Many carriers that serve rural areas use relatively inexpensive ZTE and Huawei equipment. After the FCC started collecting data about that in February, more than 50 carriers have told the agency they or their subsidiaries have tech from those companies in their networks.
However, it might be prohibitively expensive for them to tear all of that out and install equipment and services from other suppliers. The CEO of a small carrier in Oregon told The Verge in June that it could cost $1.5 million to replace Huawei equipment it bought for $500,000 in the first place — a price he might not be able to cover before he receives a reimbursement from the government.
A federal process to reimburse carriers for the cost of replacing such tech was established through the Secure and Trusted Communications Act, which President Trump signed into law in March. The legislation required telecoms to replace “suspect foreign network equipment.” In other words, Huawei and ZTE tech.
Congress has yet to appropriate the reimbursement funds, however, and FCC Chairman Ajit Pai has urged it to do so. “By identifying the presence of insecure equipment and services in our networks, we can now work to ensure that these networks—especially those of small and rural carriers—rely on infrastructure from trusted vendors,” he said in a statement. “I once again strongly urge Congress to appropriate funding to reimburse carriers for replacing any equipment or services determined to be a national security threat.”
Meanwhile, in May, Trump extended an executive order that effectively bans American companies from buying and using equipment from the Huawei and ZTE. That order now runs through May 2021.
Lo-Fi Player, a new project out of Google Magenta, wants to help people play around with music creation — no experience necessary. Lo-Fi Player is a pixelated, 2D virtual room that runs in a web browser. It lets you mix lo-fi hip hop tracks by clicking on different objects in the room, and it uses machine learning to give the tracks a little finesse.
Once you have clicked around on everything from the guitars to the window, plants and desk and generated sounds you like, you can share your Lo-Fi Player room with friends. If you click the radio or TV, you’ll trigger machine-learning models that produce a few new melodies, and you can click the green ceiling lamp to stop and start the music.
Thanks to the upgraded app, users will be able to set up their Neato D10 in just six steps. As promised, Neato vacuums now work with Siri Shortcuts, as well as Alexa and Google Assistant. You can map up to three floorplans, set “zone” cleaning, get cleaning summaries, choose turbo and eco modes and use remote start and scheduling.
Neato revealed the Neato D10, along with slightly paired down Neato D9 and Neato D8 models, at IFA 2020 in Berlin today. The Neato D9 and Neato D8 use the company’s LaserSmart mapping technology and have shorter run times than the D10, 120 minutes and 90 minutes, respectively.
The new product line is set to arrive in North America, Europe and Japan this fall, but the company has not yet revealed pricing. For reference, its existing Botvac D7 Connected cost $800. That puts Neato’s robotic vacuums in the range of the iRobot Roomba i7+, which originally sold for $1,000 but is now on sale for $700.
Lutron’s Caseta, Caseta Pro and RA2 Select systems will support this integration, as will all of Ring’s smart doorbells and cameras. You’ll have control over which lights turn on when Ring detects those aforementioned activities. For instance, you might set it up so that when someone rings your doorbell or you’re walking up to your front door, the entry light switches on. If a Ring camera picks up movement outside, you may want your porch and backyard lights to activate.
Fitbit claims the Charge 4’s battery can go seven days with regular use, and five hours with GPS enabled. This was reinforced by both Valentina’s and our users’ experiences. Valentina still had 20 percent battery after three days (which included a few hour-long GPS sessions), while Dan said he was “just a couple of hours short of seven days since my last charge and I still have 28 percent of the battery remaining.” However, he also found that “the built in GPS takes like 20 percent of the battery on an hour long walk … This was disappointing. Then Fitbit released an update that lets me use the GPS on my phone instead of the built-in GPS. Problem solved.”
