Tech Trend 247

In 76 days, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story premieres in U.S. theaters. Disney and Lucasfilm have already released several trailers, which we've watched countless times to extract as much as we can from every second of footage shown.

As part of its global UGC contest called #GoRogue, Disney sent over a box full of upcoming Rogue One action figures and toys for Mashable to check out. (Disclosure: Disney didn't sponsor or pay us to get excited about the toys, we're just geeks and huge Star Wars fans so the gushing came naturally.)

The #GoRogue contest invites Star Wars fans to create their own Rogue One fan video for a chance to win an advance screening of the movie at Lucasfilm in San Francisco and have their video played before the special private screening.

Since we're Mashable, we had to take things to Facebook Live for a live unboxing experience:

Mashable Chief Correspondent Lance Ulanoff and I did our best to get the toys open as quickly as possible, but the Disney Store Elite Series proved somewhat challenging with all the twisty ties shackling the figures' limbs down.

Once open however, we ogled at each die-cast Elite Series figure had. These are some of the most detailed $27 figures we've seen. Standing them up on a table was difficult; they kept falling over and the plastic bases they come with didn't really keep them propped up very well.

The $20 Black Series action figures are plastic and made by Hasbro. The detailing — particularly in the faces — isn't quite as nice as the ones on the Elite Series, but we did notice some of them like the new K-2SO droid had more points of articulation than the slightly pricier Elite Series.

I'm not a huge fan of the Pop bobble head figures. They're cool, but just not for me.

What excited me the most was probably the $80 659-piece Lego U-Wing ship. Because Lego. We didn't have time to unbox and build it, but we'll be back in a future Facebook Live to do just that.

But for now, feast your eyes on these Rogue One toys. It's maddening that the toys are available before the movie.

Artificial Intelligence is now a part of our daily lives. It's on our wrists in the form of Apple's SIRI and in our kitchens thanks to Amazon's Alexa. We use it, but do not always understand or trust it.

Now, a collection of tech industry giants has joined together to close the knowledge and trust gap. The vehicle for this new level of understanding and, maybe, acceptance, will be a brand new mouthful of an organization: the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to Benefit People and Society. In conversation it will actually go by the more manageable "Partnership on AI." Member companies of the new alliance are all knee-deep in artificial intelligence and Machine Learning. They include Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Google's DeepMind and IBM. Notably absent, for now, is Apple.

The objective, according to Thursday's announcement, is "to address opportunities and challenges with AI technologies to benefit people and society."

Partnership AI will actually conduct open-source research, investigating AI areas such as ethics and human and AI system collaboration. One thing it will not do is lobby governments on behalf of AI initiatives by member companies.

"“The possibilities for positively impacting a global society with advances in AI are numerous, ranging from connectivity, healthcare, and transportation. As researchers in industry, we take very seriously the trust people have in us to ensure advances are made with the utmost consideration for human values," said Yann LeCun, the director of Facebook AI Research, in a release.

The partnership does plan to work with other third party AI organizations, including the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2).

“We’re excited about this historic collaboration on AI and its influences on people and society. We see great value ahead with harnessing AI advances in numerous areas, including health, education, transportation, public welfare, and personal empowerment," said Eric Horvitz, technical fellow a managing director at Microsoft Research, in a release.

IBM, which has aggressively spread the reach and influence of its own AI engine, Watson, gave Mashable exclusive access to an internal memo to global employees from CEO Ginni Rometty on the formation of the alliance and IBM's participation:

Team:

For more than a century, IBM has stood apart not only for creating world-changing innovations, but also for guiding their responsible adoption. This is foundational to why our company is respected both as an innovator and a trusted brand everywhere in the world. 

As you know, the most important innovation of our time – cognitive computing, led by Watson — is rapidly maturing and entering the mainstream of business and society. It is essential that this technology’s growth and development be robust, visionary and enduring.

That is why I am excited to tell you about an important new non-profit organization that IBM is forming with Deep Mind/Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft. As the founding members of the Partnership for AI, we will work together to ensure the responsible development and deployment of cognitive and AI technologies.  

As with every world-changing innovation, cognitive raises new questions, new issues and new challenges, for both business and society. These range from ethics and transparency to control and jobs. In addressing these questions, we expect to be joined by many leading universities, foundations and other organizations as we conduct research, make its results available to the world and share best practices. Together, we will develop principles on collaboration between people and AI systems, and work to advance the trustworthiness and reliability of the technology.

A world with Watson will be healthier, safer, more productive, more convenient and more personal – in ways that we are only glimpsing today. As we deliver on this profound potential, we are committed to doing so in a way that benefits not only business, but the individual and society. We make that commitment because we're IBMers.

Samsung plans to begin selling the Galaxy Note7 in India before the festival of Diwali.

The company had to postpone sales of the Galaxy Note7 in India earlier this month, after it found “battery cell issues" in the smartphone. Shortly afterwards, Samsung had issued an advisory worldwide, urging users to return the device.

Mashable India has learned that the Galaxy Note7 will launch in the country before Diwali. Much like Christmas in Western nations, Diwali is a big festival in India and it sees huge spike in sales during the period. Diwali will be celebrated on Oct. 30 this year. 

Samsung launched the Galaxy Note7 in India last month. The company's newest Android flagship smartphone was scheduled to go on sale in the country on Sept. 2. However, on launch day Samsung India began informing customers who had pre-booked the smartphone that there will be some delay in the shipment of their phone. Later that day, Samsung held a press conference in Seoul where it acknowledged the battery issue that led to some Galaxy Note7 units exploding. 

Samsung said earlier this week that it has exchanged 60 percent of sold recalled Galaxy Note7 phones in the United States and South Korea. In Singapore, the company has exchanged 80 percent of all Galaxy Note7 phones sold. 

