David Oh
Contributing since September, 2019
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137articles
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About David Oh
David is a tech enthusiast who likes to tinker around with his phones and computers. Besides tech, he enjoys working on his car, driving on mountain roads, going to the beach, flying his drone, writing reviews, and gaming.
Latest Articles
Google reveals The Claw, a phone mount for the Stadia controller (Update: Pricing revealed)
The Claw's existence was let out of the proverbial bag by Andrey Doronichev, Director of Product for Stadia at Google.
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- Appropriately on time for the official Stadia launch, the "Claw" accessory has gotten a placeholder page on the Google Store. Although you can't order it just yet, more details have surfaced. It will come in a matte black finish, weigh 1.26 oz (36g), and be compatible with the Pixel 3, Pixel 3a, and Pixel 4 families of devices (sorry Pixel 2 owners). With a layer of protective covering on all the contact points, it looks like it should securely stay put on the phone without, hopefully, causing any scratches.
Earlier today, two Google Stadia team members hosted an AMA on Reddit to answer people's questions about the upcoming Stadia game streaming service. Although the Q&A session dampened some of our enthusiasm for Stadia by revealing a bunch of missing day-one features, the AMA contained a pleasant surprise: Google made a phone mount for the Stadia controller, and it is called "The Claw."
One UI 2.0 beta 5 update hitting Galaxy S10 as S9 and Note 9 get ready to join beta program
In less than a week after releasing the fourth One UI 2.0 beta, Samsung has pushed out another one for Galaxy S10 owners. As usual, a bunch of bugs have been fixed, and the list appears to be getting shorter as the beta program shows signs of winding down. Samsung also made an announcement on its Korean forum announcing the start of the Android 10 beta program for Galaxy S9 and Note 9 devices.
A 360-degree action camera can be quite a fun device to have around. Besides being great for capturing panoramic videos during sporty activities such as biking or snowboarding, you can also use it to create interesting tiny planet photosphere pictures, shareable virtual reality videos, and use them in other interesting and creative ways. When 360-degree cameras first came out, they were quite expensive and hard to recommend to casual users. Thanks to companies like Xiaomi who often bring lots of value to the table, this type of camera is now within the reach of anyone who wants one. The Xiaomi Mijia, which has seen a few price drops previously, is now down to its all-time lowest of $125.49 ($74.50 off).The Xiaomi Mijia Mi may not have the brand cachet of a GoPro, but it offers many similar features at a much lower price point: dual Sony image sensors that can shoot 360-degree videos at up to 3.5K at 30FPS, 6-axis electronic image stabilization, up to 75 minutes of recording time from its 1,600 mAh battery, IP67 water-resistance, Wi-Fi connectivity, and a free mobile app that takes care of the editing and sharing.
There's fierce competition out there in the streaming music space, and Amazon isn't playing around. After the company announced that it would make Amazon Music free on Android, iOS, Fire TV, and the web, Spotify's stock price took a 5% dive while Amazon's went up nearly 0.5%.
Chromebooks are great machines for casual users, providing a simple and easy-to-use interface, support for Android apps, low maintenance, and often perfect as either a secondary device or a starter laptop for a child. Low-cost Chromebooks usually come with slow Intel Celeron or Pentium-level CPUs with a heavy plastic build. But cheap doesn't always mean low-quality, though. Walmart's got for sale the 15.6" Acer Chromebook 715 with a respectable Core i3 CPU and an all-aluminum build for just $300, a full $100 off its usual price.
Besides making smartphones that are affordably priced and well-specced, Xiaomi is also known for applying the same philosophy to its other lineups, such as its range of smart home security products, often undercutting the competition by huge margins while offering similar feature parity. Xiaomi's Mi Home security camera, which has been selling on Amazon for an already reasonable price of $40, has dropped to its lowest price ever of $20 (50% off).The features and specifications of the Xiaomi Mi Home security camera, on its own, isn't particularly impressive or special when compared to competing products. What is remarkable, though, is how much stuff you get for so little money. For just $20, you get a security camera that records in 1080P at 20FPS with a 130-degree viewing angle, support for both 2.4 and 5GHz Wi-Fi, night vision mode, a speaker for two-way communication, Amazon Alexa integration, and configurable motion detection and alerts. With a microSD card expansion slot, you can store weeks worth of video clips locally or use Cloud NAS. The final neat feature is support for selective person recording using Bluetooth technology.
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T-Mobile's boisterous and pugnacious CEO John Legere is in the news again, and this time, it's not for calling Verizon and AT&T "dumb and dumber" or cursing up a storm at some event. According to the Wall Street Journal, John Legere has been singled out as a possible pick for the top CEO position at WeWork.
Android 10 update for Huawei P30, P30 Pro, Mate 20, and Mate 20 Pro is rolling out in Europe (Updated)
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Despite being a big player in the smartphone industry who pumps out almost as many phones as Samsung, Huawei has proven itself to be quite nimble when it comes to major Android software updates. After starting its Android 10 beta program faster than most other companies in September, it's beginning to roll out the stable version of EMUI 10 for its P30 and Mate 20 series of phones to users on the old continent.
