You can add the standalone Street View app to Google's growing product graveyard. Upon decompiling the latest version of the application for Android, 9to5Google found shutdown notices that the company has yet to publish. In those notices, the tech giant is announcing that the Street View app is going away and that support will end on March 21st, 2023. Spokesperson Madison Gouveia has confirmed to The Verge that the app truly is getting the ax. Gouveia also told the publication that Google will pull Street View from app stores in the coming weeks.
Google announced that it was spinning off Street View into its own app back in 2015. Available for both Android and iOS, it lets you upload your own spherical photos from your phone or from spherical cameras. Last year, the company also introduced Photo Paths, which lets you contribute a series of 2D photos for roads and locations that haven't been documented by a Street View car (or camel or sheep) in the past.
Street View will continue being a key Google Maps feature, so you can still virtually explore all the places the tech giant had documented with its cameras. You can also keep adding Photo Spheres within Maps and publishing 360-degree videos using Street View Studio. As 9to5Google notes, though, there will be no way to add Photo Paths anymore after Google completely shuts down the dedicated Street View app. Previously submitted Photo Path images, however, will continue being viewable within Google Maps.
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Kids love to use smart speakers, but it's all too easy for things to go horribly wrong — including content that's decidedly not family-friendly. Google is trying to address those worries by both revising parental controls for Assistant and providing more child-oriented responses. To start, an update will let you disable some Assistant features, restrict the services children can use and establish downtime hours. You can bar kids from making calls, or limit them to watching YouTube Kids on a Nest Hub.
The controls will be available in the "coming weeks" through the Google Assistant, Google Home and Family Link apps for Android and iOS. They'll be available in the Assistant settings for your child's account.
Google is simultaneously encouraging kids to ask more questions. It's adding a "Kids Dictionary" to Assistant that provides age-suitable answers on speakers, displays and mobile devices. If your young one asks what a telescope is, for instance, you'll get a simple explanation rather than discussions of optics and electromagnetic radiation. There are also four new "kid-friendly" voices that are slower, more expressive and otherwise better-matched to childhood development.
Google is relatively late to these kinds of features. Amazon's Alexa has had parental controls for a while, and can help kids read stories. Even so, this is good news if you've wanted more choice in kid-oriented smart speakers and displays. You can likely get the device that meets your grown-up needs without worrying quite so much about your little ones.
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The Xiaomi 12S Ultra surprised us with its 1-inch camera sensor and Leica co-branding back in July, but it turns out that the Chinese brand was working on something far more ambitious at the same time. Earlier today, the "Xiaomi 12S Ultra Concept Phone" was unveiled with an appearance almost identical to the namesake flagship device, but with a second 1-inch 50.3-megapixel sensor occupying the middle of the camera island instead. Let that sink in for a bit. Not only that, but this new sensor is designed to work with an interchangeable Leica M lens.
Interestingly, Xiaomi has instead chosen to shield this additional 1-inch sensor — also a Sony IMX989 with 10-bit RAW support — underneath a large, circular piece of durable sapphire glass, as opposed to cutting out an opening for it as you'd find on traditional interchangeable lens cameras. While this would protect the sensor against dust and larger foreign objects, we do wonder how this extra layer of glass would affect the overall optical transmittance. But hey, better safe than sorry.
Meanwhile, the 48-megapixel ultra-wide camera that was originally positioned in the middle of the camera island has been shifted to the side, taking up the space that once housed a 48-megapixel periscopic telephoto camera.
Agatha Tang
As shown in Xiaomi's video, in order to install an interchangeable lens onto this 5G concept phone, you must first unscrew the protection ring around the rear camera island, then by way of an adapter, you'll be able to mount any Leica M lens. As captured by a Xiaomi staffer in the above photo, the full assembly with a Leica Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4 ASPH lens looks rather impressive from the side. Previously, the closest thing to this intriguing combination would be one of those Yongnuo 4G-connected Android cameras (which never left China). Or you may travel further back in time and reminisce the good old days with the Samsung Galaxy NX.
