Technology - Google News

The new Palm is a tiny phone to keep you away from your phone
Here's Why You're Getting So Many Kills In 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4'
Finally: real Photoshop on the iPad

The new Palm is a tiny phone to keep you away from your phone

Posted: 15 Oct 2018 05:00 AM PDT

There's a new phone with the word "Palm" on it that's tiny, intriguing, and has very little to do with Palm beyond that word printed on the back. It comes from a startup in San Francisco, which purchased the rights for the name from TCL last year. It costs $349.99 and will be available in November, but you can't go out and buy it on its own. It's only available as an add-on to a current line. Also, Steph Curry is somehow involved.

It is a weird little thing.

The Palm phone is a device that you can add on to your Verizon plan, which shares your phone number. It's a phone designed for you to use on the weekends, when you're going out for the evening, or just generally when you want to be a little less distracted by your big phone with all its apps. That said, it runs a full version of Android 8.1 and all the apps from the Google Play Store.

So to review: it's a tiny phone to keep you from using your big phone, but it could do all the things your big one can do if you wanted (but you shouldn't because the whole idea is to get you to be a little less obsessed with your phone). It's like a phone for your phone. And Steph Curry helped design cases for it so you can strap it to your forearm during workouts. There are Kate Spade clutches for it, too.

Like I said: weird. But also: fascinating.

Let's step back. There's a whole trend of some people trying to get away from being too tied to their phones. We have new settings and software to track and show us our usage, but those are easy to ignore. There's also a trend of every phone just getting bigger and bigger.

So some are trying to get around both problems by buying a "minimalist phone," something that can just call and text. But you end up with a whole host of problems when do you do that. Do you just give up on having a smartphone entirely? That's not really a feasible option for most people anymore. Do you find a dumb phone — like the Light Phone — that does just enough to cover your needs? Chances are, there will also be One More Thing you want that phone to do.

If you want a less distracting phone, what you really want might be something you can use without giving up your big honking smartphone when you really need it.

That's the idea behind the new Palm phone. It's a sidecar for your phone. You should almost think of it more as a thing to get instead of a connected smartwatch than as a second phone. In fact, thinking of it as a smartwatch is a good move since that's precisely how Verizon (and only Verizon) is selling it: as an add-on for existing plans. You can't just go buy the thing on its own or unlocked as your primary phone.

On the one hand, getting a second phone to help you get away from your main phone is a patently ridiculous idea. But then that idea kind of worms into your head. Yes, I would like to go out to the cabin and just have a little tiny phone I know won't blow me up with work emails. Yes, having a tiny phone that will actually fit in my pocket and weighs next to nothing seems great.

It might be a more elegant solution to having a "time well-spent" phone than picking up a plain Jane feature phone or backing a Kickstarter for an in-betweener phone. But even though the Palm phone solves a lot of "second phone" problems, that doesn't mean that it doesn't come with a lot of complications of its own.

Before we get into all that, though, this thing is still a phone. And there's plenty to say after a couple hours of playing around with it last week. (We'll get to Steph Curry, too.)

The new Palm phone looks nothing so much like an itty bitty iPhone X. Its designers say that they weren't aiming for that; instead their design goals of making a little phone that felt comfortable tucked away in your hand led to the shape. Still, though, look at it.

Both the front and back are Gorilla Glass 3, and it's rated for IP68 water and dust protection. There's just one button — the power button — which serves multiple purposes. There's only an 800mAh battery in there, but that's more than enough to power it for a long time since it's so small.

It's obviously tiny; at just 50 x 97 millimeters, it's not much bigger than a credit card, but it's thicker at 7.4mm. It nestles in your hand in a way that will make you instantly nostalgic for the old days of smaller phones. It weighs 62.5 grams, and it's easy to believe you'd forget this thing was even in your pocket.

Being this small, there's no room for a headphone jack or for wireless charging; it has a single USB-C port. And yes, it will be one more thing you have to keep charged.

It is not a very powerful phone, by design. It has a tiny 3.3-inch, 445-ppi LCD display, big enough to use to check information and type on but not big enough to make you want to do real work on it. The rear camera is 12 megapixels, and the photos it takes seems passable but not great. There's also an 8-megapixel selfie camera.

The Palm phone has a processor we've seen on other low-end phones — the Snapdragon 435 — paired to 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage. If you know anything about Android specs, you probably know that's not super powerful — but since this phone is so small, there are fewer pixels to drive, and so it felt fast enough when I tried it.

Palm (and yes, it is very weird for me to refer to this company as "Palm") has made a bunch of software changes both to make Android 8.1 work better on a tiny screen and to ensure it will do a better job of not distracting you.

