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B&H is offering a rare AirPods Pro deal with AppleCare included

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Buy AirPods Pro at Amazon – $229

AirPods Pro sales aren’t very common, and when they pop up, they tend to sell out quickly. These earbuds build upon the solid foundations of Apple’s original AirPods by adding more customizable ear tips, noise-cancellation, IPX4 water resistance and improved audio. We gave them a score of 87 for all of these reasons in addition to their hands-free Siri controls. While Sony’s WF-1000XM3 earbuds beat out the AirPods Pro in terms of noise-cancellation and overall audio quality, Apple’s higher-end earbuds will be more comfortable for more people than the original AirPods and their built-in H1 chip make them the most convenient earbuds to pair and use with Apple devices.

But being some of the smallest Apple products, it can be easy to drop, lose and otherwise abuse AirPods Pro. AppleCare+ for headphones normally costs $30, so B&H’s one-day-only bundle deal is a good one if you feel safer having protection for all of your electronics.

AppleCare+ extends Apple’s warranty coverage on the AirPods Pro for an additional two years after the AppleCare+ purchase date. Not only do you get battery service coverage and express access to Apple’s tech-support desk, but AppleCare+ also includes two incidents of accident damage coverage (both of which are subject to a $30 fee). So while you will have to pay a fee to get your AirPods Pro fixed if anything happens to them, you’ll pay much less than you would if you had to buy an all-new pair.

Follow @EngadgetDeals on Twitter for the latest tech deals and buying advice.



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Twitch gives traditional sporting streams their own category

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Twitch is putting a spotlight on its traditional sports streamers to help fans stay connected with their favorite teams and athletes even if they can’t attend live events yet. The Amazon subsidiary is relaunching the official /Twitchsports channel and making “sports” a standalone category. /Twitchsports will showcase content from leagues like the NBA, the UFC and the NHL, as well as from professional athletes such as Los Angeles Chargers’ Austin Ekeler and WWE wrestlers Rusev, Paige and Cesaro. It will also display a Featured Streams Guide where you can see who’s going live that week.

The streaming platform is kicking things off by teaming up with soccer clubs — and, yes, we do mean football, non-American fans — Real Madrid, Arsenal, Juventus and Paris Saint-Germain. All four will produce exclusive and interactive content fans will be able to access through the new channel.

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Lenovo’s first gaming phone has a camera on the side and two batteries

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Legion Phone Duel speakers

Engadget

When it comes to the Duel’s other cameras, Lenovo played it safer. For its primary camera, the phone has a dual array that consists of a 64-megapixel sensor paired with an f/1.89 aperture lens and a 16-megapixel ultrawide camera with a 120-degree field of view. By 2020 standards, a dual-camera setup is about two cameras too few for a high-end phone, but then the people who buy the Duel aren’t going to get it for its photography capabilities.  

Internally, the phone features Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 865 Plus processor. The updated chipset features a processor that is 10 percent faster than its counterpart on the Snapdragon 865, as well as a slightly higher clocked GPU to boot. Gamers overseas can buy a Legion Phone Duel with either 12GB or 16GB of LPDDR5 RAM (both options being overkill), and either 256GB or 512GB of fast UFS 3.1 storage. 

Legion Phone Duel batteries

Lenovo

To keep those high-performance components running cool, the Legion Phone Duel includes a “liquid cooling” copper pipe and uses two 2,500mAh batteries (for a total capacity of 5,000mAh) that Lenovo has physically separated from one another. The company says the placement helps prevent the logic board and batteries from heating one another up. Battery life comes in at about a full-day with “average use.” 

In some markets, the Legion Phone Duel will ship with a 90W charger. Lenovo says the adapter can charge the Duel’s two batteries from zero to 50 percent in 10 minutes. Fully charging the batteries takes 30 minutes. The funky thing here is the phone also features two USB-C ports. 

The Duel being a gaming-focused device, it comes with a smooth 144Hz 6.65-inch display with a 240Hz sampling rate to reduce input lag. If you want to use the phone with your gaming monitor or TV, you can. Home mode allows you to pair the phone with either a keyboard and mouse or controller, with support for keymapping included.

Legion Phone Duel rear

Lenovo

The Legion Phone Duel is clearly a beast of a device, but gaming phones are a tough sell — just ask Razer. The fragmented nature of Android hardware means most developers aren’t willing to put the time, effort and money required to optimize their titles for specific devices. Take Fortnite, for example: It runs at 90 frames per second only when played on OnePlus 8 phones. It doesn’t matter if you own another device with a compatible display — the game won’t render at a higher frame rate. There’s also the uncomfortable fact that the iPhone is the probably best gaming phone you can buy. Too many mobile games are simple time-wasters at best, but the titles that can most ably stand against their PC and console counterparts tend to wind up on iOS first. (That’s something that the launch of Apple Arcade has only made worse.)

If none of that matters to you, buying the Legion Phone Duel may be tricky. It will be available in China later this month, where Lenovo will market it as the Legion Phone Pro. It will also make its way to select markets in Africa, Europe, the Middle East and other parts of Asia later this year. Lenovo currently doesn’t plan to sell the Duel in the US, nor has it said how much the phone will cost outside of China.