GPS
Mark had the opposite experience, finding the GPS antenna “woefully weak and inadequate for the task at hand.” He was frustrated by the time the watch took to scan for, connect and stay linked to a GPS signal. “Just hope that nothing blocks signal visibility, like a forest, a two-story building or a light cloud cover. It can, and will, lose signal should any of the aforementioned ‘obstacles’ occur — and finding the signal again requires you to restart your activity.” K also experienced issues here, as the “device randomly stops tracking my GPS during workouts. Sometimes it happens two miles in and sometimes it just records a few data points altogether.” Dan got luckier, saying his only gripe (in addition to the GPS drain) was “sometimes when I turned over at night, the screen would light up and was blindingly bright.” However, he found “you could prevent this from happening by setting a sleep time which requires you to use the button on the side to turn the screen on.”
Valentina Palladino
Software
This is where the majority of our users ran into problems. The built-in NFC payment function was not among them, with K reporting that it “works like a charm. I didn’t have to retry tapping and waving like I used to at times with my Wear OS device.” Mark liked this feature too, calling it “another nice addition, provided it works with your bank or card.” K also felt good about the sleep tracking and smart wake up options, which worked well for them. Dan liked that he could see “steps, heart rate, calories and distance walked on the screen at once. I used to have to swipe several times to do that on the Alta HR.”
But there was much more mentioned in the cons column. Edgar had issues syncing the phone and using multiple profiles on it. “The app would always show that the watch was not charging, which makes it impossible to continue with the [installation] process … Before setting it up, it just shows either a smiley or the Fitbit logo, nothing more. After many attempts, I was able to connect the watch to my wife’s phone.” He also ran into problems trying to wipe user data to set up the watch for another profile. “In order to not mess with her data, I decided to create an account for me and connect the device with my phone. The second time doing so, I had no success at all. I tried everything.” Edgar was also upset that “until it is connected with a smartphone, it does not work even as a normal watch.”
Valentina Palladino
K, who found the user interface challenging and experienced problems with workout tracking, mentioned that the “screen timeout is annoyingly short, even on the long setting.” They also said “password unlock is a pain to use,” there was “poor native syncing with other fitness portals” and that it is “sadly undermined by its own software.” However, “the good news is that the software could easily be refined to be better.” Mark’s drawbacks were the cumbersome Spotify integration and the Premium paywall, which locks away sleeping heart rate data unless users pay to upgrade.
Overall
The average user score for the Charge 4 was a stinging 64. Mark said that “on paper, the Charge 4 is everything, and more, you could wish for in a fitness wearable: small form factor, good looks, water resistance, HR sensor, GPS, NFC, seven days of battery, an SPO2 sensor.” But overall, the device was “just a Charge 3 with some additional gimmicks.” K is awaiting a software improvement to fix the majority of their problems, and Edgar’s issues caused him to immediately return his Charge 4. Dan was the only user who was happy with the Charge 4, stating “it really hits on all these marks for me.”
It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of shift functions on this keyboard. Most of them are clearly labeled and self-explanatory, but it will take a while to commit them to muscle memory. All but one of the 37 keys has a shift function. As do most of the buttons. The most immediately useful and obvious are the ones that control the arpeggiator and scale mode. The arpeggiator here is excellent. There are seven different modes including: in order, random and polyphonic. And there are options to descend one octave or ascend up to three. Scale and chord modes make it easy for those of us with lesser keyboard skills to transpose a chord or stay in key when jamming. There are seven preset scales to choose from, but you can also create custom scales and save them in one of the two user slots.
There are even three options for how the sequencer will advance. There’s forward, obviously. But there’s also a random mode, which just jumps around a sequence chaotically. This is surprisingly fun for creating on the fly drum fills without relying on the beat repeat function. Then there’s “walk”, which is semi-random. The KeyStep Pro manual probably explains it best:
In Walk mode, the sequencer digitally ‘throws a dice’ to decide whether to go forward or backward at the end of each step: there’s a 50% chance it will play the next step, a 25% chance it will play the current step and a 25% chance it will play the previous step.
