Month: July 2016

Under Google, Motorola was one of our favorite OEMs. The company delivered bang-for-your-buck hardware, stock Android with some actually good additions, and speedy updates. Motorola couldn't hold Google's interest for very long, though, and in 2014, Google sold Motorola to Lenovo.

When Google took over Motorola, the company mentioned it would have to clear "12 to 18 months of product pipeline" before Google's changes would take effect. Assuming the Lenovo had the same 12 to 18 months of pipeline after the October 2014 takeover, the Moto Z and Moto Z Force mark the first "Lenovorola" flagship.

And boy, are things different. Along with the new name (RIP, Moto X) comes a huge jump in price: Motorola's flagship has gone from $400 in 2015 to $720 (for the Z Force) in 2016. That's an 80-percent increase. Moto Maker—Motorola's design service that let you customize the outside of the device—is dead, at least for the flagship. Motorola's love of software updates seems to have gone out the window, too. Major updates now take several months instead of several weeks, and a Motorola rep told us the company won't be providing security updates for the Moto Z.

(credit: Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

40 years after the first VHS video cassette recorder rolled off the production line, the last known company making the devices is ceasing production. According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, Funai Electric, a Japanese consumer electronics company, will give up on the format by the end of the July after 30 years of production.

Declining sales, plus a difficulty in obtaining the necessary parts, prompted Funai Electric to cease production. While the Funai brand might not be well-known in the west, the company sold VCRs under the more familiar Sanyo brand in China and North America.

Funai Electric began production of VCRs in 1983 following the unsuccessful launch of its own CVC format in 1980. While CVC had its strengths—its quarter-inch tape made its machines smaller and lighter than VHS machines, which used half-inch tape—VHS and Betamax were strong competitors.

Firefox will begin retiring Adobe Flash on August 2 with the release of Firefox 48. In 2017, probably with Firefox 53, Flash plug-ins will require the user to actively click-to-play.

In Firefox 48, Mozilla will enable a new Firefox plug-in blocklist by default. Initially the blocklist will be small, mostly containing URLs of Flash SWF files that have been identified by Mozilla as supercookies (i.e. cookies that are very hard to shake off) or fingerprinting files (i.e. they scan your system and create a unique fingerprint, again usually for tracking purposes).

The Github repo explains the criteria for adding new SWFs to the blocklist: