Ordering delivery through an app like DoorDash or GrubHub saves the trouble of cooking and lets you be a little picky — you can order from your favorite restaurant. But imagine receiving your food, sitting down to eat, and it tasting… different. And then, following your gut, you learn that you’ve been duped by a fake, an imposter restaurant that stole its name. For many people ordering from two Japanese restaurants in San Francisco, that exact thing may have happened, The San Francisco Chronicle reports.
One restaurant, now styled as an izakaya called Chome, originally opened for delivery and takeout in the former location of Blowfish Sushi. Except it didn’t bother to change the name, awning, or logo at the start. Chome, operating as if it were Blowfish Sushi, served sushi to people ordering through apps like GrubHub, Postmates, DoorDash, and Uber Eats using the identity of a restaurant that closed in December 2020. Before it closed, Blowfish Sushi had been serving its neighborhood for two decades.
Blowfish’s former owner, Jason Teplitsky, was not exactly thrilled. “How does someone decide to do something like this? Did they think we all got COVID and died?” Teplitsky tells the Chronicle.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the real Wagyumafia is famous for its use of wagyu beef Photo: Wagyumafia
Another fake restaurant, SF Wagyumafia, shares the name of a famous sandwich shop known for its $180 wagyu sandwich and locations in Tokyo and Hong Kong. This San Francisco restaurant has no connection with the actual chain, according to the real Wagyumafia, but it was advertising the $180 sandwich. The fake was convincing enough to initially fool one food writer, the Chronicle writes. When you’re ordering through an app without any real way to gauge what you’re getting into, what can you do but take a restaurant at its word?
At first glance, both these restaurants might seems like ghost kitchen schemes gone awry. They’re seemingly focused on delivery, readily accessible through the most popular apps, and of an unknown origin. But blatantly copying other well-known restaurants to the point that people mistake one for the other, or think a classic has suddenly reopened, seems more like straightforward fraud. The new “Blowfish Sushi” even registered as Blowfish with the city of San Francisco, which makes it seem like the owner knew what they were doing.
Teplitsky and the original Wagyumafia are considering legal action, according to the Chronicle.
In response to the concerns over both restaurants’ legitimacy, DoorDash and GrubHub have removed Wagyumafia and Blowfish Sushi from their listings,the Chronicle writes. I wasn’t able to find a listing for either restaurant on Postmates or Uber Eats, either.
DoorDash, Postmates, GrubHub, and Uber Eats either didn’t respond to our questions about how they verify restaurant listings in the first place, or weren’t able to tell us whether they have any specific protections to keep one restaurant from stealing another restaurant’s name.
GrubHub did at least reply with a generic description of its practices:
We have no tolerance for misconduct or misuse of the Grubhub platform. We have a number of safeguards in place to prevent potentially fraudulent listings on our marketplace and we are constantly improving our processes and testing new features to prevent these situations. In the case of any listings that might be fraudulent, we immediately investigate and remove them from the marketplace if they’re in fact fraudulent.
In GrubHub’s case, it says fraud like this isn’t widespread, but says it’s unable to explain exactly how it prevents fraudulent listing because doing so would potentially make its methods no longer useful.
Fake restaurants aren’t the only surprises potentially awaiting you in food delivery apps: some legitimate brands have also tried to entice diners by changing their name for delivery. Remember, that pizza you purchase from Pasqually’s actually comes from Chuck E. Cheese.
I love it when companies go public. I am never more excited than when I get to read a mandatory S-1 filing for the first time. Anything could be in there! Maybe the company has wildly more people using its products than I would have guessed. Maybe the company is surprisingly profitable. Maybe the company is WeWork!
Anyway, there is a new Robinhood regulatory oopsie in the news, and it’s made me even more eager to find out what’s lurking in that document. If I do not get the Robinhood S-1 soon, I will die. The company has confidentially filed to go public, but what fun is confidentiality? There might be some juicy shit in there!
Here’s the shape of the new thing: Robinhood allows customers to trade fractions of a share — something that makes it easier for ordinary investors to get into high-priced stocks. The problem, however, is that Robinhood didn’t report these trades to a public data feed, according to Reuters. This reporting is required by both the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Though Robinhood launched this service in December 2019, nothing was publicly reported until January 2021, Reuters says.
Other brokerages have been fined for this in the past because the missing information makes it harder to price stocks. It’s not the biggest violation — an expert Reuters spoke to suggested that Robinhood deserved “a parking ticket” for it — but it suggests something the other Robinhood screw-ups also hint at: start-up sloppiness.
Robinhood is where the “move fast and break things” tech ethos runs straight into the “I will kill and eat you, but in a highly regulated way” Wall Street ethos. The most obvious example is the service outages. Remember in January, when Robinhood pissed off the entire internet by limiting trades on GameStop? The company hadn’t planned for an event of the GameStop scale and coming up short for clearinghouse requirements. There were also three huge outages in March 2020, which Robinhood has said were due to “stress on our infrastructure”; then, as with GameStop, it simply hadn’t planned for an outlier event. Some real fail whale stuff!
But the other interesting bit is the regulated part of Wall Street. Robinhood has run into trouble there, too. For instance, the company was fined $65 million by the SEC for deceiving its customers about “payment for order flow” (PFOF), a practice that lets market makers bundle trades. (It is controversial because, theoretically, it could let banks illegally front-run trades; in practice, it doesn’t seem like this would be a very good idea because the price on PFOF trades is better than what’s available on the market.) Also, there’s the $1.25 million settlement on claims that Robinhood didn’t work hard enough to get the best price for its users. This is to say nothing of 2,000 hacked accounts.
The new regulatory thing is small potatoes by these standards, but nonetheless illustrative. It’s easier to get away with being sloppy if you’re, like, a social network and there’s no specific government or industry watchdog that’s tasked with keeping you in line. Sure, you might get bad press and a congressional scolding, but that’s about the end of it. This is part of what makes fintech so interesting: if you’re focused on making a pretty app and to hell with the rest of it, you are in trouble.
