Lenovo’s next gaming phone has leaked, with a design that looks like a Michael Bay Transformer and a gaming PC merged together. It’s unlike anything I have ever seen on a phone before. I’m not sure if I like it.
Pictures of what appears to be the phone were shown on the social media service Weibo recently, and I am speechless. Specifically, the dual-camera setup is located at the dead center of the phone, and there’s a built-in active cooling fan. It reminds me a lot of a Transformer, as you can see from the photo below.
Image: Weibo
Image: Weibo
Now, Lenovo is not the first company to stick a cooling fan in a gaming smartphone. In 2019, Nubia’s Red Magic 3 had a cooling fan placed inside of the device. The Black Shark FunCooler Pro is an external cooling fan designed for people who game on their phones. Not to mention Asus’ AeroActive Cooler 5, an external fan designed to cool down its ROG Phone 5 Ultimate gaming phone.
But the biggest concern I have for the recent images of the rumored Lenovo phone (which is rumored to be called the Legion Phone 2 Pro) is that gaming phones may continue to include more ridiculous designs. Lenovo’s first gaming phone, which launched last year, already had an absurd design by placing a pop-up camera on the side of the phone. But new model looks to escalate things even further.
According to the leaks, Lenovo’s Legion Phone 2 Pro is rumored to launch on April 8th in China first, but it’s unclear if the phone will release anywhere else.
Leaving a missed call on someone’s phone usually signals that you should call them back — but at one point in India, it was communication in its own right. A new feature by Atul Bhattarai in Rest of World examines the Indian culture that grew up around missed calls — and the startups that took advantage of it.
In basic terms, a “missed call” means dialing a person but hanging up before they can answer. Hanging up without talking let users send a basic message (“I called”) without getting charged for minutes or SMS messages — like paging someone without a pager. Bhattarai focuses on ZipDial, a company that turned missed calls into a robust advertising business and a way to experience some of the features of online life without paying for data.
As Bhattarai writes, using missed calls to communicate came about because of the high cost of cellphone data and limited access to high-speed internet. Calling long enough to connect to someone else’s phone and then hanging up or not picking up on the other end avoided being charged for the call. These missed calls could mean a variety of things, like letting a friend know you’re on your way or a loved one know that you miss them. “The fact that the missed call demanded only basic numeric literacy made them accessible to the third of India’s population that was illiterate,” Bhattarai explains.
ZipDial combined the missed call trend and preexisting SMS services into a kind of a one-stop shop for cellphone owners who wanted basic internet functionality. ZipDial would partner with a brand and set up a hotline that people could call for services like sports scores or celebrity tweets. All it took was “signing up” with a missed call.
Bhattarai also highlights a proto-Spotify algorithmic playlist service called Kan Khajura, which delivered new music in 15-minute calls. “Kan Khajura’s central appeal was that it could be accessed anywhere and anytime, unlike the radio and TV,” Bhattarai writes.
Those businesses became unsustainable as mobile data became cheaper, and ZipDial ceased operations in 2016. But Bhattarai argues the services helped bridge the offline-online gap in a period before internet service providers and physical infrastructure caught up.
You can read the full feature on ZipDial’s missed call empire on Rest of World.
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The Sonos Roam is the most focused, calculated product from Sonos yet. It’s a small $169 speaker that’s meant to compete with portable Bluetooth speakers that people so often carry everywhere without a second thought. But it’s also designed to slot into Sonos’ multiroom audio platform and showcase the versatility that comes with it. In fact, excluding the co-branded speakers that Sonos makes with Ikea, the Roam is now the cheapest way into the company’s ecosystem.
The Roam supports hands-free voice commands, has Apple AirPlay 2, includes wireless charging, and features a rugged design that lets you use it practically anywhere. There’s a lot riding on this speaker; Sonos only releases a couple new products per year, so they all have to deliver. So let’s examine how the Roam stacks up against similarly sized speakers and whether it should replace whatever you’ve got now.
At 6.61 inches tall, the Roam actually stands shorter than popular Bluetooth speakers like the UE Boom 3 and JBL Flip 5. And at under a pound, it’s lightweight enough to toss into your backpack or tote. The Boom is bigger all around: you could pretty much fit the Roam right inside it. UE’s Megaboom 3 and the new JBL Charge 5 both increase the size advantage further, and they’re still close to the Roam in price. Going up from there, you get to the real giants like the UE Megablast. For this review, I’ll keep it simple and focus on speakers that resemble the Roam in size.
The Roam retains what’s become the standard Sonos aesthetic, with hundreds of precision-drilled holes in the speaker enclosure. But this is not a cylinder-style speaker that shoots audio in all directions. The Roam has a curved triangle shape that naturally projects sound both forward and up when it’s laid horizontally. It comes in either black or white, and I’ve noticed that when the black one is in bright lighting, you can actually see a hexagon pattern behind the holes. That plate is there for structural reasons, but it’s not really visible on the white speaker.
Battery life tops out at 10 hours.
