told the Post.

Other critics believe that Facebook is going to need much more oversight. “Right now they are operating in an arena where they have some, but very few, legal responsibilities,” Stanford Law School scholar Morgan Weiland told The Atlantic earlier this month. “We are going to keep seeing examples of this kind, and at some point the jig is going to be up and the regulators are going to act.”

Source: The Washington Post

Apple Watch Series 3 Teardown Reveals Larger Battery and Air Vent Moved Next to Diagnostic Port

iFixit has completed a teardown of the Apple Watch Series 3, which has a virtually identical form factor as previous models.

The display is unchanged from the Series 2, with one key difference being that it now functions as a multifrequency antenna for cellular. Series 3 models support LTE and UMTS, according to Apple’s tech specs.

The battery in the 38mm model with GPS + Cellular has a capacity of 279 mAh at 3.82V, or 1.07 watt hours, which is only a slight increase of about 3.8 percent over the 38mm Series 2 model without cellular.

Apple said Series 3 models with cellular get up to 18 hours of battery life, including four hours of LTE and 14 hours of connection to an iPhone via Bluetooth. Series 2 models are also rated to last 18 hours with mixed usage.

iFixit was surprised that Apple managed to increase the battery size while still leaving room for the added functionality of cellular antennas, radios, power amplifiers, the embedded SIM card, and so on in the same form factor.

The embedded SIM, outlined in red, appears to be sourced from ST Microelectronics, and it is positioned next to a Wi-Fi module from Broadcom and other RF chips that enable cellular capabilities in the watch.

Last, we finally know what the tiny meshed hole is next to the diagnostic port: it’s an air vent, since the Apple Watch Series 3’s new barometric altimeter took over the vent’s previous location next to the microphone.

Apple Watch Series 3’s relocated air vent outlined in yellow
iFixit gave the Apple Watch Series 3 a repairability score of 6 out of a possible 10 points. Display repairs and battery replacements are both possible, albeit tricky, but replacing any of the component cables requires micro-soldering.

Related Roundups: Apple Watch, watchOS 4
Tags: iFixit, teardown
Buyer’s Guide: Apple Watch (Buy Now)
Discuss this article in our forums

iPhone 8 Adoption Expectedly Lower After First Weekend of Sales as Customers Await iPhone X

New data shows iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus adoption was lower than previous models over the first three days of availability.

During the first weekend of sales, the devices combined for an estimated 0.7 percent market share of all iPhone models, the lowest since the iPhone 5s in 2013, according to mobile engagement platform Localytics.

With an estimated 0.4 percent market share, the iPhone 8 Plus recorded higher first weekend adoption than any Plus-sized iPhone ever, as demand continues to shift towards the larger 5.5-inch smartphone.

It is important to note the data does not represent actual sales of the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, but measures users who have received the devices and started using one of the 37,000 apps integrated with the Localytics SDK.

The slow start for the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus is unsurprising, as the type of customers who would rush to purchase a new iPhone during the first weekend are likely waiting for the iPhone X to launch in November.

“Apple is betting big on the iPhone X, and so far it looks like consumers may be doing the same,” said Localytics.

Apple stopped releasing first weekend sales numbers for new iPhone models last year, as demand typically outweighs supply, so the company feels it is no longer a representative metric for investors or customers.

In years past, we’ve announced how many new iPhones had been sold as of the first weekend following launch. But as we have expanded our distribution through carriers and resellers to hundreds of thousands of locations around the world, we are now at a point where we know before taking the first customer pre-order that we will sell out of iPhone 7.

These initial sales will be governed by supply, not demand, and we have decided that it is no longer a representative metric for our investors and customers. Therefore we won’t be releasing a first-weekend number any longer.

iOS 11’s estimated 22 percent adoption is also lower than previous versions through the first six days of availability.

These numbers may or may not be completely accurate, but together with shorter lines reported at Apple retail stores on iPhone 8 launch day, there is an overall sense there will be overwhelming demand for the iPhone X.