Samsung will face off with its global rival Apple in the country next month. The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus will go on sale in India from Oct. 7, and it is now clear Samsung won't be able to launch the Galaxy Note7 in the country by then. 

The U.S. is objectively behind countries like Australia in digital banking "by whatever metric you choose," according to Stripe cofounder John Collison, but that head start may not last forever. 

As president of a global payment company, in Sydney recently to launch the marketplace tool Stripe Connect, Collison was in a position to help me understand the digital divide between American and Australian banking.

Having lived in both countries, the difference feels striking. While I'd been paying landlords and sending friends dinner money online in Australia for years, suddenly in the U.S. in 2014, I found myself searching each month for a stamp and an envelope to mail off my housemates' rent cheques.

It's not all cheques and cash: America finally began rolling out chip cards and terminals widely in late 2015 — an innovation so traumatic it inspired a BuzzFeed post titled: "Credit Card Chips Are The Absolute Fucking Worst." In Australia, the world's largest user of contactless (tap-and-go) payments, many may be wondering what the fuss is about.

Collison suggested two main culprits for the digital banking discrepancy: First up, the curse of the early adopter. 

"The U.S. started modernising and computerising its banking much before most other countries," he explained. "Those [mainframe] computers worked pretty well and they're good enough, and so the result is, we're still running on those mainframes, which is ridiculous."

Other countries have been able to learn from and surpass the U.S., and even make Australia look like it's caught in the payment past. Cash transfers are being digitised mobile-first in countries like Kenya, which has the M-PESA network allowing money to be transferred via SMS. 

"Because they don't have these legacy systems to deal with, they can obviously design something for the new world," Collison said.

The other possible cause, pointedly in contrast to Australia's situation, is the highly fragmented banking market in the U.S. 

"Everyone banks with banks like the 'First State Bank of Omaha' ... and here you have the big four," he said, referring to the National Australia Bank, Commonwealth Bank, ANZ and Westpac, which together are said to account for an incredible 80 percent of the Australian market.

"Because they don't have these legacy systems to deal with, they can obviously design something for the new world."

According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, there are at least 6,016 banking institutions in the U.S. That's a lot of bodies to pull kicking and screaming into a digital network at once. 

This is not to downplay the mangled rollout of chip cards in the U.S., which has been widely acknowledged to be a mess. 

Unlike Australia, which uses contactless payments, or chip and pin typically for items over A$100, the U.S. opted for chip and signature despite it being less secure. As Ian Kar reported in Quartz, that may have been part of an attempt by the U.S. to save money, but lack of education has also plagued the transition.

"Payment experts have been openly complaining about the lack of education on how and when customers should use chip cards," Kar wrote. "The Aite Group notes in a report from June 2014 that banks and retailers in Australia ran full-page newspaper ads explaining the benefits of chip cards and how to use them when the country added EMV."

Falling behind on mobile payments

Despite its love of cheques and apparent hatred of chip cards, the U.S. may be set to leapfrog Australia and move straight to mobile payments. 

The growing demand for mobile payments is insatiable, suggested Ben Pfisterer, the Australian country manager of merchant payment provider Square. "They're actually in the process of leapfrogging contactless cards, or trying to ... straight from magstripe to chip cards and phones in the same leap."

And that's where Australia may be left behind. A report released by research firm RFi Consulting in mid-2016 found only 24 percent of Australians said they would try using mobile payments, compared to 77 percent in the U.S who said they were "extremely likely to use the technology," the ABC reported.

"It is probably because contactless credit and debit cards have been so successful and the incremental benefits are not enough — or been explained well enough — to make the jump," RFi managing director Alan Shields told the publication at the time. "You would be lucky if you get the right card from the right bank that connects with the right phone at the moment."

While Apple Pay, Samsung Pay and Android Pay have launched locally, the major banks are not wholesale on board with each provider.

To further complicate the picture, a number of Australia's largest banks applied to Australia's competition watchdog in July to negotiate collectively with providers of third-party mobile wallets — enemy number one: Apple. They want to get their own banking apps on Apple's hardware, which Apple has strongly resisted.

That's a dangerous impasse, Pfisterer suggested. In his view, there's a lesson in how Australia moved smoothly to contactless cards over the past decade. It was the liability shift in 2014 that he thinks became the tipping point. From August 2014, only PINs and not signatures were accepted.

"My general philosophy on payment innovation is you can't go two steps of change in one leap."

"They put a liability shift in that if you didn't accept chip cards you'd be liable as a merchant," he explained. "The whole market was incentivised to move. It's a really easy next step to go 'we've got this technology, what should we do about it?' That's where contactless cards came in."

Now 59 percent of Australians have made a purchase with contactless cards, according to RFi Consulting, but only 10 percent said they had used a mobile wallet.

It was also a lucky confluence of events — Australia managed to find the right balance of cards and available terminals. "If you get too many cards and not enough terminals, people will stop using their cards," he said.

In contrast, too many mobile payment providers and not enough bank cards to use them with could prove enough of an inconvenience that consumers fail to see the appeal.

So could Australia leapfrog the U.S. again and move straight to wearable payment devices? Probably not, Pfisterer said.

"My general philosophy on payment innovation is you can't go two steps of change in one leap," he said. "I think wearables were identified years ago as the next generation a little too soon. That mass population device has not really come through."

Still, we're all just at the tip of the iceberg. "What's next is where it gets really exciting," he said.

First it was the smartphones, now it's the washing machines.

In the same month that Samsung admitted it knows of at least 35 instances of Note7 batteries exploding or catching fire amid a nationwide recall in the U.S., the company is also having to deal with reports that some of its top-loading washers are also exploding.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued a warning Wednesday, CNN reports, saying that there were "safety issues" with certain models made between March 2011 and April 2016. It did not specify models.

A woman's washer "exploded with such ferocity that it penetrated the interior wall of her garage."

