Browsing Tag: Mobile Smart Phones

Samsung decided to forgo the Mobile World Congress pomp and circumstance, instead opting to through its own part last week in San Francisco. I’ve been carrying around Galaxy S10 for a few days now, so more on that soon. In this meantime, here’s the device everyone is really interested.

As promised, the Galaxy Fold was on display at the company’s booth this morning, but it was protected by security rope and thick panes of glass, like so many carbonited Han Solos. Not folding and unfolding — just static, playing videos while throngs of reporters elbowed one another, joking for a bit of space.

It’s not a production device just yet. And honestly, it’s not the kind of display that engenders a lot of faith that the product will be coming to market in just under two months. At least it’s a step ahead of where we saw it late last year.

In the meantime, there’s this new video from Samsung. It’s a highly controlled “demo” of the voice, devoid of soundtrack (with some ASMRy sound effects). It shows more of the Fold than we’ve seen so far — which, granted, isn’t a particularly high bar, as far as these things go. You can, however, see folding and unfolding, the same Wireless Power Share feature you’ll find on the S10 and DeX functionality for bringing contact to an event larger screen via USB-C.

You can also catch glimpses of the App Continuity feature, which picks up your workflow where you left off, event as you switch between screens. But again, how that sort of thing plays out in person vs a video shot and edited by Samsung is a different question altogether. The positioning of the product at MWC leave one wondering whether the company has worked through all of the software kinks.

At least we we can the hardware exists in the world. We know there four of the things in the world, each of which was on display behind glass (two with the screen facing out and two with the rear). We also know that, like Huawei’s device, the fold crease is highly visible when the light catches it. How much of an impact that will ultimately have on, say, the movie viewing experience is another one of those open questions.

But Samsung is a big company with a lot of resources, and it’s got roughly two months to make sure everything is in working order on the device. Given the $1,899 starting price, it no doubt wants to get everything right. The clock is ticking. 

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Behold the Samsung Galaxy Fold under glass

Qualcomm today announced new 4g and 5g chipsets for connected vehicles. The chip maker sees the advanced communication platforms powering the next wave of in-vehicle experiences and telematics features including advanced automotive safety features and self-driving cars. Qualcomm says vehicles equipped with these chipsets are planned for production in 2021.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive 4G and Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive 5G Platform feature C-V2X direct communications, high-precision multi-frequency global navigation satellite system (HP-GNSS) and RF Front-End (RFFE) functionalities — basically, the chipsets will give vehicles next level positioning capabilities.
Along with improved positioning, vehicles equipped with these Snapdragon platforms gain vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications.

The Snapdragon Automotive 5G chipset is the first in the industry announced with support for dual SIM dual active — or DSDA, for short.

Qualcomm says it intends to give automakers the ability to test the platforms with a reference design kit in the second half of 2019.

It’s through chipsets like these that vehicles will gain autonomous driving capabilities. Without advanced, reliable connectivity, vehicles will not have access to the data needed to navigate across the ever-evolving urban landscape. While current systems are being used to some level of success, improved connectivity is ultimately needed to make good on the promise of self-driving cars.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Qualcomm’s new 4G, 5G platforms to bring improved telecommunication to vehicles

Qualcomm wants to create a new device category, XR viewer headsets, that combine the compute power of its current Snapdragon 855 platform with the speed of 5G on a smartphone to provide you with mobile VR and AR experiences — or ‘Extended Reality,’ as Qualcomm likes to call it — with six degrees of freedom tracking. The company announced this new initiative at MWC in Barcelona and noted that it expects OEMs like Pico to launch devices later this year.

The idea here is that the headsets will be tethered to a smartphone via a USB-C connection that drives high-res displays, with a lot of the content being streamed over — ideally – a 5G connection.

The headsets are an extension of the company’s previous XR work which mostly focused on using a phone’s camera’s and displays to power AR experiences. The company did start an accelerator program for head mounted displays (HMD), the aptly named HMD accelerator program, back in 2017. In many ways, today’s announcement is an extension of this work.

“Our HMD Accelerator Program has been a critical catalyst for ecosystem partners ranging from component suppliers and ODMs, to bring quality standalone XR headsets to consumers,” said Hugo Swart, senior director, Product Management, Qualcomm. “Building upon the momentum of this program, we will extend this to XR viewers and compatible smartphones, starting with smartphones enabled by the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform.”

