Google Chrome 77 is now rolling out for Android, with a new feature that lets you send tabs to different devices. This handy tool (which started rolling out to a small test base in July, but it now available to everyone) eliminates the need to mess about with bookmarks, or email URLs to yourself.
To give it a try, tap the menu button in Chrome, select ‘Share’ and select the option ‘Send this page’. This will enable you to send the current page to any device you’re currently signed into using your Google account.
The receiving device will display an alert that includes the name of the sharing device, the name of the page, and the URL.
It’s a welcome addition, but Google is rather late to the game. Firefox gained an almost identical Send Tabs feature in February this year, which you can see demonstrated in the video below:
Simpler downloads
This isn’t the only new feature arriving in Chrome 77 for Android – once you receive the update you’ll also notice a new, simplified Downloads screen. Google has done away with the drop-down menu in the top left corner, which was used for selecting different file types (including images, video, documents and pages).
Instead, there’s a row of buttons along the top of the screen for choosing different file types. It’s a small change, but saves you a couple of unnecessary taps and makes the filters more obvious.
There are also various changes aimed at developers, plus some performance enhancements under the hood. You can find a full list of all the updates in Google’s change log.
If you subscribe to Sling TV—and plan to for a while—the AirTV Mini could be the best streaming device for you.
Unlike a Roku or Amazon Fire TV Stick, the $80 AirTV Mini is built around Sling’s live TV streaming service. The Sling TV app launches automatically when the device boots, and the remote has handy shortcut buttons for navigating Sling’s menus. While you can certainly access Sling through other devices, none of them make it quite as easy.
Still, anyone who has second thoughts about committing to Sling should look elsewhere. The AirTV Mini and Sling TV are so inextricable that using the streaming device for any other purpose can be a hassle, and your options for alternative live TV services are more limited than they are on other devices. For most Sling subscribers, a Roku player, Amazon Fire TV, or Apple TV will still be better fits.
A streamer for Slingers
Though it’s a bit hefty for a streaming dongle, the AirTV Mini still manages to hang from your television’s HDMI input via a short, rubberized cable. It has a quad-core processor and 2GB of RAM, which is adequate for scrolling smoothly through menus and launching apps without delay. It also supports 4K HDR video in apps like Netflix and YouTube, but it won’t display advanced HDR formats such as Dolby Vision and HDR10+. While the dongle only has a single micro-USB port for power, you can use a USB OTG cable to plug in an external USB hard drive or game controller.
Jared Newman / IDG
The Sling TV app launches automatically when the AirTV Mini boots up.
Whenever you boot up the AirTV Mini, it loads directly into Sling TV, whether you’re paying for the live TV service or not. (Read our full Sling TV review here.) The underlying software, however, is Android TV, so you can always hit the remote’s home button to see a menu of other apps, such as Netflix and YouTube. (The Sling TV menu also has its own integration with Netflix, so you can scroll through recommendations or jump into the app without visiting the main app launcher first.)
The remote control is equally Sling-centric. Alongside the usual directional pad and playback control buttons, it has a big blue “Sling” launch button near the top. It also has dedicated buttons for viewing the Sling TV guide, the channel recall menu, and the info screen for whatever’s currently playing. None of these buttons serve any purpose outside the Sling app.
Jared Newman / IDG
The AirTV Mini remote has dedicated buttons for Sling TV’s programming guide, channel recall function, and info pages.
Unlike the AirTV Player from a couple years ago, the AirTV Mini has no full-sized USB ports, so you can’t directly plug in a TV tuner to watch over-the-air channels from an antenna. Instead, you’re supposed to use AirTV’s networked tuner, a separate $80 box that can stream broadcast TV into the Sling app over Wi-Fi. The AirTV tuner supports USB hard drives for recording over-the-air channels as well, so you could potentially have multiple AirTV Mini streamers served by a single tuner and DVR. (I tried connecting the AirTV USB tuner adapter to the Mini through an OTG cable, but this only caused the Sling TV app to reboot without recognizing it. Hauppauge’s USB tuner didn’t work either.)
AirTV
The separate AirTV networked tuner ($80) can stream over-the-air channels into the Sling TV app.
Taken as a whole, the AirTV system is a convenient way to combine Sling TV, other streaming apps, and optional over-the-air channels. If you’re used to how a cable box launches directly into live TV, with remote shortcuts for most common TV functions, AirTV provides a similar experience. And combining Sling with an antenna remains a great way to save money over other live TV streaming packages. The Sling app on Roku and other devices might provide the same content, but it’ll make you thumb through more menus and click more buttons along the way.
