The tiniest controller we’ve ever tested is a lot better than you might think

Enlarge / At 73mm long, the 8Bitdo Zero 2 controller, like its predecessor, is shorter than a standard Amiibo figurine. The reason we're reviewing it? It turned out to be serviceable in a pinch. (credit: Sam Machkovech)

Over the years, we've become frequent users of 8BitDo game controllers, particularly the company's "legacy" line. You won't find a much better maker of unofficial gamepads made for classic consoles' ports (NES, Genesis, Super NES), and those models also come in Bluetooth-equipped flavors, ready to run on modern consoles and PCs.

Between its classic and modern gamepads, 8BitDo clearly favors the SNES's controller as an archetype, and that goes for the company's "Zero" series as well. Hence, if you see a Zero gamepad in a photo by itself, you may wonder what's so special about it.

That's probably why people photograph the 8BitDo Zero series next to tiny objects for scale. At 73mm long and 36.5mm wide, it's barely bigger than an adult's thumb and dwarfed by an average GI Joe figurine. After receiving and unboxing my very own 8BitDo Zero 2 gamepad (the newest model, introduced one month ago to retailers), I laughed incredulously. Seriously, 8BitDo? Who in the world do you think would play games with one of these?

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Smasung launches the rugged, enterprise-ready Galaxy XCover Pro

We got a bit of a surprise at the end of CES: some hands-on time with Samsung’s latest rugged phone for the enterprise, the Galaxy XCover Pro. The XCover Pro, which is officially launching today, is a mid-range $499 phone for first-line workers like flight attendants, construction workers or nurses.

It is meant to be very rugged but without the usual bulk that comes with that. With its IP68 rating, Military Standard 810 certification and the promise that it will survive a drop from 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) without a case, it should definitely be able to withstand quite a bit of abuse.

While Samsung is aiming this phone at the enterprise market, the company tells us that it will also sell it to individual customers.

As Samsung stressed during our briefing, the phone is meant for all-day use in the field, with a 4,050 mAh replaceable battery (yes, you read that right, you can replace the battery just like on phones from a few years ago). It’ll feature 4GB of RAM and 64GB of storage space, but you can extend that up to 512GB thanks to the built-in microSD slot. The 6.3-inch FHD+ screen won’t wow you, but it seemed perfectly adequate for most of the use cases. That screen, the company says, should work even in rain or snow and features a glove mode, too.

And while this is obviously not a flagship phone, Samsung still decided to give it a dual rear camera setup, with a standard 25MP sensor and a wide-angle 8MP sensor for those times where you might want to get the full view of a construction site, for example. On the front, there is a small cutout for a 13MP camera, too.

All of this is powered by a 2GHz octa-core Exynos 9611 processor, as one would expect from a Samsung mid-range phone, as well as Android 10.

Traditionally, rugged phones came with large rubber edges (or users decided to put even larger cases around them). The XCover Pro, on the other hand, feels slimmer than most regular phones with a rugged case on them.

By default, the phone features NFC support for contactless payments (the phone has been approved to be part of Visa’s Tap to Phone pilot program) and two programmable buttons so that companies can customize their phones for their specific use cases. One of the first partners here is Microsoft, which lets you map a button to its recently announced walkie talkie feature in Microsoft Teams.

“Microsoft and Samsung have a deep history of bringing together the best hardware and software to help solve our customers’ challenges,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in today’s announcement. “The powerful combination of Microsoft Teams and the new Galaxy XCover Pro builds on this partnership and will provide frontline workers everywhere with the technology they need to be more collaborative, productive and secure.”

With its Pogo pin charging support and compatibility with third-party tools from a variety of partners for adding scanners, credit card readers and other peripherals from partners like Infinite Peripherals, KOAMTAC, Scandit and Visa.

No enterprise device is complete without security features and the XCover Pro obviously supports all of Samsungs various Knox enterprise security tools and access to the phone itself is controlled by both a facial recognition system and a fingerprint reader that’s built into the power button.

With the Tab Active Pro, Samsung has long offered a rugged tablet for first-line workers. Not everybody needs a full-sized tablet, though, so the XCover Pro fills what Samsung clearly believes is a gap in the market that offers always-on connectivity in a smaller package and in the form of a phone that doesn’t look unlike a consumer device.

