Month: June 2019

Huawei was planning to announce a new MateBook laptop this week, but an executive confirmed that the company cancelled the launch because of US sanctions against the Chinese company. It’s not clear when—or whether—the laptop will be released.

The US has banned sales of technology to Huawei, which uses Intel chips and the Windows operating system in its MateBook PCs. Huawei “planned to unveil the new Windows laptop at the CES Asia 2019 trade show in Shanghai this week” but “indefinitely postponed” the launch because of the US export ban, The Information reported yesterday.

Huawei consumer division CEO Richard Yu subsequently confirmed the cancellation to CNBC. “We cannot supply the PC,” Yu said, calling it “unfortunate,” according to CNBC.

Huawei has also “paused production at its personal-computer business because of restrictions on buying US components,” the Wall Street Journal reported. We contacted Huawei today, but a company spokesperson had no further information to share.

Huawei on “Entity List”

The US last month put Huawei on its Entity List, which prevents it from buying parts and components from US companies without US government approval. The US argues that the Chinese government could use Huawei to spy on the US, but Huawei has denied those accusations and called on the US to provide evidence.

“When asked if the laptop could be launched at a later date, Yu said it ‘depends on how long the Entity List will be there,'” CNBC wrote. “He acknowledged that, if Huawei is on the blacklist for a long time, the laptop will not be able to be launched.”

Huawei is known more for smartphones and networking equipment but has courted PC users with laptops such as the MateBook 13 and MateBook X Pro.

China’s state-run media offers different version

The Global Times—which is part of China’s state-run media—published a story disputing some of the reporting about the laptop launch. “Huawei will release a new laptop product in July, with different models and configurations compared with previous series such as the MateBook and HonorBook, a source close to the matter confirmed to the Global Times,” the news organization said.

“The new laptop will be equipped with the Windows operating system, the source said, in contrast to rumors about Microsoft halting cooperation with Huawei,” the report added. The laptop will use an ARM processor instead of Intel, the report said.

The state-run media report doesn’t mention the fact that a Huawei executive confirmed the cancellation of this week’s laptop launch. The Global Times also said its source “refuted reports that Huawei had halted laptop production due to the export control imposed by the Trump administration amid the escalating trade war.” The Global Times wrote that “industry insiders” called Huawei’s plan to release the laptop “an inspiring move.”

Intel reportedly restricted its employees from having informal conversations with Huawei, but an Intel executive also spoke out against the Trump administration’s Huawei ban on Monday.

ARM—which licenses its intellectual property to other vendors—recently told its employees that the US export ban means it can no longer work with Huawei. Microsoft recently removed Huawei laptops from its website.

In other Huawei news today, The Wall Street Journal reported that Huawei has told Verizon it should pay licensing fees for more than 200 patents that cover “core network equipment, wireline infrastructure and Internet-of-things technology.”

Microsoft just released a new Windows 10 Insider Preview build featuring the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2. WSL 2 includes a real Linux kernel that lets you run more Linux software on Windows and with better performance than WSL 1.

This is part of Windows 10 Insider Preview build 18917, released on June 12, 2019. It’s part of the fast ring of updates. You can experiment with it today, although you’ll have to join the Windows Insider program and get unstable builds of Windows 10 on your PC.

Microsoft’s Windows Command Line blog offers more information about WSL 2, complete with an install guide, list of user experience changes, and more documentation. To install WSL 2 on the latest insider build, run the following command in a PowerShell window launched with Administrator permissions:

Enable-WindowsOptionalFeature -Online -FeatureName VirtualMachinePlatform

This new version of WSL 2 uses Hyper-V features to create a lightweight virtual machine with a minimal Linux kernel. It will still be available on Windows 10 Home, however, even though Hyper-V isn’t normally available on Windows 10 Home. Expect better compatibility with Linux software, including support for Docker, and “dramatic file system performance increases.”

The virtual machine will automatically launch at startup and use a bit of memory in the background, but Microsoft promises it “has a small memory footprint.” You can run the wsl –shutdown command if you ever want to shut down the background VM.

WSL 2 is part of the development builds for Windows 10 20H1, which is expected for release around April 2020. WSL may be part of Windows 10 19H2, expected for release around October 2019, but Microsoft isn’t testing 19H2 yet.

The latest Windows 10 Insider build includes some other useful features, too. You can now head to Settings > Update & Security > Delivery Optimization > Advanced Options to throttle Windows Update. For example, you can set Windows Update to only use 1 Mbps or a specific percentage of your available bandwidth while downloading updates in the background.

Microsoft’s Sunday E3 pressure was all about the games. In fact, while the company did offer some information about hardware and services, the information all arrived fast and furious at the end of the conference. While it’s probably unsurprising that the company had very little to offer in the way of information about its upcoming 8K console, Project Scarlett, most of us expected Project xCloud to get a lot more face time on stage.

The company powered through a whole lot of information about its upcoming streaming offering like it was going out of style (or, perhaps, like the lights were going out at its own theater). The speed and brevity of it all left a number of audience members confused on the specifics — and caused some to speculate that the service night not be as far along as Microsoft had hoped.

