Counterpoint Research has a new report detailing the smartwatch market, and Wear OS is a huge winner. Just three months ago, Google and Samsung teamed up to resurrect Wear OS, with the new Wear OS 3.0 debuting on the Galaxy Watch 4. Counterpoint’s latest data has the partnership down as a resounding success, with Wear OS market share rocketing from 4 percent in Q2 2022 to 17 percent in Q3 2022.
Google and Samsung’s team-up was a complete reboot of both companies’ smartwatch strategies. Google was floundering at the bottom of the sales charts, having seemingly lost interest in Wear OS for years. The last major OS release was Wear OS 2.0 in 2018, and that had been stagnating on the market for years. The major Wear OS tech partners from the early days, like Samsung, LG, Sony, and Motorola, had left the platform, with only fashion brands like Fossil hanging around to make watches. Qualcomm was the main SoC provider, and while Apple was revolutionizing the power you can get from a smartwatch SoC, Qualcomm wasn’t really putting in a full effort and strangled the Wear OS market for years with sub-par chips.
Samsung left Google’s smartwatch ecosystem after the initial release and struck out on its own with Tizen OS. Tizen is a Linux-based OS made by Samsung, built out of the ashes of other failed mobile Linux OSes, like Nokia’s Maemo and MeeGo, Intel’s Moblin, and Samsung’s Bada and LiMo. The OS was described by one security researcher as “the worst code I’ve ever seen” and doesn’t have a ton of third-party app support. Samsung’s strength is in hardware, and unlike Qualcomm, Samsung’s Exynos division has regularly been churning out flagship-class smartwatch SoCs using a modern transistor size and decent ARM CPU designs. Combining the two has meant pairing Google’s OS, software, and app ecosystem with Samsung’s hardware, marketing, and distribution prowess, a combination that built the Android phone juggernaut that exists today.
UVdesk is a free, open-source, and SaaS-based helpdesk solution for any business process to deliver the best customer service. In this tutorial, I will show you how to install UVdesk helpdesk solution with Apache on Debian 11.
Android is forked. There are so many versions of it around: From stock Android to Google’s own Pixel-first edition to Samsung’s One UI 4 overlay, there are enough variants to overrun the Time Variance Authority (Loki, anyone?). That means that writing a review of Android 12 is a complicated task. With so many branded and device specific tweaks, it can be hard at times to differentiate core Android features from the window dressing.
The land of Android is messy, but we’re going to keep this review of Android 12 simple. If you want an idea of the Pixel-only features, head over to our Pixel 6 Pro review where I covered things like Live Translate and Magic Eraser. Features like HDR Net videos and white balance controls are also exclusive to Pixels, though that doesn’t mean they won’t one day roll out more widely.
Material You everywhere
Functionally, that means there isn’t much obviously different for those on other devices upgrading to Android 12. The biggest change will be the new Material You design, and how much of that makes its way to your particular handset will depend on your phone’s maker.
On One UI 4, for example, you’ll get something similar to Material You by way of Samsung’s “whole host of new Color Palettes,” which like Google’s version will apply to menus, buttons and icons. But these aren’t automatically generated by the phone based on your wallpaper, and have a distinct Samsung-y cartoonish style that Galaxy users will find familiar. One UI 4 and Android 12 both also offer new widgets that look much better and offer more customization options than before.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
So Android 12 is a nice visual change, but it does go beyond aesthetics and affects how you interact with the system. Sliders and buttons are larger than before, which some might find ugly compared to the cleaner, thinner options of Androids past.
After living with this new style for a few months, I’ve gotten used to the extra chonky navigational elements. In fact, in some apps, like Clock, the bigger targets are easier to see, and I can hit the Snooze slider more easily from bed. They even look pretty thanks to Material You, which beautifully infuses everything from the Settings shade to keyboards and numpads. I also like that the new lock screen clock takes over the whole display when you don’t have any notifications.
