The original Huawei Watch was one of my surprise favorites. It didn’t have an overabundance of features, but it ran Android Wear nicely and it looked good doing it. With the new $299.99 Huawei Watch 2, the company pivoted hard. It put an emphasis on function over form in an attempt to make it more of a fitness device rather than a casual fashion piece. That’s exactly what a number of other companies such as Apple, Samsung, and LG have done with their recent smartwatch attempts, but in the case of the Huawei, the result is a mixed bag. To test the watch, I linked it with my primary Google accounts and wore it constantly, except when charging it or swimming. I wore it while hiking, running, playing basketball, and doing a couple of at-home workouts. I used it as a second screen for my phone, as an activity tracker, and even for tracking my sleep (via a third-party app) — you know, the stuff that smartwatches are typically used for. But before we get into how it did, let’s talk about what’s new in this model. The big new feature is that the watch now has its own GPS radio. This means you can leave your phone at home, then go for a run or ride and all your important, brag-worthy stats will be recorded. It also has a built-in optical heart rate monitor that tracks your ticker 24/7; it should deliver a good look at your resting heart rate over time, which is an important metric for your overall fitness. It’s one of the few Android Wear watches that has a built-in speaker, which you can use for notifications and alarms, as well as playing music directly from the watch. You should, theoretically, be able to make phone calls through it, but the app crashed on me every time I tried it. The global version of the watch has LTE as an option, but unfortunately that model hasn’t yet made it to the US. To accommodate these additional components, the body of the Huawei Watch 2 is 1.3mm thicker than the original (12.6mm vs. 11.3mm). That doesn’t seem like a lot on paper, but on a watch, you notice every tenth of a millimeter. One of the things the original had going for it was that it was fairly unobtrusive. It laid more or less flat against your wrist, and it wasn’t overly prone to catching on your cuff. The Watch 2 juts out more and makes it feel closer to the chunky GPS watches you associate with trekking — but at least those are typically waterproof to 50+ meters. The Watch 2 tops out at IP68, which means it’s water resistant up to a meter for up to 30 minutes. In other words: you can shower with it, but swimming is out. The Huawei Watch 2 is noticeably thicker than the original, but with a smaller screen The body of the watch is now plastic instead of metal, which gives it a decidedly cheaper look and feel. The biggest loss, however, is that the screen has decreased from 1.4 inches to 1.2 inches. At first I thought Huawei did this to reduce the overall size of the device, but despite the smaller screen the new version is larger than the original in every dimension. The Watch 2 has a thicker, more utilitarian-looking bezel encircling the screen (again, probably to make room for the additional sensors and such), so it’s possible that shrinking the screen was how it kept the watch from being even larger than it is. If so, it wasn’t worth it, as the display is very hard to read. Icons get jammed together and it’s extremely easy to over-scroll when swiping, or select the wrong item by mistake. For context, the Apple Watch has a 1.65-inch screen (square), and the larger Moto 360 has a 1.56-inch screen (round). Both are much easier to use. The Watch 2 also lacks a rotating bezel or crown, so all of your interaction happens on that tiny screen. The exceptions are the two buttons on the side: one is used to open apps and launch Assistant, and the other launches workout tracking. The Huawei Watch 2 runs Android Wear 2.0, which is a big improvement over earlier versions. It can run native, standalone apps and even download them directly from the Google Play Store on the watch. Watchfaces can display far more complex data fields, and the notifications are easier to interact with — or they would be if they weren’t so tiny on this diminutive screen. I actually encountered a surprising amount of bugginess: apps randomly freezing on a couple of occasions, and the watch generally being slow to respond to input. The screen times out all too quickly, which forces you to navigate all the way back to the thing you just had up (though this may be an Android Wear issue). While Google Assistant is built in, it seems that not all Google Assistants are created equal. I can ask my Pixel XL "What time do the Warriors play tonight?" and it’ll tell me they are playing the Spurs at 6PM tonight. When I ask the watch the exact same question, Assistant tells me, "Sorry, I couldn’t do that." Go figure. Also, Android Wear still won’t let Google Voice users initiate an SMS conversation from their own Google Voice phone number, which remains infuriating for me. Android Pay is another new addition with Wear 2.0 and it works smoothly. Once you have your credit cards loaded into the watch (you’ll need your phone for that, too), you can use the watch to pay for goods pretty much anywhere NFC payments are available. You must have a lock screen enabled on your watch, but once it’s unlocked, you just open the pay app, select the card you want to use, and tap your watch’s screen to the point-of-sale machine’s NFC reader. This could come in handy if you’re running without