Technology news

The Palm phone is not a good phone. It is not a good replacement of a phone. But it is now a phone to join an incredible rare club: it now has a $59.95 Mophie Juice Pack battery case, making it the only device to get a custom case from the accessory company other than an Apple or Samsung phone.I cannot, for the life of me, understand why Mophie would take the time and effort to make such a device
Now I get why someone who actually bought a Palm phone would want a Mophie case for a Palm phone &m

Niantic today released the first gameplay footage for its upcoming mobile game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, finally giving players some idea of what its AR wizardry would look like. But does it actually look like a Harry Potter game? Wanna feel old? It’s been 22 years since Bloomsbury published the first Harry Potter book and brought our favorite magical schoolboy to the world’s attention. There’s both a whole generation of adults who grew up alongside him, and another wh

Amazon will no longer require third-party sellers to price their products on Amazon lower than they price them anywhere else. It quietly eliminated a clause in its contracts today that critics have called anti-competitive.
Price parity agreements, or most-favored nations clauses (MFNs), were formerly used by Amazon in contracts with third-party sellers to ensure that people selling products on the platform did not sell the same products for cheaper on any other platform like eBay or Alibaba.
Am

The overwhelming value prospect of cheap 1080p TVs has resulted in a drought of decent computer monitors in my home. My primary screen doesn’t even have HDR. Since moderation isn’t my thing, the biggest over-correction I could think of was to add a huge, curved Alienware AW3418DW. Alienware‘s 34-inch curved gaming monitor is an elegant chunk of technology, but we’ll need to lay down some specs before we go any further. Specifications: Screen: 34-inch Ultrawide (21:9 aspe

Comedian John Oliver is fed up with robocalls and the Federal Communications Commission not doing enough about them — so he’s sent robocalls after the FCC in revenge.Oliver announced on HBO’s Last Week Tonight yesterday that he’s going to send robocalls to the five FCC commissioners — Ajit Pai, Michael O’Rielly, Brendan Carr, Jessica Rosenworcel, and Geoffrey Starks — every 90 minutes to hopefully annoy the FCC into taking action. Oliver notes that it o

The World Wide Web is 30 years old tomorrow. A day earlier, its founder, English engineer and computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee, first proposed the system that would become the WWW on March 11th, 1989. To acknowledge the anniversary, he’s revisited his ideas about the internet in a new letter published today.
Berners-Lee admits that the internet now has a lot of problems. Users are plagued by online harassment, state-sponsored hacks, and other criminal behavior. Ad-based revenue models r

One of the biggest things that could have redeemed the RED Hydrogen One was the promise of additional modules that would attach to the back and offer expanded experiences for using the phone. The modules were originally promised for a release later in 2019, but the company seems to have quietly updated its website to strike all mention of the modules, (as spotted by Reddit user u/ReipasTietokonePoju).RED hasn’t formally confirmed that it is actually canceling the modules for the Hydrogen

Talk of regulating Silicon Valley has dominated this year’s SXSW festival in Austin, with Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) pledge to break up Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook becoming a topic of conversation in almost every high-profile, tech-focused panel here.A sit-down with Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger this afternoon was no exception. The entrepreneurs sold their company to Facebook, worked there for years, then abruptly left last September amid reported

Following its arrival in a beta release over the weekend, the workplace chat app Slack has released a dark mode feature in the latest app update for iOS and Android, which should be rolling out now.Toggling the setting will switch the app’s default white background to black. Regardless of your reason for wanting a dark mode in Slack (it’s easier on the eyes, it can help to save battery life, and really, it just looks good and you fervently want every app you use to adopt it), people

The president’s budget request for NASA maintains the administration’s focus on sending astronauts back to the Moon within the next decade, and it gives the space agency $21 billion for fiscal year 2020. But while that top-line budget is a slight increase from what the president requested for NASA last year, it’s ultimately a decrease from the $21.5 billion the agency actually received in 2019.Despite that, NASA is touting the request as good for the agency, claiming it’

