BBC cuts Food and Newsbeat sites to save £15 million
The BBC has announced plans to close a string of sites and services including BBC Food, which hosts more than 11,000 recipes. The decision, which has triggered a large public outcry, is part of the broadcaster’s pledge to make its programming, apps and news coverage more “distinctive.” It follows criticism from the UK government that the BBC is trying to do too much with the licence fee, replicating and potentially suffocating services that other companies already provide. Shuttering the sites is expected to save the BBC £15 million (roughly $21.7 million).
The BBC says its popular recipe site will be “archived or mothballed” in the next 12 months, in a manner similar “to other old BBC sites.” Notably, the recipes themselves will still be available — provided you know the exact URL. So while the BBC Food homepage will disappear, along with any new updates, the old database of step-by-step instructions will live on.
Once the Food website has been removed, it’ll be much harder for people to discover new recipes — at the moment, for instance, you can use a search box on the homepage to filter by your favourite ingredient(s), chef or TV show. What’s not clear, for now, is how the closure will affect the searchability of recipes in Google. Many Brits stumble upon BBC recipes by simply entering their favourite meal into a search engine. Depending on the BBC’s approach, this might still be possible after the closure.
BBC Good Food, which operates independently of BBC Food as a separate website and magazine, won’t be affected by the change.
Other BBC services are also facing the chop. The broadcaster will close the youth-focused Newsbeat website and app, funnelling its output through the broader BBC News platform instead. Likewise, the BBC’s dedicated Travel site and app will be absorbed by BBC News. Other casualties include the science and curiosity-based iWonder site, the online BBC News Magazine, and local news index web pages. In a further bid to cut costs, the organisation will be reducing “digital radio and music social media activity,” as well as additional content “not core to (these) services.”
James Harding, Director of BBC News and Current Affairs said: “We are going to focus our energy on these six areas: BBC News; iPlay and BBC Bitesize; BBC iPlayer and BBC iPlayer Radio; BBC Sport; the Ideas Service; and BBC Live. We will stop doing some things where we’re duplicating our work, for example on food, and scale back services, such as travel, where there are bigger, better-resourced services in the market.”
The decision to remove such a wide range of services is bound to attract some criticism. But many would argue that the broadcaster has little choice. The government is currently drafting the next BBC Charter, which will govern the broadcaster’s services and programming for the next 10 (possibly 11) years. The document could have deep, long-lasting ramifications, which is why the BBC has offered its new, “distinctive” vision to politicians. If it’s seen to be playing ball, the hope is that the government will be more lenient in the final version of the BBC Charter.
The BBC is already struggling with extensive funding cuts — that’s why BBC Three has moved online and why it abandoned live Formula 1 coverage. Today’s announcements are, ultimately, just another example of cost cutting and shedding what it considers to be its most expendable services.
Source: BBC
SoundHound adds voice search to its music discovery app
Last June, SoundHound revealed its plan to provide answers to more than just your music queries. It did just that with a universal search app called Hound, software with a feature that aimed to take on the likes of Siri and Google: voice commands. However, that handy tool didn’t hadn’t made the leap to the company’s flagship app, but that changes today. The SoundHound software that finds music answers will now let you ask those questions with your voice.
Thanks to the Houndify platform, the SoundHound app can handle spoken cues after you alert it with the “OK Hound” command. For example, if you wanted to hear something upbeat, you would say “OK Hound, play Major Lazer.” Don’t worry, you can still ask the app to identify a song being played, sang or hummed — that original function isn’t going away.
You can also tell SoundHound to add a track to a playlist on your streaming service of choice or ask it trivia questions. It can let you know where a particular artist was born or the name of their latest single. Need to find a music video? The app searches YouTube, too. If you’re looking to give it a go, the updated SoundHound app with Hound’s voice search is now available for iOS and Android.
