Latest news

Earlier in the week the controversial Chinese smartphone manufacturer Huawei introduced two new smartphones, Huawei P30 and P30 Pro, in their event in Paris, France.

The introduction of these two devices focused largely on their camera prowess, and for a good reason.

The camera benchmarking firm DxOMark was recruited to be the first to test Huawei's cameras, just like they did to P30's predecessor. Turns out that the updated model took the top spot from P20 Pro with a record-setting 112 points.

The new models offer upgraded internals, which are certainly up to date technologically but offer nothing flashy, but camera tech is definitely a step up. But before we get to the cameras, lets go through the other specs quickly.

Both P30 and P30 Pro have the 7nm in-house Kirin 980 chip, found also company's Mate 20 Pro released in October, an OLED display (6.1" or 6.47"), 6 or 8 GB RAM, 128 or 256 GB storage, and an in-screen fingerprint sensor. Both also have a massive 32 MP selfie-camera.

There's also either IP53 (P30) or IP68 (P30 Pro) waterproofing and a sizable 3650 mAh (P30) or 4200 mAh (P30 Pro) battery.

Spotify has announced an update to one of its most liked features. The music streaming king has been working on improving its artificial intelligence based features, and that means that we'll get to soon enjoy even better curated playlists.

The company has made it clear a long time ago that machine learning can really help with curating music to personal needs and likes. Things like Discover Weekly were a sign of what to come, and now Spotify is bringing the technology to playlists.

Previously curated playlists have been dumb, which means that they've been the same for everyone. Now Spotify is trying to add a splash of AI to customize their editorial playlists to each individual. While the songs are still selected by hand, the algorithm will modify it slightly to fit better to the ears of each of the listeners.

They've also been testing this and are confident that this will improve the experience. The stats are with Spotify:

When we tested this new system with some of our listeners, we found that they were much more likely to listen longer. Plus, these personalized editorial playlists increase the number of artists featured on playlists by 30% and the number of songs listeners are discovering by 35%.

European Parliament voted earlier on Tuesday about the new Copyright Directive, which including the infamous Article 13. The new directive passed with a result of 348 in favor and 274 against.

The Article 17 (previously Article 13), sometimes called the "upload filter", requires web service providers to block copyrighted material to be uploaded into their service. The internet has called this the meme killer, although it's unlikely to affect memes.

Other controversial legislation include Article 15 (formerly Article 11), also known as the "link tax", which puts in place a linking fee, that services have to pay if they use content from the linked site.

Before passing the directive, Members of parliament voted to remove the upload filter article from the directive but that fell through by only five votes. Thus the directive passed with two of the most controversial articles included.

Now the member states have to adjust their legislation to comply with the new EU directive. Each state has 24 months to change their laws or face consequences in the European Court of Justice.

The Copyright Directive was first introduced to European Parliament on 20 June 2018, was revised in September 2018, and the final version presented in February 2019. It immensely criticized even in its final form, especially by digital rights groups and web companies.

Apple's event today held in Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park climaxed to an expected introduction of a updated streaming video service. Apple TV got a couple new features.

The new Apple TV Channels offers essentially a marketplace and a hub for streaming platforms, and Apple Kids as you'd expect a family-friendly place for content, but the most interesting part of the improved service is the company's own subscription service, Apple TV+.

The service was announced with a thundering and epic video segment featuring Hollywood's cream of the crop explaining the process in which they create films and TV shows. This included the likes of Jennifer Aniston, J.J. Abrams, Reese Witherspoon, Sofia Coppola, Ron Howard, Octavia Spencer, M. Night Shyamalan, and Steven Spielberg, who expressed his excitement by promoting the service on stage.

It was revealed that the service would become available in over 100 countries this fall, but details about the pricing, release date, or scope of content were not yet shared.

What we can expect is that Apple is set to fund original programming by these and other creators with billions of dollars to compete with a modern original programming behemoth Netflix and others.

Apple's press event today in Cupertino, CA included new and upgraded subscription services in many entertainment sectors. Eventually when they'll all be live and you'll subscribe to every one of them, you'll be likely using a credit card.

Thankfully, Apple has that covered as well.

They announced today a new credit card called the Apple Card. The credit card is an extension of Apple Pay payment system, and is developed in partnership with Goldman Sachs.

