Author: batteryforpc

Whether you work remotely or commute, chances are you’re constantly on-the-go, making quiet time a rare indulgence. Sony recently released a more affordable pair of ANC headphones, the Sony WH-XB900N, to accompany you on your daily subway excursion. These bass-heavy, lightweight cans are a great Beats alternative and boast Sony’s top-tier noise-canceling technology for less than the rest.

What are the Sony WH-XB900N like?

These are lightweight for on-ear headphones (254g), which is especially important if you intend to use them for travel. Ample memory foam padding on the headband and ear cups make it easy to wear these comfortably for hours at a time. Airflow isn’t great and this can lead to a damp experience in warm environments. Just like other noise-cancelling headphones we’ve seen, these fold and rotate so they can lie flat on a table.

Buttons rest on the left ear cup and may be remapped with the Sony Headphones Connect app. The same ear cup also houses a 3.5mm headphone jack and USB-C input. The headphones provide 44 hours, 22 minutes of playback and support quick charging: 10 minutes of charging affords one hour of listening. A full charge cycle requires around 4 hours. On the other side, the right ear cup is reserved for touch and gesture control. From here, you can adjust the volume, skip tracks, and enter Quick Attention mode by holding the right housing.

The headphones integrate both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, meaning you benefit from having incoming notifications read aloud, setting reminders, sending texts, and more. All of these functions may be initiated by saying, “Ok Google,” or “Alexa” to command the assistant of your choice.

Connection quality

Pairing the headphones to your device is seamless. Upon powering on the WH-XB900N for the first time, a window pops up on your phone to initiate pairing. (In order for this to happen, Bluetooth must be active on your phone.) You can also pair via NFC. Generally speaking, connection strength is consistent and reliable. During SoundGuys’ testing process, playback skips and audio-visual lag were non-existent.

While it’s disappointing to see Bluetooth 4.2 firmware, rather than Bluetooth 5.0, Sony compensates for this by providing a host of high-quality codec support. You have five streaming options: LDAC, aptX, aptX HD, AAC, and SBC. As SoundGuys’ research has shown, Bluetooth codecs are imperfect and performance varies greatly depending on the source device.

The Sony | Headphones Connect app lets you make granular EQ adjustments, prioritize connection strength or streaming quality, and more. That said, in order to use any of the Sony presets, streaming quality is bumped down to SBC. You can also use the app to adjust noise-cancelling intensity and reposition the sound, meaning you can choose your music’s directionality. It’s not quite as immersive as Creative’s Super X-Fi technology, but it’s a neat trick.

How do they sound?

These are ridiculously bass-heavy, which makes sense seeing as the “XB” moniker is emblematic of Sony’s “extra bass” product line.

Adam Molina, SoundGuys editor, was stunned by the emphatic low-end when listening to The Beatles’ song Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da. For anyone familiar with the celebrated band, you know that song is, in fact, not a banger. Midrange frequencies are masked by the low-end, but not to the extent you may expect, and treble notes remain audible without erring on the side of grating.

On the other hand, microphone quality is superb. Adam’s voice sample below is reproduced realistically. Since the microphone has a neutral-leaning response, nearly all frequencies are relayed with equal loudness. Ultimately, this means that no matter what your vocal register, this headset will make you sound good … or at least accurate.

Sony WH-XB900N microphone demo:

Just like its big brother, the Sony WH-1000XM3, the Sony WH-XB900N boast grade-A noise-cancelling technology. Ambient coffee shop sounds and car engine rumbles alike will be attenuated by the ANC. That said, it still can’t touch the effectiveness of Sony’s flagship. For $100 less, though, it may be worth the sacrifice.

The Beats Studio3 Wireless also include ANC technology, which adapts to your surroundings. Sound and noise cancelling isn’t as impressive as we’ve seen with Sony’s headphones especially its flagship. Plus, Beats’ ANC headphones are $100 more than these. If you’re going to drop the extra Benjamin, go for the WH-1000XM3 instead.

Should you buy the Sony WH-XB900N?