The S-1 is the moment of truth. Right now, it’s hard to tell where Robinhood stands. The flush of press earlier this year led to a bunch of new users. Payment for order flow means Robinhood gets paid on every trade, whether the market is going up or down. On the other hand, this company has a habit of falling afoul of regulators. (There is still an outstanding complaint from Massachusetts.)
Anyway, if you have that S-1 filing, do me a favor and send it my way. I need it. My family is starving, and we need gossip to survive.
New filings show both sides’ legal strategies at work
On May 3rd, Fortnite publisher Epic Games will finally have its day in court, forcing Apple to defend kicking Fortnite off the iOS App Store last year. Epic’s antitrust lawsuit is bigger than a single game; it’s a direct challenge to the App Store model, the most significant legal challenge Apple has faced since the Xerox days.
Last night, both sides filed a document called a “proposed findings of fact,” essentially laying out every factual claim they’ll rely on in their arguments. The documents run more than 650 pages in total, giving a detailed roadmap of how each side sees the case — from the early days of the iPhone to Epic’s specific preparations for picking this fight with Apple. But the filings also bring the case into focus, raising three questions that will be central to the trial over the coming months.
The heart of the case is the so-called App Store tax — a 30 percent surcharge Apple collects on purchases made through the App Store. Fortnite was kicked off the App Store for dodging that tax by installing its own payment system, which is forbidden under App Store rules. Now, Epic is making the case in court that the rules should never have been put in place.
You often hear that this case is about whether the App Store is a monopoly — but Epic’s argument is more subtle than that, drawing on antitrust ideas around legal monopolies and abuses of market power. As Epic sees it, Apple’s monopoly over iOS is legal, but it’s using the market power from that monopoly to dominate the secondary market for app distribution. Epic compares the situation to Microsoft’s antitrust case in the ’90s: a legitimate monopoly over Windows, extended illegally to the secondary market in web browsers.
It’s a good theory, but it only works if you see the App Store model as fundamentally separate from iOS. In its statement of facts, Apple describes the exclusive App Store as a fundamental part of the iPhone, part of the broader offering that makes the devices valuable. “Apple wanted to ensure that iOS devices were more protected from those malware and instability issues and quality issues that the PC world was used to,” Apple claims in its filing. App Store exclusivity is part of that, but so are security measures like the code-signing and hardware root-of-trust systems. On the software side, there is a range of private APIs and OS-level entitlements that are only enabled after App Store review, tying the systems that much tighter together.
Of course, it’s inconvenient for this argument that Google is offering a competing mobile operating system with none of these restrictions — to say nothing of Apple’s own macOS, which allows side loading. Clearly, it would be technically possible to allow competing app stores on iOS. The question is whether the court sees that as changing Apple’s business model or changing iOS itself.
One of the biggest challenges for Epic is that the App Store model is fairly widespread. Consoles like Xbox and PlayStation operate on basically the same playbook, delivering games digitally through an open but curated digital store that’s locked to the hardware and controlled by the manufacturer. That alone doesn’t make it legal, but it adds credence to Apple’s claim that the App Store lockdown isn’t trapping consumers. If you don’t want to play Fortnite on an iPhone, you can play it on a console or a PC. Some devices come locked into a specific distribution channel and some don’t, giving users the chance to vote with their feet.
Epic’s counter to this argument, as explained in the filing, is that “video game consoles operate under a radically different business model than smartphones.” Development for console games is slow and expensive work, and consoles are useless without a steady supply of those games, so console manufacturers are under immense pressure to attract developers. That means hardware itself is often sold at cost, leaving App Store commissions as the primary source of profit.
Apple is different, Epic argues, because most of its profits still come from iPhone sales. “Developers do not participate in those profits,” the filing argues, “even though the availability of apps contributes greatly to the sale of devices.”
On some level, this boils down to the argument that console companies are nicer to developers, so their platform power is less of an issue. The constant competition between Xbox and PlayStation gives game developers leverage to extract more favorable terms. But iOS and Android don’t compete for app developers in the same way, and the lower cost of mobile development means the competition happens on vastly different terms. Apple has given people lots of reasons to buy an iPhone, which means there’s less pressure on any given line of business. But that’s well short of the standard for monopoly power, and Apple ultimately comes away from the console comparison looking pretty good.
Underneath everything else, Apple is facing a profound question of how much control it can exert over its own devices. For critics, this is Apple’s original sin, using industrial and graphic design to lure customers into a walled garden, then locking the gate. For fans, it’s Apple’s genius, integrating hardware and software to deliver a more purposeful and powerful user experience. But it all rests on Apple’s ability to maintain a closed stack, using hardware integration to control what happens in software.
This trial won’t undo that stack, but it could limit what Apple can do with it. The Epic Games fight started over payment processing, but the same legal standard could allow for alternative app stores or limit the restrictions Apple can place on rogue apps like Parler. It’s a first step toward setting regulatory limits on how tech companies operate, similar to the regulations on wireless carriers or banks. At its most basic level, Epic is arguing that Apple’s ecosystem has grown too big and too powerful for it to be run entirely out of Cupertino, and it’s time for it to be directly accountable to antitrust law.
Hundreds of pages in Apple’s filing are devoted to the benefits of that system for developers and iPhone owners, much of it undeniably true. There really is less malware on iOS devices because of Apple’s software controls, even if scam apps sometimes slip through. The system really does generate a lot of money for iOS developers, many of whom couldn’t compete outside of Apple’s walled garden. The shift to digital distribution really has saved money for developers who don’t need to distribute their product through brick-and-mortar retail anymore.
But in a sense, all of that is beside the point. Abuses of market power aren’t excused just because they’re sometimes helpful, and classical monopolies like Standard Oil or Bell Telephone had lots of side benefits, too. The bigger question is whether courts are ready to dive into the mobile software stack and start dictating the terms of how tech companies can set up their marketplaces. That’s a hard question, and it won’t be settled by a single ruling or a single case. But one way or another, it’s a question this court will have to take on.
