Microsoft has unveiled Project Solara, a chip-to-cloud platform designed to power a new generation of "agent-first" enterprise devices — hardware designed to run AI agents instead of traditional apps. Announced at the Microsoft Build 2026 Developer Conference on the 2nd of June, the platform, developed by Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group, features a lightweight edge OS called the Microsoft Device Ecosystem Platform (MDEP). Interestingly, the OS is built on the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) rather than Windows.

MDEP is paired with Azure-hosted agent services and persistent cloud-based state, meaning devices act as interfaces to AI agents running across Microsoft's cloud infrastructure rather than as fully self-contained computers. Together, the software stack forms what Microsoft describes as a chip-to-cloud architecture for enterprise AI devices, combining cloud-hosted agents with centralized security, management, and orchestration capabilities.

"The 'operating system' is liminal, transcending the device and the cloud. The system brings a lightweight window to the edge, where the agent manifests and where the state, via Azure, can encompass a constellation of specialized devices,” explained Steven Bathiche, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President and Technical Fellow in the Applied Sciences Group.

To populate that ecosystem with hardware, Microsoft has partnered with Qualcomm and MediaTek as its first silicon partners — Qualcomm for portable and wearable form factors and MediaTek for stationary devices. The company has no plans to manufacture end products itself. Instead, the company is releasing reference designs for OEMs to build from, alongside an "approved chipsets" requirement that gives Microsoft certification-level control over which hardware qualifies for the platform, similar to Google's GMS certification model for Android.

To demonstrate Solara, Microsoft unveiled two concept reference designs built on the platform. A stationary desk-mounted AI hub built around MediaTek IoT silicon and a wearable AI badge powered by Qualcomm hardware. The desktop companion features a display, a camera, a UWB (ultra-wideband) presence sensor that handles automatic login and lock, dual far-field mics, and two USB-C ports. Connected to an external display, the device can double as a Windows 365 cloud PC client.

Meanwhile, the wearable badge is equipped with a touchscreen, Hello for Business fingerprint sensor, far-field high-SNR microphone array, side-facing camera, and 5G, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GNSS connectivity — targeting front-line workers such as nurses, retail staff, and field workers. Microsoft confirmed that both devices are intended as reference designs for OEM partners rather than retail products.

Central to the platform is what Microsoft calls just-in-time UI — an adaptive interface layer that allows a single agent to render appropriately across different screen sizes and input modalities without requiring developers to rebuild the experience for each device. Microsoft positions this on a spectrum between conventional responsive design and fully generative UI, where AI constructs interfaces dynamically with no predefined structure; Solara currently targets the middle ground, prioritizing consistency while avoiding per-device redesign overhead.

“The same agent can render a custom experience on multiple screen sizes and modalities with little or no additional work from the developer. For us, that is the first proof point: a path to specialized devices without requiring developers to rebuild the experience from scratch each time,” said Bathiche.

Another notable aspect of Solara is Microsoft's decision to build MDEP on Android rather than Windows. AOSP scales naturally to the lightweight, constrained hardware that wearables and embedded devices run on — something Windows, with its memory and processing overhead, was never designed to do. It also sidesteps the application compatibility expectations that come with Windows. Because Solara devices are built around cloud-hosted agents rather than traditional software, Microsoft can optimize the platform for dedicated AI hardware without carrying decades of legacy PC baggage.

To manage multiple agents running simultaneously, Microsoft is also working on an agent dispatcher and agent task manager — components that automatically surface or activate the right agent based on context, rather than requiring users to launch each one manually. Neither component is shipping yet. Early agent integrations include Dragon Copilot for healthcare workflows and GitHub Copilot for developer task tracking — both exploring how persistent, context-aware agents behave differently on dedicated hardware than they do inside a browser or IDE.

The platform appears to be aimed at enterprise buyers in retail, healthcare, and field service sectors, where dedicated agent hardware makes more sense than repurposing a smartphone. Microsoft has already lined up pilots with Best Buy, CVS Health, Levi's, Target, and AccuWeather, with broader OEM deployment targeted across healthcare, hospitality, financial services, legal, and industrial verticals.

If you’ve been paying close attention over the past year and change, you’ll quickly learn that while PC gaming is clearly struggling from apocalyptic component pricing, players are slowly looking to alternative platforms and operating systems to play games on. Valve’s Steam Deck is a primary cause for this success and has spawned a breed of x86-based handheld devices over the past few years. While Sony is reportedly developing its own handheld, Valve has been hard at work developing its own hardware ecosystem, or at least trying to, no thanks to the ongoing DRAM and NAND pricing devastation.

Valve’s upcoming Steam Frame will make use of an ARM-based Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip, notably differing from the x86-based chips inside the now four-year-old Steam Deck and the upcoming Steam Machine. Alongside choosing an Arm-based chip for its upcoming VR headset, the company has been quietly contributing to a translation layer named FEX.

What is FEX?

FEX or FEX-Emu, translates raw x86 instructions into ARM64 instructions, with Proton handling the software and OS-level translations from Windows into something that can be understood by Linux. When FEX and Proton work in tandem, it means that Arm-based chips could very well run many “full-fat” games stored in your Steam Library.

Valve has been funding the development of FEX for years, which is, in itself, open source. As such, over the past year or so, development has started on getting FEX up and running on Android-based devices. One such example is GameNative, a slick open-source app that can tap into your Steam Library and allow you to make use of FEX (and Proton) to run games. There are additional apps that perform similar functions, such as GameSir’s Gamehub, which is a closed-source alternative that, in late 2025, came under fire for its capture of sensitive user telemetry data. So, be sure to research these options wisely if you want to try something like this out for yourself.

So, with that all in mind, let’s try to push current Android hardware to its limits and see just how well FEX is shaping up.

Setup

Of course, many Android devices might not be up to the task of running AAA, x86-based games. As it happens, I was shopping for a new Android tablet, and lucked out finding a deal on a used RedMagic Astra Gaming tablet, which is equipped with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 4 SoC, Adreno 830 GPU, and 24 GB of LPDDR5T RAM. The device is also equipped with active cooling, which is a rarity in smaller Android tablets.

It should be noted that Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 chips are rolling out in the Android ecosystem, but availability remains limited in the U.S. With a decently powerful Android device in hand, it’ll serve as a good testbed to see exactly how (and if) current hardware on portable ARM-based devices is capable of running demanding games.

GameNative’s APK is available directly from their GitHub repository, and installation was simple: Once the app was installed, all I had to do was log into my Steam account, and voila, my entire library was available to choose from. The gamepad-friendly interface allows you to select from “Compatible” titles, and with that flicked on, I was able to view exactly which titles might play nicely with the RedMagic Astra.

For this test, I wanted to test a handful of AAA gaming titles to see how well they might run and to get a good understanding of how these titles can perform on modern hardware. For a baseline, Cyberpunk 2077 (RED Engine), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (Unreal Engine 5), and Resident Evil 3 (RE Engine) all serve as solid showcases to see how well these games might run. Resident Evil 3’s remake is an older RE Engine title, but given my Steam Library's lack of newer Capcom titles, it’ll just have to do.

Stalled boot

With Cyberpunk 2077 installed on the device, GameNative automatically chooses the best configurations for you and then pulls all of your Steam Cloud data to sync things up. This part of the process took a while, which is (what I presume to be) the sheer number of save files on my particular Steam Cloud variant. But it dutifully whittled away at downloading all of the required files to get Cyberpunk off the ground. And then… Nothing. Cyberpunk 2077 crashed to a halt. It took some tinkering with graphics drivers and Proton versions, then running a driver test to see if everything lined up.

Afterwards, I managed to finally load Cyberpunk 2077. Given that we want to run this as more of a proof-of-concept, rather than testing the silicon to its limits from the start, I immediately went to the settings menu and put everything on low, with FSR 2 off. After loading a save in a dense urban area, the game hangs, and seemingly nothing I did managed to solve that particular problem. Onwards, I pushed to the next title, undeterred.

Playable perfomance

Resident Evil 3, by contrast, offered a much smoother experience when running the title at 720p. With settings locked in and the application allowed to access the large RAM pool of the RedMagic Astra, I was able to play the introductory segments of the title with little to no issue. That should come as little surprise to anyone who knows that Capcom’s RE Engine scales incredibly well with lower-end devices, especially if they are limited in scope, such as Resident Evil 3 – I wouldn’t chance running a heavier, open-map title like Monster Hunter: Wilds on here so soon.

With the game up and running, I then pushed the image quality with settings set to prefer performance, with no upscaling. Resident Evil 3 stayed at a steady 40- 60 FPS for most of the introductory segment, and only when dealing with more challenging scenes with multiple light sources and particle effects did our frames begin to drop to lows of around 27 FPS. That’s still playable, though not quite offering a perfect experience, and some subjectivity comes into play. Following this, testing the ‘Prefer Graphics’ preset with no upscaling, we reached a range of 25-42 FPS, which is again, more than playable enough for a single-player title. While you’re not going to get that ideal 60 FPS target, the game also doesn’t look like you’re playing it through a vaseline filter, which is a plus.

With Resident Evil 3 producing solid results, I marched on to Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. This Unreal Engine 5-based title was a tricky one to get up and running. Firstly, I had to set the lowest possible internal resolution, then select the correct drivers to get things set up. Following that, we were in the game. But there was one glaring issue: Image quality. The selected graphics driver (nor any other combination) actually yielded anything that remotely looked like Clair Obscur, with textures going haywire and environments missing some textures entirely. This one was a total, unplayable mess; even measuring its performance would have been a waste of time. So, what’s going on under the hood, and why is performance so variable between titles?

Fractured configurations

To understand why individual titles run so differently is to understand that each game runs a wholly different engine. CD Projekt Red’s RED Engine has proven to scale to systems like the Steam Deck and Switch 2, but performance in-game on the RedMagic Astra has yet to match either a Steam Deck or a Nintendo Switch 2 in image quality.

For Expedition 33’s Unreal Engine 5, this is a complicated nightmare. The CPU translation layer, in addition to DirectX12’s VKD3D translation, is what’s causing things to not load correctly, such as DX12’s mesh shaders. To put things simply, there’s a complex stack of operations required to run things smoothly, and when those graphical pipelines get as complex as a modern title, like Clair Obscur, the house of cards begins to fall down.

This isn’t a problem for Resident Evil 3’s RE Engine, which uses a lighter and cleaner implementation of DirectX12, especially when compared to Unreal Engine 5. You also have the option to launch with the DirectX 11-based DXVK, which, in itself, is much easier for a translation layer to handle than the more complicated VKD3D. The caveat here is that you’ll have to access a different legacy beta branch to enable that, as the main branch of the title forces DirectX 12.

Worsening things is the fact that so much of this support relies on community-developed graphics drivers, most notably, custom “Turnip” drivers, based on the open-source Linux Mesa project, which patches Vulkan extensions that are actively still being reverse-engineered by the developers. These optimizations get missed by the official Qualcomm system drivers, which are closed-source. Therefore, as demonstrated in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, when Turnip drivers are met with complex shader pipelines from UE5, the GPU driver can fail to render geometry correctly, even if the title boots.

Many titles that do not require the usage of such demanding graphical pipelines can work without breaking much of a sweat: So, if you’re missing out on Slay the Spire, or Hollow Knight: Silksong, those titles are demonstrably stable using FEX and emulator apps like GameNative. For our tests, we wanted to see how FEX handled complex shaders, graphics, and modern “big-budget” experiences.

Where does this leave FEX?

In and of itself, FEX is an ongoing project, and we’re not going to see major miracles happen overnight when it comes to elements out of the project’s scope, such as Qualcomm’s development of official drivers that officially support mainstream games.

Qualcomm’s mobile chips were built strictly to run mobile apps and games, meaning that adding the wrinkle of supporting elements like desktop-level Vulkan instructions is a use case they simply never really considered supporting before. If the company wants to capitalize on the work being done by the FEX team, Qualcomm-based chips must also come with similar levels of support as desktop graphics drivers, and the likelihood of that happening is quite slim indeed. As of the time of writing, community drivers for specific titles can enhance the experience of some titles, if you're willing to go to those lengths.

While the efforts of FEX-Emu and its complex, layered translation to get things running are indeed impressive, you’re not about to be able to take your whole Steam Library with you anywhere, until there’s more maturation of these applications and the community-made drivers (potentially with the help of a company like Valve) to create workarounds, or dedicated drivers. For now, it’s still too early to start throwing FEX out as a feature in a mainstream product until all of those rougher edges, like driver support, are smoothed off for end-users. Anyway, my tablet’s back to being relegated to being a very fancy comic-book reader again until the entire software pipeline has matured.

You need a webcam in a hurry, and you can’t get to the store or wait for Amazon to get the best webcam, so that old Android smartphone that is now lying in a desk drawer, waiting to be recycled, could just save your skin! Yes, that old smartphone that you keep in case of emergencies or to keep your child amused while grocery shopping, now it can be brought back into service as a webcam!

In this how-to, we’ll look at Camo Studio, a free tool that turns your old Android phone into a wireless webcam. This would be useful for general webcam duties and for streamers who need an additional angle in a shot. We’ll show you how to set up your Camo camera and then how to use it in OBS.

Camo is easy to install, and all you will need is a spare Android smartphone and a PC running Windows 11 or 10. The process works over Wi-Fi, but if you intend to use the setup for some time, it would be prudent to externally power the smartphone, as the process can drain your smartphone battery.

So let's get started!

Installing Camo Studio for Windows

Installing Camo Studio for Windows is really simple, and it provides us with the user interface that we will use to control the webcam.

1. Download the Camo Studio app from the website.

2. Navigate to the Downloads folder and double-click to install the downloaded exe file. The installation process will use the Microsoft Store to install the application.

3. Follow the prompts as the installation progresses.

4. Open Camo.

The Camo Studio User Interface

The user interface is broken down into four key areas.

1. Device: Here, we can select the device that we wish to use as a webcam,

2. Device Settings: Tweak the settings of the selected device, set the resolution, focus, and light modes. We can switch between the front and rear cameras

3. The main output: See what the camera sees, including any filters.

4. Filters and templates: Tweak the look and feel of the video stream using predefined filters and templates.

Camo can be used with normal USB / laptop webcams and our Android smartphone. But, for the latter, we need to install an app on our Android device.

Installing Camo on your Android device

1. Open the Google Play Store.

2. Search for Camo Camera and install the application.

Connecting Your Smartphone to Camo Studio

With both the Camo Studio and Camo Camera app installed, we can now connect the two together.

1. In the Camo Studio Windows app, click on Device >> Pair a device. In the graphic, look for 1 to spot where this is.

2. Open the Camo Camera app on your smartphone and click on the Wi-Fi+ icon. Your PC and Smartphone must be on the same network.

3. Scan the QR code displayed in the Camo Studio app using the Camo Camera app on your Smartphone. The phone and your computer should connect in a few seconds. If it fails, restart the process from step 1.

4. You should now see a live video stream from your smartphone. You won’t have to do the full process every time. In the future, your smartphone will be listed in the dropdown.

Tweaking Your Webcam Settings

The basic camera settings are fine, but we can easily tweak them to get the best possible output.

1. Click on the dropdown under Lens, and swap between the front-facing and rear cameras.

2. Under Background, try blurring the background.

3. Under Effects, try out some of the effects; Sketch and 8-bit are great fun. Emoji Face is very “Black Mirror.”

4. The Adjustments section is where we can alter the temperature, tint, contrast, etc. of the video stream.

Templates to Tweak Your Scene

On the right of the screen (4), we can see a selection of templates for our video stream. By default, Watermark is active. Clicking on any of the other templates will trigger the template to apply to our output. Let's tweak our scene to “Meet & Greet”.

1. From the templates, click on Meet & Greet.

2. Click on the Layers icon.

3.Select a text element from the list.

4. Click on the text dropdown and select Variables. You’ll find this dropdown on the right side of the UI.

5. Tweak the variables to meet your requirements and then close the dialog box. The changes have been made to the template.

This same process applies to all of the templates.

Using Camo with OBS

Open Broadcaster System (OBS) is like having a full TV production and mixing suite on your desktop. With Camo and OBS, we can coordinate the Camo webcam along with our usual webcam and create a multi-camera setup for use on streams and YouTube videos.

