Microsoft to kill Lumia line by end of 2016, Surface phones going forward
Microsoft has been tipped to introduce a Surface Phone for a while and a new report suggests that could be all the company focused on going forward. It is said to be ditching the Lumia branding and ending production of the Windows 10 handsets by the end of this year.
Having already reported poor sales of the latest line, Microsoft is seemingly ready to ditch it and start again. An employee of the company told Winbeta that it will “end sales” of the range in December 2016.
That site suggests that Microsoft is ending production rather than sales – it’s not going to dump a load of Lumia handsets in landfill now, after all. Instead, it is likely to sell existing stock at discounted prices.
Indeed, you can already find several bargains online for Lumia devices as it stands.
Winbeta also claims that the much-rumoured Surface Phone will be announced at an event in October. It comes after Microsoft’s director of engineering, Laura Butler, tweeted about the handset with a cryptic tease.
“Surface Phone not NOT confirmed,” she wrote. The double negative has been taken by many to mean that the handset does exist.
If there is an event in October, we’ll find out soon enough.
Neural networks are powerful thanks to physics, not math
When you think about how a neural network can beat a Go champion or otherwise accomplish tasks that would be impractical for most computers, it’s tempting to attribute the success to math. Surely it’s those algorithms that help them solve certain problems so quickly, right? Not so fast. Researchers from Harvard and MIT have determined that the nature of physics gives neural networks their edge.
When you write down the laws of physics mathematically, you can describe all of them using functions with basic properties. As such, a neural network doesn’t need to understand every possible function (like a conventional computer would) to generate an answer — it just needs to know some fundamentals. The network can use each of its layers to approximate each step toward the solution, reaching a conclusion faster than a conventional computer when the solution involves a hierarchical structure (such as when you’re mapping cosmic radiation).
The insights could lead to better-designed artificial intelligence systems that do a better job of exploiting their inherent advantage. Moreover, it could help you understand your own mind. Many neural networks are patterned after the human brain, which suggests that brains are ideally structured for understanding the world around them.
Source: MIT Technology Review, ArXiv.org
BMW reportedly steps up its electric vehicle plans
Mercedes isn’t the only car maker determined to beat Tesla before it gets huge. Sources speaking to German business daily Handelsblatt claim that BMW is in the midst of planning an executive shuffle that will also include a big shift in its electric vehicle strategy. While the company would still offer ground-up EV designs like the i3, the new strategy would greenlight electric versions of some of BMW’s most important vehicles, including the 3-series sedan, X4 crossover and iconic Mini. If the leak is accurate, management is likely to approve the change at the end of September.
We’ve asked BMW for its take on the report, although it declined to comment to Handelsblatt. It wouldn’t be shocking to see the Munich crew change tack, though. While Tesla has received hundreds of thousands of Model 3 pre-orders, i3 sales dropped in 2016 — the upscale (if oddly-shaped) EV just isn’t as hot as it once was. If BMW electrifies some of its most popular cars, you wouldn’t have to choose between a super-efficient, eco-friendly EV and the familiar designs of the brand’s mainstream driving machines.
Via: TechCrunch
Source: Handelsblatt
Morrisons to open ‘hundreds’ of in-store Amazon Lockers
In the UK, Morrisons and Amazon have become unlikely allies. After partnering up on Amazon Pantry, the supermarket chain has revealed new plans to open “hundreds” of Amazon Lockers inside its stores. The complete roll-out will be “the UK’s largest collection” of pick-up points, it claims, giving Amazon customers another useful place to retrieve their online orders. Morrisons will be hoping to lure these fly-by shoppers into making additional purchases in-store, thereby boosting its own revenue. It’s a bold, but sensibly strategy — if you’re in the supermarket already, doesn’t it make sense to pick up some supplies before heading home?
Amazon is pushing a few different delivery services in the UK at the moment. Prime Now is a one-hour delivery service, spanning London, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool and a bevy of smaller municipals. Amazon Fresh covers your everyday fridge requirements, including meat, seafood, fruit and veg, while Amazon Pantry is meant as a larder and cupboard-under-the-stairs filler. Together, these three represent a major assault on traditional supermarkets. You can’t push a trolley around an Amazon store, but the company’s argument is that you should never have to — its delivery services are more than sufficient. (That’s the argument, anyway.)
