HTC’s smartphone president has resigned following ten quarters of losses

Where does HTC go from here?

HTC’s been struggling to find a strong foothold in the smartphone space for quite some time now, and matters aren’t going to be helped in this regard following the announcement that HTC’s President of Smartphone and Connected Devices Business, Chialin Chang, has resigned.

The news broke in the early morning of February 14, with HTC citing Chang’s resignation being due to his own “personal career plan.” Chang is leaving HTC effective immediately, and as such, his duties and responsibilities now fall entirely on the shoulders of CEO and Chairwoman Cher Wang.

HTC will likely be on the lookout for someone to replace Chang’s position, but that could be an uphill battle for the company. HTC’s smartphone division has been losing money for ten consecutive quarters, with one of its most recent losses being $103 million in Q3 of last year. Devices like the HTC 10, U11, and U11+ are evidence that HTC can still make enticing hardware, but the fact of the matter is that customers don’t seem to be interested in what it has to offer.

We’re anticipating a 2018 flagship from the company in the form of the HTC U12, but where HTC goes from there remains to be seen. Google recently completed its acquisition of 2,000 of HTC’s hardware employees in late January, and when you combine that with consistent losses and Chang’s recent departure, the future isn’t looking too bright.

Chialin Chang first joined HTC in 2012 as the company’s CFO, and it’s been reported that he’ll move on to create his own AI startup at some point this year.

Google has officially completed its $1.1 billion HTC deal

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Save an additional $10 when you buy two already-discounted Echo Dots right now

Need to buy two of them!

Amazon has already discounted had the Echo Dot priced at $40 for the past week or so, but this new deal helps drop that price even lower. Simply adding two Echo Dots to your cart (in either color) will result in an additional $10 discount, which drops them down to just $35 each.

Buying multiple Echo Dots may be smarter than you think. Odds are once you start using it to answer questions, control your smart home gear, and other tasks you will want another one for your house. You can use them to talk to each other if you wanted or to play music in multiple rooms.

I have four of these in my house already, and this deal probably just upped that to six. Don’t miss out on this great price.

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Chromebooks in the workplace: How one non-profit uses Chrome OS to get things done

Chromebooks and “real” work? It’s possible, even in the enterprise.

Despite its first impression, Chrome OS is great in the workplace. Every type of business needs access to email, internal sites for company announcements, calendars, and other basic tools. For the longest time, Windows has dominated the business landscape, but increasingly Chromebooks are challenging that notion.

During the weekdays, I work for a non-profit focused on mental and behavioral health. We have offices in a few counties in central Indiana, so we need to be able to communicate instantly to take care of our patients. While some members of our staff use Windows laptops and desktops, 80% of our workforce uses Chromebooks or Chromeboxes, and we all connect with Google’s enterprise services. Certain workarounds are necessary to make all our tools available on Chrome, as I’ll talk about, but most of it just… works.

Let’s explore.

The basics

Google services make collaboration effortless and intuitive.

When our employees sign into their computers or open the Chrome browser at the beginning of the day, we have three tabs open for them: Gmail, Google Calendar, and our company Intranet. Some pro users may prefer using a dedicated email application, but most people just access their email from a website. Most of our new employees tell us they have a personal Google account, so we don’t have to do much training to get them up to speed with using Gmail, Calendar and other tools.

All of the documents that stay within the company are handled inside Google Docs, and our spreadsheets and presentations are done inside Google Sheets and Slides. Since everything we do is automatically saved to Google Drive, no work is lost. When we do our orientation classes, we show the collaboration features in Google Docs; it’s incredible watching everyone type into the same document and have everything “click” in their minds.

The same goes for other services like Hangouts. Google deserves the bad reputation it has built over the last few years with all of its various and opposing messaging applications, but enterprise users haven’t been hurt by that.

Hangouts has been rock solid for us, and it integrates directly with Google Calendar. When someone creates a new meeting, they automatically get a Hangouts Meet link for video conferencing. They don’t need to visit a separate page or check a certain box because it just happens automatically.

Speaking of Hangouts Meet, that tool is the coolest part of my job. We have a few Chromebooks that are set to only load meet.google.com. Setting this up didn’t require a different version of the operating system or a separate license: every time we need to set up one of these Hangouts Meet Chromebooks or Chromeboxes, we just enter the serial number into a list in Google administrative console. Reboot the device, and that’s it.

