Belkin’s wall mount surge protector can protect 8 of your gadgets for $14

You’re going to want protection for your new gadgets!

The holidays are a time when people tend to get lots of new gizmos and gadgets that need to be charged, and unfortunately, they don’t each come with their own wall outlet to use. Odds are that you want to keep your gear safe from surges while charging it, and it doesn’t hurt anything to be able to charge more than two things from any outlet, right?

Well, today only you can pick up Belkin’s SurgePlus wall mountable surge protector for $13.95, which happens to be about $6 lower than its regular price. This surge protector has six AC outlets and two USB ports and protects against electrical spikes of up to 900 Joules.

• Compact and Convenient: Charge 6 AC powered devices or 2 USB A powered devices from 1 AC wall mounted surge protector.
• Faster Charging: The two USB ports deliver 2.1 AMPs of shared power to each port for faster charging of USB-A powered devices.
• Surge Protection: The 6 AC outlets provides surge protection for against electrical spikes (900 Joules).
• Space Saver: This small surge protector takes up minimal space.
• In Use Indicator: The “Protected” indicator light turns green to show your devices are grounded.
• Durable Construction: Damage-resistant housing protects circuits from wear and tear.

Belkin offers a connected equipment warranty of up to $25,000 with this surge protector.

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Samsung’s CTO and former Bixby head has left the company

A successor has not yet been announced.

At the end of October, Samsung announced a heap of changes for its executive department. All three of its co-CEOs were replaced, DJ Koh took over the company’s mobile division, and Rhee In-jong was assigned as the new CTO. However, Samsung confirmed on Wednesday, December 20 that Rhee has officially resigned.

Rhee is said to have expressed a want to leave the company back in July, and in an email that he sent on December 19, his decision to resign appears to be strictly for personal reasons. Rhee’s daughter was dispatched to serve in the U.S. Army in July, and after reflecting on this and his new position, Rhee said he felt “selfish” for taking the spot of CTO while his daughter was overseas.

Rhee In-jong first joined Samsung back in 2011, and during his time with the company, he helped work on products/services such as Samsung Knox and Samsung Pay, and he was even the head for development of Bixby.

Samsung has yet to announce who will replace Rhee as CTO, but whoever it is, they’ll have mighty big shoes to fill.

Samsung smart speaker with Bixby to launch in first half of 2018

Enter to win an Amazon Fire Tablet and get a Christmas surprise from GameStash!

Want the gift of unlimited mobile gaming for your kids this holiday season? How about a brand new Fire Tablet, the most child-friendly tablet ever to go along with it?

The team at GameStash is spreading some holiday cheer! Simply enter your email address below to receive a free Christmas surprise in your inbox and a chance to win 1 of 5 Amazon Fire Tablets courtesy of GameStash.

Tis the season for giving!

GameStash is one of the easiest ways for your kids to game without breaking the bank. With GameStash you pay just $4.99 a month and can choose from hundreds of big-name apps & games to use them whenever, wherever, with no extra in-app purchases or fees — ever. Install GameStash on a phone or tablet and your kids can play all they want without the worry of any “accidental” purchases.

What’s in it for me?

• With GameStash you’ll pay just $4.99/month with no extra payments or in-app purchases
• No obligations!
• Unlimited games, apps, and educational videos (did we mention no extra fees?)
• Worry-free guarantee means your kids (or you!) can play all you want without worrying about “accidental” in-app purchases
• Choose from over 300 top-name titles like Badland, Cut the Rope, Tomb Raider, and more, with new games being added all the time!

Enter now and watch your email on December 24th for your free gift from GameStash, and to see if you’ve won an Amazon Fire Tablet!

Enter to win an Amazon Fire Tablet and get a FREE Christmas surprise from GameStash!

Movies purchased via Google Play have extra content in Movies Anywhere

Get ready for more behind-the-scenes and bloopers.

When Movies Anywhere launched this past October, it came as a true godsend for those with extensive digital libraries sprawled across multiple platforms. Being able to store and watch all your movies from Google Play, iTunes, Amazon, and Vudu in one location is still pretty magical, but it looks like there’s an extra benefit for titles purchased on Google Play Movies that we didn’t notice until now.

Google Play Movies has come a long way since its launch, but there are still certain areas where it’s lacking – one of these being included extra content. There are some titles on Play Movies that come with behind-the-scenes clips and bloopers, but they’re few and far between when compared to something like iTunes.

