Pc Magazine - January 2017.pdf 2e4s6p

DIGITAL EDITION

JANUARY 2017

CONTENTS

JANUARY 2017

COVER STORY

CAN MICROSOFT REINVENT THE PC? How laptops and desktops might evolve.

FEATURE STORY A CONVERSATION WITH DR. NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON The world’s favorite astrophysicist came by PCMag Labs for a very geeky chat.

REVIEWS CONSUMER ELECTRONICS Impossible I-1 Logitech Harmony Elite OnePlus 3T

HARDWARE Asus Transformer Mini (T102HA-D4GR)

Impossible I-1

Oyen Digital MiniPro 3.1 USB-C Portable Solid-State Drive Asus ROG GT51

SOFTWARE & APPS Google Photos (for iPhone) Attenborough Story of Life (for iPad)

Asus Transformer Mini (T102HA-D4-GR)

Attenborough Story of Life (for iPad)

WHAT’S NEW NOW HOW DO YOU FEEL? AFFECTIVA’S AI CAN TELL Your mood can help with market research or making your home smarter.

NEXTEV AIMS TO LEVERAGE FORMULA E RACING TECH It’s aiming for the all-electric crossover market.

‘GUESSING ATTACK’ BYES CREDIT CARD SECURITY IN 6 SECONDS And there’s no magic-bullet fix.

TOP GEAR What we love most this month: cold-weather version.

OPINIONS DAN COSTA First Word

READER INPUT SASCHA SEGAN

Sorry Cord Cutters, DirecTV Is Now a Trap

DOUG NEWCOMB

Delphi, Mobileye Are FastTracking Driverless Car Tech

The free and open Internet actually opens the door for all sorts of manipulators to roam free.

TIM BAJARIN

JOHN C. DVORAK

What Silicon Valley Can Learn From the 2016 Election

Last Word

DIGITAL LIFE GET ORGANIZED 5 Ways to Email Better

HOW TO

How to Fix Windows PC Problems Via a Restore Point

TIPS

12 Roku Tips for Streaming Success.

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FIRST WORD

T Living in Glass Houses

DAN COSTA

he National Security Agency can read your email. Verizon knows where you are at all times. Amazon is confident you’re in the market for a new printer. We know these things about the weird world we live in, but few of us ever stop to think about what they really mean. Recently, a group of artists got together in New York City to change that. Apple doesn’t have a retail store on Mulberry Street in New York City, but at a glance, you might think it does. The Glass Room exhibit borrows heavily from the Apple Store design esthetic: white walls, white ceiling, white podium, and even helpful “inGenious” staffers in matching white hoodies (see the photo below). But nothing is for sale in The Glass Room. It’s a collection of an art pieces designed to make you think of how you’re selling yourself, maybe without even knowing it. The exhibit is curated by Tactical Technology Collective along with The Mozilla Foundation, maker of the Firefox browser. The subjects addressed in the Glass Room are digital: online privacy, location tracking, psychographic profiling, the gamification of security, and so on. But the pieces themselves are grounded in the real world; you can see them, touch them, and in one case, smell them. Here are a few that stood out to me.

? (Aram Bartholl): We’re so used to massive hacks that we barely even notice them. In fact, Yahoo! recently disclosed that it had compromised at least 1 billion more of its s’ s. Back in 2012, LinkedIn held the record for the biggest hack—a paltry 4.6 million. For this exhibit, Bartholl printed all 4.6 million of those s alphabetically and bound them into volumes. (I looked for mine; it wasn’t in there.) Random Darknet Shopper (!Mediengruppe Bitnik): This artist collective created an online shopping bot and gave it a budget of $100 in bitcoins. They set it loose on the Dark Web to make random purchases and have them mailed to the exhibition space. No drugs or pornography arrived; just random stuff. A copy of “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” a Hungarian port photo, and—featured item in the Glass Room—a pair of fake Kanye West Nike Air Yeezy 2 sneakers. Online Shopping Center (Sam Levigne): Amazon does a great job of identifying what you want to buy and getting it to your quickly. As a logical (perhaps inevitable) next step, in 2014, the company was granted a patent for “predictive shopping.” Levigne’s art takes the concept even further. As a Glass Room “shopper,” you strap on a brainwave monitor and allow an algorithm to determine what your brain looks like when you’re shopping. When Levigne first conducted this experiment, he had his bot shop for him on Amazon and Alibaba whenever his brain was in the “shopping state.” I tried it, but so far, Amazon hasn’t sent me anything. Not all the exhibits at the Glass Room are art. Some are demos of real-world products and services. The Texas Virtual BorderWatch, for example, was a real-time camera system (live from

It’s a collection of an art pieces designed to make you think of how you’re selling yourself, maybe without even knowing it.

2008 to 2012) that let volunteers monitor the United States–Mexico border from their homes and alert authorities of infractions. Another, the Silver Mother ($299), is a monitoring solution for seniors that gives medication reminders, tracks sleep, and gives front-door alerts. And then there’s Churchix, a facial recognition system that enables churches to track attendance automatically—a whole new meaning for “witnessing.” Finally, at the back of the room was a “data detox” center. For those who were moved by the exhibit and wanted to make a change in their digital lifestyle, experts at the counter explained your options. We’ve reviewed a lot of the tools used to manage your privacy, including Signal, Ghostery, TOR, and more. If The Glass Room made anything clear, it is that technology is the dominant force for change in the world right now. It is affecting our jobs, our home lives, our relationships, our environment, and even our bodies. I’m a big believer in technological progress, but not all of these changes are for the better. PC Magazine is committed to getting you the tools, techniques, and information you need to thrive in this new world. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go clear my browsing history.

[email protected]

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READER INPUT

YOUR COMMENTS

I like to go back and look at older articles written about trends in technology and in this case, politics. Thanks, Sascha, for citing an article you printed back in March. It was very insightful. I don’t want to sound like a shill for Martin Ford but I found his book (“Rise Of The Robots”) very interesting and alarming. — maverick909

Trump’s New Tech Era

PCMag’s Sascha Segan opined that the U.S. government’s attitude towards a range of technologies will change in 2017, and suggested what consumers could do in response. Here’s how readers responded.

I wonder if Sasha is afraid of getting fired if he says anything positive about Trump. Seems like a pretty scary situation for anyone not on the “right side”… I can’t seem to find any positive articles on tech sites, and considering Trump won, there must be some people who think positive of him but are just scared of the atmosphere of fear being created by the left. —Adin Sascha’s reply: Honestly, I don’t see this column as positive or negative—I’m just trying to predict based on the statements, positions, and advisers I’ve seen. Personally, I crawled out of both the Twitter and Facebook cesspools of ignorance and superficial nonsense years ago, have never looked back, and am amazed at the extra time I now have for consumption of real, substantive news and information from several sources—not to mention the joys of actually talking to and spending quality time with friends and family . — Thinkaboutit

If Twitter is struggling financially, it has to figure out a way to make money or shutter the service. No government handouts. Same with all green technology. If you want to buy a Tesla, fine, but anybody who can afford one doesn’t need a federal subsidy or tax break to cut the price… I have nothing against solar power, but I see no reason why I should have a higher energy bill simply because somebody wants a less efficient way to generate electricity. See you in four years and we will see if the sky fell. —Jeffrey Clinard Sascha’s reply: My argument about Twitter is that being a semi-official organ of the government would give it a built-in global audience. That will help it survive, if not thrive, financially, as its audience wouldn’t entirely evaporate and it would attract rs and brands trying to reach that audience.

READER QUESTION

Q

I have been a computer professional for over 30 years. This week, my Windows 10 machine changed my log-in from a local to a Microsoft , without my explicit knowledge or approval. Perhaps it was embedded in the

small print somewhere, but who ever reads that? Changing the credentials without my explicit consent is in my opinion completely unethical and criminal. I feel violated. Control over s that are able to to my computer is my responsibility. I find it alarming that Microsoft is building a collection of credentials to every Windows 10 computer. If Microsoft gets hacked or the authentication server gets spoofed, everyone’s PC becomes free entry… Who can I complain to? Am I just so out of touch that there is nothing to really worry about? —Robert Cook

Y

our particular example may not be as bad as you think. In virtually every situation, the site in question does not have your . You see this in forgot- situations where they do not just serve up the on a platter; rather, they make you prove your identity some other way (typically by ownership of your email ) and send a reset link. What happens is that when you create your , it goes through a one-way encryption called a hash function. The same input always yields the same output, but you can’t go the other way. When you , the site hashes what you

typed and lets you in if it matches the saved hash. An attacker who knows the precise hash function being used could create an immense table of common s and their hashes, thereby creating a way to decode at least some s. To prevent this, advanced hashing algorithms add a bit of randomness called “salt” to their hashing systems. Anyway, just because you to a Microsoft does not mean Microsoft controls that . It should not have changed the nature of your without your knowledge. But I’m not sure it did. I’ve gone through the process recently, attempting to troubleshoot a particular system that I had upgraded from earlier Windows with a local . I really did have to participate. I’m pretty sure you did agree to the change, without necessarily realizing it. I hope my response has at least provided you some food for thought. Neil J. Rubenking Lead Analyst, Security, PCMag Digital Network @neiljrubenking

Ask us a question!

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Have a question about a story in PC Magazine, one of the products we cover, or how to better use a tech product you own? Email us at [email protected] and we’ll respond to your question here. Questions may be edited slightly for content and clarity. PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION

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WHAT’S NEW NOW How Do You Feel? Affectiva’s AI Can Tell

I

NEWS

BY SOPHIA STUART

magine powering up your digital device and, after a quick scan of your facial expression, having it respond with, “Hey there, what’s going on?”. Massachusetts-based Affectiva is working on this type of “socio-emotive A.I.,” and PCMag met the company’s director of market development, Jim Deal, at Unity3D’s Unite 2016 conference recently.

HOW DOES THAT MAKE YOU FEEL? Technology like Affectiva determines your mood, which could help with everything from market research to smart homes.

Companies know that humans want to be liked, and so they don’t always tell the truth about a game, movie, or other commercial product when asked. People might say, “It’s great!,” but they’re not actually going to hand over any cash to buy the next upgrade. But the company takes them at their word and invests millions in development, only to have the product flop. Deal became keenly aware of this problem during his time at Microsoft and as founder of Airtight Games, his own software company. “Sometimes it was clear, during research trials, that is skewed. You’re making games, they’re just happy to be there, so they didn’t want to be negative, and we get a false reading,” he said. Unsurprisingly, companies want to cut to the truth. That’s why Affectiva’s investors include not just the the National Science Foundation and Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers but also advertising giant WPP.

Companies know that humans want to be liked, and so they don’t always tell the truth about products.

IN THE MOOD FOR GAMES Affectiva’s emotionrecognition SDK is being embedded into games, so gameplay can morph to address a player’s psychological responses.

It has other uses, too. Affectiva’s emotion-recognition SDK is being embedded into games (via a Unity3D plugin and other platforms) and, as a result, gameplay can morph to address a player’s psychological responses. (Are you scared of snakes? Guess what’s slinking over the horizon to psych you out?) Hollywood is also using it to tweak trailers to ensure sold-out crowds on movies’ opening weekends.

“Our CEO and co-founder, Dr. Rana el Kaliouby, always A FEEL FOR FEELINGS Affectiva measures and had a deep interest in building emotionally aware analyzes what is known machines. After she got her PhD at Cambridge University, about human expression, she did post-doc work with Dr. Rosalind Picard at MIT categorizing everything into emotions (sadness, Media Lab and the two of them spun Affectiva out of happiness, anxiety, joy, and that,” Deal explained. so on) to track not what we Kaliouby is part of Dr. Picard’s “Affective Computing” say but how we really feel. i ne ni movement, which got its start in the late 90s, Deal said. Today, Affectiva’s tech creates “classifiers,” or face and emotion algorithms, from an “emotion data repository of almost 4.7 million faces analyzed, and 50 billion emotion data points recorded.” This means Affectiva is constantly measuring and analyzing what is known about human expression, categorizing everything into specific human emotions (sadness, happiness, anxiety, joy, and so on) to track not what we say but how we really feel about something—the limbic brain knee-jerk reaction as opposed to the conditioned, socially moderated neural network output. In a demo of the software, Deal walked in front of a large screen running Affectiva in the background and positioned himself squarely in the camera’s machine-vision tracker. Instantly, his face was mapped by hundreds of tiny white dots that scanned and moved as his expression changed, tracking 15 different muscular actions at 14 frames per second, and translating all the data into pixels, to compare, contrast, and analyze against the database. Why is this useful? Because what we say and what we do are two different things, and machine intelligence needs to learn this to be predictively accurate.

The other reason companies like facial-expression analytic A.I. is that it’s simple to use and doesn’t require gelling up the electrodes or plugging directly into your brain (like the brain-machine interfaces at Hughes Laboratory and DARPA-funded work out of UCSD that we’ve reported on previously). So what’s next for the company? “The future goal of Affectiva is to continue to evolve software and devices that respond to humans with EQ [emotional quotient],” explained Deal, “rather than just IQ, or rapid calculations. Already our devices are trying to anticipate our needs in a way we’re not aware of, being predictive in nature. What we’re doing, using a simple webcam, is getting real data to back up what people are saying about how they really feel.” With companies like Affectiva, soon your digital device won’t just ask why you look sad—it might also suggest how to manage your moods. More helpful, the future embodied A.I. devices, with Affectiva and other such solutions, might zoom off to the kitchen to make coffee, or at least instruct the IoT system to open the blinds and let the sunshine in.

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Already our devices are trying to anticipate our needs in a way we’re not aware of, being predictive in nature.

WHAT’S NEW NOW

NEWS

NextEV Aims to Leverage Formula E Racing Tech

BY DAVID CARDINAL

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ormula racing has long been a laboratory for performance car companies to push their research and development to the limit, on the way to introducing it into their street-legal car models. That’s one reason that cutting-edge Formula 1 has moved to hybrid engines from the more fan-popular V-8s; hybrids are where the money is for companies such as Mercedes and Renault, which drive much of the funding. Startup circuit Formula E was founded in part to do the same thing for electric vehicle development. Now, Chinese startup NextEV aims to take its learnings from Formula E and turn them into a competitive all-electric mass-market crossover—aiming squarely at Tesla’s Model X.

NextEV recently attracted attention when its Nio EP9 1,341 horsepower prototype supercar set an electric vehicle record on ’s Nürburgring track. Perhaps just as impressive is that despite having a massive motor and incredible top speed of 194 mph, the EP9 is designed for a 265-mile range. Given that Formula E cars—with a top speed of 140 mph—can run for only 30 minutes on a battery charge, that’s quite a step up. NextEV hopes to use what it earns from selling six of its EP9 supercars to help fund the development of its crossover. Once the crossover comes to market, NextEV expects it to compete with Tesla, BMW, and Audi by delivering similar performance at a lower price. That’s easy to say before you’ve started production, though as we’ve seen with Tesla, initial cost and price estimates are often optimistic. Formula E technology has come a long way from when we first covered its launch in 2014, but each team only needs a few cars for the season, so they can each be hand-tuned. Anyone who watches Formula E knows that breakdowns and electrical failures are common. That’s true even though each car has to run for only 30 minutes (the drivers switch cars in the middle of the race, which is safer than trying to swap batteries). The transition from there to supercar isn’t huge. Most supercars spend 99 percent of their time in a show garage, and owners expect to have a team of mechanics around. But to compete in the mass market, vehicles are expected to remain on the road, and safe, for years. Tesla has managed a unique feat in building itself, over a period of years and several models, from an unknown upstart to a respected, major manufacturer of electric cars. It’s not at all clear whether NextEV will be able to accomplish the same thing. If it does, though, it will be a huge and much-needed boost for the value of Formula E.

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NextEV aims to take its learnings from Formula E and turn them into a competitive all-electric mass-market crossover.

WHAT’S NEW NOW

NEWS

‘Guessing Attack’ Byes Credit Card Security in 6 Seconds BY MATTHEW HUMPHRIES

D

ecember is always a very busy time for banks and credit card companies, as we all scramble to purchase presents in time for the holidays. But it’s also a boon period for fraudsters who are trying to steal those precious card details. And now it seems, they can “guess hack” a credit card in mere seconds. A team of researchers at Newcastle University discovered two weaknesses in the way online transactions are verified using the Visa payment system. Neither weakness is of much use alone, but when used together, an attacker can recover a credit card’s security information in as few as 6 seconds.

