Xiaomi has unveiled its latest lineup of flagship smartphones and wearables. The Xiaomi 12 Series, which is only available in China for now, includes two sizes of phones: Xiaomi 12 and Xiaomi 12 Pro.

Both are among the first devices to run on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset and they boast LPDDR5 RAM. The Xiaomi 12 has a 4,500mAh battery, while the 12 Pro has what the company claims is the first single-cell 120W, 4,600mAh battery. Xiaomi says it offers an increased capacity of 400mAh over dual-cell batteries without having to increase the size.

The base model's camera array includes Sony's 50MP IMX766 as the main camera, a 13MP ultra-wide angle lens and a 5MP telemacro sensor. The 12 Pro, meanwhile, has the new Sony IMX707 sensor, an ultra-wide camera with a 115-degree field of view and a 2x telephoto camera for portraits. All three sensors are 50MP, while the main camera improves light capture by up to 49 percent over the previous model, according to Xiaomi. 

On the front, each device has a 32MP sensor. The front-facing holepunch camera was positioned on the left on the Mi 11 series, but, as with the 11T devices, it's in the center this time.

Xiaomi

Xiaomi noted that Night Mode is available on both devices, each of which is said to have a camera that works well in low-light scenarios. The company says it's introducing a new imaging computing algorithm, which it claims improves capture speed and shutter lag.

The Xiaomi 12 has a 6.28-inch flexible OLED display with a 2,400 × 1,080 resolution, 1,100 nits of brightness and a refresh rate of 120Hz. The 12 Pro offers a 6.73-inch AMOLED screen with a resolution of 3,200 x 1,440 and 1,500 nits of brightness. Xiaomi says the display uses micro-lens tech, which it claims improves the "viewing experience while increasing smart energy-saving capability." Both devices have HDR10+ and Dolby Vision support.

On the audio side, both handsets have symmetrical dual speakers and Dolby Atmos support. The 12 Pro features a customized mid-woofer and tweeter.

The devices will go on sale on December 31st, starting at RMB 3,699 (around $580) for the Xiaomi 12 and RMB 4,699 (approximately $738) for Xiaomi 12 Pro. The company also said it will release a lower-cost version of the Xiaomi 12 on the same day. The Xiaomi 12X has a Snapdragon 870 chipset and starts at RMB 3,199 ($500).

The phones will use MIUI 13, an OS based on Android 12 that's also coming to Mi 11 series handsets, Xiaomi 11T and other phones and tablets. Xiaomi's smart watches, speakers and TVs will also harness the OS to help unify the ecosystem. A feature called Mi Smart Hub will allow users to share things like their screen, music and apps with multiple nearby devices using a simple gesture.

Xiaomi

In addition, Xiaomi revealed its latest smartwatch. The Xiaomi Watch S1 has a 1.43-inch AMOLED screen with a sapphire glass display and stainless steel frame. It will offer detailed health stats and has support for 117 fitness modes. The device has a 5ATM water resistance rating too. Xiaomi says the device has a 12-day battery life and up to 24 days of standby time.

Like the new phones, the Xiaomi Watch S1 will only be available in China for the time being. It starts at RMB 1,099 ($172).

Xiaomi

Also new are the Xiaomi Buds 3, which have dual-magnetic dynamic drivers. The earbuds offer up to 40dB noise cancellation and three active noise cancellation modes. Xiaomi says owners will get up to seven hours of playback on a single charge and up to 32 hours of total use with the charging case. The Xiaomi Buds 3 will cost RMB 449 ($70).

While these devices are geared toward the Chinese market, they could make their way elsewhere at a later date. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun hinted as much on Twitter.

Valve has once again given some insight into the highest-earning games of the year on Steam. The sixth annual Top Sellers list splits the top 100 games into a few categories, and the titles within each are randomly ordered. The 12 games in the Platinum category raked in the most cash.

There are several free-to-play games at the top, since Steam has factored in microtransactions and paid expansions. The Platinum tier is dominated by old favorites, including Apex Legends, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dead by Daylight, Destiny 2, Rainbow Six Siege, Dota 2 and Grand Theft Auto V.

