Apple Updates Clips and GarageBand on iOS With New Educational Features

Apple today updated its Clips and GarageBand apps for iOS with several new educational features and other improvements.

GarageBand for iOS
Clips has received a wide range of new fonts, colors, layouts, animated labels and stickers, title cards with education-themed designs, and more, all of which provides students and teachers with more creative flexibility to prepare video presentations and lessons using the app on the new 9.7-inch iPad.

The full release notes for Clips version 2.0.3:

• Four additional Live Title styles featuring new fonts, colors, and layouts
• Four new animated labels with vibrant colors and editable text
• Nine new animated stickers including hand-drawn arrows, scribbles, circles, and underlining
• Eleven new Apple-designed posters for creating animated title cards, including education-themed blackboard and notebook designs
• Two new Selfie Scenes on iPhone X from Disney-Pixar that put you in the “Finding Dory” reef and on the Scare Floor from “Monsters, Inc.”
• Drop shadows have been added to some labels to improve visibility against light backgrounds
• Fixes an issue that could prevent photos stored in iCloud Photo Library from displaying correctly in Clips projects
• Improved stability when deleting projects

Likewise, GarageBand has received new educational sound effects, including animals, vehicles, and counting to ten in different languages.

The full release notes for GarageBand for iOS version 2.3.3:

• New downloadable “Toy Box” sound pack with free educational sound effects, including animals, vehicles, and counting to ten in different languages.
• Use facial expressions and the TrueDepth camera for hands-free control over musical effects like guitar wah and synth parameters*
• Adds Modern Wah guitar stompbox effect
• Provides stability improvements and bug fixes

* Apple’s fine print: “Requires iPhone X. GarageBand uses ARKit face tracking features to translate your facial expressions into instrument effect controls. Your face information is processed on device, and only music is captured during your performance.”

The updates to Clips and GarageBand are rolling out on the App Store today. The apps are free to download on iPhone and iPad.

Tags: GarageBand, Clips
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New 9.7-Inch iPad Hands-On: ‘Very Familiar’ Update Benefits From Apple Pencil Support and A10 Fusion Chip

Following the announcement and launch of Apple’s new 9.7-inch iPad, a few websites have gotten hands-on time with the tablet and shared their thoughts online this afternoon. The initial consensus appears to be that while the iPad isn’t very surprising in terms of form factor and features, it’s a solid entry-level model that benefits from added Apple Pencil support.

Engadget said the new iPad is “as fluid and fast as the iPad Pro,” which it described as an “impressive feat.” The site said the iPad has a great screen, although it isn’t as sharp as the iPad Pro’s display. Engadget also pointed out the air gap between the display and cover glass on the new tablet, and its lack of the higher-end iPad Pro’s True Tone color correction feature and 120Hz ProMotion refresh rate.

Image via Engadget

Following today’s education-focused presentation in Chicago, we got a chance to pick up the new tablet for ourselves and, well, it’s just about the same as last year’s model. That’s not a bad thing — it still feels as solid and well-built as ever. The biggest change is Apple Pencil support, and after a brief test it feels almost as fluid and fast as the iPad Pro, which is an impressive feat.

The Verge began its hands-on coverage by stating the new iPad is “very familiar,” with all of the expected screen size, bezels, Touch ID sensor, button placement, and cameras users have come to expect from Apple’s tablet line. The Verge said the display was “vibrant and responsive,” and the site got to mess around with an AR demo, which was “as good as any AR demo” it has seen.

Image via The Verge
The Verge also pointed out that Apple’s demo area was not really “focused on the hardware,” but instead software demos that showed real-world use in the classroom, with Tim Cook walking around and discussing the new announcement with reporters.

We just spent some time with Apple’s new $329 iPad, announced here in Chicago at its education event. It’s… an iPad. Holding and using an iPad, it feels very much like an iPad! The air gap on the screen is the same as before — large by iPad Pro standards, but only iPad Pro people will really turn their nose up at it. Same goes for the screen overall, which doesn’t have all the True Tone magic of the Pro, but is nevertheless vibrant and responsive.

I checked out a quick demo of an AR classroom app and was as good as any AR demo I’ve seen. Not knock-your-socks-off good, but it didn’t lag and the baby elephant stayed put right on the table where it was placed. Obviously we’ll need to spend more time to say for sure, but the A10 Fusion processor certainly seems up to most tasks.

Besides the new iPad, Apple today announced that its Classroom app will be coming to Mac this June, revealed a new “Schoolwork” app, showed off iWork updates for iOS, and more. New accessories and devices have also emerged on Apple.com following the Field Trip keynote, including standalone Space Gray color options for the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse 2, and Magic Trackpad 2.

Related Roundup: iPadTag: March 2018 eventBuyer’s Guide: iPad (Buy Now)
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Huawei P20 and P20 Pro hands-on: Holding nothing back

Editor’s note: We’ll update our Huawei P20 and P20 Pro hands-on and related coverage with more details in the coming hours, so stay tuned!

