Category: TECHNOLOGY & INTERNET

La realidad es que los teléfonos inteligentes alcanzaron punto máximo hace ya algunos años.

Después de tantos avances, las computadoras miniatura han alcanzado velocidades increíbles, sus pantallas se han vuelto más grandes y brillantes y sus cámaras producen imágenes que logran que los fotógrafos aficionados parezcan magos.

El problema con tanta innovación genial es que las actualizaciones ahora son tan iterativas que se ha vuelto difícil saber qué escribir sobre ellas cada año. Ese es especialmente el caso del Apple iphone 13 de Apple, que podría ser la actualización más modesta del Iphone hasta la fecha.

El Apple iphone más nuevo es solo diez por ciento más rápido que los modelos del año pasado (para tener contexto, en 2015, el Apple iphone 6S fue más del 70 por ciento más rápido que su predecesor, el Apple iphone 6). Su característica más llamativa, una mayor “tasa de actualización” de la pantalla en los modelos superiores a los 1000 dólares, hace que el movimiento luzca más fluido al abrir aplicaciones y deslizar texto. Eso está lejos de ser revolucionario.

Las innovaciones en las cámaras de los teléfonos también parece que se están estancando. Los ejecutivos de Apple describieron las cámaras del Iphone 13 como “dramáticamente más poderosas” y “las más avanzadas” del Iphone hasta el momento, en gran parte porque pueden capturar más luz y reducir el ruido. Pero según mis pruebas, las mejoras fueron mínimas.

Todo esto me hace afirmar que la actualización anual de los teléfonos, que compañías como Apple y Samsung promocionan con enormes eventos de mercadeo y campañas publicitarias a fin de aumentar sus ventas en la temporada de compras navideñas, se ha convertido en un espejismo de innovación tecnológica. En realidad, las actualizaciones son ahora una celebración del capitalismo en forma de un despiadado incrementalismo.

Las cámaras del Iphone 13 también tienen una nueva función de video clip bautizada como modo cinemático, que utiliza algoritmos para enfocar de forma automática los rostros —incluso los de mis perros— en movimiento. Me cuesta imaginar por qué una persona sin ambiciones de convertirse en cineasta usaría este modo, pero se me ocurren algunos usuarios de TikTok a quienes les podría gustar.

Brian X. Chen es columnista de tecnología de consumo. Reseña productos y escribe Tech Correct, una columna sobre cómo resolver problemas relacionados con la tecnología. Antes de unirse al Occasions en 2011, reporteó sobre Apple y la industria inalámbrica para Wired. @bxchen

Have you at any time missed capturing the great picture or movie possibility mainly because you got hung up having to your smartphone’s digital camera app in time? Your telephone probable has a range of shortcuts designed into its software program and settings, despite the fact that some may be less obvious than other folks. Here’s a speedy guideline to finding the speed you want so you do not overlook your minute.

Fast Digital camera

Have to have the digicam now? With most current iPhones managing iOS 14, just swipe remaining from the lock monitor to go straight to the camera app. Pressing the camera icon in the base-correct corner of the lock display also opens the application.

On quite a few Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy phones operating Android 11, you can open up your default digital camera application by swiftly pressing the phone’s power button or Side essential twice. (If not, open up the Android process options and verify the Gestures options, or affirm that Samsung’s Facet critical settings have the Speedy Start aspect enabled for the digicam.)

You can also notify your phone’s assistant to open the digicam for you. Android’s Google Assistant will even snap the shutter or get started recording on command, as will the Bixby assistant on Samsung Galaxy phones.

On telephones with many rear cameras (large-angle, conventional and telephoto), faucet the screen to opt for a person. Transfer the on-display screen zoom slider to modify the angle. Tap the display screen to get to the controls for exposure and aim.

Want to soar right into video clip recording? With an Apple iphone XR or later on, push and maintain the camera’s shutter button to document a QuickTake movie, or slide your finger to the appropriate to lock the movie recording so you can even now snap pics. On a Google Pixel and certain Samsung Galaxy phones, push and keep the shutter button to report without the need of owning to swipe to the Online video mode.

