Tag Archives: 4K

Weekly output: ATSC 3.0, password managers, AT&T TV, ShowStoppers TV, CDA 230, CES recap, 8K TV, TV tech at CES (x2)

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Although my Google Maps timeline shows no evidence of CES having happened over the past few days, my calendar and published work (in addition to the posts below, I wrote an extra recap Saturday for Patreon subscribers) leave no doubt that I spent this week “at” this year’s digital-only edition of this trade show.

1/12/2021: ATSC 3.0 backers tout brighter prospects for NEXTGEN TV, FierceVideo

I revisited a subject I covered at CES 2020 for my fave trade-pub client: an upgrade to broadcast TV that might reach more viewers’ homes, especially if TV manufacturers would stop ignoring it.

1/12/2021: Password Managers, U.S. News & World Report

My second project for U.S. News followed the outline of the guides to local Internet providers I helped write a few months ago; after editors analyzed third-party reviews to rank the companies involved, I provided my own context in a profile of each. I thought I knew this category before, but after researching Bitwarden, Keeper, LastPass, Dashlane, 1Password, LogMeOnce, NordPass, KeePassXC, RoboForm, Sticky Password, McAfee True Key, and Zoho Vault (plus head-to-head comparisons of 1Password vs LastPass, Dashlane vs LastPass, and Dashlane vs 1Password), I think I have a much deeper grounding. In the bargain, this work reminded me that I’d been neglecting some useful features in my own password manager, 1Password.

1/12/2021: AT&T TV NotNow: Telco Giant Reshuffles Streaming Services, Forbes

AT&T closing its AT&T TV Now streaming-TV service to new subscribers and making AT&T TV its core video service looked like a welcome stab at simplicity, but then I checked out the fine print in AT&T TV’s two-year-contract option.

1/13/2021: ShowStoppers TV, ShowStoppers

As I did last summer, I emceed the product presentations of three tech companies at an event hosted by the PR firm that, in the Before Times, helped organize my trips to IFA and a few other tech events. Unlike last summer, one of these firms wound up not presenting because they could not get their audio working.

1/13/2021: Special Broadband Breakfast Live Online Town Hall on Section 230, Broadband Breakfast

Twitter’s overdue decision to boot Donald Trump off the service led to this online panel about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that lets online forums remove content that’s legal but “otherwise objectionable.” My fellow panelists: Ranking Digital Rights’ Jessica Dheere, the Cato Institute’s Will Duffield, the Computer & Communications Industry Association’s Ali Sternburg, and tech lawyer Cathy Gellis, with Broadband Breakfast editor and publisher Drew Clark moderating our conversation. The next day, Broadband Breakfast’s Samuel Triginelli wrote up the conversation that you can also watch in the embed below.

1/14/2021: Afternoon Learners SIG, Washington Apple Pi

I joined this meeting of one of WAP’s special interest groups via Zoom to share my thoughts on CES. We lost a good 10 minutes to audio glitches that I couldn’t hear but my audience could, so I stuck around for an extra 10 minutes.

1/14/2021: If You Want To Watch 8K Video On Your 8K TV, You May Have To Record It Yourself, Forbes

Yes, I remain deeply skeptical of 8K TV, even if Samsung’s newest line of smartphones can record in the format.

1/15/2021: Yes, you can have — and deserve — a bigger TV. That’s the theme on display at CES trade show, USA Today

No CES is complete for me without a state-of-the-TV piece. My industry-analyst friend Carolina Milanesi provided an opening quote that was more colorful than usual for this type of story.

1/15/2021: TVs at CES, WLW

This Cincinnati radio station had me on their afternoon drive-time show to talk about TVs. I flubbed a question from the hosts about the price for a 70-inch 4K TV: Because I hadn’t thought to leave a browser tab open to any retailer’s TV listings, I had to try to remember the prices I’d seen at Costco three weeks prior and then overshot the going rate by about 50 percent.

