Google hired Amazon and Apple employees for hardware team in Shanghai

In case you didn’t know, Google’s kinda serious about this whole hardware thing.

Google first started getting serious about being a hardware company in 2016, and it continued this push even more in 2017. Products like the Pixel 2, Pixelbook, and Google Home Mini/Max show that Google really does have a knack for the hardware business, and a new report suggests that the company is getting ready to make an even bigger push in this direction.

According to The Information, Google is building up a new hardware team that’ll be stationed in Shanghai and focused on developing smartphone and Home hardware. Google had around 20 engineers in Shanghai this time last year, but it’s since increased that number to 150.

Employees in Shanghai have been hired from Jide Technology, as well as former workers from Amazon and Apple that have “experience in hardware and supply chain management.”

Google doesn’t plan on selling hardware in China right away.

Although Google’s clearly putting a lot of work into its Shanghai operation, it doesn’t actually have any plans to sell hardware in the country for the time being. Instead, Google will initially be focused on creating deals with other manufacturing companies in the area to help expand its products on a more global scale. Google’s supposedly already “struck some deals” with certain brands, so whatever its plans are, they seem to be headed in the right direction.

In addition to Pixel phones and Google Home, the Shanghai team will also be working on the Pixelbook, Daydream VR headsets, and even wearable tech. Google’s shown that it can make serious progress in the hardware department looking at its releases from 2016 compared to 2017, so it’ll be vastly interesting to see how this new team in Shanghai contributes to this area.

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This $7 screwdriver kit comes with 45 pieces to help you complete electronics repairs at home

Complete your own repairs at home!

It happens to the best of us. We try so hard to care for our devices, but it’s inevitable that something will go wrong and they’ll need to be fixed, but that doesn’t mean you need to take it somewhere and pay a ton to get the job done. Thanks to the internet and YouTube, you can find information on how to repair just about anything these days, so why not try the job at home?

You’ll need some tools to do it, which is where this $6.92 45-piece toolset comes in handy. You’ll need to select the listing sold by Jacyled Direct and use the coupon code VRYCK688 to get it for the discounted price, which saves you $4 on the purchase.

• NEW VERSION JACKYLED 45-IN-1 TOOL KIT: Differences from the old version? More professional and lives longer at the same price! Listen! The updated version has 48 things in total now, including a tweezer, a handle, an extension bar, a suction cup and 44 screwdriver bits. The new material S2 Alloy Steel with 58-60 level hardness is harder and lives longer than the previous CR-V Alloy Steel with only 52-54 level hardness. No doubt, better than other 45 in 1 screwdriver sets in the market!
• MORE PROFESSIONAL & MORE PRECISE: 3 ADDED ITEMS give you a more professional phone repair! Now it comes with 44 pcs multi size bits to fit almost all phones in the market including some screws of iPhone. Also perfect for repairing laptops, computers, cameras, game machines, toys, wristwatches, eyeglasses and other electronics and home appliances.
• EASY TO USE: Rotatable and non-slip tough handle ensures greater comfort and convenience; The total length can be 9.65 inches when you put a bit and the extension bar into the handle; The end of the handle and extension bar have magnetic, effectively absorbing the screws without falling; The tweezer helps you a lot in picking up screwdrivers or screws.
• POCKET-SIZED CARRYING CASE: Light weight and compact design. All the kits are organized in a pocket-sized plastic carrying case, so you can take it anywhere you go.

There is also a 38-piece set for $10.99 that comes with a slightly different selection of tools that are geared more towards replacing displays instead of general device repairs.

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Deal: BlackBerry KEYone Black Edition gets $150 discount in Canada

Available from December 21 through the 24th.

We certainly hope you’ve gotten most of your Christmas shopping done at this point, but if you’re still running around trying to get some last minute gifts, BlackBerry has a pretty solid deal to check out for our Canadia readers.