The Google Digicam application on modern Pixel phones delivers a zoom perform as nicely as selfie-certain options to illuminate your confront and smooth out appearances tap the arrow at the major of the camera display screen to open people options. Several of Samsung’s Galaxy telephones also incorporate possibilities in the digital camera settings for the color tone and angle of self-portraits.

On the latest Iphone designs, swipe the Camera app’s shutter button to the still left to start out snapping photographs on the Iphone X and earlier, prolonged-press the shutter button. Immediately after you release the button, open up the thumbnail picture in the camera roll, faucet the Select button and swipe by the pictures in the burst, deciding upon the kinds to maintain. Numerous Samsung Galaxy phones take burst photographs in a equivalent way by swiping the shutter button, but verify your manual for details.

Google doesn’t have a committed burst method for its Pixel phones working Android 11, but you can pull out preferred frames from a movie or movement picture. Open the Google Camera application, faucet the arrow at the major of the monitor and enable Motion Photos (which, like Apple’s Live Photos or Samsung’s Motion Picture, capture several frames of action when you press the shutter). Then faucet the Options icon, select Advanced and transform off “Social media depth characteristics.”

As the pandemic recedes across the place, a whole lot has transformed about how we perform and are living. Some of us are now organizing on returning to the place of work, while some others will keep on doing the job from household. Several of us will do each.

The computer software on our phones, which have been our most necessary instruments in the pandemic, is also evolving for this new actuality. The changes are courtesy of Apple and Google, which a short while ago unveiled their newest cellphone software program designed for this Covid-accelerated period of hybrid distant function.

This week, Apple confirmed iOS 15, its up coming running procedure for iPhones. The software program presents product homeowners new resources to attract boundaries for hybrid work, like a standing message that allows others know you are occupied before they message you. FaceTime, Apple’s videoconferencing software package, will also get its biggest growth considering the fact that its debut extra than a 10 years back. The assistance will last but not least be opened to non-Apple gadgets, such as Android telephones, and has been enhanced so movie sessions seem and audio far better.

Last month, Google launched Android 12, its most current operating procedure for mobile products. The firm targeted on streamlining the structure of its software to enable folks get their work performed additional proficiently, such as a menu of shortcuts to get to their most loved equipment a lot more rapidly.

To Carolina Milanesi, a shopper know-how analyst for Imaginative Strategies, the modifications in iOS 15 and Android 12 — primarily Apple’s device for placing electronic boundaries — reflect the way our lives and perform are shifting once again as we test to go away the pandemic behind.

“That minor prompt that states men and women really don’t want to be disturbed is going to be actually critical,” she said. “Maybe you’ll get ready your concept on the weekend, but you never strike send out right until Monday morning, so that way you really don’t press other people today to do the job on a weekend. It can take the stress absent.”

Apple and Google walked me by the highlights of their new mobile running methods, which also consist of new privateness controls and enhancements to cellular phone cameras. Both systems are established for launch this tumble.

Here’s what you need to know.

Apple and Google want you to be additional successful.

Stuck at household for most of the previous calendar year, many of us grew to become glued to our cell phone screens, chatting on video phone calls and messaging liked types amid doomscrolling classes. For some, that produced it come to feel difficult to keep focused on a solitary task.

Videoconferencing has come to be a ubiquitous interaction medium for business meetings, pleased hrs and yoga periods. Now Apple’s FaceTime is receiving a big revamp, with extra functions and the means to function with non-Apple units. These improvements place it much more on a par with Zoom, the No. 1 videoconferencing application.

Apple has built waves around the last number of years with equipment to protect person privateness, such as a button that permits Iphone owners to ask apps not to observe and share their routines with third events like marketers.