The Morrisons partnership is, in the short-term, beneficial to both parties. Amazon has an established, reliable supermarket partner, which can help to sell its vision of an online-only food delivery service. More Amazon Lockers will buoy the rest of its business, while minimising the costs that would be required with owning its own stores. For Morrisons, the deal is a chance to piggy-back on a highly aggressive, tech-savvy company. Amazon could one day threaten its own business, but for now it’s a useful ally, one that could help driver customers away from its brick-and-mortar rivals.
Source: Morrisons
Samsung Shares Plummet After FAA Warns Passengers of Note 7 Dangers
Samsung has urged customers to stop using its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones immediately and return them for exchange as soon as possible, after more reports of the handsets catching fire emerged.
“We are asking users to power down their Galaxy Note 7’s and exchange them as soon as possible,” said Koh Dong-jin, Samsung’s mobile president. “We are expediting replacement devices so that they can be provided through the exchange program as conveniently as possible.”
A Note 7 caught fire after its charger was unplugged (Image: Ariel Gonzalez)
The advice comes after U.S. aviation safety officials warned airline passengers not to turn on or charge Note 7 model handsets during flights.
In the unprecedented move, the Federal Aviation Administration also warned passengers not to store the phones in checked bags, citing “recent incidents and concerns raised by Samsung” about the recalled devices.
Last week, Samsung initiated a global recall of the 5.5-inch handsets after faulty batteries were blamed for 35 reports of exploding handsets and devices catching fire. In one case, a family in St Petersburg, Florida, described how a Note 7 phone left charging in their Jeep caught fire, destroying the vehicle.
On Saturday in Brooklyn, New York, a six-year-old boy was left with burns after the Note 7 he was using to watch videos exploded in his hands. The boy’s family called 911 and he was taken to hospital. The boy has returned home following treatment and the family has been in contact with Samsung, but declined to comment further.
In another incident last week in Perth, Australia, a man’s Note 7 exploded while it was charging overnight in his hotel room, causing $1,382 worth of property damage and leaving the handset “completely fried”, said the owner. Samsung offered a replacement device, and the company confirmed that it was arranging to cover the bill for damages to the hotel room.
Samsung shares fell to their lowest level in two months on Monday, wiping $14.3 billion off the South Korean firm’s market capitalisation. “Some said initially the Galaxy Note 7 could be the best smartphone ever, but now it’s possible the phone will go down as the worst ever,” IBK Securities analyst Lee Seung-woo told Fortune, predicting weak sales in the fourth quarter.
Some analysts estimate the firm might lose up to $5 billion worth of revenue after accounting for recall costs – a huge blow to a company that was just starting to reclaim market share on strong sales of its Galaxy S7 smartphones launched in March.
Some commentators have blamed the flaw in the device on a rush to manufacture, given that Samsung launched the $900 Note 7 about a month ahead of Apple’s iPhone 7 announcement in an attempt to pre-empt Cupertino.
Tag: Samsung
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Electron microscope draws nano-sized patterns in metal ink
One of the greatest challenges in designing electronics is drawing very fine details. You normally need lithography, which complicates the process by requiring masks. However, Oak Ridge National Laboratory has now found a way to write at an extremely fine level — and even get a little bit creative. Its researchers have developed a technique that relies on an electron microscope to draw nanoscale patterns using metal ink. The team first creates a grayscale template to guide its work, and uses the microscope to shoot electrons into palladium chloride cells along that template. The cells neatly deposit raw palladium wherever the microscope goes.
If you want to fine-tune your output, you only have to control the microscope’s speed and electron volume. And even in this early testing, the results are highly accurate: as you can see above, Oak Ridge managed to create an extremely tiny version of its own logo.
There’s still a long way to go before the technology is ready for prime time. The lab wrote at a resolution of 40 nanometers, while the processors in many modern PCs and phones are built on a 14-nanometer process. When it’s ready, however, it could help craft highly optimized electronics that aren’t practical using existing manufacturing methods.
Via: Phys.org
Source: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Nanoscale
Take the newest Prius for a virtual spin
Toyota has a new car and a new way to market it. During Techcrunch Disrupt this week, the automaker will show off its new Prius Prime, a plug-in version of its popular hybrid vehicle. But rather than have attendees simply clamber through a static floor model, Toyota wants to take them for a ride — a virtual one.
