Technology news

Samsung is releasing unlocked models of its Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus smartphones, according to a Best Buy listing that the retailer has confirmed to The Verge as accurate. Preorders begin May 9th, strongly hinting at an earlier release date than unlocked versions of Galaxy S flagships have typically seen in recent years. With the S7 and S7 Edge, the unlocked models weren’t released until June — three months after the devices first launched at US carriers.Both unlocked phones should be f

Uber released an enlightening list of items left to die in its drivers’ vehicles, which is dubbed The Uber Lost & Found Index. The most common lost items spell out a disaster of a Friday night, with stuff like phones, keys, wallets, IDs, chargers, and purses. And then there’s the real good stuff people have left behind, from their meat packets to their poor unloved “Nintendos.”
Is this you? Did you forget your:Valuable Nordic walking poles
Paintings
Lobster
Sweet pota

Lyft Shuttle is the ride-hailing industry’s latest product to mimic the fixed routes and flat fares of a city bus service. The new feature, which is being tested out in San Francisco and Chicago, is an extension of Lyft’s carpool service, Lyft Line.
But rather than arriving directly at your door and then dropping you off at your exact location, the driver operates along a fixed route, with predetermined pick-up and drop-off locations. So people using the service may save a little mon

For months, one of the firmest bases of Trump support online has been the /r/the_donald community on Reddit, a sometimes-embattled community drawn together to cheer on Donald Trump first as a candidate, and now as president. But withthe Trump administration making its first moves to roll back FCC privacy restrictions on internet service providers, some in that community are having second thoughts.
“How does this help Americans, ‘the forgotten man?,’” one user asked in a r

Today, the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology held a heated hearing on the “assumptions, policy implications, and the scientific method” of climate science. In fact, the hearing was just an excuse to pretend there’s uncertainty within the scientific community on whether human-made climate change is real.Four witnesses were asked to testify before the committee; only one of them — Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University — agreed with

Just when I thought that great design was fading as a big point of differentiation among smartphones, Samsung has triumphantly proven me wrong with its new Galaxy S8. This phone, which I’d already seen from every conceivable angle courtesy of two solid months of leaked photos, wowed me today. Holding it in my hands for the first time, I suddenly shed all of my jadedness and cynicism, and I just felt happy that it existed. Yes, first impressions are fleeting and often misleading, but I don&

Buried in the spec sheet for Samsung’s new Galaxy S8 and S8 Plus phones is a wonderful bit of information: the new phones will be the first on the market with Bluetooth 5.0. The new wireless protocol should offer some great benefits over the latest standard, Bluetooth 4.2, which was released in December 2014.The most immediate gains will be in audio, speed, and range. Bluetooth 5.0 offers twice the speed and four times the range as Bluetooth 4.2, meaning you’ll be able to maintain co

Amazon has approved two motorsports TV shows for its Prime Video platform, one following the McLaren Formula One team across the 2017 season, and the other covering the 2017 24 Hours of Le Mans race in June.
Le Mans: Racing is Everything was greenlit last month by Amazon and will receive what Amazon calls “unprecedented access” to the entire 24-hour race later this year. Film crews will embed with the Porsche, Nissan, Toyota, Aston Martin, and Rebellion teams, and will follow a numbe

The 1982 Tears for Fears song “Mad World” is not exactly cheery, lyrics-wise, but production-wise it’s kind of a bop. It’s a fun song, with a catchy beat — yet if you think of “Mad World” you probably think of a dreary little drudgefest of a tune and Patrick Swayze crying alone.That is thanks to the 2001 film Donnie Darko, which is back in theaters this week for a 15th anniversary 4K re-release (thank goodness!). The famous final scene of Donnie Darko fe

Microsoft is rolling out major improvements to its Xbox One console today, and that includes a new way to share your gameplay live on the company’s video service.
Xbox One’s “Creators” update is leaving beta and bringing a number of upgrades to everyone who owns the console. This patch speeds up the system’s interface, introduces the new Guide user experience, and incorporates Beam livestreaming for the console — the Windows 10 version of the Creator

At its Unpacked 2017 event today, Samsung announced the Galaxy S8 and the Galaxy S8+, successors to the Galaxy S7 and Galaxy S7 edge, respectively. After months of leaks, Samsung’s eighth-generation phones are now official.
Preorders begin March 30, and the devices will begin shipping April 21. Before you get your credit card ready, you might want to see exactly what you’re buying. The comparison tables below show you what Samsung has changed, comparing the Galaxy S7 to the Galaxy S8

