Microsoft has avoided an EU fine after the US tech group offered concessions on how it packages together its Teams and Office products, ending a long-running antitrust investigation by the bloc’s regulators.

The probe, which began after a 2020 complaint from Slack, now part of Salesforce, accused Microsoft of abusing its market dominance by tying its video conferencing tool to its widely used suite of productivity applications.

Since the initial complaint, Microsoft has unbundled Teams from Office 365 in the EU, but critics said the changes were too narrow.

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Did you know you can customize Google to filter out garbage? Take these steps for better search results, including adding my work at Lifehacker as a preferred source.

I’ve reviewed enough digital notebooks over the past year that my wife has started rolling her eyes at me every time I have to sign for a package, and of that expansive lot, the reMarkable Paper Pro and its newer, smaller sibling, the reMarkable Paper Pro Move are among the most impressive.

I just wish the screens on these two premium e-ink productivity devices were a little more forgiving to my middle-aged eyes—and thanks to a software update earlier this year, they can be.

Dim by design

In my reviews of both the Paper Pro and the Paper Pro Move, I noted that their integrated front lights are too dim to be very useful. (In contrast to the backlight on an LED tablet, e-ink devices are illuminated by a lighting layer sandwiched between the outer glass and the inner display that reflects down.) Though reMarkable doesn’t publicize the number, at full strength the front light illuminates to around 3 to 4 nits, according to testers on Reddit. In contrast, the front lights on the competing Kindle Scribe and Boox Note Air 4C can get much brighter—up to 94 nits. (For reference, the screen of my M1 MacBook Air laptop peaks at 400 nits.)

According to a statement I received from reMarkable, however, it turns out this was an intentional decision—a limitation baked into the design of the product.

“The light is designed primarily to gently illuminate the page when ambient light is low—for example, in a dark conference room or at night—without compromising battery life or the natural paper-like experience,” reMarkable said in an emailed response to questions. “During development, we tested extensively across brightness levels and environments, and we intentionally capped the maximum brightness to strike the right balance between visibility, comfort, and battery consumption.

I appreciate the thoughtfulness—reduced eye strain and longer battery life are certainly among the chief advantages e-ink offers over a traditional tablet—but I think things got taken a bit far. Consistently during my testing, I found both reMarkable tablets to be too dark to read easily unless I was in a room with a good deal of natural light or a nearby lamp. Adjusting the front light to max made almost no difference. Even in a totally dark room, I still found myself squinting or bringing the device close to my face to read smaller print.

A recent software update gives you more options

Credit: Joel Cunningham

It seems I wasn’t the only one disappointed in the feature. A year ago, shortly after the Paper Pro’s release, Redditors were sharing tips for altering the code of the operating system to remove software-based lighting limits. The volume of user feedback ultimately prompted the company to rethink its design decision, sort of: While the previous limits remain, a software update earlier this year (after my review of the Paper Pro was published) introduced a new setting to boost brightness.

“After launch, we heard from some users who wanted the option for more brightness in certain situations,” reMarkable said. “In response, we added the [Extra bright] toggle in the display settings, which allows users to increase maximum brightness beyond the default range. This lets people choose what feels right for them while preserving our original design intent.”

To try it out, open Settings menu on your reMarkable Paper Pro or Paper Pro Move and tap Display, then tap the slider to turn on Extra bright. (You’ll see a warning that doing so “will drain the battery faster than normal.”)

The reMarkable Paper Pro Move with Extra Bright mode enabled, compared to a Kindle Scribe at max brightness.
Credit: Joel Cunningham

The effect isn’t nearly as dramatic as I expected—as you can see above, it’s still much darker than a Kindle Scribe at max brightness—but it does improve legibility at least somewhat under the conditions described above. The photo at the top of this article is a side-by-side comparison showing how bright the devices can get with and without the new option enabled, and you can see it in action in this video from YouTube user @howtotechstuff.

As the company noted, a brighter light will indeed drain the battery faster. According to @howtotechstuff’s video, in testing, his battery drain went from 4% an hour to 8% an hour under similar usage conditions. Honestly, that’s a pretty big hit for such a moderate increase in brightness, but it may be worth it if it makes the device more useable for you.

Is a front light even necessary on a digital notebook?

