Engadget giveaway: Win a Harmony Elite and Amazon Echo courtesy of Logitech!

Logitech’s Harmony series has come a long way and now with the Elite remote control you can do more than ever before. This universal remote not only lets you control all your media devices (from TVs to streaming media players), but it also handles a variety of smart home products. You can use the Harmony Elite to adjust your Nest thermostat or connected lighting systems, all from that well-worn spot on the couch. As if that wasn’t enough, the Elite universal home control also supports Alexa. Now you can even take the remote out of the equation, by simply using your voice along with one of Amazon’s smart speakers. Logitech has provided us with just such a pair — a Logitech Harmony Elite and Amazon Echo — so that one lucky reader can have total home control with minimal effort. You’ll still need to head down to the Rafflecopter widget below for up to three chances at winning, but that counts as exercise, right?

a Rafflecopter giveaway

• Entries are handled through the Rafflecopter widget above. Comments are no longer accepted as valid methods of entry. You may enter without any obligation to social media accounts, though we may offer them as opportunities for extra entries. Your email address is required so we can get in touch with you if you win, but it will not be given to third parties.
• Contest is open to all residents of the 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), 18 or older! Sorry, we don’t make this rule (we hate excluding anyone), so direct your anger at our lawyers and contest laws if you have to be mad.
• Winners will be chosen randomly. One (1) winner will receive one (1) Logitech Harmony Elite remote control and one (1) Amazon Echo smart speaker (total value $550).
• If you are chosen, you will be notified by email. Winners must respond within three days of being contacted. If you do not respond within that period, another winner will be chosen. Make sure that the account you use to enter the contest includes your real name and a contact email. We do not track any of this information for marketing or third-party purposes.
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• The full list of rules, in all its legalese glory, can be found here.
• Entries can be submitted until March 15th at 11:59PM ET. Good luck!

Siempo’s smartphone encourages you not to use it

Do you find having a computer in your pocket that’s connected to the sum total of human knowledge a bit… distracting? The founders of Siempo do, which is why they’ve dreamt up a smartphone that encourages you to live more in the moment. Rather than the usual Android home screen, Siempo only lets you do a handful of things to ensure you don’t spend all day staring at it.

For instance, the launcher will not give you a list of apps, but a series of options that force you to do a task and then put your phone down. The “Intention Field” lets you save notes or create reminders, send texts or create a contact when you meet someone new. “Mindful Morning,” meanwhile, will ask you to block off the phone for a period of time in the AM so you can read, exercise or meditate.

Everything you’d normally expect to see in a smartphone is still there, but buried deep beneath the software to ensure it’s not easily accessible. You’ll still be able to use the phone’s map and camera features, but the web browser and email apps have apparently been “restrained,” although it’s not clear what limits will be imposed.

This dedication to avoiding spending time on your phone is also shown with a very physical mute button on the side of the device. When pressed, your phone will mute all notifications for a pre-determined period of time, although you can set emergency contacts who can break through that wall.

Siempo hasn’t gone into the details about what specs its eponymous device will carry, but it’s fair to say this won’t be a device for stats nerds. The limited listing describes an unlocked GSM device with a 1 GHz quad-core CPU and a 4-inch display covered with Gorilla Glass. Elsewhere you’ll find a “high resolution camera,” 1,600mAh battery and the usual connectivity that you’d expect.

As an outlandish project, it’s no surprise that Siempo is launching on Kickstarter, with pre-order prices starting at $280. Latecomers will have to spend $319 to nab the device, which is expected to begin shipping by December 2017. Although it would seem to make more sense, to us, to just buy an existing low-end smartphone and buy Siempo’s launcher to run on top.

Source: Kickstarter

Sony’s first 4K OLED TV starts at $5,000

Sony’s first consumer OLED TV, the XBR-A1E was easily its best product at CES 2017, but now comes the rub: How much is it? Before I answer that, know that Sony sets tend to be expensive to begin with. And on top of 4K OLED, this one has advanced video processing, all the flavors of HDR (Dolby Vision, HDR10 and HLG), the first-ever “Acoustic Surface” sound system that’s integrated within the panel, an ultra-thin, near bezel-less design, a stand-mounted sub-woofer and Android TV support, including Google Cast and Google Assistant.

With all that in mind, the 55-inch XBR-55A1E and 65-inch XBR-65A1E will cost $5,000 and $6,500 respectively. Those sets are now on pre-order at Amazon, Best Buy and other retailers, and will arrive in stores starting in April. Sony has yet to release a price for the 77-inch model, but brace yourself for a much bigger jump in price over the 65-inch version.

Expensive? Well, it’s more than LG’s mid-range B-, C- and E-series, all of which have improved panels for 2017. However, it’s cheaper than LG’s high-end G- and W-series OLEDs, which start at $7,000 and $8,000 for the 65-inch models, respectively. LG’s W model is thinner (it’s too thin to support itself so you need to wall-mount it) but the XBR-A1E is still pretty slim, and unlike LG’s Crystal Sound, Sony’s Acoustic Surface audio tech is actually available for purchase.

Source: Sony

Teams is Microsoft’s most intriguing productivity app yet

Group collaboration software isn’t anything new, but in recent years we’ve seen an explosion of new solutions aiming to redefine how teams work. There’s Slack, of course, which has spread across startups and big organizations like wildfire. But even before that, companies relied on things like Hipchat, Yammer and plain old IRC. When Microsoft first unveiled its own offering last fall, the not-so-subtly named Teams, it initially seemed like the software giant was just jumping on the latest productivity bandwagon. It also seemed a bit redundant, since Microsoft owns Yammer. But it quickly became clear that Microsoft had some big ideas in store.

Today marks the next major step for Microsoft Teams: It’s opening up to all Office 365 commercial organizations, a figure that includes more than 85 million monthly users. It’s also packing in several new features, like the ability to schedule meetings without leaving the Teams interface. As it evolves, Teams is looking more and more like the ideal productivity solution from Microsoft, wrapping in elements from other Office 365 apps while also delivering entirely new ways to work together.

On the surface, Microsoft Teams looks like a slight twist on the Slack formula: a row of rooms on the left pane, and an fast-scrolling wall of text on the right side. But Teams quickly differentiates itself. Threaded messaging is core to the app’s experience, for example, allowing you to quickly browse and jump into conversations without confusing them with later messages. That’s something Slack has taken three years to release, and its implementation also feels like an afterthought. And on top of the message window is a row of tabs that points to things like shared files, a team wiki and whatever else you’d like.

As for what’s new since we first saw Teams, Microsoft has added features like the ability to continue email conversations by mailing Teams groups, and integrating bots and other app connections. The company says more than 150 software integrations will be headed to teams soon, including Growbot and Trello. So, instead of having a separate app or browser window open to check on your group’s Trello list progress, you can simply make it a tab atop a Teams room’s chat window.

As a fairly dedicated Slack user, I was surprised by just how thoughtfully designed Teams was after using it for a few days. It’s easier to follow threaded conversations, since they actually look like threads instead of weird off-shoot chats. It’s far simpler to start video chats with teammates, and you can even schedule video meetings from within rooms. And given that Teams supports video chats with up to 80 people, it could conceivably end up replacing conference calls for some workers. Even the mere act of creating new channels seems a lot more fluid than Slack, reflecting the fact that working groups tend to evolve quickly over time. A private chat between a few colleagues could end up becoming a channel to house conversations around a new corporate project, for instance.

On the mobile front, the Teams iOS and Android apps are both clean and well designed. Oddly enough, the Android app is the most advanced version, since it supports video and audio calls. That’s something both Windows Phone and iOS will have to wait for.

Microsoft is quick to admit that Teams won’t be the perfect solution for every time. But the company is positioning Office 365 as a bouquet of options for any group hoping to work together. If you don’t need the rich collaboration features of Teams, you can just rely on Yammer, Word, Excel and other traditional Office apps. Given that Teams won’t cost Office 365 customers anything extra, though, it has a good chance of seeing some quick pickup. One of Slack’s biggest criticisms is that it’s expensive, so having an app built into a product suite you might already own seems instantly more compelling.

Spotify integrates itself into Waze (and vice-versa)

Drivers use their smartphone for both navigation and music, so why not put the two together? Waze and Spotify have announced that they’ve done just that: You can now navigate with Waze within Spotify and access Spotify playlists from Waze. After you set up a playlist, it’ll automatically play when you start your journey, while letting you “easily” change songs. At the same time, you can browse playlists (and switch from one app to the other) when your vehicle is at a full stop.

The partnership is somewhat surprising, as Waze is owned by Google, which has its own Play music-streaming service that competes with Spotify. However, Spotify’s 50 million-strong subscriber base dwarfs Google Play (and every other music service), so it could be a way for Google to prod all those users into trying the Waze platform.

That would have a couple of benefits for Google: It would improve Waze’s crowd-sourced traffic accuracy, and possibly drive Spotify subscriber’s to Waze’s new ride-sharing platform. That service has a strong need for more users, especially since Google is planning to expand it to other cities beyond the Bay Area. For Spotify, which has been pursuing off-beat partnerships (like one with the New York Times), it could further bolster its user ranks.

Whatever the reason, the feature should be handy, especially for Spotify subscribers who already using Waze. The feature is rolling out to Android users around the world (not iOS for now) over the next few weeks, so you may have to be patient until it comes to your region.

Sex toy maker agrees to stop collecting intimate data

It can be quite costly to violate the privacy of sex toy users, apparently. Standard Innovation has settled a lawsuit accusing the company of collecting “highly intimate and sensitive data” from its We-Vibe vibrators without their owners’ knowledge and sending it to the company’s servers in Canada. The agreement will create a $3.75 million US ($5.06 million Canadian) compensation fund that will pay up to $10,000 US to buyers who used the companion We-Connect app, and $199 US to those who just used the vibrator. More importantly, the company has agreed to both stop collecting sensitive info and to purge the info it has collected until now.

Standard Innovation didn’t have to admit wrongdoing as part of the deal, but it stresses that it has rethought both its privacy policy (which is now more explicit about data collection) and its app requirements. You no longer have to register your device or provide identifying info when using the mobile app, and you can opt out of sharing any anonymous data. Opt-in policies are usually better for privacy, but the moves should still help assuage customers worried that someone might be studying their most sensitive activities.

The lawsuit underscores the mounting concerns over connected devices and the information they share. We-Vibe and We-Connect were only supposed to be sending data for the sake of product improvement and diagnostics, but users were neither told about that nor reassured that their info wasn’t going to be sold to advertisers or otherwise misused. Companies increasingly have little choice but to treat privacy as a significant concern, if not a primary concern — if they don’t, the consequences can be severe.

Via: The Verge

Source: National Post

‘Trinity’ will be the first interactive VR sci-fi TV show

Virtual reality production studio UNLTD today revealed that it is working on the world’s first interactive sci-fi TV show. Speaking at SXSW, the company announced the premise for Trinity- a show set in a future where humanity has long become extinct. With only a few surviving androids left on Earth, the story follows the robotic resistance as they take a stand against the all-powerful singularity threatening to destroy them.

After speaking about the challenges of filming in VR, producer John Hamilton promises that Trinity will be an experience which allows ‘viewers to move around an episode in a way that hasn’t been seen before’. The live-action series will be split into five fifteen minute episodes and is to be released on all available virtual reality platforms.

