theverge--2020-09-10--A closer look at Nvidia’s new RTX 3080

A closer look at Nvidia’s new RTX 3080

Nvidia is promising big things with the GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card .
“ Twice the performance ” of the RTX 2080 is perhaps the biggest claim of them all , with pledges of a PC gaming breakthrough .
While we ’ re still putting the RTX 3080 through its paces , here ’ s a closer look at what the actual hardware looks like .
Nvidia has switched to a new pennant-shaped board for the RTX 3080 and combined this PCB with a new cooling shroud .
That means the RTX 3080 forms a figure of eight , with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ using a push-pull system here , with the left-hand fan acting more like a traditional blower cooler by exhausting air out of the PCIe slot .
The right-hand fan pulls air into the card , which then exhausts on the opposite side close to your CPU cooler and rear case fan .
Nvidia claims this is a more optimal airflow model , reducing GPU temperatures on the RTX 3080 by around 20C , but there is concern it could affect CPU temperatures by passing air directly over the CPU .
Either way , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more efficient cooling .
Another big change with the RTX 3080 hardware itself is a new 12-pin connector .
It ’ s smaller than using two traditional eight-pin connectors , but it does mean you have to use a rather awkward adapter that splits and hangs out the side of the card .
Thankfully , Corsair has committed to creating a dedicated 12-pin connector for these cards , and hopefully other PSU manufacturers will also create their own versions .
These new 12-pin connectors will only be found on Nvidia ’ s own @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Compared to the RTX 2080 , the RTX 3080 isn ’ t that much bigger .
It ’ s slightly longer at 285mm versus 267mm , but it ’ s still a dual-slot design and will fit into the majority of cases .
The same can ’ t be said about the size of the RTX 3090 , which promises to be a monster of a card in more ways than one .
Nvidia ’ s RTX 3080 will ship with 10GB of GDDR6X memory , and Nvidia is using 8,704 CUDA cores @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This all adds up to 29.7 teraflops of performance .
We ’ ll be putting this performance to the test against the RTX 2080 for both 4K and 1440p gaming in the coming days to see where Nvidia ’ s claims land .
Check back soon for the full GeForce RTX 3080 review .
Nvidia ’ s GeForce RTX 3080 is launching on September 17th , priced at $ 699 .

Nvidia is promising big things with the GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card. “Twice the performance” of the RTX 2080 is perhaps the biggest claim of them all, with pledges of a PC gaming breakthrough. While we’re still putting the RTX 3080 through its paces, here’s a closer look at what the actual hardware looks like.
Nvidia has switched to a new pennant-shaped board for the RTX 3080 and combined this PCB with a new cooling shroud. That means the RTX 3080 forms a figure of eight, with fans flanking either side. Nvidia is using a push-pull system here, with the left-hand fan acting more like a traditional blower cooler by exhausting air out of the PCIe slot. The right-hand fan pulls air into the card, which then exhausts on the opposite side close to your CPU cooler and rear case fan.
RTX 3080’s new pennant-shaped design.
The RTX 3080 fans.
Nvidia claims this is a more optimal airflow model, reducing GPU temperatures on the RTX 3080 by around 20C, but there is concern it could affect CPU temperatures by passing air directly over the CPU. Either way, this new card should deliver quieter and more efficient cooling.
Another big change with the RTX 3080 hardware itself is a new 12-pin connector. It’s smaller than using two traditional eight-pin connectors, but it does mean you have to use a rather awkward adapter that splits and hangs out the side of the card. Thankfully, Corsair has committed to creating a dedicated 12-pin connector for these cards, and hopefully other PSU manufacturers will also create their own versions. These new 12-pin connectors will only be found on Nvidia’s own RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 cards.
Nvidia’s new 12-pin connector.
RTX 3080 vs. RTX 2080.
Compared to the RTX 2080, the RTX 3080 isn’t that much bigger. It’s slightly longer at 285mm versus 267mm, but it’s still a dual-slot design and will fit into the majority of cases. The same can’t be said about the size of the RTX 3090, which promises to be a monster of a card in more ways than one. Nvidia’s RTX 3080 will ship with 10GB of GDDR6X memory, and Nvidia is using 8,704 CUDA cores combined with a 1.71GHz boost clock. This all adds up to 29.7 teraflops of performance.