Related Roundup: iPhone 8
Tag: Localytics
Buyer’s Guide: iPhone (Buy Now)
Discuss this article in our forums

If data is the new oil, are tech companies robbing us blind?

Why it matters to you

Could a radical way of rethinking data ownership provide a new payment system for future humans?

Data is the new oil, or so the saying goes. So why are we giving it away for nothing more than ostensibly free email, better movie recommendations, and more accurate search results? It’s an important question to ask in a world where the accumulation and scraping of data is worth billions of dollars — and even a money-losing company with enough data about its users can be worth well into the eight-figure region.

The essential bargain that’s driven by today’s tech giants is the purest form of cognitive capitalism: users feed in their brains — whether this means solving a CAPTCHA to train AI systems or clicking links on Google to help it learn which websites are more important than others. In exchange for this, we get access to ostensibly “free” services, while simultaneously helping to train new technologies which may one day put large numbers of us out of business.

This problem becomes more crucial in a world in which AI is threatening jobs.

Viewed uncharitably, companies like Google and Facebook can appear almost like the unscrupulous oil man Daniel Plainview from Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood; offering little more than tokenistic gestures in exchange for what amounts to a goldmine.

“The defense of this practice is that these companies provide ‘free’ services, and that they deserve some reward for their innovation and ingenuity,” Dr. John Danaher, a lecturer at the School of Law at NUI Galway, who writes about the intersection of the law and emerging technology, told Digital Trends. “That may well be true, but I would argue that the rewards they receive are disproportionate. The other defense is that many companies provide for some revenue-sharing agreements with more popular users, such as YouTube. That’s becoming more true, too, but it’s only a handful of users who can make decent money from this.”

This problem becomes more crucial in a world in which AI is threatening jobs. According to a famous 2013 study carried out by the U.K.’s Oxford Martin School, 47 per cent of jobs in the U.S. are susceptible to automation within the next 20 twenty years. Could rethinking the way that data is gathered — and, more crucially, remunerated — offer one possible solution?

Paid for your data

In an age in which concepts like universal basic income are increasingly widely discussed, one of the most intriguing solutions is one first put forward by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier suggests that users should receive a micropayment every time their data is used to earn a company money.

Manuel Breva Colmeiro/Getty Images

For example, consider the user who signs up to an online dating service. Here, the user provides data that the dating company uses to match them with a potential data. This matching process is, itself, based on algorithms honed by the data coming from previous users. The data resulting from the new user will further perfect the algorithms for later users of the service. In the case that your data somehow matches someone else successfully in a relationship, Lanier says you would be entitled to a micropayment.

In scenarios like this, a formula could easily be established to determine both where data originated and how important the data was in shaping certain decisions. Not all data is created equal. While some of the systems human data helps train just requires us to click a link or upvote a comedy special, other types require high levels of expertise. One illustration of this is translating a document from one language to another. Although tools like Google Translate are increasingly effective, the reason these machines are able to work as they do is because they draw on data that was previously provided by human users. That means taking individual words and phrases that have been painstakingly matched up previously by human translators, and then applying these micro-translations to new pieces of text.

Translation isn’t about literally translating each word in turn, as illustrated by the (possibly apocryphal) story of early machine translation systems which turned, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” into, “The liquor is holding out all right, but the meat has spoiled,” or “Out of sight, out of mind” into “Invisible idiot.” In his introduction to the English translation of Dante’s Inferno, translator John Ciardi likens good translation to playing the same tune on two different instruments. “When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords,” he writes. “It can, however, make recognizably the same ‘music,’ the same air. But it can only do so when it as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.”

At present, translators are not paid for the overwhelming bulk of their translation tasks. Hanna Lützen, who translates the Harry Potter books into Danish gets paid for that particular job by a publishing house, but Google then pays her nothing if those combined 1 million+ words help make its language translation system smarter so it can translate your love letter to a girlfriend in Denmark. With a universal micropayment system, it may be possible for certain types of data to carry higher remuneration than others — much as a lawyer currently commands a higher hourly rate than a bricklayer.