We caught up with a few Microsoft reps on our final day at the show to answer some questions. The company is unsurprisingly still mum on a number of key details around the offering. A couple of key things are worth clarifying, though. For starters console stream is not considered a part of Project xCloud. Rather, the ability to play games on one’s own Xbox One remotely is a separate feature that will be coming to users via a software update.

Asked what advantages console streaming has over the parallel xCloud offering, Microsoft’s answer was simple: it’s free. Fair enough. This serves a two-fold purpose. First, it helps differentiate Microsoft’s streaming offerings from Stadia and second, it provides another value proposition for the console itself. As to how performance is expected to differ between console streaming and XCloud, it wouldn’t comment.

As I wrote earlier today, the company does see the potential of a large scale move to the cloud, but anticipates that such a shift is a long ways off. After all, if it didn’t, it likely wouldn’t have announced a new console this week at E3.

Google announced today that it will no longer automatically sync photos between its Drive and Photos services.

“Many of you store your photos and videos on both Google Drive and Google Photos, which keeps them safe and easy to access,” a new post to the Google Photos blog explains. “We’ve heard feedback that the connection between these services is confusing, so next month, we’re making some changes to simplify the experience across Drive and Photos.”

Today, new photos and videos that appear in a user’s Google Photos automatically appear in that user’s Google Drive as well. And vice versa. The problem, as it turns out, is that users would delete photos from one service but not intend to delete them in the other. So Google is making changes to prevent this kind of accidental deletion.

So, here’s what’s happening.

Starting in July, new photos and videos added to Drive will no longer automatically appear in Photos. Likewise, new photos and videos added to Photos will not be added to the Photos folder in Drive too.

When you delete photos and videos in Drive, they will not be removed from Photos. And vice versa.

Additionally, Google will add an “Upload from Drive” feature to Photos that lets users choose items to copy to Drive. Copied items are not linked back to the original service. So when you delete one in Drive, the original in Photos will remain. “Since photos and videos will no longer sync across both products, items copied in Original Quality will count towards your storage quota in both Drive and Photos,” Google notes.

Backup and Sync will continue to work as before using the Windows and Mac clients. But items uploaded using Backup and Sync in Original Quality to both services will count only once towards your total online storage quota.

Any photos or videos that were uploaded prior to this change will remain in Photos. Your Google Photos folder in Drive will remain but will no longer update automatically as before.

In a rare move by any tech company, Google confirmed the existence of the Pixel 4several months ahead its anticipated release in October. The tech giant not only posted the news on its own Made By Google Twitter account, but it also included an image of the phone, which depicts a square camera bump, with multiple rear cameras. Judging by the reactions from the tweet, many were taken aback by the information — not due to the phone itself, but because Google decided to unveil the news at all.

To drop an upcoming device’s name and an official image this early is unusual. Despite numerous rumors, rendered images and leaked specs, companies like Apple, Samsung and Google generally like to keep mum about their product announcements until they hold official events like Apple’s developers conference and September iPhone event, Samsung Unpacked and Google I/O, where the company took the wraps off its latest Pixel 3A and Pixel 3A XL. Google declined a request for comment, but we have a few guesses why Google made such a bizarre move.

Reason 1: It can claim it didn’t copy the iPhone 11

The most popular theory is that Google wanted to get ahead of any accusations that it copied Apple and its next iPhone. For several months, the upcoming iPhone 11 has been rumored to have a square camera bump too. Because the iPhone is expected to come out in September and Pixel phones usually launch in October, it would be easy to conclude that Google “copied” Apple’s design. (BTW: The camera layout isn’t altogether unique — the Huawei Mate 20 Pro, for example, also has such a design.) To avoid such talk, Google could have decided to whip out the image early to say it had the design in mind long before the iPhone’s launch, knowing that Apple will remain tight-lipped about any iPhone features until September.

Reason 2: The Pixel 4 might release earlier than October

Four months is a pretty long time to tease a product ahead of its assumed launch date. Perhaps Google unveiled this info in June because the Pixel 4 might actually not debut in October. Maybe the phone is coming earlier, like in September (to position it even closer in competition to the iPhone) or even August. This would be a strange move though, since the Pixel 3A and 3A XL were just announced in May and it’d be a good idea for Google to allow some time between announcements of its two phone series.

Reason 3: Google doesn’t care anymore!

When Google announced the Pixel 3 last year, it was pretty much one of the most leaked phones at the time. Most outlets already had a general idea about what the phone would look like (Engadget unboxed the thing three days before its launch) and a lot of the rumored specs turned out to be accurate. Google even managed to poke fun at this fact before the Pixel 3’s launch (see below). The same applied to the Pixel 3A. Due to all the leaks, people got wind that Google was working on a midtier variant of the Pixel, and we even peeped its new Purple-ish color before Google I/O.

Because we now live in such an era where it’s so hard to keep a lid on product announcements, Google might have just decided to just say “screw it.” If photos of the Pixel 4’s camera was going to get leaked anyway (and it did), the company might as well jump on it, too. At least it can then get ahead of the news and control to some extent whatever narrative tech enthusiasts cook up. I, for one, welcome this energy and wouldn’t mind more information from Google.