Nothing, the tech startup from ex-OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei, will reveal its debut pair of true wireless earbuds this June. The company says the earbuds will be called Ear 1, but it’s staying tight-lipped about other details like their specs, price, and final design. However, an illustration released alongside today’s blog post shows what appears to be a silhouette of the earbuds with a rather lengthy stem.
We know the earbuds will be designed in collaboration with Teenage Engineering and feature a “stripped-down aesthetic.” A concept render from March gives more clues like the use of transparent materials in their construction. Nothing announced back in February that its first products would be wireless earbuds.
A concept image illustrating Nothing’s design elements.Image: Nothing
A June product reveal means the company could just about make good on its January promise of releasing its debut product in the first half of the year. However, a release that same month isn’t guaranteed. The company only says that it will reveal the product and announce details on how to order them, but it wouldn’t officially confirm a shipment date.
Beyond headphones, Nothing has said it eventually plans to build up an ecosystem of interconnected devices.
Pony.ai’s next-generation robotaxi is distinctive because it appears to be missing the cone-shaped LIDAR sensor perched on the roof that’s typical of most autonomous vehicles. That’s because the startup, which is based in Silicon Valley and Guangzhou, China, is teaming up with Luminar to use the fast-growing LIDAR company’s sleek new sensors that are more flush with the vehicle’s roof.
The new vehicles with Luminar’s LIDAR sensor won’t be up and running until 2022, but Pony.ai founder and CEO James Peng said preparation was already underway for mass production of the next-gen robotaxi. After testing the vehicle next year, Peng said it will be ready for the company’s robotaxi customers in 2023. Pony.ai currently offers limited ride-hailing in its autonomous vehicles in five markets: Irvine and Fremont in California; Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou in China.
Pony also announced that it has driven more than 5 million kilometers (3.1 million miles) across an operational domain of 850km and has provided over 250,000 robotaxi rides. The startup claims to be the first company to launch an autonomous ride-hailing operation and offer self-driving car rides to the general public in China.
The company was also recently approved to test its fully autonomous vehicles, without safety drivers behind the wheel, on public roads in California. Peng said Pony was currently seeking approval to include those vehicles in its robotaxi service in California. “We are actually at the final stage of getting the approval for travelers,” he said.
LIDAR, the laser sensor that sends millions of laser points out per second and measures how long they take to bounce back, is seen as a key ingredient to autonomous driving. Peng said that Pony would use four of Luminar’s Iris sensors, two on the roof and two more on each side of the vehicle, in order to “generate a very high resolution LIDAR image for our autonomous driving vehicles.”
Luminar says that its Iris LIDARs have a maximum range of 500 meters (1,640 feet), including 250-meter range with less than 10 percent reflectivity. Luminar’s sensors are also distinctive from most other LIDAR sensors, which were once famously described as looking like “spinning Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets.” In contrast, Iris is only about 10 centimeters tall. Austin Russell, founder and CEO of Luminar, described it as a “slim form factor that’s meant to be seamlessly integrated into the vehicle design.”
Pony.ai was valued at $3 billion after a $400 million investment from Toyota last year. Luminar, which is based in Florida, went public last year via a reverse merger with a special acquisition company, or SPAC. That merger valued the company at approximately $2.9 billion in “implied pro forma enterprise value,” with an equity value of $3.4 billion at closing. In addition to Pony, Luminar is also working with Airbus, Volvo, Audi, and Toyota Research Institute.
Dslcollection is using technology to explore new ways to show off works of art
Sylvain Levy just co-produced his first video game, Forgetter, which launched on Steam on April 17th. Sylvain Levy has also never played a video game in his life. “I’m not kidding,” says the 67-year-old art collector on a Zoom call from Paris. “The three games that I know are Cyberpunk, the FIFA football game because my son plays it, and the Forgetter.”
Forgetter isn’t Levy’s first foray into the digital world, but it’s his first time working with game designers. In this case, Hong Kong-based Allison Yang Jing and Alan Kwan. It’s an acerbic take on sanitizing creativity: the player works for a startup that scrubs dysfunction and trauma from dead artists’ brains and sells the clean brains to parents who want gifted, untroubled babies. While obliterating these intimate memories, you can also find real artwork by Chinese artists — all from Levy’s collection — and smash them into bits. It’s also a quasi-janitorial sim, so you get paid extra for vacuuming up the mess.
After 10 months of development, Yang and Kwan made a walkthrough video of the game for Levy to watch. “I don’t think my hands are agile enough to be efficient in a game,” he says, turning over his palms. “But I love video games, and I love to look at people playing video games.”
Levy isn’t just a collector. He’s a new type of video game patron, eager to explore what he calls our “digital twin” — our evolving online personae that have different appetites and behaviors. “It’s really important to understand that we have this double personality,” he says, especially as tech drives more human transformation. As digital spaces continue to define our post-COVID lives, the closer we come to what a metaverse could really offer. Commercial games like Fortnite and even Roblox have long been pegged as forerunners for the idea of a shared virtual universe where we live, work, and play. But Levy’s work with games could spur deeper conversations about what we want (and need) in a metaverse that will inevitably be shaped by corporations and mainstream culture.
In 2005, Levy and his wife Dominique created Dslcollection, an influential collection of Chinese contemporary art that never exceeds 350 objects. Their daughter Karen also helps run the collection, which includes work by Chinese art stars like Gu Dexin, Yang Fudong, Jia Aili, Zeng Fanzhi, and Ai Weiwei. The couple started out in fashion and has collected art and design pieces for the last “36 or 37” years. Things changed after Levy’s brother-in-law moved to Shanghai, inadvertently introducing the Levys to contemporary art in China and nudging the family business into a new era. “We said okay, since art is a mirror for society, let’s collect Chinese contemporary art and try to find the energy… we are experiencing in the city,” says Levy.
Using the internet and YouTube, the Levys also decided to make their new collection public — something they’d never done before. As an early advocate of new technology, Sylvain Levy remembers making a Dslcollection iPad app at the end of 2010. “It was very funny when I was showing my app when walking into fairs,” he smiles. “The galleries were turning to me, ‘you don’t have enough money to print the catalog?’”
Forgetter.
It wasn’t a far stretch for Dslcollection to reimagine how they wanted to share their art with the world. In 2009, they created a Second Life museum with new media artists Lily and Honglei. A few years later came a virtual exhibition in a hacked re-creation of the Grand Palais museum in Paris, which required stereoscopic glasses to fully enjoy the artwork. And not long after that came virtual reality. “Very quickly, we learned that immersion and gamification were becoming very important in the experience of art, and especially with VR, we were trying to reach missing audiences,” Levy says.
When Allison Yang mentioned Forgetter’s art “patron” to other game developers, they seemed surprised. Levy had initially approached her about a VR project, but she countered with the idea of a game. “A lot of people who might be either intimidated by a museum, or not interested in contemporary art, would be forced to see your art in a game without knowing it beforehand,” she told him. After working on a few demos, Yang and Kwan held monthly meetings with Levy, who also supplied part of the production budget. “[Sylvain] is a very bold person,” she says. “He gave us total creative freedom to do whatever we felt to be appropriate.”
Kwan, who has been making art games for almost a decade, sees this new patron-producer partnership as a potential financial model for experimental games. After all, public art funding isn’t a gold mine. “So what we are trying to do is explore, apart from crowdfunding, apart from getting a publisher, other alternative models to support experimental indie game projects,” he says. A recent report valued the global art market at around $50 billion. Of course, the fine art world is mostly a playground for the wealthy looking to spend money, and collectors like Levy are rare. But it’s thrilling to imagine a scenario where more progressive minds in the art world contributed their capital — financial, cultural, and otherwise — to the vision of a fuller and richer shared universe. (No, NFTs, I don’t mean you.)
“We have deliberately chosen people not from the video game industry to make these games,” says Levy of his new endeavors. “When you look at [the games], you feel that this has been done by an artist, people molded by art or culture, and not only molded by technology or marketing. You can feel the soul… you can feel it’s done by people more related to the art world, than to the leisure industry.”
According to designer Calin Segal, Dslcollection is one of the first (if not first) art collectors to help develop games. Segal co-founded the multidisciplinary group Children of Cyberspace, which is working with the Levys on a game called June. “I’ve seen…collections that have rented or borrowed artwork for video games, but it was always in the form of a gimmick,” Segal says.
