Month: January 2018

The Huawei Mate S.

Reports from The Wall Street Journal and other outlets say that AT&T was ready to announce a distribution deal with Chinese smartphone maker Huawei, but the deal fell through at the last minute.

The deal would have seen Huawei phones bundled with service deals in AT&T stores, as carrier stores are the primary way US consumers buy phones. The two companies were ready to announce the deal at the currently ongoing CES trade show in Las Vegas.

Huawei is the number three smartphone vendor worldwide, behind only Apple and Samsung, but the company struggles in the US. Huawei currently sells to consumers online, but the lack of carrier deals has made the company basically irrelevant in the US market. Outside of the US, Huawei is a massive company, making not only phones, but also its own line of "HiSilicon" SoCs. The company the largest telecommunications equipment manufacturer in the world, but concerns about Huawei's relationship to the Chinese government has mostly kept its equipment out of the US.

Enlarge (credit: August)

The same-day shipping and delivery market is bursting with companies that want to ensure your packages get to you incredibly fast. One of the newest entrants is August, the smart lock company that was acquired by Assa Abloy last year. At CES, August announced it's expanding its trial in-home delivery service called August Access through a partnership with Deliv, a last-mile delivery service that specializes in same-day delivery. Deliv currently serves over 4,000 retailers across 1,400 cities in the US, allowing August to provide those retailers with Deliv same-day delivery and August Access in-home delivery.

Now, customers have the option to choose Deliv delivery service for their online orders from retailers including Macy's, PetSmart, and Best Buy. August Access customers with an August or Yale smart lock can opt for in-home delivery after they place their order. Once in-home delivery is authorized, August Access generates a one-time passcode for the Deliv employee delivering the order. Customers will be notified when the delivery is happening after the Deliv employee rings the home's doorbell and a notification is sent to the customer. If no one is home to receive the order, the Deliv employee can use the one-time passcode to enter the home and drop off the package.

August first tested this in-home delivery system with Walmart at the end of 2017. August sees the potential in offering customers same-day and in-home delivery from multiple retailers rather than only one, even if it is a giant like Walmart. Partnering with Deliv gives August a new group of retailers to potentially work with going forward.

An Athlon 64 purchased in 2007. (credit: Fred)

Microsoft has suspended delivering the latest Windows update to certain systems with AMD processors after reports that the update was causing the machines to crash with a blue screen of death when booting. The update contains countermeasures against both the Meltdown and Spectre attacks; although AMD systems are not affected by Meltdown, they're vulnerable to Spectre.

Withdrawing or suspending delivery of Windows Updates is not uncommon; while there is some testing done by Microsoft, releasing things to a wider audience does from time to time unearth incompatibilities or bugs within the update. What is uncommon is that Microsoft is not merely suspending this update; the company has also outlined why. Specifically, Microsoft writes that:

After investigating, Microsoft has determined that some AMD chipsets do not conform to the documentation previously provided to Microsoft to develop the Windows operating system mitigations to protect against the chipset vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown.

This is an unusual act of buck-passing.