Customers from several states, including Texas, Georgia and Indiana, have all said their washing machines exploded during use. ABC News believes 21 people have reported to the CPSC that their machines have malfunctioned.

In Texas, a woman's washer "exploded with such ferocity that it penetrated the interior wall of her garage," according to court documents reportedly filed earlier this year.

"The dent left at the washing machine's point of impact was so deep that it pushed through into [her] living room, which shares a wall with her garage."

Another woman in Georgia said it "sounded like a bomb went off in [her] ear” when her machine exploded in April. “There were wires, nuts, the cover actually was laying on the floor,” Melissa Thaxton of Dallas said.

Samsung issued a statement Wednesday, saying it was in "active discussions with the CPSC to address potential safety issues related to certain top-load washing machines."

"In rare cases, affected units may experience abnormal vibrations that could pose a risk of personal injury or property damage when washing bedding, bulky or water-resistant items," the company added. "Samsung is recommending that consumers with affected models use the lower speed delicate cycle" when washing those items. 

"It is important to note that Samsung customers have completed hundreds of millions of loads without incident since 2011."

The name of one of the world's fastest growing messaging apps appeared pretty self-explanatory. "Slack" seemed like a simple nod to what you shouldn't be doing at work. 

Turns out it was actually an acronym. It stands for Searchable Log of All Communication and Knowledge. 

In response to a Twitter inquiry last night, the co-founder and CEO of Slack, Steward Butterfield, explained that Slack came about as a better alternative to linefeed, the original codename for the now multibillion-dollar company. 

To prove the story was true, Butterfield uploaded a screenshot of a conversation with someone named Eric, likely Eric Costello, another co-founder of Slack. 

Costello pointed out that the name could have negative connotations, but Butterfield thought the name could be funny. "Our users would be Slackers :)" he wrote. 

Things are getting back on track for YouTube in Pakistan. Months after the country lifted its three-year-old ban on the site, people have once again begun turning to Google’s video service for consuming and creating videos.

Pakistanis are now spending substantially more time on YouTube than they were in January, the company told Mashable India. Google says the watch-time of YouTube has more than doubled in eight months. Pakistan government had banned YouTube in late 2012 after it found an anti-Islam video circulating on the video portal. The ban was eventually lifted earlier this January.

Much like India, Pakistan is an important place for Google. Unsurprisingly, both neighboring countries share a similar challenge for the company - low Internet penetration. Earlier this week, Google outlined its plans on how it intends to improve its services for Indians. Today it made two important announcements for Pakistan.

Google says users in Pakistan too can now save certain videos for offline usage. This feature has been particularly popular in emerging countries where many face connectivity issues. Through this, a user can go to YouTube app (on Android as well as iOS), and save a video for later viewing. The video will be with them for 48 hours after downloading it. 

“We are delighted to launch this new offline experience on YouTube with some of the top Pakistani players in entertainment. By making these popular videos available for temporary offline viewing, our partners will help fans connect more easily with their favorite content, while also helping bring more viewers to their videos,” said Tania Aidrus, Head of Business Development, Next Billion Users team at Google Asia Pacific.

But more importantly, Google is also looking at YouTube creators for growth. To make the deal sweeter for them, it is bringing YouTube Partner Program to Pakistan. This will allow video creators in the country to make money for their original work.

Pakistani rapper says YouTube has been his only glimmer of hope.

This is particularly an exciting development for artists in Pakistan. The country's entertainment industry is fairly small, which makes YouTube the biggest platform for many artists to showcase their work. Popular Pakistani rapper and comedian Ali Gul Pir explains the matter to Mashable India: “YouTube for Pakistan before the ban was a glimmer of hope as we did not even have a single record label in the country. So musicians and artists only had YouTube and that's where I released my first song as well."

"It got over 3 million views. It made my career but then YouTube was banned and we were back to zero. I still made content but we would use Twitter and Facebook to show the work, and frankly that didn't work well because those platforms are not made for content creators," he added. 

Google says any Pakistani creator — even if they have only one original video — can become a “Partner” and start making money. These partners will be able to run ads against their videos. YouTube splits the revenue generated by those ads, and pays its partners.

There are three reasons why wireless headphones mostly suck and I've steered clear of dropping serious dough on a pair: poor sound quality, frustrating pairing and weak battery life.

Beats' new Solo 3 wireless on-ear headphones solve all three. And they do so while looking stylish and recognizable on top of your head for hours.

Announced with the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus, the Solo 3 headphones improve on the Solo 2 in every possible way. 

They're still a little pricey at $300, but for the wireless pairing convenience and battery life alone, I think it's money well spent. Sure, you could get a pair of sleeker B&O BeoPlay H8 or noise-cancelling Bose QC35 for $100 and $50 more, respectively, but the Solo 3 hit the sweet spot.

From the outside, the Solo 3 look virtually indistinguishable from the wireless Solo 2. Beats could have went with some more upscale materials like metal, but that would have also made them heavier. Plastic will have to do.

As they are, the Solo 3 are super light, the ear pads soft and the adjustable headband comfortable to wear all day long. They also fold up and fit snuggly into an included case. 

They're available in six colors to match the newest iPhone palette: white, silver, gold, rose gold, matte black and gloss black.

A battery LED indicator on the bottom of the right ear cup shows you how much battery power is left and there are play/pause and volume buttons embedded into the left ear cup (these are real buttons, not touch-sensitive gesture controls).

Beats provided a gloss black pair that matches my jet black iPhone 7. I'm just a breathing mask, cape and boots short of being Darth Vader every single time I step out of my home. Do not buy this color if you hate seeing smudges and fingerprints. 

Pairing magic

Ask any person with a pair of Bluetooth headphones and they'll tell you pairing can be a real bitch. You never know how well the pairing process will go. There's always something that creates interference. Or your computer can't detect the headphones. Or the battery died and the next time you go to pair them, they don't.

