How to replace your iPhone’s battery

Apple has confirmed it slows down iPhone devices after the batteries reach a certain age. Older batteries can cause some iPhones to unexpectedly shut down, which is why slowing down the phone allows it to better handle the power output from these batteries. Still, that leaves you with a slow phone, which can be frustrating.

The good news is you don’t need to buy a new iPhone. You can replace your iPhone’s battery, and the device’s performance should improve. Here’s how.

Replacing the battery via Apple

The most convenient and reliable way to replace your iPhone’s battery is to do it through Apple. The process usually costs $79, but Apple is offering a $50 discount as an apology for one year, so the replacement process will only set you back $29. We recommend going this route, as you won’t void your device’s warranty or risk damaging your iPhone by replacing the battery yourself.

If you have an iPhone 6 or newer, the new battery will only cost $29. If you have an older iPhone, the service charge of $79 remains. There are a few ways to get Apple to replace your iPhone’s battery for free. If you have AppleCare+ or your phone is still under warranty, and Apple deems that the battery is defective, then repairs are free. The battery being defective, however, is rare — it’s likely that you might have to pay for the replacement.

If you purchased an iPhone 6S between September and October 2015 and your iPhone is randomly shutting down, you may be eligible for a free battery replacement. Apple has released a tool to help you figure out if your phone is eligible, which you can find here. To get the battery replacement, your phone needs to have no water damage or screen cracks.

The easiest way to start the process is to head to the nearest Apple Store, which could either take one visit or a few days, depending the complexity of the repair. If there are no Apple Stores nearby, you can opt to ship your iPhone in — but the process will take quite a bit longer, as Apple will send you a box to ship your iPhone back in, replace the battery, then ship it back to you.

Replacing the battery yourself

It is possible to replace the iPhone battery yourself, but we do not recommend this approach. Largely because iPhone devices use a lot of glue and other materials you’ll have to get through to replace the battery, which can be tricky, and doing it yourself means your waterproof iPhone 7 or iPhone 7 Plus will no longer be waterproof.

You can follow in-depth instructions from websites like iFixit, which also sells kits with the tools needed to replace your iPhone’s battery. Most of these kits cost around $25-$30, so in the end you’ll pay around the same as you would to just get Apple to do it if you have an iPhone 6 or newer. The instructions vary depending on which iPhone you have — so make sure to follow the right guide. Recently, you can find guides for the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6S, iPhone 6S Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, iPhone 8, and iPhone 8 Plus. You do not need to replace the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X’s batteries anytime soon, as they likely won’t see issues with the battery for another year or more.

Apple said it will introduce tools to help check your device’s battery health in an upcoming iOS update, which should make it easy to know when you need to change your phone’s battery.

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Everything you need to know about the SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket

It’s time for Elon Musk and his launch company, SpaceX, to shake up the world of off-planet travel once again. After a year of successful launches and recoveries of the Falcon 9 rocket’s first stages, Musk has his sights set on heavier payloads, more launches, and bigger missions — all of which will theoretically be possible with the introduction of SpaceX’s newest roccket: the Falcon Heavy. Heres everything you need to know about what’s soon to be the world’s biggest, baddest rocket.

What’s the big deal?

Big is exactly the deal. When the Falcon Heavy makes its debut, it will become the world’s largest operational rocket, only beaten by the Saturn V rocket which was last flown in 1973. Weighing in at 54 metric tons (119,000 lbs), the Falcon Heavy also boasts an operational payload of more that two times it’s closest competitor, the Delta IV Heavy , yet can be produced for a one third of the cost.

The Falcon Heavy’s multiple stages being assembled.

This is made possible by drawing heavily upon the proven success of the Falcon 9 rocket system, as the first stage of the Falcon Heavy is composed of three Falcon 9 engine cores. The combined 27 Merlin engines generate more than five million pounds of thrust at liftoff, equal to the power of eighteen 747 aircraft. Regardless of what the payload ends up being, there’s definitely room for plenty of it.

Why the wait?

First mentioned by Musk in 2005, and originally scheduled to become operational just a few years after the Falcon 9’s debut voyage in 2009 — the Falcon Heavy has been in production for quite some time.

In 2011, plans were set in motion to increase manufacturing capabilities to meet expected demands of both the Falcon 9 and Falcon 9 Heavy. Then in 2015, with the introduction of the Falcon 9 V1.1 upgrades, tandem production of the Falcon Heavy was announced. This eventually culminated in a photo released in December 2016 of the Falcon Heavy interstage at the company headquarters in Hawthorne, California.