If you’re content with saving money at the expense of noise-cancelling effectiveness, relative to the WH-1000XM3, yes. However, these retail for $250 and the WH-1000XM3 can often be found on promotion for ~$300. If you’re between a rock and a hard place, it’s worth spending $50 more for the flagship headphones. Sound reproduction is more accurate with the same Bluetooth codec support.

Qualcomm unveiled a new version of its Snapdragon 855 this morning, called Snapdragon 855+. Sort of like how we had the Snapdragon 820 and 821 back in 2016, this new 855+ is a slightly improved version of Qualcomm’s high-end mobile processor to help take us through the rest of the year.

What’s different? Qualcomm bumped the CPU up from 2.84GHz to 2.96GHz. They also boosted the GPU by 15%. That’s it. Those are the only two differences. Oh, they added a “+” or “Plus” to the name too.

It’s still a 7nm chip that is ready for 5G connectivity and will likely power the next wave of top tier devices. We have no official word yet, but one could assume that this Snapdragon 855+ will be in the Galaxy Note 10 next month, as well as Google’s new Pixel 4 and Pixel 4 XL. Qualcomm says that this new 855+ is expected to be commercially available in the 2nd half of the year, which is when those phones are dropping.

The Snapdragon 855 Plus model number is SM8150-AC.

Google is defending its practice of letting human employees, most of which appear to be contract workers located around the globe, listen to audio recordings of conversations between users and its Google Assistant software. The response comes after revelations from Belgian public broadcaster VRT NWS detailed how contract workers in the country sometimes listen to sensitive audio captured by Google Assistant on accident.

In a blog post published today, Google says it takes precautions to protect users identities and that it has “a a number of protections in place to prevent” so-called false accepts, which is when Google Assistant activates on a device like a Google Home speaker without the proper wake word having been intentionally verbalized by a user.

The company also says it has human workers review these conversations to help Google’s software operate in multiple languages. “This is a critical part of the process of building speech technology, and is necessary to creating products like the Google Assistant,” writes David Monsees, a product manager on the Google Search team who authored the blog post.

“We just learned that one of these language reviewers has violated our data security policies by leaking confidential Dutch audio data,” Monsees adds, referencing snippets of audio the Belgian contract worker shared with VRT NWS. “Our Security and Privacy Response teams have been activated on this issue, are investigating, and we will take action. We are conducting a full review of our safeguards in this space to prevent misconduct like this from happening again.”

Additionally, Google claims just 0.2 percent of all audio snippets are reviewed by language experts. “Audio snippets are not associated with user accounts as part of the review process, and reviewers are directed not to transcribe background conversations or other noises, and only to transcribe snippets that are directed to Google,” Monsees adds.

Google goes on to say it gives users a wide variety of tools to review the audio stored by Google Assistant devices, including the ability to delete those audio snippets manually and set up auto-delete timers. “We’re always working to improve how we explain our settings and privacy practices to people, and will be reviewing opportunities to further clarify how data is used to improve speech technology,” Monsees concludes.

What’s not addressed in the blog post is how the number of overall requests workers around world are reviewing for general natural language improvements, and not just to make sure the translations are accurate.

It’s widely understood by those in the artificial intelligence industry that human annotators are required to help make sense of raw AI training data, and those workers are employed by companies like Amazon and Google, where they’re given access to both audio conversations and text transcripts of some conversations between users and smart home devices. That way, humans can review the exchanges, properly annotate the data, and log any errors so software platforms like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa can improve over time.

But neither Amazon nor Google has ever been fully transparent about this, and it’s led to a number of controversies over the years that have only intensified in the last few months. Ever since Bloomberg reported in April on Amazon’s extensive use of human contract workers to train Alexa, big tech companies in the smart home sector have been forced to own up to how these products and AI platforms are developed, maintained, and improved over time.

Often, the answer to those questions is small armies of human employees, listening to recorded conversations and reading transcripts as they input data for the underlying machine learning algorithms to digest. Yet there’s no mention of that the Google Home privacy policy page. There are also GDPR implications for European users when this level of data collection is done without proper communication and consent on the user end.

