The UK’s National Health Service has announced that it will test delivering vital chemotherapy drugs via drone to the Isle of Wight. The body has partnered with Apian, a drone technology startup founded by former NHS doctors and former Google employees. Test flights are due to begin shortly, and it’s hoped that the system will reduce journey times for the drugs, cut costs and enable cancer patients to receive treatment far more locally.
The Isle of Wight is an island two miles off the south coast of England with a population just under 150,000. Due to the short shelf-life of most chemotherapy drugs, medicines are either rushed onto the island or patients take the ferry to the mainland. This journey can take up to four hours, while a drone flight can run from Queen Alexandra Hospital to St. Mary’s Hospital in half an hour. Not long after and an additional pilot scheme will take place in Northumbria to see if it’s possible to deliver vital medical supplies at ultra-short notice.
It’s not the first time that drones have been used to deliver vital medicines faster than a conventional courier. Merck and drone company Volansi began testing the delivery of cold-chain medicines to patients in rural North Carolina. Similarly, drone technology has helped move blood supplies across Rwanda, deliver prescriptions to senior citizens in Florida and help with supply drops during COVID-19.
Similarly, the UK’s Royal Mail has tested using autonomous delivery drones to get packages to remote areas. That includes getting vital supplies to the islands of Scilly, Shetland, Orkney and the Hebrides. Much like the NHS trial, Royal Mail said that using drones would reduce carbon emissions and speed up delivery times, especially in far-flung regions where infrastructure costs are too excessive to even think about.
Just six months after its last flagship launch, Xiaomi has announced another one. The Xiaomi 12S Ultra packs a massive one-inch, 50.3-megapixel Sony IMX989 main sensor. And unlike the Sony Xperia Pro-I, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra apparently uses the entirety of its one-inch sensor. And the camera unit itself? Well, it looks gigantic.
Xiaomi
Inside, there’s a Leica Summicron 1:1.9-4.1 / 13-120 ASPH camera system that combines three rear cameras: a 50.3-megapixel main camera (23mm, f/1.9), along with the 48-megapixel ultra-wide camera (13mm, f/2.2) and the 48-megapixel periscopic camera (120mm, f/4.1). Both 48-megapixel cameras use a half-inch Sony IMX586 sensor. The circular camera island (continent?) has a special coating to mitigate lens glare and improve image consistency. Oh, and there's a 23K gold rim as well. Because excess.
The Xiaomi 12S Ultra is now available for pre-ordering in China, ahead of retail launch on July 6th. The 12S Ultra starts at 5,999 yuan (around $900).
Leica has spread its bets over the years in mobile imaging partnerships. It has previously collaborated with Sharp, Huawei and Panasonic — Chinese phone makers are quick to pal up with renowned photography brands. In late 2020, Vivo joined forces with Zeiss, while Oppo and OnePlus released handsets jointly developed with Hasselblad.
The result has, broadly, meant better smartphone cameras from these companies looking to go toe-to-toe with the iPhones and Galaxy Ss of this world.
A sample of the data included crime reports going back to 1995.
A hacker (or group of hackers) claims to have stolen data on a billion Chinese citizens from a Shanghai police database. The hacker is attempting to sell 23 terabytes of data for 10 bitcoin, worth just over $198,000 at the time of writing. The data includes names, addresses, birthplaces, national IDs and phone numbers. The Wall Street Journal reports the hacker provided a sample of the data, which included crime reports dating as far back as 1995.
Amazon UK is now delivering packages by cargo e-bike and on foot as it progresses toward its climate goals. The company has opened a micro mobility hub in Hackney, central London, and says the walkers and e-bike riders will make more than a million deliveries a year. It claims those trips will replace thousands of van deliveries. The e-bikes and on-foot couriers will deliver across more than a tenth of the city's ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ).
Part of cost-cutting measures following its split from AT&T.
HBO Max is halting original productions across much of Europe, according to Variety. The streaming service confirmed it’ll no longer produce originals in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Central Europe, the Netherlands and Turkey, leaving only Spain and France untouched. The step is part of a plan from parent Warner Bros. Discovery to cut some $3 billion in costs following its split from AT&T.
The CubeSat is critical to the first Artemis mission.
NASA's grand plan to take humans back to the Moon for the first time in over half a century has taken another step forward. The 55-pound CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) CubeSat has broken free of Earth's orbit and is on its way to the Moon. Rocket Lab launched CAPSTONE on an Electron rocket last week. Following six days of orbit-raising burns to build up enough speed, the pathfinding satellite set out toward the Moon. It's a slow trip. It won't reach the Moon until November.
Chinese car giant Geely has purchased a majority stake in the now-small smartphone maker Meizu. Bloomberg reports that Meizu will be run as an independent company under Xingli Technology, another tech brand under Geely’s umbrella. That said, the pair are expected to work together on new products, and Xingli has already expressed plans to make a big splash in the AR/VR space.
