This $6 TaoTronics car mount holds your phone so you can focus on the road

Go hands-free and drive safe!

This TaoTronics car mount and phone holder is down to $6 with code CGXFYQXU on Amazon. It sells regularly at $13 and hasn’t dropped below that with a direct price drop for all of 2017. This is the lowest price we’ve seen.

The phone holder is adjustable, which means it can fit any smartphone, even larger ones like the Galaxy Note 8.

Features include:

• Redesigned For Phone Safety: Redesigned with a one-button rear release, phone safety will always come first with a safer method of unlocking
• Flat Suction Cup Sticks Better: Covering a larger area while letting in less air, the flat suction cup grips on tighter to more surfaces including dashboards and windows
• Adjust, Rotate, Or Swivel: Features three different ways to move, including adjustable arm length, 180° arm rotation, and a 360° joint ball – together they get the perfect angle
• Improved Usability: The adjustable support tray, rubber holder arms, and improved adjustment knobs add convenience and usability

This car mount has 3.8 stars based on 424 user reviews.

See at Amazon

Google Now vs. Quickdrawer: An Action Launcher dilemma

To Google Now or not to Google Now? That is the question.

For the longest time, Google Now panes were reserved for the Google Now Launcher, but when its retirement was announced in early 2017, Google released a way for manufacturers to integrate it into their own launchers. It didn’t take long after that for some enterprising third-party launcher developers to bring it to their own launchers, and Action Launcher debuted their Action Launcher Google plugin to add a Google Now page to the left-most side of the launcher.

There was just one problem: that Google Now pane takes the place of the Quickdrawer.

Action Launcher has many, many hallmark features, from Covers to Quickbar to Shutters, but one of the most easily implemented — and best implemented — is the Quickdrawer. Quickdrawer is a vertical app drawer that docks in a panel on the left side of Action Launcher, and allows you to quickly and easily scroll through your apps by letter. No matter how many ridiculous apps you have installed, Quickdrawer lets you find what you’re looking for almost instantly.

When I stray from Action Launcher, Quickdrawer is the feature I miss most, and adding Google Now automatically disables Quickdrawer, since they can’t both sit in that left-most spot. This makes Action Launcher feel a bit hobbled, but what could be done to remedy the situation?

You could use a gesture to launch the Google app and use its feed. This isn’t quite as fast or intuitive as the Google Now pane, but it lets you keep Quickdrawer and access the most current version of the Google feed.

Perhaps there could be an option in Action Launcher to move Quickdrawer to the right pane of the launcher in place of Quickpage, which I’d bet money isn’t half as popular as Quickdrawer. Better yet, Action Launcher could allow you to pick which side is which, as Quickdrawer on the left is ridiculously intuitive. There’s no telling how specific the Google Now pane is on its placement in a launcher, but it might be worth investigating.

In the meantime, Google Now can go back to the Pixel Launcher. I am sticking with the far more practical and far more functional Quickdrawer — and I’d wager I’m not alone.

Google Now or Quickdrawer?

Which choice did you end up making? Do you wish there was a practical way to do both? Let us know in the comments below!

CompuServe’s still-active forums are finally shutting down

It turns out that Instant Messenger (AIM) isn’t the only thing that AOL is shutting down next month. On December 15th, Oath (AOL and Engadget’s dear parent) is also closing what remains of the CompuServe forums which, yes, still actually exist. CompuServe had the first ever mainstream online forums well before the internet came along, letting users connect to its central servers via old-school dial-up modems. You can credit (or blame) the company for allowing some of the first online group chats about subjects like investing, politics and religion.

CompuServe provided a less nerdy alternative to BBS systems, making it easier for investors, gamers and families to connect to services and meet others online. The company charged a whopping $5 an hour, which didn’t include the telephone line, by the way. When AOL came along in 1991 with lower prices, followed soon after by the internet, it was the start of a long descent for CompuServe. Its parent, H&R Block, sold it to AOL in 1998 for what probably seemed then like all the money, $1.2 billion.

After AOL bought CompuServe, it renamed it to WorldCom Advanced Networks. That division eventually purchased the MCI telecommunications group and, after a bankruptcy, was renamed MCI. Verizon, the parent of Oath and AOL, eventually acquired MCI, completing a weird circle of old-school tech acquisitions.

