As more and more venues and events, including CES, require proof of vaccination against COVID before granting entry, Samsung is working to make it easier to keep your records on hand. The company has today announced that it has partnered with non-profit The Commons Project to help digitize people’s vaccination records. Once a user has authenticated their record through the CommonHealth app, they can add the details to their Samsung Pay wallet for “convenient access and use.”
The feature is rolling out to a small number of devices initially, but Samsung says that every compatible device will have access by the end of the week. Both parties say that the data will be secure and the transfer from the CommonHealth app to Samsung Pay will be quick and painless.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has launched an investigation into Tesla’s Autopilot system. Since 2018, Tesla cars driven by Autopilot have crashed into first-responder vehicles on 11 separate occasions, causing 17 injuries and one fatality. Given that first responders vehicles have flashing lights, arrow boards and road cones, officials are concerned the system lulls drivers into a false sense of security.
The NHTSA will now investigate how Tesla’s Autopilot system studies the road and, more importantly, ensures drivers engage with what’s going on. This could be the first brick in the road toward tougher supervision of all autonomous and semi-autonomous driver assistance systems. After all, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has already criticized Tesla for beta-testing its product on public roads with very little oversight.
For years, Intel has wanted a piece of NVIDIA’s (and AMD’s) discrete graphics card business, and now we know a little bit more about its plan. The struggling chip giant has announced it will release hardware under the Intel Arc name, with its first card due to arrive at the start of 2022. The first GPU, currently codenamed Alchemist, will offer hardware-based ray tracing and mesh shading and support DirectX 12 Ultimate. As part of the announcement, it also showed off a sizzle reel of games running on its new silicon which, unsurprisingly, looked pretty good. Continue Reading.
Earlier this year, Qualcomm and ASUS announced the snappily named Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders. It’s an ultra-premium smartphone designed, in theory, for diehards who expect their Android phones to be a cut above whatever else is on the market. Now, Engadget’s Cherlynn Low has put the phone through its paces and found a handset that was simply too undercooked to review. With a number of headline features not yet available to test, the end result is a device that, right now, can’t justify its high price. Continue Reading.
YikYak was, or is, an anonymous messaging app that only let you communicate with people in a five-mile radius. Unfortunately, the anonymity offered meant it quickly became a hotbed for abuse, and it shut down in 2017. Now it’s back, equipped with a whole new set of guardrails designed to stop its communities becoming toxic. It’s only currently available for iOS in the US but is expected to grow in the near future. It’ll need to work very hard to coax everyone away from their current social media platforms of choice. Continue Reading.
Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin has filed a complaint against NASA, saying the way it picked a contractor for the Human Landing System was unfair. It’s the second time in a month the company has launched a courtroom brace against NASA after officials picked SpaceX for its lunar lander contract. This was after Bezos essentially offered the US government a $2 billion discount to put Blue Origin at the front of the line. Unfortunately, this latest complaint will force work on the Artemis lander to be put on hold, which may mean NASA misses its 2024 goal of returning to the moon. Continue Reading.
Last week, Apple announced that it was taking new steps to prevent the distribution of CSAM on its platform. This included a system to detect such material by scanning the images in people’s iCloud libraries, which has proved controversial. Privacy campaigners have said that this is the first step on a slippery slope to allowing governments all over the world access to people’s phones. That could have implications for activists and journalists in more authoritarian countries, something Apple has prior form in bowing to.
That’s why Engadget’s Karissa Bell has taken a deep, deep dive into what exactly is going on with all of this. If you’ve only heard snatches of what’s going on, and don’t quite get what the real world impacts are, then we’ve got you covered. She’s explored how the technology works, what Apple has said, and if anyone really needs to be concerned.
Zoom knows that not even the internet can dampen the allure of watching the class clown instead of your teacher. That’s why the company is unveiling Focus Mode, which is designed for educators trying to wrest control of their lesson back from the students. With it, teachers can see all of the students on their own feed, but each student can only see the teacher and whatever presentation the teacher is giving. That could be a key tool to keep kids paying attention especially with the Delta variant threatening to derail the start of school. Continue Reading.