June traces the evolution of a child in cyberspace and will feature more conventional platforming elements. The game unpacks the artist’s journey of self-discovery, using everything from direct artwork scans and digital reproductions to hints of textures and visual Easter eggs. It’s also forged new connections between the game designers and the artists whose work is being featured. One of the team’s biggest inspirations is the performance artist Zhang Huan, who was part of Beijing’s avant-garde East Village art community — a photograph of his discomforting piece 12 Square Meters is part of the Dslcollection. The character of June will endure her own version of Zhang’s grueling performance, with his blessing. “[Zhang] is super open,” says Segal. “He’s the one who’s actually encouraging us to think more and more outside the box.”
But it’s virtual reality where Levy seems most comfortable — he uses it at home, and it’s easy on his hands. It’s the most intuitive way to dip into the future while “staying human,” something that Levy believes will be the most difficult thing to do in a metaverse where millions of users interact in thousands of different ways. It’s even more vital to stay human as our current reality veers into dystopia. “If you look at what’s happening all over the world, the world is looking a little bit like 1984,” he muses. “We have to bring back humanism in the core of all technologies… and the best way to do that is through culture, through art, and I do believe that more and more, art can be a way to counterbalance this new world which we’re entering.”
With his old Second Life collaborators Lily and Honglei, Levy is now working on an ambitious VR project to re-create the East Village, where several of Dslcollection’s artists honed their craft. Lily and Honglei considered several platforms for the VR Art Village: VRchat, Sinespace, and Second Life / Linden Lab’s Sansar, eventually going with Sansar for its capability to host several hundred people at the same time.
A short clip of the project shows a semi-armored virtual avatar jogging around a rural village on a cloudy evening. An abandoned cement factory looms large in the background. Players will be able to take part in events, watch live performances, and meet artists in the space. There’s even a transport system to get around. There will be artists’ workshops and storefronts — a barbershop and a bookstore — and a countryside school that houses a cinema, stemming from Lily and Honglei’s memories of growing up in Beijing.
Beyond bringing the fine art world into one small corner of the metaverse, the VR Art Village is also a living homage to one of the significant periods in Chinese contemporary art history, of which little historical material survived. “To everyone’s surprise, systemic documentation about 1980s and 1990s society in China is surprisingly scarce and scattered, you just can’t find things,” says Lily. Born from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the East Village was a short-lived haven for political discourse through art in a particularly volatile era. “I think if we can provide the social context for the Dslcollection, that will be something special,” Lily says. “When you look at artwork in museums and galleries, they’ve somehow lost context with the society and environment which produced or influenced those artworks.”
The designers are also opening up the village to the Grand Palais, which will have a sculpture garden for their collection. The ultimate plan is to keep adding more spaces and connect them together, and Lily eventually hopes to include the art community in New York. “This platform is a bit like the game of Fortnite,” says Levy. “I think this will be the next level, and we will release this platform by the end of the year.” Lily estimates that the village is about 70 percent complete; they’re just waiting for the art to arrive.
Of course, art games and virtual reality experiments are not new. Independent designers have been working on their craft for years, often without the resources available to larger studios. But Levy’s enthusiastic embrace of games — small, experimental games made by tiny two-person teams — is a beacon for more artists and collectors to meaningfully participate in our shared digital universe, using the language of our times.
So far, popular perceptions of the metaverse are so vast, so intimidating, that only billion-dollar corporations like Facebook or Epic could afford to develop and implement the necessary infrastructure. As a distinctly commercial space, Fortnite lets all our favorite celebrities and brands hang out together, from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars to the NFL and Major Lazer. At the end of the day, it’s all business — a business that will continue to thrive on gimmicks and cultural capital. But however our impending metaverse unfolds, it won’t be one monolithic, monocultural world.
“There’s always a bleak vision of how capitalists can manipulate things, but I still think there are some opportunities… like for Sylvain, a patron, to work with artists and designers like us, and to generate something interesting,” says Kwan. “Of course, the scale is much smaller, but I think they can still be interesting collaborations that make things work in between those two worlds.”
There’s plenty of room for artists to bring truth and empathy, even within the confines of a corporate or capitalistic world; some might even argue it’s an artist’s duty. “[The metaverse] at the same time is a real and an imaginary place, because what we consider the metaverse or cyberspace, at the end of the day, it’s a mythical land,” says Segal. “It’s a fictional place that we have created to give meaning to our times, and in the practical sense… it will never be a centralized system, but it will have pockets of resistance.”
For now, Levy’s vision for the family collection is an adventurous new conduit between fine art and games. He’s very happy if what he does encourages other art collectors to go into games and VR, not for the money, but to create humanistic experiences and bring fresh experimentation to a notoriously profit-driven space. “I’ve only had one principle,” he says. “It’s better to have a shop in the street where there are many shops, than in a street where nobody is. But we have to be the best shop in the street.”
Photo Illustration by Grayson Blackmon / The Verge
‘The AV industry has promised too much for too long, and has delivered too little’
After years of positive vibes about the future of autonomous vehicles and nearly unrestricted access to cash from Kool-Aid-drunk venture capitalists, the AV industry is confronting some hard truths. The first is that autonomous vehicles are going to take a lot longer to reach mass scale than previously thought. The second is that it’s going to be a lot more expensive, too. And the third hard truth: going it alone is no longer a viable option.
Last week, Lyft sold its self-driving car division to a subsidiary of Toyota for $550 million. Cruise bought Voyage. Aurora merged with Uber’s autonomous vehicle unit. Delivery robot startup Nuro acquired self-driving truck outfit Ike. There have been so many mergers, joint ventures, and various tie-ups lately it can be difficult to keep them all straight.
Where that leaves things is a little unclear. There is still money flowing to these companies, and nearly all of the executives, engineers, and software developers working on the technology remain bullish about the future. But there is a growing sense among experts and investors that the heady days when anyone with a couple of test vehicles, some LIDAR, and a vision for the future could launch a startup are at an end. And there will definitely be more shrinkage to come.
“The consolidation is long overdue,” said Raj Rajkumar, robotics professor at Carnegie Mellon University. “The AV industry has promised too much for too long, and has delivered too little.”
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
There are other signs of general unease in the AV world. Last month, John Krafcik announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Waymo after helping lead the company since 2015. Krafcik oversaw the transformation of Google’s self-driving car division from “Project Chauffeur” to its own standalone company. During his time, Waymo struck partnerships with several automakers, launched a limited ride-hailing pilot with fully driverless vehicles in Arizona, and expanded its commercial ambitions to include trucking and last-mile delivery.
As a former auto executive with years of experience at Hyundai and Ford, Krafcik was seen as someone who could bring self-driving cars to the mainstream. But his decision to step aside at a time of heightened uncertainty highlights the difficult road ahead for self-driving cars — especially as many of those early predictions have failed to come to pass.
Krafcik was not able to bring to market an autonomous vehicle that can drive on any road and in any conditions without years of rigorous testing. Aside from a small area outside Phoenix, Waymo’s cars require backup drivers to monitor the vehicle’s operations and take control if anything goes wrong.
Waymo still has a commanding lead in autonomous vehicles, but diminished expectations about the future of self-driving cars are affecting its business in other ways, too. In 2018, Morgan Stanley published a research note valuing the company at $175 billion based on its perceived leadership in the space and the potential for massive amounts of revenue from its autonomous vehicles.
A year later, the bank slashed Waymo’s valuation to $105 billion, still an extraordinary amount of money for a company with no revenue. But last year, when Waymo announced its first external funding round of $2.25 billion, the company declined to discuss what valuation that investment was based on. Later, the Financial Times reported it to be $30 billion — a nearly 85 percent decrease from 2018.
Valuations aren’t the sole indicator of where things stand with autonomous vehicles. But they do point to investor sentiment. And right now, investors are not feeling as confident in the prediction that autonomous vehicles will soon become the dominant form of transportation.
Drive.ai
For years, Missy Cummings, director of the Humans and Autonomy Lab at Duke University, has been criticizing rosy predictions about our driverless future. She’s consistently warned that the technology is much further away and harder to get right than anyone in the industry cares to admit.
The recent trend in consolidation is vindication for her position, she says.
“It’s kind of like the elephant in the room,” she said of the shrinking of the AV world. “People will mention that and then they’ll stop themselves from making the Socratic connection to what this means about the viability of this industry.”
But Cummings doesn’t think people in the industry will be able to ignore the truth for much longer. “There is an embarrassingly large sum of money that’s been invested in this, so people feel like they have to keep going down that path because surely all these people who invested all this money can’t be wrong,” she says.
“Not everyone is delusional,” she added. “Just most people in this business.”
That said, Toyota and Aurora weren’t delusional when they decided to buy the automated driving teams at Lyft and Uber, respectively. They likely saw the value in the code produced by those teams, as well as the talent accrued by the ride-hailing companies over the years. When you can’t hire the people you’d like to staff your own projects, then you have to acquihire them, the distinctive Silicon Valley practice of buying a smaller company for the express purpose of acquiring their team of software engineers. Also, Uber and Lyft were very motivated to sell as recently public companies under pressure to staunch the bleeding and become profitable.