However, if you’ve purchased movies on Google Play and link your account to Movies Anywhere, you’ll be able to watch any extra content that comes with those titles on other services in Movies Anywhere.

For example, if you purchased a movie like Big Hero 6 on Google Play Movies, you’ll see that it doesn’t come with any sort of extras. However, if you link your Google account to Movies Anywhere, you can jump to the Movies Anywhere app, open up Big Hero 6, and watch deleted scenes, interviews with some of the people behind the movie, and even the short Feast that aired before the movie in theaters.

Big Hero 6 on Google Play Movies (left) compared to Movies Anywhere (right). Note the disparity in extras.

I’ve checked multiple movies in my personal collection, and I can confirm that there’s extra content for titles in Movies Anywhere that just isn’t available in Play Movies – even though I originally purchased them through Google.

Movies Anywhere was already a game-changer, and this latest discovery just makes it even better.

Movies Anywhere lets you watch your digital movies on any service, and Google is a launch partner

Bose SoundWear Review: MrMobile’s first wearable speaker

When CrackBerry Kevin first suggested I try out the Bose SoundWear, I thought it looked an awful lot like a toilet seat. But it’s not, nor is it an airline pillow, horseshoe, or boomerang. The Bose SoundWear is actually a wearable speaker, and while it’ll never replace your headphones, it does complement them in a way that’s more useful than I ever expected.

If you’re at all like me, with a lifestyle that’s got you running around so much that you can’t even sit still in your own house or office, the SoundWear is one weird piece of tech that you might just find a use for – assuming you can find the space in your budget for these and a set of headphones. Come see what I mean in the MrMobile Bose SoundWear review!

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Essential Phone now getting Oreo Beta 2 with new features and bug fixes

Now with picture-in-picture, smart text selection, and more.

Essential rolled out the first beta of Oreo for the PH-1 back in mid-November, and while it’s been great to play around with the new version of Android, there have been some noticeably missing features and multiple bugs that have made us anxious for beta two. This was supposed to be pushed out last week but was delayed due to “a few regressions” that Essential caught “last minute.”

However, the waiting game is now over as Oreo Beta 2 is finally makings its way to the Essential Phone.

Weighing in at a hefty 142.4Mb, Oreo Beta 2 includes picture-in-picture, smart text selection, instant apps, security scans through Google Play Protect, app sign-in, and faster startup times.

There are also quite a few bugs that have been squashed, including:

• Android Auto and OEM Bluetooth car kit interoperability improvements
• Data tracking issues for certain U.S. carriers
• Setup Assistant screen cutoff issues due to status bar
• Further Treble support
• Battery life improvements
• LED notification and charging behavior

You’ll receive an OTA update to Beta 2 if you’re already enrolled in the beta program, but if not, you can sideload it from Essential’s website.

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‘Donut County’ is a love letter to LA

From 2002 to 2014, Dunkin’ Donuts didn’t exist in Los Angeles. Hell, during that time there was just one Dunkin’ store in all of California, at a military base on the state’s southern tip. Considering there were more than 7,000 Dunkin’ Donuts outposts littering the United States by 2013, the dead zone was an anomaly. In fact, it was one of the first things independent game developer Ben Esposito noticed when he made the move from New York to LA.

“That was a big deal to me,” he said. As a native New Yorker, he grew up on chain doughnut shops, especially Dunkin’, which was headquartered in Massachusetts. On the opposite coast, however, he was dropped into a new world: Mom-and-pop doughnut shops flooded the Los Angeles marketplace, each offering its own spin on the classic fried delicacy. If America ran on Dunkin’, California was a thousand different countries.

“I was fascinated by that and I was fascinated by the local doughnut culture,” Esposito said. “Because the interesting thing about doughnuts in LA is that each shop is a fusion of a different culture and, you know, the standard doughnut shop. So you’ll be able to get doughnuts and Chinese food, or doughnuts and Mexican food, and they’re all kind of mashed up and very local and specific to the community.”

Today, there are dozens of Dunkin’ Donuts stores across California, sitting alongside community-run shops. Esposito calls this trend doughnut gentrification. “They’re going to crush the local doughnut shops because no one can compete with the scale of Dunkin’ Donuts,” he remembers thinking as the first Dunkin’ opened in LA. “Even I have brand loyalty to them, which is stupid to say.”

Esposito’s obsession with Los Angeles doughnut culture sparked the idea for his latest game, Donut County, a pastel, raccoon-infused puzzle game where players control a hole that grows every time it swallows a new object. It’s heading to PC, iOS and PlayStation 4 next year, published by Annapurna Interactive. Esposito is an established game designer best known for his work on The Unfinished Swan and What Remains of Edith Finch, and he’s a founder of Glitch City LA, a successful incubator for local developers. Games to come out of Glitch City include high-profile indie hits Hyper Light Drifter, Dream Daddy, Quadrilateral Cowboy and Frog Fractions 2.

Esposito is in love with LA. It shows in his dedication to Glitch City and in Donut County itself. However, his latest game started life as something far removed from fried dough, the West Coast or anything truly meaningful in Esposito’s personal life. Donut County used to be a game called Kachina.

Esposito debuted Kachina at IndieCade in 2012, and by 2013 it had picked up some buzz and secured financial support from Indie Fund. Kachina’s premise will sound familiar: Players controlled a hole in the ground as it swept under various objects, growing with each new ingestion. However, the game’s design was vastly different than Donut County’s: It featured art and objects that Esposito said were inspired by Hopi culture, including items like totem poles and teepees.

However, totem poles and teepees have nothing to do with Hopi culture. What’s more, Esposito talked about drawing inspiration from Hopi “folklore,” a dismissive term for the deeply held religious traditions of indigenous people. After Kachina’s IndieCade debut in 2012, Debbie Reese of the American Indians in Children’s Literature blog wrote about the game’s missteps and tweeted the story to Esposito.

He read the article and decided to prove Reese wrong. Though Esposito knew little about the Hopi people — he simply liked the look of Kachina dolls — he stuck with his game’s premise and started researching, planning to eventually present an authentic and enlightening vision of the tribe to a new audience.

His plan quickly went off the rails in strange and offensive ways. At one point, Esposito added a mechanic where players would burn down reservations to build tract housing. It was clear no amount of research would be able to save Kachina from itself; this was not his story to tell.

By 2014, Esposito was officially woke.

“I learned this really important and now very obvious lesson, which is it doesn’t pay to tell someone else’s story,” Esposito said. “In many different ways — it hurts them and it hurts you because it’s not a genuine story.”

Nowadays, this train of thought is common in conversations with developers. The video game industry has changed dramatically since 2012; there’s a growing social awareness throughout the production process, spurred by advocacy groups and the accessibility of communication apps like Twitter. However, just five years ago, cultural appropriation was a new idea for many developers.

“I think people are tuned into the cultural implications of the media they consume a lot more now, probably thanks to stuff like Feminist Frequency doing the big, foundational work of showing people, ‘Hey, you should think about it.’ Which is, unfortunately, controversial,” Esposito said.

This bubble before online call-out culture enabled Esposito to explore the root of his issues with Kachina. Even after the AICL blog post, he wasn’t inundated with furious messages or attached to any incendiary hashtags. He was able to research, reach his own conclusions about cultural appropriation, and then pivot when he realized he was wrong. In the end, he says it was a no-brainer.

“It’s really painful, and it costs a lot of time and energy, but I have to do it,” Esposito said. “And I felt totally safe doing that. I didn’t feel under attack or anything.”

This process helped Esposito realize another truth about game development: Make what you know. He couldn’t build a heartfelt game about Hopi culture because he didn’t have any connection to the subject matter. He needed to draw from the things he was actually passionate about.

“I knew the game was about a place and the people who live there,” Esposito says. “So I had to make the game about LA. Because I love LA, I’m fascinated by it. I think about it all the time. And I’ve put down some serious roots here.”

Which brings us back to Glitch City and Donut County.

Ben Esposito

Esposito and friends founded Glitch City in 2013 as a hub for LA artists and game developers to gather, create things and support each other. A space like this doesn’t simply appear and stay open on its own — it takes organization, dedication and financing for these collaboration spots to function. More local game-development hubs are popping up around the country, though there are also ones shutting down. Look at the Philly Game Forge for just one example of a popular space having to close its doors.

“If anyone’s like me, they didn’t really know what they were doing when they started it,” Esposito said. “It costs a lot to do, it takes a lot of time and energy, it takes a lot of planning. It takes a lot of re-adjusting your priorities to make it work.”