The two weaknesses being taking advantage of are as follows: 1. Online payment systems do not detect multiple invalid payment requests if they are performed across multiple websites. They also allow up to 20 attempts per card on each site. 2. Websites are not consistent in the checks they do, varying the card information requested. It’s possible to recover the expiration date, CVV numerical code, and postal code associated with a card knowing only partial details—for example, the card number and expiration date. The CCS2015 Toolkit automatically accesses a number of website payment systems and systematically removes the unknown elements through brute-force failure and success until all the card details are uncovered. Guessing an expiration date takes no more than 60 attempts, and a CVV code takes less than 1,000 attempts. Spread over hundreds or thousands of website payment systems, you can see why card details don’t stay hidden for very long. The most worrying aspect of this attack is the fact the payment system, and therefore banks, do not detect it is happening. The attacker is creating a working stolen card in a matter of seconds, meaning they can steal it, use it, and discard it very quickly and before the owner realizes it has been stolen. The research team confirmed that only Visa is prone to this form of attack. Mastercard detects the invalid attempts after 10 failures, limiting its use to fraudsters. Dr. Martin Emms, a co-author on the Newcastle University research paper, says that when it comes to solving this problem, “Sadly, there’s no magic bullet.” Until websites and Visa solve the problems with their validation systems, it’s up to s to keep their cards safe and react quickly to any suspicious behavior. PC MAGAZINE DIGITAL EDITION

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Guessing an expiration date takes no more than 60 attempts, and a CVV code takes less than 1,000 attempts.

WHAT’S NEW NOW

TOP GEAR

What We Love Most This Month BY STEPHANIE MLOT

180S BLUETOOTH WIRELESS EAR WARMERS Freezing temperatures and snowy sidewalks shouldn’t stop you from enjoying the great outdoors. Whether you’re walking the dog or running off that holiday ham, bundle up with 180s Bluetooth wireless ear warmers. Built-in speakers let you take phone calls and listen to music hands-free. Grid fleece lining protects from wind and water for added comfort. $69.99 180s.com

WHAT’S NEW NOW

TOP GEAR

What We Love Most This Month BY STEPHANIE MLOT

SEIRUS HEATTOUCH IGNITE MITT With the Seirus HeatTouch Ignite gloves, heated insulation and windproof and waterproof lining are covered in full-grain leather for a stylish and practical wintertime accessory. Just push the button to activate the gloves for 6 hours (low), 4 hours (medium), or 2 hours (high). A built-in heat helps keep your hands and fingers toasty—as long as the battery lasts. Available in men’s or women’s versions, in black or white. $374.99 seirus.com

WHAT’S NEW NOW

TOP GEAR

What We Love Most This Month BY STEPHANIE MLOT

CELESTRON ELEMENTS THERMOCHARGE Keep your core temperature up and your electronics charged with the ThermoCharge power pack and hand warmer. The two-in-one device features a 4400 mAh rechargeable battery for 6 hours of continuous heat (104 to 113 degrees Fahrenheit). It also s USB-powered gadgets, so you can snap photos, call friends, and listen to music without a freeze-out. Aluminum casing and silicone caps keep the power pack safe when not in use. $34.95 celestron.com

WHAT’S NEW NOW

TOP GEAR

What We Love Most This Month BY STEPHANIE MLOT

PROFLEX HEATED INSOLES Any cold-weather athlete can attest that warm are happy feet. ProFLEX heated insoles fit into a ski boot, rain boot, or all-purpose boot to fight off frostbite. Built-in rechargeable batteries promise at least 2,500 hours of use—about four winters’ worth. Each flexible insole features three heat settings: standby (no heat), medium (100 degrees F), and high (111 degrees F). ProFLEX offers insoles in men’s and women’s sizes 3.5 to 14. $184.99 heat.thermacell.com

WHAT’S NEW NOW

TOP GEAR

What We Love Most This Month BY STEPHANIE MLOT

WARM MOUSE As if carpal tunnel weren’t bad enough, long hours in front of a computer, keyboard, and mouse can also make it hard to keep your extremities warm. (Have you ever tried typing with gloves on?) The Warm Mouse means never having to stick your hand into your pocket or under your armpit to regain feeling in your fingers: What looks like a generic laser mouse is actually a bundle of warmth. The only challenge is heating up your non-mousing hand. $59.00 warmmouse.com

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Sascha Sega

COMMENTARY

Sorry Cord Cutters, DirecTV Now Is a Trap

T

hanks to mysteriously escalating prices, channels you don’t want, and a lack of competitive options, cable TV and Internet companies are widely hated in the U.S. Cord-cutting is supposed to save us from at least some of that. But AT&T’s new DirecTV Now plan just transplants the cable model into the cord-cutter world. It’s full of traps and pitfalls for consumers, the biggest of which may not become obvious for another year or so. DirecTV Now is basically a cable bundle delivered through your Internet connection. You’ll see a lot about a $35 promotional rate for 100 channels, but that rate will reset soon enough to $60. That’s what Spectrum Cable here in New York charges for a traditional bundle of 125 channels plus DVR service, which DirecTV Now doesn’t offer. AT&T’s smallest bundle, which will in fact cost $35, includes 60 channels. That will be a savings over cable. But you can’t get fewer than 60 channels, and in the great cable tradition, it’ll probably include a lot of channels you don’t want. (When I wrote this, AT&T hadn’t yet released a full list.) The company also reserves the right to hike prices on that bundle whenever it wants. Because the channel bundles are so big and a little weird (for example, you need the 100-channel bundle for BBC News) you’ll be dragged along into cost negotiations for channels you don’t care about.

Sascha Segan is the lead mobile analyst for PC Magazine. His commentary has also appeared on Fox News, CNBC, CNN, and various radio stations and newspapers around the world.

Sascha Sega

This isn’t entirely on the cable companies. Fox wants to make sure you can’t get (popular) Fox News without (less popular) FX and (what is it even?) FXX. Cable companies’ negotiations over the channels owned by Disney/ABC/ESPN are an annual horror show. (ESPN alone usually costs an average of $7 per month out of your cable bill.) The whole struggle over content carriage fees is a big part of why the cable TV pricing world is such a mess, and why you can’t get recent network television on Netflix, which works really hard to contain its costs. Cable companies build these big bundles, make them opaque, and then pack profit on top. What you actually pay for the content you watch ends up hidden. Breaking the bundles would be more market efficient and more transparent to consumers. But cable companies don’t want that (as they need the opacity to hide their profit margin) and content providers don’t want that (as they want to force channels most people don’t watch into the bundle.) So expect DirecTV Now rates to hike regularly, just like cable rates do. And , if you’re getting DirecTV Now over an ISP with a data cap, as we’re seeing more and more often, your TV watching will count towards the data cap. That’s another hidden cost. Hooray for cable and its business models! It gets worse, though. For America. THE FIRST REAL NET NEUTRALITY TEST I know, net neutrality is boring. What if I just call it crony corruption? Let’s call net neutrality regulations “anti-corruption rules.” DirecTV Now is a real test of our anticorruption firewalls, in a way that T-Mobile’s Binge On and other carriers’ competing products are not. That’s because it’s free for any video

Sascha Sega

channel or site to participate in Binge On. Yes, there are some technical requirements that make it easier for bigger sites to comply than smaller sites. But DirecTV Now launches corruption into a new order of magnitude. For AT&T wireless subscribers, using DirecTV Now won’t impact their data caps. (And , AT&T subscribers who don’t have DirecTV satellite service can’t get unlimited data.) Any other video provider that wants to do this has to pay up, big time. DirecTV Now gets to do this for free. Sling TV would need to write a big check to AT&T. AT&T claims DirecTV is “paying AT&T” for this privilege. That is transparently ridiculous. That is like if I move a $50 bill from my pants pocket to my jacket pocket and claim that I’m paying myself. The money is going from AT&T to AT&T. Any other description is some silly Penn & Teller, slight-of-hand nonsense. Now we get to what I think of as the frog-in-the-pot factor in this kind of corruption. Offering DirecTV Now for free doesn’t immediately stall or block any competitors. It looks like a good thing, where nobody else’s things are damaged. The danger is that we’re now frogs in slowly warming pots. Free DirecTV Now will entice a certain number of people away from other services, which will damage those other services and reduce consumer choice. It tilts the playing field. Other services may need to align with other carriers, and then you’ll have a situation where if you want DirecTV Now, you sign up with AT&T, but if you want PlayStation Vue, you sign up with Verizon. Then there will be one choice on each carrier, and, hey, your cable bill? Yeah, it’s going to look like that. Welcome to the pot, frogs. Hope you enjoy the water. [email protected]

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Doug Newcom

COMMENTARY

How Delphi, Mobileye Are Fast-Tracking Driverless Car Tech

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veryone wants to know when fully selfdriving cars will be ready for the road. The companies developing the technology usually give a timeline of several years to decades away. Automotive parts manufacturer Delphi and Mobileye are no different, and during a media roundtable this week in San Francisco, Delphi’s VP of services, Glen DeVos, envisioned a longterm timeframe for the widespread use of the technology. He expects that fully autonomous driving will first be deployed on commercial vehicles, since businesses will be able to save on the expense of drivers and the downtime they require. At the same time, though, Delphi is partnering with Mobileye, the dominant automotive camera supplier, to fast-track self-driving technology production—ideally by 2019—via a system the partners call Centralized Sensing Localization and Planning (CSLP). CSLP uses an array of sensors to allow a vehicle to know its location within 10 centimeters, even without GPS connectivity. This helps a car navigate complex intersections even when there are no lane markings. It also identifies vehicles by their basic shape, senses whether another car is stationary or parked, and has what Delphi calls

Car tech expert Doug Newcomb has written for Popular Mechanics, Road & Track, and other publications, and is the author of Car Audio for Dummies.

Doug Newcom

“semantic understanding” to predict the path of other vehicles, so that a self-driving car can “behave more human-like in its driving behavior and determine the best path forward.” A crucial aspect of the CSLP system is circumventing what Delphi and Mobileye call the “map-heavy” approach used by companies like Google and many automakers. It allows a selfdriving vehicle to know its location but also its surroundings, to achieve full autonomy. Instead, Delphi and Mobileye’s CSLP system will employ a “map-lite” approach by leveraging a technology Mobileye introduced at CES 2016 called Road Experience Management (REM). Autonomous vehicles that heavily rely on detailed maps require a robust data connection to constantly feed accurate mapping data to the car. But the REM system s data in small bursts that can be easily handled by the 4G LTE connectivity already found in many vehicles. Another benefit of REM technology is it can be “seamlessly integrated with existing vehicle platforms,” DeVos mentioned during the media roundtable. But perhaps the primary advantage of the REM technology is that it will essentially take real-time pictures of roads. Mapping software can be out of date due to changes to the streets made after the maps were created or temporary conditions such as road construction. The CSLP system will not only capture and take into permanent infrastructure ranging from intersections to road signs but will also record construction and other short-term changes to the roadway. And this data can be crowdsourced among millions of cars equipped with the system. I had chance to see the CSLP system in action on the streets of Mountain View, CA, near

Doug Newcom

Delphi’s Silicon Valley Labs, where it’s being tested (as well as in Pittsburgh and Singapore). And I couldn’t help compare the drive to one I took just over a year ago in the same location in one of Google’s autonomous Lexus RX 350s. But unlike Google vehicles, one of which I spotted on the street during our drive, there are no noticeable sensors on the Delphi Audi unless you look very closely. Compared to a self-driving Google Lexus, the Delphi Audi handled situations such as lane closures and stopped vehicles in adjacent lanes without hesitation, although the Delphi test driver did have to take over the controls twice: once when we needed to speed up to make a right turn ahead of a city bus, and again after we made the turn and got stuck behind a garbage truck. Regardless, I was very impressed with the system, and was surprised to find out that it was operating without the benefit of Mobileye’s REM technology. This means it will only get better, and that self-driving cars could be available to the public much sooner than we think. [email protected]

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In many cases, owners simply prefer to use their smartphone or tablet.

Tim Bajari

COMMENTARY

What Silicon Valley Can Learn From the 2016 Election

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wo weeks before the election, I traveled to Maine for a conference and drove through Massachusetts and New Hampshire on my way. In Silicon Valley, which was mostly Clinton country, I’d seen very few signs or bumper stickers promoting any candidates. But as I drove through the northeast, plenty of Trump signs were displayed on people’s lawns, fences, and car bumpers. I did see a few Clinton signs, but Trump signs dominated the landscape. In fact, as I was driving up Highway 1 to Freeport, Maine, home of L.L. Bean, I drove past a group of about 18 people waving Trump signs to ersby. This surprised me. Sitting in my Silicon Valley office, I was pretty insulated from how the rest of the country perceived both candidates. Like a lot of us, we mostly trusted the media and pollsters to guide our knowledge about how the election was evolving. As I spoke to people in Maine, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire—where, interestingly, Clinton won—I saw more ion from Trump followers. More important, when I asked why they were voting for Trump, their anger against the Washington elite was top of mind. As I flew home, for the first time I thought to myself that he had a better chance of winning the election than I could have ever imagined.

Tim Bajarin is the president of Creative Strategies and a consultant, analyst, and futurist covering personal computers and consumer technology.

Tim Bajari

Since Trump’s victory, I’ve seen all kinds of media reports on why he won and how in the world the pollsters got this so wrong. While there have been a lot of explanations, one key observation from Dean Baquet, executive editor of the New York Times, should also be a warning for Silicon Valley and its view that the world starts and ends with it. Mr. Baquet praised his political team and other Times journalists for ‘“agility and creativity,” citing articles about Mr. Trump’s taxes and Mrs. Clinton’s record in Libya. But in an interview in his office, he said, “If I have a mea culpa for journalists and journalism, it’s that we’ve got to do a much better job of being on the road, out in the country, talking to different kinds of people than the people we talk to—especially if you happen to be a New York-based news organization—and remind ourselves that New York is not the real world,” he said on Nov. 9. Similarly, we need to remind ourselves that Silicon Valley is not the real world. I grew up here and have seen its amazing growth. But in some ways, our research and the tech media focuses largely on those in the know instead of the real people who use our products. I am reminded of something I saw at Xerox PARC in the late 1990s—a two-handed mouse. I and many others just did not think this product made sense, but the engineer who created said he thought “people might like it.” To be fair, globalization means Silicon Valley tech is getting into the hands of people of all generations and income levels. But we still often create products that are too complicated and difficult to use, many of which fall by the wayside. Taking a hint from the New York Times editor, as tech researchers and marketing professionals,

Tim Bajari

we need to get out more, really talk to the people who use our products, and gain greater insight into what they want and what will work for them. Here at Creative Strategies, we try and do this often, which includes going to college campuses and talking with students directly, or when possible, visiting different cities around the U.S. I really think Silicon Valley needs to get beyond its insular way of thinking, and the 2016 polling failures only reinforce that. [email protected]

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We need to get out more, really talk to the people who use our products, and gain greater insight into what they want.

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CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

Impossible I-1 $229.00 L l l m m

A Modern Instant Camera With Advanced Tech

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he Impossible I-1 is the first new camera in years to use classic Polaroid 600 film. That it comes from Impossible, the company responsible for saving the format, is no surprise. But some of its features are head-turning: It’s an anastant camera that can be controlled with a smartphone, and its lens is ringed by a series of LED lights that act as both frame counter and flash. It’s a solid camera that will appeal to those committed to the Polaroid format, but it has some room for refinement. Our Editors’ Choice remains the Lomography Lomo’Instant Wide, which uses a different, less expensive film format made by Impossible rival Fujifilm.

