News written by Matti Robinson (May, 2018)

Canon, one of the more iconic camera companies, has been selling imaging products for 80 years. The company started in Japan before the World War II under the name Precision Optical Industry Co. and produced a film camera, The Kwanon, that was perhaps an omen of the company's future name.

Now nearly two decades ago company released its first digital camera for the consumers, and eight years ago it discontinued development of film cameras altogether. Nevetheless, there's still been some Canon film cameras for sale until this day.

Today Canon has officially stopped selling the last of their film cameras, EOS-1V. In a statement the company says that it will still provide repair for the camera until 2025.

EOS-1V is the predecessor to Canon's popular line of professional digital SLR cameras, EOS-1D, the latest of which is the over $5,000 Canon 1D X Mk II. The EOS moniker comes from Electro-Optical System, if you didn't know, and it first made the jump from mechanical lenses to electronic ones.

Obviously if you still want one you can go on on eBay and get yourself a used one for a few hundred bucks. Perhaps it'll become a collector's item at some point.

Smart speakers have been one of the more popular tech trends in recent years. This odd coupling of audio equipment, smart home applications, and of course artificial intelligence, has been the focus of many of world's largest technology companies.

The trend was started by Amazon and their Echo line of smart speakers, and they've been wrecking havoc on the marketshare leaderboards ever since. Now couple years after Google has their Home lineup and Apple just entered the market with the new HomePod. Furthermore, the likes of Samsung are preparing to launch their own AI powered speakers.

It is now too, that Amazon has first time ever lost their lead in worldwide marketshare. Google has taken the number one spot, analytics firm Canalys reports.

Google sold a total of 3.2 million Google Home devices worldwide while Amazon managed to sell only 2.3 million units of their Echo lineup. The United States remained the leading market with 4.1 million smart speakers sold with China still distant 2nd and South Korea 3rd.

Just a year ago Amazon commanded the market with nearly 80 percent slice of the pie but it only hold 27.7% now. In addition to Google, Chinese manufacturer's including Alibaba and Xiaomi have gnawed on Amazon's share.

Amazon has launched a new feature for its users that allows them to track packages even more closely. In fact, the new feature lets you see where the package is currently on a map.

Map Tracking shows you the delivery truck's location on a small map in your neighborhood or at least nearby when it is closing in on a delivery. The tracking starts when the delivery is 10 stops away from you.

In the Map Tracking view you can find the approximate location as well as how many deliveries the truck will have to do before yours.

This allows you to either hurry home to receive your highly anticipated new toy or perhaps prepare for delivery (read: close the curtains, hide the bodies).

The feature was already available to selected few since last year but now it has reportedly been expanded to most if not all users. The Amazon app will remind you with a notification when Map Tracking is available.

The Chinese smartphone manufacturer OnePlus got its notoriety from years back when it vowed to destroy the flagship smartphones of its time with half the price. The company has since matured and dropped the flagship killer slogan but one could argue it really still is the same beast.

This week the company announced OnePlus 6, the latest of its impressive lineup of Android phones.

The device is the first glass sandwich design, which is water resistant but not IP certified, since the company's one-off cheaper model, OnePlus X, and it is definitely one of the more important changes in it. Obviously the system-on-chip has also been updated, and there are other slighter changes.

OnePlus 6 rocks the Snapdragon 845, 6 or 8 gigabytes of RAM, up to 256 GB of storage space, a dual camera setup, and a 6.28-inch Full HD+ resolution Optic AMOLED display covering 84 percent of the front panel which leaves you with a notch at the top, as you might expect.

The battery is the same 3300 milliamp unit from the previous model, and it supports the same super fast Dash Charging. Unlike rumors had it, there is no wireless charging despite the glass back.

The dual camera setup in the back is similar to OnePlus 5T but offers now larger sensors and thus larger pixel which translates to improved low light performance. Improving low light photography, as well as videos, OnePlus has also added an OIS. The megapixel counts are still 16 and 20.