A moral, not legal argument

While it sounds an extreme proposal, in some ways a revenue split such as this is no different to the one currently offered by companies like Apple and Google to the content creators who help prop up their services. As John Danaher notes, YouTube personalities are rewarded for the number of viewers they can attract to their videos, because this helps make Google money. Apple gives developers 70 percent of money they generate in the App Store, since this drives more people to use Apple’s services. Micropayments would be this, but on a more widespread basis. The amount of money per usage of data would be tiny, but — combined — it could add up to a reasonable amount.

This micropayment idea isn’t wholly without legal precedent, and isn’t totally dissimilar to the way musicians are paid when their music is “sampled” by another artist. This also once sounded an unlikely idea, but has now been the subject of successful lawsuits — such as when German electronica band Kraftwerk argued in court that even a few bars of a drum beat was sufficient to be protected by copyright.

Laws are still catching up with the realities of new digital technology.

Precedents like the E.U.’s “right to be forgotten” ruling against Google show how laws are still catching up with the realities of new digital technology. But according to John Danaher, enforcing this may be a tough legal case to argue.

“The case I would make against the practice is moral, not legal,” Danaher continued. “General rules of contract law are taken to apply to the agreements that users click when signing up for a service like Facebook. As long as Facebook draws the user’s attention to their terms and conditions, and as long as those terms and conditions do not breach public policy and unfair terms rules, they are held to be binding on the user. In my opinion, this just shows the inadequacy of current approaches to contract law, since it is well-known that people are willing to accept even the most outlandish terms and conditions.” (During a 2014 experiment, unwitting participants in London agreed to give up their eldest child by agreeing to public Wi-Fi terms.)

This wouldn’t necessarily be bad news for companies though. While it would initially cut into the profits made by tech giants, such a scheme could also encourage greater levels of engagement with services. If using internet services — and therefore helping make them smarter and their creators more competitive in the marketplace — was able to provide a living wage it would likely have a significant impact on the number of users using a particular service.

Users, on the other hand, would get a new robot-proof (for now!) job out of the equation. Everyone’s a winner. Right?

If data is the new oil, are tech companies robbing us blind?

Why it matters to you

Could a radical way of rethinking data ownership provide a new payment system for future humans?

Data is the new oil, or so the saying goes. So why are we giving it away for nothing more than ostensibly free email, better movie recommendations, and more accurate search results? It’s an important question to ask in a world where the accumulation and scraping of data is worth billions of dollars — and even a money-losing company with enough data about its users can be worth well into the eight-figure region.

The essential bargain that’s driven by today’s tech giants is the purest form of cognitive capitalism: users feed in their brains — whether this means solving a CAPTCHA to train AI systems or clicking links on Google to help it learn which websites are more important than others. In exchange for this, we get access to ostensibly “free” services, while simultaneously helping to train new technologies which may one day put large numbers of us out of business.

This problem becomes more crucial in a world in which AI is threatening jobs.

Viewed uncharitably, companies like Google and Facebook can appear almost like the unscrupulous oil man Daniel Plainview from Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood; offering little more than tokenistic gestures in exchange for what amounts to a goldmine.

“The defense of this practice is that these companies provide ‘free’ services, and that they deserve some reward for their innovation and ingenuity,” Dr. John Danaher, a lecturer at the School of Law at NUI Galway, who writes about the intersection of the law and emerging technology, told Digital Trends. “That may well be true, but I would argue that the rewards they receive are disproportionate. The other defense is that many companies provide for some revenue-sharing agreements with more popular users, such as YouTube. That’s becoming more true, too, but it’s only a handful of users who can make decent money from this.”

This problem becomes more crucial in a world in which AI is threatening jobs. According to a famous 2013 study carried out by the U.K.’s Oxford Martin School, 47 per cent of jobs in the U.S. are susceptible to automation within the next 20 twenty years. Could rethinking the way that data is gathered — and, more crucially, remunerated — offer one possible solution?

