Dell Ultrasharp 49 review

How wide can your monitor be? Well, that depends. How wide is your desk?

Samsung’s 49-inch CHG90 ultrawide, released in fall of 2017, challenged everyone’s assumptions about how large a monitor should be. Now, a year later, Dell is taking up that challenge with its own ultrawide, the Ultrasharp U4919DW (better known as the Ultrasharp 49).

This massive monitor is the same size as the Samsung, but it’s also very different. Its 5,120 x 1,440 resolution is higher, its 60Hz maximum refresh rate is lower, and its 3800R curve is less dramatic. Though similar size, and this is a different beast with an impressive $1,700 price to match.

Is this the ultimate monitor? Or has Dell gone too far?

Yes, sir, it’s a Dell

If you’ve ever worked in an office, or even stepped inside on, you’ve likely laid eyes on a Dell Ultrasharp monitor. These popular displays are known for sturdy but buttoned-up design that puts function over form, and the Ultrasharp U4919DW doesn’t break the mold.

That’s not say this is an ugly monitor. In fact, it’s a bit dramatic. This is a 49-inch monitor with a 32:9 aspect ratio and slim bezels on all sides, so it’s going to turn heads. Once you get over its sheer size, though, there’s little to remark on. The large plastic rear panel looks goods and feels sturdy but doesn’t entice. We can say the same for the ergonomic stand, which offers height and tilt adjustments. Due to the Ultrasharp 49’s size, this stand doesn’t have the pivot and rotation adjustments commonly found on other Ultrasharp screens.

Connectivity is impressive. The screen comes with two HDMI 2.0 ports, one DisplayPort 1.4, five USB 3.0 downstream ports, two USB 3.0 upstream ports, and one USB-C port. Shew!

Once again, Dell has shown how monitor controls should be handled.

The Samsung CHG90 has similar loadout of video ports, but it ditches the USB-C for an extra mini-DisplayPort. You’ll also find audio jack pass-through on the Samsung monitor, which the Dell lacks. The Samsung has far fewer USB ports, though, with one USB 3.0 upstream and two USB 3.0 downstream.

On balance, the design and options of each monitor are tailored to their audiences. The Samsung is built for gaming and entertainment, so it has a more dramatic curve and extra video and audio ports. Dell, on the other hand, pitches the Ultrasharp 49 as both the ultimate productivity monitor and a dock for laptops that have USB-C connectivity. You can connect to the Ultrasharp 49 monitor via USB-C and connect your peripherals through it, instead of having a separate dock.

This is how you do monitor controls

Once again, Dell has shown how monitor controls should be handled. The Ultrasharp 49 includes five tactile buttons which are clearly labeled, once touched, by on-screen icons. These controls are responsive, the menus well organized, and the font size is extremely large. Finding and activating an option is rarely a chore.

Dan Baker/Digital Trends

There’s significant depth of choices, too. Aside from the usual options of contrast, brightness, and sharpness, you can change color temperature, color hue, saturation, gain, and offset. There’s also several customizable key options and little tweaks, like the ability to turn off the power light when the display is on, should that annoy you.

Resolution is where it’s at

If there’s one thing you should know about the Dell Ultrasharp 49 (aside, obviously, from its size) – it’s resolution.

Samsung’s CHG90 beats the Ultrasharp 49 in a few key tests, but barely.

Samsung’s CHG90 has a 3,440 x 1,080 screen, which makes it basically the same in pixel density as a 27-inch 1080p monitor. However, the Dell Ultrasharp 49 has a 5,120 x 1,440 resolution, which makes it like a 27-inch 1440p monitor. Put another way, the Dell has almost twice as many pixels as the Samsung.

It’s a big difference, and you’ll notice it. The Samsung’s pixel density is adequate, but fine details can look rough at times. That’s not an issue with the Dell. Its image appears sharp and detailed no matter what you view. The higher resolution also means you effectively have a larger workspace, since there’s more pixels available.

Sharpness is a clear win for the Dell, then. Yet image quality is about more than pixel count, and in many other important areas, the Samsung CHG90 and Ultrasharp 49 trade blows.

On balance, the Samsung comes away winning these bouts. It’s slightly better in contrast, color gamut, and even average color accuracy. However, the Samsung’s maximum brightness is lower and its gamma is slightly off, while the Dell’s gamma quite good. That means the Dell appears brighter and displays the brightness of content with better accuracy.

Which is better? Well, it depends on what you need. The Samsung is a stunner in games and the rare 32:9 video clip. It looks more fluid due to its faster 144Hz refresh rate, and its better contrast provides a better illusion of depth and realism.

Dan Baker/Digital Trends

Yet the Dell takes an edge in still images and productivity. It can render sharp text with ease, which means you can have any open windows with fine fonts and still read everything (so long as your eyesight is keen). It’s also a better display for editing images due to its more accurate gamma performance. The Dell Ultrasharp 49 is effectively the same as having two nice 27-inch monitors side-by-side, but without a bezel between them. That gives you a lot of screen real-estate to work with.

