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Although it was beaten to the punch by the Samsung Fold (and the Royole FlexPai if you're feeling charitable), Huawei threw down a major gauntlet earlier this when it unveiled its Mate X foldable handset, delivering what is arguably the most appealing folding smartphone design to date. 

Now, it appears the company is going all-in when it comes to foldable smartphones, with Huawei CEO Richard Yu offering some refreshingly frank comments about the technology in a new interview with GSMArena. 

When asked about how many foldable devices it could have in its stable over the next few years, Yu said "I think that on a flagship level in two years, half of our devices could be foldable."

A smaller foldable phone is in the works

• Huawei Mate X's selfies are a game changer for photos
• Samsung Galaxy Fold video shows it's ready to bend thousands of times
• Apple could be considering a folding iPhone, new patent reveals

Of course, the CEO is more than aware of how expensive its first attempt at the technology is, stating that "folding phones are just in the beginning and the market share is small, they cost a lot and it's very expensive to produce such devices."

However, Yu believes that the cost will reduce significantly over time. "I think in two years foldable phones will have a similar price to current flagship phones," said Yu.

Revealing that his primary handset at the moment is the still-in-development Huawei Mate X, Yu also discussed the just-released P30 Pro, stating that "In the future we can make a foldable phone sized in half of this one [P30 Pro], we have plans for a smaller foldable phone."

• Foldable phones: all the rumored and confirmed foldable handsets

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Facebook announced today that it is adding a feature called “Why am I seeing this post?” to News Feeds. Similar to “Why am I seeing this ad?,” which has appeared next to advertisements since 2014, the new tool has a dropdown menu that gives users information about why that post appeared in their News Feed, along with links to personalization controls.

Meant to give users more transparency into how Facebook’s News Feed algorithm works, the update comes as the company copes with several major events that have highlighted the platform’s shortcomings, including potentially harmful ones. These include its role in enabling the dissemination of a video taken during the shooting attacks on New Zealand mosques two weeks ago, which were originally broadcast using Facebook Live; a lawsuit filed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development that accuses Facebook’s ad-targeting tool of violating the Fair Housing Act and its role in spreading misinformation and propaganda (after years of complaints and criticism, Facebook recently announced plans to downrank anti-vaccination posts and ban white nationalist content.

Facebook’s announcement says this is the first time its “built information on how ranking works directly into the app.” Users will be able to access “Why am I seeing this post?” as a dropdown menu in the right hand corner of posts from friends, Pages and Groups in their News Feed that displays information about how its algorithm decided to rank the post, including:

• Why you’re seeing a certain post in your News Feed — for example, if the post is from a friend you made, a Group you joined, or a Page you followed.
• What information generally has the largest influence over the order of posts, including: (a) how often you interact with posts from people, Pages or Groups; (b) how often you interact with a specific type of post, for example, videos, photos or links; and (c) the popularity of the posts shared by the people, Pages and Groups you follow.

The same menu will also include links to personalization options, including See First, Unfollow, News Feed Preferences and Privacy Shortcuts. The company’s blog post said that “during our research on ‘Why am I seeing this post?,’ people told us that transparency into News Feed algorithms wasn’t enough without corresponding controls.”

“Why am I seeing this ad,” a similar feature that launched in 2014, will be updated with to include more information. For example, it will tell users if an ad appeared in their News Feed because a company uploaded their contact lists, like emails or phone numbers, or if they worked with a marketing partner to place the ad.

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When it comes to streaming services and smart home compatibility, there’s no doubt going to be conflicts between the major players and their respective products, but the latest rumors suggest that gap could be closing.

Investigations into the code for Apple Music’s Android app conducted by 9to5Google have found several specific mentions of Chromecast support for Apple’s music streaming service. While this isn’t a guarantee it’ll come soon, or indeed at all, it’s the best indication of compatibility we’ve had yet.

Naturally, with both Google and Apple having their own competing music streaming services and smart home platforms, this kind of compatibility doesn't come easily for either tech giant.

• Apple HomePod holds just 4% of the smart speaker market
• Apple Music hits 50 million subscribers
• Apple Music is rolling out to even more Echo and Fire TV devices

If we do see the Android version of Apple Music become available to stream via Chromecast, this would likely allow phones to cast music from Apple's platform to Google Home devices, Android TVs and other Chromecast-connected tech, although this is just a matter of speculation at this point.

While Apple launched its music service for Android back in 2015, the Google-made operating system hasn't been high on its priority list and it has, only in recent months, added some basic functionality, such as tablet support. 

Thankfully, this has resulted in a string of compatibility updates, such as support for Amazon's Echo range of speakers in the US as well as a wider roll-out to other Amazon smart devices.

• Apple Music review

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I’ve been doing a lot of interviews lately, and I’ve been watching the rise of Lambda School — which I think is fantastic, incidentally — and the combination has me wondering two things:

1. how educated do software engineers need to be?
2. And how well does that map to what they actually learn from formal education?

Let’s step back and define some terms before we try to answer those. First, by “formal” education I generally mean a four-year accredited university, whereas people with eg Lambda School or boot camps behind them are “informally” educated, and in turn distinguished from autodidacts. This is not universal. Early Google didn’t seem to consider anyone with less than a masters “formally” educated.

Second, of course there’s no absolute need. Since the dawn of the first vacuum tube, and very much including hardcore grotty stuff like compilers and cryptography, software has been a field in which people with no formal training whatsoever have thrived and succeeded wildly. Obviously neither a formal nor an informal education is actually necessary. What we’re actually asking is: in general, is there reason to believe software engineers with formal educations are better hires?

Note that, speaking as an employer, I don’t actually care whether this is due to selection bias, i.e. whether it’s because capable people are more likely to be formally educated or because they actually learned from it. I’m happy to accept that the entire university system in any country, especially yours, is deeply and increasingly pathological, unfairly and jealously hierarchical, terrifyingly high-priced, and deeply flawed at credentialing and capability signaling.

That’s a big deal to me personally … but when wearing my hiring hat, I don’t care about how that credentialing sausage is made. All I’m interested in, when I’m interviewing, is: are those signals meaningful? Are those people more or less likely to succeed, or make a mess I will subsequently have to clean up?

It’s awfully hard to find applicable statistics here, let alone any whose compilers didn’t have some implicit axe to grind. And of course I have my own biases: I have a four-year degree, from a (Canadian) school outside the hierarchy of the (American) nation in which I live, but with a strong international reputation (Waterloo), in a field (electrical engineering) only somewhat associated with software development.

I used to ask an interview question or few about theory. One of my go-to questions used to be: “Do you have a favorite algorithm, and why?” I’ve stopped asking it, because the answer is almost always some variant of “no.” Even those who have formally studied algorithms rarely care about them. Sometimes I get some variant of “I know what an algorithm is, but I’ve never actually written one.”

That’s not surprising. A whole lot of modern software engineering consists of connecting pre-existing components in slightly new ways. “Algorithms,” as we usually understand them, come baked into our tools and libraries. Does a formal education in big-O notation and Turing machines help at all? Short answer: no. Is prior experience with matrix multiplication and eigenvectors useful? Actually yes, in the rarefied case that you want to understand modern machine learning … but, as the tooling improves, not so much if you just want to use it.

Modern software engineering often — but not always — has much more in common with plumbing or carpentry than with hacking art, architecture, or computer science. It’s more like cranking out aggregative blog posts, or writing business nonfiction, than it is like crafting a novel, much less writing poetry.

Of course, this comes with the important caveat that the analogy only stands if every few years the tools which plumbers and carpenters used changed completely, along with the occasional rise of whole new approaches to their fields. But still, the need for constant re-education is probably an argument against formal training; why spend four years learning how to use tools which will probably be obsolete two years after you graduate?

So it seems reasonable to argue that if — if — you strip out theory and history, then the pedagogical content of “formal” education, vs. “informal” education plus a year or two of experience, is roughly equivalent. Autodidacts? …They’re a difficult edge case. They tend to be highly intelligent, and both hard and fast workers, but they haven’t spent as much time implicitly learning from others’ mistakes, so if still anywhere near their larval stage, they’re more likely to make them anew. An autodidact with an extensive history / portfolio, though, has no strikes against them.

What about the credentialing and selection bias of smarter people being drawn to universities? I concede there’s something to that. If it’s a university I’ve heard of (again, I didn’t grow up here) then that biases me in favor of a candidate. But at the same time, America’s education system is so screwed up, giving such advantages to the already privileged, and the existence of “legacy” students (who don’t really happen in Canada), that at the same time I’m extra wary.

You might conclude that ultimately I don’t distinguish between formally and informally trained students. But you’d be wrong. Most of the time they actually are surprisingly equivalent. But software engineering isn’t always like plumbing — and because of that, I find myself pretty unwilling to strip out theory and history from the analysis after all.

