Google Play Music has been the official Google music streaming service for years, and it’s just hit a landmark figure on the Play Store.
The music app has reached five billion downloads on the Play Store, according to Android Police. This reportedly makes it the sixth app to cross this mark, following Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Search, and YouTube.
It’s worth noting that all these apps are pre-installed on Android devices, boosting the listed download figures in the process.
Editor's Pick
10 best music streaming apps and music streaming services for Android!
Music streaming has grown up tremendously since its inception and is now among the best ways to listen to music. Many streaming services let you listen for free, which has helped curb the need for …
Unfortunately, this could be the apex of Google Play Music’s growth, as Google will pre-install YouTube Music instead of Play Music on future Android phones. Google confirmed the news on the YouTube blog last month, saying all new devices launching with Android 10 and Android Pie will offer the app out of the box.
Hopefully Google keeps Play Music around until YouTube Music achieves feature parity at the very least. Right now, the new app lacks Play Music’s cloud locker functionality, the ability to halt autoplay, and sleep timer functionality, to name a few features.
What would it take for you to use YouTube Music? Let us know in the comments!
A device used by Samsung to launch a Cara Delevingne selfie into space has apparently made a dramatic return to Earth. Nancy Mumby-Welke of Gratiot County, Michigan, heard a loud crash outside her farmland home this weekend and discovered a large object in her backyard. “Unbelievable look what just fell out of the sky and 911 is baffled and it’s caught up in our tree,” she posted to Facebook along with a photo.
“We realized it had fallen from the sky,” Mumby-Welke told NBC News. “It looked like a satellite.” The device carried both a Samsung logo and that of South Dakota-based high-altitude balloon manufacturer Raven Industries, which eventually came to collect the crashed apparatus.
“No injuries occurred and the balloon was subsequently retrieved,” Samsung said to NBC. “We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.” The company claims the landing was “planned” and happened in a “selected rural area.”
As PR stunts go, this one was over the top even by Samsung’s standards. The “SpaceSelfie” program involved a photo of Cara Delevingne that was taken on a Galaxy S10 Plus and was supposedly “the world’s first selfie sent to space.” Users could then upload their own photos to a website for a chance to see them displayed on the screen of a Galaxy S10 5G on board the balloon.
“Our relentless pioneering spirit continues to show that amazing things happen on Samsung screens – even from the stratosphere.” Samsung Europe CMO Benjamin Braun said at the launch event. “Our ethos is Do What You Can’t and the Samsung SpaceSelfie is just that. We continually break the boundaries of what is possible with innovation and tonight’s SpaceSelfie launch is no different.”
October is almost over, and with a few days remaining, it’s possible an AirPods Pro launch still materializes. After all, it was reported that the newly designed wireless earphones would be unveiled later this month, with the product expected to arrive with an expensive price tag. According to Ben Geskin, who has revealed some interesting rumors concerning the iPhone 12’s design has made an important revelation, so let us check out these details right away.
It’s Unclear if Apple Will Host a Proper Event to Showcase the AirPods Pro Launch
Ben Geskin, who is widely known for creating unique concept renders of various smartphones and other machines believes that the AirPods Pro launch is expected to take place next week. Of course, some readers might be confused with the terms ‘this week’ primarily due to different time zones. Geskin didn’t reveal the date of the rumored launch, no doubt creating additional confusion in the process.
AirPods Pro will be shown next week on Tuesday / Wednesday at an event / session with journalists at Apple's local offices pic.twitter.com/HFLqpHAGkg
Thankfully, some people participating in the Twitter thread stated that Geskin’s currently resides in Latvia, and during the time he posted the tweet, it was still a Sunday. Using these facts, this immediately translates into the unveiling happening during the last few days of October and not during the first week of November. According to Geskin, the AirPods Pro launch will either take place on Tuesday or Wednesday (launch might not be held on Wednesday since Apple will release its Q4 2019 financial results), with the press possibly being debriefed about the product at Apple’s local offices.
Did the sources say anything about MacBook Pro 16? Also confirm if it's 29/30th Oct. or 5/6th Nov?
Hopefully, the AirPods Pro launch means we’ll get to see the wireless earphones in various color options, as reported earlier. Sadly, we’ve only seen an alleged white colored case so far, so let us hope Apple introduces more finishes in the near future.
