ZTE plans on releasing more foldable phones like the Axon M

Axon M will be a series of foldable phones – not just phones with two screens.

Towards the end of 2017, ZTE made a surprise announcement with the Axon M. The Axon M is the latest phone to tackle the dual-screen smartphone, and it’s the first big attempt we’ve seen since the Kyocera Echo back in 2011. The Axon M is not a perfect phone, but unlike a lot of the competition, it took a risk to try something different.

In an interview with Engadget, ZTE’s Vice President of Marketing, Jeff Yee, confirmed that the Axon M will not be the last of its kind. Yee says that ZTE will release successors to the M, and throughout the interview, Yee reiterates that the Axon M is a foldable phone, not one with two screens.

While the current iteration of the Axon M very clearly has two separate screens, Yee says that ZTE’s end goal is to release a phone with one single display that can fold in and out depending on how much screen real-estate you want to use.

It’s unlikely that the next version of the Axon M will utilize this tech, but even so, it’s clear that this is the direction the mobile industry is very quickly heading. Samsung is reportedly planning to start production of its foldable smartphone by the end of 2018, and ZTE likely won’t be the last company to follow in its footsteps.

Aside from the single foldable screen, what else would you like to see from future Axon M releases?

Samsung said to start producing foldable smartphone in November

Google won the voice assistant popularity contest at CES

CES 2018 kicked off with a major Google presence on the show’s front doorstep. Nathan’s already explained why the company may have decided to appear at the world’s biggest tech show with such strength, but halfway through the show, I get the feeling that the gambit’s paying off. Google Assistant is eroding the lead established by Amazon’s Alexa, arguably the internet company’s biggest voice assistant rival, and it’s doing it with better devices, wider functionality… and free donuts for anyone at CES.

With Google bringing its Assistant to smart displays (not to mention more TVs), it’s obviously chasing Amazon’s own Echo Show assistant in a major way. It’s also done it with arguably better products: Lenovo’s 8- and 10-inch Smart Displays offer better-looking screens and more premium (read: less janky-looking) hardware than own Amazon’s debut smart display.

Adding screens to a voice assistant helps to discriminate between what Alexa and Google Assistant are capable of, and Google really tried to capitalize on this durin booth demos that ran through all the ways it can fold in Gmail, your Calendar and Google Maps into its assistant.

But I (and possibly you, Engadget reader) knew that. Google’s CES 2018 booth isn’t for a guy that’s been working tech shows for over six years: it was to demonstrate exactly what’s possible with voice assistants for people that didn’t realize they probably already had one on their smartphone.

The huge Google stand was in the lot right outside the convention center, sharing space a few hundred yards away from Engadget’s own trailer. This means anyone can get to it, and given how much it stood out from other exhibitors on the lot, it was an obvious draw for the public. Google had giant gumball machines offering free Google swag to all — including Home mini smart speakers — while more people lined up to tour the Google Assistant experience, a room filled with Google-powered gadgets, or just to simply claim a free donut (“20-minute wait”). We like free stuff.

Google Assistant’s arrival on cars is slightly more evolutionary, it’ll fold itself into Android Auto — software that already had voice recognition. This will add smart home controls from the driver seat, as well as access to YouTube and more. It’s a no-brainer, but for Google, it’s an easy way to increase the ubiquity of its Assistant. Of course, Amazon is moving similarly: Toyota is the latest to announce that Alexa support was coming to its new car fleet. The likes of Ford and Hyundai have also stated similar intents. At least with Android Auto, there’s, once again, a display to add visual answers to your verbal information requests.

Nicole Lee, Engadget

Amazon isn’t standing still: Alexa is coming to Windows PCs, which is great news for the retailer, but not for Cortana, Microsoft’s own voice assistant. Across the rest of CES, Google seemed to go toe-to-toe with Amazon’s voice assistant when it came to new smart devices. For every pair of Alexa-compatible smartglasses, there was a smart lock that had its hooks in Google’s option.

White goods maker Whirlpool continues to hedge its bets and offer both voice assistants. At this point, that might have been the wisest choice of all.

Additional photos: Nicole Lee

The Las Vegas strip’s first eSports arena opens in March

Last year, Allied Esports and Esports Arena announced plans to convert a Luxor Hotel and Casino nightclub into the Las Vegas strip’s first dedicated eSports arena. That arena is almost complete and is scheduled to open on March 22nd. To celebrate the opening, Esports Arena Las Vegas will host a multi-day, live-streamed tournament that’s invitation only. “With Las Vegas rapidly becoming a hub for eSports, Esports Arena Las Vegas at Luxor will be the city’s home for competitive gaming and interactive entertainment,” Allied Esports CEO Jud Hannigan said in a statement.

Along with the Las Vegas spot, Esports Arena has also debuted its mobile eSports gaming venue, Esports Arena Drive. It’s a semi that unfolds into a gaming arena, with a stage, social media center and VIP lounge. You can check it out in the tweet below. Next month, Esports Arena Drive will host a multi-day tournament at the Daytona 500.

The #RoadToVegas was a success! The #EsportsArenaDrive truck heads to the #DAYTONA500 with @DISUpdates and @704nascarheat for its next stop! #BigMeta pic.twitter.com/o6fEHAmH8O

— Esports Arena (@EsportsArena) January 11, 2018

The Luxor’s dedicated eSports space will have a competition stage, LED video wall, telescopic seating, daily gaming stations (meaning the space is not just for major events) and advanced streaming and production studios. While it may be the first full-time eSports venue on the strip, it probably won’t be the last. The Millennial Esports arena opened in downtown Las Vegas last year and other Vegas locations have expressed interest in creating eSports spaces, which could signal that this is the city’s next big move. Las Vegas saw a slight revenue loss in 2016 and preliminary numbers suggest that there were fewer visitors to the city last year than the year before. Gambling revenue as percent of total revenue also hit a record low, meaning other sources of revenue like eSports could be a welcome addition.

Source: Allied Esports

Waymo starts testing self-driving minivans in San Francisco

Waymo’s self-driving minivans are now ready for the road. The company has confirmed to TechCrunch that it’s testing its autonomous Chrysler Pacifica vehicles on San Francisco streets, where the “hilly and foggy” environment should give them “even more practice.” Suffice it to say the densely packed city could provide a greater challenge than Chandler, Arizona, whose spacious suburban landscape is well-suited to driverless car experiments.

The testing is a callback of sorts for Waymo — the formerly Google-owned company notes that it conducted some of its first tests in San Francisco back in 2009. Circumstances have changed a lot in the past 9 years, of course. Where self-driving cars had barely gotten started the first time around, they’re now advanced enough that driverless taxi services loom on the horizon. It’s still likely to be a long while before a robotic ride takes you from SoMA to North Beach, but there’s a good chance you won’t have to wait another 9 years for that to happen.

Source: TechCrunch

Visa will make signatures optional for chipped credit cards

It’s been about a month since American Express and Mastercard decided to stop requiring signatures for EMV chip credit cards. Now Visa is joining their ranks, making signatures optional for chipped transactions in North America.

“Visa is committed to delivering secure, fast and convenient payments at the point of sale,” said VIsa’s Dan Sanford in a statement. “Our focus is on continually evolving the market towards dynamic authentication methods such as EMV chip, as well as investing in emerging capabilities that leverage advanced analytics and biometrics. We believe making the signature requirement optional for EMV chip-enabled merchants is the responsible next step to enhance security and convenience at the point of sale.”

Contact and contactless chip-enabled points of sale are taking over, of course, for their enhanced security and convenience for retail transactions. Visa notes that it has deployed more than 460 million EMV chip cards and readers at over 2.5 million locations.

Source: Visa

‘PUBG’ already has over 3 million players on Xbox One

A preview version of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds launched on Xbox One on December 12th and at the end of 2017, it already had over three million players. The game broke records left and right last year, so this may not be too big of a surprise. But it’s notable since PUBG had quite a few issues when it launched on the console last month.

When announcing the milestone, Xbox’s General Manager of Games Marketing Aaron Greenberg pointed out that four updates had already been released since the preview’s launch and he said that updates would continue to roll out regularly.

At the end of December, PUBG beat its previous concurrent player record on Steam, logging a whopping 3,106,358 players at one time. Around 25 million players were playing it on PC overall at the time. In the first two days of being available on Xbox One, PUBG pulled over a million players.

Source: Xbox

Office Depot and OfficeMax Offering $28 Aftermarket iPhone Battery Replacements Until February

Office Depot and OfficeMax today informed us they have lowered their iPhone battery replacement fee to $27.99 at select stores across the United States through February 4, 2018, essentially matching Apple’s discounted $29 price.

