LG G7 ThinQ: Rumors, Specs, Release Date, and More!

The LG G6 was a solid phone that got overshadowed by the competition. With the G7 ThinQ, LG isn’t going to let that happen again.

When talking about underrated phones from 2017, it’s almost impossible to not mention the LG G6. LG made a huge comeback following the disaster that was the G5, but devices like the Samsung Galaxy S8 simply ate the G6 for breakfast and didn’t leave it with much of a fighting chance to stand out from the crowd.

LG needs a winner this year with the G6’s successor, and this is everything we know so far about its upcoming flagship.

April 28, 2018 — The G7 will have an “unrivaled high-fidelity audio experience”

LG has issued a press release stating that the G7’s speakers will “feature exceptional audio quality” through its new “Boombox” technology that “increases the base sound level by more than 6dB with twice the amount of bass.

Audio engineers at LG came up with a new way to utilize the inner space of the smartphone as a resonance chamber to amplify sound more than ten-fold compared to the typical smartphone. With Boombox Speaker, the LG G7 ThinQ is capable of generating impressive “boombox” sound without the need for external speakers. When placed on a solid surface or box, the LG G7 ThinQ uses its resonance chamber as a woofer to amplify the bass effect even more.

For users who prefer headphones, the LG G7 ThinQ is the first smartphone to offer DTS:X 3D Surround Sound, for up to 7.1 channel performance without the need for expensive, premium headphones. Unlike other stereophonic technologies that only deliver high-end audio with specific music, DTS:X supports any type of content to create a sense of space to make the listening experience even more immersive.

Remaining consistent with LG’s heritage in superb smartphone audio, the LG G7 ThinQ features Hi-Fi Quad DAC that can drive high-impedance, high-end headphones for true audiophile-quality sound. The Hi-Fi Quad DAC packs four digital to analog converters onto a single sound chip, lowering the total harmonic distortion (THD) rate to 0.0002 per cent for highly accurate sound reproduction. The LG G7 ThinQ also supports the Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) audio format, which delivers hi-res sound quality in a small file size.

April 24, 2018 — The G7 will have a Super Bright 6.1-inch display

In its way, LG is the most leak-friendly company in the world, mainly because as its phones meander towards a public announcement, it peppers the media with teases and press releases meant to keep the hoards satisfied.

To that end, the company has announced that the LG G7 ThinQ will have a 6.1-inch IPS LCD display that goes up to 1000 nits, which makes it the brightest panel using that technology we’ve seen to date. Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8 and S9 series can go beyond 1,000 nits, but only when in bright sunlight and can’t be specified by the user.

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LG’s adopting the notch, because why not?

Amidst all the announcements coming out of MWC 2018, LG gave certain attendees an early look at its upcoming flagship phone for 2018. The photos captured of the device were pretty blurry and not all that detailed, but thankfully TechnoBuffalo teamed up with designer Ben Geskin to give us a clear look at what we can expect from LG later this year.

First off, let’s get the elephant out of the room – LG’s next flagship will, unfortunately, have a notch. This is a trend a lot of Android OEMs are rushing to adopt, and it’s one I’m not a fan of seeing. LG will likely use a software trick to hide the notch with a black status bar, but even with that in place, a notch is still a notch.

The phone will have hardly any bezels surrounding said notch (save for a small chin at the bottom), and the back will be made out of glass and feature a fingerprint sensor and dual-camera setup.

While it’s not the worst-looking phone I’ve ever seen, I’m not sure playing copycat is the right move for a company whose mobile division has been losing money quarter after quarter. An original design would have played in LG’s favor considering how many other companies are also trying to mimic the iPhone X, but that doesn’t appear to be what we’re getting.

Mr. Phone also gave us an early glimpse as to what the G7 will look like thanks to a collaboration with @OnLeaks, and as you can see from the video below, it confirms most everything we’re already expecting.