These Chromebooks have saved our skins plenty of times over the last few months. There are some days where a doctor in one location has a light patient load, and there are a large number of patients in other locations. The doctor starts the Hangouts Meet session, the front desk staff at the other location connects to them with a meeting code, then the patient goes into a room by themselves and talks to the doctor over the video conference.

Chromebooks have saved our butts more times than we can count.

The patient can’t load any other websites, and if the Chromebox reboots or the session ends, it automatically goes back to the Hangouts Meet home screen. It’s cool as heck, and has quickly become a vital part of how we treat patients.

All of our Chrome devices are running the latest version of Chrome OS with all of the proper security patches.

Our conference rooms are all run on Hangouts as well. Any Chromebook or Chromebox can be tied to a conference room calendar, and any user in those meetings can share content with the other participants by using Google Cast. These machines aren’t running some ancient version of embedded Windows or Linux; they’re using the same version of Chrome OS as our other devices. They get updated automatically every six weeks, and if something breaks they can be replaced in less than 20 minutes.

Using Chrome devices has plenty of advantages for our IT shop, as well. Chromebooks and Chromeboxes are much faster to setup and configure than Windows computers. There was one day I configured and updated 50 Chromeboxes, while I can typically do three or four Windows laptops in the same amount of time. Chrome devices are encrypted out of the box, and while hardware failures are still a thing, almost every software problem can be fixed with by factory resetting the device or recovering it.

Workarounds

There are some tools we use that aren’t web-based, however. In this case, programs like Parallels Remote Access, Citrix and VMWare can be used to host, deploy and manage these applications.

We also need to be able to share documents with outside companies, most of which use Microsoft Office. Google’s tools do an okay job of converting to and from Microsoft’s formats, but they aren’t foolproof. This means we also have a handful of employees using Microsoft Office — either accessed remotely through Parallels or installed to their Windows PCs. Some of our staff use Windows laptops because Chromebooks often can’t reliably print to a printer over USB. Our marketing team needs Photoshop and After Effects, and while Adobe has started to make these available to Chrome devices through the Google Play Store, they aren’t a replacement for their desktop equivalents just yet.

Apps like Photoshop, After Effects and other pro tools still don’t have equivalent experiences on Chrome OS.

These use cases are our low hanging fruit, and the majority of employees are perfectly productive on a Chrome device. Most of our employees even prefer Chrome OS over Windows because it is harder to mess up, and is easier to navigate. This makes me even happier since Chromebooks are safer and easier for us to keep track of. My main ongoing project is to find people using Windows laptops that don’t need that much power, offer them a Chromebook and see how they do. Everyone I’ve done that to has been extremely happy, which makes me happy and increases productivity for the reasons listed above.

Microsoft is taking Office to the same cloud-based world that Google’s tools are in.

We use Chrome and Google services, but Microsoft is going in the same direction with Office 365. Whenever I have to install and license an actual program on someone’s laptop, it feels so… archaic. Being able to have the user visit a website and type in their password is so much easier, both for me as an administrator and them as a user. We’re on our way to being 100% cloud based, and we’re using Chrome OS to get there.

Have you used a Chromebook in a business setting? Let us know down below!

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Cord cutting: 18 months later, I don’t miss cable TV

Or the bill that came with it.

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It’s more than a little strange to try to explain cable TV to my kids. To them, images on a screen are just the result of whatever app you picked. Those of us of a certain age, however, can remember a time when televisions weren’t flat, when pictures weren’t color, and when antennas and tinfoil were constantly adjusted. To them, there’s no difference between network and cable channels, premium or otherwise. It’s all #content, and it’s all available, all the time.

It’s also easier than ever — easier, but not painless — to mix and match and, ultimately, save some cash in the process.

That was the goal back in the fall of 2016. My wife and I looked at our $245-a-month cable bill and figured there had to be a better way to spend that money. Or, even better, to save some of that $3,000 a year to be spent somewhere else.

So we started researching on what we needed to do to get rid of cable TV. Was our internet connection fast enough? What hardware would we use. (OK, that part was easy, thanks to my chosen profession.) Which streaming services were we already paying for, which new ones did we want to check out?

And most important — what was it all going to cost?

• Do your homework
• Pick your hardware
• Over-the-air antenna
• Choose your services
• Everything else

You have to do your homework

It’s important to remember the purpose of all this. It’s not just to cut cable TV for sake of cutting cable TV. Because there’s nothing inherently bad about cable TV. It’s all the things you want to watch, in a single set-top box. It’s easy, and it’s fast.

