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If you like your phones big, tall, and new, the Sony Xperia 1 might be your go-to. But man, that list price of $1,000 has never felt right, especially when we reviewed it and all the little annoyances and stumbling blocks brought down the sum of its parts. However, the 1 is one of Amazon's Deals of the Day today and you might consider this lower price a bit fairer... if you're willing to accept Alexa and Amazon apps into your life.The Alexa edition of the Xperia 1 simply puts Alexa above Google Assistant in the voice assistant settings and pre-loads a bunch of Amazon apps that you might or might not use. You're free to do with them how you want, but if you'd like to use the 6.5" 21:9 4K OLED display with Dolby Atmos sound for your viewing eye's content, go for it.
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Bringing the pictures you've taken on your phone to life has become pretty easy with the advent of dedicated cloud photo storage — Google Photos, for example, helps you get albums out to your friends and relatives in just a few days. But what if you want a faster solution? Something that doesn't involve optical scans of your phone's screen? Well, CVS and Walmart have made it possible to get same-day Google Photos prints at over 11,000 locations.
Keeping your floor clean? As people as recently as 2 years ago said, ain't nobody got time for that! So, with all the robo-vacuums you can get out there, why should you get Ecovacs's Deebot 500 or Deebot 711? Well, they've been boosted as Deals of the Day right now at Amazon and you're also getting an Echo Dot smart speaker to boot. This deal lasts until midnight PST.Both vacuums do essentially the same thing: they brush the floor and then suck up all the particulates they collect into a 520mL compartment. A double-strength Max Mode is also available for those especially tough spots. What the 711 has over the 500 is an optical sensor to track where it's going, but both have anti-collision detectors and are able to run on a schedule or on command via Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.Speaking of Alexa, the packages come with an Echo Dot bundled in — they feature the best sound in the Dot series — but you can do whatever you wish with that bonus item.
Those who have come into contact with super-fast refresh rate displays have hyped them to be a big-time ruiner for anyone going back to 60Hz or less. Razer brought a 120Hz experience to mobile with its phones and while their viability has been in question, you'd probably still be interested in giving the Razer Phone 2 a try. Lucky for you, the company's dropping this ol' reliable down to its lowest price yet.Alright, yes, a Razer Phone 3 might not be happening (at least this year...) and that doesn't exactly instill confidence about the software support timeline. But remember that the phone itself is barely a year old, has some good cooling stacked on top of its Snapdragon 845, and has a respectable LED glow-up config. Oh yeah, and that 120Hz display. Fun stuff to play around with.
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Some Pixel 4 pre-order customers feel they've been left behind by Google's Black Friday offers. Long story short, when they reserved their phones to receive $100 of Google Store credit within 6 to 8 weeks, many people were assuming the company would forego a holiday season sale on phones it had just launched. However, the Pixel 4 will indeed be $200 off starting on November 24, and that has left first adopters with a bruising.
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- Hiding replies is now available to everyone globally. Twitter says its regional tests have been successful and the feature has been a good way to avoid derailing conversations or shifting their tone. The option to block users after hiding their replies is also included in the final rollout.
Social media can be thought of as an ant colony: if you want to introduce a new factor in how people can or can't communicate with each other, you should probably test it out with a sequestered region before introducing it to the whole place. Such was the case as Twitter began testing hidden replies in Canada beginning in July. Today, it is expanding that test to Japan and the United States.
Even though AT&T was the first in the United States to boast a 5G network, as yet, its millimeter wave service has only been available on to enterprise customers with a Netgear hotspot. But after Sprint put out its wider-reaching next-gen towers and with T-Mobile waiting in the wings, Ma Bell has now decided to allow regular consumers to use a phone on a new, low-band 5G grid in five markets over the next few weeks and ten more by mid-2020.
If you're a T-Mobile prepaid customer and have just received an email from the carrier, you might want to read it instead of sending it straight to trash: the company said it has blocked off unauthorized access to some of its subscribers' private information and that notified customers may need to take action.