But Esposito, Hyper Light Drifter creator Alex Preston and a handful of local LA developers have been making Glitch City work for the past four years. Aside from cultivating a string of successful indie games, the hub has been a source of emotional support for Esposito. He’s no longer trapped at home, working alone on new projects and obsessing over irrelevant details or wasting time online.

“Having the support of a lot of other people who are trying to do the same thing, who kind of understand that we’re not really in competition with one another, we’re here to support one another — that’s been just so valuable to me,” Esposito said. “I don’t think I would still be doing it if not for this community. I think I might have just given up.”

Plus, there’s a local doughnut shop next to Glitch City that Esposito frequents. He makes sure to emphasize this fact; he may love Dunkin’ Donuts, but he loves LA more and he wants to support the people who live there, whether they’re making games or frying dough. Donut County is an attempt to share the magic of the city with a wider audience, and it does so in an adorable package filled with pink frosting and anthropomorphized animals.

While Donut County’s main mechanic involves a hole that grows as it consumes the environment, the game itself is actually story driven.

“That’s kind of central to it,” he says. “It’s short and it’s got absolutely no filler in it.” (A fitting description for a game about doughnuts).

Esposito took a winding path to Donut County, starting from a place of distance and ignorance, and ending up surrounded by friends and sweet treats in LA. Despite the awkwardness of his original approach to Donut County, his game is better for the journey. He now trusts himself to build the things he knows, to tell his own story — and the story of LA.

“This is the most me game in the world,” Esposito says. “And you’re going to have to prepare yourself because it’s a very concentrated dose.”

‘Stargate: Origins’ will make its streaming debut on February 15th

Stargate: Origins, the digital-only prequel show, will make its debut on February 15th, according to a teaser that was released today. It will be available exclusively on Stargate Command, a dedicated platform where fans can interact and watch all the movies and TV episodes. The price appears to be a one-time $20 fee.

The show features a young Katherine Langford, played by Ellie Gall, who is the daughter of the man who originally discovered the Stargate. While the original movie and TV show spin-offs are firmly in sci-fi territory, it appears that this show will take its inspiration from movies like Indiana Jones, complete with Nazi villains.

It remains to be seen how much this show will change established canon — after all, it was archaeologist Daniel Jackson who decoded the Stargate decades later. Still, Stargate: Origins looks fun, and the price is low enough to encourage people to check it out.

Via: The Verge, The Verge

BlackBerry Motion review: It’s all about the battery life

Back in the old days, when BlackBerry was the premier smartphone maker, you could count on its devices to feature two things: a physical keyboard and long battery life. Things have changed a lot since then, but part of that legacy lives on in the new BlackBerry Motion. It might lack that classic keyboard, but it makes up for it with one of the biggest smartphone batteries I’ve used all year. That should keep some hardcore devotees happy, right? We’re not exactly sure when (or even if) the Motion will land in the US, but that’s just as well: It’s a fine phone but overpriced for what it is.

Hardware

Chris Velazco/Engadget

Unlike the last two all-touch BlackBerrys, the Motion is more than just a clone of an existing device. In fact, I’d argue the Motion is the best touchscreen BlackBerry in years. It’s conservative in that way BlackBerrys always are, but the Motion’s body is a handsome blend of glass, aluminum and soft-touch plastic that’s made to look like carbon fiber. In an effort to give the Motion some extra character, BlackBerry Mobile rounded the phone’s top edge while leaving the bottom one flat. It’s a neat touch, but it’s hard to appreciate unless you look closely. Still, the fact that BlackBerry Mobile is trying to give a glass-and-metal slab any personality at all is a reassuring change of pace.

The phone looks better than it feels, though. It’s quite a bit taller than the BlackBerry KEYone so folks with smaller hands will have to do the smartphone shimmy to reach the top of the screen. The Motion’s flat sides, meanwhile, make it feel boxy and utilitarian. Then again, if there’s any phone that can get away with feeling utilitarian, it’s a BlackBerry. More importantly, the Motion is rated IP67 for water and dust protection. Try pulling that off on a phone with a physical keyboard.

