Author: batteryforpc

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.

“You’re probably asking, ‘what is a gaming browser?,’ ” Opera PM Maciej Kocemba says in the opening of the Opera GX introduction video. Fair enough. My first thought when the Norwegian browser company mentioned the concept to me was something akin to Google Stadia, with remote game streaming.

Turns out a gaming browser — in this instance at least — is more about providing a custom browser for PC gamers, rather than a browser that does the heavy lifting for gaming itself. Instead, the system is more interested in minimizing system requirements as gamers game.

The browser’s central feature is the GX Control panel, which lets users determine how much of the system’s CPU and RAM are allotted to the browser. The idea being that gamers can, say, stream content from Twitch while playing, without slowing their computer to a crawl.

“Running a game might require a lot of effort from your machine. Even more so if you are streaming while you play,” says Kocemba in a release tied to today’s E3 announcement. “Before Opera GX, gamers often shut down their browsers in order to not slow down their gaming experience. We came up with the GX Control feature to make people’s games run more smoothly without requiring them to compromise on what they do on the Web.”

The other big piece here is Twitch integration, letting users log in to the service directly from the browser sidebar. They’ll also get notifications when streamers they follow go live. There are various other touches through out, including “sounds and animation inspired by gaming consoles” and other customizable design features.

You probably think this is all pretty gimmicky, and honestly, you’re not really wrong. Those who are interested can check out early access to the browser at E3 this week.

AMD took the stage at E3 to announce its “Navi” family of GPUs. The company’s new graphics cards are officially the AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT and Radeon RX 5700. The 5700 series is launching July 7, making the GPUs a one-two punch alongside AMD’s Ryzen 3000 series CPUs.

AMD isn’t tackling the flagship GPU market with the 5700 series. Instead, the company is aiming for more mainstream pricing with mainstream performance: the 5700XT is $449, while the 5700 is $379. AMD is positioning the cards against Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2070 ($499) and 2060 ($349), respectively, and claims performance wins in each comparison.

The cards introduce AMD’s new “RDNA” architecture, which AMD says has 1.25x performance-per-clock and 1.5x performance-per-watt over the previous generation. The chips are built on TSMC’s 7nm manufacturing process, a significant shrink from the 12nm process used on the Radeon RX 590, and on Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 2080. The Navi die is significantly smaller than the previous-generation Vega design, with a die area of only 251mm2 compared to the 495 mm2 die area for Vega. The smaller die should make the Navi significantly cheaper to produce than Vega.

For specs, the top-end Radeon RX 5700 XT has 40 compute units with 2560 stream processors total. AMD gives three numbers for the clock rate on the XT: a 1605MHz “Base” clock, a 1755MHz “Game” clock, and a 1905MHz “Boost” clock. As usual, the cheaper 5700 disables compute units and lowers the clock rate, so you have 36 compute units for 2304 stream processor total, a base clock of 1465MHz, game clock of 1625MHz, and a boost clock of 1725MHz.

If any of these clock rates are too conservative for you, AMD is promising the 5700 XT is “overclocking ready” thanks to a power solution with room to grown. Both of AMD’s reference designs come with 8GB of GDDR6 memory.

For cooling, AMD’s reference design is a blower-style card with an aluminum shroud and back plate. A vapor chamber draws heat into the heatsink, and everything gets blown out the back of the card. Blower cooling designs have the downside of producing a lot of noise, but AMD is promising a “quiet” card thanks to an “acoustically tuned” design. If you’re unhappy with the cooler design, partner-produced cards with alternative cooling solutions should be out eventually. The cards both take a 8-pin + 6-pin power-supply connection, with AMD providing Board Power figures of 225W for the XT and 180W for the cheaper card.

If you get the whole AMD package in July (meaning a Ryzen 3000 CPU, an X570 motherboard, and a Radeon 5700 card), you’ll be all up and running with the new PCI Express 4.0 bus standard. This faster interconnect will be great for next-gen SSDs and 200Gbps (!) Ethernet controllers. But for video cards, we haven’t seen a compelling use case yet. Still, it provides room for upgrades!

All these specs are nice to know, but they don’t really tell us anything about actual performance. As always, it’s best to wait for independent benchmarks, and if you’re in the market for a GPU, it’s probably also best to see if Nvidia does anything in response.

And speaking of Nvidia’s response, the company has been teasing a “Super” GeForce product for a few weeks now. The rumors point to “Super” cards being up-clocked editions of Nvidia’s existing cards and price drops for some non-super cards, making the company more competitive with AMD’s freshly announced lineup. Again though, benchmarks will tell the real story. AMD also doesn’t have an answer this generation for the real-time raytracing technology that Nvidia introduced with the RTX 2080 Ti. But given the huge hit in performance that ray tracing causes for even Nvidia’s fastest cards (and the limited game support for raytracing), it’s not a huge loss for AMD.

Regardless of what happens between AMD and Nvidia in the PC graphics card wars, AMD GPUs promise to be almost everywhere else in the future. At the beginning of the presentation, AMD talked about the company’s design wins, pointing out that AMD is supplying graphics chips to both the next-gen Xbox and Playstation consoles, Apple’s Mac Pro, and Google’s Stadia game-streaming platform. AMD also recently inked an RDNA licensing deal with Samsung, which will build the graphics technology into its Exynos SoCs for smartphones and tablets.

Apple and Microsoft teamed up to create an iCloud Drive experience that will hopefully resolve some compatibility issues. A brand new iCloud for Windows app is available today in the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 users. The iCloud app will use the same technology as Microsoft’s OneDrive’s On-Demand feature — a very rare collaboration from tech’s two biggest rivals. Users can now easily access photos, videos, mail, calendars, files and other information from their iCloud accounts from their PC or smartphone.

Any proud Windows user who has bit the bullet and sprung for an Apple device will probably agree: the old iCloud for Windows was not great. Last fall, PCs with iCloud installed were even blocked from installing the latest Windows 10 update. While Apple eventually released an iCloud update that was compatible with Windows 10 a month later, PC users still encountered slow sync speeds and other issues.

It’s no surprise that the products from tech’s most notorious rivalry mix like oil and water. But loyalty to one brand of technology is becoming increasingly quaint as households accumulate more devices. An entirely re-designed app powered by Microsoft technology seems to suggest that Apple wants to make life easier for all users, not just its core set of iOS devotees.