DESIGN The I-1 features a sturdy plastic build with a matteblack finish and yellow highlights. In fact, it matches one of my favorite Impossible films (the Third Man Records yellow-and-black duochrome) quite well. It has a large base, necessary to accommodate the Polaroid 600 film format, and a trapezoidal prism that directs light from the lens. The camera is noticeably smaller than older 600 models, at 5.7 by 4.3 by 4.3 inches (HWD) and 15.5 ounces. The I-1’s lens is a wider angle than older Polaroids, a nod to a generation of smartphone photographers who believe a 28mm (full-frame equivalent) angle of view to be standard. It’s a complex design that uses different lenses to capture images at different distances while maintaining a constant field of view. This approach has advantages—it’s wonderful to have an autofocusing instant camera that can lock focus from 11.8 inches (0.3-meter) to infinity. But the action of the gears putting the right lens in front of the leaf shutter is obnoxiously noisy, a drawback for using the camera in social situations. The included viewfinder attaches to the top of the camera magnetically and folds down when not in use. It consists of two pieces of glass—the rear element you put up to your eye and a front element about an inch ahead of it. Parallax can be an issue when framing shots using a finder of this type; if you don’t have the two pieces lined up properly, your shot won’t be what you expect. There’s a dot in the rear element and a circle imprinted on the front to aid you. Center the dot in the circle, and you’re good to go for framing.

Impossible I-1 PROS Numerous film types available. s autofocus and autoexposure. Wide-angle prime lens. Manual exposure via smartphone connection. Built-in LED ring flash. Classic Polaroid format. CONS Battery drains when not in use. Popup viewfinder takes some getting used to. Film is very expensive. Color film needs improvement. Autoexposure can be tricky. Noisy focus motor. Flash doesn’t work when power is low.

I’d prefer a more standard add-on optical viewfinder, like the type typically available for wide-angle rangefinder lenses, but the magnetic mounting system used by the I-1 precludes using a standard shoe mount viewfinder. Impossible states that more accessories are coming that use its magnetic connection, but none have been officially announced at this time. The lens is surrounded by LEDs that serve a few different purposes. Primary is a ring flash. You’ll certainly need a flash when shooting indoors or in low light—the close focus lens is an f/7 at its widest, and the infinity lens is about f/9. The LED ring has 12 total lights: Eight fire when you’re photographing subjects at a distance, and four are diffused for softer output and fire when you’re focusing close. In a departure from classic Polaroid cameras, which are powered by batteries inside the film packs themselves, the I-1 is powered by an internal rechargeable battery. It’s not removable, so you need to plug the camera into a USB wall adapter to charge it. Impossible claims you can get 120 shots or about three days’ worth of casual use from a full charge. The three-day claim is an issue, though. Even when you’re not using the camera, the battery drains slowly, so you need to be mindful to top the I-1 off before you take it out shooting. This is in stark contrast to classic Polaroid models, which are ready to go at any moment. In my testing I found that a fully charged I-1 is completely dead within a week of sitting on a shelf. It’s easy enough to check the level of charge. Just press the shutter button when the camera is turned off, and the lights around the lens will light up to tell you how much power is available. At least four of the seven lights must be lit for the flash to work. For indoor shots, you definitely need the flash, and it can provide fill for backlit subjects outdoors. Not having it available when the battery is low is a problem.

AN LED HALO A ring of LEDs line the lens of the Impossible I-1, acting both as a flash and as a battery life indicator.

FILM The camera works with Impossible 600 film (which includes an internal battery, unused here) and I-1 film, which is a little less expensive as it omits the battery that’s needed to power legacy Polaroid cameras. But film isn’t cheap—an eight-shot pack of I-1 film sells for $19.99, making the cost of each press of the shutter about $2.50. (You can cut the cost to $2.38 per image by buying film packs in quantities of three.) That’s a steep price to pay for an image. The Instax Wide format used by the Lomo’Instant Wide and Fujifilm Instax Wide 300 costs between $0.75 and $1.09 per image, depending on how much you buy at a time. Currently, though, Instax Wide is sold only in a color format. With the I-1, you have the option of using black-and-white film, a big plus for photographers with an artistic bent. Impossible’s color has some serious room for improvement. Even though a new emulsion was introduced this year, washed-out colors and the need to block the film from light as it develops are both real issues. You don’t have to keep the film in the dark for the full 20-to-30-minute development time (though it’s not a bad idea to do so), but the first few minutes are crucial. To help you better shield images, a long plastic film—Impossible calls it a frog tongue—is built into the camera. It completely covers the image after it’s ejected from the camera. I carry an empty film box with me when in the field, and do my best to maneuver the image into it without letting the sun hit it, but it’s a tricky process. The lip of the frog tongue curls around the bottom of the image frame. Once you pull it away the black sheet quickly retracts into the camera. If you’re not careful you can end up bending the film, and if that happens early in the development process, it can damage the image. Now, this isn’t always a bad thing—sometimes happy accidents make for stunning results. The Generation 2.0 Black-and-White is a lot better. You don’t have to protect it from light as it develops, so you can watch the image emerge. It has strong contrast and detail and fully develops in about 15 minutes. When I first shot with the film last year, I noticed that a sepia tint developed after the photos had spent about a week in storage, but that didn’t happen with the black-and-white film that Impossible provided with the I-1.

Limited edition films based on the black-and-white stock that deliver different results are also available. The aforementioned Third Man Records edition is black-and-yellow, for example, and orange- and redtinted duochromes were available when we reviewed the I-1. Since they are based on the black-and-white film, you don’t have to shield them from light, and images emerge quickly. You can also get film with different color frames around the images, and opt for a circular frame if you aren’t a fan of the square look. BLUETOOTH CONNECTIVITY The I-1 doesn’t give you a lot of control over images in its normal operating mode. You can choose whether the flash fires and dial in a bit of negative or positive exposure compensation, but that’s it. But pairing it with your Android or iOS device via Bluetooth and ing the I-1 Camera app opens up a world of control possibilities. You can manually set focus, aperture, shutter speed, and flash power. An exposure guide lets you know whether your image is going to be underexposed or overexposed based on the I-1’s ambient meter, but you’ll want to hand-meter the scene (either using something like the Lumu or your phone’s camera in conjunction with a metering app) for the best results. Impossible film is rated at ISO 640.

It’s an anastant camera that can be controlled with a smartphone, and its lens is ringed by a series of LED lights.

POSSIBLITIES Pairing the Impossible I-1 with your Android or iOS device via Bluetooth and ing the I-1 Camera app opens up a world of control features.

A PICTURE IS WORTH... A LOT The cost of each photo is about $2.50. You can cut the cost to $2.38 per image if you buy film packs in quantities of three. But that’s an expensive image.

Manual control is a big plus for shooting images that stand apart from traditional snapshots. Event photographers can combine a long exposure and the flash to both freeze a crisp image of wedding guests on the dance floor and surround them with blur, for example—just as you would with an SLR with full manual control. Note that only manual focus is available when working in manual mode via Bluetooth. I would have liked autofocus enabled, as estimating the distance between camera and subject is an unnecessary pain. Other creative functions are available via the app, including a basic self-timer option, a noise trigger (think of it as a Clapper for your camera), and two types of light painting—one that shoots a long exposure and lets you use your phone’s LED flash to paint in white light, and another that uses the phone’s screen to paint in different colors. A scanner setting digitizes your finished images using the phone’s camera. You can shoot at a skewed angle to avoid glare, and the app eliminates distortion; you just need to identify each corner of the the photo. I opted to scan images for this review using a flatbed scanner. I used an empty film cartridge as a film holder, so the physical image doesn’t touch the scanner glass itself. That eliminates the distracting Newton’s Rings effect that you can get when photos come in direct with the scanner glass. CONCLUSIONS I had really high hopes for the Impossible I-1. The company is doing an irable job at a task that some dubbed impossible—keeping Polaroid film alive in the 21st century. And it’s attacked that task in an ambitious manner, not only reverse-engineering a complex chemical process but also developing new hardware to use the film. The I-1 is a solid first effort, but like the company’s first attempts at mass producing instant film, there’s some room for improvement.

Image quality is strong, with a wide-angle lens that’s sharper than you’ll get with most eBay Polaroid 600 models, and the ability to control exposure manually via your smartphone is an excellent feature for creative photographers. And I absolutely adore the quality of the black-and-white and duochrome films. Black-and-white is currently available only in the small Instax Mini format, and no one else has toned duochrome instant film available. It’s likely only a matter of time before the black-and-white Instax Mini film is also sold in the larger Wide format. But the color stock still has a long way to go to match the quality of Instax film. And other issues with the camera can’t be ignored, most notably the battery. Given the cost to shoot, the I-1 is a camera that you will likely want to grab to capture an image or two and then put away until the next moment you want to preserve in a physical, tactile format. But with a battery that holds a charge only for up to a week, you’ll need to plan your instant photography carefully. That kills the spontaneity of the instant film format. I have faith that Impossible’s color film will get better. And the ability to charge the I-1 via USB does help ameliorate the battery issue. Despite it not having as wide a variety of film types available, we’re leaving our Editors’ Choice with the Lomography Lomo’Instant Wide, which is much more economical to use and costs less up front. JIM FISHER

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Image quality is strong, with a wide-angle lens that’s sharper than you’ll get with most eBay Polaroid 600 models.

REVIEWS

CONSUMER ELECTRONICS

Touch-Screen Remote and Hub Make a Perfect Couple Logitech’s Harmony line has been one of the biggest names in universal remotes for years, and it gets more and more advanced. The latest and most powerful iteration is the EDITORS’ CHOICE Harmony Elite, a bundle that combines the Harmony Hub and the Harmony 950 touch-screen universal remote, replacing the Harmony Ultimate Home package that came before it. It’s extensively programmable and can control both home entertainment and smart-home devices. The package is expensive, but it’s still far less than you’d pay for a custom control system installation. For its power and versatility, the Harmony Elite earns our Editors’ Choice.

Logitech Harmony Elite $298 L L L l m

HARMONY HUB The Harmony automation hub has remained largely unchanged since it launched as the Harmony Home Hub. It’s a glossy black puck measuring 1.0 by 4.9 by 4.2 inches (HWD), about the size of a Roku Premiere+. It’s a wide-angle IR transmitter, so you can simply place it in front of your TV or in your media console. Two 3.5mm ports on the back let you connect the two included IR receivers, small plastic lumps on long wires that you can set in front of any device the Hub can’t reach (handy if you put the Hub in a cabinet and still want to control your TV). The Hub gets power from a micro USB port on the back with the included cable and wall adapter. The back also holds a pairing/ reset button. REMOTE The remote is the star of the show. It’s a sleek, 7.4-inch black wand with a 2.5-inch touch screen built into the top half. The bright, colorful screen displays Devices and Activities in two separate lists by default, which lets you drill down into different sets of controls based on the active device or the activity running. The screen also provides access to a Settings menu, though the vast majority of adjustments must be made through the Harmony app. The touch screen provides access to the bulk of the system’s functions and settings, but the remote still has a welcome handful of physical buttons for common activities. There’s a prominent direction pad flanked by volume and channel rockers on the left and right, with playback controls directly above them. Menu and four color buttons sit below the pad, with a set of four home automation buttons and a dimmer rocker beneath them.

Logitech Harmony Elite PROS Tons of ed home entertainment and home automation devices. App control. CONS Expensive. Alexa skill is very limited.

YOU’RE IN CONTROL The Logitech Harmony Elite remote is a sleek, 7.4-inch black wand with a 2.5-inch touch screen built into the top half.

Two charging s sit on the bottom of the remote, around a micro USB port covered by a rubber door. The s keep the remote charged when it sits in the included cradle. The micro USB port is used to update the remote’s firmware and sync it if you want to use the Windows or Mac Harmony software instead of the Android or iOS apps; you need the wired connection for firmware updates, but everything else can be set up on the apps. SETUP Setup is fairly easy, but getting all of your devices and activities acting the exact way you want them to can be a tedious process. To start, plug in the Harmony Hub and install the Harmony app on your mobile device. The app walks you through connecting the Hub to your Wi-Fi network and creating a free Harmony to manage your settings. After that, the app helps you connect the remote and make sure it’s working with the Hub. You can program your devices into the remote at any point after you set up the Hub. Enter the brand and model of your TV, media streamer, Blu-ray player, or game system and it will go on the list of devices the remote knows to control. TVs and other IR-controlled electronics will work automatically, but you might need to take one or two extra steps for non-IR electronics; when I added my PlayStation 4 to the remote, for instance, the app directed me to go into the PS4 and add the remote as a Bluetooth keyboard. Home automation devices are added through their own menu on the app, which lets you select from a variety of smart home systems, including LIFX, Lutron, Nest, Philips Hue, and SmartThings. Device isn’t quite as diverse as it with the Wink Hub 2, but you’ll find most big-name brands and products.

The remote is extensively programmable and can control both home entertainment and smarthome devices.

THE HANDY HARMONY HUB The Harmony Hub is a glossy black puck measuring 1.0 by 4.9 by 4.2 inches (HWD), about the size of a Roku Premiere+.

THE GOLDEN TOUCH The Logitech Harmony Elite remote lets you control your home entertainment system but also a number of smart home devices. Its touch screen changes menus depending upon use.

Once your devices are set up, you can control them individually by tapping on the remote’s touch screen or on the app. The buttons on the remote directly control the active device, and the touch screen (and app) expand to offer additional options, such as numbers and inputs. I got the remote to control my TV and PS4 flawlessly, and I could switch between them in the Devices menu. ACTIVITIES, AUTOMATION, AND ALEXA A big automation draw here are Activities, remote-control macros you set up in the app that activate and configure multiple devices at once. For example, a Watch TV Activity can turn on the TV and cable box, change the input to the cable box, and set the remote to control it. The home automation buttons on the remote are similarly simple to use. You configure the four buttons to activate specific devices or perform specific tasks through the app. It took about a minute to set a button on the remote to switch my Philips Hue White Ambient lights among four different scenes with a short tap and to turn them all off with a long tap. That said, you can assign only one function to each button, so you need to pick and choose wisely. The Harmony now works with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, so if you have an Amazon Echo or Echo Dot, you can trigger activities with voice commands. Unfortunately, Alexa’s Harmony skill can only start or stop activities. You can turn your TV on and set the right input by talking, but after that you need the remote or your smartphone to actually control anything. There are no TV or playback controls, so you can’t use Alexa to pause playback or adjust the volume on the fly. It’s frustratingly limited, and I gave up on using the feature after a few tries. It would be much more useful if it could trigger simple commands and activities. Logitech plans to expand the Alexa skill in the future to allow more direct control of your devices with voice commands.

CONCLUSIONS The Logitech Harmony Elite is the most full-featured remote control you can get without paying for a custom system, which tend to cost a lot more. It’s still expensive, but you get a powerful remote control and automation hub combo that can take over both your home entertainment system and your smart home devices. The bulk of the price is for the powerful touch-screen remote, so you can save some money by buying just the Harmony Hub ($100) or the Harmony Hub with a button-only remote in the Harmony Companion bundle ($150). For features and polish, though, the Harmony Elite is Logitech’s flagship remote and our Editors’ Choice. WILL GREENWALD

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OnePlus 3: A Solid Choice for an Unlocked Phone

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ell, that was fast! The OnePlus 3T, available in 64GB ($439) and 128GB ($479 models, has arrived to replaced the OnePlus 3 ($399), which was just released this summer. With the 3T, you get the very latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor complemented by 6GB of RAM, making the phone one of the fastest we’ve tested. Camera performance has improved with a higher megapixel front sensor, the already excellent battery life is even longer, and the software remains highly customizable. If you have a OnePlus 3, you’ll probably want to hold onto it, but if you’re in the market for a new unlocked phone, the OnePlus 3T is a solid alternative to the ZTE Axon 7 and a much more affordable option than the Google Pixel XL.

OnePlus 3T $479.00 L L L l m

DESIGN, DISPLAY, AND FEATURES Put the OnePlus 3T next to the OnePlus 3, and you won’t be able to tell the difference. The two phones are physically identical, sharing the same metal unibody build and same button and port placement. They can even use the same cases and accessories (including the OnePlus Loop VR headset), and both phones are available in gray or gold, though the gray 3T is slightly darker (pictured below). The two phones are 6.0 by 2.9 by 0.3 inches (HWD), and both weigh 5.6 ounces, putting the 3T in the same size and weight class as phablet-size metal slabs including the Pixel XL (6.1 by 3.0 by 0.3 inches, 5.9 ounces) and the Axon 7 (6.0 by 2.9 by 0.3 inches, 6.2 ounces). I find it a bit too wide and tall to reach everything with my thumb, so it’s difficult to use the phone with one hand, especially since there’s no option to resize the screen.