1. With your Camo setup running, open OBS.

2. Under Scenes, click on + to create a new scene called “Camera2” and click OK.

3. With the Camera2 scene selected, under Sources, click on +.

4. Select “Video Capture Device” from the list.

5. Create a new source called Camo and click OK.

6. From the list of devices, select Camo and click OK.

7. The Camo video source should now be displayed in the Camera2 scene.

8. Click on the Camera2 and another scene to swap between the Scenes in OBS, giving you multiple camera angles for your next stream.

Google has reportedly been working on folding ChromeOS into Android since 2015, but its efforts appear to have stalled in recent years. However, we’ve just seen some evidence of the company’s work on this project through a bug report on the Chromium Issue Tracker. The company has since made the report private, but not before 9to5Google shared the screen captures. The device involved was reportedly an HP Elite Dragonfly 13.5-inch Chromebook running build ALOS: ZL1A.260119.001.A1. “ALOS” supposedly refers to Aluminum OS, which is the codename for the Android desktop that’s being developed to replace ChromeOS.

The most obvious difference between ChromeOS and Aluminum OS is that the taskbar is slightly taller, making it more suitable for devices with larger screens. Google also moved the date and time from the lower right to the upper left corner of the screen, while the status settings seem to have been moved to the upper right corner, making it look a bit more similar to macOS. Google Chrome browser also remains mostly similar to what you get on Android but now comes with Extensions, and we also see an example of side-by-side multitasking on the large screen. But aside from that, we don’t see any other major differences or features, especially given that it’s just screen recording for a bug report.

Another tidbit of information we can garner from this is that the Android desktop version is seemingly running on old hardware — the HP Elite Dragonfly 13.5-inch Chromebook mentioned in the report launched in early 2022, featuring a 12th-generation Intel processor. Although it could be that Google is just using existing hardware to validate the operating system, it could also mean that it’s planning to allow (or even force) existing ChromeOS users to update to Aluminum OS once it officially comes out.

There’s no official announcement yet on the exact date that Aluminum OS will arrive, although Google said that it expects to deliver the new operating system by 2026. This leak shows that it’s probably coming sooner, rather than later, especially as it already seems to be working and is probably already in an early, closed Beta stage. Nevertheless, many are curious as to what it can accomplish, especially as Windows 11 is known for its buggy updates, especially with the recent spate of issues, while macOS is often an expensive option that’s out of reach for many buyers.

Lapdock accessories maker Nex Computer has come up with a smartphone that can boot into three operating systems: Android, Linux, and Windows. The new NexPhone is an attempt to offer a single device for all your computing needs. Powered by the company’s NexOS, the device can be used as an everyday smartphone with Android 16 and can launch Linux (Debian) as an app within the Android interface. The phone can also boot into Windows 11, complete with a custom tile-based UI and progressive web app support reminiscent of the now-retired Windows Phone OS.

To expand productivity, the NexPhone can be hooked to a monitor with some peripherals for a full desktop experience using Android, Linux, or Windows 11, depending on the user’s preference. In terms of design, the smartphone doesn’t really stand out as it looks similar to most entry-level smartphones from a few years ago. However, the company has focused on making the NexPhone quite rugged as it meets the MIL-STD-810H military standards with IP68 and IP69K protection. This means that it can be used in harsh environments and can withstand drops, shocks, dust, water immersion, salt spray, vibration, and extreme temperatures.

The smartphone features a 6.58-inch LCD display with a 2403x1080p resolution, 120 Hz refresh rate, and Corning Gorilla Glass 3 protection. It is powered by the Qualcomm QCM6490 chipset, which is a Windows compatible Arm chipset with long-term support through 2036. It includes a 64-bit octa-core CPU with boost clock speeds of up to 2.7 GHz, 12GB of RAM, and a Qualcomm Adreno 643 GPU. There’s 256GB of onboard storage, which can be expanded further using a microSD card up to 512GB.

Connectivity features include Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.2, NFC, and USB Type-C 3.1. The USB Type-C port offers video-out support, so it can be used to connect directly to a monitor or be used with the company’s own USB Type-C hub, which includes two USB Type-C ports (one of which supports PD charging), two USB Type-A ports, and HDMI. Other features include a 5,000 mAh battery, 18W wired fast charging, wireless charging, and a dual-camera setup at the back with a 64-megapixel primary camera and a 13-megapixel ultra-wide-angle sensor. At the front, there is a 10-megapixel camera for taking selfies and video calls.

It’s worth noting that users with a flagship smartphone may find the NexPhone less appealing as a replacement. Rather, the company says, it can serve as a rugged secondary device that can double as a capable PC for many Linux or Windows-based tasks when needed. The NexPhone is priced at $549 and can be pre-reserved by heading to the company's website and paying a $199 deposit. The rest of the amount can be paid once the device starts shipping in Q3 2026.

Leading Chinese fabless semiconductor company Rockchip has had one of its major software repositories taken down in response to a DMCA takedown notice. Specifically, its rockchip-linux / mpp repository on GitHub is currently inaccessible, after the FFmpeg team complained about Rockchip’s cavalier attitude concerning intellectual property ownership, attribution, and matters of copyright infringement. Rockchip uses this code to accelerate video de/coding on its popular SoCs. If the situation isn’t remedied, it could have broad implications for users of Linux multimedia stacks, SBC communities, Android builds, and more.

FFmpeg’s complaint

FFmpeg shares its multimedia processing toolkit under the LGPL-license, and it alleges that Rockchip has infringed its copyrighted work on the libavcodec library, which contains numerous audio and video parsers and decoders for various formats.

You might assume that this is free and open source software, so little harm has been done. However, Rockchip’s Linux MPP (Media Processing Platform) code on GitHub has wholesale copied swathes of FFmpeg code, removed any attribution, and re-licensed it under Apache, which is incompatible with FFmpeg’s LGPL license. LGPL requires the original license and attribution to be preserved. Moreover, Apache adds patent clauses that LGPLv2.1 does not permit.

Rockchip dragged its feet for years

FFmpeg appears to have been quite patient in trying to converse with Rockchip devs to iron out issues ahead of this takedown. There is evidence of chats between FFmpeg and Rockchip devs taking place on Twitter/X and GitHub since early 2024, as a video from Brodie Robertson shows (h/t Hackaday).

In this chat history, we see a Rockchip dev admitting to copying the FFmpeg code in the manner they did “due to lack of understanding” about LGPL and Apache licensing conflicts.

Also in 2024, the Chinese company grumbled about being busy, but pledged fixes would come. However, the last archived response from a Rockchip dev, from last November, stated that “there are too many chips to verify and suspend…” which reduced any hope of a friendly settlement, provoking action.

What now?

FFmpeg has faced some criticism for this DMCA takedown, which GitHub has honored. However, remember that its code has been copied and re-licensed with new authorship claimed, despite large sections of code being identical and preserving original FFmpeg dev comments.

A proposed remedy to the situation, from FFmpeg, is as follows: “remove false authorship claims; restore original attribution and copyright notices; distribute the code under an LGPL-compatible license (e.g., LGPL itself, GPL, AGPL, etc.).” The nuclear option of “remove all infringing files” is also available, as is a choice to rewrite all the code without leaning on FFmpeg sources.

If the DMCA isn’t resolved, it isn’t just an annoyance for Rockchip. Linux, Android, and SBC devs, reliant on Rockchip’s MPP for hardware-accelerated video playback, might have to fall back to doing this processing in software (with multiple negative impacts). If the downstream developers continue to use MPP, they risk losing trust, losing OS support, and facing legal risks.

A PC enthusiast has used ChatGPT to circumvent the Factory Reset Protection (FRP) features of a used tablet. Thanks to OpenAI’s chatbot (and BIOS programmer hardware), XDA forums member Deskmodder then managed to update the obsolete Android 6.0-powered Panasonic ToughPad FZ-A2 tablet’s UEFI BIOS and install Windows 10 and Linux Mint. It is good to see barriers to the re-use of serviceable old hardware being eradicated.

FRP protection sidestepped

Above, we mentioned that the ruggedized Panasonic tablet was saddled with a rather old version of Android. However, this device was in some ways tamper-proof due to it being locked with Factory Reset Protection (FRP).

FRP is most commonly used in securing Android devices, and means that the original credentials need to be input to reset it. It works as a basic security measure to restrict significant changes to administrators and prevent stolen devices being easily wiped and resold. Second hand devices should be reset by the previous owner/administrator before being passed on, but obviously this doesn’t always happen.

Deskmodder seems to have been aware of the device’s FRP lock, but explains “seeing that it has an Intel CPU (Atom X5 8550) and a traditional x86 UEFI BIOS, I thought I'd try to hack it to run something else.” That’s the spirit.

With ChatGPT and a CH341A flash programmer at hand, the intrepid modder went through the following process:

1. The CH341A was used to dump the Panasonic’s BIOS.
2. The dumped bios was uploaded to ChatGPT with instructions to completely disable SecureBoot and its proprietary keys.
3. The GPT-modified BIOS was flashed back to the device.
4. Fingers were crossed... and it worked!
5. OS wrangling ensues, various compatibility wrinkles are being ironed out.

The system tinkering enthusiast has also shared their original ChatGPT conversation for the BIOS hacking, if you are interested enough in the process.

We note that Deskmodder has moved onto new milestone since their original post where Linux Mint was successfully shoehorned onto the ToughPad. Specifically, they have managed to get “Windows 10 up and running.” Sadly, at the time of writing they are still reporting a handful of driver issues.

Wider implications

You’re at the store and suddenly you remember that you really need to start a script on a remote server. It could be your Raspberry Pi 5 or in my case, back in 2012 it was a misbehaving client project server which forced me to login and restart some services while I was browsing which pizza would be for dinner. I did everything from my smartphone using SSH (Secure Shell) and JuiceSSH, a free SSH client app for Android.

In this how to we’ll install JuiceSSH on our Android smartphone and learn how to make a connection to a Raspberry Pi 5 on our home network.

For this project you will need a device running an SSH server. Typically this is a Linux machine such as a Raspberry Pi. We’re using a Raspberry Pi 5 running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS. You will also need an Android device.

If you are setting up a Raspberry Pi from scratch, follow this guide to install Raspberry Pi OS with SSH ready to go. If your Raspberry Pi is already running, follow these steps to set up an SSH server.

1. Open a terminal and as sudo, run raspi-config command.

sudo raspi-config

2. Using the arrow keys, scroll to Interface Options and press Enter.

3. Select SSH and press Enter.

4. Select Yes and press Enter to enable the SSH server.

5. Select Ok to acknowledge that the SSH server is running.

6. Select Finish and press Enter to exit. Close the terminal when done. You can now move on to the next part of this how to.

Installing and using JuiceSSH on Android

1.  From the Play Store, search for JuiceSSH and install the application.

2. Open JuiceSSH.

3. The JuiceSSH interface is broken down into four sections. Section 1 is Quick Connect, and we can use this to make a connection to a device. Section 2 will show a list of the connections that we frequently use. Section 3 is where we can create, update and delete SSH connections. Section 4 is where we can find app settings.

4. Click on Quick Connect and in the next screen ensure that SSH is selected and then enter your username and the IP address / hostname of the device. Click OK to start the connection. Here we are connecting to a Raspberry Pi 5 which we know the IP address of. You can use a hostname if you prefer.

5. Click ACCEPT for the host verification screen.

 6. Enter your password and click OK to connect. Optionally you can save the password for a quicker login. Yes it does say Authentication Failure despite us never connecting to this Raspberry Pi via SSH. This is normal as the app will first try to connect without a password.

7. Read the text and click OK - I’ve got it! We are logged in but the app will tell us how to resize terminal text (volume buttons), open the keyboard (press the terminal screen) and how to copy / paste (long press on the item). We can also use the up and down arrow keys to scroll through our command history, just like we were sitting at our desk.

8. Update the software on the remote machine, then install neofetch. Type the command and press Enter to run. Press Y when prompted to confirm. With direct control of our remote system we can issue commands as if we are sitting in front of the machine.

sudo apt update && sudo apt install neofetch

 9. Run the neofetch command to confirm that everything has been installed correctly.

10. Press CTRL and D on the terminal keyboard to exit the SSH session. Pressing the CTRL key will hold the key down enabling us to press the D key to exit.

Managing Connections

A useful part of JuiceSSH is the Manage Connection section. Here we can list all of our connections and have them ready to go at a moment's notice. We’re going to use the quick connection that we just created to create a permanent connection in JuiceSSH.

1. Click on Manage Connections.

2. From the list of connections, long press on the one that you would like to use. We’re going to reuse our connection that uses an IP address.

3. From the list select Edit. We can also duplicate and delete connections via this menu.

4. Set the nickname to something relevant and memorable and then click on the tick in the top right corner to save. If your device uses an alternative port to 22 (the default for SSH), change that here. We’re using a Raspberry Pi 5 inside of Sunfounder’s Pironman 5 case, hence our nickname.

5. Click on the nickname to start the connection. At the Connections screen we can see that the IP address has been replaced with the nickname.

6. Enter your password and click Remember Password, then press OK. Clicking Remember Password will make the login process much faster for future logins. If you did this earlier, then you will not see this dialog box.

7. Once logged in, press CTRL + D to logout.

8. Log back into the connection, this time you will not be asked for a password.

We now have an SSH client on our Android device, ready for action the next time you need to login to a server or run some code on your Raspberry Pi.

USB Type-C may be the solution to a lot of tech problems, but we can't say we expected it to solve issues coming from nature. A German company called Kamedi is selling the 'Heat-It' USB Type-C dongle that it claims can relive or heal itchy bites or stings from mosquitoes, horseflies and wasp.  

This little device can fit in your phone's Type-C port and has a metal surface on the other side that generates heat. When you plug it into your phone (there are Android and iOS apps), you can customize the duration of the heat treatment (or use a child-friendly or sensitive skin mode to turn the temperature down a bit). The 'cure' works by applying heat of a out 51 degrees Celsius (123.8 degrees Fahrenheit) over the bite.

Kamedi points to a research study published in the Swedish journal Acta Dermato-Venereologica to back up its claims. The study, which specifically uses the Heat-It, claims to be "the first published controlled real-world study of the use of concentrated heat to alleviate itch induced by insect bites or stings," and states that the findings "demonstrate a significant reduction in itch and pain using local heat application after insect bites or stings, based on data derived from a large data set with more than 12,000 registered treatments from more than 1,700 individuals."

Why Not a Cup of Tea?

This is a high-tech solution to a problem that people have attempted for a long time. One could simply use a cup with a hot beverage in it to do the same job, or a hot spoon run under boiling water. But if you're outdoors hiking, you may not have access to those. But the dongle also helps apply heat to a more specific area where you get the bite.

And since the app has customization for heat and duration, you can make customizations that you couldn't to a hot spoon. 

Prevention is better than a cure, so your best bet is probably a good bug spray. And while this may be a high-tech solution to a low-tech problem, at least the USB-C standard means you could try this on either iPhone (thanks to the European Union) or Android.

We haven't given these things a try, but proponents of the USB-C standard who also get lots of bug bites can find this gizmo on Amazon US and UK. 

In a live stream today, Chinese handheld gaming PC specialist Ayaneo unveiled its first device aimed at Android gaming. The new Ayaneo Pocket AIR looks a lot like the company's previous Windows-powered handhelds, but it manages to be thinner and lighter. Also, thanks to the Arm architecture, and retaining the "Windows handheld grade" battery, it is suggested that users can enjoy games "without worrying about battery life."

Android and Windows handheld markets may not really have a lot of overlap. On Tom's Hardware, we look most closely at PCs and PC gaming. PC AAA games titles are quite different from the library available on Android, except some common casual titles (and streaming services). 

Thus we think many readers won't be interested in this type of device for Android gaming, or games streaming, especially when they have powerful smartphones already. Nevertheless this device is worth a closer look to see Ayaneo's efforts in trying to jump into the Android market and compare the device with its Windows-powered lineage.

Starting with the basics, the Ayaneo Pocket AIR has a 5.5-inch 1080p AMOLED screen. The processor used is a 6nm MediaTek Dimensity 1200, which has 1x Ultra Core (Arm Cortex-A78 up to 3.0 GHz), 3x Super Cores (Arm Cortex-A78 up to 2.6 GHz), and 4x Efficiency Cores (Arm Cortex-A55 up to 2.0 GHz). Inside MediaTek's SoC there is also an Arm Mali-G77 MC9 GPU, support for various codecs, 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and more. Despite the flagship smartphone guts, Ayaneo says that the Pocket AIR has an "x86-level powerful active cooling system." 

Similarly, it says this compact new device uses a "Windows handheld grade" battery, at 7,350mAh. Sadly, it hasn't been forthcoming with screen-on-time gaming endurance figures, so we will have to wait and see about extended battery life claims.