There's a single virtual button on the bottom. You tap it once to go back, twice to go home, and long-press it to get to the multitasking screen. Since there are no volume buttons, you need to swipe down the quick settings panel to adjust that. And since there's no fingerprint sensor, Palm wrote a custom face-unlock feature that uses the 8-megapixel front camera. I can't say how secure it is, but my hunch is a traditional PIN would be a lot more secure. The power button does double duty as a way to launch Google Assistant; you long-press it for that.

Instead of the traditional Home Screen and App List setup on most Android phones, the Palm phone just has a vertically scrolling hexagonal grid of apps. If you long-press one of the icons, you'll get a big pop-up of the shortcuts that are available for that app. (App shortcuts are one of the most underused features in Android.)

The only real gesture to the original Palm that I could really find (besides the fact that this new phone is tiny like a Veer or Pixi) is what happens when you swipe up from the home screen. It brings up a list of apps over an area where you can draw a letter to search. It looks for all the world like the graffiti areas on old PalmOS devices, right on down to having four app icons in the corners.

But no: this is not a phone inspired in any appreciable way by either PalmOS or webOS. This company took the name. They talked to me for a long time about their ethos and it is an interesting one, but they talked about "reinventing" a Palm ethos rather than bringing it back.

The core of that ethos is something they call "Life Mode." (Or, because the founders are dads, hashtag dad mode.) More than any other feature, the Life Mode on the Palm phone is what makes this a "time well spent" minimalist phone. When you turn Life Mode on by tapping a palm tree icon, it enables a set of Do Not Disturb and Low Battery settings.

In Life Mode, your notifications are obviously turned off, but Palm is also turning off the wireless radios. The cellular and Wi-Fi radios will only turn on when the screen is on. (Bluetooth will also turn off but stay on if you are connected to headphones.) It's a much more aggressive way to turn off notifications and deny incoming phone calls. Palm specs the phone at eight hours of normal use without Life Mode on, so if you toggle it the Palm phone is expected to last a super long time on a charge.

Oddly, the Palm phone is not running the latest version of Android which has a bunch of Digital Wellbeing features built right in. The company tells me that they didn't want to conflict with those Android 9 Pie features. Perhaps an update will come in the future, but it's a miss for now.

Here's the other thing to know about the Palm phone: it's very much a Verizon phone. From the way that it's being sold to the software that's on it to the wide suite of accessories being developed for it at launch, it has the carrier's fingerprints all over it.

For people who know anything about Palm, there is a deep and rich irony to the Verizon partnership. Verizon rejected the first Palm Pre, sending it to the Sprint purgatory at launch. Verizon also pulled a bit of a bait-and-switch on Palm when it suggested it would heavily back the Pre Plus, only to move all its attention and marketing dollars to the Motorola Droid.

Anyway, the Palm phone comes preloaded with a handful of Verizon apps, but not as many as I expected. Chief among them is Verizon's Message+ app for texting. It's a terrible-looking app that comes with a lot of creepy advertising "features" and just one really killer feature: it automatically syncs text messages across multiple phones with the same phone number.

Verizon's NumberShare feature is the linchpin that makes the Palm phone work. It becomes an "extension" device to your main phone, sharing its phone number. That's what allows calls and texts to come through. The Palm phone is designed mostly for Android users — iPhone users could use this, but, since the Palm phone is an Android phone itself, they won't get their iMessages on this device.

You can also tell this is a Verizon jam because the Palm phone is launching with a huge suite of accessories: cases, lanyards, armbands, Kate Spade clutches. There is a surprising amount of money in phone cases and Verizon surely wants to make sure it gets some.

That brings us to Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors, who is a creative strategy director at the company. Palm says he's not being paid to do that job, but is instead actually an investor. His main input has been in developing accessories, they say, and he'll also be involved in the marketing. Palm insists that he has been "put to work" testing accessories and is not just a figurehead creative director in the vein of Alicia Keys, Ashton Kutcher, Justin Timberlake, Nick Cannon, and will.i.am.

Curry has previously appeared in ads for Apple and Vivo. Most of his recent tweets have come from an iPhone.

I have been reporting on the original Palm phones since the early 2000s, starting with my days at TreoCentral and on through PreCentral, This Is My Next, and The Verge. I met my wife because of a shared obsession with Palm devices. I ran the largest online Palm community. I have a drawer full of old Palm devices (some of which were never released) and still pop off on Twitter about how its innovations presaged many of the "new" features that appear on smartphones today. So when I say that this new Palm phone isn't anything like the old Palm phones. I speak from experience.

Palm has a history that is largely untold and mostly forgotten but nevertheless deeply enmeshed in the products we use today. Palm's design has informed the smartphone you're using right now, Palm's engineers work at the major companies that make products you interact with every day.

