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Verizon gives customers extra mobile data to deal with COVID-19 (updated)

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Fios and DSL users don’t have data caps, Verizon reiterated.

The provider is also offering some breaks for those facing a financial hit from the coronavirus outbreak. It’s waiving overage charges and late fees, and will waive broadband and voice charges for existing Lifeline customers. If you need wired internet access, Lifeline customers will get a $20 per month discount on Mix & Match plans that lower their service to $20 per month for a 200Mbps plan. You’ll eventually have to rent the router, but those charges are waived for 20 days.

It’s not necessarily difficult for Verizon to implement some of these moves. When many states are effectively on lockdown, there’s likely to be less demand for mobile data in general. We’d add that other carriers have implemented their own measures, such as T-Mobile’s new $15 5G plan and AT&T’s expansion of its Access low-cost internet plan to more households. Providers are bracing for a significant impact from stay-at-home orders and mass closures for businesses, and efforts like this could be crucial to both keeping people online and preventing a steep drop in subscribers.

Update 3/23 7:20PM ET: Verizon reiterated that there haven’t been caps on landline broadband to start with — we’ve updated accordingly.

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Apple Music’s Beats 1 station will broadcast from hosts’ homes

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Office workers aren’t the only ones who can work from home during the coronavirus pandemic — radio DJs can do so, too. Show hosts on Beats 1, Apple Music‘s internet radio station, will be broadcasting from the safety of their homes starting today. According to Apple, they will use FaceTime on their iPhones to conduct interviews with popular musicians like Elton John and Hayley Williams. It’s not clear whether or not the anchors will use iPhones to record the non-interview sections of their shows, but it would be surprising if they opted for smartphones over more professional audio equipment such as condenser microphones and preamps. However, exclusive programs from Stone Age’s Josh Homme, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig and more will indeed be recorded on their iPhones.

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Apple is giving free e-books and audiobooks to people in the US

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The timing of the promotion suggests Apple is trying to help out people who are stuck inside during the coronavirus pandemic. This appears to be a limited-time offer, so if you’re interested, take advantage as soon as you can.

Once you’ve finished reading your freebie from Apple Books, you can turn to an app like Libby to get more reading material. Libby allows you to borrow e-books and audiobooks from your local library. All you need is a library card, which, in most instances, you can get for free.

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Google makes it easier to play Android apps before they’ve finished loading

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First up, there are a bunch of new Android tools for mobile game development. These include a revamped Android Studio System Trace profiler, a new extension for Visual Studio and a new Android GPU Inspector, which will let devs look deeply into an Android GPU to see detailed information about a game’s render stages and GPU counters. Various Google APIs — including Google Play Billing, Android App Bundles and Play Instant — will now be consolidated in a new Game Package Registry, and Crytek’s CRYENGINE will be adding Android support this summer.

There’s also a few new ways for developers to reach more devices and users. There’s support for native symbols in Play Console, new performance insights in Android vitals and the introduction of Google Play Asset Delivery — this builds on the existing App Bundle infrastructure to help players get into games faster while assets are being downloaded, helping developers cut the costs of hosting and delivering game resources. Game developers using Unity can also now access all of Play Billing Library 2’s features, such as letting users pay with cash and surfacing IAPs outside of the game. Catch up with everything announced at Google for Games Developer Summit here.

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Today is the last day for Europeans to save on Disney+

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Today is the final day for Europeans to sign up for Disney+ at a discount. You can currently get yearly access to the home of Baby Yoda and company for £49.99/€59.99 as opposed to £59.99/€69.99. The discount is part of a limited…

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Amazon Prime Video finally introduces viewer profiles

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We’ve asked Amazon to be more specific about where profiles are available, although they’re already available in full across Android, iOS, 10th-generation or newer Fire tablets, current-gen Apple TV boxes and Chromecast. People in India also have full access on Fire TV devices. You can also use profiles on a basic level (no profile management) with screen-equipped Alexa devices, the Fire TV home screen experience and older Apple TV devices, not to mention most other living room hardware.

The timing couldn’t be more appropriate. With people being urged to stay at home to reduce the spread of COVID-19, Prime Video usage is bound to go up — and that includes driving viewership by family members who might not have used the service much before. Profiles, plus a Cinema hub highlighting movies that were supposed to be in theaters, could encourage more people to give Prime Video a try.

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Facebook opens Messenger to help governments offer coronavirus advice

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Argentina’s Ministry of Health is one of the first to launch a Messenger experience using the new program. It enlisted Botmaker.com to create an app that can “answer questions from the public about coronavirus and … provide fast, reliable and official advice 24 hours a day,” Facebook wrote. It said that UNICEF and Pakistan’s Ministry of National Health Services are also using Messenger to share COVID-19 information.

“The Messenger experience allows [us to] support and serve citizens seeking up to date information on the coronavirus, while keeping our helpline open for more critical cases,” said a spokesperson for Pakistan’s minister of health.

Facebook is also creating a hackathon, encouraging developers to create messaging solutions around COVID-19 issues like social distancing. Participants will work on local and global solutions and get access to educational materials, tutorials and more.