It's the sixth straight year that Dota 2, CS:GO and Grand Theft Auto V have made it into the top tier. PUBG: Battlegrounds and Rainbow Six Siege each made the cut for the fifth time as well. Destiny 2, meanwhile, has featured in the Platinum tier every year since it hit Steam in 2019.

Battle royale title Naraka: Bladepoint and Battlefield 2042 are among the four releases from this year that made it into the top 12. Valheim, a survival sandbox game made by just five people, is also among the biggest money makers, as is New World, showing that after years of trying and failing, Amazon has finally made a hit game.

The newcomers that landed in the second group of 12 games, Gold, are FIFA 22, Back 4 Blood, Forza Horizon 5 and It Takes Two, which won game of the year honors at The Game Awards. The older titles in that section are Final Fantasy XIV Online (which Square Enix has temporarily stopped selling due to overloaded servers), Red Dead Redemption 2, Rust, Sea of Thieves, Warframe, The Elder Scrolls Online, War Thunder and Forza Horizon 4.

The Silver section, meanwhile, includes 2021 releases such as Halo Infinite, Outriders, Resident Evil Village and Mass Effect Legendary Edition. Cyberpunk 2077, which was released in December last year, is in that category, as are The Sims 4, Monster Hunter: World and the bot-plagued Team Fortress 2.

Some key takeaways include the fact that EA, which brought its games back to Steam in 2019, had four titles among the top 24 earners, including three new releases: Apex Legends, Battlefield 2042, FIFA 22 and It Takes Two. Microsoft also had several games in the top few tiers, despite them all being available on PC Game Pass. Forza Horizon 5, its predecessor and Sea of Thieves are all in the Gold category. Halo Infinite made it into Silver even though the multiplayer is free-to-play and the paid campaign had only been out for a week before Steam stopped tracking earnings for the list.

Many of these games — including New World, Battlefield 2042, Mass Effect: Legendary Edition and Sea of Thieves — have been discounted for the Steam Winter Sale. Cyberpunk 2077, Valheim and Back 4 Blood are also included in the sale, which runs until January 5th.

At long last, NASA has launched the James Webb Space Telescope. On Christmas morning, the telescope launched from Europe’s Spaceport in French Guiana on an Arianespace Ariane 5 rocket after 14 years of development and a number of delays.

The JSWT will orbit the Sun, close to the second Lagrange point of the Earth-Sun system. It will take around a month to reach its destination, after which researchers will be able to peek into black holes, observe some of the oldest galaxies in the universe and evaluate the habitability of various exoplanets.

NASA partnered with the European and Canadian space agencies to develop the project. The JSWT has been beset by delays throughout its long history. NASA initially hoped to launch it in 2007, but spiraling costs prompted engineers to re-think the telescope in 2005. The JSWT was then declared ready in 2016, but the project was once again put on hold because of construction complications. The telescope was assembled in 2019, but then the COVID-19 pandemic struck, leading to delays to testing and shipping.

After the JWST finally reached the spaceport, NASA set a launch date of December 18th. However, it delayed the launch until today due to last-minute inspections and a lack of favorable weather. Still, what's a few days for such an important, long-in-the-works mission? The JWST is finally spacebound, and in the coming months, we'll start to learn some of its discoveries.

The tussle between Amazon and the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) has taken another turn after the company reached a nationwide settlement with the agency. Amazon has agreed to remind current and former workers across the US about their labor rights on notices posted in workplaces, and on the mobile app and website for workers. Amazon will also send a copy of the notice to email addresses it has on file for any employee who worked at its facilities between March 22nd and December 22nd.

The notice informs workers that they have the legal right to join, form or assist with a union. They can select a representative to bargain with Amazon on their behalf and "act together with other employees for your benefit and protection."  

In addition, workers have more leeway to organize in company facilities. In the notice, Amazon states it will not tell them to leave a property or threaten disciplinary action "when you are exercising your right to engage in union or protected concerted activities by talking to your co-workers in exterior non-work areas during non-work time." Nor will it ask workers about union activity, or why they're speaking to co-workers, according to the notice.

It'll be easier for the NLRB to sue Amazon if the agency believes it violated the agreement. In such cases, the company agreed to let the NLRB forego an administrative hearing process, which can take a long time to complete.