We’ll get an MLCD+ display instead of an OLED one

Most all flagship phones are shipping with AMOLED or OLED displays, but after sub-par reviews of the V30 and Pixel 2 XL’s screens, LG will be changing gears and trying its hand at a new type of panel – MLCD+.

MLCD+ is fairly new in the mobile space, but it sounds promising. Compared to traditional IPS LCD screens, MLCD+ uses 35% less power, uses the RGBW matrix, and has a max brightness of 800-nits.

The V30’s OLED panel wasn’t necessarily bad, but it also paled in comparison to Samsung’s Galaxy S8 and Note 8. A new type of screen could help LG differentiate itself from the rest of the market, but a lot of this will hinge on the company’s execution of it.

The phone should be powered by the Snapdragon 845

As great as the G6 was, one of the main reasons you might have been inclined to choose the Galaxy S8 over it was because of the processor it shipped with. The G6 launched with the Snapdragon 821, and while the 821 was a perfectly fast CPU, the S8 launched just a few weeks later with the much newer 835.

This year, however, we aren’t expecting LG to make the same mistake. A report from The Investor last May said that LG would be partnering with Qualcomm to release the G7 with its Snapdragon 845 processor, and towards the end of December, a list was found showing that the G7 would launch with the 845 in February.

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 is a big improvement compared to the 835, offering speed improvements, better camera performance, faster cellular speed, and a lot more. If LG can get this inside the G7, that’ll put it on a much more level playing field than what we saw with the G6 and S8 last year.

Based on the information we have and historical trends, we think this will be a close match to the G7’s final specifications:

LG G7

• LG G7 ThinQ: Rumors, Specs, Release Date, and More!
• LG G7 will have an extra-tall 6.1-inch display
• Join the LG G7 forums

Update April 23, 2018: Refreshed with all the latest news about the G7 ThinQ!

What is OneDrive?

OneDrive is the name given to Microsoft’s cloud services. The same way Google has Google Drive and Apple has iCloud, Microsoft provides OneDrive for people to store and exchange data online. Microsoft users can access it at any time at the OneDrive website.

As cloud services have grown, OneDrive has adopted more and more functions, so the version you see today is an amalgam of several services—that can get a little confusing for newcomers. To help out, let’s break OneDrive out into two very important parts.

Personal OneDrive: This is the OneDrive that you see when you open up Windows 10 on your computer: You’re set up for it when you log in with your Microsoft Account, and you’ll find the storage available in File Explorer. In Microsoft computers, it’s the default option for saving documents or files, which can help save space on your storage drive. Like many cloud storage services, you get several GB for free, but have to pay to get more storage if necessary. OneDrive also makes it easy to sync and share information between your Windows devices.

OneDrive for Business: OneDrive is the overarching data management system for Office365, the glue that holds all O365 services together. It allows employees to share documents, track projects, automatically input data, collaborate online, secure their data, and a whole lot more. If you’re looking at Office 365 features for your business, the data in those features is almost certainly funneled through OneDrive.

Because OneDrive is involved in so many Microsoft services, it is frequently updated by Microsoft every couple of weeks. Notice that there is a version of OneDrive for Windows and a version for MacOS, and they are updated separately. Now let’s take a closer look at how OneDrive is connected to Microsoft’s ecosystem.

OneDrive to rule them all

Microsoft wants you to use OneDrive to store and sync all your data across devices. That’s why it’s pushing out OneDrive apps to all platforms and giving you 1TB of online storage per machine with an Office 365 subscription. The Office 365 Home subscription provides 1TB of OneDrive storage for up to five machines, which at $100 a year or $10 a month, is an attractive proposition.

Microsoft knows you won’t ever be able to fill that space with documents alone. But you can basically store anything on OneDrive and its seamless integration with Windows 10 and various applications ensures your files are automatically backed up, synced, and easily accessible.

Why would you want to use OneDrive?

Up until now, cloud storage was merely a means to share files with others or transfer them from one device to the other. As storage space becomes more affordable, however, cloud storage is becoming an increasingly attractive backup solution, provided you don’t mind that someone else is managing your data. OneDrive’s major benefit is that it syncs across platforms and integrates with the services and applications you already use, including Windows, Office, Outlook, and more.

