Gadgets & Tech – Spoken Edition

Some folks have started to take exception to companies that rely on people’s nostalgia to peddle their tech. But that ain’t stopping Nokia. Last year at MWC, Nokia (which isn’t really Nokia anymore, but HMD Global) revived it’s iconic brick phone, the3310. But for 2018, Nokia is going one step further by bringing back its legendary banana phone, the Nokia 8110. For those who don’t remember, the 8110 was the original slider phone.

Just a couple days before the world’s biggest smartphone convention kicks off in Barcelona, Google is rolling out updates for a number of its most interesting Android features. The first of which is Google Lens, which will finally be available inside the Google Photos app over the new few weeks to all English-language Android users and anyone using the iPhone version of Photos. Lens was originally announced at Google I/O 2017, but until now, it was a feature exclusive to Pixel phones.

Working in a similar fashion to 3D-printing pens, but without the futile exasperation of actually trying to make 3D objects, Crayola’s new Crayon Melter turns colorful sticks of wax into a thick, goopy, ink that lets kids write on almost any surface imaginable.

Asteroid mining is about more than just heading up into space and bringing back a rock full of platinum—you actually need to land something on just the right asteroid. Falcon Heavy, the world’s most powerful rocket launched by Elon Musk-led SpaceX two weeks ago, may have changed the game, says one astronomer.

Headlines are blaring: “Trump moves to ban bump stocks,” and gun enthusiasts are wasting no time stockpiling for the apocalypse. Slide Fire, the primary manufacturer of the accessory that effectively turns a semi-automatic weapon into a machine gun, has been hit with a flood of traffic and its website is currently down.

Kids today want more from social technology than seeing something new—they want a new way of seeing themselves. Snap and Instagram’s augmented reality lenses transform users into puppies, fairies, monsters, Wonder Woman, storied Jamaican singer-songwriters, and the like. It’s as if there’s a vibrant but invisible world all around you that you need a smartphone to see.

The HPV vaccine is a fantastic drug that prevents everything from cervical cancer in women to dick cancer in men. But a new study from the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association has found that vaccination rates for American teenagers is still tragically low. Just 29 percent of 13-year-olds in the US have received the first round of the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine, based on Blue Cross Blue Shield’s numbers. The vaccine is ideally given in three different jabs over the course of six months.

This week, we finally got our first hands-on look at the long-promised “Ocean Depths” color scheme of the Essential phone. Despite looking very much green in promotional photos, however, the device now appears quite blue.

While many bugs are relatively benign, often getting patched before the user knows anything is wrong, the latest plague to hit Apple devices is already wreaking havoc on internet. The issue, which has become known as the Telugu bug, gives people the ability to crash a wide range of iPhone, Mac, and iPad apps just by sending a single character from the third most spoken language in India.

The seemingly endless string of iOS bugs is a sickness that just won’t go away. Just a month ago, people discovered that a strange hyperlink could cause Messages to crash. And while that issue has been patched, a new bug has appeared that can wreck Messages, along with a number of other major apps.