There’s plenty of little things that Google added throughout Android 12, like new animations across the interface and updated limits to toast dialogs. Those are the little boxes that pop up at the bottom of the screen when you copy text to your clipboard, for example. I’ll focus on just a few of the more obvious changes, starting with the quick settings panel and notification shade.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
In general, Google’s been busy decluttering. It removed the redundant “Conversations” and “Notifications” headers from the notifications list that took up extra lines, while using a background color in this area that’s close to the cards, making everything blend more smoothly. The Quick Settings area up top has a black background and just four buttons compared to the six from before, which means you’ll now need an extra swipe to access things like Battery Saver or Auto Rotate toggles. Of course, you can rearrange these to put your favorites first, but you’ll only be able to pick four.
This is a bummer, but at least when you make that extra swipe in Android 12, you’ll see eight settings shortcuts as opposed to just six. The net convenience lost or gained here is… kinda zero.
I also don’t love that Android 12 will default to summoning the Google Assistant when you long press the power button, but at least you can revert it to show the restart, shut down, lock and emergency buttons.
One of the most common ways I interact with my phone is by tapping the search bar at the bottom and typing either the name of an app I want or the show I’m about to watch. Nothing’s changed here since Android 11, you’ll still see your recent entries and suggested apps when you hit the text field. But if you use the search bar in the All Apps drawer, which requires a swipe up, you’ll get Android 12’s universal search. This will let you find things on your phone, including not just apps and contacts, but conversations within supported apps as well.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
I randomly hit “D,” and was shown a row of suggested apps, like Discord and Discovery+. Below that was a list of people from various apps, like my colleague Devindra on Gmail, as well as conversations with some guys named Dan and Dylan from Hinge. It also showed actions from specific apps, like “Submit a Front Desk instruction” in my building’s portal and “Connect with Mat Smith” on Duo. When I typed “the,” I got suggestions to order from “The Old Spot” on Uber Eats and quickly hail a ride to “The Westin Grand, Berlin” on Uber. Both are places I’d saved as favorites.
Finally, at the bottom, you’ll find an option to submit your query to Google’s search engine. Chances that I’ll scroll so far down the list are slim, but at least it gets shorter the more letters entered.
More privacy and battery information
Most of the changes in Android 12 I’ve described so far are in your face, and you’ll see them as you interact with the system. Others, like the new Privacy Dashboard, are things you’ll have to look for in Settings.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
That means they’ll be less impactful on your daily use, but they are, for the most part, informative. The Privacy Dashboard helped me realize that my camera and mic are activated a ton and showed the apps I most often use that require them. And speaking of, Android 12 also provides new indicators for when your mic and camera are being used (a green dot appears in the top right corner of the screen). This is basically the same as on iOS, except Google requires one more tap on the dot to see which app is accessing the sensor.
While the Battery Usage page isn’t new, it’s now more prominently featured as the first option in the Battery settings panel — you won’t have to tap a separate three-dot button to find it. Google did appear to update the graph showing your power levels for the last 24 hours, with the horizontal axis now poorly labeled with just the numbers 1, 7, 1, 7 and 1 (or 13, 19, 01, 07, 13 on the phone I set to military time) instead of “xx hr ago” and “xx min left”. I found myself ignoring this chart most of the time, since it isn’t all that helpful.
In the months I’ve been using Android 12, I’ve seen more apps ask for permission to access my specific or approximate location. I almost never selected the latter, but it’s nice to have the option for things like the weather app. In general, though, I relied on the “Allow this time” or “Allow while using” choices as a way to grant limited permissions to apps. Google will also tell you, after some time, which apps you haven’t used in awhile. It’ll automatically revoke permissions for those, which is nice. None of these apps were things I used often enough for this to be a problem.
Cherlynn Low / Engadget
That’s… pretty much it for the major new Android 12 features. I’m still waiting to see an app that uses the new audio-coupled haptic feedback, since I enjoy the sensation it adds to games I’ve played on the iPhone 13 Pro. But there don’t appear to be any at the moment. Google is also constantly pushing out security and stability updates for Android 12, so maybe there are still more features to come.
