Technology

On the afternoon of May 27th, SpaceX is slated to launch its very first passengers to space, potentially heralding a new era of human spaceflight for the United States. It’ll be the first time in nearly a decade that people have launched to orbit from American soil, and it’ll be the first time that a private vehicle takes them there. This historic flight is really a test. It’s the last big milestone for SpaceX as part of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program. The experimental initiative tasked private companies with creating new spacecraft for NASA that are capable of transporting astronauts to and from the International Space Station. SpaceX’s contribution to the program is a sleek, gumdrop-shaped capsule called the Crew Dragon. While it’s flown a few times before, the capsule has yet to carry p...

Once people got too scared to leave the house, there was lots of money to be made as a shopper-for-hire. Rachel had been running groceries for Instacart since October, but the Las Vegas market had barely offered enough gigs to scrape by. After the company switched to the On Demand model in February, the good orders (or “batches,” as Instacart calls them) went to whoever clicked first — and even when Rachel was lucky, she often wasn’t fast enough. But one morning in March, she logged on to see order after order piled up, lucrative ones at $50, $70, $100, all ready for the taking. “The demand was insane,” she says. “Things were great. You could make in one batch what a lot of people would be making in a day. But you could also be standing in line at Costco for an hour and a half just to get ...

Update May 25th, 5:20PM ET: Virgin Orbit’s test flight ended in failure shortly after LauncherOne dropped from under the company’s carrier 747 airplane. Virgin Orbit confirmed that the drop was successful and that the rocket’s main engine ignited. But then it quickly suffered some kind of anomaly at the beginning of the flight. The company says no one was hurt during the test and the team will be digging into the data to learn what went wrong. I’ll go to bed tonight smarter than I was when I woke up. I’m grateful for that, and proud of the team. Today, we tackled the biggest technical risk of the program. There’s a lot more to learn, but that is huge!!! pic.twitter.com/5keyW4r8Lr — William Pomerantz (@Pomerantz) May 26, 2020 Original Story: Small satellite launcher Virgin Orbit — the sibli...

XRSpace, a company led by former HTC head Peter Chou, plans to launch a new virtual reality headset later this year. The headset is dubbed the Mova, and it’s supposed to ship in the third quarter of 2020 for $599. Its selling points include 5G support, a hand tracking interface, and an expansive virtual world called Manova. But it sharply bucks the trend of cheaper, more interoperable VR platforms — opting for a specialized system at a fairly high price. The Mova is a self-contained headset that’s powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor. It looks similar to the Oculus Quest or the business-oriented HTC Vive Focus, although it’s slicker than either of them and gives users a choice of white or bright orange. It uses two cameras to track users’ movement around a room, and its default c...

Realme has a new high-end phone, and for the first time ever the brand is bringing it to Europe before its usual stomping ground of India. The Realme X3 Superzoom is launching in Spain and the UK first, as are more of the company’s new products including the Realme Watch and the Realme Band. As you’d expect from the name, the X3 Superzoom’s key feature is a periscope zoom lens, a feature that’s so far only featured on expensive flagship devices like the Oppo Find X2 Pro or the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra. This lens is paired with an 8-megapixel sensor and offers 5x magnification over the primary 64-megapixel camera; the quad-camera array is filled out by an 8-megapixel ultrawide and a 2-megapixel macro. The X3 Superzoom has a 6.6-inch 1080p screen with a 120Hz refresh rate. There’s a cutout f...

Google Assistant’s Voice Match feature can now secure purchases made through its voice assistant as part of a limited pilot program. A spokesperson from the company confirmed to Android Police that the functionality is new, and is designed to help secure purchases made on smart speakers and smart displays. At the moment, it’s restricted to in-app digital purchases through Google Play, as well as restaurant orders. When we followed the instructions shown on Google’s support page to enable the feature we only saw the option to enable the assistant’s existing fingerprint or face unlock security methods. Other users have reported that they were able to see the Voice Match menu option, but that the software froze when they tried to enable it. When setting up the feature, Google warns that someo...