Along with Facebook’s WhatsApp, Messenger is one of the most widely used messaging apps around the world with nearly 1.5 billion daily users. Since the service is free (if you have an internet connection), it’s often preferred by users to text messages that can carry a heavy fee.

That has made those platforms a prime source for false or misleading information. To combat that, Facebook, along with Google, Twitter and other tech giants, agreed to block the spread of coronavirus misinformation while promoting accurate content from official sources. Last week, Facebook created a new coronavirus information center for its News Feed and launched a chatbot and hub for WhatsApp.

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The Morning After: Siri has a COVID-19 questionnaire

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Plus, 40W wireless fast charging if the leak is accurate.Huawei P40 Pro may feature 50X zoom, custom photography chip

Ahead of the official debut on March 26th, more leaks have surfaced about both the P40 Pro and P40. As expected, the P40 Pro is all about photography. The phone will reportedly feature a 50-megapixel wide camera, 40-megapixel telephoto camera, a time-of-flight depth sensor and one more (likely ultra-wide) 12-megapixel camera. The telephoto camera will be able to zoom in on subjects by a factor of up to 50x — less than the 100X zoom on Samsung’s Galaxy S20 Ultra, but then that didn’t exactly work that well anyhow. 40W fast-charging? Yep, that’s rumored to be there, too.

It’s focusing on more important supplies.
Amazon halts orders on some non-essentials in France and Italy

Amazon is prioritizing orders in areas hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. The online retailer said it would temporarily stop taking orders for “some non-essential products” in France and Italy to help Amazon warehouses focus on more vital deliveries.

The company didn’t say what it was stopping, but the Reuters source believes essentials include groceries, health products, household items, personal care, industrial goods, scientific products and pet supplies. The restrictions only affect sales fulfilled through Amazon. You can still buy non-essentials from Amazon third parties in France and Italy.

Hopefully it’s just a cold.
Apple’s Siri has a coronavirus diagnosis tool

It’s no screening test, but Apple has quietly updated Siri in the US to provide a questionnaire (using US Public Health Service and CDC data) when you ask if you have the coronavirus. The voice assistant will ask if you’re exhibiting symptoms like a fever or respiratory problems and advises you to avoid contact with others if you appear infected. Siri also urges you to call 911 if your symptoms are extreme and will point you to the App Store to download telehealth apps for remote consultations. It could help take some of the weight off emergency service hotlines.

Yes it still exists.MoviePass owner sells Moviefone for a fraction of its original worth

Moviefone is far from its glory days. The defunct owner of MoviePass, Helios Matheson and Analytics, has sold the once-legendary movie listing service for just over $1 million as part of bankruptcy proceedings. That’s just a fraction of the $388 million AOL (subsumed into Engadget’s parent company, Verizon Media) bought it for in 1999. It’s not clear what winning bidder, Born in Cleveland LLC, intends to do with Moviefone, but it’s safe to say Moviefone’s heyday isn’t coming back.

The eventual ubiquity of internet access was not kind to Moviefone, which started as an automated phone offering in 1989. Although it did embrace the web and mobile apps, the era of Moviefone was already over.

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Google is rolling out a redesigned Podcasts app to some Android users

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The main draw is a new three-tab interface that does a lot to declutter the current experience. Instead of emphasizing discoverability, the main “Home” tab now focuses on your current favorites. New icons allow you to download and queue episodes without tapping into a specific episode. In a way, this part of the interface is reminiscent of the tweaks Spotify made to its podcasts section. Elsewhere, the Home tab takes a different approach to how it goes about letting you know when you have new episodes to listen to; there’s now a circular red icon at the top right corner of a podcast’s cover art that’s hard to miss.

The update also appears to have enabled auto-downloading for some people, allowing them to configure the app to fetch the latest episodes of their favorite shows automatically. According to 9to5, this is a feature Google has been slowly turning on for some Podcasts users since this past May, but it now looks like it may be rolling out more broadly. Another new feature allows you to set individual notifications for shows so that you can know the moment there’s a new episode to check out.

For most of Android’s history, Google has treated podcasts as an afterthought. Even when you factor in this upcoming update, there are still a lot of features the company could add to make Podcasts more competitive with apps like Overcast and Spotify. Still, this is a step in the right direction.

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MoviePass owner sells Moviefone for a fraction of its original worth

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The service has a long and tortured history. It started as an automated phone offering in 1989, and quickly grew in popularity as an option for finding showtimes in an era when newspapers and landlines ruled. Its role in a famous Seinfeld bit spoke volumes about its influence on popular culture.

However, the growing ubiquity of internet access was not kind to Moviefone. Although it did embrace the web and mobile apps, it simply wasn’t necessary when any theater or search engine could offer similar features. It shrunk to the point where Helios & Matheson could snap it up for a total of $9 million in cash and stock. After Helios & Matheson went bankrupt, Moviefone was reportedly run by just one person. It was a classic example of a company basing its business around technology became obsolete — the surprise is simply that Moviefone has clung to life for so long.

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