The problem, at least in my case, was the cost.

This part isn’t optional. If you don’t do the math, you can’t save money.

My monthly breakdown until the day we flipped the switch was something like $75 for internet, and something like $170 for the cable TV part. A good part of that was the basic package, of course, plus whatever premium channels we had. But it was the nickel-and-dime stuff that really added up. Rental fees on each set-top box, and taxes and fees to go along with it. That’s essentially throwing money away. And there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it.

So our working number was $245 a month. If we were going to switch to an all-streaming scheme, we’d have to come in under that. And, frankly, we’d want to see a pretty decent margin given that we were giving up the simplicity of cable TV.

Out came the spreadsheet. What were we spending every month? What would we be spending? The math isn’t optional. But neither is it difficult. It’s also important to do an audit once a year or so. Because as we’ve found out, prices and plans can and do change.

Your internet connection still matters

Funny thing about TV these days. “Cable TV” is digital. It gets fed into your home as these bits and bytes of data, and the box connected to your TV translate them into visible pictures. “Streaming TV” is also digital. It gets fed into your home as bigs and bytes of data, and translated by other boxes into visible pictures.

Technologically speaking, there really isn’t a difference. (Yes, the devil’s in the details, but that’s another thing for another time.)

Google Wifi is a good option but lacks Ethernet ports.

But that also means that your internet connection is more important than ever. Don’t depend on a 5 Mbps DSL connection to get things done here. More speed means more headroom. But you also don’t necessarily need a 100 Mbps connection, either. I remember one cable company rep trying to upsell me from our 30 Mbps (downstream) and 5 Mbps (upstream) connection, asking about how many people I had in the house, and how many connected devices we had (heh), and that we’d definitely need something faster and more expensive.

Your situation may well vary, but we’ve been doing just fine, thank you very much.

Your network situation also will make a big difference. If you’re plodding along with an 802.11 b/g connection for years, it’s time to update your router. And the other rule of thumb is if you can use a hardwired ethernet connection with your streaming box, do it.

Our current cable bill for internet-only: $80 a month.

The hardware you’ll need

I didn’t really worry too much about the cost of hardware, or what it was we’d be using. That’s mostly because hardware should be a one-time cost.

There’s a world of hardware out there when it comes to watching streaming video. I haven’t used it all, but I’ve definitely used a lot. Here’s what I’ve learned over the past 18 months or so.

The Vizio M50-D1 ($648 at Walmart.)

A good display is important

If you’re going to splurge on one thing, make it the display. And the good news is that $1,000 can go a really long way these days, giving you something bigger than you’d ever had before, with a greater resolution than you ever though you’d need.

If it fits your budget, go ahead and get a set that’s got the “UHD” resolution. (That’s also known as 4K.) Same goes for HDR (that’s the cool “colors look awesome” feature), though definitely look for something that does Dolby Vision and not just the open-source HDR10. Better yet: Find a set that does both.

A display should be a long-term purchase. So make it a good one.

That doesn’t mean that all your new streaming shows are going to look magical. So much depends on the streaming source — if it’s not being streamed in 4K, you won’t be getting that magical picture you were hoping for. (And upscaling only goes so far.) That actually hasn’t been a deal-breaker for me, though. 1080p content looks just fine at a proper viewing distance. It’s just that 4K looks that much better.

Also: You don’t necessarily need one with a smart operating system built in. I’ve got one display that uses Android TV as its built-in OS. It’s deliciously simple to use that way, without needing any other streaming boxes. But it’s also been abandoned by the manufacturer. So it’ll never get updates. And running a separate box into now definitely clunks up the works a bit.

Me? I prefer a display that’s more dumb than smart. Just give me a great picture and get out of the way. The Vizio M50-D1 set I reviewed a way back $648 at Walmart has performed admirably in that regard, without forcing its own smart features down my throat.

The NVIDIA Shield TV is the only Android TV box you should consider. ($179 at Amazon.)

OK, so which streaming box to get?

This part is actually a little easier to navigate than you might expect. Android TV and Apple TV are the best. Period. If you’re in an Android household, get the former. If you’er in an Apple household, get the latter. If, like me, you’re in a mixed household, I’d lean toward Android TV, because it’s easier to use Chromecast features from an iPhone than it is to attempt to use AirPlay from an Android phone.