It says it needs to in order to protect its users.
Amazon is planning to license keystroke-monitoring software to keep an eye on its employees when they work from home. A leaked document purportedly from the company says that there is a concern that remote working could lead to a rise in data breaches. As such, it’s planning to use software from a company called BehavioSec which tracks keyboard and mouse use. In a statement, Amazon said that it treated the security of user data with the highest respect, and that it was always exploring new ways of safeguarding its customers. Continue Reading.
If you’ve been waiting for VR to mature to the point where you can really get some value out of the technology, now may be the time. A number of companies are now making comfortable, usable and in some cases surprisingly affordable headsets for standalone and PC gaming. In our latest buyer’s guide, we explore the best VR gear for most people, the most affordable way to get set up, and which headset comes out on top as the best that money can buy. Continue Reading.
Honor, for many years, was a subsidiary of Chinese mega-corp Huawei responsible for making budget phones. When the US sanctions against the company began to bite, however, Huawei sold Honor off so it could try to flourish as a standalone business. Now, Honor is reintroducing itself to the world with the Magic3, a new flagship with a “more-is-more-is-more” approach to photography. The Magic3 Pro+, for instance, has a 50-megapixel primary camera, flanked by a trio of 64-megapixel sensors for zoom, wide-angle and monochrome photography. Honor says that it can even shoot cinema-quality video, which is a feature we can’t wait to test. Continue Reading.
The best Star Trek series since Deep Space Nine is back, and it’s as good as it ever was in its first year. Lower Decks features the crew of the USS Cerritos, with an emphasis on those folks who aren’t doing all of the top-tier adventuring on the bridge. In our preview of the second season premiere, you’ll find out if it remains as funny as it was, if it stays true to the show’s core and if it’s worth tuning in, although given that it airs on Paramount+, we probably shouldn’t say “tuning in'' any more, should we? Continue Reading.
Honor, the smartphone manufacturer that was, until late last year, Huawei’s budget division, is back. Not that it ever really went away, you understand, since it’s already released the View 40 and Honor 50 in its homeland while under its new owners. But today marks the first time that it is launching a flagship phone to the global market as an independent company. Free from the US sanctions that rocked its former parent, Honor is once again able to use American software (hello, Android 11) and silicon (hello, Qualcomm). This then, is the start of Honor’s second life, which is beginning with the launch of the Magic3, its first — well, “first” — flagship.
Historically, Honor was Huawei’s budget play, offering a surprising level of quality and tech for relatively low prices. The Honor 20, for instance, was the sort of phone that made you forget about the need to buy a flagship handset despite its modest sticker. Now, of course, with the freedom (read: obligation) to create high-end handsets, Honor is shuffling its brands. The high end will now be dominated by Magic-branded handsets, while the numbered line (like the Honor 50) will sit in the middle, and the low end now the domain of the X-Series.
Design-wise, Honor’s apple did not fall far from Huawei’s tree. From several angles, the Magic3 looks like a Huawei Mate, and this is not the only time I’ll bring this up. Given the sharing of IP and technology between the two companies before the split, this is not a huge surprise. I’m sure that many of the handsets Honor releases over the next couple of years will have that whiff of shared DNA, and like the Mate this phone has a waterfall display, with an 89-degree curve down both sides of the screen.
Honor
There are three Magic3 handsets in the range, the vanilla Magic3, Magic3 Pro, and the Magic3 Pro+. Every member of this trio is packing a 6.67-inch, 2,272 x 1,344, always-on flexible OLED display with a 120Hz refresh rate and HDR 10+. There’s a 94.82 screen-to-body ratio, the ideal fact to wheel out when you need to impress folks in bars, too. The cut-out for imaging plays host to a 13-megapixel, f/2.4 wide camera with a 100-degree wide-angle lens no matter what model you opt for. Although the higher end Pro and Pro+ models are the only ones that pair it with a 3D Time of Flight sensor for face unlocking.