Hitting Sling’s limits
The problem at this point is not so much the AirTV system, but the underlying Sling TV service.
While Sling TV has a lower starting price than most other live TV streaming services ($25 per month for either Sling’s Orange or Blue base packages), it also lacks local channel coverage in most markets, which is a problem if you can’t get those channels through an antenna.
Jared Newman / IDG
Without the AirTV tuner, you might not get local channels through the Sling TV app.
Sling’s corporate parent, Dish Network, also tends to play hardball in its negotiations with TV networks, which is great for keeping prices down but not ideal for maintaining a consistent channel lineup. To wit: Sling hasn’t carried HBO since November, and it dropped regional Fox Sports channels—along with the YES Network in New York—in July. Having hardware that revolves around Sling could be a liability if the service loses more channels.
Sling TV also continues to drag its feet on 60-frames-per-second video support, with NBCSN, NFL Network, TNT, and CNN among the many channels still lacking those smoother framerates. The omission is increasingly inexcusable as other live streaming services, such as YouTube TV, PlayStation Vue, DirecTV Now, and Hulu with Live TV add 60-frames-per-second support across all channels. The AirTV tuner doesn’t support 60-frames-per-second video either, so you’re also getting markedly inferior video quality for local channels if you tie in an antenna.
While we’re nitpicking: Although the AirTV Mini has a Google Assistant button on its remote for voice controls, Sling TV itself doesn’t integrate with Google Assistant. That means you can’t use voice commands to launch Sling’s live channels or on-demand programming. You can’t even find Sling content in Google’s top-level search results, as you can with PlayStation Vue.
Android TV annoyances
Even as a streaming player for other apps besides Sling, the AirTV Mini runs into some of the same problems we’ve seen with other Android TV devices, such as Xiaomi’s Mi Box S.
The built-in Chromecast capabilities, for instance, have a tendency to stop working when the AirTV Mini is asleep, so you must turn on the device with the remote before you can use your phone as the remote instead. The AirTV Mini also lacks support for Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu says it won’t support the device because it doesn’t meet the company’s technical requirements. (Both apps do, at least, work via Chromecast.) As with the Android TV-based JBL Link Bar, PlayStation Vue was unbearably choppy in my experience as well.
Jared Newman / IDG
Exiting the Sling TV app takes you to a standard Android TV launcher (with mandatory top billing for Sling).
If you decide to stop subscribing to Sling TV, the AirTV Mini presents further hassles. You can’t uninstall or disable the Sling TV app, nor can you move it out of the first position in Android TV’s favorite apps list. You can’t stop the device from booting into the Sling TV app, either, and the remote control will suddenly have a lot of useless Sling-specific buttons.
All of which means you really have to be confident in your enjoyment of Sling TV to invest in the AirTV Mini. More than any other streaming device, the AirTV Mini’s Sling-centric remote helps simplify the act of jumping into live channels from Sling, and it even makes launching over-the-air channels easier if you use the separate AirTV tuner.
But one of the great benefits of cord-cutting is the freedom and flexibility to switch between streaming services as needed. In exchange for more convenience around Sling TV, the AirTV Mini hinders your ability to switch to the competition. That’s probably the entire point.
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Microsoft could be preparing to release a new Surface device powered by Intel’s upcoming Ice Lake processors, according to new benchmarks spotted online.
Found by Windows Latest, Geekbench results seem to show a Surface Pro or Surface Laptop – named “OEMJL OEMJL Product Name EV1.5A” – running on a 10th generation Intel Core i5-1035G1 processor, which runs at 3.60GHz.
Microsoft has previously used a similar naming convention for its Surface Go product on Geekbench, hence why some people think this could be a new Surface device.
Ready for October 2 event?
If the benchmark results are hinting at a new Surface device, then it’s very likely we’ll see it at Microsoft’s October 2 event – which, of course, we’ll be attending.
We don’t know much about Microsoft’s October 2 plans, however it’ll be a whole year since Microsoft revealed new Surface hardware, and two years since it released the Surface Book 2.
That means it’s high time that Microsoft announced a new Surface product, and if it does, hopefully it will use Intel’s latest Ice Lake hardware, which will give it a decent performance upgrade over previous Surface devices.
Thankfully, we won’t have long to find out, and whatever Microsoft does announce at its event, we’ll be there to test it out.
