Author Archives: Ewdison Then

It should have been its crowning glory but OnePlus ended up with egg on its face with the OnePlus 7 Pro. Even if you temporarily ignore what some claim to be subjective assessment of the flagship's cameras, it's impossible to ignore the fact that some users are experiencing hardware problems where there should be none. To its credit, OnePlus is moving fast, perhaps scrambling, to patch up the ship before it sinks and this latest update may have fixed some of the most glaring ones.

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After a period of hype, the VR market seems to have gone a bit quieter. Some might take it as a sign of stagnation but others will most likely argue that it's simply maturing behind the scenes. One sign of that maturity is perhaps the adoption of VR technology and hardware in the potentially more lucrative enterprise market. And that's exactly the market that the HTC Vive Pro Eye is launching to in the US and Canada. For a hefty price, naturally.

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When showing off new graphics tech, you'd usually be treated to glorious photorealistic visuals that hint at the complex calculations that both software and hardware go through. In that context, NVIDIA's decision to use id Software's popular Quake II shooter is an odd one. At the same time, however, it is the perfect example of even an old game like Quake II can feel new and modern with NVIDIA's to new fully path-traced ray-tracing technology.

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People have done crazy things with Microsoft's famous spreadsheet program, like games or artwork, but Excel is still all about numbers, figures, and other quantifiable data. Its use in financial settings is, of course, normal but sometimes the data that you need doesn't come from some static source or formula. When it comes to stocks, users need fresh and up-to-date information, which is why Microsoft is now rolling out a new Stocks data type to pull that from the Interwebs and right into your tables.

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Since the dawn of the market, consoles have not been that friendly to their predecessors. In the beginning, it had more to do with technical limitations and incompatible advancements that made it nearly impossible to support games from older generations. These days, however, it's more about business considerations, partly to push sales of new consoles. The newly-minted PlayStation CEO says he wants to put an end to that practice and offer some compatibility between the current PS4 and its successor. That is if the company and the rest of the industry let him.

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We seem to be a screen-obsessed society these days, be it on phones or on computers. Truth be told, if we could have more screens, we would jump on them without a second thought. Unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, there are only so many screens you can afford and squeeze in a physical location. One solution would be to have an almost infinite number of virtual windows you can place anywhere in virtual space, which is exactly what Microsoft's Mt. Rogers research project is proposing you do.

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It's probably nothing new by now whenever news about this or that malware getting into Google Play Store's automated "bouncer" but few have probably achieved the same mass reach as this one. Called BeiTaAd or BeitaPlugin, the particular strain of adware will perhaps go down in history for having taking great pains to hide its nature from security measures and being found in 238 unique apps. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that those apps were all made by the same Chinese company as well.

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At its WWDC 2019 keynote, Apple made the somewhat surprising revelation of iPadOS along with some features that iOS users have been clamoring for for years. That included mouse support, external USB storage, and, for some, home screen widgets. The latter is something probably few expected will happen but Apple seems to have a lot of surprises in store. Including the almost ironic but unannounced death of macOS' Dashboard feature.

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You'd think that a mobile payment system would be as simple as managing your credit cards or payment options and letting you easily buy stuff over the Internet or on your phone. While that is indeed the core purpose of platforms like Google Pay, it has long outgrown that basic function. Google is now giving developers and users a quick preview of upcoming Google Pay features that will not only make it easier to buy things but even get on your plane.

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Apple takes pride in its strong stance on user privacy but some point out that, at times, it also limits the things Apple's products can potentially do. Siri, for example, is regarded to lag behind Google Assistant or even Amazon Alexa because of what Apple refuses to take from users. That doesn't mean, however, that one of the earliest consumer AI assistants is underpowered and in iOS 13, Apple will be showing what it can do while still respecting the user's privacy.

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Ever since the creation of emojis, humans have found a new way to communicate with each other pictorially. Emojis gave way to stickers and stickers gave way to the rebirth of animated GIFs but all of these formats, while expressive, are too generic to be personal. Then along came Bitmoji, which was snapped up by Snapchat in 2016, giving way to personalized avatars that later gave way to thinks like Animojis and AR Emojis. Now Facebook has finally arrived at the party three years later with Avatar, just in time to convince today's young generation that it's still hip and trendy.

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This week WWDC 2019, Apple unveiled its own and perhaps overdue single sign-on (SSO) service. Sign in with Apple was pretty much seen as the company throwing shade at Google and Facebook over their own SSOs. It seems, however, that Apple is doing more than giving users a more privacy-respecting alternative. It will, in fact, requires some app developers to give users that option if they're already doing Facebook or Google logins anyway.

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