They say the best revenge is massive success, and Huawei seems poised to take its symbolic revenge on a hostile US market with the Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Pro. Neither of them are coming stateside, but the rest of the world is in for a treat.

Bringing an intense camera focus and looks like you’ve never seen on a smartphone before, the P20 and P20 Pro are incredibly impressive. We take a close look at these two devices in our Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Pro hands-on.

First, let’s talk about the finish on these phones. Prepare for some double takes, because the P20 and P20 Pro come with what Huawei calls the Twilight color. We wouldn’t be surprised if you called it the “unicorn” instead.

This blue-to-purple gradient is unlike anything we’ve ever seen in the smartphone game. The glass-on-glass design is the same throughout the P20 line, but this particular colorway is just an eye-catcher. Besides Twilight, there’s a second gradient colorway called Pink Gold, that looks just as sexy.

Huawei’s Twilight color is nothing sort of eye-catching, and the rest of the colors are equally sexy.

Other colors of the P20 and P20 Pro include the classic black, midnight blue, and champagne gold (P20 only). All of them are quite shiny because of the glass-on-glass design, but the overall design works as one attractive package. And that doesn’t even take into account Huawei’s very modern approach to the small details on the P20 and P20 Pro.

Though we will get into the triple-camera setup a little later, notice how it’s lined up with the Leica-branded specifications label and the simple, but impactful Huawei logo. Altogether, these elements line the side of the device and give it a look that is similar to some point-and-shoot cameras. And, since there isn’t much else taking up the back of the device, all of these elements don’t keep the colors from shining through.

Turn the device around and you get Huawei’s version of a full-screen display with a notch. Yes, the notch is going to be much more common in Android moving forward, but on the P20 it manages to not take up too much of the top of the display. Only the phone speaker and the front-facing camera darken a tiny portion of the Full HD+ 18:9 screen.

Yes, there’s a notch, but Huawei manages its own styling for it.

Despite the lower resolution of the display compared to other flagships, Huawei keeps their new phones in line with the many minimal bezel competitors that have emerged recently.

The difference in size between the Huawei P20 and P20 Pro is not very large. The 5.8-inch P10 is eclipsed by the P20 Pro, which sports a 6.1-inch display. Handling will of course favor the smaller device, but it doesn’t feel that much more difficult with the Pro edition.

Moving on with our Huawei P20 and P20 Pro hands-on impressions, there are several other settings and features that set them apart. The displays are not only different in size, they employ different technologies. The Huawei P10 Pro sports an OLED panel, as opposed to LCD in the regular model.

As you’d expect, the Huawei P20 and Pro offer some pretty impressive specs. The beefy Kirin 970 powers both devices, but the Pro edition gets 6GB of RAM, over 4GB in the P20, and a massive 4,000mAh battery unit over the 3,400mAh in the P20. Regardless of which device you pick, it’s really impressive to see that a phone this small can house that much battery under the hood.

The P20 Pro has better protection against water and dust as well, with an IP67 rating, compared to just IP53 on the P20.

And of course, what ties all of this together is Huawei’s EMUI OS, which will feel familiar to anyone that has used a Huawei phone before. There are plenty of features available, including an option to use the front fingerprint reader to navigate through the phone using taps, holds, and swipes.

Dual apps are available and plenty of other Huawei apps are baked in, some of which are very similar to apps you might already get from Google’s standard package.

Getting back to the notch, a neat little software trick will help make it more palatable to those who dislike it – a software setting that fills out the background near the notch, camouflaging it in most situations.

When it comes to the cameras, Huawei pulled all stops to deliver the ultimate mobile photography experience. In fact, the company probably went a little overboard, to the point that the array of hardware and software features becomes a little confusing.

Starting off with the front-facing camera, you get a high-powered shooter with a 24MP sensor. We haven’t got the chance to really test the high-res selfies, but you can expect the same beauty modes and other selfie features as before, now with more power underneath the glass.

On the back, the P20 employs a familiar dual-lens combination, with a 12MP RGB sensor at f/1.8 and a 20MP monochrome sensor at f/1.6. If the original P10 is any indication, photos from the P20 should be well detailed and provide photographers with a lot of enjoyable shots.

The real headliner is the P20 Pro, which has not two, but three cameras on the back. The Pro adds a telephoto lens into the mix, but even the base specifications of the RGB sensor end up changing.

From the bottom to the top, the singular bottom lens is the 20MP monochrome sensor; the middle lens is the whopping 40MP RGB sensor; and the top lens is the telephoto lens that has an 8MP sensor.

Three cameras might sound like a gimmick, but Huawei truly delivers an astounding photography experience. Doubly so when it comes to the P20 Pro.

Though the 40MP resolution of the main sensor might make you think that all those pixels are too small for good low light performance, Huawei outfitted the RGB camera with the biggest sensor found in a typical smartphone – bigger than the iPhone X and even bigger than the Samsung Galaxy S9.

There’s a ton of options for these lenses, but usability is taken into account. Huawei added an enhanced AI engine to drive the camera hardware and – ideally – select the very best settings for each situation. That means you won’t need to worry about switching between cameras at all.

