Go hands free in your car with a $7 Aukey air vent car mount

One of the easiest mounting solutions around.

An Aukey air vent magnetic car mount is down to $6.88 with code AUKEYC38 on Amazon. This mount is normally $13 and only drops this low through the occasional coupon code.

That mount is best for phones around the size and weight of the iPhone 7. If you need something bigger for a phone like the iPhone X, this similar air vent car mount is down to $5.99 with code AUKEYHC5. It sells for $8 without a coupon code.

These car mounts easy secure to one of the air conditioner vents in your car. You then put one of the included magnetic plates between your phone and a case, and you can easily place and remove your phone on the mount. Because there are only magnets holding the phone to the mount, you can rotate it to any angle and easily switch between landscape and portrait mode.

All Aukey products are backed by a two-year warranty.

Pro-gaming giant Fnatic is introducing eSports to CES

Sam Mathews founded Fnatic about 13 years ago, when he was just 19. Today, Fnatic is a household name for eSports fans: It’s one of the most successful and prolific professional gaming franchises in the world, regularly competing at the top tier in games like League of Legends and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. The brand has expanded past the games and into hardware, and Mathews showed up at CES this year to demo Fnatic’s latest keyboards and mice, which are due to hit the market in the coming months.

The Clutch 2 and Flick 2 are updated versions of Fnatic’s existing mice, while the Streak and Streak Mini are new mechanical keyboards. All of Fnatic’s hardware is designed specifically for (and with) professional players, including features like rounded edges, built-in mic controls and an adjustable wrist rest to help combat injuries.

But Fnatic’s presence at CES is about much more than new gear. More people than ever are watching eSports; its leagues are maturing and becoming more stable, and traditional sports teams are investing heavily in this space. The eSports industry combines hardware, software and a competitive, human element — all things that make a lot of sense at CES. Fnatic isn’t the last major eSports brand to show up at tech’s biggest convention.

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

Visa Dropping Signature Requirement for Chip Cards and Apple Pay Starting in April

Visa today announced it will eliminate its signature requirement for EMV payments beginning April 2018 in the United States and Canada.

The change will apply to both chip-and-signature credit and debit cards, and contactless payment solutions like Apple Pay when linked to a Visa credit or debit card. The change is designed to allow for a more consistent, streamlined, and quicker checkout experience for both merchants and cardholders.

For years, customers have been required to sign the receipt when making a purchase to verify they own the debit or credit card they are attempting to use. A cashier is supposed to match the signature on the receipt against the one on the back of the card, but in reality, this process is often skipped nowadays.

Currently, even when using Apple Pay, a signature can be required on occasion for purchases over $25 made with a Visa card in the United States. But with EMV technology and other modern safeguards, Visa is now moving to fully eliminate this requirement, in line with Mastercard, American Express, and Discover.

The signature requirement is already much less common in Canada, where customers insert their chip card into a payment terminal and verify ownership by entering a four-digit PIN. You also can’t use contactless payments for transactions over $100 in Canada, so Visa’s change doesn’t affect Apple Pay in the country.

Visa says its partners have deployed EMV-chip enabled readers at more than 2.5 million locations around the world. Less than two years since the technology launched in the United States, counterfeit fraud declined 66 percent at EMV-chip enabled merchants, according to the company.

Merchants will remain able to collect signatures if required to do so by an applicable law in a particular jurisdiction.

Related Roundup: Apple PayTag: Visa
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Adorama and Best Buy Sales Include Up to $200 Off New MacBook Pros and MacBook Air

Adorama has marked down a collection of MacBooks this week, with instant rebates that start at $150 off Apple’s mid 2017 refresh of the 13-inch MacBook Pro and increase to $200 off the 15-inch model. Adorama’s markdowns on the latest MacBook Pros provide some of the best sale prices for these custom configurations found online, and other retailers like B&H Photo and MacMall are matching discounts in many instances.

Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with these vendors. When you click a link and make a purchase, we may receive a small payment, which helps us keep the site running.