While I still find more utility in the brighter lighting of other devices I’ve tested, it’s worth noting that a number of e-ink notebooks I’ve written about—including the 13.3-inch Boox Note Max, the Viwoods AiPaper, and my personal favorite, the Supernote Manta—forgo front lighting entirely.

Adding lighting to an e-ink device is always a tradeoff (though not nearly as much as adding color)—inserting a light layer into the display stack can impact both clarity and the distance between the outer screen and the inner e-ink display, and writing digitally feels more like pen and paper when that distance is as small as possible. Lightless devices can also be thinner, though that’s a much less important factor if you ask me; beyond a certain point, too-thin e-ink tablets can get pretty fragile.

If the Paper Pro and Paper Pro Move didn’t include a front light at all, they would still be great devices. That one is there, but too dim for many users, only makes it kind of annoying—but this relatively new setting helps.

This week, managing editor Cherlynn Low and senior reporter Karissa Bell are joined by The Verge’s Allison Johnson to talk all about the new iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17. We also answered some questions from Threads and talk about our hopes and dreams from the next Apple event. Also, Devindra and Ben chat about some recent news, including a truly awful AI podcasting company.

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Topics

• Cherlynn, Karissa, and a special guest break down the iPhone 17 news from Apple headquarters – 1:04

• Notes from the iPhone Air hands on – 14:59

• Once again, a big Apple event with no mention of Apple Intelligence – 40:27

• Animated movie Critterz will use OpenAI’s tech to try to make a CGI movie on a shoestring budget – 59:24

• Inception Point AI wants to use virtual hosts to make 5,000 new podcast episodes a week – 1:04:26

• David Zaslav thinks HBO Max should be more expensive, because of course he does – 1:23:27

• Working on – 1:25:41

• Pop culture picks – 1:28:29

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Hosts: Devindra Hardawar and Cherlynn Low
Guests: Karissa Bell and Allison Johnson
Producer: Ben Ellman
Music: Dale North and Terrence O’Brien

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/mobile/smartphones/engadget-podcast-a-deeper-dive-into-the-iphone-17-and-iphone-air-124536155.html?src=rss

Microsoft is no longer in trouble with the European Commission, at least when it comes to Teams. The commission has accepted the changes and commitments the company made in response to its concerns related to Microsoft’s bundling of its Teams collaboration platform with its other apps. This particular antitrust saga started years ago when Slack filed an antitrust complaint against Microsoft, claiming that it illegally bundled its work chat competitor with the popular Office suite. The commission opened a formal investigation into the matter in 2023 and found in 2024 that Microsoft did indeed violate antitrust laws. 

“Microsoft may have granted Teams a distribution advantage by not giving customers the choice whether or not to acquire access to Teams when they subscribe to their SaaS productivity applications,” the commission said at the time. “This advantage may have been further exacerbated by interoperability limitations between Teams’ competitors and Microsoft’s offerings.” The company was facing a fine equivalent to 10 percent of its annual worldwide turnover. 

Even before the commission published its preliminary finding, Microsoft already unbundled Teams from Office 365 and Microsoft 365 productivity suites across the European Union. However, the commission found the changes it implemented “insufficient to address its concerns.” So Microsoft made several commitments to avoid a fine, including offering customers in Europe versions of its Office 365 and Microsoft 365 suites without Teams. Those versions are sold at an “appreciably lower price.” The company also committed not to offer discount rates on Teams or on suites with Teams included. Microsoft gave Teams’ competitors “effective interoperability” with some of its products and services, as well, and allowed them to embed Office apps in their own products. In addition, it allowed customers in Europe to extract their Teams messaging data for use in competing services.

The commission tested those commitments between May and June this year. In response to the commission’s test results, Microsoft further increased the price difference between the Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites with Teams and those without by 50 percent. The company also has to display suites options without Teams if it advertises its suites options with the messaging app. “The commitments offered by Microsoft will remain in force for seven years, except for the commitments related to interoperability and data portability which will remain in force for ten years,” the commission wrote. A trustee will be monitoring Microsoft’s implementation and will be making sure it remains true to its commitments within that timeframe. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/apps/microsoft-escapes-eu-antitrust-fine-after-unbundling-teams-123052522.html?src=rss