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The Realme 8 Pro is a good, inexpensive Android phone that you probably shouldn’t buy right now — at least if you’re in the US. But it’s also a preview of positive things to come to the midrange class, especially in terms of camera hardware. I have seen the future of smartphone imaging around the $400 price point, and it is good.
If you’re not familiar, Realme is a Chinese company that started off as a sub-brand of Oppo; like OnePlus, it was founded by a former Oppo vice president. Its phones are sold in China, India, and Europe. Although, you can technically buy a global version of the phone and use it in the US, but we wouldn’t recommend it. It’s not compatible with many of the 4G bands we use in the states, so coverage won’t be great.
The 8 Pro uses a relatively new 108-megapixel Samsung sensor. It’s the same pixel count as the main camera in the Galaxy S21 Ultra, but a different, smaller chip designed for budget-friendlier phones. As in the S21 Ultra, the point of this technology isn’t to take 108-megapixel images (though you can do that if you want). It’s to combine information from groups of pixels to create a better optimized 12-megapixel final image.
There are other reasons to like the Realme 8 Pro. Considering its £279 (about $380) price, performance is very good, owing to a strong combination in its Snapdragon 720G processor and 6GB of RAM. Battery life is healthy and the phone supports 50W fast wired charging. Depending on how you feel about inspirational corporate branding, I guess the “DARE TO LEAP” printed on the back of the phone could be a plus (not my thing, personally).
But the camera impressed me the most, and it’s a component that will likely make its way into many more midrange phones sold around the globe. Let’s take a closer look.
The 8 Pro offers standard wide and ultrawide cameras, plus macro and depth-sensing modules.
Realme 8 Pro camera
In case you need a reminder at any point of how many pixels the main camera offers, you can simply look at the back of the phone where you’ll find “108 MP QUAD CAMERA” etched on the camera bump. Specifically, it’s Samsung’s 1/1.52-inch Isocell HM2 sensor coupled with an f/1.9 lens.
Unfortunately, there’s no optical image stabilization here, but maybe owing to the image processing tricks this high-res sensor can pull off, I didn’t notice a significant number of blurry shots that OIS might have corrected. Other rear cameras include an 8-megapixel ultrawide, 2-megapixel macro, and a 2-megapixel depth-sensing camera. There’s a 16-megapixel selfie camera on the front.
The main camera is able to do a couple of interesting things. In bright daylight, it can use all 108 million pixels individually, using different pixels to capture your scene at multiple exposure levels at once, and combining the information into a 12-megapixel final image. In low light, the camera switches things up and uses binning to combine pixels into groups of nine, effectively turning relatively small individual pixels — 0.7μm to be precise — into much larger 2.1μm sized pixels, which helps produce less noisy images.
Photos in bright light look good as expected. There’s an impressive amount of detail captured, though some overzealous sharpening is evident if you zoom in to 100 percent. Colors are a bit too saturated for my liking; there’s no amount of lawn fertilizer in the world that would make my yard look as green as the 8 Pro thinks it is. It seems more prone to this oversaturation with landscapes and is thankfully less aggressive with portrait mode photos. Portrait mode photos look good, and I appreciate that the camera doesn’t crop in when switching to this mode.
Taken with ultrawide
Taken with ultrawide
Taken with night mode
Taken with ultrawide
Dim indoor lighting and low light are where phone cameras typically struggle, but the 8 Pro turns in an impressive performance in these conditions. In moderate lighting, images are surprisingly detailed and show little noise. The camera’s night mode will bring out even more detail, though it does apply a distracting amount of sharpening and contrast.
I had, frankly, low expectations for the 8 Pro’s digital 3x zoom, but I’m pleased to report that it’s much better than I feared. In good light and even moderate indoor lighting, images show a lot of detail and I’m hard-pressed to find the unpleasant artifacts that usually appear in digitally zoomed images.
The camera isn’t just cropping in on a 108-megapixel image, either. Comparing them side by side at 100 percent, a photo taken with 3x digital zoom shows more detail and looks less noisy than a crop of a 108-megapixel image. The Samsung HM2’s pixel binning powers are being put to work here, too, and the result is digital zoom that is actually worth your time.
There’s not as much exciting news to report about the 8 Pro’s other cameras; they do just fine. The ultrawide is prone to some subtle but unpleasant color shifts: white balance can skew too warm and blue skies sometimes look a little gray. The macro camera is a low-resolution sensor that is little more than a gimmick, and the selfie camera thankfully avoids over-smoothing faces at its default setting. All fair for a phone at this price.
The 8 Pro’s processor and RAM combination are more than sufficient for everyday tasks and scrolling.Photo by Allison Johnson / The Verge
Realme 8 Pro performance and screen
Outside of cameras, the Realme 8 Pro is a thoroughly capable midrange phone. Battery life is sufficient to get through a day of moderate to heavy use and the aforementioned processor / RAM combo handles day-to-day app scrolling and tasks with ease. The 6.4-inch 1080p OLED with standard 60Hz refresh rate is fine but nothing special, and I had to fight with auto brightness insisting on making the screen too dim on a couple of occasions.
There’s the flashy branding on the rear of the device, which is either your kind of thing or not. The Realme 8 Pro doesn’t support 5G at all, which is something to consider if you’re in the UK and thinking of buying the phone.
My biggest gripe, though, is with the optical in-display fingerprint sensor. I’d say at least a third of the time when I unlocked the phone it required more than one try to read my finger. A couple of times — both outside in bright daylight — it gave up and had me enter my PIN instead. If this was going to be my forever phone, I’d probably skip the fingerprint sensor and just stick with a PIN, personally.
The Realme 8 Pro is the kind of midrange phone that we don’t see very often in the US: great performance and decent all-around specs combined with an excellent camera, all for what would equate to a sub-$400 price.
Phones that meet this description are surprisingly scarce stateside; in fact, its closest equivalent is probably the Pixel 4A, which we’ve recommended as the best low-cost Android phone essentially since it became available last summer. The 8 Pro goes a step beyond the 4A in some respects by offering an ultrawide rear camera and fast charging. If it came down to it, though, we’d probably still favor the Pixel for its very good device support and excellent lone rear camera.
