Technology

Before Android, before the iPhone, and before GoPro became a known brand, the Flip Video camcorder took the world by storm, allowing millions to shoot digital home videos one-handed and easily save, share, and upload them to a nascent YouTube, thanks to an iconic flip-out USB port. What you probably didn’t know: the Flip Video was almost a Google-branded camera, internal Google emails revealed by the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust sub-committee show. It would have been Google’s first camera and perhaps the first piece of Google-branded hardware as well. What we know In January 2006, a year and a half before the first Flip Video went on sale, Google Video product manager Peter Chane tried to convince his colleagues that they should cut a deal to make Google Video the primary video ho...

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos warned investors earlier this year that they might want to take a seat and prepare for a possible loss in Q2, as the company planned to spend $4 billion — all of its expected Q2 operating profit — on COVID 19-related expenses. Amazon projected a potential loss of $1.5 billion this quarter. But with the end of Q2 now behind us, Amazon shared its quarterly results, and they’re quite the opposite of gloomy. Despite the pandemic, Amazon doubled its net profit year over year to $5.2 billion, compared to $2.6 billion at this time in 2019. This impressive figure comes after the company spent over $4 billion on what Bezos describes as “incremental COVID-19 related costs in the quarter to help keep employees safe and deliver products to customers,” suggesting profit could have...

Apple has confirmed it’s planning to launch its new iPhones a little later this year. “Last year we started selling new iPhones in late September, this year we expect supply to be available a few weeks later,” said Apple CFO Luca Maestri in an earnings call with investors today. Maestri didn’t reveal why this year’s iPhone supply is delayed or constrained, but rumors of an iPhone delay have been circulating for months. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this year that Apple had delayed mass production of its upcoming iPhone handsets by around a month. Qualcomm also hinted at an iPhone delay earlier this week, highlighting a “partial impact from the delay of a global 5G flagship phone launch” for its fourth quarter projections. Apple typically unveils its annual iPhone refresh in Sept...

For years, Razer has set the standard for making gaming laptops that are compact, slim, and feel great to use. MSI wants to end that streak, and its new GS66 Stealth is actually a viable alternative, at least in terms of performance. It still has a little work to do on nailing the small design details. The GS66 Stealth doesn’t quite nail the fit and finish to take on the best, but landing short of that still gets you a polished laptop that’s stuffed with powerful components and other features that typically come with a $2,349 gaming laptop (as configured; this model starts at $1,499 and goes up to $2,999). It has a Thunderbolt 3 port for fast data transfer, and its display has a 300Hz refresh rate that takes full advantage of the Nvidia RTX 2070 Super Max-Q graphics to show off your games ...

The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel has been very busy Contributors: Verge Staff On July 29th, the House Judiciary’s antitrust subcommittee held a hearing with four of the biggest figures in tech: Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Google’s Sundar Pichai. But while the CEOs’ testimonies got most of the attention, the subcommittee also published a treasure trove of internal documents from the companies, providing an unexpected look into the internal workings of some of the largest and most secretive companies in the world. Some of those documents have gone into building the antitrust case for breaking these companies up — or at least heavily regulating them. But others simply give a glimpse into how the world’s largest tech companies operate, ...

The latest electric vehicle startup to cash in on a new wave of hype and investment in the space is Li Auto, a five-year-old Chinese company that started trading on the Nasdaq on Thursday after raising $1.1 billion in an initial public offering. It’s the second Chinese EV startup to become a publicly traded company in the United States, following Nio’s 2018 IPO and subsequent listing on the New York Stock Exchange. Another, XPeng, will reportedly be next. With Tesla recently becoming the world’s most valuable automaker, there is suddenly a renewed focus on funding EV startups. Fresh money has been rushing into the likes of Rivian, Nikola, Fisker, Karma, and even suppliers like Velodyne and Hyliion over the last few months from both the public and private sectors. While most of the ones goi...