Starting on December 21 and running until December 24 at 11:59PM EST, Canadian shoppers will be able to purchase the BlackBerry KEYone Black Edition for just $650. That’s a saving of $150 off the retail price of $800, and while that’s still not technically cheap, it is a pretty good deal if you want to get the BlackBerry fan in your life something truly special.

The Black Edition KEYone is mostly the same as its sliver-clad cousin, but it bumps up the RAM from 3GB to 4GB and offers double the storage at 64GB compared to 32GB. If that’s still not enough space for all of your local files, you can always add a microSD card and expand your storage up to 2TB.

BlackBerry will be running this sale at Amazon, Best Buy, Blueshop, Staples, Visions, and Walmart.

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Samsung’s faster, smaller DRAM chips are coming to your next PC

Samsung has built the smallest 8-gigabit DDR4 RAM chip ever using its second-generation 10-nanometer manufacturing tech, it said in a news release. The chips are 15 percent more energy efficient and run 10 percent faster than the last generation, launched just 20 months ago. Productivity for the chips is also up 30 percent, meaning that wafer throughput and yields will let it build more of the chips in the same time. That should make RAM for your computer cheaper and easier to find in the near future.

The chip division didn’t use a new fab process to make the RAM smaller, but rather just added some new tech. Specifically, it’s using more efficient error checking and “a unique air spacer” around bit lines that decreases parasitic capacitance caused by the close proximity of modern chip traces.

Samsung Electronics is a wildly successful division of the company that generates a big chunk of its profits. It builds the processors for companies like Qualcomm, and also manufacturer DRAM, GDDR5 RAM for graphics cards and non-volatile flash storage. It is currently manufacturing 10-nanometer parts, but will soon move to an 8-nanometer process using roughly the same tech. Manufacturing 7-nanometer parts using ultraviolet lithography will be a trickier step, however.

With second-gen 10-nanometer tech apparently nailed down, Samsung is “accelerating its plans for much faster introductions of next-generation DRAM chips and systems, including DDR5, HBM3, LPDDR5 and GDDR6, for use in enterprise servers, mobile devices, supercomputers, HPC systems and high-speed graphics cards,” it says. It will also build more of the first-generation chips to better fill jammed up supply channels — none of which is good news for rivals like Intel and Toshiba.

Source: Samsung

Apple may let the same app work on across iOS and Macs

The app situation between iPhones and Macs is a bit of a mess. While mobile apps are updated regularly, the Mac App Store can often leave something to be desired. Now, Apple is finally tackling this chaos. According to Bloomberg, Apple may give developers the option to create a single app that will work across Macs, iPads and iPhones as early as next year.

According to insider sources, the same app will be able to respond to a mouse, a touch pad or a touch screen, depending on the device it’s being run on. Right now, apps must be designed separately for the iPhone and iPad versus for a computer, which explains why you can occasionally find tumbleweeds rolling across the screen when you pull up the Mac App Store. If developers must choose to devote resources to one or the other, the computer apps often get shortchanged.

The change won’t come immediately, though. It’s planned as part of next fall’s iOS and Mac OS updates, according to Bloomberg’s sources. Because this is all so tentative, it’s also possible that the decision makers at Apple could change their minds and cancel this endeavor entirely. Here’s hoping they don’t, though. This streamlining would likely be a popular move for Mac users.

Source: Bloomberg

The Apple TV 4K has already sold out on Amazon

Well, that happened faster than expected: Amazon has begun selling the Apple TV 4K. And just as quick, both the 32GB and 64GB versions are already out of stock. Hopefully you got one overnight if you had some extra Prime reward points to burn. Two years ago, Amazon stopped selling Apple TVs in addition to Google Chromecasts. Its reasoning? Neither device offered easy access to Amazon Prime Video. For now, that’s only reversed for Apple hardware; early this month the Prime Video Apple TV app finally launched. Chromecasts are expected to reappear in short order, especially since Mountain View has started blocking YouTube on Amazon’s Echo Show and Fire TV.