Formal education, whether it be engineering or the liberal arts, is supposed to teach you how to think critically, how to analyze systematically and strategically, and how to educate yourself efficiently, more than it’s supposed to import any particular body of knowledge. It doesn’t always succeed at this. And most of the time you don’t need any of those skills (except the last, which you need forever.)

But on the occasions that you do need those other meta-skills, you need them badly — and it seems to me that you’re noticeably less likely to gain them from informal training or autodidacticism. You’re probably right to be suspicious of this view. I’m suspicious of it myself. It’s probably essentially impossible to measure and test.

It still seems to me, though, that what you gain from formal education is not so much an expansion of your mind as a specific and (somewhat) controlled expansion of your worldview, one which hasn’t yet been replicated elsewhere. That doesn’t mean it can’t be. But there’s more to it than just intensive training in technical skills … and maybe that kind of meta-skilling is the next step in nontraditional education.

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How’s your weekend going? Good, good. Now, here, have a billionaire’s super autotuned rap track about a famous deceased gorilla:

Tesla/Space X/Boring Company guy, Elon Musk has apparently uploaded a SoundCloud track titled “RIP Harambe,” about the 17-year-old Western lowland gorilla who was shot to death at a Cincinnati zoo in 2016 after a three-year-old boy climb into his enclosure. No word yet on precisely what role Musk played in the creation of the track, beyond releasing it on his “failed […] record label.”

This might be my finest work

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2019

“This might be my finest work,” the billionaire tweeted about the track, uploaded to his Emo G (emoji) Records SoundCloud account. The song, which includes lines like “RIP Harambe / Smoking on some strong hay” appears to be more meme-centric that serious musical pursuit. But as James Dolan can happily attest, you should never let a little thing like being an ultra-wealthy executive get in the way of your dreams.

So, happy early April Fool’s Day, I guess. Honestly, I don’t really know anymore. Now back to your regularly scheduled weekend plans.

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Things are getting very tense indeed as we go in to the Elite Eight round of the 2019 March Madness, which continues to build towards the National Championship game on Monday, April 8. And with TechRadar’s handy guide, you can make sure you get a 2019 March Madness live stream from wherever in the world you are.

How have your brackets for the 2019 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Tournament held up so far? 68 teams entered and now only 8 remain - we sure hope you didn’t pick any First Four teams!

Duke and Michigan State won their Sweet Sixteen games in the East division to move onto the Elite Eight while Virginia and Purdue did the same in the South division. In the West division, Gonzaga and Texas Tech easily triumphed in their latest March Madness games to move onto the Elite Eight while Auburn and Kentucky walked away victorious from their close  games in the Midwest division.

March Madness 2019 has reached its final stages as the Elite Eight are set to battle it out for a place in the Final Four. During the third and final week of the tournament, each region’s winners will compete for a place in the National Championship to see who will be this year’s NCAA champion.

Whether you’re a student trying to watch your college’s team play, an alumni rooting for your alma mater or just a fan of the sport of basketball, we’ll show you how to live stream March Madness 2019 online from anywhere in the world.

• Soccer fan? Also check out our guide on how to watch the Champions League

How to live stream March Madness 2019 from outside your country

If you live in the US and want to know how to catch all of the games, then keep scrolling and we’ll tell you your best 2019 March Madness live stream and viewing options. There's even a service for you if you live elsewhere in the world.

But if you discover that your chosen broadcaster from your home country is geo-blocked then we can suggest a clever alternative (and no, it doesn’t involve finding some dodgy feed on Reddit). Using a VPN - or Virtual Private Network - you can change the IP address to one in a different state or country which does have the stream so that you can live stream March Madness 2019 from anywhere in the world. The process is very straightforward… 

How to watch March Madness 2019 in the US

If you live in the US and want to watch all 67 games in the NCAA tournament, then you’re in luck as there are plenty of ways to watch.

While you could watch the games on television, you can also do so from the NCAA’s own March Madness Live app. The app and accompanying website will show all 67 tournament games with a 3-hour free preview that will let you watch games airing on TBS, TNT and truTV. However, once the time limit is up, you’ll have to login using the credentials from your cable provider. One thing to note is that any games shown on CBS, which is free over-the-air, won’t count against the 3-hour time limit.

If you have a cable subscription and would prefer to watch March Madness on your TV, truTV will show all of the games in the First Four, CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV will show the first and second rounds, CBS and TBS will show the regional semifinals and finals and CBS will show the Final Four as well as the national championship.

Don’t want to pay for a premium cable subscription to watch March Madness? Don’t worry as there are a number of streaming services that give you access to CBS, TBS, TNT and truTV. To make things easier for you, we’ve listed some of our favorite options below.

And don't forget about our handy little VPN trick if you're outside the US when you try to watch and find that your preferred broadcaster's coverage is geo-blocked.

Your options to live stream March Madness 2019 online

One streaming service worth considering to watch this year's tournament is Sling TV. The company is currently running a promotion where new users can get 40% off its Sling Orange and Sling Blue packages for the first three months. Basically this means you can watch March Madness 2019 on Sling TV for as little as $15 per month during the tournament. Don't want Sling? Then these other options are worth a look, too.

PlayStation Vue $44.99 per month - PlayStation Vue's  basic Access package offers over 45 channels including ABC, TNT, ESPN and ESPN2. A 5-day trial to Playstation Vue is also available to help you get started.

DIRECTV NOW $50 per month - DIRECTV NOW gives users all the channels needed to watch the NBA and loads of other sporting events. Use DIRECTV NOW’s 7-day trial to test out the platform for yourself. 

YouTubeTV $40 per month - YouTubeTV gives you access to TNT, ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN.

Hulu with Live TV $40 per month - Hulu with Live TV includes ABC, TNT, CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN.

• Also check out the best sports streaming sites and services for cord-cutting in 2019

Worldwide March Madness live stream with ESPN Player

March Madness is a phenomenon that doesn't necessarily translate that well globally. But if you want to know what all the fuss is about or you're a US expat wanting to catch the college basketball, then ESPN Player has you covered.

It's available in the UK, Europe, Middle East, Africa and parts of Asia and comes at a cost of £9.99/€11.99 for the next month (or £69.99/€79.99 for a whole year to get additional content from ESPN).

That gets you live and on-demand coverage of every game from the 2019 March Madness, available on desktop and mobile devices.

March Madness: what is it and how does it work?

We can't imagine you will have landed on this page if you don't already know the answer to these questions. But just in case...

Over the course of three weeks, college basketball teams from across the US will play 67 games in total to decide which team will be crowned champion. The tradition dates all the way back to 1939 when there were just eight teams participating in the competition.

March Madness begins with Selection Sunday where 32 teams will gain automatic entry as a result of winning their respective conferences and the remaining teams will be picked by a selection committee. Besides learning which teams will play in the tournament, Sunday will also be the first day the bracket will be officially released to the public. The eight teams are divided into four regions and they are then seeded from one to 16 with the top team from each region earning the top seed. 

The NCAA tournament then enters the first round where the number one seed will face the number 16 team and the rest of the teams will be matched accordingly with low seed teams facing off against high seed teams. During the second week, the remaining teams will advance to the Sweet Sixteen and then the Elite Eight. Each region’s winners will then head to the Final Four during the third and final week of the tournament where they’ll compete for a place in the national championship to see who will be this year’s winner.

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Fast, affordable food delivery service has been life-changing for many working Chinese, but some still prefer to whip up their own meals. These people may not have the time to pick up fresh ingredients from brick-and-mortar stores, so China’s startups and large companies are trying to make home-cooked meals more effortless for busy workers by sending vegetables and meats to apartment doors.

The fresh grocery sector in China recorded 4.93 trillion yuan ($730 billion) in total sales last year, growing steadily from 3.37 trillion yuan in 2012 according to data collected by Euromonitor and Hua Chuang Securities. Most of these transactions still happen inside wet markets and supermarkets, leaving online retail, which accounted for only 3 percent of total grocery sales in 2016, much room for growth.

Ecommerce leaders Alibaba and JD.com have already added grocery to their comprehensive online shopping malls, nestling in the market with more focused players like Tencent-backed MissFresh (每日优鲜), which has raised $1.4 billion to date. The field has just grown a little more crowded with new entrant Meituan, the Tencent-backed food delivery and hotel booking giant that raised $4.2 billion through a Hong Kong listing last year.

Screenshots of the Meituan Maicai app / Image: Meituan Maicai

The service, which comes in a new app called “Meituan Maicai” or Meituan grocery shopping that’s separate from the company’s all-in-one app, set out in Shanghai in January before it muscled into Beijing last week. The move follows Meituan’s announcement in its mid-2018 financial report to get in on grocery delivery.

Meituan’s solution to take grocery the last mile is not too different from those of its peers. Users pick from its 1,500 stock keeping units ranging from yogurt to pork loin, fill their in-app shopping carts and pay via their phones, the firm told TechCrunch. Meituan then dispatches its delivery fleets to people’s doors in as little as 30 minutes.