The demonstration begins with users donning a Vive VR headset and controller before being introduced to Toyota’s in-house version of Google’s Tilt Brush painting program and tasked with creating a piece of virtual 3D art. Once complete, the user puts down the controllers and sits down in a hydraulically-driven mechanical chair for a unique 4D VR experience dubbed “The Impossible Quest”:
You’re behind the wheel of the new Prius Prime and must safely deliver a mysterious stranger and his even more mysterious package to his destination, all while outrunning and outmaneuvering a cadre of villains who are in pursuit. The experience has the user navigating an ever changing cityscape designed in collaboration with Syd Mead, the concept artist for Tron and Blade Runner, as well as Saatchi & Saatchi Los Angeles and MediaMonks. While you’re dodging baddies, your passenger (who somehow knows more about your car than you do) show off some of the Prime’s various features, functions and benefits.
Toyota enhances this virtualized experience by blasting you with air and water vapor at certain moments throughout, just like those 4D theaters you’ve been trying to avoid. After you give your pursuers the slip and arrive at the destination, you’re rewarded by getting to see what’s in the box. That’s right, your passenger will totally show you his package and — surprise spoiler! — it’s the artwork you created a just few minutes before, displayed in a virtual gallery with other users’ recent creations.
The painting mechanics were custom-built by Toyota’s team of designers and animators — and in just a little over a month, no less. They decided to build a one-off alternative to Tilt Brush because Toyota found that they couldn’t display the program’s files in real-time inside the Unity game engine, with which the rest of the interactive experience is built. Unity, if you recall, is the engine that has brought us everything from Pokemon Go and Hearthstone to Alto’s Adventure and Firewatch. In this case, it does a commendable job rendering Mead’s futuristic vision, even if it can’t instantly add multiple user-generated elements to a virtual world.
I was afforded a hands-on demonstration of the Impossible Quest prior to the opening of Disrupt and came away impressed by the experience. The demo itself is a bit hokey and really just a glorified brochure for the new Prius Prime. But so long as you understand that you’re being treated to what amounts to an extended commercial and not a game or artistic performance, it’s actually rather impressive. Not the actual driving part, of course — I mean, you’re in a Prius. What’s more, there is precious actual driving to do. For the most part you can just sit there with your hands in your lap as the story unfolds around you. The entire experience lasts about 4 minutes.
But the fact that you can “sit” in a near-photorealistic virtual model of a modern vehicle, get a relative feel for the its handling through the pneumatic chair, and see all the bells and whistles (even if you can’t actually touch them) is an interesting method of marketing a car. Since their invention, you’ve had to go to where the cars are to preview them. That’s no issue if you live near a dealership but if you’re out in the sticks, taking a gander at a new ride can be challenging. But with this system, entire vehicles can be digitized — just like CDs and other physical goods before them. Now if you want to know what it’s like to drive a specific vehicle, all you really need is a VR headset and somewhere to sit down.
Mobile Nations Weekly: Seven squared
A new iPhone 7 and a Galaxy Note 7 walk into a bar and things get a little heated.
It happens every year — Apple announces a new iPhone and the tech world comes to a halt. This year is was for the iPhone 7 — it’s faster, more water resistant, and sporting better cameras than ever before. But it’s also not radically different-looking than the previous iPhone and controversially has dropped the as-old-as-time headphone jack. But… it’s already selling out in pre-orders world-wide and will doubtless sell in the millions and millions.
The Galaxy Note 7 recall keeps looking worse for Samsung, with the company now advising that owners turn their phones off and return them to the store immediately. Non-exploding replacements are starting to filter out, so hopefully Samsung will be able place this ordeal behind them. Needless to say, the timing couldn’t be worse.
But things are burning down everywhere on the Android front — Samsung’s closest competitor (in a very literal sense) rolled out their latest: the LG V20. It’s big, it’s bold, it sports a pair of rear cameras, a second screen, and will be the first new phone running Android 7.0 Nougat.
Android Central — Cool V20, hot Note 7
The big device news of the week, coming hot on the heels of IFA, was LG’s launch of the V20. It’s a big phone with top-end internals, a more broadly appealing design and Android 7.0 Nougat on board. With all of that, it also lines up quite well against the Galaxy Note 7. The V20 goes on sale starting late this month, but will more likely hit U.S. carriers in early October.
As we’re sure you’ve already seen, Apple announced its new phones this week. Here’s how the new iPhone 7 Plus dual camera setup stacks up to Android phones with the feature.
The Galaxy Note 7 global recall is now in full effect. Replacement phones have already made it out to some, at least in the U.S., and if you haven’t yet traded yours in, now’s the time.