In order to create an experience that it deemed immersive enough, UNLTD opted to develop its own proprietary camera to film Trinity. Combining a mix of high-end visual effects, interactive engines and 360 scripting, we can get a brief glimpse into the aesthetic of the ambitious sci-fi with the 2D teaser trailer below.

With most VR content dividing userbases thanks to money-hatting from hardware manufacturers, it’s nice to see projects becoming more platform agnostic. Behind the project is director Patrick Boivin, a pioneer of stop-motion video. A full release date has yet to be confirmed, but a pilot will be given to ‘select partners’ this fall.

‘Sideways Dictionary’ simplifies tech jargon for the masses

If you ever get confused about tech jargon (or want to clear up said confusion), a new tool from Google’s Jigsaw incubator and the Washington Post may help. The “Sideways Dictionary” uses analogies and metaphors to help regular, non-techy people understand terms like “zero-day,” “metadata,” “net neutrality” and other jargon. Users will be able to access analogies online like a regular dictionary or find them in the Post, where they’ll accompany articles that contain “technobabble.”

Jigsaw marketing head Alfred Malmros says the idea is to create a shared vocabulary around tech. “The innovation emerging from the technology industry is staggering, but too often we fall back on jargon to explain new concepts,” he said in a statement.

To explain the term “DDoS,” for instance, he uses a child’s birthday party. “If you think about it a bit sideways, it’s like hosting a birthday party for your ten-year-old niece where you’ve invited 20 of her closest friends to attend — only 40,000 kids show up,” writes Malmros. Another example, shown in the video below, is comparing encrypted versus plain text communication to sending a sealed letter versus a postcard.

Jigsaw, the Washington Post and the site’s first power-user, Nick Asbury, have already come up with definitions for about 75 terms. However, they also want users to come up with analogies for terms, “the quirkier and more personal, the better.”

All you need to do is log onto the site with Google or Facebook, type in a term and offer your own definition (I submitted one for “crowdsourcing.”) The team also sought definitions from luminaries like Google’s Eric Schmidt and internet co-inventor Vint Cerf, who helped coin some of the jargon in the first place.

Editors will moderate every analogy in an effort to find the most “relevant” definitions and eliminate any bias or inaccuracies. Readers will then vote on the most helpful ones, and those will appear in the Washington Post when you hover over a word. However, you’ll also be able to see other definitions if that one doesn’t work for you. “An analogy cannot be 100 percent correct, nor can it be 100 percent incorrect,” says Malmros.

Anything that helps “normals” understand the tech world is a good thing, but the timing of this is particularly good. It’s never been more important for the voting public to understand things like net neutrality, two-factor authentication, phishing and machine learning. With hundreds of “fake news” stories circulating, it also helps to have a well-informed public, particularly for the kinds of complex issues that the Washington Post, Engadget and other sites are reporting on.

Source: Sideways Dictionary

The history and future of the 3DMark, the world’s most popular gaming benchmark

If you have ever cared about how powerful your PC really is, then you’ve almost certainly used a piece of Futuremark software.

But you probably don’t know the story of where that company came from.

PCMark, Sysmark, VRMark and most famously, 3DMark, are just a taste of some of the benchmarks that have come out of a company that has been on the cutting edge of the underlying technology behind the latest games, for the best part of 20 years. Today, just as when gamers were asking each other “can it run Crysis?” overclockers and enthusiasts continue to push systems to their limit in the hope of earning the bragging rights of the highest 3Dmark scores in the world.

But what makes a benchmark? And what is Futuremark’s plans for the future?

Fortunately, there is one man we can turn to for answers to these questions — Futuremark’s commercial director Jani Joki, who has been with the company from its very earliest days.

Early days

Futuremark is an offshoot from Remedy Entertainment, which is best known for the Max Payne games. Back in the late ’90s it had created its first game, Death Rally, and was working on its second, which would ultimately become the pioneer of bullet-time, Max Payne.

“This was the age when 3D acceleration was first coming into being,” said Joki. “Remedy was contacted by a magazine publisher, VNU Publications. Together they had the idea of creating a classical demo scene made for 3D accelerators, that would also measure at the same time.”

Death Valley

Max Payne

Max Payne 2: Fall of Max Payne

Remedy’s programmers were capable of building some of the best graphical showcases in the world. Looking to market that skill, it agreed to team up with VNU Publications to create what would become the first benchmark aimed at gamers and 3D acceleration. The magazine would publish the branded benchmark as its own, as a tool for readers and to show “something cool that they did,” as Joki puts it.

“It was produced as a side project alongside the games Remedy was working on and debuted at Assembly, a large demoscene event,” he said. “It caught on, because it had a basic measuring system to it. It was largely supposed to look cool, but the concept that this new 3D acceleration should be measured, really caught on.”

More: Vulkan, VR and DirectX 12 all getting new additions in Futuremark’s benchmarks

The late ’90s was an interesting time for graphical hardware. Today’s gamers have no choice but to debate the merits of Nvidia or AMD’s latest graphics cards, but back then, gamers had many companies to choose from. Yet there was little knowledge among consumers, or even hardware and software developers, about which 3D accelerators were any good, or what techniques worked best.

Many companies claimed to have the best solution. Futuremark’s first benchmark provided a chance to prove it.

Building a benchmark

Futuremark’s founding came about at an important time in gaming, as many exciting new technological developments emerging.

“DirectX 7 was a huge new thing,” said Joki, “It was immensely popular, and T&L was standardized then. Almost everyone was using it.”

Games look better because of the graphical artists that work on them.

T&L, or transform, clipping and lighting, is a combination of rendering two-dimensional views of a 3D scene, only drawing parts of a scene that will be present in the picture when rendering is complete, and altering the color of various surfaces depending on the way the scene is lit.

Until supporting APIs and hardware were engineered, T&L had been handled exclusively by software, and processed by the CPU. It was hardware support for technologies like this that gave people a real reason to upgrade to powerful, dedicated graphics cards and in turn, gave them a reason to run testing software like 3DMark 2000. But just as those technologies drive consumers, they also gave Futuremark the spark to create a new benchmark.

“It can be a new generation of DirectX, a new generation of Windows or hardware or a combination, like DirectX 12 and Windows 10. ” said Joki. “We don’t just create benchmarks for the hell of it, there has to be some kind of demand.”

Futuremark/Twitter

That’s not to say that Futuremark is entirely reactive. It is aware of what’s coming one or two years down the pipeline, so it can prepare its benchmarks accordingly.

Part of that is the natural progression of hardware and software, with Joki claiming that Futuremark can make educated guesses about the long-term future, but it is also aware of some specific technologies that are coming in the future due to close ties with hardware and software developers.

“When we launch a new benchmark, it’s imperative that it’s valid for what’s already been launched in the past six to 12 months, and should be valid for what’s coming in the next one to two years,” he explained.

Falling behind the artistic curve

Futuremark’s focus on underlying technologies is an important aspect of what makes its software so useful. Because its tests are developed in-house, it’s engine agnostic, which means it’s testing the underlying tools used by everything, from the latest CryEngine to recent Unity releases, on hardware from various manufacturers.

“The neutrality we have held is always absolute,” laughed Joki. “We joke within Futuremark that if any one hardware vendor is too happy with a benchmark we’re developing, we need to take another look at it.”

That’s important because, if it were to build its test in any one engine already available, there would be technologies utilized in different ways by others, which it wouldn’t be able to cater to as well. It would also make it easy for hardware developers to ‘cheat’ the system, but optimizing for whatever engine is most common.

“We joke within Futuremark that if any one hardware vendor is too happy with a benchmark […], we need to take another look at it.”

But that’s also why software from 3DMark doesn’t look as good as some of the prettiest games. While Futuremark was born in a time where programmers held the key to divine artistry, today it’s much more to do with the artists themselves.

