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If you're anything like me, you probably have an unending list of books that you want to read but never actually get around to because you just don't have the time or the patience. Audiobooks are a great way to take back some of the time that's spent on a commute or on the treadmill, so it's no surprise that Amazon-owned Audible is so popular. So popular, in fact, that it has now crossed 100 million downloads on the Play Store.
Over the past 5 years, Amazon has grown by almost 500%, compared to roughly 165% for Apple and Google. Source: Yahoo Finance
Google continues to improve YouTube's livestreaming features after having announced auto-captions and new chat features just last month. Today, Google has revealed that it's refining YouTube Live's streaming process to make it much simpler and quicker for users to get their livestream up and running.
Avid audiobook listeners will be excited to know that Sonos has just added support for Audible to its line of smart speakers. Despite having already worked with Amazon to equip its Sonos One speakers with Alexa, Amazon's Audible audiobook service was still surprisingly missing from the list of available music services in the Sonos app after having been removed two years ago.
A few days ago, eBay ran a promotion for 20% off on everything on its website. Unfortunately, that promotion only lasted a single day and stocks disappeared unbelievably fast, so not everyone was able to get in on it. Luckily, eBay is running a new promotion today for 15% off everything, so if you missed out last time, this is still a very good opportunity to take advantage of.
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It can sometimes be a little annoying when a product has different features on different platforms. For example, Gmail's web interface supports multiple inbox layouts, such as Important first, Unread first, or Priority Inbox, but unfortunately Gmail's Android app doesn't. To add insult to injury, Gmail on iOS also supports inbox types, so users were left feeling puzzled as to why the same feature was present on one platform but not another. Fortunately, Google has announced that it's addressing this lacuna today, with the Gmail Android app to finally support alternative inbox layouts.
Last summer, my wife and I got married and we moved from Portugal to Boston almost immediately after our honeymoon. It's great to have a place just for ourselves, but we quickly found that neither of us were big fans of having to vacuum our apartment. It's a laborious and monotonous job that takes up a lot of time, but it's also an unavoidable fact of life that homes get dirty and need to be cleaned regularly. Not wanting to spend an hour or more every week vacuuming up the place, we checked out The Wirecutter's robot vacuum recommendations and ordered their pick, the Ecovacs Deebot N79, half expecting we'd return it within a couple of weeks.We set up the Deebot N79 using the app and scheduled it to run daily on our 850 sqft apartment, and soon discovered that this little robot actually does such a good job that we haven't had to vacuum our place manually since we bought it. Granted, we don't have pets or thick carpets, but we were both thoroughly impressed with the N79. Despite the quirks that come with the Deebot N79 not being a 'premium' robot vacuum — it doesn't have a mapping feature or a sophisticated navigation system, nor does it work with Alexa or Google Assistant — my wife and I are both very happy with our purchase.If I've managed to sway you into considering buying your own robot vacuum, then you'll be happy to know that Amazon currently has a deal on the Ecovacs Deebot N79 that'll save you $50.60 off the regular price of $229.98 and get a free accessory kit with replacement filters and brushes (which usually costs $24.99) thrown in too. To take advantage of the deal, all you have to do is add the Deebot N79 and the accessory kit to your cart and use the code MIR8RW8O at checkout.
The Ecovacs Deebot N79 was Amazon's bestselling robot vacuum cleaner in 2017 and this is the best price we've seen so far in 2018. If you don't enjoy spending your weekends vacuuming, I would definitely recommend you consider giving the Deebot N79 a try.[EMBED_APP]https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ecovacs.ecosphere.intl[/EMBED_APP]Via: SlickdealsSource: Amazon (Deebot N79), Amazon (accessory kit)
The good folks at iFixit never miss a chance to pull out their trusty Philips screwdrivers and heat guns to tear apart the newest phone on the block, and this time is no different. The new Samsung Galaxy S9+ paid a visit to iFixit's labs and came out with a very mediocre 4 points out of 10 in repairability. For comparison, Google's Pixel 2 XL got an above-average score of 6, the Essential Phone received an abysmal 1, and Samsung's Galaxy Note8 also scored 4 out of 10.