This is the first Sonos speaker to earn an IP67 dust and water resistance rating. By certification standards, that means it should survive up to 30 minutes in three feet of water. In practical terms, it means you can use the Roam in the bathroom while you shower and near pools without fretting about damage. It’s probably a good idea to keep it on a floaty if you insist on bringing it into a deep pool, though. This speaker doesn’t float. Yes, I checked.
The Roam has the best water resistance of any Sonos speaker.
I’ve also managed to drop my two review units a few times, and they’ve come away with only light blemishes and a couple nicks you really have to hunt for to notice. I chalk that up to clumsiness; there’s no built-in handle like the Move, but in general the curved triangle shape is easy to grip. Both sides of the Roam have silicone end caps to help with ruggedness. From what I’ve seen, it should be able to withstand a tumble off a bicycle and the wear and tear that comes with being a truly portable speaker.
It’s rated IP67 and has silicone at both ends to withstand bumps.
On the top (when vertical) or left (horizontal) is where you find the controls, which are actual clicky buttons beneath the silicone instead of the usual capacitive sensors that Sonos tends to use. Going with real, tactile buttons for this product was absolutely the right decision. They’re easy to feel for and hard to press accidentally. There are four buttons: play / pause, two for track controls, and a microphone button for enabling or muting the built-in microphones that are used for voice assistant commands with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.
On the back of the Roam is a USB-C port and power button. Aside from wired charging, you can also juice up the speaker using any Qi-compatible pad that it’ll fit on. My Anker dual-charging station handled the task well. Sonos also sells a wireless charger that attaches to the Roam magnetically, but I didn’t get a chance to test that. The included USB-C-to-USB-A cable is nicely angled on the Roam’s side so that it doesn’t get in the way no matter how it’s oriented. Neither the cable nor the Sonos wireless charger are water resistant, so you’ve got to keep those dry. If you’re in a hurry, definitely go wired; Sonos says it takes “about two hours” for the Roam to go from 0 to 50 percent when charging wirelessly compared to “about an hour” when plugged in. Higher-power chargers can cut down on both of those times.
You can use either Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant with the built-in mics.
Now onto the main agenda: sound quality. Sonos has built a favorable reputation with its past speakers, but the question is whether the company can make good on its name with a speaker this small and portable. What I’ll say is that the Roam is one of the clearest, most pleasant portable speakers I’ve used. Others like the UE Boom 3 can come off muddy and lack depth. There’s little about their sound and articulation that stands out.
The Roam seems to make a priority of ensuring that the texture and vibrancy of music comes through with maximum clarity. Vocals sound crisp, and strings in classical music come through lush without getting pitchy. Like other Sonos speakers, the Roam features automatic room optimization called Trueplay, and Sonos says it’s constantly adjusting to optimize sound for whatever environment it’s in. This does actually make a difference in an echoey bathroom, but it’s not some magic cure-all for an acoustically challenged room. (Auto Trueplay works with music both streamed over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.)
Let’s face it: while Sonos claims that the Roam “defies expectations,” it can’t defy physics. This is a relatively small speaker, and perhaps the best-sounding one in its size class, but it has weaknesses. At the top of that list is bass, which can’t quite match that of the Sonos One and is roundly defeated by the much larger, heavier Move. Even the barely larger JBL Flip 5 has more assertive bass that gets noticeably boomier than the Roam. It can go louder, too. Larger Bluetooth speakers like the UE Megaboom and JBL Charge 5 will almost certainly trounce the Roam at bass response, but I don’t consider that surprising.
Sonos’ speaker has some low-end resonance — you’ll feel the vibrations if it’s on a table — but it’s clear that the company has opted for balance over boom factor. The Roam can also only do so much when you’re using it in a wide open space outdoors with no walls for the sound to bounce off of. It’ll crank loud without much distortion but can’t reach the same fullness as the Move. It’s when you really turn up the volume that you’ll be left wanting some added oomph. A party speaker this is not.
Two Roams paired together can produce an excellent stereo soundstage — but only on Wi-Fi.
Using two Roams at the same time as a stereo pair brings out even more detail, and the bass also benefits from two of them playing together. There’s no beating proper stereo separation, and two Roams do a better job blanketing a bedroom or living room in music than one alone. Unfortunately, the process of creating a stereo pair can get tedious. You have to manually do it from the Sonos app every time. This makes sense since you have to select which speaker is on what side. But I’d love it if there were a button shortcut to more quickly form a stereo pair — or at least a prompt when you power on a second Roam that asks if you want to pair them instead of leaving both to their lonesome by default.
To the frustration of some Sonos customers, the Roam doesn’t allow you to use the stereo pair feature when listening over Bluetooth. This is also the case with the Move, but considering how much Sonos is hyping the portability of its new speaker, it feels like a fumble on the company’s part. Maybe this poses engineering challenges, but other Bluetooth speakers like the UE Wonderboom 2 can already link together as a stereo pair without needing an app to get there. Bluetooth stereo might be a compelling reason for some people to own two Roams, but right now the feature isn’t there.
The $169 Sonos Roam beside the much bigger, heavier $399 Sonos Move.