Via: AppleInsider

Source: Amazon

California is set to hit its green-energy goals a decade early

California is both the nation’s leading renewable-energy proponent and one of the few states to actually put its power where its mouth is. In November, the California Energy Commission released its annual Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) report which found that the state’s three investor-owned utilities — Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric — are on track to collectively offer 50 percent of their electricity from renewable resources by 2020. That’s a full decade faster than anyone had anticipated.

Reports like these have been used to promote clean-energy production throughout the US and the rest of the world since the 1970s. However, it wasn’t until 2002 that California codified the practice. But despite being in effect for only 15 years, California’s mandatory reporting has become a potent tool in fighting greenhouse-gas emissions throughout the state.

Arnold Schwarzenegger and CA Governor Jerry Brown at the One Planet Summit, Dec ’17

“We’ve got to realize that we are here today because of oil — oil and gas, to a lesser extent, coal,” California Gov. Jerry Brown told the press at a 2015 signing ceremony, where he increased the state’s renewable goal to 50 percent. There, he pointed out that California is still the third-most-oil-producing state in the union, behind Texas and North Dakota. “What has been the source of our prosperity has become the source of our ultimate destruction, if we don’t get off of it,” he added.

And get off it we have. As of last year, 32.9 percent of PG&E’s power came from renewable resources, as did 28.2 percent from SoCal Edison and a whopping 43.2 percent from San Diego Gas — granted, SDG&E is by far the state’s smallest investor-owned utility.

And, despite critics’ complaints that moving to renewables would stymie economic growth and increase the electric bills of customers throughout the state, it’s actually been quite the opposite. In the last seven years, California has seen a massive construction boom in the solar- and wind-energy sectors. The price of solar power has dropped to under $30 in 2016 from around $136 per megawatt-hour in 2008, while wind power prices have fallen to $51 in 2015 from $97 per megawatt-hour in 2007, per the report. Over the same period, the state has seen greenhouse-gas emissions from electricity generation decrease nearly every year.

Jerry Brown speaks at the launch event at the US climate action center

And despite the Trump administration’s quixotic quest to make coal happen, California has ratcheted up its own climate-change-response efforts. Of course, California isn’t the only state to do so. Hawaii recently passed legislation dictating that a full 100 percent of its electricity generation come from renewables by 2045, while Vermont is aiming to hit 75 percent by 2032.

Granted, both of those states are home to far fewer people than California and therefore require far less energy, so the Golden State is uniquely situated to lead the renewable energy revolution. “California in a lot of ways is a blessed state,” said Dr. Austin Brown, executive director of the UC Davis Policy Institute for Energy, Environment and Economy. “We have a wealth of both wind and solar, a lot of historically built hydro that we can use.”

That said, California is not — and cannot be — in this effort alone. While the state does often produce an excess of solar power in the mornings and early afternoons, utilities often have to resort to gas-powered plants during the evening hours and during times of peak demand. As such, Brown explained, “hydropower is great because it can be used to fill in the peaks and valleys.”

The Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System

“We have an interconnected grid so I think it would have been foolish to say, ‘It all has to be done in California,’” Brown continued. “One of the benefits of the grid is that we’re able to trade power — bring hydro down from the Northwest, bring wind in from Wyoming. These are all really good things.”

California’s aggressive policies toward renewables also deserve credit. “People want to cast it as a choice between policy or technology as a solution but those should exist hand-in-hand,” Brown said. “We would have never gotten renewable energy prices where they are today without really ambitious public policy.”

Since 2002, both Gov. Brown and his Republican predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, have continually sought to push the clean-energy standards forward. “It shows the importance of bold goals,” Brown declared. “When you put a marker way out there and say, ‘We’re going to go achieve that, we’re going to write this down as a matter of policy and then go do it,’ you can accomplish an enormous amount.” And now that California is on pace to hit 50 percent renewable by 2020, the state could soon set an even loftier goal: 80 percent by 2050, according to Brown.