If you live in the UK and you don’t care much about class-leading display specs and the lack of 5G doesn’t bother you, the 8 Pro has a camera and a processor that will keep up for many years to come. For the rest of us, the 8 Pro is (hopefully) a sign of good camera hardware coming our way soon.
The 3rd Generation Fire TV Stick is a capable video streamer, but it drops at an awkward price point
For
Strong app offering
Improved UI
Excellent HDR performance
Against
SDR picture could be more subtle
4K model only costs a little more
What’s grey and sticky? The Amazon Fire TV Stick (3rd Generation), of course. Far from being simply another streaming stick, this third version is the first of Amazon’s media streaming devices to feature the company’s all-new Fire TV Experience user interface, which is intended as a game-changer for streaming service integration.
The Amazon Fire TV Stick (3rd Generation) replaces the 2nd generation of the device that was once called the Amazon Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote. Back in those simpler days, the first-gen model didn’t have voice control.
Since then, Amazon has added several more branches to the Fire TV Stick family tree. Higher up that tree is the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K (launched in 2018), and below it, there’s now the Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite, the only other Fire TV device to come pre-loaded with the new UI.
Pricing
The Amazon Fire TV Stick (3rd Generation) costs £40 ($40, AU$79) at the time of writing. That’s £10 ($10, AU$20) cheaper than the Amazon Fire TV Stick 4K that launched in 2018 and, of course, has the added benefit of 4K content.
It’s also £10 ($10, AU$20) more expensive than the simultaneously released Amazon Fire TV Stick Lite, which lacks TV volume control and can only pass-through Dolby Atmos, rather than decode it.
Somewhat confusingly, you’ll find the Amazon Fire TV Stick (3rd Generation) listed as the ‘2020 release’ in the UK, but the ‘2021 release’ in the US and Australia.
Features
(Image credit: Amazon)
From a design perspective, the Fire TV Stick (3rd Gen) is hardly a departure for Amazon. It’s a gunmetal grey rectangular prism with an HDMI plug on the end and a micro-USB power socket halfway up one side. There’s a good chance that the power cable or simply the Stick’s girth will get in the way of your TV’s other HDMI sockets, so, as ever, Amazon has included an HDMI extender to take your stick clear of the rest of the ports.
The Stick itself is a little shorter than the 4K model but houses the same 1.7GHz quad-core chip. Bluetooth 5.0 and BLE are onboard for pairing with Bluetooth speakers, headphones or video game controllers, and there’s the standard 8GB of internal storage for your app collection.
The included remote is as handy and compact as ever. It’s the same second-generation Fire TV remote that comes with the 4K Stick. There are volume buttons that will work for your TV, playback controls and general navigation, plus a button at the top that turns the remote into an Alexa microphone for voice search.
Amazon Fire TV Stick (3rd Gen) tech specs
(Image credit: Amazon)
Bluetooth version 5.0
HDR support HDR10, HDR10+, HLG
Max resolution 1080p
Dolby Atmos Yes
Storage 8GB
Finishes x1
Dimensions (hwd) 13 x 30 x 86mm
Weight 32g
Those looking for 4K and Dolby Vision support will have to look elsewhere. The Amazon Fire TV Stick (3rd Generation) maxes out at 1080p HD, but can still process HDR metadata in the shape of HDR10, HLG and even Samsung’s HDR10+. Dolby Vision isn’t supported, though Dolby Atmos is.
The headline addition, though, is the all-new Amazon Fire TV Experience. The reimagined UI design pares everything down to four main screens, Home, Find, Library and Live, for a more holistic approach to your entertainment. The platform pulls in content from other streaming services, including Netflix, Disney+ and iPlayer, and sits those suggestions alongside TV and films available on Prime Video. The end result is less of a shop window for Amazon and a more useful quick hit of recommendations from across the board instead.
It’s pretty well done too. The top row on the Home page is itself a mixture of content from your subscriptions, followed by lines of film and TV suggestions dedicated to what’s on specific services such as Netflix and iPlayer. It’s certainly an improvement on the previous iteration of the Fire TV OS, but still isn’t a match for what Google has done with the Google TV UI on Chromecast.
That first row of content on the new Fire TV experience never seems to be as much of a mix as it could be. It tends to start with too big a burst from a single source, whether that’s a few screens of animated Disney content or a slew of Amazon Originals. It’s also still too Prime Video-heavy as we scroll down the page with the rows dedicated to other services swamped by too much of what’s on Amazon.
The ‘Find’ section of the experience is far better, as it seems to give a more balanced approach, as well as plenty of handy suggestions of genres and sub-genres to drill down into. Fancy comedy horrors, action dramas or trending documentaries? This is the place to look.
If you have the right to watch a piece of content for free, the Fire TV OS will let you know. It also directs you to free versions on apps you might not already own, including those available through free trials. The only thing to watch out for is that the UI still encourages you to buy and rent 4K content, even if the Stick won’t allow you to play it back at UHD resolution.
Like all current Fire TV devices, Alexa is along for the ride and makes an easy way to navigate around the OS. The addition of six user profiles per household – each with its own preferences, apps, permissions, watchlists and settings – is also welcome.
All the major apps are present here, apart from Google Play Movies & TV and Rakuten. There’s HDR available on Netflix, Disney+, Prime Video and Apple TV, but there’s no Dolby Atmos material on Apple and no way of buying new content on Apple TV through the Fire Stick itself. You have to purchase or rent content via your computer or phone, at which point it will be available in the Apple TV library on the Stick.
Picture
(Image credit: Amazon)
Heading straight to the HDR sections of the popular streaming services, we’re delighted to see that this Stick’s performance is excellent. Watching I Care A Lot on Prime Video in HDR, it’s easy to spot how well this device puts that tonal metadata to good use.
The bright scene outside the courthouse in the first episode is full of potential pitfalls. There are textures to render and different blacks to produce all while under the glare of the midday sun that bounces off the pale stone steps and floods the picture with a harsh white light. Despite all this, the Fire TV Stick copes admirably.