Read more: Huawei P20 Pro: World’s first triple camera explained

Huawei’s AI engine has been further enhanced from the Mate 10. It can now detect many more scene types and change settings on the fly. For instance, the camera app is able to change pretty easily between portrait mode and food mode, as long as it can detect a face in the frame. It takes a split second for the mode to switch up, but the feature seems sound. Among others, it can recognize dogs, cats, greenery, and even group shots, where the camera app will suggest to the user to shift in order to fit everyone properly into the frame. For anyone looking to get the best out of the cameras of the P20 and P20 Pro, this AI assistance can help take some of the load off figuring out the best settings.

Huawei’s camera-focused AI engine is back, and better than ever.

In terms of low light performance, the lack of optical image stabilization on all but the telephoto lens could be a major concern. But Huawei has an answer for that, as well: AI-assisted stabilization. Much like in the night modes for other devices, the night mode will take a bunch of photos in a row and put them together to create a well-exposed final result. The AI works to crop all of the shots as needed, so that shaky hands won’t even mess it up. In fact, it does this so well that a tripod is not needed, says Huawei – just don’t have any crazy shakes and the phone should be able to compensate for the movements.

The results are pretty amazing already – in a very low light situation, you can eke out some real results, whereas other phones would just fall apart. The HDR tweaks colors and dynamic range to try to ensure that the shadows are bumped up without blowing out the highlights. The result is a camera package that can supposedly get up to an effective 100,000 ISO from a 4 second exposure. The stabilization actually works in video as well, with a constant cropping and movement being applied to recorded footage.

And that’s not all. The P20 and P20 Pro feature four different systems of autofocus – laser, phase detection, depth, and contrast – combined into a system called 4D Predictive Focus. That means the camera should be able to constantly track subjects and refocus seamlessly as needed. 960fps video capture brings super slow motion and Huawei’s Ultra Snapshot feature returns, allowing you to wake up the device and snap a photo in just 0.3 seconds.

There is definitely a lot to take in here, but the takeaway is that Huawei is putting every hardware resource available into one super-powered smartphone camera. Add on top of all of that the AI assistance, and the shooting experience has the potential to be one of the best. Photogs will have a ton of options and settings to mess with, while the automatic mode will be great for anyone who just wants a great easy photo. We’re excited to really test out this camera and compare it to the competition when we get our full review unit.

And so, there you have it, our Huawei P20 and P20 Pro hands-on impressions. It’s great to see Huawei really trying to stand out in a sea of already capable and full-featured flagships. The Huawei P20 and Huawei P20 Pro boast more than fancy new paintjobs, and there is plenty to get excited over. Stay tuned for our full Huawei P20 and P20 Pro review soon, and let us know what you think about Huawei’s latest!

Xiaomi unveils the near bezel-free Mi Mix 2S with dual camera

Xiaomi has just unveiled the Mi Mix 2S at an event in Shanghai. The headline feature is a dual-lens camera which combines a 12-megapixel wide-angle lens with a 12-megapixel telephoto lens and some A.I. smarts to produce amazing photos.

Featuring a near bezel-less design, this eye-catching phone has a ceramic body with an aluminum frame. Unlike many Android phones of late, Xiaomi hasn’t adopted a notch, preferring to shrink the bezels above and below the 6-inch screen down as much as possible. The larger bottom bezel houses the front-facing camera. The AMOLED screen has a resolution of 2,160 x 1,080 pixels.

Under the hood you’ll find a Snapdragon 845 processor with 6GB or 8GB of RAM. Xiaomi showed off an impressively high AnTuTu score of 277,178, claiming the new phone is much faster than the competition, but we’ll reserve judgement on that until we can try it in the real world. You can get versions with 64GB, 128GB, or 256GB of storage inside. It runs Android 8.0 Oreo with Xiaomi’s MIUI on top.

Xiaomi clearly has the iPhone X in its sights, as the Chinese smartphone manufacturer spent a large section of the launch event comparing the Mi Mix 2S to Apple’s flagship. The cameras were shown side by side as Xiaomi displayed how much faster the Mi Mix 2S is at focusing and capturing subjects thanks to the dual-pixel autofocus.

There’s a Sony IMX363 sensor inside the Mi Mix 2S with large 1.4um pixels for great low-light performance. It also boasts optical zoom, OIS (optical image stabilization), and a new Portrait Mode for shots of people with that blurred-background bokeh effect. Xiaomi also talked about the frame-by-frame optimization which reduces noise.

The Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S managed a score of 97 at DxoMark, the same score as the iPhone X, but a couple of points below Samsung’s Galaxy S9 Plus, winning particular plaudits for low-light performance.

Every manufacturer is talking about A.I. nowadays and Xiaomi is no exception. The A.I. in the Mi Mix 2S camera helps create that bokeh effect and intelligently reduce noise or get the best from the different lighting settings. It can also automatically detect different scenes to change settings accordingly for best results, and translate text or convert currencies in real time.

Xiaomi has also beefed up its Xiao voice assistant, so there are many new voice controls allowing you to wake the screen, set reminders, take selfies, find photos from a specific day, and a lot more, simply by asking. Whether this will work outside of China isn’t clear.