Sonos has at least introduced some new tricks with the Roam when using it around the house. The first is called sound swap, which lets you quickly pass off audio from the Roam to whichever of your other Sonos speakers is closest. You just hold the play button for a few seconds, and the currently playing music hops over. Repeat the process, and audio moves back to the Roam. This has worked well in my experience so far, and Sonos goes about locating the nearest speaker in a clever way. When you activate sound swap, all of your speakers briefly emit a high-frequency tone that your ears can’t hear — but the Roam can. When you venture outside, the Roam does a solid job automatically pairing to your phone once you’re outside Wi-Fi coverage.
The other new feature that debuts with the Roam is the option to play Bluetooth audio over your entire Sonos system. In the Sonos app, you can add your other speakers as a group with the Roam that’s playing the Bluetooth audio source. My turntable doesn’t do Bluetooth, but if yours does, this will be an easy way to play your records in multiple rooms — at the cost of fidelity, of course. There are other ways of integrating vinyl into a Sonos system if you care more about audio quality. I did test this feature using content from a friend’s phone over Bluetooth, and it played just fine across my other Sonos speakers. The Move can’t be updated with this feature because the Roam has a new antenna that can connect to Bluetooth and Wi-Fi simultaneously. The Move only supports one or the other at a time.
But even with these new capabilities, there are still those occasional times where a Sonos system falls out of step. Maybe music playback inexplicably starts seizing up, or maybe the volume controls in the app you’re casting from — like Spotify — stop working. Even after shifting to its new S2 platform, Sonos hasn’t completely ironed out the blips when its mobile app goes on the fritz or seems to momentarily lose control over everything. The bugs are rare, but they happen.
A useful, delicious size reference.
What’s worse in the case of the Roam is how poorly Sonos handles moving between Wi-Fi networks. Everything works just great at home, but if you want to use the Wi-Fi features of Roam at someone else’s place or when traveling, it’s a real headache. The process of adding another “trusted network” in the Sonos app didn’t always work in my experience. I hope this is something Sonos will focus on more now that it’s selling a speaker that’s portable in a way that the Move never was. Music on the Roam sounds best over Wi-Fi, and it’s also needed for features like AirPlay 2. Bluetooth is right there as a fallback, but the Roam really has to get friendlier with guest networks.
The estimated battery life of 10 hours is also on the low side: the UE Boom 3 gets 15 hours and JBL’s Flip 5 hits 12. Wireless charging helps make up for this to an extent. It’s pretty rare among Bluetooth speakers, and you can play music as the Roam sits on the charger replenishing its battery. But I still wish Sonos could’ve eked out some extra playing time. The company says you can reach up to 10 days of standby time, but that strikes me as optimistic. My review units have held their charge for quite a few days, though.
There’s also a battery drain bug if you set up Google Assistant on the Roam that Sonos warned reviewers about, and it’s bad enough that the company is encouraging customers to power the speaker down when it’s not being used to conserve juice. Sonos says it’s working with Google on a fix and that customers using Alexa won’t encounter the same issue. The beamforming microphones generally picked up my voice commands without obvious mistakes the vast majority of the time, and aside from the Google battery bug, both voice assistants worked as expected.
The Roam’s many features make it among the best portable speakers at its size.
It’s best to think of the Sonos Roam as a personal speaker. It’ll do fine on your desk pumping out the soundtrack to your day. It can handle picnic duty for a small group at the park or come for a ride-along on your bike. And yes, it shines in the shower. But if you’re leading a dance class or trying to entertain guests at a barbecue, these are the types of situations where the larger Move easily wins out and proves its worth. Think of it this way: the more people that will be listening, the sooner you’ll turn to a speaker that isn’t the Roam.
But even with that understood, the Roam has a lot going for it. When in the comfort of your home, features like AirPlay and voice assistants do make it feel more capable than other speakers that are equally small and easy to carry. That and convenient wireless charging are where the $170 price gets easier to accept.
The Roam can fill in any nook of your living space — the bathroom, the garage, wherever — that doesn’t have another full-time Sonos speaker in it. On the go with Bluetooth, it’s easy to use and kicks out clear, satisfying sound for its size. Sonos needs to work on keeping the Roam’s smarts together when you’re on different Wi-Fi, and stereo pairing over Bluetooth should’ve been a feature on day one. But neither is enough to sink the overall value of Sonos’ latest speaker. As long as you don’t expect miracles from its compact size, I think you’ll end up happy.
LG has announced it will stop making phones. Once one of the top players in the smartphone market, the firm will bow out of its mobile operations globally in order to focus on other “growth areas”.
It lists such areas as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence and business-to-business solutions, and “platforms and services”.
In 2013, LG was rated as the third biggest maker of smartphones in the world, but, according to analysts IDC, it currently stands at 11th. Its smartphone business has been loss making for years, and struggling to keep up with the popularity of Apple and Samsung handsets.
Worried that your shiny LG phone will soon be rendered an expensive brick? LG has said it will maintain service support and software updates for its phones “for a period of time”. Exactly how long is anyone’s guess. This will also vary by region. According to a document spotted by XDA Developers, this support will include Android 12 updates for certain smartphones. Again, this will vary by region.
