Leak reveals some potential specifications of the iPhone 15 series, including new naming scheme, USB C, and more
Apple announced the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Pro models only two weeks ago. In case you’ve missed it, the regular models are pretty much polished iPhone 13 iterations. Meanwhile, the highest-end variants pack the exciting upgrades. These include the all-new Dynamic Island — which replaces the notch. In the screen department, we also get an Always-On Display (AOD) feature. Apart from that, the cameras got some significant improvements when compared to their predecessors. Now that the iPhone 14 units are arriving to customers, iPhone 15 leaks have started surfacing. Apple distinguished between regular and Pro iPhones in several hardware departments this year. We expect the difference to be even bigger on the iPhone 15 series next year.
From XDA
Samsung’s next-gen Galaxy A54, A34, and A14 are deep in development
Q4 is just around the corner, and according to a new report, Samsung’s next-gen mid-range Galaxy A phones for 2023 are now deep in development. They’ll hit the shelves as the Galaxy A14, Galaxy A34, and Galaxy A54.
The Galaxy A14 carries model number SM-A146B and has 5G connectivity. The exact chipset model it carries is unknown, but the A14 could become Samsung’s most affordable 5G phone of 2023 — even though it might go on sale in Europe before the end of this year. (via GalaxyClub)
Next will be the Galaxy A34, which is now reportedly in development with model number SM-A346B. And last but certainly not least, Samsung is also working on the Galaxy A54 (SM-A546B), which will probably strive to hit a perfect balance between affordability and performance.
The Galaxy A34 and A54 will likely use the upcoming Exynos 1380 chip. This SoC was discovered last month carrying model number S5E8835. It should be the successor to the Exynos 1280, but once again, it’s a bit too early for detailed specifications. We’ll keep an eye out and let you know as soon as we find out more.
From Sammobile
OnePlus teases its next smartwatch, but you won’t be able to get it
OnePlus’ Nord sub-brand is known for its budget and mid-range smartphones. The company further expanded the scope of the brand to include earbuds with the launch of the OnePlus Nord Buds in July this year. There were rumors and leaks surrounding a Nord-branded smartwatch from the BBK-owned company. Six months after the first rumors popped up on the internet, OnePlus has officially teased the smartwatch’s launch.
OnePlus’ teaser image on its Indian website and social media channels points to the Nord Watch featuring a rectangular display. The “Get moving” tagline confirms the watch’s focus on fitness and health tracking. In typical OnePlus style, the company teases that it will share more information about the watch in parts throughout the rest of this and the following week
From Android Police
Xiaomi accidentally posts image of Redmi Pad tablet, leaks point to Wi-Fi and 4G variants
Xiaomi is expected to unveil a pair of 12T smartphones this week and there was some hope that there will be a new tablet along for the ride – the Redmi Pad. However, the latest reports indicate that the Pad launch will happen in October instead.
While we settle in for the wait a number of leaks have offered a glimpse of what to expect. One of them came from Xiaomi Kuwait, which posted this image on Instagram, which clearly shows the Redmi Pad (the camera design matches what we’ve seen in renders).
This colorway will be called Mint Green and there will be two others: Graphite Grey and Moonlight Silver. This is according to Pricebaba sources, which also revealed two memory configurations for the slate, 3/64GB and 4/64GB, while casting doubt on the rumored 4/128GB version.
From Gsmarena
Asus details its ROG Phone 6D and 6D Ultimate in promo videos
The Asus ROG Phone 6D series is now official and the ROG Global YouTube account posted several videos for the newly announced phones.
The first video details the design and specs of the new ROG Phone 6D series with some nifty CGI. The ROG Phone 6D Ultimate has the ROG Vision color display on the back while the standard ROG Phone 6D settles for an RGB LED-illuminated logo. Both phones are equipped with MediaTek’s flagship Dimensity 9000+ chipset.
From Gsmarena
Leaked Tensor G2 details examined: same CPU, everything else is getting better
One of the earliest leaks about the Tensor G2 – the new chipset that will power the Pixel 7 series – revealed that the chip will retain the X1, A76 and A55 CPU cores (in a 2+2+4 configuration) as the original. Now developer Kuba Wojciechowski lends more credence to that claim by examining the details of a Geekbench result and others clues.
The Tensor G2 will reportedly be manufactured on Samsung’s 4nm process (the original chip came from Samsung’s 5nm foundries), which has enabled mild bumps in CPU clock speeds. The two Cortex-X1 cores have their cap raised by 50MHz to 2.85GHz (though this peak is likely achieved with only one X1 active), the two Cortex-A76 cores have gotten a bigger 100MHz bump to 2.35GHz, based on Geekbench data.
From Gsmarena
Dynamic Island on its way to all iPhones, analyst claims
Apple will bring the new Dynamic Island to all of its iPhone 15 devices next year, according to well-regarded display industry analyst Ross Young.
In a tweet spotted by MacRumors on Sunday, Young said he expected the pill-shaped Dynamic Island to come to standard iPhones in 2023. It currently only appears with the premium iPhone 14 Pro and iPhone 14 Pro Max models, and not the iPhone 14 and iPhone 14 Plus.
