☕ Good morning! It's Wednesday, March 25th. I felt like I had to say that just to remind myself. Anyway, today's a good day for anyone who already owns an iPad, and I'm thinking of one friend in particular who bought the 2018 iPad Pro just a few weeks ago and had whiplash regret when Apple announced the 2020 models...
And those reviews are faint with praise. The new iPad Pro is not a smash hit but with trackpad support for it and all iPads that can update to iPadOS 13.4, the world of tablets is much more interesting again.
Reviews:
But the more important thing is in the just released iPadOS 13.4, and includes trackpad and cursor support for all iPads. And those who’ve already had a few days with it seem to hugely enthusiastic:
📉 YouTube cuts SD quality by default worldwide to tame bandwidth surge - users can still choose higher-quality streams, but streams will start at 480p (TechCrunch).
📸 Samsung Galaxy S10 and Note 10 to get Galaxy S20 camera features with an update due soon (Android Authority).
🔜 Huawei P40, P40 Pro full specs leak a day before official reveal (Android Authority).
📂 Royole reveals FlexPai 2 next-gen foldable display, says it’s tougher and more vibrant (Engadget).
📈 Facebook has put out details on how its platforms are holding up under strain, noting messaging is up 50% and voice and video calling have more than doubled on Messenger and WhatsApp, and investors be warned, admits it isn’t making money from those tools.
🗞 Adding to that is a Times piece detailing how Facebook’s own staff are struggling to keep things going while working remotely: from being told to stop chatting on work message boards, to building their own video conferencing tools as the likes of BlueJeans struggled to cope (NYTimes).
😎 As Half-Life: Alyx launches, Valve talks about what happened to Half-Life 3(Ars Technica).
🧻 A consumer behavior researcher explains why toilet paper shelves are bare: This is why everyone is hoarding toilet paper (Ars Technica).
🎧 With the rise of true wireless, is there a place for wireless earbuds? (Just to be clear: “Wireless” earbuds retain a wire connecting the pieces in your ears, but no wires to the audio source. “True wireless” have no wires at all) (SoundGuys)
📚 The Internet Archive has opened 1.4m free books and has removed the waitlist to borrow books. Free and open globally: the National Emergency Library (archive.org).
🚽 The US Navy's big beautiful new carrier has hilariously messed up toilets (Jalopnik).
👽 NASA explains why wheel-like blip in space images is not a UFO (CNET).
🤖 I got my file from Clearview AI (OneZero).
🗣Personal voice assistants struggle with black voices, new study shows (The Verge). (Please use ethnically diverse training data.)
😷 Why the COVID-19 related drop in air travel could make weather forecasts less accurate: less data being gathered (Gizmodo). (Worth it.)
🎮 What is a good starter video game for a middle aged man who has never really played before? (r/askreddit).
Remember that the Smithsonian opened up some 2.8 million artifacts to the public for use in the Smithsonian Open Access initiative?
Cheers,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.
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