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• FDA okays ‘digital birth control’ app Natural Cycles despite ongoing European investigations (and some unexpected pregnancies)
  

  

  The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has, for the first time ever, allowed an app to market itself as a contraceptive. Natural Cycles brands itself as “digital birth control” and offers a return to the age-old rhythm method, albeit with the addition of technology that promises to make the process more accurate. But global regulators are casting doubt on that promise, and the company’s aggressive marketing taglines.

  The rhythm method — in which women track past menstrual cycles to predict when they might be fertile, in order to either avoid or encourage pregnancy — has largely been eschewed in the modern day, in favor of more reliable methods (like the pill or condoms).

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  FDA okays ‘digital birth control’ app Natural Cycles despite ongoing European investigations (and some unexpected pregnancies) was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

• Pandora Premium is now supported by Google Home and Smart Displays
  

  There’s a lot going on with the Google Assistant — let’s break down the important stuff.

  In May 2016, we got our very first taste of the Google Assistant with the debut of Allo. The Assistant was a big draw to Allo at the time, with Google marketing it as a helpful bot that could make restaurant reservations, search the web, and more within your conversations.

  Since then, the Assistant has gained heaps of new features and expanded to smartphones, tablets, speakers, and more. Google’s shown no interest in slowing down development for the Assistant, meaning that it’s likely here for the long-haul.

  Whether this is your first encounter with it or you just need a quick refresher, here’s everything you need to know about the Google Assistant.

  The latest Google Assistant news

  August 14, 2018 — Pandora Premium now supported by Google Home and Smart Displays

  Users have been able to stream Pandora through Google Home speakers for quite some time now, but starting today, you’l…

• Huawei Mate 20 Lite leaks with a notch and four cameras
  

  

  Phones are starting to look the same, largely thanks to the iPhone X. Huawei was never very good with making their own designs, and while it’s improved over the years, WinFuture and Evan Blass have revealed that it just couldn’t resist joining the notch movement with the Mate 20 Lite.

  Huawei Mate 20 Lite in black, blue, and gold. pic.twitter.com/c5DVT2VVsY

  — Evan Blass (@evleaks) August 14, 2018

  We had already seen the Mate 20 Lite on TENAA, but we have more photos and details now.

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  Huawei Mate 20 Lite leaks with a notch and four cameras was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

• The best Chromebooks for school
  

  

  If there’s one area where Chromebooks are undeniably dominating, it’s in education. Chromebooks made up 60% of mobile device purchases by K-12 schools in the US last year, and since 2014, they have led classroom notebook and tablet shipments. As it turns out, schools love cheap computers that back up everything to the cloud and can be easily reset.

  Chromebooks aren’t just great for schools; they’re great for students as well.

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  The best Chromebooks for school was written by the awesome team at Android Police.

• 5 things we’d like to see in Fallout 76
  

  Fallout 76 has the potential to bring the franchise to new heights with these five opportunities.

  Fallout 76’s massively-multiplayer online focus (MMO), as well as the fact that it’s set before the rest of the Fallout games, leaves plenty of room for Bethesda to go wild with what it offers to the player. Here are five things that would make Fallout 76 awesome.

  Read: New Fallout 76 trailer details perk cards

  See at Amazon

  Settlement blueprint sharing

  Fallout 76 is going to overhaul Fallout 4’s settlement system, allowing you to create blueprints for entire towns so you can pack up your settlement at a moment’s notice and move it to a different location. This is similar to how Halo 5 lets people group objects together in the Forge mode and save them as prefabrications.

  However, there is one key difference: with Halo 5, you can download prefabs and use them in your own maps. Currently, that doesn’t appear to be the case with the settlement blueprints you can create in Fallout …

• Moto Z3 review: Verizon’s middle child
  

  To love the Moto Z3 is to embrace every phone that Motorola’s made over the past five years, to accept the company’s decisions around modular telephony and gesture-friendly software. It’s to understand that Motorola doesn’t have the influence in the U.S. it once did, and to rationalize the deals it makes with carriers to get its phones on shelves and into people’s pockets.

  To love the Moto Z3 is to love the best parts of the Moto Z2 Force and the Moto Z3 Play, and to pretend that this phone isn’t just a messy mashup of those two devices.

  To buy the Moto Z3, however, is a different story.

  Moto Z3

  Price: $480

  Bottom line: The Moto Z3 is a capable phone that, even without its impending 5G bona fides, fits into a strong mid-range lineup at Verizon.

  See at Amazon

  Pros:

  Awesome battery life
  Excellent, fluid software
  Moto Display makes an…

• Sprint and LG are making the first 5G-capable phone in the U.S.
  

  5G is coming sooner than you think.

  Motorola may have already shown off a 5G Moto Mod for its new Moto Z3, but that accessory isn’t due to be released until early 2019 — and even then, it’s just an add-on that attaches to the back of your phone. Another device to purchase, another device to keep charged, and another device to carry with you at all times.

  For 5G to really start taking off, we’re going to need to start seeing phones with integrated 5G radios built directly in, and LG is teaming up with Sprint to make that happen.

  Unfortunately, neither company has given much info on the phone; we don’t know whether to expect the LG G8 to be 5G-capable or if this is a different phone entirely, but either way the companies are looking to ship this 5G phone in the first half of 2019.

  Sprint says its 5G-capable Massive MIMO cell sites can deliver up to 10 times the capacity of its existing LTE systems — at first, it’ll roll out in Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Kan…

• DVR hub for Xbox puts your console captures on your Android phone
  

  The Xbox app for Android doesn’t let you do this. Enter a third-party developer.

  One key feature the Windows 10 Mobile Xbox app has over both the iOS and Android versions is that you can not only view but also download your console captures from the cloud. Once uploaded to Xbox Live, just as you can on the PC app, the Windows 10 Mobile app allows you to get hold of them for sharing and editing as you see fit to places like Instagram and YouTube.

  Even to this day, if I want to share a clip on my Instagram account, I’ve mostly been using a Windows phone to download it and then re-upload it to Instagram. That’s not a long term solution, though, and Microsoft really needs to add it to the other platforms apps.

  Until that happens, a third-party app called DVR Hub for Xbox is here to save the day.

  How to download your Xbox One captures on Android

  The app itself is extremely simple and for anyone worried about putting your account login details in, it’s not required. All you have t…

• Pandora Premium now works with Google Assistant, and new subscribers can get a 90-day trial
  

  New tunes are arriving on Google Home devices today with the addition of Pandora Premium to the supported Assistant music services. After connecting your account, Assistant across all your devices can stream music directly from Pandora with new premiu…

• LineageOS 15.1 coming to the Huawei Honor 4X, Fairphone 2, and more
  

  The last time we covered LineageOS, it added support for the 2016 Google Pixel and Pixel XL. Since then, more devices have been added and removed. Two Asus phones and an LG device are no longer supported, but four more phones have joined the party.
  Fi…

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