“When 3DMark 2001 came out, we could pretty easily say that we had graphical superiority over most games. The graphics we could create were more interesting and more realistic looking that just about anything that was out at that time,” said Joki “While we can still do that on a technical level today, games now look better because of the graphical artists that work on them. We still employ five great graphical artists, but we can’t compete with companies that hire hundreds to work on their game,” he said.

That’s something that Futuremark has come to terms with over the past decade, and Joki believes it’s a little more obvious in recent ones. Its last benchmarks might not be quite as pleasing to the eye when compared to contemporary games, but they still tax systems like never before. And that, ultimately, is what matters most.

Sure, but can it run Crysis?

Even if today’s 3Dmark software doesn’t look as aesthetically impressive as some of the AAA titles out there, this isn’t the first time developers have challenged Futuremark’s software beauty, nor its ability to test the viability of hardware. At the turn of the century, as 3Dmark and Futuremark’s popularity increased, game developers caught on that offering their game as a testing suite provided more content for gamers, and in the case of reviewers regularly using them for testing purposes, free publicity.

Many games over the years have been used for this purpose, but one game still stands out as a paragon of not only beauty, but its ability to crush hardware hopes and dreams. Crysis.

“Can it run Crysis?” is an old meme at this point, but one that persists in comment sections to this day. And to Joki, it’s still an important question. Not because of Crysis itself, but because in his mind, if you are buying a PC to play a specific game, no test can better tell you how that game will run than a test baked into the game itself.

“Using Crysis to predict how well your PC might run Civilization IV would not have been that easy.”

“What we at Futuremark try to do, is create something that, should you buy a bunch of games and measure all of them and then aggregate all of them into one number — that’s roughly what 3Dmark is designed to do,” Joki said.

But did Futuremark think Crysis was a good way to measure PC performance when it was released?

“In some ways yes,” said Joki, tactfully. “It had a lot of cool stuff in it, so I have nothing against it, though it did use some effects perhaps a little excessively. Because of that, it was a pretty good test for certain aspects of graphics hardware, but the scaling between different graphics components was not necessarily accurate. Using Crysis to predict how well your PC might run Civilization IV would not have been that easy.”

Changing of the guard

With all its programming skill and artistic talent, you might ask why Futuremark hasn’t made games of its own. If you know a little about its history already, though, you’ll know it has. It launched the Futuremark Games Studio in 2008, and released its first game, Shattered Horizons in 2009.

“This was something a lot of people requested from us,” explained Joki. “We had the resources, the manpower, and the interest, and we decided to try and see what would actually happen.”

While Shattered Horizons saw moderate success, it wasn’t the financial hit that Futuremark’s owners were looking for. After five years, the gaming division was sold off to Rovio, the developer of Angry Birds. That profit driven thinking is why today Futuremark is owned by Underwriters Laboratories, an American safety consultation and testing company. You might be familiar with its logo, which can be found on variety of equipment, including most laptop and smartphone power chargers.

Futuremark has always been owned by venture capitalists, who invested in its earliest days, back in 1999. In 2014, with eyes on a different horizon, those investors sold Futuremark off to the testing firm, which Joki sees as a perfect fit.

“Put simply, UL is a company which does testing, and we’re a company that makes testing software,” said Joki. Including benchmarking in UL’s testing system makes sense for everyone and that gelled from our first meeting together.”

A surprising benefit of this move is that it lends more credibility to Futuremark’s stance as a disinterested third party in graphical hardware market. UL is legally bound to be impartial, so Futuremark is now also bound by such constraints. Remember that the next time you read someone complaining that its latest benchmark unfairly favors one graphics card manufacturer over another.

Is there an event horizon for graphics?

Futuremark’s extensive work in standardization of 3D benchmarking has an end goal beyond the creation of an accurate benchmark. It’s also part of the push for faster, better hardware. Games are constantly pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in real-time visual rendering. Photorealism has been touted for years as the point of no return, where we stop being able to distinguish between rendered graphics and reality. But does that mean 3DMark will eventually engineer itself out of work?

