Earlier this month, I had the chance to review Lenovo's new IdeaPad Flex 5 Chromebook. It's a great machine, with an excellent build quality and guaranteed Chrome OS updates for the next eight years, but it had one fault that kept me from wholeheartedly recommending the laptop — it only had 4GB of RAM.
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Last November, my favorite podcast—The Last Podcast On The Left—signed a 2-year exclusive distribution agreement with Spotify, for what was very likely a very substantial sum of money. That deal meant that as of February 2020, the show would only be available for Spotify users. And it wasn't just The Last Podcast On The Left, but the entire Last Podcast Network (LPN) and all of its millions of listeners. They would have to download Spotify to listen to new episodes of LPN's many popular shows, and they would no longer be able to do so via traditional podcast feeds (the exception being LPOTL Patreon subscribers, who can still access a traditional feed by paying $10/month).
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The OnePlus 8 Pro is without question a critical success for the company, but its high price and limited availability have stoked the ire of many long-time OnePlus fans. We don't think those are the only issues with this $900 flagship, though: there are definitely areas where the 8 Pro may not satisfy even those who find its cost acceptable. We're going to break down the five things we think make the 8 Pro a less-than-ideal phone (if still a great one).
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The OnePlus 8 Pro is still a lot of phone for the money, even if its high price hasn't gone down well with a large section of the company's fan base. And the new features it adds like rapid wireless charging and proper waterproofing are unarguably big and long-sought improvements that bring OnePlus' new flagship to the level of phones like Samsung's Galaxy S20+, which costs hundreds of dollars more than the 8 Pro. Altogether, we still think there's a lot to like about this $900 phone, and here are the top five, standout features we think make it shine.
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The OnePlus 8 Pro is by far the most expensive smartphone OnePlus has ever produced. At $900, it's within shouting range of "proper" flagships like the Galaxy S20 and iPhone 11 Pro. While it does come with the company's most impressive array of features ever, there's no doubt that fans of OnePlus have balked at the idea of a near-$1000 OnePlus smartphone — a phone from the company that debuted the original OnePlus One at just $300. Compared to even the outgoing 7T Pro, the 8 Pro comes with a big price hike, and that's what we're taking a closer look at in this article.
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Apple launched brand-new iPhone SE this spring, and it's already been pitted against the expected Pixel 4a as the budget smartphone war of the year. But it's a war I think Google has already lost. With the Pixel 4a nowhere in sight, the iPhone SE continues to win praise from critics, is selling well, and no major flaws or issues have emerged. With Google not expected to launch the Pixel 4a until later this summer, I think the budget phone battle ended before it even had a chance to begin.
Let's take the two side by side. First, you've got the iPhone SE: a 4.7-inch display, a single 12MP rear camera, "iPhone 8"-ish battery life (so, totally fine), 64GB of storage, the powerful A13 Bionic processor, gigabit LTE with dual SIM (via eSIM), Touch ID, no headphone jack, IP67 water resistance, 18W fast wired charging, and wireless charging.
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The original Google Home was a wildly successful product. Google sold millions of its debut smart speaker, and when it came on the scene in late 2016 to challenge Amazon's Echo, while it lost the market share battle, Google showed the world a smart speaker didn't have to feel quite so dumb. It is plainly obvious Google should build a successor to this now-discontinued product.
The Home was the Volkswagen Golf to the Home Mini's Polo.
Subsequent launches of the Home Mini (replaced by the Nest Mini) and Home Max filled out Google's smart speaker range, and the Nest Hub and Nest Hub Max later offered a more visual stationary Assistant experience.
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As YouTube Music's migration tool continues to roll out, many Play Music subscribers are likely asking themselves if it's finally time to just give up on holding out and switch to Google's new music streaming service. But as Play Music will die by the end of 2020, it could also be just as good a time to take your music collection to a personal cloud (or offline entirely) and switch to something like Spotify or Tidal as your paid streaming solution.
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At earliest, the top infectious disease official in the United States says a coronavirus vaccine may be deployable at scale by the very tail end of 2020. If everything goes right, and the vaccine works. And not for everybody, at least not until early 2021. Again, this is at the earliest if everything goes exactly right. In unrelated news, CES thinks it can hold a giant convention next January.
CES brings well over a hundred thousand people down on the city of Las Vegas via airplanes from every corner of the globe. CES is known for its extreme human density, not just in the convention center, but in hotels, restaurants, public transit (yes, people use the monorail at CES), event venues, taxis, buses, clubs, and bars.
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I've been a loyal Spotify user since what feels like the year the service launched, and a premium subscriber since 2014. Spotify premium has tons of great extra features, and I absolutely think it's worth the money if you're considering a paid music streaming subscription. But as I've been spending a lot more time at home of late, I've started watching a lot more YouTube, and the various pre-roll and mid-roll ads were starting to grate on me. Of course, you can remove those ads—by signing up for YouTube Premium. But that would also give me access to YouTube Music, meaning I'd technically be paying for two music services.
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