Many will mourn LG’s exit from the smartphone market. Its phones may have been niche and quirky, but they were usually a bit different from the competition. Recently, the firm had pursued a strategy of eye-catching folding phones like the LG Wing. Our favourite? The LG Chocolate from 2006.
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If you had to choose: would you choose a sharper screen on your smartphone, or a smoother-scrolling one? This year, budget phone buyers may be asking themselves that question: the OnePlus Nord N100, Moto G50, and the new Samsung Galaxy F12 and M12 all refresh their screens 90 times per second (which is good!) but with a lower-than-optimal screen resolution of 720p. That’s the same resolution as a Galaxy Nexus from 2011.
Compared to your average iPhone, that’s a paltry number of pixels. Since the iPhone 4 debuted in 2010, every Apple handset has offered at least 326 pixels per inch (PPI), enough so you can’t make out those individual pixels with the naked eye at typical viewing distances. (The marketing term is “retina display.”) Here, the PPI would be more like 270.
And yet Apple has never offered an iPhone with a high-refresh-rate screen, which we’ve often found to be one of the most desirable features on high-end and mid-range smartphones since it makes everything you do (not just games) feel much smoother. (Apple might make it happen later this year.)
But the Galaxy F12 and M12, the OnePlus and Moto all show that high-refresh doesn’t need to be a high-end feature at all, or even a $300 one like we recently saw with the OnePlus Nord N10 5G. The Samsung phones in particular cost under $150 each, as long as you’re willing to sacrifice pixels to get there.
In other ways, the 9,999-rupee handsets seem like they might be decent picks too: they’re based on the same basic platform as the Galaxy A12 and its four-camera array, but with a larger 6,000mAh battery that dwarfs many others on the market. You get a sidemounted fingerprint sensor. Just note while its 8nm Exynos 850 processor might sound shiny and new, it’s not comparable with Qualcomm’s recent 800-series Snapdragon chips. It’s closer to 2019’s Snapdragon 665 in performance.
It’s not clear whether either of these phones will come to the US quite yet. The OnePlus Nord N100 already has, and the G50 launched in Europe late last month.
Epic is further stitching together its various platforms with a new Fortnite integration for its social video app Houseparty that lets you stream your gameplay to friends. The integration builds on an existing one that uses Houseparty’s video chatting capabilities to bring live video chat into Fortnite, and now this essentially does the reverse.
That way, your friends can see you live both through your mobile phone camera and also the feed of your active Fortnite game. Think of it a bit like Twitch streaming without all the fuss and just for your friends instead of the broader public. Epic says the feature supports streaming from a PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, or PC right now. “We will let everyone know if we’re able to support more platforms in the future,” Epic says in its blog post.
Epic owns Houseparty, which streamlines fast and easy group video chat, following a 2019 acquisition, and the game maker has used the app to boost the social feature sets of its various gaming platforms. A few months following the acquisition, Epic began using Houseparty for improved Fortnite cross-platform audio chat, and now a full bridge between the game and the app exists.
For a breakdown of how to enable Houseparty gameplay streaming and video chat, check out Epic’s FAQ here.
LG says it will continue to offer Android OS updates — including an upgrade to Android 12 — for some of its devices after it exits the smartphone business, but the company’s poor track record has us feeling skeptical it’ll follow through.
In its press release and on a US FAQ page, LG says only that it will continue to provide some security and OS updates, but a page on LG’s Korean website spotted by XDA Developers specifically mentions that an “Android 12 OS upgrade will also be provided for selected models.” This page also notes that this is subject to change based on product performance, and that update availability may vary by region.
LG US didn’t share anything more specific when contacted by The Verge, saying only that “LG may offer certain OS upgrades for select models,” and that “additional details will be provided in the near future on software updates.” An Android 11 update schedule hasn’t yet been confirmed for the US either, though details posted on LG’s German website could give a rough idea of what that might look like.
Unfortunately, LG wasn’t very reliable with updates even prior to its decision to get out of the phone business; OS upgrades came slowly, even for flagship devices. In 2018, the company attempted to remedy this by setting up a Software Upgrade division, but when it came time to offer Android 9 Pie updates in early 2019, not much had actually changed.
If the company does make good on its Android 12 promise, we expect that it would only come to a few high-profile devices, like the Wing and V60. And with Android 11 only scheduled to come to many of the company’s phones much later this year, even if that 12 update does come it’ll likely be a long ways off.
The LG V30.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
The US smartphone market just got more boring
If you’re reading this on a phone, chances are, LG didn’t make it. The Korean tech giant has been losing money and market share with its smartphone division for years, so it wasn’t a surprise when it finally announced plans to pull the plug today. You could be forgiven for shrugging.
But LG deserves to be remembered as more than just an also-ran. Its phones were rarely big hits, much less often the kind of polished product we’d ever recommend to most over its competitors. Despite this, LG did introduce several features and innovations that the phone world would be worse off without. The company was the first to put ultrawide cameras on its phones, for example, and it pioneered the kind of all-screen, no-button smartphone designs that dominate the market today.