Another recent acquihire was when Apple bought bankrupt self-driving startup Drive.ai back in 2019. Apple had just laid off over 200 engineers from its secretive Project Titan, its own floundering self-driving operation. The Drive.ai team, composed of several graduates from Stanford’s AI lab, had already had some modest success with a ride-hailing pilot in Texas. Unhappy with its own team, Apple simply fired them and bought a new one.
“The buying up of these companies represents companies being able to buy skill sets that they would not otherwise be able to recruit,” Cummings said. “And I think that’s very valuable.”
Photo by Vjeran Pavic / The Verge
The recent reorganization of the self-driving car industry may also point to a new set of priorities. Namely, robotaxis are out, and logistics and industrial applications are in.
Four years ago, the industry saw plenty of startups come out of stealth promising to do everything: they were going to make hardware and software; they were going to build their own vehicle; they were going to do robotaxis and delivery and trucking. And of course, they were going to change the world in the process. “It was a little bit like the decathlete business model,” said Reilly Brennan, general partner at venture capital firm Trucks. “We’re going to be very good at 10 different things.”
Now, most investors are interested in more “structured” applications of automated driving technology, such as construction, mining, middle-mile delivery, and agriculture. “So instead of being a decathlete, you had to pick a javelin thrower,” he said.
That’s not to say robotaxis are completely dead — far from it, with major players like Waymo, Cruise, Argo, and Baidu as well as smaller startups like Pony.ai, May Mobility, and Optimus Ride still banking on the proliferation of autonomous ride-hailing vehicles by the middle of this decade. But Brennan says the robotaxi craze has definitely cooled in recent years.
“Frankly, we stopped seeing robotaxi startups in probably the end of 2017,” Brennan said. “Here we are in 2021 and there are very few ongoing robotaxi startups that aren’t, you know, Cruise, Waymo, or Argo.”
Brennan thinks the concept of autonomous vehicles that can drive anywhere under any conditions is still possible, but much further out than originally thought. They will require huge financial investments — “11 figures” by Brennan’s estimates — and a willingness to tolerate zero cash flow until the technology is mature and safe enough to launch. There are only so many companies with deep enough pockets to take on that challenge: major car companies like Ford, GM, and Volkswagen or tech giants like Apple, Alphabet, and Intel. Everyone else is probably not long for this world.
The mid-level engineers always knew this to be true, Brennan said. It was the CEOs who were making the erroneous predictions about the availability of self-driving taxis by 2020. “I think the CEOs of those companies knew that they were going to be playing golf by 2020,” he said.
Organising your digital music collection, you might be struck by the number of different audio file formats in your library. Almost everyone’s heard of MP3, but what about OGG, AIFF, MQA or DSD?
If the list leaves you wondering whether all those songs studied at different universities to get such official-looking letters after their names, don’t worry. We’re here to break down the meaning of the most common music file formats, the differences between them, and why you should care.
Whether you’re listening to low-quality MP3 files, probably slightly better AAC tracks, or hi-res audio in FLAC or WAV, it’s time to understand exactly what you’re getting – and which is the best file format for you.
Read on to learn about the pros and cons of each audio file format…
File formats and codecs at-a-glance
Want to cut straight to the chase? Here’s a handy guide to all the file formats and the differences between them. If you want to know more, read on below for a more in-depth look at the differences in size, sound quality and compatibility.
AAC (not hi-res): Apple’s alternative to MP3 – stands for ‘Advanced Audio Coding’. Lossy and compressed, but sounds generally better. Used for Apple Music streaming.
AIFF (hi-res): Apple’s alternative to WAV, with better metadata support. It is lossless and uncompressed (so big file sizes), but not hugely popular.
DSD (hi-res): The single-bit format used for Super Audio CDs. It comes in 2.8mHz, 5.6mHz and 11.2mHz varieties, but due to its high-quality codec, it’s (mostly) impractical for streaming. Uncompressed.
FLAC (hi-res): This lossless compression format supports hi-res sample rates, takes up about half the space of WAV, and stores metadata. It’s royalty-free and is considered the preferred format for downloading and storing hi-res albums. The downside is, it’s not supported by Apple (so not compatible with Apple Music).
MP3 (not hi-res): Popular, lossy compressed format ensures small file size, but far from the best sound quality. Convenient for storing music on smartphones and iPods.
MQA (hi-res): A lossless compression format that packages hi-res files for more efficient streaming. Used for Tidal Masters hi-res streaming.
OGG (not hi-res): Sometimes called by its full name, Ogg Vorbis. A lossy, open-source alternative to MP3 and AAC, unrestricted by patents. The file format used (at 320kbps) in Spotify streaming.
WAV (hi-res): The standard format in which all CDs are encoded. Great sound quality but it’s uncompressed, meaning huge file sizes (especially for hi-res files). It has poor metadata support (that is, album artwork, artist and song title information).
WMA Lossless (hi-res): A lossless incarnation of Windows Media Audio, but no longer well-supported by smartphones or tablets.
Best music streaming services 2021: free streams to hi-res audio
MQA audio: everything you need to know
What is DSD audio?
Compressed vs. uncompressed audio files
First, let’s talk about the three categories all audio files can be grouped into. It comes down to how compressed the data is (if at all) and as a result, how much quality or “loss” you’ll experience, as a listener.
If no compression algorithm (or codec) has been used to compress the audio within your file, two things happen: zero loss in sound quality, and soon-enough, a “startup disk full” warning on your laptop.
Essentially, an uncompressed track is a reproduction of the original audio file, where real-world signals are transformed into digital audio.
WAV vs AIFF vs FLAC: uncompressed file formats
WAV and AIFF are arguably the most popular uncompressed audio file formats, both based on PCM (Pulse Code Modulation), which is widely recognised as the most straightforward audio storage mechanism in the digital domain. Both WAV and AIFF files use similar technology, but store data in slightly different ways. They can store CD-quality or high-resolution audio files.
WAV was developed by Microsoft and IBM, hence it’s used in Windows-based platforms, and is the standard format all CDs are encoded in.
AIFF was developed by Apple as an alternative to WAV, and although not as widely popular, AIFF files have better metadata support, meaning you can include album artwork, song titles and the like.
The drawback? These babies are big. A CD-quality (16-bit, 44.1kHz) file will take around 10MB of your hard drive per minute in length.
ALAC vs FLAC vs WMA Lossless: lossless audio formats
Everyone loves a FLAC. A lossless file, the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is compressed to nearly half the size of an uncompressed WAV or AIFF of equivalent sample rate, but there should be no “loss” in terms of how it sounds. FLAC files can also provide a resolution of up to 32-bit, 96kHz, so better than CD-quality.
Other lossless audio file formats include ALAC (Apple Lossless) and WMA Lossless (Windows Media Audio). The former is a good iOS and iTunes compatible alternative to FLAC, although the files are slightly less compact than FLACs. Check for smartphone and tablet compatibility, though.
AAC vs MP3: lossy audio formats
Who’s heard of an MP3? Course you have. Steve Jobs famously pulled 1000 of them out of his pocket on 23rd October 2001. It is easily the most common audio format, and MP3s are convenient for storing music on portable players or tablets and work on almost all playback devices. But to do that, you have to lose a load of information in the process. In order to make audio files up to ten times smaller than CD quality files, some original data must be discarded, resulting in a loss of sound quality.
The bit-rate at which an MP3 is recorded also affects the sound quality. MP3s encoded at 128kbps will incur more sound loss than those encoded at 320kbps (kilobits per second, where each “bit” is essentially a “piece” of the song). Now that storage is so much cheaper, we’d avoid 128kbps at all costs, though 320kbps MP3s still have their purpose if your storage is limited – and they remain a standard on download stores.
Another lossy format is AAC (Apple’s Advanced Audio Coding) which is compressed much like an MP3, but it’s slightly more efficient and sounds better. AAC is used for Apple Music streaming (at 256kbps) and YouTube streaming.
The Vorbis format, often called Ogg Vorbis owing to its Ogg container, (the best way to think of this is that OGG is the can, Vorbis is the ring-pull) is a lossy, open-source alternative to MP3 and AAC, unrestricted by patents. Ogg Vorbis is the file format used (at 320kbps) in Spotify streaming.
If you’re sticking with lossy, it’s worth remembering this: while more “bits” usually means better sound, it depends on the efficiency of the codec in your file. Although you might notice that much of the music in your collection is encoded at 128kbps so should be much of a muchness, an MP3 will likely sound a fair bit (see what we did there?) worse than an AAC or Ogg Vorbis file, due to the inefficiency of the codec in an MP3.