This new Palm phone is not connected directly to any of that. No Palm employees work at the new Palm and beyond the fact that the old Palm was the last company to really make a serious effort at selling tiny smartphones, this new Palm phone doesn't have much in the way of the old Palm's software aesthetic. Even the new Palm logo does nothing to evoke the old Palm.

I'm not worked up about it because this new Palm phone has its own ideas which are fascinating. Is this product a luxury? Absolutely. It's a phone only for people who already have phones. Still, the idea of having a tiny phone that you could get you to stop being Extremely Online is compelling.

I don't know if this new Palm phone is the right way to achieve that goal, but I'm glad to see some companies are willing to try something different in smartphones, something other than just making them bigger and more powerful.

And hey, if this new Palm phone fails to sell, that would be a very Palm thing to do.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Here's Why You're Getting So Many Kills In 'Call Of Duty: Black Ops 4'

Posted: 15 Oct 2018 07:09 AM PDT

Call of Duty: Black Ops 4Credit: Treyarch

If your K/D ratio has been skyrocketing since the release of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, I've got good and bad news for you. The good news is that it's not a coincidence and that your numbers really are getting better. The bad news is that it's not because you're getting any better, it's because the game has changed what qualifies as a kill. Both assists and killshots now count towards your statistics, which should be good for team harmony overall.

I first noticed the change after reading about it in Polygon, because the quick time-to-kill can actually make the change a little hard to notice. There's more extensive proof of the new system over there. But the upshot is this: if you land a shot on an opponent and that opponent dies before their health starts recovering again, you get credit for the kill. That means there are more kills than deaths going around in a single match, and that's why you're K/D ratio is going up.

I noticed something similar last year in another Activision property, Destiny 2. All of a sudden I was doing much, much better in Crucible, and it quickly became clear that it was because Bungie had decided to recognize my efforts as a team player as on par with those lone wolves out there. It wasn't a complete change: the game still asks you to get "final blows" for certain challenges, which are more akin to old-style kills. It's more neccessary in a higher time-to-kill game like Destiny, where teamshooting is a regular occurrence, but it's also nice to see in something like Call of Duty.

It's a great change, and feels pretty necessary for keeping the mental peace, particularly in a matchmade game. Nobody wants to be sitting there getting mad at their own teammates for stealing kills, and it ensures that less-skilled players are still getting that little dopamine rush every time the notification flashes across the screen. Over a year of Destiny, my mental outlook has more or less equalized: I've just sort of moved the goalposts on what I consider to be a good crucible performance, and I'll wind up doing the same for Black Ops 4. It's still nice to get that little notification, though.

Let's block ads! (Why?)

Finally: real Photoshop on the iPad

Posted: 15 Oct 2018 06:00 AM PDT

Adobe really wants you to know that the upcoming Photoshop CC for the iPad, which was announced today and is set to be released sometime in 2019, is "real Photoshop."

The phrase "real Photoshop" came up several times during my week-long preview of an early version of the software giant's long-awaited app. The underlying code is the same as desktop Photoshop, and although the interface has been rethought for the iPad, the same core tools line the edges of the screen.

But the biggest change of all is a total rethinking of the classic .psd file for the cloud, which will turn using Photoshop into something much more like Google Docs. Photoshop for the iPad is a big deal, but Cloud PSD is the change that will let Adobe bring Photoshop everywhere.

Bringing a program like Photoshop to the iPad is a monumental task. The project started 18 months ago when two Adobe engineers asked to carve out time to bring the Photoshop codebase to the iPad. "There was just a lot of doubt until what we call the "proof of life" moment," says Scott Belsky, Adobe's chief product officer. Senior director Pam Clark agrees: "We fully admit we were surprised when the engineers showed up, and it was quite powerful and smooth." That "proof of life" product inspired the design team to start focusing on the app's user experience, with each new build focusing on a different Photoshop workflow.

"Photoshop has stopped being a desktop product and has become a system," Belsky says. Photoshop is an all-in-one platform, an industry standard that's used by professionals and internet memesters alike. And since the 2011 switch to the Creative Cloud model that bundled Photoshop into a monthly subscription, it's a program that's constantly evolving with new updates. You can use Photoshop for 10 years and still learn a faster, easier way to do something.

That's the challenge in bringing an already difficult-to-master program to the iPad: figuring out an intuitive and easy way to translate a powerful photo-editing app for a new platform that doesn't have a mouse or keyboard. "The teams felt very passionate about not having this friction when you see a new UI," Belsky said. "The common discussion was capitalizing on familiarity."