The Solo 3 are one of four pairs of new headphones (the others are the BeatsX, Powerbeats 3 and AirPods) from Apple and Beats that contain a tiny chip called the W1. The headphones are still connecting to devices via Bluetooth, but the W1 chip essentially acts like an assistant, talking to Apple devices (iOS devices, Macs and Apple Watch) to make pairing dead simple. 

And I really mean dead simple ... if you're pairing them to an iPhone running iOS 10, which I am. To connect, just press the power button for a second and place them near your iPhone. A screen slides up asking to connect, and that's it. No listening for beeps. No jumping into Bluetooth settings. No waiting for your headphones to appear on a list of nearby Bluetooth headphones. It even shows you the battery percentage.

Better, the headphones can pair with your Apple Watch, iPad or Mac easily using your iCloud login.

It feels good to finally be able to say, "It just works" — which is Apple's unofficial tagline of making complicated processes idiot-proof.

Unfortunately, if you're pairing the Solo 3 to iOS devices running iOS 9 or earlier, you won't get the pairing magic. Nor will you get it if you pair the headphones to an Android phone or other standard Bluetooth-supported devices; it's back to "pairing mode" and all that junk for you.

Battery champ

Aside from the W1's awesome pairing sauce, the chip also provides another major advantage: long battery life.

With the W1 chip, Beats was able to improve the Solo 2's 12 hours of battery life up to 40 hours, an increase of over 3x.

The best wireless headphones, some of which cost more than the Solo 3, only get up to half the battery life of Beats' new headphones. The only one that I could find that matches the Solo 3 on battery life is Sony's DRBTN20, which seems to have middling sound.

Beats was able to improve the Solo 2's 12 hours of battery life up to 40 hours.

On a weekday, I average about two hours of music listening during my commute to and from work, about four hours during the work day and another two hours when I'm at home. That's up to eight hours per day. I went five days before I ran the battery down from 100 percent. 

The BeoPlay H8s I tested last year needed to be charged every two days. The QC35s needed to be charged every three days for my listening habits.

If you don't listen to music as much as I do, you could easily go a few weeks without needing to charge the Solo 3 headphones again. Say you only listen to music on a two-hour roundtrip commute; that's up to 20 days of usage.

On top of that, the headphones have a "Fast Fuel" charging feature, which is basically like the quick charging features on many smartphones. With five minutes of charging, the headphones can give you up to three hours of listening time. That's more than enough to juice up in the morning and get you through your commute to work, where you'll be able to plug the Solo 3 in and charge them proper.

If you prefer, there's also a cable that plugs into the left ear cup for wired listening. The only downside is you'll need to supply your own 3.5mm headphone jack-to-Lightning or USB-C dongle if your phone doesn't have a headphone port.

Any way you slice it, the Solo 3 come out on top in terms of battery life. 

Solid sound

By now, you're probably thinking, "Ray, it's great they pair easily and battery life is awesome, but how do they sound? Do you they still sound like Beats?"

The answer is yes. But not like the old Monster-era Beats when they were tuned mainly for heavy bass and sounded terrible for everything else.

The Solo 2 reworked the sound for a wider range of music and the Solo 3 offer more or less the same audio experience. Mainly, they sound great on the low-end with dubstep and EDM and today's heavily audio-tuned vocals. 

That's intentional. Beats headphones are tuned for today's music, not Bob Marley or The Beatles. If you want a pure listening experience for the classics instead of Eric Prydz or Frank Ocean or Kanye, you'd be better served looking elsewhere. Beats headphones are made for modern digital music and your average millennial could care less.

So yeah, the Solo 3 sound like Beats and you know what? I have no issues with that. They're better than EarPods, but not as clean as more expensive wired headphones. For wireless headphones, they sound great to my "regular" ears in bed, on the subway and at work. 

They don't have noise-cancellation like the Bose QC35s, but the noise-isolation from the ear cups are quite good in blocking out ambient sound.

It's a mistake to dismiss the Solo 3 for a modest update because it doesn't look any different from the Solo 2. What Beats has achieved with the W1 chip in terms of convenience and power efficiency is game-changing. 

Years from now, when wireless headphones won't need to be charged for months, we'll be laughing at charging headphones every week (like I am now at existing wireless headphones that need to be charged every two to three days).

Audiophiles will never like Beats, but the company couldn't care less. Who needs to please audiophiles when the majority of people are streaming their music on Apple Music or Spotify, anyway?

Google today announced a new version of its YouTube app called 'YouTube Go' for India to tackle slower network connections. The project is part of company’s 'Next Billion' program through which it aims to connect India’s next billion people to the internet. 

YouTube Go offers a range of features to make it easier for users to watch videos on slow networks. The chief among them is YouTube Go’s ability to share videos among friends. The "social" feature uses Wi-Fi Direct protocol to exchange the files, the company confirmed to Mashable India. 

With YouTube Go, Google is also trying to enhance YouTube’s offline-feature. On the new app, people get a "super low bandwidth" preview of the video they want to download. The company says it is also sharing more information on how much data a video consumes. 

YouTube Go will be launched in India for Android users later this year.

YouTube Go will be launched in India for Android users later this year. It will support several local Indian languages including Tamil and Marathi. Users can sign up for early access at YouTubeGo.com/signup. 

YouTube Go is faster, lighter, and has been built from ground up for the Indian market, Johanna Wright, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube said today at a press conference in New Delhi. The team spent time in rural India to understand the challenges people face with internet access. 

"We believe that no matter who you are, or where you come from, everyone should get an opportunity," Wright said. The company said it spent a lot of time in Indian rural areas to understand the challenges people face in accessing the internet. "You can’t solve these challenges by sitting in Silicon Valley," Wright added.

Xiaomi, the Chinese company that makes phones with specs that top Samsung and Apple flagships, and then sells them at half the price, is at it again. 

