I am at Microsoft’s headquarters to get a demo of the HoloLens 2. I’m led down a basement hallway. Large sliding metal doors separate rooms. As I reach my destination, I find a re-creation of an automotive workshop. It smells like rubber tires. In front of me, there’s an ATV on a pedestal. Tools and …
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Ask me to fix a broken car or motorbike, and you’d be out of luck. But that’s exactly what Microsoft wanted me to do. And the tool it gave me was its new mixed reality HoloLens 2 headset. After I slipped it on, a set of digital instructions popped up over an actual broken ATV, set up in a mock …
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Comfort, better visuals, easier to use with your hands. That’s the takeaway from HoloLens 2, Microsoft’s follow-up to the Space Age goggles it announced four years ago. The technology behind the $3,500 (about £2,700 or AU$4,900) HoloLens 2 device, which Microsoft calls “mixed reality,” overlays computer images on the real world. Imagine arrows directing you down the street as you walk, …
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If you have anything to do with building software, Google wants you to sign up to use its new .dev domain. The internet address for developers is now available to all comers, the tech colossus said Thursday. For the past week, Google let people and companies sign up for .dev addresses at premium rates. But now the prices will drop, for example to …
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Cast your mind back to the heady days of 2012 when Nokia scored an award for launching the best new device at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. The winner was the Nokia 808 PureView, a Symbian-powered phone that boasted a camera with 41 megapixels. Seven years later, there’s a new PureView in town, but this time it’s less about the …
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Google Assistant lives in your home and might have its own button on your phone. Now it’s in your Android Messages texting app, too. I got a hands-on demo of how exactly it works, here at MWC 2019 in Barcelona. Each year at the world’s biggest phone show, Google transforms a concrete passageway between two convention center halls into a …
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The Android version of the Brave browser uses 35 percent less power than Google’s Chrome on ad-heavy websites, Brave said Wednesday, highlighting a major difference in a world where we often have to keep a close eye on our phone battery. On tests loading 20 news sites on a Samsung Galaxy S9 phone, Brave’s lower power consumption would let you …
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This year has been one of the more eventful years for the phone industry. There’s all the hoopla about 5G phones, such as Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 5G. Support for 5G will be limited in 2019, but it should be more widely available in 2020. Foldable phones, such as the new Galaxy Fold and the Huawei Mate X, made headlines, but that too …
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In a corner conference room, Han Jin, the CEO of Lucid, places an old iPhone 7 Plus on the table. He swipes through pages of apps, showing me what looks on all counts to be a normal iPhone with a screen protector on it. Then, he opens the Lucid app and plays a clip from Avatar in 3D. I look at …
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Google Duo — the web giant’s video chat service — is now available to web users. Google’s answer to Apple’s FaceTime had previously been available only on iOS, Android and Chromebook, but Google on Tuesday began offering it to web-based users, dramatically expanding the number of people who can use the service. The simple video-calling app was introduced at …
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