Since then, a number of different things (additional testing, the CRS-7 launch failure, and extensive launch pad renovations) have contributed to years of delays. But now, with it’s maiden voyage tentatively set for January of 2018, the business is piling up for SpaceX.

Who Cares?

Since it’s announcement, the Falcon Heavy has drawn a lot of attention. From military contractors to telecommunications firms to private citizens excited for the newest tourism craze, it seems like the entire world is chomping at the bit to blast stuff into orbit.

Currently, the Falcon Heavy’s launch itinerary includes contracts from Arabsat, the United States Air Force, a much anticipated visit around the moon, and one very special cherry red car. These planned missions vary in type and destination, but they all share one similarity: getting the world pumped up about space travel again.

When?!

Now that the craft has been assembled, run through preliminary tests, set vertical, and stuffed with its first payload (Musk’s own cherry-red Tesla), the Heavy’s first launch is rapidly approaching, and will likely happen sometime in late January. But first, it has to pass a static fire test. Only then will SpaceX be able to set a concrete launch date.

So until then, we’ll all just have to wait here on the edge of our seats.

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Tiny flat lenses just graduated to full color (and soon, use outside the lab)

Research on flat lenses supported the idea that future smartphones might not need that camera bump — but only if you wanted to shoot solely in black and white. Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a flat lens that can focus the entire visible spectrum of light — which means flat lenses just moved from monochrome to full color. The research, published on January 1, has already lead to commercial licensing of the technology.

Each color in the visible spectrum has different qualities — which means if all those colors passed through a flat sheet of glass, they wouldn’t reach the camera sensor at the same time, creating a colored distortion called chromatic aberration. Traditional glass lenses solve this problem by curving the glass so that each color of light reaches the destination at the same exact time.

Flat lenses or metalenses use tiny structures instead of a curve to focus the light. While previous research successfully focused some light with this type of lens, the flat lenses weren’t capable of focusing all the visible colors. Earlier efforts expanded the single wavelength capability of flat lenses to capture blues and greens, but not the full visible specturm.

So how did the researchers give flat lenses full-color capability? By adjusting those tiny structures that focus the light. Rather than single uniform structures across the lens, the research group used pairs of nanostructures. These pairs can control the speed of the light passing through, and by altering that speed, can help ensure all the colors reach the camera sensor at the same time. The nanostructures on the lens are made with titanium dioxide, a material most commonly used in products like paints and cosmetics.

“One of the biggest challenges in designing an achromatic broadband lens is making sure that the outgoing wavelengths from all the different points of the metalens arrive at the focal point at the same time,” said Wei Ting Chen, one of the paper’s authors and a SEAS postdoctoral fellow. “By combining two nanofins into one element, we can tune the speed of light in the nanostructured material, to ensure that all wavelengths in the visible are focused in the same spot, using a single metalens. This dramatically reduces thickness and design complexity compared to composite standard achromatic lenses.”

While the research is the latest in a long history of different studies, the group doesn’t plan on stopping with just the visible light. The group says that creating a larger metalens could have applications in virtual reality, already planning to focus their next research in that area.

Harvard says the technology has already been licensed to a company to develop commercial products, but did not go into further detail as to what type of consumer device the flat lens will first be integrated in.

The full research report is available from Nature Nanotechnology.

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Tiny flat lenses just graduated to full color (and soon, use outside the lab)

Research on flat lenses supported the idea that future smartphones might not need that camera bump — but only if you wanted to shoot solely in black and white. Now, researchers at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a flat lens that can focus the entire visible spectrum of light — which means flat lenses just moved from monochrome to full color. The research, published on January 1, has already lead to commercial licensing of the technology.

Each color in the visible spectrum has different qualities — which means if all those colors passed through a flat sheet of glass, they wouldn’t reach the camera sensor at the same time, creating a colored distortion called chromatic aberration. Traditional glass lenses solve this problem by curving the glass so that each color of light reaches the destination at the same exact time.

Flat lenses or metalenses use tiny structures instead of a curve to focus the light. While previous research successfully focused some light with this type of lens, the flat lenses weren’t capable of focusing all the visible colors. Earlier efforts expanded the single wavelength capability of flat lenses to capture blues and greens, but not the full visible specturm.

So how did the researchers give flat lenses full-color capability? By adjusting those tiny structures that focus the light. Rather than single uniform structures across the lens, the research group used pairs of nanostructures. These pairs can control the speed of the light passing through, and by altering that speed, can help ensure all the colors reach the camera sensor at the same time. The nanostructures on the lens are made with titanium dioxide, a material most commonly used in products like paints and cosmetics.