The app is being unveiled to the public for the first time at the Adobe Max conference today, but it won't actually be available until next year. It'll be part of the Creative Cloud subscription, so if you're already paying for Photoshop on desktop, you'll be able to use it on an iPad. There's no word on standalone pricing, and Adobe hasn't made a decision yet on whether Photoshop for the iPad will have a one-time purchase fee or require a subscription of some kind.

I've been using Photoshop for the iPad for the past week, and it feels distinctly like Photoshop with a few design choices optimized for a touchscreen. It doesn't have every tool available in desktop Photoshop; in fact, it's missing the entire upper task bar with the drop-down menu. Instead, you'll find tools like adjustment layers in the collapsible right-side toolbar.

"The features we're bringing in first really focus on compositing workflows — bringing in images, combining and manipulating pixels to blend together," says senior product manager Jenny Lyell. "The features we have in the app right now are around layers, transforming, selections, masking, brushing." Video-oriented features like the Timeline panel have been left out for now, so this first version of Photoshop for iPad can't be used for animation or quick video editing.

There aren't any keyboard shortcuts or gesture controls, although Adobe plans to incorporate them in the future. But there is a neat interface element called the touch modifier, a context-aware button that shows up on the bottom left corner of the screen (depending on which tool you're using). If you're using the brush tool, for example, holding the button down instantly switches to the eraser, then back to the brush when you let go. Holding the touch modifier down when you're using the Move tool will automatically toggle to let you duplicate layers without having to select the function manually. It's a thoughtful addition that eases the learning curve for the iPad user experience.

"From my experience using the early, early version of this new product that we just shared, I don't see why I would go to the desktop to do a retouching type of workflow," Belsky says. "It's powerful, it's somewhat faster, and it's super easy and native with a touch experience as opposed to a cursor."

Adobe's new Cloud PSD format is a big part of Belsky's vision for Photoshop's future, but it wasn't ready to test yet. Cloud PSD files live in the cloud and sync changes across devices so you can work on the same file on desktop and mobile devices that have Photoshop CC. "Cloud PSDs, when we ship Photoshop on the iPad, will also run and automatically show up on your desktop," Belsky says. "Suddenly, you'll have this cloud-powered roundtrip experience akin to a Google Docs experience, where literally the source of truth of your Photoshop creation is in the cloud."

Access to Cloud PSDs is also the biggest benefit of being a Creative Cloud subscriber. There are options in Photoshop CC for the iPad to import files from iCloud Drive, Google Drive, and Dropbox, but it's likely these services will only save traditional PSD files. "The beauty of it with Creative Cloud and the Cloud PSD and the innovations there is that you can just pick up where you left off, and you can be somewhat agnostic," Belsky says. "You can always go back in history. You can share it and have other people be able to go back and undo things you did."

Adobe's enthusiasm for cloud-based workflows was met with some skepticism when it split Lightroom into CC and Classic versions in 2017. Since Lightroom CC was based around online storage, users had to become Adobe subscribers to pay for storage. However, Belsky doesn't think the Lightroom model applies to Photoshop on the iPad. "It's a bit of a different metaphor. There's still Photoshop across every surface, and there is one Photoshop for each Photoshop experience," he says.

This also brings up the question of whether the "real Photoshop" for Android could ever be a possibility. Will there be an eventual Google Play Store launch? "We already have a number of products on Android, and we hope to bring more," is all Belsky will say.

Because Microsoft's Surface devices and other Windows tablets have been able to run full Windows programs, there hasn't been a need for a separate Photoshop. But using a full Photoshop program on a touchscreen still requires small tweaks and optimizations, like changing the sizes of pen tool anchors and other small workflows that can be hard to navigate with a clumsy finger. Will the touch optimizations for the iPad make it to Photoshop for Windows? Again, Belsky isn't saying. "The short answer is: the team's exploring it, of course, and we're always trying to modernize our desktop experience."

It's been eight years since the iPad was released, but there's never been a full Photoshop app on the iPad (just lite apps like Photoshop Express and Sketch). In that time, the lack of Photoshop on the iPad has led artists to seek out alternatives like Affinity and Procreate. Having seen what Adobe's planning in the first version of Photoshop CC for the iPad, it doesn't feel like a complete replacement of the desktop app; second-screen apps like Astropad and Duet Display, which let artists use desktop Photoshop on their iPads, aren't going anywhere anytime soon. But if Adobe can pull off transferable Cloud PSDs that track changes across devices, it'd be enough to call it "real Photoshop."

So what does this mean for bringing other Adobe programs to the iPad? Is Illustrator on the way? "I certainly want to bring more of the suite of creative products to the iPad," Belsky says. "Every product should be a multisurface system."

Let's block ads! (Why?)