While it’s attractive, OneDrive shouldn’t be your only backup solution. For example, what happens if one copy gets corrupted and you lose access to the other, because your drive dies, your OneDrive account gets hacked, or your internet connection is down? To be safe, you should always manage your backups following the so-called “3, 2, 1” backup plan: At least three copies, on two types of media, with one copy offsite. Cloud storage can be your offsite copy, but you still need a local backup.

Using the OneDrive app in Windows 10

Microsoft has also provided a OneDrive app in Windows 10 that provides the same functionality as the web interface. You’ll find that the app provides roughly the same experience as using the web interface, and you can use it to save, delete, manage, and share files. One feature that’s unique to the OneDrive app in Windows 10, however, is its ability to easily save files locally and keep them available when working offline.

To share files with the OneDrive app, just right-click on a file or folder and select “Save” from the context menu. You can invite people via a link or email, and view people that are sharing files and folders.

OneDrive integrates with Cortana and Universal Apps

Cortana, Microsoft’s virtual assistant, is now available in Windows 10. Not only can she answer questions, but when you select “Search my stuff,” she can search your files — including the ones stored on OneDrive and not synced with your device. You can then access those files from the search results. Thankfully, Cortana also responds to both voice control and keyboard inputs entered into the Windows search bar.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

Using the Photos app in Windows 10

Do you have a large photo collection spread across multiple devices? Microsoft came up with a solution for that, too. The new Photos app utilizes OneDrive to aggregate images from all of your devices. It can remove duplicates or similar images from its collection, automatically enhance your photos, and create albums based on place, time, or people.

Mark Coppock/Digital Trends

These on-by-default features can be adjusted or turned off by opening Photos and selecting “Settings” from the application menu.

Once the app has worked its magic, you can easily show your photos and share them with friends from any of your devices. This will work in both Android and iOS, provided you install the OneDrive app and use it to sync your photos.

MoviePass cuts daily movies, repeat viewings from its monthly subscription

As the old saying goes, when something seems to be too good to be true, it probably is. That’s been a suspicion about MoviePass, the subscription service that lets you see a movie every day for a low monthly fee. But new updates and restrictions may signal trouble ahead for the upstart startup.

MoviePass has been around since 2011, but when it dropped its monthly fee to less that $10 a month last August, its membership skyrocketed to more than two million subscribers.

The company loses money on virtually every subscription — a lot of money, as it pays full ticket price to the theaters for nearly each movie. Investors and subscribers alike wondered how long it could continue.

There may be an answer, as a MoviePass subscription now only allows four movies per month with its $10 plan. The company calls it a temporary promotion, but when the Hollywood Reporter asked CEO Mitch Lowe if the daily ticket subscription would ever return, he replied, “I don’t know.” Lowe claimed that 88 percent of subscribers see fewer than two movies per month, so he says this change only affects a small number of people. “We just always try different things,” he said. “Every time we try a new promotion, we never put a deadline on it.”

Another change that has some moviegoers irked is disallowing repeat viewings of “select” movies. According to The Verge, MoviePass says the policy “encourages you to enjoy something different,” but the movies on the no-repeat list aren’t specified. There have also been reports of users being required to upload photos of their ticket stubs, ostensibly to prevent fraud.

The new offer also packages in a three-month subscription to iHeart Radio All Access, which consumers must actively opt out of or it automatically converts to a $10-per-month subscription of its own.

As the New York Times reports, MoviePass executives are saying nothing to see here, move along, even as an auditor’s report voiced “substantial doubt about its ability to continue as a going concern.” The company has been losing $20 million a month since September.

“I’m not worried about the viability of MoviePass at all,” said Ted Farnsworth of Helios and Matheson Analytics, which owns the vast majority of the company. “Our customer service has dramatically improved, we’ve worked out the little bugs with the technology, and we have plenty of money to get through the next year.”