Qualcomm has signed up a number of platform and software partners like Arvizio, NetEase-AR, Iconic Engine, NextVR, SenseTime and Wikitude, as well as manufacturers like Acer and Asus.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Qualcomm wants your phone to drive your next VR and AR headsets

It’s only been a few weeks since Google brought the Assistant to Google Maps to help you reply to messages, play music and more. This feature first launched in English and will soon start rolling out to all Assistant phone languages. In addition, Google also today announced that the Assistant will come to Android Messages, the standard text messaging app on Google’s mobile operating system, in the coming months.

If you remember Allo, Google’s last failed messaging app, then a lot of this will sound familiar. For Allo, after all, Assistant support was one of the marquee features. The different, though, is that for the time being, Google is mostly using the Assistant as an additional layer of smarts in Messages while in Allo, you could have full conversations with a special Assistant bot.

In Messages, the Assistant will automatically pop up suggestion chips when you are having conversations with somebody about movies, restaurants and the weather. That’s a pretty limited feature set for now, though Google tells us that it plans to expand it over time.

What’s important here is that the suggestions are generated on your phone (and that may be why the machine learning model is limited, too, since it has to run locally). Google is clearly aware that people don’t want the company to get any information about their private text chats. Once you tap on one of the Assistant suggestions, though, Google obviously knows that you were talking about a specific topic, even though the content of the conversation itself is never sent to Google’s servers. The person you are chatting with will only see the additional information when you push it to them.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Google will bring its Assistant to Android Messages

At MWC Barcelona, Google today made a few announcements around its Assistant. A lot of these center around support for KaiOS, the operating system for low-end feature phones that Google invested in last year, and additional language support.

While KaiOS, which was born out of Mozilla’s failed FirefoxOS project, may be for the very low end of low-end phones, Google argues that it’s exactly these devices that can profit from have access to a voice-driven assistant, given that they often have smaller screens, too, that make typing a hassle. Google is now bringing the Assistant to these KaiOS devices for users in India, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. In addition, it’s also bringing Voice Typing to KaiOS to help user enter text using their voice. With this, KaiOS users can simply speak their queries and use the Assistant as a way to input all kinds of information.

“If you look at the emerging markets, we’ve seen that the number of Assistant users has multiplied by seven,” Google’s Behshad Behzadi said. “The main reason for this is that for the new users which are coming to this technology for the first time, voice is really the easiest and most natural way for them to use their phones. It’s removing a technology barrier for these users.”

With today’s launch, Google is also bringing support for its bilingual Assistant to more languages. This allows you to seamlessly switch between two languages. Until now, this only worked for English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Italian. Today, the company is adding Korean, Hindi, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch to this lineup.

In addition, the Assistant now speaks eight new Indic languages: Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu.

Besides the new languages, Google is also bringing Actions — Google’s version of what Amazon calls skills in the Alex ecosystem — to Android Go and KaiOS. Developers can build these actions in 19 languages across 29 locales now.

Google also quietly launched a few other new Assistant features today. You can now check in to your Lufthansa, Swiss or Austrian Air flights within Europe using your voice, for example. The Assistant on your phone can now also control the Digital Wellbeing settings like your wind-down time and ‘do not disturb’ mode (in English, German and French). And if you speak German or French, then multiple actions — which allow you to tell the Assistant to perform more than one action at a time (“What’s the weather like in Munich and Bordeaux?”) — are now available to you, too. Until now, this feature was only available in English.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Google Assistant gets expanded language and device support

We’ve already known about the G8 ThinQ for some months now. And a few weeks back, LG made the whole camera rig official, announcing that the handset would be getting a ToF image sensor on its front-facing camera, bring, among other things, advanced face unlock technology.

The company did manage to save a few tricks for the product announcement, including a strange little biometric addition. LG says the phone’s Hand ID tech is the first to use “advanced palm vein authentication” — which could well be accurate. Certainly it’s not a mainstream feature yet.

And I’ll give it to LG, Hand ID is a much catchier name than “palm vein unlock,” which is one of the creepier sounding smartphone features in recent memories. Still, the underlying technology is actually pretty cool here, once you’re down shuddering from how weird the whole thing is on the face of it.

From the company’s press materials, “LG’s Hand ID identifies owners by recognizing the shape, thickness and other individual characteristics of the veins in the palms of their hands.” It turns out, like faces and fingerprints, everyone’s got a unique set of hand veins, so once registered, you can just however your hot blue blood tubes over the handset to quickly unlock in a few seconds.

The Z camera also does depth-sensing face unlock that’s a lot harder to spoof than the kind found on other Android handsets. LG’s also put the tech to use for a set of Air Motion gestures, which allow for hands-free interaction with various apps like the camera (selfies) and music (volume control).