He lives in Latvia, it’s still Sunday in where he lives, so he probably meant next week as in the week of October 28th.
Will the AirPods Pro Features Justify Its Pricing?
To bring you up to speed, previously leaked code found in iOS 13.2 beta states the AirPods Pro launch should be accompanied with features like active noise cancellation, as well as rubber tips that block out ambient sound for an improved audio experience. We’re also hoping that this ‘new design’ is accompanied with an improved battery life statistic, otherwise, the rumored $260 price might appear as a ripoff to a lot of customers.
Like always, we recommend that you treat this info with a pinch of salt for now, and we’ll be back with more updates for you in the future. Are you looking forward to an AirPods Pro launch during the last few days of October? Let us know by commenting below.
DETROIT - A pseudo Samsung space satellite fell from the sky Saturday morning in a rural Michigan neighborhood, according to the Morning Sun.
Nancy Welke heard the crash around 8:45 a.m., just before she and her husband Dan were going to let their horses out, the Gratiot County Herald reported.
According to Gratiot Central Dispatch officials, the fire department had the roadway where the satellite fell closed due to a large object caught in live power lines. The road reopened 30 minutes later.
"Unbelievable. Look what just fell out of the sky and 911 is baffled and it's caught up in our tree," Welke said in a post on Facebook.
In an article from Samsung Newsroom U.K., the Samsung SpaceSelfie is a project designed for their consumers to get their pictures in space.
'HERstory in the making': Two female astronauts made history in NASA’s first all-female spacewalk
"With over 200 hours at 65,000 feet above the earth, the S10 5G will showcase the strength of Samsung’s innovations and how it continues to design products that make what was previously impossible, possible," according to the article.
According to an email statement from Samsung, the landing was planned, and no injuries occurred Saturday when the "Samsung Europe's SpaceSelfie balloon" landed.
“Earlier today, Samsung Europe's SpaceSelfie balloon came back down to earth. During this planned descent of the balloon to land in the U.S., weather conditions resulted in an early soft landing in a selected rural area," according to the Samsung statement.
"We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”
The new space race: Amazon, SpaceX compete to bring internet to world's most remote places
DETROIT - A pseudo Samsung space satellite fell from the sky Saturday morning in a rural Michigan neighborhood, according to the Morning Sun.
Nancy Welke heard the crash around 8:45 a.m., just before she and her husband Dan were going to let their horses out, the Gratiot County Herald reported.
According to Gratiot Central Dispatch officials, the fire department had the roadway where the satellite fell closed due to a large object caught in live power lines. The road reopened 30 minutes later.
"Unbelievable. Look what just fell out of the sky and 911 is baffled and it's caught up in our tree," Welke said in a post on Facebook.
In an article from Samsung Newsroom U.K., the Samsung SpaceSelfie is a project designed for their consumers to get their pictures in space.
'HERstory in the making': Two female astronauts made history in NASA’s first all-female spacewalk
"With over 200 hours at 65,000 feet above the earth, the S10 5G will showcase the strength of Samsung’s innovations and how it continues to design products that make what was previously impossible, possible," according to the article.
According to an email statement from Samsung, the landing was planned, and no injuries occurred Saturday when the "Samsung Europe's SpaceSelfie balloon" landed.
“Earlier today, Samsung Europe's SpaceSelfie balloon came back down to earth. During this planned descent of the balloon to land in the U.S., weather conditions resulted in an early soft landing in a selected rural area," according to the Samsung statement.
"We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.”
The new space race: Amazon, SpaceX compete to bring internet to world's most remote places
Your Amazon Echo is your go-to assistant for when you need to turn on the lights, set an alarm or even when you lose your phone in the couch cushions. But Alexa has so many underutilized skills that some people don't think to use. For example, did you know you can actually bring Alexa with you in the car? Or that Alexa can say whatever you want it to?
Most of these require little setup and are pretty simple to use. Read on to find out these six things you haven't tried with your Amazon Echo (See deal) yet and how to get started.
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Create custom Alexa responses
You've probably noticed that Alexa won't answer certain commands, like if you ask it to say a curse word or something else inappropriate. However, you can certainly get Alexa to say whatever you want by creating custom responses. For example, you can set it up to where if you ask Alexa who has the best smile, it can say "You, of course."
You'll need to go to Amazon's Blueprints page, select Custom Q&A and click Make Your Own. From here, you can create all of the questions and responses for Alexa to answer however you want.
Customize Alexa responses.
Screenshot by Katie Conner/CNET
Use it as a speaker for your TV
It can be annoying when you're watching a movie that's extremely quiet and you have to turn way up the volume on your TV to hear. Fortunately, you can use your Amazon Echo as a speaker for your TV. It's super convenient because you can place it on the side table when you really can't hear what's happening on the show.
Your TV will need to have Bluetooth capabilities to connect to your Echo device (or you can connect your Fire TV to your Echo). Place your Echo speaker next to your TV and say "Alexa, connect." Alexa will start checking for devices to connect to -- at this point, you'll need to navigate to the Bluetooth settings on your TV to find the Echo speaker. Next, you'll need to find the sound settings on your TV and change the sound output to your Echo.
Place the Echo speaker next to your smart TV to connect.
David Katzmaier / CNET
Put Alexa in your car
Alexa is a great assistant for all of your smart home needs, but did you know you can also use it in your car? It'll allow you to be hands-free while driving rather than constantly pressing buttons all over your dash, and there's a couple of ways you can do it. If you've already got an Echo Dot (See deal), you can plug it into your car using a USB charger. However, you'll have to connect it to your phone's hotspot for it to work. Then you can pair it to your car's stereo using Bluetooth.
Or, you can choose the Amazon Echo Auto route, the newest way to take Alexa with you in the car. It has the same capabilities as an Echo Dot, but it's designed to use in the car. You can plug it into a USB charger port or a lighter port (depending on what your car has). Be aware that you'll also have to use your mobile data to power the Echo Auto device.
Echo Auto works as your assistant in the car.
Tyler Lizenby/CNET
Alexa Cast to other Echo devices
It happens often -- you've been listening to your favorite playlist in your car, but now you're home and you want to continue listening on your Echo device. You can use Alexa Cast to transfer the music from your phone to your speaker so you can keep playing your favorite tunes.
From the Amazon Music app on your phone, select the playlist you want to listen to. Pull up the music controls and tap the button on the lower right side of your screen. Then select which Echo speaker you'd like to cast to.
Now playing:Watch this:
Amazon Echo Studio and new Echo Dot are big on sound...
2:09
Create a to-do list
How many times have you remembered you need to grab avocados at the grocery or need to pay a bill, but completely forgot to write it down? Instead of telling yourself you'll remember or scrambling to find a pen and paper, just create a to-do list with Alexa. Say "Alexa, create a list" to get started. You'll want to name your lists to keep them organized and when you're finished, you can access them from the Alexa app or one of your Echo devices.
Alexa can remember your to-do lists.
Tyler Lizenby/CNET
Make a decision with heads or tails
Having a hard time deciding between which restaurant you want to go to on Friday evening? Let Alexa make the decision for you. You'll need to download a skill, like Heads or Tails, in the Alexa app. Here's how it works -- decide which place will be heads and which will be tails. For example, that cool new pizza restaurant is heads and the Sushi bar is tails. Then say "Alexa, ask Heads or Tails to flip a coin." If it says heads, you're eating pizza, and if it says tails, Sushi it is.
A festival circuit trailer for Amazon's The Vast of Night.
AUSTIN, Texas—Everyone kinda, sorta knows the story of The Vast of Night before they even hear of this movie. Filmmaker Andrew Patterson readily admits he partially based his debut feature on a real-life event—the 1965 Kecksburg incident—and even the initial idea that led him to researching Kecksburg struck Patterson as familiar. “I have a document in my phone of three or four dozen single line movie ideas,” he told Ars. “This one said, ‘1950s, black and white, New Mexico, UFO film.’”
But The Vast of Night ultimately doesn’t hinge on how its plot plays out. This small budget, tightly scoped sci-fi film has wowed festival audiences enough to attract Amazon money largely on its spectacle—individual images you’d gladly frame for the office wall, dialogue that draws you in no matter the subject, sonic flourishes that stick with you long after the credits roll. Talking to the filmmaker after a recent Fantastic Fest screening, it becomes hard to shake the feeling he’ll be managing a much larger studio budget of his choosing in the very near future.