theverge--2020-09-10--Microsoft Surface Duo review: double troubles

Microsoft ’ s Surface Duo aspires to be something different from any other gadget you ’ ve used .
It could be mistaken for a phone or a small tablet , but it ’ s both less and more than those things .
When it ’ s closed , there are no screens or cameras .
In shape and appearance , it ’ s like a small book , a digital version of the Field Notes notebook I carry around in my back pocket .
When open , you get two screens side by side or one screen with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ notebook , it feels somehow more natural to hold than a phone ’ s vertical slab shape .
You hold it in your hand with the two sides angled toward you like a book .
In truth , there ’ s nothing the Surface Duo can do that you can ’ t do on your current smartphone or tablet .
Your smartphone surely takes better photos , and your tablet doesn ’ t have a big gap in the middle of it .
But the difference with the Surface Duo is that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I found myself tackling tasks that would have frustrated me on those other devices .
Microsoft is charging a starting price of $ 1,399 for the Surface Duo .
Given its capabilities relative to other phones , it is absolutely not worth that price .
And even after a couple of weeks , I ’ m not entirely convinced that the Surface Duo actually makes me more productive than any standard single-screen phone .
But even though it doesn ’ t always get it right , sometimes there ’ s just a little @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Duo .
I often feel more productive with the Duo .
What is that feeling worth ?
The Surface Duo is a lovely , well-designed object .
Every millimeter of it has clearly been crafted with intention — though sometimes that intention is so focused that it can lead to annoying compromises .
The most important thing to know about the Duo ’ s hardware is its thickness : 4.8mm when open and 9.9mm when closed .
Microsoft ’ s dedication to thinness is what makes the Duo a pocketable , ergonomic device @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for a device with two screens and two batteries , at 250 grams .
The thinness and lightness of the Surface Duo are essential to its appeal , as is the fact that Microsoft kept the outside free of screens or camera bumps .
Those choices make the thing thin and comfortable to hold , but they also send a signal that this is a different kind of device .
The feel of opening this device like a book — and shutting it like one — is fundamentally different than unlocking a smartphone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mindset in both cases .
The intentionality of the design encourages you to be intentional with your use of the device and to be intentional in not using it .
The hinge is classic Surface , which is to say it ’ s meticulously designed to feel great .
It rotates a full 360 degrees so you can swing one of the screens around the back and use it like a traditional phone .
Or you can angle one side up , and it ’ ll hold its place while you ’ re @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s firm without being stiff , and all of those tight tolerances minimize the size of the gap between the screens .
It ’ s glass on the front and back — both fronts and both backs , I guess I should say .
They ’ re sandwiched around a metal rail .
The rail houses the USB-C port but no headphone jack .
For once , the argument that the phone is too thin to fit a headphone jack makes sense .
It ’ s also where you ’ ll find the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fingerprint sensor ( which should be integrated into the power button , if you ask me , but it is not ) .
Not everything is perfect .
If I look very closely , I can see a tiny lack of symmetry at the hinge and maybe even the slightest bowing out along the top and bottom .
It also ships with plastic bumper rails , which helps with the fairly sharp corners on the edges and also with grip .
There ’ s also a very slight color variation between the two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ white point on the left-hand side seems a little redder .
It ’ s not something I noticed until reading a Kindle book with the lights turned low .
But the white point isn ’ t a major complaint about the hardware .
I ’ ll save that for the bezels above and below the dual 5.6-inch OLED screens .
They ’ re big , and I think they ’ re one of those annoying compromises that were necessary to keep the Duo so thin .
As with most bezels , notches , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ used to them .
Otherwise , they ’ re good screens .
They ’ re readable in bright light , pixel-dense , and have good viewing angles .
If you have a Surface Pen , it will work on this screen , too .
They don ’ t have the high refresh rates that are increasingly standard on $ 1,000-plus phones , however .
Those screens are also quite a bit wider than any recent smartphone .
Each is designed with a 4:3 aspect ratio , which translates to a device that you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — even when folded in half .
Like the rest of the Duo ’ s design , I think that width is meant to subtly influence how you think about the device .
Your apps look and feel just a tiny bit more like windows on your desktop instead of lists you end up doomscrolling .
Many other things have been sacrificed at the altar of thinness : NFC , wireless charging , a bigger battery , expandable storage , 5G , and perhaps more modern specs like a faster processor and more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ single speaker , and it ’ s no great shakes .
But all of those things you ’ d expect on a phone of this price are theoretically expendable because the Surface Duo is theoretically not a phone but something else entirely .
Delivering on that promise falls to the software , which will make or break the whole thing .
Microsoft may have bitten off more than it can chew with the software on the Surface Duo .
The original version it sent out to reviewers was riddled with show-stopping bugs and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ week ago , the company pushed out a software update — the same one that will land on retail devices today — that solved an appreciable percentage of those bugs .
But some bugs persist .
There are hassles with the camera app , with lag and missed inputs , and other oddities like the keyboard jumping into view for no earthly reason .
If for no other reason than software stability , it ’ s worth waiting to see what more people say about their Surface Duo experience over time before considering @ @ @ @ @ @ @ those problems is not the complaint — long-running and richly deserved — that Android tablet apps aren ’ t good .
Because there aren ’ t many Android tablets , many Android developers rationally choose not to make tablet-optimized versions of their apps , which means there ’ s no incentive to make Android tablets , and so it goes .
Running two apps on two screens is often easier than trying to split-screen an Android tablet The app availability problem can turn into a vicious spiral , a problem Microsoft knows all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ one of the cleverest pieces of software design on the Surface Duo is simply what Microsoft chose not to do : make a tablet .
Instead , the Duo is exactly what its name suggests : two phone-sized screens meant primarily for running apps side by side .
Just on its own , the ability to easily launch side-by-side apps is great .
Without having to learn some whole other interface , you can simply tap on the icon you want on each screen and use them next to each other .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re interested in for your phone , but perhaps that ’ s because it ’ s been such a pain with a single screen .
One of the things that helps you to be productive on your laptop is windows — the interface with boxes with your apps , I mean , not the OS .
Having windows makes it easier to cross-reference stuff and less likely you ’ ll lose your state when you do another task .
And you can move stuff across from one window to another without having to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But every attempt to replicate that on phones thus far has been kind of crappy .
On the Duo , it ’ s better simply because it ’ s easy to open up an app on each screen .
Microsoft has tried to tout drag and drop between apps , but it ’ s hard to get that gesture right , and it only works in a handful of apps — so thankfully , tried-and-true copy and paste works just fine .
The hinge allows you to contort the Duo ’ s screens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There ’ s a tent mode for watching movies , a single screen mode with one of the screens flipped around , a mode with a big keyboard , and a full-screen mode .
In full screen , most apps are oblivious to the existence of the gap between screens , and so content either looks goofily split or even gets cut off in that negative space between OLEDs .
The Kindle app is a nice example of turning the gap into an advantage : you get a page on each side and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s a little book .
But outside of that , the only apps that handle that gap well are ( unsurprisingly ) Microsoft ’ s own .
Outlook , in particular , is great : you get your email list on the left side and emails on the right .
Hit forward , and the original email scoots over to the left and the entire right screen becomes the compose window for your new email .
This means you don ’ t have to constantly scroll down and up again as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ One posture I like : the big keyboard .
When you rotate the Duo 90 degrees when there ’ s an active cursor , the bottom screen automatically turns into a keyboard while the main screen expands to the full view .
It lets you see what you ’ re typing on a larger canvas and gives you a really big keyboard to boot .
But getting apps into their proper place for each of these postures isn ’ t easy because Android ’ s natural state is a single phone screen .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the bugs really start cropping up .
It ’ s a shame , too , because those bugs are a result of Microsoft making the right choices when it comes to customizing Android for a true multitasking experience .
I don ’ t think this will be obvious to the casual observer , but after spending a decade reviewing dozens of different flavors of Android , I can say this definitively : Microsoft chose one of the hardest possible roads it could in customizing Android to fit its needs , but it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , LG , and others who have dabbled in split-screen and folding screen versions of Android , Microsoft has tried to make a multitasking system that doesn ’ t seem like it ’ s tacked on top of Android ’ s more traditional interface .
Although a lot of manufacturers are sticking with buttons , modern versions of Android work by swiping up from the bottom to get to the core parts of the OS like multitasking views , the home screen , and your apps .
So Microsoft has taken that system @ @ @ @ @ @ @ swipe up to get an app window and then drag it around on the two screens to put it in one of those modes .
It ’ s a noble goal , but remembering what all the swipes do depending on your context is a huge hurdle .
Sometimes a swipe brings up multitasking , sometimes it goes home , sometimes it launches the app drawer , sometimes it flings an app to the other screen if you angle it just right ( or wrong ) .
Oh , and if you turn @ @ @ @ @ @ @ forget that up is now over on the side .
It ’ s too much , but it ’ s a learnable system , and I eventually got proficient in it and even found myself entering that “ flow ” state that Surface chief Panos Panay likes to talk about .
But just as often , I ’ d enter a rage state as the Duo did something I didn ’ t expect or lagged out when I was trying to position a window .
The real shame of all of this is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of every other Android phone maker not named Google : a comprehensive , unified , and coherent ecosystem of apps and services .
If you ’ re in Microsoft ’ s ecosystem , you will have Outlook , Office , compatibility with Your Phone on Windows 10 , OneNote , and OneDrive , all working together in harmony .
This is all miles better than whatever Samsung or LG equivalent you ’ ll find on their phones .
Plus , Microsoft doesn ’ t force you to use any of it if you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ search is the default instead of Bing , Gmail ’ s sitting right there , and so on .
Speaking of Google , I am serious when I lay some of these issues at the feet of Android itself .
Google has been touting support for foldables for a couple of years now , but it ’ s been failing to make Android tablets successful for much longer .
The result of that technical debt is that Android is woefully unprepared for devices like the Surface Duo and Samsung ’ s Galaxy Z @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the day , it ’ s not Google ’ s logo on the back of the Surface Duo .
It ’ s Microsoft ’ s .
Through it all , there were still moments of feeling like I could get more done on the Duo than I could on other phones .
And as time went on , those moments turned into longer stretches .
The Surface Duo ’ s camera is trash .
I should talk to you about its redeeming qualities , like the fact that it has a restrained @ @ @ @ @ @ @ after using Samsung ’ s overly vivid cameras or the fact that you can dual-screen the camera app to see a roll of your selfies on one side while you take pictures with the other .
But I can ’ t .
Camera quality was sacrificed at the altar of thinness It ’ s likely that the camera is yet another casualty of Microsoft ’ s abiding dedication to thinness for the Surface Duo .
Perhaps the 11-megapixel sensor is simply the best that could fit into that thin frame .
But if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ anything , it ’ s that good software can work wonders with mediocre hardware .
Instead , the only wonder I experienced is wondering how to get the camera to work in the first place .
Since it ’ s placed on the inside above one of the screens , taking selfies is easy .
Launch the camera , take a photo , smile at the results .
Heck , Microsoft even has a passable portrait mode in good lighting conditions — well , passable by 2018 standards , anyway .
But if @ @ @ @ @ @ @ somebody else , you have to rotate the other screen so it becomes a viewfinder .
But when you try to do that , there ’ s a 50/50 chance the viewfinder will be on the wrong side .
And getting it to the side is a literal exercise in frustration .
You have to keep twisting and tapping the Duo until it figures it out .
After all that work , the results are muddy , noisy , and in low light , they ’ re a mess .
Plus , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ button .
I would berate this camera on a $ 300 device .
The Surface Duo costs $ 1,400 .
Microsoft should have just called this a webcam .
It would have set expectations appropriately .
Plus , it ’ s a great webcam !
You can position the Duo ’ s screen right where you want it and take a call without having to hold the phone .
And if you ’ re sneaky , you can play a game of Holedown on the other screen during your Zoom call .
Not @ @ @ @ @ @ @ did that . )
Much will likely be made of the fact that the Surface Duo has outdated specs .
It has last year ’ s Snapdragon 855 processor and no 5G .
I don ’ t care about any of those things — though , in a couple of years , the lack of 5G may be a minor annoyance .
But there ’ s no denying that the $ 1,400 price of the Surface Duo certainly isn ’ t a result of high component costs .
In fact , all of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 855 has yielded some benefits .
Microsoft says it was able to heavily optimize its multitasking system in collaboration with Qualcomm , using the 855 as a stable target .
I ’ ll take their word for it that it would have been buggier without that effort .
A more tangible benefit of that optimization time is battery life : it ’ s pretty good !
That ’ s absolutely not what I expected when I learned that the two batteries inside the Surface Duo add up to a mere 3,577mAh .
That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the number of pixels it ’ s being asked to light up , and it ’ s notably less than what many single-screen Android phones have .
Yet , I ’ m consistently making it to the end of the day on a single charge , and standby time is excellent .
If I have one complaint about the specs it ’ s that the Duo only has 6GB of RAM That ’ s plenty for your average Android phone , but it ’ s not enough to keep apps from closing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the background .
It ’ s also not quite enough to reliably run two apps at once without one of them getting a hiccup — and the whole point of the Surface Duo is to run two apps at once .
It ’ s another instance of the Surface Duo not being a great value — 8 , 10 , and even 12 gigs is the norm for Android devices that cost over a thousand dollars , much less $ 1,400 .
The Pixel 4A has the same amount of RAM as the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The Surface Duo is trying to be a new kind of device — not a phone , not a tablet , but something in between .
That project sounds vaguely familiar , actually .
When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad , he set up the stakes for that device : It ’ s unlikely that Microsoft has lit upon an iPad-sized market with the Duo .
But despite the bugs , I do think it has made a case for itself as a new kind of device — or at the very @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to keep a spot in the emerging class of devices that try to fit a larger screen in your pocket by folding it in half in some way .
But a better comparison for the Duo isn ’ t the iPad ; it ’ s the original Surface tablet .
When it was first announced , it wasn ’ t really ready .
It had a bunch of very good ideas , but the execution was bad , and a lot of people just didn ’ t get what Microsoft was going for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Microsoft finally came through with the Surface Pro 3 , which actually achieved what the first Surface was trying to do .
Microsoft has the right ideas , but the Surface Duo is not really ready This Surface Duo ?
It ’ s not really ready .
It has a bunch of good ideas , but the execution is bad in places , and a lot of people aren ’ t going to get what Microsoft is going for .
There are more than enough problems here to keep me from recommending it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cost fourteen hundred bucks we could be having a different conversation .
But it does .
And if you want to spend that much on a work phone , the Note 20 Ultra does split-screen , comes with a stylus , has a good camera , and runs all of those Microsoft apps just fine .
But like that first Surface , there are more than a few glimmers of vision and potential in the Surface Duo .
Microsoft has the clearest , strongest vision for a new direction in mobile computing that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but picking a direction and getting to the destination are still two different things .
Microsoft has gotten knocked out of the pocketable device games at least four times before — from WinCE to PocketPC to Windows Mobile to Windows Phone , this company is intimately familiar with failure .
But in the Duo , I can see Microsoft learning from all those mistakes , and I ’ m glad to see the company back in the fight again .
I hope that this first Surface Duo isn ’ t its last round @