We have some physical details of the Ayaneo Pocket AIR to share, too. With its 5.5-inch screen you shouldn't expect a very hefty device, but at 380 g (13.4-ounces) it is about twice as heavy as a common-or-garden smartphone. The device's 'waist' is 17 mm thick. Ayaneo asserts that the Pocket AIR "fits easily in your pocket."

As the Ayaneo Pocket AIR is a pre-release, pre-crowdfunding stage device at the time of writing, we don't seem to have a great depth of specs, so details about memory and storage options seem to be absent right now.

Some other interesting details we have access to though, concern the controls. In brief, buyers of the Ayaneo Pocket AIR should expect a very similar extensive control set. So, here we have lots of buttons and pads including hall sensing joysticks and triggers, and there is the SoundTapMagic audio vibration system, an X-axis linear motor, and six-axis gyroscope included for your gaming delights.

On top of the Android installation, Ayaneo has ported its Windows gaming UI app, AYAHome, as well as the AYASpace management app. Another software nicety is the Ayaneo Cloud Game Database for retro gaming fans.

Running emulators looks like a focus of fun on the Ayaneo Pocket AIR, as there are many slides on the Ayaneo blog and Pocket AIR product pages highlighting this aspect of the device. Even its color scheme with "classic red and white," harks back to the 8- and 16-bit eras.

We don't have pricing or availability for the upcoming Ayaneo Pocket AIR. At the time of writing the firm is asking for sign-ups for news of its Indiegogo campaign launch. Let's hope it is priced competitively, to give this device some impulse purchase appeal. We've seen a lot of pricey handhelds from this firm recently, but it has made some sub-$300 devices in the past.

Sending files to and from an Android device can be irksome at times. Sure we can use Bluetooth file transfer, which is slow, but reliable. Or we can email the files to ourselves, save them to a cloud service etc. Is there a better way to do it?

Android has just released a beta for Nearby Share, a Windows app that enables quick and easy file transfer between Android and Windows devices. The best thing is that we only need to install the Windows app. Android has featured Nearby Share since Android 6 and it seamlessly integrates into the Share feature found in many apps.

In this how to, we will install Nearby Share on a Windows 10 PC and learn how to use it to send files to and from an Android smartphone.

For This Project you will need

• Android phone connected to Wi-Fi with Bluetooth active
• PC running Windows 10 or 11

1.  Open a browser to this page and click “Download Nearby Share”.

2. Install Nearby Share. You will find it in the download folder where you double click the executable called “BetterTogetherSetup.exe”. Installation took mere seconds on our machine.

3. Sign in to your Google account.

4. Set the name of your PC, this is the name that will be shown to devices.

5. Click on Receiving.

6. Configure Receiving to your preferred option. If you are just wanting to share files between your devices, select “Your Devices”. Other choices include sharing to your contact list and everyone. Both of these have security implications, so exercise caution.

7. Click Done to finish setup.

Nearby Share is now ready to send and receive files.

8. Open Settings >> System and search for Nearby. We found these extra steps useful in ensuring that our Windows PC was correctly talking to our Android device.

9. Enable “Share content with a nearby device by using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi”, set it to “My devices only” and check that the download location is convenient.

10. Scroll down and configure share across devices to use your devices.

Sending a File to Another Device

1.  Drop a file or folder onto the Nearby Share app. Alternatively, manually select the files / folder via a dialog.

2. Select your device. This will trigger the computer to send the file / folder to the device.

In a few moments your phone will confirm the transfer and the file is ready for use on your Android device.

Sending to a Windows Machine

1. Select the file that you want to send on your Android device. This can be a photo via the Photos app, or any other file via the Files app. We chose a photo to send to our PC.

2. Click Share and select Nearby Share. You may need to click on More to see a fuller list of options.

3. Connect to Wi-Fi and select your Windows PC to start the transfer.

4. Click Done once the transfer is complete.

The Nearby Share app will confirm the transfer, saved to your default folder. In our case it saved the image to Downloads.

There are a number of alternatives to the Raspberry Pi out there, but the  Khadas VIM4 sets itself apart in a crowded field  with its considerable muscle.

The VIM4 packs an Amlogic A311D2 octa-core processor, 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM, its Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, the 4K/60 HDMI input and output, plus independent USB 3.0 and PCIe (via M.2 socket) interfaces. This successor to the Khadas VIM3 ($120) will launch on May 10, and has just started to go around the review circuit. Sadly we will have to wait for launch day for pricing.

We are now starting to see reviews of the Khadas VIM4 drip-drip onto websites and social media platforms.

CNX Software has published part one of a multi-part review of the VIM4 today. The single-page piece provides an unboxing experience, with a closer look at the product, the supplied accessories and quick start guide. Then there is a segment about the trials and tribulations of fitting the VIM4 in the supplied translucent case (dimensions are a little different to the Pi). Lastly, CNX booted the machine and was greeted with an OOWOW wizard to choose an OS to install from the cloud (Android 11 or three Ubuntu variants could be chosen at the time of writing).

For another example of an early review of the Khadas VIM4, kick off your shoes, put your feet up and watch the half hour video below, from YouTuber Leepspvideo, who is something of a Raspberry Pi specialist who likes a bit of retro-emulation gaming.

Lee's video takes you straight to plugging in the VIM4 with his usual Raspberry Pi peripherals and screen. This brings up the OOWOW wizard, as mentioned above, but Lee goes and installs Ubuntu with Gnome without any issues. First impressions are that this powerful SBC is a snappy performer in most respects.

Later in the video, Lee notes that Ubuntu might not be totally ready for mass consumption on the VIM4 due to app and drivers support – though it's possible some of this will be fixed ahead of launch. Lee found solid performance on Android 11, with emulation and demanding PlayStation Portable (PSP) games running smoothly. Lee declared the VIM4 is "a great device."

Another Raspberry Pi alternative with an Amlogic processor that we recently looked at was the Banana Pi BPI-M2S, with Amlogic A311D. This processor is a hexa-core unit, so a little bit less powerful than the A311D2. It features 4GB LPDDR4 RAM and its own particular charms like twin gigabit Ethernet ports.

 A Linux vulnerability that affects all kernels since 5.8, including Android, has been disclosed by security researcher Max Kellerman. Known as Dirty Pipe, it allows the overwriting of data in read-only files and can lead to privilege escalation via the injection of code into root processes.

Properly referred to as CVE-2022-0847, Dirty Pipe is similar to 2016’s Dirty COW vulnerability that targeted the copy-on-write (COW) mechanism in the Linux kernel’s memory subsystem. It turned a read-only mapping into a writable one and could be combined with other exploits to achieve root access.

Dirty Pipe, by contrast, is easier to exploit, with proofs of concept such as that by kernel developer Binni Shah quickly concocted and posted on Twitter, while security researcher Phith0n improved the process to leave the root account without a password. 

The ‘pipe’ part of the name refers to a tool for unidirectional inter-process communication, the first write to which allocates a page (4kb) of memory to it. If you use splice() to append data from a file to the pipe, it gets written to a page cache, and from there, you can overwrite the cache just by writing new data, properly prepared, to the pipe. 

In Linux, ‘dirty’ means a page is waiting for a disk write, and the page cache doesn’t write to disk unless a page is dirty. Overwriting its data doesn’t make a page dirty, so it stays in the memory cache, and your properly prepared exploit data can be piped to it. Writing to a pipe doesn’t check permissions, so anyone can do it, potentially allowing an escalation of privileges that vanishes on reboot because it was never written to disk.

“To make this vulnerability more interesting,” writes Kellerman, “it not only works without write permissions, it also works with immutable files, on read-only btrfs snapshots and on read-only mounts (including CD-ROM mounts). That is because the page cache is always writable (by the kernel), and writing to a pipe never checks any permissions.”

Kellerman discovered the vulnerability after investigating a bug that was corrupting web server access logs for a customer. While simple to exploit, the vulnerability requires physical access to the machine being rooted, making it harder to deploy than those delivered over networks or via malware. 

In February, Kellerman sent a bug report (and patch) to the Linux kernel security team, and fixes were issued three days later. Google added the fix to the Android kernel at about the same time. The vulnerability has been fixed in Linux 5.16.11, 5.15.25, and 5.10.102.

Windows 11 is getting its first big update today, including a public preview of Android apps in the Amazon Appstore as well as redesigned Media Player and Notepad apps, as well as significant improvements to the taskbar.

Windows and Devices lead Panos Panay first announced the new features last month, but now you can finally try them for yourself.

Microsoft and Amazon are adding more than 1,000 new Android apps to the Amazon Appstore Preview in the Microsoft Store, including Kindle, Audible and the game Subway Surfers. Notably, it's still a preview, so there's still work to be done here. Those who want to try it out should update the Microsoft Store by clicking "Get updates" in Microsoft Store > Library. You can then see which apps are on offer and use them in Windows, including as part of the Snap layouts that were introduced in Windows 11.

The Android App preview has different system requirements than Windows 11. You'll need at least 8GB of RAM, an SSD and a supported CPU: an 8th Gen Intel Core i3 or above, an AMD Ryzen 3000 CPU or above or Qualcomm Snapdragon 8c or better.

For many power users, the taskbar will be the biggest focus. For starters, those who use multiple monitors will now be able to see the date and time on the secondary screen. Previously, it only showed on the primary display, like that of a laptop.

The weather widget, which was in Windows 10, is also making a comeback — but this time, it's your entry point for the entire widgets menu. The Widgets menu will show live weather, which will update automatically. If you hover over the icon with your mouse, your Widgets will open, and if you click on the icon, it will remain open until you click elsewhere.

The taskbar is also getting new features to mute or unmute on a system-wide basis, or share your Window. During calls, a microphone icon will show up on the right hand side of the taskbar, and you can click it on and off to mute or unmute without worrying about being in your Meet, Zoom or Teams window. To share content on a call, you'll need to hover your mouse over an app in the taskbar, which will prompt you to confirm if you want to present that app to your call.

The two latest apps to get a Windows 11 redesign are Notepad and Media Player. Notepad is getting dark mode that works with your default system theme, if you use that all the time, it will be there already. Microsoft also claims to have simplified menus and added new features like colorful emojis and multi-level undo. Media Player replaces Groove Music; if you have playlists there, they will move to the new app automatically. Media Player is also getting more keyboard shortcuts.

Both apps can be updated in the Microsoft Store app in Windows 11.

Panay wrote that Micrrosoft will update Windows 11 "year-round," not just in annual feature releases.

"Overtime, you’ll see us release new features into Windows 11 for end users more frequently in addition to our annual update," Panay wrote in a blog post. "We will leverage the variety of update mechanisms we have in place including servicing and Microsoft Store updates. Our goal is to deliver continuous innovation, providing you with the best experiences year-round." 

Microsoft's Windows 11 will be able to run apps developed for Google's Android operating system natively (albeit not at launch) in a bid to bring useful programs and games to PCs. Apparently, the software giant might want to go even further and bring Android apps to its Xbox game consoles, too, at least according to a listing at the Microsoft Store. 

To let developers ensure that their Android apps work on Windows 11 and test their stability, Microsoft recently started to offer its Windows Subsystem for Android tool in its Store (as discovered by Slashgear). The program can be used on any x64 or Arm64-based device running Windows 10 version 22000.0 or higher, or on Xbox One. However, the tool is listed as 'available on PC' and cannot be found in the Xbox version of the Microsoft Store.

We don't know exactly why Microsoft listed its Xbox consoles as compatible with the Windows Subsystem for Android program. Perhaps Microsoft wanted to enable Android games developers (especially for games compatible with Xbox controllers) to test them on consoles for some reason. It's also possible that Microsoft plans to bring Android games to Xbox consoles to make them more competitive with Sony's PlayStation 5.

Formally, Windows 11 users will be able to discover Android apps at Microsoft Store, then buy them from Amazon's Appstore, and then run them using Intel's bridge technology that enables software developed for Arm-based SoCs and Android to run on x86 processors and Windows 11. In reality, Microsoft does not plan to implement any measures to stop users from installing Android apps obtained elsewhere on Windows 11. Meanwhile, since Microsoft's Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S systems have a lot in common with Windows, there should be hardly any technical difficulties with running Android apps on these consoles. 

At present, it is too early to say that Microsoft plans to enable Android apps on Xbox. In the end, productivity apps for Android could transform the latest Xbox consoles into inexpensive yet quite capable PCs, and Microsoft isn't exactly interested in this. On the other hand, if the company wants to offer platforms compatible with competing platforms, enabling Android apps on Xbox consoles is logical. 

A debate over whether this is a tablet that doubles as an external display or an external display that happens to run Android will no doubt rage following Lenovo’s announcement of the Yoga Tab 13. It’s an Android tablet with a micro HDMI input, which sees the tablet pulling a double duty as an external screen. 

With a 10,000mAh battery inside, Lenovo's Yoga Pad 13 should run all day as an external monitor, accompanying laptops on trips out of the office to really nail that dual-screen productivity feeling wherever you are without having to buy the best computer monitor. The 13 inch display has a resolution of 2160 x 1350 and a brightness of 400nits, a refresh rate of 60Hz and 100% sRGB Dolby Vision support. It’s also a 10-point touchscreen, though possibly only in tablet mode. There’s a kickstand at the back to enable it to stand upright, an 8MP front-facing camera, and four speakers supporting Dolby Atmos.

Should you wish to use it as a tablet, you’ll find Android 11 running Google’s Entertainment Space launcher, on a Snapdragon 870 (the same chip found in the Samsung Galaxy S8) and 8GB of LPDDR5. Graphics come via the Qualcomm Adreno 650 GPU, and storage tops out at 256GB. Connectivity comes via Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5, and there's a USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port for charging and compatible devices.

The screen/tablet comes as part of a tablet refresh from Lenovo, which also announced the Yoga Tab 11 (sadly without the HDMI port), the Lenovo Tab P11 Plus (which comes with a keyboard and stylus) and some entry-level tabs: the M7 and M8. The Lenovo Yoga Tab 13 starts at $680 and should be available in July.

Windows has always been the most popular operating system (OS) for gaming on a computer, and Microsoft's looking to keep that lead by introducing two key Xbox features to PCs in Windows 11. During Microsoft's livestream reveal today, Xbox Corporate Vice President Sarah Bond said Auto HDR and Direct Storage will be available on the new OS. 

Auto HDR on Windows 11

This actually isn't the first we've heard of Auto HDR coming to Windows. For the uninitiated, Auto HDR is a tool that uses machine learning to auto convert SDR content to HDR levels of quality, all without requiring any work from the developer or player. Microsoft introduced Auto HDR in the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles and released a test build of Windows 10 earlier this year that brought the tech to PC. 

Now, Auto HDR on PC is premiering in Windows 11 for the more general, non-Windows Insider audience.

During the Windows 11 livestream, Microsoft demonstrated Auto HDR running on Windows 11 through footage of Skyrim. Despite Skyrim being made long before HDR displays were common, you can still see just how much more colorful it is with Auto HDR enabled. That skybox in particular looks great. It's worth noting, though, that the company made no mention of the kind of performance Auto HDR on Windows 11 will require.

Direct Storage on Windows 11

Direct Storage is another Xbox innovation and focuses on quickly loading assets directly off the GPU and SSD without involving the CPU in the process. This is the key pillar behind the current Xbox's velocity architecture and speeds up load times while allowing the console to run multiple games in the background and quickly swap between them at a moment's notice.

Again, Microsoft actually announced earlier this year that it would bring Direct Storage to PCs, at least those with NVMe drives, sometime in 2021. But unlike Auto HDR, this feature hasn't yet seen inclusion in a Windows Insider build, so it seems like Windows 11 will be our first time seeing it on PC. 

Microsoft didn't specify about what kind of system requirements will be required for Direct Storage. And unlike Auto HDR, it didn't show any example of PC Direct Storage in action.

Bond also discussed Microsoft's commitment to keep bringing Xbox Game Pass to PC, but the final key gaming feature from today's reveal stream is that Android apps are coming to Windows via the Microsoft Store. That represents a huge boon for Android gamers, who often have to resort to playing games on Android emulators to play them on a big screen. Hopefully, Microsoft will expand Android apps on Windows beyond Amazon's offerings in the future.

Microsoft today announced that Windows 11 will feature an updated Microsoft Store that includes Android apps, courtesy of the Amazon Appstore, and new policies intended to change the marketplace’s relationship with Windows developers. It should support UWP, Win32 and PWA apps.