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CrackBerry — Hub+ more
The start of September was all about updates for BlackBerry. Kicking things off was the Android security patch rollout for Priv and DTEK50. Then, not long after that BlackBerry announced they would be expanding their Hub+ subscription service which brings apps such as Hub, BlackBerry Password Keeper, BlackBerry Launcher and more to even wider array of Android devices. Finally, all of BlackBerry’s Android app offerings got significant updates bringing a multitude of improvements, bug fixes and feature additions across the board.
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- BlackBerry expands Hub+ Suite applications for Android
- BlackBerry Hub, Keyboard, Calendar and more for Android updated!
iMore — Seven
Not sure if you noticed, but there was this little announcement for the iPhone 7. It’s like the old iPhone, but entirely different. Externally it might not look like much has changed, but inside it’s an all-new iPhone. From water resistance to a new dual camera system to the removal of the headphone jack and the arrival of the new wireless AirPods headphones, there’s a whole lot going on with the iPhone 7. Oh, and there’s a whole new Apple Watch Series 2 with GPS and water resistance and a fancy new ceramic case option. Pre-orders for both the new iPhone and Apple Watch are open now with sales beginning on Friday, September 16th.
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VR Heads — A New PlayStation 4 appears!
PlayStation 4 Pro is here, and aside from sounding was better than the highly rumored PlayStation Neo it’s a fairly small update to the hardware. Visually this console will be different from the rest of the PlayStation 4 family, but the big focus here is 4K gaming and HDR visuals for TVs that support it. With PlayStation VR coming a full month before this update is available, it’s unclear whether upgrading will be worth it for many.
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Windows Central — Console Victory
The Xbox One finally sees some success against Sony’s PlayStation. For the second month in a row the gaming console is beating Sony at sales likely due to the push of the new One S model and aggressive pricing.
We reviewed the ecobee3 smart thermostat and called it the best solution for those on Windows 10.
The HP Elite x3 super smartphone went on sale – briefly – for two days at HP.com before selling out due to low supply. Microsoft themselves won’t begin selling it until later in the month after it gets some updates.
The Intel RealSense SR300 is still the best (and only) solution for those who want Windows Hello on their home PC.
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Nano-sized metal fish deliver targeted drugs to your body
Doctors have long dreamed of delivering drugs to specific parts of your body, and they may soon have a clever way to do it: fish. UC San Diego researchers have developed nanoscale metallic fish (they’re just 800 nanometers long) that could carry medicine into the deeper reaches of your bloodstream. Each critter has a gold head and tailfin, as well as a nickel body joined by silver hinges. You only have to subject them to an oscillating magnetic field to make them swim — there’s no need for propellers or a passive (read: slow) delivery system. That, in turn, could make the drug carriers smaller even as they move quickly.
The technology definitely has its flaws. It’s not currently biodegradable, so you may be stuck with this school of fish unless there’s a way to flush them out. Gold and silver aren’t the cheapest metals, either. Scientists are working on biodegradability, however, and they’re hopeful that it will be useful for more than just guiding drugs. You could use to control individual cells, for example, or conduct certain forms of non-invasive surgery. It may just be a matter of refining the technique before you can get medicine exactly where you need it.
Via: New Scientist
Source: Wiley Online Library
NASA plans to rejoin the ESA’s gravitational waves project
NASA was supposed to be the European Space Agency’s partner in the quest to measure gravitational waves, but it had to drop out in 2011 due to budgetary constraints. According to Science, though, NASA officials changed their minds after a team of scientists confirmed the existence of these distortions in the fabric of space-time. At the 11th symposium to discuss the status of ESA’s Laser Interferometry Space Antenna (LISA) project, NASA said it wants to patch things up with its European counterpart and rejoin the mission as a major partner.
The LISA mission will be comprised of three spacecraft orbiting the Earth in an equilateral triangle, detecting and measuring gravitational waves. In late 2015, the ESA launched an experimental spacecraft called the LISA Pathfinder to test out the technologies it plans to use on the actual mission.
Under the original partnership’s terms, the two agencies were supposed to split the estimated $2 billion worth of expenses needed to run the project. Science says NASA might not be able to commit $1 billion even if it rejoins, but it will be significantly more than the $150 million it planned to contribute when it left the partnership.
Besides the confirmation of gravitational waves’ existence, NASA might have also been compelled to get back into the thick of things when the ESA announced that the LISA Pathfinder has been performing well. In fact, the team will start accepting mission concepts for the Pathfinder next month instead of in 2018. Also, it plans to move up the actual LISA mission’s launch from 2034 to “somewhere in the early 2030s.”
Source: Science
