ASUS announces ROG Flow X16 with Ryzen 9, NVIDIA RTX 3070 Ti, and Nebula HDR display
ASUS announced its ROG Flow X16 gaming laptop today. The 16-inch device runs on up to an AMD Ryzen 9 6900HS processor paired with up to NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti laptop graphics. The Flow X16 is a convertible laptop, allowing people to flip it around into different postures.
ASUS will start shipping the ROG Flow X16 in Q3 2022 in the UK. The company has not shared pricing details at this time.
The ROG Flow X16 is the most powerful ROG Flow device to date, according to ASUS. In addition to its CPU and GPU pairing, it has a MUX Switch to optimize performance. Real-world testing will be the judge, but the specs of the device stack it up well against the best gaming laptops.
From Windows Central
Kuo: Apple testing E Ink cover display for foldables
Noted Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo claims Cupertino is in the process of testing an E Ink cover display for its foldable device. The new report comes following last week’s rumor of Apple testing folding panels for its future iPhone and iPad which are expected to arrive around 2025.
Taiwan’s E Ink Corporation is one of the biggest electronic ink display makers and is the key supplier for Amazon’s Kindle range. The company also makes color e-ink panels which are the type Apple is allegedly interested in. The big advantage of e-ink panels over traditional OLED and LCD ones is their low power consumption while the main drawback is the slow refresh rate as we recently examined first-hand in our Huawei MatePad Paper review.
With companies like E Ink working on new types of e ink displays including foldable and rollable panels, we are bound to see some interesting developments. The technology should hopefully advance enough to the point where it becomes widely used by smartphone manufacturers in the near future.
From Gsmarena
WhatsApp is testing a feature that lets you quietly leave groups
If you choose to leave a WhatsApp group that has become increasingly noisy or irrelevant, the app will post a notification that anybody can see in-chat. It’s probably not a big deal in most instances… unless it’s a group with relatives or friends who are inclined to ask why you’d left. According to WABetaInfo, WhatsApp is working on an upcoming feature that could prevent awkward confrontations by letting you exit groups without posting a notification everybody could see.
To note, the app will still notify the group admins that you’re leaving when the feature becomes available, but everybody else wouldn’t know unless you tell them. WABetaInfo first talked about the feature when Meta discussed experimenting with Communities, which people can use to combine separate group chats “under one umbrella with a structure that works for them,” back in April. Now, the publication has obtained a screenshot of WhatsApp beta on desktop that shows an exit prompt that reads: “Only you and group admins will be notified that you left the group.” Hopefully, the feature will also roll out for WhatsApp on mobile when it becomes available on desktop.
From Engadget
Apple adds live captions to iPhone and Mac, plus more accessibility upgrades to come
Apple has released a bevy of new accessibility features for iPhone, Apple Watch, and Mac, including a universal live captioning tool, improved visual and auditory detection modes, and iOS access to WatchOS apps. The new capabilities will arrive “later this year” as updates roll out to various platforms.
The most widely applicable tool is probably live captioning, already very popular with tools like Ava, which raised $10 million the other day to expand its repertoire.
Apple Watch apps will get improved accessibility on two fronts. First there are some added hand gestures for people, for instance amputees, who have trouble with the finer interactions on the tiny screen. A pile of new actions available via gestures like a “double pinch,” letting you pause a workout, take a photo, answer a phone call, and so on.
Second, WatchOS apps can now be mirrored to the screens of iPhones, where other accessibility tools can be used. This will also be helpful for anyone who likes the smartwatch-specific use cases of the Apple Watch but has difficulty interacting with the device on its own terms.
Existing assistive tools Magnifier and Sound Recognition also get some new features. Magnifier’s “detection mode” normally lets the user know if either a person or something readable or describable is right in front of them: “person, 5 feet ahead.” Now it has a special “door detection” mode that gives details of those all-important features in a building.
There are a number of other, smaller updates, such as adjusting the time Siri waits before answering a question (great for people who speak slowly) and extra text customization option sin Apple Books. And VoiceOver is coming to 20 new languages and locations soon as well. We’ll know more about exact timing and availability when Apple makes more specific announcements down the line.
From Techcrunch
Google Messages RCS is being abused for ads in India
Advertising tends to creep its way into anything and everything you’re using in some form, and it seems that text messaging is a focus for some brands in India. Lately, Google Messages and its RCS messaging has been abused by businesses in India.