The Mi Mix 2S also supports Qi wireless charging at up to 7.5W, NFC for mobile payments, and Google’s ARCore for augmented reality. It comes in white or black.

The base model of the Mi Mix 2S with 6GB of RAM and 64GB of storage costs 3,299 Chinese Yuan (around $525). The top model with 8GB of RAM and 256GB of storage costs 3,999 Chinese Yuan (around $640) and comes with a fast-charging, 7.5W Qi wireless charging pad in the box.

It’s tough not to be impressed by the complete package that the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S is offering at that price, but we’ll be surprised if the phone gets an official launch in the U.S., so you’re stuck with the prospect of buying an import if you want it. With support for 43 global bands you can use it anywhere in the world, but there’s no word on international markets or prices just yet. We’ll keep you posted.

Editors’ Recommendations

• Here is everything we know about the Xiaomi Mi 7
• Everything we know about the Xiaomi Mi Mix 2S
• Xiaomi Mi Mix 2 review
• Xiaomi Mi A1 review
• Amazon, Google trade punches over Nest smart home product sales

Amazon Alexa: What kind of data does Amazon get from me?

Amazon wants your data to build a shopping and advertisement profile, not sell it to the highest bidder.

Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant is a pretty great thing. You can ask about the mundane details of life to know when your next dentist appointment is (provided you linked a calendar in the app) or have Alexa remind you to do things at a certain time or even build out a detailed to-do list if you’re busy enough to need one. She (Alexa is a” she” like Siri or Cortana and not an “it” like Google Assistant) also is tightly integrated with Amazon services, so you can play Amazon Music or watch Amazon Videos and even control your Fire TV, as well as shop for almost anything your heart desires on Amazon just by asking her to find it for you.

Alexa only knows the things you tell her, but she also never forgets them.

Where Alexa really shines is when it comes to controlling the smart products in your home, and just about any connected gadget you can buy will have Alexa support, even gadgets from other companies like Google’s Nest.

Of course, to be this smart and do these sorts of things means Alexa has to know a lot about you. You can’t expect any service to know your schedule if you haven’t shared it, and with products like the Echo Show that were clearly designed for communication with other people, details about your friends and family need to be shared, too. This brings up a very important set of questions: what sort of information does Amazon get from me when I use Alexa, what does it do with it, and can I take it back if I change my mind?

What you share

For many, this is the most important thing to know about a service like Alexa. Privacy matters and it gets slowly eroded every day, even if you aren’t using a smart assistant that knows everything about you. And when any device is always listening, it’s worthy of special attention.

Alexa does listen to every word it can hear, but most of it is never stored or sent off to the cloud. Products like Alexa work by use of a “hot word” and an Echo or Fire TV has to listen for that word to operate. If it hears the hot word, it will shift gears and be ready to process what comes next. From Amazon’s Alexa Device FAQ page:

Amazon Echo and Echo Dot use on-device keyword spotting to detect the wake word. When these devices detect the wake word, they stream audio to the Cloud, including a fraction of a second of audio before the wake word.

Of course, everything electronic can be exploited and some older models of Amazon’s Echo were vulnerable to a hack that had it record everything it could hear, but it required modifying the Echo itself and some soldering. For the most part, these things are safe because they stay locked up inside your home.

Use the tools Amazon gives you and check in on the things saved in your account and do a little spring cleaning from time to time.

Once Alexa is initialized because the hot word was detected, what she can hear is then streamed to the cloud for Amazon to process. That’s where things get a little worrisome for people who are privacy-conscious, but the reality is pretty benign.

You’re able to review everything Alexa has recorded through the app on your phone, and Amazon has made it easy to delete any queries through the app’s history feature as well as remove any Amazon device from your account (thus deleting all of its associated data) through the My Devices page on the web.

Seeing what Amazon collects is simple, and removing your data is, too. That’s great, but what does Amazon do with our data while they have it?

How Amazon uses your data

Amazon isn’t in the business of selling your data away to another company. Like Google, they are more concerned with using it to build out a marketing profile of you. Say, for example, you’re a single male between 25 and 40 who makes $50,000 to $75,000 per year. You would then see ads for Amazon products that they have determined are things that people like you are likely to buy. They gather this data by monitoring how you use their products.

Amazon’s goal with data collection is to build a “360-degree view” of you and your buying habits.

Where Facebook knows about the people you know and places you go, and Google knows about the things you use the internet to do, Amazon knows everything there is to know about what you buy online. Amazon.com is easily the biggest online shopping site and according to CNBC, 75% of people in the U.S. who shop online use Amazon to do it the majority of the time. Every one of those purchases is tied to the account that initiated it, and connecting that account to an Alexa-powered device simply rounds out the “360-degree view” of you that Amazon wants to create.

Amazon also uses information about your contacts and who you are calling through Alexa. From the Alexa Terms of Use:

Amazon processes and retains your Alexa Interactions and related information in the cloud in order to respond to your requests (e.g., “Send a message to Mom”), to provide additional functionality (e.g., speech to text transcription and vice versa), and to improve our services. We also store your messages in the cloud so that they’re available on your Alexa App and select Alexa Enabled Products.