The last thing you want to be exposed to when you're making the long schlep to your grandma's for Thanksgiving dinner is a whole bunch of noise: crying babies on airplanes, incessant gossip on the train, non-stop snoring on the bus. You might want to feed your ears something more pleasant and keep the headphone jack out of this business with a pair of Bluetooth headphones. How about a pair of Aukey Key Series B80 earbuds? They're basically half off if you stack a coupon that Amazon provides right on the buying page and put in a promo code!Our Taylor Kerns actually tried out the B60 earbuds earlier this year and found them to be modern and comfortable with passable sound that gets you buy. The newer B80, which we haven't had a chance to test, is presumably a step up. As with its cohort, it connects via Bluetooth 5, charges on USB-C, and lasts for 8 hours on a cycle. They're sweat-resistant (rated IPX6) and are supposed to sound better with a wider frequency output range. They come with three sizes of bud tips and a carrying case, too.
After months of teasing and weeks of testing, Google is officially bringing its Duplex artificial intelligence guidance to users booking movie tickets online through Assistant. Just ask Assistant or search on Google through your Android phone to check out show times for movies and then have Assistant automate most of the reservation process from filling form fields to breezing through payments.
Google Maps has been able to alert navigators to posted speed limits for the past couple of years thanks to the work it does in compositing where those signs are planted, be it through their Street View vehicles or by acquiring data from government agencies. It's a behemoth effort, so, without constant monitoring, travelers like you and me will end up reporting inaccuracies. With all that in our head, Google has just updated its speed limit accuracy ratings for 28 countries — the majority of them have been downgraded.
Google has just introduced a new audio news briefing format for Assistant called "Your News Update." When you ask Assistant to tell you the news, instead of playing a series of whole podcasts that you've chosen, it will bring together bits and pieces of produced audio from a number of sources that you've curated. If you want to try it out, just go to the settings menu within Google Assistant, hit "News," then tap on your "News playlist format" to make the change.
It's the week before Thanksgiving and you're probably about to head off to the relatives or to a friend's apartment to share in a meal, some laughs, and maybe a good dose of anxiety. One source of anxiety you'd want to nip right from the bud is power sourcing — you've got gadgets, after all. Fortunately, Anker has a few good deals running today only on Amazon to satisfy your needs.We'll be honest: Anker makes so many different SKUs for its wall warts, power banks, and cables that it can even confuse us sometimes what to get. But for this batch of deals running through midnight PST tonight, we'll grab a couple.
If you feel pretty strongly about a business, you might head to some place like Yelp to express your thoughts. But if you haven't been using its Android app lately, we can get why: it's cramped, has too many tabs to dip into, and even retains a few elements from Android's old Holo era. Well, we've been tracking a design overhaul that Yelp has been slowly dosing out and is meant to remedy all of those faults.
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If you're eagerly awaiting your chance to order a Moto Razr come January, then there's no amount of teasing that will neither discourage you nor help you pass the time. But there are a few factoids about this flip phone with a folding display you may not have caught right at the announcement, so we thought you should get to know some of them.
In time for the holiday season, Fitbit is updating a whole bunch of software and services in the hopes of getting everyone excited and resolved for a healthier 2020 — just as it hopes Google ownership will improve its stance in the fitness tech marketplace. Fitbit OS 4.1 will be rolling out some features originally exclusive to the Versa 2 to other smartwatches while Fitbit Premium will be adopting more special routines to inspire some better habits.
Google Photos is redesigning its single-view overflow menu and metadata panel. Instead of forcing users to tap on a ellipsis button in the top-right corner of the screen to access tasks such as printing, archiving and deleting, they can now find them with just a swipe up.
What's the line between enthusiastically showing your support and spamming the comments with useless information? YouTube found itself asking that question as it attempted to manage yet another debacle on its platform, blocking hundreds of users from accessing their Google accounts after they had posted strings of emotes during renowned gamer Markiplier's most recent livestream. Worse yet, it had denied the appeals from most people trying to get back into their accounts. The accounts have since been reinstated.
Time for the obligatory autobiography, my news editor Stephen Schenck texts me in Slack. I dread writing about myself, especially under the pretense of doing it for work. It's about as fun and pleasurable as standing up to introduce yourself at camp and coming up with three random facts on the fly. And yet, here I summit my cowardice and submit to you my introduction: I am Jules Wang and I am with Android Police.
YouTube has been testing a bunch of new features for its desktop client in recent months. It now feels confident enough to debut two of them to the public: viewers can now assemble a queue of videos and will be able to manually tailor their channel recommendations.