☕ Happy Friday! Big big reminder that Amazon Prime Day and all its copycats start next week. Sit tight, make sure you have Prime or at least a free Prime trial ready to go. We’ll have coverage on Monday, so tune in.
Welcome again to DGiT Intelligence, a still new weekly item featuring a quick leaderboard for new products, services, apps, deals, and more.
In this week’s edition, we welcome David Imel to the floor, Android Authority’s traveling journalist and Senior Producer over on YouTube. (Sidenote: the only way we, David’s colleagues, know where he is at any time is via his name on Slack. That could be anywhere from California to Shenzhen to Barcelona, depending on where the next great phone is being launched!)
Take it away, David.
Top 3 smartphones with headphone jacks:
“In 2019, you’d be hard-pressed to find a phone you can use with a pair of regular headphones: the headphone jack has been all but removed, leaving you with a dongle or a wireless connection via Bluetooth. AirPods are the Apple way-of-life, because Apple.
Fortunately, not all is lost.
There are still a few great phones out there that will let you plug in old reliable. Price points matter, so here are three options that should be suitable for almost everyone.
Expensive: Samsung Galaxy S10 series
Middle of the road: Asus Zenfone 6
Budget beast: Google Pixel 3a
Thanks, David!
And a PS: my sister just got the Pixel 3a, and loves it.
🆕 Huawei confirms EMUI 10 reveal date, coming next month (Android Authority).
⌚ The Galaxy Watch Active 2 will probably look like this when it launches (AA).
🥗 Looking for local specialities and discount meals? Google Maps has you covered - starting in India (AA).
👓 One report said Apple has “temporarily” stopped developing AR/VR headsets (MacRumors), this piece suggests no, that’s wrong (CultOfMac).
🗣 Google defends letting human workers listen to Assistant voice conversations (The Verge).
📉 Trump apparently knows what Bitcoin is, and he doesn’t like it - or Facebook's Libra (The Verge).
🆙 YouTube offers tiered membership levels to boost creators’ revenue (Engadget).
🛴 Bird lost $100m in Q1 because winter is hard for escooter companies (The Information).
🤖 Now AI is beating the best players at Texas Hold’Em Poker (NPR).
📦 Shopify and the Power of Platforms (Stratechery).
🏍 Harley-Davidson offers free charging for its electric motorcycle (Engadget).
❄ Here's what happened to that Tesla engineer's Jeep crushed under 10 feet of snow (Jalopnik).
🌠 Hayabusa2 lands on an asteroid and sends back pictures to prove it (TechCrunch).
📚 The war to free science (Vox).
👨💻 A nice discussion around the theme “I was wrong about spreadsheets”. Learn Excel and you can do anything, man (Hacker News).
🔥 Ja Rule off the hook for Fyre Festival fraud claims (Cheddar)
⚖ A US lawyer who uploaded pornography to file-sharing sites then sued people who downloaded it, has been sentenced to five years in jail (BBC).
🤦♂️ Here is a fireplace that burns proprietary logs (BoingBoing).
🎸 Metallica to publish a children's book, The ABCs of Metallica, for charity (The Guardian).
Here’s something fun: 400K people want to raid Area 51 to 'see them aliens'. As CNET explains, the idea is simple: they can’t stop us all.
Have a great weekend,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.
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