OnePlus 3T PROS Relatively affordable. Fast performance. Attractive metal unibody. Solid front and rear camera. 10plus–hour battery life. Clean UI and highly customizable software. Larger storage model available. Dual SIM cards. CONS Same screen resolution as the OnePlus 3 and less sharp than the competition. Lacks waterproofing and expandable storage.

CONNECTION OPTIONS A 3.5mm audio jack, USB-C port, and speaker grille can all be found on the bottom of the OnePlus 3.

As mentioned, the ports and buttons are the same as those on the OnePlus 3. On the right is a dual SIM card slot with a power button below it. The bottom has a 3.5mm headphone jack, a USB-C port, and a fairly loud bottom-firing speaker. The left edge houses a handy alert slider, letting you quickly and easily switch between Ring, Silent, and Do Not Disturb modes.

The display is a 5.5-inch 1,920-by-1,080 Optic AMOLED , the same resolution as the previous generation phone’s with the same pixel density (401ppi). That means the Quad HD s on the Axon 7 (538ppi) and Pixel XL (534ppi) are both significantly sharper. It’s a pity that given this phone’s higher price, OnePlus chose not to bump up display resolution. That said, the screen is nothing to scoff at. Maximum brightness has been ramped up and color calibration improved. Colors are accurate but also vivid when using the default sRGB mode, and customization options are available to make color temperature warmer or cooler. Outdoor visibility is excellent thanks to the combination of high maximum brightness and a polarizing layer between the screen and the protective pane of Gorilla Glass 4. Viewing angles are similarly excellent. Using the OnePlus 3T side-by-side with the Pixel XL, I never noticed the difference in display resolution. The one exception is that when you’re using a VR headset, you’ll notice more pixelation on the 3T. On the lip below the display is a fingerprint scanner that doubles as a capacitive home button with back and recent buttons on either side. You can enable various programmable functions (launching the camera, opening a previously used app, bringing up voice assistant, and so on) for each button with either a long press or a double tap. Other customization options include swapping the order of the buttons or turning them off entirely in favor of the on-screen navigation bar. Despite its rich array of features, the OnePlus 3T isn’t protected from submersion in water. And while neither the Pixel XL nor the Axon 7 offer this feature, it’s becoming more common on flagship phones and would have been a nice addition.

You get the latest Snapdragon 821 processor and 6GB of RAM, making the phone one of the fastest we’ve tested.

ON DISPLAY A 1080p Optic AMOLED display has increased brightness and a polarizing layer for greater visibility.

BUTTONS AND CONTROLS On the left side of the OnePlus 3 you’ll find an alert slider for controlling notification access, along with a volume rocker. The right side (shown here) has a dual SIM card slot and a power button.

NETWORK PERFORMANCE AND CONNECTIVITY As an unlocked phone ing LTE bands 1/2/4/5/7/12/17/30, the OnePlus 3T shares the same network compatibility as its predecessor and will work with GSM carriers such as AT&T and T-Mobile without any trouble. But unlike the Pixel XL, the OnePlus 3T has no for CDMA carriers, including Sprint and Verizon. The X12 modem is also limited to the same Category 6 LTE speeds as the OnePlus 3, so in our testing it proved to be slower than the Pixel XL, which can speeds up to Category 12 (once that kind of coverage exists). That said, network speeds were still good when we tested the phone on AT&T in midtown Manhattan, averaging 15Mbps down. Other connectivity protocols include dual-band Wi-Fi, NFC, and Bluetooth 4.2. The phone also s two SIM cards, allowing you to make calls using two separate phone numbers—a handy feature for work or travel and one that’s fairly uncommon in the U.S. Unfortunately, the second SIM slot isn’t also compatible with microSD cards, which would arguably be more useful for most people. Call quality was great in our tests. Transmissions come across with clear and audible tones, and strong noise cancellation blots out most background noise. Earpiece and speakerphone volume are quite loud and can be used to carry on a conversation in a noisy environment. PROCESSOR AND BATTERY The OnePlus 3T is powered by the very latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 821 processor clocked at 2.35GHz and has 6GB RAM and UFS 2.0 flash storage under the hood. All of this makes for one of the fastest phones we’ve tested. The 3T scored an impressive 159,144 on AnTuTu, which measures overall system

performance. It beats the Snapdragon 820-powered OnePlus 3 by a significant amount (141,429), as well as the Axon 7 (141,989). On Geekbench, the 3T has excellent single-core and multi-core scores (1881/4276), outperforming the Pixel XL (1661/4146), though not by very much. Unsurprisingly, real-world use is buttery smooth. Launching apps and multitasking is so quick it feels almost instantaneous, and during testing, I was never able to put the phone under enough strain to make it stutter. Gaming performance is also excellent. Games like GTA San STAYING ALIVE Andreas and Asphalt 8 run without any hint of Battery life is top-notch, latency or dropped frames. and the OnePlus 3’s Battery life is stellar thanks to the large 3,400mAh proprietary Dash Charger allows the cell combined with a relatively undemanding phone to be charged to display. The phone outlasted our 10-hour test video full in less than an hour. in which we stream full-screen video over LTE while set to maximum brightness. At the end of the test, we still had 5 percent charge remaining. That gives the OnePlus 3T one of the longest runtimes among the phones we’ve tested, matching the Samsung Galaxy S7 Edge and handily beating the Pixel XL (6 hours, 43 minutes) and the Axon 7 (6 hours) by several hours. Enabling the Battery Saver feature will also improve runtime by turning off vibration, location services, and most background data. And the proprietary Dash Charger allows the phone to be charged to full in less than an hour. CAMERA AND VIDEO The 3T has matching 16-megapixel cameras on the front and the back, but the one on the rear also s optical image stabilization (OIS) and 4K video recording. Generally, the camera performance of the rear sensor hasn’t changed significantly from the OnePlus 3. It’s still a fast, crisp shooter outdoors and in other well-lit settings. There’s no noise to be found in pictures taken outside, the camera app is quick to launch, and autofocus is fast and accurate.

That said, low-light shooting is still not exceptional. While the 3T manages a respectable level of clarity in darker settings, a shootout with the Pixel XL emphasizes its shortcomings. With a 1.12-micron pixel size, the 3T simply can’t gather as much light as the larger 1.55-micron pixels on the Pixel XL. That means despite the lack of OIS, the Pixel XL can take clearer, less grainy, and better-lit photos when snapping in Auto HDR mode The rear sensor is capable of recording video in 4K at 30fps. It’s smooth and fairly stable, but in a testament to Google’s impressive software optimization, the Pixel XL was more stable during testing despite offering only electronic image stabilization. The quality of the front-facing camera is top notch. Thanks to its high megapixel count, I was able to take some exceptionally crisp selfies and video, and auto exposure adjusted well to for lighting conditions indoors and outdoors. The Pixel XL has a better and more reliable sensor, at least with regard to its rear camera and video recording. The 3T can hold its own in daylight shots, though, and it has more options to fine tune photos with manual controls. You can tweak ISO, white balance, focus, shutter speed, and other settings. You can also shoot in Raw for higher quality images.

I was able to take some exceptionally crisp selfies and video, and auto exposure adjusted well to lighting conditions.

SOFTWARE The OnePlus 3T comes running Android 6.0.1 Marshmallow with its OxygenOS skin. It’s a bit disappointing that the phone doesn’t have Nougat yet, but OnePlus has promised it will be coming by the end of the year. OxygenOS live up to its name by being a lightweight skin with a look that should be immediately familiar Nexus s. App icons haven’t changed, nor has the notification shade, or app drawer. The only immediately distinguishable difference is that when you swipe left from the home screen you get Shelf, OnePlus’ custom home screen. Shelf shows you your favorite apps, most frequent s, and recent photos, also giving you the option of adding additional widgets. But what really sets apart OxygenOS are its customization options. It offers a built-in manager for themes, custom app icon , rearrangeable buttons, and different accents and colors for the Settings menu and status bar, including a spiffy-looking dark theme. You can also lock individual apps and require a or fingerprint verification to unlock them, useful for sensitive selfies. Gesture is also on board, allowing you to double tap to wake, draw on the screen to open the flashlight and use a three finger swipe to take a screenshot.

A THIN SKIN The lightweight OxygenOS skin runs on top of Android 6.0.1 (Marshmallow) and offers excellent customization options.

Bloatware is minimal. Swiftkey is integrated as one of the available keyboards (the other is Google’s), but the phone asks permission before enabling either. Aside from that, it has a File Manager, Weather app, and Voice Recorder, all of which I found useful. Out of a total of 128GB of storage, 13GB is occupied by the OS and UI, leaving you with 115GB free. It’s an ample amount of space, making up for the lack of expandable storage. CONCLUSIONS OnePlus has come a long way since the invite-only days of the OnePlus One and OnePlus 2. The OnePlus 3T is the most expensive phone the company has ever made, but it’s also the fastest. The smooth performance combined with long-lasting battery life, an improved front camera, and clean and customizable UI make it an excellent choice. But depending on storage capacity, the ZTE Axon 7 costs less and offers largely similar performance with a higher-resolution screen, thundering front-facing speakers, and high-quality audio. The Google Pixel XL retains its Editors’ Choice status for its excellent camera, unbeatable voice assistant, 24/7 live , and a guarantee of reliable Android updates. But if some of those aspects aren’t important to you, then the 3T could be a compelling option, costing nearly half as much with slightly better performance and a much longer battery life. AJAY KUMAR

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The OnePlus 3T is the most expensive phone the company has ever made, but it’s also the fastest.

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This Hybrid Is an Ideal Second PC The Asus Transformer Mini (T102HA-D4-GR) is an entry-level detachable-hybrid Windows tablet that comes with useful accessories, including a keyboard cover and a pressureEDITORS’ CHOICE sensitive stylus, that cost extra with some other tablets. It doesn’t have the most powerful processor, but it still gets full marks on usability, screen quality, local storage, and battery life. It’s an ideal second PC to have around the house when you simply want to watch Netflix in bed or quickly edit Office documents while traveling light.

Asus Transformer Mini (T102HA-D4-GR) $379.00 L L L l m

DESIGN AND FEATURES The Transformer Mini T102HA has a magnesiumaluminum alloy and glass body, which feels more than plastic-clad tablets such as the HP Pavilion x2 and the Dell Venue 8 Pro 3000 Series. The matte-silver color of the back matches the gray keyboard cover, though a bright-orange cover is an option too. The system measures 0.5 by 10.2 by 6.7 inches (HWD), so its compact frame won’t be too bulky to stow in a small bag or to carry around the house. It weighs 1.18 pounds alone and 1.75 pounds with the keyboard cover connected. A fabric loop is built into the keyboard cover, so you can clip the included stylus to the tablet.

Asus Transformer Mini

The chiclet-style keys have good travel, but they’re tiny (like those on a mid-2000s netbook) and close together, and some are oddly shaped (the right Shift key is tiny and the Fn key is oddly placed by the arrow keys); this makes touch typing less accurate than on the Surface 3 or on larger tablets. It’s good for occasional text entry, but I wouldn’t want to type a novel manuscript on it. The one-piece touchpad works fine for the most part, but there’s a bit of lag when you first touch it.

HYBRID HERO

(T102HA-D4-GR) PROS Compact and light. Comes with keyboard cover and stylus. USB 3.0 port. Fingerprint reader works with Windows Hello. Highly adjustable kickstand. CONS No USB-C port. Quirky keyboard. Occasionally finicky touchpad.

The T102HA’s keyboard cover uses a pogo plug connector to carry its signals to the tablet, and a twostage magnetic latch tilts the non-backlit keyboard up.

Like the Surface 3 and its pricier stablemate, the Microsoft Surface Pro 4, the T102HA has a kickstand that swings out of the back . It can stop at a wide range of angles, from straight up to an almost horizontal lean. The kickstand is a rather thin of metal, but you can’t knock the usability when you’re watching a video or typing a document into the included copy of Microsoft Office Mobile (which comprises Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote). The 10.1-inch screen has a 1,280-by-800 resolution, which is common for 10-inch or smaller tablets: The Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 310, the InFocus Q Tablet, and the Nextbook Flexx 9 all have 1,280-by-800 screens. The aspect ratio is 16:10, which means that 720p and 1080p videos will have to be scaled down and letterboxed. The screen is bright, rated at 400 nits, so you can easily see images in a well-lit room. Colors pop, too, making Netflix or YouTube videos look good. The stereo speakers on the sides of the tablet body are loud and clear; they should fill a medium-size room with music or movie audio. The included stylus is pressure sensitive, so you can draw lines with varied thicknesses in apps that the functionality. There are two programmable buttons on the side of the stylus, but no eraser or top shortcut button for invoking OneNote. Because the stylus is more responsive than the touchpad, you may want to keep it handy. Connectivity options are very good for a model in this price range. On the top of the tablet is a microSD card reader, and on the left are a headset jack, a micro HDMI port, a micro USB port for the charger, and a full-size USB 3.0 port for connecting memory sticks, hard drives, and so on. It has no USB-C port, which isn’t quite a deal breaker, though it would give the T102HA a measure of future proofing. You can use a phone charger to provide power, but it will take a while if the charger is rated for low wattage. Wireless connections are handled via 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1, an improvement over older tablets that only offer 802.11g or n. HANDWRITING INPUT A stylus pen comes with the tablet. Use it with Windows programs such as Sticky Notes, Sketchpad, Fresh Paint, OneNote, and Screen Sketch.

A round fingerprint sensor on the back looks and functions similarly to the Touch ID button on Apple iPhones and the new Apple MacBook Pro; it’s mainly for logging in with Windows Hello. Reaching around the tablet to activate it is a little awkward, but I got used to it quickly. The T102HA has 4GB of RAM and 128GB of eMMC flash storage onboard. That’s much better than inexpensive tablets such as the Nextbook Flexx 9 (1GB RAM, 32GB storage) or the InFocus Q Tablet (2GB RAM, 32GB storage). Most tablets in this category have only 2GB of memory; you’re better set for multitasking with 4GB. I was able to run Word Mobile along with seven tabs in Edge, with two of them playing 1080p HD videos in Netflix and YouTube. Opening more tabs than that started to make things sluggish while the new pages loaded, though performance returned to normal once they were up, and both streams ran without stutter in the background. The T102HA is covered by a one-year warranty. PERFORMANCE The T102HA is equipped with a quad-core Intel Atom x5-Z8350 processor with integrated Intel HD Graphics 400. It returned a decent score of 1,463 points on the PCMark 8 Work Conventional general-performance test, lagging the Asus Transformer Book T100HA (1,698) but matching other competitors including the HP Pavilion x2, the Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 310, and the Dell Venue 8 Pro. The Nextbook Flexx 9 and the RCA Cambio W1162 came in about 100 points behind the T102HA.

MAGIC TOUCH A round fingerprint sensor on the back looks and functions similarly to the Touch ID button on Apple iPhones and the new Apple MacBook Pro.

The system was at least able to run all three of our multimedia tests. It took 11 minutes 55 seconds to complete the Handbrake test and 17:32 on Photoshop, and it returned a score of 97 points on CineBench. None of these tablets would be suitable for multimedia power s who stress out about project deadlines, but they can handle quick edits: say, reducing red eye or changing a picture from color to black and white. Given the single-digit frame rates we saw on the Heaven and Valley tests, 3D gaming is pretty much a no-go on this or any other budget tablet. Battery life, on the other hand, was exceptional. The T102HA lasted 14 hours 14 minutes on our rundown test, one of the longest times we’ve seen. The Lenovo IdeaPad Miix 310 beat it by more than 2 hours (16:26), but the thirdplace finishers (the Asus Transformer Book T100HA and the HP Pavilion x2) made it only to 10 and a half hours. The other tablets lasted around 7 hours. CONCLUSION It’s no speed demon, but the Asus Transformer Mini (T102HA-D4-GR) is an inexpensive alternative to Microsoft Surface Pro tablets, considering that you get a keyboard cover without having to shell out an additional $129. The T102HA might cost more than the Transformer Book T100HA, but you also get almost 4 more hours of battery life, better wireless connectivity, and a stylus. Sometimes you need a lightweight tablet that can run all the Windows programs you’re used to, and you don’t want to make too many compromises just to come in at a bargain-basement price. The Transformer Book T100HA is a bit closer to a traditional laptop, but the Transformer Mini is more portable in its tablet mode and still has strong connectivity options, a nice display, all the necessary accessories, and that extraordinary battery life. It replaces the Transformer Book T100HA as our latest Editors’ Choice for entry-level detachable-hybrid tablets.