We’ve heard plenty of middle-of-the-road Bluetooth speakers that try to juice your tunes with brassy, boomy sound. The Anker Soundcore Motion+ isn’t one of them, but this compact, $100 speaker could do with a little more high-end detail. Its attention to mid-range frequencies, on the other hand, pays dividends when it comes to delivering rich, robust sound, with an impressive (but not overbearing, provided a certain feature is turned off) foundation of bass response . The Motion+’s weatherized design, app-based EQ settings, and aptX support sweeten the deal.
Design
Measuring a little shy of a foot wide, about three inches high and thick, the 2.3-pound Soundcore Motion+ feels heavy given its size. Encased in a virtually waterproof shell (Anker claims an ingress protection rating of IPX7, meaning the speaker can withsetand being immersed in up to a meter of water for 30 minutes), the Motion+ features a black aluminum grille that reveals its twin tweeters and woofers flanking a large passive radiator. The wedge-like design of the Motion+’s enclosure aims its drivers at about a 15-degree angle relative to the surface on which the speaker is sitting, so the music is directed at your ears and not your chest. The rubberized sides and back of the speaker feel reassuringly rugged, although they also accumulate oily fingerprints.
Ben Patterson/IDG
The rubberized shell of the Anker Soundcore Motion+ (seen here with its embedded playback controls) feels reassuringly rugged, but it also attracts oily fingerprints.
The Motion+’s power button is on the right side of the speaker, while the USB-C charging port and a 3.5mm analog audio input sit just beneath, securely hidden by a water-tight rubber flap. (A USB-C charging cable and an audio cable are both included.) You’ll find buttons along the top of the speakers for volume, Bluetooth pairing, and the speaker’s bass-boosting “BassUp” features (which I’ll get to in a moment).
A button in the center of the speaker–between the volume-down and volume-up buttons– performs a variety of functions depending on whether you press it once, press it multiple times, or hoild it down for a few seconds. Press the button once, for example, to play and pause your music or to answer a call on your Bluetooth-connected cellphone (in effect, turning the Motion+ into a speakerphone). Hold the button down for a couple of seconds and you’ll summon Siri or Google Assistant on your iPhone or Android phone respectively. Hold the button for more than three seconds, and you can sync the Motion+ to a second Motion+ to create a left/right stereo pair.
Ben Patterson/IDG
A rubber flap with a watertight seal hides a USB-C charging port and a 3.5mm analog audio input.
Features and functionality
Besides its Bluetooth 5.0 support, the Soundcore Motion+ also features the aptX audio codec, which can deliver near-CD-quality sound–provided you’re the device you’re streaming music from also supports aptX. Support for that codec is relatively common on Android phones, but you won’t find support for it on any iOS device (although Macbooks do support it). That’s unfortunate, as we like aptX (and we like aptX HD even more).
Ben Patterson/IDG
You can fiddle with the Anker Soundcore Motion+’s EQ settings using the Soundcore mobile app.
If you want to tinker with the Motion+’s EQ, you can do so using the Soundcore mobile app. Once the app connects to the speaker, you can switch between six EQ presets or fiddle with the app’s nine equalizer sliders.
One of the EQ presets is called “BassUp,” which is the name of Anker’s bass-boosting audio technology. We’ll cover the Motion+’s BassUp performance in a moment; for now, just know that you can toggle the BassUp mode using either the Soundcore app or by pressing the BassUp button on the top of the speaker.
The Soundcore app also lets you adjust the Motion+’s automatic power-off feature, which you can set for five minutes, 10 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour. That’s a nice feature, but those are the only settings available. There’s no sleep timer, either.
Performance
The Anker Soundcore Motion+ did a good job of filling my living room with sound given its size, particularly when I placed it on the floor; indeed, connected to my iPhone XS, the Motion+ got quite loud when I cranked the volume all the way. Since it’s not an omnidirectional speaker, the Motion+’s sound became a bit muffled when I moved behind the speaker, so you should be sure to point it toward any listeners rather than plunking it in the middle of a crowd.
Switching the speaker to the custom EQ mode and sticking with a flat frequency response, the Motion+ sounded pretty impressive given its $100 price tag, although I wouldn’t have minded more high-end detail from the speaker’s twin tweeters. I did appreciated the Motion+’s relatively powerful bass, even if the boomy BassUp feature was overkill for most of the tracks I tried. Crucially, the Motion+’s robust mid-range kept the sound from feeling too thin.