Amazon Fire TV and Roku are good alternatives. Full boxes are better than HDMI dongles, because you’ll never wish you the had less-powerful hardware.

Here’s my breakdown:

NVIDIA Shield TV

If you want an Android TV, get an NVIDIA Shield TV. Full stop. There currently is no other Android TV box you should even consider. It does everything except for iTunes content. The base model is $179, but you can bump things up with extra storage and a game controller if you want.

See at Amazon

Apple TV 4K

See at Amazon

It’s, uh, an Apple TV. And it’s really good at $179. (I haven’t bothered for the more expensive model with extra storage.) It’s what I use the bedroom. It’s fast, it’s powerful, and you can watch content from every source imaginable. (Even Google Play content, though you’ll have to use AirPlay to do it.) Just be sure to go ahead and get the 4K model, for future-proofing. The only negative? The remote sucks. (Get this one instead.)

Amazon Fire TV

See at Amazon

Fire TV ($69 when it’s not on sale) is a great inexpensive option. The new dongle does 4K content, but it doesn’t do Dolby Vision, just HDR10. Amazon has a ton of great content now — pretty much everything you’d want. You’ll not be able to get Apple content on here, though. My only nitpick is that the menu for the streaming service I use the most is really slow on Fire TV. Still, a great cheap option.

Roku Ultra

See at Amazon

OK, so Roku has a ton of options when it comes to hardware. Again, I recommend boxes over dongles, and the Roku Ultra hardly breaks the bank at $89. I’ve never been crazy about Roku’s software, though, (and again my streaming service of choice is really slow here, too) but Roku has a ton of options including news and games.

A couple other hardware notes for things I’m using:

• Again, I can’t recommend the Logitech Harmony Companion ($129 at Amazon enough. It’s a great universal remote, and handles other connected gear like lights and switches.
• If you need a TV but just can’t do an external streaming box for some reason, get something with a smart OS built in. Android TV is best. But for a less-expensive secondary screen, you can get away with one with Roku or Amazon built in. We’ve got some entertaining space outside now, and we’re using a 40-inch TCL model with Roku as the OS ($249 at Amazon), and it works just fine.
• Home theater audio is a pretty personal decision. I’ve been pretty happy with an inexpensive Vizio 5.1 sound bar ($229 at Amazon). It’s also a Chromecast target (so it’s great for wireless music without turning on the TV), and the rear speakers and subwoofer are wireless, so I didn’t have to drag cables through the living room.

Don’t forget an antenna and OTA content

Yeah, it’s not the 1980s anymore. But there’s still a place for a good antenna. All the major networks still broadcast over the air (and in 1080p, no less), and you’ll often get a picture with less compression than you will streaming. Plus, the content is 100 percent free.

HDHomerun Quatro streams OTA content over your local network. ($150 at Best Buy.)

This also is how you can often solve the “What about my regional sports?” question.

You’ve got a couple options when it comes to mounting your antenna. Inside, or outside. Outdoors is always better than indoors. Higher is better than lower. But most important is to make sure it’s facing the best direction for where you live. (For that, hit up AntennaWeb.org.)

I’ll leave it up to you as to which antenna to get, but I’m using a ClearStream 2MAX ($56 on Amazon) with great results.

Now that you’ve got an antenna, you’ve got to plug it in to something. You can go straight into your display, if it happens to have a TV tuner. (Not all do these days.)

But better is to get something like HDHomerun. Your OTA antenna plugs in, the HDHomerun box plugs into your router, and it then spits out the over-the-air content to multiple devices at once. The new HD Homerun Quatro ($150 at Best Buy) will serve up to 4 streams at once. The HDHomerun Duo ($99 at Amazon) does two streams at once.

Streaming services

So you’ve got your hardware picked out. Now it’s time for the software. The services, actually. And there’s something important to note here:

You’re not actually tied into anything. Virtually every streaming service you’ll consider has a free trial period. Use it. Don’t be married to one particular service. When pricing and channels fluctuate (and they will), try a different one to see if it works for you.

Don’t be married to a single service. Mix and match. Use free trials. And change things up if you need to.

And there’s not actually once streaming service to rule them all. You’ll most likely end up using several. But as I mentioned at the top of this piece, it’s still important to audit them once a year or so and see if you’re still getting your money’s worth.

You’ll also want to spend some time perusing the various plans to make sure you’ll be getting all the channels you actually want to watch — and also to minimize paying for the ones you don’t want to watch. Just like with cable TV, the packages often give you more than you’ll actually watch.