The instant delivery is made possible by a satellite of physical “service stations” across neighborhoods that serve warehousing, packaging and delivering purposes. Placing offline hubs alongside customers also allows data-driven internet firms to optimize warehouse stocking based on local user preferences. For instance, people from an upscale residential area probably eat and shop differently from those in other parts of the city.

Meituan’s foray into grocery shopping further intensifies its battle with Alibaba to control how Chinese people eat. Alibaba’s Hema Supermarket has been running on a similar setup that uses its neighborhood stores as warehouses and fulfillment centers to facilitate 30-minute delivery within a three-kilometer radius. For years, Meituan’s food delivery arm has been going neck-and-neck with Ele.me, which Alibaba scooped up last year. More recently, Alibaba and Meituan are racing to get restaurants to sign up for their proprietary software, which can supposedly give owners more insights into diners and beef up customer engagement.

As part of its goal to be an “everything” app, Meituan has tried out many new initiatives in the lead-up to its initial public offering but was also quick to put them on hold. The firm acquired bike-sharing service Mobike last April only to shutter its operations across Asia in less than a year for cost-saving. Meituan also paused expansion on its much-anticipated ride-hailing business.

But grocery delivery appears to be closer to Meituan’s heart, the “eating” business, to put in its own words. Meituan is tapping its existing infrastructure to get the job done, for example, by summoning its food delivery drivers to serve the grocery service during peak hours. As the company noted in its earnings report last year, the grocery segment could leverage its “massive user base and existing world’s largest intra-city on-demand delivery network.”

Alibaba and Amazon move over, we visited JD’s connected grocery store in China

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It's not been an easy couple of years for Facebook in terms of user privacy and data security and everything else, but the giant social network seems determined to start sorting out at least some of its problems.

TechCrunch reports on an open letter published by Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, in which she says the platform is "exploring restrictions" for limiting who can launch livestreams.

The letter comes in response to the terror attack in Christchurch, New Zealand, which was streamed live over Facebook by the perpetrators.

• A Facebook bug exposed private photos
• Track your usage of social media
• Facebook is testing a new interface

Facebook is ready to support the grieving community in New Zealand, Sandberg says, and will be taking further steps to address hate speech on its platform – although she didn't go into too much detail about what that would involve.

Increased regulation

In a separate op-ed in the Washington Post, Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg says governments and regulators should take on more of a role in policing social networks.

Zuckerberg is calling for new laws in four separate areas, reports the BBC: harmful content, election integrity, privacy and data portability.

"Lawmakers often tell me we have too much power over speech, and frankly I agree," Zuckerberg writes, saying that the responsibility of restricting hate speech is too much of a challenge for individual sites and apps to tackle alone.

Zuckerberg wants to see a code of conduct that all social media networks must abide by, tighter restrictions on how political parties can campaign online, and new rules for protecting the privacy of users as they move their data between services.

• Facebook is integrating WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger

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Plus, we ride the Jeep Gladiator and ponder the future of electric vehicles, courtesy of battery-swapping rickshaws.

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The report is done, but the debate rages on.

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Neuroscience has found that gestures are not merely important as tools of expression but as guides of cognition and perception.

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The text was inspired by those recipes, but its creator won't tell you what they are.

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Many futures are for physical products, while others border on metaphysical. You can buy and sell on snowfall, box office returns, energy prices—and now trucking.

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You could think about it in terms of speed, angle, or gravity.

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We've known for some time now that Sega was planning on releasing a Genesis Mini retro console, but up until now details have been thin on the ground. We do now finally have a release date for the box: September 19.

Kotaku reports that the announcement was made on stage at Sega Fes 2019. The Sega Genesis Mini will hit stores in the US for $79.99 – that's roughly £60 or AU$115, though we don't have the official international pricing yet.

The US version of the console is going to differ from the device sold in Japan, which will be take the Mega Drive name like the original console (Genesis was a rebadging done for the US market).

• Play Sega Classics on the Amazon Fire TV
• Check out the Black Shark 2 gaming phone
• Celebrating the Sega Genesis at 30

Apparently the US version of the retro gaming box will come with three-button controllers that connect via USB. The Japanese version is set to ship with six-button controllers. Again, there's no news on which version will hit Europe or the rest of the world.

