Dieter Bohn I wanna be in the Zoom where it happened

Happy Wednesday to you. We learned yesterday that Hamilton is getting released a year early as a Disney Plus exclusive. “Instead of the planned theatrical release set for October 15th, 2021, it’ll be out on July 3rd, 2020,” Julia Alexander reports. I wonder how they decided to make the switch to streaming instead of waiting for theaters to reopen. I wonder who made the final decision. I bet because everybody at Disney is working from home, it happened over a video conference.

I would have loved to have been in the Zoom where it happened. 

Short newsletter today, as I mentioned we’re working on a couple of reviews. As various states start thinking about opening up, I hope you’re keeping safe.

- Dieter

New from The Verge

┏ Facebook will pay $52 million in settlement with moderators who developed PTSD on the job 

┏ Motorola promises that the Edge Plus will get upgrades through Android 12. If you’re going to call your phone a “flagship,” then you have to support it with software updates for at least a couple of years. I’d argue the standard should be even longer than that. Three years feels like it’s more than reasonable.

┏ Google’s Nest Aware revamp is here to simplify your subscription. It’s sort of bonkers that this was per-device for so long. It was almost punishing their most loyal customers, the people who would want to buy multiple devices. 

The new Nest Aware subscription now costs $6 a month or $60 a year to cover all of your devices. That gets you 30 days of “event video history,” meaning you get the recordings from whenever the camera detects motion or sound. Jumping up to $12 a month ($120 a year) for Nest Aware Plus doubles your event history to 60 days and also gets you 10 days of 24/7 video recording history.

┏ LG is reportedly developing a dual-screen handset with a swivelling display. Weird phones forever! Lots of people told me this flippy design was reminiscent of the Iron Man phone, but unfortunately for LG they won’t get a crack at that reference for their ads. Robert Downey Jr. has switched his pitch-man allegiances from HTC over to OnePlus. (With the occasional post from a Huawei phone, maybe.)

┏ Huawei’s P30 Pro gets another rerelease to keep the Google dream alive. Speaking of Huawei, in Europe it is still selling this phone, albeit with updated software. It’s the last flagship the company is allowed to include Google apps and services on. I suppose it has no other choice, really, given what seems to be a strong reluctance among consumers to buy its non-Google-app phones.

┏ August’s Wi-Fi Smart Lock offers bolt-on smart lock convenience. Dan Seifert reviews the new design.

┏ Google Stadia is a lonely place. Tom Warren on how barren Stadia can feel when go online for multiplayer. The PUBG part is particularly damning.

┏ YouTube Music can finally import your library and uploads from Google Play Music. Here’s some good cloud services news from Google, at least. I mean, holy crap, Google remembered it had a music streaming service called Google Play Music. I kid, I kid. By all appearances the migration process here is well-done. Chris Welch has put together a helpful how-to for transferring your music.

┏ Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1 and 2 are being remastered for PS4, Xbox One, and PC 

┏ Try to dock with the International Space Station with this SpaceX Crew Dragon simulator