“When you get it right, it’s this virtuous cycle where policy improves technology and that allows us to go for greater ambition without increasing prices and continuing to reduce unintended consequences,” Brown said.

Of course, setting goals and actually achieving them are two very different things. Indeed, the path to 80 percent renewables will pose its own unique challenges. The effects of diminishing returns will soon come into play, Brown explained. “Once we get to about 50 percent, we’re going to start to run into new challenges — the second 50 percent will be trickier than the first 50 percent.” Should we continually produce renewable energy at times when there is already excess generation, the value of that energy will decrease, Brown notes.

Tesla Powerpack Units at the SoCal Edison Mira Loma Substation

Yes, we could incorporate battery technology such as Tesla’s Power Cells or the 50 MW hybrid peaker plant system that installed this past April, but Brown thinks there might be an easier, less expensive alternative. “Storage is probably not the first option you want to talk about when you discuss grid integration just because batteries are still pretty expensive compared to other technologies,” he said. Instead, Brown suggested methods such as pre-cooling buildings during times of low demand so as to not place additional strain on the grid during peak hours, or increasing grid flexibility — that is, increasing the ability to pass power around without congesting transmission lines.

“When you look at it, storage works, but it’s probably the last thing in the stack that we want to go to,” Brown concluded.

The effects of global warming will pose their own unique set of challenges. With California’s temperate climate, residents don’t typically need to run their A/C or heaters for months on end as they do in other parts of the country, though that could change as the planet continues to warm.

Daytime energy demands will likely increase throughout California and the Southwest due to the higher temperatures, thereby increasing air-conditioning usage, Brown explained. To a lesser degree, the colder winters should similarly increase heating demands. Brown also fears that we’ll see a “significant increase in heat-related injuries and death” as well as other dangerous trends such as the prolonged drought the state recently emerged from and the massive wildfires it currently faces.

Burbank, California, residents fleeing the La Tuna Canyon Fire

Energy production will also feel the impacts of climate change. “Solar is dependent on the amount of cloud cover,” Brown said. “Wind power obviously depends on wind, and we might see shifting wind patterns in a changing climate,” though he’s not entirely certain what those changing patterns will look like. Conventional power plants will also feel the effects. As Brown points out, a number of nuclear- and fossil-fuel plants have been temporarily knocked offline in the past few years because the of the heat that knocks their water-cooling systems offline. “It’s a threat multiplier,” he said. “It takes all the things that are problematic now and makes them much more common.”

And while achieving 100 percent renewable energy production is a noble goal, it may not be the most important one for California to focus on. “I think of 100 percent [renewable production] as a bit of a red herring,” Brown explained. “If you want 100 percent it should be 100 percent zero-carbon electricity. Climate change is the existential threat, and I don’t want to waste time arguing about what’s renewable or not. You have to get the carbon out of the energy system as quickly as possible.”

Images: Getty (All)

Facebook lists all the security emails it sends to fight phishing

Your Facebook account might not have your credit card or bank details, but it could have everything a crook needs to get them. To protect you from phishing schemes designed to steal Facebook log-ins, the platform is arming you with information that can be easily accessed in the settings page. The social network now lists the latest security emails it sends out. Every time you get message in your inbox asking you to change your password or email — and it smells fishy for some reason — you can check the list first and verify that it’s really from the company.

Facebook typically uses addresses ending in “@facebookmail.com” for its security emails, but as you know, phishers can spoof accounts and make their messages look legit. If you miss the flaws and irregularities that usually give phishing schemes away, such as spelling and grammar mistakes, then you really might fall victim to them. Of course, you’d have to make sure you’re visiting the real Facebook website whenever you want to access the list, so you’ll still have to make it a habit to open a fresh tab and type the URL yourself.

