Geek News

Sony announced its Xperia XZ2 and XZ2 Compact at Mobile World Congress this year and has now followed up with pricing and availability news. In the US, both models will be available to pre-order online through Best Buy from April 13th through April 19th. They’ll then be available online through Best Buy on April 20th and will come to the company’s physical stores on May 6th. Then, on May 20th, they’ll come to Amazon and “other participating retailers.” The Xperia XZ2 Compact starts at $649.99 while the Xperia XZ2 starts at $799.99. You can read our full breakdown of the phones here . The XZ2 features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845, 4GB of RAM, and 64GB of storage (with a microSD slot). It also includes a new feature called “rumble feedback”... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2HuavHp"

A lot like a tablet Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2Hs9wHu"

Technology Follow along with all the social network drama Mark Zuckerberg is back on the stand in front of the House. via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2GPRDBq"

DIY Set up price-drop alerts. Although you can download many apps for free, sometimes, you need to pay up for a program. To bring down that cost, here's how to set up price-drop alerts. via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2EAoqbL"

Spotify is planning to make changes to its free subscription tier that should make it more closely mimic its paid subscription service, according to Bloomberg . The updates, according to Bloomberg ’s sources, will make the service easier to use, especially for those accessing it on mobile devices. Mobile users with free plans will be able to access playlists more quickly and have greater control over how they listen to music on playlists. Currently, the free plan prevents you from selecting tracks within a playlist, you just have to listen to what is served up on shuffle. An announcement regarding these changes is expected within a couple weeks. Spotify went public on April 3rd , and its services are available in 61 countries with an... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2HsgJqV"

https://live.theverge.com/facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-congress-testimony-live-blog-stream/ Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2GOHlkT"

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is testifying before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce today, fresh off the heels of a grueling five-hour joint session before the Senate Judiciary and Commerce committees yesterday. In total, Zuckerberg will face questions from nearly 100 legislators, and many of those legislators have received thousands of dollars from the company Zuckerberg runs. Over the last 12 years, Facebook has spent $7 million in campaign contributions. Historically, Facebook has donated slightly more to Democrats than Republicans, but overall, the platform’s political footprint is small in Washington, DC relative to its market cap, which is currently calculated at about $400 billion. That’s not unusual for... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2HtDcUH"

The iconic moment from Mark Zuckerberg’s Senate hearing yesterday came before he faced toothless questions from profoundly uninformed senators. It happened when the Facebook boss walked to his seat and was confronted by a wall of wide-angle camera lenses and photographers jostling for position, each of them trying to capture the most distilled picture of a CEO under fire. Zuckerberg’s personal space was eroded by the heaving throng, and he was treated less as a human and more as an object of fascination. In that moment, Mark Zuckerberg must have felt what it was like to be a user of his online platform. Every inch of his being was subjected to close scrutiny, observation, and recording for posterity. Whether he liked it, whether he could... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2vazA7G"

Slack is a web app. Trello is a web app. Google Docs. Gmail. Even Twitter. The web started out as a collection of hyperlinked documents. The “Web 2.0” hype in the mid-2000s was about how the web was becoming interactive. At first we were just commenting and upvoting on hyperlinked documents, but before long, people like me could do almost all of their work in what are now called “web apps.” Some of those apps added collaboration or other nice-to-haves to traditional desktop app tasks, like email or document creation. Others are more hyperlinked-document in nature — think embeds on Slack and Twitter, or Trello’s multi-user nature. But there’s one near-golden rule about web apps: the native app is probably better. Native apps — apps that... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2v1Nbhv"

Animals This could save the species from extinction. Tasmanian devils are one of the very few unlucky creatures on this planet to carry a transmissible cancer. Nearly 95 percent of affected populations have died (and most… via Popular Science "https://ift.tt/2JCoADh"

Qualcomm is introducing a new line of chips today that are custom-made for smart cameras. The new line is called the Vision Intelligence Platform, and it’s meant to get AI features, extreme low-light image processing, image stabilization, and computer vision abilities into more cameras — and to do it better than a repurposed smartphone chip could. The chips are meant for pretty much any camera that can make use of intensive processing features: sports cameras, security cameras, 360-degree cameras, and even robots (say, something like a Roomba) that need to navigate, among others. The chips support 4K video, multiple video streams at lower resolutions, 360-video stitching, WQHD displays, obstacle avoidance, and the creation of video... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2Hqd9xy"

It’s very red, and this time Apple got the front right Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2EDEDwC"

HP has been ramping up its Omen line over the past couple years to serve the high-end gaming community, and now it’s taking a swing at more casual gamers with its new Pavilion Gaming line. At launch, the line includes two desktops, a laptop, and a display, and HP says that it’s all meant for people who are interested in gaming, but aren’t necessarily buying their PC solely to play games. The Pavilion Gaming Laptop comes in one size, a 15.6-inch model, but will be offered in a number of configurations, going as low as $799. They’ll all have 8th-generation Core i5 or i7 processors (either U- or H-series), 8GB of RAM, and some combination of a 1TB HDD and solid state storage. They’ll be offered with either a Radeon RX 560X, a GeForce GTX... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2v3hpk2"

Artificial intelligence is being used for a dizzying array of tasks, but one of the most successful is also one of the scariest: automated surveillance. Case in point is Chinese startup SenseTime, which makes AI-powered surveillance software for the country’s police, and which this week received a new round of funding worth $600 million . This funding, led by retailing giant Alibaba, reportedly gives SenseTime a total valuation of more than $4.5 billion, making it the most valuable AI startup in the world, according to analyst firm CB Insights. This news is significant for a number of reasons. First, it shows how China continues to pour money into artificial intelligence, both through government funding and private investment. Many are... Continue reading… via The Verge - Tech Posts "https://ift.tt/2v1WQ7S"