The real interest, however, is in the lenses on the back of the phone, and Honor is throwing all but the dishwasher at this phone. Arranged in a setup the company is calling "The Eye of Muse," the regular handsets get a 50-megapixel, f/1.9 lens with Sony's IMX766 image sensor, a 64-megapixel, f/2.2 monochrome camera and a 13-megapixel, 120-degree f/2.2 ultra-wide camera.
The Pro, meanwhile, adds a 64-megapixel, f/3.5 OIS telephoto camera with a 3.5x optical zoom, 10x hybrid zoom and 100x digital zoom. The Pro+, meanwhile, swaps out that IMX766 for the larger, f/1.9 1/1.28-inch IMX700 with OIS. You'll get that 64-megapixel monochrome camera with an f/1.8 aperture, a 64-megapixel 126-degree, f/2.4 ultra-wide camera and that same telephoto lens. (You'll also get a TOF sensor and color temperature sensor for more accurate imaging.)
Honor also said that this IMAX-enhanced camera can be used to shoot your own cinema-quality films, a boast previously used to sell Huawei’s Mate 30 and Mate 40 (told you I’d mention this again). Honor says that, unlike those handsets, it has developed a custom, mobile-friendly version of the filming standard Log, dubbed MagicLog, which is designed to shoot high-quality video.
Broadly speaking, Log is a way of recording footage that preserves as much of the dynamic range and tone as possible. When viewed straight from the camera, the footage looks weird and it requires a lot of post-processing and grading. In order to save ordinary users from that agony, Honor teamed up with professional colorist Bryan McMahan to create eight pre-set grades which work like Instagram filters.
Honor said that one minute of MagicLog footage will take up around 500MB of memory, so if you want to shoot a film with one of these, invest in one with lots of storage. And this is a feature that we’d love to test in depth in future, because if this in some crazy way does turn out to work, it could be a very big deal.
Beyond imaging, Honor wanted to talk up the various software engines that it has designed to help squeeze better performance out of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 888+ 5G SoC found in the Pro and Pro+. (The regular Magic3 is using Qualcomm's Snapdragon 888.) Long story short, Honor (and Huawei before it) uses an AI layer which has been trained to monitor for challenging processes and adjust power to compensate. It says that, for the Magic3, you can expect to see faster and more stable 5G and gaming performance when using the phone. Then there is OS Turbo X (Apple’s lawyers, I’m sure, will be taking notes) which, it’s claimed, will be able to keep the system running at peak performance for longer. Honor’s representatives said that this system alone will ensure that, after using it for 36 months, you’ll only experience a 3.8 percent drop in performance compared to the day you bought the phone.
And then there’s “Smart RAM,” which sounds like the sort of RAM-doubling scamware that we saw back in the days of Windows 3.1. Honor’s representatives said that, in times of need, the Magic3 can bounce some of the data from its RAM to the phone’s flash memory. Now it’s not clear if the company is trying to pass virtual memory off as some sort of new-fangled innovation or if there’s some clever new implementation here. Honor says that, no matter if you have the 8GB or 12GB variant, you can expect this system to offer you an additional 2GB of headroom when required. I have no idea if file transfer speeds between the SoC and flash memory are fast enough to make this a viable, boastworthy feature for a new flagship handset.
The company has also offered some smart privacy features, like obscuring message notifications when you cast video to a TV, as well as the ability to strip metadata from images before you share them to social media.
Honor hasn’t said how long this device will last on a single charge, but that 4,600mAh battery should have plenty of staying power. All three variants support 66W wired SuperCharge, and you can get up to 50 percent of your battery re-juiced with just 15 minutes of connection. In addition, the Pro and Pro+ models both support 50W wireless charging, should you feel the need.
Magic3 is available in four colors: Black, White, "Golden Hour" and "Blue Hour," the latter pair are a pinkish-orangey hue, and a deep royal blue. The standard colors are available in Honor's usual coating, while the two hours are available in vegan leather. The 3 Pro+, meanwhile, comes in either a ceramic black or white ceramic body with pinstripe texturing which, at first blush, looks extraordinary. All of the handsets are IP68-rated for water and dust resistance, which is about the minimum you can expect from a phone these days.
The Honor Magic3 series will make its debut in Mainland China, with news about arrivals in western markets coming in short order. CEO George Zhao did, however, reveal pricing for the handset when it reaches Europe, at the very least. The Magic3, with 8GB RAM and 256GB storage, will retail for €899 ($1,054), while the Magic 3 Pro (8GB + 256GB) will set you back €1,099 ($1,289). Flagship-lovers, looking to grab the Magic3 Pro+ with 12GB RAM and 512GB Storage, meanwhile, will have to fork over at least €1,499 ($1,758).
The employees of Typhoon Studios, the developer behind Journey to the Savage Planet, are reforming under the name Raccoon Logic. In an announcement, the team says that they are “to boldly go back to where they were before,” Google’s doomed acquisition of the company. Raccoon Logic has also revealed that the team has reacquired the rights to Savage Planet, enabling them to “hit the ground running on new adventures in the action adventure space.”
Typhoon was founded in 2017 by a group of Montreal-based game executives, including Far Cry 4 director Alex Hutchinson and Arkham Knight executive producer Reid Schneider. Their first title was Journey to the Savage Planet, a satirical sci-fi game for PC, PS4, Xbox One and Switch first released January 2020.
That decision would, in the short term, prove problematic, as Journey to the Savage Planet experienced some game-breaking bugs that Google had to race to work out how to fix. And left the future of both the Savage Planet franchise and the careers of those Typhoon staffers in the balance.
In a statement, Raccoon Logic says that it has received a “pivotal investment” from Tencent which will bankroll its as-yet unannounced debut project. Alex Hutchinson says that Tencent’s backing is a “huge boost, meaning we can do significant work on our own before we start talking to publishers.” Reid Schneider, meanwhile, thanks 505 Games, which published Savage Planet, and added that he’s planning to “build upon the Journey to the Savage Planet franchise in the future.”
We’ve known for a while that iOS 15 will grant succor to all of those who have lost, and lamented, their AirPods. Those true wireless earphones are small enough that it’s easy to misplace them, and desirable enough that some folks would want to pinch them. Now, 9to5Mac has found code inside the iOS 15 beta that better explains how this feature is going to work in practice, at least if you have the Pro or Max versions.
In its report, the site says that those AirPods will be linked with your Apple ID and use Bluetooth to help you locate them when they go missing. Even if they’re not connected to your phone, you should still be able to find them on the map via the Find My network. Unfortunately, it does look that, despite being tied to your Apple ID, the relevant AirPods will not have an activation lock attached to them. That means that, should some unscrupulous type find a pair on the street, they can remove them from the network.
It’s the same old story: Government hands out a multi-billion contract to one tech giant, only to see another tech giant complain about the process. But no sooner had we put the JEDI contract out of our minds and Amazon and Microsoft are, once again, at each other’s throats. Washington Technology, (via The Verge) reports that Microsoft has filed a complaint after the NSA awarded a $10 billion contract to Amazon Web Services. The project, codenamed WildAndStormy, of which details are not widely available, but apparently involves the provision of cloud computing technology to the wider intelligence community.
Microsoft has lodged a complaint with the Government Accountability Office, reportedly claiming that AWS’ product was not properly evaluated. The Windows giant feels that in a side-by-side comparison of its tech versus that of Amazon’s, it would win, and feels the process here wasn’t very fair. The GAO has until October 29th to respond to Microsoft’s complaint, and it’s likely that this will not be the end of the pair’s war of digital attrition. As reported by NextGov, an NSA spokesperson said that any response will be “in accordance with appropriate federal regulations.”
Twitch has announced that it will offer slightly more detail to users when it hands down suspensions for violating its content rules. As The Verge notes, the Amazon-owned platform can still be frustratingly vague when justifying why a users account has been suspended. The new update will see users informed of the name of the offending stream, the date that it aired, and the rule that it broke, but nothing more.
