Samsung partners with Google to make Play Music default music player and service on its devices

After Samsung shut down its U.S. mobile music service, Milk Music, the South Korean tech company turns to Google and makes its Play Music the default music player and service on its new phone and tablets worldwide. This begins with the new Galaxy S8 and S8+. As a bonus, Samsung users will get to upload 100,000 of their own songs to Google Play Music for free, which is double the storage capacity Google offers its users. New Samsung phones also get a three-month trial of Google Play Music’s subscription service and access to YouTube Red.

Google has also promised it’ll work with Samsung’s Bixby, the company’s own personal assistant software, so you can ask it to play a particular song, among others.

Source: Tech Crunch

Airbnb quietly tries out new paying scheme for guests

When you book a home with Airbnb, the policy is to pay upfront once you decide where to stay. But a new option has been spotted by Fast Company’s Ruth Reader while looking for her honeymoon destination. It hasn’t been officially launched but her account seems to be part of a small group of users that are shown a new “partial-payment feature.” It lets her pay partially for the place she booked and then having to pay the remaining balance two weeks before she arrives.

According to Airbnb’s spokesman Tim Rathschmidt, “We’re always looking for ways to make booking with and paying for Airbnb listings easier for guests, but have nothing to announce at this time.” It seems to be in the early testing phase yet but Reader theorizes this is being tested out on people who have booked far in advance and above a certain price point to make the feature attractive and more worthwhile. As she points out, from the time of the first payment and the next one, her and her fiancé will have four paychecks each, giving them more time to save up for it.

Review: 2017 Lincoln MKZ

One thing that impressed me about the 2017 Lincoln MKZ is the power it had given the 2.0L 4-cylinder engine under the hood. Thanks to the turbocharger, the vehicle had pep and didn’t lag when I wanted it to accelerate quickly. If you’re in the market for a mid-size luxury vehicle, take a look at the MKZ with me.

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Google PhotoScan now lets you turn off glare removal

A new update for the Google PhotoScan app makes the process of scanning faster and sharing easier. One of the new features include the ability to turn off glare removal. As Google reasons, “…sometimes, the lighting is just right, and there’s no glare present. For those moments, you can now turn off glare removal and scan in one step.” It’s something you can toggle right in the camera window. Even if you turn off glare removal, you can still access PhotoScan’s other features like cropping, image straightening, edge detection, and rotating to the correction orientation.

The app also now lets you share your new scan right after you take the photo. This means you don’t need to log on to Google Photos to start sharing. The new update is coming to both Android and iOS versions of the app.

Source: GSM Arena