Mobile hotspots are a crucial tool for travelers needing to keep all their gear connected. But with the advent of 5G, Netgear’s new Nighthawk M5 5G Wi-Fi 6 Mobile Router could replace all of your home’s Wi-Fi equipment with a pocket-friendly hotspot that will provide fast Wi-Fi even when you take it on the road.

As 5G mobile networks continue their slow but steady rollout across the country, mobile internet seems like it is increasingly becoming a viable alternative for users tired of having their internet delivered through a prehistoric coaxial cable with questionable reliability. With 5G capable of delivering download speeds up to one or two gigabits/second, with a strong enough signal reaching a home, it could theoretically deliver more than enough throughput for everything from streaming 4K content to online gaming.

Netgear’s Nighthawk M5 Mobile Router includes features that are now standard on most hotspots, including a dedicated touchscreen display for accessing its settings, showing its connection status, and keeping an eye on how much data you’ve used, and your monthly limit. What other hotspots don’t have is the ability to connect to not only the next-generation 5G mobile networks, but also the next wave of Wi-Fi 6 devices which promise the fastest wireless performance and minimal bottlenecks, even with several smartphones, tablets, computers, and IoT devices all connected at the same time.

Netgear is also positioning the Nighthawk M5 as both an alternative to getting your home internet through wires, and as a reliable backup for when your cable internet or even fiber service goes on the fritz. The M5 includes a removable rechargeable battery so that when used at home, you can instead plug into an outlet. Because hotspots typically don’t have the same Wi-Fi range as larger routers or even mesh networking hardware, the mobile router also includes a gigabit ethernet port so you can connect it to a dedicated Wi-Fi router that will provide a stronger signal throughout your entire home.
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The Nighthawk M5 won’t be available until sometime in the second half of 2020 at the earliest, with pricing being revealed at that time. And it will also be dependent on a mobile plan, and a carrier who’s operating a 5G network in your area. In other words, ditching cable internet is going to be an expensive proposition when this thing arrives, but the ultimate conveniences could easily outweigh the cost.

The majority of phones sold today are enabled for 4G connectivity, but if you’re looking to get yourself a new phone with your holiday money, you would be wise to bide your time and get yourself a 5G phone.
Here are five of the best reasons why:

1. 5G networks are better than ever, and keep improving. When launched earlier this year, 5G was limited to a few of the busiest areas of the biggest cities. But now, 5G is present in many more locations than before and will soon spread further.

2. 5G phones will be far more widespread this year. It’s not just the networks that will see significant expansion this year; we also expect to see a far greater number of the devices themselves becoming available. Qualcomm has unveiled its two latest top-of-the-line processors, the Snapdragon 865 and the Snapdragon 765, and both of them have 5G enabled.

The Samsung Galaxy A90 5G is just one of a whole new wave of 5G phones hitting the market. That means there’s no option for a 4G flagship running Qualcomm this year, which is undoubtedly essential news when one considers the ubiquity of the chipsets among Android-sporting brands such as OnePlus, Sony, Motorola, Asus, and more. You’ll have a far greater choice of a 5G phone if you wait for 2020, and depending on your commitment to your favored brand, you might not even have the option to stick to 4G this year.

3. iPhones will almost certainly adopt 5G, so no need to switch to Android. It was mildly surprising that the most prominent tech brand in the world didn’t offer the option of a 5G handset last year, but they will most likely be offering multiple 5G models this coming year. What’s more, a report has indicated that 80 million 5G modems are being readied for the September launch of the iPhone 12, so there’s strong evidence that we may see the whole range enabled for 5G.

4. 5G phones will become more affordable. Also, at the Qualcomm conference, Xiaomi announced that they would release a minimum of 10 new 5G phones throughout 2020, but more crucially, that these new devices would fall in the mid-range and possibly even budget segments of the market.

Most reviewers have been impressed with Xiaomi’s new devices, even though the 5G handsets are costly. So, if Xiaomi brings out models in the mid-range with better pricing and 5G capability, it should be welcome news for the whole market.

Moreover, most industry insiders doubt that Xiaomi will be the only brand to offer mid-range devices.

5. 5G’s excellent performance means it is the future of mobile tech. The most persuasive argument in favor of 5G comes not in the form of words, but numbers. Qualcomm’s latest X55 modem promises top download speeds of 7Gbps, and upload speeds hitting 3Gbps.