What about high-resolution audio?
Unlike high-definition video, there’s no single universal standard when it comes to high-resolution audio.
However, in its simplest terms, hi-res audio tends to refer to music files which have a higher sampling frequency and/or bit depth than CD – which is specified at 16-bit/44.1kHz. Hi-res files therefore come in the form of 16-bit/96kHz or 24-bit/192kHz, for example.
So why should you care? Quite simply, hi-res audio files have a lot of extra audio information and thus sound a lot better than compressed audio formats, which lose information in the compression process. They will take up more storage space but we definitely think it’s worth the trade off.
Uncompressed files like AIFF and WAV are hi-res, as are those lossless FLAC and ALAC file formats. DSD (the somewhat niche format used for Super Audio CDs) is also hi-res, but it’s not as widely supported. When it comes to streaming, MQA is a file packing format used by the likes of Tidal Masters, which helps to bring hi-res audio to streaming services using as little bandwidth as possible.
As for playing hi-res audio, an increasing amount of products now support it. Premium portable music players such as the Award-winning Cowon Plenue D2 plus the newer and rather splendid Cowon Plenue D3 support 24-bit/192kHz WAV, FLAC, ALAC and AIFF files. Both players boast DSD128 file compatibility too – and that support is native, so DSD files aren’t converted to PCM during playback.
The Astell & Kern Kann Alpha and another 2020 Award-winner, the Astell & Kern A&futura SE200 digital audio players are like many A&K players (including the entry-level A&norma SR25) in that file support goes all the way up to 32-bit/384kHz and includes native DSD256 and MQA playback.
KEF’s new LS50 Wireless II speakers will play 24-bit/192kHz files in all their glory, and support for DSD256 is also onboard too this time, as is MQA decoding for the playback of compatible downloaded files and hi-res Tidal Masters.
Hi-res audio can also be played on most flagship Android smartphones, but you can’t play hi-res on a box-fresh iPhone. We’ve found ways around that, but it’s worth remembering that hi-res audio isn’t quite as portable as its lossy brethren – yet. You can find more info on which hi-fi products support hi-res audio here.
Which is the best audio file format for you?
The file format you choose will depend on whether storage or sound quality is your key concern, as well as which devices you intend to use for playback.
MP3s became hugely popular when storage was at a premium. Now that phones, music players and laptops have far more storage space, we think you really should be looking to use better-than-CD-quality files.
If you’re archiving your audio files, a FLAC or other lossless file might be a good shout for ripping your music, though. Lossless files strike a good balance between compression and sound quality, allowing you to listen to the best quality digital music without taking up all your storage space. Just make sure your devices are all compatible with your file format of choice.
High-resolution audio: everything you need to know
Best portable music players 2021: from budget to hi-res music
No matter how much web browsers improve, it feels like they can’t keep pace with everything we want to do. Open one too many tabs on a few-year-old laptop, and your fan starts spinning, your battery life dips, your system starts to slow. A faster or cleaner PC might fix it, but a startup called Mighty has a different idea: a $30-a-month web browser that lives in the cloud.
Instead of your own physical computer interacting with each website, you stream a remote web browser instead, one that lives on a powerful computer many miles away with its own 1,000Mbps connection to the internet.
Suddenly, your decent internet connection would feel like one of the fastest internet connections in the world, with websites loading nigh-instantly and intensive web apps running smoothly without monopolizing your RAM, CPU, GPU and battery, no matter how many tabs you’ve got open — because the only thing your computer is doing is effectively streaming a video of that remote computer (much like Netflix, YouTube, Google Stadia, etc.) while sending your keyboard and mouse commands to the cloud.
Skeptical? I definitely am, but perhaps not for the reason you’d think — because I tried this exact idea nearly a decade ago, and it absolutely works in practice. In 2012, cloud gaming pioneer OnLive introduced a virtual desktop web browser that would let you load full websites on an iPad in the blink of an eye and stream 4K video from YouTube. (Quite the feat in 2012!) I called it the fastest web browser you’ve ever used, and OnLive’s asking price was just $5 a month.
Cloud desktop providers like Shadow have also offered similar capabilities; when you rent their gaming-PCs-in-the-cloud ($12-15 a month), you can use those virtual PCs’ built-in web browsers to get similar speeds, thanks to the fact they typically live in data centers with very few hops to (and possibly direct peering arrangements with) major content delivery networks.
Mighty argues that by focusing on the browser (rather than recreating a whole Windows PC), it can give more people what they actually want. “Most people want an experience where the underlying OS and the application (the browser) interoperate seamlessly versus having to tame two desktop experiences,” founder Suhail Doshi commented at Hacker News. Mighty claims it’ll eliminate distracting cookies and ads, automatically notify you about Zoom meetings, quick search Google Docs and presumably other integrations to come. Mighty also says it encrypts your data and keystrokes, among other security promises.
But it’s not entirely clear why it costs so much more, or who would be willing to pay $30 a month for such a subscription — you’d think the kinds of people who can afford a monthly browser bill on top of their monthly internet bill would be the same kinds of people who can afford a faster PC and faster internet to begin with. Gigabit fiber is already a reality for some homes, and it’s not like Mighty will turn your iffy 25/3 connection into a gigabit one; while Doshi tells me it’ll technically work with a 20Mbps connection, he says he’s targeting 80+Mbps households right now.
Then again, it’s not like everyone has a real choice of internet service provider, no matter how much money they make. As Jürgen Geuter (aka tante) points out below, this feels more like an indictment than innovation. It’s been a decade, and we still haven’t solved these problems.
“Streaming your browser to you because rendering the HTML is too slow on your machine” is not innovation but a mark of shame on everyone building websites and browsers.
Tech failed as an industry. https://t.co/JJC0WomArb
— tante (@tante) April 28, 2021
I agree with my colleague Tom: I genuinely want to know who’d actually pay for this and why. Would you?
I want to meet whoever is going to spend $30 a month to stream a Chromium browser from the cloud just to avoid RAM hungry Chrome https://t.co/4pl6jL2zUV
The United Auto Workers union is “laying the groundwork” to organize factory workers that will build electric vehicles for startups like Rivian and Lucid Motors, president Rory Gamble told CNBC.
“That’s a given. We are formulating plans to go out to all these start-ups to give these workers a voice,” he said. “In today’s world, you have to think out of the box in how you reach people. We really have to drive home the benefits of belonging to the union.”
Gamble declined to say what those plans involve, according to CNBC. The UAW did not respond to a request for comment from The Verge. Representatives for Rivian, Lucid Motors, Faraday Future, and Lordstown Motors did not respond to requests for comment.
Factory workers who build cars for legacy automakers like Ford, General Motors, and others have long been part of the UAW. But that’s not been the case for newer automakers in the US. The factory Tesla operates was once jointly owned by Toyota and GM, and its workforce was represented by the UAW. But when Tesla bought the shuttered factory after the recession in 2010, it rebuilt the workforce without a union.
Since then, Tesla CEO Elon Musk has maintained that his factory workers are better off without union representation. He once wrote that the UAW “does not share our mission,” and claimed its “true allegiance is to the giant car companies, where the money they take from employees in dues is vastly more than they could ever make from Tesla.” (The UAW collects monthly dues ranging from 0.805 percent to 1.44 percent of a worker’s monthly earnings, depending on a number of factors.) The National Labor Relations Board ultimately ruled that Musk’s comments should be considered union-busting and broke the law.
While a lot of attention has recently been paid to organizing efforts in tech and media industries, the number of non-government employees who belong to a union has fallen slightly over the last decade. The labor rights movement took an especially public hit earlier this month when a push to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Alabama overwhelmingly failed.
Similarly high-profile efforts to unionize in the auto industry have also recently failed, like when the UAW tried to organize workers at a Nissan plant in Mississippi in 2017 or at Volkswagen’s plant in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 2019.
There are a number of EV startups that plan to build their vehicles in the United States. But, like Tesla, they have been assembling non-unionized workforces ahead of production at their respective factories. Many of them are also now flush with cash thanks to big investments or mergers with publicly traded special purpose acquisition companies.
Rivian, which is backed by Amazon and is the most well-funded of the bunch, is supposed to start assembling its electric pickup truck and SUV at a former Mitsubishi plant it bought in Normal, Illinois. Saudi Arabia-backed Lucid Motors will build its electric luxury sedan at a massive new factory it’s building in Casa Grande, Arizona. Faraday Future, which is going public sometime before the end of June, is partway through refurbishing and retooling a former Pirelli tire plant in Hanford, California, where it will build its luxury SUV.