Updated 1/18/2021 to add links to my Patreon post, three other posts in the U.S. News password-manager guide, and Broadband Breakfast’s video and recap. 

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Weekly output: Facebook diet, 8K TV, social-media hearings

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Another trip to Berlin for IFA is in the books, which means I’ve spent another year wondering when Berlin Brandenburg Airport–which was originally scheduled to open before my 2012 introduction to the show–will ever inaugurate scheduled commercial service.

8/28/2018: How to detox from Facebook, Yahoo Finance

I’d had the bones of this piece in mind since sometime after writing a similar how-to on reducing Google’s role in your life. I’m going to guess that most people didn’t install the Facebook Container extension for Firefox (although I am now running that on my Windows laptop), but I do hope that a good fraction of readers opted out of Facebook’s noisier mobile notifications.

Yahoo Finance IFA 8K post9/1/2018: Forget 4K TVs — 8K televisions are already here, Yahoo Finance

If it wasn’t obvious enough the last time I covered this topic: No, I really don’t think anybody should pay extra for 8K resolution, and if this entire format vanishes into consumer irrelevance as 3D TV did, I won’t be too sad. Meanwhile, I appreciated seeing Yahoo give this a little more publicity with a repost on Yahoo Sports.

9/2/2018: What to expect as Google, Facebook and Twitter face Capitol Hill lawmakers, Yahoo Finance

I wrote a curtain-raiser for Wednesday’s grillings of social-media executives in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. Based on how prior House interrogations of tech execs have gone, my expectations for the latter hearing are exceedingly low.

Weekly output: Meltdown and Spectre, CES 2017 revisited, CES 2018 (x3), TV technology, IoT security, Last Gadget Standing, Volocopter, Facebook News Feed

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CES 2018 is done, but I’m nowhere near done recovering from the sleep deficit I ran up during my 21st consecutive trip (!) to the Consumer Technology Association’s gargantuan gadget show. While I try to catch up with that, why not have a look at my Flickr album from the convention?

1/8/2018: That big computer security flaw has one hidden value, USA Today

Not long after this post about the Meltdown and Spectre processor bugs went up Monday, we updated it to note that Apple had since posted a second batch of updates.

1/8/2018: How the hottest gadgets from CES 2017 panned out, Yahoo Finance

This exercise in self-accountability journalism is something I should do before every return to CES… and Mobile World Congress and SXSW and Google I/O and Web Summit, etc. etc.

1/9/2018: CES report, WTOP

I did a live radio interview without having had any coffee, which is always a risk. At least Washington’s news station quizzed me on-air early in CES week, when my voice was still mostly intact.

1/9/2018: CES 2018: The TV set will not be revolutionized, Yahoo Finance

The headline “The television will not be revolutionized” popped into my head as I was sitting in a CES press room Tuesday, and I knew it was the obvious headline for a post about the state of the TV even if there was no way I was the first to think of it. (Indeed, I wasn’t.) And then the copy desk tweaked the hed slightly anyway.

1/11/2018: CES 2018 Day 4 roundup: Self-driving cars and insanely big screens, Yahoo Finance

I shot this video recap with my Yahoo colleagues Dan Howley and JP Mangalindan after a few false starts that would make a great bloopers reel (one of us kept bursting into a stream of curses after flubbing a line, and that person wasn’t me). Looking at the video now, it’s clear that I didn’t tuck in my shirt properly or talk with my hands sufficiently.

1/11/2018: What a security expert thought of a few new smart-home devices at CES 2018, Yahoo Finance

In case people think that all CES pitches are a waste of time, this post started when I got an e-mail from a publicist for a local cybersecurity company that I’d talked to in October. I answered that offer of security insight by saying that what I could really use was a chance to follow the company founder around the CES floor to see him quiz various smart-home companies.

1/11/2018: Last Gadget Standing, Living in Digital Times

For the second year in a row, I helped judge this contest and introduced one contestant. (As you can see from that Facebook Live clip, I momentarily blanked on the name of one of the company founders.) The gadget in question, the Play Impossible Gameball, won the in-person vote–not because of anything I said, but because the founders put on a great presentation and had a fun, reasonably priced product.