The company just launched two new phones in China: The Mi 5s and the Mi 5s Plus. The phones are an obvious answer to the iPhone — both are very, very powerful devices, but the 5s Plus is bigger and has a dual camera. 

As you might imagine, the specs on these things are top notch. The Xiaomi Mi 5s has a 5.15-inch, Full HD screen, a 2.15GHz Snapdragon 821 chip, 3/4GB of RAM and 64/128GB of storage. 

It also has a fingerprint scanner has a 12-megapixel rear camera, and a 4-megapixel selfie cam with an f/2.0 aperture and 2-micron pixels. 

The price is RMB 1,999 or $300 for the 3GB/64GB variant, while the 4GB/128GB version costs RMB 2,299 or $345. 

5s Plus currently the most powerful out there

As for the Xiaomi Mi 5s Plus, it is, on paper, currently the most powerful smartphone out there. It has a 5.7-inch, Full HD screen, a 2.35GHz Snapdragon 821 chip, 4/6GB of RAM, 64/128GB of storage, and a fingerprint scanner. 

It also has a Sony-made, dual, 13-megapixel camera on the back, the setup being similar to the dual-camera setup on the Huawei P9 — one camera takes color snaps and the other monochrome for increased sharpness. The selfie cam on the front is also a 4-megapixel one.  

The price for the 4GB/64GB variant is RMB 2299 ($345), while the 6GB/128GB version costs RMB 2,599 ($390). 

While the spec sheet for both devices reads great (especially considering the price), there's more technical wizardry going on there that's not immediately apparent. 

For example, the fingerprint sensor on both phones is ultrasonic and placed under glass, which should theoretically mean it will not wear out with use. And the dual camera on the Mi 5s Plus sits flush with the phone's back, unlike the one on the iPhone 7 Plus. 

Design-wide, the phones aren't far off their predecessor, the Mi 5. Both have an aluminium body and a curvy back, with a round fingerprint sensor nested below the rear camera. 

There's no jet black (or any sort of black) option, however — an odd omission from Xiaomi which takes pride in following in Apple's footsteps (and sometimes being a step ahead, as well). 

The phones will be available in four colors: gold, rose gold, silver and white, and will go on sale starting Sept. 29. There's no word on international availability. 

Google today announced a new version of its YouTube app called 'YouTube Go' for India to tackle slower network connections. The project is part of company’s 'Next Billion' program through which it aims to connect India’s next billion people to the internet. 

YouTube Go offers a range of features to make it easier for users to watch videos on slow networks. The chief among them is YouTube Go’s ability to share videos among friends. The "social" feature uses Wi-Fi Direct protocol to exchange the files, the company confirmed to Mashable India. 

With YouTube Go, Google is also trying to enhance YouTube’s offline-feature. On the new app, people get a "super low bandwidth" preview of the video they want to download. The company says it is also sharing more information on how much data a video consumes. 

YouTube Go will be launched in India for Android users later this year.

YouTube Go will be launched in India for Android users later this year. It will support several local Indian languages including Tamil and Marathi. Users can sign up for early access at YouTubeGo.com/signup. 

YouTube Go is faster, lighter, and has been built from ground up for the Indian market, Johanna Wright, Vice President of Product Management, YouTube said today at a press conference in New Delhi. The team spent time in rural India to understand the challenges people face with internet access. 

"We believe that no matter who you are, or where you come from, everyone should get an opportunity," Wright said. The company said it spent a lot of time in Indian rural areas to understand the challenges people face in accessing the internet. "You can’t solve these challenges by sitting in Silicon Valley," Wright added.

DarkSky, the popular iPhone and Android weather app with dazzling graphics and hyper-specific forecasts, has made a transition onto your desktop. 

The company launched DarkSky.net earlier this month in an effort to bring its design philosophy and forecasting prowess to a broader audience. Like the app, the website features local forecasts presented in a deterministic way, meaning it will tell you when it will rain, rather than a probability of precipitation. 

DarkSky is the product of a team of six people, none of whom are meteorologists. The Boston-based company would not reveal any user figures to Mashable, but anecdotal evidence gathered through social media suggests it has a sizable, cult-like following.

Adam Grossman, the co-founder of DarkSky, told Mashable the website is in part a marketing move to boost name recognition of the app. 

“The biggest reason we launched this website is DarkSky is an app and a 'for pay' app," Grossman said. "We have a lot of users,” he said, but “it doesn’t get a huge lot of exposure that say a website would.”

“We tried to make, spend a lot of effort making beautiful maps. There’s something different about having it on a big screen,” he said. 

DarkSky relies on two different streams of information to produce the weather forecasts its users rely on. For precise estimates of rain or snow start and stop times, the company projects the movement of radar echoes from federal government weather radars. 

“We take in the raw radar data from the NWS in the U.S. and the Met Office in the UK,” he said.  

For the longer-range forecasts that DarkSky offers, the company pulls in data from about 10 weather models, including the U.S. Global Forecast System, or GFS model, and the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts model, or ECMWF. 

The company then compares historical weather data to the computer model projections and gives each model solution a weighted average based on how accurate their computers calculate each model is for a particular point. 

Grossman said the company's trademark is its precision rainfall forecasts, which other, more popular weather apps aren't doing, or aren't doing well. In fact, when DarkSky first launched, all it offered were minute-by-minute precipitation forecasts out to one hour in advance.

The first time the app says it will rain in five minutes, and then it does, it "kind of feels like magic," Grossman says.

“That’s our hook, that’s what the app is all about. Having that kind of constrained focus gives something for users to latch onto and appreciate.” 

Plans for the website include adding different maps, including snowfall accumulation forecasts. 

"Our goal with the maps is to make them clear and easy to understand," Grossman wrote in a blog post on the company's website. 