Paid for your data

In an age in which concepts like universal basic income are increasingly widely discussed, one of the most intriguing solutions is one first put forward by virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier. In his book Who Owns the Future?, Lanier suggests that users should receive a micropayment every time their data is used to earn a company money.

Manuel Breva Colmeiro/Getty Images

For example, consider the user who signs up to an online dating service. Here, the user provides data that the dating company uses to match them with a potential data. This matching process is, itself, based on algorithms honed by the data coming from previous users. The data resulting from the new user will further perfect the algorithms for later users of the service. In the case that your data somehow matches someone else successfully in a relationship, Lanier says you would be entitled to a micropayment.

In scenarios like this, a formula could easily be established to determine both where data originated and how important the data was in shaping certain decisions. Not all data is created equal. While some of the systems human data helps train just requires us to click a link or upvote a comedy special, other types require high levels of expertise. One illustration of this is translating a document from one language to another. Although tools like Google Translate are increasingly effective, the reason these machines are able to work as they do is because they draw on data that was previously provided by human users. That means taking individual words and phrases that have been painstakingly matched up previously by human translators, and then applying these micro-translations to new pieces of text.

Translation isn’t about literally translating each word in turn, as illustrated by the (possibly apocryphal) story of early machine translation systems which turned, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” into, “The liquor is holding out all right, but the meat has spoiled,” or “Out of sight, out of mind” into “Invisible idiot.” In his introduction to the English translation of Dante’s Inferno, translator John Ciardi likens good translation to playing the same tune on two different instruments. “When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords,” he writes. “It can, however, make recognizably the same ‘music,’ the same air. But it can only do so when it as faithful to the self-logic of the violin as it is to the self-logic of the piano.”

At present, translators are not paid for the overwhelming bulk of their translation tasks. Hanna Lützen, who translates the Harry Potter books into Danish gets paid for that particular job by a publishing house, but Google then pays her nothing if those combined 1 million+ words help make its language translation system smarter so it can translate your love letter to a girlfriend in Denmark. With a universal micropayment system, it may be possible for certain types of data to carry higher remuneration than others — much as a lawyer currently commands a higher hourly rate than a bricklayer.

A moral, not legal argument

While it sounds an extreme proposal, in some ways a revenue split such as this is no different to the one currently offered by companies like Apple and Google to the content creators who help prop up their services. As John Danaher notes, YouTube personalities are rewarded for the number of viewers they can attract to their videos, because this helps make Google money. Apple gives developers 70 percent of money they generate in the App Store, since this drives more people to use Apple’s services. Micropayments would be this, but on a more widespread basis. The amount of money per usage of data would be tiny, but — combined — it could add up to a reasonable amount.

This micropayment idea isn’t wholly without legal precedent, and isn’t totally dissimilar to the way musicians are paid when their music is “sampled” by another artist. This also once sounded an unlikely idea, but has now been the subject of successful lawsuits — such as when German electronica band Kraftwerk argued in court that even a few bars of a drum beat was sufficient to be protected by copyright.

Laws are still catching up with the realities of new digital technology.

Precedents like the E.U.’s “right to be forgotten” ruling against Google show how laws are still catching up with the realities of new digital technology. But according to John Danaher, enforcing this may be a tough legal case to argue.

“The case I would make against the practice is moral, not legal,” Danaher continued. “General rules of contract law are taken to apply to the agreements that users click when signing up for a service like Facebook. As long as Facebook draws the user’s attention to their terms and conditions, and as long as those terms and conditions do not breach public policy and unfair terms rules, they are held to be binding on the user. In my opinion, this just shows the inadequacy of current approaches to contract law, since it is well-known that people are willing to accept even the most outlandish terms and conditions.” (During a 2014 experiment, unwitting participants in London agreed to give up their eldest child by agreeing to public Wi-Fi terms.)

