Month: March 2020

Enlarge / An AT&T sign outside a company office in New York City. (credit: Getty Images | Roberto Machado Noa )

AT&T is waiving home-Internet data caps during the coronavirus pandemic.

"Many of our AT&T Internet customers already have unlimited home-Internet access, and we are waiving Internet data overages for the remaining customers," AT&T said in a statement provided to Ars today.

AT&T imposes monthly data caps of 150GB on DSL, 250GB on fixed wireless, and 1TB on most of its faster wireline services. Overage charges are $10 for each additional 50GB, up to a maximum of $100 or $200 per month, depending on the plan.

Jimmy Iovine announces Apple Music in 2015.

For months, we've seen reports and rumors that Apple is on the brink of introducing its own answer to Amazon Prime: a bundled subscription service that would offer users access to Apple Music, Apple TV+, and Apple News+ for one flat fee. But a new article providing details about Apple's newly signed deals with major record labels for Apple Music calls that prediction into question—at least for the near term.

According to a report in Financial Times, Apple Music has inked new deals with the record labels Sony Music, Warner Music Group, and Universal Music Group to continue to offer those labels' artists' work on Apple's streaming service for years to come. That includes huge names like Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, Blake Shelton, and Mariah Carey.

That said, the new deals do not "include an economic agreement to bundle Apple Music with the company's television service," according to Financial Times' sources. Late last year, Bloomberg reported that Apple was pursuing a plan to bundle Apple TV+, Apple Music, and Apple News+ in one service. (Apple Arcade and the company's other services were not mentioned.)

Enlarge / The Rosalind Franklin rover following environmental tests. (credit: ESA)

On Thursday, the European Space Agency and its Russian partners announced that they would be delaying their planned rover/lander mission to Mars. As we reported earlier this year, the project was facing a number of technical hurdles, and time was running short to sort them out before a convenient launch window for Mars closed. Now, travel restrictions put in place to limit the spread of the coronavirus have ensured that they won't be handled in time.

Life on Mars?

The project, termed ExoMars, is an ambitious one, intended to help determine if life might ever have existed on the red planet. It will include a Russian-built surface platform that includes weather instruments and the ability to monitor the exchange of volatile chemicals between the Martian atmosphere and its surface. But the star of the show would be the ESA's first rover on Mars, the Rosalind Franklin (named after a scientist who helped determine the structure of DNA).

The rover's key feature is the ability to drill down two meters below the Martian surface, a depth at which liquid water is more likely to be found and which would be somewhat shielded from the harsh radiation that bathes the Martian surface.

• 

  The TAG Heuer Connected. [credit: TAG Heuer ]

TAG Heuer is not giving up on Wear OS, having just launched a third generation of the ludicrously expensive TAG Heuer Connected. The new model is $1,800, or about the price of four Apple Watches.

While most Wear OS devices are starved for viable hardware options when it comes to the SoC, TAG Heuer's exorbitant prices have let it experiment with exotic options in the past. The two previous versions have been powered by Intel Atom processors. This new version just houses a regular old (and we do mean "old") Qualcomm Snapdragon Wear 3100. Qualcomm is really the only company selling smartwatch chips to device manufacturers, but Qualcomm also doesn't seem to care about the smartwatch market. The company hasn't released a significant update to its smartwatch chips since the original Android watches came out in 2014. Qualcomm has released products with new names, like the Snapdragon Wear 2100 and the Snapdragon Wear 3100, but they all have similar architecture and will benchmark similarly to Qualcomm's first Snapdragon 400-equipped smartwatches that launched six years ago. Naturally, this unprecedented lack of progress for a tech product has killed the Wear OS market.

Other specs include a 1.39-inch 454×454 OLED display, a 430mAh battery, Wi-Fi, NFC, GPS, water resistance, and a heart-rate sensor. As far as the "smart" parts of the smartwatch, you can get all this in a $300 Fossil watch. Previous versions of the TAG Heuer Connected were modular, meaning you could supposedly rip out the smartwatch guts someday and replace them with traditional watch parts. This new version does not seem to have an upgrade feature.