When I reviewed the BlackBerry KEYone earlier this year, I said it was a little strange to be testing a phone with such a cramped screen after being spoiled by devices like the Galaxy S8 and LG G6. Even with a longer, more conventional display, though, the Motion still feels a little dated compared to other recent phones. It doesn’t help that there’s lots of space beneath the 5.5-inch screen; that’s where the capacitive navigation keys go, along with the physical home button. There’s a fingerprint sensor stuck in there, too, and while it worked quickly most of the time, it routinely faltered when my thumb was even slightly sweaty.

Honestly, there isn’t a whole lot to say about the Motion’s 5.5-inch LCD screen. It runs at 1080p, as you’d expect from a phone in this price range, and it’s generally nice looking. Colors are pleasant, if not exactly exciting, and the viewing angles are quite good; you’d have to look from a pretty extreme angle to see the colors distort. The Motion’s screen lacks the punchy hues and deep blacks you’d get from an AMOLED panel (like, say, the one on the DTEK60), but I’m not sure anyone expected otherwise. All told, it’s a perfectly serviceable display and nothing more. For a brand whose core mission is to fuel productivity, though, that’s not necessarily a dealbreaker.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

Same goes for the Motion’s sound quality: It’s purely adequate. The single, downward-firing speaker produces loud, slightly lifeless audio; there’s a notable lack of oomph evident when listening to music, partly because there’s very little bass to speak of. Setups like this are all too common in mid-range phones, but they’re still just fine for plowing through podcasts or taking in a few YouTube videos. Kudos to BlackBerry Mobile for including a headphone jack, though.

You’ll find the USB-C port next to the headphone jack along the phone’s bottom, while the volume rocker, sleep/wake button and convenience key are located on the right side. Good luck keeping those last two buttons straight, by the way — the latter is ribbed so you can identify it without looking, but it’s right where you’d expect the phone’s power button to sit. I’ve been testing this phone for close to two weeks now, and I still find myself reaching for the wrong button when I want to turn the device on. Here’s hoping your muscle memory adapts faster than mine does.

Despite some charming new design flourishes, the stuff inside is basically the same as what you’ll find in the KEYone. BlackBerry Mobile once again opted to use a Qualcomm Snapdragon 625 chipset with an Adreno 506 GPU and a relatively paltry 32GB of storage. (Thankfully, you can slip a microSD card onto the SIM tray and go nuts with the movies and photos.) The Motion packs 4GB of RAM compared to the KEYone’s 3GB, but the biggest deviation from the KEYone formula is the Motion’s massive, 4,000mAh battery. That’s one of the largest we’ve tested this year, and it’s a clear callback to the days when BlackBerrys were the kings of smartphone battery life.

Software and security

Chris Velazco/Engadget

The Motion runs Android 7.1.2 out of the box and, as usual for BlackBerry, what looks like a stock Android interface actually hides quite a bit of depth. The KEYone and Motion share plenty of features so I’ll try not to repeat earlier Engadget coverage too much, but man, there is a lot going on here.

As usual, your emails and social communiques get routed into a unified inbox called the Hub, making it easy to quickly glance at all your incoming messages. Actually dealing with all of those items can still be tricky, though; there’s still no way to mark all of them as read in one fell swoop, but you can create different “views” that only show notifications from certain apps and accounts. The productivity tab, meanwhile, seems more immediately useful. Tapping on the right edge of the screen offers up quick glances at upcoming calendar events, unread messages in the Hub, tasks you’ve added to your checklist and your favorite contacts. Normally, I’d have widgets splayed across my home screens to offer the same information, but the productivity tab has the added benefit of being usable while you’re already in another app.

Chris Velazco/Engadget

The other usual flourishes are here too, like shortcuts for common actions in the app launcher and the ability to swipe up on app icons to see their related widgets. There are a few interface tweaks specific to this device, though: You can swipe your finger down the home button to pull down the notifications shade, and more importantly, you can assign up to three actions to the so-called “smart” convenience key. If you only have one action tied to the key — say, firing up Google Maps — tapping the button does just that. With multiple actions attached to the convenience key, though, you’ll have to tap on the screen to make your selection. It’s not nearly as elegant as the KEYone’s approach, but then again, how could it be? You could map actions to just about every button on its physical keyboard — that’s 27 convenience keys to work with instead of just one.

Beyond the interface, BlackBerry Mobile also spent more time thinking about how to keep your important data under wraps. The result: a new feature called Locker mode that allows you to securely store your most sensitive files. Moving things into the locker is easy enough: Just select some items in the Files app and hit “Lock.” Once done, you’ll be prompted to authenticate every time you want to see your secrets. It’s not as technically elegant as, say Samsung’s Secure Folder — which allows users to install a separate, private instance of an app that requires authentication to access — but it’s a step in the right direction.