🛡️ As of today, enforcement notifications sent to suspended users will include the name of the content and the date of the violation to ensure they have better clarity about what content is being actioned on. pic.twitter.com/aAnrdEZoyi
Opaque moderation has been a problem for Twitch before, and as we reported last year, the site still has a problem with context. In 2020, the platform suspended a professional Valorant player when their young child appeared on the stream while the player was answering the door. There are common-sense reasons to ban minors from streaming, but this was clearly an accident rather than intentional.
A similar incident took place when Twitch, without warning, suddenly demonetized a number of high-profile accounts during the Hot Tub Meta. At the time, it said that it should have “alerted affected streamers to this change before it happened — it was a mistake not to do so.” As we wrote in 2020 the site needs to make much more of an effort to explain why it’s doing what it’s doing or else see the relationship with its community deteriorate even further.
Xiaomi has today announced the CyberDog, an open-source quadruped robot intended for developers to “build upon” and create applications for. The machine, which resembles a beefier version of Boston Dynamics’ Spot, is a showcase for Xiaomi’s engineering know-how, including its proprietary servo motors.
Xiaomi
Running the show is a version of NVIDIA’s Jetson Xavier NX, which has been dubbed the world’s smallest AI supercomputer. In terms of being able to experience the world, CyberDog has 11 sensors over its body, including touch and ultrasonic sensors, cameras and GPS to help it “interact with its environment.”
Xiaomi says that this technology is good enough to enable CyberDog to follow its owner and navigate around obstacles. It is also capable of identifying posture and tracking human faces, enabling it to pick out and track individuals in a group.
XIaomi
Rather than selling this as a general-sale product, the company is for now going to release 1,000 of these things to “Xiaomi fans, engineers and robotics enthusiasts to jointly explore the immense possibility of CyberDog.” This will be facilitated by an open-source community, hosted by Xiaomi, which may be followed by the construction of a robotics laboratory to lay a pathway for “future innovations.”
Of course, this thing isn’t cheap, and those folks willing to get involved will need to shell out 9,999 yuan or around $1,540 to get one of these for themselves.
Commodore’s Amiga 500 was one of the most popular home computers in the era just before the PC swallowed the world. Now, thirty years and change since its heyday, Retro Games is making a “mini” version of the computer and games console. Much like Retro Games’ last machine, a “mini” version of the Commodore 64 that can’t use the Commodore name, this will be branded as THEA500 Mini.
Retro Games has said that the console will include 25 titles from the vast (and excellent) Amiga library including Another World, Worms, Simon the Sorcerer and The Chaos Engine. The full list of titles hasn’t been released, but if Bart vs. The Space Mutants and Dalek Attack aren’t on there, I will cry.
Much like pretty much every other retro console, a glossy software layer will smooth out the rougher edges of this software. Users will be able to save and resume titles part-way through play, and you’ll be able to side-load titles you (ahem) own over the included USB port.
Rather than simply emulating the vanilla Amiga 500, the hardware will also run the Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) layers found in the Amiga 500 Plus, a short-lived revision released in 1991. You’ll also be able to harness the advanced graphics architecture (AGA) of the much-pricier flagship model, the Amiga 1200.
Retro Games / Koch Media
Hardware-wise, it’s likely to be a similar sort of moulded-plastic-around-a-mini-board situation as found in THEC64 Mini. But on the accessories front, it’ll ship with the Amiga’s famous two-button mouse, and a joypad that, to my eyes, seems to be based on the Amiga CD32’s gamepad rather than the 500’s (which, to be fair, was more famously a joystick-led machine).
Retro Games / Koch Media
THEA500 Mini will launch at some point in early 2022, and is expected to cost $140 (£120, €130) when it arrives. The only misgivings I have at this point is that Retro Games’ previous work with the THEC64 Mini made that a hard product to love in several ways. Hopefully, however, many of those issues have been resolved for the new model, which was the object of lust for many people soon be knocking on 40.
Oh, and here's the greatest advert for a computer ever made:
