Technology

Motorola has announced the Moto G Stylus 5G, a new version of its very good, non-5G budget-friendly stylus phone. It offers broadly similar hardware to the 4G version, with notable exceptions in the new Snapdragon 480 5G chipset with sub-6GHz 5G connectivity and a bigger 5,000mAh battery. Priced at $399, it’s at the higher end of the budget range and will go on sale June 14th. Like its 4G peer, the G Stylus 5G features a large 6.8-inch 1080p screen, ready for your notes and doodles courtesy of a built-in stylus. It includes 4GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and ships with Android 11. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack, and a charging brick is included in the box. The Stylus 5G is a little bigger and heavier than the 4G version, but not by much — it’s about four grams heavier and 0.3mm thicker. Gri...

When I reviewed Nvidia’s RTX 3070 last year, I called it the sweet spot for 1440p gaming. At $499, it arrived as a more budget-friendly option for those not ready to move to 4K. Now, Nvidia has another option: the $599 RTX 3070 Ti. Compared to the standard version, the RTX 3070 Ti has been redesigned and comes with 8GB of newer and more efficient GDDR6X RAM instead of GDDR6. Like all of Nvidia’s 30-series cards, the RTX 3070 Ti also supports ray tracing and AI-powered DLSS technology to improve frame rates and maintain image quality. The bump to performance is small, though. I spent the last week testing out the RTX 3070 Ti at both 1440p and 4K, and in most titles, it falls behind AMD’s cheaper RX 6800 card. I wasn’t expecting the RTX 3070 Ti to come close to the RTX 3080, but there’s a bi...

OnePlus is planning to announce a new budget smartphone called the Nord CE 5G this week. TechRadar has a render of the device straight from OnePlus itself, showing that, well, it looks quite a lot like the original OnePlus Nord. The CE 5G, however, will be a little cut back in terms of specs. OnePlus’ product head Oliver Zhang tells TechRadar that CE stands for “Core Edition” and refers to a design philosophy where the company had a goal of “distilling the product down to the most important things.” “You see mid-range phones on the market with very exaggerated specifications,” Zhang says. “We actively avoided some of those features and kept the things we felt would really make a difference to the daily smartphone experience, like fast charging (Warp Charge 30T Plus), a 90Hz AMOLED display,...

Vivaldi users will now be able to check their email, calendar, and RSS feeds all through the browser’s built-in tools: the 4.0 release is launching today, and includes the Vivaldi Mail beta, which promises a more private alternative to web apps made by “Big Tech” companies. Even putting any potential privacy gains aside, Vivaldi is offering something that power users may want: an all-in-one app for browsing, emailing, and planning. The email client supports IMAP and POP accounts, so you can connect the vast majority of email services to it, and you can easily have messages open up in tabs rather than taking over the current window — handy if you’re the type who often needs to bounce between emails. The search is also, in my experience, very quick. Having your email available as a sidebar c...

HBO Max has updated its Apple TV app as it attempts to fix the myriad issues that have been plaguing the software since last week. The update fixes significant problems with basic features like fast-forwarding and rewinding, which had been introduced after the software switched away from using the native tvOS video player. The software update brings the native player back. “We just released an update to our Apple TV app, restoring the native tvOS video playback experience you know and love, with more improvements to come,” HBO Max said in a tweet. “Ensuring HBO Max viewers have a quality experience is our top priority and we missed the mark here.” We just released an update to our Apple TV app, restoring the native tvOS video playback experience you know and love, with more improvements to...

The Internal Revenue Service asked Congress for more authority to request reporting on the transactions of cryptocurrency exchanges and brokers on Tuesday, Bloomberg reports. The IRS hopes to use the data it collects to develop regulations for the fast-growing crypto industry — if it’s able to get the space’s biggest players to comply. The organization made the request during the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on the IRS’s proposed Fiscal Year 2022 budget. IRS Commissioner Charles Rettig said that the group is challenged frequently in its requests for reporting and “to have a clear dictate from Congress on the authority of [it] to collect that information is critical.” A request from the IRS for actual power to do something about cryptocurrencies makes sense. Proposed legislation regul...