Xiaomi
Xiaomi stopped short at saying whether the 12S Ultra Concept Phone will ever be mass produced. All we know is that this project was developed alongside the actual 12S Ultra, and in the end, only 10 units of the former were made. A few of those samples were seeded to some lucky influencers for some quick hands-on time, but with each unit costing around 300,000 yuan or about $41,210 to make, they better not drop them.
T-Mobile may be joining rivals Verizon and AT&T by introducing an $35 charge for all new postpaid activations and upgrades, according to The T-Mo Report and some Redditors. According to T-Mobile internal documents, it's introducing a "Device Connection Charge" for "all activations and upgrades for mobile, Beyond the Smartphone and broadband devices."
Before, the Uncarrier charged activation fees only if you received in-store customer support for new activations, with online orders exempt. Now, all new postpaid activations are charged, whether or not you were assisted. This includes updating to a new device, adding a Bring-Your-Own-Device line, or ordering a Home Internet line, according to The T-Mo Report.
T-Mobile has always tried to separate itself from regular telecoms, but charging customers for essentially nothing doesn't sound very Uncarrier-like, if the reports are accurate. And you can't take your business to Sprint, as it no longer exists thanks to its merger with T-Mobile. When that deal was finalized, T-Mobile said things would be "better for customers," but constant activation charges would definitely not be better.
Worse, it appears to be justifying the new fee in a dubious way, saying it's "simplifying" the system to bring a "more consistent and straightforward experience for customers." In other words, you'll no longer need to wonder if you'll get soaked for the charge or not — you definitely will. Engadget has reached out to T-Mobile to confirm the report's accuracy.
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Google has laid Hangouts to rest, a couple of years after it first announced that it was going to push people to use Chat, its Slack-like app, instead. After allowing users to move to Chat on their own in 2021, Google phased out the Hangouts Chat app for Android and iOS in July. Users were shown a prompt telling them that "Hangouts has been replaced by Google Chat" and to switch to either the standalone Chat app or the Chat experience within Gmail. As TechCrunch notes, the last version of the messaging service, Hangouts for the web, is now also going away for good.
When users access the Hangouts website, they might see a message that says: "Starting November 1, 2022, Hangouts on the web will redirect to Chat on Web. We recommend moving to Chat now." We can still access the website without being automatically redirected, but there's a link to Google Chat that we can click to load the new messaging experience. The website might completely disappear in the coming days.
Chat used to be one of Google's business offerings before the company switched up its messaging strategy and made it available to everyone. The company says Chat "opens up new and better ways" to collaborate with features that weren't available on Hangouts. Users can edit Docs, Slides or Sheets side-by-side within Chat. Teams at work or groups of friends can also work on documents and manage tasks using Spaces, which is a dedicated place they can use for topic-based collaboration. And since Gmail features Chat integration, people can easily access conversations without having to open the Chat website.
Google previously said that those who want to keep a copy of their Hangouts data will have to use its Takeout tool before the service is gone for good. We still see Hangouts on Takeout, so those who want to do some last-minute data-saving may want to do so now while it's still possible.
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Now's a great time to stock up microSD cards for your phone or console, or new portable drives for all of your most important files. A new sale at Amazon has knocked up to 67 percent off Samsung storage gadgets, including some of our favorites. The latest model in the company's T7 drive series, the T7 Shield, has dropped to a new record low of $90 for the 1TB model, plus you can get Samsung 980 Pro SSD in 1TB for only $120 or a 256GB EVO Select memory-card-plus-adapter set for only $24.
Samsung's T7 family of portable SSDs has been one of our favorites for some time thanks to its generally fast read/write speeds and its pocket-friendly design. All of the T7 drives can easily fit into your back pocket or a stuffed travel bag, making them one of the better options for professionals who travel often and need extra space to store important documents and files. The T7 Shield is the newest addition to the series and, along with being IP65 water- and dust-resistant, it has a more rugged exterior that helps it survive nearly 10-foot drops. When it comes to performance, it supports 1,050/1,000 MB/s read/write speeds and its Dynamic Thermal Guard controls heat to help maintain performance even when you're pushing the drive to its limits.
If you're finally getting around to expanding the storage available on your PS5, Samsung's 980 Pro internal drive is a good option, particularly at this sale price. It supports read speeds up to 7,000 MB/s and it uses a nickel coating to control heat levels for improved efficiency. You will need a heatsink in order to use this drive with the PS5, though, and if you want to keep things simple, you could spring for the $150 bundle that includes one with Samsung's drive.
Any of the microSD cards included in this sale will work well with the Nintendo Switch, smartphones and tablets, cameras and more. We like the 256GB EVO Select model on sale because the discount is pretty solid (it's only $4 more than it was during the Prime Early Access Sale last month) and it comes with a full-sized adapter.
Amazon Prime members can now listen to much more music without any ads — as long as they do so in shuffle mode. They'll have access to Amazon Music's full catalog of more than 100 million songs (50 times more than before) without ads. Prime users can also check out on-demand All-Access playlists that are personalized for their tastes. It's possible to download these for offline listening.
It's not quite as positive a step forward as full ad-free listening, but it's still a change for the better. Amazon still needs to keep some features locked behind an Amazon Music Unlimited subscription, after all. Those include on-demand access to the full catalog, more than 100 million songs in HD quality and an expanding selection of music in the Ultra HD fidelity and spatial audio lineups.
Elsewhere, the Amazon Music app is getting a redesign and a new feature called "podcast previews." You'll be able to listen to curated clips from podcast episodes. These could help you figure out if a show might be for you before listening to a full episode. Amazon offers some podcasts ad-free, including its exclusives, shows that premiere on its servicesbefore they're available elsewhere and other third-party shows, such as ones from The New York Times, ESPN and NPR.
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Meta has spent the GDP of a small country trying to make the metaverse a thing, and now we get to see the latest device designed to take us there. The Meta Quest Pro is a $1,500 flagship VR headset that should offer the best experience Mark Zuckerberg’s money can buy. And our Sam Rutherford has spent plenty of time with one and is full of praise for it.
Rutherford lauded the comfort, the design, the power and pretty much everything else about it, at least on a hardware level. The sting, of course, is that fancy hardware doesn’t mean much if there isn’t compelling software to back it up. And while there are some cool new apps able to take advantage of the Pro’s more muscular performance, it’s still a pretty thin selection.
As someone who would love to spend more time in VR but can’t find a headset that offers the right combination of eye (and neck) comfort, I’m excited to try the Pro. But, like many people, I’ll wait a year or two before investing in one, lest I wind up with a very pretty, very expensive piece of furniture gathering dust on my side table.
A luxury Chromebook has always been a bit of a paradox because Chrome is designed to work on the dirtiest of dirt-cheap hardware. HP’s Elite Dragonfly Chromebook fits the category, however, with a base model costing more than a grand, and our review model topping $1,500. Naturally, our Chromebook expert, Nathan Ingraham, put it through its paces and had plenty of nice things to say about it. Sadly, no matter how nice it is, it’s still 1,000-plus dollars for a Chromebook.
The process isn’t transparent, with a massive accountability gap.
The UK has been playing around with live facial recognition technology (LFR) for several years, but not in a way that’s ethical or legal. That’s the conclusion made by University of Cambridge researchers after analyzing its use by police forces in London and South Wales. The findings, published in a new study, said key information about how data is used has been “kept from view,” leaving unanswered questions around if the technology is used as a cover to justify racial profiling. Not to mention its overall efficacy, which third-party experts say is far lower than the forces themselves like to boast about.