JOEL SANTO DOMINGO

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A Fast, Reliable SSD at a Surprising Price Some s are looking for advanced security features or ruggedized drives to take into the field, but many are simply looking for a reliable and fast device to store their data for EDITORS’ CHOICE travel. The Oyen Digital MiniPro 3.1 USB-C Portable Solid-State Drive (1TB, $299) does exactly that with its sleek design and fast data transfer speeds. It’s also one of the most affordable 1TB drives around, offering a combination of speed and value that’s hard to beat. Factor in the inclusion of two types of cables and no weak spot in testing, and the MiniPro 3.1 earns our Editors’ Choice.

Oyen Digital MiniPro 3.1 USB-C Portable Solid-State Drive $299.00 L L L l h

DESIGN AND FEATURES Although it isn’t isn’t especially small or visually unique, the MiniPro 3.1 is sleek and looks professional. The sides are grooved, and the top has a slightly raised middle section, both for style, and the bottom has four rubber feet to prevent sliding. The all-aluminum case (ours is black, but it also comes in silver) measures 0.77 by 4.9 by 3.2 inches (HWD) and weighs 10 ounces. It’s not the most portable drive we’ve tested at that size and weight, but it can still be easily tossed into a bag or slipped into a larger pocket. The SanDisk Extreme 900 Portable SSD, a similarly quick drive, measures 0.7 by 5.25 by 3.25 inches and weighs 5.7 ounces, while the G-Technology G-Drive slim SSD USB-C is super thin, but otherwise in the same ballpark at 0.39 by 5.08 by 3.23 inches and 4.48 ounces. The Adata SE730 External SSD is even more portable, at just 0.4 by 1.7 by 2.8 inches and 1.3 ounces. The MiniPro 3.1 features an on-off switch, which is related to the optional DC port you can use to power the drive. The adapter is not included, though, so we used the system only on USB-C power. We tested the 1-terabyte-capacity version of this drive; in reality, you actually get roughly 950GB of storage in practice once the drive is up and running. The MiniPro 3.1 drive is also available in 256GB ($119), 512GB ($179) and 2TB ($729) capacities. There are no extras beyond USB-C and Thunderbolt 3 with the MiniPro 3.1—it’s not billed as a rugged or security-focused drive but as a nicely built option at an attractive price point. It’s formatted for exFAT out of the box, meaning you can switch it between a Mac and a Windows PC without having to reformat the drive. The drive comes with both a USB-C– to–USB-C cable and a USB-C–to–USB 3.0 cable. It is covered by a limited three-year warranty.

Oyen Digital MiniPro 3.1 USB-C Portable Solid-State Drive PROS Very good value. Fast data transfer speeds over USB-C and USB 3.1. Includes cables for connecting to USB-C and USB 3.0 ports. Sleek aluminum build. CONS Lacks any extra features.

BACK TO BASICS The MiniPro 3.1 doesn’t offer many frills, but it does deliver fast transfer speeds, plenty of storage, and a solid metal build at a nearly unmatched price.

PERFORMANCE As an SSD, the MiniPro 3.1 offers data transfers speeds that are inherently faster than those of hard drives, and it also stacked up well against other SSDs. On the Blackmagic disk speed test over USB 3.0, its write speed was 400MBps and its read speed was 427MBps. That’s very similar to the SanDisk Extreme 900, which achieved 417MBps write and 425MBps read. The G-Drive slim SSD was a good bit slower when writing (290MBps) but hung around the same score when reading (427MBps), while the VisionTek USB Pocket SSD was even more lopsided in that direction (138MBps write and 421MBps read). The MiniPro 3.1 also performed quite well on our file transfer test, which measures how quickly a drive can copy a 1.22GB file. It transferred the file in 4.8 seconds over USB 3.0 and in 4.4 seconds over USB-C—the SSD itself is fast enough that the interface has an almost negligible effect. The G-Drive took 13 seconds to transfer the same file, and the SanDisk Extreme 900 was again very close at 5 seconds via USB 3.0 and 4 seconds via USB-C. Overall, the drive is on the faster side of comparable SSDs, with no particular weak area. The MiniPro also represents an excellent value. At $299, it comes in at 29 cents per gigabyte. That undercuts the G-Drive’s 38 cents per gigabyte—which is already a good deal—and the SanDisk Extreme 900’s 42 cents per gigabyte. The Samsung Portable SSD T3 offers twice as much storage, but it’s a much pricier proposition at $849.99 and 42 cents per gigabyte. CONCLUSION The Oyen Digital MiniPro 3.1 USB-C Portable Solid-State Drive is a fast, sturdy, and no-fuss SSD. It’s also one of the most affordable options out there, which really raises its appeal despite its lack of any noteworthy extras. If you simply want somewhere to store the files you need on hand at work, home, or on the road, it’s tough to beat the speed and value of the MiniPro, which earns an Editors’ Choice. MATTHEW BUZZI

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Asus ROG GT51 $4,999.00 L L L l m

Fast Gaming Rig Costs Less Than You’d Think The Asus ROG GT51 combines a powerful aesthetic with equally strong internal components, resulting in a distinctive looking and high-performing gaming desktop. Design-wise, it may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it’s definitely a conversation piece—if you EDITORS’ CHOICE want your rig to look like the gaming system it is, it’ll probably work for you. With dual Pascal graphics cards, a ton of RAM, and a useful array of ports and storage, the GT51 is able to run any modern game at maximum settings with ease, even in 4K. For those buying without budget constraints, the Falcon Northwest Talon (2016) is our Editors’ Choice gaming desktop for its superior power (making it even more future proof) and gorgeous paint job, but the Asus ROG GT51 earns an Editors’ Choice of its own for its extremely fast performance at roughly half the price.

DESIGN AND FEATURES There’s no question that the GT51 is made to be seen, with a bold design that makes it look as though your games are being powered by Megatron. This is particularly evident in the front: A bronze, turbine-style air intake at the bottom dominates the , with a color-changing ring of light that gives it the appearance of a living, thinking machine. Two red light strips run vertically up the , evoking the distinct look of “Battlestar Galactica’ Cylons. A window on the left side lets you see into the surprisingly low-key interior. Both the interior and front lighting are customizable, with eight million color options. Some circuit patterns on top of the case further suggest robots, as does the hexagonal mesh over the side window.

Asus ROG GT51 PROS Very fast performance. Capable of 60fps 4K gaming. Reasonable price for the power. Eyecatching chassis. CONS Bold design could be divisive.

TRANSFORM AND ROLL OUT! There’s no question that the GT51 is intended to be seen, with a bold, robotic design that makes it look as though your games are being powered by Megatron.

The angular design has a lot in common with that of the ROG laptop line. If you like one, you’ll probably like the other, but there’s no question that it screams gaming—which you may not want. The Talon is much more understated, and the Maingear Rush X99 Super Stock looks like a work of art in comparison. The design of the more expensive Digital Storm Velox, on the other hand, is underwhelming.

The GT51 will take up a serious chunk of your desk real estate. It measures 23.11 by 10.31 by 22.99 inches (HWD), which is a little larger than the sizable X99 Super Stock (21.4 by 8.8 by 22.6 inches) and a fair amount bigger than the Talon (17.5 by 8.2 by 19 inches). If you’d like something that saves more space (and money), the Acer Predator G1-710-70001, our midrange Editors’ Choice, measures only 16.46 by 4.33 by 13.70 inches. The GT51 also ships with a basic but satisfying mechanical keyboard and a mouse with adjustable sensitivity settings. Prebuilt with no options you can customize when ordering, the GT51 isn’t really geared toward DIY work. The interior is oddly difficult to access, requiring the removal of three extra-long screws and then tugging harder than should be necessary to open the side door. There’s a little room for additions inside, but for the most part, it’s already complete. The GT51 has no open memory slots, since the configuration includes four 16GB DIMMs for 64GB total, but it does have plenty of room for additional storage, thanks to five open drive bays (a total of six drives can fit). As is, the machine comes with 1TB of hard drive storage and 1 additional terabyte via two 512GB NVMe solid-state drives (SSDs) in a RAID Level 0 array.

The angular design has a lot in common with that of the ROG laptop line. If you like one, you’ll probably like the other.

IT’S ALIVE! The turbine’s lighting slowly shifts colors and becomes particularly dramatic in overclock mode.

The ROG GT51 is loaded with port options. The front holds three USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port, microphone and headphone jacks, and buttons for Power and Overlock (more on that later). The back includes six more USB 3.0 ports and two USB 2.0 ports, as well as an Ethernet jack and audio out. Between the two graphics cards are three DisplayPort and two HDMI outputs. That many USB and video ports, plus the graphics power, make this system ideal for plugging in a VR headset. The desktop also boasts 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1. Asus s the GT51 with a one-year warranty. PERFORMANCE With an Intel Core i7-6700K processor that’s overclocked out of the box from 4.2GHz to 4.6GHz, 64GB of memory, and dual Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 graphics cards, the GT51 is a powerhouse. It’s more than sufficient for VR gaming, easily clearing the recommended specs. (A VR-capable machine need not be quite so expensive, though). The Us, in addition to the one-click overclock activation through the button on the front, are aged 40 hours by Asus and fine-tuned, which in theory leads to better-than-stock performance. (We kept the overclock active for testing, since most s looking for the best out of their system will likely keep it on when gaming.) The GT51 scored well across the board, earning 3,392 points on the PCMark 8 Work Conventional productivity test. This falls into the lower end of the same range as the Talon (3,433) and the X99 Super Stock (3,412), though the CybertronPC Titanium (4,350) and the Maingear F131 X99 Super Stock (3,977) saw even more success on this test. The GT51 fell a bit further behind on the multimedia tests, but they are more expensive PCs, and the GT51’s scores were still plenty fast—it’s suitable for any day-to-day tasks or processor-intensive projects regardless.

CONNECTIVITY GALORE The front holds three USB 3.0 ports, a USB-C port, microphone and headphone jacks, and buttons for Power and Overlock.

Since gamers are the main target for the GT51, the 3DMark and Heaven and Valley tests are the best ways to measure it. On 3DMark Cloud Gate and Fire Strike Extreme, it scored 36,479 points and 15,964 points, respectively. Those scores blow away those of most other systems—as they should, given the dual GTX 1080s—and only other super-expensive desktops are in the same ballpark or better. The Talon scored 39,259 and 19,013 on these tests, while the X99 Super Stock scored 60,308 and 18,484. These both beat the ROG by a fairly sizable margin. The Acer Predator G1 ($2,299.99) scored somewhat close on Cloud Gate at 30,584 but fell way behind on the Fire Strike Extreme test at 9,263, which demonstrates the gap in power with a single-card desktop. The same goes for the gaming results: On Heaven and Valley at 1,920-by1,080 resolution with the graphics set to Ultra, the GT51 averaged 210 frames per second (fps) and 139fps, respectively. Turning the resolution up to 4K caused frame rates to drop, but they remained playable at 60fps and 74fps. These scores were reflected in my anecdotal testing with Doom: At 4K and maximum settings, the GT51 was able to maintain 60fps constantly during gameplay, not even dipping slightly during hectic combat sections. The Predator G1 held around 30fps on these tests at 4K, which is pretty solid, but more demanding games will require you to turn down some settings since it’s just over the threshold, unlike the ROG. CONCLUSION When you’re paying this much for a high-end gaming desktop, the performance offered by the Asus ROG GT51 is exactly what you’d hope for. It doesn’t quite reach the heights of the more extreme Maingear Rush X99 Super Stock or the Falcon Northwest Talon—both of which are nearly double the price of the GT51—but it is more than sufficient to run anything currently on the market at maximum settings. The Talon is still the top gaming desktop we’ve tested, but not everyone can justify spending quite that much. The GT51 is a ready-made powerhouse that will keep you playing for years to come, and at half the price of the Talon, that makes it worthy of an Editors’ Choice.

MATTHEW BUZZI

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Better Editing and Search in New Google Photos

W

ith a recent update, Google has greatly improved its Google Photos iPhone app. Already impressive thanks to excellent face detection and (more or less) limitless storage, the app now includes smarter photo-editing features and improved search. It outperforms Apple’s first-party Photos app in some ways—but those who are serious about iPhonography should check out our Editors’ Choices in this category: Flickr, Instagram, and (for those who want to really go to town with imaging creativity) PicsArt.

Google Photos (for iPhone) Free L L L l m

PRICING AND BACKUP Google Photos is available as a free in the iTunes App Store. You just need to sign into a Google to get started, and you can easily switch among multiple s—a claim that iCloud can’t make. The central Photos page displays all your recent snaps, and it has a fast-scrolling button to help you find your pictures quickly. If you have hundreds or thousands of photos, you’ll really appreciate this button. You can also pinch to shrink and enlarge groups of photos. A hidden drawer on the left opens to reveal the rest of the app’s features. Google Photos’ biggest selling point by far is its promise of unlimited photo backups. These images are stored in Google Drive and synced among all your enrolled devices; they’re available in the Web version of Google Photos, too. The catch is that Google doesn’t actually back up original photos that are larger than 16 megapixels. Instead, it s a high-quality (compressed) image that is, to most people’s eyes, indistinguishable from the original. To store uncompressed images, you have to pay for additional storage. That may affect those who shoot with a D-SLR, but for iPhone photos, it isn’t an issue, since iPhone cameras top out at 12 megapixels.

Google Photos (for iPhone) PROS Effectively unlimited storage for your pictures. New smart photo-editing tools powered by Google’s machine learning. Creative and sharing tools. s Live Photos. Face and object detection. Search. CONS Lacks some advanced editing tools. Inconsistent search results. Bottomless storage limited to lower-res photos. No social photo-sharing component.

SIZE MATTERS Google Photos offers unlimited photo backups, but it compresses image files that are larger than 16 megapixels.

Note that you can now view Apple’s combination-photo-and-video Live Photos in Google Photos. When you view a Live Photo on Google Drive, you see only a video, however; the image component is lost. We had no trouble ing and viewing a test Live Photo in the app, however, even though we were ing only the compressed version of the photo. And it did not appear to affect the almost bottomless storage provided by Google Photos for compressed images. Apple has a similar scheme, but you have to pay after you fill up iCloud’s stingy free 5GB with images: A terabyte of space from Apple costs $9.99 per month. Flickr also offers automatic photo backup and an entire terabyte of free storage, which is more than enough for the average —enough, indeed, for 200,000 regular iPhone photos. Flickr’s free terabyte includes any photo of up to 200MB in size. Google Drive, by comparison, has only 15GB available for free s and offers a terabyte of storage for $9.99 per month. Dropbox offers photo backup, with only 2GB of free storage, and OneDrive does the same, with 5GB for free. Many online backup services throw in automatic backup of photos in their apps, too. That said, no service we’ve found offers unrestricted unlimited storage for free. When local storage becomes an issue, you can free up space on your device by deleting the local copies of photos already ed to the cloud. It’s a smart feature that leverages Google’s bottomless backup policy to help s. Note, however, that if you’ve opted to back up only compressed versions of photos, the uncompressed ones are deleted in this process. Apple offers a good solution to the local storage issue by letting you keep lower-res images on the phone while storing the full deals up in the cloud.

MAKE ROOM When you need more local storage, you can free up space on your device by deleting the local copies of photos already ed to the cloud.

GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH ON YOUR PHONE Google Photos uses a gridded, chronologically ordered view to swipe through all your pictures. You can pinch to zoom and reorder the grid as you see fit. Search is, however, the preferred way to explore your photos. When you tap the magnifying glass, the apps shows you a list of every face detected. You can hide these entries (more on that later) or give them a name for easy reference. Google does a great job of detecting instances of the same person, even over the course of decades, but you can combine entries if the search giant makes a mistake. You also can tap Recent Places to see photos grouped by location. Some people may not be comfortable having Google in their photos, fearing that the company might use the information for ad targeting. Note that the Google Photos app says that only you can see the name information associated with images, which, while comforting, doesn’t allay all concerns. You can enter any term you like into the Google Photos search box, and we’re happy to say that the app’s search abilities have improved. Searching for “dog” in our test returns mostly dogs, with only one or two other four-legged mammals. The search is still not accurate enough to find a specific image and doesn’t do well with complex search such as “orange jacket.” But it does a good job with broad that can help winnow down the number of images for you to consider.

Google does a great job of detecting instances of the same person, even over the course of decades.

SMART PHOTO EDITING Google Photos has been revamped with new photo editing tools, smartly arrayed in expandable sliders. You can, for example, move the Color slider or click to open it and see all of its constituent options. Two new sliders, Deep Blue and Skin Tone, show off Google’s machine-learning technology. The first lets you edit just the blue portions of the image, isolating changes made to the blue intensity from the rest of the image. It’s a great way to make the sky or sea pop without discoloring other objects in the frame. The Skin Tone slider does the same thing for human skin in an image. It is especially useful for rebalancing faces after you’ve increased the color saturation of the rest of the image. We are happy to say that this feature works with a variety of skin tones. Google Photos also offers premade filters for photos and movies, including an Auto button, which makes what the app deems to be the best adjustments. It’s light on advanced editing and effects, lacking tilt-shift and bokeh tools, for example. The app lets you save your changes to a new image, but that’s tricky to pull off. Adobe Photoshop Express and Apple’s photo apps handle this much better. Google Photos also lacks an equivalent to the artistic effects of Prisma. The app’s Movies and Animations features have more editing options than you might expect, but fine-grained editing isn’t an option. Movies, for example, can have different music and styles, but the transitions and the time that images appear on screen cannot be edited. Strangely, when we tried exporting the looping GIF-like animations the app created, they appeared as still images in the Apple Photos app and when exported to Twitter on an iPhone 6. Exported animations worked in other places on the iPhone, but we had no issues when exporting these animations on an Android device.

Two new sliders, Deep Blue and Skin Tone, show off Google’s machinelearning technology.

CREATIONS, BOTH ON-DEMAND AND AUTOMATIC From just about anywhere in the app, you can create new albums, animations, collages, or movies. A new Shared Album option lets you share photos with others while inviting them to contribute their own pictures. But Google Photos offers no thriving photo-sharing social community, like those you get with apps such as Flickr, Instagram, and PicsArt. These networks are handy for finding kindred-spirit iPhone photographers and liking, commenting on, and following their work. If you like the idea of animations, collages, movies, and so on, but don’t know where to start, don’t worry: The Google Photos Assistant will do it for you. Periodically, you receive alerts that the Assistant has produced another masterpiece. Sometimes it’s an animation, sometimes a collage, sometimes an artistically edited and filtered photo. New options let you suppress certain people from appearing in these creations. The Assistant doesn’t just do its job willy-nilly, either. For example, photos from the same time period are grouped into collages, and photos taken in sequence are made into animations. There are also specific movie types, such as Lullaby, which groups together photos of sleeping newborns and sets them to soothing music. The app does this by watching for a spike in baby photos and then selects only the ones in which the child is sleeping. Similar smart movies will be launching in coming months, including holiday-themed varieties that are said to trigger only when the app determines you actually celebrate the holidays. That’s keen, but we wish there was an option to request some of these movie types on demand, rather than waiting for the Assistant to decide to make them. Apple recently introduced similar features in iOS 10, such as face-tagging and automatically constructed Moments in the Photos app. There’s even a search option. In general, though, Apple’s offerings are disappointing. The search field, for example, pulls up only predefined categories, including bewildering ones such as “Bathroom.” (For the record, Max has 54 photos that fall into this category.) Face detection in Apple Photos isn’t nearly as robust as in Google Photos, and the generated Moments albums cannot be edited. Apple clearly needs to step up its game if it wants to contend with Google in this area.

CONCLUSION We’re impressed with Google Photos and how it has improved since launch. The Search feature is greatly improved, though it still falls short of the accuracy of Google Image Search on the Web. New editing tools let you add subtle flourishes or dramatic effects, and the machine learning enhanced tools are impressive. Throw infinite storage in as well, and it’s a leading photo app. But it’s also in need of some tweaks. Other apps offer more and more powerful editing options, as well as more flexible storage plans. We heartily endorse Google Photos, but consider it more of a companion app to Editors’ Choice winners Flickr, Instagram, and PicsArt.

MAX EDDY, MICHAEL MUCHMORE

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REVIEWS

SOFTWARE

Free Attenborough App Educates Beautifully Legendary British naturalist and broadcaster Sir David Attenborough turned 90 this year. In honor of this milestone, the BBC has released Attenborough Story of Life, a free EDITORS’ CHOICE iPad app that lets you stream more than 1,000 clips from his many excellent nature documentaries. For the sheer variety of fascinating, free nature clips from all over the world narrated by this amazing documentarian, Attenborough earns an Editors’ Choice for educational iPad apps.

Attenborough Story of Life (for iPad) Free L L L l h

Here’s a little background on the man himself: As a BBC responsible for programming from 1965 to 1973, he commissioned a number of groundbreaking shows, most notably “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.” But he realized that his real love was in making documentaries. In the years since, Attenborough has narrated more than 40 such BBC nature programs, including “Life on Earth,” “Planet Earth,” and “Blue Planet.” He has gone on many field expeditions and narrated s of the animals and people he encountered. The Attenborough app is available in both iOS and Android versions. I tested it using an iPad Air 2, taking advantage of the tablet’s relatively large screen to display the gorgeous videos.

Attenborough Story of Life (for iPad) PROS Narration by famed documentarian Sir David Attenborough. More than 1,000 video clips. Easily searchable. Free. CONS Brief ads daily on startup.

SHARING NATURE Post a link for a video clip to Facebook or Twitter, or email it. The link takes you to a BBC Earth page for the app, from which anyone can view the clip for free.

DESIGN AND FEATURES The home screen shows a picture of Attenborough and the title of the app. When opening the app for the first time on a given day, you have to sit through a 20-second ad, but after that, the clips run ad-free. The first section you encounter shows clips—narrated by Attenborough, as are all the clips that I viewed—of each of the African Big Five animals: elephant, lion, rhino, leopard, and cape buffalo.

You can access additional featured videos by swiping your screen from left to right. By swiping upward, you reach a page titled All Clips, and you can view a double layer of thumbnails by swiping the screen carousel-style. This is fine for browsing smorgasbord-style, but for a more focused view, use the Search function. Activate it by touching the magnifying-glass icon at the screen’s upper right corner. This calls up an alphabetical list of topics, from Africa—tapping it shows thumbnails for 35 entries—to Adélie penguin, which still offers a generous seven entries. Another way to navigate in this thumbnail section is by tapping the Explore button (its icon is concentric circles) at the left-hand edge of the screen. This brings up a wheel that fills the screen; run your finger around the wheel’s edge to see different topics. These include such choices as Coastal, Forest, Urban, Favourites, Traveling, Playing, Mating, Plants, Reptiles, and Fish. Tapping on a subject brings up thumbnails showing related content. TESTING AND EVALUATION In testing the app, I viewed several dozen of the videos. Most were beautifully filmed, and all were well narrated. Many showed some seldom-filmed phenomenon—say, a night view of a pride of lions taking down a young elephant, the first filming of a rare species, or a peculiar characteristic of a species. For example, female gibbons are occasionally unfaithful to their mates, which may actually be a protective measure, because a male gibbon might be hesitant to attack a young gibbon if there’s a chance he might be the father. Many of the apps I don’t hold my interest. Once I’m done testing them, I put them down forever. But I can see myself going back to Attenborough again and again whenever I want to deepen my appreciation of the natural world or when I need an escape from the stresses of life.

I can see myself going back to Attenborough again and again whenever I want to deepen my appreciation of the natural world.

The app has good social media integration. Each video’s launch screen has a Share icon in its upper right corner. From here, you can send a link to the video via Messenger, email, Twitter, or Facebook. You can also save to the Notes app. The link goes to the app’s Web page on BBC Earth, and you launch the video by clicking on a Play button on the page’s lower right corner. Recipients have to sit through a brief ad before the video starts. Unlike the Ken Burns iPad app, which shows clips from many of that filmmaker’s documentaries, Attenborough is totally free, the only price being watching a brief ad on startup once per day. With Ken Burns, only the first of nine sections is free; you have to pay $9.99 to unlock the rest of the app. To see the full Attenborough documentaries from which most of the clips are taken, however, you would have to buy the shows on DVD or Blu-ray, or via or streaming (as is also the case with the Ken Burns documentaries), or wait for them to air on BBC America. The Attenborough clips are very self-contained, though. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything by not seeing the full documentaries, as I did when watching the Ken Burns clips. CONCLUSION The Attenborough Story of Life iPad app is a magnificent tribute to Sir David Attenborough, who has narrated numerous wildlife documentaries on location in a career spanning more than six decades. Featuring more than 1,000 clips narrated by Attenborough, the app showcases the wonder and diversity of life on Earth. This easily searchable app streamed video well over several Wi-Fi connections, with no hangs or glitches. It’s a clear Editors’ Choice for educational iPad apps. TONY HOFFMAN

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BYMATTHEW BUZZI

T

he growth in computing power and battery life of phones and tablets have left traditional PCs and desktops searching for an identity as their roles diminish, filled by these increasingly powerful mobile machines. This has challenged manufacturers, forcing them to reexamine the form, functionality, and overall purpose of desktops in particular. If even a tablet can perform the everyday services that once required the power of larger systems, do desktops even have a place in the market? Indeed, PC sales in general continue to decline, so perhaps a natural conclusion is to write off the category as a whole. Longer product lifespans, increased reliability, and a higher performance floor have reduced the need for s to buy computers frequently, as has the fact that more tasks than ever can be completed on the always-on-hand phone or tablet.

PC sales continue to decline, so perhaps a natural conclusion is to write off the category as a whole.

PC SALES DIP Gartner’s numbers tip a 5.7 percent drop in worldwide PC shipments from the same time in October of 2015.

NEW DIRECTIONS FOR PCS But this leads manufacturers down a reasonable line of thinking: Specialize desktops to capitalize on their size and power advantage, aiming at specific tasks and audiences to give these traditional systems a reason to stick around. They may not reach the raw sales numbers in of units moved compared to the golden age of PC buying, but the business is there.

MICROSOFT SURFACE LINE The Surface Studio’s use of touch technology will—for now, at least—most set the Studio apart from the iMac.

This points to an additional problem for Windows machines; Apple claimed skilled creators— photographers, graphic designers, artists, engineers, and animators—early on, by making its hardware appealing to them. Even if they’re a niche compared with the average consumer, many creative occupations and s require big-screened, lightning-fast systems for artistic and data-crunching work. Particularly, the combination of design and performance in the first Intel-based iMac in 2006 cornered the market on professional and home-office use, giving Apple desktops a slice of the market but leaving less of it for Windows systems. Surrendering that demographic to Apple and making it synonymous with creative types is not a winning strategy for keeping PCs afloat. While I’m fairly that confident Microsoft and the big PC manufacturers were and are acutely aware of this situation, they’ve only just begun to respond. Windows systems have long been seen as stodgy and businessfacing, but that’s a trend that has been reversing itself over the last few years, at least in the laptop space. Microsoft’s Surface line is a big part of that trend more recently, but the other mainstream manufacturers have made increasingly slim, sleek, and generally attractive systems as well. Despite the addition of some pretty impressive all-in-ones, non-Apple desktops are still waiting for their savior.

Many creative s require big-screened, lightning-fast systems for artistic and datacrunching work.

INNOVATIVE APPLE? Apple could be accused of stagnation under Tim Cook, and while I’m not so quick to blame the man himself, you can make a case that we’ve mostly seen iterative upgrades through his reign. As such, the Cupertino giant’s control of the personal computer space is waning, with no real innovations to the product line compounded by decelerating sales. The MacBook Pro line is notoriously slow to update, and for the most part, the once-revolutionary iMac has merely decreased thickness and increased screen resolution for several generations. Apple has drawn a clear line between its touch-based mobile operating system, iOS, and its computer OS, macOS, and as of now has shown no intention to combine the two. They might work together, share a payment system, and take advantage of top-notch integrated software, but the company clearly sees them as two separate platforms. The new MacBook Pro’s touch bar is perhaps a step in that direction, but if anything, it feels like a statement of intent to relegate touch functionality to a corner of the experience. By contrast, those sleek Windows all-in-ones do often incorporate touch control, although it adds relatively little to their capabilities. MICROSOFT SURFACE STUDIO Enter the Surface Studio. Its use of touch technology will—for now, at least— most set the Studio apart from the iMac. This stunning 28-inch desktop does not simply include a touch screen but embraces it as a core part of its design. Not only does it look gorgeous, with an all-aluminum body and the world’s thinnest display (inspiration was undeniably drawn from the iMac itself), but it goes right for the jugular in of audience.

I was in attendance when Microsoft Corporate VP of Devices Panos Panay debuted the system (take a look at my hands-on report, below). He especially wowed the crowd with this big reveal: The Studio’s arm is a flexible hinge, allowing you to fold it down nearly flat to serve as a natural drawing surface. In this way, the touch screen calls out to designers and artists, offering not only something that is inherently cool but is also a product that’s genuinely useful for their work. The Surface Studio is an elegant combination of the discrete parts needed for digital creation. As such, it serves as your large high-res monitor, powerful processor, and digital canvas all in one, which has advantages. For one, you don’t have to buy multiple devices to do the same job, and you may in fact end up saving money despite the Surface Studio’s high price. At $2,999 for the main SKU, it’s obviously not cheap. But a fast desktop and drawing tablet could approach that price as well—and you’d also have to buy a monitor. Regardless, the Surface Studio is a remarkable achievement in engineering and could very well be the innovation needed to revitalize the market. Apple’s comparative lack of imagination is surprising (and disheartening for longtime s, to be sure), and it might just lose the company a large chunk of the creative market. It’s easy to see the appeal of the Studio—being tied in to the Apple ecosystem is the most concrete reason for artists to stay, but with the hardware advantage rapidly switching Microsoft’s way, an ecosystem switch is not an insurmountable obstacle.

The Studio’s arm is a flexible hinge, allowing you to fold it down nearly flat to serve as a natural drawing surface.

THE BIG REVEAL Microsoft Corporate VP of Devices Panos Panay debuted the Surface Studio in November 2016.

Microsoft also made a very savvy move in its presentation and marketing: Kids and young teens were featured heavily in the presentation. PCMag’s Sascha Segan has written about this appeal to the young ones in greater detail, but children were shown a lot in the tied-in Windows 10 Creators Update portion of the show. Microsoft is not only aiming its desktop and entire operating system at creatives, but the company is also including tools and software meant for children. They’ll feel welcomed by Windows from an early age and won’t associate digital creation only with Apple. It’s a very smart strategy and key in linking the present to the future. It remains to be seen whether the Studio will truly spark a sales turnaround and light a fire for the PC market. This isn’t entirely wishful thinking, though: The Surface Pro line had a measurable impact on the PC space. Two-in-ones have consistently shown the best growth in PC sales even as overall numbers have declined, and that’s largely due to the appeal and success of Microsoft’s device. Other manufacturers have followed suit, putting out sleek convertibles and detachables of their own. Products such as the Lenovo Yoga 900S, Acer Aspire Switch 11 V, and HP Spectre x360 15t occupy different parts of the twoin-one spectrum in of price and functionality, but they aim for the appealing combination of portability, touch, and power. Like Google with its Pixel phones, Microsoft—the major operating system creator—can also provide hardware to serve as a footprint, paving the way for a new wave of technology by example and setting the ideal picture of how hardware can work with software. So Microsoft would benefit even if its desktop were gaining competitors, because more s would be embracing its software platform. The Surface Studio may succeed as the Surface Pro did before it, with the right execution. And its descendants would be adopted by a whole new generation of s, becoming the seamless, single-product workstation for the huge, businessdriving swath of artists, graphic designers, modelers, animators, architects, and game designers. We’re looking forward to seeing how it shakes out.