Google may have shied away from a Pixel Watch, but a Pixel Fold still very much seems to be on the way — following a leak last August that revealed the company was planning to release its first folding Pixel phone in late 2021, Korean industry site TheElec is now reporting that Samsung will begin production of folding OLED panels this October for Google, Vivo and Xiaomi’s upcoming folding phones, all of which will reportedly be revealed late this year. Google hasn’t exactly kept its folding phone ambitions a secret; in 2019, it published patent applications for its own folding screens and admitted it had been prototyping them for quite some time, telling CNET that it didn’t have “a clear use case yet.” But now, it appears Google has a foldable, codename “Passport,” that could be nearly rea...

Apple’s text selection magnifying glass has reappeared in the iOS 15 beta, and Apple’s own site confirms its return by listing it as a feature. Bringing the feature back is a reversal from when Apple made the decision to dump it in iOS 13, which is a bit of a rare occurrence: Apple doesn’t usually go back after it’s done away with something (bringing back scissor switches in its keyboards after years of butterfly switches is a notable exception). The return of the little pop-up is welcome, though: I can only speak for myself, but since iOS 13’s release, I’ve constantly been struggling without the helpful little magnifier. The new version of the text magnifier seems to be a bit smaller than the old one (in case you’ve forgotten what it used to look like, you can see a great demonstration he...

After months of political jockeying and procedural hurdles, the Senate approved a massive science and technology bill Tuesday to boost US competitiveness with China. The bill invests billions into emerging technology industries like artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing in the US. The bill — titled the US Innovation and Competition Act or USICA — builds off a previous proposal from Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the Endless Frontier Act. Endless Frontier was lauded as one of the first big bipartisan bills to come from the Biden administration. But over the last few months, the bill, which was seen as a must-pass piece of legislation for both parties, was bloated with political mush and much of the original funding was watered down as it moved th...

Today, let’s talk about one of Apple’s many announcements this week at its Worldwide Developer Conference, which some see as a possible threat to the rise of journalism distributed by email. If that sounds self-indulgent, given that it’s coming from a journalist who distributes his work via email, I apologize. But it touches on so many of the subjects of interest to us here — a tech giant’s ability to reshape markets to its liking; how journalism will navigate the platform era; what we mean when we talk about privacy — that I hope I can pique your interest at least a little. I. Start with the announcement. On Monday at WWDC, Apple announced Mail Privacy Protection, which will limit the amount of data that people who send you emails can collect about you. Here’s how the company describes it...

If you’ve attempted to stream something on HBO Max from an Apple TV sometime during the last several days, you may have noticed that its player controls are unusable. It’s not just you. Ongoing issues seem to be related to an app update that supposedly addressed “a few bugs lurking around” on June 5th. Since that update released, users have reported that basic playback functionality — such as fast-forwarding, rewinding, and pausing — is borked completely when you try to use the service on an Apple TV box. How an update this riddled with bugs rolled out to consumers remains unclear. Unfortunately, it’s also unclear when exactly they’re going to be fixed. There’s legitimately no way to pause, rewind or fast forward on the HBO Max app no matter if you use the apple remote or the remote mobile...

The iPhone 6S will turn six years old this September, an eternity in phone years. If you’ve managed to hold onto one this long, then Apple has some good news for you — your phone will be eligible for the iOS 15 upgrade when it arrives for the public this fall. The iPhone 6S, 6S Plus, and first-generation iPhone SE, which all shipped with iOS 9, will be among the oldest devices to receive the OS update. Six years is an awfully long life span for a mobile device, and certainly puts the 6S in the running for the longest supported phone to date. The iPhone 5S was five years old when it got its last OS update with iOS 12 but wasn’t eligible for iOS 13. On the Android side, Samsung has made recent moves to improve its device longevity by offering four years of security support for some of its ph...