That’s not something Joki’s too worried about in the near future. It’s not a problem you can solve just by throwing more hardware at it, he says. You need the software development right alongside the hardware to be able to achieve true-to-life visuals. And while we’re closer to photo-realism than ever before, each success makes the next step harder.

More: Wondering if your PC can handle VR? Basemark’s VRScore will let you know

Still, even if we do reach a point where we can make a scene look close to reality, there is still much more to be done, and much more to be tested.

“I just don’t see a point where we can say that there is sufficient performance,” Joki said. “Let’s say you can render a house at a photo-realistic level. Add 100 more houses and suddenly the scene is vastly more complex.”

“Plus, I’m pretty sure that the need for measuring how fast things are in different scenarios will still be needed […] There are situations even today where people could say that it doesn’t matter what hardware you have. If you only use Gmail, then any computer will do, but even the people buying pre-built systems for that still like to see how much faster it is than their old one. People who buy cars still like to know what the 0-60 speed is, even when buying a family sedan.”

Getting down to the mantle

With Futuremark not yet foreseeing its own demise, it has a lot of work still to do, and much of that will be taking advantage of new APIs. With DirectX12 gathering support among developers, and similar APIs like Vulkan helping draw more power from existing hardware, that’s going to be an immediate focus of the benchmark developer.

Joki tells us that there are new DirectX12 tests coming to VRmark, as well as an entirely new version which will be shown off at the Games Developer Conference at the end of this month and will launch shortly after. There’s also “some sort of 3Dmark launch” planned before the end of the year and Futuremark is already working on the next full version of it.

Whatever’s released, it’s certain that Futuremark will remain an essential part of the 3D graphics community. Its long history has rightly given it great influence, and we’ll need the company to use that in building next-generation benchmarks for tomorrow’s gamers.

Oppo turns the dual-lens cam trend around, puts them on the front of its new phone

Why it matters to you

The trend for dual-lens cameras on the back of our phones is slowly changing to include them on the front, and Oppo is the latest to bring the same tech to its selfie cameras on the F3 Plus

Oppo, a smartphone company known for its strong camera technology, has announced the F3 Plus, a new phone with a very special selfie cam. While dual-lens cameras are becoming commonplace on the back of our phones, there aren’t very many on the front; but that’s the F3 Plus’s party piece.

The main lens has 16 megapixels, and is joined buy a second 8 megapixel sub-camera lens, both set above the F3 Plus’s screen. However, Oppo hasn’t revealed what the two lenses will do. It’s natural to assume they will produce a bokeh effect on portrait shots, but a teaser image suggests one will be a wide-angle lens for group selfies. Whether this will be the only function remains to be seen.

More: Oppo’s clever 5X camera tech uses a prism for clearer pictures

Oppo is also staying quiet about the rest of the F3 Plus’s specification. Rumors spread recently about the phone, indicating it would have a screen larger than the F1 Plus’s 5.5-inches, potentially stretching up to 6-inches. A Snapdragon 653 processor with 4GB of RAM is possible, along with a 4,000mAh battery and 64GB of internal memory. The rear camera is expected to have 16 megapixels and a single lens.

The F3 Plus is likely to be joined by a smaller F3 smartphone, but Oppo hasn’t shared a release date or specifications for the device yet. It’s possible the phone will retain the dual-lens selfie cam from the F3 Plus. Unfortunately, it’s rumored the F3 series phones will run Android 6.0 Marshmallow, rather than the latest 7.0 Nougat version, and have Oppo’s ColorOS user interface over the top.

Oppo will release the F3 Plus on March 23, when it’ll be sold in India, Indonesia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Vietnam. A wider international launch hasn’t been confirmed, but Oppo has sold its devices in Europe and the U.S. before.