The lower price, down from $49.99 regularly, is applicable to the iPhone 5c, iPhone 5s, iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6s, iPhone 6s Plus, iPhone 7, iPhone 7 Plus, and iPhone SE, subject to battery availability and while supplies last.

Office Depot and OfficeMax promise same-day battery replacements. If the order is not completed by the end of regular store hours, the customer receives a repair discount of $25, according to fine print on its website.

One very important caveat is that Office Depot and OfficeMax are not Apple Authorized Service Providers, meaning their replacement batteries are not supplied by Apple, and having an aftermarket battery installed can void your iPhone’s warranty, although iFixit argues that Apple cannot do so under U.S. law.

A spokesperson for Office Depot and OfficeMax informed us that their iPhone batteries are built to Apple’s specifications for each iPhone model and added that all of their batteries carry a one-year warranty against defects.

We still highly recommend only having an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider replace your iPhone’s battery, but Apple is currently running low on some batteries, and Office Depot and OfficeMax may be an option worth considering for customers with an iPhone that is already past its warranty.

Office Depot and OfficeMax offer iPhone battery replacements at hundreds of locations across the United States. Those interested can enter their ZIP code on Office Depot’s website to find a participating location near them.

iFixit has also discounted its iPhone battery replacement kits to $29 or less as a do-it-yourself option, but again, we recommend letting a professional at Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider complete the process.

For customers who want to keep things official, read our guide on how to get your iPhone’s battery replaced with an appointment at an Apple Store or Apple Authorized Service Provider. Apple also offers a mail-in option.

Related Roundups: iPhone 6s, iPhone 7, iPhone SEBuyer’s Guide: iPhone 8 (Buy Now), iPhone 8 (Buy Now), iPhone SE (Don’t Buy)
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The Most Interesting Products We Saw at CES 2018

The 2018 Consumer Electronics Show is wrapping up today, bringing an end to a week’s worth of non-stop announcements about all of the new products we can expect to see over the course of the year.

For our last video, we asked MacRumors videographer Dan to spend some time on the show floor, hunting down the most interesting products he could find. Not everything we’re sharing today is Apple related, but we thought MacRumors readers might want to see some of the zanier things on display at CES.

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Robots were big at CES, some of which were offering an impressive level of detail and intelligence. Jibo, a $900 “social” robot that’s already for sale, was on display, as was the CLOi Robot from LG. LG’s CLOi is designed to control smart home products and , but it had a bit of a rough start this week when it failed to perform at an LG event.

LG’s CLOi
You might have seen Jibo in person already, because the company has been showing it off at mall kiosks and other locations. Jibo has a built-in camera for both facial recognition and capturing “special moments,” plus he can dance, answer questions, play music, and more.

Jibo
Other robots on display were just plain odd. Robotis had a bunch of its programmable $499 Mini Humanoid Robots set in a choreographed dance to South Korean hit song “Gangnam Style.” Robotis also had a pet dog robot on hand, which was able to roll over, wag its tail, and even pretend to go to the bathroom.

Robotis Mini
Some robots were more conceptual than consumer oriented. Omron, for example, was showing off its Forpheus ping pong robot, which can play a mean game of table tennis. In the future, Omron has goals beyond ping pong or Forpheus, but for now, it’s an interesting proof of concept demonstrating what robots are capable of.

Omron’s ping pong robot
Beyond robots, there was some impressive TV tech being demonstrated at CES. LG created an entire tunnel filled with OLED TVs to simulate walking through a forest, while Samsung showed off its 146-inch microLED modular TV, “The Wall.”

The Wall scales out to as large as 146 inches, which is the average size wall a consumer might have in a house. It’s modular, though, so if your wall is smaller, it can be built smaller, too. Samsung hasn’t provided pricing on The Wall, but we imagine it’s going to be a lot more than most people want to spend for a TV set, even one as cool as this.

The Wall from Samsung
Though not quite as visually interesting, the latest Vivo phone was being shown off on the show floor. The Vivo is notable because it’s the first phone that includes an in-display fingerprint sensor, courtesy of Synaptics. Apple was rumored to be working on this kind of technology, but the company ultimately went with Face ID.