More interesting is how you can snap a photo with the camera using the fingerprint sensor instead of tapping the on-screen shutter button, a move that sends the resulting shot straight into the locker. If some of your data is so important that it needs to be shielded from prying eyes, there’s always the included privacy shade app. It obscures all of the screen except for a slim bar you can drag up and down. My life isn’t nearly interesting enough to require this, but it’s a nice touch for paranoiacs and people with codeword clearance.

And then there’s our old friend DTEK, an app that rates how secure the Motion is at any given time. I imagine most business-oriented users will stay firmly in the “Excellent” category, but tinkerers and power users who install apps from outside the Play Store will definitely see their ratings docked. (Not that that matters to anyone who isn’t beholden to an IT department.) DTEK hasn’t changed much since it debuted on the BlackBerry Priv two years ago, but it’s still a handy tool for managing app permissions and at least tries to make it easy for people to understand the importance of mobile device security.

Camera

Chris Velazco/Engadget

BlackBerrys have never excelled at photography, and nothing about the Motion’s 12-megapixel main camera changes that. At its best, when scenes are awash in light, the Motion is capable of capturing some pleasantly solid photos. Colors are mostly accurate if a little washed-out and there’s a respectable level of detail to be found if you look closely enough.

Unfortunately, anything less than optimal conditions seem to stymie the Motion’s camera. Let’s say people are walking back and forth through your frame — the Motion’s camera often struggles to expose photos correctly in scenarios like those. The KEYone had similar problems and I was hoping BlackBerry Mobile would get around to fixing them by the time it released its second phone. Alas, they’re still here.

And even now I’m a little confused by the fact that an option to “focus before capture” is disabled by default. The feature might add a moment of hesitation before actually snapping the photo, but the results almost always look better. It’s like BlackBerry was more concerned with maintaining the perception of speed than actually producing better pictures from the outset.

Just to reiterate, the camera is actually pretty good sometimes. What’s frustrating is that it can be difficult to tell when you’re actually going to get a pretty photo. More than anything, this camera needs to be more reliable. I will say, however, that the camera is pretty consistently bad in low light. Colors begin to look more lifeless as ambient light grows scarcer. Focusing — which can be dicey to start with — becomes more sluggish. Some will argue that BlackBerrys are business focused, and that as a result, the company doesn’t need to care about camera quality as much as its rivals do. Those people have a point, but don’t forget: BlackBerry Mobile went to the trouble of including a camera mode that scans business cards and adds them to your contact list. Helpful? Sure, but I would’ve preferred a little less effort on that and more time spent improving the overall camera performance. Thankfully, the 8-megapixel front-facing camera was tougher to criticize: It churned out decent selfies without issue, and I can’t ask for much more than that.

Performance and battery life

Chris Velazco/Engadget

BlackBerry was never really interested in fighting spec wars with the rest of the industry. Indeed, the Motion isn’t some flagship beast meant to get power users rallying under the BlackBerry banner. With its Snapdragon 625 chipset and 4GB of RAM, the Motion is decidedly mid-range, but that doesn’t mean it left me lacking. There was more than enough horsepower here for me to flit between Slack, Spotify, Gmail and Trello with ease. All told, I noticed very few hiccups during my daily routine. Productivity is a BlackBerry priority, and for what most people probably have to accomplish in a given day, the Motion seems like more than enough.

It shouldn’t surprise you to hear the Motion isn’t terribly well-suited to gaming, but it’s not awful at it either. I ran into some lag while taking a pirate’s ship out into the open seas in Tempest, but the game never felt unplayable. Ditto for graphically intense games like Modern Combat 5 and Asphalt: The Motion dropped some frames and stuttered now and again, but it held up better than you might expect.

More importantly, it’s clear the Motion was designed with longevity in mind. Qualcomm’s power-sipping chipset and 1080p display pair nicely with the enormous 4,000mAh battery wedged inside and, as a result, the Motion routinely lasted two full days before needing to be recharged. To be clear, that’s two full days of me checking my email like a maniac, furiously Google searching and binging on YouTube videos. Over quiet weekends, I could stretch the Motion’s battery life to nearly two and a half days before plugging it in. Not bad at all. There were times when it seemed possible I could get it to hang in for almost three days, a prospect that made me giddier than I care to admit. While I’m far from sold on some of the Motion’s attributes, I’m seriously considering bringing it to CES with me next month just to make sure I have a phone that won’t go dark in the middle of a press conference.