“We love the idea that everybody thinks that we’re going to fail. It’s exactly what people told us at Netflix and Redbox,” said Lowe. “And then suddenly they all turned around and realized we were too big to stop.”

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Huawei may have a backup OS in case it has to drop Android

It’d be hard to blame Huawei executives if they’re feeling very nervous lately. The US has created havoc for ZTE by renewing an export ban over trade violations, potentially depriving it of its Android license and leaving it without a platform. How would Huawei avoid a similar fate? Simple: it would use its own operating system instead. South China Morning Post sources have claimed that Huawei has been developing its own mobile operating system (there are reportedly tablet and PC equivalents) ever since it and ZTE faced an American investigation in 2012. It’s considered an investment for “worst-case scenarios,” the insiders said.

The company hasn’t released this OS because it isn’t up to Android’s level of quality and app support, the sources added.

Huawei hasn’t confirmed or denied the software’s existence, saying only that it “has no plans” to launch an in-house OS in the “foreseeable future” — if there is one, there’s no rush to use it. There was a purported meeting leak in 2012 that referenced a new platform.

It certainly wouldn’t be surprising if Huawei had its own software at the ready. For one, the concept isn’t unheard of: Samsung makes Tizen phones partly as a failsafe, while Apple was developing OS X/macOS on Intel for years in case it needed to switch away from PowerPC (which, of course, it did). And like those companies, it already has its own custom processors courtesy of HiSilicon. While it uses third-party hardware for some devices, it would have an easier time dropping American products than some of its rivals.

That’s not to say that ditching Android would be easy. If it had to drop Android, it would lose ready-made access to Google services outside of China. Even a powerhouse phone like the P20 Pro would lose its allure if you had to either use third-party clients or stop using your Google account. Even in China, where Google services are blocked, vendors who could still use Android might have an advantage just by virtue of the abundance of apps. This secondary OS would mostly help Huawei avoid a nightmare situation where it suddenly lost Android and couldn’t sell any phones until it found new software.

Source: South China Morning Post

NASA and ESA want to team up to bring Martian soil samples back to Earth

ESA

As much as the sophisticated laboratories aboard probes like the Curiosity Rover and the upcoming Insight Mars Lander can tell us, having samples of Martian soil in terrestrial laboratories would open new worlds of exploration for scientists. To that end, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) just revealed a bold plan to retrieve soil samples from the surface of the red planet and transport them back to Earth.

In a “statement of intent” released last week, the two agencies outlined their proposal, which would require multiple missions and some tricky maneuvering in orbit around Mars.

“There is no question that for a planetary scientist, the chance to bring pristine, carefully chosen samples of the Red Planet back to Earth for examination using the best facilities is a mouth-watering prospect,” said David Parker of the ESA. “Reconstructing the history of Mars and answering questions of its past are only two areas of discovery that will be dramatically advanced by such a mission.”

The Mars 2020 rover, which has already begun assembly at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, will land on Mars via a rocket-powered sky crane. It will collect about 30 soil samples in small test-tube-sized containers and place them in a location for later retrieval.

The next mission will utilize a “fetch rover” to collect the samples and then return to its lander, which will launch the small payload into orbit using a Mars Ascent Vehicle. Such a launch has never been done before, and it will require extensive coordination between the agencies to pull it off.

Finally, a third spacecraft launched from Earth will rendezvous with the Mars Ascent Vehicle and retrieve the samples. Upon returning to Earth, a module containing the samples will enter the atmosphere and land somewhere in the U.S.

All the details of the cooperative venture haven’t been finalized, and a more complete proposal will be submitted by the two agencies later this year.

Thomas Zurbuchen of NASA speculated that this mission could finally answer the question about whether there was ever life on Mars. “A sample would provide a critical leap forward in our understanding of Mars’s potential to harbor life,” he said. “I look forward to connecting and collaborating with international and commercial partners on tackling the exciting technological challenges ahead — that would allow us to bring home a sample of Mars.”

