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Galaxy Note 10 image leaks spoil Samsung’s party

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You will find a few tidbits elsewhere on the images. The back borrows a page or two from Huawei’s book with a triple-camera rear array (four if you include what appears to be a depth sensor) and an iridescent glass back on one variant. The under-display fingerprint reader should make its return as well. The S-Pen may be less flamboyant this time around — you’d either get blue or black depending on the color of the phone itself.

These leaks don’t say much about what’s underneath the surface, although you may know what’s coming based on history. They’ll likely both use the Snapdragon 855 (or Samsung’s Exynos in some regions), carry 8GB or more of RAM and ship with ample amounts of storage. SamMobile even claimed that the 5G version of the Note 10+ will come only in 256GB, 512GB and 1TB variants. It’s safe to presume they’ll be expensive. The Note line is usually the ultimate expression of Samsung’s phone design for a given year, and that usually carries a premium over the Galaxy S line.

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Twitter will let you pin your favorite lists in its app

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You’ll be able to select which lists you can swipe between in the home screen and pin them to the top of your lists page for easier access, whether they’re ones you’ve created or public lists made by others. A Twitter spokesperson confirmed to Engadget this is only a test for now, and a limited number of people will see it in the app for the time being. In any case, by bringing lists to Home, Twitter is aping the utility of apps like Tweetbot, which lets you set a list as your main feed.

Update 7/10/2019 6:11 PM ET: Added clarification from Twitter that this is a test for now.



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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sued by people she blocked on Twitter

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In the lawsuits, both men allege that they were blocked by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter after criticizing her on the platform. “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez blocked me from viewing and engaging with her official Twitter profile after I responded to one of her political posts,” wrote Saladino under the lawsuit’s statement of claim. Hikind claims that the New York congresswoman blocked him after he was critical of her on Twitter, and mentions other critics that she’s also blocked, such as conservative journalist Ryan Saavedra.

Over the past year, federal courts have considered whether President Donald Trump — and by extension, all public officials — have a right to block critics on a public forum like Twitter. Overwhelmingly, the consensus of the courts has been that access to a politician on social media is, in fact, a constitutional right. Back in January, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a public official’s Facebook page is a public forum, so public officials cannot block people for their opinions. This week’s ruling from the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit concurred with that ruling.

Even before the Trump ruling, courts were siding with the public on the banning rights of elected officials. Back in 2018, the ACLU and the Maryland Board of Public Works reached a settlement in a social media banning lawsuit against Maryland Governor Larry Hogan. Hogan was forced to create a new social media policy for his Facebook page, as well as create an appeals process for constituents who feel that they were wrongfully blocked or that their comments were improperly deleted. The ACLU has also been sending letters to politicians around the country, warning them to unblock people on social media. “The fact that a public official disagrees with you on an issue doesn’t mean she can silence you. Indeed, it means the opposite — and that holds true whether you’re speaking out in a public park, at a town hall meeting, or on a Facebook page,” wrote ACLU staff attorney Vera Eidelman in a blog post earlier this year.

The office of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hasn’t responded to a request for comment, so it’s unclear how they will respond to the lawsuits — but both Saladino and Hinkind state in their lawsuits that they seek to be unblocked by Ocasio-Cortez.

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Apple filings hint at new iPads coming soon

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Rumors have circulated for months of Apple working on a 10.2-inch replacement for the base iPad, with mass production reportedly starting soon. Given that the tablet hasn’t been updated for over a year, it’s a prime candidate for a refresh. We’d add that the redesigned iPad Pro is also approaching its first birthday — it might not get an overhaul, but it could benefit from newer processors and other minor tweaks. There isn’t much to go on for rumors surrounding the higher-end slate, mind you.

The timing is convenient, at least. Apple typically unveils a smorgasbord of new hardware in September and October, and it’d only make sense to court buyers with new iPads as they go back to school or shop for the holidays. The filings suggest Apple is laying the groundwork for those launches.

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Facebook snags exclusive VR games for Oculus headsets

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When Facebook acquired Oculus in 2014 for $2 billion, it took a leap of faith. The company hadn’t formally released a finalized product and VR was still an experimental medium. Today, VR is certainly more common, but it’s not exactly mainstream. Oculus has faced high-profile leadership departures and restructuring. But it has also found success partnering with games like Vader Immortal – A Star Wars VR Series, Beat Saber, Moss and Superhot, so the decision to double down on VR gaming isn’t a total surprise.

Details on which games Facebook plans to acquire are vague. “We cannot comment on specific partnerships, but we will continue to focus on expanding our library and reaching broader gaming audiences for years to come,” an Oculus spokesperson told The Information. It’s not clear when Assassin’s Creed and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell will arrive, but it’s safe to say, we can expect more VR games for Oculus headsets soon.

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Leica’s V-Lux 5 is a high-end, travel-friendly camera

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The centerpiece is the combination of a 20-megapixel, 1-inch sensor with a 16X 25-400mm equivalent f/2.8-4.0 lens. You should get good low-light performance and overall high quality, even when you’ve zoomed all the way out. The Panasonic roots also ensure fast autofocus (as little as 0.1 seconds), continuous burst shooting at 12 frames per second and 4K video up to 30FPS. The 2.36M electronic viewfinder and 3-inch swiveling touchscreen remain intact, too.

Like many of Leica’s other rebadges, the price gap over the Panasonic equivalent is significant — the V-Lux 5 is available for $1,250, or well above the $899 for the FZ-1000 II. That’s a bargain by Leica’s standards, though, and it gives the brand’s fans a true multi-purpose camera without forcing them to buy into an interchangeable lens system.