your phone and you find yourself in desperate need of a drink or a taxi back home. Huawei did build some of its own apps to take advantage of the Watch 2’s new hardware features. Simply press the physical button on the bottom right of the watch and you can track running, walking, outdoor cycling, treadmill, indoor cycling, and "other," which you can use for general workouts. There are also modes for cardio and "fat-burning," which will help you stay within a predetermined heart rate zone while running. If you also use the phone-based Huawei Health app, it can help you train for a 5K, 10K, half marathon, or full marathon based on your current fitness level and your goals. Huawei Health can also integrate with Google Fit, MyFitnessPal, and (strangely) UP by Jawbone so your stats won’t languish in a silo, alone forever. The workout app is really pretty decent. It has an embedded Google Map which you can use to see your location (though only if you have preloaded the map or have your phone with you), and it can display your running cadence (i.e., steps per minute), which is an important metric and a pretty rare one for a watch to display. Unfortunately, this is somewhat neutered by the small screen. Cadence is displayed on a page with five other data fields. When crammed into a 1.2-inch screen, those data fields are entirely illegible while running. If I wanted to see my cadence I had to stop and look, and then I only had a few seconds to see it, because it changes when your feet stop moving. This could easily be solved by separating some of these data fields onto other pages, so a larger font could be used. Of course, you can just as easily install Runkeeper, Strava, Runtastic, and other favorite mobile fitness apps, but even then the tiny screen is prone to cutting off text at the corners. Heart rate monitoring was surprisingly accurate Wrist-based optical heart rate monitors are notorious for having accuracy problems, which is why I was surprised to discover the quality of this one. I did a workout with the Huawei Watch 2 on my left rest, and on my right I used the Garmin Fenix 5X paired with a very trustworthy chest strap HRM. I found that the Huawei tended to be 5–10 seconds behind the Garmin when it came to displaying changes in my heart rate, but once it caught up it was almost always within five beats per minute, and more often it stayed within two. That’s really quite good! The lag was definitely annoying, but in the context of a long workout I wouldn’t call it a deal-breaker. One of the things the watch does best is function as an activity tracker (a la Fitbit and co). When you open the built-in Daily Tracking app, you’re greeted with a ton of data that’s laid out very nicely. It tells you how many steps you’ve taken, how many feet of elevation you’ve gained, how many times you’ve stood up, how long you’ve spent standing, how much time you’ve spent in different heart rate zones, how many calories you’ve burned, and even your resting heart rate for the day (and a graph for viewing all the spikes and valleys over the last six hours). Many of these data fields can be integrated into your favorite watchface, too. It will also advise you to get up and move if you’ve been inactive for more than an hour, and it will even show you some stretches you can do. Unreliable battery life is frustrating Unfortunately, battery life is extremely variable and unreliable. The Watch 2 has a 420mAh cell in it (up from 300mAh on the previous model), and there were times when I used the watch to track a couple of activities with GPS and it still made it nearly two full days. The next day, I used the watch very lightly and it drained to 12 percent after 24 hours. The day after that, it was down to 12 percent after just 18 hours. There doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to it. You can use it in a low-power mode — which Huawei claims will get you 21 days of battery life — but the only thing it can do in that mode is tell you the time of day and how many steps you’ve taken. This kinda defeats the point of wearing a bulky smartwatch. Maybe "bulky" isn’t fair, at least not when compared to behemoths like the LG Watch Sport, which at 45.4 x 51.2 x 14.2mm is handily wider and thicker than the Huawei Watch 2 (48.9 x 45 x 12.6mm), but it’s not exactly svelte, either. It seems that Huawei was hoping to sway some daintier-wristed individuals with this iteration, but I don’t think they’ve quite cracked the code here. I think it looks fine on me, personally, but my wrists are on the larger side of the spectrum. On thinner wrists, it protrudes a bit awkwardly, and I can’t see it bringing many fashionistas into the fold. Overall, I found that the Huawei Watch 2 was one of my more frustrating Android Wear experiences. Trying to read the tiny screen while exercising made me want to chew off my own hand. (It was even worse when I was wearing polarized sunglasses.) I actually found the watch to be pretty comfortable, and it was surprisingly accurate for the things it could track. That said, for a watch this big and sporty-looking, I want it to be, well, sportier. I want it to be waterproof and capable of tracking my swimming or kayaking. And if it’s trying to be a smartwatch, then it simply needs to work better —without glitches or precipitous dives in battery life. Ultimately, it feels like Huawei was trying to make a watch that could be right for everybody, and it ended up with a watch that isn’t really right for anybody.