13-inch MacBook Pro from mid 2017

• 2.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD – $1,549 at Adorama and B&H Photo, down from $1,699
• 2.3GHz, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD – $1,749 at Adorama and B&H Photo, down from $1,899
• Touch Bar, 3.1GHz, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD – $2,049 at Adorama and B&H Photo, down from $2,199
• Touch Bar, 3.5GHz, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD – $2,349 at Adorama and B&H Photo, down from $2,499

15-inch MacBook Pro with Touch Bar from mid 2017

• 2.8GHz, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD – $2,199 at Adorama, down from $2,399
• 2.9GHz, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD – $2,599 at Adorama and MacMall, down from $2,799
• 2.9GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD – $2,989 at MacMall / $2,999 at Adorama and B&H Photo, down from $3,199
• 3.1GHz, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD – $3,199 at Adorama and B&H Photo, down from $3,399

In addition to Adorama’s instant rebates, Best Buy today started a new 2-day sale that will last until tomorrow, January 13 at 11:59 PM CT. Discounts include $200 off the MacBook Air, around $60 off the HP ENVY printer, as well as savings on 4K tvs and various smart home products. We’ve rounded up some of the most notable deals during Best Buy’s 2-day sale in the list below.

• 13-inch MacBook Air, Mid 2017, 1.8GHz Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD – $999.99, down from $1,199.99
• 13-inch MacBook Air, Mid 2017, 2.2GHz Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, 512GB SSD – $1,349.99, down from $1,549.99
• HP ENVY 5660 Wireless All-In-One Instant Ink Ready Printer – $29.99, down from $79.99-$89.99
• LIFX Smart LED Light Bulbs – Save between $5 and $8
• TP-LINK Smart Wi-Fi Plug Mini – $29.99, down from $34.99
• TP-LINK Wireless Smart Light Switch – $34.99, down from $39.99
• TP-LINK LB130 Smart LED Light Bulb – $34.99, down from $44.99
• Bose SoundTrue Ultra In-Ear Headphones – $79.99, down from $129.99

If you were interested in T-Mobile’s BOGO iPhone offer announced earlier this week, remember that the carrier’s trio of deals go live today. For more of the latest discounts and sales — including a third-party Rose Gold Milanese Loop for $8 on Amazon — head over to our Deals Roundup.

Related Roundup: Apple Deals
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This might be the Game Boy’s ultimate form

Hyperkin is working on something for retro gamers looking to retire any venerable Game Boys that have seen better days. The aluminum-hewn Project Ultra GB might be the hardware you need to break out your old Game Boy hits. It takes the original cartridges, as well as keeping the dimensions of the Game Boy Pocket and those iconic simple controls.

Not much has changed — in a good way — but I really liked the idea (and feel) of a metal Game Boy. While controls and design haven’t changed, Hyperkin does plan to upgrade the audio-out for anyone that likes to make their own chip tunes with old Nintendo tech: This prototype will evolve to include left and right audio for stereo as well as an audio amp. The team is even trying to add LSDJ chip tune software to the device internally.

Beyond audio, the final device will also have a USB-C charging port (it’s currently rocking an old-school AC port), while the screen will include an RGB wheel to cycle through color options, including that classic yellowish-greenish palette of the very first Game Boy. More details are set to come at E3 2018, with a production unit scheduled to appear — including that all-important price. Hyperkin says it expects the device to cost less than $100.

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

Cruising the Las Vegas Strip in the Smart Vision EQ concept car

Introduced at the Frankfurt auto show in September, the Smart Vision EQ from Mercedes-Benz is the automaker’s EV concept that combines mobility, autonomy and connectivity. The result is a car built on the Smart Fortwo platform, can wink at pedestrians, has level-five autonomy (no steering wheel or pedals), and welcomes passengers by name. It also took me for a short ride on the Las Vegas Strip.

Mercedes says the concept vehicle isn’t made to be sold to individuals and would instead be part of an autonomous ride-sharing fleet. The way Mercedes envisions a car like this would work is that it would arrive at a location and display the name of the individual that hailed the ride on the front of the car. They would enter the vehicle, and the dash would show their name, photo and other information they shared with the car-share service.

Then the electrical vehicle would cruise autonomously around and eventually drop you at your location and bid you farewell. One interesting feature is that the car is outfitted with hand-sanitizer dispensers, so as the passenger departs, they can clean their hands after being in a car that’s been on the road all day with various people getting in and out.

My ride in the car was a bit less personalized. Mercedes did update the front display with the Las Vegas Strip, but it was set to the default demo passenger. No biggie, the point of the short drive (about 500 meters done twice) was to experience the sensation of being in a level-five car that could be the blueprint of a future Mercedes.

