The Morning After: Weekend Edition


Hey, good morning! You look fabulous.

Welcome to the weekend! It's the perfect time to catch up on everything from Mobile World Congress along with Friday's big news stories. An AWS outage knocked out Alexa (and Engadget) while we took Samsung's Galaxy S9+ out for some "late night photography testing."

Fight!Google vs. Amazon = no more Nest on Amazon

According to Business Insider, Amazon informed Nest it wouldn't stock the company's new devices. In response, Nest apparently won't restock any of its goods with the retailer, so once they're sold out, that's it.

And Engadget too.Amazon server outage pulled the plug on Alexa for a few hours

An outage in Amazon's cloud services muted the voice assistant for many people on March 2nd, producing error messages when you spoke commands to Echo speakers and other Alexa-equipped devices. It also prevented us from updating Engadget for a couple of hours before everything was restored -- hopefully, everyone enjoyed the short break.

We had to be thorough.Testing the Galaxy S9+ on a night out in Barcelona

The biggest changes Samsung implemented in its new flagship revolve around improving low-light photography, so what better way to make full use of our scenic surroundings here in Barcelona than to take the S9+ out for an evening sightseeing tour?

This time the fight comes to the US.'Far Cry 5' is deeper than you think

The latest Far Cry will put you in the shoes of a rookie cop sent to arrest Joseph Seed, the head of a dangerous cult called The Project at Eden's Gate. You end up becoming part of a resistance movement, whose goal is to take down the cult by going after Seed and the rest of his family. Of course, you could just play it like any other game in the series, but it's hard to ignore the subtext.

Still the best.Dell XPS 13 review

Dell's latest XPS 13 doesn't stray from the line's high standards. This time around it's packing all USB-C ports, support for external GPUs and an optional HDR display. Sure, the company didn't change much, but it didn't really have to.

How many messaging apps can one company make?Google's Slack alternative is available

As of now, Hangouts Chat is out of Google's early adopter program and will be available to all G Suite users over the next week, assuming their company enables it, of course. On one hand, it's easy to roll our eyes at yet another attempt at Chat. But Google has been saying ever since it launched the consumer-focused Allo messaging app that Hangouts was destined for businesses. To differentiate itself from Slack and the others, Hangouts Chat adds bots and some artificial-intelligence magic.

But wait, there's more...

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