What happened at Samsung Unpacked 2016?
Wondering what all the fuss was about Samsung’s Unpacked 2016 event earlier today? Let our Senior Mobile Editor Chris Velazco explain everything you need to know about the new Galaxy Note 7 and its accompanying accessories. Those include an upgraded S Pen stylus, a new and improved Gear VR headset, and the US debut of the Gear 360 camera. Of course, the spectacle of the show may have surpassed the tech, so press play and get a taste of what it was like — all in just two and a half minutes.
The NFL and Snapchat make their partnership official
While Snapchat has been courting sports fans and major leagues for some time now, the National Football League will be the first to announce an official, multi-year deal with the social media platform. According to the league’s announcement, Snapchat Discover and NFL Media will produce official content and Live Stories for every single game of the season, including the Super Bowl.
During a trial run in 2015, over 70 million people watched Snapchat Discover content from NFL games and events — not bad compared to the 199 million TV viewers who tuned in to the NFL last season, according to Nielsen. As part of the new extended partnership, the NFL’s Live Stories will feature a mix of fan Snaps and insider content from the league.
Between game days and in the off-season, the league will still have a daily presence on Snapchat with more official NFL Media content around current news, trending topics and other events like the draft and the scouting combine. Finally, there will be custom Geofilters for all 32 teams and the league will be selling advertising opportunities within the Live Story and Discover content, because it wouldn’t be football without team pride and advertisements,
Everything you need to know about Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 event
Sure, there might not have been many surprises going into Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 launch event, but you can’t say the massive conglomerate can’t put on a good show. For about an hour, we saw execs take the stage, make lousy dad jokes, throw shade at their competitors, show off a few products and convinced hundreds of people to strap VR headsets to their faces more than once. It was a hell of a thing.
If you happened to miss the event, or just can’t be bothered to sit through an hour-long informercial, never fear: we trimmed the fat from Samsung’s presentation to leave you with about seven minutes of juicy news morsels (and part of Samsung’s head-scratchingly nutty closing ceremony). Oh, and a friendly reminder: we went hands-on with the Galaxy Note 7 and the updated Gear VR in case you’re itching for more context around today’s announcements. We won’t spoil the stories for you, but here’s the TL;DR in case you’re really pressed for time: both new bits of hardware are thoughtful improvements over their predecessors, though they’re perhaps not the fascinating leaps forward some were hoping for. Alright! We’ve said enough — do as you please.
Google’s speeding up mobile web search results for all sites
The time you spend waiting for mobile search results to load is about to drop drastically. Google announced on Tuesday that it is expanding the scope of its Accelerated Mobile Pages program to include non-publishing websites.
Google initially debuted AMP back in February. The program grew out of a collaboration between the company and various online publishing partners (Engadget’s parent company, AOL, included) intended to hasten their site’s load times. Sites that made their content AMP-compatible saw load times drop by 400 percent and use a tenth of the data as conventional websites — even if the page contained bandwidth-hungry video and images. What’s more, AMP-enabled pages are highlighted in the Top Stories carousel, putting them above the standard list of results.
To date, Google’s cached more than 150 million URLs from 650,000 domains for the AMP project. The original AMP rollout was so well-received, in fact, that a number of non-publishing sites like Fandango, Disney, Food Network and eBay began integrating the technology. And soon, though Google remains mum on the exact date, those sites (and any other that use AMP) will begin seeing faster load times. They will not, however, show up any higher in the result rankings — there will reportedly be no change in Google’s search algorithm.
Source: ReCorde
Snapchat is developing scannable ads
Snapchat users could soon be scanning more than each other’s snapcodes. The company is reportedly working on scannable ads that would unlock sponsored content within the app. Like QR codes before them, these machine-readable advertisements can be integrated into stuff like product packaging or movie posters. Upon being scanned, the ads will grant users access to item discounts, sponsored content, and other goodies, while presumably providing Snapchat and its partners valuable marketing data about its users’ interests. According to The Information’s pair of unnamed sources, these ads should start rolling out sometime this fall.
Source: The Information
Windows 10’s Anniversary Update arrives
After a few months of hype, the Windows 10 Anniversary Update is here… well, mostly. Microsoft has started rolling out the upgrade to desktop users, who’ll automatically receive it stages with “newer machines” getting it first. You can update manually if you just can’t stand sitting behind the curve. However long you wait, your PC will get more pervasive Cortana voice commands (such as controlling some apps), deeper pen input (including a dedicated pen interface) and a spruced-up Edge browser with extensions.