The competition

Chris Velazco/Engadget

No US carrier has committed to carrying the BlackBerry Motion, and for all we know, it may never be sold unlocked here. It’s available in Canada for $600CAD (about $470 in US dollars) and there’s a real chance that the only way you’ll be to get one is from an online retailer in another country. While I know that’s no big deal for some BlackBerry die-hards, it’s worth taking a deep breath and exploring other options, too. After all, the Motion has a clear edge when it comes to security, but there are far more stylish, powerful options out there for about the same price.

Consider the OnePlus 5T. It was built to replace a phone that is itself only a few months old, and it offers flagship performance and an extra-long AMOLED screen for $499. That tidy sum also nets you one of Qualcomm’s top-tier Snapdragon 835 chipsets, 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage, all of which help the 5T outclass the Motion in pure power. You’ll have to make do with a smaller battery, though, and recent concerns about security flaws may mean OnePlus is a non-starter for some BlackBerry fans.

In that case, there are also devices like the $499 Essential PH-1. It might not have the best camera I’ve tested this year, but it is easily one of the most impeccably crafted smartphones I’ve ever used — no surprise considering founder Andy Rubin embraced Apple’s approach to premium designs. The Essential uses the same Snapdragon 835 chipset as the OnePlus 5T, but it comes with a generous 128GB of storage and features one of the cleanest Android builds you’ll find out there. And who could forget its design? The PH-1 has virtually no bezel surrounding its screen, making it a compact delight that fits comfortably in most hands. Now, do most people’s daily routines require as much power as either of these phones offer? Probably not, but they illustrate just how much you can get for $500 these days.

Wrap-up

Chris Velazco/Engadget

The BlackBerry Motion is a strong follow-up to a phone I liked more than I expected to, and in general, it gets more right than wrong. More importantly, I get the impression that the folks at BlackBerry Mobile/TCL are focusing on the things that really matter to its core fans. With all that said, it’s hard to recommend the BlackBerry Motion to anyone who hasn’t already pledged allegiance to the brand. It’s just such a niche device, and what you get for the money doesn’t quite feel like enough considering how strong the competition is. Unless you’re absolutely obsessed with security or want to pay to keep your beloved phone brand alive, the BlackBerry Motion is ultimately a good phone that doubles as a bad deal.

Coinbase halts Bitcoin Cash transactions over insider trading fears

The start of Bitcoin Cash trading on the Coinbase exchange was supposed to be a great opportunity to get into a major new cryptocurrency while its values weren’t yet through the roof, but that’s… not how it panned out. Coinbase froze transactions just a few hours after they began in order to investigate numerous accusations of insider trading. Observers noticed that the price of Bitcoin Cash rose sharply before news of its availability on the exchange broke, and that there was a sharp selloff virtually the moment trading started. From a cursory glance, it looked like someone knew about the Coinbase move in advance, triggered a flurry of trading that led to a spike in price, and took advantage of this for a massive windfall.

Coinbase chief Brian Armstrong stressed in a blog post that there was no evidence of insider trading “at this time,” but also promised a zero-tolerance approach. The CEO said “will not hesitate” to immediately fire anyone shown to be trading on non-public info, and insisted that the company had repeatedly warned employees against the practice. Staff are barred from any trading for “several weeks.”

It’s not certain when Bitcoin Cash transactions will return to the exchange. Whenever they do, the unusual activity is a reminder that digital currency is still a relatively untamed space. Even with futures trading and tighter regulation in place to add some stability, virtual money still tends to be volatile — it doesn’t take much to create havoc.

I dont care how you slice it, this is INSIDER TRADING! Someone with alot of Bitcoin knew @coinbase would add Bitcoin Cash BCH and took one BIG chunk of profit from the #flippening. Whoever you are you are your making crypto look like wall st. Shame on you. pic.twitter.com/g9YU9jGm0T

— CryptoSoldier (@NoTimeToSearch) December 20, 2017

Via: The Verge

Source: Coinbase Blog (Medium), CryptoSoldier (Twitter)