Month: October 2017

Enlarge / The Sonos One looks a whole lot like the Sonos Play:1. There's an all-black model, too. (credit: Jeff Dunn)

Sonos on Wednesday announced the Sonos One, its latest wireless home speaker.

As the company suggested earlier this year, the One is the first Sonos speaker to natively support voice assistants. The device will work with Amazon’s Alexa platform to start; the company says an update to enable Google Assistant support will arrive sometime next year, and Sonos is open to working with more digital helpers in the future. The device costs $199/£199/€229 and will ship on October 24, with pre-orders now live on Sonos’ website.

The company said those who already have a Sonos speaker will gain Alexa support through an update rolling out today, too.

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SAN FRANCISCO—To accompany the new Pixel smartphones announced Wednesday, Google debuted new wireless earbuds, dubbed "Pixel Buds." These are Google's first wireless earbuds that are built to be used with Pixel smartphones, but they also give users access to Google Translate so they can have conversations with people who speak a different language.

Unlike Apple's AirPods, the Pixel Buds have a wire connecting the two earpieces. However, that wire doesn't connect to a smartphone or other device. Pixel Buds will pair via Bluetooth to the new Pixel smartphones—and presumably any other devices that accept Bluetooth wireless earbuds.

All of the Pixel Buds' controls are built in to the right earpiece, which is a common hardware solution on wireless earbuds. You can access Google Assistant by tapping or pressing on the right earbud, and the Assistant will be able to read notifications and messages to you through the Buds.

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You'd be forgiven for thinking that the Obama administration's Clean Power Plan was already dead. After all, President Trump thinks that the problem it was intended to address—climate change—is a hoax, and he signed an executive order directing the Environmental Protection Agency to kill the plan back in March.

But the situation is substantially more complicated than that, as the Clean Power Plan had already been through a formal rulemaking process and was hung up in the courts. To get rid of it, the EPA would need to repeat the rulemaking process, something that could take years. So far, there has been no sign of this happening. Today, though, Reuters is reporting that that's about to change—but only because the judge hearing the challenges to the Clean Power Plan is forcing the agency to act.

The Clean Power Plan was the EPA's policy response to its own finding that greenhouse gas emissions posed a danger to the public (formally, this is called an endangerment finding). It had gone through the full federal rulemaking process, with a proposed plan, public feedback, a revised plan, and formal publishing in the Federal Register. A number of states, however, challenged the rule, leaving it in limbo while the court system examined its legal foundation.

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SAN FRANCISCO—Google's second generation flagship smartphone is official. Today, the company announced the 5-inch Google Pixel 2 and 6-inch Google Pixel 2 XL. The specs are pretty much the same as every other 2017 Android phone: both phones have a Snapdragon 835 SoC, 4GB of RAM, and a base 64GB storage option. Both have 12.2MP, single-lens rear cameras with f/18 apertures.

The smaller Pixel has an HD OLED display and comes in three colors—kinda blue, just black, and clearly white. There is no headphone jack. The 2 XL has curved glass and an 18:9 resolution. It comes in two colors—just black, and black and white. Google says both phones have the same features. They're both IP67 water and dust resistant, and they both feature an always-on display that shows the time, the currently playing song, and other information without the need to press anything.

On the front, the design of the two models diverges. The Pixel 2 XL gets a modern redesign with slimmer bezels, rounded screen corners, and a six-inch display. Users that prefer a smaller phone are stuck with an inferior device, since the smaller Pixel 2 didn't get redesigned and looks a lot like the 2016 model. You get a five-inch panel with an old 16:9 aspect ratio, square corners, and much taller bezels.

Enlarge / Allergan CEO Brenton Saunders addresses employees at a production facility in Pringy, France. (credit: JEAN-PIERRE CLATOT/AFP/Getty Images)

Members of Congress want answers about a multinational drug company's deal to save its patents by handing them off to a Native American tribe.

Last month, Allergan gave the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe six patents that protect Restasis, the company's blockbuster eye drug. The goal is a sophisticated legal strategy to avoid having the US Patent Office proceed with a process called inter partes review, which is a kind of quasi-litigation in which opponents of a patent can try to have them revoked. Lawyers for Allergan are hoping that the principle of sovereign immunity, in which Native American tribes are treated as sovereign nations in certain ways, will protect their patents from government review.

The strategy may well succeed. IPR proceedings against patents held by public universities have been canceled on at least two occasions, when the Patent Trial and Appeals Board held that the universities benefit from sovereign immunity because they are state actors. The St. Regis Mohawk tribe will be paid an annual royalty of $15 million as long as the patents are valid.

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SAN FRANCISCO—After a year of hibernation, Google's flagship Chromebook offering is back! At the company's hardware event in San Francisco today, Google announced the "Google Pixelbook," representing a new generation of Chrome OS device.

The Pixelbook is full of "firsts" for a Chrome OS laptop. It's the first Chromebook with a seventh-gen Intel Kaby Lake processor. It's the first Chromebook with the Google Assistant built-in, in the form of a hardware button and an "OK Google" hotword when the screen is turned on. And the Pixelbook is the first Chromebook with a pen: an optional $99 Active Electrostatic (AES) stylus called a "Pixelbook Pen."

Like the Chromebook Pixels, this is a premium Chromebook with a premium price tag: the Pixelbook starts at $999. That gets you a 12.3-inch 2400x1600 3:2 display with an Intel Kaby Lake Core i5, 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a backlit keyboard. You can upgrade to a 256GB SSD for $1,199, or you can jump up to a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe SSD config for $1,699.