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These Anker true wireless buds are an excellent fit for my new Parisian life
Multiple noise cancellation and transparency settings are *chef kiss*
A few weeks ago, my husband and I packed up our entire lives in six suitcases and left Lebanon for a new beginning in France. Paris to be exact, or the outskirts of it to be more granularly precise. While the reasons for the move are more bitter than sweet, I've found myself adapting surprisingly well — and fast — to this new lifestyle. No car, more subways and walking, a ton of greenery, more rain, but also sunlight until 9 or 10pm, and more baguettes than I could ever dream of. But since we're a gadget site, I'll spare you the cheese and wine assortment and get straight to the main dish. Over the last few weeks, the Anker Soundcore Liberty Air 2 Pro (what.a.mouthful) quickly became my take-everywhere gadget and has conquered the precious real estate in my tiny pockets.By any specific metric, the Air 2 Pro is not the best pair of earbuds or headphones I have brought with me to France:
Android's Enterprise program to switch out security update requirements for mandatory transparency
Trading security for transparency?
For two years, Google has been trying to make it easy for businesses to run and deploy reliable Android devices through its Android Enterprise Recommended (AER) program. It's essentially a collection of certified hardware with certain minimum guarantees: They must be eligible for zero-touch enrollment, carrier-unlocked, and should receive security updates no later than 90 days of release for a minimum of three years. As XDA Developers reports, the latter requirement might soon be significantly relaxed in favor of more nebulous transparency requirements.
YouTube is constantly experimenting with ways to demonetize creators present news in a more organized and informative fashion. Last year, it started showing a 'Breaking News' section on the home page during important events. Now the company is expanding on that feature, with changes to search and video playback to improve transparency and accessibility.
With a platform as huge and open as YouTube, it's difficult to ensure that information distributed on it is honest and transparent. This issue has never been more apparent than it is now, with the spread of fake news and the labeling of real news as fake making it damn near impossible for viewers to know which sources they can trust.
As the WalMart of the Internet age, Amazon has its fair share of detractors, and for some of the same reasons. With tens of thousands of vendors using Amazon as a storefront, to say nothing of millions of products the company sells directly, sometimes its wares can be a bit on the obscure side. A new system from the retailer is trying to offer a bit of transparency, showing consumers where the products they've ordered were made and packaged. The app is appropriately titled Transparency.
I have always wanted true wireless earbuds. Over the past years, I have gone from using Bluetooth earphones connected to a central unit (Sony MW600, Jabra BT3030) to the smaller and less intrusive earbuds (Jaybird BlueBuds X, Plantronics BackBeat GO2, and BackBeat Fit), but there was still a wire somewhere in the design connecting the left and right earbuds together and I wanted it gone. I wasn't alone in that sentiment.It's this desire that Bragi banked on when it launched its Kickstarter campaign about two years ago, in February 2014. The Dash was promised to be a true wireless set of earbuds that had everything I wanted and more — built-in storage for local music playback, waterproofing for use in pools, and activity tracking and heart rate monitoring. It sounded amazing and I pledged for the $179 early backer tier knowing fully well that the October 2014 delivery date was incredibly optimistic and that I might be throwing my money at a project that may fail eventually. I was willing to take the risk though and pay that much money to dream and help the team achieve that dream.The Dash was delivered to me more than a month ago, about a year and a half late. I was expecting that kind of delay because the challenges of wireless earbuds are far more complicated than we can comprehend. But what matters is that The Dash was eventually produced and delivered. Is it everything the project creators said it would be? More or less. Is my search for the perfect wireless earbuds over? Far from that. I love my Dash, it works very well most times, but I can't use it because… well, you'll have to read the full review.
Back in KitKat, we were introduced to translucent system bars, which gave app developers the ability to make the navigation and status bars semi-transparent. Reclaiming as much of the screen as possible became an obsession for many fans as they demanded their favorite apps go "full bleed." With Android L, Google is treating us to even more flexibility by allowing developers to set their own color for the status bar, or even turning it completely transparent.
Are you in the Reddit Sync beta program? Well, now you might have a reason to join. The dev has just pushed version 8.0.54 with support for transparent system bars on Android 4.4.
Earlier today, we noticed a bug report for a very strange issue with multiple user accounts on the Nexus 7. Apparently, certain applications are displaying the underlying screen - be it the wallpaper, app tray, or the Play Store (depending on where the app was launched from) - through the foreground app. But here's the kicker: it's only happening on secondary accounts. Yeah, it's confusing and strange.