I played around with the feature, and if I’m being totally honest, it takes some getting used to. You’ve got to train yourself to get things just right, which could well dissuade most users from any sort of long-term adoption of features that can pretty quickly with accomplished with a tap.

Other notable features for the new flagship include a 6.1 QHD+ OLED display and a new video portrait mode, which lets users adjust bokeh on the fly.

The handset will hit the States “in the coming weeks.” Pricing is still TBD, but I anticipate that it will cost around the same a previous LG flagships.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | LG’s latest flagship uses your hand veins to unlock

You want camera? The Nokia 9 PureView has them — more than you could ever possibly need, really. The latest premium device from HMD sports a five camera hexagonal array, along with the flash and color sensors. The two front-facing cameras, meanwhile, bring the total up to seven.

Overkill? Yeah, probably. But the device certainly maintains the Nokia brand’s legacy of pushing mobile imaging to its limits. What’s most interesting here, is how it all works. Rather than, say, switching between different focal points, the device takes shots on all five at once, fusing them together into one big picture.

Working in tandem, the cameras capture more than 60-megapixels worth of data. The system builds on the expertise of Light (the name of the even more silly nine-camera array) and Qualcomm to process the information into one complex photo that allows for tremendous editing leeway and deep depth maps. Users can shoot in RAW format and edit those images with the mobile version of Lightroom, made available through a partnership with Adobe.

The phone’s design is nice — certainly one of the newly reborn Nokia brand’s nicer to date. Though the rest of the aspects are fairly middling, including a 5.99 inch POLED display and a Snapdragon 845 chipset.

The price is right. At $699, it’s a decent mid-range phone with a heck of a gimmick. HMD, however, seems to be keenly aware that this one will have a relatively niche appeal. The company says it’s a limited edition device with a “defined production run.” No word what that means in terms of numbers, and it seems pretty reasonable to expect HMD to make this manner of device more widely available should it sell.

No word on timing, but HMD says we should expect the product to be available in the States.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Need cameras? The Nokia 9 PureView has lots

HMD was something of an instant success when it launched at Mobile World Congress two years back. That rapid rise owed to a few key things: price, familiar branding and its predecessor’s long time commitment to the feature phone.

Those who’ve been following the industry for some time will recall that the original Nokia mobile wasn’t particularly quick to adopt the smartphone lifestyle, but the company maintained marketshare by catering to the low end of the market. HMD has continued to embrace the category by re-releasing some familiar designs and creating altogether new non-smart phones.

While it shares a number with the QWERTY-sporting Asha, the Nokia 210 is more burner than BlackBerry. The Palm-sized handset sports a small screen, surrounded by thick casing and some big buttons. The handset can access the internet via Opera mini, so users can do some light social network.

And yes, it runs Snake.

HMD promises an impressive month of battery life, packed into a handset that should run around €30 ($34).

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | HMD keeps feature phones and Snake alive with the Nokia 210

Foldable phones are having their moments at this year’s Mobile World Congress. A few days after Samsung debuted the Galaxy Fold on stage at an event in San Francisco, Huawei has just shown off its solution, the Mate X.

On the face of it, the device looks like it may well be a step up from the Galaxy device, right down to its three large screens. Of course, all of that display real estate presents some key new challenges, beyond the underlying technology. Namely, how to avoid getting those surfaces scratched to hell.

Huawei’s got a solution for that, too — albeit not quite as elegant as the phone itself. In one of the earliest examples we’ve seen indicating what foldable cases may look like, going forward, the company quickly showed us a slip case.

The accessory opens to accept the folded up phone, snapping shut to protect both sides of the device. That means it doesn’t unfold to protect the eight-inch display — which, to be fair, won’t be exposed when you’re carrying the device around in your pocket.

Of course, this is just an early solution developed in house. No doubt future cases will be every bit as varied — if not more so — than the devices themselves. This, at least, probably won’t run to $2,600. 

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | This is what a foldable phone case looks like

Microsoft is set to announce a brand new hardware device at MWC in Barcelona — the new HoloLens headset. The conference starts at 6:00 PM CET (5:00 AM GMT, 12:00 PM ET, 9:00 AM PT).

If you’ve ever tried the HoloLens, you know that this it is a magical device. But Microsoft quickly realized that it had more potential for industrial use cases. It is now positioned as a B2B device.

Let’s see what Microsoft has in mind with the second-generation HoloLens. The company is also going to talk about its mobile strategy when it comes to apps and services on iOS and Android.

You can check it out live via Microsoft’s official stream above, and stay tuned on TechCrunch.com for ongoing coverage of all the news coming out of MWC.

Source: Tech Crunch Mobiles | Watch Microsoft unveil the HoloLens 2 live right here