"The whole purpose of weather maps is to provide context for the forecast, to give you a bigger-picture view of what’s happening. So often, though, weather maps serve only to confuse and obfuscate, with weird lines, befuddling isobars, and garish colors. So we’ve designed ours to be an aid to understanding, and I think they turned out downright gorgeous."

Interestingly, the company's philosophy that weather maps should be visually striking, and not necessarily complicated, has not earned it many fans in the weather industry itself. 

While meteorologists generally are not in favor of overly complicated maps, to them, isobars (lines of equal air pressure) and other data are crucial to understanding the weather. That's why meteorologists have flocked to high-cost, fully loaded apps like RadarScope, which gives users the ability to access multiple parameters from live Doppler radar feeds in the U.S. and Canada, plus lightning strike data. 

For forecasters, raw data like that is more useful, even if it's somewhat more complicated and less elegant in presentation. RadarScope's creators were even honored by the American Meteorological Society in 2015.

Welcome to the 2016 presidential election.

Here we have a photograph of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton standing before a crowd full of excited young supporters at a campaign event in Orlando... except the group of "millennials" greeted Clinton by literally turning their backs to her. 

You're probably asking yourself what could possibly be more important than looking directly at the potential first female president of the United States. A selfie, of course.

The iconic photograph, captured by Barbara Kinney — a former White House photographer for Bill Clinton who is currently working full time for the Hillary Clinton campaign — perfectly highlights the essence of this generation's technological priorities.

Though it is unclear whether the massive group selfie session was requested by Clinton herself, the candidate is no stranger to the art of selfie taking.

What a time to be alive.

Mashable has reached out to Barbara Kinney for comment.

In its quest to make itself indispensable, Uber is keen to slide itself into your daily commute.

On Monday, the company announced a partnership in Australia with the travel planning app TripGo, which lets users request an Uber ride to the closest ferry terminal or train, bus or tram station in time for the next departure.

The new service is available in Brisbane, Gold Coast, Melbourne, Newcastle, Perth, Sunshine Coast and Sydney. While the company would like to partner with other Australian transport apps, an Uber spokesperson told Mashable there are no current negotiations underway.

The last mile gap

With this collaboration, Uber is targeting what's known in transport planning parlance as the "first or last mile gap." That's the inconvenient distance between someone's home and a transport hub, which often keeps them driving their own car.

In Sydney, data provided by Uber to Mashable indicates that 10 percent of Uber trips start or end within 200 metres (656 feet) of a "medium frequency public transport hub." In Brisbane, it's nine percent, in Melbourne, eight percent, and Perth, five percent.

Uber has undertaken similar collaborations with travel apps in other countries. In the U.S., it has teamed up with the transit tracking company TransLoc to let users create a journey combining Uber and public transport, as well as order a car in-app.

According to Geoffrey Clifton, lecturer in transport management at Sydney University, these integrations will be particularly useful for people who live in the outer suburbs, where there are longer distances to get home from the train station or bus stop.

Public transport works best when there is a density of population or activity, he suggested, which typically means there are better services closer to the city during peak times and during daylight hours. Those living in further flung areas can be left out, especially at night.

"There isn't really a fully integrated night network [in Sydney], whereas cities like London have that," he said. "Anything that helps fill that last mile gap is useful, and some of these new technologies will have a big benefit there."

Australian cities have by and large pushed poorer communities to the outer suburbs, while the wealthy have taken over urban centres. Is there a risk the government could forgo investment in public transport in these areas if they see private services like Uber stepping in?

It's unlikely, in Clifton's view. "Some people talk about Uber-like services replacing public transport all together, and I think we're very far away from that happening," he said. "I can't see people switching to Uber being enough to cancel a bus service.

"It might even go the other way — people being more confident to take public transport at night if they know they've got some way of going that last mile home."

Nevertheless, the technology gap — whether people in less-served areas always have the technology to order an Uber — or the extra cash to pay for it is another question.

What's in it for Uber?

Well, Uber wants you to know you can always use Uber, but there's more to it than that.

According to Matthew Burke, associate professor at the Cities Research Centre at Griffith University, the company is also trying to diversity its local offering. For Uber, introducing a suite of options that allow it to play an increasingly vital role in someone's commute is "a bit of a no-brainer."

"Uber recently failed in China. Many people have said that was protectionism on behalf of the Chinese state, but I actually think [Didi Chuxing], the competitor, was a better product," he said, pointing out that Didi already had a range of transport integrations, including a bus shuttle service.

"I think [Uber has] been slower than many others in this space ... and this is in part because of working out its legality as it entered the market [in Australia]," he added.

It's also a way for the ride hailing giant to get a head start on competitors. Although Uber does have some homegrown rivals such as GoCatch, it's not facing off a powerful, established product such as Didi in Australia, but that situation may not last forever.

"Those rivals will comes, and those rivals will come in niche areas. For instance, there's a group in Shanghai who only do airport runs," Burke explained. "We're going to see, I think, diversification in the market."

Ultimately, Burke sees Uber and public transport working together to evolve a transport situation that has remained largely static thanks to Australia's reliance on the privately owned car.

That's Uber's point, too: "Aligning ridesharing with public transport systems is one of the smartest ways to help people move around the city without the need for costly infrastructure developments or owning a personal vehicle," David Rohrsheim, general manager of Uber Australia, said in a statement.

It may soon be time to let go of owning a car, and in bad news for the labour market, maybe even the human driver.

"Uber is part of a set of transport that will see more and more of us changing our relationship with the car," Burke added. "I think we'll start to see more and more use of these services, more and more for the collectivised car, and less two car or three car households.

"Still, it's going to be difficult to untangle that."

Things just keep getting worse and worse for Samsung.

After weeks of investigating cases of Galaxy Note7 phones catching on fire, destroying people's cars, and even injuring people, Samsung and the United States Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) issued an official recall for 1 million of the phones sold in the U.S.

