Fortnite Expands to Android, but Epic Skirts Google Play Store With Custom Installer

Fortnite, the ultra popular multiplayer battle royale game that’s available for iOS devices, consoles, and PCs, is expanding to Android today, but Epic Games is launching Fortnite for Android in a unique way that’s worth paying attention to.

As outlined by our sister site TouchArcade, rather than releasing the game on Google Play or another Android marketplace, Epic has created its own Fortnite installer that skirts all fees and eschews the Google Play monopoly on apps, letting Android users install the app outside of Google Play.

Google, like Apple, collects a 30 percent fee for apps (and in-app purchases) released through the Google Play platform, and despite the fees, most developers use Google Play anyway because it’s simple, streamlined, and easier in terms of app discovery. But, in contrast to the iOS platform, it is possible for apps to be installed on Android devices without Google Play (or the Amazon Marketplace) and that’s what Fortnite has done here.

Fortnite is so popular that Epic doesn’t need Google Play to get people to download the game, and thus Google won’t be getting a cut of in-app purchases from a mobile game that’s already brought more than $100 million in revenue on iOS devices.

Fortnite on Android is being distributed exclusively through Epic’s Fortnite Installer, which TouchArcade says is basically a third-party App Store that lets you install one app – Fortnite.

TouchArcade spoke with Epic Games founder Tim Sweeney, and he said that the company was motivated by “economic efficiency.” The 30 percent fee charged by open platforms, he says, is “disproportionate” to the services provided.

The 30% store tax is a high cost in a world where game developersʼ 70% must cover all the cost of developing, operating, and supporting their games. Thereʼs a rationale for this on console where thereʼs enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers. But on open platforms, 30% is disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service. Weʼre intimately familiar with these costs from our experience operating Fortnite as a direct-to-customer service on PC and Mac.

Sweeney says that right now, Epic Games is focused on Fortnite and there are no current plans for a full Epic App Store that permanently shuts out Google Play, but he didn’t rule it out.

Unfortunately for Epic, Apple’s mobile platform is more restrictive than Android and there is no way to make a similar move on iOS devices. The only options for skirting the App Store are jailbreaking or distributing outside of the App Store via Xcode, two practices that Apple heavily frowns upon. F.lux, for example, tried using side-loading to release an iOS app back in 2015, and Apple shut it down quickly.

While Epic Games won’t be paying fees on Android, Apple will continue getting its 30 percent cut of all Fortnite in-app purchases, at least for now. TouchArcade editor-in-chief Eli Hodapp suggests that this launch has the potential to put pressure on both Google Play and the App Store if Epic Games releases an alternative Android platform that offers more affordable rates. Epic’s Unreal Engine Marketplace, for example, offers an 88/12 split, a much better deal than the 30/70 split Apple and Google provide developers.

For more details on how Fortnite for Android will work, make sure to check out TouchArcade’s walkthrough following a hands-on demo with the app install process.

Tags: Android, Fortnite
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PSA: Your @Mac.com, @Me.com, or @iCloud.com Emails Sent via Gmail Might Be Marked as Spam Now

For the past several years, I have had my Apple-provided @me.com email address set up as an alias in Gmail, and enabled auto-forwarding of my iCloud emails to my Gmail account. This allows me to use Gmail as my one-stop-shop for sending and receiving emails from both my @gmail.com and @me.com addresses.

However, it recently came to my attention that many of my emails sent from my @me.com address via Gmail have automatically ended up in the spam boxes of my recipients—even those I’ve emailed regularly. This went on for a few weeks, with zero indication on my end, beyond a puzzling lack of replies.

Eventually, one of my recipients alerted me that my email went to spam, and I turned to Google to do some research. As it turns out, there is an industry-wide email authentication, policy, and reporting protocol named DMARC, and it appears Apple upped its DMARC policy to “quarantine” in July.

Essentially, this means that emails sent from an Apple-provided email address, such as @mac.com, @me.com, or @icloud.com, via a third-party email client such as Gmail, are now likely to be automatically marked as spam.