An Instagram bug caused users to receive notices their accounts were suspended without cause. The issue also saw individual follower counts fall, as well as disruptions to the platform’s main image feed. Around eight hours later, Instagram said it had fixed the bug but declined to elaborate on what caused it. It’s the second high-profile service disruption to the image-sharing network in a month, and another sign not all is well inside Meta’s gilded walls.
Including students’ religions, sexual orientations and their parental income ranges.
Education provider Chegg is in the FTC’s sights after it exposed the personal information of more than 40 million users. Officials have filed a complaint accusing the company of treating private data “carelessly.” That included letting employees access databases with a single sign-in, storing data in plain text and using outdated password encryption. Chegg has already responded to the complaint, saying it takes its obligations seriously and will fully comply with the FTC’s order when it’s issued.
Starship's first orbital test flight could finally take place next month. Mark Kirasich, a senior NASA official overseeing the development of the Artemis moon program, has revealed the information during a livestreamed NASA Advisory Council meeting. According to Reuters, Kirasich said that NASA tracks four major Starship flights and that the first one is coming up in early December.
Based on the plans SpaceX previously released, the Starship spacecraft with its Super Heavy booster will launch from the company's Boca Chica facility in Texas. The booster will break off three minutes into the flight and splash down in the Gulf of Mexico, while the Starship vehicle itself will go into orbit before reentering and making an ocean landing near Hawaii. The company expects the entire test flight to last for 90 minutes.
SpaceX has been planning Starship's first orbital flight since mid-2021, but it kept getting pushed back due to various technical and regulatory reasons. The space corporation's launch facility in Boca Chica, for instance, only recently cleared the FAA's environmental assessment. And even then, the FAA required the company to make more than 75 changes to mitigate the environmental impact of its flights before it grants the company a launch license for the site.
An FAA spokesperson told Reuters that the agency will grant the company a launch license "only after SpaceX provides all outstanding information and the agency can fully analyze it." As SpaceNews notes, SpaceX must also conduct and clear more tests before the flight, including a static fire test of all 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster.
A static fire test of the Starship in July ended up in flames when propellants ignited under the booster. SpaceX's next attempt in August went smoothly, but the company only fired a single Raptor engine on the Super Heavy that time. In addition, Starship must go through a full wet dress rehearsal, wherein a rocket that's loaded with propellants go through the launch countdown without actually taking off.
SpaceX will do a lot of test flights of Starship, including an uncrewed landing on the moon, before landing astronauts there, Kirasich says. But the first time it will dock with Orion will be on the Artemis III mission in lunar orbit.
In its latest earnings drop, Sony said it sold 3.3 million PlayStation 5s this quarter, matching exactly what it did last year and bringing total units sold since launch to 25 million. Its numbers this quarter are far short of what it needs to hit the 18 million PS5 sales target for fiscal year 2022, though. Sales halfway through the fiscal year (ending March 31st) are now at 5.7 million, which is also nearly the same as 2021 at this point (5.6 million).
Despite the equal number of PS5s sold, revenue was up significantly over last year (12 percent) to 727 billion yen ($4.92 billion), thanks in part to a PS5 price increase earlier this year. However, profit was down by 49 percent due to the company's recent acquisition of Bungie, along with game developer cost increases.
Sony sold 11.5 million consoles last year, so it's a good bet that 2022 sales will be about the same . However, a lot depends on holiday sales and whether it can keep production up with demand. That's a problem that has plagued the PS5 since it arrived, due to the pandemic and other issues. In May, Sony said that it will finally be able to ramp up production to meet PS5 demand as supply chain issues ease. While it hasn't given any numbers in that regard, anecdotally it appears that the console has been easier to find in recent months.
Meanwhile, software sales fell to 62.5 million units from 76.4 million this time last year. Digital downloads accounted for 63 percent of that, up slightly from last year. PlayStation Plus subscriber numbers declined for the second consecutive quarter.
