Month: March 2020

Enlarge (credit: Google)

Google is stripping away a key feature from its best and most popular messaging app. Google Hangouts users are no longer able to share their locations with one another.

It's not clear why Google is suddenly stripping away features from Google Hangouts, but an update to the Hangouts Android app, version 32, removes the location button from the text input area. Previously, the button would do a one-time ping of the user's location, mark it on Google Maps, and send a link and in-line map to the chat window. In the past, this worked on Android and iOS, though at some point it was removed from the iOS version. Hangouts users will have to switch to real-time location sharing through Google Maps.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is led by a one-day discount on Amazon's Fire HD 8 tablet, bringing it down to $50. While we've seen it hit this price multiple times before, it's still a $30 drop and tied for the lowest price we've seen to date. Amazon says the offer will last through March 17 only.

This version of the Fire HD 8 has been on sale since late 2018, so it is getting somewhat long in the tooth. Viewed strictly as a cheap outlet for casual Web browsing and video viewing, though, it remains a decent, if not spectacular, value at this $50 price point. Its 1.3Ghz Mediatek chip and 1.5GB of RAM aren't really great at anything beyond lighter tasks and games, its all-plastic design makes it feel like a budget tablet, and Amazon's default lock-screen ads are an annoyance. Amazon's Fire OS still can't run Google apps or the Play Store without some legwork. Still, the 16GB of storage here can be expanded with a microSD card, the 1200x800 resolution display is sharp enough for an 8-inch slate, and the roughly 10-hour battery life is fine.

We'd recommend paying up for an iPad or at least a Fire HD 10 if you need a tablet for more than the basics; the more vibrant displays and faster internals on those will make a difference over time. For small children who'll chuck whatever they get their hands on, Amazon's Fire Kids Edition slates are better equipped to withstand wanton abuse. But most of those devices come at a higher cost. For $50, the Fire HD 8 is still a decent buy for older kids or those who just want to keep a tablet around for tinkering purposes.

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  Explode! [credit: Microsoft ]

We've now had a day to process the massive amounts of Xbox Series X technical information that Microsoft and Digital Foundry unleashed on the world yesterday. Looking past the raw numbers, which you can see summarized in the chart below, it all starts to paint a picture of how the future of console gaming could look and feel different thanks to Microsoft's new hardware.

For sure, having enough raw power for a game's target of a full 4K resolution at 60fps by default (with 120fps capability) is a nice touch. Hardware-accelerated ray-tracing capabilities and high-resolution HDR upgrades for older backward-compatible titles will also lead to some distinct visual improvements as well. But the things that have us most excited about the Xbox Series X all have to do with speed.

High velocity

That starts with the "Xbox Velocity Architecture," which Microsoft promises will allow "100GB of game assets to be instantly accessible by the developer" as a sort of "extended memory." That "instant" access might be a slight exaggeration, since that expanded pool of data still seemingly has to come from the system's NVMe storage at a 2.4GB/s transfer rate. Even expanded to 4.8GB/s thanks to a new decompression stack, that's well below the 336 to 560GB/s access for data stored on the system's 16GB of RAM. It's also not clear why Microsoft specifically cites a 100GB limit for those "instant" assets amid the 1TB of internal storage built into the system.

Enlarge (credit: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)

Uber plans to disable Uber Pool, its shared-rides feature, in the United States and Canada, the company announced on Tuesday. The company hopes to help slow the spread of the coronavirus.

"Our goal is to help flatten the curve on community spread in the cities we serve," Uber executive Andrew Macdonald said in a statement to the media.

Uber says that it will decide on other markets beyond the US and Canada on a case-by-case basis.

Enlarge / A long-exposure view of the mobile launcher at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (credit: NASA)

A new report published Tuesday by NASA's inspector general looks into the development of a mobile launch tower for the agency's Space Launch System rocket.

The analysis finds that the total cost of constructing and modifying the structure, known as Mobile Launcher-1, is "at least" $927 million. This includes the original $234 million development cost to build the tower to support the Ares I rocket.

After this rocket was canceled in 2010, NASA then spent an additional $693 million to redesign and modify the structure for the SLS rocket. Notably, NASA's original estimate for modifying the launch tower was just $54 million, according to the report by Inspector General Paul Martin.