Dialing up Vlado Perlemuter’s rendition of Maurice Ravel’s solo piano works on the Nimbus Records label (granted, probably not the album the makers of the Motion+ had in mind when they designed thios speaker), the sound was full and relatively rich, if (again) a tad lacking in high-end detail. Skipping over to the title track of Bruce Springsteen’s The Ghost of Tom Joad, I liked the sound of the plucking acoustic guitar scenes, while the rising synth sounded appropriately warm without being overbearing (that’s with the BassUp feature turned off, mind you).
While I wish the Motion+ delivered finer high-end detail, I prefer its sound to cheaper Bluetooth speakers that sacrifice mid-range sound for a shrill yet thumpy mixture of thunderous bass and a overly brassy high end. Indeed, because of its solid mid-range sound, the Motion+ actually sounds better the more you crank the volume, making it ideal for outdoor playback.
Anker promises 12 hours of battery life from the Motion+’s rechargeable battery, and after several hours of playback, I’d only put a modest dent in the speaker’s battery meter.
Bottom line
You can’t expect perfect sound from a $100 Bluetooth speaker, but Anker wisely chose a solid middle ground when it came to the Soundcore Motion+, a compact, waterproof speaker that eschews goosed, flashy sound (the too-boomy BassUp mode notwithstanding) for robust mid-range performance. Sure, a little more high-end detail would have been nice, but if you’re hoping to take your portable sound to the next level, be prepared to shell out a much bigger chunk of change.
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In this month’s edition, we look at all things gaming. We reveal the very best gaming laptops, headphones and mice, as well as the top games of 2019 (so far). Plus, we’ve our usual reviews of the latest tech, including the all-new Samsung Galaxy S10 5G. All this and much more in the latest issue of Tech Advisor.
How to subscribe and start reading
Tech Advisor is available on a range of platforms, including Google Play, Readly and Zinio. To buy a copy of the latest issue, go to www.techadvisor.co.uk/magazine.
Apple has just launched the iPhone 11 line, and with it comes the usual race to be among the first manufacturers to offer a protective case for the new phones. Rarely do these excite, but gaming peripheral giant Razer may have something a little bit different up its sleeve.
Razer is releasing a few gaming-oriented cases (the Arctech Slim and Arctech Pro) in multiple colors, which are designed to work with iPhones from 2018 and later (including the iPhone 11, iPhone 11 Pro and iPhone 11 Pro Max), as well as the Razer Phone 2.
The key selling point with Razer’s cases is that where some phone cases insulate the device, the Razer cases should keep your handset cool, even when going through an intense gaming session.
Hot, hot, heat
As games become more advanced on phones, they become more power hungry, which puts CPU and GPU components under stress, causing both them and the battery powering them to heat up.
The Arctech Pro and Arctech Slim use a custom Thermaprene material along with perforations in the design to transfer heat away from the handset – instead of cooking it.
The effectiveness remains to be seen, but Razer claims its design kept phones working within recommended temperature limits for two hours even when chugging away at an intense gaming session, whereas alternative cases started to get dangerously hot within 20 minutes.
Both support wireless charging, though the Pro is the more protective of the two, being able to withstand falls from as high as 10 feet. Meanwhile, the Slim is a more pocket-friendly alternative.
Matching Razer’s usual branding colors in black and green, white and grey, and pink and grey shades, the Arctech Slim will set you back $30 (about £25 / AU$45) , while the Arctech Pro is $40 (about £35 / AU$60).
Google has finally begun rolling out a dark mode for its Gmail app, over a week after the release of Android 10 with its system-wide dark mode.
The company had intended to convert all its first-party apps ahead of the release, but a couple weren’t quite ready when the new OS was released on September 3 – namely Gmail and the Google Play Store, which remained stubbornly white.
Now, as XDA Developers reports, the latest Gmail release (2019.08.18.267044774) has a fully-functioning dark mode that turns the app’s background a pleasing dark gray color (though some might find the stark white text a little hard on the eyes).
You’ve got mail
We got a small glimpse of Gmail’s dark mode two weeks ago, when the app received an update that made the splash screen and home screen widget black if you were using dark mode on Android Pie.
However, the dark mode being rolled out now is only available for Android 10 – it won’t appear if you’re using Pie, even after your Gmail app is updated.
The Play Store is now the only significant holdout, and may be taking longer to convert due to the complexity of its icon-heavy interface. We imagine it might take quite some time to get it looking presentable.