Even at the maximum-supported 1080p resolution, we get a decent sense of the stone-washed jeans of a bystander and the layers of clothing material on the black-clad Eiza Gonzalez. The sky is a searing blue and Rosamund Pike’s dress an expensive red, while the nearby trees remain a natural green. It’s an enjoyable picture with an easy-to-watch balance between dynamism and subtlety.
Dropping to SDR content is certainly a different experience, but the picture still pleases. It’s a punchy effort with a lot of brightness and big contrast, which helps to keep that sense of zeal to the on-screen action. Watching the sitcom Flowers on Netflix in Full HD, there’s plenty of impact as Mrs Flowers walks down her ramshackle garden to flirt badly with the tradesmen. What could be quite a flat, overcast sky has a bold, foreboding look and works as a fantastic foil to the dark brown, gnarled trees and the thick, overgrown grass. You can’t fail to get a sense of the way the story is going to play out.
That dynamic approach isn’t without its drawbacks, though. The focus on punch can leave detail fairly scant without the benefits of HDR. The faces of the characters sometimes come off a little too uniform, missing the same wealth of tone that is available from the Fire TV Stick 4K, given the same source material. The push for high contrast can overpower black depth and white detail too, unless you keep a careful eye on your TV settings. Again, that’s something the more expensive Stick has a better handle on.
Sound
(Image credit: Amazon)
The differences in audio between the Fire TV Stick (3rd Generation) and the 4K model are far less marked than the picture performance. Their overall character is undeniably similar.
Listening to This is Me from The Greatest Showman soundtrack on Tidal, there’s a respectable sense of rhythm to the music in the build towards the first full chorus. The drum rolls are tight enough to pick out the individual beats of the sticks, the reverb on the guitar is clear and controlled, and all of the excellent diction on vocals is nicely clipped.
Switching to the cinema, we head to the freeway crash shoot-out at the beginning of Deadpool on Netflix with its wealth of surround sound action. The audio is just as spacious as we’d expect from a budget streaming stick. Ajax’s motorbike zips neatly from one side to another as he weaves his way through the traffic, and both the movement and detail of sound as the pin flies out from the hand grenade shows what an enjoyable experience this stick can deliver.
At the same time, the 4K model is just a touch better all over for sound. Dynamically, the more expensive model has a noticeable edge that is easy enough to pick up both with music and while watching video content. It’s also a little crisper, which gives it a shade more energy.
Playing This is Me via the third-gen Stick, there isn’t quite the same thrill as the chorus reaches its crescendo. The equivalent for Deadpool is a slight loss of dimension to the sound effects. The bullets are a little less impactful than through the 4K Stick, and it’s noticeable in more incidental noises, such as the opening of the electric car door window before the eponymous hero pops his head out to address the bad guys. There isn’t quite that same satisfaction to its clunk as the glass reaches its limits.
Verdict
The third generation of the original Amazon Fire TV Stick offers the kind of solid performance we’ve come to expect from the Stick family. It also features all of the most important apps and comes with an all-new interface that offers owners a genuine solution to the problem of what to watch next at short notice. HDR viewing is excellent and it’s hard to ask for much more sonically.
The trouble is that more is actually available and for only a little extra. For just a few extra pounds or dollars, you can buy the 4K version of the Fire Stick, which is slightly better performing with the same content and offers all of that 4K future-proofing too. And that leaves our third-generation model, although good, in a slightly sticky spot.
Intel’s Bleep announcement starts at the 27:24 mark in its GDC 2021 presentation.
Last month during its virtual GDC presentation Intel announced Bleep, a new AI-powered tool that it hopes will cut down on the amount of toxicity gamers have to experience in voice chat. According to Intel, the app “uses AI to detect and redact audio based on user preferences.” The filter works on incoming audio, acting as an additional user-controlled layer of moderation on top of what a platform or service already offers.
It’s a noble effort, but there’s something bleakly funny about Bleep’s interface, which lists in minute detail all of the different categories of abuse that people might encounter online, paired with sliders to control the quantity of mistreatment users want to hear. Categories range anywhere from “Aggression” to “LGBTQ+ Hate,” “Misogyny,” “Racism and Xenophobia,” and “White nationalism.” There’s even a toggle for the N-word. Bleep’s page notes that it’s yet to enter public beta, so all of this is subject to change.
With the majority of these categories, Bleep appears to give users a choice: would you like none, some, most, or all of this offensive language to be filtered out? Like choosing from a buffet of toxic internet slurry, Intel’s interface gives players the option of sprinkling in a light serving of aggression or name-calling into their online gaming.
Bleep has been in the works for a couple of years now — PCMag notes that Intel talked about this initiative way back at GDC 2019 — and it’s working with AI moderation specialists Spirit AI on the software. But moderating online spaces using artificial intelligence is no easy feat as platforms like Facebook and YouTube have shown. Although automated systems can identify straightforwardly offensive words, they often fail to consider the context and nuance of certain insults and threats. Online toxicity comes in many, constantly evolving forms that can be difficult for even the most advanced AI moderation systems to spot.
“While we recognize that solutions like Bleep don’t erase the problem, we believe it’s a step in the right direction, giving gamers a tool to control their experience,” Intel’s Roger Chandler said during its GDC demonstration. Intel says it hopes to release Bleep later this year, and adds that the technology relies on its hardware accelerated AI speech detection, suggesting that the software may rely on Intel hardware to run.
A Google Fi user in Hawaii received a couple text messages Monday night wishing him a happy Easter. The problem is, those messages had been sent on Easter Sunday, but only made it through more than a day later.
Google is now informing Fi users who receive text messages through Hangouts that messages sent to them may have gone missing between March 31st and April 5th. The company said there was a service “interruption” that impacted “a small number of people.” Google says it has now resolved the issue and is sending through the delayed messages. Missing messages should appear in Hangouts by the end of today, April 7th.
