Technology news

The first thing you should know: the Huawei Watch 2 isn’t good. The second thing you should know: the Porsche Design Huawei Watch 2 is very pretty. This is the crossroads we find ourselves at.Huawei announced the Porsche Design collaboration back in February, but there was no info on the price or release date. The watch, which has the same internals as the standard Huawei Watch 2 features a stainless steel case, a hybrid strap with red stitching, and custom watchfaces created by Porsche De

Last year I got to check out Sgnl, a wristwatch that subtly vibrates your wrist to send audio through your finger bones and into your ear bones. "Bone conduction," as it's known in the professional literature. It worked, kind of. It wasn’t very loud, and the audio wasn’t as good as a Bluetooth headset. But I could hear stuff, for sure.
Orii is a new Kickstarter (via Engadget) with a similar idea, but it cuts out the middleman: you wear it as a ring on your finger, so the vibration ha

Spoilers ahead for Game of Thrones season 7, episode 2, “Stormborn.”
As Game of Thrones’ “Stormborn” episode came to an end, so did the road for two of the three Dornish women known as the Sand Snakes. Nymeria and Obara Sand, facing off against Hot Euron Greyjoy in an annoyingly blurry combat sequence, were murdered with their own weapons. It was a brutal end for two brutally boring characters.
Game of Thrones introduced the Sand Snakes along with a widely hated plo

A new iOS 11 feature has shown up in the software’s most recent beta release that should be quite helpful for travelers and those who find themselves using a lot of public Wi-Fi. The change, not publicized by Apple but noticed instead by beta users, automatically disables auto-join for Wi-Fi networks with poor connectivity. The auto-join button itself was first added in an earlier version of the iOS 11 beta, and it can be found by tapping on the small blue “i” icon next to any

The Vim text editor is beloved by programmers. It’s ludicrously powerful, and lets you accomplish tasks with greater efficiency than you otherwise would. But boy, is it complicated. So complicated that one of the most popular questions on developer Q&A site Stack Overflow is “How do I exit Vim?“ Most people’s introduction to Vim is a bit of a baptism of fire. You inevitably spend a lot of time looking at reference guides trying figuring out how to do the most basic o

Over the past couple of years, Roombas haven’t just been picking up dust and chauffeuring cats around, they’ve also been mapping the layout of your home. Now, Colin Angle, the chief executive of Roomba maker iRobot, has said he wants to sell the data from these maps in order to improve the future of smart home technology.
In 2015, iRobot introduced the Roomba 980, its first W-Fi-connected model. This meant that while a Roomba was quietly whirring around your floors, it was also colle

Justice League — the DC Extended Universe’s upcoming superhero team-up movie — has spent the last few weeks filming reshoots under the guidance of Joss Whedon (who replaced original director Zack Snyder, who stepped out for personal reasons).Variety has a new report out today detailing some of the struggles the months-long reshoot process is experiencing. Whedon is said to be working on “connective tissue” to link Snyder’s already filmed set pieces, and schedu

Last week, Der Spiegel published an explosive report alleging that the major German automakers formed a secret cartel in the 1990s to collude on diesel emissions. These companies, including Volkswagen, Audi, BMW, Porsche, and Daimler, met in secret working groups to discuss “the technology, costs, suppliers, and even the exhaust gas purification of its diesel vehicles,” the German weekly reported. The meetings were disclosed to German competition officials in letters from VW and Daim

Alphabet just reported its second quarter earnings for 2017, and the numbers were as expected. The advertising business built around Google, Android, and YouTube continues to account for the vast majority of the revenue and all the profit. The company, despite its massive size, continues to grow revenue at a double-digit rate on a year-over-year basis. And while it’s true that profit was down a bit this quarter, that’s only on account of a one-time, $2.7 billion fine levied by regula

Buried in the settings of Chrome OS has been an option to use an “OK, Google” prompt to start a verbal Google search. But according to a report from Chrome Unboxed, Google is deprecating that feature in an upcoming version of Chrome OS.The news gels with speculation (also from Chrome Unboxed) that Google is working on adding its digital assistant to its desktop operating system, including a rumored “Chromebook Eve” model that could have a dedicated Assistant key.Removing

Android O is nearing completion. Google today announced the final version of its next mobile OS is now available for developers to try, and the public version is nearly ready. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of new features in this release. We’ll keep an eye out, but this release mainly seems to be a more stable version of past releases. Not to say that’s a bad thing; there are plenty of new features introduce in previous builds of Android O. One would

Mercedes-Benz will compete in Formula E, the all-electric racing series, starting in 2019. The news was announced today after months of speculation over whether the German automaker would exercise an option it had purchased to join the series back in October.Despite that uncertainty, joining Formula E seemed like a relatively sure bet for Mercedes-Benz. Formula E is a cost-controlled series, and Mercedes-Benz has a wide presence in motorsports. The company is heavily invested in electric vehicle

Travelers leaving San Diego Comic-Con on United Airlines got an unwelcome surprise this weekend, when United said that comic books were banned in checked luggage. United claimed this was a TSA-mandated rule for all airlines operating out of San Diego — only to have the TSA publicly refute United’s claim on Twitter.
As The Consumerist reported yesterday, United posted a notice telling “Comic-Con attendees [to] remove all books from checked bags.” When people complained on

Alright, so it’s pretty bold to come straight out of the gate, claiming that you’re going to read about seven unbelievable industries, but I’m going to deliver. After you finish this article, you’ll be more familiar with a few of America’s most unusual industries. You’ll also walk away understanding that, although unusual, these industries are practically goldmines. Their services and products may be strange, but they’re money-making machines that fill