Zack from JerryRigEverything has become famous for his (somewhat extreme) durability tests, and now he's finally gotten his hands on a new Galaxy S9 to put through its paces.
We might still be a couple of weeks away from the official unveiling of the Huawei P20, but we've already found out most of what there is to know about the upcoming phone. This year, Huawei decided to switch things up, choosing not to reveal the newest member of its P series at this year's MWC and wait to launch it in Paris on March 27.
Back when Chrome OS was first made public, people would often dismiss it as "just a browser" on a laptop. Fast forward to 2018, and while Chrome OS might not be able to perform every single task a full-fledged desktop computer can, it can certainly handle essentially anything an average user would need. Today, Chrome OS is able to run Android apps, work offline, and even do boring desktop stuff like change the wallpaper.
We usually cover deal alerts for a specific product or even just a particular variant of a product. This deal is a little different: for today only, (almost) everything on eBay is a whole 20% off, capped at a $100 discount.
The launcher is arguably the most frequently viewed screen on your phone, and it's also one that Google thoroughly enjoys playing around with. Of course, we couldn't have a new major release of Android without some change in the launcher, and this time is no different.
Most of us are already aware of the existence of Chrome's hidden flag menu, which holds an exceedingly long list of toggles for experimental features, but what you probably don't know is that Android P now also includes a similar list that's hidden away in Settings.
I'm a sucker for animations. Objectively speaking, they don't add any functionality (some might even say that incessant animations make tasks slower and end up actually reducing productivity), but I still can't get enough of them. Fortunately for me and for any other animation fans out there, Android P has a couple of new transition animations that look pretty dope.
It's always fun to poke around a developer preview in search of what might have changed in Android. Some things are more obvious, like moving the volume slider around or making Quick Settings vertically scrollable, while others are a little more subtle. This one falls squarely in the latter category.
Now that a large portion of our daily lives is spent staring at a screen, we've started becoming more and more concerned that this behavior may impact our circadian rhythms and the quantity and quality of our sleep. The hypothesis goes that humans have evolved to sync their sleep cycles to the cycle of the Sun, and that shining the pale blue glow of a phone screen into our eyes at night throws that sync off-balance and prevents our brain from recognizing when it's time to sleep. That's why so many devices now have a 'night mode,' where the color of the screen shifts to a more reddish tint at night so as to minimize the impact to sleep.
Anyone who's lived in anything larger than a mid-sized apartment knows how annoying it is to deal with Wi-Fi dead zones. It may essentially be the definition of a first world problem to complain about how long YouTube takes to buffer on a multi-hundred-dollar supercomputer that fits in the palm of your hand while you're sitting on the toilet, but we humans do have a tendency to complain. Fortunately, mesh Wi-Fi router systems like Luma, eero, and Google Wifi have become increasingly more commonplace over the past couple of years and are a great way to blanket your entire home with a strong and reliable Wi-Fi signal.
If you're a parent, you're likely somewhat concerned about the kind of content your kids consume, and you might even try to manage or limit what they can or can't watch. Today, Netflix has said it will begin rolling out some improvements to its parental control tools to make content access more granular and more transparent, helping parents better manage what they want their kids to see.
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- Waze has officially announced the new Carpool and along with the option to choose someone to ride with from your gender or company, it also lets you see the profile of a driver/rider and send multiple requests to improve your chances of getting a ride.
Waze is well known for its eponymous GPS navigation app, but what you might not know is that Waze also has a ride-sharing service called Waze Carpool that's in some ways (no pun intended) similar to Uber or Lyft. Carpool lets drivers get paid to use their own car to pick up and drop off passengers, and it allows riders to request a ride from point A to point B. However, unlike Uber and Lyft, Waze Carpool isn't meant to be used as a ride-hailing service — instead, it's only meant as a way for two or more coworkers (or people who work in the same general location) to share a ride to and from work.