Microsoft’s Surface Duo aspires to be something different from any other gadget you’ve used. It could be mistaken for a phone or a small tablet, but it’s both less and more than those things.
When it’s closed, there are no screens or cameras. In shape and appearance, it’s like a small book, a digital version of the Field Notes notebook I carry around in my back pocket. When open, you get two screens side by side or one screen with the other folded back. And like a notebook, it feels somehow more natural to hold than a phone’s vertical slab shape. You hold it in your hand with the two sides angled toward you like a book.
In truth, there’s nothing the Surface Duo can do that you can’t do on your current smartphone or tablet. Your smartphone surely takes better photos, and your tablet doesn’t have a big gap in the middle of it. But the difference with the Surface Duo is that the way you do things is unique. I found myself tackling tasks that would have frustrated me on those other devices.
Microsoft is charging a starting price of $1,399 for the Surface Duo. Given its capabilities relative to other phones, it is absolutely not worth that price. And even after a couple of weeks, I’m not entirely convinced that the Surface Duo actually makes me more productive than any standard single-screen phone. But even though it doesn’t always get it right, sometimes there’s just a little less mental friction to multitasking on the Duo. I often feel more productive with the Duo.
What is that feeling worth?
The Microsoft Surface Duo has no screens or cameras on the outside when closed.
Surface Duo hardware
The Surface Duo is a lovely, well-designed object. Every millimeter of it has clearly been crafted with intention — though sometimes that intention is so focused that it can lead to annoying compromises.
The most important thing to know about the Duo’s hardware is its thickness: 4.8mm when open and 9.9mm when closed. Microsoft’s dedication to thinness is what makes the Duo a pocketable, ergonomic device. It’s also relatively light for a device with two screens and two batteries, at 250 grams.
The thinness and lightness of the Surface Duo are essential to its appeal, as is the fact that Microsoft kept the outside free of screens or camera bumps. Those choices make the thing thin and comfortable to hold, but they also send a signal that this is a different kind of device.
The feel of opening this device like a book — and shutting it like one — is fundamentally different than unlocking a smartphone. It puts you in a different mindset in both cases. The intentionality of the design encourages you to be intentional with your use of the device and to be intentional in not using it.
The Duo has been meticulously designed to feel great
The Duo is comfortable to hold.
The hinge is very well-engineered.
The gap between the screens is small but unavoidable in this design.
The hinge is classic Surface, which is to say it’s meticulously designed to feel great. It rotates a full 360 degrees so you can swing one of the screens around the back and use it like a traditional phone. Or you can angle one side up, and it’ll hold its place while you’re making a video call. It’s firm without being stiff, and all of those tight tolerances minimize the size of the gap between the screens.
It’s glass on the front and back — both fronts and both backs, I guess I should say. They’re sandwiched around a metal rail. The rail houses the USB-C port but no headphone jack. For once, the argument that the phone is too thin to fit a headphone jack makes sense. It’s also where you’ll find the volume buttons, power button, and fingerprint sensor (which should be integrated into the power button, if you ask me, but it is not).
Not everything is perfect. If I look very closely, I can see a tiny lack of symmetry at the hinge and maybe even the slightest bowing out along the top and bottom. It also ships with plastic bumper rails, which helps with the fairly sharp corners on the edges and also with grip. There’s also a very slight color variation between the two displays on my review unit — the white point on the left-hand side seems a little redder. It’s not something I noticed until reading a Kindle book with the lights turned low.
But the white point isn’t a major complaint about the hardware. I’ll save that for the bezels above and below the dual 5.6-inch OLED screens. They’re big, and I think they’re one of those annoying compromises that were necessary to keep the Duo so thin. As with most bezels, notches, and other screen borders, you get used to them.
Otherwise, they’re good screens. They’re readable in bright light, pixel-dense, and have good viewing angles. If you have a Surface Pen, it will work on this screen, too. They don’t have the high refresh rates that are increasingly standard on $1,000-plus phones, however.
The hinge feels solid throughout its full 360-degree range of motion. The power button and fingerprint sensor are separate, for whatever reason. When closed, the Surface Duo is less than 10mm thick.
Those screens are also quite a bit wider than any recent smartphone. Each is designed with a 4:3 aspect ratio, which translates to a device that you can’t use with one hand — even when folded in half. Like the rest of the Duo’s design, I think that width is meant to subtly influence how you think about the device. Your apps look and feel just a tiny bit more like windows on your desktop instead of lists you end up doomscrolling.
Many other things have been sacrificed at the altar of thinness: NFC, wireless charging, a bigger battery, expandable storage, 5G, and perhaps more modern specs like a faster processor and more RAM. There’s only a single speaker, and it’s no great shakes. But all of those things you’d expect on a phone of this price are theoretically expendable because the Surface Duo is theoretically not a phone but something else entirely.
Delivering on that promise falls to the software, which will make or break the whole thing.
Microsoft has heavily customized Android.
Microsoft’s Android
Microsoft may have bitten off more than it can chew with the software on the Surface Duo. The original version it sent out to reviewers was riddled with show-stopping bugs and crashes. A little less than a week ago, the company pushed out a software update — the same one that will land on retail devices today — that solved an appreciable percentage of those bugs.
But some bugs persist. There are hassles with the camera app, with lag and missed inputs, and other oddities like the keyboard jumping into view for no earthly reason. If for no other reason than software stability, it’s worth waiting to see what more people say about their Surface Duo experience over time before considering buying one.
Surprisingly, one of those problems is not the complaint — long-running and richly deserved — that Android tablet apps aren’t good. Because there aren’t many Android tablets, many Android developers rationally choose not to make tablet-optimized versions of their apps, which means there’s no incentive to make Android tablets, and so it goes.
Running two apps on two screens is often easier than trying to split-screen an Android tablet
The app availability problem can turn into a vicious spiral, a problem Microsoft knows all too well from Windows Phone. So one of the cleverest pieces of software design on the Surface Duo is simply what Microsoft chose not to do: make a tablet. Instead, the Duo is exactly what its name suggests: two phone-sized screens meant primarily for running apps side by side.
Just on its own, the ability to easily launch side-by-side apps is great. Without having to learn some whole other interface, you can simply tap on the icon you want on each screen and use them next to each other. That may not seem like something you’re interested in for your phone, but perhaps that’s because it’s been such a pain with a single screen.
One of the things that helps you to be productive on your laptop is windows — the interface with boxes with your apps, I mean, not the OS. Having windows makes it easier to cross-reference stuff and less likely you’ll lose your state when you do another task. And you can move stuff across from one window to another without having to muck about with other interface elements.
But every attempt to replicate that on phones thus far has been kind of crappy. On the Duo, it’s better simply because it’s easy to open up an app on each screen. Microsoft has tried to tout drag and drop between apps, but it’s hard to get that gesture right, and it only works in a handful of apps — so thankfully, tried-and-true copy and paste works just fine.
Unsurprisingly, the apps that do best navigating the gap are Microsoft’s
Outlook provides a two-screen view.
When forwarding an email in full-screen view, the original email slides over to give you more room to compose.
The hinge allows you to contort the Duo’s screens into what Microsoft calls “postures.” There’s a tent mode for watching movies, a single screen mode with one of the screens flipped around, a mode with a big keyboard, and a full-screen mode. In full screen, most apps are oblivious to the existence of the gap between screens, and so content either looks goofily split or even gets cut off in that negative space between OLEDs.
The Kindle app is a nice example of turning the gap into an advantage: you get a page on each side and the ability to hold the Duo like it’s a little book. But outside of that, the only apps that handle that gap well are (unsurprisingly) Microsoft’s own. Outlook, in particular, is great: you get your email list on the left side and emails on the right. Hit forward, and the original email scoots over to the left and the entire right screen becomes the compose window for your new email. This means you don’t have to constantly scroll down and up again as you comment point-by-point to an email.
One posture I like: the big keyboard. When you rotate the Duo 90 degrees when there’s an active cursor, the bottom screen automatically turns into a keyboard while the main screen expands to the full view. It lets you see what you’re typing on a larger canvas and gives you a really big keyboard to boot.
But getting apps into their proper place for each of these postures isn’t easy because Android’s natural state is a single phone screen. And that’s where the majority of the bugs really start cropping up.
It’s a shame, too, because those bugs are a result of Microsoft making the right choices when it comes to customizing Android for a true multitasking experience. I don’t think this will be obvious to the casual observer, but after spending a decade reviewing dozens of different flavors of Android, I can say this definitively: Microsoft chose one of the hardest possible roads it could in customizing Android to fit its needs, but it is the right road.
Unlike Samsung, LG, and others who have dabbled in split-screen and folding screen versions of Android, Microsoft has tried to make a multitasking system that doesn’t seem like it’s tacked on top of Android’s more traditional interface.
An animation of the Surface Duo’s multitasking. Note this screen recording doesn’t show the gap between screens.
The gap between the two screens when viewing a single webpage across them.
Although a lot of manufacturers are sticking with buttons, modern versions of Android work by swiping up from the bottom to get to the core parts of the OS like multitasking views, the home screen, and your apps. So Microsoft has taken that system and added to it. You can swipe up to get an app window and then drag it around on the two screens to put it in one of those modes.
It’s a noble goal, but remembering what all the swipes do depending on your context is a huge hurdle. Sometimes a swipe brings up multitasking, sometimes it goes home, sometimes it launches the app drawer, sometimes it flings an app to the other screen if you angle it just right (or wrong). Oh, and if you turn the Duo sideways, don’t forget that up is now over on the side.
It’s too much, but it’s a learnable system, and I eventually got proficient in it and even found myself entering that “flow” state that Surface chief Panos Panay likes to talk about. But just as often, I’d enter a rage state as the Duo did something I didn’t expect or lagged out when I was trying to position a window.
The real shame of all of this is that Microsoft has achieved the holy grail of every other Android phone maker not named Google: a comprehensive, unified, and coherent ecosystem of apps and services. If you’re in Microsoft’s ecosystem, you will have Outlook, Office, compatibility with Your Phone on Windows 10, OneNote, and OneDrive, all working together in harmony.
This is all miles better than whatever Samsung or LG equivalent you’ll find on their phones. Plus, Microsoft doesn’t force you to use any of it if you don’t want to. Google search is the default instead of Bing, Gmail’s sitting right there, and so on.
Speaking of Google, I am serious when I lay some of these issues at the feet of Android itself. Google has been touting support for foldables for a couple of years now, but it’s been failing to make Android tablets successful for much longer. The result of that technical debt is that Android is woefully unprepared for devices like the Surface Duo and Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 2. But at the end of the day, it’s not Google’s logo on the back of the Surface Duo. It’s Microsoft’s.
Through it all, there were still moments of feeling like I could get more done on the Duo than I could on other phones. And as time went on, those moments turned into longer stretches.
The Surface Duo has a single 11-megapixel camera.
Surface Duo camera
The Surface Duo’s camera is trash. I should talk to you about its redeeming qualities, like the fact that it has a restrained opinion on color balancing that I appreciate after using Samsung’s overly vivid cameras or the fact that you can dual-screen the camera app to see a roll of your selfies on one side while you take pictures with the other. But I can’t.
Camera quality was sacrificed at the altar of thinness
It’s likely that the camera is yet another casualty of Microsoft’s abiding dedication to thinness for the Surface Duo. Perhaps the 11-megapixel sensor is simply the best that could fit into that thin frame. But if the Google Pixel 4A has taught us anything, it’s that good software can work wonders with mediocre hardware.
Instead, the only wonder I experienced is wondering how to get the camera to work in the first place. Since it’s placed on the inside above one of the screens, taking selfies is easy. Launch the camera, take a photo, smile at the results. Heck, Microsoft even has a passable portrait mode in good lighting conditions — well, passable by 2018 standards, anyway.
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But if you want to take a photo of somebody else, you have to rotate the other screen so it becomes a viewfinder. But when you try to do that, there’s a 50/50 chance the viewfinder will be on the wrong side. And getting it to the side is a literal exercise in frustration. You have to keep twisting and tapping the Duo until it figures it out. After all that work, the results are muddy, noisy, and in low light, they’re a mess. Plus, they arrive well after you hit the shutter button.
I would berate this camera on a $300 device. The Surface Duo costs $1,400.
Microsoft should have just called this a webcam. It would have set expectations appropriately. Plus, it’s a great webcam! You can position the Duo’s screen right where you want it and take a call without having to hold the phone. And if you’re sneaky, you can play a game of Holedown on the other screen during your Zoom call. Not that I did that. (I did that.)
The Microsoft Surface Duo is surprisingly pocketable.
Surface Duo specs and performance
Much will likely be made of the fact that the Surface Duo has outdated specs. It has last year’s Snapdragon 855 processor and no 5G. I don’t care about any of those things — though, in a couple of years, the lack of 5G may be a minor annoyance. But there’s no denying that the $1,400 price of the Surface Duo certainly isn’t a result of high component costs.
In fact, all of that extra development time with the Snapdragon 855 has yielded some benefits. Microsoft says it was able to heavily optimize its multitasking system in collaboration with Qualcomm, using the 855 as a stable target. I’ll take their word for it that it would have been buggier without that effort.
Battery life is surprisingly solid
A more tangible benefit of that optimization time is battery life: it’s pretty good! That’s absolutely not what I expected when I learned that the two batteries inside the Surface Duo add up to a mere 3,577mAh. That’s a paltry number when compared to the number of pixels it’s being asked to light up, and it’s notably less than what many single-screen Android phones have. Yet, I’m consistently making it to the end of the day on a single charge, and standby time is excellent.
If I have one complaint about the specs it’s that the Duo only has 6GB of RAM That’s plenty for your average Android phone, but it’s not enough to keep apps from closing sooner than I’d like in the background. It’s also not quite enough to reliably run two apps at once without one of them getting a hiccup — and the whole point of the Surface Duo is to run two apps at once.
It’s another instance of the Surface Duo not being a great value — 8, 10, and even 12 gigs is the norm for Android devices that cost over a thousand dollars, much less $1,400. The Pixel 4A has the same amount of RAM as the Duo, and it costs $350.
The Microsoft Surface Duo.
The Surface Duo is trying to be a new kind of device — not a phone, not a tablet, but something in between. That project sounds vaguely familiar, actually. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, he set up the stakes for that device:
The question has arisen, lately: is there room for a third category of device in the middle? Something in between the laptop and the smartphone? In order to really create a new category of devices, those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks.
It’s unlikely that Microsoft has lit upon an iPad-sized market with the Duo. But despite the bugs, I do think it has made a case for itself as a new kind of device — or at the very least, it has earned a chance to keep a spot in the emerging class of devices that try to fit a larger screen in your pocket by folding it in half in some way.
But a better comparison for the Duo isn’t the iPad; it’s the original Surface tablet. When it was first announced, it wasn’t really ready. It had a bunch of very good ideas, but the execution was bad, and a lot of people just didn’t get what Microsoft was going for. But a few years later, Microsoft finally came through with the Surface Pro 3, which actually achieved what the first Surface was trying to do.
Microsoft has the right ideas, but the Surface Duo is not really ready
This Surface Duo? It’s not really ready. It has a bunch of good ideas, but the execution is bad in places, and a lot of people aren’t going to get what Microsoft is going for. There are more than enough problems here to keep me from recommending it. Maybe if this didn’t cost fourteen hundred bucks we could be having a different conversation. But it does. And if you want to spend that much on a work phone, the Note 20 Ultra does split-screen, comes with a stylus, has a good camera, and runs all of those Microsoft apps just fine.
But like that first Surface, there are more than a few glimmers of vision and potential in the Surface Duo. Microsoft has the clearest, strongest vision for a new direction in mobile computing that I’ve seen this year, but picking a direction and getting to the destination are still two different things.
Microsoft has gotten knocked out of the pocketable device games at least four times before — from WinCE to PocketPC to Windows Mobile to Windows Phone, this company is intimately familiar with failure. But in the Duo, I can see Microsoft learning from all those mistakes, and I’m glad to see the company back in the fight again. I hope that this first Surface Duo isn’t its last round.
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theverge--2020-09-10--Huawei adds Qi wireless charging to its Watch GT 2 Pro smartwatch

