New iPhones sport three-camera arrays in latest rumors

One thing we count on for sure in this unpredictable world of ours: the will, indeed, be new iPhones. Another thing that’s looking — at the very least — pretty likely is the inclusion of a three-camera array. A number of different rumors from different sources are currently circling around the addition of a third lens for 2019 models.

New reports from “reliable sources” in the Chinese supply chain (by way of 9 to 5 Mac by way of Macotakara, a Japanese Apple blog) have the three-camera system popping on on models with 6.1 inch and 6.5 inch OLED screens, marking another real estate for the base level model of the flagship.

The larger camera configuration (which may well induce minor trypophobia among some users) is said to be a driving factor in the decision to increase screen size). We’re still very much in the “grain of salt” portion of the Apple rumor cycle, through as 9 to 5 notes, the source has had a solid track record with these sorts of rumors before.

All of that, one assumes, would also come with a price increase for the handset, which has been pushing the $1,000 mark for a couple of years now. And all of this in a year when the company’s still not quite ready to pull the trigger on 5G. All signs currently point to a 2020 date on that one.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2OTOCF5

Fleetsmith lands $30M Series B to grow Apple device management platform

Fleetsmith launched in 2016 with a mission to manage Apple devices in the cloud. It simplified an IT activity that had previously been complex with help from Apple’s Device Enrollment Plan. Over the last year, the startup has beefed up its offering considerably, and today it announced a $30 million Series B round led by Menlo Ventures.

Tiger Global Management, Upfront Ventures and Harrison Metal also participated. Under the terms of the deal, Naomi Pilosof Ionita, a partner at Menlo will join the company board. Her colleague Matt Murphy will become a board observer. With today’s announcement, the startup has now raised over $40 million, according to data supplied by the company.

Company co-founder and CEO Zack Blum says the original mission was about solving a pain point he and his co-founders were feeling around finding a modern approach to managing Apple devices. “From a customer perspective, they can ship devices directly to their employees. The employee unwraps it, connects to WiFi and the device is enrolled automatically in Fleetsmith,” Blum explained.

He says that this automated approach, combined with the product’s security and intelligence capabilities means that IT doesn’t have to worry about devices being registered and up-to-date, regardless of where an employee happens to be in the world.

It has moved from solving that problem for SMBs to having a broader mission for companies of all sizes, especially those with distributed work forces, who can benefit from enrolling in this automated fashion from anywhere. Once enrolled, companies can push security updates to all of the company’s employees and force updates if desired (or at least send strong reminders to avoid updating in the middle of a client meeting).

Over the last year, the company developed a dashboard for IT to monitor all of the devices under its management, including providing an overall health score with any potential problems it has found. For example, there may be a number of MacBook Pros without disk encryption enabled.

The dashboard ties into the identity management component of Office 365 and G Suite.  IT can import the employee directory into the dashboard from either tool, and employees can sign into Fleetmsith with either set of credentials, providing a quick way to manage all of employees in an organization.

Screenshot: Fleetsmith

Fleetsmith has also set up a partner program with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to expand its reach further. MSPs manage IT for SMBs and building a relationship with these types of companies can help it expand much more quickly.

The approach seems to be working as the company has 30 employees and 1500 customers. With the new cash in pocket, it intends to hire more people and continue building out the product’s capabilities while expanding beyond the US to markets overseas.

Fleetsmith secures $7.7M investment to manage Apple devices

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2YWmEx0

The team behind Baidu’s first smart speaker is now using AI to make films

Apple Music cuts prices in India

This morning, The WSJ reported Apple’s streaming music service overtook Spotify in paid subscribers in the U.S., and now it hopes to do the same in the Indian market by way of a big price cut. The company’s individual plan in India is now 99 rupees per month ($1.43 USD), versus the 120 rupees per month ($1.73 USD) it was previously.

In addition, the price for the Apple Music student plan dropped from 60 rupees per month to 49 rupees; and the Family Plan is now 149 rupees per month versus the 190 rupees per month it was before the price cuts.