Fi users have for years been able to send and receive calls and messages through Hangouts, but Google announced plans years ago to strip those features out as it transitioned Hangouts into yet another Google communications app. The features appear to have been disabled within the last week.
But the interruption occurred before the service was fully shut down, and so Google is still working to patch the delayed messages through to Hangouts. A Google spokesperson confirmed the service interruption to The Verge and said affected users are being contacted. SMS messages will be delivered to Messages by Google or another default messaging app going forward.
Delayed messages can cause real problems for senders and receivers. In November 2019, more than 168,000 messages were delivered that had originally been sent on Valentine’s Day 2019, nine months earlier. People received confusing, context-free messages — in some cases, messages came through from people who had died in the months between. The issue was caused by a server failure at Syniverse, a firm that routes text messages between carriers.
Google has been in the process of shutting down Hangouts for years, so it’s possible there weren’t many users left using the service in conjunction with Fi. Even the Fi user in Hawaii — who, full disclosure, is a friend of mine — said they knew they should have switched a while ago and decided not to.
“I intentionally put myself in this spot,” Jason Bennett, who received the delayed Easter messages, told The Verge. “I wanted to see what happened when it went offline.”
The body of an email sent to Fi users whose messages were delayed.
Twitter’s already building a competitor to the hot social audio app Clubhouse, but apparently, it’s discussed outright acquiring the company, too. Bloomberg reports today that Twitter held discussions with Clubhouse about purchasing the app for around $4 billion.
These conversations have reportedly stalled, and it’s unclear why. It’s also unclear whether Twitter or Clubhouse approached the other first, which could speak to how either platform is feeling about the competition in the social audio space. Bloomberg also reported yesterday that Clubhouse is now looking to raise money at a $4 billion valuation; it’s possible that number came out of these Twitter discussions, or that Clubhouse is shopping that figure around.
Clubhouse launched last year and popularized the idea of hosting live audio conversations. Celebrities, tech CEOs, and regular folks have since tuned in and hosted rooms. More than 10 million people have reportedly downloaded the app, which is currently invite-only and iOS-only.
The app also faces lots of competitors, including Facebook, Twitter, Discord, LinkedIn, and Slack, among others. These other platforms already come with built-in user bases of millions of people, as well as fully built web, iOS, and Android apps. Still, Clubhouse is rapidly trying to innovate. It’s staffed up in recent months and hired an engineer to build its Android app. It also, this week, launched tipping within the app as a way for creators to make money. (It says it won’t be taking a cut of that revenue.)
For its part, Twitter Spaces has already launched on both iOS and Android. The company also plans to launch a web version and to open hosting abilities up to all users this month. Why Twitter would want to acquire Clubhouse doesn’t totally make sense, unless it simply wanted to wipe the competition out and gain its dedicated user base and buzzy name. Either way, Clubhouse and Twitter now will both continue to face each other in the journey to dominate social audio.
The Amazon Music mobile app is getting a new feature to make it a little bit easier to use while driving. Car Mode is a simplified version of Amazon Music’s interface, featuring larger buttons, suggested playlists and albums, and easy access to Alexa.
Once enabled, Car Mode is divided into two sections. The upper part near the top of your phone is devoted to playback controls like play, pause, and skip, while the bottom section features a collection of music suggestions which you can switch between with a swipe or a tap. If a hands-free experience sounds better (and it probably should if you’re trying to drive safely) you can trigger Alexa in the bottom right corner with a tap or by using an Alexa voice command (“Hey Alexa, play Elton John”).
Car Mode doesn’t add any new functionality to Amazon Music, but its changes to the user interface could make it easier to switch songs or dive into a new playlist without having to take your attention away from the road. Like Spotify’s own take on simplified car controls, Amazon Music can be set to switch to Car Mode as soon as it recognizes your phone connecting to your car’s Bluetooth. For anyone with an older car, Car Mode can also be enabled in settings.
Amazon Music might not be as popular as Spotify or Apple Music — it’s on its way with over 55 million subscribers as of January 2020 — but for a growing service that’s pretty easy to try if you’re already have an Amazon Prime subscription, any new feature has the possibility to help a lot of people. Car Mode is available in Amazon Music now on iOS and Android.
Facebook’s experimental app development division, the NPE Team, has released a new Q&A platform that borrows concepts from buzzy, audio-only social network Clubhouse but with dashes of live-streaming thrown in.
The platform is called Hotline, and it featured its first Q&A with investor Nick Huber earlier today, according to a report from TechCrunch. A website for the service is online now and allows sign-ins via Twitter, but it features only a waitlist and a tool for applying to host your own show. TechCrunch says Facebook has created designs for mobile versions of the app, though those do not appear to be live at this moment.
News of Facebook building its own version of Clubhouse first surfaced in February, though Hotline is said to be a different product than the ongoing Clubhouse competitor being built by the team behind the video chat platform Messenger Rooms, TechCrunch reports. Twitter has been openly testing its Spaces alternative, too, putting more pressure on Clubhouse as whispers of a new funding round valuing the company at an eye-popping $4 billion valuation surfaced earlier this week.
Image: Facebook
Hotline works differently than Clubhouse and Spaces. It allows hosts to use video and to schedule more formal presentations with Q&A built in, rather than the more open-ended, audio-only conversations that take place on Clubhouse. Hotline also allows hosts to record their sessions in both audio and video formats, TechCrunch says.
The core Q&A component of Hotline involves the hosts fielding questions from the audience supplied via text, while audience members can then upvote which questions they want answered and then respond to the ongoing conversation with emoji reactions. Hosts can also bring individuals from the audience up onto the virtual stage to ask their question live and potentially engage in a longer conversation. In that way, Hotline events seem designed more like a cross between a radio show and a Twitch stream, where the audience is asked to weigh in here and there but control of the conversation remains firmly with the host.
The project is being led by Erik Hazzard, who joined Facebook when his app tbh, a platform for sending anonymous compliments to your friends, was acquired in 2017. Facebook later shut tbh down, despite Hazzard’s success attracting millions of users to the platform. But it sounds like his expertise in creating these new mobile experiences is now being put to good use at Facebook as part of the NPE Team, which in the past has released music-making apps like Collab and Bars.