And particularly in the US, where Android competition is extremely low, the loss of LG will only further entrench the Apple-Samsung duopoly at the high end. LG is the third-biggest phone vendor in the US, with roughly 10 percent of market share, although much of that was midrange prepaid devices sold through carrier stores. LG might not have been at the top of your smartphone shopping list, but if you live in the US, that list just got a lot more boring.
The LG Velvet in its Dual Screen case.Photo by Sam Byford / The Verge
LG did have some claim to being a tastemaker in the pre-smartphone world. Its Chocolate and enV phones were stylish devices that helped LG expand its brand recognition around the world. But after the iPhone and Android changed everything, LG struggled to adapt. I’m duty-bound here to mention the original LG Prada, which had a capacitive touchscreen and was technically announced just before the iPhone, but its true legacy is mostly people pointing that out in online comments.
LG’s early Android phones weren’t impressive. The 2011 Nitro HD, for example, was its first splashy flagship device in a long time, but it was saddled with outdated, clunky software and poor battery life. Its successor, the Optimus G, represented a degree of refinement, and by the time the G2 came along in 2012, LG’s new G-series was a fairly credible alternative to the likes of Samsung or HTC. The G2 was one of the first flagship smartphones to attempt to cut down on bezel size, for example, and LG made on-screen buttons a core part of its design long before most others.
It was also around this time that LG found a new partner in Google, releasing two Nexus phones in a row. The 2012 Nexus 4 was built around the guts of the Optimus G, and it had its fans despite its crippling lack of LTE, weak battery life, and unimpressive camera. The next year’s Nexus 5 found an even stronger cult following despite it too having a poor camera and bad battery life. (The red version did look great, and the $349 price didn’t hurt.)
The modular LG G5.Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge
LG’s mobile division kept on ticking on, turning out respectable phones like the G3 and G4 without ever really challenging Samsung. The software was still a heavy-handed customization of Android, and LG continued to lag behind peers with its pace of updates, but the hardware was solid. It was the 2016 G5 where things really started to fall apart. Designed around a series of swappable modular accessories called “Friends,” the phone flopped, and LG quickly pretended it never happened. Suffice it to say that if you bought a camera grip or a DAC Hi-Fi audio accessory for your G5, it wouldn’t be able to make Friends with 2017’s G6.
It’s unfortunate that LG focused on gimmicks with the G5 because that phone did introduce one new feature that would become ubiquitous in the smartphone market years later: the ultrawide camera. Ultrawides on smartphones let people capture pictures that were previously restricted to camera gearheads, and it’s hard to imagine buying a new phone without one today. But it took a long time for other phone makers to figure out the utility; Apple introduced its first in 2019, for example.
The V20, released the same year as the G5, had another unique feature that would become a hallmark of the company’s phones for years: an honest-to-God headphone jack in the year that Apple decided to ditch it. And not just any headphone jack — one that worked with a built-in quad DAC designed to boost sound quality and appeal to audiophiles. Did this sell many phones? Well, no. But it became a hallmark of LG’s high-end devices ever since, providing an option for wired headphone enthusiasts who despaired as other phone makers followed Apple’s lead one by one.
The LG G6.Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
The 2017 G6 got the G-series back on track. It was the first major smartphone released with a now-familiar taller aspect ratio, with an even stronger focus on eliminating bezels than ever before. Of course, not many people noticed as Samsung followed immediately with the similar but sleeker Galaxy S8 and its “Infinity Display.” Later that year, LG released the V30, which had a completely new (and very nice) design, but it’s always going to be a hard sell when your most differentiated feature is your (also very nice) haptics system.
From here on out, LG’s flagship phones mostly blurred into one. The G7 was a pretty good facsimile of an iPhone X, even winning an Editor’s Choice designation from Verge editor Dan Seifert. The V40 pioneered the now-common triple-camera setup. The G8X came with a dual-screen case that, in hindsight, Microsoft’s Surface Duo really didn’t improve much upon a year later. But all of these phones looked basically identical to each other, and none of their key features were viewed as much more than gimmicks at the time.
For every good idea LG had, there’d be something pointless like the G8’s vein-sensing “Hand ID” unlock. Despite the company making a big announcement about a new Software Upgrade Center to increase the pace of Android updates, nothing changed. And in the face of Samsung’s unstoppable marketing machine, LG’s best attempt at a brand identity was to add “ThinQ” to the name of each flagship phone.
The LG Wing.Photo by Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge
In its final year, LG’s mobile division did move to address its problems. The Explorer Project was intended to produce more innovative designs, like the beautiful but underpowered Velvet and the oddball dual-screen Wing. At CES this year, the company announced a Rollable concept phone that it said it planned to take to market.
That’ll never happen now, and it’s hard to say it’s a huge loss with companies like Oppo and TCL likely to pick up the slack with their own versions. But in the context of the US phone market, there’s going to be fewer choices, and whoever ends up accounting for LG’s lost market share is unlikely to be as creative a replacement.
LG’s phones were rarely, if ever, the best available, but the company did make a significant impact on the smartphone world at large. With its mobile division’s demise, the US market becomes even more homogenous.
By now, you have probably heard of the huge Facebook data breach, in which upwards of 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries had personal data leaked online, including phone numbers, Facebook IDs, birthdates — you name it.