If you’ve been reading Engadget for long enough, you’ll have likely seen Meizu’s early rise at the dawn of the smartphone boom. Unfortunately, it found its lunch being eaten by other Chinese upstarts, including Xiaomi, and wound up remaining a small player. Back in 2015, Alibaba decided to take a stake in the company just as it found itself distracted by various boondoggles, including the baffling-in-retrospect decision to build phones with Ubuntu.
Geely, meanwhile, is perhaps best known in the West as the controlling owner of Volvo, Polestar and Lotus, all of which have been pushed towards electrification. Of course, with cars becoming more like phones (and phones becoming such a crucial part of most cars) the idea of automakers buying in to the phone space makes plenty of sense. As Reuters reports, both the mobile and car businesses are slowing down, and so deeper integration might be one way to corner the market.
With so many streaming services now available, finding the right box or dongle to view them on can be a challenge. Apple's own streamer, the uniquely-named Apple TV, is one of the best on the market, but its price can often put people off. With Prime Day just days away, Amazon has dropped the price of both the 32GB and 64GB models, dropping them by $29 to $150 and $170, respectively. That's not quite the low of $130 we saw last month for the 32GB version, but it's a great price nonetheless.
Devindra Hardawar gave the 2021 Apple TV 4K a score of 90 in our review. The new model irons out some of the kinks from what was already a powerful media box. The updated remote is a lot more intuitive in the hand and the beefier A12 Bionic chip delivers both HDR video at 60 frames per second (if the content you're playing supports it) and better game performance.
If it's just basic streaming you're after, the Apple TV is expensive compared to Google's Chromecast, Amazon's Fire TV and Roku's range of media players. However, if you're already invested in Apple's ecosystem and want one of the best streamers available at its second-lowest price ever, now might be time to pull the trigger.
The music of Crosby, Stills and Nash is once again available to stream on Spotify. In February, the supergroup left the platform to protest Spotify’s inaction against Joe Rogan, who was accused of spreading COVID-19 misinformation through his podcast. According to Billboard, the trio plan to donate their Spotify earnings to COVID-19 charities for “at least a month.”
Crosby, Stills and Nash were among a handful of musicians who left Spotify in response to Rogan’s interview with vaccine skeptic Dr. Robert Malone. The exodus, such that it was, began with Neil Young and later came to include Joni Mitchell, as well as author Brené Brown.
In the end, Spotify did not drop Rogan. Instead, the company said it would add a content advisory to any episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19. The protest’s effect on Spotify’s bottom line appears to have been minimal, with the company recently reporting that it grew to 422 million monthly users.
Despite the return of Crosby, Stills and Nash to Spotify, don’t expect to see all of the music the trio helped created on the platform. As The Verge point outs, Young’s continued absence from the service means not every song from Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young is available. For instance, tracks like “Helpless” and “Country Girl” are missing from the band’s 1970 album Déjà Vu,
NASA's grand plan to take humans back to the Moon for the first time in over half a century has taken another step forward. The 55-pound CAPSTONE (Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment) cubesat has broken free of Earth's orbit and is on its way to the Moon.
Rocket Lab launched CAPSTONE on an Electron rocket from New Zealand last week. Following six days of orbit-raising burns to build up enough speed, the pathfinding satellite set out toward the Moon. It's a relatively slow trip, though. CAPSTONE won't reach the Moon until November.
NASA will try to put CAPSTONE in a Near Rectilinear Halo Orbit around the Moon, a feat that's never been attempted before. The agency plans to use the same orbit for the Gateway space station, which will provide support for long-term lunar missions under the Artemis program. The outpost will have living quarters for astronauts and a lab. That mission won't launch until at least 2024.
Meanwhile, it emerged last week that NASA has targeted a launch window of between August 23rd and September 6th for the Artemis 1 mission. It will send an uncrewed module around the Moon to assess how the journey might affect the human body. The agency ran a successful wet launch fueling test for Artemis 1 in June.
A hacker (or group of hackers) claims to have stolen data on a billion Chinese citizens from a Shanghai police database. According to Bloomberg, the hacker is attempting to sell 23 terabytes of data for 10 bitcoin, which is worth just over $198,000 at the time of writing.
The data includes names, addresses, birthplaces, national IDs and phone numbers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the hacker provided a sample of the data, which included crime reports dating as far back as 1995. Reporters confirmed the legitimacy of at least some of the data by calling people whose numbers were listed.
It's not yet clear how the hacker infiltrated the police database, though there have been suggestions that they gained access via an Alibaba cloud computing company called Aliyun, which was said to host the database. Alibaba said it's investigating the matter.
