Razer Phone hands-on: Built for gamers, good enough for everyone

Razer is best known for its gaming PCs, but everyone knew what its acquisition of smartphone startup Nextbit meant: the company wanted to get into handsets too. The big question was, how does Razer, which prides itself as a gamer-first company, actually build a gamer-first phone? Few phone makers have bothered trying, and those that did — like Sony and Motorola — didn’t find the success they were looking for. Razer’s approach is a little different. With its new $699 Razer Phone, the company tried to balance pure power with a handful of fascinating hardware features. In doing so, Razer has built a gaming phone that you don’t have to be a gamer to appreciate when it launches on November 17.

If you took a Nextbit Robin, made it bigger and draped the thing in dark anodized aluminum instead of cutesy plastic, you’d basically have the Razer Phone. That’s fine by me — the Robin’s design was clean and classy, and I appreciate Razer carrying on that tradition. The Razer Phone is far denser and sturdier than the original Robin, though, and thankfully it makes good use of the extra space. There’s a huge 4,000mAh battery inside, and sitting above and below the screen are a pair of front-facing speakers.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

In short, they’re fantastic. they’re about the loudest, most immersive speakers I’ve ever heard on a phone. For those of you who miss the days of HTC’s excellent, front-facing BoomSound speakers, the Razer Phone just might be the spiritual successor you’ve been looking for. There’s unfortunately no headphone jack here, though the included USB-C-to-headphone adapter does pack a 24-bit, THX-certified digital-to-analog converter (DAC).

Really, though, we need to talk about this screen. The Razer Phone uses a 5.7-inch IGZO LCD panel, which is plenty bright and pleasant to look at. Keep in mind, though, that the screen refreshes at a rate of 120Hz — that’s the same as on an iPad Pro, and it’s a first for a globally available smartphone of this caliber. Long story short, that makes everything that happens on-screen look remarkably smooth. Whether I was scrolling through Twitter or running games like Final Fantasy 15 Pocket Edition (which I did a lot of during our hands-on time), this screen left me seriously impressed. In a bid to further improve smoothness and reduce screen tearing, game developers are working to unlock the framerates in their apps when installed on the Razer Phone.

Of course, performance like this requires some high-powered silicon, and that’s where the Snapdragon 835 comes in. As usual, those eight CPU cores are paired with an Adreno 540 GPU, but Razer has added 8GB of RAM to keep everything moving along at a brisk pace. Combine this rock-solid performance with that super-fast screen and, well, Razer might be onto something here. Even in its unfinished form, I noticed very few instances of lag while playing the preloaded demo games, and hopefully Razer does a little more polishing prior to launch.

Even Razer’s approach to customizing Android manages to impress. The phone runs a mostly clean version of Android Nougat with the Nova Prime launcher pre-loaded, giving people extensive customization options right out of the gate. Razer is also working with game developers on themes users can apply to their phones, because of course they are. There is one notable omission to the Razer Phone’s software suite, though: the handy cloud backup feature that was core to the Robin experience has been left behind.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

To be fair, Razer didn’t get everything right here. The phone isn’t IP rated for water or dust resistance, so you can’t be as cavalier with it as you could be with other flagship devices. And the 12-megapixel dual camera also fails to impress; I’m told it was designed with sheer simplicity in mind, but the few test photos I took made me wish the team had focused on image quality first.

For Razer’s intended audience, though, these shortcomings probably fall well short of being deal-breakers. All told, the Razer Phone is the odd niche device that you shouldn’t write off just yet. It represents a serious attempt to build a serious gaming phone, and Razer gets enough right on its first try that even mainstream smartphone users may want to pay attention.

GoPro is finally profitable again, but its holiday outlook disappoints

After years of losses, GoPro’s main goal in 2017 was finding a way to make its business profitable. And it looks like the company finally succeeded during the third quarter, where it saw a net income of $15 million, according to its latest earnings report. That’s not much, but it’s a big improvement over last year’s $104 million loss during the same quarter. Analysts expected to its revenues to jump by 30 percent, but GoPro surpassed that with 37 percent growth, reaching $330 million (compared to $240.5 million last year).

