Apple Moves Toward a Wireless Future, One Tweak at a Time

SAN FRANCISCO — During a two-hour product showcase held on Wednesday in one of rock music’s most storied venues, Apple executives signaled that the company was heading toward a wireless future, where devices would connect without cables.A big step in that direction is the removal of a headphone jack from the latest version of the iPhone, called the iPhone 7.What was lacking in Apple’s presentation, as has been the case for the Silicon Valley giant in recent years, was a new, can’t-miss hit like the original iPod. There wasn’t even a dramatic change to an old classic, like the bigger iPhones it introduced in 2014.PhotoA screenshot of Apple’s new AirPods, illustrating their built-in wireless technology. Credit Beck Diefenbach/ReutersBut if you like tweaks to products you may already have, Apple had plenty to offer at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, a cavernous arena named for a famous music promoter that has hosted the likes of the Grateful Dead and Bob Dylan. The iPhone 7 includes a better camera and the bigger iPhone 7 Plus has a second high-end camera with a telephoto lens. It also has an improved home button that lets users perform different tasks by varying how hard they press it.

Two critical bugs and more malicious apps make for a bad week for Android

It was a bad week for millions of Android phone users. Two critical vulnerabilities were disclosed but remain unpatched in a large percentage of devices, while, separately, malicious apps were downloaded as many as 2.5 million times from Google’s official Play Marketplace.FURTHER READING950 million Android phones can be hijacked by malicious text messagesThe vulnerabilities, whoch are similar in severity to the Stagefright family of bugs disclosed last year, have been fixed in updates Google began distributing Tuesday. A large percentage of Android phones, however, aren’t eligible to receive the fixes. Even those that do qualify don’t receive them immediately (the September updates are currently not available as over-the-air downloads for either of the Nexus 5X devices in my household). That gives attackers crude blueprints for exploiting vulnerabilities that remain unpatched on millions of devices.

Hands On With the Apple Watch Series 2

For better or worse, Apple is pushing on with their smartwatch endeavors in the form of the Apple Watch Series 2. For the most part I would say that there isn’t a ton that can be said about the new watch in the context of a hands-on, but I figured that at least some discussion of the new ceramic casing would be interesting to see.

For those that are unaware of what this finish entails, the ceramic casing is much stiffer than stainless steel whoch makes it much harder to scratch and impervious to corrosion. It’s going to feel a lot more like glass rather than steel. However similar to glass, the ductility and malleability of ceramic is fairly low and if you really do something to damage the case it’s likely that it will shatter altogether rather than bend and deform.