If you’ve ever wondered where you’d end up if you were to transport directly to the other side of the Earth, Google now has a browser-based AR toy that lets you find out. It calls the site Floom, and the experience is pretty simple: you point your phone’s camera at the ground, tap the little tornado object, and it will show you a hole to the other side of the Earth. Then you can open that location in Google Earth to take a look around.
Testing it out was kind of a joy, and I have discovered that, depending on where I am in my house (and how I have my phone angled), I’m directly above either the Middle East, New Zealand, or the Antarctic.
Oh, awkward.
Floom is just one of the experiments that Google announced yesterday that rely on WebXR, which can create AR or VR experiences that work in webpages. The others include a virtual measuring tool and a tool that lets you visualize what six-foot social distancing looks like in your current environment. Google also has an upcoming app that will let you turn your photos library into an AR gallery. At the moment, Floom can only be used with Chrome on Android devices.
These WebXR experiments are the first experience I’ve had with the tech, and it’s reasonably impressive for something that’s running in a phone’s web browser. Google’s experiments have always been interesting, but this is the first one that lets me fulfill a childhood dream: digging a tunnel to the other side of the globe. Now all Google needs to add is a visualization that makes it seem like you’re flying through the Earth’s core.
Best Buy is piloting a new paid membership service that would provide exclusive perks, including concierge-style tech support and exclusive pricing. The subscription service, which will cost $200 a year or $180 if you have a Best Buy credit card, bears similarities with Amazon’s Prime subscription as Best Buy looks to expand its services outside the sale of consumer tech products.
The new membership, called Best Buy Beta, grants members access to a slew of benefits, including free standard shipping, unlimited Geek Squad technical support, exclusive member pricing, and a 60-day extended return window. Best Buy confirmed that Beta members will also have 24/7 access to a concierge team, which they can contact by phone, email, chat, or through the Best Buy mobile app.
Here are a few perks included with the Best Buy membership program. Image: Best Buy
Best Buy already has a $200 membership program called Total Tech Support that provides similar services, but it will be unavailable in the pilot markets. In fact, based on how similar both services are, there’s a possibility that Best Buy will discontinue Total Tech Support.
Best Buy is not the first retail giant to roll out a service to compete with Amazon Prime. Last September, Walmart released its own subscription service for $98 a year, offering minimal benefits such as free delivery on orders over $35 and fuel discounts at select gas stations.
Best Buy is piloting the new Beta membership in three states: Iowa, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma, but the retailer says it plans to expand the annual subscription to select stores in Minnesota, North Carolina, and Tennessee sometime this month.
Apple is officially opening up its Find My tracking network to third-party companies (as it had promised last year.) Now, any hardware manufacturer can add software-side support for Apple’s localized network to track missing items — so long as they play by Apple’s Made for iPhone (MFi) accessory rules.
The first wave of items that can now be tracked starting today include VanMoof’s S3 and X3 e-bikes, Belkin’s SoundForm Freedom True Wireless Earbuds, and the Chipolo One Spot tracking tag — all of which can now rely on Apple’s crowdsourced Bluetooth network (which encompasses millions of iPhones, iPads, and Macs).
Users will be able to add those devices to the updated Find My app starting today and can track them through that app much in the same way that they’d track any missing Apple product.
Chipolo’s Find My-compatible One Spot tracker.
Apple says that third-party devices looking to add support will have to apply through the company’s MFi program for authorized accessories and “adhere to all the privacy protections of the Find My network that Apple customers rely on.” Approved products will sport a new “Works with Apple Find My” badge to let customers know that they’re compatible with Apple’s network.
Additionally, Apple announced that it’d be offering a chipset specification for third-party hardware companies to integrate with the Ultra-Wideband systems in Apple’s more recent phones for even more precise tracking in the future. Apple has also long been rumored to be working on its own AirTags product, which would offer similar UWB-based tracking.
If you want to pull up your favorite Spotify track or playlist without pressing buttons, there is no shortage of voice assistants to help you get those jams, including Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, Cortana, and even Bixby. But now, Spotify has its own hands-free wake word: “Hey Spotify” appears to be rolling out on Android and iOS, as tested by GSM Arena, 9to5Mac, and us here at The Verge.
Frankly, it’s a little less handy than some of the native voice assistants built into your phone because you need to leave the app open for it to work — it’s not something you’ll launch with your phone asleep or with Spotify simply running in the background.
But if you have the app open, you can just say “Hey Spotify” and ask it to play a song; pull up a playlist; launch a radio station; and skip, pause, or play. We also found the “Play something I like” command would pull up a random one of our Daily Mix playlists.
The phone version of the feature’s been in the works for at least a year, as app researcher Jane Manchun Wong discovered last March. The app should prompt you to get started if the feature’s rolled out to you by now, but you might be able to find the toggle manually under Settings > Microphone permissions > “Hey Spotify.”
Why now? Why bother when other voice assistants can do this without launching an app? I imagine that’s because Spotify is tracking toward its own hardware, where its voice assistant will be always on and always ready. Specifically, Spotify appears to be tracking toward the launch of its Car Thing, a dedicated Spotify smart assistant for your vehicle that was reported to include a “Hey Spotify” voice command way back in January 2019.
Having the same voice command on your phone makes sense; users might get used to it, and start looking for it, after they exit their vehicles. And while they’re at it, I also wouldn’t be surprised if we see some “Hey Spotify” headphones or earbuds sometime in the next year.
(Pocket-lint) – When out cycling it’s not just your eyes but also your ears that can be crucial in assessing what’s going on around you – it’s why we’d never put in headphones and listen to music while out on the road. But sometimes your own limited senses aren’t quite enough.
That’s where the Garmin Varia (RTL515) comes into play. Not only does it function as a rear bike light, it also has built-in radar that can detect when another vehicle or cyclist is on the approach and, through sync with your Garmin Edge cycling computer or mounted smartphone (via the Varia app) can alert you to what’s going on.