I could actually imagine that there are quite a few consumers who may opt for this device. For a while, the company made phones like the Galaxy S8 Active that traded weight and size for larger batteries and ruggedness. the XCover Pro isn’t officially a replacement of this program, but it may just find its fans among former Galaxy Active users.

Week in Review: The old Vision Fund heave-ho

Hey everyone, welcome back to Week in Review where I dive deep into a bit of news from the week or just share some thoughts and go over some of the more interesting stories of the week.

If you’re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inbox here, and follow my tweets here.

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The big story

The WeWork saga already led SoftBank to make headlines months ago when CEO Masayoshi Son urged portfolio companies to chase cashflow, but this was the week that the shoe dropped for plenty of startups and the layoffs commenced.

• Getaround let go of 150 employees according to The Information.
• Zume is planning to fire 400 people, Business Insider reports.
• Oyo is firing “thousands,” Bloomberg reports.
• Rappi is laying off 6% of its workforce, the company announced.

These are just the Vision Fund portfolio companies to announce layoffs this week, in the past several months we’ve already seen restructurings at Fair, Wag, Katerra, Opendoor, Ola, Brandless, Uber and, of course, WeWork. Now, one batch of portfolio companies making a similar move does not a trend make, unless it’s SoftBank of course. It’s been a rocky year for late-stage startups chasing the public life. The less-than-rosy debuts of some of the decade’s most investor-adored startups has been embarrassing for plenty but Uber’s debut and WeWork’s near-implosion has been a pretty awful look for the Vision Fund.

On the positive side, in many ways it seems SoftBank isn’t ushering in a new ill to the world of late-stage capital, rather it’s being forced to correct a trend it helped usher in. Hyper-growth isn’t dead but there are limits in turning “Uber for X” into a universal mantra for revamping business strategies. Plenty of SoftBank’s startups are going to be stuck making on-the-move adjustments they weren’t expecting to need to make, but the move to trim the fat seems far from life-or-death for the majority of them. For the employees affected, there isn’t as much of a silver-lining.

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• Sonos sues Google
  An interesting lawsuit to emerge this week, Sonos is suing Google for alleged patent infringement, with the speaker company alleging that Google has stolen some of its tech and owes it cash. Google acknowledges that the two had been in talks about licensing tech but doesn’t seem stoked about the suit. Read more here.
• Twitter rethinks replies
  Twitter banning the nazis has become an unfortunate meme of sorts that highlights how many issues Twitter has with abuse on its site. Building a comprehensive blacklist was a pretty daunting challenge for Twitter which has significantly less resources that Facebook or YouTube, its new solution is to have different types of whitelists for tweets so that the original poster can limit replies. Read more about it in our coverage.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

• Amazon employees share customer data:
  [Amazon fires employees for leaking customer phone numbers and email addresses]

Extra Crunch

Our premium subscription business had another great week of content. My colleague Megan Rose Dickey talked a bit about the fight being waged to keep contractors classified as such in the face of new legislation.

How gig economy giants are trying to keep workers classified as independent contractors

“Now that 2020 has started, Uber, DoorDash and Lyft are taking additional steps to undermine a new California law that would help more gig workers qualify as full-time employees. These moves entail product changes, lawsuits and ramped-up efforts to get a ballot initiative in front of voters that would roll back the new legislation.

Let’s start with the most recent development; yesterday, Uber  sent a note to users announcing that it’s getting rid of upfront pricing in favor of estimated prices, unless they’re Uber Pool rides…”

Sign up for more newsletters, including my colleague Darrell Etherington’s new space-focused newsletter Max Q, here.

A look ahead to the 2020 IMSA sports car season

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  2019 was the year that Mazda Motorsport finally saw victory with the RT24-P. The car lost none of its speed in the offseason and set a new unofficial track record in preseason testing at Daytona. There are even rumors of a third Mazda joining some rounds of the series, but it's all unconfirmed as of now. [credit: Mazda Motorsport ]

Motorsport doesn't have much of an offseason these days. That's particularly true for IMSA's WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, North America's main endurance racing series. After wrapping up 2019 in late October, the series has already conducted its big preseason test—called "the Roar before the 24"—and is gearing up for the first and one of its biggest events of the year, the Rolex 24 at Daytona, which takes place at the end of January. With that in mind, let's take a look at what storylines might be bubbling up for 2020.

