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Xiaomi releases MIUI 12 global update with more privacy controls, revamped user interface

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Xiaomi Takes on IPhone in Japan With Big Battery and Megapixels

Xiaomi on Tuesday unveiled the global version of MIUI 12, the latest update to its Android -based operating system, for hundreds of millions of smartphones as the Chinese electronics giant pushes to broaden its services ecosystem.

The world’s fourth largest smartphone firm said it is delivering a range of new features to its overseas users with MIUI 12, including a revamped user interface, the ability to cast the phone screen without the need to connect it to a computer, improvement to multitasking support and battery life and more privacy controls to users.

Chief among the new changes is how the software looks. A company executive said animation renders slightly differently after installing MIUI 12, stretching more naturally across the screen — especially on smartphones with rounded corners — as a user taps on an app.

Xiaomi has been able to deliver this graphical improvement thanks to what it calls “kernel-level innovation” that includes a new rendering engine, she said.

“With our rendering, we have enabled color blending and Gaussian blur. You can see various degrees of blurring happening in real time as light penetrates different materials,” explained Louisa Jia, head of marketing and operations of Global MIUI, at an event today.

MIUI 12, which is built atop Android 9 and Android 10 (depending on the device on which it will be rolled out), also changes how storage, memory and power consumption usage are displayed on the phone, making it easier for users to quickly understand the state of their device at a glance.

As part of the new coat of paint, Xiaomi is also deploying dark mode across all third-party apps, including those that have not introduced support for this feature yet.

Support for multitasking is also getting an improvement, popping any additional app on a floating screen that users can move around to any part of the screen and engage quickly without having to switch from the game or other app that they were focusing on. The company said it is also introducing an “ultra battery saver” feature that kicks in when the level of phone charge hits 5%. The new feature shuts off every non-essential service to deliver an additional five hours of battery life.

Privacy

Another interesting feature the company is introducing grants more privacy control to users. MIUI 12 will allow users to easily monitor and restrict apps from using the camera, microphone, location, contacts, storage, call history and calendar.

Whenever an app uses any of these, a persistent icon appears in the notification bar, tapping which will allow users to see which app is using this data and easily shut that access. Additionally, like with newer versions of Android and iOS, MIUI 12 gives users the ability to determine how often an app can access sensitive personal information.

Xiaomi said with MIUI 12, it is also providing users with the ability to strip off sensitive information, such as location data from a photo before they share it with their friends. By default, the new operating system will strip off such data from photos — a feature that privacy advocates have long desired, and business communication app Slack recently introduced to its service.

MIUI 12 will roll out to select smartphones — Mi 9, Mi 9T, Mi 9T Pro, Redmi K20 and Redmi K20 Pro — at the end of June, and dozens of smartphone models, including Poco F1 and Redmi 6, that were launched in 2018, “soon afterward,” said Jia. The company said it will make a beta version of MIUI 12 available to users next week for those who don’t want to wait too long.

More than 300 million smartphones ran MIUI software at the end of last year, Xiaomi revealed in its most recent earnings call in late March. The company previously stated that it is banking on MIUI to expand its services ecosystem as it looks to cut its financial reliance on sales of gadgets.

In 2018, Xiaomi started to display ads in the lockscreen and settings app to users in India and select other markets.

source: techcrunch

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Tech Update

Testing Apple’s New Screen Time Parental Controls: First Came Tears, Then Frustration.

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Testing Apple's New Screen Time Parental Controls: First Came Tears, Then Frustration.

“Don’t set the time limit. I can be reasonable!” pleads 9-year-old Tazio, looking up from his iPad.

It’s not always fun owning an iPad that a parent can remotely shut off. Also not easy: Trying to parent via new digital “Screen Time” controls.

Coming soon to an iPad or iPhone near you, Apple’s iOS 12 adds menus, buttons and bar charts to help monitor and control what kids (and adults) do with their devices. It’s a good thing that Apple, along with Amazon and Google, now acknowledge tech can be disruptive, if not addictive.

