Facebook is introducing new policies to safeguard users from online bullying and harassment. In a post attributed to Head of Safety Antigone Davis, the company said it will take down mass coordinated harassment campaigns targeted at individuals at heightened risk of offline harm. It will do so even if the content people post wouldn’t normally violate its safety guidelines. Additionally, Facebook says it will remove objectionable content in whatever form it takes, be that direct messages, comments or posts. As part of the same policy, the company will remove state-linked networks that work together to silence and harass people.

Had the above policy been in place in the past, one situation where Facebook may have enforced it was when Taylor Swift’s Instagram account was bombarded with snake emoji following a dramatic breakup with electronic producer Calvin Harris. Speaking of celebrities, the company has also put in place new protections to safeguard public figures from sexual harassment and appearance shaming. To that end, it plans to remove profiles, pages and groups dedicated to sexualizing those individuals. It will also target “severe sexualizing content,” including photoshopped images and drawings.

“We made these changes because attacks like these can weaponize a public figure’s appearance, which is unnecessary and often not related to the work these public figures represent,” the company said. Facebook will also provide additional protections for individuals who become famous involuntarily. Those may include individuals like journalists and human rights activists. 

Facebook has repeatedly faced pressure to do more to prevent bullying and harassment across all of its apps, but particularly on Instagram. In the aftermath of the Euro 2020 final, which saw three Black players on the English national team face a flood of harassment after England lost to Italy, Instagram Head Adam Mosseri promised the company would introduce new features to protect users. “Racism and hate speech have no place on Instagram,” he said at the time. “It is not only honestly fucked up to see people treated that way, but it breaks how Instagram works.”

Over the next year, DoorDash has earmarked $1,000,000 to support local restaurants affected by state or federally declared natural disasters. With help from Hello Alice, it will distribute $10,000 grants to businesses that can use the funds to pay for essential expenses like rent, supplies and payroll in times of need. Starting on November 1st, the companies will process applications every three months, with funding to follow shortly thereafter.

Currently, the program is only available to restaurants in the US. Other eligibility requirements include that a business owner operate three restaurants or less. None of those locations may have generated more than $3 million in revenue over the last 12 months. Notably, a partnership with DoorDash or Caviar isn’t required to apply for the program.

The relief fund comes as food delivery apps face increasing scrutiny from local governments. The City of Chicago recently launched separate lawsuits against DoorDash and GrubHub, accusing the two companies of using bait-and-switch tactics to mislead consumers. New York City also recently passed sweeping legislation aimed at protecting workers of app-based delivery services.

At the end of July, AMD announced the Radeon RX 6600XT, a video card the company billed as its 1080p flagship. For its final GPU release of 2021, it has unveiled the Radeon RX 6600. It's a video card that offers 28 compute units, a 2,044MHz game clock and up to 8GB of GDDR6 memory. On paper, that makes it only slightly less powerful than the RX 6600XT, which comes with 32 compute units, a 2,359MHz game clock and 8GB of GDDR6 RAM.

On average, AMD claims the RX 6600 is 23 percent faster than NVIDIA’s last generation RTX 2060 and about on par with the RTX 3060 while delivering better per watt performance. In Cyberpunk 2077, the company says players can expect an average of 70 frames per second at max settings in 1080p. In less visually demanding titles like Resident Evil Village and Hitman 3, you can expect on average more than 100 frames per second, according to AMD.

Notably, AMD didn’t say how the RX 6600 performs in esports titles like Valorant and Overwatch. Presumably, it should be able to put up the kind of frame rates you need to drive a single Full HD monitor at 240Hz or 360Hz. The more interesting tidbit about the RX 6600 is that it can play some games at 1440p. In Far Cry 6, for example, AMD says it’s possible to get a very playable 62 frames per second at the higher resolution.

The RX 6600 will also ship with ray-tracing support out of the box. Here the company claims you can get more than 60 frames per second while playing Far Cry 6 at both 1080p and 1440p, provided you also take advantage of its DLSS-like FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling technology. Ray-tracing performance has consistently been a weak point among AMD’s RDNA 2 GPUs, so we’ll have to see if the RX 6600 lives up to the claims.

One other point AMD was eager to get across is that RX 6600 only needs 132 watts of board power. So you’ll only need a power supply unit with about 450 watts of total power to run the GPU, making it an upgrade that should be easy to add to most computers.

The Radeon RX 6600 is available today from AMD board partners like ASUS, Gigabyte and XFX, with pricing for the GPU starting at $329. AMD CEO Lisa Su recently said she expects the current global chip shortage to continue through into the second half of 2022, so we anticipate supply of the RX 6600 will be hard to come by.

In the meantime, if you’re still using a Radeon 5000 series GPU, the good news is that AMD is expanding support for its Smart Access Memory feature to cards in that family. You’ll need a Ryzen 5000 or 3000 series CPU and B550 or X570 motherboard to take advantage, but if you have the necessary components, you can expect up to a 16 percent performance uplift in some games.

If you live in a city where rideshare scooters are available, chances are you’ve had someone zip by on one while you were walking on the sidewalk. It’s an issue that local governments around the world have pushed mobility companies to address since day one. And after working on the problem since 2019, Bird thinks it has a solution.

Collaborating with a firm called U-blox, the company has developed a custom multi-sensor and GPS module it says is far more accurate than other solutions at detecting when someone drives a scooter onto a sidewalk. When you drive a Bird scooter that’s equipped with the module onto a sidewalk, it will produce an audible sound and send a notification to your smartphone. The vehicle will also slowly and smoothly come to a stop.

Bird is testing the technology in Milwaukee and San Diego and plans to bring it to Madrid and other cities in the future.

For Bird, coming to this point has been a long journey. At one point, the company tried using AI-assisted cameras for sidewalk detection but found they presented two problems. One, they would have added a fragile component to a vehicle that’s already frequently vandalized. Two, training the machine learning software that would power those cameras would have proven difficult due to the ways road infrastructure in different countries can look. According to Bird, the advantage of its latest solution is that it’s a solution it can implement at scale without worrying about the weather or vandalism.

Ahead of its Max conference on October 26th, Adobe has shared a preview of a feature that’s coming to Photoshop on the iPad, and it’s a big one. You'll soon be able to use its Camera Raw tool to import RAW files from your camera to the iPad. 

You can use the tool to import any file format Camera Raw currently supports. That includes the ProRAW files that Apple iPhone 12 Pro and iPhone 13 Pro can output. Once you’ve loaded an image, you have access to all the usual adjustments you’ll find on the desktop version of Camera Raw, allowing you to tweaks things like the exposure and color of your photo.

One nifty new feature is that it’s possible to import your RAW file as a Smart Object into Photoshop. That means you can add your image to a PSD, open the resulting file in Photoshop desktop and still have access to the embedded file and adjustments. Adobe says Camera Raw is coming to Photoshop on the iPad soon. In the meantime, we’ll likely see the company preview more upcoming features for its various apps at Adobe Max later this month.

Vudu is now available on Oculus Quest and Quest 2 headsets. Fandango’s free streaming service includes both paid and ad-supported content. With today’s launch, you can rent and buy more than 200,000 titles through the storefront, including recent releases like Black Widow and Jungle Cruise. Additionally, there are “hundreds” of 3D movies you can watch on an Oculus Quest 2 headset. Notable inclusions on that front include Venom, Guardians of the Galaxy and Mad Max: Fury Road, among others.

Following a voluntary recall, Facebook restarted Oculus Quest 2 sales on August 24th. The $299 base model now features 128GB of internal storage, up from the 64GB it came with at launch. At the time, Facebook said the update was about allowing players to store more of their favorite games and apps on a single device. Clearly, it also had movies in mind.

Provided there aren’t any last-minute delays, Star Trek actor William Shatner will fly to the edge of space on October 13th. You can watch the entire flight right here and on Engadget’s YouTube channel. Tune in at around 9:30 to see NS-18 lift off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One facility near Van Horn, Texas. The mission was originally scheduled to blast off on October 12th but was pushed back due to unfavorable weather conditions.

The upcoming launch comes some three months after Blue Origin successfully completed its first crewed flight on July 20th. If this latest flight is successful, Shatner, at 90, will become the oldest person to have made such a journey. The current record is held by aviation legend Wally Funk, who joined Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos on the company’s inaugural flight.

PDFs aren’t the headache they once were, but they can still be a hassle sometimes, especially if all you need to do is make a quick edit. Not everyone wants to download dedicated desktop software for signing the occasional document and their web apps can present their own jank. In a move that feels long overdue, Adobe is releasing Acrobat Chrome and Edge extensions that allow you to access its PDF tools directly through your browser.

If you mostly need something that allows you to sign documents, the good news is you don’t need an Acrobat Pro DC subscription to access that functionality within the extension. Free access also allows you to add comments to PDFs, in addition to allowing you to download and print them. It’s when you get to things like trying to convert a PDF into a Microsoft Word document that you’ll need to pony up.