Huawei announced a new smartwatch and a pair of wireless earbuds during its annual developer conference today .
The Watch GT 2 Pro is an updated version of last year ’ s Watch GT 2 , which can be recharged wirelessly using any Qi-compatible charger — a helpful inclusion that means you can recharge it using almost any mainstream wireless charger or even the back of certain smartphones like Samsung ’ s recent flagships .
Meanwhile , the FreeBuds Pro are new noise-canceling true wireless earbuds with an eye-catching design and interesting control scheme .
Alongside them , Huawei also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ FreeLace Pro wireless earbuds are getting a global release .
The Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro is available in a couple of different variations , including sport and classic models , which come with silicon and leather straps , respectively .
If you ’ re using the LiteOS-powered smartwatch for sport , then Huawei says you ’ ll find over 100 workout modes included , including a new golf driving range mode that ’ s capable of measuring your swing speed as well as new skiing and snowboarding modes .
If you get @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new “ route back ” mode , which works without your phone and can help you retrace your steps using GPS .
However , there ’ s no native mapping app like what you ’ ll find on the Apple Watch , and although Huawei says the watch can integrate with third-party services , there ’ s currently no support for popular activity-tracking service Strava .
Also new for this smartwatch are bad weather alerts as well as more accurate heart rate monitoring , thanks to a sensor with improved light transmission and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also monitor your blood oxygen saturation ( Sp02 ) levels and track your sleep like many other smartwatches , and it ’ s got a water-resistance rating of 5ATM , meaning it can survive being 50 meters underwater for up to 10 minutes .
The Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro has a 1.39-inch circular OLED display with a resolution of 454 x 454 , the same as its predecessor , and it ’ s powered by a Kirin A1 chipset .
Huawei says its battery life is around two weeks , and that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ GPS mode or play music for 24 hours before it needs to charge , the same as the Watch GT 2 .
When wirelessly charging , you should see as much as an additional 10 hours of use from a 5-minute charge , according to Huawei , suggesting it could avoid the problems we had with slow charging speeds with Samsung ’ s Galaxy Watch 3 .
Huawei says the Watch GT 2 Pro will be available from this month .
Its Sport version will cost €329 , while the Classic model with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ After years of producing true wireless earbuds with a very similar appearance to Apple ’ s AirPods , Huawei is finally switching things up with its new noise-canceling FreeBuds Pro .
These true wireless headphones have a much more square stemmed design compared to Apple and Huawei ’ s existing earbuds , although the tip of the earbud itself is still curved for a more comfortable fit in your ear .
You can control the earbuds by squeezing this stem and sliding your finger up and down the earbud to control volume , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we see on most earbuds .
Although Huawei has moved away from the design language of the AirPods , it ’ s not been afraid to borrow one of the AirPods Pro ’ s handier features .
Huawei says the FreeBuds Pro will be able to intelligently test their fit while they ’ re in your ears using Huawei ’ s AI Life app to help determine which size silicone ear tips you should use .
Along with the typical noise-cancellation features like a transparency mode , Huawei also says that these are @ @ @ @ @ @ @ intelligent dynamic noise cancellation , ” a feature that means they ’ re able to automatically detect your listening environment and switch between three different noise-canceling modes , depending on what it thinks is most appropriate for your current location .
Huawei is claiming a maximum noise reduction of 40dB , which it says is higher than the AirPods Pro .
The FreeBuds Pro are available in black , white , or silver .
Battery life varies depending on whether you ’ re using noise cancellation .
While using noise cancellation , you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of listening out of the earbuds themselves , rising to seven hours with noise cancellation turned off .
Combined with the charging case , Huawei says you ’ ll get up to 30 hours of charge , dropping to 20 if you have noise cancellation turned on .
The earbuds will cost €199 and will be available in October , Huawei says .
As part of its presentation , Huawei also announced global releases for its Watch Fit smartwatch and FreeLace Pro wireless earbuds , which had previously been announced for the Chinese @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rectangular 1.64-inch OLED display and should get 10 days of battery life , according to Huawei .
Meanwhile , the FreeLace Pro are noise-canceling earbuds with a built-in USB-C cable for charging .
Both will be available starting this month .
The FreeLace Pro will cost €119 , while the Watch Fit will cost €129 .