Renders of the Note 20 Plus come from leaked CAD drawings. | Credit: @OnLeaks / Pigtou Last year’s Galaxy Note 10 Plus was truly a thing of beauty, with an amazing screen and superlative industrial design. And, judging by some high-quality (and completely unofficial) renders of the Galaxy Note 20 Plus, it looks like Samsung won’t be changing too much in 2020. The only major difference is a new, bulkier camera module on the rear of the device. These renders come from noted leaker @OnLeaks in collaboration with phone-case maker Pigtou. As with all renders based on leaked CAD drawings, they should be taken with a pinch of salt, but the design they suggest for the Note 20 Plus seems reasonable enough. The most obvious feature is the big, nearly edge-to-edge display, with curved bezels, sloping...

Realme’s explosive performance in India has made it one of the fastest growing smartphone brands in the world, and today the company is expanding into the nebulous “lifestyle tech” market with products in new categories. First up is Realme’s first smartwatch, imaginatively called the Realme Watch. It has a square design with a 1.4-inch 320×320 LCD display and runs what appears to be a custom version of Android. It can display notifications, control music, hang up phone calls, and do other typical smartwatch things. Realme is claiming 7 to 9 days of battery life from the watch, or 20 days in its power-saving mode. After my experience with the new watch from technological stablemate Oppo, though, I’d want to check that claim for myself. Realme’s watch has much of the same functionality ...

If your iPhone or iPad has dozens of apps needing unexpected updates, don’t worry: you’re not alone. For some reason, Apple appears to be reissuing recently-published app updates, resulting in users having to reinstall the latest version of some apps. Among the Verge team, the number of unexpected updates ranged from less than twenty to nearly 100, with updates dating back to the beginning of the month resurfacing from the depths of the App Store. Your experience will vary, of course, depending on how many apps you have and have frequently you update them. Exactly why these updates are being reissued isn’t clear, but, as MacRumors notes, it might have something to do with a bug that seems to be affecting apps as of iOS 13.5. This bug bug meant some apps became inaccessible, with an error m...

Sony’s new flagship smartphone, the Xperia 1 II (pronounced “mark two”), will ship in the US starting July 24th for $1,199, the company announced. Pre-orders start on June 1st. And if you pre-order by June 28th, you’ll get a free pair of Sony WF-1000XM3 noise canceling earbuds. A major feature of the Xperia 1 II is its 12-megapixel triple-camera array, which Sony says can shoot up 20 fps in burst mode, make AF/AE calculations up to 60 times per second, and autofocus on the eyes of humans and animals for portrait shots, among other features. The phone also comes with the Photography Pro and Cinematography Pro apps, which give you more manual control over the camera settings for your photos and videos. [embedded content] The Xperia 1 II has a 4K HDR OLED screen that’s 6.5 inches and has a 21...

One of the new streaming shows I’ve been looking forward to most, Netflix’s Space Force with Steve Carell, debuts this week. I definitely need something funny and smart in the lineup— I started watching I Know This Much is True and now catching up on Ozark, so a less morbid/bleak show will be a welcome change. Here are three shows on the lighter side (or at least, the less-dystopian side) coming to streaming this week: [embedded content] Hannah Gadsby: Douglas (Netflix, May 26th) Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby, probably best known for her stunning, Peabody Award-winning standup show Nanette, is back, bringing her latest comedy standup show Douglas to Netflix (fwiw, Douglas is the name of one of her dogs). [embedded content] Ramy, Season Two (Hulu, May 29th) Egyptian-American Ramy Hassan...

The 1980s show Knight Rider was about a guy who drove a talking car and solved crimes. I think. I (sort of) remember watching a young(ish) David Hasselhoff argue with the car, a 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am named KITT (Knight Industries Two Thousand), voiced by William Daniels. KITT had a Cylon-like red light on its (his?) front grill which made the car seem vaguely menacing. Knight Rider was amazing ‘80s television and as such, had an equally spectacular theme song (sidebar: I would like us to get back to TV theme songs that explain the entire plot of the show either in the lyrics or via a voiceover like this one did. I miss you, 1980s). London-based cellist Samara Ginsberg, who among other things, produces “virtuoso arrangements of cartoon/film/tv/video game themes” took the Knight Rid...