Month: November 2021

Enlarge (credit: Scharon Harding)

Acer chose the Swift 5 as its vehicle for ushering in Windows 11, and that was a safe choice. With a starting MSRP of $1,100, up to 1TB of storage, a good port selection, and a more standout keyboard and webcam, it will suit many laptop needs just fine.

But "just fine" feels less fine when looking at alternatives that go the extra mile. With similarly priced options offering a bit more CPU, graphics, and even SSD performance than the Swift 5, the eye can easily start to wander.

Enlarge / North Rhine-Westphalia, Herten: The crew of a Dutch ambulance brings a COVID-19 patient from Rotterdam to St. Elisabeth Hospital in Herten. (credit: Getty | Picture alliance)

Health officials in Europe are pleading for people to adopt more health precautions as the region grapples with its most dramatic surge of COVID-19 cases yet in the pandemic.

Cases have been skyrocketing across the European region since the start of October, with cases rising from around 130,000 per day to the current all-time high of more than 330,000 per day. For the week ending November 21, the region of 53 countries—including the European Union, the United Kingdom, Russia, and several countries in Central Asia—reported 2,427,657 new cases, representing 67 percent of all COVID-19 cases reported globally.

The region also accounted for 57 percent of all COVID-19 deaths worldwide, with 29,465 deaths in the week ending on November 21, according to a weekly report by the World Health Organization. During the week, daily COVID-19 deaths increased to close to 4,200, doubling from 2,100 daily deaths seen at the end of September, the WHO noted.

Enlarge / EK-MD088. (credit: Nojima)

We saw the tall-screen trend coming—but we didn't know things would get this tall. PC monitors that are taller than they are wide have enjoyed a resurgence this year, as they provide more vertical space for taking in long documents, articles, spreadsheets, and social media and news feeds. But this 420×1920 monitor takes the tall-screen thing to new heights.

As spotted by Gizmodo today, the screen comes from Elsonic, a sub-brand of Japanese company Nojima, which started off with LED bulbs but now makes TVs and other tech products. The EK-MD088 proposes a new category for PC monitors: ultra-tall. Sure, ultra-wide monitors have won spots in the homes of productivity hounds who need to be surrounded by all their tabs and gamers who want to get lost in their virtual world. But an ultra-tall monitor lets you give in to that insatiable need to scroll. The product page specifically highlights web browsing, Twitter, and browser games as use cases. 

Handy for keeping a constant watch on your news feed. (credit: Nojima)

The display is only 8.8 inches, so it would best serve as a portable or secondary monitor. It charges via USB-C but can't output video through the port. The monitor relies on mini HDMI for its video signal. That gives it a little versatility in the sense that it can connect to things lacking USB-C, like a Raspberry Pi and older systems. But with more PCs starting to ditch HDMI, and the monitor already having a USB-C port right there, it feels like a missed opportunity.

(credit: Aurich Lawson)

A federal judge has accepted Valve's motion to dismiss an anti-trust lawsuit against company Steam's store and platform, saying that plaintiff Wolfire Games failed to establish the basic facts necessary to sustain the case going forward.

Wolfire's lawsuit in part rested on the argument that Valve was illegally tying its Steam game store (which sells the games) to the separate Steam platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.). Wolfire argued that Valve was using its dominant market position in digital PC game sales (accepted in the lawsuit as 75 percent of the market for full PC game sales) to illegally prop up the platform in a way that was not conducive to competition.

In a ruling issued late last week, though, Western District of Washington Judge John Coughenour said that no illegal tying could take place because the Steam store and platform "are a single product within the integrated game platform and transaction market." That's because the revenues from sales of games on the Steam store go directly toward supporting the "free" services available on the platform. And in the rare cases that games sold elsewhere make use of the Steam platform, Valve lets developers create free keys to enable that integration, obviating any potential harm.

Enlarge / The Fairphone 2 and its many modules. (credit: Fairphone)

Fairphone continues to push boundaries and lead the Android ecosystem when it comes to system updates. The company announced it is shipping Android 10 for the Fairphone 2, a six-year-old device that originally shipped with Android 5.

Six years of major updates is unheard of in the Android market. Most Android companies charge iPhone-level prices but don't offer iPhone-level support, which is six years of major updates. The best you can get from more mainstream Android OEMs like Google and Samsung are three years of major OS updates. Fairphone is a dramatically smaller company than its competition, but it is wiping the floor with them when it comes to updates.

For Fairphone, shipping Android updates for this long has meant going outside the normal update support structure. The Fairphone 2 uses a Snapdragon 801 SoC, and Qualcomm only supported that chip up to Android 6. Without Qualcomm's help, Fairphone had to enlist the help of the Lineage OS Android community to get the phone updated. The difference between Fairphone and an aftermarket ROM is that Fairphone is still passing all of Google's CTS tests and officially licensing the Play Store, which is a huge undertaking.

Enlarge / Some of Windows 11's new emoji designs. (credit: Microsoft)

We're nearly two months out from the public release of Windows 11, and Microsoft is still slowly updating bits and pieces of the operating system that weren't quite ready in early October. Microsoft announced redesigned emoji back in July, and the next Windows update (version 22000.348, if you're tracking this sort of thing) adds those emoji to Windows 11.

The new emoji remove the bold, black outlines from the Windows 10-era designs and change the colors and shapes of a few to make them match up better with Apple's, Google's, and Samsung's glyphs—compare the new design for Spiral Shell to the old one, for an example. There are also a few cute Microsoft-specific touches, like a Clippy design for the paperclip emoji, though Ninja Cat appears to have been removed entirely.

A selection of the old Windows 10-style emoji (left) and the Windows 11 redesigns. The new versions drop the thick outlines, so now they all look lighter and brighter.

These emoji use the basic designs that Microsoft showed off earlier this year—but without animation or the "3D" touches, like added depth and color gradients. The Verge speculates that this is a limitation of the vector graphics format Microsoft uses to display emoji in Windows—using vector graphics can reduce file sizes while making it a lot simpler to scale the size of emoji up and down without losing sharpness or detail, but it also works best with flat colors. We may yet see the 3D animated emoji in other Microsoft apps, like Teams.

Enlarge / Collins put out this .gif to help you grok just how non-cheugy NFTs can be. (credit: Collins)

Perhaps the best thing to come from this year's widespread adoption of the term "Non-Fungible Token" (NFT) is greater public comfort with the word "fungible." What a perfectly cromulent word, fungible, even if it sounds like a foot powder.

Now, dictionary-maker Collins has picked NFT as its "word of the year" for 2021, mostly because people are making SRS $$$ from the blockchain-based tech. One of those people is of course the artist who goes by "Beeple"; his collection of 5,000+ everyday digital art pieces went for $69 million earlier this year, which every subsequent article on NFTs has been required to mention. This sale made Beeple one of the best-paid artists on earth. The New York Times did not love this, arguing that the gross-out and meme-based imagery of much of Beeple's work was puerile. Also, Beeple "struggles with flesh; as in many video games, the skins appear waxy and desiccated. It’s as if every remaining human in this cryptouniverse has scurvy, though maybe that is what happens when you subordinate your flesh to the screen." Yikes. While I agree that this was a pretty dumb way to spend $69 million, NFTs definitely have utility; for instance, just imagine how much fun it would be to buy this critic an NFT of a high-quality "OK Boomer" meme?

As for what NFTs actually are, my explanation would probably get lost in a rant about energy efficiency and the nature of originality in the digital age. Before you know it, I, too, would be banging on about "scurvy." So I'll let Collins try to explain things: