Samsung is now on its fourth generation of foldable phones with the release of the , and it expects its successors to outsell even the Galaxy S lineup. Roh Tae-moon, the head of Samsung’s mobile division, predicted in a new interview that foldables will make up more than 50 percent of Samsung’s premium device sales by 2025. With sales last year , that may actually be a reasonable assertion. Samsung’s early foldable efforts were troubled by issues with display reliability — it even had to recall review units of the original Fold due to high failure rates. Ever since then, it’s been relatively smooth sailing.
The enormous star known as Betelgeuse has been a target of study since the early days of astronomy. As one of the brightest objects in the sky, it’s visible even without a telescope. But in 2019, it dimmed considerably. With the aid of the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have identified a cause: an unfathomably large Surface Mass Ejection (SME), which is something we’ve never observed before. The scale of this monstrous star can be hard to fathom. It’s almost 20 times the mass of our sun, but it’s nearing the end of its short lifespan as a red supergiant.
A recent tweet about a self-bricking Epson has reminded everyone how important the right to repair is. The printer in question alerted its owners that it had reached the end of its lifespan, and then promptly stopped working. Epson’s response is a reminder that many of the devices you own come with secret expiration dates. While most technologies have become more versatile and reliable over the years, printers are an outlier: They’re terrible. In this instance, the cause of the end-of-life message is the ink pads. These components are designed to soak up excess ink so it doesn’t get smeared on your pages or leak from the printer.
Hello, lovelies, and welcome to your favorite roundup of space news: the one corner of current events that doesn’t suck. This week, we’ve got lots of updates from NASA. For one thing, the agency is building a six-mile-wide space telescope. We also found out that an important asteroid is “barely a rubble pile,” and a spacecraft en route to the asteroid might destroy it just by touching it. But the European and Indian space agencies have both had a busy week, too. So has the European Southern Observatory (ESO). Let’s start at the top. Betelgeuse Blows Its Stack
The launched a few weeks ago to mostly positive reviews, which is no surprise. It offers almost everything you get with the , which has also been widely praised. Google had to pull a few features to hit its $450 price point, but you might be able to bring one of them back. Pixel fans have found that with some tinkering, it’s possible to increase the display’s refresh rate from 60Hz to a nice, smooth 90Hz. Smartphone display resolution topped out a few years ago, but the refresh rate race is heating up. Phones have started shipping with 90, 120, 144, and even 165Hz screens.
Nvidia announced preliminary earnings for the quarter ending July 31 this week, and the results weren’t pretty. Given the upheaval in the market recently, it was assumed Nvidia would see its revenue degraded. However, the actual numbers it posted were surprising. It faced an eyebrow-raising 44 percent drop in gaming revenue quarter-to-quarter. Total gaming revenue was estimated to be $2.04 billion, which is also a 33 percent drop year-over-year (YoY). Overall, it had expected to rake in $8.10 billion, but it fell short at $6.70 billion. That includes all of its business units. The main culprit for the shortfall is the company’s gaming division.
(Photo: Martin Geiger/Unsplash)The seemingly perpetual chip shortage has taken another prisoner: new vehicles. With semiconductors in high demand and automakers unable to get enough, more than 100,000 vehicles are expected to be dropped from this week’s assembly lines in North America alone. Globally, the total number of nixed vehicle assemblies sits around 180,000. AutoForecast Solutions (AFS), a private auto market forecasting database, has tasked itself with providing updates on vehicle-related chip supply fluctuations ever since the shortage began. According to Automotive News, the latest is ugly: the 180,000 vehicles missing from the world’s assembly lines this week constitute the largest dip in manufacturing AFS has seen in recent years.
(Photo: Android)A bold new campaign from Android is asking Apple to “fix texting” by adopting text standards maintained by the rest of the industry. A new web page titled “It’s time for Apple to fix texting” the iPhone maker to resolve most of the issues inherent to “green bubble” text conversations. The page explains that most mobile operating systems support a texting standard called RCS (short for “Rich Communication Suite”), which allows apps to send texts over Wi-Fi, swap high-resolution media, and use read receipts, among other modern perks. Apple, meanwhile, has elected to stick with SMS/MMS (“Short Message Service” and “Multimedia Messaging Service”), which was previously the gold standard for the industry but has over time become outdated.
(Photo: Apple Glass concept by Taeyeon Kim)Apple’s still-unannounced is approaching a level of speculation unseen since the Apple car rumors that persisted throughout the 2010s. And yet, analysts insist that the device is real and will launch in 2023. The latest report claims that Apple has finalized launch plans for its headset, and it’s going to be expensive even by Apple’s standards, with an asking price in excess of $2,000. Longtime Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says in his latest that Apple has settled on an early 2023 launch for the mixed reality headset. However, doubts about consumer interest in AR experiences have led the company to plan modestly.