But anyone looking for help from this software may be in for a surprise. It might make parenting more difficult. One example: Apple’s bad default settings give kids access to NC-17 movies, explicit books and the entire Web – even when it knows their exact age.

A focus on the family is overdue. As of 2017, 42 percent of American kids ages 0 to 8 have their own tablets – and 78 percent have access to one somewhere in the home, according to the nonprofit Common Sense Media. Most of these are iPads, often hand-me-downs, offered with trepidation to kids who zone out like zombies or melt down when they’re taken away. Apple has previously offered some parental restrictions, but they were incomplete.

Is there a kid-proof tablet? For the last few weeks, I’ve been conducting an experiment with Tazio, the 9-year-old son of my editor. He wanted his first tablet – and his mother was wary. So I set up the family with two devices: One is a $330 iPad running a pre-release version of iOS 12 with Screen Time (available widely in the coming weeks). The other is one of the iPad’s few competitors in the family market, the $200 Amazon Fire HD 10 Kids Edition tablet running Amazon’s version of Android.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, but I review all technology with the same critical eye.

Playing technical adviser to navigate this real family challenge, I was surprised how difficult Apple’s parental software was to use. Even discounting for beta-software bugs Apple will hopefully squash, Screen Time is one of Apple’s weakest software launches in years. Apple treats parents like IT administrators for their kids, saddled with a zillion choices to make and knobs to adjust.

Amazon’s Fire Kids Edition was designed as a product for kids, and is more like a day care where someone else has picked the books and games, put deadbolts on all the doors and painted the walls electric blue. It’s a safer place to leave kids than Appleland, but the kids may get bored – and be jealous of the fun friends are having elsewhere.

I don’t mean to discourage parents from using these tools. But I recommend going in understanding how the software works, and how much it will require of you.

How Apple Screen Time works – and doesn’t
Our experiment began in tears.

Tazio, my pint-size reviewer, was setting up his iPad when his younger brother happened by. He wanted an iPad, too, but we only had one. An epic meltdown ensued.

Why couldn’t we share? Blame Apple, little buddy: It designed iOS 12 to work with only one account per device (outside of schools) and Tazio was already using it.

A child account is at the heart of how Screen Time works. Parents create one through their own Apple ID settings, assigning the kid his own email address and password that’s associated with a guardian. It gives parents the power to approve downloads and control functions. (The video above walks through the setup basics.)

Here’s the next head-scratcher: Even though Apple knows the child’s age, the default settings are not child-appropriate. They don’t restrict explicit content, add privacy protections such as limiting sharing location data or spare kids annoying system questions. Yes, parents can remotely change these settings and approve media purchases, but defaults matter.

Parents can decide what apps are available, what chunk of the day the iPad is off limits, and how many minutes different categories of apps (such as games) can be used. They get a bar-chart readout of the child’s device use during the current day and the previous week.

Managing settings on your own device is a once-every-few months thing. Managing Screen Time for kids is much more work because parenting requires frequent negotiation. Aside from a first-time setup window that covers some Screen Time features, controls can be buried behind half a dozen clicks in settings menus where few venture. Even I couldn’t figure out how to set a daily time limit for a specific app without asking Apple for instructions.

We also found loopholes. If you’re watching a video on Netflix and then press the home button to make it appear as a picture-in-picture, the minutes won’t count against your Screen Time limit. Junior could watch all day long.

Time limits are rigid, and especially annoying for kids when they’re almost at the end of a game or movie. Tazio came to treat his limits like an allowance, guarding them carefully and using them as a negotiating tactic with mom.

Apple does let kids request time extensions, which pop up as a notification on parents’ devices. If you’re thinking those requests might get annoying quick, you’re right.

The Amazon Alternative
Where Apple left Tazio’s mom to make lots of choices, Amazon pre-decided many for her – for better and worse.