FEATURES

HANDS ON WITH THE

MICROSOFT

SURFACE STUDIO

At first glance, the Surface Studio is a stunner, featuring what Microsoft claims is the world’s thinnest LCD screen. The all-aluminum body is sleek—the inspiration from the Apple iMac is undeniable—and comprises a 28-inch screen with aluminum legs and a small base that holds most of the components and many ports: audio, SD, Mini DP, Ethernet, and USB 3.0. At $2,999 for the main SKU, the Studio is very expensive. But it’s a high-quality device whose target market is creative professionals; one of those pros, a comic artist, was on stage and in the demo room after the unveiling of the Surface Studio to explain its benefits. So yes, it’s pricey, but the same people who currently use an iMac could make even better use of the Studio. Furthermore, one expensive all-in-one device may end up saving you money, since you won’t have to buy multiple products (drawing tablet, PC, and display) to do the same job. In theory, the Studio merges a powerful artist’s work PC with digital drawing tools. Even my ittedly unartistic hands (that became all the more clear after watching the comic artist) could tell that this is a tool that dedicated professionals will see as worth its hefty price tag. It’s also conceivable that a design studio or architectural firm will purchase these devices for employees, mitigating the price.

Yes, it’s pricey, but the same people who currently use an iMac could make even better use of the Studio.

CREATIVE TIME An all-in-one device may save you money, since you won’t have to buy multiple products (drawing tablet, PC, and display) to do the same job.

The touch-screen display has a PixelSense resolution of 4,500 by 3,000, which includes 63 percent more pixels than a 4K television. The 5K 2015 iMac, for comparison, features a resolution of 5,210 by 2,880. Up close, the quality of the Studio screen really shines, with an incredibly crisp, vibrant, and responsive picture that’s clearly suited to the creative types Microsoft is targeting. The 3:2 ratio with 192ppi furthers this aim, with one inch on the screen representing one inch in real life, as Microsoft devices lead Panos Panay demonstrated by holding up a sheet of paper to the screen during the press conference. Not using 16:9 might make it a little more difficult for the video editors out there, but the benefits for drawing and modeling, where the Studio really seems focused, are clear. It leans back easily and folds down very smoothly—a pretty seamless transition from an upright setup to a format more akin to a physical studio. This should help artists imagine and create designs, and it’s pretty evident that drawing, sketching, and shading on this screen will be intuitive and useful. The huge screen feels like a great canvas—some sketching software was pulled up for demo—and I also got to try out the Surface Dial. This $99 product (which, unlike the Surface Pen, does not come included) is placed on the screen and gives you really intuitive and intriguing physical control over a digital interface. A radial wheel appears around the Dial when you place it on the screen; twist to peruse and select options. This includes simple tasks like volume and copy, but it can be used for more, such as a color wheel for on-thefly adjustments. The Dial also works with any Surface devices from the Pro 3 and beyond, which is good news for anyone interested in the Dial and other Surface hardware who can’t quite afford the Studio.

The inclusion of a Nvidia GeForce GTX 980M graphics processor strikes me as a little strange, given that it’s part of the mobile line and not a desktop card, but there’s not much space for a full-size card given the thin screen and small base. That said, Nvidia 10-series Pascal cards are available in laptops and desktops, providing more power than ever before so this is technically already behind the curve before it’s available. It should provide the power needed for most, as the 980M is a strong card, and it will be helped by a Core i7 processor and 32GB of memory, but I did see some slowdown while zoomed in on and rotating a detailed object. A GTX 1080 would probably be overboard for a portion of s, but a 1070 or 1060 would make this a nearly unbeatable (though even more expensive) desktop. The line has to be drawn somewhere in of price, and the system may have been in development before those additions were plausible. The Surface Studio is truly exciting and innovative, and although professional artists are a niche, relatively speaking, this machine’s features and high-quality design offer some clear advantages that are currently unmatched by other hardware. MATTHEW BUZZI

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This machine’s features and high-quality design offer some clear advantages that are currently unmatched by other hardware.

FEATURES

BY EVAN DASHEVSKY

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e’ve had some big names drop in for a chat on PCMag’s streaming interview series, The Convo, including best-selling authors, government officials, CEOs, scientists, and former astronauts. No one had managed to attract a live studio audience consisting of the busy PCMag staff until Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson—astrophysicist and Frederick P. Rose Director of the Hayden Planetarium—stopped by. Dr. Tyson came to talk about his new book, “Welcome to the Universe,” but the conversation quickly veered off in many geeky directions. And we mean “geeky” as a compliment. Here’s a partial transcript of our conversation (edited for clarity and brevity). Evan Dashevsky: Dr. Tyson, what is the origin or ‘the big bang’ of this book? Neil deGrasse Tyson: I have two coauthors: J. Richard Gott III and Michael Strauss. The three of us taught this class, and we took you from Earth to the outer reaches of the universe and back. So many books today, you’ll get an introduction to a field, and it could be a mile wide, but still really only an inch deep. What [we] decided here is to make that same mile-wide book, but also make it a mile deep. So wherever you are in the book, you can go deep and learn not only what it is we know to be true in the universe but how we arrived at that knowledge as well.

ASTROPHYSICS AND BEYOND Our interview with Dr. Tyson quickly veered off into many geeky— and entertaining— directions.

Dare I say, we’ve got math in this. There are places where we need an equation to show you how we got this number. You could skim over it if you choose. Or if you say, ‘Wait, how did they really figure that out?’ It’s all there.

I want to talk about rockets. Now, rockets go up. They explode every so often. It seems like it’s not the best way to get to low orbit—or is it? I mean, it’s 2016. Is there any better way to get up there? No. Next question. You got another question? [laughs] By the way, they explode because they carry a lot of energy in them, and we want to control that explosion in the form of a throttled rocket or the solid rockets. We ignite them, and they just go until they shut off. That’s using chemical energy, the energy contained in molecules. We’ve been doing that since Goddard, a century ago. It’s a little embarrassing. Goddard said, ‘Wow. In a hundred years I’ll bet you’ll have some other kind…’ Well, no, actually, we’re doing the same damn thing you did with your liquid-fuel rocket in the woods of Massachusetts. It would nice to have matter-antimatter drives, but what we really want is a warp drive. Let’s just be honest with one another. The warp drive.

What makes the warp drive so important is we can now get to places in the solar system within a human lifetime, so 10 years here, five years there, 15 years there. The nearest stars, however, at those speeds, would take 50 to 100,000 years, so that’s incompatible with human physiology. That’s just the nearest stars. Forget crossing the galaxy or visiting other galaxies. What you really need is some new understanding of the fabric of space and time that allows you to take shortcuts through that fabric or to surf the warps in ways that you can travel many, many times faster than the speed of light. Without that, we’re just kind of hopelessly imprisoned on this speck of dirt we call Earth. We’re living in hyper-partisan times. What’s happening with science in the political discussions of today? So, I’ve said this many times. I’ll say it again. The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it. Now, I should sharpen that. That’s the catchphrase, but really, the methods and tools of science when invoked, what role they serve, is they find what is truly independent of who it is that’s doing the finding. If you get a result and I say, ‘Well, I don’t know if that’s true or not. In fact, I think you’re wrong.’ I then design some experiment more clever than yours and I get an answer that agrees with it! Oh, my gosh. Then someone else from another country using a different power source, using a different bias gets the same result. We have found an emergent scientific truth, and when you find those, they are not later shown to be false. We can build on them, but when something is experimentally verified persistently that is a new emergent truth. If you are in denial of that in a free country, sure. Go ahead. I don’t even have an issue with that. A free country means freedom of speech, freedom of thought. But if now you have a position of power over others, then you’re taking your belief system, which is not based in objective truth, and applying it to others who don’t share your belief system—that is a recipe for disaster. It’s the beginning of the end of an informed democracy. We have a democracy that protects our freedom of thought, and one way to do that is to make sure if you have thoughts that are not based in objective reality, you don’t have the power to force them on others who don’t agree with you. Earlier this year you had a Twitter beef with a fully grown adult celebrity about whether the Earth was actually round or not. I guess my question to you is, is the Internet making us dumber?

First of all, normally I don’t chase after people who say things like, ‘the Earth is flat.’ The reason I did, in that case, is because this is B.o.B., the rapper. He had in his Twitter-stream statements that the Earth is flat. Normally, I wouldn’t pay attention, except in his Twitter stream he claimed he was invoking laws of physics to calculate this. Well, if you’re going to say that, then that called me out. I was happy in the corner. So I come out of my den, my cave, and I say, ‘Here are the laws of physics, and here’s why you got it wrong.’ I did that, but then that got noticed, and then I got pulled onto Larry Wilmore [‘The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore’] and did a mic drop. My only mic drop. Google ‘Tyson mic drop.’ It goes straight to my rebuttal to B.o.B. on Larry Wilmore. I only did it because he was invoking science as his defender, and I didn’t want his huge following to think that he was thinking rationally about this. I ended this exchange by saying, again, ‘I don’t care what you believe, but because you have more than 2 million Twitter followers, there’s a certain ability to those who have that much influence over others. That ability—as an educator, I should think you should anchor those kinds of statements in objective realities and keep other thoughts that derive from your belief systems to yourself.’

We have found an emergent scientific truth, and when you find those, they are not later shown to be false.

We have a new President-elect coming in. As someone who pushes for science research and funding, what do you expect of the Trump istration? Again, I understand how people can think of me as one who’s pushing an agenda or being an advocate. I don’t think of myself that way. I’m not telling you to do anything. I will analyze your decision or your thoughts, and if you say, ‘Oh, we don’t need science,’ or whatever, I’ll say, ‘Well, the history of civilization … If you care about your health, your wealth, and your security, the history of civilization argues differently,’ and then I’d give examples of it, and then I’d go home. I’m not going to keep beating you on the head. As an educator, though... there are people who elected the representatives into positions of power. You can go running after the elected representative and beat them on the head, but they’re representing a base of people who voted for them. I have never felt comfortable talking to of Congress unless they’re my representative. I’m not comfortable doing that. In a democracy, I’m an educator. I will talk to your electorate and say, ‘You’re thinking what? Have you considered this other fact, how this plugs in? Have you considered these causes and effects?’ Upon doing so, then I go home. If they value it they’ll vote that way. If they don’t value it or don’t care that is their expression of a vote in a free society. Right, so then the next istration, the Trump istration, there’s no details on anything. Forget science—there’s just no detail, so it’s hard to comment where that would go or what consequences it would have. The day we do learn, I’d be happy to offer comments on something that’s real.

Let’s talk about STEAM. That’s when you have STEM and then you add the A for the arts into it. What do you think is the proper mix in 2016 of arts and science in education? STEM, of course, became a very strong movement. It had a great acronym. Science, technology, engineering, and math. Just to remind people if you didn’t otherwise know, the value of those four fields is incalculable in its role in driving the growth in an economy. If everyone cares about money, and the economy, and economic health, you cannot detach yourself from what role those four branches, that science literacy, plays in this. Innovations in those fields will be the engines of tomorrow’s economy, and to the extent that you do not know that or invest that way is to the detriment of your economic health going forward. Now, the arts are always the whipping boy of budgets. ‘Oh, we ran out of money. No room for arts, no money for arts…’ and they’re getting cut. It’s a noble effort to say, ‘Let’s put the A in STEM so we can carry it along,’ but you have to be careful about that… There’s plenty of art that’s completely self-driven, if you want to go top 40. I don’t know if that’s the art we’re talking about here.My sense that I think we’re talking about fine arts. Yes, music, but just as a general appreciation for it and what role it can play in your creativity. That’s how I see it happening, because there are plenty of jobs and economic stability for people who are graphic artists, who are architects, or this sort of thing. Designers, set designers. There are jobs out there. That’s not the issue. We’re talking about what’s going to grow an economy. What I want is art to make a case for itself without claiming that it has to be in STEM, for STEM to do what it has to do. History shows that’s just simply false.

It’s a noble effort to say, ‘Let’s put the A in STEM so we can carry it along,’ but you have to be careful about that.

What fictional show or movie do you think gets space science the most correct? Well, my two favorite sci-fi movies had good science advisors, and they’re also interesting movies. There are some movies that maybe weren’t as fun. Maybe they took their science more seriously than necessary to tell a really good story, but ‘Deep Impact’ from the 1990s, ’96, ’97. That portrayed an asteroid impact. That came out within a year of ‘Armageddon.’ Now, ‘Armageddon’ was an entertaining movie, but it violated more laws of physics per minute than any other movie ever made. It had a lot of stars in it, and it was entertaining.

‘Deep Impact’ was, I think, a better written movie in of how convincing the story lines were, and the relationships. Also, most of Earth’s surface is water. If you’re going to be an asteroid, you’re probably going to hit water, rather than in ‘Armageddon’ where a piece of the asteroid must have had GPS locators of Manhattan monuments. Because one decapitated the Chrysler building. One went into Grand Central Terminal, hit the clock in the middle of Grand Central Terminal. Don’t get me started.

‘Armageddon’ was an entertaining movie, but it violated more laws of physics per minute than any other movie ever made.

Anyhow, another one is our Carl Sagan story, ‘.’ That is surely how we would all behave with all the various factions, and the fringe groups, and the governments. That’s surely how we would behave if in fact we made with extraterrestrial intelligence. I thought that was an interesting scientific as well as psychological explanation, exploration on who and what we are. What’s your confidence level that we’re living in a simulation? I think there’s a path of reasoning that makes it pretty compelling. For example, as we get better at programming our computers, and as computers get faster and smarter, and as we approach AI, what is to stop us from writing a computer game that itself has characters that control their own destiny with a kind of free will? Well, if we do that perfectly enough with all the interactions of all the characters, who’s to say that we are not those characters playing out our lives in this world that is itself the simulation of someone who programmed this universe in their parent’s basement? Some acne teenager, but way smarter than any of us, creates our universe. Here’s where the reasoning becomes compelling. If you create an accurate enough representation of life, and that life has what it calls free will, and that’s all a simulation, what’s to prevent that life from programming their computers to make a simulation within themselves, and then it’s simulations all the way down. So in that world, there’s one real universe, but all the other universes that are created are simulations. Now you ask, ‘What are the chances we are in the one real universe rather than in one of the uncountable simulations within the simulations within the simulations?’

The theories, the hypotheses hold that there could be infinite universes embedded within this multiverse.

Let’s talk about the Many Worlds theory. That’s one of the zanier theories out there. Is there any experiment that could ever be done to it? There’s the formal Many Worlds hypothesis to explain quantum physics. Is that what you’re talking about? Or are you talking about the multiverse? Maybe I’m talking about the multiverse. That means that everything that’s possible to happen can happen, right? If you look at the tenets of relatively and quantum physics, where they both have to meet in a kind of shotgun marriage in the early universe, you have people such as string theorists, who are top people working on this, and they’re struggling. I’m backseat to that, watching where that heads. But one of the outcomes of this exploration is the idea that our universe is not just alone and sitting by itself, but that it could be part of a multiverse. In a multiverse, we are just one pocket expanding. We can poke it, observe it, and we come up with all our laws of physics that apply in our observable universe, but there could be other universes. In those other universes, according to these models, they would have slightly different laws of physics in them, which would make them difficult to visit. If you step across the membrane, all the laws of physics that kept your molecules together in this universe might explode them apart in another universe, so I would be cautious. Don’t be the first out of the box for that one. The theories, the hypotheses hold that there could be infinite universes embedded within this multiverse. If that’s the case, then every outcome is possible. There could be another universe where you and I are having this conversation, and, I don’t know, I’m Norwegian or something. It’s otherwise identical, right?