The true scope of the leak is unknown. However, cybersecurity experts have dubbed it the biggest cybersecurity breach in China's history.
Amazon has started delivering packages by cargo e-bike and on foot in the UK for the first time as it makes more progress toward its climate goals. The company has opened a micromobility hub in central London. The company says the walkers and e-bikes will make more than a million deliveries a year from the hub in Hackney. It claims those trips will replace thousands of van deliveries.
At the outset, the e-bikes and on-foot couriers will be in service across more than a tenth of the city's ultra low emission zone (ULEZ). E-bikes and fully electric vehicles are exempt from the London Congestion Charge and ULEZ fees, so Amazon and its delivery partners will avoid having to pay those.
Amazon plans to open more e-cargo delivery hubs in the UK in the coming months. It already has more than 1,000 electric delivery vans on the road in the country. Earlier this year, the company added five fully electric heavy goods vehicles to its UK fleet to replace diesel trucks.
This isn't the first time Amazon has used cargo e-bikes. Euronewsnotes that they're being used for deliveries in five cities in France and seven metropolitan areas in Germany. It also employs electric scooters in Italy and Spain. As of last November, the company was fulfilling two-thirds of deliveries in Paris with e-bikes, on-foot couriers and electric vans.
Under its Shipment Zero project, Amazon aims to deliver 50 percent of packages with net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. It expects to become net-zero carbon by 2040 as part of its Climate Pledge.
The company also plans to run its operations entirely on renewable energy by 2025. It will install more than 30,000 additional solar panels at its sites in Manchester, Coalville, Haydock, Bristol and Milton Keynes by the end of the year. Amazon has 18 on-site solar projects in the UK and it's working to double that number by 2024.
Merely six months after its previous flagship launch, today Xiaomi announced a trio of familiar-looking smartphones to mark the beginning of its partnership with Leica. The new 12S Series features MIUI 13 based on Android 12, and it runs on Qualcomm's allegedly more efficient Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 flagship processor, with the headlining 12S Ultra packing a massive 1-inch, 50.3-megapixel Sony IMX989 main sensor. This translates to a generous pixel size of 1.6um, which then doubles to 3.2um via pixel binning for a supposedly boosted color accuracy and low light performance. And unlike the Sony Xperia Pro-I, the Xiaomi 12S Ultra apparently uses the entire portion of its 1-inch sensor.
According to CEO Lei Jun, Xiaomi took part in the Sony IMX989's development, and the $15 million cost was also split evenly between the two companies. Interestingly, the sensor won't be exclusive to Xiaomi; Lei added that it'll be made available to his local competitors after the launch of the 12S Ultra, in order to "promote the advancement of mobile imaging together."
Xiaomi 12S Ultra
Xiaomi
As for Leica's part on the Xiaomi 12S Ultra, you get a "Leica Summicron 1:1.9-4.1 / 13-120 ASPH camera system" covering all three rear cameras: the aforementioned 50.3-megapixel main camera (23mm, f/1.9), along with the 48-megapixel ultra-wide camera (13mm, f/2.2) and the 48-megapixel periscopic camera (120mm, f/4.1). Both 48-megapixel cameras use a 1/2-inch Sony IMX586 sensor. The entire circular camera island — now with "Leica" co-branding — benefits from some coating magic to mitigate lens glare and improve image consistency across each lens. Oh, and there's a 23K gold rim here as well.
In addition to some Leica filters, users will be able to switch between two photographic styles: "Leica Authentic Look" for natural-looking shots with stronger three dimensional depth, and "Leica Vibrant Look" which adds Xiaomi's input on vibrancy while preserving authenticity (somehow). You can also toggle the watermark banner at the bottom of your photos, which will add Leica's iconic red logo, photo metadata and location coordinates to the right, along with phone model and timestamp on the left.
Xiaomi
On the other side of the phone, there's a 32-megapixel selfie camera powered by an unknown RGBW sensor. Most of these cameras are capable of Dolby Vision HDR video recording (up to 4K@60fps) and playback, thus making the 12S Ultra the first Android device to sport these features. Some also utilize the motor-based "HyperOIS" for more stable footage. As for still shots, the entire 12S Series supports 10-bit RAW format calibrated by Adobe Labs, with color correction metadata embedded in the files for easier post-production with the likes of Adobe Lightroom.
The 12S Ultra also happens to carry two proprietary Xiaomi Surge chips: a Surge P1 fast-charging chipset and a Surge G1 battery management chipset. These provide support for 67W wired fast charging, 50W wireless fast charging and 10W reverse charging for the 4,860mAh single cell silicon oxygen anode battery. Note that some fast-charging solutions use a dual cell battery instead to split the current load, which is why it's a good thing that the Surge P1 can handle an output current of up to 16A here, and apparently with 96.8% conversion efficiency. Like Oppo's and ASUS' recent handsets, the 12S Ultra offer adaptive charging as well, which allegedly increases the number of charge cycles by 25 percent.
