Fire TV Cube is a hands-free 4K Ultra HD streaming media player with Alexa, allowing you to control your TV from across the room. Just ask Alexa to turn on the TV, dim the lights, and play what you want to watch from over 500,000 movies and TV episodes.

The Cube is essentially a mashing of an Echo speaker with Amazon’s Fire TV stick & a universal remote to control your TV & cable box.

Unfortunately for us Aussies Fire TV is a North American thing and the Cube is the same. It’s a shame because the new product has a lot of promise and in having it plugged into your TV means you get contextual responses similar to the Echo Show but then at the same time doesn’t require the TV to be running and works as a regular Echo also.

The new Fire TV Cube is on sale now and ships June 21 for US$119.99 to North American customers only.

Sonos has unveiled a new soundbar speaker that, in an industry first, will be compatible with Amazon’s Alexa smart assistant, Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant.

Significantly cheaper than the original Playbar the new Beam will retail for A$599 and be available in July.

Other differences include the smart speaker capabilities (obviously) as well as the input on the rear being a single HDMI port instead of toslink/optical in. It does come with an adaptor however to convert HDMI to optical should your setup not support the HDMI remote control functions and you don’t want to waste/use a HDMI port on your TV or receiver.

The new Beam, reportedly has a solid level of sound quality however anecdotally the Playbar remains king.

Sadly the new version also doesn’t include support for Dolby Atmos, which many have been holding out for. It appears the battle for a lower cost has won out in order to see Sonos engrain itself in more consumers’ lives.

As impressive and as nice as it is to see the new product emerge I’ll likely be giving it a miss. Not hitting the mark on Atmos and providing a sound quality that doesn’t improve on my existing Playbar doesn’t coerce me to up/down-grade. Event Sonos’ own creative lead Jedd Derderian doesn’t think you should stating that “[Sonos] don’t believe in the replacement cycle…”, suggesting users buy the Beam to add on to their current setups instead of replace what they have.

For more details check out our good mate Peter Well’s article on the launch for SMH or check out The Verge’s exclusive in-depth hands on.

Source: Sonos announces Beam, a lounge room speaker it says can do it all

Unveiled at Computex 2018, the Asus ZenBook Pro is the new pinnacle of Asus’ premium laptop range, and it comes with an attention-grabbing new feature: a smartphone-sized touchscreen in the place of the regular touchpad.

They’re calling it the “ScreenPad”. The Verge has a full hands on preview and their reviewer describes it as being “not terrible” it’s hardly a glowing endorsement.

The ScreenPad is controlled via a cursor and not just a tap and activate sort of deal, which when you think about it makes sense because it’s still being used as your mouse/touchpad.

I’ll reserve judgement until I get hands on myself and hats off to ASUS for innovating. At least they didn’t remove a bunch of keys that people rely on to do it!

Source: Asus replaced the new ZenBook Pro’s touchpad with a touchscreen – The Verge

Microsoft Corp. has agreed to acquire GitHub Inc., the code repository company popular with many software developers, and could announce the deal as soon as Monday, according to people familiar with the matter.

Didn’t see that one coming, but then Microsoft is apparently the top contributor to GitHub with over 1000 employees pushing to it.

GitHub was last valued at a lazy US$2b back in 2015 and is reported to have an estimated annual income of $200m.

Searching for a new CEO for 9 months now the company has, in true Silicon Valley fashion, never been profitable and a buyout by Microsoft (or anyone) would be a solid win.

As for developers whom make use of the wildly popular service religiously the shift to Microsoft may not be as well received. However with advents of tools such as VisualCode and other initiatives led by MS CEO Satya Nadella the company has made huge inroads into restoring developer faith of late.

Source: Microsoft Is Said to Have Agreed to Acquire Coding Site GitHub – Bloomberg

ASUS is excited to announce the new H370 Mining Master motherboard that increases density with support for up to 20 graphics cards, simplifies connectivity by letting USB riser cables plug directly into the PCB, and reduces downtime by making problems easier to diagnose.

They say it right on the box “Mining Master”, this board is a beast.

On show at Computex in a custom mining rig and on sale in Q3 of this calendar year the H370 is sure to be a favourite amongst crypto miners worldwide.

Pricing TBA.

Source: ASUS Announces H370 Mining Master Motherboard

Apple engineers have been working on an initiative dubbed Digital Health, a series of tools to help users monitor how much time they spend on their devices and inside of certain applications.

Whatever Google can do, we can do better…

Apple very rapidly returning to old ways becoming the reactor instead of the innovator.

To quote Matthew Machonhay, “Time is a flat circle”.

Source: Apple Is Set to Unveil AR Upgrade, Software to Manage iPhone Use – Bloomberg