The news was first reported by The Indian Express and was shared across social media.

Apple has revised Apple Music price in India. Each plan now costs less. pic.twitter.com/bMjEDXtgsA

— Manish Singh (@refsrc) April 5, 2019

The new, lower prices are available to both existing subscribers and new customers, it appears.

India is a crucial market for streaming services, and one that’s a more recent battleground for major U.S. tech companies in addition to Spotify.

In March, YouTube Music and its paid subscription service, YouTube Premium, launched in India, following Amazon and Google which already operate their music services in the region. This year, Spotify also entered India amid a complicated licensing dispute with Warner Music, which impacted the number of tracks available.

But these companies aren’t just duking it out with one another for domination.

India today has a rich music scene which includes local players like Gaana, JioSaavn (created via the JioMusic and Saavn merger), Wynk, and others.

And recently, JioSaavn and Gaana both slashed their annual subscription prices by 70 percent. Those cuts were focused on locking down customers for a year – keeping them away from YouTube, Spotify and Apple, as a result. The recently discounts saw JioSaavn’s premium tier drop to Rs 299 per year – 70 percent down from Rs 999. Meanwhile,Gaana Plus was discounted to Rs 298 per year instead of Rs 1098, as before.

Apple doesn’t disclose its Apple Music subscriber count in India, but it has 56 million subscribers on a global basis.

The service has been customized for the Indian market with playlists that feature local music, including those popular in regional languages like Malayalam and Tamil, The Indian Express noted. It also has 14 localized radio stations and deals with leading Indian labels like Saregama, T series, Zee Music, YRF, Universal, and Sony.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2FQZ9g6

The Google Assistant on Android gets more visual responses

About half a year ago, Google gave the Assistant on phones a major visual refresh. Today, the company is following up with a couple of small but welcome tweaks that’ll see the Assistant on Android provide more and better visual responses that are more aligned with what users already expect to see from other Google services.

That means when you ask for events now, for example, the response will look exactly like what you’d see if you tried the same query from your mobile browser. Until now, Google showed a somewhat pared-down version in the Assistant.

[gallery ids="1808356,1808354,1808357,1808355"]

Also — and this is going to be a bit of a controversial change — when the Assistant decides that the best answer is simply a list of websites (or when it falls back to those results because it simply doesn’t have any other answer), the Assistant used to show you a couple of boxes in a vertical layout that were not exactly user friendly. Now, the Assistant will simply show the standard Google Search layout.

Seems like a good idea, so why would that be controversial? Together with the search results, Google will also show its usual Search ads. This marks the first time that Google is showing ads in the Assistant experience. To be fair, the Assistant will only show these kinds of results for a very small number of queries, but users will likely worry that Google will bring more ads to the rest of the Assistant.

Google tells me that advertisers can’t target their ads to Assistant users and won’t get any additional information about them.

The Assistant will now also show built-in mortgage calculators, color pickers, a tip calculator and a bubble level when you ask for those. Also, when you ask for a stock quote, you’ll now see a full interactive graph, not just the current price of the quote.

These new features are rolling out to Android phones in the U.S. now. As usual, it may take a bit before you see them pop up on your own phone.

from Android – TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2G2WcdJ
via IFTTT

Amazon reportedly readying its Alexa-powered answer to Airpods

Amazon is ready to challenge Apple with a cheaper, Alexa-powered set of wireless earbuds. If successful it would carve out a space for the popular digital assistant, and its deep connections to the rest of Amazon’s ecosystem, in the mobile world Amazon has hitherto largely failed to penetrate. But that’s a big if.

A report from Bloomberg details the upcoming hardware, which sounds a lot like Airpods (and the handful of other wireless sets that have appeared): a pair of small wireless in-ear buds, a case that doubles as a charger, and built-in controls and a mic so you can control your music, talk to friends, and ask Alexa things on the go.