In this week’s episode, Travis and Stewart talk about a new AI-powered startup that measures viewers’ emotions as they watch YouTube videos, and they discuss the latest in social media advertising, including how important video has become.
Which provides a nice segue, since they also get to interview Michael Stelzner, founder and CEO of Social Media Examiner, during the week of his company’s Social Media Marketing World. We talk with Michael about all things social, mobile, and

Google Calendar has been available on iOS since 2015, but until now it has only been optimized for the smaller-screened real estate of the iPhone. Now, however, it’s been turbo-charged for iPads too.
The app is pretty much the same version that already existed on the App Store, with users able to use Spotlight Search to find items from the iPad home screen. They can also switch views between days, weeks, and months, and create new events with Google suggesting titles and pla

With The Walking Dead getting long in the rotting tooth, World War Z 2 indefinitely delayed, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter theoretically closing out its long-running franchise, and no more zombie blockbusters on the immediate horizon, it feels like zombies are slowly lurching out of the cultural zeitgeist. Like vampires before them, they’ve peaked and faded from the mainstream back into the horror canon, allowing another type of killer to have its moment in the spotlight. Recently, a ne

Samsung’s shift to on-screen buttons has resulted in a beautiful bit of customization for longtime Android users: the ability to change the layout of those buttons. Yes, you’re now able to move the back button to the left side of the phone, which is where it’s supposed to be despite years of Samsung stubbornly switching up the default Android layout.
As confirmed in this video from “Mr. Mobile” Michael Fisher, there’s a settings menu in the S8 that lets you re

Samsung’s much-anticipated “Unpacked 2017” event came and went today, and it was little surprise that the Korean tech titan finally unveiled the latest version in its flagship Galaxy smartphone series.
But Samsung used the event to debut a number of other new products from the hardware and software realm. Here’s a quick recap of everything Samsung announced.
First, the hardware.
Samsung Galaxy S8 / S8+
Above: The Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ have a headphone jack and US

Tesla has updated its Autopilot software, bringing more advanced semi-autonomous driving capabilities to Tesla vehicles built since October 2016. That’s when Tesla began including a more advanced sensor-suite in its Model S and Model X vehicles. Though while the hardware is more advanced, it’s taken Tesla’s engineers a few months to slowly roll out the capabilities of the companion software.The end result was that buyers of new Tesla cars had vehicles with fewer features than o

Disney just shared a new, unreleased Pixar short on YouTube called Dante’s Lunch... A Short Tail. The story is set in the same universe as Pixar’s upcoming original movie, Coco — Pixar’s only film currently slated that’s not a sequel.First spotted by journalist Brendon Connelly, Dante’s Lunch is just a brief, wild tour through Coco’s world, led by a dog (presumably Dante) chasing a bone. It’s likely an attempt to ramp up interest in Coco, although

Storyhunter has raised $1.3 million to a global marketplace to match video journalists with news organizations and brands.
New York-based Storyhunter has created a talent marketplace that is already being used by 20,000 video producers and journalists in 180 countries. The company has now raised $4.2 million to date.
Storyhunter transitioned from a production studio to an open platform for media production, and now it has four of the five largest news organizations and two of the

Google Calendar’s iPhone app is not the most innovative calendar app on the iPhone by any stretch of the imagination. It’s simple, straightforward, and relatively easy to use. But for people who use GSuite or advanced features in Google Calendar like booking rooms or “find a time,” it’s often the best option.
Until they switch to their iPad, that is, and they’re faced with a garish, blown-up phone version of the app.That changes today, as Google is finally rol

Samsung just concluded its Unpacked event and it was light on virtual reality news, but the company is making up for it with a Gear VR ad that’s... quite odd. If you can’t or don’t want to watch the video above, the joke is that an ostrich (which, you may recall, is a flightless bird) puts on a Gear VR headset and launches a flight simulator inside it, after which said ostrich is literally able (I think?) to begin soaring above its bemused companions. “We make what can&rs

Hopefully the internet has not yet tired of watching celebrities do things in cars.
A spinoff of James Corden’s late-night phenomenon Carpool Karaoke will soon debut on Apple Music. Netflix recently acquired Jerry Seinfeld’s series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. And now Spotify is aiming for some viral views with its own take on the automobile theme: Traffic Jams, a new original series coming out next month.
On Traffic Jams, a rapper and a producer will climb into the back seat of

Overwatch’s popular loot system is coming to another Blizzard game.
Today, the publisher announced Heroes of the Storm 2.0, an update coming to its PC multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) on April 25. This will change the way players unlock cosmetic items, adopting a system similar to Blizzard’s Overwatch. That team-based shooter has become a big hit for Blizzard since launching last year, and now the developer is hoping that putting some of its ideas into Heroes of the Storm

