Dual Screen ZenBook; New iPod Touch; Next iPhone-Dual Bluetooth Feeds; Portland Gets Alphabet Mobile Tracking

We all know you can never have enough screens, right? Now Asus goes over the top with the ZenBook Pro Duo…it has a second screen…half the size of the primary one… just above the keyboard. It’s like Apple’s Touch Bar on steroids. Theverge.com reports that both screens are 4K. The laptop still has a full sized keyboard with a function row. In one example of use, the bottom screen becomes a piano keyboard, and the music lesson is displayed in the primary keyboard. The computer has an 8 core Intel Core i9 processor and an Nvidia RTX 2060 GPU. No pricing or release date is out, but look for it around 3rd quarter.

Apple has updated laptops without much fanfare in the last few weeks, and now has dropped a new iPod Touch. It comes with an A10 Fusion Chip, 4 inch Retina display, and up to 256 Gigs of storage. Macrumors.com says they start at $199 for 32 Gigs. The 128 Gig iPod is $299, and it’s $399 for 256 Gigs. They come i 6 colors.

The next iPhone (and we’re talking 2020, not this September, most likely) may be capable of sending separate Bluetooth feeds. According to engadget.com, some Samsung phones and others already support the feature. It allows two people to listen to separate playlists off the same iPhone, or one to listen over ear buds while another plays different tunes on a home Bluetooth speaker.

From the ‘creepy enough for you’ Department….Portland has signed on with Alphabet’s Sidewalk Labs. They will pilot Replica software for a year…and in exchange, according to GeekWire.com, will get access to a massive dataset that mirrors how people actually move through the city and its surroundings. The city says it will help manage issues like safety and congestion. Although it is supposed to basically use ‘deidentified’ mobile location data showing how people actually move through the city to build a mock environment to simulate peoples’ travel activities, how good do you feel about your clone being tracked? Stay tuned, and let’s see the good people of Portland respond. Maybe some will ditch Android phones for iPhones….or start carrying flip phones.