OnePlus 3’s official render could be a decoy
This morning, a render of the much anticipated OnePlus 3 flagship phone (pictured left) has been making the rounds on the internet. We can confirm that this “leak” is legit as our pals over at Engadget Chinese also got it directly from a source at OnePlus, who didn’t say anything other than that this is a “OnePlus 3 render.” But said source has clearly been seeding the same image to other Chinese media outlets as well, which is why we’re smelling a decoy here — a tactic often deployed by OnePlus’ sister company, Vivo, to stir up hype before a product launch. Leaving the HTC-like design aside, we have a hard time believing that OnePlus would remove laser autofocus and dual-tone flash from its next flagship device; but hey, at least NFC is back, as hinted by the T-shaped antenna band.
If the render has any remaining credibility, it seems that the front-side fingerprint reader, three-stage alert slider and USB Type-C port are here to stay. The StyleSwap back covers are gone, though we don’t doubt that OnePlus will continue to offer other types of cases.
We reached out to both CEO Pete Lau and Head Of Global Carl Pei regarding this render, but they both declined to comment. So far, the only official detail about the OnePlus 3 is the June launch window which Pei confirmed to CNET back at MWC. According to some benchmark and certification listings from last month, the metallic device is expected to come with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 820 chipset, up to 6GB of RAM, Oppo’s VOOC rapid-charging tech and Android 6.0.1. Evan Blass, formerly known as @evleaks, added that it’ll feature an AMOLED screen and a 3,000 mAh battery.
Here’s hoping OnePlus has saved us some genuine surprises for the launch in a few weeks’ time; it’d be quite a shocker if the actual device looks rather different.
Via: Engadget Chinese
Who needs a smart tampon when you have common sense?
I wasn’t surprised two weeks ago when I was invited to see an early demo of a so-called smart tampon. I am, after all, one of few women who write for Engadget. Indeed, as I would later find out, the founder of this startup, called my.Flow, had no plans to meet with male reporters ahead of her product’s launch. And that makes sense: It’s a product by a woman, for women, that she believes women will “get.” None of us need to be told what a nuisance menstruation can be, or that we risk life-threatening complications when we leave our tampons in too long.
The problem is, I’m a woman, and even I don’t get this thing.
Though the initial email I received described it as a “smart tampon,” this is, in fact, a bit of a misnomer. The tampon itself looks like any other tampon, complete with a plastic applicator. There’s no circuitry inside, so in that sense, it’s dumber than its name implies. Instead, an insulated string connects to a small sensor that the wearer clips onto her underwear or waistband. The sensor then talks to a smartphone app that sends notifications when the tampon is nearly saturated. Over time, too, the app can predict when a woman’s period will start, how long it will last and what her heaviest-flow days will be.
The idea is to help women avoid embarrassing surprises — the sort of leaks you’d see if you neglected to change your tampon or weren’t expecting your period to start that day. My.Flow is also trying to prevent toxic shock syndrome, a rare but potentially fatal complication sometimes caused by leaving a tampon in too long. Conversely, says the company, if the cotton has barely absorbed any blood, a woman can avoid the discomfort of having to remove a dry, unlubricated tampon.
These are noble intentions. Women still get toxic shock syndrome, and sometimes they die from it. But TSS is less common than it used to be — or at least, bacteria-infested tampons are less often to blame. According to the Mayo Clinic, since tampon makers took certain superabsorbent tampons off the market, there have been fewer recorded cases of menstruating women contracting the illness.
Also, these are all problems that can largely be solved with common sense. The cases that occasionally make headlines are about women who, say, forget about the tampon and leave it there for nine days. Don’t fucking do that. The packaging on most tampon boxes says you shouldn’t leave one in for more than eight hours, and even those of us who don’t always read the fine print can probably recall hearing at least one warning about toxic shock syndrome.
I don’t actually know how one forgets about a tampon, and it’s also not that hard to remember to change it before the workday is done. And, precisely because tampon makers have discontinued their most absorbent models, the ones available today are going to get saturated more quickly. If you’ve been menstruating for decades, you’ve probably gotten the hang of changing your tampon before there’s any actual leakage. But even if you’re a newbie, a little spotting in your underwear would be clue enough that it’s time for a fresh one.