The iPhone’s Dynamic Island garnered a lot of attention — most of it positive — when Apple unveiled it at its Far Out event earlier this month. Digital Trends’ Alex Blake described it as a “delightful surprise” and was so impressed by it that it left him feeling “a little giddy.”
So what is it exactly? Well, instead of leaving the cutout as just a simple black space housing the front camera and Face ID sensors as we’ve seen with the notch, Apple went one step further and cleverly made it an integral part of the display, designing it to transform its shape when delivering snippets of useful information.
From Digital Trends
Rockstar owner issues takedowns after Grand Theft Auto VI leak
More than 90 videos and images of Grand Theft Auto VI, the long-awaited follow-up to 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V, one of the best-selling video games of all time – leaked online over the weekend, in one of the biggest confidential data breaches in gaming history.
The footage was posted to the GTAForums website by a user going by the name teapotuberhacker, who claimed to have accessed it by hacking Rockstar’s internal company Slack feed and gaining access to their servers.
The original post has since been taken down, but not before the images and video proliferated across social media. Rockstar Games’ parent company, Take-Two Interactive, has been issuing takedowns to remove the footage from YouTube and Twitter.
The hacker has also threatened to leak the source code for Grand Theft Auto V and the in-development version of Grand Theft Auto VI, inviting Rockstar Games to negotiate a deal.
Sources close to Rockstar Games have indicated to the Guardian and Bloomberg that the leak represents an early-in-development build of the game that is already a year old.
In a statement posted to social media, the developer confirmed the leak. “We recently suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto,” the company said. “At this time, we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services nor any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects.
“We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our next game shared with you all in this way. Our work on the next Grand Theft Auto game will continue as planned and we remain as committed as ever to delivering an experience to you, our players, that truly exceeds your expectations. We will update everyone again soon and, of course, will properly introduce you to this next game when it is ready. We want to thank everyone for their ongoing support through this situation.”
The footage shows animation tests, level layouts and gameplay tests, including some fully voiced conversations between characters. The footage shows a female protagonist in a fictionalised modern-day Miami, Vice City, also the setting of 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.
The videos clearly show an in-progress version of the game, with debug commands and other technical information overlaid. Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 was in “active development” earlier this year, though early work on the game probably began in 2014.
Leaks are damaging to video game developers not just because of the confidential information that they represent, but because a leak can adversely affect a game’s perception before release. It is usual for in-development builds to look rough until the final months of development, and they are rarely representative of the finished game – something that uninformed viewers often don’t understand. Developers who spend years of their lives making big-budget games are demoralised by leaks that do not show the quality of work that they strive for in the complete product.
From The Guardian
Treasury Recommends Exploring Creation of a Digital Dollar
The Biden administration is moving one step closer to developing a central bank digital currency, known as the digital dollar, saying it would help reinforce the U.S. role as a leader in the world financial system.
The White House said on Friday that after President Joe Biden issued an executive order in March calling on a variety of agencies to look at ways to regulate digital assets, the agencies came up with nine reports, covering cryptocurrency impacts on financial markets, the environment, innovation and other elements of the economic system.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said one Treasury recommendation is that the U.S. “advance policy and technical work on a potential central bank digital currency, or CBDC, so that the United States is prepared if CBDC is determined to be in the national interest.”
“Right now, some aspects of our current payment system are too slow or too expensive,” Yellen said on a Thursday call with reporters laying out some of the findings of the reports.
From US news
The $300bn Google-Meta advertising duopoly is under attack
For Meta and Google’s corporate parent, Alphabet, the cyclical problem may not be the worst of it. They might once have hoped to offset the digital-ad pie’s slower growth by grabbing a larger slice of it. No longer. Although the two are together expected to rake in around $300bn in revenues this year, sales of their four biggest rivals in the West will amount to almost a quarter as much. If that does not sound like a lot, it is nevertheless giving the incumbents reason to worry. Five years ago most of those rivals were scarcely in the ad business at all (see chart). What is more, as digital advertising enters a period of transformation, the challengers look well-placed to increase their gains.
The noisiest newcomer to the digital-ad scene is TikTok. In the five years since its launch the short-video app has sucked ad dollars away from Facebook and Instagram, Meta’s two biggest properties. So much so that the two social networks are reinventing themselves in the image of their Chinese-owned rival. TikTok’s worldwide revenue will exceed $11bn this year and will be double that by 2024, forecasts eMarketer, a firm of analysts.
The TikTok threat is well known—not least to Meta’s boss, Mark Zuckerberg, who mentioned the “unique” competitor five times on a recent earnings call. But Meta and Google may have more to worry about closer to home, where a trio of American tech firms are loading ever more ads around their main businesses.
Chief among them is Amazon, forecast to take nearly 7% of worldwide digital-ad revenue this year, up from less than 1% just six years ago. The company started reporting details of its ad business only in February, when it revealed sales in 2021 of $31bn. As Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, points out, that is roughly as much as the ad sales of the entire global newspaper industry. Amazon executives now talk of advertising as one of the company’s three “engines”, alongside retail and cloud computing.
From The Economist