Huawei announced a new smartwatch and a pair of wireless earbuds during its annual developer conference today. The Watch GT 2 Pro is an updated version of last year’s Watch GT 2, which can be recharged wirelessly using any Qi-compatible charger — a helpful inclusion that means you can recharge it using almost any mainstream wireless charger or even the back of certain smartphones like Samsung’s recent flagships.
Meanwhile, the FreeBuds Pro are new noise-canceling true wireless earbuds with an eye-catching design and interesting control scheme. Alongside them, Huawei also announced that its Watch Fit smartwatch and FreeLace Pro wireless earbuds are getting a global release.
The Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro is available in a couple of different variations, including sport and classic models, which come with silicon and leather straps, respectively. If you’re using the LiteOS-powered smartwatch for sport, then Huawei says you’ll find over 100 workout modes included, including a new golf driving range mode that’s capable of measuring your swing speed as well as new skiing and snowboarding modes. If you get lost, then there’s a new “route back” mode, which works without your phone and can help you retrace your steps using GPS. However, there’s no native mapping app like what you’ll find on the Apple Watch, and although Huawei says the watch can integrate with third-party services, there’s currently no support for popular activity-tracking service Strava.
Also new for this smartwatch are bad weather alerts as well as more accurate heart rate monitoring, thanks to a sensor with improved light transmission and better machine learning. The watch can also monitor your blood oxygen saturation (Sp02) levels and track your sleep like many other smartwatches, and it’s got a water-resistance rating of 5ATM, meaning it can survive being 50 meters underwater for up to 10 minutes.
The Huawei Watch GT 2 Pro has a 1.39-inch circular OLED display with a resolution of 454 x 454, the same as its predecessor, and it’s powered by a Kirin A1 chipset. Huawei says its battery life is around two weeks, and that it can go for 30 hours in GPS mode or play music for 24 hours before it needs to charge, the same as the Watch GT 2. When wirelessly charging, you should see as much as an additional 10 hours of use from a 5-minute charge, according to Huawei, suggesting it could avoid the problems we had with slow charging speeds with Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 3.
Huawei says the Watch GT 2 Pro will be available from this month. Its Sport version will cost €329, while the Classic model with a leather strap will cost €349.
Image: Huawei Image: Huawei
After years of producing true wireless earbuds with a very similar appearance to Apple’s AirPods, Huawei is finally switching things up with its new noise-canceling FreeBuds Pro. These true wireless headphones have a much more square stemmed design compared to Apple and Huawei’s existing earbuds, although the tip of the earbud itself is still curved for a more comfortable fit in your ear. You can control the earbuds by squeezing this stem and sliding your finger up and down the earbud to control volume, a departure from the exclusively tap-based controls we see on most earbuds.
Although Huawei has moved away from the design language of the AirPods, it’s not been afraid to borrow one of the AirPods Pro’s handier features. Huawei says the FreeBuds Pro will be able to intelligently test their fit while they’re in your ears using Huawei’s AI Life app to help determine which size silicone ear tips you should use.
Along with the typical noise-cancellation features like a transparency mode, Huawei also says that these are the first true wireless earbuds with “intelligent dynamic noise cancellation,” a feature that means they’re able to automatically detect your listening environment and switch between three different noise-canceling modes, depending on what it thinks is most appropriate for your current location. Huawei is claiming a maximum noise reduction of 40dB, which it says is higher than the AirPods Pro.
The FreeBuds Pro are available in black, white, or silver. Battery life varies depending on whether you’re using noise cancellation. While using noise cancellation, you’ll get up to 4.5 hours of listening out of the earbuds themselves, rising to seven hours with noise cancellation turned off. Combined with the charging case, Huawei says you’ll get up to 30 hours of charge, dropping to 20 if you have noise cancellation turned on. The earbuds will cost €199 and will be available in October, Huawei says.


theverge--2020-09-10--Huawei updates MateBook X laptop with 10th-Gen Intel CPUs and Wi-Fi 6 support

As part of its developer conference today , Huawei has announced that updated versions of two of its laptops , the MateBook X and MateBook 14 , are getting a global release following their launch in China .
The MateBook X features a 13-inch 3000 x 2000 resolution display with a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio , support for Wi-Fi 6 , and tops out with an Intel 10th-Gen i7-10510U CPU .
The MateBook 14 , meanwhile , has a 14-inch 1440p display , and its power maxes out with a Ryzen 4800H .
The MateBook X sits just below the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s laptop lineup .
There ’ s no discreet graphics option like the X Pro , but instead you ’ re getting a thin-and-light fanless design with a maximum thickness of 13.6mm , and a weight of just 1kg ( a bit over 2 pounds ) .
In terms of connectivity there ’ s a 3.5mm headphone jack alongside a pair of USB-C ports , either of which can be used to charge the laptop .
Huawei is introducing a new touchpad with the MateBook X .
As well as having a larger @ @ @ @ @ @ @ says the “ Free Touch ” trackpad supports “ full haptic feedback , ” which makes it sound similar to the Force Touch trackpad Apple introduced to its MacBook lineup back in 2015 .
The NFC tag to enable Huawei Share is also located under this trackpad .
If you want another way to control the laptop , then its 3:2 aspect ratio display is multitouch-enabled .
Rounding out the specs , the MateBook X comes with up to 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD .
There will also be a version @ @ @ @ @ @ @ There ’ s a power button with a built-in fingerprint reader , and the laptop has the same recessed webcam hidden under one of the keys on the keyboard that we ’ ve seen on Huawei ’ s other laptops — meaning it ’ s physically blocked when the camera ’ s off .
The MateBook X will be available in silver , green , blue , and pink .
Huawei says that the i7 model of the MateBook X will cost €1799 , while the i5 model will cost €1599 .
Both @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A new version of the MateBook 14 is also seeing a global launch .
The big update this year is that the laptop can be maxed out with an AMD Ryzen 4800H CPU with integrated graphics , 16GB of RAM , and a 512GB SSD .
Huawei says its 56Wh battery should be able to play 1080p video continuously for 10 hours .
The MateBook 14 is a little thicker than the MateBook X at 15.9mm , heavier at 1.49kg , and although its 3:2 screen is larger at 14-inches and still supports @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
It ’ s also only available in gray , Huawei says .
The MateBook 14 does provide a bigger selection of ports , including two USB-A ports , HDMI , USB-C , and a 3.5mm headphone jack .
The laptop will be available starting in October , starting at €849 for a model with a Ryzen 5 4600H , 8GB of RAM , and 256GB of storage .
Stepping up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage costs €949 .
Finally , the model with a Ryzen 7 4800H will come @ @ @ @ @ @ @ storage and will cost €1049 .
Update September 10th , 8:42AM ET : Updated with pricing and availability information .

As part of its developer conference today, Huawei has announced that updated versions of two of its laptops, the MateBook X and MateBook 14, are getting a global release following their launch in China. The MateBook X features a 13-inch 3000 x 2000 resolution display with a 90 percent screen-to-body ratio, support for Wi-Fi 6, and tops out with an Intel 10th-Gen i7-10510U CPU. The MateBook 14, meanwhile, has a 14-inch 1440p display, and its power maxes out with a Ryzen 4800H.
The MateBook X sits just below the flagship MateBook X Pro in Huawei’s laptop lineup. There’s no discreet graphics option like the X Pro, but instead you’re getting a thin-and-light fanless design with a maximum thickness of 13.6mm, and a weight of just 1kg (a bit over 2 pounds). In terms of connectivity there’s a 3.5mm headphone jack alongside a pair of USB-C ports, either of which can be used to charge the laptop.
The new MateBook X features a larger trackpad with a built in NFC tag to connect to a Huawei smartphone. Image: Huawei
Huawei is introducing a new touchpad with the MateBook X. As well as having a larger surface area than its predecessor, Huawei says the “Free Touch” trackpad supports “full haptic feedback,” which makes it sound similar to the Force Touch trackpad Apple introduced to its MacBook lineup back in 2015. The NFC tag to enable Huawei Share is also located under this trackpad. If you want another way to control the laptop, then its 3:2 aspect ratio display is multitouch-enabled.
Rounding out the specs, the MateBook X comes with up to 16GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD. There will also be a version powered by an Intel i5 CPU. There’s a power button with a built-in fingerprint reader, and the laptop has the same recessed webcam hidden under one of the keys on the keyboard that we’ve seen on Huawei’s other laptops — meaning it’s physically blocked when the camera’s off. The MateBook X will be available in silver, green, blue, and pink. Huawei says that the i7 model of the MateBook X will cost €1799, while the i5 model will cost €1599. Both will go on sale in October.
Huawei’s new MateBook 14 now comes with up to an AMD Ryzen 4800H. Image: Huawei
A new version of the MateBook 14 is also seeing a global launch. The big update this year is that the laptop can be maxed out with an AMD Ryzen 4800H CPU with integrated graphics, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. Huawei says its 56Wh battery should be able to play 1080p video continuously for 10 hours.
The MateBook 14 is a little thicker than the MateBook X at 15.9mm, heavier at 1.49kg, and although its 3:2 screen is larger at 14-inches and still supports multitouch, its resolution is just 1440p. It’s also only available in gray, Huawei says. The MateBook 14 does provide a bigger selection of ports, including two USB-A ports, HDMI, USB-C, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. The laptop will be available starting in October, starting at €849 for a model with a Ryzen 5 4600H, 8GB of RAM, and 256GB of storage. Stepping up to 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage costs €949. Finally, the model with a Ryzen 7 4800H will come with 16GB of RAM and 512GB of storage and will cost €1049.


theverge--2020-09-10--Instagram is testing three new designs to make room for Reels and shopping

