Technology

Motorola has quietly released its new budget phone, the Moto G9 Plus, in Brazil. As leaks previously mentioned, the new smartphone includes a 6.81-inch display screen, a quad-camera setup on the phone’s back, plus a 5,000mAh battery. The Moto G9 Plus is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G — the same chip used by Google’s recently released Google Pixel 4A — plus 4GB of RAM and 128GB of storage. On the front of the screen, the Moto G9’s 6.81-inch screen includes a 1080p display with a 16-megapixel front hole-punch camera located on the screen’s upper-left side. The quad-camera setup on the back includes a 64-megapixel main sensor, an 8-megapixel wide-angle camera, a 2-megapixel macro sensor, and a 2-megapixel depth sensor. No word on when Motorola will release the G9 Plus in other markets ...

Here we are again: it’s that time of year when every company starts announcing and releasing their amaze-o flagship phones, and we like to go just as big when we review them. For our iPhone 11 Pro review last September, we made one of our most ambitious and artistic opening shots ever. So unfortunately, that means we have a brand-new baseline of production quality. Tough for us, good for you! Our Microsoft Surface Duo review came out yesterday, and for obvious reasons, we didn’t have access to our usual set of cool toys, so we had to get creative. The end result was this shot: a composition of a 3D re-creation and practical footage, created in tandem on both sides of America in the space of just a few days. While our iPhone 11 Pro opening shot was all practical, this time, we decided to bl...

A group of Democratic senators is calling on the telecom industry to lift their limits and fees associated with heightened broadband use for students in light of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. In a letter addressed to the CEOs of telecom companies including AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, and T-Mobile Friday, senators like Mark Warner (D-VA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and Ron Wyden (D-OR) requested that the telecoms temporarily suspend data caps, overage fees, and throttling as students across the country begin remote schooling. “We have heard from public schools who express appreciation for internet service options that enable remote learning, but are also concerned with ongoing data limitations and continued lack of service for many households,” the senators wrote. “In many situations, onl...

We already knew that Crysis Remastered would support ray tracing if you had the PC hardware to run it. However, ahead of the release on PC and current-gen consoles, Crytek announced this week that, for the first time, in this console generation, the PS4 Pro and Xbox One X will offer ray-tracing support — because it’ll appear in the current-gen console versions of Crysis Remastered. Crytek’s CryEngine provides software-based ray tracing, allowing current-gen hardware to support the feature. Back in 2019, the game studio showed off the Neon Noir Tech demo, which, according to Crytek, was developed using a modified version of CryEngine 5.5. Software-based ray tracing isn’t remotely new; most recently, Nvidia added the feature to GTX cards in 2019, but the experience was subpar compared to usi...

TikTok star Addison Rae Easterling has been cast as the lead role in a new, gender-swapped version of 1999 teen romantic comedy She’s All That, called He’s All That. Easterling, with over 60 million followers, is the second most popular TikTok user in the world (after Charli D’Amelio), but He’s All That will mark her film debut. The upcoming reboot is being produced by Miramax, Variety reports, which made the original film over 20 years ago, with R. Lee Fleming (the writer of the original) and producers Jennifer Gibgot and Andrew Panay (who also worked on She’s All That). Mark Waters, best known for directing Mean Girls and Freaky Friday and producing 500 Days of Summer, is set to direct. Like the original She’s All That, the remake will draw on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion, and th...

The Xbox Series S might have leaked earlier this week before being officially unveiled, but Microsoft was hiding it in plain sight months ago. Xbox chief Phil Spencer appeared in multiple interviews in July, ahead of Microsoft’s Xbox games showcase, and he hid an Xbox Series S on the shelves behind him. The official Xbox account revealed the elaborate prank today, and Spencer added that the Xbox Series S appeared in at least three YouTube video interviews during July. While it might sound surprising for an unannounced console to be hidden in videos, Microsoft has a habit of hiding secrets and codes as teasers ahead of its console announcements. Microsoft teased its Xbox One X console with a bunch of videos that hinted at its 6 teraflops of GPU performance ahead of E3 in 2017. The company a...