Nearly 10 years ago, YouTube started displaying a banner to Internet Explorer 6 users, warning that support for Microsoft’s browser would be “phasing out” soon. It was a message that appeared on all YouTube pages, at a time when IE6 users represented around 18 percent of all YouTube traffic. Frustrated by supporting the aging browser, a group of YouTube engineers had hatched a plan to kill Internet Explorer 6. “We began collectively fantasizing about how we could exact our revenge on IE6,” reveals Chris Zacharias, a former Google and YouTube engineer. “The plan was very simple. We would put a small banner above the video player that would only show up for IE6 users.” A group of engineers implemented this banner, knowing that most YouTube employees using the company’s staging environment wouldn’t even see it. At the time, Google had acquired YouTube a few years prior to the IE6 banner and the video sharing site hadn’t really fully adapted to Google’s infrastructure and policies. YouTube engineers had created a special set of permissions called “OldTuber,” so they could bypass Google’s code enforcement policies and make changes directly to the YouTube codebase with limited code reviews. Zacharias and some other engineers were granted OldTuber permissions, allowing them to put the banner in place with very little oversight. “We saw an opportunity in front of us to permanently cripple IE6 that we might never get again,” admits Zacharias. YouTube’s IE6 banner appeared in 2009 The banner appeared in July 2009, and the press coverage immediately approved of Google’s push to kill off Internet Explorer 6 support on YouTube. “The first person to come by our desks was the PR team lead,” explains Zacharias. Every major tech publication was asking why YouTube was threatening to kill of IE6 support, at a time when the browser was still used frequently. “We eagerly told them [PR] everything about what we had launched and helped them craft the necessary talking points to expand on the narrative already established by the media.” Two Google lawyers also wanted to know why YouTube had the banner in place. “They immediately demanded that we remove the banner,” reveals Zacharias. The lawyers were worried that Chrome was being promoted first as an alternative browser, prompting fears about EU regulators looking for anti-competitive behavior. But it turns out the YouTube engineers had programmed the banner to randomly display browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer 8, and eventually Opera, and they demonstrated this to the lawyers. “Content with the demonstration, the lawyers quickly retreated back to their desks without any further concerns,” says Zacharias. The banner spread to other Google properties. The Google Docs team added a similar message warning about IE6 support. “One of their engineers testing in IE6 had noticed the YouTube banner pretty shortly after it went live and immediately took it to their manager as evidence as to why they should do the same,” explains Zacharias. Google internal chatter centered on the Docs team adding the IE6 banner, so the original YouTube engineering team “somehow bypassed detection as the originators of the IE6 banner inside of Google.” The result was a massive dip in Internet Explorer 6 traffic to YouTube. “Within one month, our YouTube IE6 user base was cut in half and over 10 percent of global IE6 traffic had dropped off while all other browsers increased in corresponding amounts,” says Zacharias. “The results were better than our web development team had ever intended.” YouTube engineering management eventually realized what had happened, but it was too late and they “begrudgingly arrived at the conclusion that the ends had justified the means.” The rebel YouTube engineers succeeded with their secret plan to kill Internet Explorer 6, and by April 2012 IE6 usage had dropped below one percent in the US.