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Google co-founder’s letter focuses on the dangers and promises of A.I.

The annual Google founders’ letters provide insight into the minds that lead one of the world’s largest tech firms. Google co-founder and current Alphabet president Sergey Brin wrote this year’s letter. Brin briefly mentioned Etherum and the cryptocurrency boom, but a highlight of the letter was the rise of artificial intelligence, which he called the “most significant development in computing in my lifetime.”

Brin noted that when Google was first founded, A.I. and neural networks were largely viewed as little more than relics in the history of computer science. Today Google and other companies use A.I. for everything from photo analysis to translation services.

“Every month, there are stunning new applications and transformative new techniques,” Brin wrote. “In this sense, we are truly in a technology renaissance.”

The growth of A.I. is not without its problems. Brin mentioned that tech companies have a responsibility to ensure A.I. is used in an ethical manner. He also cautioned readers to be mindful of some of the downsides of advanced A.I. and automation, such as job losses across various industries and the protection of privacy.

Brin’s letter focused heavily on Alphabet’s efforts to ensure that A.I. is used in a manner that is safe and ethical. To this end, Brin highlighted several current safety initiatives that Alphabet is involved in.

“There is serious thought and research going into all of these issues,” the letter reads. “Most notably, safety spans a wide range of concerns from the fears of sci-fi style sentience to the more near-term questions such as validating the performance of self-driving cars.”

An overarching theme from Brin’s letter is responsibility. He acknowledges that Google and other tech companies have a well-earned reputation to take an optimistic — some might argue naive — view regarding the promises of technology. He goes onto admit that technology has created newfound problems for society, but believes that, overall, progress is a force for good.

“While I am optimistic about the potential to bring technology to bear on the greatest problems in the world, we are on a path that we must tread with deep responsibility, care, and humility,” the letter concludes. “That is Alphabet’s goal.”

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Bill Gates and Larry Page pledge $12 million to universal flu vaccine

Two of the biggest names in tech are teaming up to fight for a universal flu vaccine. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and Google co-founder Larry Page have pledged to give $12 million dollars to researchers working to develop a universal vaccine for the flu.

The $12 million in grant money will be split into grants of $2 million for individual research projects. The money would be given out over the course of two years and be used to fund the collection of data in animal subjects. After that, the most promising researchers would be able to apply for additional grants of up to $10 million in order bring the vaccine to human trials.

“We think a universal flu vaccine would not only eliminate the pandemic risk, but would have significant health benefits,” Gates told STAT News.

Gates and Page have said they are interested in funding projects which are “game-changing,” as opposed to incremental improvements on existing treatments. Researchers will have to work fast if they want to take advantage of these grants. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation says that in order to be eligible for the grants, researchers must be ready for human testing by 2021.

Twelve million dollars likely won’t be enough to develop this vaccine, as most estimates say it costs roughly $1 billion to do so. Gates said that these grants are only the beginning, however. Teams with promising results will be eligible for additional funding.

Gates made the announcement at a symposium on epidemics organized by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine. The timing of the event is meant to correspond to the 100-year anniversary of the 1918 Spanish outbreak. It’s estimated that nearly 50 million people died as a result of the disease. Gates has warned that a similar outbreak today could kill as many as 33 million in the first six months, despite advances in medicine.

Gates and Page are optimistic regarding the prospects of a universal flu vaccine, but not everyone in the medical community agrees.  Dr. Anthony Fauci, Director of National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has warned that such a vaccine may be impossible to produce.

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NHTSA proposal would override California’s tougher emissions rules

The Trump administration hasn’t been shy about wanting to roll back emissions and fuel economy guidelines, but there’s been a key obstacle to that: California. It has a waiver permitting it to apply tougher emissions standards, and that (combined with support from 12 other states) effectively dictates the rules for automakers across the US. Officials may soon force California to honor looser federal standards, however. The Wall Street Journal has learned of an NHTSA proposal that would not only freeze increases on fuel emissions standards between 2020 and 2026, but would include “scenarios” that would let it override or even eliminate California’s authority to maintain its own increases.

