Users can now transfer WhatsApp chats from iPhone to Android, but this requires a cable

WhatsApp recently announced that users would finally be able to transfer their chat history between iOS and Android devices, starting with Samsung Galaxy smartphones. While this feature was already available in WhatsApp Beta for some users, the transfer option has now been made available to everyone — but it requires nothing less than a cable.

The first thing to keep in mind is that the process only works from iPhone to Android, not vice versa. Right now, only Galaxy smartphones are compatible with the new option, so even if you have an Android phone, you won’t be able to transfer your conversations to non-Samsung phones.

Another detail about this transfer method is that it requires a Lightning to USB-C cable. There is no way to transfer your WhatsApp backup between iOS and Android wirelessly.

Read More at 9to5Mac

Snapdragon 898-powered vivo pops-up on GeekBench

Qualcomm’s current top-dog chipset – the Snapdragon 888+ is only a few weeks old at this point. It is essentially a Snapdragon 888 with a slightly overclocked prime core. A proper next-gen chip is already in the works – the Snapdragon 898 or 895. It is yet to be made official, but has already been featured in a few leaks. The latest one comes from GeekBench, where a mysterious vivo prototype is apparently already testing the new silicon.

Read More at Gsmarena

Facebook says its AI mislabeling a video of Black men as “primates” was “unacceptable”

Facebook is apologizing for an incident where its AI mislabeled a video of Black men with a “primates” label, calling it an “unacceptable error” that it was examining to prevent it from happening again. As reported by the New York Times, users who watched a June 27th video posted by the UK tabloid Daily Mail received an auto-prompt asking whether they wanted to “keep seeing videos about Primates.”

Facebook disabled the entire topic recommendation feature as soon as it realized what was happening, a spokesperson said in an email to The Verge on Saturday.

“This was clearly an unacceptable error,” the spokesperson said. The company is investigating the cause to prevent the behavior from happening again, the spokesperson added. “As we have said, while we have made improvements to our AI we know it’s not perfect and we have more progress to make. We apologize to anyone who may have seen these offensive recommendations.”

Read More at The Verge

Intel Alder Lake CPUs could go on sale November 19

Intel’s Alder Lake processors are expected to hit shelves mid-November, or at least that’s the fresh word from the CPU grapevine.

To be precise, this comes from Wccftech which is citing its own sources as feeding back the info on the launch date that’s supposedly set for November 19.

That’s the actual on-sale date for the 12th-gen CPUs, with Intel supposedly revealing the spec, initial internal performance benchmarks, and pricing, a few weeks beforehand at the Intel ON event which takes place in San Francisco on October 27-28.

Read More at Techradar

Realme 8s 5G color options officially confirmed ahead of September 9 unveiling

September 9 will be a big day for Realme since the company will unveil its first tablet, dubbed Realme Pad. The young brand will also introduce two new smartphones on the same day – Realme 8s 5G and Realme 8i. Leaked renders have already revealed the designs of both smartphones, but we’ve only seen them in one color – 8s 5G in purple and 8i in black. Today, a couple of posters shared by Realme show the 8s 5G in a blue shade while also confirming the purple colorway.

Read More at Gsmarena

Did IBM Just Preview The Future of Caches?

At Hot Chips last week, IBM announced its new mainframe Z processor. It’s a big interesting piece of kit that I want to do a wider piece on at some point, but there was one feature of that core design that I want to pluck out and focus on specifically. IBM Z is known for having big L3 caches, backed with a separate global L4 cache chip that operates as a cache between multiple sockets of processors – with the new Telum chip, IBM has done away with that – there’s no L4, but interestingly enough, there’s no L3. What they’ve done instead might be an indication of the future of on-chip cache design.

Read More at Anand Tech

The OnePlus 10 could end up looking a lot like the OnePlus 9

The OnePlus 9 launched in March 2021, and it sounds as though there might not be a OnePlus 9T at all – which leaves the way clear for us to start speculating on what the OnePlus 10 might be bringing with it at some point during 2022.

Well-known tipster Yogesh Brar gets the ball rolling for us with the reveal that the OnePlus 10 phones are “being pitched as polished series 9 models”, suggesting that not a huge amount is going to change in terms of the aesthetics of these devices.

It’s still very early days for OnePlus 10 rumors, and information from this particular source isn’t always accurate, so bear that in mind. At this stage it does seem likely that we’ll get a standard model and a Pro edition as usual when the time comes.

Read More at Techradar

Comment: iPhone 13 won’t be port-less, but maybe the next one will

Reports have also suggested that 2021 could be the year that Apple introduces an iPhone without a Lightning port. This would be the first-ever port-less iPhone, and most recently, Bloomberg reported it as something being tested internally at Apple. 

But while Apple is testing a port-less design, it isn’t expected to be released to the public this year. Ming-Chi Kuo has reported that the iPhone 13 will continue to use a Lightning port on all models. This also means that the iPhone 13 will not feature USB-C support.

Read More at 9to5Mac

No, your phone isn’t making you dumber or more forgetful

Digital technology helps us offload complex sets of information more effectively and efficiently than analogue tools, and it does so without sacrificing accuracy. One significant benefit is that the internal cognitive capacity that gets freed up from having to perform specialized functions like remembering a calendar appointment is freed up for other tasks. This in turn means that we can accomplish more, cognitively speaking, than we ever could before.

As such, digital technology need not to be viewed as competing with our internal cognitive process. Instead, it complements cognition by extending our ability to get things done.

Read More at TNW

Scientists Build Molecule-Sized “Camera” To Watch Chemical Reactions in Real-Time

University of Cambridge scientists have gotten an unprecedented glimpse at chemical reactions in real-time, thanks to a new molecule-sized “camera.”

The device, little more than a clump of gold nanoparticles, semiconductor nanocrystals called quantum dots, and a molecular “glue,” uses a process similar to photosynthesis to reveal exactly what’s happening while various molecules interact with each other during a reaction, according to research published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Thursday.

The device offers a far simpler way of monitoring how various chemical compounds form during reactions than the methods currently available to scientists, and the team that built the “camera” says it’s already using it to improve the technology behind solar cells.

Read More at Futurism