Windows 11 technically won’t be the first version of the operating system to support Android apps. Windows 10 offered similar features—such as adding Android apps to the Start menu or pinning them to the taskbar—via the Your Phone ecosystem.

The devil is in the details. Your Phone required a PC and an Android smartphone connected to the same Wi-Fi network. Windows 11 will allow PC users to bypass that restriction by including Android apps in an updated version of the Microsoft Store.

Microsoft chief product officer Panos Panay said Windows 11’s support for Android apps arrived courtesy of the Amazon Appstore, an alternative to the Google Play Store most commonly used on Kindle Fire devices, as well as Intel Bridge.

Changes for Windows developers

Panay also said the Microsoft Store will feature new policies meant to benefit Windows developers. The biggest shift was the company’s decision to allow devs to implement their own content delivery and payment solutions rather than relying on the store itself.

Microsoft won’t take a cut of the revenues earned via custom payment solutions, Panay said, which should make the Microsoft Store more appealing to developers. This way they can enjoy the benefits of a central distribution platform without having to give up 30% of their revenues in exchange for that privilege. (See: the App Store.)

The ability to use third-party content delivery solutions should allow Windows developers to update their software without having to wait on Microsoft to approve the changes, propagate them to the Microsoft Store, and ship them to the app’s users. That process could take too long for devs looking to ship critical updates.

 The store itself has been redesigned, too, in line with the rest of the user interface. Combine that visual upgrade with new developer policies and support for Android apps and Windows 11 should have a far more compelling Microsoft Store. But don’t worry — these changes to the store are also supposed to reach Windows 10.

Microsoft’s changes have already attracted the attention of some major developers: Panay said that Adobe Creative Cloud, Disney+, and popular Android apps like TikTok will be available via the new app store when Windows 11 debuts later this year.

Panay said that Microsoft plans to reveal more information about the changes Windows 11 will offer to developers at an event scheduled for later today.

The chip shortage has expanded to the smartphone market, Reuters said Thursday, with Qualcomm reportedly struggling to make enough processors for its clients. That struggle could affect the availability—and pricing—of Android phones in the future.

This shortage reportedly stemmed from two problems: increased demand for Qualcomm processors and decreased availability of the parts used to make them. Sound familiar? It’s the same duo affecting the automotive and tech industries.

Reuters said the increased demand was partly caused by companies rushing to fill the void left by Huawei after the U.S. government sanctioned it. The rise of 5G has also helped, according to IDC, as has “pent-up demand” caused by COVID-19.

5G phones need 5G-capable processors, of course, which is where Qualcomm comes in. The company announced the flagship Snapdragon 888 5G Mobile Platform in December 2020; numerous manufacturers have already built phones around it.

Reuters said that, per an anonymous source, there’s a Snapdragon 888 shortage. Other sources reportedly told the publication that Qualcomm hasn’t been able to meet the demand for the processors used in low-end or mid-range smartphones, either.

That essentially means the entire band of Android smartphones, from budget models to flagship products, could be affected by the Qualcomm processor shortage. But the problem might actually start with another company: Samsung.

Qualcomm used Samsung’s 5nm process in the Snapdragon 888; it’s possible that production of that process hasn’t scaled enough to meet demand. Reuters said the company also relies on a Samsung factory in Texas for some of its radio frequency transceivers.

You might have guessed where this is going. In February, Samsung was asked to shut down that Texas factory to conserve power while the state responded to a winter storm that left millions of people without electricity, heat, or running water.

Samsung has struggled to get that fab running again because it needs to inspect, clean, and reconfigure all of its equipment. (All while making sure COVID-19 safety protocols are being followed, of course.) This could lead to even more delays.

This means Samsung can’t make smartphones without Qualcomm’s products, but Qualcomm can’t make those products without Samsung, either. It’s like an ouroboros that’s starving even as it consumes itself, but with 5G networking. 

Today, Epic Games announced the expansion of its #FreeFortnite initiative, which alleges that App Store policies are anti-competitive, with an antitrust complaint against Apple to the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition.

#FreeFortnite started in August 2020 when Epic Games offered Fortnite players a 20% discount for purchasing V-Bucks, the in-game currency used to buy cosmetic items, directly through its website instead of via the App Store or Google Play.

That discount made sense for Epic Games because Apple and Google both take a 30% cut of transactions made via their marketplaces. Both also prohibit efforts to bypass those cuts, however, and Fortnite was promptly removed from their stores.

Epic Games responded with a U.S. lawsuit against both companies that, according to a CNN interview with chief executive Tim Sweeney, was months in the making. Similar complaints have been made in Australia, the UK, and now the EU.

The company said in today's announcement that “through a series of carefully designed anti-competitive restrictions, Apple has not just harmed but completely eliminated competition in app distribution and payment processes.”

Epic Games said it's not seeking damages in any of the cases it's brought against Apple; instead, it's "simply seeking fair access and competition that will benefit consumers and developers." It just wants more of those sweet, sweet V-Bucks sales.

CNBC reported that the European Commission said it "has received the complaint and will assess it based on its standard procedures." Don't expect any of these proceedings — in the U.S., UK, Australia, or EU — to be resolved any time soon.

Remember the first robot you built as a child? The excitement of learning what each component does, how each piece fit together and the accomplishment you felt when you got things to work the way you imagined it to? Robo Wunderkind has created a learning platform to make a child’s first experience in robotics unique and memorable by providing building blocks of learning, both in the physical and metaphorical sense. 

Some toy manufacturers sell robot kits that already look like robots to begin with and some others offer kits that contain over a hundred different pieces. Robo Wunderkind took the opposite approach here by breaking its design down to simple blocks, each with its own specific function --- keeping things uncomplicated for young minds. This method allows for boundless opportunities of imagination, creativity, problem-solving and self-expression. It also equates to hours upon hours of fun and learning, which is what it’s all about.

Because of its simplicity and the nature of its design, the Robo Wunderkind offers more versatility and diverse types of play activities compared to other robot kits that are already formed as an actual robot, car or character. You can reinvent Robo Wunderkind into anything - from creating a robotic dog that will follow you around one day, to a tower that will fire laser shots the next, to programming it to write your name. While the Robo Wunderkind robotic kit claims to target kids 5 and up, it is so simple it could also appeal to even younger groups who are already interested in building things.

Each play or learning session can be totally different based on what project the child wishes to create. Kids can start from scratch the next time they play, or can recreate previous projects, building it faster because the process has become familiar already. They can even add new functionalities like lights or sounds as they become more confident and creative. So each child can begin with simple creations and expand as they build more complex robots. If your kit does not include a particular module or sensor, you can easily purchase extra ones and add them to customize your set.

All this fun comes at a cost though. Ranging from $199 (for the basic set) to $399 (for the top model), the pricing on the Robo Wunderkind is definitely in the high-end spectrum of stem-based robot kits.

Compared to other robotic kits in the same price point as our review unit (the Explorer Prime for $249), like the Sphero RVR for example, the Robo Wunderkind comes out ahead in terms of versatility and its accessibility to engage with younger age levels, but the Sphero is better when it came to advanced coding because it supports JavaScript and is compatible with Raspberry Pi, albeit targeting a higher age bracket. So, the cost value really depends on the type of learning and coding experience you want for your child.

Robo Wunderkind also has three levels of coding applications available - Robo Live, Robo Code, and Robo Blockly. They use proprietary block-based VPL (visual programming language) to guide and teach kids how to code. Depending on their skill level, the child can start from the very basic coding application and escalate to the next level at their own pace, and go all the way to Python programming.

Robo Wunderkind Specifications 

The Robo Wunderkind kit comes in three variants: 

Robo Wunderkind Setup 

The Robo Wunderkind is composed of modules and connectors. The Main Block is a rectangular orange block that functions as the battery source, includes a built-in speaker, and houses the Bluetooth and Wi-Fi electronics. It serves as the body for whatever you build, supporting an infrastructure of various combinations of the modules and connectors listed below. A color-coding scheme helps identify the key function of the module or connector being used. A set of handy tools also comes with the kit to make pulling modules and connectors apart a snap.

Similar to other STEM-based robotic kits, the Robo Wunderkind uses a built-in application that you download to your smartphone or tablet to remotely control your creation. To set up your Robo Wunderkind, first choose one of the three apps available and download. Then connect to your Main Block via Bluetooth. Once connected, the app will let you know whether you have enough charge. It will also detect if you have the latest firmware installed or prompt for updates. In addition to firmware located on the Main Block, many of the modules also contain upgradable firmware to support added functionality.

Robo Wunderkind Modules and Sensors 

Our review kit included the following modules: 

Robo Wunderkind In Action 

My 7-year-old daughter created some of the recommended projects, and it was easy enough for her to follow the instructions in the app and control the robots. In fact, she quickly understood the relationship between the color-coded Block Types in the Robo Code app and the modules. With experience already in Scratch and Minecraft Code Town, she didn’t take long to string together some code after assembling her first mobile robot and getting it moving about. 

One setback though was the placement of the power button. She was constantly turning it off accidentally while plugging together her creations. This led to some frustration as she kept on starting over.

She also realized that too hard of an impact like ramming into a heavy object had the potential to send a module or two popping off. These are not robots you want to take into battle or to roll off high surfaces like a ramp. I guess that is where that distance sensor comes in most handy.

Another issue was battery life. While the battery claims 6-hours of playtime, we found this depends on what you are doing with your project.  For simple projects like the Defense Tower, the charge lasted longer compared to more complex projects that required more blocks.  Just keep in mind your mileage may vary and you may need to pause your play session to recharge. 

Lastly, while the apps listed below are available for mobile phones, my daughter found that the best experience was on a tablet, especially when coding with Robo Blockly, mainly because of the screen size.

Robo Wunderkind Programming Apps 

Here are the Robo Wunderkind programming apps available:

Robo Live - This app is geared toward beginner coders. It uses drag and drop icons to code and control the robot. You can build tutorial projects located in the Getting Started menu, including a Defense Tower, Car, Trike and Rover, and experiment with blocking your own actions out in the icon code editor, as well as power them using the app’s remote control. The My Robo screen keeps track of battery status, the name of the project or tutorial you’re working with and the modules currently connected to your Robo. An integrated link to the How-To guide can help you maximize your experience. You can start a project from scratch and save your designs and code to experiment with later.

Robo Code - This app is a step up from Robo Live, where new concepts such as states, actions and connections are introduced, but still using drag and drop icons. Similar to Robo Live, the My Robo and Getting Started tabs are available. The pre-programmed projects are a little more complex than Robo Live, with a focus on programming concepts. Robo Code’s My Projects includes a Coding Lab with all the same core controls as Robo Live. Kids will get familiar with programming concepts quickly as Robo Code uses Color Logic, the same functional category identifier for the modules, to show what code block does what. You can grab a yellow code block and pull it into your project to add light functions, for example. Kids can experiment with actions, lights and sounds, sequence programming and smart obstacle navigation.

Robo Blockly - This app uses an open-ended block-based programming language similar to the popular Scratch language. Aimed at advanced users, Robo Blockly is recommended for those who have spent some time in Robo Code and feel comfortable with complex code sets and projects. It features the familiar My Robo, Getting Started and Coding Lab tabs and includes 9 types of Code Blocks in the Coding Lab, which can control inputs/outputs such as Sounds (Orange), Motion (Blue), Visuals (Yellow) and Sensing (Red). Kids can then use Block Types like Events, Variables, Functions, Flow and Operators to create complete programs to manipulate their Robo. 

With color-coding, the code is easy to read and update, needing just a click on a Block Type to edit values such as directional movement count, what type of sound to play, what color LED to flash and so on. Using Flow Blocks, you can repeat your favorite piece of code for as long as needed, useful for projects like a motion sensor and alarm system, or even a dancing robot that sings your favorite songs.

Robo Libs – If you’re familiar with the Python programming language, more advanced users can fetch the open-source Robo Python API or the Arduino Library written in C++. The Robo Python API features functions to manipulate your Robo modules such as Check Turn Action, Drive Forever, Get Robo Build, Stop All Actions, Blink RGB, Random Color, and a host of useful command-line queries to get information on your project’s build. Both APIs come with example code to get you started.

Bottom Line 

Robo Wunderkind’s simple design and versatility make it a great fit for a younger audience who want to get into technology. It most definitely will create that spark of curiosity and promote fun learning. Compared to other STEM-based robotic kits in the market, the Robo Wunderkind may not be the cheapest one you can find, but if the price tag doesn’t bother you, it will be well worth your investment. That's especially true if you have or are thinking of giving the kti as a gift to young kids who are eager to tinker and learn the basics of coding. For older kids who are leaning towards more complex robot creations and coding experience, the UBTech Jimu robots are a great option, as is the STS Pi, which is a Raspberry Pi-powered robot.

It’s also worth noting that expanding your Robo Wunderkind set once you have it is not that expensive. Additional modules range from $5-$45 as of this writing, and grabbing one or two extra modules for your kit can add features and learning experiences well worth the money. Moreover, with a learning arc that can take a programming novice from object-based coding skills to creating complex robotics, this kit has the potential to be a long-lasting tool that won’t get discarded quickly due to boredom.

Today we change gears a bit, from featuring best gaming keyboards, to talk about a different type of keyboard – the fun-learning musical kind. Combining its love for music and technology, Roli created Lumi Keys, a wireless RGB MIDI keyboard controller designed to work together with the Lumi app to make music learning easier and more interactive for everyone, using the learn-as-you-play approach. 

Setup

Getting setup with Lumi is very simple. Download the Lumi mobile app to your iOS or Android device (compatible devices are listed below), then pair it via Bluetooth with the Lumi keyboard. Once you’re connected, you’ll get access to the Lumi library, where you can either dive right into learning to play a song or study the basics first by watching the video tutorials. 

Lumi Keys and Lumi App Specs 

Hardware: Lumi Keys 

The Lumi keyboard comes with 24 keys, featuring the Roli BrightKey technology which has "full spectrum" illumination and design inspired by Fresnel lenses (used particularly in lighthouses). This is what provides the Lumi keyboard with its bright, attractive colors that look great in dark environments but also stand out in well-lit settings. Its keys feel precise, even though they are fairly small, measuring just 19.4mm wide, which is a touch narrower than the typical 23.5mm. The high (black) key measures 9.67mm, rather than the standard 13.7 mm.

The plunge distance is 10mm, which is 92% of what you'd find on a grand piano. If you are a beginner, this may not be a concern, but experienced musicians will notice the difference and may need to get acclimated.

The Lumi Keys have a modular design, using DNA connectors (proprietary Roli magnetic connectors), so you can connect to another Lumi keyboard or to Roli's Blocks, a studio-ready mini keyboard with a variety of configurations including a drum pad. As of this writing, the software app for Lumi only supports two joined keyboards, but theoretically, more Lumi keyboards could be attached together for playing more than 48 keys at once.

Weighing 1.3 pounds and measuring at 11 x 5.5 x 1 inches, the Lumi Keys is really portable and convenient to carry around compared to other more traditional MIDI keyboards which can measure anywhere from 20 to over 50 inches in length. Portability is key to musicians on the go, and you can easily fit more than one Lumi keyboard into a regular backpack.

As a true MIDI keyboard, Lumi Keys will work with other MIDI-compatible software. Just plug it into your desktop and use it with any DAW (digital audio workstation) such as GarageBand, Kontakt, Cubase or Omnisphere.

Software: Lumi App 

The Lumi mobile app allows multiple methods of keyboard fun, including free play, jamming or learning songs. The RGB keyboard sets the stage for learning songs using the app, with color-coded notes and a Guitar Hero-like experience. As the song plays, notes scroll down on the screen with colored keys appearing for you to play on your keyboard. The more used to the learning activity you get, the easier it becomes to play without looking at the RGB keyboard. 

Challenge mode is available where, much like Guitar Hero games, it tracks your accuracy and rates your performance at the end of the song.

You can connect to the Lumi mobile app via Bluetooth and USB-C which includes MIDI out and power for charging the rechargeable lithium battery).

Content: Lumi Library 

At the heart of the Lumi app is the Lumi library, where all the content (songs and lessons) are stored and organized. It comes in two packages – Essential and Premium/Complete. The Lumi Essential is the free access service that comes with the initial package and starts you off with 60+ lessons and 40 classic songs. Once you've mastered the songs and lessons there, you can move up to Lumi Premium/Complete, which does require a subscription, but provides access to a constantly-updated library of 400+ contemporary and classical songs and over 130 interactive lessons. 