As per the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), affected Note7 phones with defective batteries must be turned off and can't be used during flights. Many public transportation agencies like New York City's MTA have also urged riders not to use the Note7.

And then just as safe replacement Note7 shipments started arriving on Wednesday and Samsung announced about 500,000 phones of the 1 million recalled in the U.S. had been exchanged, a Galaxy Note 2 catches on fire during an IndieGo flight from Singapore to Chennai.

India's Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) and Samsung are currently investigating why the phone caught on fire in the first place. 

"We are in touch with relevant authorities to gather more information, and are looking into the matter," a spokesperson from Samsung India said in an emailed statement to Mashable India.

A Samsung spokesperson provided the following statement to Mashable over email: “We have been informed about an incident in India involving a Note 2, which uses a replaceable battery and was released in 2012. We are in touch with local authorities to gather more information and investigate whether there were any external factors involved.”

Following the incident, the DGCA has reportedly advised flyers to "exercise caution while flying with Samsung Note devices" according to spokesperson who spoke to The India Times. "They should either keep these devices switched off or not travel with them."

The last thing Samsung needs is another disaster that paints the company in more bad light.

Note (excuse the pun) the wording and how it urges against using essentially all Samsung Galaxy Note phones during flights. That includes any Note produced since the original device launched in 2011.

It's basically a declaration that SAMSUNG PHONES ARE DANGEROUS.

Talk about terrible timing.

The last thing Samsung needs is another disaster that paints the company in a worse light. It's especially tough at a time when the company's doing everything it can to prevent further tarnishing of its brand. It's also trying to reassure consumers that it has the Note7 situation under control and that new devices are safe to use.

What Samsung doesn't need right now is people scrutinizing the quality of all of the phones it produces. 

But alas, you can't control public perception. People are going to point fingers — even if the Note 2 incident is pure coincidence — at Samsung and demand answers.

And that's what sucks the most for Samsung. The Note7 issue may blow over quickly if it's able to successfully recall even 95 percent of the defective phones, but the brand damage will probably take a lot longer to repair.

Consumers, as loyal as some of us are, really aren't that loyal. We vote with our money and if a company can't assure that its products are safe to use, we'll leave in a heartbeat. Trust is not something easy to regain after major disasters.

Still, if you're a Samsung Galaxy Note user, I wouldn't worry at all.

While we won't know the real cause of the Note 2 incident until the official investigations are completed, it seems highly unlikely the fire is related to the Note7 defects, which prompted the global recall.

As eagle-eyed techies know, the Note 2 was released in 2012 and Samsung no longer sells the phone. And based on the image of the damaged phone that was made public, it looks like the removable battery expanded, which caused it to catch on fire. 

The cause could very likely be a third-party battery and not an official one. While some third-party batteries meet very strict quality control requirements, there are many that don't and those are the ones that are more likely to catch on fire.

Scary as a phone catching on fire on a flight is, it's happened before. Last year, an iPhone 6 inexplicably burst into flames aboard a flight going to Hawaii. And in 2014, there were two reported cases of iPhones catching on fire in people's pockets. Do a Google search and you'll find many more that happen every year.

It's unfortunate, but like I said earlier after the Note7 explosions started rolling in: Any phone could explode. There's no such thing as an explosion-proof phone. 

In fact, any device with a battery could potentially explode or catch on fire. Companies do their best to create controllers that monitor and regulate a battery to prevent it from overcharging and overheating, but defective batteries can happen (as was the case with the Note7) and people can (and do) push their phones beyond their advertised limits.

Generally, most phones go through their lifespans without any issues. If you're using an old Note or Samsung phone with removable batteries, we highly recommend using official batteries and not cheap knockoffs; the lower prices are tempting, but not worth potential risk and injury.

It's just really, really too bad for poor Samsung. The company just can't catch a break.

Amazon might be getting a little worried.

Pricing details for Google's upcoming smart speaker, the Amazon Echo-like Google Home, may have just been leaked and they suggest that Google's speaker will be a lot cheaper than Amazon's.

The speaker will sell for $129 when it goes on sale later this year, according to a report in Android Police. Google Home, which the company first introduced at its I/O developer conference in May, is a speaker that also has Google Assistant built in. (You can preview the assistant in the company's new messaging app, Allo.) It can also control smart home devices, complete searches and help you manage tasks like managing your grocery list.

If true, the $129 price tag would make Google's offering extremely competitive with Amazon's Echo line. Amazon's flagship Echo sells for $179.99 while the portable Amazon Tap costs $129.99

The report didn't provide specifics around availability, just that the Google was set to unveil the price at its upcoming Pixel event in October. But, given that Google previously promised the device would be available in the fall, it seems safe to assume it will go on sale soon after October's unveiling. 

Android Police also reports that Google will show off a new 4k-ready Chromecast at that event, called Chromecast Ultra. That device will sell for $69, according to the site's sources.  

A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the report.

Mashable will be covering the event live from San Francisco so stay tuned for our full coverage.

Count down three seconds in your head. It goes fast, right?  I bet you did it the "one-hippopotamus way." That's actually considerably more than 3 seconds. Ask Siri to set a 3-second timer and then try to read something on the web.

Exactly, it's barely enough time for a sentence, including this one.

A couple of years ago, Facebook apparently set 3 seconds or less as the benchmark for actual video ad engagement. A choice that, on its face, seems rational, even preferable for media planners and advertisers. 

Anyone who spends under 3 seconds watching a Facebook video ad was, for the last couple of years, not factored into the social media giant's average viewing time. 

Of course, an average that doesn't account for the total number of viewers, whether they're engaged or not, is probably not much of an average — a fact Facebook belatedly discovered and confessed to in a well-hidden blog post. Now, though, as ad partners stepped forward and called foul, Facebook made a more public apology, but insisted that "it did not impact billing," which is another way of saying that everyone got what they paid for.