Wrap-up
Ultimately, the biggest things Android 12 brings are Material You design and more privacy tools. That might seem minor on paper, but the visual refresh and faster animations throughout the system make it feel drastically different. Plus, Google continues to drop feature sets every quarter or so, meaning each version of Android doesn’t have to be as major of an upgrade. But if you’ve been looking for a fresh face for your phone, Android 12 is a fun, satisfying update.
Gaining access to domain admin credentials is part of the endgame in many sophisticated attacks where threat actors are trying to maintain persistence. One of the ways that adversaries accomplish this is through DCSync attacks. Here’s how to guard against them.
Inadequate as I am to properly articulate what loss feels like, I turn to the poets. So in the words Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Where you used to be, there is a hole in the world, which I find myself constantly walking around in the daytime, and falling in at night. I miss you like hell.” I am, of course, talking about…
A processing anomaly has caused an unexpected vibration to course through the entire Webb telescope just weeks before launch. An investigation is now underway to determine if the incident somehow damaged the observatory.
Samsung Electronics has decided to build an advanced U.S. chip plant in Texas, a win for the Biden administration as it prioritizes supply chain security and greater semiconductor capacity on American soil. From a report: South Korea’s largest company has decided on the city of Taylor, roughly 30 miles (48 kilometers) from its giant manufacturing hub in Austin, a person familiar with the matter said. Samsung and Texas officials will announce the decision Tuesday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter, asking not to be identified because the news hasn’t been made public. A Samsung representative said it hadn’t made a final decision and declined further comment. Samsung is hoping to win more American clients and narrow the gap with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Its decision, which came months after de facto leader Jay Y. Lee was released from prison on parole, follows plans by TSMC and Intel Corp. to spend billions on cutting-edge facilities globally. The industry triumvirate is racing to meet a post-pandemic surge in demand that has stretched global capacity to the max, while anticipating more and more connected devices from cars to homes will require chips in future. The plant will cost Samsung $17 billion to set up, according to WSJ.
In an email to all Nintendo employees sent Friday and obtained by Fanbyte, Nintendo President Doug Bowser said the reports coming out regarding Activision Blizzard were “distressing and disturbing. They run counter to my values as well as Nintendo’s beliefs, values and policies.”
Without getting into specifics, Bowser goes on to say that Nintendo management has been “in contact with Activision, [has] taken action and [is] assessing others.” And Bowser added that Nintendo is working with the industry’s leading lobbying group, the ESA, to strengthen its anti-harassment language. “Every company in the industry must create an environment where everyone is respected and treated as equals, and where all understand the consequences of not doing so.”
Active response allows Wazuh to run commands on an agent in response to certain triggers. In this use case, we simulate an SSH Brute Force attack and configure an active response to block the IP of the attacker.
Battlefield 2042 is shaping up to be a broken mess of a game, one that probably could’ve benefited from another month—or year—in development. Still, it’s officially out on most major platforms, and players are once again having a blast with aspects of it that the designers never intended them to. This time, instead of…
Considering that it’s one of the few things unaffected by supply chain issues, you might be want to consider gifting friends and family cryptocurrency for the holidays this year. Of course, cryptocurrencies are risky investments due to their volatility, so you’d have to be comfortable with crypto as a “fun” gift that…
Add Nintendo to the list of major gaming companies that say they’re disappointed with Activision Blizzard following last week’s bombshell Wall Street Journal report on the publisher and CEO Bobby Kotick. In an internal company email obtained by Fanbyte, Nintendo of America President Doug Bowser says he was distressed by the allegations detailed in The Journal’s investigation.
“Along with all of you, I’ve been following the latest developments with Activision Blizzard and the ongoing reports of sexual harassment and toxicity at the company,” Bowser says in the message. “I find these accounts distressing and disturbing. They run counter to my values as well as Nintendo’s beliefs, values and policies.”
According to Fanbyte, Bowser notes in the letter he’s been in contact with Activision and is in the process of accessing potential “actions.” What those actions may entail, Bowser doesn’t say. However, there’s no mention of reassessing the relationship with Activision like Xbox chief Phil Spencer said was on the table in his message to Microsoft employees. What he does mention is that Nintendo is working with the Entertainment Software Association, a lobbying group that represents both Nintendo and Activision, to strengthen its stance on harassment and workplace abuse.
