Huawei gearing up to launch EMUI 5.0 this Fall with a major redesign

Huawei’s EMUI received a significant boost with version 4.1, which made its debut on the Huawei P9. It looks like the vendor is working to bring the UI closer to stock Android, with version 5.0 said to offer an interface that resembles vanilla Android while offering a lot of customizability.

That’s according to GSMInfo, which states that the changes are geared twoard making EMUI more palatable to a Western audience. Given that Huawei has a strong presence in Europe and is gaining a foothold in the U.S. market, dialing the interface back will go a long way toward making its devices more appealing. Huawei makes gorgeous phones, but the software has always proved to be a sore point.

Huawei is said to debut EMUI 5.0 sometime in the third quarter, which puts the launch during the IFA window, signaling the unveil of a new Mate handset as well.

In other news, Huawei is also said to be mulling a “contingency measure” in which the vendor is building its own mobile operating system as an alternative to Android. Citing “three people briefed about the project,” The Information mentions that the homegrown mobile OS is Huawei’s way of ensuring that it has a foothold in the mobile space if Google were to scale back support for third-party vendors, or start restricting what OEMs can do on the platform.

There’s no information about the Chinese vendor’s own mobile OS at this point, but if Huawei is making strides in this direction, we should be hearing more later this year.

Computer simulations point to the source of gravitational waves

Since the first gravitational waves were successfully detected last September by the earthbound Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO), scientists have wondered what made them. Today, researchers from the University of Warsaw published a theory suggesting that they were likely created by the collision of two black holes, which had been stars that formed 12 billion years ago.
They arrived at that cause and date by modeling the birth of the universe. The researchers plugged stars and data into the computer simulation Synthetic Universe and ran it until they encountered an event that would possibly have emanated the actual gravitational waves. In this case, the culprit was likely a recent merger of two black holes made soon after the dawn of the universe.

“We play God,” lead study author Chris Belczynski, an astrophysicist at Warsaw University, told The Verge. “We have a model of the entire Universe in our computer. We populate the computer with stars from the beginning, from the Big Bang, and you let them go ahead, evolve, produce black holes, etc.”

Since Synthetic Universe’s simulation also includes a mock-LIGO to chronologically sync when we detected the waves, the model is also predictive, the study argues. If correct, we should see LIGO pick up to 60 detections when it starts “listening” for the waves again in fall. At its peak sensitivity, it could hear up to 1,000 detections annually.

Belczynski’s speculation specifies the size of black hole mergers that the LIGO should be able to detect from gravitational waves, a combined mass between 20 and 80 times the mass of our sun. That large size indicates that they’re likely from just after the Big Bang, when stars had lower metal content and formed proportionately larger black holes.

Belczynski’s model strongly suggests that the ones that collided to make these gravitational waves were stars that formed 12 billion years ago, became black holes 5 million years later, and then merged 10.3 billion years after that. 1.2 billion years later LIGO detected those reverberations in space-time. As more data comes in to LIGO and other detectors from these gravitational waves, the more Belczynski can refine his Synthetic Universe model and theorize the life cycles of stars.

Via: The Verge

Source: Nature

Dropbox now uses your iPhone’s camera for scanning documents

Dropbox just got quite an impressive update, all with the purpose of improving productivity.

The iOS app now comes with a built-in document scanner that uses an iPhone or iPad’s camera to snap photos of whatever you want – whether that be whiteboards, notes, sketches, receipts, papers, and more. It then converts them into a document that can be stored in Dropbox. It works like any ole scanning app, automatically detecting the outline of your item and offering up editing tools for straightening.

There’s also options to adjusting contrast, add pages, and convert to black and white. Dropbox for Business will get optical character recognition too, meaning they can convert their scans into searchable text. Another new feature in the app includes improved Microsoft Office integration. You can now create a Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, or Excel file by clicking a new button (here’s a FAQ page with more details).

In fact, Dropbox has published a whole blog post to discuss these new features as well as other new tweaks. Camera uploads are changing, for instance. Dropbox Basic will need to install the Dropbox desktop app in order to use the feature and for management purposes. That app is available from the Dropbox website at no cost, while Dropbox for iOS is also free and can be downloaded from the App Store.

Watch Dropbox’s promo video below for more details. The company said it’s “still working on a timeline” for when all these features will be available on Android. So, stay tuned.

Yuneec’s 3D-sensing drone is available for pre-order

Have you been curious to see how a drone fares when it has Intel’s depth-aware RealSense tech onboard? You now have a chance to find out first-hand. Yuneec has started taking pre-orders for the Typhoon H, its first drone with RealSense built-in. Plunk down $1,899 ($100 more than mentioned in January) and you’ll get a hexacopter that uses Intel’s camera system to map its environment and avoid obstacles while it records your adventures. You’ll also get 4K video, 12-megapixel still shots and a 7-inch Android-based controller. It’s a lot to pay, and you’ll have to endure a 4-week wait if you’re in the first wave, but look at it this way: the money you spend now might save you from a nasty tree collision in the future.

Source: Yuneec

Apple Confirms Unencrypted Kernel in iOS 10 Beta is Intentional

Yesterday it was discovered that iOS 10 does not feature an encrypted kernel, allowing users and researchers access to the core of the operating system and its inner workings. It was unclear at the time whether the lack of encryption was an accident or intentional, but today Apple confirmed to TechCrunch that the company did not encrypt the kernel for a reason.

“The kernel cache doesn’t contain any user info, and by unencrypting it we’re able to optimize the operating system’s performance without compromising security,” an Apple spokesperson told TechCrunch.

The kernel, which dictates how software can use hardware and keeps the device secure, is unencrypted so that developers and researchers can “poke around” and find potential security flaws. Because the kernel is easier to access and flaws may be easier to find, Apple can more easily and more quickly patch potential issues.

The move is a shift for Apple, who had encrypted the kernel in past versions of iOS, leaving developers and researchers out of the loop on the inner workings of the operating system. As noted by security expert Jonathan Zdziarski, it’s likely that Apple has made this shift to prevent groups from “hoarding” vulnerabilities in Apple’s software, like the vulnerability used by the FBI to break into the iPhone 5c of the San Bernardino shooter.

Related Roundup: iOS 10
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Protect your smartphone data with G Cloud Unlimited Backup – now over 90 per cent off

The cold panic of losing your phone is an all-too-familiar feeling, with so much of our data, contacts, memories and more packed into our devices. Worry no more with G Cloud Unlimited Backup, which allows you to safeguard your important data against accidents and misfortune.

With G Cloud, you can conveniently back up any photos, videos, contacts, calendars and more on your Android – as well as any iPhone or iPad devices. For a limited time, a 5-year subscription is available at 93 per cent off from Pocket-lint Deals.

G Cloud is simple to use, offering a one-tap restore feature alongside an intuitive timeline interface allowing you to easily organize your personal media. Utilizing highly secure, military-grade 256-AES encryption, your data and files are stored on the secure and reliable Amazon AWS Cloud, allowing for ultimate flexibility in both sharing and storage.

If you’re prone to losing your phone, G Cloud is here to help. Taking a cue from Apple’s “Find my iPhone” feature, G Cloud has expanded the idea to the Android platform – simply sign into your G Cloud account to utilize a number of locator options, and reunite with your misplaced device in no time. Even without Internet access, you can send your phone an SMS to locate it with ease.

Pocket-lint readers can pick up the G Cloud Unlimited Backup: 5-Yr Subscription for just £20.42 ($29), for a limited time only.