If you’re hoping to update your Windows 10 phone… well, you’ll have to be patient. The Redmond crew will only say that the Anniversary Update hits smartphones in the “coming weeks.” Not that there’s as much of a rush in the first place. While the Windows 10 Mobile release gets some desktop features (such as cross-platform Cortana syncing) as well as interface tweaks (like more active Live Tiles and swipe-based browser navigation), it’s not the star of the show this time around.
Source: Windows Experience Blog
Latest Firefox update will help stop your browser from crashing
If Microsoft’s anniversary update and Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 launch weren’t already enough excitement for you in one day, then hold on tight. Mozilla’s rolling out an update that brings a multi-process version of Firefox to some users. Trust us, it is exciting.
The most potentially useful update here is Firefox’s new ability to split its workload into multiple processes. By splitting up Web content and Firefox’s own UI processes, the toolbars and buttons should never become unresponsive.
Mozilla’s also tweaked the Awesome Bar to offer up more suggestions and to make it easier to read, redesigned the Discovery Pane and improved security for downloads. This last feature means that new classes of downloads are now protected — potentially unwanted software and uncommon downloads.
Meanwhile, on mobile, Firefox for Android is getting a couple of worthwhile tweaks, like a merging of Reading Lists into Bookmarks, and moving Synced Tabs to the History Panel. If you’re watching a video while you receive a call, it’ll now pause automatically too.
All in all, both the Android and Desktop updates are worth checking out, but don’t get too excited about that multi-process just yet — Mozilla’s rolling it out in a very cautious way that starts with around 1 percent of users and will shortly ramp up to around half, providing there are no major problems.
Source: Mozilla
The best tech for students studying abroad
There’s nothing quite as exciting or daunting as packing up your stuff and heading overseas for a semester. You’ll have an opportunity to immerse yourself in a new culture, a foreign language and a whole ocean of unique tech challenges. But don’t worry, we’re here to help you navigate those obstacles.
In our guide you’ll find top notch cameras to capture all those transformational memories, luggage that is basically impossible to lose, a backpack that hides a spare battery for charging your phone and, of course, some noise-cancelling headphones for those long flights filled with screaming children. But you’ll also need a lightweight laptop with solid battery life (like the HP Spectre 13.3) and a phone with a couple of SIM slots for doing a little border hopping. Check out the gallery below for all our recommendations for students studying abroad. And make sure to check out our full Back-to-School Guide right here.
Source: Engadget’s Back-to-School Guide
HTC’s 10 and Vive boost sales, but the future still looks grim
HTC’s Vive VR headset and HTC 10 smartphone sold briskly in Q2 2016, boosting revenue 27 percent over last quarter to 18.9 billion Taiwanese dollars ($598 million). The bad news is that compared to the same period last year, sales are down 42.7 percent — not quite as bad as the 64 percent tumble last quarter, but still a precipitous drop. The company had an operating loss of 4.2 billion Taiwanese dollars ($133 million), making five straight quarters of futility.
HTC realized it had a hit on its hands with the Vive, and created a wholly-owned subsidiary called the HTC Vive Tech Corporation to manage it. It also created a $100 million fund to expand the ecosystem. Sales from the division still count toward overall company earnings, but HTC hasn’t said how many of the $800 headsets it has moved so far. It did get a piece of good news when Oculus removed DRM constraints from games, meaning they’ll work with the Vive and not just the Rift headset.
The well-received HTC 10 apparently sold well and the company is counting on that to continue. CFO Chialin Chang unofficially predicted a return to profitability by next quarter, but the company will need a Hail Mary to meet that goal.
Source: HTC
Samsung Cloud safeguards your phone’s data
The star of Samsung’s Unpacked show might be the Galaxy Note 7, but one of its biggest surprises is something you can’t really touch: its long, long rumored cloud storage service. The tech giant is launching Samsung Cloud, an online storage option that’s focused on safeguarding your phone’s data. Much like iCloud, you can use it for both backing up and restoring your phone’s data — helpful when you’re replacing a phone and don’t want to spend hours recreating your settings.
Unlike iCloud, though, Samsung is being fairly liberal with space: at least with a Galaxy Note 7, you’ll get 15GB of storage for free (par for the course among cloud rivals like Dropbox and Google Drive). We don’t have details of any paid options at this point, but it won’t be surprising if Samsung offers paid tiers that give you more breathing room.
Source: Samsung
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