New Collections Coming Soon !!! Microsoft is unveiling a number of new features for its upcoming Edge Chromium browser today. The first big addition is a new “IE Mode” for Edge that will allow businesses to load old sites directly in the new Edge Chromium browser, using the Internet Explorer rendering engine. Microsoft is building IE directly into Edge for this purpose, so businesses aren’t forced to directly use IE for ancient internal sites. “What we’re going to do is make this totally seamless,” explains Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, in an interview with The Verge. Currently, the existing version of Edge will open Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10, which has a separate interface, favorites, and doesn’t work well on modern websites. This new IE mode literally loads the content within Edge, so you’d never be able to tell the difference, apart from a small IE logo on the tab that indicates that this mode has been enabled. The new IE mode is for businesses This new IE mode is designed exclusively for businesses, and Belfiore admits it’s a big pitch to get them to use Edge Chromium instead of a combination of Chrome and Internet Explorer. “We’ve got a browser for you that updates regularly that will go on Windows 7 and the Mac that handles things like IT customization of the New Tab page and Microsoft Search, and IE built-in,” says Belfiore. Microsoft is also allowing businesses to customize the New Tab page for Edge Chromium. This will involve a custom company logo, the option to load some sites into the top tabs, and integration with Microsoft Search and Office 365. While these features will be mainly targeted at businesses, Microsoft is also building an entirely new Collections feature for Edge Chromium. This is perhaps the most interesting feature addition to Edge so far, and it’s designed for web users to be able to more easily collect text, images, and information from the internet into a note. It goes beyond simple notes, though. Microsoft is linking the images you drag and drop into these collections, and even text into references back to the original websites where you found them. Microsoft is adding in web tracker blocking You’ll then be able to share this with friends or family via email or instantly export it to Word or Excel. This seems super useful if you’re collecting information about a big purchase, as you’ll be able to export to a list in Excel that can be sorted by price. If you’re a teacher or student collecting information from the web, then these collections will all have citations. It’s even useful if you’re just researching vacation locations and you want to easily share your collection of information. Microsoft is also focusing on privacy enhancements to Edge, specifically on blocking web trackers that follow you on the web. Microsoft has been on a privacy mission in recent years, and it’s something CEO Satya Nadella constantly talks about focusing on. “We’re going to give you, the user, control over your privacy and try to explain in a way that’s clear,” explains Belfiore. Microsoft is planning to create a single privacy page in Edge that will allow users to choose from three different levels: unrestricted, balanced, and strict. All three are designed to block malicious trackers on the web, but the level of ad tracking will vary a lot across each mode. Unrestricted is designed to allow trackers from all sites, with personalized ads. Balanced mode, which should be the default, blocks trackers from sites you haven’t visited yet, meaning you’ll see fewer ads based on sites you’ve visited. The most aggressive tracking prevention will be found under the strict control, which blocks all trackers, meaning you won’t see ads tracking you around the web at all. The strict mode is aggressive, which does mean some websites might break because of these trackers being blocked. Microsoft’s implementation is “specific to ad trackers” and not designed to block all ad content, explains Belfiore. That means that it’s similar to third-party extensions like Ghostery, but it won’t block all of the ad elements you see on a page. Microsoft is even adding strict tracking prevention to its incognito mode, so it’s clear that if you use that mode, then nothing will be tracked. The software giant still hasn’t figured out all of the exact details on its tracking prevention. “We have some initial ideas that we think are pretty good,” admits Belfiore. “We like this general approach, but there’s a lot of detail.” It’s not clear when all of these new Edge features will be available, but Microsoft is announcing them today as work has begun on all of these new features, and parts of them could show up in Chromium commits and trigger questions for the company. If you’re testing Edge Canary, then you’ll be among the first to try out any of these new features, even if Microsoft hides them behind a settings flag.

I went for a long hike recently, up a steep mountain trail, excited to enjoy some crisp autumn air and beautiful fall foliage. In one pocket I had my smartphone. In another, I had a drone, the new DJI Mavic Pro. This was a pretty revelatory experience. Normally bringing along a drone means carrying at least a backpack, and most of the time a very bulky backpack. Now I was carrying a drone that was light enough I could forget it was there, slipped into the ordinary breast pocket of my Eddie Bauer vest. There have been plenty of small drones on the market before the Mavic. Hardly a week goes by without a new company claiming they have created the world’s smallest camera drone, smallest 4K drone, smallest drone with live-streaming video. My kids love to play with quadcopters that fit in the palm of your hand. But in the past using a small drone typically meant sacrificing camera quality, flight range, battery life, and advanced features. The Mavic Pro, which retails for $999, changes all of that. It’s definitely one of the most portable drones on the market right now, but it manages to deliver imagery, battery life, range, and