Even though the two passes I took in the car lasted about five minutes, and the car was controlled by a Mercedes technician via a remote, it was a good indicator of how it would feel to sit in a car you’ve hailed without a human behind the wheel. If this service were available now (and was safe), I would use it all the time. Parking in San Francisco is challenging even on the best of days, and I like the idea of a car that winks at people as it drives down the road. I’m guessing that other folks tired of traffic and spending 20 minutes looking for parking would too.

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

Touring Hyperloop One’s ever-evolving test site

Virgin Hyperloop One, a company that’s developing a new way of moving people around the world, has precedent when it comes to missing deadlines. The company pledged to test a fully working Hyperloop by the end of 2016, but its first test didn’t take place until Aug. 2017. The future doesn’t conform to timetables, and we can forgive plenty, but it’s still with trepidation that the company sets its next ambitious goal. It intends to have a full-size, passenger-ready Hyperloop in operation by 2021. After touring the transport company’s DevLoop site in Clark County, Nevada, it’s clear the challenges now aren’t technical but political.

For the first time since May 2016, the site was opened up to a handful of journalists this week during CES. Hyperloop One was a vastly different company. Back then, it was led by original co-founders Brogan BamBrogan and Shervin Pishevar — the former quit a few months after an alleged falling out with Pishevar’s brother. The latter would depart at the tail end of 2017, forced out after becoming embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal. In their place, Richard Branson has stepped in as chairperson, rebranding the company as Virgin Hyperloop One.

Another new face is Dr. Anita Sengupta, who has joined the company as the head of its systems engineering division. Sengupta is a veteran of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the figure behind the Curiosity rover’s supersonic parachute that enabled it to land on Mars. Sengupta’s knowledge of theoretical physics will be helpful when it comes to ensuring that the Hyperloop can function safely and reliably. After all, as she says, you don’t get to practice landing hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of equipment on another planet.

Her job has been made easier by the fact that DevLoop has now played host to more than 200 test runs of increasing speed and complexity. In November, the company demonstrated that its test pod could reach speeds of up to 240 miles per hour in just a 500-meter long tube. It took a distance of 300 meters to hit that speed, with the following 200 being used for deceleration, fact fans. And even though the tubes have been welded in place, the company continues to make significant tweaks to the system.

There was always a plan to include airlocks in the final design, but engineers were prompted to retrofit one onto DevLoop after a visit to SpaceX’s own test Hyperloop. They noticed how very long it took for the tube to depressurize before each run and started building their own airlock shortly afterward. Now a large white box roughly 10 feet tall sits just after the entrance of the tube, which houses a heavy airlock plate that keeps the vacuum separate from the entryway.

Things organized neatly.

Daniel Cooper

The airlocks not only make tests faster but also make the Hyperloop much more energy efficient, since you don’t need as much power to maintain the vacuum. Well, it’s not a vacuum as much as a very low-pressure environment that is kept at between 10 and 100 Pascal during operation. For comparison, the atmosphere most of us experience is around 100,000 Pascal, while the Hyperloop tube is operating at the equivalent of 200,000 feet above sea level.

Now that the physics problems have been dealt with, the company is also doing its best to walk back from some of its more ambitious plans. There will now be a single, unified pod design for both people and cargo and potentially only one or two passenger-pod designs therein. The concept of having self-driving units take you from your Hyperloop to your home has now been scrapped. Instead, its system will enlist the services of taxi, ride-sharing and other last-mile providers to schedule rides in time with your departure and arrival.

Daniel Cooper

And as Hyperloop’s leadership becomes more pragmatic, the hurdles that stand between it and a working system continue to fall. Perhaps the biggest one now is simply that it will take hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of funding to bring a project like this to fruition and the blessing of many a government agency. That’s not something that can happen overnight, unless some devil-may-care petrodollar baron can afford to fund the effort as a vanity project and stake a claim for the future.

The company won’t be drawn on where the first loop will be built but wants to make meaningful progress on the deal in the first half of the year. But if Hyperloop One believes that 2021 is a feasible deadline, then we’ll be holding it to its claims and watching the next three years with great interest.

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

Intel’s Meltdown and Spectre fixes have some bugs of their own

Earlier this week, Intel said it would have Meltdown and Spectre fixes available by the end of the month for all recently made chips. But as the Wall Street Journal reports, some of the patches the company has released have caused some problems of their own. Some firmware updates are apparently causing computers to reboot.