Besides using your data to do the things you ask Alexa to do, Amazon also uses it to “improve their services” which includes any customer profile they may be creating about you. Big data is an amazing monster and machine algorithms that can use something innocuous like knowing you call your mother on Sundays to target products to you is a real thing.

Amazon also promotes advertisements using this data. Amazon sellers can pay to have their products promoted and Amazon sweetens that deal by promoting products to users who are more likely to buy them. We think of Google when talking about online advertising, but Amazon does the same thing and does it very well. They just limit it to their own market, mostly.

Does Amazon sell any of my data?

An example of an Amazon ad block based on my shopping profile. Don’t bother trying to click this one!

No, because if they did they would lose a lot of money. Your data is kept in-house and secured and encrypted, and during transmission is secured and encrypted through SSL. Amazon does not detail how much of your data is stored anonymously, and it’s safe to assume that the bulk of your customer data is easily traceable back to you. That means keeping it secure is very important and Amazon uses their own security specialist teams to keep the machine running and in check.

Like most online services, there are times when Amazon shares your data with partners. Here is what Amazon has to say about how they handle this from their general Privacy Policy:

This does not include selling, renting, sharing, or otherwise disclosing personally identifiable information from customers.

Examples of when Amazon shares your data are things like sharing with credit card processors, their own subsidiaries, package and parcel delivery services or wire transfers. Amazon does offer third-party promotions (ads for companies or websites that are not under the Amazon umbrella) but they build and send these themselves on behalf of the third-party and don’t give another company your information. Seeing anonymized data shared with strategic partners is commonplace and no cause for alarm.

The shopping profile Amazon has built of you makes your data more valuable to Amazon than any dollar amount. Using the profile of your account for targeted advertisement is a never-ending well of revenue, and selling it away to another company would only serve to lessen its value. Amazon is worth billions, and a big part of what got the company there is how they target products to potential buyers. They aren’t about to give any of it away or sell it for a relatively small fee.

Foxconn just purchased Belkin, Linksys, Wemo, and Phyn

The deal was made for $866 million in cash.

In a move that seemingly came out of nowhere, Belkin International issued a press release announcing that it’s been acquired by Foxconn – a company that’s become most well-known for manufacturing Apple’s iPhones.

You probably know Belkin for its wireless chargers, routers, cables, etc., but Belkin International is made up of more than just Belkin itself. This deal also means Foxconn now owns Wemo (Belkin’s smart home brand), networking hardware company Linksys, and Phyn (a smart water pressure sensor).

Foxconn is purchasing Belkin International for around $866 million in cash, and with this deal, it’s looking to make a big step into the world of smart home products and “premium accessories.”

Speaking on behalf of Foxconn, CEO Sidney Lu said –

FIT is excited to acquire Belkin and its capabilities in the premium consumer products space. Integrating Belkin’s best-in-class capabilities and solutions into FIT, we expect to enrich our portfolio of premium consumer products and accelerate our penetration into the smart home.

FIT is short for Foxconn Interconnect Technology, and it’s a subsidiary of the main Foxconn entity. FIT currently just makes cables and a variety of computer connectors, so while its portfolio isn’t the most exciting at the moment, its manufacturing prowess is expected to be a big benefit for Belkin’s growth.

Belkin says it and its other brands will continue to operate like normal, with CEO and Founder Chet Pipkin commenting –

We see significant synergies with FIT, including leveraging its world-class manufacturing capability to enhance Belkin’s operating efficiency and competitiveness. The transaction also grants us access to more resources to invest in our people and to aggressively pursue opportunities in the marketplace.

What are your thoughts on this deal? Sound off in the comments below.

Oculus Go: Everything you need to know!

We now have a third headset on the way from Oculus.

At Oculus Connect 4, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Oculus is working a new headset that sits in a “sweet spot” somewhere between Gear VR and Rift.

Officially called Oculus Go, this headset requires no phone and no cables running to the PC. It will be able to play movies, run games, and help you meet up with friends in VR. We’ve got the details for you here!

March 21st Update: Oculus Go updates from GDC

Our very own Russell Holly is at GDC feeding us with information! Jason Rubin, the VP of Content with Oculus states that, even though desktops are a priority, standalone headsets are the future. Seems that Oculus is aiming to remain in the future with their marketing as well, hoping to attract consumers with big name games and apps and keep them there, allowing existing content to speak for itself.

Oculus even took the time to reiterate the specs listed below, saying that OGO will basically be a phone when it comes to hardware, albeit with less overheating and better battery life. Furthermore, instead of limiting the eye buffer to 1024×1024 like it did on the Gear VR, Oculus is using Fixed Foveated Rendering to make the display clearer. To them, this means it will be very difficult to see the burls in the display, something we’re very excited to test out for ourselves.

The headset will also be capable of 72FPS, instead of the 60FPS ceiling on Gear VR. 72Hz means the display can be brighter and more vibrant. Lots of Gear VR apps can already handle this bump, but devs have to request it when porting to Go.