Welcome to Edition 8.10 of the Rocket Report! Dear readers, if everything goes according to plan, four astronauts are less than six months away from traveling around the far side of the Moon and breaking free of low-Earth orbit for the first time in more than 53 years. Yes, there are good reasons to question NASA’s long-term plans for the Artemis lunar program—the woeful cost of the Space Launch System rocket, the complexity of new commercial landers, and a bleak budget outlook. But many of us who were born after the Apollo Moon landings have been waiting for this moment our whole lives. It is almost upon us.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

North Korea fires solid rocket motor. North Korea said Tuesday it had conducted the final ground test of a solid-fuel rocket engine for a long-range ballistic missile in its latest advancement toward having an arsenal that could viably threaten the continental United States, the Associated Press reports. The test Monday observed by leader Kim Jong Un was the ninth of the solid rocket motor built with carbon fiber and capable of producing 1,971 kilonewtons (443,000 pounds) of thrust, more powerful than past models, according to the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.

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There are approximately 45,000 flights every day in the U.S., all of them filled with people heading off to adventure, relaxation, or business. If you were one of them at any time recently, there’s a very good chance you booked your tickets online, possibly by going directly to an airline’s website. And after buying those tickets, you probably relied on the airline’s website for real-time updates about your flight—and that means you have to be able to trust the information on an airline’s website and trust that the airline is being above board with you regarding pricing, seat availability, and everything else to do with your desired flight. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Here are some of the ways your airline’s website is built to deceive you.

Fake customers

If you’ve ever spent some time on an airline’s website or a booking site, playing with dates, seat choices, and other logistics, you’ve probably seen a little graphic showing you that X number of people are looking at those tickets. The implication being that several dozen (or more) folks are also sitting at their computers or on their phones, about to click BUY and steal those tickets out from under you.

This is an example of “social proof,” a technique used in sales that leverages our desire for communal validation to push us to buy something. Seeing that all those invisible strangers are mulling those plane tickets makes the decision seem valid and correct—why else would so many other people be considering pulling the trigger on that purchase? But there’s no way to know if there are actually dozens or hundreds of people looking at those precise tickets or if it’s a randomly generated number or a vague approximation. Either way, it’s there just to pressure you into buying.

Deceptive scarcity

Another way airline and booking sites lie to you is with deceptive language around scarcity. If you’ve ever put together an itinerary and the sites tells you that there are only two seats left, so you’d better get a move on, you might reasonably assume that this means only two sets left on that flight, and you’ll be scrambling to find a different flight unless you decide immediately (this is often combined with a timer counting down the minutes that you can hold those tickets and deliberate. Combined with the constant fluctuation of ticket prices as the plane capacity and demand change, this can push you to click BUY before you’ve completely thought it through.

But what that language often actually means is that there are two seats left … at that price. That’s useful information, of course, but omitting the pricing aspect changes the stakes. There’s a huge difference between having to pay a little more and not being able to book the flight at all.

Check-in fees

You might assume that if you want to check in for your flight in-person at the airport, or have a printed boarding pass instead of a code displayed on your phone, that it’s no big deal. But many budget airlines will charge you a fee for that—and it’s usually not made clear on their website. There is often also a fee if you don’t check in online early enough, usually at least two hours before your flight, and those fees are also typically buried in FAQs and fine print instead of clearly displayed, so don’t assume you’ve got flexibility there.

Convenient weather

It’s smart to track your flights as your departure day approaches, right up until you need to leave for the airport. Better to know that your flight is going to be delayed before you’re trapped in an airport for hours. But unexpected delays can have a ripple effect on the rest of your travel plans, so when a flight is delayed and you have to spend extra money to rebook other aspects of your trip, you might want to ask for some compensation. After all, it wasn’t your fault the plane or flight crew wasn’t there when they were supposed to be.

Ah, but then the airline website informs you that the flight was delayed due to weather, and since weather is outside the airline’s control, you’re not entitled to any kind of compensation. Weather delays are very common excuses for airlines—but Federal Aviation Administration data shows that weather delays account for just a tick more than 1% of flight delays, so the chances that the airline is using weather as an excuse to not deal with your compensation claims are actually pretty good.

Apple’s Awe Dropping event started with dramatic health testimonials from Apple Watch users, then revealed a key new feature for the new Watch Series 11: hypertension alerts. The function had yet to receive FDA approval at the time, but that has now been granted, according to Bloomberg. As a result, it will reportedly be available to users in 150 countries when the Watch 11 and Ultra Watch 3 ship starting on September 19. 