The Interface is a daily column and newsletter about the intersection of social media and democracy .
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One reason I enjoy writing a column about the intersection between big technology platforms and democracy is that on most days , it feels like one of the most important things in the world .
But on this strangest of days in San Francisco , where wildfires up and down the west coast blotted out the sun and gave the town the eerie feel of permanent midnight , it was hard to pay the usual attention to my beat .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ over Sutro Tower this morning and captured the surreal imagery .
The word “ apocalypse ” gets thrown around with truly unfortunate frequency these days , but on Wednesday nothing else really fit .
Distracting as the orange sky outside my window has been , I had one fascinating thing to occupy my attention : a conversation I had on Tuesday with Adam Mosseri , the person who leads Instagram .
The occasion was an announcement the company made this morning about the formation of a new “ equity team ” that will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may be underserving different groups of people .
( The Wall Street Journal had reported that the company was building such a team in July . )
Here ’ s how Mosseri described the team in a blog post on Wednesday : The team is already working on projects including “ comment warnings , ” which will scan your post and ask you if you really want to say that mean thing you ’ re about to say ; re-examining policies about blackface and posts related to the Jewish community ; and reviewing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which determine what can show up in Instagram ’ s “ explore ” tab .
The moves come after a summer in which racial justice surged to the forefront of discussions at Facebook and other companies around the country .
“ Having a dedicated team , I think , is a really important step , ” Mosseri said over video chat .
I certainly like what I hear so far .
The question is whether they can retain their power over time — or whether their ideas will get sidelined by product managers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impact of these moves on their targeted metrics .
That ’ s not a concern unique to Facebook or Instagram — it ’ s a challenge at any company who creates a dedicated team to address something that arguably every employee should be concerned about .
( See also : corporate environmental sustainability efforts . )
Mosseri also chatted me up about what promise to be some major changes to Instagram ’ s design : namely the insertion of two new tabs , which the company is now testing globally .
One tab @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s effort to occupy the short-form video space that TikTok carved out in the world ; the other is for shopping , which Instagram created a dedicated space for in July .
At most apps , the addition of a tab or two wouldn ’ t be a big deal .
But this is Instagram we ’ re talking about — an app whose dedication to pixel-polishing is legendary .
( “ Simplicity ” and “ craft ” are two of the company ’ s three core values . )
It also has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ photographers , and know-it-alls , and even just redesigning the app ’ s logo has been known to send them into fits .
( Those people were all wrong , by the way ; few re-branding exercises in recent years have held up as well as Instagram ’ s 2016 refresh . )
But it ’ s in the nature of social apps to try to capture more of their users ’ behavior in dedicated features — whether that behavior is already happening in the app or not .
Shopping is already a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sense as a dedicated feature .
Reels is an effort to recreate the magic of TikTok on Instagram , and is a much dicier proposition .
And both are arriving in an app that already feels somewhat crowded .
The writer and investor Eugene Wei criticized the current design this summer in an essay about the rise of TikTok : So adding two tabs to all of that ?
It ’ s going to be tricky .
“ We ’ re gon na get a lot of heat , ” Mosseri said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ around , or make some big changes — I expect a lot of really derogatory DMs.
” The reason is that you can ’ t just add two tabs to the bottom row of the app — you have to move at least one existing tab to make room for it .
So maybe the search button and “ composer , ” the button you tap to add a new photo , will move to the top right , next to the Direct inbox .
Or maybe the activity feed , which tells @ @ @ @ @ @ @ followed you , will jump up next to your DMs , and the composer will float to the left of the Instagram logo .
There are currently three designs now in testing .
Even if you think shopping and short-form video are huge opportunities for Instagram — and I do — these moves may push the notions of craft and simplicity to the breaking point .
At the very least , they make the app feel more like Facebook — an app with so many tabs that they change dynamically for each person @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( And has dozens they may never use at all . )
So why do it ?
Mosseri says Instagram wants to help individual creators earn their livelihoods on the app , whether by becoming video stars or e-commerce moguls .
From Patreon to TikTok , it ’ s clear that that ’ s where the opportunity is in social apps , he said .
“ We ’ ve been thinking a lot this year about what Instagram is about , and keep coming back to this idea of emergent culture — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Mosseri said .
“ I think we always have focused on emerging culture — it ’ s why we focused on youth , and it ’ s why we focused on creators .
These are groups that set trends in many different industries , in many different countries around the world.
” Given the amount of shopping that transpires already on Instagram , adding a dedicated tab felt like a no-brainer .
( The company came close to releasing a standalone shopping app , and Mosseri says he would still consider doing one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before the pandemic there was this massive shift of commerce from offline to online — and COVID-19 accelerated that by , I don ’ t know , half a decade maybe , ” he said .
Instagram ’ s twist on e-commerce is to have individual creators do the selling , by creating collections of products and writing their own captions or making videos about them .
( They don ’ t yet get a cut of the sales , but if they move a lot of merchandise they can win big brand @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is trickier , since Instagram ’ s efforts around video have been less successful .
IGTV , the company ’ s effort at promoting longer vertical videos , doesn ’ t even merit placement on the home screen .
( It ’ s available as a tab on the explore page , as well as in a standalone app . )
And the video that people love watching on Instagram — their friends ’ ephemeral stories — is very different in kind than the endlessly remixed memes that launched TikTok to great success @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it was simply too hard to find .
TikTok works because you just open it and the app starts showing you interesting videos , even if you haven ’ t signed in yet .
With Reels , you had to navigate to the explore page and tap into a separate Reels feed , if you knew to look for it at all .
A dedicated Reels tab solves that problem , effectively adding a TikTok “ For You ” -style page to the home screen .
“ We ’ re really just @ @ @ @ @ @ @ video creator ecosystem , ” Mosseri said .
“ TikTok willed that into existence ... Obviously , they are on to something .
You ’ re seeing short-form video growing on a number of platforms at this point.
” Looking at the tests designs , I can ’ t say I have a strong preference for any of them : my eyes are still getting used to seeing those familiar icons in such seemingly strange new places .
But I have reason to believe that eventually , Instagram will get it to work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ iteration has generally served it well .
And , as Mosseri notes , stasis isn ’ t really an option .
“ When you ’ re as large as we are , competition is always a risk , ” Mosseri said .
“ But an even bigger issue is that what you do becomes irrelevant.
” ⭐ ByteDance is in talks with the US government about possible arrangements that would avoid a full sale of TikTok ’ s US operations .
The move comes after the Chinese government took steps that make a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Microsoft more difficult .
Miriam Gottfried , Georgia Wells and Kate Davidson at The Wall Street Journal have the story : ⭐ Ireland ’ s Data Protection Commission sent Facebook a preliminary order to suspend data transfers about EU users to the US .
It ’ s the first significant step EU regulators have taken to enforce a July ruling about data transfers .
That ruling restricted how companies like Facebook can send personal information about Europeans to the US .
Here are Sam Schechner and Emily Glazer at The Wall Street Journal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend Ankhi Das , the company ’ s public policy director for India .
The move comes after Das was revealed to have not enforced hate speech policies for politicians from India ’ s ruling party who posted anti-Muslim content .
( Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed ) Mark Zuckerberg said it is “ just wrong ” to consider Facebook a right-wing echo chamber , even though conservative voices usually top lists of the platform ’ s most-engaged content .
The company likes to cite what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ favors legacy news organizations , over what they engage with the most , which does not .
( Mike Allen and David Nather / Axios ) Amazon has spent $ 24,000 to kill Portland ’ s facial recognition bill , which would be the strongest ban on the technology in the United StatesS if it passes .
The law would ban the use of facial recognition technology by both the public and private sector .
Amazon ’ s concern is that this would create a nationwide legal precedent .
( Edward Ongweso Jr @ @ @ @ @ @ @ media can lull people into believing they are making a difference when they ’ re not — although they also think the platforms are an important tool for political activists .
( Pew Research Center ) ⭐ TikTok is suppressing hashtags related to LGBT content in Eastern Europe and the Middle East , according to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute , a think tank .
Rather than banning the content outright , the app is making it difficult for people to find .
Here ’ s Jane Li at Quartz @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in part on its ability to cater to lurkers — people who consumer but rarely create content .
There are twice as many lurkers than content creators on TikTok , according to some estimates .
( Shreya Sudarshana and Johnathan Zhou / Medium ) TikTok husbands bear little resemblance to the behind-the-scenes Instagram husbands of old .
On the video sharing app , they ’ re part of the fun , often featuring in videos and engaging with the creator .
( Jillian Goltzman / Glamour ) Doctors and scientists are using TikTok @ @ @ @ @ @ @ becoming TikTok influencers , and incurring harassment as a result .
( Helen Santoro / Wired ) Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg downplayed concerns about the company ’ s size by comparing the choice people have in social media to the relative lack of choice they have when choosing their home electricity provider .
( Alex Heath / The Information ) Epic announced a new , three-week-long concert series that will take place on Fortnite ’ s party royale island .
It will be broadcast from a brand-new Los Angeles studio built specifically for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The Verge ) Startups are trying to recreate the office water cooler online , now that employees are working remote .
Some work as Slack plugins , randomly pairing you with colleagues on the chat platform .
( Katherine Bindley / The Wall Street Journal ) Stuff to occupy you online during the quarantine .
Visit the WinAmp skin museum .
It really whips the llama ’ s ass .
Send us tips , comments , questions , and test Instagram designs : casey @ theverge.com and zoe @ theverge.com .