Google appears to have a new Nest Thermostat in the works, according to new FCC documentation. It could be equipped with Google’s Project Soli radar motion controls, in what would be a first for the company’s home products, as spotted by Droid Life. There’s very little to go by in the current crop of documents, but the new Nest Thermostat (model G4CVZ) does have an interesting addition: not only will it offer 802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.0, it’ll be equipped with a 60GHz radar transmitter, similar to the one already used by the Pixel 4 for its Motion Sense gesture controls. That’s particularly interesting, given that those Motion Sense features would actually make a lot of sense on a wall-mounted home thermostat. The ability for the thermostat to detect when you’re actually nearby and loo...

Groups of conservative provocateurs, QAnon supporters, and others on social media have jumped on the release of the French coming-of-age film Cuties and a trending “Cancel Netflix” hashtag to associate the company with pedophilia. This isn’t the first time that people have tried to cancel Netflix. Republicans tried it in 2018 following Netflix’s confirmation that it had signed a multiyear deal with Barack and Michelle Obama to produce a series of titles. Earlier this year, people threatened to cancel Netflix over 365 Days, a movie that petitioners argued glorified sexual violence against women. And, at the same time that people are calling for others to cancel Netflix over Cuties, there’s a petition from fans of shows like Jessica Jones, The OA, and Anne with an E, hosting a “cancel Netfli...

Apple issued new App Store rules earlier today, permitting game streaming services like xCloud or Stadia to exist on iOS or iPadOS with a big catch. Apple wants companies like Microsoft to individually submit their games as separate apps using its streaming tech. Microsoft and Google are free to create a “catalog”-style app that collects and links out to all of these individual apps as well. Microsoft isn’t impressed. “This remains a bad experience for customers,” says a Microsoft spokesperson in a statement to The Verge. “Gamers want to jump directly into a game from their curated catalog within one app just like they do with movies or songs, and not be forced to download over 100 apps to play individual games from the cloud. We’re committed to putting gamers at the center of everything w...

I don’t think anyone expected an impressively thin gadget with two displays to be more repairable than single-screen smartphones, and iFixit’s teardown of Microsoft’s new Surface Duo confirms this is the case. The takeaway is that while the displays and rear glass can be swapped without too much stress, replacing anything else will be a tedious, risky process. As part of the teardown process, iFixit got this very cool X-ray shot of the Surface Duo. The innards of the left half look close enough to an iPad or any modern tablet, but iFixit says the right side “looks like nothing we remember seeing before — it’s almost a solid wall of circuit board, with a little window in the middle for the second battery.” There’s that engineering know-how of the Surface team. Image: iFixit But getting insi...

These days, it’s no longer surprising when a friend or acquaintance suddenly breaks into a rant on your Facebook feed. It can be triggered by anything from a politician’s tweet to a movie spoiler to the type of mask someone’s wearing (or whether they’re wearing one at all). If somebody on your Facebook feed has crossed what you consider to be a line, then you can use a number of methods to remove their posts — or them — from sight. You can unfriend them, block them, snooze them (so you won’t see anything from them for 30 days), or simply hide one of their entries. Here’s a rundown of how to accomplish each. Note: All of these directions are for the “new” version of Facebook on your desktop. Hide a post Let’s say somebody whom you otherwise like writes a rave review of a movie that you abso...

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 is a huge game. It draws from live data feeds to model air traffic, weather patterns, and more. It’s also incredibly realistic: nearly every location you can think of in the real world is represented in the game — and that’s enough for most people. But if you want to really enhance your experience, there are mods. Beautiful, gorgeous mods. I did a brief tour of some of ‘em. Here are a few of my favorites. The Millennium Falcon and more That’s right. Modder Eggman28 has put together a roster of cool-ass ships — including your favorites from Star Wars and Star Trek — that you can drop into your copy of Flight Simulator 2020. (Eggman28 does, however, point out that the ships are… challenging to fly: “They are pretty rubbish to fly, have no working interio...