Month: February 2018

2018 has gotten off to a rough start for Huawei, the world’s third largest smartphone maker. Just before the company’s CEO made a keynote speech at CES, AT&T pulled out of a partnership that would have put Huawei’s flagship in the stores of a major US carrier for the first time. A month later, Verizon did the same thing. Both wireless providers blamed the moves on rising government concerns that Huawei’s phones pose a risk to US security.

And now things have gotten worse, as Huawei might have pissed of one of its few remaining retail partners by flooding Best Buy’s website with fake reviews. According to 9to5 Google, the fake reviews were the result of a beta program that offered users the chance to own and review a Mate 10 Pro in return for leaving a comment in the review section of Best Buy’s pre-sale retail page.

This resulted in more than 70 reviews on BestBuy.com (many which have not yet been taken down), with the vast majority giving the Mate 10 Pro glowing 5 star recommendations en route to an overall score of 4.8 out of 5 before the phone has even officially gone on sale.

While this may feel like a shady attempt to juice review scores, Huawei claims the fiasco was caused by a misunderstanding between the company and the people participating in its contest. When asked for an official statement, Huawei responded by saying:

“Huawei’s first priority is always the consumer and we encourage our customers to share their experiences with our devices in their own voice and through authentic conversation. We believe there is confusion around a recent social media post reaching out to recruit new beta testers. While there are reviews from beta testers with extensive knowledge of the product, they were in no way given monetary benefits for providing their honest opinions of the product. However, we are working to remove posts by beta testers where it isn’t disclosed they participated in the review program.

Right, OK, so mistakes happen, and it’s hard to really get that angry about a company trying to promote its new device. But no matter how you slice it, this isn’t a good look for Huawei, which has struggled to gain wider adoption in the US.

This whole situation could have been avoided in the first place. Although it’s apparent that a lot of the Mate 10 Pro reviews on BestBuy.com’s website are shallow and potentially made by people who haven’t used the phone, I have, and it actually is a nice device. While I don’t agree with every decision Huawei made on the Mate 10 Pro, such as its somewhat sedate design and lack of a headphone jack, the phone also includes some innovative features including a dedicated neural processing unit and AI that can automatically enhance your photos. Then you add in a large 5.9-inch AMOLED display, excellent battery life, and IP67 water-resistance, and the result is a big-screen phone that almost anyone would be happy to own.

Unfortunately, now a lot of people are people are going to think customer feedback about the Mate 10 Pro’s is tainted, which is something Huawei really can’t afford right now.

We have reached out to Best Buy and will update this story if we hear back.

[9to5 Google]

On August 3, 2016, seven kilometers above Alaska’s Aleutian Islands, a research plane captured something mysterious: an atmospheric aerosol particle enriched with the kind of uranium used in nuclear fuel and bombs.

It’s the first time scientists have detected such a particle just floating along in the atmosphere in 20 years of plane-based observations.

Uranium is the heaviest element to occur naturally on Earth’s surface in an appreciable amount. Normally it occurs as the slightly radioactive isotope uranium-238, but some amount of uranium-235, the kind humans make bombs and fuel out of, occurs in nature. Uranium-238 is already rare to find floating above the Earth in the atmosphere. But scientists have never before spotted enriched uranium, a sample uranium containing uranium-235, in millions of research plane-captured atmospheric particles.

“One of the main motivations of this paper is to see if someobody who knows more about uranium than any of us would understand the source of the particle,” scientist Dan Murphy from NOAA told me. After all, “aerosol particles containing uranium enriched in uranium-235 are definitely not from a natural source,” he writes in the paper, published recently in the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity.

Murphy has led flights around the world sampling the atmosphere for aerosols. These tiny particles can come from polution, dust, fires, and other sources, and can influence things like cloud formation and the weather. The researchers spotted the mystery particle on a flight over Alaska using their “Particle Analysis by Laser Mass Spectrometry” instrument. They considered that perhaps the signature came from something weird, but evidence seems to point directly at enriched uranium.

They were not intending to look for radioactive elements. “The purpose of the field campaign was to obtain some of the first global cross-sections of the concentration of trace gases and of dust, smoke, and other particles in the remote troposphere over the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans,” according to the paper.

But where the particle came from is a mystery. It’s pretty clear it came from recently made reactor-grade uranium, the authors write (aka, not from Fukushima or Chernobyl). Perhaps from burnt fuel contaminated with uranium, they thought. They tried to trace it to a source using the direction of the wind—but their best estimate pointed vaguely to Asia. Higher probability areas include some parts of China, including its border with North Korea, and parts of Japan.

You don’t need to worry about atmospheric radiation from just one particle, though. “It’s not a significant amount of radioactive debris by itself,” Murphy said. “But it’s the implication that there’s some very small source of uranium that we don’t understand.”

One author, Thomas Ryerson from NOAA, told me that he needs other scientists’ help. “We’re hoping that someone in a field that’s not intimately associated with atmospheric chemistry can say ‘a-ha!’ and give us a call.”

[Journal of Environmental Radioactivity]

While it produces fantastic audio, Apple’s new HomePod smart speaker has also annoyed early users with obtuse software limitations, a lack of real Bluetooth connectivity, and missing multi-room playback support that won’t come until later this year. And now there’s one more irritation to add to that list, as it seems the HomePod can damage your wood furniture.

Multiple reports on Twitter and from outlets, including Wirecutter and Pocket-Lint, claim that when left on a wooden object, a HomePod can leave behind potentially permanent white rings.

Wirecutter reports that Apple has confirmed the problem. It’s apparently caused by an interaction between the HomePod’s silicone base and certain oils used to finish wood furniture. The severity of the marks seems to vary, judging from a tweet by MacStories’ Federico Viticci.

For those affected, Apple says “the marks can improve over several days after the speaker is removed from the wood surface.” However, if the rings don’t go away, Wirecutter says Apple suggests that you can either go refinish the furniture or “try cleaning the surface with the manufacturer’s suggested oiling method.”

This is not a good look for Apple. For the people who just brought home a fancy new smart speaker, the last thing they’ll probably want to do is be forced to re-sand their furniture on a regular basis. We have reached out to Apple for comment on the news, but have yet to hear back.

[The Wirecutter]