Canadian Reviewer Weekly Roundup 10/29-11/04

First impressions of iPhone X

Spotify and Netflix help you find your ‘Stranger Things’ music match

Review: Miele Blizzard CX1 Hardfloor PowerLine

4 of the best mobile gaming apps you can’t miss

Apple fires engineer after daughter’s hands-on video of the iPhone X goes viral

Netflix cancels ‘House of Cards’ following sexual assault allegations against star Kevin Spacey surface

NASA comes out with its own spooky Halloween playlist made from sounds heard in space

BlackBerry Motion coming to Canada

Apple releases expected battery life for Apple Watch Series 3 when streaming music over LTE

Android’s Fast Pair feature makes it easier to pair Bluetooth accessories to your phone

Interac Debit comes to Samsung Pay in Canada

GarageBand 2.3 for iOS bringing new beats and loops

Razer unveils its beast of a smartphone

Microsoft rolls out its Microsoft 365 Business for SMBs

X marks the spot as iPhone X brings back the lines to Apple Retail stores

Review: Microsoft Xbox One X

Amazon's Canadian expansion continues with new Vancouver office and 1,000 employees

Logitech builds VR keyboard kit to make it easier to type while using the HTC Vive

YouTube Kids introduces new features like child profiles and more parental controls

Apple's iPhone X guided tour video gets users up and running

Apple's iPhone X guided tour video gets users up and running

iPhone X is out and this new flagship smartphone brings an all-screen display and Face ID at the expense of the Home button. This means there are a lot of new gestures and actions to get things done. Personally, the changes are quite intuitive but I still find myself searching for the Home button. Apple's posted the guided tour video above to help new iPhone X users get up and running.

YouTube Kids introduces new features like child profiles and more parental controls

YouTube is looking to give more control to both the kids and parents with the new update to its YouTube Kids app. The app now supports multiple users, letting your child set up their own profile and have optional passcodes added to keep their brothers or sisters from messing with the profile (parents can still override the passcode). This also ties their profile to the same Google account and lets them switch between devices (including smart TVs) with ease. For the parents, the setup process has been improved as well. When you enter your child’s age, the app will adjust its look to suit the age range (the app does get a fresh new look to it). The app will also now let parents now information you put in during the initial setup process will impact what your child can watch.

The YouTube team is quick to remind users though that they are still working on making sure mature content gets filtered out. In the blog post announcing the changes, they encourage parents to block and flag videos that do get through the cracks and they promise they are working and “looking at ways to build an even better experience for families.”

Facebook outs GIF-supported polls for main app

You might have noticed Instagram recently added a poll feature to its app. Its parent company Facebook is refreshing that idea (they’ve had this before) for its web and mobile apps. Now, you can ask friends and family your important life questions (or the silliest ones) with the help of GIFs, too. The poll feature will allow you two options and let you use GIFs as responses to said question. You can access this feature by selecting the “What’s on your mind” text box and pick Poll from there.

You don’t have a limit for how long the questions should be but the responses need to be limited to 25 characters. But you can use GIFs for this, which you can access when you hit the camera or GIF icon in the option line for responses. You can select how long you want to have the poll up. Your options are: one day, one week, custom, or never. For your followers who answer your poll, they won’t be anonymous, these responses will be recorded for the poster to see.

Source: The Verge