1/11/2018: Intel wants this drone to fly you around, Yahoo Finance

Wednesday morning, I got to the Las Vegas Convention Center by 8 a.m.–it was the one traffic-free ride to there I had all week–for an up-close look at the passenger-carrying drone that Intel had shown off at Monday evening’s CES keynote.

1/12/2018: The weirdest tech of CES 2018, Yahoo Finance

I started writing this Thursday night at McCarran Airport before a sequence of flights that brought me to Dulles around 7 a.m. Friday, then finished the post at home that afternoon in a haze of sleep deprivation.

1/13/2018: Facebook’s new News Feed, Al Jazeera

The Arabic news channel had wanted me to talk Friday about Facebook’s coming de-prioritization of public pages in the News Feed. Fortunately, I had a schedule conflict more specific than “I’m so tired I need to sound out my words,” so they pushed this hit to Saturday.

Weekly output: telecom bargaining (x2), net neutrality, gadget gift guidance, 4K viewing options

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The list below would suggest that I spent more time talking about my job this week than actually doing it, but I filed two other stories that you should see Monday.

12/4/2017: Bargaining for lower telecom bills, KTRH

This Houston radio station wanted to interview me about last Sunday’s USA Today advice to bargain for a better rate on your TV and Internet bill. Fortunately, I had spare time during a long connection through Newark and an unusually uncrowded United Club in which to take anchor Scott Crowder’s call. I should probably list this with an asterisk, as I don’t know when or even if KTRH ran the interview; if you happened to tune in Monday and hear my spot, please let me know.

12/5/2017: Total Eclipse of the Net: The End of Net Neutrality?, New America

“I am serving a life sentence of covering net neutrality” was how I began this 90-minute panel hosted by New America’s Open Technology Institute. My conversation partners were Incompas general counsel Angie Kronenberg, economist Hal Singer, National Hispanic Media Coalition policy adviser (and former FCC commissioner) Gloria Tristani, and Free Press policy director Matt Wood.

12/5/2017: This Morning with Gordon Deal December 05, 2017, This Morning with Gordon Deal

A few minutes after my interview with KTRH, I did a second interview about last Sunday’s USAT column. My spot comes up a little after 13 minutes into this episode.

12/6/2017: Holiday gift guide: Shopping for a person who’s hard to shop for? These D.C. locals have you covered., Express

Bryanna Cappadona, entertainment editor at the Washington Post’s free tabloid, quizzed me for this gift guide. I will admit that my suggested purchase is rather nerdy, but it could also spare the recipient major heartache with their Gmail or Facebook account.

12/10/2017: 4K TV: How much Internet bandwidth do you need?, USA Today

This column also notes your primary offline option for watching 4K content–the small minority of Blu-ray discs that offer Ultra High Definition resolution–and the continued absence of 4K in cable-TV lineups and over-the-air broadcasts.

Weekly output: New laptops, IFA gadgets, online-video subscribers, wireless plans, Equifax

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Technically speaking, I didn’t wrap up my IFA coverage until Sunday night, when I posted an album of photos from the show. Monday afternoon, I’m off to San Francisco for Mobile World Congress Americas, a successor to the CTIA wireless-industry show that I skipped last year.

9/5/2017: Why you might not want a laptop with a 4K display, Yahoo Finance

I liked most of what I saw in Windows laptops at IFA, but the idea of cramming Ultra High Definition resolution into a 13- or 14-inch screen seems idiotic to me.

9/6/2017: 4 amazing new gadgets you can’t get in the US, Yahoo Finance

Going to a gadget show overseas means you’ll see some hardware that you won’t be able to buy back home in the States.

9/7/2017: Best Cell Phone Plans, The Wirecutter

If I’d filed this on time, I would have had to rewrite the update to factor in Verizon’s downgrade of its most-advertised “unlimited” wireless plan. Instead, I had a hurried few days of revising the text I’d last updated in March to reflect that and many other pivots among wireless services.