Both displays do share one weak point, and that’s backlight uniformity. You’ll likely notice areas near the edge of the monitor that are brighter than the middle. This is a common problem with ultrawide displays of any size and it’s usually towards the edges, where you look the least, but you should know of the issue before you buy. We think it’s an acceptable trade-off for size, but perfectionists will be annoyed.

Dell Ultrasharp 49-inch monitor (U4919DW) Compared To

Samsung LC49HG90DMNXZA CHG90 Series

BenQ EX3200R Gaming Monitor

Samsung CFG70

HP Dreamcolor Z32x

Philips 276E6ADSS LCD monitor

Acer S277HK

Acer XB280HK

Acer B286HK

AOC mySmart A2472PW4T

Dell P2314T

HP 2311gt

Gateway XHD3000

HP w2207

Gateway FPD1930

Samsung Syncmaster 173T

As mentioned, the Dell Ultrasharp 49 has a typical 60Hz refresh rate. It also lacks FreeSync support for smoother gameplay, something the Samsung CHG90 supports. Finally, the Samsung CHG90 supports HDR (in limited fashioned). These reinforce the differences between these monitors. The Dell won’t be able to handle high-framerate gaming or HDR movies as well as the Samsung display.

After calibration, it’s more of the same

Both monitors look great out of the box. Neither sets records, but they offer solid scores across the board and they’re a huge upgrade over the budget monitors most people buy. Which is good, given these massive displays have massive price tags.

Calibrating the displays didn’t change our impressions. Color accuracy didn’t change much. Gamma also stayed the same. We did tame the cool color temperature both monitors had out of the box, making the picture warmer and more inviting.

Our Take

Dell’s Ultrasharp 49 is only the second product in a niche category, and it does enough to distinguish itself from the Samsung CHG90.

The Dell’s $1,700 price tag is huge, however, and seriously cut into the display’s value. Samsung’s CHG90 is only $1,000 – still a lot, but more tolerable.

We doubt value shoppers are looking at 49-inch screens to begin with, though, and the Dell’s superior resolution might be worthwhile for discerning eyes.

Is there a better alternative?

There’s one alternative which, by now, you should know – Samsung’s CHG90. It’s the same size, but it offers different features for a different audience. Gamers will be more interested in the Samsung because of its lower price, high refresh rate, and HDR support. Those seeking a big monitor for multi-tasking, though, will prefer Dell’s superior resolution and work-friendly connectivity.

How long will it last?

Dell has an edge over Samsung here and again, it comes down to resolution. The Samsung’s lower resolution already looks a tad dated and may look seriously old-school in three years. That’s not a problem with the Dell Ultrasharp 49.

Our one concern is the lack of HDR support. We suspect that’s about to become common. However, even monitors that support it have limitations, so its absence is understandable.

A three-year warranty is standard with the Dell. Samsung offers the same for the CHG90.

Should you buy it?

Yes.

Look. The Dell Ultrasharp 49 is expensive. Very expensive. You don’t need it and odds are that, like most of the world, you can’t afford it. But if you can afford it, and you do want it, go for it. We’re certainly going to be sad when it leaves our desk.

New PortSmash attack exploits Intel’s Hyper-Threading architecture to steal your data

Intel

Security researchers from Finland and Cuba have discovered a side-channel attack, known as PortSmash, that affects Intel chips and could allow attackers access to encrypted data processed from a computer’s CPU. The vulnerability exists on chipsets that use simultaneous multithreading (SMT) architecture, so it could also affect AMD chips in addition to Intel chips with Hyper-Threading technology.

Researchers claimed that they notified Intel of the vulnerability at the beginning of October, but the chip-maker did not have a patch ready until the end of the month, the same day that a proof-of-concept code was published on Github to show how the attack would work on Intel’s Skylake and Kaby Lake architectures.

For PortSmash to work, malicious code must run on the same PC using the same processor core as the legitimate code. SMT and Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology allow for codes to run on separate threads simultaneously using the same processor core. This delivers greater efficiency, as more code can be executed at the same time. However, code executed on one thread can also observe what is happening on the other thread, and an attacker could use this behavior to inject malicious code to run in tandem with a legitimate code in order to eavesdrop on the processor. The malicious code will leak out bits of encrypted data that it observed from the legitimate process, allowing an attacker to reconstruct the encrypted data from the leak.

“We detect port contention to construct a timing side channel to exfiltrate information from processes running in parallel on the same physical core,” Billy Brumley, security researcher, and one of the research paper’s authors, told The Register.

Intel has since responded to the findings of Brumley and his team, noting that the issue is not related to already widely-known vulnerabilities like Spectre or Meltdown.