“This settlement agreement provides a crucial commitment from Amazon to millions of its workers across the United States that it will not interfere with their right to act collectively to improve their workplace by forming a union or taking other collective action,” NLRB general counsel Jennifer Abruzzo told The New York Times. Engadget has contacted Amazon for comment.

The agreement is related to six cases brought forward by workers who complained Amazon was impeding their efforts to organize. The company previously settled NLRB cases on an individual basis, but this a broader agreement. The agreement includes references to employees, but not contractors, who make up the bulk of Amazon's delivery workforce. It's unclear whether they will be afforded the same rights and protections under the deal.

The NLRB and Amazon have been at odds in recent times. In November, the labor board ordered Amazon to rerun a union election at an Alabama warehouse. It said Amazon interfered with the process. Workers at other facilities have attempted to organize — those at a fulfillment center in New York are trying once again to unionize after failing to obtain enough signatures last time.

Amazon has long been criticized over working conditions. Lawmakers this week sought answers from the company over whether its policies contributed to the deaths of six people after a tornado struck a warehouse in Illinois. Amazon recently warned its workers that an even more demanding workload than usual during the holiday period could have a significant impact on their mental health.

Vodafone has turned the first text message into a non-fungible token (NFT). It sold at a Paris auction house this week for €132,680 ($150,000) worth of Ether. The company will donate the proceeds to the United Nations Refugee Agency to support forcibly displaced people.

Just over 29 years ago, Richard Jarvis, then a director of Vodafone, received the first text message from programmer Neil Papworth. Suitably enough, given that it was sent in December, the SMS read "Merry Christmas." Although the content of the text message wasn't exactly exciting, it laid the foundation for the next several decades of communications.

The anonymous auction winner will receive a copy of the communication protocol for the SMS, as CNN notes. They'll also get a certificate of authenticity and a digital frame that displays an animation of a phone receiving the message.

It's yet another telecommunications landmark that has been turned into an NFT. Also in December, Jimmy Wales sold an NFT of the first Wikipedia edit at auction for $750,000. Earlier this year, Tim Berners-Lee minted the web's source code as an NFT and sold it for charity.

OnePlus is gearing up to show off its next smartphone, and it seems we won't have to wait long to get our eyes on it. It will reveal the OnePlus 10 Pro next month, according to co-founder and CEO Pete Lau. “OnePlus 10 Pro, see you in January," Lau wrote on Weibo, as spotted by Gizmodo.

If OnePlus does reveal its next phone in January, it will mark a shift in the brand's usual timeline. Over the last few years, it has announced its flagship handsets in March or April, typically after Samsung debuts the newest Galaxy S series phones.

Rumors suggest OnePlus will only reveal a single phone this time around, instead of the usual approach of having a base model and a pro device. In the past, OnePlus has followed up the flagship devices with a T-series model as well, but it decided not to release a 9T this year.

Lau previously said 10-series devices will have a new Android 13-based operating system that OnePlus is sharing with Oppo. The two formally merged this year under the ownership of BBK Electronics, with OnePlus becoming a sub-brand of Oppo.

Leakers have already offered a peek at the next OnePlus phone through unofficial renders. It seems OnePlus will again use Hasselblad cameras, while the OnePlus 10 Pro screen is slated to be a 6.7-inch QHD+ display with a 120 Hz refresh rate. Lau confirmed earlier this month that the upcoming device will use the new Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset.

Square Enix has rolled out the first Final Fantasy XIV patch after the ultra-popularEndwalker expansion arrived in November. Along with adding more quests, items and a raid dungeon, the update addressed various issues. One of those was a so-called bug fix that targeted some delightfully janky-looking grapes in one of the new areas.

"An issue wherein the polygon count of grapes in Labyrinthos were reduced in excess to alleviate system memory usage in the area," Square Enix wrote at the end of the latest patch notes, perhaps in an attempt to bury the biggest news from the update. "They have been adjusted to be comparable to those found at the Crystarium."

The low-poly model quickly became a meme after the expansion went live, as PC Gamer notes, with some players embracing the blocky aesthetic and other, more foolish players incorrectly deriding the grapes as ugly. So, not everyone may be on board with the smoothed-out edges of the model.