The early real-world experience says that performance improvements will be eye-opening. This massive performance improvement to your daily usage would be reason enough to adopt 5G, but it’s the implications for future tech that mean you’ll want to be a part of this new revolution.

If it seems like all your friends have smartphones, you may be on to something. A new report by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that reports on technology and media for children, found that by the age of 11, more than half of kids in the U.S. have their own smartphone. By age 12, more than two-thirds do, and by 14, teens are just as likely as adultsto own a smartphone. Some kids start much younger. Nearly 20% of 8-year-olds have a smartphone!

Now, let’s speak to the kids. So, what’s the right age? The best answer is when both you and your parents feel the time is right.

Here are some points to consider to help you and your parents make this decision.

Responsibility.Have you shown that you are generally responsible? Do you keep track of valuable belongings? Do you understand the value of money, and can you save up to buy things you want? These are all good signs that you may be ready for a phone. If not, it might be wise to wait a bit longer.

Safety.Do you travel to or from school or after-school activities without an adult? This is when phones often go from a “want” to a “need.” Sometimes parents report that they feel better knowing they can reach their children directly and that their kids can reach them, too.

Social Maturity.Do you treat your friends with kindness and respect? Do you understand the permanence of the internet, the fact that once something goes out onto the web, it can never truly be deleted? It is critically important that you have a grasp on these issues before you own a smartphone.

Bullying. We all get angry and say hurtful things we don’t mean sometimes, but when you post something on the internet that you might not mean later, or might wish you could take back. It can have real and lasting harmful effects. In the era of smartphones, there have been considerable increases in cyberbullying.

Be Smart. If you and your parents decide this is an excellent time to take that step, here are some tips for creating a healthy relationship between you and your phone.
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Parents should model good behavior! Your parents are the number one most important influence in your life, and that goes for technology use as much as anything else. If parents are glued to their phones all day, guess what? Their children probably will be, too.
On the flip side, if parents model smartphone habits like putting the phone away during meals and not texting and driving, that will go a long way toward helping kids develop similar healthy behaviors.
You and your parents should talk together about the importance of setting rules and limits around your phone use and screen time. Understanding why rules are made and set in place can help kids stick to a system.

If you’re leaving a phone or tablet in your car for some reason, you probably put it in the glovebox or out of sight under something a fair bit less valuable. That’s just common sense. But in fact, your gadget’s Bluetooth may be making them way more visible than they ever could be with the naked eye.

As Outside Magazine notes, enterprising thieves have been using Bluetooth scanner apps – particularly in otherwise deserted areas like trailheads – to quickly scan their surroundings for high-value targets. To avoid this fate, simply put your device into Airplane mode (Android, iOS), turn it all the way off or, of course, avoid having to leave it in the car in the first place.

Better yet, you can test your own preventative measures by downloading a readily available Bluetooth scanner app yourself to see if your devices are visible by this method even after you have attempted to disable them. Certain devices like wireless headphones and fitness trackers can be pretty insistent on sending out Bluetooth signals for pairing purposes, so it is worth double-checking you actually know how to disable them fully.
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Or, for a dead-simple approach that will cost you a few bucks, pick up a signal-blocking “Faraday bag” to keep in your car, so you can be sure the gadgets inside it can’t signal the outside world no matter how hard they try.

The world has been hard at work, trying to find solutions to store the 100 zettabytes of data that are expected to hit the cloud by 2023. 

Microsoft and Warner Bros, for their parts, have just demonstrated why they think they are ahead of the game – in both protecting past archives, and in storing those to come.

At Microsoft's Ignite conference, CEO Satya Nadella showed off a piece of quartz glass the size of a drink coaster. Within the glass was stored a 143-minute Warner Bros movie – fittingly, the film was Superman. 

The technology is the result of Microsoft Research's Project Silica, which was set up to design new storage systems for the cloud. 

Project Silica's researchers have been working on developing ultrafast laser optics, which they used to encode the entire film in glass.

Using an ultrafast pulse laser, they wrote 'voxels' inside the glass – that is, the three-dimensional equivalent of the pixels that make up an image. Each voxel, therefore, has its own orientation, depth, and size, making it a unique encoder for the movie. 

Because voxels are engraved at the nano-scale level, they can be written in multiple layers throughout the glass. A two-millimeter piece, for example, can contain more than 100 layers of voxels, making for high-density storage. 

According to Microsoft, the glass and the data it contains can resist being boiled in water, baked in an oven, microwaved, flooded, scoured, and demagnetized. By permanently changing the structure of the glass, the laser ensures that the information is securely printed for potentially thousands of years.