Your first question will be, of course, how to check whether you are part of that breach. There are a couple of places out there where you can find out whether your data has been compromised.
One well-known site that tracks data breaches is Have I Been Pwned. Just follow the link to the site and put in your email address. You will find out not only if you’ve been part of the Facebook breach, but also any other breaches in which your data may have been compromised.
While as of this writing, you could only do a search using your email address, Troy Hunt, creator of Have I Been Pwned, was considering whether to include a phone number search as well:
Should the FB phone numbers be searchable in @haveibeenpwned? I’m thinking through the pros and cons in terms of the value it adds to impacted people versus the risk presented if it’s used to help resolve numbers to identities (you’d still need the source data to do that).
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) April 4, 2021
If you want to check your phone number against the leaked Facebook database, Gizmodo has suggested a tool created by a site called The News Each Day, in which you input your phone number to find out whether it’s part of the breach. However, that site is not as well-known, so until more is known about it, you may want to stick with the more trusted site listed above.
And if you do find out that your data has been compromised? Some of the steps you can take are to change the passwords of compromised sites, use a password manager so that you can create and track unique passwords for each site (so that if one is compromised, it won’t affect any others), use two-factor authentication for additional security, and stay alert for news of any other breaches.
Apple CEO Tim Cook rarely provides details on unannounced products, but he offered some hints about Apple’s thinking on augmented reality and cars in an interview with Kara Swisher for The New York Times this morning.
When it comes to augmented reality, he agreed with Swisher’s framing that the tech is “critically important” to Apple’s future and said it could be used to enhance conversations.
“You and I are having a great conversation right now. Arguably, it could even be better if we were able to augment our discussion with charts or other things to appear,” Cook said. He imagines AR being used in health, education, retail, and gaming. “I’m already seeing AR take off in some of these areas with use of the phone. And I think the promise is even greater in the future.”
Apple has been rumored for years to be working on an augmented reality headset, and the latest leaks suggested a mixed reality device could launch next year. Augmented reality features are already available on the iPhone and iPad, but outside of some fun Snapchat filters, augmented reality hasn’t become all that widely used yet.
Cook also talked broadly about Apple’s approach to products during a question about cars. Leaks from Apple have made it unclear if the company is developing self-driving tech that it could license to other companies or if Apple plans to develop an entire car by itself. Cook’s latest comments suggest the latter, assuming the project comes to fruition.
“We love to integrate hardware, software, and services, and find the intersection points of those because we think that’s where the magic occurs,” Cook said. “And so that’s what we love to do. And we love to own the primary technology that’s around that.”
Cook referred to “autonomy” as a “core technology” and said there are “lots of things you can do” with it in connection with robots. But he warned that not every Apple project eventually ships. “We investigate so many things internally. Many of them never see the light of day,” Cook said. “I’m not saying that one will not.”
Swisher also asked Cook about Elon Musk’s comments about a failed attempt to discuss selling Tesla to Apple around 2017. “You know, I’ve never spoken to Elon,” Cook said, “although I have great admiration and respect for the company he’s built.”
LG is exiting the smartphone business, the company confirmed today. The decision will “enable the company to focus resources in growth areas such as electric vehicle components, connected devices, smart homes, robotics, artificial intelligence and business-to-business solutions, as well as platforms and services,” LG said in a statement.
Existing phones will remain on sale, and LG says it’ll continue to support its products “for a period of time which will vary by region.” The company hasn’t said anything about possible layoffs except that “details related to employment will be determined at the local level.” LG says it expects to have completed the business’ closure by the end of July this year.
The move has been rumored for several months, following the division’s huge losses over the past five years. Once considered a rival to fellow South Korean manufacturer Samsung, LG’s recent high-end smartphones have struggled to compete, while its more affordable handsets have faced stiff competition from Chinese rivals. The company had previously said it hoped to make its smartphone division profitable in 2021.
Today’s news means LG’s long-teased rollable phone is unlikely to ever see the light of day. The last time the company showed off the device was back at this year’s virtual CES when the company insisted that the device was real and would be launching later this year.
Reports that LG has been considering exiting smartphones have been around since at least the beginning of this year. Although a company spokesperson branded an earlier report about the company’s potential exit from the smartphone business “completely false and without merit,” an LG official later confirmed to The Korea Heraldthat thecompany had to make “a cold judgment” about the division. Potential measures could include “sale, withdrawal and downsizing of the smartphone business,” the official said at the time.
In March, reports emerged that the company had tried to find a buyer for its smartphone business, but that talks had stalled and it could instead shut down the division. Korean outlet DongA said the company had ceased development of its upcoming phones with rollable displays, and that it had shelved its planned smartphones for the first half of this year.
As it lost share to rivals, LG released a series of eye-catching devices with unusual form-factors. There was the LG Wing, whose main display rotated to reveal a smaller secondary screen beneath it, or its recent dual screen devices. LG also tried its hand at a modular smartphone with the LG G5, only to abandon the initiative a year later.
Unfortunately for LG, none of these features were useful enough to turn the phones into mainstream hits, and meanwhile the company’s more traditional handsets fell behind their rivals in core areas like camera performance.
