Daily Tech Headlines – March 27, 2018
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| Daily Tech Headlines – March 27, 2018 | |
| Number | 467 |
| Broadcast Date | MARCH 27, 2018 |
| Episode Length | 4:44 |
| Hosts | Sarah Lane |
Apple unveils new 9.7-inch iPad designed for classrooms, Arizona suspends Uber autonomous vehicle testing, Foxconn buys Belkin.
Headlines
- Apple introduced a new 9.7 inch iPad, including Apple Pencil support, today at its education event in Chicago, which also includes Touch ID, an HD FaceTime camera, 10 hours battery life, an 8-megapixel rear camera, LTE, and Apple’s A10 Fusion chip. Apple will sell this new 9.7-inch iPad for the same $329 as the previous base model, but students can get it for $299. VP of product marketing Greg Joswiak said on stage, there are 200,000 apps made for education and that Apple’s most popular iPad is the 9.7-inch model.
- Apple also announced new versions of its iWork suite with updated Pages, Keynote and Numbers apps for iPad supporting Apple Pencil. Pages will also integrate Digital Book authoring features. Apple says student accounts through schools will now get 200GB of iCloud storage for free, up from 5GB. And Apple announced the ClassKit development framework along with a free homework management app called Schoolwork and an update to make the Classroom app work on the Mac.
- Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in a letter Monday that Uber is suspended from testing autonomous vehicles in the state, following last week’s fatal crash. Ducey said it's in “the best interests of the people” of Arizona following Uber’s “unquestionable failure.” Prior to the crash, Uber had been testing self-driving cars in Arizona since late 2016. The New York Times reported last Friday that Uber’s self-driving program caused some employees to express safety concerns, and that Uber's autonomous test drivers had to take control of the vehicle more often than competing self-driving car programs.
- Huawei’s new P20 Pro device family — which includes the regular P20 and a P20 Lite — have a couple standout features...a 3-camera system which adds an 8-megapixel, optically stabilized telephoto camera, which allows for 3x optical zoom or a 5x hybrid zoom, and a color sensor at 40 megapixels. The P20 Pros also have dual-tone paint that shifts color based on how light hits the unit, it thanks to something called non-conductive vacuum metalizing. The P20 and P20 Pro are on sale starting today with prices of €649 and €899 respectively, but they won’t be available in the US.
- In the latest turn in a years-long case of whether or not Google used copyrighted Oracle code to build Android improperly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled Google didn’t have the right to use the Oracle-owned Java programming code in its Android operating system on mobile devices. The case now heads to a federal court in California to determine how much the Alphabet Inc. unit should pay. Oracle said it was owed $8.8 billion in damages from Google during the 2016 trial of this case.
- Earlier this month, Walmart filed a patent for autonomous robot bees called pollination drones, which can help to pollinate crops. The bee drones can pollinate like real bees, and also have tiny cameras and sensors to help detect locations of the crops that actually need pollinating. Walmart also filed five other patents for additional farming drones, including one drone that tracks plant pests, and another that monitors the health of various crops, according to Science Alert. Harvard University researchers first tested their own RoboBees in 2013, and in 2017, a student at Georgia's Savannah College of Art and Design created Plan Bee -- a drone controlled by a smart device that artificially pollinates flowers on behalf of bees.
- Mozilla announced the Facebook Container Extension for Firefox that it says helps you control more of your web activity from Facebook by isolating your identity into a separate container. In other words, the extension makes it harder for Facebook to track your activity on the internet. Mozilla says it does not collect data from your use of the Facebook Container extension, only the number of times the extension is installed or removed.
- Foxconn, which manufactures around 40% of all consumer electronics, is buying Belkin for $866 million in cash. Belkin, which owns the Linksys, Phyn, and Wemo brands, will continue to operate as a Foxconn subsidiary. Bloomberg reports Foxconn will also acquire Belkin’s portfolio of more than 700 patents in the deal, which still needs to be approved by the Treasury Department's Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States.
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| Preceded by: "Daily Tech Headlines – March 26, 2018" |
Daily Tech Headlines – March 27, 2018 |
Followed by: "Daily Tech Headlines – March 28, 2018" |