Ant Rowstron, deputy lab director at Microsoft Research - Cambridge, said: "One big thing we wanted to eliminate is this expensive cycle of moving and rewriting data to the next generation."

"We really wanted something you can put on the shelf for 50 or 100 or 1,000 years and forget about until you need it." 

To carry out Project Silica, Microsoft partnered with the University of Southampton in the UK, where scientists had already developed a laser-writing technology to record data back in 2016, which they claimed could have "a virtually unlimited lifetime at room temperature."

Peter Kazansky, who worked on the project, said at the time that this would open a new era of data archiving. "This technology can secure the last evidence of our civilization: all we've learned will not be forgotten," he said.

For a media company like Warner Bros, this could have huge implications. Storing its 100-year film and television archives is indeed currently causing it some headaches. 

The company keeps three copies of each asset stored in various locations around the world. It has plans in place in case an earthquake, a hurricane or a fire struck one of its storage locations. And every three to five years, it migrates its digital content to stay ahead of degradation issues.

The company's chief technology officer, Vicky Colf, said: "Imagine if a title like The Wizard of Oz or a show like Friends wasn't available for generation after generation to enjoy… That's why we take the job of preserving and archiving our content extremely seriously."

As intriguing as storing data on glass may seem, though, the technology is not made for users to be able to play films at home on a specially made quartz glass DVD player. 

The voxels encoded by the laser in the glass can only be read by a computer-controlled microscope that uses machine learning to decode and reconstruct the patterns that come out when polarized light is shone through the glass. 

So, the data stored in the new technology won't be information that needs to be accessed regularly. Instead, Microsoft spoke of it as 'cold data,' or archival data that companies are required to maintain but don't need to see for months or years. 

Cold data includes media archives like those held by Warner Bros, but also medical data, or legal contracts, or even urban building plans that cities have to retain.

"We are not trying to build things that you put in your house or play movies from," said Rowstron. "We are building storage that operates at the cloud scale."

In other words, Microsoft is interested in technology that exists exclusively for the cloud – something that it previously outlined in its mission statement for Project Silica, in which it said that its research was not concerned with the deployment of information outside the cloud, such as offices, homes, mobile phones or enterprise data centers. 

Microsoft cautions that there is much work ahead before physical quartz-glass archives can be used at scale. To do so, Microsoft engineers would need to speed up data encoding, as well as increase the data density.

You can now bring your old whiteboards into the 21stcentury with Rocketbook Beacons. These four restickable, reusable Beacons convert your writing surface into a smartboard by integrating with popular cloud services in the free Rocketbook app. 

Brainstorm the next great mission with your crew, capture and share your ideas, and then take your Beacons with you to your next adventure. The Beacons Go-Pack is $15.
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• Set of 4 Beacons
• 2.5-inch triangles
• Fluorescent orange
• Restickable Yupo adhesive 
• Wash with soap and water
• Free Go-Pack carry case

Rocketbook Beacons allow you to capture, organize, and broadcast important notes, diagrams, and big ideas on any whiteboard or wall surface in real-time. Just four restickable "beacons" for any sized surface and one smartphone app that connects with many of the popular cloud services you already use.
Using Beacons involves four easy steps:

1. Place the four Beacon quadra-triangles in each corner of a whiteboard or your preferred writing area. Do your best to make it straight, but it doesn’t have to be perfect. Now document your ideas and discussions on the whiteboard the way you usually would.
2. Got an iPhone or Android? Use the free Rocketbook app to configure popular cloud services as your scan destinations. Rocketbook has partnered with some of your favorite services, such as Evernote, One Note, Dropbox, and Google Drive. You can also use regular email if you wish.
3. For crucial missions with scattered participants, you can stream your whiteboard in real-time. Switch to “Snapcast” mode, share the unique URL, and collaborate with your team anywhere in the world. Your private, real-time page is updated every time you scan your whiteboard. Or prop your phone facing your whiteboard and set the app to auto-scan every 5 seconds. 
4. Is your next mission destined for a different whiteboard? No problem. Peel the Beacons off of the board and prepare for your next voyage. Beacons have a space-aged micro-suction surface that can not only be reused over and over but even cleaned with soap and water.

Whether you love paper and pen or prefer to live paper-free, you still probably need to take notes, read PDFs, or maybe even illustrate an idea with a sketch. Smart notebooks help bring ideas typically captured on paper into a digital format. Some smart notebooks also involve real paper.