Over the past few weeks, Google Messages users in India have been reporting more and more ads showing up through RCS messaging. While many brands – even in the US and other countries – have used messaging apps and SMS texts to advertise new products to former customers, these ads going on in India are not necessarily the result of a user’s buying activity.
Business messaging on RCS, as Google’s Jibe website points out, is supposed to be used for things such as sending copies of your travel tickets or sending links for buying additional products based on a past purchase based on a user’s request.
From 9to5Google
The Huawei P50 Pro can gain 5G connectivity via a special case with an eSIM
International politics have cut Huawei off from suppliers of 5G tech, which has forced the company to release its flagships as 4G-only devices. A workaround has been discovered – a case with a built-in 5G modem can add next-gen connectivity to the phones. Of course, the case is not made by Huawei itself, it is manufactured by Soyealink.
Right now only the Huawei P50 Pro is supported. However, if this solution proves popular enough, the company will likely create cases for other Huawei phones. The case will be available soon at a price of CNY 800 ($120/€115/₹9,200).
From Gsmarena
iPhone 14 Pro Max hands-on video: Dummy unit demos Apple’s new iPhone design
About a year ago, we saw the iPhone 13 design rumors materialize in a hands-on video. A YouTuber got his hands on a Pro Max dummy unit. The mockup looked and felt like the real thing. And it turned out to be almost identical to the iPhone 13 Pro Max that Apple launched last September. Unsurprisingly, the iPhone 14 Pro Max just got the same hands-on treatment courtesy of the same vlogger. And the iPhone 14 Pro Max dummy unit is probably our best look at the new iPhone 14 design.
From BGR
OLED TV breakthrough fixes all the tech’s problems, and it’s coming soon
A new way of making OLED screens has just been unveiled by manufacturer Japan Display (via OLED-info), and it promises to deliver twice the brightness of current OLED displays thanks to huge improvements in efficiency, which also mean it could be ideal for phones by delivering current brightness levels with much lower power consumption.
Known as eLEAP, the tech also means that the OLED panels would have a longer lifespan, estimated by Japan Display to be three times longer than current models, even at the higher brightness levels.
And best of all, this isn’t some theoretical ‘we did it in a lab one time’ breakthrough. Japan Display says that it’s in talks to start sample production of OLED screens made with eLEAP by the end of 2022, and that it plans to provide the technology to other display makers too.
The technology will work with OLED manufacturing all the way up to the latest 8th-gen facilities, which are coming soon and should mean that the prices of both smaller and larger OLED TVs come down.
eLEAP’s advantage is that it offers a larger ‘aperture ratio’, which is basically how much of the space of each OLED pixel can actually be devoted to the parts that put out light. A larger window for light means… more light. You don’t have to pump as much energy in to get high levels of brightness if you have wider light-emitting components.
From Techradar
Apple allows subscription apps to increase auto-renewal price without user consent
Claiming that auto-renewing subscription apps are sometimes currently being “unintentionally interrupted” when users fail to spot the notification of a price increase and don’t opt into the new price, Apple yesterday announced a change to the App Store rules. Subscription apps can now increase the price and carry on auto-renewing without users giving explicit consent.
Apple is at pains to downplay any concerns that this will lead to exploitation. For one thing there will still be notifications of the increase, “including via email, push notification, and a message within the app,” and any users who see these notifications and don’t consent to the increase will be able to go into the app and cancel their subscription. (Mind you, considering that this change was supposedly required because users weren’t seeing the notifications and opting in, one might question whether they are any more likely to see them and opt out.)
We can get an idea of what this notification will look like by examining what now seems to have been a pilot scheme Apple ran for the Disney+ app: as Max Seelemann noticed in March, users of this app were notified of a price increase rather than asked for their consent.
From Macworld
Elon Musk: Twitter deal ‘cannot move forward’ without fake accounts proof
Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter acquisition is getting less and less likely – at least at the terms initially agreed upon.
On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Musk is looking to renegotiate the deal terms and possibly look to acquire the social media site at a lower price. Musk previously said he’d put the deal “on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users.”
The report follows the remarks Musk made at the “All In” conference in Miami on Monday, where he said that he believes as many as 20 percent of Twitter accounts could be fake.
On Tuesday, Musk offered some more details on Twitter. The number of fake and spam accounts on could be “much higher” than 20 percent, he wrote.
From Mashable