One of the youngest EV startups in the country, Lordstown Motors, bought a shuttered GM factory in Lordstown, Ohio that was previously operated by UAW workers. The company’s CEO Steve Burns has said he was considering rehiring some of that workforce, but he told The Verge last year that it would be up to them whether they want to unionize.
“[I]t isn’t our call, but in case they do, we will embrace it and make sure the union knows what we’re trying to accomplish and see how we can work together to hit it out of the park,” Burns said. “The culture of the place is union, you know, the history. So we anticipate that to happen, to have union representation.”
Legal services startup DoNotPay is best known for its army of “robot lawyers” — automated bots that tackle tedious online tasks like canceling TV subscriptions and requesting refunds from airlines. Now, the company has unveiled a new tool it says will help shield users’ photos from reverse image searches and facial recognition AI.
It’s called Photo Ninja and it’s one of dozens of DoNotPay widgets that subscribers can access for $36 a year. Photo Ninja operates like any image filter. Upload a picture you want to shield, and the software adds a layer of pixel-level perturbations that are barely noticeable to humans, but dramatically alter the image in the eyes of roving machines.
The end result, DoNotPay CEO Joshua Browder tells The Verge, is that any image shielded with Photo Ninja yields zero results when run through search tools like Google image search or TinEye. You can see this in the example below using pictures of Joe Biden:
Before Photo Ninja, you get plenty of results from Google Image Search (top) and TinEye (below). Image: DoNotPay
After Photo Ninja, the image yields no results in reverse image searches. Image: DoNotPay
The tool also fools popular facial recognition software from Microsoft and Amazon with a 99 percent success rate. This, combined with the anti-reverse-image search function, makes Photo Ninja handy in a range of scenarios. You might be uploading a selfie to social media, for example, or a dating app. Running the image through Photo Ninja first will prevent people from connecting this image to other information about you on the web.
Browder is careful to stress, though, that Photo Ninja isn’t guaranteed to beat every facial recognition tool out there. When it comes to Clearview AI, for example, a controversial facial recognition service that is widely used by US law enforcement, Browder says the company “anticipates” Photo Ninja will fool the company’s software but can’t guarantee it.
In part, this is because Clearview AI probably already has a picture of you in its databases, scraped from public sources long ago. As the company’s CEO Hoan Ton-That said in an interview with The New York Times last year: “There are billions of unmodified photos on the internet, all on different domain names. In practice, it’s almost certainly too late to perfect a technology [that hides you from facial recognition search] and deploy it at scale.”
Browder agrees: “In a perfect world, all images released to the public from Day 1 would be altered. As that is clearly not the case for most people, we recognize this as a significant limitation to the efficacy of our pixel-level changes. Hence, the focal point and intended use case of our tool was to avoid detection from Google Reverse Image Search and TinEye.”
DoNotPay isn’t the first to build this sort of tool. In August 2020, researchers from the University of Chicago’s SAND Lab created an open-source program named Fawkes that performs the same task. Indeed, Browder says DoNotPay’s engineers referenced this work in their own research. But while Fawkes is a low-profile piece of software, very unlikely to be used by the average internet consumer, DoNotPay has a slightly larger reach, albeit one that is still limited to tech-savvy users who are happy to let bots litigate on their behalf.
Tools like this don’t provide a silver bullet to modern privacy intrusions, but as facial recognition and reverse image search tools become more commonly used, it makes sense to deploy at least some protections. Photo Ninja won’t hide you from law enforcement or an authoritarian state government, but it might fool an opportune stalker or two.
China’s original state-owned automaker, First Automobile Works (FAW), has revealed the first electric vehicle that’s part of the government’s massive Belt and Road project. The Hongqi S9 is a 1,400-horsepower hybrid hypercar created in partnership with Italian engineering and design startup Silk EV.
The car was first teased in February, but the two companies gave it a proper debut at Auto Shanghai 2021 this week. FAW and Silk EV are only making 99 of them and will start taking orders by the end of this year. They didn’t announce a price tag and also didn’t share many specs for the S9 (besides that the internal combustion engine will be a V8). It was designed by Walter de Silva, known for his past work with Alfa Romeo, Audi, Volkswagen, and Lamborghini.
The S9 is meant to serve as a halo car above future fully electric vehicles that FAW will develop in China and in Italy as part of the joint venture with Silk EV — an effort that is backed by some of China’s biggest banks. It’s being developed under FAW’s Hongqi brand, or “red flag,” which the automaker first started using when it pretty much exclusively made cars for high-ranking Chinese government officials, including Mao Zedong.
FAW has said it wants to make Hongqi into China’s first global car brand. There are a number of electric vehicle startups trying to do the same thing — Xpeng has started shipping small volumes of its EVs to Europe, for instance — though they don’t have access to the same scope of resources that a state-owned automaker can tap. (FAW itself even backed one of these startups, Byton. But after Byton ran into financial trouble, FAW has since reportedly absorbed the startup, and offices in the US and Germany have been closed).
And as part of China’s Belt and Road, which involves infrastructure projects of various sizes all across Asia, Europe, and Africa, the Silk-FAW joint venture has the benefit of becoming part of the Chinese government’s larger narrative for the initiative of creating diplomatic and economic opportunities.
While Italy makes sense as a place to develop such a car, being the home of Ferrari and Lamborghini, it was also the first G7 nation to endorse the Belt and Road Initiative. So what is starting out as a curious, limited-run hypercar just may be the beginning of something much bigger with regards to China’s influence on the global market for electric vehicles.
No matter what you do during your waking hours — work at home or outside of it; commute in a car, a train, or by walking from your bedroom to your living room; or spend your days watching the kids or job hunting — you’re probably spending at least some of that time listening to music. But where do you find that music? And if you already have a site you go to regularly, would you like to try something new?
There is a wealth of streaming music services now available to anyone who wants to listen and experiment. Some offer both free and paid subscription versions. Others are completely free.
We asked the staff of The Verge to tell us about their favorite music streaming services. Some listen to major outlets such as Apple Music, Spotify, or YouTube Music, while others have discovered lesser-known but interesting venues.
Here’s what they recommend.
Radio Dismuke
Image: Earl 1900s Music Preservation
For some reason, my partner and I have become addicted to the popular music of the early 20th century, mostly the 1920s and ’30s. Over the past few years, we’ve become happily familiar with the sounds of Cliff Edwards, Bessie Smith, Ruth Etting, Annette Hanshaw, Paul Whiteman, Cab Calloway, and Ethel Waters. (Here she is, in one of her sadly few motion picture appearances, singing “Birmingham Bertha.”) So we spend a lot of time listening to Radio Dismuke, a little-known streaming service sponsored by Early 1900s Music Preservation, which gives us a constant diet of pop and jazz from the early part of the last century. —Barbara Krasnoff
Soma fm
Soma fm started life as an actual micropower radio station in San Francisco in 1999 but flipped over to the internet in 2000. It has been one of my go-to audio sources ever since. The site has tons of different genre stations. While working, I bounce between Groove Salad (ambient / downtempo), Secret Agent (think classic Bond meets modern sensibilities), and Drone Zone (very chill). In the early 2000s, Indie Pop Rocks was my secret weapon for finding new bands my friends didn’t know yet. When the holidays come around, Soma’s holiday stations will make your party twice as festive and half as corny. There are apps for it on all platforms, but if you’re using TuneIn for terrestrial radio, Soma’s stations are listed there, too. It’s all free, but if you use it a lot, find a way to chip in a bit — after more than 20 years of streaming, Soma deserves it. —Dieter Bohn
YouTube Music
Most of my time on YouTube isn’t spent watching videos; it’s listening to music. YouTube Music is everything I wanted out of Google Play Music, plus some. Its catalog of music is incomparable, mostly thanks to users who upload music that otherwise isn’t available on streaming services. It has recent hits and full albums if you want to use it like, say, Spotify, but it’s my destination for listening to uploads of older music or obscure tunes, live performances, and compilations of video game soundtracks. (For some reason, I know the Ghost Trick original soundtrack by heart, yet I haven’t played much of the game.) I’m always a little concerned that my favorite playlist or an upload of a hard-to-find album will be delisted, but perhaps it’s that rush that keeps me listening to it more often than any other music streaming service these days. —Cameron Faulkner
8tracks
I’ll confess that I don’t listen to 8tracks regularly these days, but using it is a predictable way to trigger a burst of nostalgia. The streaming service launched in 2008, and it lets users upload playlists of at least eight songs (aka 8 tracks). You can search through playlists based on their tags (which could include artists, genre, or “mood”), but you can’t see the list of songs ahead of time. They’re revealed as you listen. You also only get three skips per playlist per hour. The forced discovery helped me find songs and artists I never would have listened to. 8tracks shut down in December 2019 but was brought back to life by a new startup called BackBeat last April. All of the playlists I made in high school are still intact, but they are very embarrassing — so I’m keeping that username a secret. —Nicole Wetsman