Hypertension alerts can help detect hypertension (high blood pressure), a potentially dangerous condition that affects over a billion people. The feature relies on the Watch’s optical heart sensor, but now uses new machine learning algorithm that also draws from a study involving more than 100,000 participants to look for high blood pressure. It works in the background a month-long period to seek patterns associated with hypertension. Unlike devices that measure your specific blood pressure, it only tells users that there may be a danger. 

Last year, Apple received the FDA’s nod for its over-the-counter Hearing Aid function that transforms the second-gen AirPods Pro into OTC hearing aids for people with mild-to-moderate hearing loss. Another recently approved feature is sleep apnea detection. However, the company is currently facing a lawsuit over the Apple Watch’s redesigned blood oxygen monitoring feature.  

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/wearables/apple-watch-series-11-receives-fda-approval-for-hypertension-alerts-120046036.html?src=rss

As is often the case, the tech news tide is out after Apple’s iPhone 17 event. (Did we do a dedicated newsletter on all the announcements? Yes, yes we did.)

Before the weekend, though, there’s still more to read about. But let’s start with the not-great tech news. David Zaslav, CEO of Warner Bros. Discovery, plans to make HBO more expensive and passwords a lot harder to share. These were part of his comments at a Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology Conference, which sounds awful.

The main thrust of his argument was that HBO Max’s content is so good that Zaslav thinks he should charge a lot more for it.

— Mat Smith

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Takara Tomy is releasing a Poké Ball virtual pet toy

Tamagotchi but with… Pokémon.

Takara Tomy

Japanese toymaker Takara Tomy is releasing a Poké Ball virtual pet toy, so you can fulfill your dreams of carrying your favorite Pokémon around with you everywhere. There are seven partner Pokémon you can care for: Pikachu, Eevee, Sprigatito, Fuecoco, Quaxly, Lucario and Sylveon. And if you pet the device, it reacts. Cute! There are also 150 other Pokémon to interact with inside the toy.

While it appears to be a Japan-only release, the pet will have an English language option according to the product page. So, some of you are already convinced, right? Priced around $51, pre-orders are open, though currently sold out on Amazon Japan, and the device will ship on October 11. Now, to decide whether to pick Pikachu or Eevee.

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A closer look at the AirPods Pro 3

ANC, live translation and heart-rate tracking.

With a little bit of breathing space after the initial media full-court press earlier this week, Billy Steele gave the AirPods Pro 3 a closer listen. Apple says the ANC on the AirPods Pro 3 blocks twice as much noise as the AirPods Pro 2 and four times as much as the original AirPods Pro. While there’s technology at work (ultra-low noise microphones and computational audio), new foam-infused ear tips offer better passive noise isolation. In short, less noise gets in.

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Grok claimed the Charlie Kirk assassination video was a ‘meme edit’

The chatbot repeatedly told X users that Kirk was ‘fine.’

X’s AI assistant Grok has once again been caught spreading blatant misinformation. In several bizarre exchanges, the chatbot repeatedly claimed that Charlie Kirk was “fine” and that gruesome videos of his assassination were a “meme edit.” One user tagged Grok and asked if Kirk could have survived the shooting. Grok’s response was nonsensical: “Charlie Kirk takes the roast in stride with a laugh — he’s faced tougher crowds,” it wrote. “Yes, he survives this one easily.”

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This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/general/the-morning-after-hbo-max-is-going-to-get-more-expensive-111533620.html?src=rss

Consider the cul-de-sac. It leads off the main street past buildings of might-have-been to a dead-end disconnected from the beaten path. Computing history, of course, is filled with such terminal diversions, most never to be fully realized, and many for good reason. Particularly when it comes to user interfaces and how humans interact with computers, a lot of wild ideas deserved the obscure burials they got.

But some deserved better. Nearly every aspiring interface designer believed the way we were forced to interact with computers was limiting and frustrating, but one man in particular felt the emphasis on design itself missed the forest for the trees. Rather than drowning in visual metaphors or arcane iconographies doomed to be as complex as the systems they represented, the way we deal and interact with computers should stress functionality first, simultaneously considering both what users need to do and the cognitive limits they have. It was no longer enough that an interface be usable by a human—it must be humane as well.

What might a computer interface based on those principles look like? As it turns out, we already know.

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