The biggest difference is that Fire Kids Edition tablets come with a year’s worth of Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited service, which includes access to 15,000 apps and games, videos, books, and educational content from sources including PBS Kids, Nickelodeon and Disney. (After a year, they charge $3 per month for Prime members.) Based on the kids’ age and gender, Amazon shows the kids content it thinks they might be interested in. Tazio got a lot of Star Wars.

Amazon says it has vetted all that content, had most ads removed, as well as removed appeals for in-app purchase upgrades (none of which Apple did). While kids can peruse all that content, there’s no app or bookstore in the kids mode. Parents can buy and manually add in other apps, movies and books purchased from Amazon via their own accounts.

Amazon’s tablet can also be shared by parents and multiple siblings, each of whom get their own age-tailored experience by swapping logins. (Younger brother crisis averted.)

Also unlike Apple, Amazon by default puts additional restrictions in place for all apps that run in its Kids Edition tablets. They can’t send location data to third parties. Talking assistant Alexa is turned off.

With the Fire, parents access a dashboard view of their child’s account through a web link that, like Apple’s Screen Time, includes data about what he’s doing on his device that day and over the previous week, as well as the ability to set time restrictions for types of activity. An app would have been superior to its website, but it did offer an awesome button missing from Apple: “Pause devices” now.

Amazon’s software also allows parents to incentivise behaviour. We set Tazio’s Fire tablet to allow him to play games only after he had completed a half-hour of reading. It worked. He even woke up early to burn through his reading so he could get to his game time.

The problem with all this: Tazio could sort of tell he was getting the “Truman Show” treatment from the Fire. He wanted to be able to send messages, but Amazon doesn’t have a built-in app for that. Tazio also wanted to play Fortnite, but Amazon doesn’t offer the popular game in its app store. I don’t blame him for wanting to do the same things his friends do on their tablets.

And Amazon has its loopholes, too. Tazio discovered he could still talk to Alexa by switching to his mom’s login screen even though he didn’t know her passcode. (Amazon says it’s going to issue a software update that requires a PIN before a child can exit FreeTime mode, preventing them from accessing Alexa.) Perhaps the lesson is tech companies can’t get much past 9-year-olds.

Tazio’s family decided that the Amazon Fire tablet was the right fit for his first tablet. It was less powerful than the iPad, but also less frustrating for mom.

The decision was rooted in how much extra work Apple’s Screen Time created. Even with my assistance, mom spent hours inside settings, attempting to adjust their rigid controls to what was actually happening at home. Instead of being an electronic babysitter, the iPad became a new project.

Apple’s approach assumes kids are all different, so it leaves all the decisions to parents. They’re not wrong: No two 9-year-olds are alike. But so are adult users of laptops and phones, and Apple’s designers have been successful at making tech simpler by making choices that suit most of us.

Apple plans to offer training in stores for parents, as well as detailed instructions on its parents website.

What’s most important with any screen is for parents to “not just hand it over without discussion, parameters and expectations,” Christine Elgersma of Common Sense Media told me. A parenting editor for the nonprofit, she’s also been testing iOS 12 with Screen Time. “When I hand over the iPad to my daughter, I still ask her ‘what are you going to do with it?'” she says. She also has rules in place about when a time extension might be acceptable.

Being involved in kids’ digital lives is work. If tech companies are going to make software to help, they need to make sure they’re not just creating more work.

[“Source-gadgets.ndtv”]

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Internet

Apple Responds to Investors’ Demand on iPhone Addiction in Kids, Says It Will Improve Parental Controls

by Loknath Das
written by Loknath Das

Apple Responds to Investors' Demand on iPhone Addiction in Kids, Says It Will Improve Parental Controls

HIGHLIGHTS

  • Apple says it already offers a variety of parental controls
  • The company says that more robust tools can be expected
  • Two prominent investors had asked Apple to help curb addiction

Responding to demands to help curb smartphone addiction amongst children, Apple said the iPhoneand other devices running on its mobile software already offer a variety of controls that enable parents to restrict or block “effectively anything a child could download or access online.” However, it would bring “new features and enhancements” in future updates.