“We expect that it is not unique to Intel platforms,” Intel said. “Research on side-channel analysis methods often focuses on manipulating and measuring the characteristics, such as timing, of shared hardware resources. Software or software libraries can be protected against such issues by employing side channel safe development practices. Protecting our customers’ data and ensuring the security of our products is a top priority for Intel and we will continue to work with customers, partners, and researchers to understand and mitigate any vulnerabilities that are identified.”

Brumley noted that in order for PortSmash to work, the malicious code must run on the same processor as the target machine. Brumley’s team has not tested PortSmash on AMD processors, but the plan is to see if the same kind of attack can happen on Ryzen processors in the future.

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Microsoft has #*!@ed up to-do lists on an epic scale

I’ve always been a note-taker. From Post-Its to little twists of paper, I jot down reminders a dozen times a day. I know, it’s stupid: Digital Trends itself has a great post on the best productivity apps to get my lists in order, from simple systems like Remember the Milk and Google Tasks to robust life-organizers like Evernote. Technology can solve this problem for me. So I set out recently to get off the analog world of paper notes and into digital — and promptly ran into an immovable object: Microsoft.

Microsoft has mucked up to-do lists on a scale you simply can’t imagine, a failure that spans multiple products and teams, like a lil’ bit of salmonella that contaminates an entire factory’s output.

…like a lil’ bit of salmonella that contaminates an entire factory’s output

Yuck. Hear me out.

A year and half ago, the engineers rolled out a beta of Microsoft To-Do, the company’s replacement for the profoundly useful and popular Wunderlist app, which Microsoft bought back in 2015. Wunderlist is still pretty decent, even though Microsoft is very clear that it plans to suck the life out of it before burying it in an unmarked grave in Redmond. (To be fair, those are my words. In Microsoft’s, “Once we are confident that we have incorporated the best of Wunderlist into Microsoft To-Do, we will retire Wunderlist.” It reads better my way.)

So I signed up for Microsoft To-Do a month or two back, and replaced my Post-Its and scraps with tech. And it became clear pretty immediately the enormous gulch that still exists between Wunderlist and Microsoft To-Do. For starters, there’s the Cortana integration. Cortana is supposed to be Microsoft’s answer to Alexa and Siri, and To-Do lists are a key part of making that voice assistant functional. Tap the microphone next to the Cortana icon on your computer and say “Create a Holiday Planning list” and Cortana will make a new list for you … in Wunderlist. It’s the same functionality that has existed since the integration was rolled out in November of 2016, two years ago.

Microsoft To-Do, a tool to help you create a list for anything—for work, home projects or just your groceries.

That’s right, Microsoft’s own signature voice-recognition technology doesn’t recognize Microsoft’s own To-Do app, despite the company’s publicly announced plans to port over the best of Wunderlist. Is the company working to change that? Are the Cortana team and the To-Do team talking to each other? We asked Microsoft this question a week ago. The company declined to go on the record for this story.

Ugh.

Change is coming, thanks to announcements made at an early October event (where Microsoft unveiled the fantastic Surface Pro 6). Unfortunately, those changes are profoundly stupid.

First, Microsoft announced integration with Outlook – a concept that could turn To-Do into something amazing. Outlook is pervasive, like Dunkin Donuts or something. According to Jee Soo Han, a product marketing manager for Microsoft: “While in your inbox, open the tasks pane and drag and drop emails to it on the right-hand side to create a task. This task will sync to Microsoft To-Do with the associated email linked for reference. Now you don’t have to leave Outlook to create a task manually, and you’ll have the email to reference right in the task notes!”

Unfortunately, changes Microsoft plans are profoundly stupid

Great! Except it will only work in Outlook.com when the feature is finally released next month, and for other web versions of Outlook in December. Meanwhile, the same functionality exists today for the vast majority of consumers using the Outlook app on our desktop….. through Wunderlist, of course.

Digital Trends asked Microsoft when this basic functionality would be brought to the To-Do app. The company declined to respond.

Then there’s Microsoft Launcher version 5.0, unveiled at the same event and promising a deep connection between your Android smartphone and your Windows laptop or desktop. One key feature: Microsoft To-Do is built directly into the app. Great! Easy access to my list? I love it. Guess which program Microsoft decided to sync with it? You get a gold star if you guessed Wunderlist.

Launcher 5.0 is especially maddening because it looks virtually identical to the To-Do app itself, yet doesn’t connect with it in anyway. Install ‘em both and you’ll have two different versions of Microsoft To-Do running on the same phone that are unable to talk to each other. In the only meaningful comment Microsoft was willing to make for this article, the company acknowledged this issue: “The to-do list feature in Microsoft Launcher you see currently does not yet integrate with Microsoft To-Do. We are actively working on delivering Microsoft To-Do integration into Microsoft Launcher. We’ll have more to share when we’re ready.”

Don’t hold your breath.