9/7/2017: Measuring the OTT Subscriber, FierceCable

This piece–you’ll have to cough up an e-mail address to read it–covers how some online video services try to get a sense of their customer metrics.

9/8/2017: Why Equifax needs to give up some details about how it got hacked, Yahoo Finance

Equifax’s massive data breach–yes, I seem to be included among the victims–made me mad. Then it made me think about other posts I’ve written to denounce the reflexive silence of too many tech companies after they realize a third party has broken in and stolen customer data.

Weekly output: WannaCry, Google I/O, Android O, AMP, DVD on UHD

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Google I/O consistently ranks as one of the most info-dense events I cover. After Google has put out its headline news in the opening keynote, the conference offers dozens of talks that get into the weeds on things like mobile-ad formats, Android’s notifications interface, and augmented-reality applications. I take far more notes than I can put into the stories I file from this event, but those notes inform many more stories over the next 12 months.

5/15/2017: Rob Pegoraro Finance and Tech Writer from Yahoo.com [Interview], Mike and Molson

I talked about the WannaCry ransomware outbreak with Johnny Molson and Mike Wennmacher, hosts of this show on the Springfield, Illinois station WMAY.

5/17/2017: Google Assistant and Google Home Make Renewed Pitch to Consumers, Consumer Reports

An editor at CR e-mailed to ask if I could do an I/O recap right as I was going to e-mail him to ask if they needed one.

5/18/2017: Android O: Google tries to fix Android’s biggest weakness, Yahoo Finance

I led with Project Treble, Google’s overdue move to speed Android updates by putting a hardware abstraction layer between that operating system and that machine-specific code that talks to a phone’s chipsets. Google did not, relegating Treble to brief mentions in presentations until engineering V.P. Dave Burke called Treble “probably the biggest architectural change since we started” in a Q&A session Thursday evening.

5/19/2017: How Google’s trying to make the mobile web look less ugly, Yahoo Finance

My big takeaway from a few I/O talks about Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages effort: How about putting the same effort into making the desktop Web look less like hot garbage?

5/21/2017: Ultra-high-def TV’s image problem, and how to fix it, USA Today

A chat over breakfast at the IFA Global Press Conference last month with another tech journalist led me to this under-reported problem with 4K televisions: how bad a DVD can look on them.

Weekly output: CES (x4), freemium apps, Faraday Future, cybersecurity, TV technology, drones, personal-data business models, Mobile Apps Showdown, battery and bandwidth advice

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I wrapped up the tech-journalism hell week that is CES with a red-eye flight out of Vegas last night, as if I wasn’t tired enough after writing close to 6,000 words of copy and doing two panels, one radio interview and one on-stage intro. So if you’re hoping for typo-free prose, this may not be the post for you.

1/3/2017: The biggest busts from the world’s most renowned gadget show, Yahoo Finance

I enjoyed writing this reality-check post about past flops at CES–some of which I thought at the time could fly.

1/3/2017: Can you put a price on ‘freemium’ apps?, USA Today

You may have seen my column on alternatives to paying Evernote and iCloud appear a few days earlier in a personal-finance section that I’m told ran in some Gannett newspapers.

1/3/2017: What to expect this week at CES, the world’s biggest gadget show, Yahoo Finance

This was the second post I filed on Monday–you know, the day that was supposed to be a holiday.

1/4/2017: Faraday Future’s FF 91: Electric speed at a vaporous price

I attended the unveiling of this self-driving, electric-powertrain supercar Tuesday night and did not find the overhyped “reformat the future” sales pitch super-persuasive.

1/4/2017: Tech trends at CES, WTOP

I talked with WTOP’s Shawn Anderson and Hillary Howard about early headlines from the show. We usually do these interviews over Skype, but bandwidth was so bad that they had to call my phone.

ces-2017-cybersecurity-panel1/5/2017: The Escalating War on Cybersecurity, CES

I talked about the changing landscape of cybersecurity with Blackberry chief security officer David Kleidermacher, HackerOne CTO Alex Rice, and Qualcomm senior director of product management Sy Choudhury. One big takeaway of our discussion: Companies and organizations that don’t want to talk about their security misfortunes aren’t the ones you want to trust.

1/6/2017: CES 2017: The top trends in new TVs, Yahoo Finance

This piece ran over a thousand words in my first draft, which is not an optimal writing strategy when you have a CES-dense schedule.

1/6/2017: Selfie drones and more fly into CES 2017, Yahoo Finance

I finished and filed this from a chair near an entrance to the Venetian at around 6:30 Friday night, which is not generally part of people’s weekend activities in Vegas.

1/7/2017: Business Models in the Personal Data Economy, Mobile Ecosystem Forum

I inflicted some dead air on the organizers when I forgot that they’d moved up my introduction of this panel by 15 minutes. After that awkward start, I had a good conversation about ways customers can become empowered custodians of their own data with executives at companies trying to make that happen: digi.me founder Julian Ranger, MatchUpBox CEO Didier Collin de Casaubon, Meeco founder Katryna Dow, and Universal Music CTO Ty Roberts. Update, 2/6: MEF posted audio of our conversation.

mobile-apps-showdown1/7/2017: Mobile Apps Showdown, Living in Digital Times

I helped judge this competition (irreverently emceed by my Yahoo colleague David Pogue), then jumped on stage to introduce the app I’d evaluated, Intel Security’s True Key. My summary of its use case: “You all suck at passwords.”

1/8/2017: How to stay online in impossible circumstances, USA Today

My editor suggested I use my column to share lessons learned from CES about preserving  the battery life and connectivity of mobile devices in phone-hostile environments like the gadget show. I should have known that the press-room WiFi would crap out as I was trying to write this Friday afternoon, leaving me to limp along on the Las Vegas Convention Center’s insultingly-limited guest network.

1/8/2017: The weirdest tech we saw at CES 2017, Yahoo Finance

I filed this from the United Club at McCarran at around 11, which is also not how people normally spend a weekend night in Vegas.

Weekly output: IMAX VR, HDR, laptops, IFA

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My fifth IFA is in the books. The biggest surprise of this year’s trip to Berlin: I did not get into any involved conversations about the election with Germans, only with other Americans. In a weird little bookend to that, I spotted Donald Trump’s 757 parked at the far end of Newark International Airport earlier today.

Note that as in prior years, the organizers of IFA are covering most of my travel costs, an arrangement my regular editors okayed beforehand and with which I’m okay in certain situations.

8/31/2016: IMAX wants to add VR to your next movie, Yahoo Finance

I finished writing this at the evening event during which Samsung introduced its new Gear S3 smartwatch. Having a hard deadline–as in, wanting to get dinner at Samsung’s reception upstairs–helped me get this done faster than other stories this week.

Fierce HDR story9/1/2016: The Progress of HDR, FierceCable

This post about cable, satellite and online video’s adoption of high dynamic range video is my first for this outlet. One thing I’ve realized I like about writing stories for trade publications: The research required to get into the weeds for those clients can save me serious time when I need to write something quickly about the same subject for a consumer site. Note that you’ll have to cough up an e-mail address and some other details to read the post and the others collected in Fierce’s miniature e-book.

9/2/2016: Your next laptop could have a fingerprint reader and USB C, Yahoo Finance

This report from the show floor went up with a stupid typo–I wrote that a Lenovo laptop was 5.6 inches thick, not the correct .56 inches. I haven’t done something like that since I made the reverse error for a Post review of an Apple laptop, describing it as a quarter of an inch thick instead of (if I recall correctly) 1.25 in. thick. My Yahoo colleagues fixed that on Saturday.