Al Iverson’s Spam Resource explains:

If you monitor these things, you might have noticed that Apple’s consumer email domains (iCloud domains) — mac.com, me.com and icloud.com — have moved to a “p=quarantine” DMARC policy. This means that if you have an email address in these domains, your ability to send outbound mail using an email service provider or other, non-Apple email platform to send mail, deliverability won’t look so good. Mail may not be blocked outright (Apple didn’t move to “p=reject”) but moving to “p=quarantine” means it’s much more likely that your mail could end up in the spam folder.

DMARC records on wiseTools confirm that @mac.com, @me.com, and @icloud.com now adhere to a “p=quarantine” policy.

DMARC is designed to combat one of the most common types of phishing attacks, in which the “from” address in an email is faked, so Apple moving to a “quarantine” policy is a good move in terms of security, even if it is an inconvenience for people who use an Apple email via third-party clients.

After learning this, I reached out to Apple for clarification, and while it didn’t confirm the new DMARC policy, it did offer a potential solution for Gmail.

Apple told me that I should be able to avoid the marked-as-spam issue by ensuring that emails from my @me.com address are set up to be sent through iCloud SMTP servers: smtp.mail.me.com. Apple has a related support document.

When I opened my Gmail settings, I discovered that my @me.com address was already configured in a similar manner, although the SMTP server domain was smtp.me.com, rather than smtp.mail.me.com. After updating it to the latter, emails from my @me.com address via Gmail began to reach the inboxes of others.

For further testing, I then reverted back to smtp.me.com, thinking that my emails would be marked as spam again. However, all of my emails still landed in the inboxes of others, including contacts I emailed for the first time.

At this point, I’m not entirely sure what has fixed the issue for me, but hopefully tinkering with the SMTP server settings works for others. If not, and you have an important email to send via your @mac.com, @me.com, or @icloud.com address, make sure to send it from Apple’s own Mail app or iCloud.com.

Tag: Gmail
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How A.I. can defeat malware that doesn’t even exist yet

(in)Secure is a weekly column that dives into the rapidly escalating topic of cybersecurity.

Another day, another malware attack. Regardless of how much money is poured into increasing cybersecurity, the situation doesn’t seem to improve. Could machine learning that adapts to new methods be the solution?

For some companies, such machine learning techniques go hand in hand with more traditional signature based detection and others employ behavioral learning to watch out for other, unspecified threats. For threat prevention company Cylance, however, machine learning is all it needs to offer what it claims is the most effective anti-malware solution available today.

Like Google’s Sundar Pinchai championed last year, Cylance is putting AI-first in its new consumer-facing antimalware solution. But more than that, it’s putting AI-only in its flagship security software, which it claims is more than enough to stifle the malware threats of yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

All you need is love… of AI

“If you look at it historically, all of the technology from legacy vendors really goes back to the 1990s which operates under the premise that somebody needs to get infected for the rest to be protected,” Cylance senior VP, Christopher Bray, told Digital Trends. “That worked very well and in the 90s and early 2000s, when you just had a handful of viruses being released every month, you could get an update to end users [quickly].”

Today though, he explained, things are quite different. Citing that there are more than 350,000 new pieces of malware released every single day, such signature-based anti-malware solutions just don’t cut it, he said.

The types of threats facing consumers, businesses, and the security companies who protect them all are different too. While spam and adware are still prevalent, new threats like ransomware and cryptojacking have become commonplace. With these new and ever growing attacks, Cylance believes that machine learning and AI-driven smart software is the only real way to combat it.

“[Machine learning] does not cover ALL types of malware and threats, and is much more prone to false positives”

“We’ve trained an algorithm. We’ve trained it with samples of good and samples of bad software,” he said. “The smart antivirus product which resides on a desktop Mac or a PC and inspects every file that tries to execute and before it can run you’ll analyze it and say, hey, is this good or is this bad and if it’s bad. It’ll quarantine it.”

This, Bray claims, is all you really need. But is that really true?