autonomous intelligence that match up to what you get from drones more than twice its size. It feels like moving from the desktop PC era into the age of laptops, an evolutionary shift that allows the Mavic Pro to be a casual, everyday device in a way that no drone has been before. The Mavic Pro’s small stature has a lot to do with its clever design. It has four wings that fold underneath and to its sides, and its rotors can be folded in half, allowing them to slip right alongside the belly and back of the drone. This form factor conveys the added perk of allowing you to keep the rotors on at all times, instead of having to attach and remove them for transport as you do with most serious camera drones. Ready to fly with rotors and battery, the whole unit still weighs just over one and half pounds. The Mavic’s remote is also much smaller than the competition, about the size of an iPhone 6. Unlike DJI’s previous remotes, this one has a small LCD screen in the center, allowing you to fly the drone without DJI’s app while still getting all the basic telemetry you need to navigate safely. The screen gives you distance, altitude, and direction, and pings you with a little haptic buzz and warning message if the drone senses high winds or gets too far from your home point. In another first for a DJI drone, the Mavic can be flown without a remote at all. You toggle a little switch on the body of the drone to switch from radio control mode to Wi-Fi. Connect your mobile device to the Mavic’s Wi-Fi network and you can use the DJI Go app to pilot the drone. Using it this way definitely takes away a lot of the fine-grained control you get when piloting with a remote, and switching from RC to Wi-Fi also cuts way back on your range. But it’s a nice option to have for short-range flights when you want to carry even less gear. The third and most satisfying option for piloting the Mavic Pro is to combine the remote with your phone. The bottom of the remote unfolds so you can plug in your phone. Unlike the Phantom remote the connector cable for your phone fits into the housing of the Mavic remote, giving you one less piece of gear to worry about. Your phone provides the live video feed and access to the more complex autonomous modes and camera settings. The remote, meanwhile, provides much more fine-grained control over flight than the mobile app. Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge The Mavic Pro has a completely different form factor than DJI’s flagship drone, the Phantom. But when it comes to the components and software, the two have a lot in common. They share the same downward-facing optical flow sensors, allowing the drone to see the ground below it. Using that image, the Mavic Pro works to stabilize itself, and it’s rock solid, even in mild winds, when you take your hands off the controller and let it hover. Optical flow also allows the Mavic Pro to hold its position indoors when it doesn’t have a GPS signal. The Mavic even has a new "Tripod Mode" that is optimized for flying indoors or in tight conditions. All the tools of DJI’s larger Phantom The camera and gimbal are very similar to what you find on the Phantom, only smaller. The camera uses the same sensor, shooting 4K video and 12 megapixel stills. The only difference is that the Mavic Pro doesn’t have as wide a field of view as the Phantom. The Mavic Pro does have the same forward-facing optical sensors as the Phantom 4, though, allowing it to detect obstacles and autonomously avoid crashes. It can also use its computer vision for gesture control. Wave your arms to have the drone lock onto you and frame your face with your hands to have it snap a photograph. The Mavic’s camera system is a bit different than what you find on the Phantom in terms of how it treats focus. Phantom drones focus automatically, ensuring what you shoot will look good, but preventing you from tightening in on a particular subject inside of a broader landscape. The Mavic requires you to choose your subject. This led to some initial reviews criticizing Mavic footage as muddy and blurred. In our testing, so long as you remembered to snap focus during your shot, the footage from the Mavic was as crisp and smooth as what you get from DJI’s larger drones. There are some drawbacks to the Mavic’s small size when comparing it with a larger drone like the DJI Phantom 4. When unfolded into its flying position it has only short legs keeping its belly off the ground. That means you don’t have a lot of clearance during take off and landing and will want to avoid tall grass that a Phantom’s rotors would easily pass over. The longest range of any consumer drone Despite its smaller size, the Mavic Pro delivers a top speed of 40 miles per hour and a promises a clear video stream from up to 7 kilometers away, besting the transmission range of its bigger sibling. That incredible range comes with a caveat, however. The Mavic Pro has smaller rotors and motors, something you need to stay aware of when pushing it to its limits. During testing I got caught up in a beautiful shot, following a sailboat down the Hudson River. A warning popped up on my screen advising me that strong winds were present, and that I should plan my flight accordingly. But the drone was handling well and my video was smooth, so I dismissed it. My tiny flying camera was two kilometers from where I was standing when it stopped, having reached the maximum range I had approved in my settings. I was, at this moment, in love with my new DJI Mavic Pro drone. The video stream at this distance was still incredibly smooth and clear. The drone responded without hesitation to my commands. The problem started when I decided to come home. In hindsight I should have heeded the wind warning, recognizing that the sailboat speeding along the Hudson was taking advantage of a strong, continuous breeze. My Mavic Pro began making its way home under my control, but it seemed to be moving in slow motion. It crept one meter closer, than two meters, while my battery meter dipped under 10 minutes remaining.