Technology

Hot on the heels of updating the foldable Razr to Android 10, Motorola has announced that the soon-to-be-released Edge Plus will also get at least two future Android OS updates, ensuring that the new flagship will run both the pending Android 11 and next year’s Android 12 (assuming Google sticks with its naming scheme). The Motorola Edge Plus is set to ship with Android 10 when it releases on May 14th. While the promise of two software updates isn’t exactly a generous one — Google offers at least three years of updates for its Pixel phones, to say nothing of Apple’s support for its phones — in the world of Android where any OS updates can be hard to come by, it’s better than nothing. And given that Motorola is selling the Edge Plus as a top-tier Android flagship, complete with the $999 pri...

Google’s new Nest Aware pricing model is rolling out starting this week, the company announced today. The new model means that a single subscription now covers all of your Nest devices, rather than asking you to pay on a per-device basis. It’s available in each of the 19 markets where Nest Aware is available, including the US, UK, Australia, France, and Germany. The new Nest Aware subscription now costs $6 a month or $60 a year to cover all of your devices. That gets you 30 days of “event video history,” meaning you get the recordings from whenever the camera detects motion or sound. Jumping up to $12 a month ($120 a year) for Nest Aware Plus doubles your event history to 60 days and also gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording history. Or pay $12 a month for up to 60 days of recordings I...

Twitter has added a new way to see how many people have retweeted a tweet and added a comment, the company announced today — but it’s only available on the iOS version of the app. The new feature organizes all of the retweets with comments into a handy list. To access it, tap on a tweet and then tap on the word “Retweets.” You’ll see retweets broken out into two columns — ones commenting on the retweet (or a “quote tweet”) and a list of retweets with no comment. Here’s a video from Twitter showing off the feature: You can already see quote tweets, but you have to copy and paste a tweet’s URL into Twitter’s search box to do so. (Here’s what that looks like when searching for the above embedded tweet, for example.) The feature rolled out today seems to be a much easier way to see retweets wi...

In a landmark acknowledgment of the toll that content moderation takes on its workforce, Facebook has agreed to pay $52 million to current and former moderators to compensate them for mental health issues developed on the job. In a preliminary settlement filed on Friday in San Mateo Superior Court, the social network agreed to pay damages to American moderators and provide more counseling to them while they work. Each moderator will receive a minimum of $1,000 and will be eligible for additional compensation if they are diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder or related conditions. The settlement covers 11,250 moderators, and lawyers in the case believe that as many as half of them may be eligible for extra pay related to mental health issues associated with their time working for Fa...

There’s a new iPad-related case in town from Pad & Quill: a case for Apple’s newly released Magic Keyboard, which is itself a $350 case for your iPad Pro. It’s called the Copertina, and it retails for $99.95. It looks a little bit like the hard cover of a book; it is made, apparently, from archival-quality buckram linen, which is also used in bookbinding. It is undeniably beautiful. And yet, its existence troubles me. Not all cases are created equally; we hold that particular truth to be self-evident. However, the question must be asked: why would you need a case to go over a case? Does the first case — which has a very nice keyboard that essentially turns your iPad Pro into a laptop — not adequately protect your thousand-dollar investment? Is the Copertina (Italian for “sleeve” or “pr...

Computer and phone accessory maker Belkin is developing an emergency ventilator in partnership with the University of Illinois to be used to treat COVID-19 patients, the two organizations announced today. Called the FlexVent, the gas-operated ventilator is a “single-use, emergency ventilator that can provide constant-flow, pressure-cycled ventilation automatically to patients in respiratory distress.” The FlexVent is currently under review by the Food and Drug Administration. Belkin and the University of Illinois have applied for an emergency use authorization, which allows medical products that haven’t been formally approved by the FDA to be used in emergencies or to treat life-threatening conditions. Image: Belkin Belkin said it “realigned our assets to serve the healthcare community” so...

A new high-resolution scan of The Night Watch lets you zoom in close enough to see all its small details: brushstrokes, small cracks around the eyes and noses, and even the facial expressions of every character. The Night Watch was painted in 1642 by Rembrandt van Rijn. The painting itself is famous for a few reasons, including its large size, measuring at 11.91 feet x 14.34 feet, and its use of light and shadow to emphasize specific characters in the painting. This new scan was published by the imaging team at the Rijksmuseum, a national Dutch museum based in Amsterdam. The release of the high-resolution image is part of a research and conservation initiative to conserve Rembrandt’s piece. This is not the first time the painting was brought online in high resolution, but this version stan...

Twobird is a new email application from Ginger Labs, the company behind popular note-taking application Notability, that wants to make email simpler and more powerful. Today, it’s launching fully after an early access beta that began in September last year. The “powerful-yet-simple” philosophy in Twobird manifests in two ways. The “simple” part lies in things like the slimmed-down UI that cuts out a lot of the cruft from emails like repeated signatures or complex formatting along with an automatic “Tidy Up” feature for clearing out your inbox and easy unsubscribing. But where Twobird tries to stand out is with new features layered on top that add collaborative notes and to-do lists directly in-line with emails. The result is an email app that feels a lot more like a real-time communication...

Waymo’s first external fundraising round, initially expected to bring in $2.25 billion for the self-driving company, just grew to $3 billion, thanks to the addition of some new investors. On March 2nd, Waymo announced its first outside investment round, with investors including Silver Lake, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Mubadala Investment Company, Magna International, Andreessen Horowitz, AutoNation, and Waymo’s parent company Alphabet. That round was extended to include a new crop of investors: funds managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Perry Creek Capital, and Fidelity Management and Research Company. “COVID-19 has underscored how fully self-driving technology can provide safe and hygienic personal mobility and delivery services.” To date, Waymo has been an outlier in the world ...

Twitter will now let its employees work from home indefinitely, which was first reported by BuzzFeed News. CEO Jack Dorsey reportedly informed employees of the new policy in an email sent on Tuesday. “If our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge. “If not, our offices will be their warm and welcoming selves, with some additional precautions, when we feel it’s safe to return.” The spokesperson also shared the following information about the company’s reopening plans and how it is thinking about business travel and events this year: Opening offices will be our decision, when and if our employees come back, will be theirs. With very ...

The Internet Archive is alerting users when they’ve clicked on some stories that were debunked or taken down on the live web, following reports that people were spreading false coronavirus information through its Wayback Machine. As NBC reporter Brandy Zadrozny noted on Twitter, the site includes a bright banner on one popular Medium post that was removed as misinformation. Its video archive also creates friction by making users log in to see some videos containing false information, like a reposted version of the conspiracy documentary Plandemic. These videos also include critical comments from Wayback Machine director Mark Graham who described the warnings to Zadrozny as an example of the “importance and value of context in archiving.” A post removed from Medium for making unsubstantiate...

Apple released a big update to Logic Pro X today, adding Live Loops, a beat sequencer, a revamped sampling tool, and more. Apple calls it the app’s “biggest update” since the music production software launched under its current name, Logic Pro X, in 2013. The new tools are particularly focused on electronic music, hip-hop, and beat making. The update adds in a pair of music creation tools that have been in GarageBand for several years now that let users quickly start tinkering with beats and sounds. Live Loops allows musicians to create beats out of a series of adjustable loops that can be dragged and dropped around a grid, and a new Step Sequencer feature lets you create beats by programming a pattern that they’ll play on. More compatibility between Logic and GarageBand These new features...