AI competition

Relying solely on machine learning is not an approach other anti-malware companies are taking, even ones that incorporate AI into the process. While Bray might have a glowing opinion of Cylance’s own machine learning, other companies do use it too. Kaspersky, Malwarebytes, McAfee, and many others, all utilize machine learning to help detect malicious software, they just tend to do it alongside more traditional techniques.

So what’s so different about Cylance’s solution?

“What we’re seeing from from the industry right now in the consumer space, machine learning seems to be applied to triaging [the] identifying [of] malicious software and writing fixes for it,” Bray said. “So, it’s still the old model. It’s just, it’s faster. With the volume of most software out there. It doesn’t matter how fast you are if you get a signature up 15 minutes or five minutes as these threats propagate within seconds globally. We don’t view [their machine learning] as an AI solution like ours.”

It would be unfair to categorize such a statement as anything other than opinion – one that we’re sure other antivirus companies would contest.

“It uses the power of it’s learning of his training to look at that and say, ‘Okay, this is good. I’ll let it run or no, this is bad.’”

Indeed we’ve seen anti-ransomware protections from the likes of Malwarebytes and Zone Alarm offer similar analaytical software that looks at processes as they begin to run and if they detect malicious behavior in their application, halts them in their tracks and in some cases rolls back any changes that they made.

Furthermore, according to Malwarebytes, there are some serious problems with relying solely on machine learning for threat detection.

“It does not cover ALL types of malware and threats, and is much more prone to false positives,” Pedro Bustamante told us, the VP of Products & Research at Malwarebytes. “[We] implement machine learning as one of the detection layers in its protection stack. It is not the main layer, but it is an important layer.”

Clearly, Bustamante doesn’t think machine learning is the end-all, be-all from a malware detection point of view. He even stated that he couldn’t foresee a time when machine learning would be all that was needed for anti-malware software.

Cylance doesn’t have a dedicated scan function; it focuses entirely on live protection.

Still, Bray was adamant that Cylance’s solution is quite different. Nailing him down on the specifics of what makes it so wasn’t easy, but he explained the AI further by stating that it’s been trained on millions of attributes that could suggest “good and bad behavior,” as he put it.

“[The algorithm] essentially analyzes any piece of software that runs on that device and before that software can run it uses the power of it’s learning of his training to look at that and say, ‘Okay, this is good. I’ll let it run or no, this is bad,’” he said.

Analysis over scans

One area where Cylance’s antiviral solution is distinctly different than most, is that it doesn’t offer any sort of remediation scanning function with its software. Scans have been at the heart of most antivirus software for decades, but to Cylance, that’s more akin to closing the door after the horse has bolted.

Instead, it focuses entirely on live protection, making sure threats are detected before they even start having an impact on a system. The upside of this, Bray tells us, is that its software has a very small footprint on the system it’s installed on and requires far less resources to run.

Cylance senior VP, Christopher Bray

“Because [Cylance AV] doesn’t need to churn through your hard drive and run all of these scans, the resource impact is is significantly lower than a legacy solution,” he said. “If you think about a legacy solution, it’s […] got this database of signature files that then needs to reference every time it’s checking something — just by virtue of going back and forth and checking the signature file list.”

By avoiding that, Bray claims, Cylance Smart Antvirius is far less taxing on a system. In some very rudimentary testing of this claim, we found it to be a bit of a mixed bag.

“With our solution, our philosophy is ‘hey, you know what, go click on whatever you feel like, we’ve got your back.’”

When no new applications were opened, we found the client to be very lightweight, consuming no more than a few megabytes of RAM and almost zero percent of our (Intel Core i5-4690k) CPU. However, upon opening new applications, we did see significant spikes in CPU usage, in one case (when opening Adobe Acrobat DC) it required as much as 50 percent of the test system’s CPU for a few seconds.

In comparison, Malwarebytes Antimalware, which was also running on that same system, required close to 150MB of RAM while idling, but typically only required a few percent of the CPU’s cycles when opening new applications.

However, Malwarebytes did continue to show such numbers upon repeat opening of the same applications, while Cylance’s solution appeared to learn that such apps were not malicious and required far less resources on repeat launches.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware Free (Windows)

These tests are far from conclusive, but do appear to highlight the difference between anti-malware solutions when it comes to resources required for tracking potentially dangerous processes running on a system.