When it shut down AIM, Oath VP of communications Michael Albers told Engadget that “it ignited a cultural shift … [but] the way in which we communicate with each other has profoundly changed.” Obviously, that applies in spades to CompuServe, a much older technology.

While much reduced from their glory days, the forums still have an active user community which is obviously dismayed by the news. “I’m in the stunned-and-disbelieving phase, which will no doubt last a while,” said one member. So, if you’re old enough to remember the squeal of a 1,200 baud modem, pour one out for another deceased technology.

Via: Fast Company

Source: CompuServe

Bandsintown opens its music event listings to venues and festivals

Bandsintown is helpful if you want to find out when your favorite group is playing nearby, but it’s not as authoritative as you might like when the venues themselves have had to resort to targeted campaigns to get the word out. Thankfully, it’s about to get much better. The live music discovery service has announced that venues and festivals can set up their official pages, including an option for them to add and modify events. They won’t have to wait to announce a new gig or make a last-minute change. And crucially, you could discover gigs you weren’t aware of just by visiting the venue page.

It could be be a while before your frequent haunts are using this feature. Bandsintown says it has “over 500” venues signed up for the current beta phase, and its public launch isn’t slated until December 15th. When it does roll out in earnest, however, you may spend less time checking out artist and venue websites (or getting lucky with searches) and more time planning that big night out.

Source: Bandsintown Biz Blog

GameStop halts its unlimited used game rental program

Back in October, GameStop announced that it would debut a used game rental service called PowerPass. Interested gamers could pay $60 for six months to have one title out at a time. At the end of those six months, subscribers would be able to choose a title to keep. But now, according to Kotaku, it looks like GameStop is suspending the program indefinitely.

It’s not clear why the retailer is putting PowerPass, which was in the middle of its soft launch, on hold; Kotaku reports that employees have been ordered to remove all signage about the program from stores and put it in the back rooms. Employee speculation centers around GameStop’s antiquated point-of-sale system, and specifically that it isn’t equipped to handle the mechanics of a game rental service.

If you already have signed up for PowerPass, a GameStop spokersperson told Kotaku that you can bring your pass and rented video game in for a full refund, and you’ll be allowed to select a free used game. The spokesperson specified that the roll out was being paused due to “program limitations.” It’s not clear when or if PowerPass will be open to the public again.

Source: Kotaku

Pinterest’s take on QR codes will unlock curated boards

Pinterest has really ramped up its visual search efforts lately. In February, it launched Lens, a tool that lets you shop for an item just by taking a photo of it. It incorporated that same tech into browser extensions, enabled the detection of multiple items, let you create and shop for outfits and, more recently, made those visual search tools more prominent in the app. Today, Pinterest is boosting visual search once more with an array of updates — which include custom Pinterest codes, a new way of shopping for outfits and more shoppable pins — just in time for the holiday shopping season.

First up: It’s introducing Pincodes, which are essentially the Pinterest version of QR codes. Of course, users aren’t the ones making them; businesses are. But according to Pinterest, you’ll soon see these Pincodes everywhere. One of Pinterest’s launch partners is Nordstrom’s, and starting today, you’ll see placards in select stores with signs such as “Gift ideas under $10” along with a Pincode underneath. Scan the Pincode with the camera in your Pinterest app, and it’ll take you straight to a Nordstrom-curated board of gift ideas.

Another Pincode partner is Real Simple magazine, which will have a few Pincodes scattered throughout their upcoming issue. Readers can scan them to see additional content, like extra recipes or bonus tips. Kia will also have a custom Pincode at the upcoming LA Auto Show, where visitors to the company’s booth can view other car configurations and behind-the-scenes info. Other launch partners include The Home Depot and Kraft, though any company can start making their Pincodes today if they like.

The next big update is an improvement to Pinterest’s Lens feature that’s called Lens Your Look. As we mentioned, the company already lets you find outfits that match an item of clothing you already have. So, snap a photo of your denim jacket, and the Pinterest app will scour its library of more than 16 billion pins to find matching outfits, and in turn, help you plan your next wardrobe purchase.

Lens Your Look, however, adds yet another layer to that search. You can combine that image search with a few keywords, like “autumn outfit” or “spring fashion” and it’ll not only find outfits that match that denim jacket, it’ll also find clothes that match that corresponding style.

“This is an evolution for search that makes it more like human conversation,” said Jeff Harris, Pinterest’s lead of visual search. “When people are talking to each other, we communicate with words, but we also show each other things.”

