Nearly a quarter of US households own a smart speaker, according to Nielsen

This week in Android: It’s weird phone week

We got to play with a lot of cool tech at CES 2019 , but little was cooler than the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 . Qualcomm had a reference device sporting the new SoC and we were able to put it through its paces , including our very own Speed Test G . The results are impressive. In other big news this week, we found out Motorola is planning on bringing back the Razr phone , made famous in the mid 2000s. We don’t know a lot about the phone itself, but we can make some guesses based on a patent from August of last year. Plus, we look ahead at the future of LG and OnePlus , including a new peculiar accessory for LG . Also, we have good news and bad news about Huawei’s security. Here are your top stories for the week 4:20 – Snapdragon 855 performance and benchmarking: Speed Test G, AnTuTu & Geekbench At CES, Gary Sims previewed the Snapdragon 855 processor in reference hardware. He had some fun with it. 21:45 – You’ll flip for the foldable Motorol...

My product launch wishlist for Instagram, Twitter, Uber and more

‘Twas the night before Xmas, and all through the house, not a feature was stirring from the designer’s mouse . . . Not Twitter! Not Uber, Not Apple or Pinterest! On Facebook! On Snapchat! On Lyft or on Insta! . . . From the sidelines I ask you to flex your code’s might. Happy Xmas to all if you make these apps right. Instagram See More Like This – A button on feed posts that when tapped inserts a burst of similar posts before the timeline continues. Want to see more fashion, sunsets, selfies, food porn, pets, or Boomerangs? Instagram’s machine vision technology and metadata would gather them from people you follow and give you a dose. You shouldn’t have to work through search, hashtags, or the Explore page, nor permanently change your feed by following new accounts. Pinterest briefly had this feature (and should bring it back) but it’d work better on Insta. Web DMs – Instagram’s messaging feature has become the defacto place for sharing memes and trash talk about peopl...

First ever drone-delivered kidney is no worse for wear

Drone delivery really only seems practical for two things: take-out and organ transplants. Both are relatively light and also extremely time sensitive. Well, experiments in flying a kidney around Baltimore in a refrigerated box have yielded positive results — which also seems promising for getting your pad thai to you in good kit. The test flights were conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland there, led by surgeon Joseph Scalea. He has been frustrated in the past with the inflexibility of air delivery systems, and felt that drones represent an obvious solution to the last-mile problem. Scalea and his colleagues modified a DJI M600 drone to carry a refrigerated box payload, and also designed a wireless biosensor for monitoring the organ while in flight. After months of waiting, their study was assigned a kidney that was healthy enough for testing but not good enough for transplant. Once it landed in Baltimore, the team loaded it into the container and had it travel 14 ...

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