Predictive policing under the hood

Regardless of everything else Cylance’s Smart Antivirus does, the one feature Bray was most proud of was its ability to detect “unknown” threats. That is, malware that has yet to be written or even effectively categorized. By relying heavily on analysis of process behavior, he claims that Cylance’s security software is capable of handling threats that no one has ever seen before.

“With an AI based solution, an application that can identify the characteristic of malicious software, it doesn’t matter if it’s known or unknown,” he said. “You can say, hey, this thing is bad and make split second decisions.”

New types of ransomware attacks is one area where he feels that the software is particularly good at combating. Citing the WannaCry ransomware attack from mid-2017, Bray claimed that Cylance fed the malicious software to a copy of its algorithm from two years prior, and that it was able to detect the ransomware and stop it in its tracks, despite predating its creation by some time.

That same applies to new ransomware attacks, he said, which are stopped before they even start and the end user is none the wiser.

Operating seamlessly out of the line of sight of consumers was something that he and Cylance truly believe in, removing the emphasis of knowledge and oversight from the consumer.

“Over the years, people have gotten accustomed to [thinking] ‘Okay, I am running security software but I shouldn’t have double clicked on that and that’s why I’m infected,’” he said. “With our solution, our philosophy is ‘hey, you know what, go click on whatever you feel like, we’ve got your back.’”

Even if Cylance’s AI-driven Smart Antivirus isn’t quite perhaps as revolutionary as its marketing might suggest, it is certainly a leaner and more focused approach to cybersecurity. If it can predict and stop the next WannaCry, we’ll happily let AI take the wheel.

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Huawei and Apple’s tablet sales rise despite big market segment decline

The second quarter of 2018 has seen overall tablet sales decline by 13.5 percent when compared the same period in 2017, according to a sales report from the International Data Corporation (IDC). That fall represents a drop from 38.2 million units to 33 million — a drop of just over 5 million units.

Fire Tablet magnate Amazon was hit the worst by the decline, suffering a 33.5 percent drop in sales compared to 2017 — and losing its fourth-place position to Lenovo as a result. However, Amazon’s comparatively lower sales mean that its drop of 800,000 thousand units is small fry compared to other manufacturers. Samsung dropped a cool million units, falling from 6 million units to 5 million, though still retaining its second place position in the market. The IDC blames an ageing lineup as the major reason for the decline, though it forecasts that the recent reveal of the Galaxy Tab S4 should boost Samsung’s sales in the coming months.

It’s not all bad news. Likely spurred on by the launch of a new, more affordable iPad at the end of the first quarter, Apple’s sales have risen — though only by 0.9 percent. Still, that means that Apple is sitting pretty with 11.5 million sold in the second quarter — over twice what second-place Samsung achieved, and enough to grant it over a third of the market’s sales with a market share of 34.9 percent.

Huawei saw gains, too, rising from 3.1 million units to 3.4 million units — a rise of 7.7 percent, with nearly half of these sales continuing to be found in the Asia/Pacific area (excluding Japan). Sales of Huawei’s convertibles, though a limited range, also showed promise, achieving a rise of 200 percent. Samsung’s sales should be boosted by the reveal of the Galaxy Tab S4, but the South Korean company still risks losing its second-place position to Huawei should recent trends continue. Huawei recently surpassed Apple to become the world’s second largest smartphone manufacturer, and the Chinese company would probably welcome another trophy on its mantleplace.

The sales being tracked include traditional “slate” tablets, as well as convertible tablets that connect to a keyboard — but do not include the growing market of convertible notebooks, which are permanently attached to a keyboard and can rotate fully around to form a bulky tablet.

How to turn off Suggestions in the Pixel Launcher on Android P

I appreciate the help, but…

Google’s made a lot of welcome changes to its Pixel Launcher since we were first introduced to it in 2016, and in Android P, it takes its Suggestions feature to the next level.