KEXP
Image: KEXP
KEXP, a public radio station based in Seattle, is my favorite radio station in the world. It primarily plays alternative and indie rock, but there are also weekly blocks with completely different genres like blues, Latin music, songs entirely by Pacific Northwest-based artists, and my wife and I especially enjoy reggae on Saturday mornings. We regularly stream the station to our kitchen speaker while eating dinner or doing chores. The music selection is consistently excellent, and it’s also a regular reminder of the city where we met and fell in love. —Jay Peters
Aux Live
As The Verge’s resident Post Malone fan, I recently discovered Aux Live when a recording of his performance at PostyFest in 2019 was featured. My first intention was to only keep the subscription long enough to watch that one concert, but I ended up really enjoying the service. Aux Live is a music-focused service with a range of live concerts and documentaries across an expansive range of genres and legendary artists. It works both in-browser and via app. It costs $4.99 a month, but that feels reasonable given the vast number of artists featured in the service. —Kaitlin Hatton
Qobuz
Image: Qobuz
After purchasing a portable DAC to listen to higher-resolution music on my phone, I was looking for a place where I can actually listen to higher-resolution music. I found Qobuz, which allows you to stream songs with up to a 192kHz sampling rate and 24-bit depth. You’re also able to buy hi-res songs or albums and download them from the Qobuz store without having to subscribe to the service. Revisiting some of my favorite albums that I listened to during my iPod days gave me a newfound appreciation for those recordings, and I ended up paying closer attention to the way they were mixed and mastered. —Andru Marino
Spotify
Okay, fine — I’ll be the boring member of staff who recommends Spotify. Yes, other streaming services might offer better audio quality or curation, but Spotify has a nice user interface and compatibility with almost every piece of streaming hardware on the market, and that’s really all my basic music tastes require. And soon, with Spotify HiFi launching later this year, audio quality will receive a big boost. It helps that I’ve been using Spotify for close to a decade at this point, so it has near-limitless data on me to create custom playlists tailored to my tastes. Its daily mixes are far from perfect, but they’re good enough that I regularly use them when I can’t be bothered to pick a specific band to listen to. —Jon Porter
Apple Music
Photo: Apple
I use Apple Music for a very specific reason: because it lets me listen to music that’s not on Apple Music. Let me explain. A solid 10–15 percent of the music I listen to isn’t on Spotify or any streaming service. Whether it’s something I made or one of my friends made, a rip from a long-forgotten song posted to YouTube or SoundCloud, an album that’s too copyright-infringement-astic to be allowed on streaming services, or just music that’s on Bandcamp but not streaming services, I still want to have a good way of syncing all of the music I like across devices — and Apple Music does a great job of that. I just drag something into the application formerly known as iTunes, and in a few moments, it shows up on my iPhone, syncs to my iPod, and can even be played through my HomePods. I’d write more about how much I love this one aspect of Apple Music, but honestly, I’m starting to sound like an annoying hipster, even to myself. —Mitchell Clark
Live Music Archive
Did you know you can listen to over 200,000 concerts in lossless audio quality for free? And I really do mean free. The Live Music Archive, part of the Internet Archive, hosts an enormous vault of live performances from a wide range of artists who’ve given their blessing to have concerts traded among fans. Yes, there’s a ton of material from the Grateful Dead and jam bands in there, but the LMA also contains hundreds of recordings from acts like the Drive-By Truckers, John Mayer, Elliott Smith, Smashing Pumpkins, and more. Every so often, I’ll start digging through the archive and land on a gem I hadn’t heard before. Most are audience-recorded shows, as commercial releases (understandably) aren’t allowed.
Now, the Internet Archive isn’t exactly known for intuitive navigation, and the Live Music Archive site can be very kludgy to use. Thankfully, there are apps like this one for iPhone or this for Android that serve as easier-to-browse portals for everything inside the Live Music Archive, complete with features like offline downloads. —Chris Welch
(Pocket-lint) – Hammerhead claims that the Karoo 2 is the closest you’ll get to a smartphone. That’s no surprise, because this is a Google Android-based bike computer – the operating system that so many phones run – which is cause for some excitement.
Hammerhead’s pitch with the Karoo 2 is that you’ll get regular updates. And that’s true – indeed, we’ve started to write this review on several occasions, only to find we wanted to explore something more following additional updates.
As a result of updates, the Karoo 2 has got better over the months we’ve been using it. But is it good enough to tempt you away from the likes of the Garmin Edge?
Design and build
Dimensions: 100.6 x 60.8 x 19.3mm / Weight: 131g
Handlebar and out-front mounts included
IP67 waterproofing
The Hammerhead Karoo 2 has a 3.2-inch display, meaning it sits between the Garmin Edge 530/830 and Edge 1030 sizes, but it’s bigger than the Wahoo bike computers. It’s on the larger size, yes, but that’s good for quick glancing.
The body itself is a glass-filled polycarbonate, with an elastomer bumper. The display is topped with Dragontrail Glass for scratch resistance, while the whole package gets an IP67 rating to keep the water and mud out.
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On the rear there’s a sealed compartment you can open with a coin that will accept a SIM card, while a USB-C socket on the bottom of the device is used for charging. This has a rubber bung that inserts into it (with a spare in the box), but it’s not attached in any way. We’ve no qualms about losing it on a ride, but we might lose it when we have to take it out for charging.
We’ve used the Karoo 2 in rain and shine, through mud and sleet, and we’ve no worries about the waterproofing of this device. It feels solid, it looks good, and it’s kept on going with all we’ve put it through.
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We’re not huge fans of the buttons being on opposite sides of the body, though, because we find it more difficult to press a button than ought to be. Press the bottom button too hard and the device might rotate on the mount – which is how you remove it. But with another button on the other side, gripping to press on one side is a little more difficult. Basically, we’d prefer them to be staggered.
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It’s something of a moot point, however, given that most cycling gloves these days work with touch displays (or one finger does at least) and there’s touch support for pretty much anything you might want to use a button for – although this is less reliable in the wet, when the buttons come into their own.
Turning to mounting, there’s an out-front mount in the box, which users Hammerhead’s connection system. This will let you slide it into place to lock in securely, with a twist to release and slide forward again to remove. This means you can mount it on busy handlebars without a twist as large as you’d need for a Garmin computer, for example.
The supplied mount is designed to sit out the front of your handlebars and to be aerodynamic. It’s designed for standard 31.8mm bars and there’s no shims supplied for anyone riding a vintage steed or anything smaller.
There is an adapter to switch the Karoo 2 to a Garmin quarter-turn mount, which was bundled with preorders, otherwise available as an accessory (it’s £14 in the UK). That’s a great option as you can switch between bikes using an old mount (which we did), without having to mess around with changing all the mounts on all your bikes.
The display is important, because in a world of data, that’s what you spend your time looking at. It’s a good resolution too, with 292 pixels per inch, and while that’s somewhat lower in count than the latest smartphones, it suits the content well enough – which is the important point.
As this is an Android-based system (Android 8, so generations behind current phones), some of the interface and interactions will be familiar. Trying to use the tiny keyboard, however, especially for setup, is a little tedious – and Hammerhead could well do with offloading some of these tasks to a companion app, in the way Garmin does.
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There is plentiful brightness, but it’s not automatic, so you might have to swipe to bump it up when the rain starts falling – or indeed when the sun comes out.
There’s a Qualcomm-supplied quad-core processor, 32GB of storage, and a whole world of connectivity. That includes all the essentials: Bluetooth and ANT+ for accessories; GPS for location tracking; Wi-Fi for syncing and updates; 3G/4G for mobile data connectivity; motion sensors to aid navigation, and so forth.
This being an Android device it’s important that there’s enough power to do what you want. Startup is a little slow, but we’ve got used to starting it on the way to getting changed for a ride. Loading routes and profiles is a little slower than we’d like too, but we’re sure that software updates could fix this.
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It’s easy to manage connected devices, perhaps a little simpler than some other bike computers, especially if you know your way around Android.
We tested the Hammerhead with Garmin ANT+ bike sensors, Scosche Rhythm+ 2.0, and the Polar Verity Sense via Bluetooth – and found no connectivity problems at all.
On to that smartphone-like experience. There’s no call support, because even with the SIM card this isn’t a phone, but the card slot in the back gives the option for a permanent data connection. Otherwise, you can just use a Wi-Fi hotspot from the phone – the one that’s probably in the back pocket of your jersey anyway – to save you needing another SIM.