“We knew we were working in a genre that was shop-worn, nothing new,” Patterson says. “We wanted to let people know, ‘OK this is an abduction in New Mexico—we know this story, you know this story. How can we find a way in and do something special, to make something new?' I wanted to make it like the films I enjoy, which are usually about people learning about each other, their dynamics and relationships. So, OK, I want to start this like it’s a Richard Linklater movie… then we get side-swiped into something extraordinary.”
Fay (Sierra McCormick) is a go-getter student who bought a tape recorder and works the switchboard.
Amazon / YouTube
Everett (Jake Horowitz) is a radio DJ willing to train Fay on interviewing techniques. (He has Rivers Cuomo style crossed with McConaughey speech.)
Fantastic Fest / Fons PR
Whitney, Texas is pretty stunning when viewed through the right lens (it plays Cayuga, New Mexico in the 1950s in this film)
Amazon / YouTube
The Vast of Night has its period pieces down pat, including some delightful classic cars and driving style.
Amazon / YouTube
This is very much not like the modern NBA game, but 1950s New Mexico High School basketball rivalries bring all the townspeople together.
Amazon / YouTube
The current trailer's official title image...
Amazon / YouTube
...but the film impressed enough people in Austin, Texas to get the Mondo treatment during Fantastic Fest 2019.
Fantastic Fest / Fons PR / Mondo
Midwestern maker mojo
Patterson has worked as a videographer and amateur filmmaker around Oklahoma City for years, partially financing The Vast of Night from funds gained through shooting Oklahoma City Thunder promotional videos. All those reps have evidently built an incredible technical base for this first-time filmmaker. It may have taken four years to go from script to screen, but the craftsmanship behind this film only grows more impressive (and becomes more glaringly obvious) as the story unfolds.
To start, The Vast of Night’s period touches appear seamless but took a lot of care. Basketball in the 1950s, for instance, has no three-point line or modern backboards, and the game didn’t feature endless pick-and-roll. So for the big rivalry game that would occupy most of the town in this story, Patterson and co. scoured Oklahoma and Texas until they found a gym in Whitney, Texas that could look the part. “We went and counted gyms, looked at 400 or so,” he says. “We sanded the floor, got rid of the three-point line—and that’s a $20,000 cost, but I’m glad we did it. I’m enough of a sports guy that if I saw that and glass backboards, c’mon.”
TheVast of Night team took the same obsessive approach toward more central aspects of the film like the radio station and switchboard, too. (Patterson initially toyed with the idea of a stage play, and those locales would’ve been two of three main sets.) To help these young actors better sink into the world and roles, Patterson wanted to make sure the switchboards used for the film could be actually used. They called up the Oklahoma City Museum of Telephone History and connected with passionate switchboard collectors in the area, eventually finding four functional switchboards and an enthusiast willing to modify them for 2019. “He got under the hood and got them functioning again, then he built a system where you can make calls,” Patterson says. “You could pick up your cell phone, call the box, and then [Sierra McCormick, who plays Fay] could hear you in her headphones.”
The old-school looking radio station required even more small film ingenuity. The team made a set for the interior of the station and hosted it next to the basketball court at the Whitney gym… because they didn’t actually have permission to go into a radio station to film. “We knew they were going to bulldoze [the building for the town radio station] a month later, and the company had said, ‘Yeah you’re good to use it,’” Patterson recalls. “So we put that tower on top, those call letters in front, and then they said, ‘We’re not comfortable with this, we’re not going to sign off.’ And then we went and shot it—it’s in the movie. The production design team did a lot of work. Luckily it’s night, so we got away with murder. ‘There’s a neon sign in the distance—someone throw some duvetyne over it. Do we have permission? No. OK, no one’s awake, go do it.’ That way we could keep our dirty little secret—there’s a Subway five feet away.”
Listing image by Amazon / YouTube
The Vast of Night offers many other examples of clever creative decisions: with radio being such a prominent part of the main character, sometimes the screen simply goes black to mimic the listener’s experience. The same philosophy gets applied later to a crucial car ride. And the film has the audacity to pivot twice on what feels like a rarity, a big ol’ monologue (~10 minutes) where the visuals simply get more and more claustrophobic and linger only on the speaker or listener. It totally works in that Mindhunter-sort of way, ultimately two people talking becoming the most riveting thing in a story where way more frenetic things happen.