But while GoPro had a strong showing this quarter, investors weren’t too pleased about its holiday revenue outlook of $470 million, driving its stock down to 10 percent at the time of this post. Analysts were expecting around $520 million in holiday sales.

The company credits its improved business on lower operating costs and a higher average sales price (ASP). It expects operating expenses to drop by 30 percent in 2017 (it sounds like those layoffs are paying off), and during the quarter they reached a three-year low. Its ASP, meanwhile, increased 22 percent this quarter. In particular, GoPro says “strong perfomance” from its $500 Hero 6 Black camera helped push that figure higher. Demand for its older the Hero5 Black was “lighter than expected,” GoPro CEO Nick Woodman said during an earnings call, but he noted that holiday promotions might help with sales. Additionally, he says consumers are warming to the entry-level $150 Hero Session.

Looking ahead, the company is launching its $599 Fusion 360-degree camera later in the middle of this month. That’s clearly not meant for everyone, but it’s an important move into a new product category. It’ll give consumers an easy way to make videos suited for 360-degree VR viewing, and thanks to its Overcapture feature, they’ll also be able to make videos suited for normal 2D viewing.

Source: GoPro

Cigarette butts could be reborn as green energy storage

It’s no secret that smoking is seriously bad news for your health, but the impact of the habit on the planet’s health is pretty bleak, too. Every year nearly six trillion cigarettes are smoked around the world, generating more than 800,000 metric tons of cigarette butts. Something has to be done with them all, and they usually end up in landfill (or leaching into waterways). But now, scientists have discovered they may have a hidden potential: hydrogen storage.

Chemists at the University of Nottingham have found that exposing discarded cigarette ends to hydrothermal carbonisation — a process requiring only water and heat — creates a carbon product called hydrochar. When the hydrochar is activated, it generates oxygen-rich porous carbons that have a very high surface area which could, in theory, be used to store extremely high volumes of hydrogen. When burned to produce heat or reacted with air to create electricity, its only by-product is water, making hydrogen an attractive and sustainable fuel alternative.

The researchers believe this technique could then be developed in pursuit of the so-called “hydrogen economy”, replacing gas in cars or used as a heating fuel, but the findings have also offered up some interesting insight into hydrogen storage in general. The work is still in research stage though, so it’ll be a very long time before smokers can claim their habit is helping the environment.

Via: phys.org

Source: Energy & Environmental Science

House Intel Committee releases Russia-backed Facebook election ads

The House Intelligence Committee has begun a hearing with leading internet titans. As it promised to do last month, the committee released a collection of data Facebook ads, and Twitter accounts run by Russia-backed accounts on the social network. They’re just a sample of the trove that foreign groups paid $100,000 to host on Facebook, part of a campaign that reached 126 million Americans, the social network announced earlier this week. How much those ads influenced the election is what the committee hopes to answer.

In the hearing’s opening statement, ranking member of the House Intel Committee Adam Schiff (D-CA) explained that the ads were part of Russian-backed accounts’ attempts to support Donald Trump’s presidency. But he also explained that the sample ads showcased things we’ve known the accounts were fond of doing, like exploiting social divisions in one example. As Schiff wrote: “… the social media campaign was also designed to further a broader Kremlin objective: sowing discord in the U.S. by inflaming passions on a range of divisive issues. The Russians did so by weaving together fake accounts, pages, and communities to push politicized content and videos, and to mobilize real Americans to sign online petitions and join rallies and protests.”

Schiff’s statement linked to other material, including a list of known Russia-backed Twitter handles as well as metadata (below each entry) for cost and impressions that indicated how successful some of the example ads were. A broadsheet summarized the stakes, as it were, at the start of the hearing: So far as we know, the Kremlin’s Internet Research Agency bought almost 3,400 ads, had 470 Facebook accounts and its content was seen by 126 million Americans. Twitter didn’t get off any easier, with over 36,000 Russia-backed bot accounts tweeting 1.4 million times which had 288 million views. Russia-linked accounts on YouTube posted over 1,100 videos, which got over 300,000 views.

