(upbeat electronic music)
- Hey everyone, Daniel Rubino here, Windows Central,
and this is your Microsoft and Windows news roundup.
Alright, first up, ASUS.
So they have not had a good week.
In a story that first ran on Motherboard,
it was pointed out that ASUS has a backdoor Trojan problem.
So if you don't know a lot of PCs, especially from OEMs,
come with their own updating software.
That software then allows them to install drivers,
configure some aspects of the hardware,
and install BIOS updates.
In fact HP, Lenovo, Dell, almost all of them have this.
Unfortunately the one from ASUS had a backdoor to it
that some hackers were able to exploit.
Around 57 to 100,000 computers were affected,
and it was a pretty serious thing that allowed hackers
to install malicious software through this backdoor.
Now to cover their tracks the hackers also used
all sorts of tricks including making the file size
exactly the same as the official version.
ASUS has since patched the software
and it's supposed to be pretty safe now,
but this does highlight a problem
with this kind of software.
Now Microsoft has been working with its OEM partners
to getting drivers and BIOS updates
going through Windows Update.
That is Microsoft themselves host it,
it comes through with your OS updates,
it's a much more secure system,
and a lot of companies are already doing this.
But you can see we're still having issues here,
this is just one more reason though
why we need to get rid of these apps.
Surface Hub 2, it's finally coming out.
So we heard about Q2 2019 as the release date
for Microsoft's giant collaborative display.
It's over 51 inches, it's over 4k,
and it's absolutely beautiful.
And we did kind of see this last year at Ignite,
that we were unable to film it or take photos,
we could just kinda look at it, just get a brief tour.
But that's all gonna change April 17th, New York City,
Panos Panay, the Surface Team will be there to unveil
Surface Hub 2 to the public.
It's gonna be actually a small group of media there,
we'll be of course in attendance,
we'll be able to actually see this thing.
There will also be pricing and the exact availability
for Surface Hub 2 which will be announced.
This is all good news if you're a big company
or a school who's looking to invest into this system,
but this also means we're probably not going to be getting
new Surface products at least in the spring.
So no new Surface Book 3, no new Surface Pro,
and that's a bit unfortunate so we'll have to wait
until the fall which is the other time
that Microsoft likes to announce those new products.
But if you're interested in Surface Hub 2 well pay attention
to April 17th, we'll be there covering it live.
Next up Surface headphones.
Microsoft released a new firmware patch this week.
It's one of the first ones that I've received
for my headphones and it addresses a few concerns
including improving the audio quality
of the Bluetooth connection.
It also now allows you to manage up to eight devices
paired with the headphones.
Now you can only have two that are active at a time,
but you can still have eight devices paired total,
that's actually pretty huge especially if you're using
the Sony headphones, you can't do that at all.
This is one of the big selling points
of the Surface headphones, and it works really well.
The other thing you can do now is you can plug in
the USB Type-C to recharge them while also having
the 3.5 millimeter headphone jack plugged in
and still use the active noise cancellation and the volume.
That may sound kind of trivial
but a lot of headphones you can't do that.
On my BOSE, when I plugged them in to charge,
I couldn't even do a firmware update for them.
So a lot of these kind of headphones it's one or the other,
Microsoft's allowing you to do them all.
And if you want the full change log
well we're gonna post it right here and show you what's new,
let me know what you think about the Surface headphones
if you're going to get them now.
Xbox One S All-Digital Edition.
So the question was what will this thing actually look like.
As it turns out, a lot like the Xbox One S.
So our games review editor Jez Corden and Matt Brown
teamed up and they got an actual inside look
at what this device is gonna look like
and we put mock ups on Windows Central,
and it looks just like an Xbox One S
except it doesn't have a digital drive in there for a DVD.
And the reason I think Microsoft is doing this
is to, well, save money.
So they can just reuse the current chassis
without doing a huge revision to the hardware.
After all we don't know how well
this thing is going to sell.
As to when will it become available,
look for an announcement in mid April on sale for May 7th.
As far as pricing well it's gonna be a little expensive
as far as the initial pricing.
But we do expect this to go on sale
eventually for around $199.
Next up Your Phone.
So Microsoft's project here to allow you to use
your phone with your Windows 10 PC.
It's getting some new advances,
one of them is gonna be the My Phone feature
which will mirror the android device on your computer.
That means you can launch apps and control it directly
from your PC without having to take it out from your pocket.
Now this is in very early stage testing,
and the fact that it only works with the Surface Go
and a Samsung Galaxy S9 or S8 which is kinda weird
but that's what we expect as they're gonna control
the Bluetooth stack here to get some
early testing and feedback.
Expected to go wide later on.
Now if you wanna see it in action
well we did a whole video on that.
And you can go check that out and see
what it's gonna look like.
Next up is the Microsoft Edge browser.
So as was reported a few months ago
they're switching to the Chromium Project
as the backend for its browser, replacing Edge HTML.
Now since then we've had a couple leaks
including screen shots but this week the entire thing
leaked out and you can go and install it yourself.
Now this precedes Microsoft's expected upcoming announcement
about when you can just test it through its preview program
where you can get on the safe version
that will actually update itself.
I don't actually recommend you go out and just download
a random executable, that's a little bit dangerous.
Stay tuned though.
All this is a buildup to the fact that
Microsoft is about to release this.
So the official version is coming.
So how is it so far?
Well we did a whole video walkthrough of it
and it's actually really good.
It's very polished and yeah, you can actually make this
your default browser today and start using it.
Now at first it still looks like a lot like
the Chrome browser but if you go into about flags
you can actually enable the Edge theme and all of a sudden
now it looks like your Edge browser
including having a dark mode in those nice context menus.
And not everything works right now,
for instance there is no share menu,
there is no inking, there's a few things missing,
scrolling could be a little bit smoother.
All of that is expected to come later on though.
But currently where it is it's a pretty impressive browser
but you tell me what do you think?
Are you going to switch to Edge now
or are you going to stick with Firefox?
Leave me a comment, tell me what you think.
Alright here's a quick summary of all the major
Microsoft and Windows news out there.
Now if you want more information about any of this,
go to the description below,
we have all the links to the major stores.
Otherwise leave me a comment, tell me what you think,
what Microsoft could be doing better.
Thanks for watching, take care everyone.
(upbeat electronic music)