Thing is, the Varia RTL515 is rather a lot of money. But, having been solo cycling in the country for some months now, it’s proven its worth and our peace of mind time and again. Here’s why we recommend it.
Design & Mount
Syncs with Garmin Connect / Garmin Edge computers / Varia mobile app (iOS & Android)
Mount: Garmin twist-lock mount (adaptors included)
Dimensions: 98.6 x 19.7 x 39.6mm / Weight: 71g
ANT+ & Bluetooth connectivity
IPX7 weather-resistant design
While most bike lights are rather small, the Varia is a lot larger on account of its mount, internal battery and radar technology. It’s not big to the point of bothersome, but much of the product isn’t the actual light itself – as you can see from the extended black area in the elongated pill-shaped design.
To mount the light it’s a case of getting the included Garmin mount, fixed by O-ring bands, onto your rear seatpost. It fits fairly snug, although road vibrations can, to some degree, make the light/radar turn around the seat post slightly – and we cannot see any way to make it tighter. It’s never stopped the product functioning for us, though, so it’s no bother.
There are some adaptors included in the box, which you may find helpful, which pad out the mount. Our light, once mounted, has a fairly ‘downward’ facing position, so using the adaptors can be assistive in getting a better position overall.
Once it’s mounted up, there’s an on button, a press of which will see a small blue light show you that the light is active. From here it’ll want to find your relevant Garmin kit to sync. Through the Garmin Connect app it’s possible to sync with a bike computer, as we have with the Edge 1030 Plus, where the light’s presence shows as a little always-on-top symbol to the top right. If it’s deactivated this is red, if it’s in play then this is black. Nice and simple.
You don’t even really need to worry about turning the light itself off or on – a long press of the on/off switch can do this though – as the sync with your Garmin product means it’ll only be active when your cycling computer is also active. Very handy.
The connection is made through ANT+ or Bluetooth in the case of using a phone app instead of dedicated Garmin cycling computer. We’ve had no issues with the connection, but if the radar is blocked due to say, excess mud all over the light, then it’ll let you know that it’s not functioning – so you can stop and give it a wipe down as needed.
Performance
Radar: 140m range & 220 degree field of view
Modes: Solid, Peloton, Night Flash, Day Flash
Maximum lumens: 65 (in Day Flash mode)
Minimum lumens: 8 (in Peloton mode)
Up to 16 hours battery life
Micro-USB recharging
Once you’re out on the road, the only presence of the Varia is that little symbol to the top right corner of the Garmin Edge display. However, once a vehicle is detected on the approach the side of the display becomes an ‘approach bar’ showing a little dot (representing the vehicle) and how closely it’s approaching. There’s also an audible “de-dah, de-dah, de-dah” type alert, which will make you look – and is really useful, as it sounds even when the rest of your Garmin’s functions are muted.
That ‘approach bar’ is reasonably accurate, as you’ll tend to note a vehicle sits awaiting its sensible moment to overtake. At this point, the Varia will sound an alert again – as the radar can detect the wider movement, effectively giving you one alert for initial approach, and a second alert for overtake.
Once a vehicle has passed, the ‘approach bar’ will turn from red to green, to let you know there’s nothing else on the approach. If there is, however, the bar will remain red and show the next vehicle awaiting its turn to pass – and you might not get an approach alert in this instance. We don’t see that as a problem, but it’s something to be aware of.
There’s a similar minor issue we’ve found when riding with others: when riding chain gang style, in a bit of a peloton, the close proximity seems to make the Varia think nothing is in your near vicinity. This is how it’s supposed to function – a consistent speed follow within 30m is seen as a fellow cyclist, in effect – in order to free up the system to alert you for faster approaching vehicles.
Which is all well and good, but can’t you just use your ears? Well, yes and no. See, when we lived in London, cycling was a whole other experience compared to cycling country backroads. Our old London route was open, largely straight, with ample passing space and, frankly, enough traffic that it would rarely be faster than two legs a-pedalling. But in the country, with often concealed turns, dappled light, and rush of wind that can make hearing tricky, it’s very valuable.
Pocket-lint
As one example: there are two sections of our daily country ride that are a bit tighter. It’s actually hard to hear anything on the approach in those sections, due to the rush of wind at relative speed. That said, it’s a national speed limit road, so a passing vehicle could, technically speaking, overtake at pace. What we do here is get alerted from the Varia that there’s a vehicle behind, then await a decent passing spot and sign for the vehicle to proceed safely. Not something we needed in London, massively useful in the country.
As for the brightness of the Varia, it’s pretty punchy. A flashing Day Flash mode is 65 lumens, with a battery life up to 16 hours. There’s also Solid (20 lumens, always on), Peloton (8 lumens to not distract nearby cyclists’ eyes), and Night Flash (29 lumens, to be seen). We’ve also seen that the sequence of flashing will change when the radar detects a vehicle in order to help you to be seen, which is a clever little feature.
As for battery life, the claimed time of 16 hours is perhaps a stretch. We’re probably poor at switching the light off properly, however, and it is at least easy to charge – although it uses older Micro-USB when we’d prefer USB-C and the possibility of wireless charging for a much simpler solution without the need for vulnerable ports and enclosing flaps to protect.
Pocket-lint
In terms of sensitivity, the Varia is very good at identifying a relevant approach. If your bike is stationary and you walk up to it from behind it’ll count that as an approach. And, as we’ve said, other vehicles – motorbikes, cars, vans and beyond – and cyclists are detected with ease. So if there’s a T-Rex on your tail, the Varia will let you know about it.
Verdict
Your eyes and ears are one thing, but adding radar to your cycles adds a layer of safety that’s very useful. In the case of the Varia RTL515 it’s expertly integrated into your Garmin setup, too, which makes it an easy-to-understand tool to act upon as necessary.
The only real question mark over whether to buy one is the simple fact that it costs an awful lot of money for what is, in effect, a fancy rear light. But it’s proven its worth and our peace of mind time and again. And for that we say it’s well worth it.
Writing by Mike Lowe.
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