Month: January 2022

Enlarge / The 2021 12.9-inch iPad Pro. (credit: Samuel Axon)

Today, Apple released several new operating system updates to the public: iOS 15.3, iPadOS 15.3, macOS Monterey 12.2, watchOS 8.4, tvOS 15.3, and HomePod Software 15.3.

The update notes for these releases are some of the leanest I’ve seen. iOS, iPadOS, and macOS simply state that the update “includes bug fixes and security updates” and is “recommended for all users.”

iOS and iPadOS 15.3 do not add any new user-facing features. Rather, they fix several key security issues. The most notable is a previously reported Safari vulnerability that allowed websites that use the common IndexedDB API to access the names of databases from other websites. Note that this also affected other browsers on iOS and not just Safari (that’s because all iOS web browsers must use WebKit). macOS 12.2 fixes the same bug in the desktop version of Safari. (Unlike iOS, there are macOS web browsers that were not affected.)

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  The Huawei P50 Pro in several colors.

It’s time for a wellness check on Huawei, everyone’s favorite beat-up Chinese smartphone vendor. The company is dealing with all sorts of export restrictions and plummeting market share, but it’s somehow still shipping phones and is in a very weird place when it comes Android. The company’s latest devices are the Huawei P50 Pro and P50 Pocket, which are finally getting a wider international release after launching in China earlier.

With this international launch, Huawei is positioning the P50 Pro and P50 Pocket as a pair of devices. The P50 Pro is a regular old slab phone, while the P50 Pocket is a flip-phone-style foldable. When we reviewed Samsung’s foldable flip phone, the Galaxy Z Flip, our main takeaway was that it felt exactly like a regular smartphone when open, and it just folded in half as a neat gimmick. Huawei is now offering two similar phones—one that folds in half and one that doesn’t. It would be like Samsung selling the Galaxy S21 and Galaxy Z Flip 3 next to each other.

That’s not to say the phones are the same sizes. The P50 Pro is a 6.6-inch device (158.8×72.8×8.5 mm) and costs €1,199 (~$1,353) while the Pocket is 6.9-inches (170×75.5×7.2 mm) and costs €1,299 (~$1,465). Huawei says the two phones will be available in “key markets across Asia Pacific, the Middle East & Africa, Europe, and Latin America.”

Enlarge / A PC running Windows 11. (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft will be tending to some of the unfinished parts of Windows 11 in an update next month, according to a blog post by Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay. Foremost among the new features will be a public preview for Android apps running in Windows, a feature Microsoft promoted when it announced Windows 11 back in June 2021.

Microsoft also called out a few other areas of improvement in the post: redesigns for the Notepad and Media Player apps, taskbar improvements, a universal call mute and unmute button, “easier window sharing,” and adding the weather directly to the taskbar instead of keeping it in a widget.

Most of these updates have already been available for Windows Insiders in the Beta and Dev channels for a while, so you can read our preview coverage (for Notepad, taskbar changes, and lots of miscellaneous bits and pieces) to get a good sense of what things will look like. It’s possible that we’ll see changes that Microsoft hasn’t made public yet, but major changes are unlikely to skip the preview channels before being widely released. 

Enlarge / Pokémon Legends: Arceus is as close as we’ve ever gotten to an open-world Pokémon game. (credit: Nintendo)

Last year’s by-the-numbers Pokémon Diamond and Pearl remakes did even less than most Pokémon games to spruce up and modernize the series’ decades-old formula. That’s understandable for a remake of a 2006 Nintendo DS game, but the games were still disappointing follow-ups to the more adventurous Sword and Shield.

The good news is that if you’ve been waiting for Game Freak to really shake up Pokémon‘s gameplay without totally burning it to the ground and starting from scratch, Pokémon Legends: Arceus is the game you’ve been waiting for. Part Pokémon and part Breath of the Wild, Legends takes the free-roaming “Wild Area” concept from Sword and Shield and updates the series’ catching and battling mechanics to match.

That’s not to say it’s a perfect fusion of those disparate elements. Its mission-based structure gets pretty fetch quest-y, it leans heavily on an over-familiar roster of existing Pokémon, and the aging Switch hardware sometimes struggles to make it look good, especially when docked. But despite those problems, the whole package works together surprisingly well, and it makes the Pokémon feel fresher than it has in quite a while.