Google has revealed a new service, or actually a renewed service, called the Google One. It is actually the good old Google Drive, one of the more popular cloud services, that has been rebranded and is a little bit easier on the wallet.

The search giant hasn't quite yet revealed the exact, official release date, and currently you can only register to receive news about the service on the website (one.google.com). However, Google does promise it in the coming months for the folks that already pay for Google Drive's storage.

At first Google One will be available in limited quantity which probably means that free tier Google Drive users will be stuck with the old service for a while.

If you've been thinking of getting some more cloud storage, though, you'll be happy to hear that Google One offer better deals than its predecessor. 100 GB package costs the same $1.99 but you now have a 200 GB and $2.99 option. The $9.99 tier has also been updated to hold twice as much stuff at 2 TB. Tiers above 2TB will stay the same price.

There's no news whether Google will kill Drive and when this would happen, but you'll probably be able to use it at least until Google One is available for all.

Google's I/O conference keynote was focused largely on the improvements of Android, its apps, and the new navigation scheme Android P will bring along. It's perhaps hard to pick one that was more important than the others, but there surely was one that was the most controversial.

That is, of course, Google Duplex. That is the upcoming feature of Google Assistant, the search giant's super advanced voice assistant. In fact, Duplex makes Assistant so smart that it can make calls for you.

Pretty much everyone was flabbergasted about how natural the calls sound, although you won't be listening them as Assistant does this in the background, but many were also puzzled whether this might have ethical consequences.

Should the recipient know that he or she is not talking to a human? With all the "umms" and "mmhmms" Google Assistant had seemed to passed the Turing test in demo calls played back at the I/O stage.

And now, in an interview with CNET, Google agrees. Agrees not only that Turing test might have been passed but that it is necessary to make sure the receiving end of the call is aware that they are talking to a robot.

Mozilla has today announced a new version of their web browser, one which was once considered one of the greats. Firefox's new version number suggests that it might be one of the bigger updates in recent history.

Firefox v60 does bring some new features alongside more general updates to security, privacy, and obviously stability.

According to the company, though, the security and privacy aspects are one of the more important updates in this iteration. And many of you would probably agree in that these days it seems to be integral to provide strong protection against all ilks of privacy and security infractions.

There aren't a lot of eye candy in this update, and you won't see revamped UI either.

The new version will, however, include new features such as redesigned Cookies and Site Storage settings, Web Authentication API supporting USB tokens, enhancements to New Tab and Firefox Home, application of faster Quantum CSS engine, and improved camera privacy indicators.

You can read more about the update here.

You can download Firefox v60 from our download section or from Mozilla

Microsoft's own developer conference Build 2018 ended yesterday, and while there were a myriad of updates to different tools within Windows, one of the updates that had the crowd cheering the most had to do with the little text editor called Notepad.

For years and years, actually a total of 33 years, Windows Notepad has been a pain in the behind for developers, and there's really one reason for it. It doesn't support the Linux operating system's line feed, that is it doesn't recognize when line is changed in the text.

Since 1985, that is the first version of Windows, the Notepad has served all sorts of users for taking notes and obviously even coding. However, never has it played well with other types of line feeds, including the ones Linux text editors use.

This means that in the worst case you'll just have one endless line, and everyone knows, or can imagine, how frustrating that is to edit.

While this seems like a minor problem, as the Microsoft presenter below notes (no pun intended), it's often the little things that matter the most. And thus, after decades of frustration from developers, Microsoft has fixed the Notepad and it finally supports Linux line feed.

You'll find the new, fixed and improved, Notepad in the upcoming updates of Windows 10.

Google's annual I/O conference is at hand, and Sundar Pichai et al are talking in front of a crowd to reveal what new their upcoming Android operating has to offer. We already had an idea about a few of the updates, both major and minor, but now we have little more details.

Android P brings along updates that refresh the look and feel of Android, and even changes some major navigational elements. Google has decided to get rid of the app switcher button, but worry not, multitasking view hasn't been deleted. Now you access the multitasking view, which now shows cards horizontally, by swiping up from the home screen.