Meanwhile, what about One Note? Does that integrate with To-Do? What about Windows itself? Or the other Office applications, like Word? What about Edge? I’ll let you guess. Microsoft, if you’re listening, tackle these simple asks!  It helps you to get it done, build yourself a To-Do list – just take the hint. Do it in Wunderlist, m’kay?

The views expressed here are solely those of the author and do not reflect the beliefs of Digital Trends.

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Sony Xperia XZ3 review: A low-key entertainment winner

I know I’m a little late to this one, but Sony products are ones that I feel the need to luxuriate in, to get a feel for their pros and cons, benefits and drawbacks, over the course of a few weeks, not a few days. I think that’s OK, too, because the average Sony smartphone buyer probably isn’t lining up on day one to buy the company’s new phones. That is, if they’re even in a country that sells Sony products in stores.

The Xperia XZ3 was announced back in September, during the IFA conference in Berlin, and comes just six months after the Xperia XZ2. While the cadence was not surprising — Sony’s been doing twice-yearly phone refreshes since 2013 — the number of changes, physical and otherwise, were meaningful. The XZ3 is Sony’s best phone ever, but it comes at a $100 price increase over the XZ2, and given the number of high-end phones in that price bracket, I’m not sure the PlayStation maker has done enough to justify the surge.

A slippery sensation

Sony Xperia XZ3

$900 at Amazon

A smartphone that’s good at almost everything

Sony’s Xperia XZ3 nails the fundamentals with a beautiful OLED screen, outstanding performance and battery life, a decent camera, and plenty of charm. But at $900, it’s too expensive.

I’ve used the Sony Xperia XZ3 on and off for a month now (it’s been a busy October, give me a break) and it’s been a sturdy companion. But should you buy it — especially when the up-front cost for most Americans is $900? Let’s dig into it.

Sony Xperia XZ3 What I love

Repelling (or ignoring) years of criticism about its phones, Sony has slowly been moving towards a style and feature set that it thinks will win over enthusiasts. Display, sound, and camera, all meant to bolster the entertainment experience of using one’s phone. With the XZ2 redesign, the company’s phones became a bit more ergonomic (and slippery), but considerably more in line with what you’d expect from a high-end smartphone in 2018. The bezels were reduced, the display quality improved, and the sound boosted.

And yet, even compared to other phones released in early 2018, the XZ2 was bulky and awkward. With the XZ3, there’s just enough refinement in the build and design that I’m willing to concede that the phone looks great, albeit a bit more generic than previous generations. The front is covered with a 6-inch QHD+ OLED display, with glass that slopes in slightly to meet the narrow metal bezel and color-matched glass back. I love this display, with its bright, vivid colors, excellent brightness, and HDR for supported content (though the company’s X-Reality engine reportedly upscales SDR to HDR, but that’s not really a thing).

It’s funny to think that just a few years ago Sony was rightfully excoriated for releasing phones with some of the worst LCD panels on the market. Things improved in 2014 with the Z3 line — viewing angles and colors grew more in line with the industry standard at the time — and the company is playing catch-up once again with the XZ3.

But it’s fine, because this is one of the nicer OLED panels I’ve seen on a phone. At 2880×1440 pixels, it’s much sharper than the XZ2’s LCD panel, and touch response is as good as ever. Not only that, but Sony managed to eliminate more of the bezel above and below the display while maintaining the superlative S-Force stereo speakers the line is known for, all without resorting to a notched design.

Sony’s phone looks fantastic, if a little generic, but it’s in the feature set that the company hopes to differentiate itself this generation.

The best (and given the recent price drops, perhaps worst) thing I can say about the XZ3 from the front is that it looks a heck of a lot like the Samsung Galaxy S9. Sony’s paying attention to symmetry here, with an evenness and balance to the bezels above and below the display as well as the metal frame around the phone.

All of the phone’s buttons are on the right frame, and I’ve grown fond of their placement: volume near the top, power dead center (and well apart from the others), and a dedicated camera shutter near the bottom. While I love that Sony continues to emphasize the tactility of photo taking by offering a physical button, its usefulness has declined proportionally to the slipperiness and reduced size of the bezel. With the XZ3, Sony’s most svelte and slippery smartphone to date, I find it nearly impossible to use the shutter button without dropping the damn phone. It’s a problem (that requires a case).

Around back, the phone’s single 19MP camera is flanked by a trail of sensors and LEDs, along with a capacitive fingerprint sensor that, while still too low, isn’t as awkward to use as it was on the XZ2, as the phone is slightly taller overall. We’ll talk about the camera later, but let’s talk sound now, because it’s one of my favorite aspects of this device.

Sony’s dual front-facing speakers are loud and clear, and combined with the Dynamic Vibration System, makes for an engrossing and enjoyable video-watching or music-listening experience. Dismissed as a gimmick in many of the reviews of the XZ2 and XZ3, I’m a big fan not only of the feature itself but of the concept: in lieu of using the phone’s internals as a resonance chamber a la LG G7 or Pixel 3, Sony’s chosen to focus on tuning its speakers for sparkling highs and warm mids while relying on an ultra-powerful vibration motor to recreate bass within the phone.