Upgrades 

Once you've settled in and gotten some knowledge under your belt, Lumi can connect you to Roli software packages like Studio Player, the Noise app and Roli Dashboard.  These are real pro tools and while Lumi can readily use the entry-level Blocks, there's no reason to not jump right into making music like the pros. Studio Player opens up a massive library of sounds and has composition tools like Smart Chords (for chord composition) and Multi-Layered Arpeggiator (for rhythmic patterns). You can add Roli Noise to your mobile iOS device for sketching out musical ideas on the fly. With Roli Dashboard, your LUMI can work with Roli’s popular Seaboard Rise and other popular DAWs.

Bottom Line

Since the advent of MIDI, making music has become more accessible to aspiring musicians. The new Lumi keyboard and app offer something everyone from beginners to professionals can appreciate.

For those who want to go Pro, Lumi provides the perfect first-step toward using Roli Blocks and instant connectivity to software packages like Roli Studio Player and the mobile Studio Noise. This is definitely a great toolset for any beginner who is wants to make the leap into serious music playing and production.

Depending on your budget, the $299 price tag may seem a tad expensive compared to other MIDI keyboards on the market. But combined with its beginner-friendly game-style learning and easy upgrade potential to pro-level tools, the Lumi is an impressive and powerful music platform for new learners and hobby musicians.

Lumi aims to inspire and cultivate a love of music by making it easy to learn, play, and make music in a fun environment. This keyboard delivers on that promise.

Writing an SD card, the first thing you need to do to set up a Raspberry Pi, typically involves a computer, card reader and software such Raspberry Pi Imager. But what happens when you are away from a computer and need to write a new OS for your Raspberry Pi? Well luckily there is a very useful app for Android phones and tablets. 

Raspi SD Card Imager from Mike Redrobe is a tool to write operating system images for use on the Raspberry Pi. It can download and flash from a selection of images, from Raspberry Pi OS, to Ubuntu and RetroPie, all from one handy app.

If you have your own custom images, these can be written to an SD card while you are on the road. Let's take a look at this application and learn how to write the latest Raspberry Pi OS 32-bit to a microSD card for a spare Raspberry Pi 4.

What You Need

• Android device
• Adapters to connect a micro SD card reader
• Micro SD card
• Raspberry Pi and accessories

How to Install Raspberry Pi OS with Raspi SD Card Imager

1. On your Android device open the Google Play Store and install Pi SD Card Imager. 

2. Insert your micro SD card (and reader) into your Android device. If your device has a built-in micro SD card reader, use that.

3. Open Raspi SD Card Imager app and press the three dots in the top right of the screen. Select Choose OS and use the filters at the top of the screen to select Pi 4. 

4. Choose Raspberry Pi OS (32-bit) (3.2GB). This will download and cache the installation files to your Android device. 

5. Select Choose SD or USB via the three dot menu. Select the drive which contains your micro SD card. 

6.  Click on “Enable SSH for remote login” for out of the box SSH support. 

7.  Click on “Write to SD” to start the process. Depending on the Android device, this should take no longer than 10 minutes. 

8. Eject the micro SD card and then insert the micro SD card into your Raspberry Pi.

9. Power up the Raspberry Pi and it will go through the final stages of the install process. Once complete, the Pi will reboot and you will see the Raspberry Pi OS Desktop.

Hat tip to leepspvideo who provided the inspiration for this article. 

Want to reboot your Raspberry Pi? Don't even worry about opening a terminal window—the HomeBerry Android app, developed by Andrej Martinák, has everything you need to control your Pi remotely with a few basic functions.

HomeBerry works with a custom REST API. This API must be installed on your Raspberry Pi in order for a companion Android app to communicate the Raspberry Pi. You can read more about and download the HomeBerry API repository on Github. Once it's installed, you'll need to load the HomeBerry app onto an Android device (an Android tablet should work just as well as a smartphone).

The Android app features a user interface with plenty of options and settings. You can restart your Pi, enable and disable Bluetooth or even launch specific apps like Kodi.

If you want to take HomeBerry for a spin, you can check it out on Github. Martinák provides all of the source code and plenty of info to get you started. This isn't his first project, either. Be sure to follow him on Reddit for more projects and future updates to HomeBerry.

Samsung announced today that the Galaxy Book S will be available with Intel Lakefield processors. The company has yet to release U.S. pricing and release dates, though the company's UK site has it shipping on June 12 for £999.00.

Update, May 29, 2:07 p.m. ET: Samsung told Tom's Hardware that this announcement is for the Korean market and that US details are unavailable. Story continues below.

The laptop will use an Intel Core i5-L16G7 CPU, which boasts Intel UHD graphics, Foveros 3D stacking technology for the first time and a hybrid CPU architecture. 

Besides its first-of-its-kind processor, the Galaxy Book S will arrive with 8GB of LPDDR4X RAM and up to 512GB of eUFS storage. It will also come with Wi-Fi 6 and LTE options for connectivity.

The upcoming clamshell is light at 2.1 pounds and is just 0.5 inches thick. Samsung will offer the design in two colors: earthy gold and mercury gray.

Samsung Galaxy Book S Specs

Samsung Galaxy Book S Is a Lakefield Showcase

The Galaxy Book S debuted with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx, but this will be the first time we see Intel's five-core hybrid processor, which pairs one Sunny Cove core with four Tremont cores using Intel's 3D Foveros technology. Samsung's specification states that the Core i5-L16G7 offers clock speeds of up to 3 GHz and an L3 cache of 4MB.

We first saw Lakefield at CES inside the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold, though Lenovo was careful not to name the chip specifically, only saying that it uses Intel Hybrid technology. Microsoft also suggested it would use Lakefield in the now-delayed, dual-screened, Surface Neo. So instead, Samsung got first dibs (though Lenovo plans to release the Fold this year). This laptop leaked earlier on a Canadian version of Samsung's website. 

Enabling All Apps

Using an x86 chip over an Arm chip in the Galaxy Book S means Samsung's machine will support all Windows apps. If Samsung opted for an Arm chip and Windows 10 on Arm,  32-bit x86 apps would have to be emulated, and 64-bit apps wouldn't run at all. Some Windows programs have been compiled for Arm, but they're not all there yet. The Lakefield version of the Book S should offer far fewer limitations in that regard.

What is unclear until we test it is how the two will compare in terms of performance and battery life. But we hope to see this sleek laptop land in our lab soon.

With coronavirus forcing “non-essential” workers to work from home, tools for building a home office are selling out almost as much as toilet paper. We recently covered the best webcams that are still available to buy and explained how to use a Raspberry Pi as a PC webcam, but there are other options out there. If you need to video conference now and you can’t wait for a delivery or don't have a Raspberry Pi with camera module, you can use your phone or DSLR as a webcam.

How to use a Phone as a Webcam

With built-in video meeting apps like Facetime, most modern smartphones already come with video conferencing in mind. This means that, at the very least, distressed work-from-homers can join video calls from straight from their phone. But what if you want to take calls at your desk, using your phone’s camera as a plug-in accessory?

For both iPhone and Android, there are apps to do just that.

On iPhone, the most popular webcam app is EpocCam, with an average 4.3 star rating across 15.5k user reviews. EpocCam is a free download with a paid upgrade option that allows either a Windows PC or a Mac to read an iPhone as a webcam, either over Wi-Fi or using a USB connection. You’ll have to install separate drivers to your target computer from EpocCam’s site, but after that, you’re good to go.

Out of the box, EpocCam lets you choose between streaming your front or back phone camera, and ets you take advantage of your phone’s flashlight and autofocus while using it as a webcam. It boasts full compatibility with video chat and streaming programs like Skype and OBS, where your phone’s input will just show up as “EpocCam” in your webcam options.

The free version of EpocCam does have a catch in that it only offers sub-HD 640 x 480 pixel resolutions, but the $8.00 EpocCam HD version does offer full 1080p support, as well as background replacement on devices with a TrueDepth camera, which includes most recent iPhones.

EpocCam is still available on Android, though user reviews aren’t as confident, averaging 3 stars for the free version and 2 stars for the paid version. Instead, most Android users seem to have shifted to IP Webcam, a free app that has an average of 4 stars across 90k reviews.

IP Webcam is a home security app that lets you stream your Android phone’s camera to any web browser over local Wi-Fi. However, it also includes drivers for emulating a webcam in video chat programs such as Skype, at the caveat of no audio support. Just download the app, press the “Start Server” button, and enter the IP address that shows up on your phone to begin streaming your phone’s video to your computer. From there, you’ll be able to download drivers for either Windows or Linux that will let you set a resolution and use your phone as a webcam in video chat.

IP Webcam also allows video recording, easy uploads to Dropbox, activation upon motion and sound detection, and bonus niceties like text overlays. There is a paid version available for $3.99, although the only additions are a customizable UI and Tasker integration (for automating your phone’s processes). For basic video conferencing, you shouldn’t need either. 

How to use a DSLR as a webcam

If you somehow have a DSLR on hand, but not a webcam, there’s a good chance you can actually use your DSLR to substitute one. 

1. Check to see if your camera is either Nikon or Canon branded. If not, you're out of luck.

2. Download the free SparkoCam software from the company’s main site, which also has a full list of supported webcams at the bottom of its home page. 

3. Plug your DSLR into your PC using the cable that came with it. This will usually be either a microUSB, miniUSB, or full USB cable, depending on the camera. If you’ve lost your original cable, you’ll most likely be able to use a third-party replacement, so long as it’s the right type.

4. Click on the device tab in Sparkocam, where it should auto-detect your camera. 

5. Open Skype or any other video chat app and select “SparkoCam” as your webcam. You’ll have to find your own microphone, but otherwise, you’ll be set.

SparkoCam also includes options to change your DSLR’s exposure, shutter speed, ISO, and white balance, as well as add overlay effects like glasses or hats. The free version does come with a watermark, so you will need to pay for a pro license to remove it. Licenses offering DSLR support start at $50.00.

If you own a smartphone, you’ll soon be able to volunteer for a contact tracing system that could inform you if you’ve been near someone who’s tested positive for coronavirus, Apple and Google announced .

Contact tracing is a medical term for keeping track of someone with a communicable illness' recent physical contacts, to alert those people if they might be at higher risk of either becoming infected or infecting others, as well as to provide early care for any symptoms they might develop. For instance, the WHO’s definition of contact tracing cites Ebola as an example, with the idea being that once a patient is confirmed to have Ebola, healthcare workers interview that patient about their recent activities and form a list of people who may have come into contact with them, so that they can prepare or quarantine those who might have contracted the disease in the time the patient was contagious before seeking care.

With the whole globe now in the grips of the worldwide coronavirus pandemic, governments are now looking to technology giants to help scale up this crucial task. In particular, Android’s Google and iOS’ Apple are stepping up to the plate with a new solution. With smartphones almost being as commonplace to carry as wallets, the companies feel that the data their products give off makes them ideal candidates for mass contact tracing.

“In this spirit of collaboration, Google and Apple are announcing a joint effort to enable the use of Bluetooth technology to help governments and health agencies reduce the spread of the virus,” identical posts on both the Google blog and the Apple Newsroom stated today.

The idea of using cell phone data to track the spread of a disease isn’t exactly new. In fact, a cell phone heat map tracking location data from phones that had congregated on a single Florida beach during spring break this year gained mass popularity on Twitter late this March for showing just how far potentially infected spring breakers could have spread the disease.

However, what Apple and Google are proposing is different from using location data to track large trends. Instead, the two companies want to bake individual, automatic contact tracing into each of their operating systems, effectively allowing anyone with a smartphone to keep track of when they might have encountered a sick person.

For privacy’s sake, rather than location data, the idea is to use an opt-in bluetooth system that “doesn’t collect personally identifiable information” to let phones track which other phones they’ve come across during the day, and then use that information to help users and public health authorities limit coronavirus spread. Think of it like Nintendo’s 3DS Streetpass functionality, but for public health.

 To explain how it works, Google has drawn up a diagram of an example interaction between two fictional users- Bob and Alice. At the start of the interaction, Bob has a 10 minute conversation with Alice on a park bench. Here, their phones exchange what Apple calls “rolling proximity identifiers,” which update every 15 minutes to prevent wireless tracking of the device and are derived from a “daily tracing key” that changes once every 24 hours. A few days later, Bob tests positive for coronavirus and enters the test result into an app from a public health authority. He gives his phone permission to upload his last 14 days of keys to the cloud, at which point Alice’s phone recognizes that she’s come into contact with one of those keys and sends her a notification that she’s been exposed to a person who has tested positive for coronavirus.

At no point in the interaction do Bob and Alice’s keys identify the two to each other or anyone else, and Google promises that the “list of people you’ve been in contact with never leaves your phone.” Additionally, both passive tracking and the upload of keys from a person who has tested positive are opt-in only.

However, the system will be limited to apps at first, which could limit adoption. It’s set to begin rollout in May, when both Apple and Google will release APIs that allow Android and iOS to communicate with each other using “apps from public health authorities,” which will be available on both platforms and will function across operating systems, meaning that a Pixel user and an iPhone user will still be able to track if they’ve come into contact with each other. 

In the future, the two companies say that they are planning to build this functionality into Android and iOS themselves, to allow more people to participate and to allow a phone’s whole app ecosystem to use its contact tracing data.

Each company promises that “user privacy and security” are “central to the design,” with the hope being that anonymous keys, opt-in procedures, limiting who has access to collected data and using bluetooth instead of location data will encourage smartphone users to participate. Additionally, each company’s central servers will only maintain a database of shared keys, with local phones being where matches are tracked. Earlier this week, the American Civil Liberties Union warned against using phone data to track users during an epidemic, but largely focused on location data, which this solution seeks to avoid.

Unfortunately, this privacy-motivated switch to bluetooth does come with its own unique limitations. If keys only last for 15 minutes at a time, phones might have difficulty differentiating between individuals who spend extended periods of time together and those who simply pass each other on the street. Additionally, Bluetooth can’t detect walls, which might cause individuals in adjacent rooms who were never exposed to each other to worry unnecessarily if one of them tests positive. There’s also the larger question of how failure to update either contact tracing apps or eventually operating systems could impact the system, especially in areas with low connectivity. Further, tests are limited right now, which could limit the app's usefulness to certain communities.

Still, as a supplement to more traditional contact tracing interviews, the information offered here is, at the very least, more useful than knowing if you’ve met Lonk from Pennsylvania.

Google announced yesterday that its bug bounty program paid out $6.5 million in 2019, which is more than double the previous highest payout. It's rewarded more than $21 million through the program since it debuted a decade ago.

The ever-rising annual payouts can be partly attributed to Google offering rewards in exchange for information about vulnerabilities in more kinds of products. Google said it's expanded the program to Chrome, Android and other products, including some third-party applications that have proven popular among Android users.

But the payouts themselves have risen as well. Google said in 2019 it tripled "the maximum baseline reward amount from $5,000 to $15,000" and doubled "the maximum reward amount for high quality reports from $15,000 to $30,000"  for vulnerabilities in the Chrome browser. 

It also made big changes to Android bounties.

"Android Security Rewards expanded its program with new exploit categories and higher rewards," Google's blog said. "The top prize is now $1 million for a full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M secure element on Pixel devices. And if you achieve that exploit on specific developer preview versions of Android, we’re adding in a 50% bonus, making the top prize $1.5 million."

Additionally, the tech giant increased outreach for some programs, introduced the Developer Data Protection Reward Program and otherwise expanded its bug bounties in 2019. It's no wonder the programs' cumulative payout--$500,000 of which was donated to charities at the winning researchers' request--far exceeded the previous record.

Google isn't alone in its efforts to expand its bug bounty programs. Apple's public bug bounty program arrived in late 2019, and many other companies have steadily expanded their existing programs over the years. Turns out there's a pretty penny just waiting to be made by finding vulnerabilities in tech offerings.

These days, it seems like everyone wants to play classic arcade games. And why not? There's nothing quite like the feeling of running around the Pac-Man board or pumping dragons until they explode in Dig Dug. So the market is flooded with retro arcade and console systems, but there are a lot of catches. Some cabinets can only play a handful of titles, and other systems require you to bring your own (illicitly downloaded) games. And many only support one platform.

Enter the iiRcade. Due out later this year for an undisclosed sum, the iiRcade is a full-sized arcade cabinet with an app store you can use to buy and download fully-licensed games from a variety of platforms, including current-day Android. 