For years, ketamine clinics across the country have offered intravenous infusions as a fast-acting treatment for severe depression. But last week, the US Food and Drug Administration approved a version of ketamine, called esketamine, to do the same thing — so what’s the difference and what will this mean for newly interested patients?Ketamine, sometimes known as the party drug Special K, is a compound made of two mirror-image molecules. It has long been approved as an anesthetic, is

Apple has officially confirmed that it will hold an event on March 25th where it’s is expected to announce its long-rumored TV streaming and Apple News subscription services.As usual, the invitation doesn’t have much to go by, but the animated countdown GIF and “It’s show time” tag seem to hint that the new TV service will play a big role. Rumors of an event at the end of March began last month, saying that the company will reportedly focus exclusively on services.

In one of the most explicit demands yet sent to an ally over Huawei, the United States government has told Germany to drop the Chinese company from its future plans or risk losing access to some US intelligence, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Huawei has faced accusations from the US that it could be used by the Chinese government for espionage. The company has repeatedly denied that it would act on behalf of China, and pointed out that the US government has not publicly produced any evidence

A doctor speaking through a telepresence robot in California gave a dying patient and his family devastating medical news, raising questions about when the convenience of telemedicine should be skipped in favor of a face-to-face conversation.According to KTVU, Ernest Quintana was in the intensive care unit of the Kaiser Permanente Medical Center in Fremont, California, when a doctor on a video screen told Quintana that he wasn’t likely to survive. “We knew that this was coming and t

Huawei recently published some image samples as part of a teaser campaign for the upcoming P30 Pro’s camera — but it turns out they were shot on a DSLR, as spotted by GSMArena. This isn’t the first time that Huawei has faked its phone camera results — the last time it happened was in August 2018 for a Huawei Nova 3 commercial.The P30 Pro’s camera includes purported specs that sound interesting on paper, including four cameras, a periscope lens (similar to what Oppo

As YouTube tries to crack down on conspiracy theories, some of its biggest creators are using them to bring in views and ad revenue.
Logan Paul released a trailer today for a documentary-style video that goes inside a flat Earther convention, which ends with Paul stating, “I think I’m coming out of the flat Earth closet.” The video arrives just over a month after Shane Dawson, another of YouTube’s largest creators, released a two-part, three-plus hour series exploring a

DirecTV Now is gearing up for a price hike that will see customers pay an additional $10 per month, but receive an HBO subscription in return.AT&T is restructuring the current packages that DirecTV Now subscribers have access to, and replacing them with two new options, according to Cord Cutter News. The first package, DirecTV Now Plus, will offer more than 40 channels, including HBO, for $50 per month. The second package, DirecTV Now Max, boasts more than 50 channels (also including HBO) f

In news that made us go “That’s still around? Huh,” Adobe announced that Shockwave will be discontinued, and the Shockwave player for Windows will no longer be available to download starting on April 9th. Adobe cited declining Shockwave usage for the shutdown, as interactive content has moved to platforms like HTML5 Canvas and WebGL in recent years. Enterprise customers will still be able to use Shockwave until their contract runs out in 2022. Everyone else, say your goodbyes

With over one billion monthly active users, Instagram stands as one of the most influential social media networks in the world. It’s only natural that brands would desire to have a strong presence on the site as well. In fact, according to Instagram’s own internal data, over 80 percent of users follow at least one business online. Whether it’s a major corporation or a small startup, it’s clear that businesses are able to garner high levels of interaction and engagement w

The Apple Watch Series 3 is back down to $199 for the 38mm model with GPS connectivity. This matches the lowest price that we’ve seen for Apple’s third-gen smartwatch, but if you’re looking for more savings (and are itching to leave your phone at home while you go out for a jog), the GPS-equipped and LTE-ready version starts at $259 at B&H Photo, while Best Buy and Amazon have it starting at $299 in case B&H sells out.
It’s March 11th, which means that Nintendo&r

