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Andrew Cunningham

The 9.7-inch iPad Pro and its most important accessories.

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Earlier today, I was handed a 9.7-inch iPad Pro and a gaggle of accessories in a big bag with my name on it, which is pretty standard procedure when companies hand review units off to you. And then I was told there was no embargo.

For those of you who don’t know, pre-release review hardware is often given under the condition that you not publish anything about it until a certain date and time. It’s unavoidable in access-based journalism and it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, agreeing to let a company dictate when you can publish something gives the company tighter control of its message, and outlets that aren't included in that embargo are at a disadvantage compared to publications that are. On the other hand, it serves as a sort of safety cushion for reviewers, giving us time to test things thoroughly and prepare articles for publication without fear that we’ll be beaten to the punch by some competing outlet.

We’re flying without that particular safety cushion for the new iPad Pro, so we’ll try to split the difference. Today, I’ll give you some expanded impressions of the hardware and accessories based on the few hours I’ve been able to use it (as opposed to the 10-15 minutes that are typical for a hands-on session). Next week, I’ll expand those impressions into a full article with additional observations, more performance and battery data, and other thoughts about the new iPad Pro’s place in Apple’s lineup and the wider market.

This patent application may point to Nintendo's next home-console controller—and now, it may be the only thing that Nintendo Wii U fans can look forward to, thanks to a Wednesday report from Japanese business publication Nikkei. (credit: US Patent Application 2015/0355768)

Nintendo's Japanese arm has assured investors that the company will unveil its new gaming console, currently code-named Nintendo NX, by the end of this year, but it hasn't had nearly as much to say about the future of its current major home product, the Nintendo Wii U. That might be because its time is nigh. In spite of a few major Wii U exclusives slated to launch this year—particularly a major new Legend of Zelda game—a major Japanese business publication has now claimed that the hardware in question will cease production by the end of 2016.

A Wednesday-morning report from Japan's Nikkei pegs this year as the final year of Wii U hardware production—a crazy prediction, to be sure, considering that its console successor doesn't even have an official name or release date. However, that report also backs up its claim with the allegation that some Wii U accessories have already been discontinued. Worth noting: Nikkei's report did not go so far as to attach a 2016 release window to the new console.

If true, that may explain why Japan saw some substantial Wii U shortages in the past few months. A Nintendo World Report story in February pointed to a substantial sales drop-off in Japan after selling 250,000 Wii U consoles in December of last year and over 40,000 consoles in January 2016. That count dropped to 4,000 for the first week of February.

A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket successfully launches the AFSPC-5 satellite for the U.S. Air Force in 2015, (credit: United Launch Alliance)

In a memorandum sent Tuesday to the US Secretary of the Air Force, the Department of Defense's deputy inspector general for policy and oversight, Randolph R. Stone, announced his office had begun an investigation "regarding assertions" made by a former United Launch Alliance executive.

The executive, Brett Tobey, resigned from the Colorado-based company last week after making comments about ULA struggling to compete on launch costs with another rocket company, SpaceX. Tobey also said the government "had bent over backwards to lean the fill to our advantage," when it came to awarding launch contracts.

"At the request of the Secretary of Defense, the OIG DoD has opened an investigation regarding assertions made by United Launch Alliance’s former Vice-President of Engineering relating to competition for national security space launch and whether contracts to ULA were awarded in accordance with DoD and Federal regulations," Stone writes in the memorandum, obtained by Ars Tuesday evening.

The Google Keyboard for Android.

A report from The Verge claims that Google is working on a third-party keyboard for iOS. The site says the keyboard would include "a variety of search options," a description that suggests it will be more than a copy of Google's Android keyboard.

According to the report, the keyboard has "been in development for months," and is "visually distinct" from Google's Android keyboard. The usual Android Google Keyboard features are here, like gesture typing, but on iOS you'll be able to "tap the Google logo" to jump to traditional web search. The report says there are "distinct buttons for pictures and GIF searches," all apparently designed to push users to do more Google Searches.

Apple added support for third-party keyboards in iOS 8, and since then we've seen the usual Android keyboard developers bring over their work. Companies like Swype, Swiftkey, and Fleksy made the jump, and now Google is following suit.

(credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The Idaho mother who sued President Barack Obama over alleged unconstitutional telephone metadata collection has lost again in court. Anna Smith had her initial case dismissed in 2014, and this week her appeal met a similar fate.

On Tuesday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against Smith, finding that her case was now moot in light of the new changes to the now-expired Section 215 of the Patriot Act.

Within the past year, Congress voted to end Section 215 but then substituted it with a similar law (called the USA Freedom Act) that leaves the phone metadata surveillance apparatus largely in place. The government no longer collects the data directly, but even former NSA Director Michael Hayden admitted in June 2015 that this legal change was pretty minor.

Jonathan Gitlin

I wonder what's under that sheet?

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NEW YORK—Buick is so excited about its new Encore that it couldn't wait for the New York International Auto Show, choosing instead to unveil the new small SUV/crossover the day before the show opens to the media. It's an important car for the company—last year it sold more than 66,000 Encores in the US, accounting for a third of all new Buicks sold here.

"The Buick Encore created the premium small SUV segment and remains the top choice for customers seeking premium features and dependability coupled with timeless design," said Duncan Aldred, vice president of Buick Sales, Service and Marketing. "In a rapidly evolving segment, the Encore continues to lead with smart, purposeful updates and a new level of technology-infused elegance and refinement."

As befits the current trend of small-capacity forced induction power units, the Encore gets a pair of turbocharged 1.4L 4-cylinder engines. The cheaper option is capable of 25mpg in town and 33mpg on the highway, and there's a more advanced unit with direct injection that not only produces more power but also does so with more efficiency—28mpg in town and 34mpg on the highway. (Exact power and torque outputs were not available at press time.) Those figures are for the front-wheel drive versions; all-wheel drive will be an option, with an electronic clutch controlling just how much torque gets redirected to the rear wheels depending upon driving conditions.

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Millions of Android phones, including the entire line of Nexus models, are vulnerable to attacks that can execute malicious code and take control of core functions almost permanently, Google officials have warned.

The officials have already uncovered one unidentified Google Play app that attempted to exploit the vulnerability, although they said they didn't consider the app to be doing so for malicious purposes. They are in the process of releasing a fix, but at the moment any phone that hasn't received a security patch level of March 18 or later is vulnerable. The flaw, which allows apps to gain nearly unfettered "root" access that bypasses the entire Android security model, has its origins in an elevation of privileges vulnerability in the Linux kernel. Linux developers fixed it in April 2014 but never identified it as a security threat. For reasons that aren't clear, Android developers failed to patch it even after the flaw received the vulnerability identifier CVE-2015-1805 in February 2015.

"An elevation of privilege vulnerability in the kernel could enable a local malicious application to execute arbitrary code in the kernel," an Android security advisory published Friday stated. "This issue is rated as a critical severity due to the possibility of a local permanent device compromise and the device would possibly need to be repaired by re-flashing the operating system."

Enlarge / The 9.7-inch iPad Pro isn't quite the equal of the 12.9-inch version. (credit: Andrew Cunningham)

Apple has started distributing both the iPhone SE and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro to journalists, and one of the first things to come to light has been the amount of RAM in each device. Memory in iDevices has a big impact on performance and general usability, but Apple almost never actually talks about it so we need to have hardware in hand before we can get the full story.

The good news is that the iPhone SE has the same 2GB of RAM as the iPhone 6S and 6S Plus despite its smaller size and lower price. The not as good news is that the 9.7-inch iPad Pro has the same 2GB of RAM as the iPad Air 2, not the 4GB of RAM on offer in the 12.7-inch version.

RAM doesn't have quite the same effect in an iOS device as it does in laptops and desktops—iOS was originally designed for low RAM devices and even though current iPhones and iPads have much more RAM than the 128MB in the first iPhone, the OS is still aggressive about ejecting apps from memory. Giving an iPhone or iPad more RAM doesn't necessarily speed up general performance, but it does mean that apps and browser tabs need to be ejected from memory less often. Today this is particularly beneficial in Safari, which needs to reload tabs when they're ejected from RAM—at best this process adds a couple of extra seconds to what ought to be a simple tab switch, and at worst you don't have connectivity and so can't see the tab you're trying to open.