9/4/2016: Cheaper phones, brighter TVs rule IFA tech show, USA Today

I wrote a quick recap of notable consumer-relevant trends in laptops, smartphones and TVs seen at IFA. If this story doesn’t offer enough detail, I should have two last IFA items going up at Yahoo in the next day or two.

Weekly output: UHD + HDR, Apple TV, Apple news, iPhone Upgrade Program, Nextbit Robin

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PORTLAND–I’ve just spent two mind- and heart-expanding days at the XOXO festival here. I don’t know if it was quite as inspirational as two years ago, but I still think the things I’ve heard and seen from the speakers and other attendees will be leaving little ripples in my life for some time to come.

In other news, it’s going to be so great to come home tomorrow.

9/7/2015: Are 4K Televisions Finally Ready for Primetime?, Yahoo Tech

I wrote one last post from IFA Friday evening that didn’t get posted until Monday. My own answer to that headline is “not yet”–at least not until the wider color and brightness of “HDR” isn’t confined to expensive, reference-line UHD TVs. I also want to see a next-gen HD/UHD broadcast standard supported in affordable sets.

Yahoo Tech Apple TV post9/8/2015: Can Apple Save Apple TV?, Yahoo Tech

Since this ran, Apple has announced that the new Apple TV’s remote will feature volume buttons ( It’s weird when Apple does something I ask it to do!) and Plex has said it’s working to bring its app to the new model.

9/9/2015: Apple’s news, WTOP

I had a quick chat from the CTIA pressroom with WTOP’s anchors about the new iPhones, iPads and Apple TV.

9/12/2015: Can Apple’s iPhone upgrade deal work for you?, USA Today

My editors and I had originally thought of using this week’s column slot for a look at the fading fortunes of CTIA’s event, but they asked me to explain Apple’s new iPhone-upgrade program (so instead you read about this trade show’s travails here). Note the presence of a T-Mobile publicist in the comments; I invited him to leave that comment after he asked if we could revise the piece to note that that carrier’s trade-in option.

9/12/2015: Nextbit’s Android Phone Puts Its Faith—and Your Data—in the Cloud, Yahoo Tech

I had a demo of this upcoming Android phone Wednesday evening in Vegas and wrote it up over the course of Thursday. I doubt I’ll buy it myself–I’m going to need a new phone sooner than next year–but they’ve got an interesting concept and design.

Weekly output: 4K UHD TV, Tech Night Owl, stolen phones

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This week was a lot less productive than I’d hoped, even factoring in Monday being a holiday and most of Tuesday’s schedule getting canceled out by snow and sub-freezing temperatures. I’m going to be paying for that this week.

1/20/2014: All of the Potential Problems with 4K TV, Yahoo Tech

This was set to be last week’s column until the net-neutrality ruling upended my schedule. Considering that nobody’s rushing out to buy UHD sets before the Super Bowl, I don’t think the delay hurt this post too much.

1/25/2014: January 25, 2014 — Adam Engst and Rob Pegoraro, Tech Night Owl

I returned to Gene Steinberg’s podcast to talk about my new role at Yahoo Tech, net neutrality, the Mac’s 30th birthday and more.

USAT stolen-phones update1/26/2014: Tip: Serial number can’t recover stolen smartphone, USA Today

Barely a year has elapsed since I’d last covered find-my-phone apps in my USAT column, but two major changes have come around since that piece: Google offering its own, free phone-finder app for Android, and increased attention to the lack of a persistent kill-switch feature for smartphones beyond iOS 7’s capability and Absolute Software’s aftermarket Lojack app for some Samsung Android devices. Besides, the reader asked for help nicely.

On Sulia, I noted my old Washington Post colleague Ezra Klein’s departure from the paper, voiced some anger about a Kafkaesque overreaction by law enforcement and the MPAA to somebody wearing Google Glass to a movie, griped about bad USB-port placement and the stubborn survival of obsolete music formats in cars shown off at the Washington Auto Show (yes, you’ve read those two rants before), and reported about my experience using Absolute’s software to wipe and lock a Galaxy Note 3.