What is Oculus Go?

Oculus Go is the third headset from Oculus, and it’s meant to sit between Gear VR and Oculus Rift. A cordless headset, you’ll no longer have to strap in at your PC or have enough juice on your phone in order to play in VR.

It is built to be lightweight, has a new mesh foam interface, and it supposedly has the best visual clarity so far seen in VR, thanks to new lenses and a WQHD LCD fast-switch display with a higher fill-factor than OLED. We learned at CES 2018 that Oculus Go is going to be made by Xiaomi, and it will be run by a Snapdragon 821 processor making it more than capable of playing the awesome games that are going to be available.

Oculus says this headset lives somewhere in between the Gear VR and Oculus Rift, but it leans much closer to the Gear VR than you might expect. This is a standalone headset, meaning the computer is inside the headset with the display, but it’s still an Android-powered headset. The good news is this means it will run many of the apps currently available for the Gear VR. That means the headset will not let you walk around and do much. Functionally, this will be very similar to the Gear VR.

Read more: Lenovo Mirage vs Oculus Go

Whats the difference between Oculus Go and Gear VR?

To begin with, Oculus Go is a stand-alone headset. This means no need to be wired into your computer like Oculus Rift, or the need for a top of the line phone like with Gear VR. It’s a middle of the road option that is priced affordably in an effort to draw in new users to help Oculus reach their goal of one billion VR users.

Instead of including headphones with the headset, a spatial audio experience is built right into the headset. That is spatial speakers that are built on the rails of the headset to let you hear what’s going on clearly without headphones. Of course, if you’d rather go with classic headphones, you can plug a set of your own into a 3.5mm jack. Oculus Go will have a controller similar to that of Gear VR, meaning devs can create apps that work on both platforms.

Indeed, a lot of the Gear VR’s best apps will be available for the Oculus Go from day one. The controller employs three degrees of freedom (DoF), which is the same as the Gear VR controller. It’s interesting to note that the Go headset will also use three DoF. To put that into perspective, the Oculus Rift uses six DoF.

Oculus Go will also have access to its own catalog of games and apps to dive into on launch day. While ports of Gear VR games are sure to show up, you’ll be getting access to new content with Oculus Go. From the photos we’ve seen of Oculus Go, there is also a fairly pared down look compared to Gear VR. No touchpad on the side of the headset, and only two buttons on the top; volume controls, and a power button.

Games and Experiences

Since we have been notified that Gear VR apps and games will be compatible with Oculus Go we know we’ll have plenty to keep us occupied. Some of the titles in games you’ll be able to play are:

• Where’s Om Nom?
• Bait!
• Cloudlands VR Minigolf
• Lands End
• Ocean Rift
• Smash Hit
• Rush
• VR Sports Challenge
• Dragon Front
• Sing Space
• Dead and Buried
• Anshar Wars 2
• Ultrawings
• Rangi
• Catan
• Anshar Online
• Piece By Piece: Assembling They Suspect Nothing

And as for Experiences you’ll have:

• Facebook 360
• Netflix
• Discovery VR
• Hulu
• Jurassic World: Apatosaurus
• Rooms
• A Night’s Sky
• Star Chart

When is it launching?

The official website for Oculus Go still has the announced release date to be sometime in early 2018. If you want to keep notified keep checking in or sign up for their e-mailed newsletter by following the link below.

Redditer LifeWithAdd has found an image released by Oculus where it simply says “2018” instead of “early 2018″. Yet, as the website still shows “Early”, we’ll be expecting the headset before June 2018!

Get notified about the launch date at Oculus

How much will it cost?

While we don’t have an exact launch date yet, we do know how much Oculus Go is going to cost. You’ll be able to pick up this standalone headset for a tidy sum of $199. Considering Gear VR alone costs $129.99 and requires a top of the line smartphone, this is pretty exciting news!

Are you excited?

For now, we don’t have a ton of information about everything that Oculus Go will be able to offer, but that should be changing soon. However, the details we do have are definitely worth getting excited about, especially since this is a stand-alone headset, with an affordable price tag. Are you excited about Oculus Go, or are you sticking with another Oculus headset? Let us know about it in the comments below!

Updated March 2018: We’ve updated this post with all of the information given to us from GDC!

Huawei P20 and P20 Pro hands-on preview: The rise of triple cameras

Huawei’s new flagship phone is encased in a beautiful glass chassis, and boasts an absolutely bonkers triple-camera setup.

The most common criticism leveled at the hot new Android phone of the moment, the Galaxy S9, is that it’s kind of a boring upgrade. Samsung did just enough to justify releasing a new model, and little more.

The perfect foil to that device, then, should be Huawei’s P20 series. Just announced at a glitzy launch event in Paris, the P20 takes the core hardware of the Mate 10 Pro, encases it in shimmering curved glass, and equips it with a crazy new camera array, boasting a combined total of 68 megapixels across three sensors.