I think it works, and because it’s a motor it can be tuned to your liking; the G7’s bass increases and decreases proportionally to the phone’s volume. And while the Dynamic Vibration System doesn’t reproduce low-end the same way as a subwoofer, I think it’s a stupendous solution to a problem many companies have struggled for a long time to solve.

Battery life is characteristically Sony excellent, which means all-day-plus, in my experience. Despite only having a cell size of 3,330mAh, Sony’s imperious killing of background processes ensures that there’s no workflow this phone can’t survive. In my multi-week torture test of the XZ3, I didn’t kill it before bedtime even once. Plus, it supports Qi wireless charging and USB-PD, so topping it up is fast and reliable.

As for software, I’m satisfied, if not elated, with Sony’s restraint in Android 9 Pie. Yes, it ships with the latest version of Android, but it also looks increasingly like Google’s version but for a launcher that can be easily swapped for something better. Sony doesn’t inundate users with gimmicky features (save for one, which I’ll get to), but there’s plenty to like about the pre-loaded experiences, including a well-designed camera app and gallery, and first-party options that are inspired by, but don’t copy verbatim, Google’s Material Theme.

A few more things the Xperia XZ3 does well:

• Call quality is excellent, as is Bluetooth reliability.
• I used the phone on TELUS and Wind Mobile in Canada throughout my testing period, and both networks performed extremely well. Speeds were often well above 150Mbps in tests, and signal strength remained strong.
• While the XZ3 doesn’t have a headphone jack, it’s compatible with every USB-C headphone I own, which is encouraging.

Sony Xperia XZ3 What’s not great

There’s a lot to like about the Xperia XZ3, but one thing dooms it, especially for the price: the camera isn’t great. The 19MP sensor and f/2.0 lens combination goes all the way back to early 2017 with the Xperia XZs, and while Sony gave image quality a boost with the XZ2, switching from its own proprietary processing engine to Qualcomm’s, and it showed — daytime images had better colors, and low-light photos weren’t as bogged down with noise. Here’s what I wrote when I reviewed the XZ2 back in June:

The phone makes smart decisions most of the time, but not every time, particularly in scenes with blown-out areas that require HDR, something Superior Auto is reluctant to apply.

That still applies today, but the points of comparison aren’t the same. Since the XZ2’s release, the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, Pixel 3, and iPhone XS have all been released, lengthening the delta Sony has to narrow to get back into camera conversation. The problem isn’t that the XZ3 shoots bad photos — the sensor is good and the lens is sharp, so there are no real technical roadblocks here — but that they’re lifeless and boring, especially when compared with the current crop of great camera phones. While Sony’s camera app has improved immensely with its phones’ Android Pie update, the software just makes poor decisions.

Sony’s photo (left) overexposes the sky and doesn’t capture the correct white balance for this difficult daylight shot. Google’s HDR+ on the Pixel 3 (right) is wonderfully rich and visually impressive.

Colors aren’t just lifeless, they’re often wrong. White balance errs on the cool side, and exposure is infuriatingly inconsistent. And in situations where HDR is necessary, the automatic shooting settings don’t activate it, washing out skies and other bright areas, or keeping darker areas completely imperceptible.

When Sony’s camera (left) exposes properly it does grab lots of lovely, deep color, but it’s still overshadowed (pun intended) by the Pixel 3 (right).

I have taken great photos on the XZ3, and on Sony phones in general, but they are usually done in manual mode, and with a bit of patience tweaking settings. That shouldn’t be necessary.

Sony’s nighttime shooting (left) captures some detail, but even at high ISOs can’t manage to eke out enough light to make this low-light shot usable. The Pixel 3 (right) performs much better.

Sony’s video prowess is also marred by an issue I also experienced on the XZ2: dropped frames. Shooting a random video in 4K nearly always results in blips in the viewfinder — it looks like of like a glitch in the Matrix — which translates into dropped frames in the final product. I hoped this would be resolved with the update to Pie and the improved camera app, but it doesn’t appear to have been prioritized.

Elsewhere, Sony’s one software “gimmick”, Side Sense, could have been great but is criminally underutilized. The idea of having a touch-sensitive side area isn’t new to the phone industry — HTC’s Edge Sense is probably the best-known and most robust example— but Sony’s Side Sense tries a different tack. By default, double-tapping anywhere on either side of the phone’s slightly curved glass — not the metal bezels, but the actual OLED display — shows your last eight most-used apps, with shortcuts to bring down the notification shade or to disable auto-rotate, among others. You can also configure a slide up or down the side to emulate Android’s back button.

The Xperia XZ3’s Side Sense feature could be an invaluable tool for power users, but it’s bogged down by Sony’s narrow thinking.