“We think deeply about how our products are used and the impact they have on users and the people around them,” Apple said in the statement. “We take this responsibility very seriously and we are committed to meeting and exceeding our customers’ expectations, especially when it comes to protecting kids.” The company said it is “constantly looking” to improve its offerings, and that it plans new features that will make parental controls “even more robust.”

To recall, two major Apple investors have urged the iPhone maker to help curb smartphone addiction among children, highlighting a growing concern about the effects of gadgets and social media on youngsters.

New York-based Jana Partners LLC and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System said in open letter to Apple that the company must offer more choices and tools to help children fight addiction to its devices. The two investors collectively control $2 billion (roughly Rs. 12,700 crores) worth of Apple shares.

“Apple can play a defining role in signalling to the industry that paying special attention to the health and development of the next generation is both good business and the right thing to do,” the letter said.

Among their proposals to Apple: Establish a committee of experts, including child development specialists; offer Apple’s “vast information resources” to researchers; and enhance mobile device software so that parents have more options to protect their children’s health.

The investors’ letter cited various studies on the negative effects of smartphones and social media on children’s mental and physical health. Examples include distractions from digital technologies in the classroom, a decreased ability of students to focus on educational tasks, and higher risks of suicide and depression.

A study published in November suggested that heavy smartphone use and social media exposure among teens may contribute to depression and other traits linked with suicide. But that and similarly designed research cannot rule out that already troubled teens may be more likely than others to be frequent users of smartphones and social media.

In its most recent update on teens and media use, the American Academy of Pediatrics said in 2016 that social media and internet use have benefits and potential risks for teens. It urged families to create their own media use plans that include consistent time and content limits.

The American Psychiatric Association does not consider heavy internet use a true mental addiction and says more research is needed.

The letter released Saturday touches upon the growing concerns about the long-term impact of gadgets and social media, especially for those who start to use smartphones at an early age.

While tech companies have not acknowledged openly that their gadgets may be addictive, some Silicon Valley insiders have begun to speak about how gadgets, mobile applications and social media sites are designed to be addictive and to keep users’ attention as long as possible.

Facebook’s founding president, Sean Parker, said recently, for example, that the company exploits a “vulnerability in human psychology” to addict its users. He called its stream of comments, “likes” and reactions a “social validation feedback loop that exploits how human brains work.” And, he said, “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains.”

James Steyer, the CEO of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that studies kids’ technology use, called the letter a “big deal” in the ongoing effort to make it clear that cellphones are a “public health concern.”

“It’s the beginning of a much bigger conversation about these issues and it’s great that shareholders care about it,” he said.

Apple said it regularly considers how the iPhone and its other products affect the people who use them. “We take this responsibility very seriously and we are committed to meeting and exceeding our customers’ expectations, especially when it comes to protecting kids,” the company said.

Steyer said Apple is in a position to do more. Among other things, he said, Apple can finance independent research on the effects of mobile phone use and pay for public education campaigns that teach parents and kids about responsible technology use. He said Apple can also design addiction-prevention features, such as an automatic shut-off after an hour.

But Steyer said a bigger problem is with social media companies “designing platforms to grab and retain your children.” He said companies such as Twitter, Facebook and Snap will change “only with major pressure from the public and from shareholders.”

The Apple letter is the start of a bigger push by one of the investors, Jana, to focus on socially responsible investing, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. The investor, the Journal said, is planning to raise billions of dollars to launch a new fund, Jana Impact Capital, to invest in companies that should be “better corporate citizens.” The idea is that responsible companies can produce better long-term value not just for shareholders, but for society.

[“Source-ndtv”]

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