The P20 and P20 Pro represent a major departure from the design language of previous Huawei phones. It’s all about the curves now, with beautiful mirrored finishes and glass panes that blend almost seamlessly into the metal frame.

There’s a standard loadout of colors available: black, gold and blue. But the ones you’ll really want are the stunning gradient finishes, which shift through colors on the vertical, and shimmer as they tilt through the light. We got some face time with the “twilight” gradient finish ahead of today’s launch event, which shifts through turquoise, to blue, to purple. There’s also a “pink gold” gradient finish for the P20 Pro.

The shimmering ‘gradient’ finishes on the P20 Pro are spectacular and ostentateous, but not gaudy.

It’s reminiscent of what we first saw in the HTC U11 last year, and needless to say, looks spectacular. Whatever other issues you might have with the P20, it’s hard to fault the aesthetics and build quality of the gradient-finished P20s. These are the best-looking Android phones I’ve used, and I’ve used pretty much everything.

As with previous models, the differences between P20 and P20 Pro go beyond the size of these devices.

The P20 has a 5.8-inch LCD panel, while the larger, more premium and much more interesting P20 Pro steps up to a 6.1-inch OLED. And yep, that’s an iPhone-style screen notch up top. Notches are a thing now, and Huawei isn’t the only manufacturer aping this iPhone X design trait.

Yep, there’s a notch. Nope, it’s not that big of a deal.

Some people will hate the notch, but I don’t find it all that distracting, mainly due to the way it’s implemented. Neither P20 has an unnecessarily large display cutout — they’re just big enough to house the earpiece, sensors and a 24-megapixel front camera.

That front camera enables face recognition too, which we couldn’t test ahead of launch, but which Huawei says can unlock the phone in as little as half a second. That’s faster than the iPhone X, though it remains to be seen how well it’ll perform in darker conditions. At least Huawei already has a decent track record in this area, with the impressive face recognition capabilities of sister brand Honor’s new View 10 phone.

Both P20s run Huawei’s Kirin 970 processor, of course — the same chip that powers the Mate 10 Pro. In other areas, the spec sheets do diverge a little: You get an extra couple gigs of RAM in the P20 Pro (6GB, up from 4GB), as well as IP67 water resistance and a bigger battery.

The big P20 has the same battery capacity as the supremely longlasting Mate 10 Pro.

The smaller P20 is only rated IP53 (splash-resistant), which is disappointing considering that water resistance is such a table-stakes feature in a modern flagship.

The P20 should do fine with its 3400mAh cell, but the Pro steps all the way up to 4,000mAh. That’s the same rating as the Mate 10 Pro, so given the other hardware similarities here, the P20 Pro should match the legendary battery life we’ve seen from that model.

More: Huawei P20 vs P20 Pro specs

And that brings us to the meat and potatoes of these phones: The unique camera setup that really sets the P20 series apart. The standard P20 has dual cameras, a 12-megapixel RGB shooter augmented by a 20-megapixel monochrome camera, with new, larger 1.55-micron pixels for improved low-light performance. These sit behind f/1.8 and f/1.6 lenses respectively.

But what’s really unique is the absolutely bonkers triple camera setup of the P20 Pro. So let’s zero in on what’s going on in this cluster of components on the top left corner. The P20 Pro has a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor, like the regular P20. The main sensor is an enormous 40-megapixel unit, a huge sensor by smartphone standards at 1/1.7 inches. The third camera is an 8-megapixel 3X telephoto camera — 8 megapixels at f/2.4, with optical stabilization.

The new three-camera array on the back of the P20 Pro is what really makes it special.

An array of extra sensors is onboard too, including a color spectrum sensor for more accurate white balance, alongside laser autofocus. The laser AF unit is just one of four ways in which the P20 Pro’s cameras can focus, the others being phase-detection (standard for high-end phones cameras), depth focus — by triangulation using the three cameras — and contrast focus.

In a meeting ahead of today’s launch event, Huawei also demonstrated how the NPU — Neural Processing Unit — in its Kirin processor can predict erratically moving subjects and keep them in focus, where competitors might quickly lose the subject. For example, a flower blowing in the wind, or kids and pets.

This combination of cameras (plus the NPU, of course) lets Huawei do quite a few unique things that we really haven’t seen before in a smartphone camera. Thanks to the new telephoto lens and high-res main sensor, up to 5 times hybrid zoom is supported in the P20 Pro, up from 3X in the Mate 10 Pro. The combination of a high-res RGB sensor, plus monochrome, plus a true telephoto lens means the P20 Pro can eke out more detail from zoomed shots where other phone cameras might produce a blurry mess.

At the risk of jumping to conclusions before we give the phone our full review treatment, it’s pretty clear to me that the P20 Pro has probably the best telephoto camera on any phone to date.

The 40MP main camera can help in low light too, in tandem with the AI hardware inside the Kirin processor. The P20 Pro uses a kind of pixel-binning, combining four pixels into one, equivalent to 2 microns in size, to work magic in darker conditions.

Huawei has expanded the number of scenes that can be recognized by its AI scene detection and the NPU has also been drafted in to help with a seriously impressive new night shooting mode.