One reason I enjoy writing a column about the intersection between big technology platforms and democracy is that on most days, it feels like one of the most important things in the world. But on this strangest of days in San Francisco, where wildfires up and down the west coast blotted out the sun and gave the town the eerie feel of permanent midnight, it was hard to pay the usual attention to my beat. My colleague Vjeran Pavic flew a drone over Sutro Tower this morning and captured the surreal imagery. The word “apocalypse” gets thrown around with truly unfortunate frequency these days, but on Wednesday nothing else really fit.
Distracting as the orange sky outside my window has been, I had one fascinating thing to occupy my attention: a conversation I had on Tuesday with Adam Mosseri, the person who leads Instagram. The occasion was an announcement the company made this morning about the formation of a new “equity team” that will be tasked with examining how the app may be underserving different groups of people. (The Wall Street Journal had reported that the company was building such a team in July.)
Here’s how Mosseri described the team in a blog post on Wednesday:
The Equity team will focus on creating fair and equitable products. This includes working with Facebook’s Responsible AI team to ensure algorithmic fairness. In addition, they’ll create new features that respond to the needs of underserved communities. Seperate from this new product group we’re also hiring a new Director for Diversity and Inclusion for Instagram who will help to advance Instagram’s goal of finding, keeping, and growing more diverse talent.
The team is already working on projects including “comment warnings,” which will scan your post and ask you if you really want to say that mean thing you’re about to say; re-examining policies about blackface and posts related to the Jewish community; and reviewing the app’s recommendation guidelines, which determine what can show up in Instagram’s “explore” tab.
The moves come after a summer in which racial justice surged to the forefront of discussions at Facebook and other companies around the country.
“Having a dedicated team, I think, is a really important step,” Mosseri said over video chat.
I certainly like what I hear so far. The question is whether they can retain their power over time — or whether their ideas will get sidelined by product managers on other teams worried about the potential impact of these moves on their targeted metrics. That’s not a concern unique to Facebook or Instagram — it’s a challenge at any company who creates a dedicated team to address something that arguably every employee should be concerned about. (See also: corporate environmental sustainability efforts.)
So: we’ll see.
Mosseri also chatted me up about what promise to be some major changes to Instagram’s design: namely the insertion of two new tabs, which the company is now testing globally. One tab is for Reels, the company’s effort to occupy the short-form video space that TikTok carved out in the world; the other is for shopping, which Instagram created a dedicated space for in July.
At most apps, the addition of a tab or two wouldn’t be a big deal. But this is Instagram we’re talking about — an app whose dedication to pixel-polishing is legendary. (“Simplicity” and “craft” are two of the company’s three core values.) It also has a user base heavy with designers, photographers, and know-it-alls, and even just redesigning the app’s logo has been known to send them into fits. (Those people were all wrong, by the way; few re-branding exercises in recent years have held up as well as Instagram’s 2016 refresh.)
But it’s in the nature of social apps to try to capture more of their users’ behavior in dedicated features — whether that behavior is already happening in the app or not. Shopping is already a core behavior on Instagram, and makes sense as a dedicated feature. Reels is an effort to recreate the magic of TikTok on Instagram, and is a much dicier proposition.
And both are arriving in an app that already feels somewhat crowded. The writer and investor Eugene Wei criticized the current design this summer in an essay about the rise of TikTok:
Instagram is some strange hybrid mix of social and interest graph, and now it’s also a jumble of formats, with a Stories feed relegated to a top bar in the app while the more stagnant and less active original feed continues to run vertically as the default. Messaging is pushed to a separate pane and also served by a separate app. Longer form videos bounce you to Instagram TV, which is just an app for videos that exceed some time limit, I guess? And soon, perhaps commerce will be jammed in somehow? Meanwhile, they have a Discover tab, or whatever it is called, which seems like it could be the default tab if they wanted to take a more interest-based approach like TikTok. But they seem to have punted on making any hard decisions for so long now that the app is just a Frankenstein of feeds and formats and functions spread across a somewhat confused constellation of apps.
So adding two tabs to all of that? It’s going to be tricky.
“We’re gonna get a lot of heat,” Mosseri said. “Any time we move the tabs around, or make some big changes — I expect a lot of really derogatory DMs.”
The reason is that you can’t just add two tabs to the bottom row of the app — you have to move at least one existing tab to make room for it. So maybe the search button and “composer,” the button you tap to add a new photo, will move to the top right, next to the Direct inbox. Or maybe the activity feed, which tells you who liked your posts and who followed you, will jump up next to your DMs, and the composer will float to the left of the Instagram logo. There are currently three designs now in testing.
Even if you think shopping and short-form video are huge opportunities for Instagram — and I do — these moves may push the notions of craft and simplicity to the breaking point. At the very least, they make the app feel more like Facebook — an app with so many tabs that they change dynamically for each person depending on which they use most frequently. (And has dozens they may never use at all.)
So why do it?
Mosseri says Instagram wants to help individual creators earn their livelihoods on the app, whether by becoming video stars or e-commerce moguls. From Patreon to TikTok, it’s clear that that’s where the opportunity is in social apps, he said.
“We’ve been thinking a lot this year about what Instagram is about, and keep coming back to this idea of emergent culture — of culture on the fringe,” Mosseri said. “I think we always have focused on emerging culture — it’s why we focused on youth, and it’s why we focused on creators. These are groups that set trends in many different industries, in many different countries around the world.”
Given the amount of shopping that transpires already on Instagram, adding a dedicated tab felt like a no-brainer. (The company came close to releasing a standalone shopping app, and Mosseri says he would still consider doing one at some point.)
“Even before the pandemic there was this massive shift of commerce from offline to online — and COVID-19 accelerated that by, I don’t know, half a decade maybe,” he said.
Instagram’s twist on e-commerce is to have individual creators do the selling, by creating collections of products and writing their own captions or making videos about them. (They don’t yet get a cut of the sales, but if they move a lot of merchandise they can win big brand deals for sponsored content.)
Reels is trickier, since Instagram’s efforts around video have been less successful. IGTV, the company’s effort at promoting longer vertical videos, doesn’t even merit placement on the home screen. (It’s available as a tab on the explore page, as well as in a standalone app.) And the video that people love watching on Instagram — their friends’ ephemeral stories — is very different in kind than the endlessly remixed memes that launched TikTok to great success.
An early criticism of Reels was that it was simply too hard to find. TikTok works because you just open it and the app starts showing you interesting videos, even if you haven’t signed in yet. With Reels, you had to navigate to the explore page and tap into a separate Reels feed, if you knew to look for it at all.
A dedicated Reels tab solves that problem, effectively adding a TikTok “For You”-style page to the home screen.
“We’re really just trying to lean in to the short-form video creator ecosystem,” Mosseri said. “TikTok willed that into existence ... Obviously, they are on to something. You’re seeing short-form video growing on a number of platforms at this point.”
Looking at the tests designs, I can’t say I have a strong preference for any of them: my eyes are still getting used to seeing those familiar icons in such seemingly strange new places. But I have reason to believe that eventually, Instagram will get it to work: its spirit of cautious but steady iteration has generally served it well.
And, as Mosseri notes, stasis isn’t really an option.
“When you’re as large as we are, competition is always a risk,” Mosseri said. “But an even bigger issue is that what you do becomes irrelevant.”
Governing
⭐ ByteDance is in talks with the US government about possible arrangements that would avoid a full sale of TikTok’s US operations. The move comes after the Chinese government took steps that make a sale to a US tech giant like Microsoft more difficult. Miriam Gottfried, Georgia Wells and Kate Davidson at The Wall Street Journal have the story:
A number of options remain on the table, the situation is fluid and a sale is still a possibility, the people said. Even if there isn’t a full sale, the outcome would likely involve some sort of restructuring of TikTok, one of the people said. That could involve a deal in which TikTok takes on a U.S. technology partner that helps secure its data and potentially takes a minority stake. The main concern for government officials involved in the talks has been the security of TikTok’s data and keeping it out of reach of the Chinese government, said people familiar with the negotiations.
⭐ Ireland’s Data Protection Commission sent Facebook a preliminary order to suspend data transfers about EU users to the US. It’s the first significant step EU regulators have taken to enforce a July ruling about data transfers. That ruling restricted how companies like Facebook can send personal information about Europeans to the US. Here are Sam Schechner and Emily Glazer at The Wall Street Journal:
To comply with Ireland’s preliminary order, Facebook would likely have to re-engineer its service to silo off most data it collects from European users, or stop serving them entirely, at least temporarily. If it fails to comply with an order, Ireland’s data commission has the power to fine Facebook up to 4% of its annual revenue, or $2.8 billion.
More than 40 human rights groups are calling on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to suspend Ankhi Das, the company’s public policy director for India. The move comes after Das was revealed to have not enforced hate speech policies for politicians from India’s ruling party who posted anti-Muslim content. (Pranav Dixit / BuzzFeed)
Mark Zuckerberg said it is “just wrong” to consider Facebook a right-wing echo chamber, even though conservative voices usually top lists of the platform’s most-engaged content. The company likes to cite what content users view the most, which favors legacy news organizations, over what they engage with the most, which does not. (Mike Allen and David Nather / Axios)
Amazon has spent $24,000 to kill Portland’s facial recognition bill, which would be the strongest ban on the technology in the United StatesS if it passes. The law would ban the use of facial recognition technology by both the public and private sector. Amazon’s concern is that this would create a nationwide legal precedent. (Edward Ongweso Jr / Vice)
Industry
⭐ TikTok is suppressing hashtags related to LGBT content in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, according to a report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, a think tank. Rather than banning the content outright, the app is making it difficult for people to find. Here’s Jane Li at Quartz:
According to ASPI, other major hashtags that are shadow banned by the app include “#acab,” an acronym for “all cops are bastards,” “#Putin is a thief” in Russian, “#Jokowi,” a nickname for Indonesian president Joko Widodo, and “#why do we need a king” in Thai, amid a wave of protests in Thailand that are openly defying the monarchy. ASPI also found that TikTok categorizes most of the shadow-banned LGBT hashtags in the same way that it does terrorist groups such as ISIS, swear words, and illicit substances such as cocaine. Some of these hashtags were also categorized by the app as non-existent despite the terms having been tagged in videos on the app.
TikTok’s success is based in part on its ability to cater to lurkers — people who consumer but rarely create content. There are twice as many lurkers than content creators on TikTok, according to some estimates. (Shreya Sudarshana and Johnathan Zhou / Medium)
TikTok husbands bear little resemblance to the behind-the-scenes Instagram husbands of old. On the video sharing app, they’re part of the fun, often featuring in videos and engaging with the creator. (Jillian Goltzman / Glamour)
Doctors and scientists are using TikTok to combat Covid-19 misinformation. Some are becoming TikTok influencers, and incurring harassment as a result. (Helen Santoro / Wired)
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg downplayed concerns about the company’s size by comparing the choice people have in social media to the relative lack of choice they have when choosing their home electricity provider. (Alex Heath / The Information)
Epic announced a new, three-week-long concert series that will take place on Fortnite’s party royale island. It will be broadcast from a brand-new Los Angeles studio built specifically for in-game concerts. (Andrew Website / The Verge)
Startups are trying to recreate the office water cooler online, now that employees are working remote. Some work as Slack plugins, randomly pairing you with colleagues on the chat platform. (Katherine Bindley / The Wall Street Journal)
Things to do
Stuff to occupy you online during the quarantine.
And finally...
Talk to us


theverge--2020-09-10--Walmart begins testing drone deliveries for household goods and groceries