Rather than just recommending a few apps it thinks you might want to use at the top of your app drawer, Suggestions now shows these recommendations in the recent apps page, highlights App Actions in the app drawer it thinks you might want to use, and even allows you to copy and paste text while switching apps.

These features are all fine and dandy, but if you don’t want the Pixel Launcher making recommendations based on your usage, it’s rather easy to turn all of these off completely.

Hold down on a blank part of your home screen.
Tap Home settings.
Tap Suggestions.

Tap all three toggles to turn them off.

If you decide you’d like to re-enable all of these at any point or just turn on one or two, you can easily do so by following the same instructions listed above.

Keep on keeping on

Have any questions? Just want to chat about Android P / the Pixel Launcher? Feel free to sound off in the comments below!

Android P: Everything you need to know about Android 9

Android P

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• Join the Discussion

Let one of these discounted Bluetooth FM transmitters make your next drive more enjoyable

Amazon UK has limited-time discounts on a range of in-car Bluetooth FM transmitters, with some prices as low as £11 for today only.

If you’re sick of listening to the radio on your commute but your car stereo system does not support Bluetooth, these devices are for you. Each model powers on by plugging into your cigarette lighter socket. Using it as is as simple as tuning it and your radio to an unused frequency in your area. Connect your phone via Bluetooth and you’re ready to go. All the models feature a USB port (two ports, on some) to keep your device charged and a built-in microphone for hands-free calling. The built-in screen can display song names, incoming caller ID and more.

Check out the range of discounted models on Amazon.

For more UK deals coverage, be sure to keep an eye on Thrifter UK and follow the team on Twitter.

See at Amazon UK

Tim Cook Says Apple’s $1 Trillion Value is a ‘Significant Milestone’ But ‘Not the Most Important Measure of Success’ in Employee Memo

Apple today reached a major milestone and became the first publicly listed U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization. Following the news, Apple CEO Tim Cook, who did not comment publicly on the occasion, sent out a memo to employees, which was shared by Buzzfeed.

In the memo, Cook said that while the valuation is a “significant milestone” that the company should be proud of, it’s not the most important measure of Apple’s success. He instead thanked employees and said that it’s their hard work and refusal to settle for less that makes Apple great.

Team,

Today Apple passed a significant milestone. At our closing share price of $207.39, the stock market now values Apple at more than $1 trillion. While we have much to be proud of in this achievement, it’s not the most important measure of our success. Financial returns are simply the result of Apple’s innovation, putting our products and customers first, and always staying true to our values.

It’s you, our team, that makes Apple great and our success is due to your hard work, dedication and passion. I am deeply humbled by what you do, and it’s the privilege of a lifetime to work alongside you. I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for all the late hours and extra trips, all the times you refuse to settle for anything less than excellence in our work together.

Let’s take this moment to thank our customers, our suppliers and business partners, the Apple developer community, our coworkers and all those who came before us at this remarkable company.

Steve founded Apple on the belief that the power of human creativity can solve even the biggest challenges — and that the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. In today’s world, our mission is more important than ever. Our products not only create moments of surprise and delight, they empower people all around the globe to enrich their lives and the lives of others.

Just as Steve always did in moments like this, we should all look forward to Apple’s bright future and the great work we’ll do together.

Tim

With a closing stock price of $207.39 following arecord breaking Q3 earnings report on Tuesday and a total of 4,829,926,000 outstanding shares as of July 20, Apple successfully beat Amazon, Microsoft, and Google parent company Alphabet to a $1 trillion valuation.

Apple is set to have yet another strong quarter with the 2018 iPhones, new iPad Pros, new Apple Watch models, and new Macs on the horizon.

Tags: Tim Cook, AAPL
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Motorola Moto Z3 hands-on: Our first glimpse at the 5G future

Some people might take a look at the Moto Z3’s spec sheet and think it’s dead on arrival. A Snapdragon 835? Isn’t this Motorola’s Pixel 2 and Galaxy S9 competitor?

Yes and no.

It is Motorola’s top-tier flagship phone of 2018, so it will be expected to go head to head with the other Android flagships on the market. But the Moto Z3 has a big trick up its sleeve: the promise of being the very first 5G-capable phone. Coupled with Motorola’s new 5G Moto Mod, the Moto Z3 will be able to run on Verizon’s 5G network when it’s rolled out sometime in 2019.