Smart notebooks don’t really conform to a firm definition. There’s still a lot of interpretation as to what a smart notebook is. That said, they are different from tablets: Tablets usually have color screens, like the Retina display on any recent iPad. Smart notebooks use some other kind of technology for the interface.

Some smart notebooks work best as digital tablets for writing and sketching. Others are paper-based notebooks with either a pressure-sensitive pad behind them to capture what you write or a companion app you use to scan pages.

Also included is one unique product that is something of an “honorary” smart notebook even though it’s a pen. It’s so smart, however, that it turns any notebook into a smart notebook.

Here are five of the best options listed in alphabetical order:

LiveScribe Echo 2GB ($179). It’s not a smart notebook per se, but the LiveScribe Echo pen turns any notebook into a smart one. This special pen has the unique ability to remember what you write or draw, the order in which you did so, and any audio that played while you wrote. That means you can take lecture notes while also recording the speaker. Or you can write your notes and dictate additional thoughts. When you’re done with your work, you can sync the memory from the LiveScribe Echo pen to a macOS or Windows computer and see all your notes reappear in the order that you took them on screen in a digital notebook.

Onyx Boox Max 3 ($859). It may seem like you need a money-is-no-object attitude to buy the Onyx Boox Max 3, and maybe you do. But the key thing to know about this smart notebook is just how much it’s capable of. It’s a big, 13.3-inch e-reader with E-Ink Mobius (making reading easy on the eyes) running Android 9 that’s Wi-Fi-capable, so you can also use it to surf the web or connect to digital libraries. About the only thing it can’t do is display color since it’s grayscale only. The Onyx Boox Max 3 is especially useful for anyone who spends hours a day pouring over PDFs and needs to make notes on the pages, mark them up, highlight passages, or even translate text. It ships with 4GB of RAM, a stylus, charging cable, HDMI cable, and protective sleeve.

reMarkable ($499). ReMarkable is billed as the digital notebook for people who don’t want to give up paper. It’s designed to feel like paper as you read, draw, and write on it. This 10.3-inch smart notebook not only feels like paper but also sounds like it when you write or draw on it with the included marker. The pressure-sensitive marker never requires charging or pairing. This notebook doubles an e-reader. The surface contains the company’s own Canvas technology, which uses black ink particles to reflect natural light. When you buy a reMarkable tablet, it ships with not only the marker but also with eight replacement tips and a cable for recharging.

Rocketbook Everlast ($32). The Rocketbook Everlast Notebook is a smart and reusable paper notebook. The predecessor version of the Rocketbook had users write with a special pen and then use a microwave oven to remove the writing. In the 2019 version, you write on special waterproof pages with a Pilot Frixion pen and wipe the pages clean with a damp microfiber cloth when you’re done. So, what makes it a smart notebook? Using a companion app, you scan your pages to turn them into digital notes. At the bottom of each page are a few icons. You assign each symbol to a destination in one of your cloud storage services, such as a particular folder in Google Drive or a notebook in Evernote. Whenever you write on a page, you put color in the corresponding icon, and the app files your pages accordingly when you scan them. The app works with Dropbox, Google Drive, Evernote, Microsoft OneNote, and email, with support for a few other services in the works. The book comes in four colors (black, red, midnight blue, and teal) and two sizes (8.5 X 11 inches with 32 pages or 6 X 8.8 inches with 36 pages).

Wacom Bamboo Folio ($199). The Wacom Bamboo Folio is for people who love to write on paper with a pen but also want the benefits of digitized notes. Wacom has long been a leader in digital tablets, especially those for drawing and sketching. The Bamboo Folio puts an exciting twist on the concept of a smart notebook, however. It’s a paper pad tucked into a little folio case, and the back of the case is a smart surface. When you write or draw on the paper, the smart surface records your marks. It stores them and later transfers them wirelessly to a companion app. You never have to scan your handwritten pages, but you get the same result as if you did.
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Wacom also sells a less expensive Bamboo Slate ($129.99). It works similarly, but it’s a slab rather than a folded folio.

You hear the warning every time you fly: Please set all devices to airplane mode. But what happens if you don't?

It’s not that long ago that airlines stopped telling passengers to keep their mobile phones, tablets, e-readers and other devices turned off throughout the flight. 

Why Airplane Mode. We’re asked to turn our devices off or to put them in Airplane Mode because of electromagnetic interference from phones, tablets, e-readers, electronic headsets, and more. Since some planes were built before these became a thing, it took a while for the industry to make sure it was entirely safe to use them.