You’ll have to do the math.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime Video. (Click here for a free trial.)

I haven’t necessarily used everything out there, but I’ve at least taken a look at a lot of them. Here are some quick notes on what I’ve found.

• Netflix: I mean, how do you not have Netflix, right? What it maybe lacks in good movies it’s started more than making up for in original content.
• Sling: This was the first service I trialed. But I found the Orange/Blue plan thing to be confusing, and I just can’t stand Sling’s on-screen menu system.
• PlayStation Vue: Never mind the name — you don’t need a PlayStation to use this. It’s what we use for probably 90 percent of our streaming content. It’s easy to see which plan has which channels. And while the pricing has gone up a tad over the 18 months I’ve been using it, it’s still the least worst of the services I’ve tried.
• DirectTV: Seems like a decent option for some — especially if you’re an AT&T Wireless subscriber. I’m not, though, and so we stayed with PS Vue.
• Amazon Prime Video: I tend to not even count this in our monthly expenditures because I’ve always had Amazon Prime for better shipping options. But it’s an excellent addition for free streaming content. And like Netflix, Amazon now has some incredible original content. Highly recommended.
• Hulu: We subscribe to Hulu. (My kids have things there they like to watch.) But the Hulu Live service just doesn’t have all the channels we want. So we’ve not done that.
• YouTube TV: Looks promising. But it’s not available where I live, so that’s a nonstarter. Update: OK, I dunno what joker at YouTube thought it’d be fun to give me YouTube TV in Pensacola the day after publishing this, but WELL PLAYED.
• Movies Anywhere: A cool service for cross-platform families. Buy a movie one place (say, on iTunes) and watch it somewhere else, like on Android TV.

Again: Take advantage of free trials. Shop around. And don’t be afraid to change things up if the math no longer makes sense.

Everything else

I haven’t quite touched on everything here. There are holes in my streaming scheme. There are plenty of things I don’t use.

What about DVR and local recordings?

“But how do you record things?” is a question I get a lot.

The answer: I don’t, really. So much of what we watch is available on demand. Or if it’s that good and that important, I might just go ahead and buy it. Nothing kills the mood in Mr. Robot like commercials, and I like paying for good content. So that’s $30 or so once a year that I don’t mind spending.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t record things at all, or play back local content.

Services like Kodi and Plex work great on pretty much any hardware you might have. You can roll your own entertainment server on a decent networked-attached-storage box. A lot of folks do this. For what I watch and the way I want to watch it, I just don’t need local storage anymore, though. (Same goes for music, too.) Streaming fits all my needs.

What about Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo Switch?

For a lot of folks out there, gaming platforms can take the place of nearly all the hardware I mentioned above. If you’re an Xbox person, or hit a PlayStation all day long, awesome. There are great options for each of those platforms, too. (The Windows Central folks have a great guide for Xbox.)

They’re great options — just not the ones I use.

The bottom line

I’m saving close to $1,000 a year, even though streaming isn’t quite as easy as using cable TV.

Let’s wrap this up: There are there three things you’ll want to do here.

Do the math. See how much you’re spending every month. I went from spending upwards of $3,000 a year on cable TV and internet to spending about $2,200 for internet and streaming content. (And unlike before, we’re not throwing a good chunk of that money away on taxes and fees.) And once a year or so, do the math again and make sure you’re not wasting money on things you’re not actually watching.
Figure out your hardware. Is your router up to the job? What streaming boxes do you need?
Pick your streaming services, but don’t be married to them. You can mix and match. You can try new ones. Take advantage of free trials.

After that, just sit back and relax and watch a show. And figure out what you’ll want to do with all the money you’re saving.

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Tacklife’s $10 USB-rechargeable arc lighter never runs out of gas

Never go digging for matches again!

The Tacklife USB-rechargeable electric arc lighter is down to $10.03 with code 8WBYZBHY on Amazon. We haven’t shared a deal on Tacklife’s USB-rechargeable arc lighter since early December. This deal is almost the same as that one, with a coupon code bringing it down to just $10. Although it’s $15 without the code, this lighter usually sells around $17.

This might be the last lighter you ever buy! It takes no gas, causes no sparks, and can easily be recharged via USB. It has a built-in 220mAh Li-ion battery and can be used more than 400 times per charge. You won’t have to worry about wind or small splashes when trying to use this either. It will automatically shut down after 10 seconds to both save the battery and as a safety feature. There’s also an extra safety switch for when you’re not using it. It comes with a two-year warranty.