The House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust subcommittee has just released a huge trove of internal documents from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google as part of its vast investigation into the tech industry. The documents reveal the internal machinations of companies that are typically highly secretive — and they even include a few buried emails from Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which we’ve shared below. Two sets of emails discuss the decisions that, to this day, keep iPhone and iPad users from buying digital books in Amazon’s apps. (You have to use a web browser as a workaround.) In one email from November 2010, marketing chief Phil Schiller wrote to Jobs, internet services lead Eddy Cue, and product marketing head Greg Joswiak about how Amazon was marketing the Kindle mobile app at the ti...

Less than a day after announcing that the controversial Saudi megacity Neom would become a major sponsor of the League of Legends European Championship, Riot has reversed the decision. The news comes after fans, LEC staff, and Riot employees criticized the decision, due largely to the Saudi government’s long history of human right abuses, which extends to the creation of Neom itself, a city billed as a kind of sci-fi wonderland. In a statement, Alberto Guerrero, Riot’s director of esports for the EMEA region, said: As a company and as a league, we know that it’s important to recognize when we make mistakes and quickly work to correct them. After further reflection, while we remain steadfastly committed to all of our players and fans worldwide including those living in Saudi Arabia and the ...

Earlier this year, Motorola burst back into the flagship phone world with the Motorola Edge Plus, a $999 smartphone designed to go toe to toe with top-tier phones like the Galaxy S20 Ultra or OnePlus 8 Pro. And now it’s following that up with the Motorola Edge, a less expensive, less powerful version that promises sub-flagship features at a sub-flagship $699 price. A cheaper Edge I’ve already talked plenty about the hardware on the Edge Plus in my review of that device earlier this year, so I’ll largely refer you there, seeing as the Edge’s design is identical in all but the color it comes in (a shimmering rainbow-finished black that aggressively picks up fingerprints) and the number of cameras on the back. In short, though, it’s a well-made slab of aluminum and glass that’s fairly unremar...

NASA’s latest Mars rover — a six-wheeled SUV-sized robot named Perseverance — successfully launched from Florida this morning, embarking on a nearly seven-month journey to the Red Planet. Once it reaches Mars, it will attempt a harrowing landing to the surface and start exploring the planet’s terrain, hoping to solve the biggest lingering mysteries about Mars’ past. The primary focus of Perseverance’s mission is to find out if Mars ever hosted life some 3.8 billion years ago. The rover is equipped with multiple instruments to search for signs of ancient microbes that may be lurking in the rocks and dirt on Mars. But most important of all, Perseverance is decked out with a sophisticated drilling system, designed to dig up samples of the planet’s surface, package them, and leave them in stra...

Let’s play a quick game of word association: Microsoft — Windows? Excel? Xbox? All solid answers. But for me, for a while in the ‘90s at least, I would have immediately answered “Flight Simulator.” Microsoft Flight Simulator is the very first thing I can remember ever doing on a computer, sat on my granddad’s lap as we soared across blocky landscapes together with a Sidewinder joystick. It is one of Microsoft’s all-time iconic brands. It’s also a brand that the company has more or less ignored in the past decade-plus. The last release, Flight Simulator X, came out in 2006, and a few years later, its developer, Aces Game Studio, was closed as part of widespread layoffs at Microsoft. A 2012 free-to-play spinoff called Microsoft Flight was less than well-received. In just a few weeks, though,...

Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 5G, the 5G version of the foldable phone it released earlier this year, is now available for preorder as an unlocked device on Samsung.com. Prices start at $1,499.99, a $70 premium over the previous LTE version. Along with 5G connectivity, that price gets you a slightly upgraded Snapdragon 865 Plus processor. Otherwise, the two phones are almost identical. Samsung is widely expected to announce a host of new devices at its Galaxy Note 20 Unpacked event on August 5th, including the new Galaxy Z Fold 2. The Z Fold is a tablet-sized device that folds to become the size of a smartphone, while the Z Flip is a more traditional flip phone device that folds in half to become more compact. The Z Fold 2 will reportedly also support 5G. We initially expected the Z Flip 5G to m...