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SiriusXM lets you customize music stations with Pandora

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The new personalized stations are a mash-up of Pandora’s free service and SiriusXM; they’ll use Pandora’s Music Genome Project categorization system and SiriusXM’s music library. Subscribers can create the stations using the SiriusXM app by picking a song or artist to start with, and the station will learn your music preferences as you gives songs thumbs-up or thumbs-down ratings.

While SiriusXM isn’t extending the Pandora benefits to its Select subscribers, the company is throwing in some other perks for its lowest subscription tier. Select subscribers will now have access to unlimited streaming on multiple devices as well as more than 100 curated “Xtra” music channels. All subscribers will also get access to an expanded preview of SiriusXM Video, that includes hundreds of in-studio performances and behind-the-scenes footage from musicians.

The roping-in of Pandora tech with SiriusXM may convince some subscribers of the former to convert. Pandora Premium is currently $9.99 per month, while SiriusXM Premier is $13 a month. Still, if you’re highly attached to Pandora’s on-demand music service and aren’t a fan of talk radio, there might not be a reason to jump ship.

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Amazon won’t have to offer a phone helpline in the European Union

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The court did require effective substitutes, though, saying that Amazon must let customers get in touch “quickly” and “efficiently.” It currently offers automated callbacks and online chat.

Amazon, unsurprisingly, was happy. It was “always confident” its callback service did the trick, and that the EU ruling showed it its support methods matched the “spirit and purpose” of the Union’s consumer rights mandate.

The decision isn’t very reassuring if you prefer to talk to a human being the moment you need help. At the same time, it might be good news for smaller online businesses. They wouldn’t need to devote resources to maintaining phone support lines that might rarely see use. The catch, of course, is that they’d need to provide timely online help — and it’s not certain that every company is up to that task.

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Amazon is co-developing a ‘Lord of the Rings’ game

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According to Amazon, the game is unrelated to the show, but there will be at least one key similarity. While Amazon has kept pretty quiet about the series, we know it will take place in the Second Age, which predates Tolkein’s most well-known novels. According to Athlon Games, the game will also be set “at a time long before the events of The Lord of the Rings.” It’s likely Amazon Game Studios chose that time to help distinguish its title from The Lord of the Rings Online, another massive online multiplayer game. And while it’s supposedly coincidental that both the Amazon series and game will explore the Second Age, it will be interesting to see how each approaches that lesser-known time.

To pull this off, Amazon Game Studios is partnering with PC gaming company Leyou. As you might remember, last fall, Leyou-owned Athlon Games announced that it had reached an agreement with Middle-earth Enterprises to develop and publish a Lord of the Rings video game. But at the time, it said only that it was working with “a partner.” While we know this game will be free-to-play and available on PCs and consoles, we don’t know yet when it will be ready, and it’s too soon to say which will arrive first, the game or the show.

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Farewell, 12-inch MacBook, you crazy, overpriced experiment

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The “New” MacBook, as it was called in 2015, was clearly a departure from what we thought a laptop was. Even from a company known for its courage, a stripped-down laptop with a crazy high price, silly specs and just one I/O port was something else. The focus was on portability over everything else, including usefulness and, in some cases, common sense.

I always imagined the MacBook would, eventually, supplant the Air in Apple’s lineup since both did a similar job. After all, the original Air was stupidly overpriced (and underpowered), more famous for what it lacked than what it had. But Apple persisted, and most people eventually saw why losing the disc drive and the heftier ports (like VGA and Ethernet) were good things.

But, by 2015, the world had moved on, and thinness and lightness weren’t novelties — they were table stakes. Lenovo’s $699 Yoga 3 had more ports and similar internals to the 2015 MacBook and weighed just 0.34 pounds more. Apple couldn’t sell you a laptop that was dramatically thin and light because plenty of laptops were dramatically thin and light.

The new MacBook was designed to solve a problem that didn’t really exist, at least not by the time it debuted. And the compromises that Apple made to reach that small size and weight often made it harder to use than the machines it sought to replace. This was a machine that cost $1,300 and had an underpowered Core M CPU and one — one — USB-C port.

The new MacBook was basically useless for anything more demanding than writing emails and documents. Spec-wise, it looked terrible beside the older MacBook Air, which remained on Apple’s product line for years after. Look at this table from Apple’s own website circa 2017 and you’ll see how badly it made the case for you to buy a MacBook. A $999 machine that hadn’t been updated for a couple of years could outperform a device $300 more expensive.

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When Apple revived the Air in late 2018, I said that the company’s laptop line was now a confusing mess. For $1,300, you had a choice of three machines, only one of which was actually worth the money. The MacBook was too pricey and underpowered, the Air too close to the Pro and the Pro weighed barely anything in its modern form, anyway.

Apple has also killed off the Touch Bar-free MacBook Pro (aka the MacBook Escape) and dropped the price of the Air. Suddenly, the company’s product lineup makes sense: For $1,099, you get a machine with moderate power, which will serve most people’s needs. For $1,299, you get a more powerful machine that still won’t weigh down your bag too much.

I’m surprised that Apple didn’t choose to keep the MacBook around and slash the price to $899 or $999, but the reasoning is obvious. For that sort of money, Apple would like you to consider the iPad Pro (with its one USB-C port). And, to be cynical, given the high margins Apple makes on iPads, it probably wrings more cash out of consumers at the same time.

My hunch is that, until we see the long-awaited ARM Mac, the MacBook will remain locked in a vault somewhere. In the near future, low-power, super-efficient chips would suit a chassis that thin and light — perhaps battery longevity would be the new selling point. This particular iteration of the MacBook, however, will be remembered as a 12-inch experiment that never really found its niche.

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