👋 Good morning!
Before we dive into what’s happening, we wanted to take a brief moment to thank today’s sponsor, OnePlus. The OnePlus 8 sports a triple camera arrangement, 8GB of RAM, and zips along on a Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 processor. Its 30W fast charging capability means getting a full day’s charge in just a half-hour. And you can currently snag one for as little as $10 per month through an offer with Verizon! Get the full details here.
Spherical Amazon Echo (2020) reviews are baller
Here’s something I didn’t see coming. The new, round mound of smart speaker from Amazon, its latest Amazon Echo (4th-gen, 2020), sounds "incredible.” Incredible!
- Reviews dropped late yesterday and while you expect a continuing set of improvements, it seems this device is worthy of your attention.
- That’s even as the ~$100 smart speaker competition heats up, with the Google Nest Audio just out as a direct competitor
- And various devices from Sonos and Apple that fall mostly above that barrier — Apple’s new HomePod Mini at $99 is the exception, but it hasn’t been tested yet.
- One more reason it matters: the 4th-gen Echo has both a Zigbee receiver and Amazon Sidewalk Bridge as well. Now, if that means nothing, it’s just an additional set of useful ways for smart home devices to connect to its smart speaker.
- It does still have a 3.5mm output port, useful for some.
- Maybe the main downside is the ball shape is a little bit tricky to manage on a busy kitchen shelf, for example, where real estate is prime.
Reviews:
- Engadget: It “sounds better than the 2018 Echo Plus, which cost $50 more, and it sounds better than Google’s just-released Nest Audio,” … “The Echo beats it on audio quality, but that’s not to say the Nest Audio sounds bad by comparison. It’s just not quite as loud, and the bass isn’t as prominent. But it still sounds great for its size, and a stereo pair offers a very strong listening experience.” (Image above, comparing the Nest Audio and the new Echo, via Engadget).
- The Verge: “... now Amazon has brought excellent sound quality and a ton of features to a price that’s much more accessible. That price is likely to get better once Amazon’s frequent and aggressive discounts are available for the new Echo. If you already have Alexa speakers in your home, whether that’s a cheap Echo Dot or an older Echo model, the new Echo is a noticeable upgrade to throw into the mix.”
- CNET: “This Echo has turned up the sound quality and added higher-end smarts than the competition, all for the same $100 price tag, leaving it one of the most forward-looking smart speakers released in years.”
- For the bargain hunters, let’s see where Amazon prices it during Black Friday.
Round Up:
🆕 Huawei Mate 40 Pro hands-on: Modernizing the Mate (Android Authority).
🍟 The company’s new Kirin 9000 chipset looks good too, with built-in 5G (Android Authority).
💻 LG Display reports first profit in 7 quarters, thanks to work-from-home shift (Android Authority).
📺 Google Chromecast with Google TV review: The new best streaming dongle (Android Authority).
♨ Google Fi deal: Pick up a Pixel 4a for just $216 / $15 a month (Android Authority).
🌶 Speaking of hot: Better than the Scoville scale? Chili-shaped device can rate pepper hotness (Ars Technica).
🍎 iPhone 12 launch day: People are still lining up for Apple's new devices (CNET),
🔎 New Google Shopping tools announced ahead of Black Friday (Mashable).
📉 Here’s why Intel’s stock just dropped 10% after reporting earnings. In short, cloud revenue should always go up, so when it doesn’t... (TechCrunch).
📞 Microsoft is putting Skype's seamless 'Meet Now' calls in the taskbar. Skype blew a 3-1 lead (Engadget).
🚗 Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ beta is here, and there’s a lot going on. The Verge’s headline says “it looks scary as hell,” because of the inevitable misuse that will happen. Early videos show promise though, with more advanced understanding and steering (The Verge).
🔋 Why is everyone building an electric pickup truck? “Tesla has the Cybertruck, GM a $113,000 Hummer, and Ford an electric F-150. And then there are the startups.” (Wired).
🤔 “You accidentally put in an hour more community service than needed, now you have to do 1 hour of community disservice. What do you do?” (r/askreddit).
Friday Fun
McBroken.com is an app to find out if any McDonald's Ice Cream machine in the US is working, hacked together by 24-year-old Rashiq Zahid, who queries McDonald’s internal APIs for ice cream, to figure out which machines are broken. Behold!
- This wide view of New York City alone shows a stack of broken machines, around 23.91% which is crazy. Why do these machines break so often?
- A number of different users on Twitter tested out the app by checking out different McDonald’s restaurants. For the most part, the app checks out.
- At some point, McDonald’s may try and obfuscate this data and break the app.
- But I am reliably informed that McDonald’s HQ did form some kind of “McFlurry Task Force” to get ice cream machines fixed.
From Rashiq’s twitter:
- I reverse engineered mcdonald's internal api and I'm currently placing an order worth $18,752 every minute at every mcdonald's in the US to figure out which locations have a broken ice cream machine
- to clarify how this works: mcdonald's keeps track which locations have a broken machine, I'm merely querying for those - no order gets executed, no ice cream is actually wasted 🍦
Thanks,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.
