consumer – Page 10

T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Enlarge T-Mobile USA failed to adequately disclose speed and data restrictions on its “unlimited data” plans and has agreed to pay a fine and provide some benefits to customers, the Federal Communications Commission said today. Like other carriers, T-Mobile slows the speeds of its unlimited data customers after they’ve used a certain amount of data each month; when these customers connect to congested cell towers, they receive lower speeds than customers without unlimited data plans. The throttling is applied after customers use 26GB in a month. “Under its ‘Top 3 Percent Policy,’ T-Mobile ‘de-prioritizes’ its ‘heavy’ data users during times of network contention or congestion,” the FCC said in an announcement today. “This potentially deprived these users of the advertised speeds of their data plan. According to consumers, this policy rendered data services ‘unusable’ for many hours each day and substantially limited their access to data.” Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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T-Mobile punished by FCC for hidden limits on unlimited data

Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

(credit: Qualcomm) Qualcomm is promising to launch its first 5G modem in 2018, even though basic standards for 5G have yet to be established , nor even which part of the radio spectrum it will use. Dubbed the Snapdragon X50, the San Diego chipmaker says its new modem will be able to deliver blindingly fast peak download speeds of around 5Gbps. The X50 5G will at first operate with a bandwidth of about 800MHz on the 28GHz millimetre wave (mmWave in Qualcomm jargon) spectrum, a frequency that’s also being investigated by Samsung, Nokia, and Verizon. However, the powers that be have far from settled on this area of the spectrum, with 73GHz also being mooted. In the UK, Ofcom is investigating several bands in a range between 6GHz and 100GHz. As the industry as a whole is a long way from consensus, this could be Qualcomm’s bid to get the final frequency locked down well before 2020—the year that 5G is expected to reach any kind of consumer penetration. Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Millimeter-wave 5G modem coming mid-2018 with 5Gbps peak download

iOS 10.0.3 fixes iPhone 7 cellular connectivity problems

Enlarge / The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus. (credit: Andrew Cunningham) Apple has just released iOS 10.0.3, a minor update to iOS 10 intended to fix cellular connectivity problems with the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus . Unlike most iOS updates, this one is available exclusively for the newest iPhones, since older iPhones and iPads running iOS 10.0.2 don’t seem to be affected. The problem seems to affect US users on Verizon the most consistently, and most users’ complaints say that the phones drop their LTE connections and either fall back to 3G speeds or lose connectivity altogether. Reports of similar connectivity problems have also come from AT&T users, and late last week, Bloomberg also reported on complaints from Chinese users who were losing their signals . Apple’s release notes don’t mention any particular countries or carriers, but iOS 10.0.3 will hopefully resolve the problems for everyone. Apple is also working on a major update to iOS 10, version 10.1, which adds the “portrait mode” feature to the iPhone 7 Plus’ dual-camera system and makes other tweaks. That update is currently in its third developer beta and will be released later this fall. Read on Ars Technica | Comments

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iOS 10.0.3 fixes iPhone 7 cellular connectivity problems

Western Digital finally offers a consumer SSD

Western Digital has enjoyed a long run supplying data drives for all markets, but had stubbornly resisted releasing solid-state ones for consumers. This was an odd position back in 2008 when the technology began entering the mainstream and it’s only become a more glaring omission in the interim. But today, WD is finally offering its first SATA SSDs for personal computers. While their new products for the consumer market have focused on cloud-based networked hard disks and traditional HDDs, they haven’t completely ignored solid state tech. Back in May, WD bought SanDisk for $19 billion, likely to get their considerable share of the SSD market. Their new storage drives, however, will come out under the Western Digital banner. Their WD Blue solid-state drives come in 250 GB, 500 GB and 1 TB sizes as a higher-performance line available globally to “select customers, ” according to their press release . The lower-powered WD Green SSDs, coming in 120 GB and 240 GB, will have a more limited release later this quarter in certain regions. Source: Western Digital

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Western Digital finally offers a consumer SSD

SCiO, the pocket-sized molecular analyzer, is making everyone angry

We were all pretty excited when Consumer Physics showed us their hand-held molecular scanner at TechCrunch Disrupt two years ago. They garnered much praise here and all over the web for creating a hand-held product that could scan and identify food, medicine, and vitamins. Now, two years later, people are pissed. The project raised $2.7 million from 130, 000 backers and it looked, at least on… Read More

Android 7.0 Nougat review—Do more on your gigantic smartphone

The unveiling of the Nougat statue. After a lengthy Developer Preview program starting in March, the final version of Android 7.0 (codenamed “Nougat”) is finally launching today. The OS update will slowly begin to rollout to devices over the next few weeks. This year, Google is adding even more form factors to the world’s most popular operating system. After tackling watches, phones, tablets, TVs, and cars, Nougat brings platform improvements aimed at virtual reality headsets and—with some help from Chrome OS—also targets laptops and desktops. For Android’s primary platform (still phones and tablets), there’s a myriad of improvements. Nougat brings a new multitasking split screen mode, a redesigned notification panel, an adjustable UI scale, and fresh emoji. Nougat also sports numerous under-the-hood improvements, like changes to the Android Runtime, updates to the battery saving “Doze” mode, and developer goodies like Vulkan and Java 8 support. As usual, we’ll be covering Google’s Android package as a whole without worrying about what technically counts as part of the “OS” versus an app in the Play Store. Android is a platform not just for third-parties, but for Google as well, so we’re diving into everything that typically ships on a new Android smartphone. Read 154 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Android 7.0 Nougat review—Do more on your gigantic smartphone