Synaptics’ Clear ID in-display fingerprint sensor
Cars and other alternative transportation methods were also a highlight of CES, with companies showing off everything from the luxurious to the futuristic. There were also plenty of electric bikes and scooters, including an FAA-approved collapsible electric scooter from Immotor. It’s sleek, folds down into a tiny package, and offers a 16 mile radius on one charge, but it’s expensive at $1,500.

Immotor Go
Our CES coverage is at an end for 2018, but we’ll be seeing more of many of these products over the course of the year. If you want to catch up on our coverage, make sure to check out our CES 2018 hub, and don’t miss our roundup of some of the best Apple-related accessories we saw at the show.

Tag: CES 2018
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‘Adversarial glasses’ can fool even state-of-the-art facial-recognition tech

You may have heard about so-called “adversarial” objects that are capable of baffling facial recognition systems, either making them fail to recognize an object completely or prompting them to classify it incorrectly — for example, thinking that a rifle is actually a 3D-printed toy turtle. Well, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have just found a practical, scaleable, and somewhat scary application — anti-facial-recognition glasses.

Building on previous work by the same group from 2016, the researchers built five pairs of adversarial glasses, which can be successfully used by 90 percent of the population, making them a nearly “universal” solution. When worn, the glasses render wearers undetectable (or, as the researchers describe it, “facilitate misclassification”) even when viewed by the latest machine intelligence facial recognition tech. And far from looking like the kind of goofy disguises individuals might have worn to avoid being recognized in the past, these eyeglasses also appear completely normal to other people.

The eyeglasses were tested successfully against VGG and OpenFace deep neural network-based systems. Although the instructions for building them have not been made publicly available, the researchers say that the glasses could be 3D-printed by users.

Facial recognition has no problem identifying the Owen Wilson on the left. The one on the right? Not so much.

Whether the technology is good or bad depends largely on how you perceive facial recognition. On the one hand, it’s easy to see how privacy advocates would be excited at the prospect of glasses that can help bypass our surveillance society, in which we’re not only photographed 70 times per day, but can also be readily identified through facial recognition. (There are already examples of similar facial recognition disguises available on the market.)

On the other hand, facial recognition is frequently used to keep citizens safe by identifying potentially dangerous individuals in places like airports. For this reason, the researchers have passed on their findings to the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), and recommended that the TSA consider asking passengers to remove seemingly innocuous items like glasses and jewelry in the future, since these “physically realizable attack artifacts” could be used to beat even state-of-the-art recognition systems.

A paper describing the researchers’ work was recently published online, titled “Adversarial Generative Nets: Neural Network Attacks on State-of-the-Art Face Recognition.”

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Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips now power laptops, multi-lens cameras, more

For years, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips have powered some of the best smartphones on the market, but now they’re increasingly showing up in other products. PJ Jacobowitz, Qualcomm senior marketing manager, stopped by the Digital Trends booth at CES 2018 in Las Vegas to discuss some of the exciting new devices that the Snapdragon chipset is powering.

One of the more interesting products that Jacobowitz showed us was the one he called his personal favorite, the Light L16 camera, which has 16 lenses built in. Using Snapdragon, the 16 lenses all snap pictures at the same time, which are merged into one DSLR-quality image.

Qualcomm refers to this as “computational photography.” Working together, the lenses create a “depth map,” which lets you use depth-of-field effects like blurring the background similar to a DSLR. This also lets you re-focus the image after you’ve taken it, similar to the cameras in some recent smartphones.

“The way to get amazing, awesome image quality from a big image sensor is to break it into pieces,” Jacobowitz told Digital Trends. “So if you break it into pieces, you get smaller image sensors and smaller lenses that you can fit in a compact design.

Jacobowitz also showed us the Lenovo Miix 630, which was announced late last year and is the first Windows 10 laptop to be powered by a Snapdragon chip. Not only is the Miix 630 thin and light, but is also capable of up to 20 hours of video playback on a single charge. Jacobowitz says that Microsoft’s own testing indicates that a person using the laptop for web browsing and document editing could get up to a week on a single charge. Asus and HP also have Snapdragon-powered laptops in the works.

“I shouldn’t even say this, because you know, I shouldn’t tell the competitors this, but that’s how we get the awesome battery life,” Jacobowitz says. “It’s not just a CPU, it’s not just a GPU, it’s not just a DSP, it’s not just an ISP. We have all of these things, and the idea is that if you can spread all of that processing out to the right type of architecture, then you can get the best battery life for that exact process.”

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