Schiff finished the statement by laying a heavy responsibility at the feet of the gathered tech titans: “Russia exploited real vulnerabilities that exist across online platforms and we must identify, expose, and defend ourselves against similar covert influence operations in the future. The companies here today must play a central role as we seek to better protect legitimate political expression, while preventing cyberspace from being misused by our adversaries.”

Via: The Daily Beast

Source: House Intelligence Committee

Paul Manafort’s password inspiration: Bond. James Bond.

Apparently, being involved in high-level political intrigue doesn’t guarantee that you’ll be any good at password management. Security researchers speaking to Motherboard have discovered that former Trump campaign manager and international lobbyist Paul Manafort used uncannily appropriate password variations for his old (2012-2013) Adobe and Dropbox accounts: Bond007. Yes, you read that correctly — as Christina Wilkie notes, this was a secret foreign agent signing in as another secret foreign agent. Cheekiness aside, the James Bond nod underscores the tendency toward terrible password habits and how they can have very real consequences.

To start, Manafort’s security hints for these accounts were dead giveaways (“secret agent” and “James Bond”). It was trivially easy to guess the passwords with such obvious clues. And more importantly, using the same password in multiple places is a very, very bad idea. Never mind the Adobe or Dropbox accounts — there’s a chance that there are other accounts using the same login. This doesn’t mean that Manafort’s email or social accounts have suddenly been compromised (they may have different passwords), but the reuse of passwords makes it difficult to rule out.

There’s also the matter of how easily the researchers obtained Manafort’s info. All they had to do was look into known data breaches and find the info that had leaked online. Manafort previously confirmed that text messages from his daughter had been compromised, so it wasn’t too hard to find his old email address buried in messages posted on the Dark Web. After that, it was just a matter of running that address through HaveIBeenPwned.com to see if it had turned up in data breaches. There were at least two: the 2012 Dropbox hack and the 2013 Adobe hack.

No, this probably won’t affect Manafort’s indictment over allegations of conspiracy and money laundering. However, it may serve as a wake-up call: if you’re going to think of yourself as a real-life Bond, you should probably ensure that your accounts are as difficult to crack as you’d expect for a super spy.

Via: Christina Wilkie (Twitter)

Source: Motherboard

Face ID Unlocks an iPhone More Slowly Than Touch ID, but is Faster in Day-to-Day Usage

Apple’s new Face ID facial recognition system coming in the iPhone X unlocks an iPhone more slowly than Touch ID did, according to Tom’s Guide.

Tom’s Guide is one of the sites that was provided with an iPhone X for evaluation this week, and reviewer Mark Spoonauer compared Face ID and Touch ID unlocking times with a stopwatch.

I’ve been using Face ID on the iPhone X for more than 24 hours, and I don’t need a stopwatch to tell you that it unlocks my phone slower than when I was using Touch ID on my older iPhone 7 Plus. I used a stopwatch app anyway to prove my point.

It took 1.2 seconds for Spoonauer to unlock the iPhone X from pressing the side button on the side of the device and another 0.4 seconds to swipe up to get to the lock screen, while getting to the Home screen on an iPhone 7 Plus using Touch ID took 0.91 seconds.

When using Raise to Wake and swiping up on the display as the iPhone is recognizing a face (as Face ID is meant to be used, according to John Gruber), unlocking was faster at a total of 1.16, but Spoonaeur still found it to be slower than Touch ID.

In a raw comparison like that, Touch ID seems like the faster unlocking method, but as TechCrunch’s Matthew Panzarino points out, in actual day-to-day usage, Face ID has benefits over Touch ID because it’s a more streamlined interaction.

With Touch ID, to do something like open up a notification, you need to tap the notification and then use Touch ID to open the notification, a two step gesture. With Face ID, it recognizes your face as the phone is raised while you’re tapping the notification, a quicker, less involved action.