To be clear, the extensions are separate from Acrobat web, which Adobe recently updated to bring to clear feature parity with its desktop client. If your work involves editing PDFs frequently, you’ll probably continue using Adobe’s dedicated app. For everyone else, the extensions should do just fine in a pinch.

Google says it will phase out its use of Material Design interface elements within its iOS apps in favor of Apple’s own UIKit. Jeff Verkoeyen, the company's iOS design chief, announced the change in a Twitter thread spotted by The Verge.

Introduced in 2014, Material Design is Google’s in-house design language. The company has used it to unify the look and feel of its apps and services across various platforms. According to Verkoeyen, Google shifted its open source iOS Material component libraries into maintenance mode earlier this year after it conducted a “deep evaluation” of what it means to build a “hallmark” Google experience on iOS. What it found was that many of the custom elements it started building nearly a decade ago to fill gaps in UIKit’s design language are no longer necessary.

“With the introduction of SwiftUI and significant UIKit improvements in iOS 14+, it’s never been easier to build a great branded experience with a tiny amount of code,” Verkoeyen said. 

With the shift to UIKit, Verkoeyen expects his team will spend less time building custom code, which should hopefully lead to faster and more frequent releases. Additionally, the use of UIKit should allow the company to more tightly integrate its software into iOS. However, those benefits may pale in comparison to the fact the company’s apps may end up looking more at home on Apple devices.

Motorola launched a pair of Edge phones in 2020 that stood out for their “waterfall” displays. But it wasn’t the flagship that we preferred of the two. Instead, we were impressed by the more modest Edge. It wasn’t perfect, but you got a lot of phone for the price. So it’s not surprising to see Motorola seemingly skip the Edge+ this year and focus instead on the more affordable model. But what comes as a pleasant surprise is just how much of an improvement the 2021 Edge is. Most important among the updates is a 144Hz screen, a feature normally reserved for top-tier phones. When you add a better fingerprint sensor, superior cameras, and the promise of longer software support, the 2021 Moto Edge is a phone well worth checking out.

The display

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

The 2020 Edge was defined by the fact it featured the same 6.7-inch curved “Endless Edge” OLED display as the more expensive Edge+. This year, Motorola has gone with a flat 6.8-inch LCD that makes this new model easier to use. With no rounded edges for your palm to touch, you don’t have to worry about accidentally tapping on an icon or swiping to another part of your home screen.

Besides a more practical design, the panel is faster than the one on last year’s model. It can refresh at up to 144Hz, up from 90Hz on the 2020 Edge. Like phones from Samsung and Apple, the panel defaults to an adaptive mode, which limits the refresh rate to 120Hz. Two additional options lock the display to 144Hz and 60Hz, allowing you to prioritize either performance or battery life. I preferred pushing the panel to 144Hz, for reasons I’ll get into in a moment.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

On paper, the 144Hz panel is an impressive spec that sets the new Moto Edge apart from phones in its price range like the OnePlus Nord 2 and even more expensive devices like the iPhone 13 Pro. The tradeoff is that it’s a phone with an LCD screen, so you’re missing out on the advantages OLED displays offer, including deep blacks and better power efficiency.

The Moto Edge’s 144Hz screen also presents some issues I haven’t seen on other devices. With the default adaptive mode enabled, it didn’t always render animations at the same speed. For example, sometimes I would scroll through Instagram and my timeline would breeze by as expected. Other times, it felt like that same action would play out at 60Hz. I suspect this is an issue with the software Motorola wrote to dynamically adjust the refresh rate between 60Hz and 120Hz. We have asked Motorola for comment.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

Locking the display to 144Hz helped address this issue, but there were still moments where I witnessed slight hitching. The faster panel does make the Moto Edge feel smooth and responsive, but don’t expect the same seamless experience you can find on more expensive devices like the Galaxy S21 and iPhone 13 Pro.

One other thing I want to note is that the Edge’s 144Hz display does not necessarily make it great for gaming. Unless a developer goes out of its way to update a game for the Moto Edge’s display, as Epic Games did with Fortnite on the OnePlus and Samsung devices, you won’t see a benefit from the faster panel.

Beyond the fast refresh rate, there’s a lot to like about the Moto Edge’s display. It’s vibrant, bright and supports HDR10, but there are a couple of things that may irk some people. Out of the box, the screen is set to a saturated color mode that overbakes sRGB content. You can switch it to a “Natural” color setting to make images and videos look more realistic. I also recommend playing with the color temperature settings since my unit came with the display too warm.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

You’ll also either love or hate the Moto Edge’s 19.5:9 aspect ratio. The extra real estate is great for scrolling through Instagram, Twitter and other vertical apps but unwieldy when it comes to video content. I’ve been watching a lot of guides and gameplay videos of Diablo II: Resurrected on YouTube, and it quickly becomes evident that there’s no ideal way to consume 16:9 content on a 19.5:9 display: You either leave the image as is and accept the fact that there’s about a thumb’s worth of wasted space on each end of the screen, or you use YouTube’s pinch-to-zoom functionality to crop into the image. The 19.5:9 aspect ratio may also be too tall for some people to use in one hand.