The Wall Street Journal got its hands on a document Intel was sharing with some of its customers (see note below), in which it advised them to “delay additional deployments of these microcode updates.” Stephen Smith, Intel’s data-center group general manager, told the publication that the bugs didn’t have anything to do with security and that the document was being shared with computer makers and large cloud providers. Since the Wall Street Journal published its report, Intel has released a blog post explaining the systems affected by the reboots are running Broadwell and Haswell CPUs. “We are working quickly with these customers to understand, diagnose and address this reboot issue,” it said.

Microsoft also halted some of its updates earlier this week after some AMD computer users reported that they couldn’t boot their computers after installing its patch. And Intel reported that most people would experience a small amount of slowdown — less than 10 percent — on their personal computers after installing its fix.

One of Intel’s partners told the Wall Street Journal that only telling some of its customers about the issue was a bad move on the part of Intel, saying the public has “been given the microcode update but has not been given the important technical information that Intel recommends that you don’t use this.” But security researcher Paul Kocher, who discovered some of the issues with Intel’s chips, said this sort of thing is to be expected. “It doesn’t surprise me a lot that there would be some hiccups.”

Update: While the Wall Street Journal reported that only some of Intel’s customers were receiving notice that they may want to hold off on installing its updates, Intel tells us that all of its customers were notified. The notice “was sent to all customers through the standard patch notification process,” a spokesperson told us.

Via: Wall Street Journal

Source: Intel

‘Detective Pikachu’ game’s US debut set for March 23rd

Ever since the Detective Pikachu game launched in Japan in early 2016, there’s been a lingering question: when would it be available elsewhere, if it ever left Japanese shores? At last, there’s a date. The Pokémon Company has announced that its 3DS sleuth title will reach the US and Europe on March 23rd, 2018 for $40. On top of that, there will be a $30 giant Detective Pikachu amiibo (nearly double the usual height at 5.35 inches tall) which unlocks videos that might provide clues.

In a sense, an international release was inevitable. If the Ryan Reynolds-starring Detective Pikachu live-action movie is going to premiere outside of Japan in May 2019, it’s going to need a fan base eager to see that movie. And besides, there’s still clearly an audience for Pokémon games. The developers would be leaving money on the table if Detective Pikachu didn’t get a wider release.

As it stands, the game won’t be alone. Nintendo has unveiled plans to launch a Pikachu Edition New 2DS XL in at least the US on January 26th. Shell out $160 and you’ll get Nintendo’s latest handheld in Pikachu’s signature yellow, complete with the electric critter’s smiling face on the lid. You’ll even have a ‘new’ game to play — Nintendo is re-releasing a 3DS-native, wireless multiplayer version of the Game Boy Color title Pokémon Crystal the same day for $10.

Here’s some shocking news, the New Nintendo #2DSXL Pikachu Edition arrives 1/26! This eye–catching yellow design features a stylized close-up of Pikachu’s face. https://t.co/fh0Tki7SzG pic.twitter.com/6yVcqEbvuf

— Nintendo of America (@NintendoAmerica) January 12, 2018

Via: Polygon

Source: Pokemon (1), (2), BusinessWire

Google Duo allows you to call people who don’t have the app

Duo is Google’s video calling app, and it looks like the tech giant wants to spread the word about it. According to Android Police, Duo users can now call people who don’t have the app installed and who haven’t registered with the service. It works like any other Duo communication, except that at the end of any call, recipients who don’t have the app installed will then be prompted to install Duo. They also have the option to decline future Duo calls from that person. We’ve contacted Google for confirmation.

It’s a good move for accessibility — and should encourage those who do have the app installed to use it more widely. Additionally, it will help expand the user base. Cody Toombs at Android Police notes, though, that he wasn’t able to reach all of his contacts through Duo. It’s unavailable for all non-Android phones (sorry iPhone users, you’ll just have to install Duo first), but Toombs reports there are likely more criteria that play into who you can contact. However, it’s unclear what they are.

This is all thanks to the App Preview Messaging feature, which allows Android users to use supported messaging apps to contact people who don’t have said app installed. Google’s smart messaging app Allo has supported App Preview Messaging since its launch, but the design for recipients without the app installed was a bit clunky. Android Police notes that it’s been refined, giving a better preview for what it would look like if the person installed Allo.

Source: Android Police, Google