Of course, the obvious question is how exactly this will work, given that Airpods have special privileges as first-party Apple hardware that let them perform tasks others can’t yet do. If your phone is locked, non-Airpod headphones (for instance Galaxy Buds) can’t connect through their associated app to look stuff up or provide services. You can of course set up a “Hey Siri, OK Google” situation, but that’s a bit sad.

Google Assistant iOS update lets you say ’Hey Siri, OK Google’

Bloomberg’s report says that the Alexa headphones let you “order goods, access music, weather and other information,” but it isn’t clear under what circumstances. If you have to have the phone unlocked and an app open for it to work, the whole thing is a non-starter. And it seems unlikely that Apple would grant Amazon some kind of clearance to do the kind of things only Airpods can do.

It’s conceivable that the headphones will, when possible, connect instead on detection of a command to a compatible Alexa device nearby with an internet connection — and there’s no shortage of those in many a tech-savvy home. But if you’re walking down the street and need to ask directions, you may have to pull the phone out, which rather negates the already somewhat limited convenience of owning a pair of wireless headphones.

These difficulties, plus those associated with simply making such a sophisticated piece of hardware for relatively cheap, explain why the headphones have reportedly had a bit of trouble getting shipped.

A cheaper price tag and potentially better audio quality may not be enough to make this particular endeavor a winner, but we’ll know more if and when Amazon goes official.

from Apple – TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2YNXZKO

Trying out Beats’ fully wireless Powerbeats Pro

Beats took its time getting untethered. The last addition to the Powerbeats line arrived in late 2016, right around the same time as the original AirPods. The product shared Apple’s W1 chip, further cementing its place as part of the company, with instant iOS syncing. But the products were once again yolked together with a cable.

A few weeks after the release of the second-generation AirPods, Beats finally unveiled the Powerbeats Pro, the company’s first fully wireless earbuds. Comparisons with Apple’s latest are inevitable. After all, Apple and Beats are one big happy family now, sharing technologies and working together in some capacity.

In many ways, however, Beats remains its own brand. Where the AirPods are a living testament to Apple’s minimalist “just works” approach to hardware, the Pros owe much of their design to the fact that Beats has long targeted athletes with its earbud line. I wouldn’t be too surprised to see promotional campaigns with the likes of LeBron James and Serena Williams sporting the Pros in the near future.

That target demo means that the new headphones have maintained the over the ear hooks found in earlier versions of the headphones. That’s either a good or bad thing, depending on what you’re looking for from a pair of buds. If you want something more minimal, Apple’s got a pair it will happily sell you.

In spite of all of the added plastic, however, the Pros are quite comfortable, even with a pair of glasses on. That’s owed, in part, to the inclusion of swappable silicone tips. Those are coupled with an ergonomic design that fit nicely in my ear. I’ve never had an issue getting AirPods to fit, but their rigid plastic design means they just don’t fit certain ears. That’s going to be much less of an issue here.

The major downside of the form factor, however, is awkward size and shape. They’re fine when you’re wearing them, but the Pros require a large charging case for storage. Really, really large. Like, you’re probably not going to want to attempt to carry these around in your pants pocket large. The placement of the buds inside the case is also a bit awkward and takes some getting used to. It’s not like the AirPods, which neatly slip into place.

The good news, however, is that the stated battery life is ridiculously long here, at nine hours on the buds themselves and 24 hours when combined with the charging case. That means you likely won’t need to take the case with you when you go out for a run in the morning.

The Powerbeats Pro also sound quite good for a pair of Bluetooth earbuds. The company has spent the last several years working to shake the (deserved) notion that it overcompensates for sound shortcomings with amped up, distorted bass. That’s really a relic from its earlier days. Beats has made great strides to offer better sound, even in a smaller form factor.

I sampled a fairly wide range of genres on the Pros, and was pretty impressed with what I heard. The instrument isolation is nice, and it sounds clear even with bass-heavy hip-hop and dance tracks.

Price may end up being a dealbreaker. At $250, they’re $50 more expensive than the latest AirPods and more than $100 more than the Galaxy Buds. That could end up being a tough pill to swallow.

The Powerbeats Pro are due out next months.

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