However, the card isn't a traditional credit card you carry around. In fact, Apple says it doesn't have many unwanted features of current cards, including late fees, annual fees, international fees or over limit fees. Furthermore Apple promises what they call "lower interest rates," but there are no actual figures yet.

Apple also said that privacy will be a key factor in this new service as well, and they won't collect data on what you purchase and where.

Apple announced today a new game service, called Apple Arcade. The subscription service offers access to over 100 exclusive new games for a monthly fee.

Many of the most influential tech giants are more and more interested in gaming nowadays. Google just announced a game streaming platform called Stadia, and Microsoft, whom of course have long line of Xbox gaming pedigree, are expected to launch xCloud service to rival Google's Stadia at E3 in June.

However, Apple's offering is nowhere close to what Google and Microsoft, and even the likes of Sony and OnLive, are attempting. Apple's service is simply a subscription to hand-selected exclusive games on iOS, although you'll be able to play the games on Mac and the Apple TV as well.

According to the company iOS is the largest gaming platform and the power of over 300,000 games available it's gamer's paradise where over a billion games have been downloaded. Unfortunately it doesn't allow you the access to all of them, unlike some rumored.

Even though Apple did show some sneak peak into what will be included in the first 100 or so titles, we don't have a list of games yet. Neither do we know how much Apple Arcade monthly charge will be.

Tonight's Apple event is still under way in Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park but we've already got some news about, well, news.

Apple's first new release was the updated Apple News, which offers new paid services for people who like to read newspapers.

According to the company the improved Apple News will bring more, and more in-depth, content from leading papers. To acquire access to the best content on Apple News, you'll have to subscribe to Apple News+ which comes at a cost of $9.99 a month.

You'll get more than 300 newspapers with the most exclusive content whether it is about fashion or politics. Articles have been customized to take use of touchscreens, including animations and other graphic elements.

Apple News+ subscriber can share their subscription with their family for free and the service has a one month free trial. You can subscribe to Apple News+ starting today.

Smartphones are becoming an inseparable part of people's lives. An argument can be, and has been, made that we are already cyborg's because of how dependent we are on one piece of technological equipment.

Perhaps we aren't quite the Borg yet, but mobile is becoming more and more pervasive in most aspects of our lives. As expected newest stats from Nielsen support the fact too.

In every target group TV viewing went down while "App/Web on a Smartphone" went up.

In adults 18 to 34 the trend was the strongest, as one can imagine. TV time reduced by 5 percent points to 22% and smartphones went up the same 5 percentage points to 34%.

Unfortunately there is no data for teenagers, but one can imagine the mobile being much more dominant, perhaps capturing more than half of the time spent.

A Sandvine study revealed ealier this month that YouTube is responsible for overwhelming amount of mobile traffic. Even though Netflix is dominant in non-mobile traffic, YouTube captures a massive 37% slice of the pie in mobile.

Second and third, Facebook and Snapchat, have around 8 percent shares, while Netflix is only at 2.4 percent. Perhaps people download Netflix show on WiFi connection and it isn't included.

Microsoft is planning a launch event in early May. The company is said to be launching a new version of their current Xbox One game console.

Rumors have it that Microsoft is releasing a Xbox One S All-Digital Edition on May 7. This new version is a cheaper version of the already affordable Xbox One S, and, as you might decipher from the new name, doesn't include a Blu-ray or any other optical drive.

Microsoft is trying to move swifter towards digital media, which makes sense especially after the news about Google's new game streaming Stadia, and Microsoft's in-house response to that.

It is a perfect first step towards the digital content that will be distributed by Microsoft's upcoming xCloud platform, which is due at E3 in June.

At this point there's no word on how much exactly the new Xbox One S All-Digital Edition will cost, but thanks to the folks at Windows Central we have a picture of what the retail box will likely look like.

Apple is readying up the launch of a new streaming video service, and it might be here sooner than we thought in October.

Cupertino giant is focusing much of its efforts to launching this service, and even the new iMacs and iPads released earlier this week seemed like an afterthought, which shows how important the new video service is.

Apple will reveal the new platform next Monday, and while there's no official information yet, Recode says they know what to expect.