Users give it 4.3 stars based on 44 reviews.

See on Amazon

Moto X4 vs. Honor View 10: Which should you buy?

Motorola and Honor both have a tight grip on the mid-range space.

When you think of mid-range phones — that is to say, phones that are too expensive to be called affordable, but not quite as pricey as flagships — chances are your mind immediately gravitates towards either Motorola or Honor. Both brands have long established themselves within the territory, consistently providing phones with excellent performance and build quality at a reasonable cost.

The two phones in question are no exceptions. The Moto X4 combines beautiful hardware with convenient gestures, while the Honor View 10 banks on its powerful AI capabilities. So which one should you buy?

What the Moto X4 does better

It’s hard to beat the aesthetic quality of the Moto X4. This phone features a glass and aluminum build befitting of much more expensive devices, with a striking high-gloss coating and hand-hugging curves along the back. Yes, this design is predictably slippery and fragile, but it’s far more eye-catching than the View 10, and the premium materials make it feel more substantial.

The Moto X4 combines beautiful hardware with clean software and wide carrier compatibility.

But the Moto X4 isn’t just a pretty face. It features plenty of useful hardware amenities, including USB-C, fast-charging, a headphone jack, and IP68 water resistance. It’s also compatible with CDMA carriers like Verizon and Sprint — something the View 10 can’t match.

Where the Moto X4 really gets the edge over the View 10 is its software. The standard model features a near-stock build of Android, with just a few of Motorola’s custom tweaks added in, like the endlessly convenient double-twist motion to quickly launch the camera.

There’s also the Android One version, which offers a totally stock experience and the promise of fast updates — most recently, it received Android 8.0 Oreo an entire month before the standard model. As an added bonus, the Moto X4 is one of the few phones compatible with Google Fi.

See at Amazon

What the Honor View 10 does better

While the View 10 may not be as pretty as the Moto X4, it’s more durable thanks to an aluminum unibody design, and far better balanced; the Moto X4’s massive camera module makes it noticeably top-heavy in the hand. Despite a slimmer profile, it also houses a much larger battery than the Moto X4 — 3750mAh versus 3000mAh, respectively.

What the Honor View 10 lacks in style, it makes up for with … pretty much everything else.

Inside, the View 10 boasts Huawei’s Kirin 970 chipset, complete with the same Neural Processing Unit found on the Mate 10 Pro. It’s vastly more powerful than the Snapdragon 630 processor found in the Moto X4, and promises to keep the View 10 running smoothly for quite a while.

You also won’t find the View 10’s modern 18:9 aspect ratio display on the other side, which allows for a larger screen without a physically larger device. And forget about microSD expandability on the Moto X4; that luxury is exclusive to the View 10, along with dual SIM support.

Both phones have fairly impressive cameras, but the Honor View 10 easily outmuscles the Moto X4 with its faster glass, smarter dual-camera module, and AI enhancements. Honor’s camera app is also much more flexible than Motorola’s, allowing for more precision in shots.

See at Honor

Which one’s right for you?

The Honor View 10 has the Moto X4 completely beat on paper; its specs are more powerful, its cameras take better photos, and its battery lasts longer. But as always, your taste for EMUI will play a large role in how well you get along with the View 10. Particularly when faced with a phone like the Moto X4: close to (if not entirely) stock Android software can easily be the deciding factor.

The View 10 is the better phone, but Honor may have shot itself in the foot with a botched release.

If you lean towards software agnostic, or you simply value the other factors of the phones more, the Honor View 10 is probably the way to go — or at least, it would be … if you could buy it. The View 10 still doesn’t even have official pricing in North America, let alone a release date.

In contrast, the Moto X4 has been available for months at a competitive $400. You can even knock an additional $150 off by buying it with a new Google Fi activation. Of course, not everyone will want to switch carriers just for a phone, but if you can get it for $250, the Moto X4 is an absolute no-brainer.

Are you planning on getting the Moto X4? Or maybe waiting it out to buy the Honor View 10? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments below!

Amazon is refunding Prime phone buyers who paid to remove ads

Amazon’s Prime Exclusive phones have great prices, but there was a big catch. You had to allow ads on your home screen and if you changed your mind later, it cost $50 to opt out. Buyers got a bonus last week when Amazon decided to eliminate the ads, saying they could interfere with facial recognition and cause other issues. That’s great, but it what about folks who paid the fee to get rid of them? Amazon has agreed to refund it in the form of a gift card, essentially closing the chapter on its Prime Exclusive phone ad experiment.

