Quick Shots-164

a smartphone and smartwatch on the table

Garmin launches Fenix 7 series and Epix outdoor smartwatches in India

Garmin launches Fenix 7 series and Epix outdoor smartwatches in India
Image: Garmin

Garmin has expanded its wearable portfolio in India with the launch of the new Fenix 7 series and Epix. The lineup consists of the Garmin Fenix 7, Fenix 7 Solar, Fenix 7 Sapphire Solar, Fenix 7X Sapphire Solar, and Garmin Epix.

From XDA

Red Magic 7 and 7 Pro unveiled with 135W charging, UD camera, improved cooling

Red Magic 7 and 7 Pro unveiled with 135W charging, UD camera, improved cooling
Image: Nubia

The new Red Magic 7 series arrives with an even bigger thirst for power – 135W of power that is, in the case of the Pro model. The Pro is also the first gaming phone with an under display camera. Nubia also introduced the custom “Red Core 1” chip, which is dedicated to handling some gaming-related tasks.

Let’s look at the improved cooling system – ICE 8.0 – as that is where the true power of the 7-series lies. It has a fan, spinning at 20,000 rpm as before, however, nubia added a “canyon air duct”, which connects to a second air inlet.

This increase airflow by 35% compared to previous generations and helps keep the chipset 3ºC lower than before. The metal canyon air duct is responsible for 2.4ºC of that improvement.

All of this is focused on keeping the Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 running as cool as possible to keep its CPU and GPU frequencies high. We’ll get back to the chipset and its fan in a bit, let’s talk about the screen next.

Both the Red Magic 7 and the Pro have 6.8” AMOLED panels, 1,080 x 2,400 px resolution (20:9) and full DCI-P3 coverage. They do differ in their configuration, however. For starters, the Pro display has 10-bit support and is brighter at 700 nits vs. 600 nits.

More importantly, it has a touch sampling rate that goes as high as 960 Hz with a display refresh rate of 120 Hz. Interestingly, the vanilla model offers a lower touch sampling rate, 720 Hz, but a higher refresh rate, 165 Hz.

The shoulder triggers have been improved to 500 Hz (was 450 Hz in the previous generation), meaning that the response rate is as low as 7.4 ms. This is one of the responsibilities of the Red Core 1 chip, which also deals with sound and vibration enhancement, as well as game lighting effects.

Two more things to note about the display. First, both phones have unblemished displays. The Red Magic 7 Pro does it with an under display camera (the first in its segment), which leverages a tripod pixel arrangement and wave-shaped wiring to keep the transparency as high as possible. The vanilla Red Magic 7 simply puts the front-facing camera in the top bezel.

And second, the upgraded Red Magic Studio app allows you to wirelessly mirror the screen at 120 Hz. If you want more, with an HDMI adapter or USB-C video output you can get up to 165 Hz out to a compatible display. You can also record gameplay at 120 Hz (in H.264 1080p format).

Both phones launch with Red Magic 5.0 out of the box. It is based on Android 12 with some tweaks to reduce response times and improve performance. The Red Magic Game Space will help you configure the shoulder triggers for each game as well as tune the phone for performance or battery endurance.

Finally, we get to the charging. The air cooler is crucial here as well since the Pro model charges at a whopping 135W and it can fully fill its 5,000 mAh battery in 15 minutes. The fan makes sure that the resulting heat is kept in check while that is happening. The vanilla phone is no slouch either, it does 120W charging that fills its 4,500 mAh battery in 17 minutes. By the way, both phones ship with 165W USB-C chargers, which you can use to charge up a compatible gaming laptop as well, not just the phone.

Since we started talking about the cooling system again, here are a few more details. The fan may spin very fast, but it doesn’t make much noise – 28 dB. It drops the CPU core temperature by 16ºC (60.8ºF) and ensures a stable performance over long gaming sessions. It doesn’t do it alone, ICE 8.0 features a nine-layer cooling structure that includes Composite Phase Heat Dissipation Material, a new thermally-conductive gel, a vapor chamber and a graphite sheet.

If that is not enough, the new Turbo Cooler accessory adds an external fan that improves heat dissipation by 17% while being 3 dB quieter than competing accessories. All with RGB lighting effects, of course.

From Gsmarena

vivo V23e 5G India launch set for February 21

vivo V23e 5G India launch set for February 21
Image: Vivo

vivo launched the V23 and V23 Pro in India last month, and the company will further expand the lineup in the country by introducing the V23e 5G on February 21.

The vivo V23e 5G was unveiled last November and will come in gold and blue colors in India. And if vivo makes no changes to the specs for the Indian market, you’ll get the Dimensity 810 SoC, 6.44″ FullHD+ AMOLED screen, 8GB RAM, 128GB storage, Android 11-based FuntouchOS 12, and 4,050 mAh battery with 44W charging.

