Technology

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...

On Thursday morning, NASA is scheduled to launch its next rover to Mars, the beginning of a years-long mission to figure out if the Red Planet ever hosted life. The rover, called Perseverance, is equipped with instruments to look for evidence of ancient Martian microbes, but its prime goal is to excavate samples and leave them on Mars — so that one day they can be returned to Earth for study. There’s even a tiny helicopter aboard named Ingenuity. Perseverance’s ride to Mars is the Atlas V rocket, made and operated by the United Launch Alliance. Atlas V rockets have previously flown four NASA missions to Mars, including the Curiosity rover, which landed on the Red Planet in 2012. For this flight, the rocket is equipped with four small boosters at its base to give the vehicle an extra boost ...

Google One, the cloud storage service that Google launched back in 2018, will now backup your iOS or Android phone for free with your Google account. The iOS app will be able to backup your photos, videos, contacts and calendar events, consolidating what’s offered by different services like Photos and Drive into one place, Android Authority notes. Meanwhile the Android app, which could already backup a range of files from your phone, will now offer backups without a Google One membership. Along with backing up your files, Google One is also being updated to make it easier to manage which files are being stored. This storage management feature is available from either the app or the web, and will let you manage files saved from Drive, Gmail, and Photos in one place. A new storage manager wi...

Samsung posted better than expected earnings for the second quarter of 2020, with operating profit up 23 percent year-on-year to 8.15 trillion won ($6.84 billion) despite a 6-percent fall in revenue. The Korean conglomerate says it experienced a greater recovery from the impact of COVID-19 than it had initially forecast and managed to optimize its expenditure, even though sales of devices like smartphones were down from last year. Samsung expects smartphone sales to rise next quarter due to the launch of the Galaxy Note 20 and an unnamed foldable phone, likely the leaked Galaxy Z Fold 2. Its display business, which supplies panels for other device makers, saw demand fall but had earnings boosted due to a “one-time gain.” This is understood to be a compensatory payment from Apple after the ...

On Wednesday, lawmakers squared off with the chief executives of the tech industry’s four most powerful players, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. Even though each company is under antitrust scrutiny for different reasons, the committee used this week’s hearing to point out similarities between all four, making the case for future regulatory reform. Since last June, lawmakers have been engaged in a sweeping antitrust investigation into the tech sector, honing in on how some of the most notable names in the industry have grown too big by allegedly stifling competition. Lawmakers have heard hundreds of hours of testimony and obtained over one million documents throughout their investigation, a process that made it difficult for CEOs like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos ...

For the first time ever, Huawei has shipped more smartphones worldwide over a quarter than any other company, according to a new report from analyst firm Canalys. Huawei has long harbored ambitions to overtake Samsung as the world’s biggest smartphone seller, and going by the numbers from Canalys, that’s just what happened during the April-June period this year. That doesn’t mean Huawei will hold onto the top spot for long, as the results were clearly influenced by the ongoing pandemic. Canalys’ figure of 55.8 million Huawei smartphones shipped is actually down 5 percent year-on-year, while Samsung slid 30 percent to 53.7 million. More than 70 percent of Huawei’s devices are now sold in China, which hasn’t been hit as hard by COVID-19 as many of Samsung’s major markets. Samsung, meanwhile,...

During Wednesday’s tech antitrust hearing, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) tore into Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the company’s dominance in search and its use of data to monitor would-be competitors. “It is Google’s business model that is the problem,” Cicilline said, alleging a pattern of anti-competitive behavior that allowed Google to grow while smaller businesses were crushed. “Our documents show that Google evolved from a turnstile to the rest of the web to a walled garden that increasingly keeps users within its sites.” Cicilline cited specific emails from “over a decade ago” between Google employees discussing sites that were growing and traffic. Employees “started to fear competition from certain websites [and] web pages that could divert search traffic and revenue from Google,” Cici...

A car with a masked driver rolls down the street, windows open, bass thumping, dystopian chorus blasting into the summer air: Do you have the antibodieeees? Do you want to be with me? It’s the new song of this pandemic summer thanks to, uh, the guy who played Cousin Greg in Succession. Historically, it’s taken time for apocalypses like climate change to become summer bops. But hey, if nothing else, 2020 is moving fast. The song got its start in May when actor Nicholas Braun (aka Cousin Greg) was quarantining with friends, according to Rolling Stone, where the song premiered today. “My friends are a couple and they’ve been together for years, but I was back there sort of being like, ‘Man, I wish I had somebody right now to go through this with,’” Braun told Rolling Stone. “And so this girl ...

The 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards will be an all-virtual event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, a representative confirmed to The Verge, and it sounds like the new format could lead to peeks inside the lives of some of your favorite television stars, according to a letter from the executive producers (and host Jimmy Kimmel) that was published by Variety. USA Today also obtained a copy of the letter. “We are assembling a top notch team of technicians, producers and writers to work closely with Jimmy Kimmel and with you and your team to make sure that we can film with you (and loved ones or whomever else you choose to be with) at your home, or another location of your choice,” reads part of the letter, which was reportedly sent to nominees yesterday. Producers are still deciding what parts air liv...

Spread the word: Netflix has secured the rights to stream some of the best Black sitcoms from the 90s and 2000s — including my personal favorites Moesha, Sister Sister, and The Parkers, all of which I fondly remember watching as a little girl. I still remember running to my room to turn on the TV, singing the R&B theme songs for each show (they were so energetic and catchy that I memorized the lyrics word by word), and how amazing it was to see TV sitcoms targeted to my demographic. There weren’t a ton of black TV shows, with black female leads taking charge, that focused on things I personally struggled with growing up. I was pretty young when these three shows had their initial runs (I was born in 1995), but thanks to reruns throughout the 2000s, I got to experience these shows and w...

During Wednesday’s antitrust hearing, Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos came under fire by lawmakers over the company’s alleged use of third-party seller data in developing its own products. Earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon employees have accessed sales data from independent sellers on its marketplace to help the company develop competing products for its private-label. Amazon has a policy barring the practice, but lawmakers like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) focused in on the company’s enforcement of that policy. “Let me ask you, Mr. Bezos, does Amazon ever access and use seller data when making business decisions?” Jayapal asked. “I can’t guarantee you that that policy has never been violated.” Bezos highlighted the company’s policy banning the practice, but said...