Also read

What is 5G, and what can we expect from it?

You’ve likely heard the term a lot recently, but what is 5G? Good question. Simply put, 5G networking is the next major evolution of mobile wireless technology. It will empower customers with even faster data connections, …

“Sometime in 2019” is important to remember, here. If you decide to purchase the Moto Z3 on August 16 — when it goes on sale exclusively at Verizon — you’ll have to wait to experience all that 5G goodness. The 5G Moto Mod isn’t arriving in the U.S. until early 2019, and we still don’t know how much Motorola will charge for it. Plus, when it comes to market, it’ll only work with Verizon’s network at first. Motorola tells us it will eventually be able to work with other carriers’ networks.

The 5G Moto Mod itself works just like any other Moto Mod — it’s a modular accessory that snaps onto the back of the Z3, and you can take it off whenever you’d like. The Mod has an extra 2,000mAh battery inside to help with the inevitable battery drain from connecting to the high-speed network, too. It makes the phone pretty bulky, and there’s a little antenna that sticks up above the top-right edge of the phone.

Moto Z3 design and specs: What’s new?

Not a whole lot.

The Moto Z3 isn’t so much a followup to the Moto Z2 Force. It doesn’t have that super scratchable plastic display, it doesn’t have the fastest processor on the market, and it doesn’t have an insanely high price tag, either. Think of the Moto Z3 as a higher-end Moto Z3 Play — Motorola’s early 2018 mid-range phone.

It’s essentially the same design — it’s thin, glass, and feels like a high-end phone. It has a big 6.01-inch Full HD+ AMOLED display, the same dual-camera setup as the Z3 Play, 4GB of RAM like the Z3 Play, and a 3,000mAh battery, just like the Z3 Play. The biggest difference under the hood is the Snapdragon 835 chipset — the same SoC that’s found in the Pixel 2, Galaxy S8, and Moto Z2 Force. It’s not a slow processor by any stretch of the imagination (my Pixel 2 still works wonderfully), but it isn’t the fastest, and will surely disappoint customers who were looking forward to a Moto phone with the new Snapdragon 845.

The fingerprint sensor is mounted on the side, just like with Play edition, and the front of the device features the Motorola logo on the chin where fingerprint sensor or home button used to be. Really, the Moto Z3 and Moto Z3 Play are the same phones as far as appearances go.

The Motorola Moto Z3 is a smartphone with a 2018 design filled with 2017 specs.

For a full rundown of the specs, take a look at the official Moto Z3 specs table below:

Pricing, availability, and final thoughts

The best part? Motorola isn’t charging an arm and a leg for this phone.

It’ll be available exclusively on Verizon’s network in the U.S. on August 16, where it will go on sale for $480 full retail or $20 per month with 24 months of payments. That’s actually a fair price for everything you’re getting here — a speedy phone, a high-end design, and decent cameras.

However, it’s hard to be excited about the price when we don’t know how much the 5G Moto Mod will cost. If the new Mod is only a $50 add-on, that might be a great value. If Moto plans on charging over $200 for it, that brings the Z3 right up into Pixel 2 and Galaxy S9 territory — not a great look for a phone with older specs and Verizon exclusivity.

Next: Motorola Moto G6 and Moto G6 Play review

We’ll be sure to tell you even more in our full review, which is coming soon. For now, I really want to know your thoughts on this phone — does the promise of 5G have you interested in the Moto Z3, or are you passing on this one?

A series of solar flares disrupted hurricane relief efforts in 2017

Last year’s hurricane season was one for the record books. In late August, Hurricane Harvey dropped more than 40 inches of rain on eastern Texas, making it the wettest and one of the costliest tropical cyclones on record. In late September, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico, devastating the island and causing the worst electrical blackout in United States history. A few weeks earlier, Hurricane Irma became the strongest storm ever recorded in the Atlantic region. Satellite views depicted Irma as shrouding Florida from coast to coast.