Putting bloatware on devices in return for a lower price is a time-honored tradition in the PC world, famously used by Lenovo and others. It’s also de rigueur with carriers like Verizon on locked phones, and you could even argue that apps from handset makers like Samsung are bloatware (*cough* Bixby), since nobody actually uses them.

As proof of much those ads can be worth, Amazon jacked the Prime Exclusive phone prices by $20 when it removed them. That makes the $50 cost to remove them a bit steep, and the refund in the form of store credit, rather than cash might not please everyone. However, it does give you an excuse to buy something rather than socking the money away.

Source: Android Police

Sony’s STEM-focused coding toy is ready for classrooms

The first product from Sony’s Global Education division, a candy-colored robot-building toy called Koov, is now ready for all of us to order. The toy, which is Sony’s attempt to topple Lego Mindstorms’ dominance in the STEM toy market, comprises of blocks that you can put together with motors and sensors. Once you’ve constructed something, you can then head over to the iOS, Windows or OS X app to program its behavior.

Koov had something of a tortured journey to store shelves, and last summer Sony turned to Indiegogo to test demand for the kits. Unfortunately, the project missed its crowdfunding goal by $1,656, forcing the company to think about how it was going to bring the gear to the US. Half a year later, and the company will now sell direct to consumers via its website, with the first kits being aimed at schools.

The Educator Kit will set you back $519.99 and comes with more than 300 blocks, two DC motors, an accelerometer, light sensor and a pair of photo reflectors. You’ll also get all the necessary gears, servos, switches, gears and cables necessary for your rugrat (ages eight or older) to go toe-to-toe to Boston Dynamics. Pre-order today and you can expect the first sets to arrive at your door at the end of March,

Source: Sony

‘Florence’ turns falling in love into a video game

Video games are good at war. For decades, games have covered the breadth, horror and honor of battle in every conceivable arena, from ancient history to futuristic space stations, from the hills of Mordor to the beaches of Normandy. Games have a long history of transforming firefights into sporting events, pitting players against one another with a wide array of weapons at their disposal. It makes sense, given where the industry started.

“When our technology was really primitive, the easiest things to create were simulations of sports and of physical things and battles and sort of black-and-white conditions,” Ken Wong, the creator of Monument Valley, says. “Since then we’ve developed so much technology and discussion, and we’re able to create stories and characters with a lot of subtleties, but it feels like gaming as an industry is still hanging onto that past as sort of the true form of gaming.”

It’s far less common to see video games tackle the other side of war and competition: the human side. Love, for instance, is rarely a central selling point for a video game. Plenty of classic action and adventure games use love as a motivation for the main character — usually by kidnapping or killing the male protagonist’s wife — but less often do these experiences dive into the dense complexities of relationships and romance.

Wong’s latest game, Florence, does just that. It landed on iOS devices this week, just in time for Valentine’s Day, and it’s the first title out of Wong’s Melbourne, Australia, studio, Mountains. The game follows a 25-year-old woman named Florence as she meets a cellist named Krish and falls in love. There’s no real dialogue — instead, the game plays out in snippets of Florence’s life, with players guiding her through menial daily tasks and heavy relationship milestones. Krish and Florence have their first date and, later, their first argument; Krish moves into Florence’s apartment and she has to find room for all of his things, sacrificing parts of herself to blend their lives together in a deeply real, relatable moment.

“I found myself spending a lot of time talking with my friends and family about love and relationships,” Wong says. “We celebrate that in popular media and books and film and songs. Yet it seems like this is a bit of a blind spot for games, and it felt like I’d found something that I could talk about a lot and had a lot of nuance to it.”

Florence isn’t the first video game to cover love in this way, though it’s joining a niche crowd. Just recently, Gone Home, What Remains of Edith Finch, Life is Strange, To the Moon and other independent games have proven the medium’s ability to tell powerful, rich stories about love and loss. Florence dives into this genre wholeheartedly, offering players an interactive story that Wong hopes feels layered, emotionally raw and, most of all, honest.

“When we started out, these characters were kind of blank,” Wong says. “We had two characters, they were going to fall in love and we were going to explore the gameplay, and we tried a couple of arrangements of, physically, race and gender. It felt like what I was most familiar with was straight relationships and I didn’t really want to go into LGBT relationships without having that background myself, so that was the deciding point.”