Keeping the phone cool is also key to a healthier battery, not to mention a more stable performance while gaming. The Xiaomi 12S Ultra is equipped with a "three dimensional cooling pump" which moves cooling liquid across warm surfaces using a capillary mechanism similar to that on leaves. This apparently improves thermal conductivity significantly, compared to conventional vapor cooling modules.
Xiaomi
The rest of the Xiaomi 12S Ultra is standard flagship affair. For the display, you get a 6.73-inch Samsung E5 AMOLED panel (3,200 x 1,440, 522ppi; LTPO 2.0), with a peak brightness of up to 1,500 nits, a 1-120Hz AdaptiveSync Pro refresh rate, native 10-bit color depth and support for P3 color gamut. As you can tell from the camera features, the screen can handle Dolby Vision, as well as HDR10+, HDR10 and HLG; these will go well with the Harman Kardon speakers which also support Dolby Atmos audio. The device is IP68-rated, meaning it should survive accidental dives into sinks and pools. You'll also find an infrared remote port at the top for controlling home appliances.
Options include up to 12GB of LPDDR5 RAM, up to 512GB of UFS 3.1 storage — featuring Xiaomi's self-developed FBO (File-Based Optimization) storage refresh tech, which supposedly maintains the same read/write performance for at least four years (and Lei added that FBO has already been written into the next-gen UFS 4.0 storage specification). Buyers can choose between a "Classic Black" and a "Verdant Green," both wrapped in vegan leather.
Xiaomi 12S Pro
Xiaomi
The lesser Xiaomi 12S Pro shares the same 6.73-inch display and Surge P1 fast charging-chipset as the 12S Ultra, though it supports a whopping 120W wired charging for its smaller 4,600mAh battery, but lacks 10W reverse charging. It features a more regular (but apparently still pricey) 1/1.28-inch, 50-megapixel Sony IMX707 main sensor, which is a variant of the IMX700 previously found on Huawei's Mate 40 Pro series. This still offers a good pixel size of 1.22um (or 2.44um after pixel binning), and it matches the resolution of its ultra-wide camera (14mm) and telephoto camera (50mm) — all fine-tuned by Leica as well, of course.
As for the "basic" Xiaomi 12S, it has the same main camera as the 12S Pro and the same fast-charging features as the 12S Ultra, but with a smaller 4,500mAh battery in a more palm-friendly body under the 6.28-inch 120Hz display. Apparently there is still a sizeable demand for small flagship phones, according to Lei.
The Xiaomi 12S Series is now available for pre-ordering in China ahead of retail launch on July 6th. The 12S Ultra is priced from from 5,999 yuan (8GB RAM, 256GB storage; around $900) to 6,999 yuan (12GB RAM, 512GB storage; around $1,000). The 12S Pro is cheaper, asking for 4,699 yuan (8GB RAM, 128GB storage; around $700) to 5,899 yuan (12GB RAM, 512GB storage; around $880). The 12S is the most affordable option here, starting from 3,999 yuan (8GB RAM, 128GB storage; around $600) and capping at 5,199 yuan (12GB RAM, 512GB storage; around $780). We'll keep an eye out for international availability later.
HBO Max is halting original productions across much of Europe, Variety has reported. The streaming service confirmed that it will no longer produce originals in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Central Europe, the Netherlands and Turkey, leaving only Spain and France untouched. The news is part of a plan from parent Warner Bros. Discovery to cut some $3 billion in costs following its split from AT&T.
"We are reviewing our current content proposition on the existing services," a spokesperson told Variety in a statement. "As part of this process, we have decided to remove a limited amount of original programming from HBO Max, as well as ceasing our original programming efforts for HBO Max in the Nordics and Central Europe. We have also ceased our nascent development activities in the newer territories of Netherlands and Turkey, which had commenced over the past year."
Some of the service's most praised shows including Lust (Sweden) and Kamikaze (Denmark) came from the Nordics and other affected regions. On top of ceasing production, HBO Max will remove those shows along with the Hungarian drama The Informant from its service globally. Projects already in production and other approved shows will reportedly continue — but they may be sold to other platforms, with Warner acting strictly as producer.
Streaming content production has been a bright spot in Europe, as Netflix and other platforms have hit the 30 percent local content quotas required in major markets there. HBO Max's announcement may put a damper on that, though, as "redundancies are likely across [HBO Max's] European business," Variety noted.
More ominously, "similar decision-making for HBO Max is currently taking place in all territories where the streamer operates, which spans the U.S., Latin America and parts of Europe," it added. Along with layoffs recently announced by Netflix, it's the first sign of dark clouds during the era of peak TV.