“It’s funny you mention Mindhunter—this wasn’t Mindhunter, because we started before that. But it was Zodiac,” Patterson says when discussing his inspiration for these scenes. “There’s a phone call where the guys get a call at the TV station, and they think it’s the killer, so they take it. I remember thinking, ‘This is cool. I’d love to hang a movie on something similar to that.’.. So you would never go to a movie to intentionally sit with Mabel [a seemingly minor female character in her 70s or 80s] for 12 minutes in this old lady’s living room. How is that going to happen? But if you do it right, you get there because the audience is brought along through a film’s values system that creates it.”
Patterson’s filmmaking abilities will most floor audiences not during the film’s perhaps guessable (though still visually gripping) conclusion, but during one mid-film sequence where it starts to feel like something unusual may be happening this night.
That way we could keep our dirty little secret—there’s a Subway five feet away.
As radio DJ Everett prepares to clear the lane and allow a caller to discuss his past experience with unusual military assignments uninterrupted on-air, the camera stops following our two main characters for the first time. Instead, this town suddenly appears from a low, almost menacing angle, and full orchestration kicks in. It feels like viewers have been put in a small vehicle that starts quickly casing the entire place, traveling the distance between radio station, switchboard house, and basketball gym at superhuman speed just to get the lay of the land. Patterson says he’s been asked about this sequence so much during The Vast of Night’s festival run that he’ll be putting out a small behind-the-scenes featurette on its making.
“I knew what it’d take to make the idea work,” Patterson admits. ”The main technology we used was new at the time, but we’d been using it for three years—it was old to us: a Gimbal, early Movi tech that can offset the bouncing of your camera. But that doesn’t explain how you can get a camera going 35mph down a street through a field over gravel and then to this guy’s backyard.
“It takes multiple departments—grip and electric, camera and the VFX team. And the actual tracking isn’t moving geographically; if you Google Maps the shot you’d be, ‘Huh, that’s 20 miles from here.’ But the shooting of it is 100% practical. There is not one moment where some world is invented in a computer, and we flew the camera through it. It’s a mixture of go karts, handoffs, bungee cords, and cranes, and it was mapped out months in advance.”
In this alternate trailer for the festival circuit, you get a sense of Patterson's tracking shot described above.
Familiar but fun
Visually interesting and stunning films can be worthwhile even if the story becomes secondary at some point (cough, cough The Lighthouse or Roma), but Patterson backs up his technical abilities with a story that keeps propelling you forward even if it feels familiar. McCormick and Jake Horowitz (Everett) both deliver solid performances, swapping roles toward the end even in a Ripley-sort of way. And the film openly winks toward Twilight Zone-ish inspirations while delivering on the kind of promise such a move presents; this becomes a piece of sci-fi that allows an audience to find deeper societal meanings about today through the lens of sci-fi-tinged yesteryear.
As a journalist, for instance, I saw the idea of pursuing the truth at all costs bubbling up again and again—Everett and Fay first interact as the former trains the latter on basic interviewing skills, and throughout the film they’re drawn deeper and deeper into the incident out of a desire to find out what’s real and inform others. Without spoiling anything, one of the film’s high points seems to lean into why that would be important in modern times through a monologue:
I think they like people alone; they talk to people with some kind of advanced radio in their sleep… I think at the lowest level, they send people on errands, play with people’s minds. They sway people to do things, think certain ways, so we stay in conflict and focused on ourselves, so we’re always cleaning house, losing weight, or dressing up for other people. I think they get inside our heads and make us do destructive things like drink or overeat. I've seen smart people go mad and good people go bad. At the highest level, I think they make nations going to war, things that make no sense. And I think no one knows they’re being affected. We all work out other reasons to justify our actions, but free will is impossible with them up there.
But Patterson says that didn’t explicitly come across his mind while honing the script—the real Kecksburg incident involved a local radio broadcaster, so The Vast of Night did, too. Instead, he sees this observation as an indication that his debut film hashit its mark. “Good films will be about something else depending on the era they’re watched in. They can kind of meander through time,” he says, citing a recent Lawrence of Arabia rewatch that brought the film’s LGBTQ undertones to his attention. “So I hope we made a movie that in 40 years is about the definition of a family or in 30 years is about something else.”
The Vast of Night continues to play the festival circuit in 2019. Upcoming screenings can be found on the film’s Facebook page, but Amazon intends to release the film in theaters and on Amazon Prime in 2020.
