Technology - Google News

Best Buy gets smart, teams up with Amazon to sell Alexa-powered Fire TVs
Microsoft claims to make Chrome safer with new extension
Android is going all in on copying an iPhone feature that might disappear next year

Best Buy gets smart, teams up with Amazon to sell Alexa-powered Fire TVs

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 08:12 AM PDT

After fighting a bruising battle for years in the retail electronics ring, Amazon and Best Buy have decided to shake hands and team up. Starting this summer, Best Buy will begin selling Amazon's Fire TV Edition smart TVs, which debuted last year inside 43-, 50-, 55-, and 65-inch sets produced by Element.

Why this matters: Amazon and Best Buy may be only agreeing to sell Fire TV sets here, but this has the potential to be an industry-changing partnership. With a third-party store on Amazon, Best Buy is waving something of a white flag without ceding too much ground to Amazon. Of course, the two retail giants will still be competitors, but Best Buy has found a way to make nice without completely sacrificing its brand identity.

In fact, a presence on Amazon.com might actually bolster the company's reputation while giving Amazon a strong retail partner and a way to show off its new TV sets to customers who are leery about buying big-ticket items sight unseen. If it works, we could see the exclusive partnership expand to other Amazon products, while also opening the door to Best Buy carving out a new way to reach online customers.

Trial by Fire

This time around, the new TV sets will be made by Toshiba and Insignia, but promise to bring the same Fire TV experience inside, emulating the interface and navigation you get with Amazon's boxes and dongles. And of course, they come equipped with Alexa for voice control and search. Amazon says the new Toshiba sets will be available this summer, with Insignia models to follow later in the year.

Sets will be available for purchaser at Best Buy stores and on bestbuy.com, but they won't be sold by Amazon directly. Instead, as part of the partnership, Best Buy will become a third-party seller on Amazon.com, joining the burgeoning Amazon marketplace. While Amazon's Echo and Fire products are prominently featured in Best Buy stores, it's the first time Amazon and Best Buy have partnered together in such a direct way.

Amazon's first round of Fire TV sets are currently sold out on Amazon.com. Amazon hasn't announced whether the new sets will include any features that weren't available on the original model. For example, the Element sets didn't include a built-in microphone, so the remote button needed to be help when using Alexa.

Pricing or sizing hasn't been announced for the new sets, but presumably they will follow the same aggressive strategy Amazon started with its first round of Fire TV sets. Ranging in price from $449 to $900, the sets delivered 4K picture quality with a familiar interface for streaming shows from Netflix, HBO, Hulu, and other services. And with 16GB of internal storage, you could pause and rewind live TV without using a DVR box.

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Microsoft claims to make Chrome safer with new extension

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 08:12 AM PDT

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Chrome's unsafe content warning.

Chrome already provides effective protection against malicious sites: go somewhere with a poor reputation and you'll get a big, scary red screen telling you that you're about to do something unwise. But Microsoft believes it can do a better job than Google, and it has released a Chrome plugin, Windows Defender Browser Protection, that brings its own anti-phishing protection to Google's browser.

Microsoft justifies the new plugin with reference to a 2017 report that claims that the company's Edge browser blocked 99 percent of phishing attempts, compared to 87 percent by Chrome and 70 percent in Firefox. The plugin brings Edge's protection to Chrome, so if the theory holds, it should bump the browser up to 99 percent, too.

The new extension doesn't appear to disable Chrome's own checking (or at least, it doesn't seem to be doing so for me), so at the very least isn't likely to make you less safe, and with phishing being as widespread as it is, the extra protection probably doesn't hurt.

While making Windows users that extra bit safer is good for the Windows platform as a whole, this release does ever so slightly erode one of the purported benefits of the Edge browser. Microsoft has struggled to get people using its browser—while the core engine and security features are solid, the interface still has frustrating shortcomings—but one of its virtues was that it has different, and arguably better, defense-in-depth protection against phishing and malicious exploitation. In bringing that protection to Chrome, there's one less reason to pick the Microsoft browser.

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Android is going all in on copying an iPhone feature that might disappear next year

Posted: 18 Apr 2018 06:55 AM PDT

Apple's iPhone X features what is arguably the most stunning design we've ever seen on a smartphone, so it makes sense that Android vendors would want to copy it. As beautiful as it is, however, we don't think anyone expected rival smartphone makers to rip off the iPhone X's design to the extent that they have. Almost every single Android phone company in the world either has stolen Apple's design or is in the process of stealing it. That includes everything from tiny no-name Chinese phone brands to some of the biggest names in the industry, like Huawei and LG. In fact, only one major smartphone player hasn't copied the iPhone X at this point — Samsung — but a new revelation on Tuesday proved that the South Korean company is indeed at least considering an iPhone X clone of its own. This shouldn't be much of a surprise, of course, since Samsung literally wrote the book on copying Apple's iPhone designs.

Apple wasn't the first smartphone maker to release a handset with a notch cut out of the display. LG had a phone with the top corner removed, and Essentials' PH-1 has a small rounded notch cut out for the camera. Of course, Apple's iPhone X has a unique oblong notch that's unlike anything else — or at least, it was unlike anything else until nearly every Android company on the planet copied it. Just look at this picture of 20 embarrassing iPhone X copycats in a single image. The irony here is that the nifty new notch design all these Android clones are copying could be outdated as soon as next year.

There has been a ton of talk surrounding Apple's notched display design and all the Android phones that are copying it. That conversation was rekindled this week when a Samsung patent application emerged showing a notch design just like Apple's iPhone X. Android vendors are tripping over themselves to copy Apple's pseudo all-screen design. Even though some of them are embarrassed and are trying to convince the world they weren't copying Apple, we can all see the truth. In fact, so many Android phone makers are copying the notch that Google had to build notch support into Android P, its next big Android update.

As we mentioned, though, the real irony in all this is that all these Android companies are copying a design that could disappear a year from now.

Apple's display notch exists to make room for the iPhone X's ear speaker and the TrueDepth camera and sensor array that enables Face ID. The company's Face ID solution replaced Touch ID on the iPhone X, and Apple says it's going all in on Face ID moving forward. All three new iPhone models that debut in September are expected to feature Face ID in place of Touch ID, and so they'll all have notches at the top of their displays.

The notch was born of necessity, but it appears as though that necessity may be short-lived. According to a report that emerged last month, Apple may already be working on a solution that will allow it to ditch the notch but keep Face ID on an iPhone with thin bezels. And according to that report, these new notchless iPhone models could be released as soon as next year.

In other words, Android vendors are spending all this time and effort copying a design that might not even exist a year from now.

What'll be truly funny to watch is all the apologists who bizarrely insist that all these Android phone makers aren't really copying Apple's iPhone X design. It may be a bit more difficult to make that claim when Apple does away with the notch and all these Android copycats quickly clone whatever new design Apple comes up with.

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