Panzarino says that while Face ID is slower when placed head to head with Touch ID, it’s “much more fluid and faster to actually ‘do things.’”

Here. Let me show you in a video what I mean that Face ID in use is different than Face ID artificially clocked. pic.twitter.com/1jvU2f5vC2

— Matthew Panzarino (@panzer) November 1, 2017

Face ID is a first-generation technology, and early Touch ID was also much slower than it is today. In the future, Face ID will improve and get much faster, but even in the interim, it seems to be a more natural biometric authentication method that won’t require thought or attention once users become accustomed to the way that it works.

Right now, Face ID is only available to a select number of people who have been provided with early iPhone X review units, but once it launches on Friday, we’ll have a much better understanding of just how it works and how it compares to Touch ID in real world usage.

Related Roundup: iPhone XBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
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Apple CEO Tim Cook to Appear on NBC Nightly News Tonight

Apple CEO Tim Cook will appear in an interview with NBC’s Lester Holt on this evening’s NBC Nightly News broadcast, NBC unveiled in a tweet this afternoon.

One of the topics of discussion will include Russia’s use of social media to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. In a teaser clip airing ahead of the interview, Cook says the use of social media to spread fake news and manipulate people is a major problem.

“I don’t believe that the big issue are ads from foreign government. I believe that’s like .1 percent of the issue,” Cook told NBC Nightly News anchor Lester Holt in an exclusive interview airing Wednesday night.

“The bigger issue is that some of these tools are used to divide people, to manipulate people, to get fake news to people in broad numbers, and so, to influence their thinking,” Cook said. “And this, to me, is the No. 1 through 10 issue.”

Cook’s commentary on Russia comes just after representatives from Facebook, Twitter, and Google testified before congress over what role Russian interference on social media networks may have played in the election. On Facebook alone, an estimated 126 million Americans viewed Russian-backed ad content during the campaign.

TONIGHT: Apple CEO Tim Cook sits down with @LesterHoltNBC to weigh in on Russian use of social media to meddle in the 2016 election. pic.twitter.com/UJLjZDUZbq

— NBC Nightly News (@NBCNightlyNews) November 1, 2017

During the testimony, execs from the three social networks faced tough questions and were lambasted for not doing more to prevent Russia from taking advantage of social media to spread misinformation.

Another topic of conversation will include US tax reform, with Cook telling Holt that tax reform is sorely needed and “should have been fixed years ago.”

JUST IN: Apple CEO Tim Cook tells @NBCNightlyNews exclusively that the U.S. should reform the tax code now. https://t.co/CGk1Gcihbw pic.twitter.com/vrzUKPNfdI

— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) November 1, 2017

NBC Nightly News premieres at 6:30 p.m. eastern time in the United States.

Note: Due to the political nature of the discussion regarding this topic, the discussion thread is located in our Politics, Religion, Social Issues forum. All forum members and site visitors are welcome to read and follow the thread, but posting is limited to forum members with at least 100 posts.

Tag: Tim Cook
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iPhone X Features Exclusive ‘Reflection’ Ringtone

Apple doesn’t often introduce new default ringtones for the iPhone, but with the launch of the iPhone X, the company has added a new “Reflection” ringtone that’s exclusive to its new flagship device.

Reflection, with its soft, mellow twinkling sound, is the new default ringtone on the device according to Forbes’ David Phelan, who has an iPhone X review unit.

It’s called Reflection and it sounds great. Because it’s new, I missed two or three calls before I realized I’d been listening to my own phone ring. I mention this because it’s the default ringtone and so you might miss it, too.

Developer Guilherme Rambo shared the audio for Reflection on Twitter, and a reddit user dug into the iOS 11.1 code and made a downloadable copy that can be installed on non-iPhone X devices.

This is the new “Reflection” ringtone, only available on iPhone X pic.twitter.com/La0wTzB4wd

— Guilherme Rambo (@_inside) November 1, 2017

The iPhone X with the new Reflection ringtone is set to launch in just two days, on November 3.