This is actually pretty similar to the stochastic mode on the Volca Modular. And, it turns out it’s really great on drums as well. If you find yourself falling back into the same old grooves or just want something that’s a tad unpredictable (without being pure chaos), the walk mode can generate some great glitchy drums. This works best with pretty busy patterns, though.
Terrence O’Brien / Engadget
Honestly, my only complaint here, other than the occasionally steep learning curve, is that you have to have the sequencer playing to use the arpeggiator. It would be great, especially when just noodling around and jamming, to be able to use the arpeggiator regardless of whether you’ve hit play or not.
The only thing keeping the KeyStep Pro from being a no-brainer is its limited software integration. This was built almost exclusively for players who spend their life using hardware instruments. There’s no transport controls for your DAW and a limited number of knobs, which need to be manually mapped.
If you’re running a hybrid setup with both hardware and software, you might want to consider either a dedicated controller for your DAW or the Novation 49SL MkIII. It’s quite a bit more expensive — $600 versus $399 for the KeyStep Pro — but you get tight integration with Ableton, decent pads for launching clips and finger drumming, plus multiple larger screens for direct feedback of parameter changes. You still get CV and MIDI connections as well, though fewer of them than on Arturia’s controller, and there’s no dedicated drum gates.
It’s also a lot larger. While the KeyStep Pro isn’t exactly portable, it’s easy enough to toss in the backseat of a car or move around the house if you want a change of scenery. The 49SL is almost eight inches wider, four inches deeper and more than twice as heavy at 15 pounds. The 49SL will live in your studio.
According to Bloomberg, the new treadmill, called Tread, will use a belt design similar to other treadmills on the market. Peloton’s existing treadmill, which has a slat design, will be renamed Tread+. The company will also release a new premium stationary bike called Bike+, which will likely cost more than Peloton’s existing bike at its current price, and the company is bringing a more adjustable tablet screen to its new products, Tread and Bike+. That should allow users to do more workouts near their machine, not just on it.
Since the pandemic began, the Peloton home fitness app has landed on more streaming devices, including Android TV, Apple TV and Roku, and instructors have been live streaming classes from their homes. While the company continues to face increased competition, Bloomberg says Peloton’s stock has risen 190 percent this year.
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Update 12:22pm ET: It appears the additional $90 coupon is no longer available on Amazon. However, the Segway ES2 scooter remains on sale for $399, which is roughly 32 percent off its normal price. We’ll update this post accordingly if the coupon returns.
If you’re looking for a fun and convenient way to travel short distances, an electric scooter can do the trick. Most can be pretty expensive, but one of Segway’s scooters is deeply discounted right now. Amazon has the Segway Ninebot ES2 electric scooter for $309, which is roughly 47 percent off and the lowest price we’ve ever seen it. Normally priced at $589, the scooter is actually on sale for $399 but you can clip a coupon on the product page for an additional $90 off (make sure to do so before you checkout so you get the full sale price).
After news broke of Chadwick Boseman’s passing last week, ABC aired a special tribute to the late actor during the episode of its 20/20 show the Sunday after. If you missed it the first time around, you can now catch Chadwick Boseman: A Tribute For A Kingon Disney+, according to the streaming service.
Disney+ is also the home of some of Boseman’s shows like Black Panther, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. According to Deadline, ABC’s special tribute features testimony from castmates like Robert Downey Jr, Don Cheadle, Scarlett Johansson and Mark Ruffalo. Avengers director Joe Anthony Russo, Marvel chief Kevin Feige, Disney executive Chairman Bob Iger as well as Kamala Harris, Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg also shared their memories.
The next-gen version will be released as a standalone purchase for PC, Xbox Series X and Playstation 5, and it will arrive as a free update for anyone who already owns the game on PC, Xbox One or PlayStation 4.
In June, CDPR offered a free PC version of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt to anyone who already owned the game on PS4 or Xbox One, and in February, CDPR enabled PC cross-saves to the Switch. It’s nice to get this confirmation that the game will live on in the new generation of consoles, especially when CDPR has its hands full with the delayed Cyberpunk 2077.