From Gsmarena

Oppo will launch a new flagship phone next week

Oppo Find X Pro
Image: Oppo

It’s mid-February, and you know what that means: Companies that make phones are about to shower us with new models ahead of the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

One company that hasn’t launched a proper flagship in a while is China’s Oppo, but that’s about to change. The company says it’s launching a new smartphone, the Oppo Find X5 Pro, on February 24 – four days ahead of MWC, which officially kicks off on February 28.

Oppo will reveal all the details about the Find X5 Pro at launch, but right now we know that the phone will feature the company’s new neural processing chip called MariSilicon X, which should greatly improve nighttime photography and video.

We also know the phone will otherwise be powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 processor, while the cameras have been developed in partnership with Hasselblad.

Finally, Oppo shared a few images of the device, and the design appears to be a surprisingly fresh take on the modern smartphone, with an all-white or all-black glossy back and an odd-shaped camera bump that rises organically from the back’s surface and hosts a triple rear camera module.

The launch event will be streamed live on Oppo’s website at 11am GMT.

From Mashable

Samsung’s Galaxy S22 series launches in India, prices start at ₹72,999

Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra Display Green Wallpaper
Image: Nick Sutrich / Android Central

Earlier this month, Samsung introduced the Galaxy S22 series at its first Unpacked event of 2022. The company has now formally announced the launch of the flagship trio in India. As confirmed by Samsung recently, the Indian variants of the S22 series phones are powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chipset and not the in-house developed Exynos 2200.

The standard Galaxy S22 will be available in two configurations in the Indian market: 8GB/128GB and 8GB/256GB. While the 128GB version is priced at ₹72,999 (about $972), the 256GB version will retail for ₹76,999 (about $1,025).

The Galaxy S22+ will also be offered in the exact same memory configurations as the standard Galaxy S22. The phone’s 128GB version has been priced at ₹84,999 (about $1,132) for the 128GB version and ₹88,999 (about $1,185) for the 256GB version. Both devices come in Phantom Black, Phantom White, and Green color options.

Like the Galaxy S22 and S22+, Samsung’s top-of-the-line Galaxy S22 Ultra will also be available in two storage versions in India. Unlike the U.S., however, both the 256GB and 512GB versions of the phone come with 12GB of RAM.

While the 256GB version will be available for ₹1,09,999 (about $1,465), the 512GB version will retail at ₹1,18,999 (about $1,585). Color options include Phantom White, Phantom Black, and Burgundy. The 512GB version of Samsung’s best Android phone, however, only comes in Burgundy and Phantom Black.

Weirdly, Samsung India is yet to announce availability of the new Galaxy S22 series phones in India. There’s also no word on the pricing of the Galaxy Tab S8 series tablets. However, we expect both the Galaxy S22 and Tab S8 series devices to go up for pre-orders in the country later this month.

From Android Central

Foldable Phone Market Will Hit $29 Billion in 2025, IDC Says

Galaxy Z Fold 3
Image: Samsung

The foldable phone market continues to skyrocket, with more than 7 million flip and fold units sold in 2021 alone. 

That’s an increase of over 260% from the 1.9 million models shipped in 2020, according to a new report from telecom market intelligence firm International Data Corporation, which projects that around 27.6 million flip phones will be sold in 2025 at a total estimated market value of $29 billion.

By 2025, fold and flip phone market share could more than triple, according to IDC, representing 1.7% of all mobile phones.

From Cnet

NVIDIA sets revenue records for Q4 FY22 and the entire 2022 fiscal year

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070
Image: Harish Jonnalagadda / Windows Central

NVIDIA saw a record-breaking quarter in Q4 FY22 of the fiscal year, which ended on January 30, 2022. The company also reported record revenue for the entirety of the most recent fiscal year. NVIDIA brought in $7.64 billion of revenue in Q4 ’22, which was an increase of 53% year-over-year. The tech giant’s $26.91 billion of revenue in the 2022 fiscal year was up 61% compared to the previous year.

“We are seeing exceptional demand for NVIDIA computing platforms,” said NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang. “NVIDIA is propelling advances in AI, digital biology, climate sciences, gaming, creative design, autonomous vehicles and robotics – some of today’s most impactful fields.

From Windows Central

Samsung teases new Galaxy Book and more at February 27th event

Image: Samsung

Samsung is teasing the announcement of a new Galaxy Book laptop at an event on February 27th coinciding with this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC). In a small animation released alongside the invitation, a laptop can be seen unfolding itself, before being joined by a collection of other Samsung products, including a smart watch, smartphone, and a tablet. The event will be streamed on Samsung’s YouTube channel at 1PM ET / 10AM PT on February 27th.

