Author Archives: Ewdison Then

Just like the old Nexus line, Google's own Pixel phones are taken as the standard by which all Android phones are to be measured against. Like the old Nexus line, that may be true only for the software part. There is no shortage of complaints about the quality of the Pixel phone's hardware, even up to the latest Pixel 5 but a new and inexplicable issue with a growing number of Pixel phones' cameras may become the biggest mess the phones might face.

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It used to be the case that owners of Samsung's Galaxy phones would have to wait indefinitely before they get any news about updates. The new Samsung, however, has been more religious in pushing out updates, both on high-end as well as mid-range Galaxy A models. In fact, it didn't take too long for Samsung to announce that its One UI 3.1 user experience, which debuted on the Galaxy S21 series last month, is already heading out to last year's Galaxy S20 and Galaxy Note 20 families.

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Depending on who you ask, Windows feature updates are either exciting or stress-inducing, maybe even both. While they bring a fair number of new features and improvements, Microsoft's track record in quality and bugs make each bi-annual release sometimes frightening. Microsoft has been working on improving its process and has even adopted a "tick-tock" cadence but, due to global conditions related to the pandemic, it is delaying making big changes until later this year, making Windows 10 21H1 a smaller "scoped" release.

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There has been a focus on device-to-device file sharing on Android recently, partly due to the revelation about popular app SHAREit's security flaws. The reason third-party apps like this proliferate is that Android itself hasn't had a reliable, long-term file-sharing system across different phone brands. Google has been slowly, very slowly, working on its Android Nearby framework and its latest trick is to let users share not just files between two phones but even apps from Google Play Store.

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DOTA has really come a long way. It started out as a third-party mod for WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne, the popular Defense of the Ancients caught the interest of Valve. No longer tied to Blizzard's property and no longer an acronym, Valve was free to take DOTA 2 places where its predecessor couldn't even dare. That apparently includes an animated series that will be premiering on Netflix next month, an honor the very few games, even bigger ones than DOTA 2, could boast of.

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Although the Pokemon franchise has very passionate and hardcore fans, especially in Pokemon GO, the games themselves are rarely considered to be "hardcore", at least not in the sense of action. Designed for younger audiences from the start, Pokemon's actual turn-based battle system, unlike those in the animated shows, offers more time for thought and planning and not exactly the adrenaline-generating competition that some games have these days. The next Pokemon spin-off, however, will be turning that notion on its head and fans in Canada will be some of the first to experience whatever novelty Pokemon Unite has to offer.

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Wear OS by Google, formerly Android Wear, also by Google, still leaves some things to be desired but no one can deny how it opened up the smartwatch market to more players. While it ironically seems to have pushed away smartphone makers, it invited traditional watchmakers to the party. That includes ones that make super-expensive luxury watches like Hublot who is bringing a Bing Bang e Premier League edition to fans of football or, as it is known in the US and some parts of the world, soccer.

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Last month, LG made a big splash with an almost inexhaustible number of TVs for consumers to choose from this year. From OLED QNED Mini LED, to NanoCell LCD, LG almost has a TV for every size, technology, and need. These TVs are starting to become available around the world this quarter and LG is taking a short breath to remind consumers what makes this generation of smart TVs special.

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Home screen widgets are now a staple on mobile, especially after Apple adopted them for the latest iOS and iPadOS releases. On the desktop, however, it's not exactly a common functionality and they come and go, depending on the version of the operating system. The old OS X, for example, once had dashboard widgets and users on Windows had some third-party software that added those to the desktop. It seems that Microsoft is now considering making widgets a more standard part of the Windows experience and it will be arriving via Microsoft Edge.

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It seems that the next version of Android will be its biggest one yet. An earlier leak showed how Android 12 will make some rather substantial changes to the notification panel and Quick Settings tiles but that was apparently just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of that iceberg is slowly but surely getting exposed, painting a picture of a next-gen Android that could be changing how people use the platform, especially the stock version of Android, practically catching up with what other manufacturers have already been doing for years.

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The iPhone X back in 2017 was the first to fulfill the long-rumored move from LCD screens to OLED panels for Apple's iPhones. OLED technology has a couple of advantages over LCDs but one of the main ones remained unused in iPhones, at least so far. That could change in the iPhone 13, or at least the Pro models, which will employ new display technology that, together with OLED panels, can finally bring some Always-On Display or AOD functionality to iPhones.

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NVIDIA is having one hell of a time meeting the non-stop demand for its latest RTX 30-series graphics cards but it seems that one of its strategies to compensate is to make yet another one. Of course, the affordable NVIDIA RTX 3060 has been rumored for quite a while now so far be it for the world's biggest graphics tech company to bow out because of a supply shortage. It seems that all things are ready to go for the company's cheapest 30-series card and it might be launching as early as next week.

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