LG joins a long list of high-profile device makers to give up on smartphones over the years, although many of the brand names have stuck around on devices made by third-party manufacturers. Nokia’s consumer-facing brand lives on atop handsets made by HMD, while Blackberry’s branding was initially used by TCL and is set to return this year on a device made by OnwardMobility. There’s also HTC, which still sells a few oddball handsets but sold most of its IP to Google in 2017. Who’s next?
Personal data from 533 million Facebook accounts has reportedly leaked online for free, according to security researcher Alon Gal. Insider said it verified several of the leaked records.
“The exposed data includes personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India,” according to Insider. “It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and — in some cases — email addresses.”
If that 533 million number might sound familiar to you, that’s because this information is apparently from the same dataset that people could pay for portions of using a Telegram bot, which Motherboard reported on in January. Now, though, it appears that those who want to get their hands on the data won’t have to pay anything at all.
Details include:
Phone number, Facebook ID, Full name, Location, Past Location, Birthdate, (Sometimes) Email Address, Account Creation Date, Relationship Status, Bio.
Bad actors will certainly use the information for social engineering, scamming, hacking and marketing.
— Alon Gal (Under the Breach) (@UnderTheBreach) April 3, 2021
Facebook told Insider that this data was scraped because of a vulnerability that it fixed in 2019. The company gave a similar answer to Motherboard in January. “This is old data that was previously reported on in 2019,” Facebook told BleepingComputer. “We found and fixed this issue in August 2019.” Facebook has not replied to a request for comment from The Verge.
Troy Hunt, the creator of the Have I Been Pwned database, said on Saturday that “I haven’t seen anything yet to suggest this breach isn’t legit.” In the data, he found only about 2.5 million unique email addresses (which is still a lot!), but apparently, “the greatest impact here is the phone numbers.” Here’s what that might mean, in Hunt’s words:
But for spam based on using phone number alone, it’s gold. Not just SMS, there are heaps of services that just require a phone number these days and now there’s hundreds of millions of them conveniently categorised by country with nice mail merge fields like name and gender.
— Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) April 3, 2021
If you can, I strongly recommend taking a couple minutes to read Hunt’s full Twitter thread about the breach.
Hunt has already loaded the leaked email addresses into Have I Been Pwned, meaning you can check to see if yours was included as part of the dataset. He is still considering whether or not to make the leaked phone numbers available through the service.
Should the FB phone numbers be searchable in @haveibeenpwned? I’m thinking through the pros and cons in terms of the value it adds to impacted people versus the risk presented if it’s used to help resolve numbers to identities (you’d still need the source data to do that).
A pressure vessel from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket stage fell on a man’s farm in Washington State last week, leaving a “4-inch dent in the soil,” the local sheriff’s office said Friday.
The black Composite-Overwrapped Pressure Vessel, or COPV, was a remnant from the alien invasion-looking breakup of a Falcon 9 second stage over Oregon and Washington on March 26, local officials said. The stage reentered the atmosphere in an unusual spot in the sky after sending a payload of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites to orbit.
A Grant County, Washington property owner, who told authorities he didn’t want to be identified, found the errant COPV — roughly the size and shape of a hefty punching bag — sitting on his farm one morning last weekend. He reported it to the Grant County Sheriff’s Office, GCSO spokesman Kyle Foreman said in a phone call. A sergeant was dispatched on Monday to check it out.
“Neither the property owner nor our sergeant are rocket scientists, of course, but judging from what had happened a few days prior, it looked to them like it was possibly debris from the Falcon 9 reentry,” Foreman said. So the sergeant called SpaceX, which confirmed to GCSO it appeared to be their’s and dispatched employees to retrieve the COPV on Tuesday. SpaceX didn’t respond to a request for comment.
The COPV left a neat, COPV-shaped dent in the man’s farm.Photo: Grant County Sheriff’s Office
“Of course we didn’t have a protocol for this, so we just erred on the side of returning someone’s property to them,” Foreman said.
A COPV is a part of the Falcon 9’s second stage, the smaller section of the rocket that detaches from the main stage at the edge of space and boosts satellites farther from Earth. The COPV stores helium at pressures of nearly 6,000psi, which is used to pressurize the second stage’s large tanks of propellant.
While most second stage parts either hang out in orbit for years or reenter Earth over the ocean, last week’s stage put on a spectacular nighttime show over populated areas in the northwestern US. And somehow from that show, a COPV ended up embedded roughly 4 inches into the property owner’s farmland, some 100 miles inward from the Pacific coast.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and a keen tracker of things in space, had been keeping tabs on the second stage and said its reentry wasn’t a surprise — but the timing and location of the reentry was a head-scratcher.
“It is a bit of a puzzle that the stage was not de-orbited under control back on March 4 — looks like something went wrong, but SpaceX has said nothing about it,” McDowell said. “However, reentries of this kind happen every couple of weeks. It’s just unusual that it happens over a densely populated area, just because that’s a small fraction of the Earth.”