Other Pinterest updates today include more than five million new shoppable products courtesy of ShopStyle, a new feature that lets you pinch to zoom on a pinned object to trigger a visual search and, last but not least, Pinterest’s visual search extension will now be on Firefox. These updates to Pinterest will roll out to users starting today.

Pandora’s app now offers direct control for Sonos speakers

If you use both Pandora and Sonos, there’s a pretty useful update coming your way today. Pandora’s apps for iOS and Android now let users directly control music streaming to your Sonos speakers. The Sonos controller app is still required to set up Pandora, but once that’s done, users can select songs, playlists and stations directly through the Pandora app to play on their speakers.

Additionally, Sonos now works with Pandora Premium, the company’s on-demand music service. Previously, Sonos only worked with the traditional radio-style stations that Pandora creates based on songs, artists or genres, but Premium subscribers can now send any music they want from Pandora’s catalog to their speakers.

It’s a pretty notable addition that rounds out the Pandora experience — as a Sonos owner, using Pandora Premium has been a non-starter until now. And being able to control music directly through the app makes for a much-improved experience as well. Just like using Spotify Connect with Sonos, you can group and un-group speakers, move music to different speakers around the house and adjust volume right in the Pandora app. This all follows the recently-added support for Pandora stations on the Alexa-powered Sonos One speaker. Unfortunately, you can still only use your voice to start stations — Pandora Premium users can’t just pick anything from their libraries and ask Alexa to play it just yet.

Anyone who uses Pandora will be able to use the app to control their Sonos speakers, regardless of whether they pay for one of Pandora’s two subscription options or use the free, ad-supported station service. And with the addition of Pandora Premium support, Sonos users will be able to access their full Pandora libraries through the Sonos controller app, as well. These updates are going live in the Google Play Store and App Store today — if it’s not on your phone yet, it should be soon.

FDA approves first drug that doctors can track remotely

Doctors in the US might soon start prescribing a pill that can tell them whether you’ve truly taken your medication. The Food and Drug administration has approved the country’s first digitally tracked medicine to ensure patients comply with their prescriptions, since non-compliance is a costly problem that could negatively affect a patient’s health. Still, medical professionals are raising concerns about using pills that can be tracked, especially because, for some reason, the drug the FDA approved is an antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

The pill called Abilify MyCite has a sensor made of copper, magnesium and silicon that produces an electric signal when your stomach acids start the digestion process. Its accompanying patch that you need to stick to your ribcage sends the date and time when it detects the signal to a mobile app. You can then choose to share that data with your doctor or a family member.

While opting for the digital pill is voluntary — you’ll need to say yes to wearing a patch, after all — some medical professionals are worried that insurers might offer huge incentives so that people would feel forced to use it. It could also eventually be required as a condition for parole or to release patients from psychiatric facilities, giving authorities an easy way to track individuals.

Which brings us back to the fact that Abilify MyCite is an antipsychotic drug.

Columbia University’s chairman of psychiatry, Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, told The New York Times that “there’s an irony in it being given to people with mental disorders than can include delusions. It’s like a biomedical Big Brother.” His colleague, Dr. Paul Appelbaum, Columbia’s director of law, ethics and psychiatry pointed out that “drugs for almost any other condition would be a better place to start than a drug for schizophrenia.”

That said, drugs that can be tracked do have a number of benefits. They can help medical professionals monitor the medicine intake of elderly patients who keep forgetting to take their medication. Doctors could use them to ensure post-surgical patients don’t take too much opioid medication, which could develop into an addiction. And researchers can use them to make sure clinical trial participants are taking their experimental drugs correctly for the most accurate results possible.

Via: The New York Times

Source: FDA, Abilify MyCite

OnePlus inadvertently left a backdoor on its phones

OnePlus’ security troubles aren’t over yet. Users have discovered that many of the company’s phones from the past few years (including the OnePlus 5) include a Qualcomm testing app, EngineerMode, that lets you get root-level access to the phone without having to unlock its bootloader. An attacker would likely need physical access to your phone to do any damage, but that still means they could insert trackers or otherwise compromise your phone with very little effort.

At first glance, it looks like this is an accident rather than any kind of malicious behavior. The app is normally hidden until you tell Android to show system apps, so you might not notice it unless you went looking for it.