IMSA's series has been in fine form the past few years, with strong interest from manufacturers and teams eager to prove their prowess in each of the different classes that all compete on track at the same time. 2020 is going to be somewhat of a transition year for the sport. Entries are down, and fans of Nissan and Ford will have to find new teams to cheer for as both OEMs are ending their factory-backed participation.

But it's not all bad. A new boss is running things, the highly anticipated new mid-engined Corvette makes its racing debut, and everyone's starting to think about possible convergence with the new set of technical rules being written for Le Mans and the World Endurance Championship.

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Mobileye collects 3.7M miles of sensor data daily from vehicles, using it to produce HD maps that will let its partners offer Level 2+ driver assistance systems (Timothy B. Lee/Ars Technica)

Timothy B. Lee / Ars Technica:
Mobileye collects 3.7M miles of sensor data daily from vehicles, using it to produce HD maps that will let its partners offer Level 2+ driver assistance systems  —  Mobileye made a self-driving car that only uses cameras—no lidar or radar.  —  A lot of media coverage of self-driving technology …

Iranian hackers have been “password spraying” the US grid

Enlarge / Electricity pylons at sunset (credit: James O'Neill | Getty Images)

In the wake of the US assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani and the retaliatory missile strike that followed, Iran-watchers have warned that the country could deploy cyberattacks as well, perhaps even targeting US critical infrastructure like the electric grid. A new report lends some fresh details to the nature of that threat: By all appearances, Iranian hackers don't currently have the capability to start causing blackouts in the US. But they’ve been working to gain access to American electric utilities, long before tensions between the two countries came to a head.

On Thursday morning, industrial control system security firm Dragos detailed newly revealed hacking activity that it has tracked and attributed to a group of state-sponsored hackers it calls Magnallium. The same group is also known as APT33, Refined Kitten, or Elfin, and has previously been linked to Iran. Dragos says it has observed Magnallium carrying out a broad campaign of so-called password-spraying attacks, which guess a set of common passwords for hundreds or even thousands of different accounts, targeting US electric utilities as well as oil and gas firms.

A related group that Dragos calls Parisite has worked in apparent cooperation with Magnallium, the security firm says, attempting to gain access to US electric utilities and oil and gas firms by exploiting vulnerabilities in virtual private networking software. The two groups' combined intrusion campaign ran through all of 2019 and continues today.

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Xiaomi Mi A2 now receiving Android 10 update with December 2019 security patch

Xiaomi is finally rolling out the Android 10 update for its Mi A2 Android One smartphone. As per a report by XDA Developers, the second Android One smartphone by Xiaomi is receiving the Android 10 update. This development was also apparently confirmed by one of the company’s customer care executives, which was reported on Xiaomi forums by a user, and another user posted a screenshot of the update being made available for their Mi A2. The latest update brings all the standard features of Android 10 like a system-wide dark theme, notification dots, new gestures and more. The update is said to be around 1.3GB in size and should also update the device’s security patch to December 2019. 

The news of Android 10 update rolling out for Xiaomi phones comes soon after Android kernel sources for the Mi A2 and the Mi A3 were released online. The kernel release suggested that a new update could be on the way and it seems like this indeed was the case. As per the XDA’s report, there are some issues with the update like no VoWiFi calling feature, glitches in the UI and more. However, there have been no reports of performance or overheating issues, the report suggests. The update is most likely being rolled out in iterations and one should receive it automatically. 

The Mi A2 was launched back in 2018 running on Android 8 Oreo, and was later updated to Android 9 Pie. The handset received a price cut in India back in March this year and was made available starting at Rs 11,999. It runs on the Snapdragon 660 SoC, features a 5.99-inch IPS LCD display, and comes in 4GB and 6GB RAM variants. Equipped with a 3000mAh battery, the handset also supports 18W fast charging. On the back is a 12MP + 20MP dual-camera sensor and there’s a 20MP sensor on the front as well. 

 

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Realme 5i India Launch, Jio Wi-Fi Calling Arrives, and More News This Week

Realme 5i launch in India was certainly the biggest piece of news this week, with the Oppo spin-off brand bringing a new budget smartphone featuring a quad rear camera setup to the country. The... https://ift.tt/2R8DhlX

Black Shark 3 leak reveals device could come with 16GB of RAM

If you’re the type of person who is interested in specs and numbers then a phone with 12 GB RAM should be the kind of device that grabs your attention. And, that’s what Black Shark seems to be heading towards. There have been rumors floating around the internet which state that the Black Shark 3 could come with 16GB of RAM. Is this the next wave of smartphones, ones with incredible specs and even more processing power? 16GB of RAM is nothing to scoff at. 

Called the Black Shark 3 5G, the device was certified by MIIT, a Chinese certification website. In the certification, it revealed that the phone could possess 16GB of RAM. If anything, this could be the next big thing in the world of smartphones as it would make the Black Shark 2 5G the world's first device with 16GB RAM. Tipser, @Sudhanshu1414 revealed the certification in a tweet a few days ago. The phone has the model number ‘SHARK KLE-AO’ and is touted to be the Black Shark 3 5G. 

Theoretically it should be the World's First Phone with 16GB RAM. But let's wait for the official announcement

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The Pocophone F2 could be coming in 2020, new patent leak reveals

The Pocophone F1 was one of the more impressive phones to have been released in the past few years and users have been expecting a second version of the phone for sometime now. Rumors around the device have been rather rare and the only piece of information we’ve gotten is from the Global Head of Xiaomi, Alvin TSe, who teased that the phone would be releasing in 2020. 

But now, there are a bunch of new leaked documents from @_the_tech_guy who claims that Xiaomi has already filed a trademark for a device called the PCOC F2. This could just mean that the company has filed a patent and nothing could come of it. There have been many patents for various devices that have been filed and nothing has come of it. So do take this news with a grain of salt. Check out the patent below and see for yourselves. 

If the device does end up coming out, it will probably be called the Pocophone F2. Although, the phone could be called the PCOC F2 in India as the first phone was dubbed the POCO F1 when it launched the country. So, for what it’s worth we can say that according to the leaked documents, the phone should be hitting markets in 2020. 

 

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AI systems, like Google's system for reading mammograms, have the potential to worsen pre-existing problems like overtesting, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment (Christie Aschwanden/Wired)

Christie Aschwanden / Wired:
AI systems, like Google's system for reading mammograms, have the potential to worsen pre-existing problems like overtesting, overdiagnosis, and overtreatment  —  A new study out from Google seems to show the promise of AI-assisted health care.  Actually, it shows the threat.

Reliance Jio's new calling feature, Realme's new phone, Uber has new safety features and other top tech news of the week

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Covera Health, whose analytics platform helps employers and insurers lower health care spend by identifying errors in imaging diagnoses, raises $23.5M Series B (Marty Stempniak/Radiology Business)

Marty Stempniak / Radiology Business:
Covera Health, whose analytics platform helps employers and insurers lower health care spend by identifying errors in imaging diagnoses, raises $23.5M Series B  —  A New York City startup that's working to help employers and insurers root out misdiagnoses and unnecessary treatment …

Legalpad, which uses a mix of software and attorney support to help entrepreneurs and startup employees with the US visa process, raises $10M Series A (Natasha Mascarenhas/Crunchbase News)

Natasha Mascarenhas / Crunchbase News:
Legalpad, which uses a mix of software and attorney support to help entrepreneurs and startup employees with the US visa process, raises $10M Series A  —  It's clear that work authorization for international talent in the United States is getting increasingly harder in the Trump administration.

Dami Wangxiao, a sub-brand of Chinese online education platform VIPKid, announces $80M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings, and Hammer Capital (Sarah Dai/South China Morning Post)

Sarah Dai / South China Morning Post:
Dami Wangxiao, a sub-brand of Chinese online education platform VIPKid, announces $80M Series A led by Sequoia Capital, Tencent Holdings, and Hammer Capital  —  Sarah Dai, based in Beijing, covers technology and capital flows in the world of start-ups in Greater China.