According to them, Apple's new platform isn't going to challenge Netflix as much as you and I might have thought. It's not going to be a Netflix clone but instead going to offer other video streaming services a platform on the Apple ecosystem.

Facebook hasn't exactly been the poster boy for a good social network in that recent past, but there might be still things that haven't been uncovered.

In fact, one new issue was revealed by the company just now. Facebook admits that hundreds of millions of passwords were stored in their servers in plain text, that is without encryption of any kind.

While it's unlikely that any outsiders could have accessed the data, there is a possibility that Facebook employees managed to get their hands on Facebook users' passwords and abuse them.

Facebook claims that there is no sign of any Facebook employee abusing the plain text passwords, although that would probably be fairly hard to diagnose anyway.

Some of these passwords have been stored in this internal server since 2012. According to a source within Facebook, who spoke to Krebs on Security, from 200 million up to 600 million passwords were in danger of leaking.

The same source says that more than 20,000 Facebook employees had the capability to leak the data, and a total of 2,000 employees made around nine million inquiries to the database.

Microsoft has released a patch for Windows 7 which brings along a new dialog box reminding of the most unfortunate news. Well, unfortunate if you don't want to change your operating system.

See Windows 7 is about to go obsolete, in terms of software updates at least. The 2009 launched operating system will not receive support after January 14, 2020.

The market share of Windows 7 was still over 35 percent in late 2018, and in fact it was just December last year that Windows 10 managed to overcome the market share of Windows 7.

There's fortunately still plenty of time, 299 days to be exact. Unfortunately the free updates from Windows 7 to Windows 10 are far gone. Enterprise customers can buy an extended security update package that will provide support until 2023.

If you happen to be in a fairly unpopular limbo of Windows 8, you will continue to receive updates until January 10, 2023.

As expected, the European Commission has now come up with a fitting bill for Google's newest strain of antitrust violations.

As reported earlier, Google violated EU's antitrust laws with their advertisement network AdSense.

During the time of previous reports the size of the fine was not revealed, but now we have proper figures from the European Commission themselves. As reported, this one is the smallest of the three antitrust fines Google has gotten from EU, but is still significant and in the same billion dollar range as the others.

Previously Google has been ruled two fees, 4.34 billion euro ($4.91 billion) for abusing competitive advantage with Android and 2.4 billion euro ($2.72 billion) for preferring Google's price comparison data in their search engine.

Google is set to pay a fine of 1.49 billion euro (approx. $1.69 billion) for requiring advertisers an exclusivity, or "relaxed exclusivity", for search adverts. This happened since 2006 up until 2009, after which Google implemented a less strict but still illegal Premium Placement clauses.

Microsoft, like many others, paid close attention to Google's Game Developer Conference keynote this week. Google's new cloud gaming platform Stadia probably sent shivers down the spines of people at OnLive and others, but Microsoft doesn't seem too phased.

According to reports, Microsoft's Xbox boss Phil Spencer sent a memo to employees thanking for the hard work they've done in the recent years.

He said that Google's announcement only validifies their mission during the past two years and which will be unveiled at E3 later this year. Spencer is of course talking about a cloud gaming platform of their own, which is called Project xCloud within the company and is now seemingly confirmed for June launch.

Just Google, Microsoft has a strong cloud service infrastructure which will help in the logistics side of things. In addition Microsoft obviously has strong gaming pedigree, which Google largely lacks.

It looks like the cloud gaming wars are just around the corner, and there's plenty of contender of the highest tech tier.

As expected, Oculus has finally revealed that they'll be bringing a new virtual reality headset to market soon. The device, called Rift S, has been developed, somewhat surprisingly, with the help of Lenovo.

Rift S is a more mobile headset that integrates new environment sensing cameras which means that there's no need for external motion sensing cameras.

However, to keep the price down they've had to make some compromises compared to previous Rift headset. While the resolution has gone to 1280 x 1440 from 1080 x 1200, the refresh rate is actually lower at 80hz (was 90hz) and OLED panels have been changed to less impressive LCD technology.

There's no setting for the optics either, so you won't be able to change the distance of the lenses to your specific needs.

The headphones are also a downgrade to what Oculus uses in it's cheapest Go headset, which are near-ear speakers. There are other slight changes too which TechCrunch has listed nicely.

Oculus has confirmed the price at $399 and they should become available some time this spring.