The measure of a view

I bet advertisers and their partners miss the good old days, when a media platform (newspapers, magazines, TVs) simply handed them audience numbers. The size of the audience dictated how much a media company could charge for inches, pages and minutes. No one could prove if people skipped the ads in print and, before the DVR, everyone ignored the fact that most of us used commercials as snack and bathroom break times.

The problem is that the explosion of social media and mobile video has led to the rise of engagement as a measure of success. YouTube does a good job of measuring video engagement. It knows when a video is playing, for how long, and if it stopped playing. They still don't know if you left it playing and walked out of the room.

I am a little surprised that advertisers are trying to equate YouTube and Facebook video ad views. 

I am a little surprised that advertisers are trying to equate YouTube and Facebook video ad views. The interfaces and consumption styles are so different.

On YouTube, you find video and play it on a page basically devoted to that video. Facebook's newsfeed puts everything on a sort of user-controlled assembly line. Users scroll up and down, only occasionally pausing to actively engage with a piece of content or maybe an ad. Much of what they see in the newsfeed hits their retinas for a second or two. Even if a video autoplays, they might scroll right by it. This is why so many Facebook videos feature text overlays — you can ingest a sentence much more quickly that you can understand what's going on in a moving image.

I honestly don't think it's easy to know when people truly engage with video and if engagement leads to brand recognition or even action (buying a product or service), but you would think that measuring average video views would be a solved problem.

It's clearly not. In fact, there is no system or any kind of agreement about how to measure this stuff, which basically makes Facebook the poster boy for this entire mess.

Help me understand

It bothered me that I sort of sympathized with Facebook. If no one can agree on how to measure video ad views, how can Facebook be blamed for trying to do it their own way? Another part of me, though, knew that Facebook chose a measurement system that favored their platform and its performance. Once they do factor in all those Facebook users seeing a video ad for 3 seconds or less, the Facebook video add engagement numbers are going to drop, by a lot.

I decided to turn to an expert to help me work through some of my conflicting concerns and feelings.

In my inbox was an email from Brian Shin. He's the founder and CEO of Visible Measures, a social video measurement and activation company.  Visible Measures recently put out a report on engaged viewing times that shows, according to the company, that actual consumer attention is more important than view counts. 

Shin, who's been in the industry for 15 years and has a business degree from MIT's Sloan School of Management, seemed to have the answers. I wanted to clear up my own confusion and see if my feelings of sympathy for Facebook were ill-founded.

I was curious if you thought Facebook was trying to be fair by not counting any views below 3 seconds. After all, what can you glean in that period of time? Even on auto-play, you might see a second of a video ad.

Shin: Video viewership is like a going down a funnel. At the top of the funnel, you have viewers scrolling through their feed and the video player loads. On Facebook, before 3 seconds, those are considered 'ad impressions.' Progressing down the 'funnel' — if viewers stay long enough — that's when the video view event is triggered. So much money now is being spent on buying video views (which is an improvement over buying just 'ad impressions' or buying based on CPMs - cost per thousand impressions), but there is no standardization on what constitutes a video view. Hence the need to know your Engaged Viewing Time across platforms. 

How might Facebook have better measured engagement? Should they have factored in every potential view — anyone the ad is served to whether it played or not? What would that have done to their engagement numbers?

Shin: Properties [like Facebook] do not show you the whole funnel — 

video player loads ->

ad impressions ->

video views ->

viewing time ->

video completions

— for lots of reasons including not wanting to enable dissection of their economics or traffic patterns. Facebook should have shown, at a minimum, the total video views and combined it with an objective measure of Engaged Viewing Time. The inaccuracy of 'self-reported' stats is why an objective measure is needed. The lack of standardization in terms of how video views are calculated is why an objective measure of time is needed that goes across YouTube, Facebook and other places selling cost-per-view (and other forms of) video advertising.  

So much money now is being spent on buying video views... but there is no standardization on what constitutes a video view.

Facebook including ad impression data (the stuff before 3 seconds) would not help. Marketers are paying for views (post-3 seconds) and they need to know the "value" of what they bought — demonstrable by viewing time. 

How much of all this is media buyers and advertisers still not understating the nature of social media video engagement — especially video advertising on these platforms? It is fundamentally different than the video on YouTube, after all, which isn't even designed as a scroll. If you view a video on YT, you will likely see a pre-roll ad.

Shin: Much of the growth in video today is being driven by these 'social' experiences and we would include YouTube in that category. If you look at places like nbc.com, espn.com, etc., that's really repurposing and monetizing TV content or 'longer form' video. 

But places like YT, FB, Twitter, etc., are pushing advertising that offers more user choice (option to skip or scroll, or share or repost, comment, etc.) and that is presenting both opportunities and challenges for marketers.

Marketers are embracing this idea of more interactivity and choice in video advertising (hence the now billions of dollars going into cost per view and other types of video advertising). But the constantly evolving landscape requires new measures of consumer attention (vs. just ad impressions). Attention in video would include finding all the views that you are generating across all properties and copies and sharing (what we call True Reach) and the actual time that consumers are spending with your video content (what we call Engaged Viewing Time). Provide total views + viewing time (and you know the spend) — you can better assess the value of your ad campaign.

Here's what I glean from what Shin said. 

As long as companies like Facebook make up their own measurement strategies, there will be a fundamental inequity in video ad measurement on social media platforms and other services that include video ads. 

Standards would help, but so would more transparency from Facebook and others. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake, someone needs to step in and level the playing field for everyone. 

We all agree that video is the future, so it's time to get on board with a future that's equitable and fair. Facebook's mea culpa is a step in the right direction, but no matter what it might cost them in the short term, an agreement on video ad metrics will probably help them and everyone else make billions more in the future. 

In the end, I realize this was never about 3 seconds of video. It's about math, averages, the measure of engagement and standards. Facebook simply couldn't run away from those realities anymore — certainly not in three seconds or less.