“One of the biggest challenges in designing an achromatic broadband lens is making sure that the outgoing wavelengths from all the different points of the metalens arrive at the focal point at the same time,” said Wei Ting Chen, one of the paper’s authors and a SEAS postdoctoral fellow. “By combining two nanofins into one element, we can tune the speed of light in the nanostructured material, to ensure that all wavelengths in the visible are focused in the same spot, using a single metalens. This dramatically reduces thickness and design complexity compared to composite standard achromatic lenses.”

While the research is the latest in a long history of different studies, the group doesn’t plan on stopping with just the visible light. The group says that creating a larger metalens could have applications in virtual reality, already planning to focus their next research in that area.

Harvard says the technology has already been licensed to a company to develop commercial products, but did not go into further detail as to what type of consumer device the flat lens will first be integrated in.

The full research report is available from Nature Nanotechnology.

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Here’s your early look at the Nokia 6 (2018)

Updates in all the right places.

The Nokia 6 was one of the many Nokia phones released in 2017, and although it wasn’t the best budget phone we saw throughout the year, it still put up a solid fight and offered a tremendous amount of value thanks to steep discounts offered by Amazon’s Prime Exclusive system. We’re expecting a refresh at some point this year, and thanks to a Chinese retailer, we now have a clear look at the Nokia 6 (2018) in all of its glory.

Starting off with the design, the Nokia 6 is once again made out of aluminum (6000 series this time around) and will be available in two different colors – black with gold accents and white with copper accents. The bezels appear to be trimmed down compared to last year’s Nokia 6, and because of this, the capacitive navigation buttons have been moved on-screen and the fingerprint sensor is now on the back below the camera.

The display is once again 5.5-inches with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, and although it’s not directly mentioned, our guess is that Nokia will once again use an LED panel rather than AMOLED. Also here is a 16MP rear camera with f/2.0 aperture, 8MP front camera, 3,000 mAh battery with support for fast charging, and 32 or 64GB of internal storage that can be expanded up to 128GB.

One of Harish’s biggest complaints about the 2017 Nokia 6 was with its performance. The phone shipped with the Snapdragon 430, and while it’s a perfectly fine processor, it struggled to power the Nokia 6’s 1080p display. This time around, Nokia is using the much more capable Snapdragon 630 and pairing it with an increased 4GB RAM.

The Nokia 6 (2018) will ship with Android 7.1.1 Nougat out of the box, and according to the site it’s listed on, pre-orders will begin January 10. As for price, the 32GB model is listed at €191 and the 64GB variant is €216.

CES 2018 is right around the corner, and assuming this information is correct, we can probably expect an official announcement from Nokia next week.

Nokia 6 review: A great phone with one major drawback

Google is running customer surveys in the Pixel 2’s settings page

Um, whatcha doing, Google?

Although Google’s been around since the late 90s, Google as a hardware company is still very young. The Pixel and Google Home from 2016 were the first two major hardware releases we saw, and Google followed those up this year with the Pixel 2, Home Mini/Max, Pixelbook, Pixel Buds, and more.

The Pixel 2 is an incredible phone that we’ve raved about more than once, but it looks like Google is feeling a bit self-conscious and is in need of some reassurance from its customers.

When perusing his phone, Android Central’s Andrew Martonik noticed something rather odd on his Pixel 2 XL. Near the bottom right of the screen in the settings, a pop-up can be seen with the title of “Help improve Pixel: 1 minute survey.” You can tap “no thanks” to make this go away, but selecting “take our survey” will present you with a handful of questions.

These are presented to you in a larger pop-up window so you’re never actually taken away from the settings page, and questions include the likes of “how satisfied are you with this phone”, “when did you start using a Pixel 2 phone”, and “before getting your Pixel, which company made your previous phone.” Once you get through these questions, the survey ends with a box where you can choose to type in any comments you’d like to send to Google.

Andrew says he’s only seen this on his Pixel 2 XL and not the regular Pixel 2, and I’ve yet to see it on my Pixel 2 either. It’s unclear how Google is choosing which phones to run these surveys on, and while the info being collected here is likely valuable for Google going forward with future products, it’s also decidedly intrusive to throw pop-ups on a phone that costs at least $650.

Have you noticed this on your Pixel 2? If so, let us know in those comments down below.

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Everyone will soon have to use the Google Calendar redesign

If you’ve been avoiding the visual refresh Google recently gave to the web version of Calendar, your time is almost at an end. Starting January 8th, users of G Suite and Google Domains will be automatically switched to the new design. Anyone who opted out manually won’t be forced to use the new Calendar until February 5th, but all users will get the upgrade on February 28th.