The WSJ’s sources didn’t say exactly how this override would work, and the proposal isn’t guaranteed to survive. Even if the proposal remains the same, it would still need EPA approval that isn’t expected given a “lack of consensus” in the administration. The NHTSA has declined to comment so far.

If the proposal went forward, though, it would risk triggering a wider legal battle. The administration has already lost a bid to delay fuel economy penalties, and California’s Air Resources Board is considering a lawsuit to counter the White House’s efforts to loosen emissions standards. It’s doubtful the Golden State would let the loss of authority go unchallenged. That, in turn, could lead to a protracted court battle and might even create a split where companies build different versions of cars for different states. Automakers have pushed for a unified fuel standard, but they might get just the opposite.

Source: Wall Street Journal

ESA releases the most detailed star map yet

The European Space Agency has updated Gaia’s 3D star map, making it much richer and more likely to make you feel like a tiny speck of dust in an incredibly vast universe. This updated map includes stellar objects up to 8,000 light-years away, whereas the first one only covered an area within 500 light-years of where we are. It shows the location and brightness of 1.7 billion stars in our galaxy and beyond, over half a billion more than the first set of data the ESA released back in 2016. Even more impressive is that it also includes the distances and motions of a whopping 1.3 billion stars — the previous map only contained those values for 2 million.

The Gaia satellite and its one-billion-pixel camera have been mapping the Milky Way (and more) since 2013, collecting data to reveal new information, such as stars we haven’t seen before. In addition to the location, brightness, distances and motions of over a billion stars, Gaia’s second set of data also includes color measurements of nearly all the star subjects, surface temperatures of about 100 million, the effect of interstellar dust on 87 million, as well as the positions of more than 14,000 known asteroids.

The satellite’s data could keep astronomers busy for years. Scientists are already using it to study the evolution of our galaxy, the gravitational forces at play in space and the distribution of dark matter. “Gaia will greatly advance our understanding of the Universe on all cosmic scales,” one of the project scientists, Timo Prusti, said. “Even in the neighbourhood of the Sun, which is the region we thought we understood best, Gaia is revealing new and exciting features.”

You can watch 960 million of the 1.7 billion stars in motion in the video below, but you can expect to see another one in a few years that looks even denser. Gaia Science Operations Manager Uwe Lammers told Gizmodo that his team is hoping to release a third set of data in 2020.

Source: ESA

LG G7 ThinQ’s speaker is apparently ten times louder than others

Another day, another LG G7 ThinQ teaser. Following the 1,000-nit super bright display, today the Korean giant decided to boast another feature on its upcoming flagship smartphone: the “Boombox Speaker.” As the name implies, we’re told to expect a speaker that “increases the base sound level by more than 6dB with twice the amount of bass.” This apparently translates to more than ten times the loudness than that of a typical smartphone, which is surprising given the usual physical limitations. As a bonus, the bass can be further amplified when you place the device on a solid surface or box.

LG didn’t give away the whole story in its teaser, but in short, the Boombox Speaker relies on a special resonance chamber design within the phone. The attached image even suggests that the speaker is somehow using the device’s whole body, which should provide a lot more resonance space than conventional smartphone speaker modules. We’ll try to find out more about this intriguing design at the launch, and hopefully the audio sounds as good as it claims to be.

There’s also good news on the headphone side. Like recent LG flagship phones, the G7 ThinQ will also be packing a Hi-Fi Quad DAC to please high-end headphone users. What’s new this time is the addition of DTS:X support — apparently the first for smartphones — which brings 3D surround sound effects at up to 7.1 to the user, even when normal headphones are used.

Obviously, we’ll need to see how good the Boombox Speaker and the DTS:X feature are in real life, but at least on paper, the former will likely become a much-welcomed experience — something that LG’s mobile division desperately needs in order to sell more units.