The review embargo has lifted, at last, so I can tell you that, yes, Persona 5 continues the 2017 trend of fantastic video games. I can also vent about the role-playing game’s most maddening design quirk, a mistake that I think could prevent it from reaching as broad an audience as it deserves. Persona 5 — a game largely about the overlap of the real and digital worlds —blocks players from sharing their experiences online by restricting the PlayStation 4’s screen capture,

Smartwatches are having a rough time. No matter what your chosen platform, sales are mostly down, hardware is mostly bulky, software is mostly slow, and battery life is mostly poor. The industry in general seems to be pivoting towards a slew of similar Android Wear watches where the main difference is in what fashion brand logo they bear.
But yet, there are still dreamers like the folks behind the Dagadam Watch, which is looking for backing on Kickstarter. Now, there’s nothing wrong with t

Valve’s PC game store is making room for an experience most know for it mobile success.
Bethesda announced today that its free-to-play Fallout Shelter is now available on PC’s biggest digital game store, Steam. Fallout Shelter debuted for iOS and Android in 2005, with a PC version following in 2016. The game has over 75 million lifetime players worldwide, according to Bethesda.
Bethesda also released a new update for Fallout Shelter on all its platforms, adding 30 new quests and

Twitter is launching several updates today relating to Periscope that not only improve discovery of broadcasts, but provide additional insights into who’s actually watching them. Starting today, live videos can be watched within Moments, offering users more ways to tell a story about a particular event.
To provide broadcasters with more details about viewership and engagement, Twitter is rolling out a new dashboard and activity tab with enhanced analytics beyond what average users have.
Tw

Limitless specializes in tools that make it easy to create animated characters and stories in virtual reality. And that work is paying off today through a partnership with High Fidelity, a virtual reality world creation platform founded by the creator of Second Life, Philip Rosedale.
Bellevue, Wash.-based Limitless has created a platform that makes it easy to craft interactive characters who respond to human voice, gestures, and social cues inside VR. And High Fidelity is creating a place w

Facebook has begun rolling out access to its feature that lets you livestream in 360 degrees. Initially made available in December to Page administrators through the Live API, it’s now more broadly accessible to everyone. In addition, the 360-degree livestream feature now supports the Samsung Gear 360 (which was also announced today), the Giroptic IO, Insta360, ALLie Camera, Z Cam S1, and Nokia Ozo cameras.
Many people are accustomed to Facebook Live as a means of inviting people

When it comes to smartphones, Samsung’s Galaxy S series has been viewed as being more for consumers, while the company’s Note brand appealed to those interested in productivity. So following the termination of the Note7, one of the questions has been whether the Galaxy S8 would step in to fill the void. While the company has integrated many of the Note7’s best features into the S8, the S Pen is noticeably absent. But those looking for more productivity features should rejoice,

In the world of artificial intelligent assistants, you’re perhaps most familiar with Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and Amazon Alexa. Samsung wants to be counted in that list and today formally introduced Bixby, a service designed to simplify your life and help manage your connected devices. News of the AI assistant had been previously released, but here’s our first look at what Bixby can do.
“It’s really about leveraging intelligence that’s not only intuitive, bu

More than a year after introducing its 360-degree camera, Samsung is updating it so it’s “cuter” and meets the needs of creators. The latest incarnation now has a slimmer design that makes it look like a miniature Kuri robot, an improved camera that can now record 4K video, iOS support, and livestreaming capability through YouTube.
Samsung has not released pricing for its next-generation Gear 360 camera nor when it’ll go on sale, but it’s possible that the device co

It’s no secret that Samsung is heavily invested in the connected home space, and the company’s purchase of SmartThings in 2014 plays a big part in its strategy. On the same day that Samsung introduced the Galaxy S8 and S8+ to the world, it also unveiled the Connect Home, a Wi-Fi mesh router to compete against Eero, Google, and Luma. The expectation is that this device will be the module in the home to manage not only Samsung’s line of connected devices, but all those third-part

After months of leaks, Samsung has officially unveiled its newest set of flagship phones, the Galaxy S8 and S8+, confirming what VentureBeat previously reported. Coming more than a year after their predecessor was introduced, the new devices are designed to provide more screen real estate, while still fitting comfortable in the palm of your hand, and enhance productivity through Samsung’s Bixby intelligent assistant.
Samsung is accepting preorders for the Galaxy S8 and S8+ premiu

Samsung launched a virtual reality controller today for its Gear VR mobile headset to go with the new Samsung Galaxy S8 smartphone also introduced today.
The Gear VR controller sells for $39, or for $130 when bundled with the Gear VR headset. It hits retail stores on April 21. The controller has buttons, a touch pad for your thumb, and a trigger. I tried the controller out on a recent visit to the Oculus building at Facebook’s campus.
I used the controller to navigate through the Oculus Ho