In an accompanying blog post, Samsung Electronics’ head of new computing R&D team Hark-sang Kim gives some hints about the company’s priorities for its “next generation Galaxy Book lineup.” Kim says the aim is to offer a “seamless experience across devices and operating systems” with various different Galaxy devices working together. No concrete specs for the laptop have been announced, but Intel is mentioned as a partner.

From The Verge

Firefox and Chrome versions ‘100’ may break some websites

BERLIN, GERMANY - APRIL 22: The logo of the webbrowser Google Chrome is shown on the display of a smartphone on April 22, 2020 in Berlin, Germany. (Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)
Image: Thomas Trutschel via Getty Images

As both the Chrome and Firefox browsers approach their 100th versions, what should be a reason for the developers to celebrate could turn into a bit of a mess. It turns out that much like the Y2K bug, the triple-digit release numbers coded in the browsers’ User-Agents (UAs) could cause issues with a small number of sites, Bleeping Computer reported.

Mozilla launched an experiment last year to see if version number 100 would affect sites, and it just released a blog with the results. It did affect a small number of sites (some very big ones, though) that couldn’t parse a user-agent string containing a three-digit number. Notable ones still affected included HBO Go, Bethesda and Yahoo, according to a tracking site. The bugs include “browser not supported” messages, site rendering issues, parsing failures, 403 errors and so on.

How could such a silly thing be happening? “Without a single specification to follow, different browsers have different formats for the User-Agent string, and site-specific User-Agent parsing,” Mozilla explained in the blog. “It’s possible that some parsing libraries may have hard-coded assumptions or bugs that don’t take into account three-digit major version numbers.” 

Luckily, developers for both browsers have a plan. If there are issues with sites that can’t be resolved before the versions are released, both browsers will freeze the version numbers at 99 in the UA strings or inject code overrides to fix the problems. Both have also asked developers to test their sites with Firefox/Chrome 100 user agents. The browsers are set to arrive on March 29th and May 3rd for Chrome and Firefox respectively — hopefully like Y2K, it’ll be much ado about nothing.

From Engadget

MIT Researcher: Don’t Ignore the Possibility That AI Is Becoming Conscious

Getty Images/Futurism
Image: Getty Images/Futurism

Amid a maelstrom set off by a prominent AI researcher saying that some AI may already be achieving limited consciousness, one MIT AI researcher is saying the concept might not be so far-fetched.

Our story starts with Ilya Sutskever, head scientist at the Elon Musk cofounded research group OpenAI. On February 9, Sutskever tweeted that “it may be that today’s large neural networks are slightly conscious.”

In response, many others in the AI research space decried the OpenAI scientist’s claim, suggesting that it was harming machine learning’s reputation and amounted to little more than a “sales pitch” for OpenAI’s work.

That backlash has now generated its own clapback from MIT computer scientist Tamay Besiroglu, who’s now bucking the trend by coming to Sutskever’s defense.

“Seeing so many prominent [machine learning] folks ridiculing this idea is disappointing,” Besiroglu tweeted. “It makes me less hopeful in the field’s ability to seriously take on some of the profound, weird and important questions that they’ll undoubtedly be faced with over the next few decades.”

“I don’t actually think we can draw a clear line between models that are ‘not conscious’ vs ‘maybe slightly conscious,’” he said in a followup message. “I’m also not sure any of these models are conscious.”

“That said, I do think the question could be a meaningful one that shouldn’t just be neglected,” he added.

While fears of conscious computers go as far back as the infamous “Maschinenmensch” in 1927’s “Metropolis,” researchers have repeatedly punted on the concept, saying that it was too far in the future to worry about just yet — and that in any case, misuses of less advanced AI are already widespread.

That stance explains much of the pushback to Sutskever’s claim, which represented one of the first times a credible AI researcher hinted that their creation may have gained some consciousness of its own.

OpenAI — which Sutskever cofounded alongside Musk and the group’s current CEO Sam Altman — has in recent years gained notoriety for making GPT-3, a sophisticated text generating algorithm that’s caused controversy after users exploited it in some pretty grotesque ways.

AI has advanced so rapidly in recent years that many humans, whose advanced intelligence capabilities evolved many tens of thousands of years ago, seem to be struggling with the dizzying concept of conscious computers.

If nothing else, this iteration of the conscious AI debate could well be pushing the boundaries of what constitutes consciousness — and may, ultimately, play a role in how we come to define it.

From Futurism

I’m a tech savvy person who occasionally cook and party. I am an engineer by profession and tech enthusiast by passion.
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