It's hard to call this a fix, since it's a shame Square Enix changed the look of the grapes. They looked fine as is. The previous version felt like a refreshing throwback to some 3D games from the '90s, like the original Tomb Raider. In any case, the latest twist in the saga of the grapes goes to show developers can't please everyone all the time, even when they're tackling apparent bugs. 

Tesla came under fire earlier this month following reports that certain games are playable on dashboard infotainment systems while an EV is in motion. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is now investigating Tesla over the so-called "Passenger Play" function.

The preliminary evaluation from the agency's Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) covers around 580,000 Model 3, S, X and Y vehicles sold since 2017. While the feature prompts players to acknowledge they're a passenger before they start a game, the NHTSA said Passenger Play "may distract the driver and increase the risk of a crash."

A report from the New York Timesindicated that an update Tesla rolled out in the summer made three games playable while a car is moving. Before then, Passenger Play was only available when the EV was in park. The NHTSA told Engadget earlier in December that it was speaking to Tesla about the feature.

The ODI said the preliminary evaluation will assess the driver distraction potential of Passenger Play while the EV is moving. It will look into various aspects of Passenger Play, including use scenarios and how often it's used.

In announcing the investigation, the NHTSA cited a report that was filed with the agency in August. "Tesla is now making interactive video games and live internet web searching possible on the main front seat display while the car is driving," the complaint reads. "Why is a manufacturer allowed to create an inherently distracting live video which takes over 2/3 of the screen which the driver relies on for all vehicle information? Creating a dangerous distraction for the driver is recklessly negligent."

Tesla didn't respond to a request for comment from Reuters. The company no longer has a PR department.

If you find that some apps, websites and games are having trouble loading this morning or seem more sluggish than usual, there might be an explanation. Amazon Web Services, on which many apps and websites run, experienced more difficulties today, impacting a number of services for at least the third time in the last few weeks.

AWS said on its service health dashboard that there was a power outage at a data center in the US-EAST-1 region. It first reported issues at 7:35AM ET. By 8:39AM ET, power had been restored to "all instances and network devices within the affected data center" and AWS noted services that use the data center for hosting and were impacted by the outage were starting to recover. Around 25 minutes later, it said the majority of AWS services had recovered, but noted it was still trying to remedy issues with some Elastic Block Store volumes (a type of AWS storage) due to "degraded IO performance."

Among the affected services were Epic Games Store — which said internet service outages were impacting logins, library, purchases and more — and Slack, which noted it was having trouble with uploading files, editing messages and other features. Imgur, Asana, family location sharing app Life360, Udemy and Honeywell and Fall Guys are among the services that reported issues, while the likes of Hulu, Rocket League, Grindr and the McDonalds app also suffered difficulties, according to user-submitted reports on Down Detector. At the time of writing, some of those issues are ongoing.

An AWS outage on December 7th impacted the likes of the Associated Press, Disney+ and Vice. AWS later said an issue with an automated capacity scaling feature was the cause. A brief outage on December 15th affected Twitch, Slack and online gaming services.

DuckDuckGo has offered an early peek at its upcoming desktop app. In a blog post that recaps the company's year, CEO Gabriel Weinberg looked toward the future as well. He said DuckDuckGo will bring the privacy protections the company is known for to the app. You can expect the speed and simplicity of its mobile app too.

"Robust privacy protection" will be enabled by default for search, browsing, email and more. Weinberg said the app isn't a "privacy browser" per se, but rather "an everyday browsing app that respects your privacy."

As it did on mobile, DuckDuckGo is building the app using OS-provided rendering engines instead of basing it on projects like Chromium. According to Weinberg, that helped the development team to "strip away a lot of the unnecessary cruft and clutter that’s accumulated over the years in major browsers."

Along with a streamlined interface and the Fire Button (which closes all tabs and wipes browsing data in a single tap), the DuckDuckGo desktop is cleaner and much more private than Chrome, Weinberg said. He also claimed it's "significantly faster" than Google's browser, based on early tests — here's hoping it's less of a memory hog than Chrome too. DuckDuckGo didn't reveal when it plans to release the desktop app.

Weinberg notes that, over the last 12 months, DuckDuckGo has bolstered its search and tracker blocking features. He said DuckDuckGo's mobile app is now the most downloaded Android browser in key markets. In July, the company announced a free email forwarding service that removes tracking pixels from messages.