Here’s How A Tesla Taxi Held Up After 100,000 Miles

Christian Roy of Quebec City has been using his Tesla Model S as a taxi for over two-and-a-half years, accumulating over 100, 000 treacherous taxi miles. How did this high-tech electric car stand up to that much cab abuse? Read more…

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Here’s How A Tesla Taxi Held Up After 100,000 Miles

Report: Blizzard will reveal HD remaster of StarCraft in September

It’d be cool to see this in a resolution higher than 640×480. (credit: Blizzard Entertainment) Are you one of the thousands of diehard real-time strategy gamers who has yet to abandon the 1998 version of StarCraft ? Would you rather not deal with the sequel’s altered soldiers and upgrade trees, yet also pine for a version of the original that runs at a higher resolution than 640×480 pixels? The game’s creators at Blizzard Software might have a treat in store for you: a remastered version of the original StarCraft . According to Korean news outlet iNews24— spotted by Kotaku on Friday—multiple sources are confident that Blizzard plans to announce StarCraft HD in September. The announcement would be followed by a deeper reveal at BlizzCon’s November event in Anaheim. The Korean report hints at “improved graphics resolution and user interface,” but it doesn’t confirm whether fans should expect redrawn 2D assets or a complete 3D overhaul of the game’s Terran, Protoss, and Zerg races. The report doesn’t mention whether or not the remaster will include single-player content, and it doesn’t mention whether the multiplayer mode will hinge on the Brood War expansion pack (though, based on that version’s dominance in international competitive play, we assume it will). Read 1 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Report: Blizzard will reveal HD remaster of StarCraft in September

Mint 18 review: “Just works” Linux doesn’t get any better than this

We tested the latest Mint on this beauty: Dell’s XPS 13 Developer’s Edition (2016). (credit: Scott Gilbertson) The newly released Mint 18 is a major upgrade. Not only has the Linux Mint project improved Mint’s dueling desktops (Cinnamon and MATE), but the group’s latest work impacts all underlying systems. With Mint 18, Linux Mint has finally moved its base software system from Ubuntu 14.04 to the new Ubuntu 16.04 . Upgrading to the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu means, as with the Mint 17.x series, the Mint 18.x release cycle is now locked to its base for two years. Rather than tracking alongside Ubuntu, Mint 18 and all subsequent releases will stick with Ubuntu 16.04. Mint won’t necessarily get as out of date as Ubuntu LTS releases tend to by the end of their two-year cycle, but this setup does mean nothing major is going to change for quite a while. If the Mint 17.x release series is anything to judge by, that’s a good thing. Stability allows Mint to focus on its own projects rather than spending development time creating patches for every Ubuntu update. That should be especially good news for the 18.x series since Ubuntu plans to make some major changes in the next two years: moving to a new display server (Mir) and updating its own Unity desktop to Unity 8 are chief among the priorities. Many of those initiatives will impact components that affect downstream users like Mint. Read 40 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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Mint 18 review: “Just works” Linux doesn’t get any better than this

Is Elon Musk serious about the Tesla Semi?

Wrightspeed is currently working with Mack Trucks to supply the OEM with electric powertrains for its LM chassis. Wrightspeed Out of all of Elon Musk’s recent “Master Plan Part Deux,” the part that really caught our eye was a short paragraph about a Tesla semi. Much of the rest—solar, autonomous driving, ride-sharing—wasn’t exactly unforeseen. But the idea of a heavy duty Tesla electric vehicle took us by surprise and left us scratching our heads. Tesla isn’t the only company going after this market; Wrightspeed, Proterra, and BYD are already building heavy duty urban electric vehicles, and Mercedes-Benz is about to enter the fray. The Nikola Motor Company (no connection to Tesla Motors) already has 7,000 orders for a zero-emission heavy duty freight hauler that won’t be revealed until December. To find out if our confusion over the Tesla Semi is unwarranted, we spoke to some of the big players in the heavy duty EV market. Even though heavy duty vehicles only account for about eight percent of US carbon emissions (light duty vehicles make up roughly 20 percent), Wrightspeed CEO Ian Wright says electrifying that sector makes more economic sense. In fact, Wright doesn’t think the economics work in favor of electric passenger vehicles. “A Nissan Leaf is twice the price of a Versa and you only save $800 a year,” he told Ars, “that’s a 20-year payback time.” Wright goes on: Read 6 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Ken May

Tag: consumer