I got a chance to play with an iiRcade machine at the startup's CES 2020 booth and came away impressed with the build quality of the machine itself. The cabinet can be used either as a tabletop (aka cocktail) machine or placed onto an optional stand that makes it full-height for standup gaming. 

The screen, available in 17 or 19-inch varieties, offered crystal clear images and colors when I played a game of Double Dragon, the first title that iiRcade has licensed. The dual arcade sticks felt really good and the buttons had a very satisfying clicky feel that's been absent from many build-at-home arcade kits I've tried. 

Each joystick has six buttons, and then there's a top row for accessing the menu, adjusting the volume and selecting one- or two-player modes. Two speakers, which sounded very loud in my demo, live on either side of the iiRcade banner on the top front of the machine.

iiRcade CEO Jong Shin didn't disclose many specifics about the system's internal components. But he did share that it's an ARM-based computer that's not a Raspberry Pi and that it runs a highly customized version of Android that's been optimized for gaming.  He didn't disclose how much internal storage the machine has, but said that it has plenty of capacity for holding the types of games users will install.

Shin said that, because the iiRcade arcade machine is built on top of Android, it can run Android games that have been modified to play with its retro joysticks and buttons. So, you can play a modern, Android-based first-person shooter and use one old-school joystick to move and the other to look around, something you could never do in the eighties. Shin said that any Android games he licenses will be specially modified to work with the iiRcade's controls rather than a touch screen.

When iiRcade launches later this year, there will be a mobile app  that gamers will use to purchase games via their phones. The arcade machine will then use its own Internet connection to download and install the titles you've bought. 

While the hardware seems really good, the success of the iiRcade could hinge not only on the machine itself, but on the array of licensed titles that will run on it. So far, Shin said he has licensed the Double Dragon series, but is still working to sign up other partners before launch. 

There's no word yet on pricing for the iiRcade or a precise launch date, though consumers can sign up for updates on the iiRcade website. If iiRcade can get the product out at a reasonable price and license a critical mass of games, it could be a very compelling option for gamers who want to enjoy a mix of retro and modern titles on a classic-style arcade cabinet. 

MalwareBytes today revealed that Assurance Wireless by Virgin, which receives subsidies from the U.S. government to offer discounted cellular service to low-income Americans, sells an Android phone with "unremovable malware" installed.

The phone in question, the UMX U686CL, is said to cost just $35 from Assurance Wireless. (We couldn't find the device on the Assurance Wireless website, although we did find the UMX U683CL.) Assurance Wireless receives U.S. funds via the Lifeline program that offers discounted phone and broadband access to people who need it.

MalwareBytes said the UMX U686CL came with an app called "Wireless Update" pre-installed. Although the app does allow people to update the phone's software, it can also be used to install other apps without the owner's permission and MalwareBytes said it's actually a variant of the rightly maligned Adups software for Android.

Adups was criticized in 2016 and 2017 for secretly collecting user data via pre-installed apps that can't be removed without creating problems for the host device. In this case, Wireless Update is said to start installing apps the moment someone logs into the device, "with zero notification or permission required from the user."

But that's actually just the start of the UMX U686CL's problems. MalwareBytes said there's another piece of malware pre-installed on the device, and that one can't be removed without rendering the phone unusable. The company explained:

"It’s with great frustration that I must write about yet another unremovable pre-installed malicious app found on the UMX U686CL phone: the mobile device’s own Settings app functions as a heavily-obfuscated malware we detect as Android/Trojan.Dropper.Agent.UMX. Because the app serves as the dashboard from which settings are changed, removing it would leave the device unusable.

Android/Trojan.Dropper.Agent.UMX shares characteristics with two other variants of known mobile Trojan droppers. The first characteristic is that it uses the same receiver and service names. The receiver name ends with ALReceiver and the service name ends with ALAJobService. These names alone are too generic to make a solid correlation. But, coupled with the fact that the code is almost identical, and we can confidently confirm a match."

MalwareBytes noted that the UMX U686CL isn't the only budget smartphone that comes with malware pre-installed. The security company said it only expects that problem to get worse, too, and it's hard not to wonder how many of these devices escape scrutiny just because they're made for people without money to spare.

In its blog post, MalwareBytes said it "informed Assurance Wireless of our findings and asked them point blank why a US-funded mobile carrier is selling a mobile device infected with pre-installed malware," but it never heard back. Assurance Wireless doesn't appear to have commented after the report's publication, either.

Samsung announced the original Galaxy Book Flex in October, but it's back around already with the new "α," short for alpha, variant. The notebook  comes in one size, 13.3 inches, but  specifications will vary depending on how much you're willing to spend.

Starting with the display, Samsung built a QLED Full HD display into the Galaxy Flex Book α. No color space details were given other than that it is a 10-bit panel, but we were told that the display has a peak brightness of 600 nits, and with QLED tech it will have HDR support. As a 2-in-1, that display is a touchscreen. It supports pen input, but the pen isn't included.

Elsewhere, the units will carry Intel's latest 10th generation Core series processors and pack either 8 or 12GB of DDR4 RAM depending on the variant you pick. SSD storage is handled by an NVMe unit of either 256 or 512 B in capacity. Security is handled by a fingerprint scanner.

The notebook's real party trick is its form factor and design, as it's made out of a solid diamond-cut aluminum frame. It measures just 305 x 202 x 13.9mm and weighs in at 2.6 pounds (1.19 kg), making it one of the lighter aluminum-framed small form factor notebooks on the market. Despite this small form factor, it comes with a 54Wh battery, which paired with the efficiency of Intel's latest CPUs and the lack of a discrete GPU means a battery life of up to 17.5 hours depending on your level of activity and preferred brightness. Of course, we'd have to test that ourselves to confirm. 

Connectivity is also more than adequate with one USB Type-C port, two USB 3.0 Type-A ports, HDMI, a MicroSD card reader and a 3.5mm headphone/microphone combo jack.

Pricing will start at $829.99 with availability slated for H1 2020.

Some developers are bringing Windows 10 on Arm (the processor architecture, not the appendage) to flagship Android smartphones, as reported by Windows Latest this week. 

These efforts are in their early stages. A developer called "Lemon1Ice" told Windows Latest that Windows 10 on Arm can be installed on the OnePlus 6 and is being ported to Xiaomi's Mi Mix 2S, but much of the operating system (OS) is unusable. Another developer called "Enviso0n" is attempting to bring the OS to Samsung's Galaxy S8.

Windows 10 on Arm enables this kind of tinkering because smartphones and so-called always connected PCs use many of the same chips (often from Qualcomm). Microsoft didn't intend for the desktop version of Windows 10 to reach smartphones, but the shared Arm architecture makes it possible, at least in theory.

Like other projects, these efforts might serve little practical purpose. Microsoft announced in January that it would end support for Windows 10 Mobile at the end of the year, indicating that people don't even want to use a mobile-optimized version of Windows on their smartphones. Who'd want to use the full desktop version?

The real value in these projects comes from demonstrating the power of the Arm architecture and the value in supporting it. Microsoft brought Windows 10 to Arm, so it could make PCs with Qualcomm chips that never have to go without Internet access, and in doing so, it opened up a world of possibility for many other devices.

Gearbest is selling the new H96 Max Android TV box at a discount as of Sunday. The mini-computer is available for $22.50 (€20.42) in a limited quantity.

The H96 Max is only one of several products created by H96. The company, based out of Shenzhen, China, is well known for its Android TV boxes. The new 3318 model is the latest edition to the H96 Max series.

The H96 Max box runs Android 9.0—making it easy to stream content using almost any Android streaming app. The box uses an HDMI output and comes with a few additional ports, including USB 3.0. The H96 Max supports both Bluetooth and WiFi but also offers an Ethernet port for hardwired connections.

You can expect a few accessories with the mini-computer. The package includes the H96 Max TV box, a wireless remote, an HDMI cable, and a power adapter for the TV box.

You can get your hands on the H96 Max Android TV box via Gearbest. As of Sunday, the price has been set at $22.50 (€20.42), with a default price of $49.00 (€44.47). The H96 Max isn't the first Android TV box or mini-computer, but it definitely stands out against competition like the Raspberry Pi with a price this low. 

Microsoft announced Monday that it's combining Word, Excel and PowerPoint into a single Office app on mobile devices. The products will remain separate on desktops--even Microsoft wouldn't dare confuse Windows users by consolidating its Office suite into a single app--but will be lumped together on Android and iOS.

"The new Office mobile app represents our vision for what a productivity solution would look like if first built for mobile devices," Microsoft said in the blog post announcing this change in approach. "In designing this new experience, we first considered how people’s expectations differ when using a phone versus a computer, so we set out to optimize for simplicity, efficiency and common mobile needs."

Bringing the Office suite together into a single Office app helped achieve most of those goals. The apps had their own mobile optimizations already: Word and Excel could both create editable documents from pictures, for example, and PowerPoint could use pictures taken directly from the phone's camera roll. This isn't the first time Microsoft's tried to make the Office suite a bit easier to use on smartphones.

But the new Office app will feature other changes too. Microsoft introduced a new Actions pane that's supposed to make it easier to create PDFs, scan QR codes and more. The company also tried to provide easier access to Sticky Notes, and the integrated Office Lens features enable users to "create automatically enhanced digital images of whiteboards and documents."

The new Office app is currently available as a public preview on Android. The iOS version reached the 10,000 user limit Apple imposes on pre-release software distributed via its TestFlight platform the same day it was announced. 

Microsoft said the new app will initially be exclusive to smartphones, but it plans to bring it to tablets some time in the future (it didn't provide a date). 

Users of the Word, Excel and PowerPoint mobile apps needn't fret about their apps going away yet. Microsoft said it will "continue to support and invest in the existing Word, Excel and PowerPoint mobile apps" because it believes "everyone should decide which experience works best for them on their phones." 

But we'll see how long the redundant apps will remain available once people get used to the idea of a single Office app.

Huawei's mobile operating system (OS), named Hongmeng, is starting to seem like Apple laptop's new keyboard mechanism: there have been a lot of reports about it, and there are plenty of reasons why the company would develop it, but it still has yet to make its way into an official product. That might change later this year, however, with Chinese state media reporting that Huawei could release a smartphone running Hongmeng as early as this December.

The switch to Hongmeng would follow Google's decision to prevent Huawei from using certain aspects of Android--such as the Google Play Store and Google's applications--after the company was blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Commerce in May. Huawei could technically still use Android because it's partly open source, but many Android users are probably accustomed to having easy access to Google's services on the platform.

Huawei could reportedly ditch Windows 10 in its laptops, too; although, it's not clear if the company would use Hongmeng to do so. That lack of clarity is actually Hongmeng's defining trait right now--even Huawei can't seem to decide what the platform is for. First it said it was ready to replace Android and Windows even though it didn't want to. Then, reports said Hongmeng could debut this year. And then Huawei said the platform won't replace Android.

The Global Times disputed that claim today in a report saying Huawei would announce Hongmeng during a developer conference on August 9. The company reportedly plans to release a smartphone featuring the new operating system in the fourth quarter of 2019 with a 2,000 yuan ($284) price tag.

Huawei's ambition reportedly won't stop there, either, with the Global Times citing an anonymous source, who claimed the company is building a platform:

"In addition to smartphones and industrial use, Huawei has greater plans for the HongMeng OS: to make it run on many platforms and facilitate IoT. The source disclosed that unlike the Android system, which is based on the Linux kernel, Huawei's idea of developing HongMeng is similar to Google's Fuchsia OS - based on a microkernel, can better accommodate artificial intelligence and can run on multiple platforms."

At this point we're going to treat Hongmeng like we're treating Apple's butterfly mechanism replacement. There's enough smoke to assume there's a fire, sure, but we also don't know when the company will finally confirm the blaze. That's especially true for Huawei, considering its status as the designated example of how the U.S. can target Chinese companies during the ongoing (and slowly escalating) trade war between the two countries.

Huawei board member and Senior Vice President Catherine Chen said in a Brussels meeting on Thursday that the company’s Hongmeng operating system (OS) was never designed for smartphones, or even any consumer product at all, Xinhuanet reported.

According to the publication, during a roundtable she said Hongmeng was designed for industrial use and that its development started years before Huawei began having trade troubles in the U.S.

The exec also reportedly pointed to smartphone OSes requiring dozens of millions of lines of codes, while Hongmeng only has hundreds of thousands, making it more secure. According to Chen it also has much lower latency than a smartphone OS would have. 

In Brussels, Chen also said that Huawei intends to continue using Android for its smartphones. It’s not clear yet whether or not Google will acquire a 90-day license to work with Huawei, but Huawei recently announced that Android Q will come to some of its higher-end devices.

Huawei Talked Big About Ditching Android

Last year, Huawei reportedly told its partners not to worry about the increasingly hostile moves from the U.S. government against the company because if Huawei needed to stop using Android (made by U.S.-based Google) it could use its own OS. Huawei also told European partners that its new OS would gain 50 million app installs by the end of 2018. However, Huawei has yet to release a smartphone OS. 

After the U.S. government this year banned U.S. companies from collaborating with Huawei, Huawei said its Android replacement could be out by the end of the year. It also claimed the OS would be up to 60% faster than Android. U.S. companies, including Google, started defending Huawei to the U.S. government, fearing that Huawei (and perhaps others) would indeed switch away from Android if Google’s OS was no longer an alternative. 

Perhaps as a result of all of this lobbying, President Trump has started to backtrack somewhat on banning U.S. companies from working with Huawei. However, any collaboration with Huawei still needs to go through the U.S. Commerce Department, which will apply a “presumption of denial” when making a decision about whether or not to allow a certain partnership.

Some U.S. companies, such as Microsoft and Intel, have already started to resume some business deals with Huawei and more may be expected to follow soon. A Reuters report this week said that more companies may be granted temporary licenses to sell their products to Huawei within the next four weeks. 

Huawei's facade of indifference to losing the American market started to show more cracks this weekend. Reuters said in two separate reports that the company reduced its revenue forecast for 2019 by $30 billion, which is the first time it's quantified the impact of the U.S. ban, as some of the American semiconductor industry's leaders attempted to convince lawmakers to rethink the extent of the restrictions.

The U.S. Department of Commerce added Huawei to the Entity List, which prohibits American companies from working with it unless they have special licenses, in May. While the ban was officially attributed to national security concerns, its announcement following unsuccessful trade talks between the U.S. and China made it seem like blacklisting Huawei was at least partly motivated by other factors as well.

American businesses--as well as some of their overseas counterparts like Arm and Tokyo Electron--were quick to sever ties with Huawei. But the company often made it seem like it could weather the U.S. ban somewhat easily. It was said to have stockpiled components, developed its own operating systems, and prepared itself for a shift to Chinese suppliers just in case such a ban were put in place.

But today, Huawei CEO Ren Zhengfei admitted the U.S. ban had a bigger impact than originally anticipated. (Which makes sense, given his warning that the company would probably have to start handing out pink slips, which arrived before the ban.) Zhengfei said that Huawei's prediction of making $125 to $130 billion this year has been revised to making $100 billion because of the blacklisting.

"We did not expect they would attack us on so many aspects," Reuters quoted him as saying, adding that he expects a revival in business in 2021. [...] We cannot get components supply, cannot participate in many international organizations, cannot work closely with many universities, cannot use anything with U.S. components, and cannot even establish connection with networks that use such components."

Another report said that executives from Intel, Qualcomm, Xilinx, and the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) trade group have pushed the U.S. government to reconsider the blanket ban on working with Huawei. Those efforts were characterized as self preservation on the American companies' part; it's hard to lose a customer as big as Huawei without suffering at least some drop in revenues as a result.

Reuters said these companies believe Huawei's smartphones, server, and the like don't pose the same national security risk as its 5G wireless equipment. If the company truly was banned as a matter of national security, preventing it from selling consumer devices in the U.S. (or using American parts in products sold abroad) could have a significant effect on their businesses with little security benefit.

Both reports indicate that neither Huawei nor its American partners have been as steadfast in the face of the U.S. blacklisting as they seemed. Now the question is how many more cracks that facade can bear before it falls completely, because as long as Huawei is the preferred scapegoat in the U.S. and China's trade war, things are probably going to get worse before they get any better.

Western Digital today announced that it's severing ties with Huawei following the company's blacklisting by the U.S. Department of Commerce, according to Nikkei, which reported that the storage company might reverse that decision if it's given the go-ahead from the U.S. government.