The new Google Calendar on the web looks much more like the mobile version, now, with a matching color palette and a self-adjusting interface based on your browser’s window size. There’s a new drop-down menu that lets you switch views between day, week, month, year, schedule and four days, too. You can put rich text and hyperlinks in calendar entries, and format text and create bulleted lists as well. Enterprise users will see more details on conference rooms if administrators have added the information.

Via: 9to5Google

Source: Google

Pixel 2’s ‘Portrait Mode’ unofficially makes it to non-Google phones

While Google’s Pixel 2 didn’t change much from its predecessor, which came out only a year before, one of the newer smartphone’s standout features is the background-blurring Portrait mode. But this photo tech might not be exclusive to Google’s flagship phone anymore: Members of XDA Developers community got Portrait Mode working on other devices, from the original Pixel to non-Google devices running Android Oreo.

XDA Senior Member Charles_I, known for previous Google Camera mods, was the first to port the Portrait Mode software beyond the Pixel 2, getting it working on the Pixel & Pixel XL as well as Google’s Nexus 5X and 6P phones via a custom app. Then XDA Senior Member Arnova8G2 adjusted that app to work on a broad range of non-Google devices, with users reporting it functioning on Xiaomi, OnePlus and Moto G5s Plus phones.

Google’s imaging and HDR algorithms have long been prized, and they work magic with the Pixel 2’s basic lenses. Porting that tech to a smartphone with higher-caliber cameras — or at least an optical zoom — could be big.

Source: XDA Developers

Hyundai and Volkswagen team with Google’s former self-driving lead

Both Hyundai and the Volkswagen Group announced today that they are partnering with self-driving technology company Aurora Innovation and will be incorporating the firm’s autonomous driving systems into their own vehicles. Hyundai will be working the technology into its latest fuel cell vehicle, debuting next week at CES, while the Volkswagen Group says it could be incorporated into a number of its brands’ vehicles, including self-driving Sedric pods, shuttles, delivery vans or trucks.

Aurora was launched last year by three big shots in the self-driving world — Chris Urmson, who headed Google’s self-driving project before it was spun out as Waymo, Tesla’s Sterling Anderson and Uber’s Drew Bagnell. The company is focused on developing highly and fully autonomous driving systems that they can then license to companies like Hyundai and Volkswagen. While this sort of strategy means those companies won’t have exclusive technology like they would if they developed it themselves, it allows them to get their hands on it more quickly and while devoting fewer resources to technology that is currently in constant flux. Volkswagen Group’s Chief Digital Officer Johann Jungwirth told The Verge that going with a startup like Aurora was done because of the people on Aurora’s team. “It’s not just the founder team,” he said. “The team they’ve been able to hire, the talent they are attracting? They are the best in the world. The progress they have made in such a short time frame, it’s just amazing.”

The Volkswagen Group, which has been working on integrating Aurora’s technology into its vehicles for the last six months, plans to test a double-digit number of self-driving vehicles by the end of 2018, The Verge reports, upping that fleet to triple digits next year and aiming to pilot the vehicles in two to five cities in 2021. Hyundai is also looking to have self-driving vehicles on the market by 2021.

Click here to catch up on the latest news from CES 2018.

Via: The Verge

Source: Hyundai, Volkswagen Group

‘Black Mirror’ predicted our dystopia. How does it evolve?

Before Black Mirror became a Netflix phenomenon, it was the very definition of a cult hit. It appeared on the British network Channel 4 out of nowhere in 2011, and for years it was almost impossible to find outside of the UK. That, to be honest, felt fitting. Its biting and deeply observant commentary on technology’s creeping influence in our lives felt dangerous. In many ways, it was like the Twilight Zone reborn. Black Mirror was so prescient, it predicted that a cartoonish reality show star could almost win an election thanks to the power of social media. But in its fourth season, available exclusively on Netflix, the series’ cautionary lens on tech is beginning to feel stale.

Spoilers for Black Mirror season four ahead.

There’s no doubt the world in 2018 is a very different place than when Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones started the series. You could say we’re basically living through a Black Mirror episode. We’re more addicted to smartphones than ever. Social media companies have a tremendous sway on how we consume news, making it harder to discern fact from fiction. And, of course, there’s a reality show star sitting in the White House who could start a nuclear war while tweeting from the toilet. Compared to that, a story simply telling us that we should be wary of child surveillance technology doesn’t seem as compelling. We know.