Leakage, by the way, is a more likely problem. Accidents happen, even to the most seasoned among us. Again, though, common sense goes a long way. Not all of us have predictable periods, but for many of us, everything runs like clockwork after a while. (That’s especially true for women on the pill, which tends to make periods lighter, shorter and more regular.) For my part, I’m turning 32 and have been menstruating every month for nearly 20 years. Even without the help of an app, I know when my period will start, which days will be the heaviest be and how long on each day I can get away with leaving a tampon in.
If you’re less experienced (or just more risk-averse), it’s possible you’re using a pad or panty liner as backup, or substituting it for a tampon altogether. As for the discomfort of removing a tampon prematurely, I don’t personally think it hurts; the discomfort (if you can even call it that) is fleeting. But if you disagree, you might not be as much of a tampon person in the first place.
To be clear, I do believe there’s room for advancements in the way women manage their periods. And there are startups doing great work there. Thinx makes absorbent underwear that can take the place of pads and tampons. Lola is a website selling tampons as a subscription, saving women trips to the pharmacy. (You could do the same through a site like Amazon and subscribe to a wider variety of toiletries while you’re at it.)
Then there’s Looncup, the smart menstrual cup announced last year. Like my.Flow, it could be accused of putting tech in a woman’s vagina for tech’s sake. But I would wager that particularly because menstrual cups are a newer invention than tampons, many women (myself included) are more nervous about an overflowing cup than a saturated tampon. For what it’s worth, the Looncup also monitors your health in ways my.Flow can’t, with sensors that can tell if your discharge is an unusual color.
In any case, all of these companies aim to make women’s lives easier, and also help remove the stigma that can make it uncomfortable to talk about menstruation in the first place. My.Flow also tries to normalize periods — in fact, founder Amanda Brief tells me the reason the device is purple is that it’s closer to the color of menstrual blood than the sterile blue liquid used in maxipad commercials. This is fantastic: I am sincerely glad to see startups working on products like this. But my.Flow, in particular, isn’t especially convenient. The prototype sensor I saw was large — about the size of my palm. It’s definitely bigger than other gadgets I might clip onto my person, like an iPod Shuffle or even the original Fitbit.
Are you there, God? It’s me, vintage period tech. [Image: Mum.org]
If clipping the sensor onto your waistband feels too clumsy (or you want to go swimming), you can slip the sensor inside a custom key fob, but then it won’t be actively monitoring your flow; you’ll need to plug it into the tampon string at some point for it to get a read on how you’re doing. In that sense, it’s more cumbersome than the Looncup, which otherwise works like a regular menstrual cup. As high-tech as my.Flow tampons are, I can’t help but think of the sort of sanitary belts women wore 50 years ago to hold their pads in place. There’s no reason for a tampon — or a pad, for that matter — to still require two pieces.
My.Flow tampons are not available yet. The company is seeking seed funding, with hopes of launching a commercially available product sometime next year. If and when that happens, the sensor will cost a one-time price of $49 (about the median cost of a menstrual cup), with the battery rated to last “years,” according to Brief. The tampons themselves will be sold online, as a subscription, and at $13 or so, they’ll be more expensive than competing products (a 50-pack of Tampax costs around $10 on Amazon).
I’m less interested in whether the (largely male) venture-capital community thinks this is worth funding. I mainly care about whether there are women out there who would buy such a thing. And I’m not convinced there are. The My.Flow tampon was born out of a group project in one of founder Amanda Brief’s masters-level engineering classes at UC Berkeley. The assignment was to create a wearable and indeed, the product is a good proof of concept.
But I suspect that the hardware itself will need to become less intrusive if it’s going to succeed. The advent of self-adhesive maxipads in the ’70s led to the extinction of the ol’ sanitary belt, making it (in my humble opinion) one of the greatest inventions of 20th century. Twenty-first-century menstrual gear doesn’t need to be high tech, but it, too, should strive to make those few days of the month easier.