If you want this data deleted, you have to jump through quite a few hoops. And in the case of Amazon and Alexa, some of that data is stored indefinitely even after a user decides to delete the audio, the company revealed just last week. Google’s privacy controls appear to be more robust than Amazon’s — Google lets you turn off audio data storage completely. But both companies are now contending with a broader public awakening to how AI software is being beta tested and tinkered with in real time, all while it powers devices in our bedrooms, kitchens, and living rooms.

In this case, we have a Belgian news organization that says it identified as many as 150 or so Google Assistant recordings out of 1,000 snippets provided by a contract worker that were accidentally captured, with no wake word uttered. That the employee in question who was able to get this data easily, violating user privacy and Google’s apparent safeguards, is disconcerting. Even more questionable is how the worker says he was able to piece together sensitive happenings inside user’s homes, like a potential threat of physical violence captured by a false accept when the worker heard a female voice that sounded as if it were in distress.

It’s clear that owning a Google Home or a similar Assistant device and allowing it to listen to your sensitive daily conversations and verbalized internet requests involves at least some type of privacy compromise. Using any Google product does, because the company makes money on collecting that data, storing it, and selling targeting ads against it. But these findings contradict Google’s claims that it’s doing seemingly everything it can to protect its users’ privacy, and that its software isn’t listening unless the wake word is uttered. Clearly, someone is in fact listening, somewhere else in the world. And sometimes they’re not supposed to be.

Google will soon unveil a refreshed News tab that places a priority on publishers, rather than headlines. The company today tweeted a preview of the redesigned news section for the desktop version of its search engine, which will roll out to users over the next few weeks. The change falls in line with recent efforts by the search giant to be more responsive to the needs of publishers and cut down on fake news.

While it’s too early to tell what exactly the revamped News tab will accomplish, it’s clear that it’s a step in an entirely different direction. A look at the “Before and After” GIF of the News tab reveals that prominent news publishers are highlighted clearly on top, and the staggered look of numerous news headlines stacked on top of each other is gone. Instead, the tweaked News tab resembles the card format of the main Google news page or the Google news experience on mobile.

Instead of several similar stories being grouped together under one card, each story appears to have its own card. For example, a search for “MLB” hones in on the most timely MLB topic (National League All-Star voting results) and the stories of three mainstream publishers (CNN, the Washington Post and USA Today) are featured front and center, highlighted in boxes. There are fewer links per page, but individual stories are featured more prominently. There is more white space, but readers will be able to see more of a preview of each story.

According to Google, in addition to making publisher’s names more prominent, the updated News tab also organizes articles more clearly. While it’s clear that the new design is a lot less busy than its predecessor, it’ll be harder to get an idea of the breadth of coverage or read related news stories. Like all major redesigns of Google’s products, this one will likely take some time for people to get used to.

Samsung will reveal the Galaxy Note 10 smartphone on August 7.

But fans don’t need to wait until next month to see the phone for the first time — photos of the device have already been published by the Federal Communications Commission.

On Thursday, the FCC published routine certification documents on Samsung’s upcoming high-end smartphone. One document, focusing on the testing environment, included several photos of the unannounced device.

The images reveal that the Galaxy Note 10 will not include a headphone jack, following a trend set by Apple in 2016, when it removed headphone jacks from the iPhone 7 and then from subsequent devices.

It will include a triple-lens camera, according to the photos. The documents indicate that this specific model will not support 5G, but Samsung is expected to release multiple models of this device.

Samsung didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

The Galaxy Note is positioned by Samsung to compete directly against Apple’s iPhones in the U.S. in the premium smartphone market. Its distinguishing feature is a stylus that Samsung calls “S-Pen” and a large screen. It’s typically released in the late summer.

Last year’s model, the Galaxy Note 9, sported a starting price of $999 when it was released last August.

Samsung shipped more smartphones than any other company in 2018, beating Apple and Huawei, according to data from research firm IDC.

It appears that either the FCC or Samsung made a mistake when uploading the document with the photos. The photos are no longer available on the FCC website but have been saved on sites that mirror the database.

FCC certification is required by the U.S. government for every device sold in the U.S. that can connect to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or cellular networks. Samsung asked the FCC for confidentiality in a June 27 letter so that photos and other information stay private until the device is officially launched.