Raise your hand if you thought the hardest part about hiring a new employee would be actually posting the job online. Nobody? Thought not. The issue of creating an appealing job description is one that few anticipate but all inevitably encounter. The quality of applications you receive comes as a direct result of the quality of the post. If your job description piques the interest of the bright and talented, you’ll receive applications from the bright and talented. If your job description

Alright, Google. We need to have a serious talk. For months, the greater technology community has been waiting on tenterhooks to find out the name of Android O. Will it be Oreo? Oatmeal Cookie? Orange Sorbet? Some other “O” dessert?
But now, you’ve gone and stuck this image in the Easter egg section of the latest Android O developer preview, replacing the original placeholder Easter egg that traditionally has been there to keep the real name of the OS a secret. This is clearly

The internet discovered today that Microsoft Paint might be removed in an upcoming Windows Update, and newshounds everywhere rushed to open their copies of the program to create ironic images. I’ll never pass up a chance to let my inner art snob out to play, so here’s a quick review of my favorite Paint Memorials the internet news have to offer. The Fader RIP MS Paint. RIP our childhoods pic.twitter.com/UpNYEDe4cA — Ramsha (@Economistaken) July 24, 2017 The Fader used an image

The official release of Android O must be getting close, as Google has just pushed out the latest version of its public beta — and it’s performing reliably enough to be considered a release candidate. Android O, which will be version 8.0 of the mobile operating system, doesn’t contain a ton of major new features for users. But there are a handful. They include notification channels and dots on app icons to alert you of notifications, picture-in-picture video playback, a streaml

Contemporary car design is art, science, and technology. To parse through the marketing hype and sensory overload, I focus on fine bits of automotive design, to find just one thing that makes a vehicle look extraordinary.
It’s no small feat to make a typical flat-faced sport utility vehicle look fantastic. That’s what makes the Jaguar F-Pace a standout crossover. The brand helmed by design director Ian Callum — the person responsible for the original Aston Martin DB7, the Jagua

The Moon has more water than previously thought, and it’s deep below the lunar surface. A new study suggests that water is widespread beyond the poles, where it was already known to exist, although scientists don’t know exactly how much water is there. The discovery has consequences for future missions to the Moon.
Scientists analyzed lunar rock samples that contain tiny, water-trapping beads of glass; these beads formed when magma erupted from the Moon’s interior billions of y

 Funny or Die is launching an all-new miniseries, The Real Stephen Blatt, which will be streamed exclusively on Amazon Prime video. Though some Funny or Die content is currently available on Amazon Prime, such as The Very Best of Will Ferrell, The Very Best of James Franco, Drunk History, and Between Two Ferns, The Real Stephen Blatt marks the first Funny or Die content to stream exclusively… Read More

Sundar Pichai has another job to do: serve on the board of directors for Alphabet, the parent company for Google. Pichai has been the CEO of Google since the creation of Alphabet in October 2015 — a move that split out a bunch of somewhat random businesses into quasi-independent companies separate from Google proper.Since then, things have gone well at Google under Pichai’s leadership while things at Alphabet have been a bit more rocky. Some of those bumps can be attributed to the wh

Back in January, when Asus announced its upcoming home mesh Wi-Fi system (then called "HiveSpot"), the market was already flooded. Now the HiveSpot has been renamed to Lyra, but it's mid-2017 and there are seven aisles in every Best Buy dedicated to mesh Wi-Fi routers. What could Asus possibly add to this conversation?
Lyra is a three-pack of tri-band 802.11ac mesh routers with max speeds of 2134Mbps. The routers also include something called "AiProtection" for security (with no recurring fee),

I’m going to address something right now, and then we’re not going to talk about it again for the rest of our lives: it is strange to watch the men tasked with writing Game of Thrones attempt to write intimacy that is not twisted in some way. And so this week’s sex scene between Grey Worm and Missandei was both touching and embarrassing. Grey Worm comparing the feeling of being in love with Missandei with a child’s fear of snakes or the ocean was a clumsy rhetorical choic

As my gang of adventurers made their way through the desolate landscape, the ragtag group — comprised of a human, a towering demon, a swamp witch, and an armor-clad wyrm — made camp at a small, moonlit grove. There they spent the night preparing for the challenge ahead. Each member had spent time, in some cases years, toiling away in this wasteland, banished from the comparatively luxurious world above. Now it was time to perform a sacred rite, which, if successful, would send one of

 Today’s kids aren’t just reading books. They’re also tapping and playing with interactive stories on tablets as preschoolers, then delving into instant messaging-like chat fiction apps as teens. Amazon’s entry in this space, Amazon Rapids, was announced late last year as a way to bring this style of interactive fiction to readers in the 5 to 12 age range. The company… Read More

NASA is postponing the launch of one of its communications satellites after an antenna on the vehicle was somehow damaged during mission preparations over a week ago. That satellite is the TDRS-M, for Tracking and Data Relay Satellite, and it was scheduled to launch on August 3rd from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on top of an Atlas V rocket made by the United Launch Alliance. But now, NASA, ULA, and Boeing — the manufacturer of the satellite — are trying to figure out a new time to launc

Another year of San Diego Comic-Con is now in the books, and it brought everything you’d expect from a four-day celebration of geek culture. There were costumes, announcements, and incredible new trailers; there were exciting immersive experiences, and authors blending the worlds of film and gaming.It was a lot to take in. So as we say goodbye and make our way home, we’re taking a brief look back. Here are our favorite things from the 2017 San Diego Comic-Con International.Photo by B