Month: February 2021

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

Today's Dealmaster is headlined by a new round of deals on Amazon's Fire HD tablets. While the deals don't match the all-time lowest prices we saw around Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they are substantially below the typical street prices we see on Amazon for those in the market for a cheap slate today. The offers include the Fire HD 8 for $65, the Fire HD 10 for $95, the Kids Edition version of those slates for $90 and $135, respectively.

As always, the Fire HD lineup should only be considered by consumers looking for a media consumption device for as cheap as possible. These tablets are neither as well-built nor as speedy as Apple's entry-level iPad, and they're still saddled with Amazon's Fire OS skin, which excludes Google apps and the Play Store altogether (by default, at least). That said, for basic Web browsing, e-book reading, and Netflix viewing, they're more than competent, which is still a victory given how little they'll set you back.

Besides that, our deals roundup includes discounts on Apple's AirPods Pro, the excellent UE Wonderboom 2 portable speaker, a lap desk we like, tons of video games, and much more. You can check out our full roundup below.

Enlarge / Dubai's Burj Khalifa is lit up in red with a slogan reading in Arabic, "Mission accomplished" on February 9, 2021 as the UAE's Hope probe successfully entered Mars' orbit. (credit: GIUSEPPE CACACE/AFP via Getty Images)

Mars month began in earnest on Tuesday, with the arrival of the United Arab Emirates' "Hope" spacecraft at the red planet. It is due to be followed in short order by spacecraft from China and the United States over the next 10 days after these missions all launched from Earth last summer.

The UAE spacecraft, built in conjunction with several US-based universities, successfully completed a maneuver to enter Mars' orbit on Tuesday, firing its six Delta-V thrusters for 27 minutes. This significantly slowed the spacecraft from 121,000km/hour to about 18,000km/hour, allowing it to become captured into a Mars' orbit.

Some weeks remain while the spacecraft will test out its scientific instruments and then enter into a final "science" orbit. Once there, it will collect data about weather on the red planet for an entire Martian year.

Enlarge / By the end of April, the dedicated Blue Sky Studios team behind the above films will be shuttered by its current owners at Disney. (credit: Blue Sky Studios)

After acquiring 21st Century Fox in 2018, Disney moved forward with content plans that, in some ways, celebrated and married the combined corporate-entertainment universes. But film cancellations and corporate redundancies soon followed, and today's announcement is a huge one for CGI animation. Blue Sky Studios, the makers of the Ice Age and Rio film series, is shutting down.

Citing "the current economic realities," a Disney spokesperson confirmed to Deadline that Blue Sky will be fully shut down by this April, affecting all 450+ employees in the Greenwich, Connecticut, studio. But Disney will keep all the rights to Blue Sky's series and characters, and according to the same Deadline report, an unnamed animation team inside the Disney corporate machine is moving forward with an Ice Age series exclusively for Disney+.

Bad Nimona news

For years, CG animation at Disney had a severe split in quality between its outside partnership with Pixar and the company's in-house Disney Animation Studios. That changed with the megaton budget and years of stops-and-restarts in the making of 2010's Tangled, a critical and commercial success that paved the way to more internal-production successes like Frozen, Moana, and Wreck-It Ralph. At the same time, Pixar became a wholly owned Disney property in 2006 and continued to thrive with its own universe of existing IP and new series.

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  Check out these colors! It looks like they are all driven by the wallpaper selection. A beige-colored wallpaper leads to a beige notification panel, widgets, icons, and more. [credit: XDA Developers ]

The final version of Android 12 should be released sometime in September, but the first developer preview is expected any day now. Our first hint of what Google's new release might have in store comes to us from XDA Developers' Mishaal Rahman, who has some pictures of what looks like a major UI overhaul for Android 12. According to the report, these images represent mockups, not screenshots, of Android 12. The mockups appear in a document describing the new features of Android 12, and the document is being passed around to partners as a heads-up before the public rollout.

The first thing that jumps out to me is the weird sepia-tone color scheme, like someone left night mode on permanently. This color scheme looks like a huge change compared to the all-white color scheme of Android 11, but it's probably completely up to the user. A recent report from 9to5Google claimed that Google would launch an in-depth theming system in Android 12 that would let the system and third-party apps recolor themselves based on a user's preferences. One line of the report says, "Interestingly, your Android 12 theme colors should also be able to be chosen automatically based on your current wallpaper. When you change your wallpaper, Android should be able to seamlessly swap to new colors similar to your wallpaper’s color palette."

It looks like that's what's going on here. The UI colors match the wallpaper very well because they are probably from the wallpaper. A beige-colored wallpaper leads to a beige-colored notification panel, icons, settings, widgets, and more. Even the camera app becomes beige. Android has had unused code for a theming engine for a very long time. Automatic UI color picking launched all the way back in Android 5 with the Palette API, when Google started kicking around the idea of using it for a music app. It looks like these things are finally being put to use.

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  Audi loves a good light show to launch a new model. The e-tron GT had to be content with a livestream and no live audience. [credit: Audi ]

After getting its electric feet wet with the e-tron and e-tron Sportback SUVs, Audi is adding a third battery EV to its lineup. On Tuesday, the company revealed the car to the world, with one of its now-traditional light shows, albeit by livestream rather than in front of an audience. It's called the e-tron GT, and it's a sleek four-door, four-seater that shares more than a little with the excellent electric Porsche Taycan.

Spot the difference

Audi has been showing off an e-tron GT concept since 2019, and the production car differs very little from that show car, save for some sensors embedded in the front bodywork. The design language is very obviously Audi's, with hints of A7 fastback and R8 supercar depending on where you look. But aerodynamics have been at least as much a concern as curb appeal, as the drag coefficient is nice and low at 0.24.

The e-tron GT is built on the Taycan's J1 platform, and so these specs may therefore look familiar. The car is built around its 93.4kWh lithium-ion battery pack (total capacity, net, is believed to be 85kWh), and utilizes an 800V electrical architecture that allows it to DC fast charge at up to 270kW, which means, like the Taycan, you can go from 5 to 80 percent in 22.5 minutes. AC charging is at 11kW by default, with an optional 22kW onboard charger available shortly after launch. It's too soon for an EPA range estimate, but Audi says it should achieve 298 miles (488km) on the European WLTP cycle.

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  A phone you can easily grasp with one hand? Crazy talk. [credit: Samuel Axon ]

Bad news for lovers of smaller phones: the iPhone 12 mini has sold poorly compared to other phones in the iPhone 12 lineup—poorly enough that analysts wonder whether Apple will remain committed to the smaller phone design moving forward.

A data firm called Counterpoint Research found that the iPhone 12 mini accounted for just 5 percent of overall sales from the company's smartphone lineup in early January. And J.P. Morgan analyst William Yang told Reuters that screens under 6 inches now account for only 10 percent of smartphones sold industry-wide.

The data from Counterpoint is not the first to tell this story. Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) broke down iPhone 12 lineup sales in detail last month. They found that the iPhone 12 Pro and 12 Pro Max made up about 20 percent of sales from the larger iPhone 12 lineup during the launch window, while the non-Pro, 6.1-inch iPhone 12 accounted for 27 percent.