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However, there’s no data connection between the Karoo 2 and your actual smartphone via Bluetooth – all the syncing that the Karoo 2 does is via its own Wi-Fi or data connection if you’ve given it a SIM card. That’s mostly fine – but does also present some limitations.
You could, of course, ditch your smartphone and just take the connected Karoo 2, knowing that it will give you map searching and other features. But on a display this small, it could end up being just a little too frustrating when you get properly lost.
How Hammerhead handles its data
Karoo Companion app
Browser-based dashboard
Third-party services
You need to make sure the Karoo 2 is connected to Wi-Fi if you want to sync a new route that you’ve made, or to push ride data to a third-party service, because Hammerhead isn’t trying to run its own platform.
This is the fundamental difference between the Karoo 2 and Garmin’s devices: Garmin wants you to be as connected as possible, to feed data into Garmin Connect and drive the data machine. Hammerhead doesn’t offer that, so presenting some services is limited or constricted, while third-party connectivity plays a bigger role.
We hinted before that setup is a little strange. There’s no real smartphone app for starters: there’s the Karoo Companion app, which only handles push notifications; or there’s the web dashboard. This is a weird position for a company developing on Android, as you’d think Hammerhead would focus on being mobile first – but it’s not.
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The notifications you get are a little basic too, missing a huge opportunity: Android quick replies. This is a gem that iPhone won’t know about, but quick replies on Android work really well on Garmin, letting you send a reply to an incoming message or call – really useful when you’re riding. Visually, the Hammerhead notifications are too basic too, so could certainly be presented better.
Instead you need to get yourself onto the browser and setup your Hammerhead account and then sign into your Karoo with that account when it arrives. There’s some downloading and updating that takes place – but syncing, you’ll remember, is via the device to third-party services and the dashboard, rather than within a smartphone app.
Really, your phone plays no part – and we think Hammerhead could make everything smoother with much closer pairing with phones. For example: if you want use the live tracking feature, that data can’t go via your Bluetooth-connected phone, you have to connect the Karoo 2 via Wi-Fi or a data connection and then share a URL to those you want to live track you.
It’s jumping through disconnected hoops and resulted in us using WhatsApp location tracking instead. Bear in mind that Garmin’s livetracking can be set to automatically notify a list of people as soon as you start a ride – and that’s really what Hammerhead needs to offer, rather than relying on people finding a link that was shared with them a few months prior.
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Some might say there aren’t enough partnerships to drive this platformless system. For many, the link with Strava will give them all the data analysis they want, with the reciprocal Strava Segments in place too – which does have some parity to Garmin’s offering, allowing you to have your starred Segments pop up when you get to them.
But there’s a lot that’s not on the list – and while more is likely to come, Hammerhead really needs to cover all cyclists’ needs.
Naturally, without a full platform for data analysis, most will be looking at this on Strava – which you can read about here – with Hammerhead’s dashboard only showing basic time, route, distance and elevation details.
Being Android-based also adds opportunity. Hammerhead mentions sideloading APKs onto the Karoo 2, which might be beyond your average user – but certainly there’s the opportunity for native apps rather than just data syncing. With a little thought, the Karoo 2 could be running its own Strava app or a Komoot app – but with the Karoo 2 running Android 8 (software originally released in 2017), some developers might baulk at the thought of working with that older version.
On the saddle and navigation
Profile customisation
Offline mapping
Rapid rerouting
With all that out of the way and accepted, riding with the Karoo 2 is actually great. The user interface presents a range of profiles, each offering up different data sets. The default selection is a little odd, but you can make a custom profile or edit any of the default profiles to your liking.
It’s worth having a play around with, because once you’ve entered one of these profiles you can’t back out and switch to something else if you find you can’t get to the data you want. But you can customise all the existing profiles, so if you want to add cadence instead of your average heart rate (or whatever) that’s easy enough to do.
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And there are loads of data fields, including shifting information for Shimano Di2, battery life, every variant on time, power, climb, etc., that you can think of. It makes everything super customisable so you’re looking at exactly what you want.
Navigation is good, with the option to create routes on the device, sync routes from other platforms, import GPX files and so forth. Despite the lack of a proper smartphone app, you can download a GPX route and upload it to the Dashboard in your phone browser, to then appear on your Karoo 2 when it syncs.
Hammerhead does have a habit of changing routes – especially offroad routes. Having found and saved a route in Komoot, Hammerhead then imported and reinterpreted it, switching some of the forest paths to roads. Attempting to edit that route created a lot of doglegs, again attempting to avoid some of the paths that are perfectly legitimate to ride on.
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Rerouting is rapid, however, but missing a waypoint can lead to lengthy rerouting instructions – especially if that missed point is the start of the route. You’ll spend the first 10 minutes being directed back to where you came from.
The GPS is accurate and fast to locate, with a good sense of direction. Thankfully it uses arrows on the route and a directional arrow for you, so on circuits or routes that cross themselves, there’s no confusion.
Navigating maps on a ride is easy too, because you can pinch and zoom, or drag around the map, which is far easier than Garmin’s system.
When you’ve planned a route and head out, you’ll be able to see route profile data so you can see how long those climbs are and when they’re coming up, so you can prepare yourself to open the hurt box.
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Once in a route you can browse the maps on the device to make an alteration. For example, if you need to get home, you can zoom out on screen, drop a pin on home, then follow the new route easily enough – which is great for last-minute changes.
There is support for workouts too, which can be imported from TrainingPeaks, so you can directly access them on the Karoo 2. Although as we said previously, there’s room to expand this offering to make it more encompassing.
A lot of what the Karoo 2 offers is about expanding the offering too. As we said in the introduction, the software is always changing. Mostly this adds functionality which is welcomed – but we’ve seen a few rearrangements of the on-screen controls that took us by surprise. You’ll get an email detailing the changes, but Hammerhead also has a changelog here.
Battery life
2500mAh battery
12 hour reliable life
If you’ve used a smartphone you might be concerned about battery life. Having moved to Hammerhead from the capable Garmin Edge 830, we were pleasantly surprised.
You’ll get a reliable 12 hours of battery life from this computer. There are measures you can take to reduce the battery drain – including turning off the display if you just don’t need all those functions – and charging is fairly fast too.
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You’ll get 30 per cent charge from 30 minutes plugged in – but you’ll need 3 hours to fully charge it again. And there’s no charger in the box, but as USB-C is common now you can simply charge it with any existing charger.
But put this in context: most phones will happily charge fully in half this time – with much larger batteries. So this isn’t really that fast in terms of charging speed, not when compared to the phone market. Certainly, we’d love to see faster charging in a future Karoo – just so you can avoid those last-minute delays.
Verdict
The biggest thing about the Karoo 2 is accepting that you might be stepping away from a huge ecosystem to do things a little differently. Unless you’re really committed to specific Garmin features, the mainstay of the Karoo 2’s offering is excellent – the visible and recorded data, the customisation, solid build and good battery life.
For those who live in Strava, rather than something like Garmin Connect, the Karoo 2 will potentially provide you with everything you need, rather than being drawn off into complete lifestyle tracking. But there are areas where the Karoo 2 can get more competitive – and it needs to, given the fairly steep price.
When all is said and done, the Karoo 2 is a great bike computer. It’s getting better all the time and fundamentally it gives everything you’ll need on a ride. Over time it has endeared itself to us.
Alternatives to consider
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Garmin Edge 830
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A natural rival to the Karoo 2, with a similar asking price. It’s equally ambitious, bettering the Karoo in terms of its smartphone interaction, while playing into a larger ecosystem where Garmin will help track your whole lifestyle – not just your rides.
Wisk Aero, a joint venture between Boeing and Kitty Hawk, is suing rival air taxi firm Archer Aviation for allegedly stealing its trade secrets and infringing on its patents. Wisk is seeking unspecified monetary damages and an injunction against Archer to prevent it from using the allegedly stolen technology. In response, Archer says it has “no reason to believe” that it possesses any of Wisk’s intellectual property.
In a complaint filed in the US District Court of Northern California, Wisk said it is suing Archer “to stop a brazen theft of its intellectual property and confidential information, and protect the substantial investment of resources and years of hard work and effort of its employees and their vision of the future in urban air transportation.”
Santa Clara-based Archer came out of stealth in the spring of 2020 after having poached key talent from Kitty Hawk, the flying taxi company bankrolled by Google co-founder Larry Page and run by Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford AI and robotics whiz who launched Google’s self-driving car unit. The company also hired engineers away from Airbus’ Vahana project. According to Avionics International, Archer was able to lure these engineers by offering higher salaries.