As if these hurricanes weren’t bad enough, residents in the Caribbean were threatened by another storm nearly 93 million miles away. Just as Hurricane Irma battered the Caribbean in early September, a series of solar flares erupted from the sun and caused emergency radio communications to go offline for hours, according to a new study published in the journal Space Weather. In the paper, the researchers note that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) reported an eight-hour loss of high-frequency radio used by ham radio operators and other emergency bands.

“Space weather and Earth weather aligned to heighten an already tense situation in the Caribbean,” Rob Redmon, a space scientist with NOAA and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. “If I head on over to my amateur radio operator, and they have been transmitting messages for me, whether it be for moving equipment or finding people or just saying I’m okay to somebody else, suddenly I can’t do that on this day, and that would be pretty stressful.”

A few days later, on September 10, another large solar flare hit Earth and compromised radio communication for another three hours — around the same time that Caribbean islands like the Bahamas were recovering from and bracing for two consecutive storms.

Solar flares are strong eruptions of radiation, carrying electronics, ions, and atoms from the sun into space. Though flares occur often, they usually don’t impact our planet.

This isn’t the first time a solar flare may have meddled in affairs on Earth. According to a study published in Space Weather two years ago, a solar flare in 1967 nearly sparked World War III, jamming radars at the North American Aerospace Defense Command Post, and leaving U.S. Air Force officers to suspect Soviet interference.

Astrophysicists are looking into ways to shield the planet from solar flares, including using a massive magnet.

It’s unclear what indirect impact last year’s solar flares had on emergency and relief efforts, but the study may draw more attention to the real risks of these difficult-to-predict events.

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Moto Z3 hands-on review

Research Center:

Moto Z3

The Motorola Moto Z3 is not exactly a new phone. It’s almost identical to the recently-released Moto Z3 Play, except with a slightly better processor and an evolved dual-lens camera system. But there’s a much more consequential difference lurking beneath its skin: The Moto Z3 will be the “first upgradeable 5G phone” in the world.

That’s possible thanks to Motorola’s Moto Mod program, which lets you snap unique components to the back of the phone. So far we’ve seen more pedestrian mods like a 360-degree camera, or a tiny snap-on projector. The new 5G Moto Mod will up the stakes with exponentially faster data speeds. That means you can perform traditional tasks much faster — downloading a 4K movie, for example, in a minute and a half. Here’s how it all works.

5G Moto Mod

The 5G Moto Mod is a little thick, and it has a unique shape. Like all Moto Mods, it magnetically attaches to the back of the Moto Z3. Four millimeter-wave antennas implanted in the device ensure you consistently get a 5G signal without interference.

Let’s get things straight — you’re not going to access 5G as soon as you slap the mod on. You need to be in somewhere with 5G Verizon service, which means only three cities right now: Sacramento, Los Angeles, and Houston. It will take a long time before 5G is as ubiquitous as 4G LTE.

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

The Moto Z3 is a Verizon-exclusive device, and so is the 5G Moto Mod. So if you want to access these faster data speeds, you’ll need to be on Verizon. Motorola told Digital Trends it will decide which previous Moto Z devices will be able to support the 5G Moto Mod at a later date (through a software update) — but you’ll need to be on the Verizon network no matter what.

The 5G Mod has its own SIM card inside it, and two modems: Qualcomm’s X24 for 4G, and Qualcomm’s X50 for 5G. In a 5G-supported area, it will be capable of hitting 5Gbps speeds. In 4G areas, the X24 modem should still be able to hit speeds up to 2Gbps speeds — a marked improvement of what you would get from the X16 modem built into the phone.

Downloading a 4K movie, for example, will take less than a minute.

What will these dramatically faster data speeds enable? Well, it will drastically change the way we use our smartphones. Think about this: It will currently take around a minute and 20 seconds to download 90 songs from Spotify on an iPhone X — that’s with peak download speeds. With the 5G Moto Mod on the Moto Z3, Motorola said you will be able to do the same thing in 10 seconds. Downloading 200 pictures from Google Drive will take 30 seconds; downloading four episode of Game of Thrones will take a minute; downloading one 4K movie from Netflix will take around a minute and a half. Motorola showed us a demo of the Z3 hitting 3Gbps per second, but promised the final unit would achieve the full 5Gbps in areas with 5G coverage.