Unmind, a U.K.-based startup that offers a mental health platform for the workplace, has raised £3 million in new funding. The round is led by London-based venture capital firm Felix Capital, with co-investment from Michael Whitfield and Chris Bruce, the founders of Thomsons Online Benefits.
Founded in 2016, Unmindis a B2B service that provides “clinically backed” tools, training and assessments for company employees in a bid to improve workplace mental health. The digital plat

As the blockchain sector evolves, it’s important for policy makers and industry to co-create standards to make multi-layered, interoperable chains a reality. That’s one of the recommendations made by The EU Blockchain Observatory & Forum – a European Commission initiative tasked with accelerating blockchain innovation and development – in its latest report, which identifies scalability interoperability, and sustainability as the main challenges facing the indust

Welcome to CHEAP, our brand-new series about things that are good, but most of all, cheap. CHEAP! You can’t talk about the Kindle without wading into an e-reader vs. normal book debate. And, well, I’m here to solve that once and for all. Are you ready? Good. Both e-readers and normal books are wonderful. If you consider yourself a novel fanatic, you should have both. Each have their benefits and each have their downsides. There, problem solved. Now that’s out of the way, if yo

Tidal’s “Master” quality recordings, which are the streaming service’s hi-res MQA music tracks, are now available to listeners via its iOS app. The announcement follows the launch of the feature on Android phones back in January. Master quality audio first became available to Tidal’s desktop listeners back in 2017.Hi-res audio — which is defined as anything with a higher bitrate or sampling frequency than the 16-bit / 44.1kHz standard used by CDs — is a

Nearly one and a half years ago when Alyssa Milano asked women to click MeToo on their social media platforms, the #MeToo movement was born. Since then millions of women have indicated through social media that they too have been victims of sexual harassment or assault. The power of this movement has been its ability to show the world how pervasive sexual harassment is. And it’s had an effect on perpetrators. In the film industry producers and actors such as Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey

For Niantic Labs’ next trick, the augmented reality game studio is diving head-first into another knotty fandom, the world of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter, with scores of dedicated fans, a rich history of lore to explore, and untold storylines to tell.But this time, boiling down a massive fictional world into an easy-to-understand AR video game seems to have been a much more difficult task. That’s because Harry Potter: Wizards Unite is not very simple. In fact, it’s got n

Authorities have sentenced three criminals for robbing a group of Chinese businessmen in Dubai. The crooks stole over $250,000 (Dh1 million) from four businessmen after luring them to an apartment in Al Rafaa, Dubai at the end of March, local news reports. The businessmen were hooked by a Facebook post offering cryptocurrency for sale. The attackers showed proof they owned Bitcoin to the victims, after which accomplices of the attackers, dressed like police officers, raided the apartment and ti

The Apple Watch Series 3 isn’t the latest model, but it’s a good place to start if you’ve been looking for an affordable wearable for your iPhone that has a lot of features. Best Buy’s deal starts at $199 for the 38mm model with GPS capabilities. This matches the best price that we’ve seen, and while it pops up about every month or so, it usually sells out.According to my colleague Dan Seifert’s review of the non-LTE model, “It’s fast, has by far

Boeing’s newest 737 airplane has been grounded in China, Indonesia, and Ethiopia after anEthiopian Airlines crash killed 157 people on Sunday. It’s the second deadly crash involving a Boeing 737 Max 8 in the past five months; in October, a 737 Max 8 operated by budget airline Lion Air crashed shortly after takeoff, killing 189 people.Sunday’s crash took place just after takeoff as well, prompting worries that the two Max 8 failures could be related. Officials haven’t lin

HQ Trivia made “quiz-tory” this week when it hosted its first live, in-person game with a $10,000 prize. Host Scott Rogowsky flew into Austin, Texas, to host the show (donned in a full HQ-branded suit) at Comcast NBCUniversal’s SXSW pop-up. Prior to the start, HQ projected a one-time link to the live show on a screen, which audience members had to load in order to compete. I thought they’d bring contestants onstage to make it more of a live experience; instead, everyone