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Microsoft shows off potential changes to the Office UI

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“The next wave of Microsoft 365 UX changes will go even further by fading brand colors from app headers and exploring adaptive commanding,” wrote design and research VP Jon Friedman. “A flexible ribbon that progressively discloses contextually relevant commands at the right time just where you need them.”

Judging by the video, this could mean that Microsoft will use icons and app color branding in the headers to make it clear what app you’re in. It also plans to replace the fixed ribbon with one that can be docked and floated based on what you’re doing, perhaps like a glorified right- or ctlr-click command box. The team hasn’t locked down the final design, however.

The designers also want to put the command search bar in the top center, making it easier to find the myriad functions available in Word, Excel and other apps. “We’ll further advance our seamless, cross-suite Search to bring relevant information to your fingertips,” wrote Friedman.

All the changes are in service of keeping you focused on the task at hand, whether it requires lengthy concentration or quick tasks. “By designing for multiple cognitive states, focused experiences throughout the Microsoft 365 ecosystem minimize external distractions, lessen self-interruptions, and jumpstart flow,” according to Friedman.

The sprawling article and lavish video don’t convey much information, but may unintentionally explain why the Office UI has become so complicated. Hopefully the new design ideas will help, but they could take awhile. “While some of these changes will roll out within a year or two, others are still very much exploratory,” wrote Friedman.

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Microsoft details how it will become carbon negative by 2030

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The company has also started to work on removing its historical emissions, starting by taking concrete steps to remove 1 million metric tons of carbon from the environment this fiscal year. It promises to make sure that the removal will be accomplished by nature- and technology-based solutions that are net negative and scientifically verified.

Microsoft has also launched a new coalition called Transform to Net Zero, which is bringing together industry leaders with the goal of conjuring up guidance and plans on how businesses can achieve net zero. Finally, the company has announced the private preview of its Sustainability Calculator, which provides its cloud customers transparency into the total carbon emissions resulting from their cloud usage.

Microsoft isn’t the only teach giant vowing to embrace a cleaner future. Apple just released its 2020 environmental progress report, as well, promising to make its supply chain and all of its products carbon neutral come 2030. It will achieve that goal by using low-carbon and recycled materials, recycling products and convincing its suppliers to rely more on renewable energy.

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Microsoft’s Xbox Summer Game Fest features 70 playable demos

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The summer Xbox event Microsoft announced earlier this month is now live, and it’ll give you access to over 70 playable demos from dozens of developers. You’ll be able to access and play demos until July 27th, though the company warns that most of them offer an early look at gameplay, sort of like “show floor demos” — the final versions of the game could offer an entirely different experience.

Similar to Valve’s Steam Game Festival that serves to highlight indie developers, the event gives you the chance to try titles you might ignore otherwise. The games are varied in nature and genre, so there’s something for everyone: there’s one inspired by classic JRPGs (Cris Tales), a skateboarding game with bird characters (Skatebird) and an action—adventure title set in India (Raji: An Ancient Epic). When the event was first announced, the game list only had around 60 titles, but Microsoft has added 15 more to it.

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Waymo and FCA’s expanded deal includes self-driving Ram vans

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FCA CEO Mike Manley said in a statement announcing the deal that “we’re turning to the needs of our commercial customers by jointly enabling self-driving for light commercial vehicles, starting with the Ram ProMaster. Adding Waymo’s commitment to partner with us to deploy its L4 fully autonomous technology across our entire product portfolio, our partnership is setting the pace for the safe and sustainable mobility solutions that will help define the automotive world in the years and decades to come.”

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Gmail is about to start testing verification-like logos for email

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Google has announced a slew of security enhancements headed for G Suite services, including some we’ve heard about like admin changes for Google Meet, but one of the biggest announcements is all about Gmail. Last year Google announced it joined the Brand Indicators for Message Identification (BIMI) group (Verizon Media, the parent company of Engadget, is also a part of the group), which is pushing an email spec that adds brand logos to authenticated emails.

In practice it seems a lot like the verified stamps that have proliferated across social media, but when you see them it won’t be a blue check, it will be the logo of the company the sent the email, as shown above with CNN. Emails are authenticated using the existing DMARC system and then there’s certification that applies the associated logo, which hopefully gives people trust an email came from the company or person it’s claiming to represent.

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Twitter bans thousands of QAnon accounts

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“We will permanently suspend accounts Tweeting about these topics that we know are engaged in violations of our multi-account policy, coordinating abuse around individual victims, or are attempting to evade a previous suspension — something we’ve seen more of in recent weeks,” the company wrote in a statement. 

Twitter also said it would take steps to limit the reach of QAnon-related content throughout its service. The company will block accounts and content associated with conspiracy theory from trends and recommendations and will “work to ensure we’re not highlighting this activity in search and conversations.” Twitter will also prevent users from sharing URLs linked to QAnon, though Twitter didn’t elaborate on which sites or forums might be impacted. 

Twitter’s actions are, notably, much more aggressive than Facebook’s stance toward QAnon. Though Facebook banned a small subset of QAnon accounts this year for breaking its rules around coordinated inauthentic behavior, proponents of the conspiracy theory remain quite active on Facebook and Instagram. The company also continues to surface groups, pages and accounts associated with the conspiracy theory in its recommendations. 



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