5G will affect everything from cars to the Internet of Things, but for our purposes here with the 5G Moto Mod, expect your smartphone experience to dramatically improve.

There’s a 2,000mAh battery inside the 5G Moto Mod, and the battery will deplete alongside the phone — so you’ll never end up with a dead Moto Mod first.

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

The real kicker here is that the 5G Moto Mod won’t be available until early 2019 from Verizon, and we don’t know what it will cost. Even then, while you will be able to access 2Gbps speeds, we’re not sure exactly when you’ll be able to truly access those 5Gbps 5G speeds.

So why didn’t Motorola just build this 5G technology into a new phone? It’s because the technology isn’t really there yet. Motorola said the requirements would severely constrain the design and display of the smartphone — it would look like a “low-tier device.” By putting it all into a Moto Mod first, people can still get a modern smartphone experience, and the benefits of 5G data speeds. The company said doing this also helps it fast-track development on a 5G smartphone.

Moto Z3 Compared To

Moto Z3 Play

LG G7 ThinQ

Moto E5 Plus

Nokia 7 Plus

Porsche Design Huawei Mate RS

Alcatel 3V

Motorola Moto G6

Sony Xperia XA2 Ultra

ZTE Blade Z Max

ZTE Max XL

Meizu M3 Max

ZTE ZMax Pro

Huawei Mate 8

ZTE Grand X Max+

LG G Flex

Why’s the phone and mod restricted to Verizon? Motorola said it believes Big Red is on track to lead in the 5G space, and there has already been a strong partnership between the two companies (such as with the Droid-branded smartphones). Motorola is exploring opportunities with other carriers, though it wouldn’t say much else.

The Moto Z3

With the Moto Z3 only costing $480, you may be wondering if it’s truly a “flagship phone” that can compete with the likes of the more expensive iPhone X and Galaxy S9. Motorola’s message is that you can still get an edge-to-edge design, an 800-series Snapdragon processor, a solid dual-lens camera, and great battery life for almost half the price of most of these high-end phones. The 5G Moto Mod is icing on the cake, offering speeds you won’t be able to access on any other phone (for now).

The Moto Z3 is a Verizon-exclusive device, and so is the 5G Moto Mod.

The Z3 may seem very similar to the Z3 Play announced a few months ago, but it has a different flash storage system that’s quicker, making it more conducive to 5G downloads. It also has an improved Snapdragon 835 processor (though most 2018 Android phones use the Snapdragon 845 processor), and the dual-lens camera system is different. Instead of the 12-megapixel and 5-megapixel depth-sensing lens system on the Z3 Play, the Moto Z3 has two 12-megapixel sensors on the black. There’s an exclusive black and white mode available as well.

The rest is more or less the same. There’s a 6-inch screen with a Super AMOLED display with a 2,160 x 1,080 pixel resolution, a 3,000mAh battery, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage with support for a MicroSD card slot. The front camera packs 8 megapixels, and the software is Android 8.1 Oreo. We recommend checking out our Moto Z3 Play review, since it’s very similar to the Moto Z3.

Julian Chokkattu/Digital Trends

We asked Motorola’s President, Sergio Buniac, whether the 5G mod will be the last Moto Mod. When the company announced Moto Mods three years ago, Motorola committed to maintaining the same modular design for three generations. His answer? “No.”

Buniac said Motorola has been able to change the Moto Z3’s design quite a bit while still adhering to Moto Mod design standards, and considering it’s putting one of its biggest technological advancements in a Moto Mod, it doesn’t see it dropping support for them soon.

Price and availability

The Moto Z3 is exclusive to Verizon and will cost $480. It will be available on August 16. The 5G Moto Mod will arrive early in 2019, and we don’t know pricing just yet.

Stay tuned for a full review of the Moto Z3 soon, and we’ll be adding more to this story as we learn about the 5G Moto Mod.