SanDisk is well-known for its high-performance and premium lines of microSD cards. Trusted by many, its products are often bundled together with mission-critical equipment, such as dash cams, action cameras, and drones. After floating around between $130-150 for the past few months, the SanDisk Extreme 512GB microSD card is at its lowest price ever at Amazon for $110.Today's deal is different from the $80 SanDisk Ultra 512GB microSD deal we posted a couple of days ago. The SanDisk Extreme has better specifications than the Ultra card with its higher A2 and V30 ratings. The A2 notation means it can perform 4,000 read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 2,000 write IOPS — great for storing your Android phone's app data for quicker file transfers and data manipulation. The UHS speed class 3 (U3) and video speed class 30 (V30) designations point to a sustained video capture rate of 30 MB/s, suitable for high res recording with drones and action cameras. It's also capable of 160 MB/s of read and 90 MB/s of write rates for faster file transfers. Depending on your application, it can definitely be worth paying $30 more for the Extreme over the Ultra. I personally have a 512GB Extreme inside my Galaxy S10+ (for total 1 terabyte of storage), and it's fantastic at managing file transfers and app data.
Although smartphones are almost a necessity in the modern world, smart speakers and smart displays don't enjoy the same kind of perception despite their much lower cost. Case in point, Samsung alone shipped 78.9 million phones in Q3 2019, while all the smart speaker manufacturers in the world combined shipped less than 30 million units in the same time period. Smart speakers with displays take up an even smaller share. Regardless, both the smart speaker and smart display markets continue to be hotly contested, and most companies experienced healthy year-over-year growth in Q3 2019. The major exception was Google, whose market share dropped like a rock.
Stadia, Google's hotly-anticipated game streaming service, is only six days away from going live. After formally announcing it back in March, the company has been periodically keeping us up-to-date on its features, requirements, and list of launch-day games, trying to cover all the bases. As revealed inside today's Reddit AMA, however, there is a long list of features that will be missing when Stadia launches on the 19th.
Although 5G is often touted for being newer, faster, and more secure than 4G, a team of security researchers from the University of Iowa and Purdue University has flipped the last bit of that marketing message on its head by discovering almost a dozen new 5G vulnerabilities. As a result of these breaches, they were able to carry out some nasty attacks like location tracking, broadcasting of false emergency alerts, and severing the 5G connection of a phone entirely from the network.
Not long after revealing its new, inclusive, and color-shifting corporate logo, Facebook is taking another step toward unifying its various social media applications through Facebook Pay, a payment system like Venmo that will work across Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram apps. With Facebook Pay, the company says the payment process will become easier for its users to buy and sell things online, and it will help businesses to grow.
After hinting about it last year, Facebook is finally giving its users the ability to hide certain tabs from the top nav bar bar as well as an option to turn off notification dots. The new feature, called Shortcut Bar settings, is gradually being rolled out to Android users over the coming weeks.
When DJI released its newest and lightest foldable drone called the Mavic Mini last month, it also announced a new app to go along with it. Instead of adding support for the new drone to the existing DJI Go 4 app, the company has now released DJI Fly. The drone maker says DJI Fly is better suited for novices and newcomers, which it hopes to attract with the Mavic Mini.
It's been almost exactly one year since the 2018 Users' Choice Awards, and like clockwork, Google is asking its users again to place their votes in the 2019 Google Play Users' Choice Awards. There is now one more category (books) to vote on, and more choices in each category to choose from compared to last year. The four categories are apps, games, movies, and books.
A group of security researchers has discovered an exploit that lets Bluetooth and USB accessories wreak all sorts of havoc on multiple Android smartphones. In both cases, the door of entry was the cellphone modem, or baseband, which is found inside all smartphones.
One of Chrome's most powerful and convenient features is its ability to sync data like bookmarks, passwords, and browser extensions across multiple devices. Chrome's usefulness got a boost when it began integrating a native clipboard sharing capability aptly called Shared Clipboard back in September. In its nascent state, the feature was only capable of sharing plain text, including URLs, between devices. Now, further updates to the Chromium Gerrit have revealed the inclusion of image sharing in future versions of Chrome.
Among a sea of Chromebooks, some stand out more than others. For example, the 14" HP Chromebook x360 with its clean design, good backlit keyboard, and snappy performance. After debuting at $600, its price has dipped a few times but not as low as today's sale. At Best Buy, you can now get one for just $349 ($250 off).
Samsung kicked off the Android 10 beta program for the Galaxy S10 family last month, and it's already released a couple of updates. Today, there is a new OTA rolling out for the S10s in South Korea and the UK — this will be the third update for Korea, but only the second for the UK and other regions that follow the same cadence. As for the US, there are still no signs of the third update.