“Every company in the industry must create an environment where everyone is respected and treated as equals, and where all understand the consequences of not doing so,” he said in the email.
Bowser reportedly sent the letter on Friday, November 19th, to all levels of the company, including internal development teams like Retro Studios. Nintendo of America later confirmed the authenticity of the email. “We can confirm the content of Doug Bowser’s internal email to Nintendo of America staff is accurate,” a spokesperson for the company told Fanbyte. “We have nothing further to share on this topic.”
According to The Journal, Kotick knew about many of the incidents of sexual harassment at Activision Blizzard and, at times, acted to protect abusers at the company. He also allegedly acted as one himself at times. In a statement to Engadget, a spokesperson for the company said the article presented a “misleading view of Activision Blizzard and our CEO.” The report drew an outcry from Activision Blizzard employees who staged a walkout on the day it was published. Some of those same employees have also called on Kotick to resign from his position, an action the executive reportedly said he would consider if he can’t fix the company’s culture “with speed.”
“We respect all feedback from our valued partners and are engaging with them further,” an Activision Blizzard spokesperson told Engadget after the Microsoft letter surfaced online. “We have detailed important changes we have implemented in recent weeks, and we will continue to do so. We are committed to the work of ensuring our culture and workplace are safe, diverse, and inclusive. We know it will take time, but we will not stop until we have the best workplace for our team.”
We have only now entered into the era of DDR5 memory with the introduction of Intel’s Alder Lake platform pushing us through the door, and it will take some time for the latest memory standard to gain significant traction. That’s to say, DDR4 isn’t going to disappear from the market in the near future. Nevertheless, Samsung is already looking
Microsoft has created versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11 that run on ARM chips, but to date, the company has not been interested in selling Windows on ARM licenses to anyone other than PC builders. The ARM versions of Windows can run on things like the Raspberry Pi or in virtualization apps running on Apple Silicon Macs, but Microsoft doesn’t officially support doing it, and the company has never elaborated as to why.
One possible explanation comes from a report on XDA Developers, which claims that an exclusivity deal with Qualcomm keeps Microsoft from making the ARM versions of Windows more generally available. According to “people familiar with it,” that exclusivity deal is currently “holding back other chip vendors from competing in the space.” The Qualcomm deal is also said to be ending “soon,” though the report isn’t more specific about how soon “soon” is.
This allegation comes a few weeks after Rick Tsai, CEO of ARM chipmaker MediaTek, said on a company earnings call that MediaTek “certainly intend[s]” to run Windows on its chips. Qualcomm, MediaTek, Rockchip, and others are all shipping ARM chips for Chromebooks, in addition to the chips they all provide for Android devices.
There’s so much about Hawkeyethe trailers aren’t telling you. The trailers have been all about Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) and Kate Bishop (Hailee Steinfeld) traveling around New York at Christmas time, firing arrows, and getting into general mayhem. Oh, and did they mention it was Christmas time? Obviously, though, …
Enlarge/ A health care worker prepares to administer Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 vaccines at an elementary school vaccination site for children ages 5 to 11. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)
The fresh data comes at the start of a holiday week and a new surge in cases, worrying experts that the pandemic—and its impact on children—will only worsen as the country heads into the winter months. Travel during this week will likely rival pre-pandemic levels, according to estimates by AAA and the Transportation Security Administration. And many families are anxious to resume holiday traditions and packed family gatherings, in which unvaccinated children are at risk of getting and transmitting the virus.
In the week of November 11 to 18, nearly 142,000 children reported getting COVID-19. That’s an increase of 32 percent from two weeks ago. Overall, cases of COVID-19 in the US have increased 27 percent in the past two weeks.
Enlarge/ As usual, a whole lot of video games are on sale for Black Friday. (credit: Ars Technica)
Black Friday officially arrives in a few days, but many of the noteworthy deals we expect to see have already begun. We have a big roundup of the best early Black Friday deals we can find more generally, but today we wanted to break out a separate roundup for video game discounts, since a metric ton of them have gone live across several retailers this week.
