It used to be the case that you had to spend at least GBP700 to get a really good phone. But in 2020, that’s no longer true. With fantastic smartphones costing as little as half as much as an iPhone 11, here’s a quick guide to the best mid-priced phones. Many of these smartphones will […]
Worker strikes, let alone successful ones, are vanishingly rare in the video games industry. But in August, writers at Lovestruck, a mobile app that publishes visual romance novels, went on a 21-day strike, accusing the company of unfair pay, and won a rates increase after owner Voltage initially dismissed their demands. This is part of […]
Who ever thought it a good idea to disperse 2 million Covid super-spreaders across British cities this month? One hundred and twenty-four returning Glasgow students have already tested positive, with dozens more at Aberdeen, St Andrews and elsewhere. Six hundred are now confined to their Glasgow lodgings and told they may have to stay there […]
Amazon has announced a full range of new spherical Echo devices, new motorised smart display, a camera drone that flies around your house, a game-streaming service and more. In a streaming presentation, the company showed off a smorgasbord of new devices from its various brands, including Ring, Eero, Fire and Echo. The new standard Echo […]
Google is planning for a world in which many of its employees never return to the office full-time, its chief executive has revealed. Sundar Pichai said 62% of Google employees had expressed an interest in returning to the officepart-time, and that the company would try to accommodate that desire even after the Covid pandemic subsides. […]
The long-awaited Facebook Oversight Board, empowered to overrule some of the platform’s content moderation decisions, plans to launch in October, just in time for the US election. The board will be ready to hear appeals from Facebook users as well as cases referred by the company itself “as soon as mid- or late-October at the […]
The launch of the NHS Covid-19 app in England and Wales has exposed problems with the programme, some of which were known about in advance, and some of which will come as a surprise to both the government and users. Although there were hundreds of thousands of downloads of the app in the first few […]
As people across England and Wales download the long-awaited NHS contact-tracing app on Thursday, they’ll also contribute to one of the most unlikely revivals of the Covid era: the humble QR code. The app, which has been substantially rebuilt from the version first tested in the Isle of Wight in May, has had two significant […]
There are certain phrases that are central to the sway the tech industry holds over our collective imagination: they do not simply reflect our experience, they frame how we experience it in the first place. They sweep aside certain parts of the status quo, and leave other parts mysteriously untouched. They implicitly cast you as […]
Take-up of the NHS Covid contact-tracing app being launched in England and Wales on Thursday – and once touted as key to controlling the pandemic – could be as low as 10% in some places, government sources believe. International examples show take-up rates of similar apps at between 10% and 30%, a far cry from […]