Archer was founded by Adam Goldstein and Brett Adcock, co-founders of Vettery, a marketing software-as-a-service company, which the two sold to Switzerland-based staffing firm Adecco Group in 2018 for $100 million. But Wisk argues that Archer didn’t just steal talent — it also stole trade secrets. Wisk accuses Archer of misappropriating “thousands of highly confidential files containing very valuable trade secrets, as well as the use of significant innovations Wisk has patented.”
Archer’s emergence “surprised the industry,” Wisk claims, based on its shortened time frame for going to market with its electric aircraft with just a fraction of the staff of other, more established urban air mobility firms. According to Wisk:
Archer’s stated timeline for releasing an aircraft was a fraction of the time taken by its serious competitors, using a fraction of the number of employees of those competitors. The development of an entirely new kind of passenger aircraft requires years of engineering and significant expertise to get right, as demonstrated by Wisk and the other leading players in this space. For example, after 10 years of hard engineering and testing, Wisk is currently developing its sixth-generation aircraft, which it plans to certify with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). We believe it is virtually impossible for Archer to have produced an originally-designed aircraft in this timeframe that has gone through the necessary testing and is ready for certification with the FAA.
Most surprising to Wisk was the design of Archer’s prototype aircraft — mainly because it closely resembled Wisk’s own prototype. Both aircraft feature six front rotors, each with five blades, that can tilt either horizontally or vertically, as well as six rear rotors that each consist of two blades and remain fixed in a vertical position. Archer’s aircraft also includes an “unconventional” V-shaped tail, similar to Wisk’s patented design.
Image: Wisk
“The striking similarity in these designs could not have been a coincidence,” Wisk says. The month that Wisk filed its patent application was the same month that Archer hired away 10 of Wisk’s engineers, the company says.
With its suspicions raised, Wisk said it hired a forensic investigator, who returned with some “troubling” information:
We discovered that one of those engineers downloaded thousands of Wisk files near midnight, shortly before he announced his resignation and immediately departed to Archer. Those files contain our valuable trade secrets and confidential information about Wisk’s aircraft development spanning the history of the company, accumulated over countless hours of incremental progress by scores of engineers. Another engineer downloaded numerous files containing test data just before departing for Archer. Yet another wiped any trace of his computer activities shortly before leaving for Archer.
Wisk also points out that among its competitors, no two prototypes look the same, which makes Archer’s alleged theft of its trade secrets stand out even more.
Archer has recently made news by raising $1.1 billion by going public through a reverse merger with a special acquisition company, or SPAC. The merger, which is valued at $3.8 billion, is also backed by Stellantis, the parent company of Fiat Chrysler and Peugeot, and United Airlines. United has placed a $1 billion order for 200 Archer electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, with an option to purchase 100 more for $500 million.
In an interview with The Verge last month, the startup’s co-founders gave a lot of credit to Page’s Kitty Hawk and Wisk for helping launch the eVTOL industry, while also acknowledging having poached many of the key players from Wisk to help start Archer.
“We started the business three or four years ago. And our team here is a team that basically kind of started the space,” Adcock told The Verge. “So Larry Page basically invented the space in a large way. In 2010, he started a company that’s now called Wisk. It used to be called Kitty Hawk, and then Zero, but it’s called Wisk now. That was like the big, big group in the space.”
Adcock continued to heap praise on Page, saying, “You know, Larry’s spent a considerable amount of money and time over 10 years basically maturing the technologies, like motors, batteries, flight control, software, aircraft design, these type of things.”
But that didn’t prevent him from hiring away many of the key players at Wisk and Airbus’ Vahana, including Tom Muniz, who ran engineering at Wisk and is now chief operating officer at Archer; and Geoffrey Bower, who was chief engineer at Vahana and now holds that same title at Archer. “We’ve basically been bringing over kind of the best folks in the world here to kind of tackle this problem last several years,” he added.
A spokesperson for Archer called the lawsuit “regrettable” and denied the allegations that the company had stolen Wisk’s intellectual property.
“It’s regrettable that Wisk would engage in litigation in an attempt to deflect from the business issues that have caused several of its employees to depart,” the spokesperson said. “The plaintiff raised these matters over a year ago, and after looking into them thoroughly, we have no reason to believe any proprietary Wisk technology ever made its way to Archer. We intend to defend ourselves vigorously.”
Air taxis, sometimes misidentified as “flying cars, “are essentially helicopters without the noisy, polluting gas motors. A number of startups have emerged in recent years with prototype aircraft that are electric-powered, able to carry a handful of passengers, and intended for short flights within a city or regionally. Analysts predict that the flying taxi market could grow to $150 billion in revenue by 2035.
Update April 6th 1:08PM ET: This story has been updated to include Archer’s response.
Google has started rolling out the April Android security update for Pixel phones, and it looks like it’s brought some performance improvements to the most recent devices. Google says the update includes “performance optimizations for certain graphics-intensive apps and games” on the Pixel 5 and 4A 5G, and, as noted by XDA Developers, some testers are noticing substantially improved GPU performance on the Pixel 5.
Anandtech previously found that the Pixel 5 turned in much worse GPU results than other phones using the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 765G chip. Now, the site’s reviewer Andrei Frumusanu says that performance on his Pixel 5 has been “essentially doubled” from the review’s initial figures and is now “in line or better than other 765G phones.” Benchmarks don’t necessarily translate into real-world results, of course, but combined with Google’s reference to optimizations for graphics-intensive apps, it does sound like GPU performance should be better with the new release.
In addition, Google says that the Pixel 5 and 4A 5G should receive “improvements to camera quality” in some third-party apps. There’s also a fix for a startup freezing bug on Pixel 4 and 5 devices, as well as one for missing home grid settings on the Pixel 3 and 4 generations of phones.
(Image credit: Grzegorz Czapski / Shutterstock.com)
The Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA) announced yesterday the cancellation of Computex 2021’s onsite exhibition due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead the many companies that show off their upcoming products at the event will have to do so via #COMPUTEXVirtual, an online gathering set to start on May 31.
TAITRA said in the announcement that “another wave of coronavirus pandemic across the world” means “the majority of the show’s stakeholders, including international exhibitors, visitors, and media, cannot join the show due to border control.” At that point it makes more sense to simply cancel the event entirely.
The decision comes much earlier—and is more definitive—than TAITRA’s response to the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. The council initially said it would push Computex 2020 from June to September; it didn’t officially cancel the event until mid-June. Many other event organizers were faster to respond to the pandemic’s spread.
Computex 2021 was also set to be one of the first in-person events held in the pandemic’s wake. TAITRA announced that the show would return in December 2020, which was after several COVID-19 vaccines received the go-ahead from global health officials, but well before the vast majority of people could even receive them.
TAITRA said it will focus on “building the best virtual platform for tech and startup communities [to] explore digital business opportunities” in the wake of this cancellation. The result: #COMPUTEXVirtual, an online event that will run from May 31 to June 30, and which the similarly hashtagged #InnoVEXVirtual conference.
In the meantime, Computex 2021’s cancellation is another reminder that things haven’t quite returned to normal. (As if most of us needed one.) If the past is any indicator we’ll know if Computex 2022 will be held in-person sometime between this December and next June.
Google is releasing a new experimental app today called Stack that borrows the technology underlying its powerful DocAI enterprise tool for document analysis. The end result is a consumer document scanner app for Android that Google says vastly improves over your average mobile scanner by auto-categorizing documents into the titular stacks and enabling full text search through the contents of the documents and not just the title.
“I joined Google a couple of years ago when my education startup, Socratic, was acquired. At Socratic, we used Google’s computer vision and language understanding to make learning easier for high school students. I wondered if we could apply the same technologies to make organizing documents easier,” said Christopher Pedregal, the team lead on Stack, in a statement.
Pedregal and his colleague Matthew Cowan joined Google’s Area 120 incubator program, where they came up with an app that could use DocAI and its artificial intelligence technology to improve the process of scanning receipts, bills, and other important documents. The app uses Google’s biometric authentication on Android, so you can secure sensitive documents behind face or fingerprint scanning to unlock the software. It also automatically creates fields for scanned bills so you can fill in due dates and other important info.
The app, like so many of Google’s experimental (and sometimes even not-so-experimental) efforts, is getting released in the hopes it catches on and not with any real concrete business model attached or a definite roadmap. Pedregal stresses that “it’s early days” for Stack, which means the app can “still get things wrong.” It also means it could, at a moment’s notice, get sent to the Google Graveyard — though, presumably, with the option to export your documents if that does happen at some point in the future.
That said, it seems like a powerful alternative to a normal document scanner, and few companies are better than Google at understanding text and recognizing images. So it’s certainly worth a shot if you’re in the market for a better way to organize your real-world paper.
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