Losing access to Western Digital as a supplier will make it even harder for Huawei to manufacture its smartphones. The company's said to have stockpiled enough components to last it between three months and a full year without needing to restock, but eventually that time will pass. Huawei reportedly had to delay laptop development and manufacturing; having to do the same for smartphones could be a disaster.

Huawei was blacklisted in May, and even though many companies announced their intent to abide by U.S. policies soon after that announcement, not all of have figured out how they plan to move forward. Some received a temporary license to continue working with Huawei until August 18, and if relations between the U.S. and China improve before then, Huawei might be whitelisted once more.

U.S. companies also have the option of applying for a special license to continue working with Huawei. Nikkei reported that Western Digital is weighing that option, quoting chief executive Steve Milligan as saying the storage company is "working with the U.S. government at various different levels" and that it might apply for a special license from the U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security to continue supplying Huawei despite the ban.

It's not an easy situation for companies to navigate. Failing to comply with U.S. laws could lead to fines and other punishments. Severing ties with Huawei right away only to have the company whitelisted if the U.S. and China settle their differences might cost U.S. companies a large customer. Western Digital appears to be trying to have it both ways by abiding by the ban while making it abundantly clear that it would really rather not.

The desire to play it safe doesn't appear to be strictly financial. Milligan told Nikkei that Huawei makes up less than 10% of Western Digital's revenues. But the companies did just announce a Strategic Cooperation Agreement in April to "agree to a common goal of market success through the continuation of their relationship in the areas of HDD, SSD and NAND flash storage technology." That could make a clean break kind of awkward.

Either way, here's another entry on the list of companies that plan to sever ties with Huawei. The list already included Google, the U.S. semiconductor industry, Arm and Tokyo Electron. We suspect the list will continue to grow as the August 18 deadline approaches. At this rate, no matter what Huawei claims about its hardware stockpile or ability to make its own operating system, running its business will get harder.

It turns out that being put on a U.S. Department of Commerce blacklist has a way of forcing a company's hands. Case in point: Huawei could reportedly introduce a new operating system (OS) because it's being cut off from core aspects of the Android and Windows platforms on which it previously relied. Numerous reports have claimed Huawei plans to make the switch soon, and the latest reportedly came from Chinese newspaper Global Times, which said it could debut in 3Q19.

Huawei reportedly started working on its own platform in 2012. The company's been hesitant to release it, however, because its customers have grown accustomed to Android and Windows. (And because more people than ever actually care about the OS their devices run, of course.) Yet the company's addition to the Entity List in May--which makes it difficult for it to work with U.S. businesses--haven't left it with very many options.

Global Times said that Huawei is likely to call its platform "HongWeng OS" in China and "Oak OS" elsewhere. Citing numerous unidentified sources familiar with Huawei's plans, the report claimed that Huawei might introduce the platform as early as August or September and that the company has already "filed several applications with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) for trademarks for the OS and other software."

Other reports have claimed that Huawei's new OS--at least the one meant for the company's phones--could debut even sooner than this fall. Despite the company repeatedly saying that it didn't want to switch from its current OSes, TechRadar reported on May 28 that Huawei's platform could debut as early as June, per Huawei Enterprise Business Group Middle East managing director and vice president Alaa Elshimy. 

Huawei itself reportedly CNBC that it could introduce the new OS in China by the end of 2019 and then expand to the rest of the world by the first half of 2020. The discrepancy between these reports could result from internal miscommunications about the company's plans; it could also be part of Huawei's attempts to convince the U.S. government that cutting off its access to U.S. platforms would be a mistake.

The company reportedly found in ally in those efforts via Google, which reportedly told the U.S. government that allowing Huawei to introduce its own operating system could be a national security risk. (Google likely wants to make sure Android doesn't lose a massive hardware partner, of course, but it's at least cloaking that self-interest in a facade of concern.) We don't yet know how the federal government responded. 

So will Huawei introduce an OS this month, or in August, or sometime in 2020? We don't know. It's also possible that Huawei's simply hoping the U.S. and China will resolve their differences so it can keep using Android and Windows. But these leaks make it clear that the company--or at least a fair number of its workers--really want the rest of the world to know that it's ready to drop U.S. platforms if it absolutely necessary.

Updated, 5/21/19, 7:05am PT: The Bureau of Industry and Security announced that Huawei suppliers will be given a 90-day reprieve from the new trade restrictions. In an update to the May 15 announcement that it was expanding the Entity List, the bureau said that "Effective May 20, 2019, BIS amended the EAR to create a 90-day temporary general license that partially restores the licensing requirements and policies under the Export Administration Regulations (EAR) for exports, reexports, and transfers (in-country) to sixty-nine entities added to the Entity List on May 16, 2019."

Issuing a temporary license was nominally meant to give American companies more time to adjust their plans following the loss of Huawei's business. But it also gave the U.S. and China time to have more--and hopefully more productive--trade talks. Perhaps the delay of execution will become a stay of execution; but at least now companies should find it easier to transition to an economy that doesn't involve Huawei.

Original article, 5/20/19, 6:18am PT: 

Huawei's addition to a U.S. Department of Commerce blacklist could have dire ramifications for the company. Weekend reports indicated that numerous American companies, including Google and Intel, will sever ties with Huawei because of the federal government's actions. The company said it would respond to those lost connections by becoming more self-sufficient, but analysts weren't convinced that it would be able to do so in the near future.

Reuters said on May 19 that Google planned to stop letting Huawei use its apps, the Google Play software marketplace, and other aspects of Android in response to the company's addition to the Entity List on May 15. Huawei would still be allowed to use the Android Open Source Project in its phones, but losing access to Google services would effectively make the version of Android running on the company's smartphones unrecognizable to many people.

Bloomberg later reported that Intel, Qualcomm, Broadcom, and Xilinx wouldn't supply Huawei until further notice. Losing those suppliers could seriously limit Huawei's ability to ship new phones--it's kinda hard to make a smartphone without a processor, wireless modem, and other components made by these companies. Huawei attempted to downplay those concerns by claiming it could replace its American suppliers with some based in China.

Numerous analysts told Reuters and Bloomberg they doubt Huawei's claims. Chinese companies might be able to replicate the products offered by their American counterparts--emphasis on "might"--but analysts didn't think any would be able to do so at the scale Huawei would require. The company is the second-largest smartphone maker in the world, behind Samsung, and that means it needs a large supply of components to meet demand.

Huawei might not feel the effects of these losses right away, though, because it's reportedly stockpiled enough components to last at least three months. It's also been designing its own chips, but analysts told Reuters that even those efforts could be stymied because they rely on software made by American companies. Losing the U.S. market could have been enough to rock Huawei; losing American suppliers could be even more problematic.

Not that Huawei would be the only company to suffer. Like we said, it's the world's second-largest smartphone maker, and losing that business also hurts American companies. Seeking Alpha reported that numerous semiconductor companies saw their share prices drop this morning. STMicroelectronics, Micron, Qualcomm, Xilinx, and Intel saw price drops between 7.4% (STMicroelectronics) and 1.8% (Intel) in early trading.

It wouldn't be surprising if shareholders for all those companies--from America's semiconductor industry to Huawei--waited with bated breath to see how the U.S. and China planned to proceed. The relationship between the countries is critical, and tensions could harm companies in both. It's only been five days since Huawei was added to the U.S. Department of Commerce blacklist; we doubt this is the last we'll hear about that decision's fallout.

Google today announced a new feature for Android 7+ devices (via an update to its proprietary Google Play Services software) that effectively turns these devices into a two-factor authentication security key. The feature uses the FIDO Alliance protocols, which have become an industry standard for hardware security keys.

Android Smartphones as Security Keys

Last year, Google learned through a year-long experiment within its own organization, that hardware security keys are basically impervious to phishing attacks. This prompted the company to build and sell its own hardware security token, the Google Titan Security Key.

However, not everyone wants to pay $20-$50 for such a key, and most people may not want to deal with the hassle of using an extra gadget, even if they can tie it to their keychain.

Turning your personal phone into a security key seems like the next best option that should be safer than say SMS-based two-factor authentication, which can be intercepted, while also providing high convenience.

Google’s implementation of this Android feature also uses the FIDO standards, which means that it should be supported in whichever browser or operating system that supports those standards. For now that includes only Chrome, but Firefox and the upcoming Chromium-based Edge browser should also support it in the near future.

The Windows 10 operating system may also support it in the near-future, as Microsoft is a member of the FIDO Alliance, as well as an early adopter of the FIDO standards.

How to Activate Android’s Security Key Feature

As mentioned above, first you need a smartphone running Android 7 or newer. This should include most phones from 2017 and on. Next, you need to use a Bluetooth-enabled Chrome OS, macOS X or Windows 10 computer with a Chrome browser. Make sure your phone's Bluetooth is activated.

Next, follow these four steps:

1. Add your Google Account to your Android phone.
2. Make sure you’re enrolled in 2SV.
3. On your computer, visit the 2SV settings, and click "Add security key".
4. Choose your Android phone from the list of available devices.

Google recommends registering a backup security key (either hardware token or phone), in case you lose your main one. If you lose your main security key and you don’t have a backup, you may not be able to get back into your Google account or whatever service for which you enabled the security key-based two-factor authentication.

The potential of running full Windows 10 on ARM CPUs is huge, but the early results have been mixed at best. In spring 2018, a handful of OEMs launched 2-in-1s running Windows, but powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processors rather than traditional x86 chips from Intel or AMD. These first-gen devices were intriguing but suffered from sluggish performance and annoying compatibility issues. 

Now, Qualcomm has released the more-powerful, Snapdragon 850 chip and Samsung is using it to power the Galaxy Book 2, a 12-inch detachable 2-in-1 with built-in 4G, a colorful OLED display, a surprisingly-snappy keyboard and a comfortable stylus (both of which come in the box). The Book 2's performance, particularly when running standard win32 apps, is a noticeable step up from its predecessors, but $999 (UK price TBD) is a high price to pay for what is undoubtedly a secondary device. 

Test Unit Specifications

Design

The Galaxy Book 2 has the same basic design as other detachable 2-in-1s. The 1.8-pound (0.8 kg), 11.3 x 7.9 x 0.3-inch (287.5 x 200.4 x 7.6 mm) slate connects magnetically to a 0.6-pound (0.27 kg) keyboard cover while a panel on the back flips out to serve as a kickstand. The gunmetal gray, matte metal back panel looks premium and resists fingerprints but just isn't as attractive as the Surface Pro 6 in gray or its stunning new black shade or the leather and aluminum-clad Envy x2. It’s all a step up in design from Samsung’s recent laptops that used the lightweight Metal12, which didn’t feel luxurious.

The kickstand extends back nearly 90 degrees so you can adjust the angle as you see fit. The system balanced decently on my lap, but wasn't as stable as the Surface Pro 6 because the kickstand just isn't as tight. When I used the Galaxy Book 2 on a bumpy train, it jostled uncomfortably on my lap, but never fell over.

The Galaxy Book 2 has two USB Type-C ports which can be used to charge the device, plug in to a docking station or connect to peripherals. There's also a 3.5mm audio jack for headphones, but no USB Type-A port for connecting to the most common accessories. By contrast, the Surface Pro 6 has a single Type-A port, a mini DisplayPort out and an audio jack, but no Type-C.

There's also a fingerprint reader located right next to the rear camera on the Galaxy Book 2. The sensor did a great job of recognizing my index finger and logging me in via Windows Hello.

Display

The Galaxy Book 2's 12-inch, 2160 x 1440 AMOLED screen offers incredibly vibrant colors and sharp images. When I watched a 1080p trailer for Aquaman, the blue of the water and the brown of desert sands looked particularly lush.

According to our colorimeter, the Galaxy Book 2 can reproduce an impressive 200 percent of the sRGB color gamut, nearly double the premium laptop category average and way ahead of the Surface Pro and Envy x2.

At 328 nits on our light meter, the Galaxy Book 2's screen is a little brighter than the category average but dimmer than its competitors. When I put the Surface Pro 6 next to the Galaxy Book 2, Microsoft's screen was notably more luminous, which made Mera's red hair look redder. Blues were still deeper on the Samsung display.

Audio

The Galaxy Book 2's audio output was surprisingly good. When I listened to AC/DC's "Highway to Hell," the music sounded heavenly, with accurate drums, guitar and vocals. The sound was loud enough to fill my dining room and blissfully free of the tinniness we see on so many laptop and tablet speakers.

Performance

The Samsung Galaxy Book 2's Qualcomm Snapdragon 850 CPU and 4GB of RAM are capable of competently surfing the web, running office apps and note-taking, but the experience just isn't as smooth and seamless as on similarly-priced competitors like the Surface Pro 6. The problems are far worse when you multitask or use an app like Google Chrome, which is not a Microsoft Store app.

When I opened over a dozen tabs in Chrome and had a YouTube video window sitting side-by-side with a Google Docs tab, I noticed a lot of lag, both in editing the document and switching tabs. At a couple of points, the screen froze.

When I performed the same test with Microsoft’s Edge browser, there was still lag, but it wasn't as bad. On a Surface Pro 6, there was no lag at all and pages loaded and drew much faster.

The Galaxy Book 2 fared worse on synthetic benchmarks. Its Geekbench 4 score of 3,545 is less than a third of the premium laptop category average and even farther behind the Surface Pro 6. The HP Envy x2, which had the last-generation Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, was about 15 percent worse, so there is some definite generation-over-generation improvement here. Some would argue that tests like Geekbench, which themselves are not Microsoft Store apps, aren't fair because they are running in emulation mode, not natively. However, if you choose to use non-Store apps like Chrome, this is perfectly representative of the performance you'll get.

Don't even think about crunching video. It took the Galaxy Book 2 a glacial 39 minutes and 43 seconds to convert a 4K video to 1080p using Handbrake. That's nearly twice as long as the average premium laptop and way slower than the Surface.

The Galaxy Book 2 runs Microsoft Office well enough for use, but it's not as quickly as Intel-powered competitors. Samsung's 2-in-1 took 2 minutes and 18 seconds to match 65,000 names with their addresses in Excel, which is around 15 percent better than the HP Envy x2 but way behind the Surface Pro 6 and the average premium laptop.

Since this is a Qualcomm-powered laptop, it uses smartphone-style eUFS Flash storage instead of a typical SATA or NVMe SSD. The Samsung eUFS drive copied 4.97GB of mixed media files at a rate of 110 MBps, which is less than a quarter of the category average and half of the Surface Pro 6's rate. The Envy x2 had nearly identical transfer speeds.

If you're buying this 2-in-1, you probably weren't thinking of gaming, which is good. The Galaxy Book 2 returned an unplayable frame rate of 24 fps on Dirt 3, a low-end racing game that runs on even the cheapest hardware. By contrast, the Surface Pro 6, which has Intel integrated graphics, played a smooth 81 fps. the average premium laptop got 74 fps.

Battery Life

The Samsung Galaxy Book 2 lasted 10 hours and 41 minutes on our battery test, which involves continuous web surfing over Wi-Fi with the screen set at 150 nits. While that time compares favorably to premium laptop average, it's less than we expect from a device with an ARM processor. The Envy x2 and its Snapdragon 835 CPU lasted 14 hours and 22 minutes on the same test while the Surface Pro 6, which has a power-hungry Core i5 or Core i7 CPU, lasted for a 9 hours and 20 minutes.

Windows 10 S and Software Compatibility

Like other Qualcomm-powered Windows 2-in-1s, the Galaxy Book 2 ships with Windows 10 Home in S mode, which prevents you from installing any app that doesn't come from the Microsoft Store. It's easy to understand why Microsoft, Samsung and Qualcomm would want you to use a crippled version of the operating system. The Snapdragon chips can run any store app natively so performance is much better while, with regular win32 apps, the processor has to emulate an x86 chip, which really slows things down.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of important apps that aren't available as store apps. If you want to use a browser other than Edge, you're out of luck. If you want to do some coding with Visual Studio or Android Studio, you can't run either in Windows 10 S. You can't run my favorite code and text editor, Notepad++ in Windows 10 S either.

Fortunately, with a couple of clicks, you can switch out of S mode and into regular Windows 10 Home, which lets you install 32-bit apps. However, there are many Windows applications that are only available in a 64-bit version. Photoshop Elements, an app I use every day, does not come in 32-bit anymore and the Cinebench benchmark, which we wanted to run, is also 64-bit only.

Even among 32-bit apps, not all will work on ARM processors. I tried to use OpenVPN, a popular VPN client which I use to access some private networks, but it won't install because it tried to load a TAP driver that's not compatible with ARM. On the bright side, Google’s Chrome browser works fairly well and there is a 32-bit version of Firefox as well.