It could be that we’re just holding Black Mirror to high standards, given just how trenchant it’s been over its first three seasons. Fifteen Million Merits (my personal favorite) thrust us into a futuristic world where people live in rooms surrounded by screens, are forced to exercise for money and their only respite is a vapid reality TV show. Be Right Back is a somber tale of romantic loss that explores the creation of a digital consciousness and the value of an android’s life. And White Christmas, the show’s Netflix debut special starring Jon Hamm, explored the existential horror of forcing AI to live through months of isolation at the turn of a dial. Sure, every episode isn’t a slam dunk — the voyeuristic punishment of White Bear and the bee drones (yup) for Hated in the Nation come to mind. But the show’s dramatic highs overshadowed those pitfalls.

In season four, it’s as if Brooker is struggling to find something truly new to say. Or perhaps it’s just becoming easier to see the mechanics of his allegorical tales. New technology might seem useful at first, but it eventually reveals itself to be something that controls our lives or strips us of our humanity. (Much like the Twilight Zone episode The Man in the Bottle, they typically lean on the downsides of something you’ve wished for.) And when he’s not exploring that, he ponders the sentience of digital life. There’s certainly room to mine for more stories around these topics, but they don’t feel as fresh as they used to. And at times, the predictability of Brooker’s storytelling begins to feel didactic and laughable to the point of self-parody.

The key to good parenting. pic.twitter.com/1eLks4754S

— Black Mirror (@blackmirror) January 3, 2018

Arkangel, for example, tells the story of a mother who implants a surveillance device in her young daughter after almost losing her at a park. She can track the child’s location through a tablet, an obvious extrapolation from the increasing popularity of today’s GPS trackers for kids. Going further, though, she can see and hear everything her daughter does. And, just to take things into true dystopian territory, she can also block her child from seeing disturbing imagery — in her eyes, it just ends up looking like amorphous blobs. (That’s similar to how people could choose to “block” themselves from your vision in White Christmas.) Naturally, that leads to emotional development issues and bigger problems when she’s a teenager.

While the episode brings up some interesting ideas, it doesn’t really say anything new. We can see the pitfalls from the beginning, especially since we’ve seen similar scenarios before in Black Mirror. There isn’t much room for the story to surprise us. And it doesn’t help that the episode ends with a flash of violence that feels as if it’s there for shock value, instead of exploring what the technology means to the characters or the predicting dangers of extreme surveillance.

Netflix

Similarly, Crocodile introduces an intriguing concept — a device that can read your memories — but fails to do much with it. Booker frames it as a noir tale: An accidental killing occurs, and inevitably, violence begets more violence. All the while, an inquisitive insurance agent uses the memory reading technology to verify a claim from a client, which eventually puts her on the path of the killer. We’re told that it’s mandatory for people to open up their memories to investigations, which shows a society where civil rights and privacy are secondary to security and conformity. But that world building is bogged down by clunky and at times nonsensical storytelling.

Even the highlights of this season feel more reminiscent of earlier Black Mirror episodes than anything truly new. Hang the DJ gives us a unique take on the algorithmic matchmaking behind dating apps, but it’s not nearly as moving as last season’s Emmy-winning San Junipero. And Black Museum gives us a smattering of familiar Black Mirror concepts where the pitfalls are easy to see from a mile away. It’s ultimately a moving exploration of digital consciousness, but it’s hard not to feel like we’ve gone down this path before.

Netflix

Black Mirror still manages to explore a few new concepts this season. USS Callister is Brooker’s take on modern misogynistic gamer culture, which also ends up being a hilarious Star Trek spoof. Metalhead is a straightforward horror tale, reminiscent of The Terminator. The core idea behind it is pretty silly — What if there were killer Aibos?! — but it’s held together by solid direction from David Slade (Hard Candy, Hannibal).

So where does Black Mirror go from here? Hopefully, Brooker opens the show to more writers with fresh ideas. He’s written most of the series so far and only occasionally brought in collaborators. Just two episodes, The Entire History of You and Nosedive, feature scripts he didn’t write (though he did get a story credit on the latter). While Brooker might fashion himself as the next Rod Serling, even he made room for the likes of Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury on The Twilight Zone.

Black Mirror might just be a victim of its own success. It’s done such a good job of warning us about where we’re headed, its commentary is beginning to feel practically obvious today. There’s still room for Brooker’s unique brand of criticism, though. Perhaps instead of focusing so much on the dangers of specific innovations, it’s worth exploring how they come about, and the societal pressures that make them flourish. Instead of leaning into the idea of technological dystopias, let’s see how we get there.