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- Dropbox officially files IPO, cloud service seeking $500 million
- New leak spills the most revealing photos yet of Samsung's Galaxy S9
- XPS 13 2018 review: Dell's improvements propel this laptop forward
| Dropbox officially files IPO, cloud service seeking $500 million Posted: 23 Feb 2018 01:03 PM PST Dropbox privately filed for its IPO just last month as the company built expectations for a public offering over the last year. Today, the SEC has publicly revealed the IPO details, offering specifics including last year's financial performance.   AirPodsCNBC notes that Dropbox's $500 million IPO matches up exactly with its 500 million users. Additionally, Dropbox created $1.11 billion in revenue last year, an increase of 31% over 2016. While many have noted a track record of profitability, Dropbox had a net loss of $111.7 million in 2017. Dropbox has previously had an estimated value of $10 billion. Notably, Dropbox's founder, Drew Houston remembers an intense interaction with Steve Jobs when he called Dropbox "a feature, not a product." Via Business Insider:
It's safe to say the company has created much more than a feature. Dropbox is planning to use the IPO funding to build even more third-party partnerships and integration, while also working on creating more paying customers out of its huge user base. Dropbox's full IPO disclosure is available here. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| New leak spills the most revealing photos yet of Samsung's Galaxy S9 Posted: 24 Feb 2018 06:13 AM PST We have just one day to go before Samsung officially takes the wraps off of its next-generation Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ smartphones. So naturally, the most revealing photos we've ever seen of the two unreleased flagship smartphones just leaked. Big-name smartphone makers always have trouble keeping the lid on their unreleased products. There are just too many hands in the pie for these companies to control them all. That said, the leaks leading up to Samsung's Galaxy S9 announcement have been particularly extensive. In fact, we might know every single detail there is to know at this point. We've heard the rumors and we've read the reports. We know the specs and we know the pricing. We know when preorders will go live and we know when the Galaxy S9 and S9+ will be released. We've seen the renders and we've seen the mockups. We've even seen leaked photographs of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+. But we've never seen Samsung's new flagship phones quite like this. The wait for Samsung to unveil its new Galaxy S9 and S9+ flagships is about 24 hours now. Despite the short amount of time we have left to wait, a flurry of photos hit Instagram to show the world what Samsung's new flagship smartphones look like in the wild. Most of the photos were posted by an Instagram user with the handle "vnas_world." This appears to be an anonymous account created solely to share these leaked photos of the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+. With everything we've seen and everything we know at this point, we're more than confident enough to say that these photos are the real deal, giving us a clear view of both the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ while they're powered on. Here's are a few of the photos that were posted, and you can see the rest on the user's Instagram page.
Did you catch the "AR Emoji" app in the second photo above? That's rumored to be Samsung's take on the Animoji feature Apple introduced on last year's iPhone X. A second anonymous Instagram account posted another photo of the Galaxy S9 and S9+, this time showing the backs of the phones in three different colors. This particular photo was later removed and the account was deleted, but you can still see it below.
Samsung will officially announce its new Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ smartphones on Sunday during a press conference at the MWC 2018 trade show in Barcelona, Spain. The phones are expected to be available for preorder beginning March 2nd, ahead of their release on Friday, March 16th. Both phones are expected to be priced higher than their predecessors at launch, but Samsung is rumored to have a preorder promotion in place that will save buyers up to $350 when they trade in a qualifying smartphone. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| XPS 13 2018 review: Dell's improvements propel this laptop forward Posted: 24 Feb 2018 05:15 AM PST  The XPS 13 laptop needed an overhaul and Dell needed to make a statement. The XPS family has produced some of the best and most-loved consumer ultrabooks, but this particular laptop has been stifled in recent years. Since 2016, it has seen incremental improvements that helped it keep up with the competition in terms of performance, but not in design, hardware perks, and general innovation. Performance is key, sure, but it's not the only factor that contributes to why customers choose some laptops over others. The new XPS 13, announced at CES in January, has plenty of new characteristics that Dell hopes will push the device back to the front of the pack: a fresh rose gold and alpine white color option, a refreshed design with a new thermal management system, new biometric security features, and 8th-gen Intel CPUs. But not everything has changed, and the XPS 13's biggest challenge is proving that it has matured well by balancing necessary new features with reliable existing features that users have grown to expect. Look and feelThe XPS 13 debuted with a sleek design, and it hasn't necessarily become offensive in recent years (please hold your impassioned comments about webcam placement, we'll get to it). But it had become unremarkably inoffensive next to similar laptops made by competitors—in short, it was boring. The new XPS 13 tries to remedy this with the biggest overhaul we've seen in the laptop's design in a long time. Most noticeable is the new white and rose gold color-way that's sold alongside the traditional black-and-silver option. Dell offered a similar pink color-way for previous XPS 13 models, but the "alpine white" hue on the keyboard and surrounding the display pushes Dell into the modern era that treats the metallic rose and milky white combo as a standard option.
The area around the keyboard and the palm rests have new texture as well. On the rose-and-white model, woven fiber glass creates the makeshift basket weave pattern that's subtly detectable under your fingertips. The woven construction makes for a "high-strength, low-weight" chassis and its titanium oxide coating makes the palm rests more stain-resistant than other lightly colored laptops. I don't make a habit of dirtying my laptops, so I can't say I noticed its stain-resistant properties in action during my personal use. However, at a pre-CES briefing, Dell did make a slash with permanent marker on one of the white palm rests of the XPS 13 and it nearly disappeared after a bit of elbow-greased cleaning. Nevertheless, the new texture gives the area around the XPS 13's keyboard the look and feel of a sophisticated placemat—and I mean no shade to Dell in saying that. It's a pleasant change to see an OEM play with texture in a subtle yet sleek way. I welcome the change from the soft-touch palm rests the previous XPS 13 models had, but that material certainly has its fans and they will be sad to see it eliminated from this laptop. The texture also gives the XPS 13 more personality, at least in its keyboard area, than a competitor like the HP Spectre 13. However, HP's device has more personality in its C-shaped hinge than the XPS 13 has in the same area. The black-and-silver XPS 13 model also has the woven pattern on the palm rests but it's less noticeable and less tactile than that on the white model since it's made of carbon fiber, not glass. In typical laptop-update fashion, Dell slimmed down the XPS 13's frame by 3.4mm and the new model weighs just 2.68 pounds. The top and side bezels surrounding the Infinity Edge display are also smaller, measuring a mere 4mm, giving the device a 80.7 percent screen-to-body ratio. The relationship between screen real estate and the size and weight of a laptop's body has always shaped the way I see a laptop's overall design efficiency. Dell touts that the XPS 13 is a 13-inch laptop in a 11-inch laptop's frame, and the large display in relation to the overall look and feel of the laptop's chassis makes this sentiment ring true. Insulated internalsDell's new thermal solutions helped the company shave off millimeters from the XPS's design. Inside is a new thermal management system that includes dual fans, dual heat pipes, and Gore Thermal Insulation covering some parts of those pies near the CPU and GPU. The system keeps the chassis cool by directing heat out of the device through its vents, allowing for more sustainable, strong performance over time. We'll discuss Dell's power management software that works in with the thermal solution in the Software section, but the new hardware does a good job of keeping the laptop cool under pressure. Even during high workloads, the chassis showed no signs of overheating and only some warmth at the back-middle section of its underside. Screen, ports, and that webcamThe Infinity Edge display on the XPS 13 comes as either a 4K, 3840 x 2160 touchscreen or an FHD non-touch option. I tested the 4K touchscreen configuration and my thoughts on touchscreen laptops haven't changed much since reviewing the Spectre 13: it's a useful input mechanism to have, especially when most devices in our lives now feature touchscreens, but it's most useful on a device that can flex from its hinge upwards of 180 degrees. However, I'm more frustrated that Dell considers a touch panel a premium feature when OEMs including HP, Lenovo, and others are throwing touchscreens on base laptop models. While I may not use a touchscreen on a regular laptop often, there are plenty of consumers who do and that feature is quickly becoming a necessity. It's likely that Dell kept the touchscreen out of the base model to maximize thinness and battery life, and to keep its price tag at $999. While barely-there bezels hug the top and sides of the XPS 13's display, a larger bezel sits at its bottom holding the webcam and IR camera. Yes, Dell still insists on having the front-facing cameras at the base of the display, turning them both into up-nose cams. I rarely video chat on my laptops, but you won't be able to escape the less-than-flattering angle that the webcam forces upon you if you do. It's silly that we're still talking about this in 2018, but alas, we are. That also means Windows Hello facial recognition also subjects you to the webcam's uncomfortable upward glance. But the good news is that Windows Hello works as promised even with this camera placement—it took milliseconds for the camera to recognize my face and unlock the screen, and only once was I poorly positioned enough that the camera couldn't recognize my face. The bad news is minimal—you'll have to see your face chin-first for a few seconds as you set up the biometric feature. The circular power button at the top-right corner of the keyboard also incorporates a fingerprint sensor, letting you use your touch to turn on and unlock the device at once. I prefer more biometric authenticator options than not, so I was happy to see Dell including both on the XPS 13 laptop. The new XPS 13 shuns USB Type A ports for more modern connections. It has one USB Type C port and two Thunderbolt 3 ports, as well as a microSD card reader, headset jack, and Noble lock slot. There's also a nifty new battery gauge on the left side that shows the level of battery remaining in the device with a press of a tiny button. As an ultrabook, the XPS 13 is meant to be an multi-purpose laptop and but most devices like these aren't mistaken for gaming devices. But Dell made the new XPS 13 a bit better for gamers by making the Thunderbolt 3 ports support four-lane PCI connections, allowing users to connect external graphics cards to the device for a better gaming experience.
Keyboard and trackpadThe full-sized keyboard on the XPS 13 features chiclet keys with 1.2mm of travel and a buttonless trackpad directly underneath it. It was comfortable enough for me to use it as my main keyboard for more than a week, and I appreciated the clicky nature of the keys. All of the mainstay keys are normally sized, and Dell added dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys with the directional keys at the bottom-right corner. Some find those keys indispensable and I understand why, but they often got in my way since they are half-sized keys that sit right on top of my beloved left and right arrow keys. Many times I hit either the Page Up or Down key when I wanted to hit one of the arrow keys to move one space to the side. The Precision trackpad is smooth and perfectly fine to use. It's my preferred input method over the touchscreen so I used it much more than others might. It's quite responsive to full clicks and soft taps alike, as well as multi-point gestures. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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