These days, you’ll even see iPads and other tablets in the flight deck, which pilots use to store paperwork instead of lugging around big bags with actual paper in them. You’ll see flight attendants using tablets and big phones too, either instead of or in addition to those reams and reams of dot-matrix printed paperwork. All those devices have been tested extensively to make sure there’s no interference.  

That testing happened during the rigorous qualification process to enable airlines to offer inflight internet. Part of that testing process is creating enough electromagnetic interference to represent an entire cabin full of devices of a variety of sizes, including some that are malfunctioning. Pretty much every airliner-equipment combo operated by a major international airline has now been tested.

So, what happens if I don't put my phone on airplane mode? 

For years, safety regulators, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, and everyone else in the industry has known that there are dozens of devices left out of airplane mode on every flight. In a way, the fact that planes haven’t fallen out of the sky willy-nilly because someone left their Kindle on is the best demonstration that, for the most part, most devices don’t affect most planes.

But “most” isn’t good enough for aviation. Some folks don’t know that their Kindle even has 3G, or that the Bluetooth on their watch or headphones or other device counts as needing to be put into airplane mode. Some forget that they’ve packed one of those devices in the overhead bin. Some even blatantly ignore the rules, assuming that their vital email on that BlackBerry isn’t going to make their plane start to plummet. And it probably isn’t. 

The real reason to be sure your phone is put into Airplane Mode is to be sure that you don’t accidentally connect to the in-flight roaming network and get billed for time on that network. This is also true if you are in a foreign country. Airplane Mode keeps your cellular devices from roaming on a local network which could generate huge charges depending on how long you are in-country. That’s also true for cruises.
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The other big reason to use Airplane Mode while on aircraft is that the effort your cell phone goes through to keep scanning and tower hopping at fly-by speeds can drain your battery in a big way.

More than 400 police agencies across the United States are working with the Amazon-owned Ring home surveillance system, and now you can check if your local department is one of them.

Ring disclosed the number late month, and it’s double what reports had previously revealed. It also published an interactive map where anyone can check whether their hometown cops are part of the controversial effort through which police can see all the Ring cameras in a given neighborhood, can seamlessly request the footage and are encouraged to promote the device.

The map, where you can also check when each department started working with Ring, is available here, along with a blog post about the Ring-law enforcement partnership. The company will be updating the map as new departments are added, it says.

The release coincided with an in-depth Washington Post story, which disclosed the full number of agencies for the first time.

The Ring system includes its surveillance cameras (most famously the motion-activated camera doorbells) as well as the Neighbors app (where people can share footage from their cameras and discuss crime in their areas) and the Neighborhood Portal (where police can see a map of Ring cameras and quickly submit a request for footage during an investigation). In recent months, Vice, CNET, and Gizmodo have reported on police’s close relationship with the company, which, for example, gives departments discounts or free cameras to distribute among residents. In some cases, police have used the giveaways as leverage to demand that people hand over their footage, although Ring says it is supposed to be voluntary.
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Critics worry about the privacy implications of such a built-out surveillance network, especially one that is controlled by a private company. What’s more, “neighborhood watch” apps like Neighbors or Nextdoor have had problems with racism and racial profiling, after users have raised the alarm after merely seeing people of color in their area.

We often take the quality of the water we drink for granted. Food is regularly tested for hygiene and safety, but that level of scrutiny doesn’t extend to water. With water, we usually take for granted that it’s clean if it looks, smells, and tastes okay. If only purity worked that way!

Lishtot TestDrop Prodoes what our senses cannot. Tests water for contaminants that we can’t see, smell, or taste. It scans water without needing to be immersed in it, and in a matter of 2 seconds, tells you if the water you’ve got is safe to drink or not.

In what outwardly seems like magic, the TestDrop Pro is capable of analyzing your water in seconds, without even being in contact with it. Water emits its own local electromagnetic field, which the TestDrop Pro reads. Using this electromagnetic reading, the TestDrop Pro can tell if your water is safe to drink or not. The device can test for lead, E. Coli, pesticides, chlorine, and more. The electromagnetic field emitted by the contaminants is different from that of pure water. So, using this electromagnetic reading, and a simple red and blue light, the TestDrop Pro can, within seconds, tell you whether your water is pure or not. It goes even a step further with Lishtot’s smartphone app (currently in beta testing), showing you the exact percentage of purity with remarkable accuracy!
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You can buy a TestDrop Pro at Amazonfor $50.