🌞 Good morning! The OnePlus 8 series launches today, with the announcement live streaming starting at 11am ET, or just about four hours after this newsletter goes out. Lots of details are out, so final pricing and any surprises left for us await…
The Fitbit Charge 4 is out and reviews have landed over the past 24 hours. And while it’s a weird time to be buying fitness trackers and doing the things that fitness trackers help you track, this line from a review made me sit up: “The best fitness tracker you can buy, period.”
What’s good?
What’s not as good?
Other bits:
😷 Google, Apple reveal more details on huge contact tracing initiative. Android phones will get the tracking updated via the Google Play Store, not Android itself (Android Authority).
❓ And here’s more details in question/answer format from a call hosted by the two companies (TechCrunch).
🔜 OnePlus 8 series: Everything we know so far (Android Authority).
🆕 Red Magic 5G review: A beast of a smartphone with 144Hz display and 5G for $579, but uncountable little problems that make it unpolished (Android Authority).
🔼 Nintendo Switch update 10.0.0 is out now: finally move downloaded games and saves between internal storage and an SD card, remap buttons more freely, and there are new Animal Crossing-related icons (Engadget).
📹 Zoom will let (paying) customers pick which data center their calls are routed from (The Verge).
📺 Quibi to let people watch on their TV after viewers complain, which implies at least some people are watching (Bloomberg). The problem is I’ve re-opened Quibi twice since we discussed it, it’s tech, and its hyperspeed content. It does not spark joy and I think I was too kind initially.
👎 On that note, if you want to read someone exploring the content itself more fully: Quibi is a vast wasteland. Ouch. (The Atlantic).
📉 As YouTube traffic soars, YouTubers say pay is plummeting. Not a YouTube-related scandal, but a symptom of the wider downturn. CPMs paid by advertisers are dropping because there’s suddenly less advertising money, and less competition for spots. This isn’t just happening on YouTube but all media and advertising, from outdoors to Podcast ad-slots to newspapers (OneZero).
🎧 Razer just won the wireless headphone wars with Pikachu earbuds that charge inside a Poké Ball (Gizmodo).
🎶 The weirdly enduring appeal of Weird Al Yankovic (NY Times).
👨💻 “My code was in the original Terminator movie” (Twitter).
🕳 Elon Musk's Boring Company is done excavating first Las Vegas tunnel (Engadget).
📏 Portable clock, or the most expensive altitude sensor ever, provides a new ruler for measuring the Earth: an optical clock so accurate it runs faster if lifted by a centimeter (Ars Technica).
🌳 Not just us facing disease: A deadly olive tree disease across Europe looks disastrous (BBC).
🐻 Wildlife is reclaiming Yosemite National Park: 'The bear population has quadrupled' (SFGate).
🌠 Aw: A really promising comet that might’ve been visible to the naked eye just fell to pieces (Gizmodo).
🔊 “Is anyone else having problems with watching movies and constantly having to do volume up and down, because the dialogue is too quiet and the background music is too loud?” (With help for how to fix this!) (r/nostupidquestions).
Cheers,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor
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