Keyboard and Touchpad

The backlit keyboard is pleasantly snappy and responsive, with a deep 1.6 mm of vertical travel and a strong 70 grams of required actuation force. Typing on a lightweight keyboard cover usually isn't as satisfying as pressing against a laptop keyboard that has some mass, but Samsung's keys felt good and enabled me to achieve a score of 95 words per minute with a meager 5 percent error rate, which is on the low end of my typical range.

The 1.7 x 3.9-inch touchpad is a little small, but highly accurate. In my tests, I was able to target icons, drag windows around and highlight text, without a hint of jumpiness or stickiness. The pad also responded instantly to multitouch gestures such as pinch-to-zoom and three-finger swipe.

Stylus and Inking

The Galaxy Book 2 comes standard with Samsung's S Pen, a 5.5-inch (14 cm) plastic stylus you can use for drawing or note-taking. Unlike Microsoft's $99 (£99) Surface Pen, the S Pen doesn't need batteries or to be charged. It works competently, but isn't one of the better stylii I've used.

The plastic tip is small enough to target narrow areas on the screen and draw thin lines, but doesn't have the same realistic pen on paper feel of the Surface Pen. I had no problem taking text notes or drawing in Samsung's preloaded Notes app and marking up screenshots in the Screen write app, but I didn't get the kind of helpful friction that I have experienced with the Surface. But, like the Surface, the back of the stylus can be used as an eraser, which is welcome for inking in Windows.

If you're going to carry the pen, keep it in a bag or a pocket. It weakly attaches to a magnet on the side of the tablet, but if you get jostled or move around too much, it will likely fall off. The stylus also comes with a sheath that protects the tip while it rolls around in your bag. It also doesn't help that the S Pen is made of cheap, glossy plastic with just a tiny metal sliver in the middle for attaching to the magnet.

In addition to Windows Ink, Microsoft's set of first-party note-taking and drawing apps, Samsung bundles its own set of useful utilities. When you press the button on the S Pen, a circular menu called "Air Command" appears in an overlay on the right side of the screen. There you can choose to create or open a document in Notes, an app that lets you take handwritten notes or draw pictures. You can crop a part of the screen and edit it (or convert images to text) with Smart Select or you can capture the entire screen mark it up in Screen Write.

While Samsung's inking apps are helpful, I wish that Notes provided an easy way to convert your scrawlings into text as you write so that you could then copy and paste them into word processors like Google Docs or Microsoft Word.

4G Connectivity

The Galaxy Book 2's built-in 4G LTE modem is a huge convenience. Our review unit came with a Verizon SIM card that gave us speeds as high as 74 Mbps down and 49 Mbps up. As with any carrier, connection quality can vary. In my house, which has poor Verizon connectivity, loading videos and web pages was sluggish and results were mixed when I used the connection on a commuter train.

However, if you buy the Book 2, you can use any SIM card you want. In the U.S., it will be sold online by AT&T, Samsung and Microsoft and at Verizon, AT&T and Sprint stores. We're still waiting to find out about UK availability and pricing.

It almost goes without saying that, if you buy a competitive product that doesn't have built-in 4G, you can use a hotspotting feature on your phone to get online. However, it's very convenient to have LTE available from the moment you boot up or wake your tablet. When you have to turn on a hotspot on your phone, provided that your plan allows it, that's an extra step and you're also eating up your handset's battery.

Cameras

Both the 8 megapixel rear camera and the 5MP front shooter capture excellent images. When I shot pictures of a park and a city street, details like the complex wood lattice of a sculpture and the painted graffiti on a truck were sharp and colorful.

The 5MP webcam is a lot better than most laptop cameras. It got the bright color of my shirt just right and captured fine details like the lines in my forehead and the hairs in my beard.

Software and Warranty

In addition to Samsung's small suite of pen apps, the company preloads Samsung Flow, which syncs files and content with your Samsung phone, allowing you to transfer live calls, documents or web pages from one device to another. Samsung Gallery is a lot like Windows 10's built-in gallery; it shows all of your on-device photos but it also allows you to sync with the images on your phone.

Dolby Atmos gives you fine control of the audio, allowing you to choose among music, movie, voice or gaming profiles. There's also the same suite of crapware that comes on every Windows 10 laptop, including Candy Crush Saga, Royal Revolt 2: Tower Defense and Drawboard PDF.

Samsung sells the Galaxy Book 2 with a one-year warranty.

Bottom Line

When evaluating the Galaxy Book 2, I keep coming back to the same question: "who is this for?" Samsung doesn't market this 2-in-1 as a secondary device, but its mediocre performance, low storage capacity and paltry 4GB of RAM make it viable only as a lightweight mobile device you can carry with you when you have a more powerful computer waiting for you at home. However, few people would pay this kind of money for a second computer, particularly one that's incompatible with some mainstream apps and sluggish when running Chrome, the world's leading browser.

For only around $125 more, you can get a Surface Pro 6 with a Core i5 CPU and 8GB of RAM ($1,124 or £1,104 with keyboard and pen), one which offers good enough performance to be your main system, along with a brighter screen, a superior stylus and a nicer design. The Surface doesn't have a built-in 4G option (yet), but you can always connect it to your phone's hotspot.

If you really do want a secondary device to compliment your powerful home PC, there are better and cheaper options such as the Surface Go ($399 or £379, $599 or £599 with pen/keyboard). The Surface Go has a 10-inch display, no 4G and shorter battery life but it has no problem running Chrome and it has Microsoft's more-premium design.

The Galaxy Book 2 has several positives, including a gorgeous screen, a snappy keyboard, built-in 4G, good sound and great cameras. It's also a noticeable step up from first-gen Qualcomm-powered laptops like the HP Envy x2. However, consumers don't grade products on a curve. Unless the price drops significantly lower, the Galaxy Book 2 just isn't worth the money.

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Fortnite is finally coming to Android, Epic Games announced on stage at Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event announcing the Samsung Galaxy Note 9. It will launch as an exclusive for Samsung Galaxy devices, starting immediately with the Note 9.

Samsung devices with the exclusive include the Note 9, Note 8, Galaxy S9 and S9+, S8 and S8+, S7 and S7 Edge, Tab S4 and Tab S3. Note 9 and Tab S4 owners will get an exclusive Galaxy skin for their avatars.

This exclusivity may only last a few days. On Epic's website, it listed devices that the beta will be playable on. They include:

• Google: Pixel / Pixel XL, Pixel 2 / Pixel 2 XL
• Asus: ROG Phone, Zenfone 4 Pro, 5Z, V
• Essential: PH-1
• Huawei: Honor 10, Honor Play, Mate 10 / Pro, Mate RS, Nova 3, P20 / Pro, V10
• LG: G5, G6, G7 ThinQ, V20, V30 / V30+
• Nokia: 8
• OnePlus: 5 / 5T, 6
• Razer: Phone
• Xiaomi: Blackshark, Mi 5 / 5S / 5S Plus, 6 / 6 Plus, Mi 8 / 8 Explorer / 8SE, Mi Mix, Mi Mix 2, Mi Mix 2S, Mi Note 2
• ZTE: Axon 7 / 7s, Axon M, Nubia / Z17 / Z17s, Nubia Z11

Epic is working on fixes for phones from HTC, Lenovo and Sony. It also suggests that any phone with 64-bit Android 5.0 or higher, 3GB of RAM, and an Adreno 540 GPU or higher, Mali-G71 MP20, Mali-G72 MP12 or higher.

Epic already announced it will be skipping the Google Play store and release the APK on its own website. You can go to Fortnite.com on your Android phone or tablet to sign up.

Updated 11:58 a.m. ET with more devices.

The European Commission announced a 4.34 euro (~$5 billion) fine against Google as a conclusion to its antitrust investigation into the company’s abuse of Android's dominance in the smartphone market.

Last year, the EC imposed another $2.7 billion fine, the largest in EU history at the time, against Google over market abuse in search. The EC has another antitrust case against Google opened over alleged abuse of the company’s AdSense network.

Google’s Android Abuses

The EC alleged that Google used Android's dominance in the European Union to further strengthen its lead in search, a practice that is illegal in the EU.

More specifically, Google is said to have used its control over Android to require manufacturers to install the Google Search app and Chrome browser in all Android devices if they wanted a Play Store license. Additionally, the company made payments to larger manufacturers on the condition that they exclusively pre-install the Search app, rather than installing apps from other search tools.

The EC alleged that even though the core Android OS is open source, Google prevented manufacturers from pre-installing its apps if they installed a version of Android that wasn’t pre-approved by the company. Android manufacturers who wanted to pre-install Google's apps couldn’t use Amazon’s Android fork, for instance, and could only use Google’s version of Android.

The EC also said that Google invested in Android because it anticipated users' shift from the desktop to mobile devices, so it planned all along to use Android’s dominance to protect its search business as that shift happened.

Android has an 80% market share among mobile operating systems and a 95% market share in “licenseable mobile operating systems,” a market which doesn’t include vertically integrated operating systems such as iOS or Blackberry OS because those can’t be licensed by manufacturers. Google’s search market share in the EU is over 90% in most countries.

The EC investigated whether or not the iOS competition is sufficient to restrain Google from certain market abuses, but it discovered that it’s not for the following reasons:

• Customers are influenced by a variety of factors, such as hardware features, when buying a smartphone
• Apple devices are priced at the high-end of the spectrum, so they are inaccessible to most customers
• There is a switching cost between operating system so users can’t easily switch from Android to iOS or viceversa
• Google’s search business would not be significantly harmed even if Android users did switch to iOS, because Google also has deals with Apple to implement Google search on iOS.

In a statement, the EC said:

"Google's practices also harmed competition and further innovation in the wider mobile space, beyond just internet search. That's because they prevented other mobile browsers from competing effectively with the pre-installed Google Chrome browser. Finally, Google obstructed the development of Android forks, which could have provided a platform also for other app developers to thrive."

Google’s Response

In a blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai argued that Android has expanded choice for users, not lowered it. The main argument seems to rely on the fact that iOS exists and that Android has enabled many app developers, including European ones, to make a living through the platform. Pichai also mentioned that there are over 24,000 Android smartphone SKUs from 1,300 phone maker brands currently. 

Pichai added that the restriction against Android forks was needed in order to keep Android app compatibility among all Android devices. However, that’s should not necessarily be up to Google, and even so, the main issue is that Google also requires OEMs to install other Google apps alongside the Play Store.

This is one of the main abuses that the EC mentioned, because it prevents competition from other search services or browsers such as Firefox to gain significant market share on Android. In other words, it’s the same antitrust issue that Microsoft created when it pre-loaded Internet Explorer on Windows.

Google said that it will appeal the $5 billion fine. In the meantime, the EC has given Google 90 days to end all the illegal practices or face penalty payments of up to 5% of the average daily worldwide turnover of Alphabet, Google's parent company.

Google announced a new entry to its ever-growing portfolio of immersive technology. The company already has its hands full with two VR platforms, Cardboard and Daydream, and it dumped significant resources into realizing the Tango AR platform. Now, Google has another AR option that’s cheaper to adopt: Google ARcore.

Tango is impressive, but to date, only two smartphones (the Lenovo Phab 2 Pro and the Asus Zenfone AR) feature the cameras and sensors necessary to realize the potential of the platform, and it’s unclear if that will ever change. Without more Tango-ready smartphones on the market, few people will experience what Tango can do. Fortunately, Google is bringing similar technology to standard Android phones.

Tango-Like Features

Tango offers motion tracking, depth perception, and area learning to create sophisticated AR experiences. ARcore also leverages three similar technologies to understand your phone's surroundings, including motion tracking, environmental understanding, and light estimation. The primary difference between the two platforms comes down to the hardware needed to use them. Tango requires special hardware, whereas ARcore works with the components found on most modern smartphones.

Google’s ARcore technology relies on a process called “concurrent odometry and mapping” (COM for short) to determine the position of the phone relative to the environment around it. COM uses the phone’s internal camera to scan the area and identify “visually distinct features,” such as furniture. The visual information is then compared to IMU sensor data to estimate the position and orientation of the camera relative to the identified features.

ARcore uses the IMU and visual information to keep track of the motion of your phone, so you can see the correct perspective of digital assets when you move around them. ARcore combines the information from clusters of points to get a better understanding of the environment and its features. The technology can track horizontal surfaces, such as the floor or a tabletop, to help ground the digital visual elements to the environment.

ARcore also takes the light sources in your environment into account to create a higher sense of realism. ARcore detects the average light intensity levels in different areas and renders the digital assets with the same lighting characteristics. In other words, if you place a virtual object in the shade, it too will be dimmed by the shadow.

ARcore also allows you to anchor digital assets within a real environment so they hold their position over time. That is, when a virtual asset is anchored to the real world, you can leave the room and come back to the object where you left it.

Only A Preview

A preview release of Google’s ARcore SDK is available now, but it presently works on only three devices. If you have a Google Pixel, Google Pixel XL, or Samsung Galaxy S8, you can get started with the ARcore SDK today. Google said that when it rolls out the full ARcore platform, “a wide variety of qualified Android phones running N or later” would support it. If you have the hardware to get started already, you have several choices of development environment to use--Google’s Android Studio, Unity, and Epic’s Unreal Engine all support Google’s ARcore platform.

Google didn’t give any indication as to when the ARcore platform would be available on a wider range of devices, and a disclaimer found on Google AR developer resource page gives us the impression that the platform is far from mature, which suggests that we may be waiting for a while.

Note: ARCore is being offered as an early preview so that you can start experimenting with building new AR experiences. It's also an opportunity for you to give feedback on an early version of the API. This preview is the first step in a journey to enabling AR capabilities across the Android ecosystem.

In the meantime, you can learn more about the ARcore SDK and the technology behind it on Google's ARcore developer section on the ARcore Fundamentals page.

Cortana hasn't been resting on its laurels. It leapt out of Halo to become a virtual assistant on Windows 10, expanded further still to Android and iOS, and now has the ability to appear over the Android lockscreen with information about the weather, upcoming appointments, and other goings-on. Updates to Windows 10 have also given Cortana the ability to find tasks in your email, for example, or proactively display apps in Microsoft Edge.

All those updates came after Microsoft removed the ability to easily disable Cortana with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update in August 2016. You still have some control over the information available to Cortana--you can opt not to let it access your email, calendar, and messages, for example--but now you have to fiddle with your registry (if you use Windows 10 Home) or group policy settings (if you use Windows 10 Pro) to make Cortana disappear.

Combine that with Microsoft's decision not to update Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 to support Intel's Kaby Lake or AMD's Ryzen processors, thus ensuring all but the most resilient of Windows users will make the jump to Windows 10 in the near future, and Cortana's expansion feels as inevitable as the parasitic Flood it helped combat in the Halo series. Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on how Microsoft decides to use Cortana's nigh ubiquity.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation criticized Microsoft for Windows 10's data collection, especially with Cortana, in August 2016:

The trouble with Windows 10 doesn’t end with forcing users to download the operating system. Windows 10 sends an unprecedented amount of usage data back to Microsoft, particularly if users opt in to “personalize” the software using the OS assistant called Cortana. Here’s a non-exhaustive list of data sent back: location data, text input, voice input, touch input, webpages you visit, and telemetry data regarding your general usage of your computer, including which programs you run and for how long.While we understand that many users find features like Cortana useful, and that such features would be difficult (though not necessarily impossible) to implement in a way that doesn’t send data back to the cloud, the fact remains that many users would much prefer not to use these features in exchange for maintaining their privacy.

It's important to note that sharing information with Cortana is opt-in; you have to give the assistant permission to access your data. That isn't true of everything on Windows 10, which by default collects plenty of information about you, but at least the virtual assistant won't just read your email without permission. The question is whether or not Microsoft will change this in the future, just like it nixed the ability to easily disable Cortana back in August.

Cortana's increasing availability could raise fears about the virtual assistant's privacy settings. Microsoft continually demonstrates its commitment to Cortana with announcements like the one today, which made it even easier to use Cortana on a software platform Microsoft doesn't even control. The assistant often gets more features with greater control over the system, such as the ability to shut down, restart, or sign-out of a Windows 10 device.

Cortana is expanding. It's available on more platforms, it's regularly updated with new capabilities, and soon it will be core to your Windows experience, even if you held off updating to Windows 10, simply because new hardware won't be compatible with older versions of the operating system. If you're skeptical about the virtual assistant's respect for your privacy, that might not be the good news Microsoft likes to present it as.