Found an email not in the list? Facebook is encouraging you to report it to phish@fb.com.

iPhone X Plus Should Lead Apple to Significantly Increase OLED Display Orders Next Year

Samsung Display will supply Apple with between 180 and 200 million flexible OLED displays for the iPhone in 2018, up from an estimated 50 million this year, according to The Korea Herald’s sister publication The Investor.

While the report focuses on the iPhone X, it’s likely that a portion of the OLED displays will go towards the “iPhone X Plus” rumored to launch alongside the second-generation iPhone X in the second half of 2018.

Like the Galaxy Note 8, the iPhone X Plus is expected to have a 6.4-inch display, but its overall physical size will likely be closer to an iPhone 8 Plus. Meanwhile, the next iPhone X will likely retain its 5.8-inch display.

With both a full year of iPhone X sales and the addition of the iPhone X Plus to the lineup in 2018, Apple will undoubtedly need many more OLED displays, so today’s report about Samsung quadrupling its production next year makes sense. Samsung could reportedly gain an extra $22 billion in revenue from the orders.

The report also claims Samsung has achieved around a 90 percent yield rate, compared to around 60 percent earlier this year, meaning it is getting more efficient at making OLED displays that live up to Apple’s strict quality standards. This could lead to improved shipping estimates for next year’s launch.

The new iPhone X and iPhone X Plus will likely launch around the usual timeframe of September to October, potentially alongside a new 6.1-inch mid-range model with an LCD display that is predicted to start at around $649 to $749.

There’s no word on how much the iPhone X Plus could cost yet, but given the iPhone X starts at $999, the larger version should have a four-digit price tag. Apple charges a $100 premium for other Plus-sized iPhones, so it’s possible the iPhone X Plus could start at around $1,099, but it’s too early to say.

Apple is likely to remain dependent on Samsung for supply of OLED displays next year, but the company is reportedly investing billions into LG building OLED display production lines dedicated to the iPhone by 2019.

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Pokémon Go for iOS Adding Advanced ‘AR+’ Capture Mechanics Thanks to Apple’s ARKit

Niantic and The Pokémon Company today announced that an update coming this week to Pokémon Go on iOS will bring support for Apple’s ARKit, enhancing the augmented reality abilities of the popular mobile game. The company is calling this feature “AR+” and will be available to players running iOS 11 on the iPhone 6s and later devices.

Previously announced by Apple at WWDC, ARKit brings a few new advancements to Pokémon Go’s augmented reality technology, including the ability for the app to fix Pokémon to a specific point in space. This scaling feature allows players to walk up close to a Pokémon and move around them freely, bringing the app “one step closer to truly realizing Pokémon the way they are supposed to be represented in the real world,” according to Niantic.

Another advancement is in the awareness of Pokémon that players are trying to capture, meaning that the creatures might run away if they notice trainers are getting too close. But, if trainers can sneak up on the Pokémon an Expert Handler bonus can be earned upon capture. This mechanic is represented in an “awareness meter” next to each Pokémon and if it fills up the Pokémon will flee, although another opportunity for capture might come if the player taps nearby tall grass.

Both of these new features are combined for the Expert Handler bonus, which rewards players for moving close to a Pokémon in AR+ mode, and capturing it without it fleeing. The bonus will reward players with more XP and Stardust upon capture.

Regarding the ARKit update to Pokémon Go, the company said that “this is our first step toward making AR capabilities in Pokémon GO even more awesome, opening up the framework for greater AR experiences in the future.”

During the WWDC reveal of ARKit in June, Apple’s senior vice president of Software Engineering Craig Federighi presented the Pokémon Go AR+ enhancements now rolling out and stated, “The Pokémon is so real, he’s right there on the ground. As the ball bounces, it actually bounces right there in the real environment. It’s AR like you’ve never seen it before.”

Pokémon Go is available to download for free from the iOS App Store [Direct Link].

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