Author: batteryforpc

The amount of fun you can get out of Google Maps Street View is endless. Between the frequent Buzzfeed articles detailing the same funny/creepy locations to check out, the searching for your own house, and the attempts to find funny place names, Maps is more than just a navigation service. With that being said, though, most of the funny stuff has been done on a PC, as the desktop implementation of Street View is a little more feature-rich. That is until now. The Google Maps Android app was just updated to fall more in line with the browser implementation of Street View.

Previously, Street View in Google Maps on Android was triggered by opening a location’s listing or dropping a pin. Now, as spotted by 9to5Google, nestled underneath the “Map Type” and “Map Stacks” categories is a new category: “Explore,” of which Street View is the only inhabitant. Tapping this option will highlight all observable streets in blue. Once there, all you have to do is tap on the desired location in the street and you’ll be instantly shown the associated street view. For areas that don’t have Street View available, they’ll just appear in the default color, depending on which map type you’re using.

It’s a quality-of-life improvement for Android users, though I doubt that too many of us asked for it. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see Google paying attention to the finer details and bringing all mediums via which Google Maps can be accessed up to standard.

This latest feature is enabled on version 10.23.4 and above of Google Maps for Android. You can download the latest release from the Google Play Store. For iOS users, it has not yet been rolled out, so we will have to wait and see if Google brings it there as well.

All eyes will be on Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., next week when the tech giant unveils its latest iPhones.

The tech giant is expected to launch three new iPhones at the event next Tuesday. It’ll be held at the Steve Jobs Theater on the company’s campus, according to reports.

“The main event of next week’s launch will be the flagship iPhone 11 Pro and the iPhone 11 Pro Max, as these smartphones represent the crux of improvements coming in this year’s releases,” Wedbush Securities analysts Daniel Ives and Strecker Backe wrote in a research note. “The new triple camera lens technology in iPhone 11 Pro that will work in unison for users taking pictures, along with some next-generation AI capabilities built into this year’s iPhones will be the key specs showcased, in our opinion.”

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The iPhone 11 Pro will also get a video upgrade involving real-time re-cropping technology, the analysts predict.

Wedbush expects that the base iPhone 11 will be priced at $749, with the iPhone 11 Pro priced at $999 and the iPhone 11 Pro Max priced at $1,099.

Angelo Zino of CFRA Research thinks that the three phones, which are successors to Apple’s iPhone XR, XS and XS Max, will be priced at $749, $999 and $1,199. The triple-lens camera on the iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone Pro Max could provide better 3D sensing for augmented reality (AR), better optical zoom and improved performance in low-light conditions, according to Zino.

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“All phones will come with a more powerful A13 processor from Taiwan Semiconductor, which will of course bring about better performance and efficiency,” he wrote in a research note.

In addition to three new iPhones, Zino thinks that Apple will reveal an upgrade to the Apple Watch and additional details on new service offerings. “The Apple Watch Series 5 will look like the Series 4,” he wrote. “It is believed that [Apple] will look to unveil a new ceramic casing design as well as a titanium Apple Watch for the Series 5 models.”

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Earlier this month, Apple rival Samsung unveiled its new Galaxy Note 10 phones, which use Google’s Android operating system and come with a stylus.

The organizations behind the widely used USB standard have released some new info on the latest iteration of the interface, and it’s nothing but good news for consumers. It’ll be faster and bring improved compatibility, with no need to pay close attention to which cable or port you’re using. And pedants take note: there’s no longer a space after “USB” and the number.

USB4, as it’s now styled (versus USB 4), was announced in March with a few promises regarding features, but now the actual technical specifications have been released to anyone who cares to inspect them. It’s another step in the process of bringing a major standard from idea to reality.

There are three main improvements in USB4 over USB 3 (or 3.2, or 3.1 gen2v2… the naming system is a mess):

Better speed. USB4 tops out at 40 gigabits per second, twice the speed of the latest version of USB 3 and 8 times the speed of the original USB 3 standard, which was of course itself way faster than what it was replacing. It’ll also support the max speed of previous cables and interfaces.

Universal Thunderbolt 3 compatibility. Thunderbolt 3 is Intel’s proprietary implementation of USB 3, which you’d find on Intel boards and those of any company that had licensed the tech. But Intel has come to realize that it was counterproductive to split things off like this, so they’re providing the Thunderbolt 3 spec for free. Anyone making a USB4 device or cable can make it compatible with Intel’s standard; it’s possible, but unlikely, that some will choose not to. There’s no reason for it, but who knows?