Major retailers like Target, Best Buy, and Walmart have already kicked off their official sales, as have the digital gaming storefronts for Xbox and PlayStation, with others like Amazon price-matching many of the better offers. We’ve pored over as many so-called deals as we can find from all of them and have listed the genuine discounts we like below, spotlighting a few particularly notable offers along the way.
Ten years ago Moog released Animoog — a strange departure for a company best known for its old-school analog synths. The company had dabbled in the app world before with the Filtatron, which was an emulation of the classic Moog ladder filter. But Animoog was a different beast entirely. It was a full-fledged software instrument that used wavetable synthesis, often associated with cold and complex digital sounds that are in many ways the antithesis of what Moog stood for. But, the app turned out to be a huge success. And for its tenth anniversary it’s finally getting a proper sequel in Animoog Z.
The core, which Moog calls Anisotropic Synth Engine, is largely the same. Of the dozens of waveforms you choose up to eight at a time from. They range from samples of analog saw waves to decidedly more digital sounds. What makes it relatively unique is the ‘orbit’ and ‘path’ modules which shape the timbre. The way they work is hard to describe, but basically notes you play travel along a path drawn in space, and orbit around that path. You control the speed and intensity of distance of the orbit, as well as the speed at which it travels along the path and that determines how the sound of each note evolves, in a relatively opaque way.
Moog
The big change here from the original app is that Animoog Z adds a third dimension to the path. So instead of just traveling along an X and Y axis, the notes also can move along this Z axis. This gives the new app just a touch more depth and notes a bit more room to evolve. The difference can be subtle at times, but certain presets in Animoog Z take advantage of additional modulation path to create truly wild and complex sounds. (Just check out Downward Spiral and Ball Lightning.)
There’s also a new effects section with a looper, delay, filter, an arpeggiator and a “thick” section. Thick was also in the original app and it just offers a variety of ways to beef up your sound, from adding detune, drive and bit crushing effects. While a few of these are holdovers from the original, the way they’re grouped together here makes sound design a little more fluid and linear.
The whole app has received a massive face lift that not only makes it feel more modern, but also makes it easier to navigate. While the UI can feel a bit cramped on an iPhone, it’s still light years beyond the original. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to test it on an iPad or a Mac, so I can’t speak to how well the interface scales up when it has space to breathe. But, the general layout is clean, logical and consistent.
Moog
The LFO, mod and envelope sections are more accessible and more powerful than their counterparts in the original app. In Animoog Z there is an entire tab dedicated to envelopes, with a clearly labeled amp envelope, and you’ll find it in the same place you’ll find the FX, orbit, filter, path and LFO tabs. There’s no need to go searching. In the original some of these features were scattered amongst dropdown menus. There are also just a lot more options for routing modulation in the new app.
Lastly, Moog added MPE support to the app, and even offers a limited version of it through the touchscreen interface. If you expand the keyboard, you can slide your fingers up and down individual notes to add unique modulation to each. You can also bend each note individually by moving your fingers. One of the great ways to add a little character to your playing is to turn down the keyboard correction and turn up the glide which will just by dint of your imperfect and imprecise human fingers add subtle detuning and bends as you play. With the right settings this can simulate everything from subtle analog drift to the tape warbles of a dying Walkman.
Moog
Animoog Z is available as a free download, but only in an extremely limited version. You can play the built-in presets and manipulate some basic parameters, but if you want full access to all its features you’ll need to pay $10. One nice change here is the flat price no matter the platform. Currently the iPhone version Animoog is $10, but it’s $20 on the iPad. Animoog Z is $10 no matter where you’re using it.
Animoog is definitely starting to look and feel its age. So this sequel couldn’t have come at a better time. And Animoog Z is definitely a worthy successor to this groundbreaking app.
I want to copy a file (or recursing into directories and copy everything) to the clipboard in Linux and then paste it somewhere else. How do you copy a file to the clipboard in Linux? We have four commands for scripting and other CLI needs to copy a file to the clipboard in Linux.