Side Sense would be useful were it not for its unreliable nature — you have to be very precise with your taps and swipes — and its lack of customization. Why not let me bring down the notification shade with a double-tap or slide instead of making me wade through a bunch of icons? Why can’t you disable the app switcher altogether and just emulate the quick settings menu? Sony’s idea is sound, but it didn’t take into account that the last thing I need is yet another way for me to access my apps; the home screen is a single tap away, as is the multitasking menu.

For Side Sense to be useful it would have to let me automate tasks that aren’t already within thumb’s reach. (Can we also talk about the fact that Sony lets me pull down the notification shade using a shortcut within Side Sense but not by swiping down on the rear fingerprint sensor like nearly every other manufacturer? Come on.)

Moving onto hardware, I’m all-in on Sony’s new design language and aesthetic, but my gosh this phone is slippery. Sony really should be including a case in the box — even a cheapy clear case — if it wants people to buy this. I can’t tell you how many times I almost dropped this phone during my testing period, and it slid out of my pocket more than once while sitting down.

Sony Xperia XZ3 Should you buy it?

The Sony Xperia XZ3 is a good phone, and competes well with other flagships in its price range in every way but one: camera. That’s unfortunate given Sony’s position in the camera sensor market; it creates the actual sensors that go into every phone that destroys it in terms of photo quality and video performance. As Huawei, Google, Apple, and others invest in computational photography, Sony’s left exposing the weakness of relying on hardware alone (or the consequences of bad software processing).

The phone’s display and sound make for an enjoyable, if slight, upgrade over competing products, but it doesn’t trounce any of them. Indeed, the screen on the newly-released OnePlus 6T is almost as good, though it lacks the XZ3’s stereo speakers and powerful haptics. Sony also lacks a carrier ecosystem to fall back on in the U.S., so there’s no getting the phone on a generous financing plan. Nor can you use the XZ3 on Verizon, which limits its potential uptake in the U.S. Even the OnePlus 6T can boast of being sold at a U.S. carrier and being compatible with Verizon’s network.

3.5
out of 5

I’m a big fan of the Xperia XZ3, and have enjoyed my time with it. But like I’ve said with almost every other Sony phone (except the exceptional XZ2 Compact, which you should buy right now if you prefer small phones), it’s too expensive, and requires a pretty substantial price job to even be considered in the same breath as today’s flagships. As many people pointed out to me already, why should you buy this when the Galaxy S9 and G7 ThinQ are available for under $700 right now, or when the OnePlus 6T debuts at a tantalizing $549?

I don’t really have an answer for you. And that’s a big problem for Sony.

See at Amazon

Apple’s Rumored to Debut First 5G iPhone in 2020 With Intel as Modem Supplier

Apple will launch its first 5G iPhone in 2020, according to an unnamed source that spoke to Fast Company.

Apple is said to be planning to use Intel’s 8161 modem chip in the 2020 iPhone lineup, with Intel set to be the sole provider of 5G chips for Apple devices. The upcoming 8161 chip will be fabricated using Intel’s 10-nanometer process.

Right now, Intel is said to be testing a precursor to the 8161, the 8060, which will be used for prototyping the 5G iPhone.

Fast Company’s source says that Apple has “been unhappy” with Intel as of late because of Intel’s failure to solve heat dissipation and battery life issues with the 8060 modem chip that’s in the works.

Many wireless carriers, including Verizon and AT&T in the U.S., will initially rely on millimeter-wave spectrum (between 30 gigahertz and 300 Ghz) to connect the first 5G phones. But millimeter-wave signal requires some heavy lifting from the modem chips, our source explains. This causes the release of higher-than-normal levels of thermal energy inside the phone-so much so that the heat can be felt on the outside of the phone.

Despite its displeasure with Intel, Apple has not considered reopening conversations with Qualcomm about supplying 5G modems for the 2020 iPhone models. The company has, however, held conversations with modem chip maker MediaTek as a Plan B if Intel can’t work out its modem problems over the course of the next year and a half.

With its legal dispute with Qualcomm escalating, Apple has been relying on Intel chips for its devices. The iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR all use Intel modem chips, with Apple having transitioned away from Qualcomm entirely for its flagship iPhone lineup.

Rumors late last year suggested Intel and Apple were already working on 5G chip technology for future iPhone devices. Intel is said to have thousands of people working on 5G tech to catch up with Qualcomm and win Apple’s 5G modem contract.

The first 5G smartphones are expected to start debuting early in 2019, with the first to be Android devices using Qualcomm 5G chips. 5G technology is expected to deliver speeds that are 10 to 100 times faster than the average 4G connection, at a gigabit per second or higher, along with lower latency and other benefits.

Related Roundup: 2019 iPhones
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To curb teen vaping, schools across the U.S. welcome A.I. into their bathrooms

There’s a problem with bullying at schools. Since today’s students are also members of the post-millennial generation there’s, unsurprisingly, a reported problem with vaping as well. Who are you going to call? If you’re anything like 500 schools across the U.S. and Canada, the answer is simple: Soter Technologies.