Related Roundup: iPhone XBuyer’s Guide: iPhone X (Buy Now)
Discuss this article in our forums

Some Samsung Galaxy Note 8 owners say their phones are freezing with certain apps

Experiencing a frozen Samsung Galaxy Note 8? You’re not alone. Galaxy Note 8 users around the world are complaining of phones freezing up on Samsung’s community forums. These reports first appeared shortly after the release of the Note 8, but have been growing in numbers over the past few weeks.

The problem does not appear to be tied to a specific model of the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, though Android Police reports that SM-N950U units on U.S. carriers, unlocked European (SM-N950F), and dual-SIM (SM-N950D) models have been listed in the forums.

An exact cause is not known, users have noticed the phones tend to freeze when using the Contacts app or other apps that pull information from the Contacts app, such as the dialer, messaging apps, and more. Several people suggest the issue stems from downloading the Google Contacts app, which may be conflicting with Samsung’s Contacts app, though this has not been confirmed.

Potential Solutions:

Currently there is no solution to the problem, but the following two inconvenient workarounds can restore functionality, at least temporarily, to your phone:

• A hard reset is the primary workaround for a frozen Galaxy Note 8.  A hard reset will take several minutes and will completely erase all information on your phone. To perform a hard reset on your phone, press the Volume up, Bixby and Power buttons at the same time.  In 30 to 45 seconds you should see the Android Recovery Menu. Use the Volume down button to select the Wipe data/Factory reset option and press the Power button to select it.
• An alternative, but even more time consuming, option is to allow your battery to die and then recharge. While this will take a lot longer, you will likely not lose any data if you regularly backup your phone.

For people who are experiencing frequent freeze-ups, Android Authority is reporting that you can contact Samsung support to arrange an “evaluation and repair.” Samsung’s U.S. support number is 1 (800) 726-7864. Users outside the U.S. can check out Samsung’s country-specific site to find relevant support options.

We’ve reached out to Samsung for comment, and will update this story when we hear back.

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MIT app listens to a car to diagnose problems before symptoms are apparent

Why it matters to you

A new MIT app that analyzes the sounds and vibrations made by a car to detect problems could save drivers $125 per year on car costs.

In the next couple years, you may be able to diagnose your car’s ailments with little more than a smartphone app, thanks to research from engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The system works by turning a phone’s microphone and accelerometers into a kind of automotive stethoscope that analyzes the sounds and vibrations made by a car to detect problems, even before the vehicle shows any obvious symptoms.

The MIT app has the potential to save the average driver $125 per year, according to Joshua Siegel, one of the research scientists behind a recent paper describing the app. That savings could be as much as $600 per year for trucks. Gas mileage is could possibly increase by a few percentage points for all vehicles.

“Right now, we’re able to diagnose several common engine and suspension problems,” Siegel told Digital Trends. “Our engine diagnoses include identifying misfires and optimally timing filter changes, while our suspension diagnostics include identifying wheel imbalances and variations in tread depth and tire pressure.”

As with much of today’s emerging tech, Siegel and his team owe a lot to recent advancements in AI algorithms and cloud computation. Thanks to machine learning, the more data the app is able to collect, the more its performance improves.

“For each diagnostic or prognostic, we collect data from the sensor or sensors best able to measure the physical manifestation of a defect, and then train models to look for certain characteristic “fingerprints” of each fault type,” Siegel explained.

To analyze air filters, the app listens to how the car “breathes” to detect how clogged the airflow is. For misfires, it listens for what Siegel called the “characteristic popping sound” that tends to scare the wits out of people in the passenger seat. By measuring vibrations, the app can pick up on wheel imbalances.

“We’re able to do this because the sensors in your phone — the same microphone you use to talk, and the same accelerometer your phone uses to rotate the screen when you switch from portrait to landscape — are far more sensitive to small changes than people are,” Siegel said.

The MIT team is currently testing the app internally with promising results, Siegel said. Moving forward, the team will train the app on various vehicle types to add to their data, with the hope that the app will work on any type of consumer vehicle.

A paper detailing the research will be published in the November issue of the journal Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence.

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