Does that mean that every movie that’s ever happened has actually happened, in theory, in a universe somewhere? Well, no. Some movies create their own universe within them, like ‘The Lego Movie.’ Is there a universe where Legos are alive? Maybe. There are other universes where they make a movie where one Lego is slightly different in that movie. That’s how you should think about it. Not that there are live Legos running around.

Is there a universe where the multiverse doesn’t exist? If the multiverse is what spawns universes, then the answer is no. But here’s a thought. It might too early in the morning to have these kinds of thoughts. I like the fact that if you look at what we have to come to understand about the universe, where you go back enough centuries, Earth was sort of unique and alone of its kind in the universe, and everyone imagined the whole universe revolved around us. Then we found out, ‘Oh, Earth is just one of seven other planets.’ Just get over that number, okay? Pluto’s gone. So among planets, we’re not unique. I mean there are other planets. How about the sun? No, there’s 100 billion other suns in our galaxy. How about the galaxy? No, there’s a 100 billion galaxies. Well, how about the universe? Well, we went for 70 years thinking it’s the only universe. The multiverse is philosophically natural, given this trajectory of learning that the universe never makes anything in ones. Perhaps not even itself. Well, if that’s the case then maybe the multiverse is one of multiple multiverses. The multiverse could be part of a ‘metaverse’ itself, comprised of infinite multiverses—each having infinite universes.

Are we getting another season of ‘Cosmos’? Well, I’ve got top producers working on this. I think we all want one, and it’s a matter of, can we get everybody together? Get the band back together. It was a huge, creative collaboration with set designers, musicians, and writers. Ann Druyan, who co-wrote along with Steve Soter, not only this most recent ‘Cosmos’ but the first one that had Carl Sagan as well. You put all this together, you want to make sure you have the right mixture and combination of people. We should know soon, I think, if anything is green-lit, but one shouldn’t announce until something’s green-lit—because anything can happen.

WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE Dr. Tyson’s new book is based on an introductory astronomy course that he and coauthors Michael A. Strauss, and J. Richard Gott taught together at Princeton.

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TIPS & HOW TOS

GET ORGANIZED

5 Ways to Email Better

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BY JILL DUFFY

lenty of philosophies and methodologies exist for using email more efficiently. They are foundational for limiting distraction and being more productive. But you also need to know what tools are at your disposal to get to that more productive place. Email service providers and third-party app developers have invented some exceptional tools that make email much more efficient. There are five that I think have the greatest effect and are most widely applicable.

WRITE BETTER Writing unnecessarily long or unclear emails is a waste of time for you and your recipient. The recipient may not have time to read them, waste time rereading them to try to make sense of them, or have to reply to you for clarification. Two apps work hard to help you write better emails, because they focus directly on the writing itself: Grammarly and Crystal. Grammarly is a plug-in that works something like a spell checker to analyze grammar and make intelligent suggestions about how to tighten your language, write clearly, and fix common mistakes. It has a remarkable ability to spot ESL errors, in particular. Crystal is also a plug-in, and it nudges you to tailor the language of your email to appeal to the recipient. First, Crystal finds your recipients online—their Twitter s, Facebook pages, and so forth—and looks at how they use and respond to language. Are they concise and direct? Or do they tend to get caught up in lengthy discussions? Based on the results, Crystal then guides your writing.

Email service providers and app developers have invented exceptional tools that make email much more efficient.

BETTER GRAMMAR Grammarly helps you tighten your language, write clearly, and fix mistakes.

If you are not a strong writer, Crystal’s very clear prompts may genuinely help you find words to write what you want to say. That’s a valuable proposition, but there is something about it that it rubs me the wrong way. There’s an unstated premise that you are tailoring your language to get something out of the other person, and I find that manipulative. It might not bother you, and it might even be exactly what you are looking for. There’s no denying that Crystal is good at what it does. TURN EMAILS INTO TASKS Your inbox is not your to-do list, but you probably still get tasks assigned to you by email. The fix is to set up a connected app to efficiently move those tasks to a more appropriate place. Rather than manually typing a new task for yourself in whatever to-do or reminder app you use, you can connect the app directly to your email or set up email forwarding, and with one or two clicks, move that email into its proper place. A few apps that the ability to move emails to tasks, either through direct connection or email forward, are Wunderlist, Evernote Plus and , Todoist , Boxer, and Newton Mail. UNDO SEND We’ve all hit Send prematurely; maybe we overlooked a typo, left out some information, or didn’t stop to reconsider an email written in the heat of the moment. You don’t have to live with regret or the inefficiency of having to write a second email, though. You just need to be able to undo send. MAKING A LIST... One app that helps you turn your emails into tasks is Wunderlist; you can also share your to-do lists and add comments to tasks.

Undo send is different from recalling a message. With undo send, the message is never sent. Basically, your email holds the message for something like 10 to 30 seconds, during which time you can change your mind. Gmail has an Undo Send function (in Settings > General) that every Gmail should enable. Newton Mail, which is full of rich features for email on mobile devices, also has one that works on any email it s, including Microsoft Exchange and iMap s. Other email providers offer it, too. SCHEDULE SEND “Right now” is not always the appropriate time to send an email. That’s when Schedule Send comes in handy. This email feature lets you pick a time in the future when your message will be delivered. Outlook, Boomerang for Gmail, and Newton Mail all have it. With Schedule Send, as long as the message hasn’t gone out yet, you can still edit it, too. So it covers some of the same ground as the Undo Send feature. SNOOZE I’m not a fan of the Inbox Zero philosophy—trying to keep your unread message count at nothing. It takes too much time to manage and doesn’t address people’s real email needs, psychologically or technically. I am a fan of snoozing, though, which gets at the same idea of keeping the number of messages in your inbox minimized at any given time. Snoozing does nothing more than hide a message from your inbox for a time. How long? You decide. The effect is you can focus on important messages without being distracted by less important ones. Those less important messages will resurface at a time when it’s better for you to deal with them. Outlook (where it’s called “schedule”), Airmail, Sparkmail, and Newton Mail all have a snooze button.

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With Schedule Send, as long as the message hasn’t gone out yet, you can still edit it, too.

TIPS & HOW TOS

HOW TO

How to Fix Windows PC Problems Via a Restore Point BY LANCE WHITNEY

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indows is acting funky. Maybe you’ve installed a new application or driver or other piece of software that’s wreaking havoc with your system. Perhaps Windows is crashing or blue screening, and you have no idea why. But don’t worry. All is not lost, at least not if you have a system restore point waiting to act as a white knight. A restore point is essentially a snapshot of Windows at any given time. You can create restore points on a regular basis. Then if Windows goes kersplat, you can bring it back in time to that restore point, before the problem occurred.

The beauty of a restore point is that it restores your Windows system and settings to a previous state, but by default, it won’t mess around with your documents and personal files. So any changes you’ve made to your personal files since you created the restore point remain intact. Windows automatically creates a restore point at key moments, such as when you install certain software programs and drivers or when you apply Windows updates. But you should manually create these points yourself on a regular basis, perhaps a couple of times a month, to ensure that your system can be restored to a recent state in the event of a mishap. The Restore Point feature is available in Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and Windows 7 and essentially works the same way in all three versions.

In Windows 10 or Windows 8.1, right-click on the Start button and select Control from the pop-up menu. In Windows 7, left-click on the Start button and click on Control from the right pane. In Control , type the phrase restore point in the search field in the upperright corner. The Restore Point feature should appear among the search results. Click “Create a restore point.”

The System Properties window appears with the System Protection tab as active, showing you your drive partitions and their current status. Click the drive for which you want to create a restore point and then click the Create button.

In the Create a Restore Point window, type a name for the restore point. Click Create. The current date and time are automatically added to the name. Windows should then tell you that the restore point was created successfully. Click the Close button.

Now, let’s travel into the future after a calamity befalls Windows. Open Control , type restore point in the search field, and click on the link to “Create a restore point” to bring you to the System Protection tab. Click on the drive or partition on which you created the restore point. Then click on the System Restore button.

At the Restore system files and settings screen, Windows explains what System Restore does. Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 also ask if you wish to “Undo System Restore,” meaning undo the last system restore if you feel it did not fix the problem in Windows. Your other option is to browse all restore points. Let’s click on “Choose a different restore point” to view them all with the intention of restoring one of them. In Windows 10, 8.1, or 7, click the Next button at this point.

The next window shows you the system restore points for the drive you selected. Select a specific restore point. Then click on the button to “Scan for affected programs.”

Windows scans for any programs added since the last restore point in order to delete them and looks for any that were removed in order to restore them. It also scans for any programs and drivers that might be restored but may not work correctly and might need to be reinstalled. Note the results if Windows finds anything. After the scan completes, close the current window to return to the previous System Restore window.

Make sure the restore point you want to use is selected, and click Next.

At the next screen, confirm the restore point you wish to apply, then click Finish.

Windows tells you that System Restore cannot be interrupted. Click Yes to continue.

Windows starts to bring your system back to the restore point you selected and reboots, telling you that your files and settings are being restored.

Log back into Windows. You should receive a message telling you that System Restore completed successfully.

You may now need to reinstall any applications, drivers, or other software that were removed. You’ll also want to play around in Windows to see if the problem that prompted you to restore it has been eliminated.

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TIPS & HOW TO’S

TIPS

12 Roku Tips for Streaming Success

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BY CHANDRA STEELE

hether you’re a cord cutter or not, you’re probably going to want a streaming device for your TV, and Roku remains more popular than Apple TV, Google Chromecast, and the Amazon Fire TV Stick, according to Parks Associates. We’ve put together 17 ways for you to get more out of your streaming device.

1. HIDDEN CHANNELS Not all available Roku channels are listed in the Roku Channel Store. To find the “secret” ones, check out the Roku Guide online. Clink the link you want, then Add Channel, and you’ll be taken to a Roku page. , add the code for the channel, and you’re set. 2. STREAM YOUR OWN STUFF Though Roku has a ton of different channels and things to watch, you’ll probably still want to access your locally stored content on your TV. Sign up for Plex ($4.99 per month, $39.99 per year, or $149.99 for a lifetime) and you can. Plex organizes your scattered content and lets you watch it from tablets, TVs, phones, and more; you can also share it with friends and family. Sign up for the service, then the Plex app. In the Roku app, go to Preferences > Connect Plex , and follow the instructions to the PIN code to connect the app with your Plex . 3. MOVIE-STAR QUALITY You can control the quality of your Netflix streaming on your Roku, whether you want to see things more clearly or you need to stay within a data cap. to Netflix’s website, then go to Your > Playback Settings.

Among streaming devices, Roku is more popular than Apple TV, Google Chromecast, and the Amazon Fire TV Stick.

WHAT’S ON, ROKU? Your Roku can let you know when a movie or show is coming to a channel or when your favorite actor or director has something new to offer.

4. FEWER CLICKS As great as the Roku is, navigating from the remote could use some help. the Roku app (available for iOS, Android, and Windows) and get the benefit of a keyboard, easy searching, and streaming on your phone or tablet. Screen mirroring is available on:

• Roku 4: Model 4400 (software v5.6 and above) • Roku 3: Model 4200, 4230 (software v5.6 and

above) • Roku 2: Model 4210 (software v5.6 and above) • Roku Streaming Stick: Model 3500, 3600 (software v5.6 and above) • Roku TV: Currently on most Roku TVs. (Other Roku TVs will receive the Screen Mirroring feature in a future software update)- (software v6.2 and above) 5. SAVE THAT SCREEN Maybe you paused whatever you were watching and walked out of the room. Or you slept through streaming, and now the Roku logo is just bouncing around like the flying toasters of the new millennium. Give yourself something nice to look at with Roku’s screensavers. Select Screensavers & Apps from your Roku and you can get an art gallery viewing, hang out by a crackling fire, or keep an eye on the weather. 6. BIG GAME So it’s not an Xbox One or a PS4, but your Roku is still in the game. Go to Games, and you can race to save an emperor’s daughter in Chop Chop Runner, go retro with Pac-Man, or test your smarts with Jeopardy. A motion controller for gaming is built into the remote that comes with the Roku 4 or Roku 3. 7. YOU’VE GOT OPTIONS Roku displays your channels in the order in which you added them—unless you select Options (visible on the upper right) using the asterisk key from the Home screen and reorder them so that your most frequently watched channels are at the top.

8. FEED ME If you’re waiting to watch your favorite movie, but it hasn’t come to a Roku channel yet, you don’t have to search for it every day. Your Roku can let you know when a movie or show is coming to a channel or when your favorite actor or director has something new to offer. Go to the main menu, select My Feed, and then search movies. Select the movie, show, actor, or director you want to follow and when something new becomes available, the details on where and how to watch will appear in the Watch It section under the menu. 9. CAST YOUR VOTE Maybe you’ve ed on Google’s Chromecast for the Roku, but you don’t have to on casting YouTube videos from your mobile screen to your TV. Go to the YouTube channel on Roku > Settings > Pair Device. You’ll see a string of numbers to enter. On your mobile device, open a browser window, go to youtube.com/pair, and enter the code. Now when you’re in the YouTube app on the mobile device you paired, you can send the video to your TV screen by clicking the cast icon (just make sure both devices are on the same Wi-Fi network). 10. IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD Cutting the cord doesn’t have to mean cutting yourself off from televised local news. The NewsOn Roku channel gives access to local news broadcasts from outlets nationwide. If you’re just looking for the weather report, then you can get it with the Weather Underground channel.

WHEN YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT If you’re looking for something specific, instead of scrolling through the offerings of every Roku channel, you can search across lots of them.

11. SAY WHAT? If you missed those last few lines, there’s a quick way to catch up. Set up instant replay by going to Settings > Captions > Instant Replay. When you hit the Instant Replay button on the remote, you also get the text on the screen. 12. UNIVERSAL SEARCH There’s no such thing as too much content… unless you’re looking for something specific. Instead of scrolling through the offerings of each Roku channel, you can search across lots of them. Click on the magnifying glass in Roku-level search, and you’ll get results for over 100 channels, whether you have them or not. Search by title, actor, or director to see a comprehensive list.

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Cutting the cord? The NewsOn Roku channel gives access to local news broadcasts from outlets nationwide.

LAST WORD

D The False Promises of the Internet.

JOHN C. DVORAK

uring the age of early idealism, the Internet was imagined as a great creation that would free the world’s oppressed people and lead to a grand utopian future. All the world’s information would be available at the touch of a button, greater participation in government would be easy, and so on. This hasn’t happened, nor will it. Instead, the American Internet-using public dove into a closed system—Facebook, where the machine feeds them filtered crap in an echo chamber of their own creation. Those who venture beyond the bubble quickly retreat into Facebook, where they feel safe. Currently, Facebook wants to make a play for China and has reportedly developed a tool that will allow for content censorship. In other words, it won’t along information the Chinese government doesn’t want spread. But China is just the tip of the censorship iceberg. Here in the United States, there is no government censorship, because it’s not necessary. Sketchy do-gooder operations censor all sorts of websites and opinion writers. The original censor was Net Nanny, which was designed to keep your kids from seeing porn. That evolved into blacklists to minimize the shipping of spam. Now we have a phenomenon called “fake news,” which propagates the notion that some websites are making up stories and should be blacklisted as fake news sites. This is funny to me, as I recall Jayson Blair of The New York Times making up s and running them as fact in the paper of record until he was caught. Janet Cooke at The Washington

Post is another great story about a real news reporter making things up. But this is not really about fake news. It’s about a consolidated effort to censor everything except government-approved positions and viewpoints. And to be honest, the free and uncensored Internet actually opens the door for manipulators to roam free. When you hear reports about how ISIS recruits terrorists online using a range of propaganda mechanisms, they are not kidding. This is what happens if you do not clamp down on the Net. The Chinese have a clue; a lot of countries do. And they are not going to let open subversive activity take down their regimes in the name of free speech. The future of the Internet is grim. It will consist of Facebook and its own censorship police with an agenda. Also, you’ll have approved, probably licensed, blogs, podcasts, and news outlets that have to follow rules such as those imposed by the FCC on broadcasting. You’ll have the closed social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, and others, and endless e-commerce sites and hubs selling you stuff that you probably do not need, led by Amazon. In a decade, when the new closed and censored Net is in full swing, ask yourself, “What did you expect?”

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