LURKING
How a Man or woman Became a Consumer
By Joanne McNeil

In her 1st book, “Lurking,” Joanne McNeil charts the historical past of the web by means of the ordeals of the consumers. These are not automatically the similar as men and women. Conflating the two, McNeil describes, “hides the ‘existence of two lessons of persons — developers and end users,’” as the artist Olia Lialina has put it.

The big difference: Builders establish and form the on the internet activities that consumers run all around in like rats in a maze. Consumers make their way via the huge world wide web trying to satisfy sure necessary wants. McNeil separates these behaviors — exploring, activism at the cost of security, privateness, id, local community, anonymity and visibility — into chapters, just about every speaking about the platforms and sites that serve them. McNeil maps out the history of the world-wide-web, from the 1st bulletin boards, to the early days of blogging, to the emergence of social platforms like Friendster and ultimately to the on the net environment we are living in these days, dominated by tech giants like Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Some customers are deeply nostalgic for particular platforms of the earlier. “Most shocking is how fondness for Myspace has developed as time passes,” McNeil writes. “It has occur to signify a certain instant of flexibility and drama on the web, especially to those people also youthful to recall it.” She offers the musician Kyunchi, who compares Myspace to Woodstock. It was a exclusive, exceptional place and if you weren’t there, you skipped it.

McNeil uses language that is incisive still poetic to capture thoughtful insights about the world-wide-web, like the insidiousness of these platforms’ monetization strategies: “The challenge with Instagram lies in how user id entwines with commerce.” Nor does she mince text when taking on one behemoth in individual. “I detest it,” she writes. “The company is one of the most significant issues in contemporary history, a digital cesspool that, whilst calamitous when it fails, is at its most perilous when it works as supposed. Facebook is an ant farm of humanity.”

At quite a few details, “Lurking” speaks to the powerlessness we people can from time to time feel on these platforms, how challenging it can be to remain in regulate. In 2011, having gotten her first Iphone, Winona Ryder advised Jimmy Fallon she was now “afraid of the world-wide-web,” the place she nervous that one day, “I’m going to be seeking to uncover out what motion picture is enjoying at what theater and then suddenly be a member of Al Qaeda.”

Usually the creator returns to the titular actions fundamental them all, which she defines as an “internet superpower,” a “real-daily life invisible cloak.” Through lurking, McNeil finds she “had handle in excess of my identification and I could opt for what areas of it I uncovered to other people.”

And stealth is, of study course, a natural reaction to considerably of the new dislike that has emerged on the net in our life span. “Cyberspace did not submerge our identities less than a common oneness of ‘user,’” McNeil writes. “Rather, the internet heightened our recognition of id,” and, as she warns in the chapter entitled “Clash,” when specific identities are confronted with mass belief units like Gamergate and correct-wing extremism, distress, outrage and even trauma can ensue.

Tempting as it is to blame the internet’s rampant hostility on a couple negative end users, McNeil rather places the onus on “systems, buildings and abstract processes like ‘design.’” In any other case, “when users are scapegoated, Silicon Valley is left off the hook.”

The media is no support, either, its “delayed — and generally misplaced — concerns about technology” obtaining precipitated “an infinite ping-pong of area improvements and ways,” relatively than a a lot-wanted “focus on structural improvements like decommodification and decentralization to enact a improved web.”

“Lurking” does not just spotlight the internet’s complications, it also voices her hope for an alternate foreseeable future. In her last chapter, titled “Accountability,” McNeil compares a healthier internet to a “public park: a house for all, a gain to absolutely everyone a house one can enter or leave, and go away without a trace.” Or probably the internet really should be a lot more like a library, “a civic and unbiased body … guided by ideas of justice, legal rights and human dignity,” exactly where “everyone is welcome … just for staying.”

Ultimately, severing our tethers to these platforms needs opting out, an more and more complicated activity as the earth turns into at any time a lot more related. Perhaps “Twitter’s bard” @Dril stated it finest, typo and all: “who the [expletive] is scraeming ‘LOG OFF’ at my house. demonstrate on your own, coward. i will under no circumstances log off.”