Games, games, games

We know some of the 40 games that'll be bundled with the box too: Altered Beast, Castlevania: Bloodlines, Comix Zone, Dr. Robotnik’s Mean Bean Machine, Ecco the Dolphin, Gunstar Heroes, Shining Force, Sonic The Hedgehog, Space Harrier II and ToeJam & Earl will be included in the US.

In Japan the line-up includes Sonic 2, Puyo Puyo 2, Shining Force, Castlevania Bloodlines, Powerball, Gunstar Heroes, Comix Zone, Rent-a-Hero, Space Harrier II and Madou Monogatari Ichi (some of which were originally Japanese exclusives).

Finally, Sega did say that the M2 studio behind some of its retro game reboots would be taking care of software development on the Genesis Mini.

Sega follows both Nintendo and Sony in releasing a retro version of one of its classic consoles, but we'll have to wait until September to see if there's enough built up nostalgia for the launch of the Genesis/Mega Drive Mini to be a hit.

• Smartphones are the future of gaming, according to Epic Games CEO

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When you’ve been doing this job long enough, you start to develop strange interests (though some might compellingly argue that strange interests are a prerequisite). Lately for me it’s been power banks. Quite possibly the least sexy product in all of consumer electronics outside of the ever-ubiquitous dongle.

I don’t know what to tell you. Blame the fact that I’m traveling every other week for this job. There are also all of the liveblogs from years’ past that got cut off in the last few minutes as my poor ancient MacBook put itself to sleep during those last precious battery percentages. Low batteries give me anxiety. I’m the guy who’s the first to notice when your phone’s screenshot is below 10 percent.

So the power bank has become constant accessory in my life, both home and on the road. Until last year, I used to carry a massive one that was just north of 20,000mAh. The peace of mind to back pain ration seemed sensible enough, but I learned the hard way that, not only do Chinese airports have a limit on battery size, they chuck yours in the trash without a second thought if you go over. It’s a quick way to lose $150.

The good news, however, is that between USB-C, wireless charging and the magic of crowdfunding, it seems we might be living through the golden age of the power bank. I know, right? What a time to be alive.

Point is, there are a lot of choices out there. Anker and Amazon’s house brand RAVPower both offer some good options on a budget. There’s also mainstay Mophie for those who don’t mind paying a bit of a premium for design.

Fuse Chicken was actually a brand that was new to me when they hit me up to try out their latest product. It’s a name I definitely would have remembered — because, honestly, it’s pretty terrible. Memorable, but terrible. Maybe that’s why the company went with such a mundane name for what’s a really interesting charger.

My dad ones told me that he gave my sister and I boring first names because we had such an unusual surname. I have no idea if this is true, but it’s an interesting story and could well apply here.

The Universal is a good example of making the most of out a form factor. It manages to jam a lot of features in without creating a Frankenstein’s Monster worthy of the name Fuse Chicken. On its face, the product looks like a black and white version of Amazon’s default power bricks. It serves that purpose, of course, coupled with a trio of swappable international wall adapters (bonus points for travelers).

But the brick also sports a 6,700mAh battery inside, so you can continue charging gadgets while unplugged. That’s ideal for a phone — you can keep a laptop alive for a bit as well, but you’re going to burn through that pretty quickly. There’s also a wireless charging pad up top, so you can power up another phone or, say, a new set of AirPods at the same time. The side of the device features a small display showing off how much juice is left.

It’s great having a bank that’s also a plug, though like Apple’s brick, it’s much too massive to plug into many vertical outlets. I learned this lesson the hard way on a recent coast to coast flight. Thankfully, though, it’s compatible with Apple’s extension cable.

OmniCharge, meanwhile, is a company I’ve been following since their earliest Kickstarter days. Matter of fact, the aforementioned power bank that’s currently sitting in a Chinese garbage dump is one of their products. R.I.P. noble battery pack.

The Omni Mobile 12,800 mAh is a much more basic product that the company’s earliest offerings. There’s no display for power information here — instead you have to rely on four lights to let you know how much juice is left.

As with most of the company’s products, I do quite like the design language. It’s subtle and unobtrusive and fits nicely inside a backpack. It’s definitely too big for carrying around in a pocket, however. Thanks the wonders of USB it will charge a laptop, as well, though once again, you’re going to run through that 12,800 mAh pretty quickly, if you do.

The Fuse Chicken and OmniCharge run $85 and $99, respectively. They’ve both served me well as travel companions these last few weeks. Here’s to long flights and avoiding life’s landfill.

from TechCrunch https://ift.tt/2Wxvbo7