Soter has developed a smart bathroom sensor called Fly Sense. It’s capable of detecting both indoor vaping and noises above a certain decibel threshold, indicative of bullying or fighting. Think of it like Amazon Alexa: Snitch edition — but in a totally good way.

“Fly Sense, and now Fly Sense 2.5, is the first Internet of Things device that was designed to detect sound anomalies in schools that suggest potential incidents of bullying,” Derek Peterson, CEO and founder of Soter Technologies, told Digital Trends. “After receiving feedback from school administrators about the explosion of the vaping problem with young people in secondary schools, an advanced vape detection and alert system was [also] integrated into the system solution. Developed for the education market, FlySense is the only dual sensor and real-time alert system of its kind on the market today.”

Fly Sense contains multiple sensors capable of making different environmental readings. Using air quality sensors and associated software, it can identify trends of vape use in a given location over time, thereby helping schools identify hot spots for reacting accordingly. Despite our quip about smart speakers, the devices do not actually record sound, but rather analyze decibel levels to identify anomalies. When a vaping signature or a sound anomaly is detected, an alert is then automatically sent via email, SMS text message, or push notification to a defined user list.

While Fly Sense could theoretically be installed anywhere, Peterson said that schools will typically use them in places like locker rooms or bathrooms. That’s because these represent “the soft underbelly of school security,” where there are no cameras, teachers or coaches to keep an eye on what happens.

Since being introduced in August 2017, Fly Sense is now shipping out more than 600 units per month. The cost of a single unit is $995 and includes cloud-based monitoring and alert service for one year. Each subsequent year costs $150 for the service.

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NASA dreams of fueling up its rockets at a gas station on Mars by 2038

Glen Benson/NASA

The idea of robots mining for dirt on Mars, which could then be transformed into water, oxygen, or rocket fuel, sounds like some futuristic sci-fi concept. But it’s an actual idea that NASA scientists are working to make a reality just a couple of decades from now. It’s part of research that could one day allow a Mars-based crew to return home to Earth after using up much of their fuel on the journey there. And while it’s all hypothetical right now, NASA has a prototype robot to underline how serious it is.

“RASSOR is a low-gravity excavation robot that NASA is currently prototyping and evaluating for potential future use on the Moon or on Mars,” Kurt Leucht, NASA software engineer at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, told Digital Trends. “It’s a novel design because it is itself a very lightweight machine – because minimizing launch mass is a major focus in the rocket business – and yet it is still a very capable digging machine despite its low weight.”

RASSOR digs using small digging scoops that are mounted onto counter-rotating hollow bucket drums. It drives forward while digging in order to create a long slot-trench, and digs down deeper and deeper with each pass. The hope is that, as it digs down several feet beneath the surface, it will discover water/ice mixed in with the soil.

Glen Benson/NASA

This water could then be filtered and deionized to produce water, or split into hydrogen and oxygen components to provide some of the raw materials needed for liquid rocket fuel.

“The processing plant will also collect carbon dioxide from the thin Mars atmosphere, and create methane rocket fuel using the Sabatier process,” Leucht said. “It’s basically an unmanned and fully autonomous gas station on the surface of Mars. It can create oxygen for breathing air. It can create liquid water for drinking. And it can create liquid methane and liquid oxygen rocket propellants for our return trip.”

In a recent article for IEEE Spectrum, Leucht cited the year 2038 as a possible date for this to take place. However, he noted that that this date is just notional at present — although he is hopeful it will come to fruition. “It’s very difficult for NASA, as a federal agency, to plan in detail more than just a few years out into the future,” he said. “Everything depends on funding and direction from our federal administration.”

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HP blasts a supercomputer into orbit and it’s (mostly) still in one piece

Back in August 2017, HP Enterprise teamed up with Space X and NASA to send a supercomputer to the International Space Station. Part of a year-long mission to test if the systems onboard the computer could survive the harsh environments of space, it is now still alive and partly in working order, Wired reports.

Built with help from NASA, and based on HP Enterprises’ Apollo 40 servers, the supercomputer’s 32 cores all kept working all year despite the radiation of space. There were, however, several periods where the connections to NASA were down for three seconds to 20 minutes at eight times during the day. Despite the downtime, data was not lost, which is something that shows big potential for use in space, according to HP.

“There’s a lot of 4K cameras and videos on ISS looking for something … We should do that kind of general-purpose image processing on board and save that bandwidth for other things,”  HP told Wired.

Parts of the Linux-powered supercomputer were also protected by a custom water-cooled enclosure and software which would default it to safe mode if radiation and heat thresholds were met. Unfortunately, that system wasn’t 100 percent accurate and failures occurred on nine out of 20 of the solid-state drives onboard.