Now, instead of having to stand perfectly still or use a tripod, Huawei’s AI stabilization system can take continuous exposures — up to four seconds — and then use the NPU’s intelligence to pull out a bright, clear image. What seems to be happening here is that the phone is continually pulling data from the camera, then using its AI capabilities to compensate for motion and perspective differences. It’s not unlike the “HDR+ Enhanced” mode you’ll find buried in the settings on the Google Pixel 2.

The results in the P20’s night mode aren’t quite the same as one long exposure — nor are the results as instant as a regular photograph — but in my brief time with the feature, it was impressive. If real-world use matches up with my first impressions, it could be a great option for the times when you have the opportunity to take a longer exposure, but don’t want to carry around a tripod.

The P20 Pro can use AI and pixel-binning on a 40MP sensor for long exposures without a tripod.

We’re just scratching the surface of what the P20 and P20 Pro cameras can do here. There are countless other features we didn’t have time to fully test ahead of today’s launch. To name but a few: AI composition assistance, which will nudge you towards improving the way your photos are framed. For instance, the P20 will be able to identify subjects in group shots and prompt you to fill out the frame appropriately. And for landscapes, it’ll be able to find horizon lines and prompt you to align these for a more pleasing overall image.

And Huawei is onboard with 960fps slow-mo capture too, though like the Samsung Galaxy S9, this will be limited to 720p resolution. (The company claims the 40MP camera’s pixel-binning, and ISO ceiling of 102400, also helps it avoid some of the low-light issues seen in rival slow-mo implementations.)

The software side of Huawei phones has always been a mixed bag, but at least now we’re up to Android 8.1 in the new EMUI 8.1 build. Huawei of boasts significant performance improvements in this version — responsiveness up 60% and smoothness up 50% compared to EMUI 8. Some of that seems to be thanks to a few slick new animations. Regardless, we’ll have to wait for review time to judge overall performance.

EMUI 8.1 otherwise sticks close to what we already knew from previous software versions — this is a highly customized version of Android, with a handful of weird quirks — for instance, the way music player notifications are handed. (EMUI pulls colors from the app icon, not the album art, for reasons unknown.)

Other new features are mostly contained in the Gallery app, where Huawei’s on-device AI can now tag more than 100 different types of photos, and rate and organize them using its own aesthetic score.

With the P20, Huawei is challenging the assertion that smartphones have become boring. It’s doing so through glitzy, eye-catching hardware and envelope-pushing camera features. The P20 Pro in particular could be the perfect antidote to a relatively safe and unexciting upgrade from Samsung this year. The main questions to answer in our full review will be around software quality, and whether EMUI is still littered with nagging software issues.

And, of course, just how well the P20 Pro’s whizbang camera features compare to the two Android camera champs from Samsung and Google.

Stay tuned.

Huawei P20 and P20 Pro specs

How do Huawei’s latest handsets compare on paper?

Huawei’s new flagship phones have been officially announced, bringing a stunning glass-backed design, and two unique new camera setups. The P20 Pro is the star of the show, with its triple-camera array around the back, as well as a battery bank to match the current champion of smartphone longevity, the Mate 10 Pro.

But the regular P20 is nothing to sniff at, with the same powerful Kirin 970 platform, 128GB of storage and many of the same camera features.

Check out the spec sheets below.

Huawei P20 + P20 Pro hardware specifications

Doodle Jump is still hopping nearly a decade on [Retro Review]

Revisiting one of the most iconic mobile games ever released.

Mobile gaming has come a long way since 2010 — thanks to the crazy processing power of modern smartphones, we’ve reached the point where you can play console-quality games on the go. And yet, there’s still something to be said for those games that offer a simple distraction in small doses.

Take Doodle Jump, a game that I was reminded of after seeing the arcade version at a local movie theatre. Doodle Jump was initially released as a paid app and quickly amassed millions of downloads in short order — at the time earning the acclaim of being the most downloaded iPhone app ever in 2010.

Of course, so much has changed since then and Doodle Jump has long since been surpassed in the App Stores by newer games, but the crazy thing is that revisiting this game in 2018 is still an absolute joy.

Doodle Jump is such a simple and intuitive game to pick up and play that literally anyone can figure it out in just a few seconds.

I think it comes down to the KISS acronym — keep it simple, stupid. Doodle Jump remains such a simple and intuitive game to pick up and play that literally anyone can figure it out in just a few seconds. It was also one of the first games to really make good use of the accelerometers in your phone to let you control your Doodler by subtly tilting your phone right and left, and arguably the best game to use such controls even to this day.

If you’re like me and it’s been some time since you’ve played Doodle Jump, you could download the app for free from the Google Play Store and it’s still incredibly addictive. First of all, the developers have clearly been adding to the game over the years. There are a ton of different themes, power-ups, and over 100 missions.

Unfortunately, the “free” version of Doodle Jump is really hamstrung by all the ads scattered throughout, which is why I got more enjoyment out of the GameStash version of the game, which is completely ad-free. And really, that’s the way casual games like this were meant to be played!

See at GameStash