The COPV in Washington wasn’t the only piece of debris to land on US soil in recent weeks. An absolute hellstorm of debris rained over SpaceX’s Boca Chica, Texas facilities on Tuesday when a Starship prototype exploded mid-air during its attempt to land, marking the fourth explosion of a Mars rocket prototype in a row in Elon Musk’s speedy Starship test campaign. The 16-story-tall test rocket successfully launched over six miles in the air, but its return was utterly unsuccessful and resulted in the loss of all test data from the mission.
Dish Network issued a new letter to the Federal Communications Commission this week, as reported by Axios, highlighting the urgent situation it faces if T-Mobile moves ahead with its planned January 2022 CDMA network shutdown. “We believe that T-Mobile’s actions raise significant competition and public interest concerns,” the letter states. It would be a blow to Dish’s business, but most importantly, millions of Boost Mobile customers would feel the impact as a result.
Boost Mobile, a former Sprint MVNO sold to Dish as part of T-Mobile’s acquisition, serves 9 million customers. According to the letter, more than half of them rely on CDMA service. Its prepaid service is an accessible alternative to contract plans for low-income customers; there’s no credit check required or even a credit card. Customers can pay for phones and service at retailers like Walmart and top them off as needed.
It makes for an appealing service if the costs and contracts of major carrier plans are prohibitive, but it’s also what makes migrating these customers to a newer network uniquely challenging. Boost customers may not necessarily even have an email registered with the company, and those still using slower 3G CDMA devices are likely doing so not because they prefer it, but because they can’t afford a new phone. In less than a year, they’ll be forced to choose between making that purchase or losing their current cell service altogether.
Bearing disproportionate effects of the pandemic and related economic fallout, it’s likely not a great time for these customers to be shopping for a new phone. Dish also points out that the global chip shortage makes it an especially bad time to try to secure a large number of new devices for customers. Overall, the company’s letter to the FCC makes quite clear how dire the situation is in its view: “A forced migration of this scale under this accelerated time frame is simply not possible and will leave potentially millions of Boost subscribers disenfranchised and without cell service come January 1, 2022.”
As part of the Sprint merger, T-Mobile agreed to help set Dish up as the US’s fourth wireless carrier, and selling the prepaid Boost business to Dish was one step in that plan. However, in late 2020, T-Mobile notified Dish that it would be shutting down the CDMA network that many Boost customers use in early 2022, several years earlier than Dish had anticipated. It’s a move the company has been quick to call anti-competitive, both in previous communications and in this latest letter to the FCC.
T-Mobile doesn’t see things the same way. It isn’t technically violating the agreement by doing so, and in the company’s view, it has given Dish plenty of notice. Here’s what it had to say in a statement on the matter:
Everything we are doing here is exactly consistent with the agreement that DISH made with us a year and a half ago, and we have been very proactive and transparent about the timing for this transition with all of our MVNOs, including DISH. We gave DISH notice in October 2020 for a January 1st 2022 transition – far more than the required 6-month contractual agreement. Our agreement with DISH is also clear that they are responsible for migrating Boost customers, just as we are responsible for migrating Sprint customers, and we are confident that DISH is already making plans to take good care of their impacted customers prior to the transition date. Given the advance notice that they received, just a small percentage of Boost customers should need to upgrade their handsets by the end of this year, and typically those customers would be supported with incentives and promotions to get their handsets upgraded.
In fact, the company is taking a kind of victory lap on the anniversary of the acquisition with a new post on its blog, celebrating the 5G network it’s been able to build with Sprint’s former spectrum. Based on the tone of this latest letter to the FCC, it’s a celebratory mood that Dish certainly doesn’t share.
Until recently, the default voice for Apple’s Siri assistant has been stereotypically female-sounding. However, studies have found that having AI assistants default to female-sounding voices can reinforce harmful stereotypes, so Apple has tried to fix that in its upcoming iOS 14.5, which is now in beta.
When you update your phone to iOS 14.5, you’ll be prompted to pick a default voice for Siri — and Apple is including two new voice options. However, if you’ve changed your mind and want to use a different voice (or are using the 14.5 beta and weren’t prompted), this guide will show you how to change the voice after setup.
It’s a reasonably simple process. First, go to the Settings app, then to Siri & Search, and tap Siri Voice. There, you’ll be presented with the list of options.
Tap Siri Voice to be taken to the list of options.
At the moment, the American variety is the only one with four voice choices; Australian, British, Indian, Irish, and South African versions only have two. The four US voice choices are:
Voice 1, which is a soft-spoken male-sounding voice
Voice 2, an energetic, confident female-sounding voice
Voice 3 is similar to Voice 2 but male-sounding
And finally, Voice 4, which is similar to the default Siri voice that’s been around all these years
If you want to hear what the voices sound like for yourself, they’re in the embedded tweet below.
Tapping on a voice will play a snippet of it saying “Hi, I’m Siri. Choose the voice you’d like me to use.” If you choose voices 1–3, it will have to download them before you can use them, but you don’t have to stay in the Settings app while it does so. Once it’s finished downloading, Siri will respond with your chosen voice.
This process is unlikely to change in the final version, but if it does, we’ll be sure to update this how-to.
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