Sony has revised its revenue projection for next quarter downward to due an expected drop in first-party game sales. However, it's bullish on the next fiscal year, aiming to ship 23 million PS5 units in that time. Interestingly, it also still expects to 18 million units by the end of the fiscal year (March 2023), so it may still have something up its sleeve.
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Twitter became the target of a coordinated trolling campaign shortly after Elon Musk took over the company last week. Yoel Roth, the company's head of safety and security, said that the organized effort was to make people think that Twitter has weakened its policies. Roth also said that the company was working on putting a stop to the campaign that had led to a surge in hate speech and hateful conduct on the website. Now, the executive has tweeted an update to the Twitter's cleanup efforts and said that it has made "measurable progress" since Saturday and has removed over 1,500 accounts involved in the trolling.
Roth explained that those 1,500 accounts didn't correspond to 1,500 people. "Many were repeat bad actors," he tweeted. The executive also said that Twitter's primary success measure for content moderation is impressions — that translates to the times a piece of content is seen by users — and the company was able to reduce impressions on the hateful content that flooded its website to nearly zero.
Our primary success measure for content moderation is impressions: how many times harmful content is seen by our users. The changes we’ve made have almost entirely eliminated impressions on this content in search and elsewhere across Twitter. pic.twitter.com/AnJuIu2CT6
In addition to providing an update about dealing with the recent trolling campaign on Twitter, Roth also talked about how the website is changing how it enforces its policies regarding harmful tweets. He explained that the company treats first person and bystander reports differently: "Because bystanders don’t always have full context, we have a higher bar for bystander reports in order to find a violation." That's why reports by uninvolved third parties about hateful conduct on the platform often get marked as non-violation evens if they do violate its policies.
Roth ended his series of tweets with a promise to reveal more about how the website is changing how it enforces its rules. However, a new Bloomberg report puts into question how Twitter's staff can enforce its policies in the coming days. According to the news organization, Twitter has frozen most employees' access to internal tools used for content moderation.
Apparently, most members of Twitter's Trust and Safety organization have lost the ability to penalize accounts that break rules regarding hateful conduct and misinformation. This event has understandably raised concerns among employees on how Twitter will be able to keep the spread of misinformation in check, when the November 8th US midterm election is just a few days away.
Bloomberg said the restriction placed upon the employes' access to moderation tools is part of a broader plan to freeze Twitter's software code, which will prevent staff members from pushing changes to the website as its changes ownership. The organization also said that Musk asked the Twitter team to review some of its policies, including its rule regarding misinformation that penalizes posts containing falsehoods about politics and COVID-19. Another rule Musk reportedly asked the team to review is a section in Twitter's hateful conduct policy that penalizes posts containing "targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals."
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Earlier this year, Sony PlayStation boss Jim Ryan said that Microsoft's promise to support Call of Duty on PlayStation for three more years was "inadequate on many levels." Now in comments to the gaming podcast SameBrain, Xbox chief Phil Spencer appears to have extended that timeframe to forever, or at least as long as PlayStation exists as a platform.
"We're not taking Call of Duty from PlayStation," he said. "Our intent is not to do that, and as long as there's a PlayStation out there to ship to, our intent is that we'd continue to ship Call of Duty on PlayStation, similar to what we've done with Minecraft since we've owned that.
"We've expanded the places where people can play Minecraft, we haven't reduced the places, and it's been good. It's been good for the Minecraft community—my opinion—and I want to do the same as we think about where Call of Duty can go over the years."
Spencer made the comments just as the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a "Phase 2 investigation" into Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition of Activision. One specific reason cited is concern that Microsoft could restrict Call of Duty from PlayStation consoles. In response, Microsoft accused the UK regulator of specifically adopting Sony's complaints in its initial probe. Despite that, Spencer said Microsoft is confident that the deal will be approved by the end of its fiscal year in June 2023.
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