Likewise, power failures were common for the supercomputer, happening four times during the one-year testing period. That shows that while the supercomputer might not be perfect, it still holds value for NASA for tasks like crunching data and beaming it back to Earth.

“They learned a few things and they demonstrated that the system works in space. …It gives NASA the option to purchase a capability we may need in the future rather than developing it ourselves,” NASA’s David Hornyak told Wired.

NASA provides a full rundown of the initial mission online and HP also dives deeper into the technical details of its supercomputer offerings on its website. The rocket carrying the supercomputer originally launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, but after the initial success, HP is now announcing plans to allow more researchers to access the Spaceborne supercomputer.

That should make computing in space much easier for the astronauts looking down on Earth.

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Get a refurbished Apple 12-inch MacBook for $400 less than price of a new one

Now that Apple has announced its new MacBook Air, we’re starting to see deals that make the 12-inch MacBook more competitive. Amazon is the latest to offer such a deal — and it’s for today only. The internet retailer is offering a certified refurbished MacBook for $400 less than the cost of a new one.

For $899, you’re getting a device with a 1.2GHz dual-core 7th-Generation Kaby Lake Intel Core M3 processor, a 256GB solid-state drive, and 8GB of memory. Amazon’s discount applies to all colors, so you can pick up the 12-inch laptop in space gray, silver, rose gold, or gold. The MacBook deal is part of Amazon’s early Black Friday promotions.

Amazon’s deal represents a sizable savings, but, as we mentioned, the unit you’re getting is refurbished, not a new one, and Amazon only offers a limited warranty on the laptop.

“The condition of these units are Manufacturer Certified Refurbished by Apple,” Amazon said in its MacBook listing. “These units are not eligible for Apple Care and do not come with an Apple Warranty.” Amazon does offer a 30-day return policy, however, but a restocking fee may apply.

Given widely reported keyboard woes plaguing Apple’s MacBook and earlier generations of the MacBook Pro since the company switched to the butterfly key designs, the warranty may be an important consideration for potential buyers. Apple has since redesigned the keyboard to mitigate problems with sticky keys, but the keyboard is only available on the latest models of the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air, not the MacBook.

In addition to the warranty, another consideration that potential buyers looking to hop on this deal should make is that the MacBook ships with just a uniport USB-C port. This means that you won’t be able to connect another peripheral while the charging the laptop, unless you’re willing to carry a hub. Apple’s other laptops, including the newly announced MacBook Air, ships with at least two USB-C ports for added convenience, allowing users to use one port for charging and the second for connecting peripherals like a storage drive or monitor. Additionally, the USB-C port on the MacBook doesn’t support the faster Thunderbolt 3 specifications.

If you’re looking at picking up the MacBook, be sure to check out our review and laptop buying guide. If you’re not set on MacOS, there should be plenty of deals on Windows laptops as the holiday shopping season approaches.

We strive to help our readers find the best deals on quality products and services, and choose what we cover carefully and independently. If you find a better price for a product listed here, or want to suggest one of your own, email us at dealsteam@digitaltrends.com.Digital Trends may earn commission on products purchased through our links, which supports the work we do for our readers.

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Paralysis treatment that helped 3 patients walk again could come to hospitals

Three paraplegics who sustained serious spinal injuries years ago have been given the ability to walk again, courtesy of electrical stimulation of their spinal cords using a wireless implant. Called STIMO (Stimulation Movement Overground), the technology allowed people who had long since lost the use of their legs to regain control of them.

“In our method, we implant an array of electrodes over the spinal cord, which allows us to target individual muscle groups in the legs,” Jocelyne Bloch, a neurosurgeon involved in the study, said in a statement. “Selected configurations of electrodes are activating specific regions of the spinal cord, mimicking the signals that the brain would deliver to produce walking.”

The study was led by the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and the Lausanne University Hospital (CHUV), both based in Switzerland. It represents a potentially massive leap forward for rehabilitation technology. Participants required only one week of usage before they regained limited ability to walk with body weight support. After several months, they were able to exchange this for other less-supportive devices such as walkers or crutches.

Best of all, even after the electrical stimulation was switched off, the participants retained the progress they had made over the course of the experiment.

A paper describing the work, titled “Targeted neurotechnology Restores Walking in Humans with Spinal Cord Injury.” was recently published in the journal Nature. A medical startup called GTX, co-founded by Jocelyne Bloch and another researcher named Grégoire Courtine, will now aim to turn this work into a treatment that’s available to patients in hospitals and clinics.

“We are building next-generation neurotechnology that will also be tested very early post-injury, when the potential for recovery is high and the neuromuscular system has not yet undergone the atrophy that follows chronic paralysis,” Courtine said in a statement.

As impressive as it undoubtedly is, this work is not the only example of electrical stimulation yielding impressive results. Recently, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in the U.S. demonstrated how an implanted electrical stimulator was able to help a man paralyzed four years earlier in a snowmobile accident to regain the ability to stand — and even walk the length of a football field.

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