Wong didn’t stay entirely within his comfort zone for Florence: The main character is a woman, and learning how to tell the story from her perspective was part of his personal development puzzle. Florence is entering the marketplace at a time when women are speaking up and taking action against sexism in nearly every industry, and many men are thinking critically about these issues for the first time. For Wong, Florence represents a new opportunity to traverse the world from a woman’s eyes.

“Over the past three years I’ve been just really interested in understanding how experiences are for women,” Wong says. “As a man, I think it’s important for me to learn more about how women experience the world, so I think I wanted to take what I learned from the stories around me and some of the experiences of my producer, Kamina, my sister Emily and some of my previous partners and my friends, and put that into Florence.”

Florence herself is Chinese-Australian, just like Wong, while Krish is Indian-Australian. Presenting this image of a non-white Australia was incredibly important to Wong because it rings true to his own experiences.

“I live here in Melbourne now and I grew up in Adelaide, and my friends all looked different,” Wong says. “They all had different skin colors and came from different backgrounds, and I don’t know if that story of Australia is often portrayed to the world.”

This is part of building an emotionally honest game — presenting the world as it is, rather than how it’s shown on television, film or in advertising. Wong didn’t want to create the 50 First Dates or Friends with Benefits of mobile gaming, filled with cliche storylines and hollow characters doing ridiculous things. Wong says Florence is more like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind or (500) Days of Summer in that it aims to present love as it exists in reality: messy, gorgeous, banal, exciting and tense. Florence is grounded in moments that feel real, like sitting on the couch together or talking during dinner.

Wong’s personal creative style shines in Florence, too, though fans of Monument Valley may not recognize it at first glance. although the games are visually disparate, they share similar DNA, Wong says: “They’re both short experiences where we value visual beauty and a sense of story, and there are no words — you have to kind of figure out what to do by yourself. [But] it is different in a lot of ways. I hope that fans of Monument Valley appreciated what Monument Valley did differently and I hope that they’ll appreciate that we are continuing to find new experiences with Florence.”

To create the sense of a real relationship, Wong blended his own experiences with new perspectives and wrapped it all up in a comic-book-style mobile experience about one of the oldest human interactions: love. Not war.

“I don’t think there’s any game out there that’s quite like Florence,” Wong says. “We’ve tried hard to make something that a lot of people can relate to, and will maybe help them look at themselves and their own relationships and reflect.”

US intelligence agencies warn buyers to avoid Huawei smartphones

After being rebuffed by carriers AT&T and Verizon, Huawei’s push to sell phones in the US isn’t getting any easier. Six top US intelligence chiefs, including the heads of the FBI, CIA and NSA, told Americans they wouldn’t recommend buying products or services from the Chinese manufacturer, CNBC reports. “We’re deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments … to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks,” FBI Director Chris Wray testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Last year, Huawei thought it had a carrier deal sewn up, but AT&T called it off, reportedly due to pressure by US Congress. During a keynote at CES, Huawei CEO Richard Yu expressed his frustration, noting that 90 percent of handsets are sold through US carriers. Nevertheless, the company is selling an unlocked version of its flagship Mate 10 Pro via Amazon, Best Buy and other resellers.

The US government has tried to block Huawei from any US government contracts, and also advised private carriers and ISPs against using its telecom equipment. Now, all the major intelligence agencies are recommending that private citizens avoid buying handsets, too. “It provides the capacity to maliciously modify or steal information,” said Wray. “And it provides the capacity to conduct undetected espionage.”

Huawei, obviously, takes exception to those claims. “Huawei is aware of a range of US government activities seemingly aimed at inhibiting Huawei’s business in the U.S. market. Huawei is trusted by governments and customers in 170 countries worldwide and poses no greater cybersecurity risk than any ICT vendor, sharing as we do common global supply chains and production capabilities,” it said in a statement.

The company has never shaken its perceived ties with the Chinese government, particularly because its founder was a senior engineer in the Chinese Liberation Army. It was also sued by T-Mobile in 2014 for allegedly stealing phone-testing technology.

Outside of North America, though, Huawei is one of the biggest handset makers in the world. Its phones have taken big leaps forward of late, matching rival products in technology and design. With the US government and intelligence agencies aligned against it, however, it seems to have little hope for stateside success in the near term.

Source: CNBC