Gesture control is coming to phone-based VR
Right now, gesture control in virtual reality typically requires an expensive PC and specialized sensors. But what if you can only afford (or simply prefer) VR on your phone? Don’t worry, you’re covered. EyeSight Technologies has developed gesture control that uses your phone’s rear camera to allow touch-free input. It should work with any Android or iOS device, and it isn’t picky about headsets. Anything from Gear VR to Google Cardboard should work, although we can’t imagine Cardboard owners having much luck if they don’t have a head strap.
There’s no mention of just when you’ll see this gesture input in practice, although its hardware-independent nature makes it more a matter of integrating with the right apps. Also, more advanced experiences are in the pipeline. EyeSight is bringing its control scheme to phones with built-in 3D sensors, so you might get top-notch VR navigation without ever touching a computer or special controller.
Source: EyeSight, YouTube
Nest’s thermostat now talks to WeMo smart home switches
Want Nest’s smart thermostat to do a lot more than change the temperature when you’re out? Belkin is about to make your day. The gadget maker has introduced Works with Nest support to its WeMo switches and the WeMo Maker, giving you an easy way to toggle devices when you’re home or away. You can switch on the lights when you get home, for example, or turn on a fan to cool down your home while you’re out. The WeMo app has control over the Nest thermostat’s target temperature, too, in case you’d rather not switch apps. All the integration support will be live the moment the latest WeMo app update arrives (no later than 3PM today, the 17th), so you don’t have to wait long to automate more of your household.
Source: Belkin
NVIDIA’s GeForce GTX 1080 is a PC gamer’s dream
It’s never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Hardware is getting both cheaper and more powerful, most big-budget console games are making it to PCs (where they also look better), and the rise of virtual reality offers a tempting upgrade target. NVIDIA, one of the pioneering graphics card designers, is taking full advantage of this revitalized PC gaming market with the GeForce GTX 1080, its latest powerhouse GPU. It’s the first consumer card built on the company’s Pascal architecture, and most intriguingly, NVIDIA claims the $599 video card ($699 for the special “Founder’s Edition”) is faster than the Titan X, which goes for upwards of $1,000. After testing it out over the past week, I can say the 1080 is clearly something special.
Hardware
I had the privilege of testing the Founder’s Edition of the card, which is something unique for NVIDIA. Previously, the company released fairly plain reference editions of its cards, which would inevitably be one-upped by partners with more elaborate cooling designs. But NVIDIA is positioning the GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition as a premium offering. The company claims the materials used to build the card, including the aluminum vapor chamber cooler (a step up from plain old air cooling) and more efficient power components, justify its $100 premium. But that’s a bit hard to stomach when its reference cards had similar cooler designs in the past.
NVIDIA went for a bit more flair this time around. The sharp angles around the 1080’s cooler feel more reminiscent of a Ferrari than the company’s past designed. That’s a fitting way to represent just how fast it is: It’s capable of pumping out nine teraflops of computing power. The 1080 runs at 1,607MHz (up to 1,733MHz in boost mode) and packs in 8GB of Micron’s new DDR5X RAM. In comparison, last year’s 980 Ti card clocked in at 1,000MHz with 6GB of standard DDR5 memory. Unlike CPUs, video cards haven’t seen massive megahertz bumps over the past few years, so the 1080’s numbers are seriously impressive.
You can chalk up much of the GTX 1080’s upgrades to NVIDIA’s new Pascal architecture. It first appeared on the P100 card for data crunchers, but this is the first time we’ve seen what it looks like in consumer hardware. The big benefit with Pascal is its new 16nm FinFET architecture (a type of 3D transistor technology). It allows NVIDIA to reach higher clock speeds, as well as make the card much more power efficient.
In terms of connectivity, the 1080 Founder’s Edition features 3 DisplayPort connections, one HDMI port and a single DVI socket. It would have been nice to see another HDMI port, but I’m sure there are plenty of professionals out there who are still running fancy monitors over DVI.
Setup
Getting the GTX 1080 up and running isn’t any different than you typical video card. It’s a big piece of kit, so you’ll want to make sure there’s enough room in your case for it to fit, but otherwise it snaps right into a PCI-X slot. Unlike the Radeon R9 Fury X, which required me to move some case fans around to make room for its water cooler radiator, the GTX 1080 was a cinch to install. After grabbing some fresh drivers from NVIDIA (and making sure any traces of old drivers were gone for good), I was off to the benchmarking races.
Performance
NVIDIA wasn’t lying: The GTX 1080 is a beast. I only had the R9 Fury X to compare it to on my gaming rig (which consists of a 4GHz Core i7-4790K CPU, 16GB of 2400Mz DDR3 RAM and a 512GB Crucial MX100 SSD on a ASUS Z97-A motherboard), but that’s a powerhouse GPU that easily keeps pace with the GTX 980 and Titan X. And for every major benchmark, the 1080 was significantly faster.
| 3DMark | 3DMark 11 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 | Standard 15,859/ Extreme 9,316/ Ultra 5,021 | X9,423 |
| AMD R9 Fury X | Standard 13,337/ Extreme 7,249/ Ultra 3,899 | X,6457 |
In 3DMark online comparisons with similar systems, the 1080 was typically ranked better than 92 to 95 percent of results. It was only bested by scores from machines running multiple 980 and 980 Ti cards in SLI mode (which would also cost a lot more than the 1080 to put together).
| Witcher 3 | Hitman | Fallout 4 | |
| NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 | 43 | 48 | 54 |
| AMD R9 Fury X | 35 | 38 | 42 |
Average FPS performance in 4K with all graphics set to maximum.
Still, benchmarks are one thing: I was more interested in how the GTX 1080 performs in actual games. And once again, it didn’t disappoint. Compared to the R9 Fury X, it reached around 43 frames per second in the Witcher 3 while running in 4K with all of the settings set to Ultra. That made the game much more playable in such a high resolution — the Fury X averaged around 35 fps, and it would sometimes dip below 30, which makes things unbearably jerky. For Hitman, the 1080 reached a smooth 48 fps on average, whereas the Fury X hovered around 38.
I was particularly impressed with the card’s performance in Fallout 4 (after turning off that game’s frame limiter). It was playable on the Fury X, reaching around 42 fps, but on the GTX 1080 it more often hovered between 50 and 55 fps in most environments. Sometimes it would shoot upwards of 60fps indoors, and in wide open areas it would dip to 40 fps. That wouldn’t make for the smoothest experience, but it’s certainly a lot more playable in 4K.
Thanks to the elaborate heatsink design, the GTX 1080 Founder’s Edition was also cooler than I expected. It idled at a mere 33c, and under full load it reached between 65c and 70c. I also had no trouble overclocking the GPU by 250MHz (reaching around 1.95 GHz under load), and the memory by 200MHz, without any significant temperature changes. NVIDIA reps managed to push the card past 2.1GHz during a stage demo without any additional cooling. If you’re into overclocking, this card was basically made for you.
Last year I wasn’t sold on the viability of 4K gaming — if a $600 card like the R9 Fury X couldn’t always handle it, why even bother? — but the GTX 1080 actually makes it viable with a single card. But while it’s nice to see significant progress in high-res gaming, I still prefer bumping down to a lower resolution like 2,560 x 1,440 to ensure a silky 60fps experience. Most people wouldn’t notice the marginal difference in rendering resolution, but they’d certainly pick out when frames start to stutter in 4K.
Even if you’re not chasing 4K, a powerful card like the 1080 could be used to “supersample” games, which involves rendering them at a higher resolution than what’s being shown on the screen to remove unsightly jagged lines. It’s a technique that’s fallen out of fashion in the PC gaming world, but now that cards have computing power to spare, it could be a smart way to make games look even better. With Hitman, I was able to get around 60 fps when running it at 2,560 x 1,440 with a 1.2X supersample. I couldn’t see a huge difference without enabling the feature, but this is the sort of thing that some PC gamers might eat up.
When it comes to VR, the GTX 1080 doesn’t feel significantly better than the R9 Fury X. That’s partially because the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive run at a relatively low 1,200-by-1,080-pixel resolution for each eye display, which is significantly less sharp than the 1080p HD screens we’ve grown used to. You need to reach at least 90 fps in VR to make games look smooth, but that’s not a tough target for the 1080 to reach at such a low resolution.
NVIDIA has also included some new technology, dubbed Simultaneous Multi-Projection, which makes the 1080 more efficient at displaying VR scenes than other cards. For example, it only needs to render a scene once to show it in VR, whereas other video cards have to do that work twice (once for each eye). The card is also much smarter about processing the pixels you actually need to see in a scene. These new innovations won’t make a big impact on existing VR games, which don’t need to be displayed in high resolutions, but they could be a big deal with next-generation headsets.
The competition
As great as the GTX 1080 is, most gamers will likely opt for its cheaper sibling, the $379 GTX 1070 ($449 for the Founders Edition). It’s only slightly slower — pumping out 6.5 teraflops instead of the 1080’s nine terfalops — but NVIDIA says it’s also “roughly” the same performance as the $1,000 Titan X. That’s an insane cost/performance ratio, and it also leaves room for snapping up another (inevitably cheaper) 1070 in a year or so to bump your speeds up.
As is usually the case, there will also be plenty of competing GTX 1080 designs to choose from in the next few months. Those cards will likely come in closer to the $599 retail price NVIDIA is advertising, rather than the $699 premium for the Founders Edition.
Normally, I’d also urge you to look at previous-generation hardware as new gear comes in. But the 1070 and 1080 are such huge architectural leaps that it doesn’t make sense for most people to consider a 970 or 980. If you’re really trying to save money, a 970 for around $200 could be a decent deal in the future (they’re still going for around $300). But you’d also regret that choice if you want to dabble in VR within the next year.
AMD has also shown off its next-generation graphics technology, Polaris, which promises to be just as power efficient as NVIDIA’s Pascal. We still don’t know what Polaris consumer cards will look like yet, so it might pay off to wait a few months before you decide on a new GPU.
Wrap-up
If you have the cash, and need the most powerful video card on the market, you can’t go wrong with the GTX 1080. It’s built precisely for the things gamers are focused on today: 4K and VR. It’s not just an incremental upgrade for NVIDIA: It’s a dramatic leap forward.
NVIDIA’s Ansel game camera placed me in ‘The Witcher 3’ with VR
Geralt of Rivia, the grizzled silver-haired hero of The Witcher 3, was in front of me, sitting atop his trusty steed. Around me, the remnants of a bloody battle. Trees dotted the clearing I was standing in. I looked to the sun and squinted out of habit. I wasn’t just playing The Witcher 3, I was inside it, thanks to the HTC Vive headset I was wearing and a 360 degree screenshot taken by NVIDIA’s Ansel in-game camera. I was looking at the game like never before, which is notable since I’ve already spent more than 50 hours playing it.
Ansel was a small part of NVIDIA’s massive GTX 1080 launch event, but it has the potential to impact far more people than the company’s shiny new GPUs (in part because it’ll also work on its older cards, too). It’s an in-game camera that developers can easily plug into their titles. Ansel lets you move the camera around independently of the player character, change the color intensity, add a vignette and make other tweaks to get your screenshot looking just right.
On top of taking typical 2D screencaps, you can also capture the entire 360-degree view of the game world, which can be viewed on the Vive as well as upcoming Ansel mobile apps. That’s what let me step into The Witcher 3 — while it’s not exactly VR, it was mindblowing to see a game world I know so well blown up to near realistic proportions.
You can also create “super” resolution photos, which basically turn the screencaps into highly detailed image files. At its media event, NVIDIA used a 2.5 gigapixel Witcher 3 photo taken by Ansel, which clocked in at 1.5GB, to print out a giant 38′ x 8′. Basically, it’s a huge step up from fighting with your position in a game and hoping you hit “Print Screen” at the right moment.
Game photography has been a vibrant scene for several years, but it’s now going mainstream in big ways. Uncharted 4, one of the PlayStation 4’s biggest titles this year, has an in-game “Photo Mode” with a load of customization options. (Check out an in-depth look on that feature by Engadget’s Tim Seppala.) Of course, both the Xbox One and PS4 have had image (and video) capture and sharing capabilities since they launched. But what’s interesting now is that gamers are finally getting the tools to do more than just take quick and dirty screenshots.
At the moment, Ansel’s interface is fairly spartan. It’s mostly relegated to the left side of the screen, which lets you sort through its many editing options. On top of those I mentioned above, you can also roll the camera in either direction and expand the camera’s point of view. In The Witness, Ansel let me move the camera below water (which just revealed graphical glitches), as well as hundreds of feet above the island, which gave me a birds-eye view of all its puzzles. Since having a free-roaming camera could be used to cheat in certain games, developers can also lock it down to the perspective of the player.
I wasn’t able to save any of the images I took with Ansel, but NVIDIA says you’ll be able to save them at up to 4.5 gigapixel resolutions. You can also export your pics as OpenEXR files, which lets you open them in Photoshop and other apps for professional editing.
There’s no set release date for Ansel yet, but NVIDIA says it’s coming soon with support for new titles like The Division, No Man’s Sky, Paragon and Lawbreakers at launch. NVIDIA also stressed that it doesn’t take much code to implement Ansel, so I’d expect plenty of additional games to support it eventually.
I could easily see myself spending hours in Ansel, which is surely what NVIDIA wants. Obviously, it’s a great way for it to convince people to buy its cards over AMDs. But Ansel is also a smart community-oriented move by NVIDIA that shows its appreciation of games as artistic creations.
ICYMI: Pill-sized robot cleans your innards and much more
Today on In Case You Missed It: MIT created an origami robot made of pig intestine that researchers have big plans for. Meanwhile on the Kickstarter circuit, someone made an art display that can autonomously plug itself in when the battery gets low, and created a viewfinder that shows you where people have applied sunscreen, and where they’ve missed.
If you’re in the market for a new bike lock, do consider scaring the hell out of thieves with the Bike Mine. As always, please share any great tech or science videos you find by using the #ICYMI hashtag on Twitter for @mskerryd.
Intel to Supply Up to 50% of Faster LTE Chips for iPhone 7
Intel will supply up to 50 percent of faster LTE chips, manufactured by TSMC and KYEC, for the iPhone 7 series expected to launch in September, according to DigiTimes.
Intel will itself package the modem chips for the upcoming new iPhones, but have contracted Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and tester King Yuan Electronics (KYEC) to manufacture the chips, the sources said.
Apple’s current LTE chip supplier Qualcomm previously hinted that it would be losing LTE modem orders from one of its major customers to one of its leading competitors, which increasingly points towards Apple and Intel respectively. Multiple rumors have hinted at the switch from Qualcomm to Intel since early 2015.
CLSA Securities analyst Srini Pajjuri issued a research note in March that said Intel has secured a “significant portion” of the LTE chip orders, likely in the range of 30 to 40 percent of production. Qualcomm is expected to be tasked with the remaining orders, but it will no longer be the primary supplier.
Intel reportedly has 1,000 or more employees working on preparing its 7360 LTE modem for the next-generation iPhone. Intel’s 7360 LTE modem chip [PDF] features faster theoretical downlink speeds up to 450 Mbps, uplink speeds up to 100 Mbps, and support for LTE category 10 and 29 LTE bands overall.
For customers, the switch to Intel modems means the iPhone 7 could have faster LTE speeds for browsing the web, downloading apps, streaming video, and other data-related tasks. Apple already improved LTE speeds on the iPhone 6s series by adopting LTE-Advanced for downlink speeds up to a theoretical max of 300 Mbps.
Qualcomm has been Apple’s exclusive supplier of LTE modems for over three years, including the MDM9635 chipset in the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus, which provides theoretical downlink speeds up to 300 Mbps and uplink speeds up to 50 Mbps. Real-world download speeds will vary.
Related Roundup: iPhone 7
Tags: Intel, Qualcomm, LTE
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