Walmart has started making its first deliveries by drone , launching a small pilot program this week in Fayetteville , North Carolina .
The retailer will be delivering “ select grocery and household essential items ” using automated drones operated by Israeli startup Flytrex .
Each of the drones can fly at speeds of 32 mph , travel distances of 6.2 miles in a round trip , and carry up to 6.6 pounds ( that ’ s roughly “ 6-8 hamburgers , ” according to converted units offered on Flytrex ’ s own website ) .
A demo video of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the ground from 80 feet in the air rather than having to land itself .
Flytrex received approval from the FAA to test food deliveries in North Carolina last year , with caveats that its drones only fly predetermined routes in the daytime over unpopulated areas .
“ We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone.
” Walmart has offered few details on the program , including how many drones are involved in the pilot and what checks ( if any ) customers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
“ We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone , ” said Walmart senior vice president Tom Ward , in a news post .
“ That still feels like a bit of science fiction , but we ’ re at a point where we ’ re learning more and more about the technology that is available and how we can use it to make our customers ’ lives easier.
” Walmart has been looking into drone delivery for many years , making its @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with using drones to check inventory in its warehouses in 2016 .
Moving from internal tests to customer deliveries is a big step , though .
Although delivery drones have been on the horizon for many years , a number of challenges , like safety regulations and high costs compared to traditional delivery , have slowed adoption .
Walmart , though , no doubt has one eye on its biggest rival , Amazon , which last month received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration ( FAA ) to operate as a drone airline @ @ @ @ @ @ @ way for larger commercial operations .
Walmart seems to be avoiding the need for direct certification by contracting its drone operations to Flytrex , which is already part of the FAA ’ s UAS Integration Pilot Program .
Walmart also recently launched a new subscription service , Walmart+ , to compete with Amazon Prime .
Drone deliveries look especially attractive during a pandemic , when many customers and business are keen to avoid in-person interactions .
But don ’ t expect to see drones from Walmart ( or any other retailer ) buzzing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ As Flytrex boasts on its website , its aircraft are “ designed for the suburbs .
”

Walmart has started making its first deliveries by drone, launching a small pilot program this week in Fayetteville, North Carolina. The retailer will be delivering “select grocery and household essential items” using automated drones operated by Israeli startup Flytrex.
Each of the drones can fly at speeds of 32 mph, travel distances of 6.2 miles in a round trip, and carry up to 6.6 pounds (that’s roughly “6-8 hamburgers,” according to converted units offered on Flytrex’s own website). A demo video of the drone shows how it lowers packages to the ground from 80 feet in the air rather than having to land itself. Flytrex received approval from the FAA to test food deliveries in North Carolina last year, with caveats that its drones only fly predetermined routes in the daytime over unpopulated areas.
“We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone.”
Walmart has offered few details on the program, including how many drones are involved in the pilot and what checks (if any) customers need to make before receiving a delivery.
“We know that it will be some time before we see millions of packages delivered via drone,” said Walmart senior vice president Tom Ward, in a news post. “That still feels like a bit of science fiction, but we’re at a point where we’re learning more and more about the technology that is available and how we can use it to make our customers’ lives easier.”
Walmart has been looking into drone delivery for many years, making its first tests back in 2015 and experimenting with using drones to check inventory in its warehouses in 2016. Moving from internal tests to customer deliveries is a big step, though. Although delivery drones have been on the horizon for many years, a number of challenges, like safety regulations and high costs compared to traditional delivery, have slowed adoption.
Walmart, though, no doubt has one eye on its biggest rival, Amazon, which last month received approval from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to operate as a drone airline in the United States, paving the way for larger commercial operations. Walmart seems to be avoiding the need for direct certification by contracting its drone operations to Flytrex, which is already part of the FAA’s UAS Integration Pilot Program. Walmart also recently launched a new subscription service, Walmart+, to compete with Amazon Prime.


theverge--2020-09-10--Fortnite special edition Nintendo Switch announced for Europe

Nintendo is releasing a new Fortnite-themed special edition Switch next month , via NintendoLife .
The bundle includes yellow and @ @ @ @ @ with the Battle Bus etched around the home button — and a dock that features @ @ @ @ @ The Switch tablet itself also has characters on the back .
Fortnite is preinstalled on @ @ @ @ @ package includes 2,000 V-bucks plus some exclusive cosmetic items .
It appears only to have @ @ @ @ @ PAL regions , however — NintendoLife reports an October 30th release date for Europe and @ @ @ @ @ New Zealand .
There ’ s no word yet on a release for the US @ @ @ @ @ could be a popular holiday item , though — particularly for Fortnite obsessives who can @ @ @ @ @ version on the go any more .

Nintendo is releasing a new Fortnite-themed special edition Switch next month, via NintendoLife. The bundle includes yellow and blue Joy-Cons — the latter with the Battle Bus etched around the home button — and a dock that features various well-known Fortnite skins. The Switch tablet itself also has characters on the back.
Fortnite is preinstalled on the Switch, and the package includes 2,000 V-bucks plus some exclusive cosmetic items. It appears only to have been announced for launch in PAL regions, however — NintendoLife reports an October 30th release date for Europe and 6th November for Australia and New Zealand.


theverge--2020-09-10--Huawei’s HarmonyOS is coming to smartphones

Huawei has announced the second version of its HarmonyOS operating system and detailed plans to bring it to a wider range of devices , including smartphones .
Consumer business CEO Richard Yu made the announcement today at Huawei ’ s developer conference in Shenzhen , China .
Huawei will make a beta version of the HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK available to developers today , though it ’ ll initially only support smartwatches , car head units , and TVs .
A smartphone version of the SDK will follow in December 2020 , and Yu hinted that phones running HarmonyOS might appear @ @ @ @ @ @ @ off its OpenHarmony project , which allows developers to build upon an open-source version of the OS — similar to what AOSP is to Android .
As of today the project only supports devices with 128MB of RAM or below , but that ’ ll expand to 4GB in April of next year , and the memory limit will be removed completely by October 2021 .
HarmonyOS is a strategically important project for Huawei , as it could serve as a bulwark against sanctions prohibiting the Chinese giant from doing business with American @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ship its Android-based phones without Google services , crippling its app ecosystem and functionality for users outside China .

Huawei has announced the second version of its HarmonyOS operating system and detailed plans to bring it to a wider range of devices, including smartphones. Consumer business CEO Richard Yu made the announcement today at Huawei’s developer conference in Shenzhen, China.
Huawei will make a beta version of the HarmonyOS 2.0 SDK available to developers today, though it’ll initially only support smartwatches, car head units, and TVs. A smartphone version of the SDK will follow in December 2020, and Yu hinted that phones running HarmonyOS might appear next year.
Huawei is also kicking off its OpenHarmony project, which allows developers to build upon an open-source version of the OS — similar to what AOSP is to Android. As of today the project only supports devices with 128MB of RAM or below, but that’ll expand to 4GB in April of next year, and the memory limit will be removed completely by October 2021.


theverge--2020-09-10--Today I learned Google Sheets now lets you link multiple words in a single cell

I find that Google Sheets can be an incredible tool for organizing projects — the endless rows and columns let me track and categorize things to my heart ’ s content .
( You should see my byzantine spreadsheet for my family ’ s personal finances . )
Until recently , though , I ’ ve run into one major limitation that irked my organizational brain .
If I wanted to add hyperlinks to a cell , I could only hyperlink an entire cell instead of hyperlinking individual words inside it .
That meant , for example , if I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ finance in my spreadsheet , I ’ d have to make individual cells for each one of those hyperlinks , which could quickly fill up way more cells than I ’ d like .
But earlier this summer , while researching a big story , I must have subconsciously noticed something had changed .
I could , at long last , hyperlink as many things as I wanted in one single cell , allowing me to pack even more organization into my handcrafted spreadsheets .
The feature was so good — and felt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to using it as if it had always been there , and didn ’ t think much more about it .
But today , another Verge staffer excitedly noticed the change , too , sharing it in The Verge ’ s Slack as a PSA .
And then my editor realized that he , like me , has started using it without even thinking about it .
It ’ s just that handy .
Admittedly , my colleagues and I might be a little late to the hyperlinking party .
I found a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from May 7th and a YouTube tutorial posted the same day .
But perhaps the feature reached my colleagues and I a bit later than May , as Google sometimes rolls out features over time .
We figured we ’ d share our shared discovery of the feature along to you , dear Verge reader , so you can begin hyperlinking all the things .

I find that Google Sheets can be an incredible tool for organizing projects — the endless rows and columns let me track and categorize things to my heart’s content. (You should see my byzantine spreadsheet for my family’s personal finances.)
Until recently, though, I’ve run into one major limitation that irked my organizational brain. If I wanted to add hyperlinks to a cell, I could only hyperlink an entire cell instead of hyperlinking individual words inside it. That meant, for example, if I wanted to track interesting links about personal finance in my spreadsheet, I’d have to make individual cells for each one of those hyperlinks, which could quickly fill up way more cells than I’d like.
But earlier this summer, while researching a big story, I must have subconsciously noticed something had changed. I could, at long last, hyperlink as many things as I wanted in one single cell, allowing me to pack even more organization into my handcrafted spreadsheets. The feature was so good — and felt so natural — that I immediately switched to using it as if it had always been there, and didn’t think much more about it.
But today, another Verge staffer excitedly noticed the change, too, sharing it in The Verge’s Slack as a PSA. And then my editor realized that he, like me, has started using it without even thinking about it. It’s just that handy.
Admittedly, my colleagues and I might be a little late to the hyperlinking party. I found a Google support thread discussing the new functionality from May 7th and a YouTube tutorial posted the same day. But perhaps the feature reached my colleagues and I a bit later than May, as Google sometimes rolls out features over time.