Gadgetory

let's talk the HTC One s9 it is officially announced the HTC One S nine packs a five inch full HD Super LCD display with Gorilla Glass a two Giga hurt octa-core MediaTek Helio x10 system-on-a-chip two gigabytes of RAM 16 gigabytes of on-board storage a 13 megapixel rear camera and a 4 megapixel front-facing camera boom sound speakers and a 2,840 milliamp hour battery and it also ships with Android marshmallow the phone has an official web page in Germany and will retail there for 499 euros or roughly $561 us now judging from these images this looks a lot like the m9 the back of the phone has the same design for the camera and antenna lines and the side view reveals the same two-tone approach as well the front of the phone is clearly different however and it's here that HTC may be on to something or at least trying to evoke a new design language as far as the pricing goes however $560 is seemingly a lot of money to be asking for what is internally at least quite similar to the now old HTC m9 let's talk googles dream team Google Ford uber lyft and Volvo have just teamed up for a mighty lobbying coalition to make sure the interests of self-driving vehicles are represented it's called the self-driving Coalition for safer streets and their angle is to promote the statistical certainty that self-driving vehicles are hands-down better and safer than human drivers the lobbying group is headed by David Strickland who is a former administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration these are the guys that sponsored our show just last week this is a solid leader for the group considering that the organization is tasked with coming up with regulations to govern self-driving cars by this summer self-driving vehicle technology will make America's roadways safer and less congested the best path for this innovation is to have one clear set of federal standards and the coalition will work with policy makers to find the right solutions that will facilitate the deployment of self-driving vehicles now for the be who hate YouTube ads there's news for you well ads have become the cost of doing business in a world where we've grown accustomed to getting our content for free although YouTube does have long ads that are skippable before videos Google is pushing out a new ad format called bumpers which are unskipable six-second shorts placed in front of the video that you selected to watch in the AdWords blog that announced the new format product manager Zach loop I compares these bumper ads to video haikus current ads placed before videos are often full-length ads that can be skipped after a few seconds however these ads have a hard cap of 6 seconds making them a lot more like vine videos than traditional video ads YouTube is targeting mobile users who tend to prefer snackable content so you can expect these new short form ads to start hitting your smartphones sometime soon however you can always opt out of this by buying into the YouTube red subscription which actually brings a lot of bang for your buck let us know what you think of this new ad format in the comments below now let's talk the Facebook messenger which now supports group calls Facebook is pushing to make messenger the one-stop solution for all your communication needs whether at work or play and it's pretty understandable why the service has 900 million active users every month and Facebook is looking for ways to monetize that if they can scoop out some of the usage that's going to competitors like Skype and Google Hangouts it's basically all aboard the gravy train currently you can have up to 50 people at a group call which sort of signals that Facebook is targeting the working world with this feature still if it can handle 50 separate lines then a three-way debate about dinner between friends should be a piece of cake what messenger still lacks however is video of course this is something that hangouts and Skype still have a stranglehold on however we'd be really surprised if Google didn't integrate this feature over the next year