Launched in 2016, Apple's iPhone SE served as the smaller, more pocketable member of the iPhone family. It had a 4-inch display and looked similar to 2013's iPhone 5S. Despite being the more "midrange" iPhone at the time and lacking powerful hardware, the SE ranked highest in smartphone customer satisfaction. Two years later, the phone is overdue for an update. And because Apple has kept mum about a possible sequel, the […]
Microsoft today released two new Windows 10 previews for PCs. Both builds include support for the High Efficiency Image File (HEIF) format, but they diverge from there. It’s rare for the Windows Insider program to get two new builds on the same day, though the last time this happened was only a month ago. That’s because Microsoft is developing two updates of Windows 10 at once. The first build is […]
The Samsung Galaxy Note 8 looks to be starting to receive the Android 8.0 Oreo update, at least in France, recent reports indicate. It’s currently not clear, though, when the update will roll out to other territories including the United States. The major Android OS upgrade is expected to arrive for Samsung‘s flagship device this month after it was previously reported that the Galaxy Note 8 was on track to receive the update […]
Microsoft has officially confirmed its plans for E3 2018. Rather than have its usual presence inside the Los Angeles Convention Center, where E3 takes place, Microsoft is moving the bulk of its efforts across the street to the nearby Microsoft Theater in LA Live. The company says this will make for the company's "biggest E3 showing ever." First up at the Microsoft Theater will be Microsoft's E3 press conference, which […]
Spotify announced today the launch of a new tool called Line-In that will allow its community members to offer input about the music data it has on file, like genre, mood, explicitness and more. The goal is to leverage the wisdom of the crowds in correcting and expanding Spotify’s data over time, which could give it a competitive advantage against rival services like Apple or Pandora, for example. Notes Spotify in its FAQ, by […]
Apple announced today that it signed an agreement to acquire the digital magazine service Texture, which serves articles from more than 200 magazines digitally on iOS, Windows, Amazon, and Android devices for a flat monthly fee. Apple has acquired the entire company, including staff, and has assured users that the Android version of the app will still be supported. The price of the acquisition was not disclosed. Texture was founded in 2010 […]
About a year ago last march, a robot called the Sub1 solved a Rubik’s Cube in 0.637-seconds, earning it the Guinness World Record for being the fastest cube-solving bot. That honor now appears to be in jeopardy, however, as a pair of engineers have demonstrated a new robot that can solve a Rubik’s Cube in almost half that time: a mere 0.38 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt00QzKuNVY According to the blog that Ben Katz and […]
The Light Phone is a cellphone that was released last year with an interesting premise: strip away all the extraneous, distracting pieces of modern smartphones — like internet, texting, email, and photography — to leave the distilled essence of a phone. It could make calls and store nine phone numbers, but that was about it. It was an interesting idea, promising a life where you could remove the distractions of a […]
It turns out, one of Facebook’s biggest News Feed experiments last year only made the service worse. Last October, the Guardian reported that Facebook was testing significant changes to its News Feed. For users in six countries, Facebook moved nearly all non-promoted posts from pages and publishers out of the main News Feed into a secondary feed, called the Explore Feed. Predictably, people didn’t want to have to bounce between two feeds, […]