Improved display/data splitting. USB 3 introduced the ability to use a single cable to send power, data and a video signal (basically just more but specialized data) over a single cable. Great! But sometimes, depending on how you set it up, it could only send one or the other, or speeds were greatly reduced. USB4 does this much better, so if you have a monitor that uses 8 Gbps for its video bandwidth, the full 32 Gbps will be available for other purposes. It’s just one of those behind the scenes changes that will make things better and easier for everyone.

The other good news about USB4 is that it doesn’t use a new connector. We’re still in the transition period from the big rectangular port, the small trapezoidal one, the big trapezoidal one and so on, to the sleek USB-C plugs that you can’t do wrong even if you try. Changing that again would be disastrous — so the connector will be the same.

Two not-so-good pieces of news, though: It won’t be here for a while and it might be a little more expensive. These ports are complicated things and the ability to send more data, power and so on means it’s a little harder to make. And despite the spec being published today, it’ll almost certainly be at least a year before any products come out that use it.

Lastly is the name. The computing hardware industry is notoriously bad at naming stuff, and USB 3 was no exception to the rule. It was always annoying trying to figure out which version of USB was supported, what that meant and so on. So from now on, USB4 is the name until they come up with USB5.

Speaking to Tom’s Hardware, USB Promoter Group CEO Brad Saunders said they just wanted to simplify things, and prevent the profusion of products sporting version number badges that could confuse consumers.

“We don’t plan to get into a 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 kind of iterative path,” he explained. “We want to keep it as simple as possible. When and if it goes faster, we’ll simply have the faster version of the certification and the brand.”

Google today added a new setting to the iOS version of its Gmail app that will let you more easily block unwanted email tracking. The setting in question, the ability to prevent Gmail from automatically loading attached images, used to be found only on the web version of Gmail. Toggling that setting on allows Gmail to block incoming images, including invisible email trackers hiding in the body of email messages that, in most cases, will tell senders when and sometimes even where you opened the message.

This is a pretty clear response to the Superhuman controversy that erupted back in July, when former Twitter executive and designer Mike Davidson penned a blog post about the popular subscription email service that let its users track the location of a recipient and the time of day he or she opened a message. After Davidson’s blog post when viral, shedding light on an age-old and sadly pervasiveness form of privacy violation, Superhuman decided to turn its read receipt feature off by default and removed the location tracking aspect of its service entirely.

Google has built protections against non-consensual tracking into Gmail, by disabling an email sender’s ability to precisely locate a recipient via an IP address. (Google first routes incoming email messages through its own proxy servers, rendering any location tracking useless.) It has also for quite some time allowed you to disable automatic image loading to prevent any of these trackers from gathering data about you unless you deliberately decide to load an image.

But the image loading setting was previously restricted to the web version of Gmail, and that means it may have gone unnoticed by heavy mobile email users of the iOS app. Now, at the very least, you’ll be able to access this setting on your iPhone or iPad if you so choose.

As of Tuesday evening, the setting appears to be live for personal Gmail accounts, but not for enterprise ones managed through G Suite. It’s unclear if that’s because a system administrator has to enable it, or if Google is simply not supporting image blocking right now for users of G Suite. We’ve reached out to Google for further clarification.

Most 5G phones we’ve seen so far have been variants of products at the top end of manufacturers’ lineups: see the Galaxy Note 10 Plus 5G, the OnePlus 7 Pro 5G, and so on. Samsung’s latest 5G phone, however, is the Galaxy A90 5G, which means it fits into its mid-range Galaxy A lineup below phones like the S10 and Note 10.

Samsung has recently released other Galaxy A models that focus on high-end features like quad-camera systems and flip-up camera mechanisms as part of a strategy to combat aggressively competitive Chinese manufacturers. And to be clear, the Galaxy A90 5G would have seemed like a very high-end phone at the beginning of this year, and still has a more than solid spec sheet. 5G connectivity and Samsung DeX support aside, though, the phone feels pretty familiar.

The A90 5G has a Snapdragon 855 processor, 6 or 8GB of RAM, and 128GB of storage. The screen is a 6.7-inch 1080p OLED panel with a small “Infinity-U” notch and an integrated fingerprint sensor. There’s a triple-camera system with a primary 48-megapixel sensor (presumably Samsung’s own), an 8-megapixel ultrawide camera, and a 5-megapixel sensor for depth information, along with a 32-megapixel selfie camera. The battery is 4,500mAh and charges at up to 25W.

5G is of course a differentiator for some, but on paper the specs put the A90 5G right up against reasonably priced phones like the Xiaomi Mi 9T Pro (known as the Redmi K20 Pro in India), and it’s hard to judge how competitive it’ll be without release information for various markets. (5G isn’t yet a factor in India, for example.) All we know for now is that the Galaxy A90 5G is coming out in South Korea tomorrow, and Samsung hasn’t announced pricing details.