Month: February 2017

Enlarge / MWC tries to be a blast from the future, but the Nokia 3310 is decidedly a blast from the past. (credit: Ron Amadeo)

CES is still the biggest consumer tech showcase in the early part of the year, but if you're a smartphone company, you increasingly save your big announcements for Mobile World Congress in February. We're on the ground at the show this year, and we've already been busy. For those looking to find a TL;DR version of the biggest happenings, we've rounded up all of the major announcements on day one to help you keep up.

• The biggest phone announcement so far is probably the LG G6. LG usually plays second fiddle to Samsung, and it's too bad to see the G6 saddled with last year's Snapdragon 821 SoC. Still, the tall screen is a neat design touch.
• Sony's phones still have their fans, and the XZ Premium offers a better SoC than LG along with an impressive-sounding camera.
• Decent budget phones abound! The newest Moto G5 phones add better specs and metal backs to Lenovo/Motorola's longrunning line of midrange handsets. Meanwhile, the Nokia 6 looks like a surprisingly competent newcomer, and Nokia is making the right noises about a clean build of Android and speedy updates. We'll need proof first, but we can always dream.
• Speaking of Nokia, did you know that old-school feature phones still exist?
• Samsung's flagship Galaxy phones usually skip MWC in favor of doing their own thing, but the company still has a couple Android and Windows tablets for you to look at.
• The long-irrelevant BlackBerry continues to release phones without really paying attention to industry trends or anything its competitors are doing. The $549 KeyOne attaches a physical keyboard to a decidedly mediocre-looking and overpriced midrange phone.
• Huawei's P10 flagships look OK, if a little too familiar. The Huawei Watch 2 looks... less good.
• Google doesn't have much of a formal presence at MWC, but the show basically runs on Android, and Google often puts out a minor announcement or two to coincide with everyone else's announcements. To that end, Google says that its heretofore-Pixel-exclusive Google Assistant software will soon begin rolling out to all Android phones running version 6.0 (Marshmallow) and up.
• PC companies are the busiest at CES, but they often release a couple things at MWC, where they'll have a bit more room to breathe. The HP Pro x2 tablet is a repairable, business-friendly riff on Microsoft's Surface, and Lenovo's newest Yoga laptops offer a good blend of features and performance.

We'll have more coverage for you as the week rolls on. Follow our landing page here for all the latest updates.

Lenovo

The foldable hinge of Lenovo's Yoga laptops has become a mainstay in the convertible laptop market since the original was launched in late 2012. Along with the MacBook Air and the Surface Pro 4, the Yoga has become one of the industry's most commonly copied designs. This week at Mobile World Congress, Lenovo has updated the originals with new features that check a lot of the boxes we're looking for 2017's PCs to check.

The most interesting options of the new Yogas are the new midrange 720-series models, available in both 13.3-inch and 15-inch screen sizes. Both offer many of the same features: they have Windows Hello fingerprint sensors embedded in their palmrests, they come with both 1080p and 4K touchscreens, they both support pen input via an optional Windows Ink-compatible pen accessory, and they both offer a Thunderbolt 3 port that charges the laptop and offers DisplayPort support. The 13-inch model also offers one USB 3.0 port, and the 15-inch model offers two USB 3.0 ports; both have headphone jacks but no SD card readers. Both use Intel Kaby Lake CPUs, both offer up to 16GB of DDR4 RAM, both offer PCIe SSDs up to 1TB in size, both have 867Mbps 802.11ac Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1, and both offer backlit keyboards and Windows 10 Home (Pro doesn't appear to be an option). Like Dell's XPS 13, each of these devices also uses slim bezels around the top and sides of the screens that are offset by a larger bottom bezel; unlike the XPS 13, though, both squeeze their 720p webcams in above the screen rather than below it.

(credit: scot2342)

Creative Commons, the free culture licensing scheme, has survived a far-reaching legal challenge to its "noncommercial" licensing platform. It was a first-of-its-kind dispute, one that threatened Creative Commons' purpose of fostering the sharing of content, both online and offline.

Creative Commons, often known as CC, allows content creators to share their works with various licenses. The license at issue here is known as BY-NC-SA 4.0. Content under this license can be freely used by anybody for "noncommercial" purposes if the original source is credited. There are more than 1.1 billion works within the CC licensing umbrella, and 150 million licensed for noncommercial use.

However, a Washington, DC-based nonprofit educational stalwart called Great Minds (GM) tried to turn the CC noncommercial licensing scheme on its head. Great Minds develops K-12 curriculum for schools throughout the US and licenses its product under the CC noncommercial license. The nonprofit sued FedEx for profiting when school representatives used FedEx to duplicate the materials so they could be distributed in class. Great Minds demanded royalties from FedEx, which refused. Great Minds sued last year, claiming FedEx was infringing its content, which also enjoys US copyright protection.

Nintendo's attempt to define its new Switch game system as a portable-home hybrid grew a little more confusing on Monday. A Japanese rhythm-tapping game that might have otherwise flown under the radar was spotted by a user at the NeoGAF gaming forum because of one unexpected feature: a "portable-only" mode.

If the developer's listing is indeed accurate, that would make the game in question, called Voez, the first Switch game to officially forbid docking to its TV stand. In some ways, that restriction makes sense, as the game is all about tapping buttons that appear on the screen to the beat of the music, much like games in the Elite Beat Agents and Hatsune Miku series.