This wouldn’t necessarily be bad news for companies though. While it would initially cut into the profits made by tech giants, such a scheme could also encourage greater levels of engagement with services. If using internet services — and therefore helping make them smarter and their creators more competitive in the marketplace — was able to provide a living wage it would likely have a significant impact on the number of users using a particular service.

Users, on the other hand, would get a new robot-proof (for now!) job out of the equation. Everyone’s a winner. Right?

Galaxy Note 8 SD card: Top things you need to know

Here’s what you need to know about the Note 8’s SD card slot.

With a bump up to 64GB of internal storage, fewer people will find it necessary to pop an SD card into their Galaxy Note 8. But for those who need to have tons of storage available, even without a network connection, an SD card slot is a necessity.

If you fall into the latter camp, or are considering the merits of getting an SD card for your Note 8, here’s the info you need to make the best use of it.

The SD card is best for media

To make the most of your SD card it’s best to set your expectations from the start. Big, removable storage like an SD card is best utilized for storing large media files. Why? Well music, photos and videos can be some of the biggest files on your phone, and because of how you interact with them the inherent speed and compatibility limitations of the SD card don’t really get in the way.

There are some issues with using apps on the SD card, as we’ll get to down below, but you won’t hit the same limitations when you’re just downloading a movie to watch for your train ride into work or storing dozens of hours of Spotify playlists for a weekend camping.

Photos and videos go there by default

To that point on media storage, the Note 8 will automatically start putting photos and videos you capture with the phone onto the SD card. The goal is to just start loading them there by default because the phone knows it will handle them just fine, and you can save your internal storage for more mission-critical data that can’t be moved externally.

You’ll notice that this will create a separate folder in the Gallery for photos on the SD card versus those you’ve already taken and stored on the internal storage, but other than that you won’t see issues. If you expect to be taking out your SD card regularly and would prefer to capture photos and videos to the internal storage again, just head into your camera app settings and toggle it back over.

You can’t use Adoptable Storage

The reason why we need to make this distinction between putting data on the SD card or the internal storage is because Samsung doesn’t use the “Adoptable Storage” feature in its phones. Adoptable Storage, introduced in Android 6.0, lets a phone take in an SD card and seamlessly integrate it into the system to make it and the internal storage look like one continuous block of storage. That means your 64GB phone with a 256GB SD card would appear to the system like one big 320GB volume, with no differentiation in where data goes.

Adoptable Storage is wonderful for phones that ship with a very small amount of internal storage and rely on an SD card to operate at their best, but it also has lots of usability issues. Namely the SD card can’t be swapped between devices, nor can the phone properly operate with the SD card removed. Those are issues for a lot of people, and Samsung has chosen to skip Adoptable Storage and instead let people use an SD card on their Note 8 as they always have on early Galaxy phones.

You can move (some) apps to it

Being able to move apps to the SD card is one of the original reasons so many people wanted the capability in their phone. Over the years fewer and fewer apps allow you to move them to the SD card, and it’s mostly for good reason. Apps just can’t perform as well when they’re loaded on the SD card as they can on internal storage, and more importantly an app doesn’t know if you have a nice fast card or a super old and slow one — and when an app is slow, people just blame the app developer, not their SD card.

More: How to move apps to your SD card on the Galaxy Note 8

Nonetheless, you can still move some non-intensive apps to your SD card and save on that internal space. Just head into your Note 8’s settings, scroll through the apps and check out the apps you want to potentially move — they’ll clearly show whether or not they’ll let you make the shift. Some large apps, like games, will technically let you move the app but will only actually move part of it — don’t think you’ll be moving full 2GB games over to that external card.

Consider encrypting your SD card

As you start to put more and more valuable data on your SD card, you should at least consider the benefits of encrypting that card. Remember that even if you have a lock screen on your Note 8, anyone with a SIM ejection tool can remove your SD card and place it in a computer to have full access to every file on the card.

It isn’t as convenient, but encrypting your SD card is a great idea.

If you encrypt the card, the only way to read those files is to unlock your phone with the card inside and either view the files locally or decrypt the card and remove it. That makes the files on your SD card just about as secure as the ones on your phone. To encrypt your SD card, go into Settings, Lock screen and security, Encrypt SD card and follow the quick steps.

Once you encrypt the card you must remember that it can no longer be quickly removed and popped in your own computer to transfer files, which can be a hindrance for some. You can’t quickly transfer photos off of your card or add a bunch of video or music to listen to on the phone — you’d have to decrypt the card before removing it, then re-encrypt it when it’s back in the phone. Security isn’t always simple.

You’ll benefit from a fast card

No matter what you’re doing with the SD card on your Note 8, you’ll see real daily benefit from having a properly fast card in the phone. The faster the card, the quicker your phone can read and write data from and to that card and the smoother everything will be when you’re just trying to watch a show you downloaded or open up an app.

There are a whole lot of numbers and classifications involved with SD cards, but a good rule of thumb is to skip over typical class 2, 4 or 6 cards — get a class 10 and you should be happy with its performance. Going a step up to U1 or U3 cards, you’ll get an excellent experience.

Good SD cards don’t have to be expensive

It is, actually, possible to get an SD card that strikes a good balance between speed, capacity, and cost. Even though you’ll see big cheap SD cards and small expensive ones, most people probably shouldn’t be tempted by both extremes. Be willing to spend a little bit of money to get a card that will offer solid speeds and hold up over time, and also be willing to get a 128GB card or even just a 64GB card to keep those speeds if you can’t justify a top-end 256GB model.

More: Best SD cards for the Galaxy Note 8

For example SanDisk offers a really good 64GB card for about $30 and also a 200GB card for around $75 — see, they don’t have to break the bank!

Samsung Galaxy Note 8

• Galaxy Note 8 review
• Complete Galaxy Note 8 specs
• Galaxy Note 8 vs. Galaxy Note 5
• Which Note 8 color is best?
• Join our Galaxy Note 8 forums

Verizon
AT&T
T-Mobile
Sprint
Best Buy

The Morning After: Monday, September 25th 2017

Hey, good morning!

Over the weekend, you might have missed Nintendo’s attempt to refresh its first major smartphone game, Super Mario Run, and the smart planner by Moleskine that requires a little too much mental investment.

Even after it’s set up, the app probably won’t recognize your chicken scratch. Moleskine’s smart planner requires too much effort to use

Moleskine’s latest product is a smart planner that builds on its existing connected writing set by letting you jot down appointments and have those meetings show up in your online calendar. But, as Reviews Editor Cherlynn Low found out after a few days of testing, the effort required to get the system up and running ultimately isn’t worth it.

Self-aware algorithms and flexible joints help them move more like humans.
Robots learn to walk naturally by understanding their bodies

The challenge with bipedal robots isn’t so much getting them to walk at all, as it is getting them to walk naturally. They tend to either step cautiously or quickly run into trouble. Swiss researchers think they can do better, though: They’re working on COMAN (Compliant Humanoid), a headless robot designed to master walking. The automaton is more graceful through a combination of more flexible, elastic joints and a control algorithm that helps the bot understand its own body.

What? You already deleted it?
‘Super Mario Run’ update will try to breath life into Nintendo’s mobile plans

Nintendo is about to spark a bit of life into its signature mobile game. It’s releasing an update on September 29th that will add a new world (World Star) with new gameplay elements, and a Remix 10 game mode that randomizes parts of levels for a fast, perpetually fresh experience. You can also listen to your own music while you play, if you’re finally tiring of the usual Super Mario themes. And if you haven’t bought into it yet, Nintendo will half the game’s price between September 29th and October 12th.

But wait, there’s more…

• Ruling gives FAA more power than local governments over drones
• What we’re watching: ‘Marvel’s The Defenders’ and ‘The Night of’
• Recommended Reading: Behind the scenes of ‘Blade Runner 2049’