Over the last three years, Google’s Pixel phones have earned a well-deserved reputation for photographic strength. With the Pixel 4 and 4 XL, the company is flexing new camera hardware and software muscles. The new flagship Android smartphone, which the search giant unveiled Tuesday, gets a second 12-megapixel camera, a key component in an overhauled …
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Still not sold on the merits of owning a smartwatch? Everyone fusses over things like heart-rate monitoring and GPS run tracking — useful features, to be sure — but those aren’t the true benefits. The true benefits are deceptively simple: Telling time and receiving notifications from your phone. Once you get accustomed to having those features on your wrist, you’ll …
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I’ve seen touch-sensitive areas on phones and wearable devices before. But I’ve never seen an entire phone case become a touch surface. That’s exactly what San Jose startup Sentons is trying to do, with ultrasonics that work like sonar to register touch and pressure anywhere on a gadget’s surface. The possibilities seem incredibly weird, and extremely useful. In my hands was …
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Hardware security key maker Yubico has released software that lets you log onto Windows with one of its USB keys, a security measure that offers stronger protections than just a password. The Yubico Login for Windows tool has been in testing for a half year but now is available for anyone to use, the Swedish company announced Thursday. YubiKey, Google …
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Sony‘s latest surround sound music format, 360 Reality Audio, will be coming to iOS and Android mobile devices and the Amazon Echo Studio smart speaker in late fall. Approximately 1,000 songs will be available at launch through Amazon Music HD, Deezer, Tidal and live music service Nugs.net, with more songs coming in 2020. The format will feature music from the three major …
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When Google announced the camera of its new Pixel 4 on Tuesday, it boasted about the computational photography that makes the phone’s photos even better, from low-light photography with Night Sight to improved portrait tools that identify and separate hairs and pet fur. You can even take photos of the stars. What makes it all possible is something called computational photography, which …
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Update, Oct. 23: The Huawei Mate X was released, but only in China so far. Original story follows. Huawei is still on shaky ground in the US, but that hasn’t stopped the embattled Chinese phone maker from shipping 185 million phones in the first three quarters of 2019. That represents a year-on-year increase of 26%, the company said in a Tuesday …
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Google’s annual Made by Google event fully confirmed the details that have been leaking out for weeks regarding the company’s new Pixel 4 and 4 XL phones (read our in-depth Pixel 4 review and Pixel 4 XL review here) and other hardware, including the buzzy Pixel Buds 2 earphones and Pixelbook Go Chromebook laptop. That big phone reveal ended the string of …
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Chinese phone maker Oppo brought its Reno 2 and Reno 2Z phones to Europe on Wednesday, after unveiling them in Asia back in August. Like Honor, HMD (Nokia), Xiaomi and OnePlus, Oppo sees a massive opportunity to challenge dominant forces Apple and Samsung. To do so, it’s willing to take some risks. That’s why it plans to launch its next …
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Mozilla is publishing anecdotes of YouTube viewing gone awry — anonymous stories from people who say they innocently searched for one thing but eventually ended up in a dark rabbit hole of videos. It’s a campaign aimed at pressuring Google’s massive video site to make itself more accessible to independent researchers trying to study its algorithms. “The big problem is we have …
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