Company chief Carl Pei says his team is “looking into” the software’s presence. If it’s as widespread as it appears to be, there’s a good chance you’ll see a software update removing EngineerMode. However, the discovery isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring. Between this and previously aggressive data collection, it looks like OnePlus hasn’t been paying particularly close attention to security or privacy on its devices. It’ll need to run a tighter ship if it wants to persuade users that its software is trustworthy.

Via: The Hacker News

Source: OnePlus Forums, Carl Pei (Twitter), Elliot Anderson (Twitter)

HTC Vive dropped its Google Daydream headset to focus on China

Throughout the Vive Focus event today, HTC never once referred to the headset as a Daydream VR device, which was a little odd given how it was first teased as one of the two standalone Daydream devices back at Google I/O. Then came this baffling statement from HTC shortly after the keynote: “We still have a great relationship with Google, but will not be bringing a standalone device to the Western markets on Daydream.” In other words, the aforementioned Daydream collaboration between HTC and Google is no more, even though the Vive Focus lives on by way of the Vive Wave VR open platform. This cancellation was later confirmed by Clay Bavor, Google’s Vice President of Virtual and Augmented Reality, though he also implied that the other standalone Daydream headset from Lenovo is still in the pipeline.

Have been using and loving my pre-release @Lenovo standalone headset, running Daydream. More soon. Can’t wait for you to try it. pic.twitter.com/lwb6PCG4tD

— Clay Bavor (@claybavor) November 14, 2017

Pulling out of such a special partnership — let alone passing an exclusivity to a competitor in the process — seemed a little counter-intuitive for any young brand like HTC Vive, so I later caught up with the company’s Vice President Raymond Pao to see if he was losing his mind. As it turned out, he wasn’t, and that this was purely a logistical decision in favor of an apparently huge market opportunity — one that’s buried deep underneath a pile of random Chinese VR headsets.

In my earlier conversation with HTC Vive’s China President Alvin Wang Graylin today, he mentioned that the ever-growing Chinese market now has over 400 VR head-mounted display vendors, and no thanks to their different app stores, APIs plus accessories, developers aren’t willing to deal with the hassle to cover all devices for relatively little return. And because of the lack of quality content plus inconsistent experience, many of those devices — ranging from the cheap mobile-based headsets to the handful of standalone VR headsets — fail to go mainstream or even enter retail. This, Pao said, is where HTC’s Vive Wave can patch things up.

“China is the fastest growing VR market in the world and where mobile VR is most likely to gain mass adoption first,” Pao told Engadget. “It’s also a marker where fragmentation has occurred due to the lack of a leader open platform. Vive Wave is intended to address both these issues, and it’s clear from today’s cross-industry support that the market as a whole is in agreement.”

Specifically, Vive Wave aims to standardize both hardware and software, in order to offer a vast library of VR content across a range of devices with optimal performance. For the former part, it already has 12 manufacturers signed up, and Pao obviously wishes to see even more hardware partners join the party — even if it means adding more competition to his own Vive Focus. On the software side, not only is it about optimizing performance for medium-level hardware to ensure sub-20ms latency, but it’s also about making it as easy as possible for developers to port from Vive, Daydream or Samsung Gear VR.

If Vive Wave is as versatile as it claims to be and that the hardware manufacturers get things right, then it shouldn’t be hard to convince developers from all around the world to tap into the vast Chinese market via this platform. In fact, about 1,200 to 1,300 developers have already inquired HTC to develop for Vive Wave, according to Graylin.

It’s obviously too early to tell whether HTC has placed the right bet, but from a business standpoint, it makes sense for HTC to go all in on this opportunity. Most notably, Google and therefore Daydream have no access to the Chinese market, so HTC would have to go solo to lead the effort in that part of the world, anyway — as it did with the original Vive since Steam isn’t always accessible there (hence the birth of Viveport).

“China is a huge potential market and we have no plans to take Vive Wave outside of it at this time.”

One could argue that HTC should really be covering both sides of the playing field, and after all, the Daydream version of the Vive Focus would have likely been almost identical to this China version, so it only would’ve needed relatively little extra manpower. But on the other hand, building an ecosystem doesn’t scale the same way as building hardware in terms of resources, which is why HTC has taken the safer approach to focus on building up Vive Wave, and solely for China. “China is a huge potential market and we have no plans to take Vive Wave outside of it at this time,” Pao added.

Well, here’s hoping that one day the Vive Focus will still make it to other markets in some shape or form (and preferably in a darker shade of color), so long as Google is genuinely fine with that after this little breakup.