If you don’t mind that, the Moto Edge is a great media consumption device. That said, you’ll want to use Bluetooth headphones for watching movies or TV. This year’s model only has a single speaker that sounds tinny and unsatisfying. Oh, and there’s no longer a headphone jack here, one of the few steps down from last year’s model.

Other upgrades

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

Motorola has made two other notable changes. First, it replaced the finicky in-display fingerprint sensor found in last year’s model with a capacitive scanner that’s integrated into the new phone’s side-mounted power button. The company also moved the camera cutout to the center of the screen, which makes taking selfies and video calls feel more natural. But it’s the transition to a traditional fingerprint scanner that makes the most impact.

Where I live, masks are still mandatory on public transit as well as in stores and restaurants. Coming from inputting my passcode every time I unlock my iPhone or pay for something, the Moto Edge made doing things like buying a croissant at a coffee shop feel, well, normal. The sensor also works well; It’s fast and accurate and I didn’t have to register the same fingerprint multiple times to get it working efficiently, which was a problem we ran into with last year’s model. If companies learn nothing else from the pandemic, I hope it’s that the humble fingerprint sensor has a place on every phone.

Another highlight of the Moto Edge is battery life. Motorola says you can get up to two days from the phone’s 5,000mAh battery. I found that was possible when I limited the display to 60Hz. On our video rundown battery test, it lasted 19 hours and 45 minutes, which puts it in good company among the phones we’ve tested. Only the Pixel 5a put up a better result, but it’s worth noting it features a more power-efficient OLED display.

Cameras

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

Motorola has also managed to improve the camera system on this year’s Edge, but not in the same meaningful way as the display. The 2021 model features three rear sensors: a 108-megapixel primary system with f/1.9 aperture, an ultra wide-angle and a depth sensor.

Unsurprisingly, it’s the primary camera that’s the highlight. It can take stunning shots during the day and Motorola’s HDR mode does a commendable job of preserving detail. In particularly challenging scenes, the camera tends to blow out highlights while brightening shadows to the point of making them look unrealistic. But when it properly exposes a scene, the results can be eye-catching. Colors appear vibrant and life-like, and there’s almost a physical texture to small details. Unfortunately, Motorola didn’t add OIS to the main camera, which means it can sometimes struggle when there isn’t as much light.

The 32-megapixel selfie camera is also great. It takes vibrant shots that are sharp and pop with detail. But again, the issue here is when you try to use the camera in a dark room or at night. Without OIS, I found most selfies I took in those situations ended up blurry.

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

Lastly, there’s the 119-degree wide-angle camera that still feels mostly like an afterthought. It offers plenty of horizontal and vertical space but is almost unusable when there isn’t plenty of light. I used the camera extensively on a dark and cloudy morning, and most of the shots I took that day looked smeared.

I ended up using the wide-angle camera more for macro photography. Unfortunately, that mode has some useability issues too. Focus hunting is a problem; it often took multiple attempts for the camera to lock onto my subject.

The camera app can be slow to launch and switch between lenses, which is one of the few areas where the Edge’s Snapdragon 778G didn’t have a great showing. My review unit came with 6GB of RAM and 128GB of internal storage, though you can buy it with up to 8GB of RAM. Besides the issue I noted around the refresh rate, I didn’t run into any other notable performance issues.

Wrap-up

Igor Bonifacic / Engadget

A Motorola spokesperson told Engadget the company plans to support the 2021 Edge with two OS upgrades and two years of security updates. That’s a significant change from its predecessor, which only got one Android update.

When you add that to all the hardware updates the 2021 Edge features, it’s a far more compelling phone than its predecessor and an easier recommendation. For the time being, you can get the unlocked 256GB model for $600. It will eventually cost $700. On October 14th, Verizon will also start selling a 5G UW variant that will go for $550.

At $600, the Moto Edge is a good option if you don’t mind sacrificing on camera quality and can live without wireless charging. It’s $150 more than a device like the Pixel 5a, but you’re getting a phone with a better display, faster processor and bigger battery. Even at $700, it still represents good value with specs comparable to devices like the OnePlus 9. It’s not without its flaws, but it’s still one of the best mid-range phones on the market.