Hasta La Gadget!

You probably didn’t have a hankering to build Minecraft worlds on your Apple TV, and Microsoft has quietly acknowledged that reality. The company recently started notifying players that it had stopped updating and supporting the Apple TV version of t…

This clever – if expensive – product is called the BoxLock and it is a keyless padlock that lets your package delivery person scan and drop off your packages into a locked box. The system essentially watches for a shipping event and then waits for the right barcode before opening. Once the delivery person scans the package, the lock opens, the delivery person sticks the package in a box or shed (not included) and locks it back up. You then go and grab your package at your leisure.

The lock costs $129.

The company appeared on everyone’s favorite show, Shark Tank, where they demonstrated the system with a fake door and fake UPS dude.

The internal battery lasts 30 days on one charge and it connects to your phone and house via Wi-Fi. While the system does require a box – it’s called BoxLock, after all, not LockBox – it’s a clever solution to those pesky porch pirates who endlessly steal my YorkieLoversBox deliveries.

The Honor 8X is an affordable phone with a 6.5-inch full-screen design that looks like a high-end smartphone. When you hold it in, the phone doesn’t feel cheap, and many people would be surprised to learn how much it actually costs.

But that’s hardly new for Honor. Not so long ago, we reviewed the Honor Play, a gaming-centric handset that is priced slightly above the Honor 8X’s ~$330 estimated value. The brand has always been about “quality for the price,” and so far, our smartphone data shows it distinctly review after review, whether it is for battery capacity, performance or here: display quality, Honor phones often have a value-oriented twist.

The industrial design looks and feels great and can rival competitors that cost $100 more. The phone is made with a classic dual-glass sandwich with an aluminum frame. It’s a proven design that is exceptionally rigid, and Honor has cleverly tuned it to reduce the parts and assembly costs.

The huge 6.5” IPS LCD display has a 2340×1080 resolution for a pixel density or sharpness of 396 PPI and can reproduce 16M colors and is relatively bright for a comfortable-enough usage in sunlight. The display has been carefully selected to offer a high price/quality ratio, and we computed its screen to body ratio at 84.4%, which is excellent.

The Sim Tray and micro-SDXC port are on the left side, and the bottom has the 3.5 mm audio port and oddly-enough a micro-USB connector for data and charging. This is another cost-reducing technique that would betray the otherwise high-end “feel” of this handset.

In the rear, there’s a 20 Megapixel camera with a respectable f/1.8 aperture and a 2 Megapixel camera that serves as Bokeh depth sensor for portrait photography. The front camera is a 16 Megapixel selfie cam with an aperture of f/2.0.

If you could crack it open (don’t do it), you would see a Kirin 770 processor from HiSilicon (a Huawei subsidiary, just like Honor). It’s a mid-range processor that offers good performance but can’t remotely approach what top tiers smartphones have today. In fact, the Honor Play would be the go-to phone for budget-conscious power users, the Honor 8X is for more casual users who enjoy social media and entertainment activities.

Yet, Honor 8X has GPU Turbo, a feature we discussed recently that might help boost the performance of specific games that are supported.

The 3750 mAh battery has excellent capacity and offers a high power density (capacity/size) which is superior to the iPhone XS Max for example. Not surprisingly, the amount of battery that you get for the price will easily leap high-end phones just as the chart below shows.

We’re looking forward to publishing a complete, in-depth review of the Honor 8X, just like we did for the Honor 7X last year.

Honor 8X: An Affordable 6.5-inch Premium Android Phone , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

Circuit Scribe is a very cool pen that allows builders to draw conductive traces on anything that can be used to power gizmos and gadgets. Now the company has announced that it will soon launch a kit that allows DIYers to make their own drone.

The build process includes drawing the wires to the motors using the pen’s conductive silver ink. The kit uses cardboard arms to hold the motors in place, so if crashes happen, you can just cut out another set of cardboard arms and you are good. The drone is controlled via a smartphone app available for Apple and Android devices, and offers one-key takeoffs and landings.

The drone works indoors and out and has an integrated 480p video camera. It has a 150-foot communication range, but sadly it can only fly for about 3 minutes per charge. The Circuit Scribe Drone Builder kit will launch October 23 at CircuitScribe.com for $99.99.

Today, the president signed the Music Modernization Act into law with various celebrities, including Kid Rock, Mike Love and John Rich, present. This is one of the largest reforms to copyright law in decades, and it focuses on updating music copyrigh…