Technology - Google News |
- New Galaxy S9 video and hands-on photos leak just hours before Samsung's big event
- 4 Reasons Why You Should Pay Attention To Huawei's New Notebook
- Hands On With the LG V30S+ ThinQ
| New Galaxy S9 video and hands-on photos leak just hours before Samsung's big event Posted: 25 Feb 2018 04:38 AM PST Excuse us if we get a bit emotional during this post, but we can't tell you how happy we are that this is the last time we'll ever have to relay Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ leaks. Samsung's new phones look fantastic, don't get us wrong, but they've leaked so much over the past few months that we simply can't take it anymore. And on Sunday, the Galaxy S9 and S9+ finally — FINALLY — get official. Samsung has a big press conference scheduled to begin at 12:00 PM EST / 9:00 AM PST at the MWC 2018 trade show in Barcelona, Spain, during which the company will officially unveil its new Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ flagship phones. Of course, given how extensively the two phones have leaked over the past two or three months, it's only right that we all enjoy one last massive collection of leaks before Samsung gets the show on the road. At this point, we've seen the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ so many times that it seems like Samsung announced them months ago. We've seen renders, mockups, and even some hands-on photos. We've read about the specs, and we've been impressed by the leaked benchmark test scores. Now, with just a few hours to go before Samsung finally makes its new flagship phone duo official, we have one last round of leaks. First, the big one: Samsung accidently posted an official Galaxy S9 promotional video on its YouTube page before quickly taking it down. After all the leaks at this point, we're not sure why Samsung even bothered to pull the video. Of course, a number of people downloaded the Galaxy S9 video before it was pulled, and you can watch the full thing below. If the Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ didn't look impressive to you before, that should cast away any doubt that these are major upgrades despite bearing a striking resemblance to last year's Galaxy S8 and S8+. Beyond the video, we also have two different sets of hand-on Galaxy S9 photos to check out. Both were posted to Instagram this morning, and both were subsequently removed — but not before we grabbed them, of course. The first pair of photos shows a Lilac Purple Galaxy S9, but only from the front so you can't really see the color very well, just a hint on the phone's aluminum edges.
Next up, we have an Instagram user with the handle "ariafa23," who posted a pair of Galaxy S9+ photos but then got cold feet and deleted them. Of course nothing is ever truly removed from the internet, and someone on Slashleaks reposted the Galaxy S9+ photos after they were removed. Samsung's Galaxy S9 and Galaxy S9+ announcement event is scheduled to begin at 12:00 PM EST, which is just a few short hours away. The phones are both expected to become available for preorder beginning March 1st or March 2nd, and they'll go on sale in stores and online on Friday, March 16th. |
| 4 Reasons Why You Should Pay Attention To Huawei's New Notebook Posted: 25 Feb 2018 07:51 AM PST  The MateBook X Pro is the second notebook Huawei has ever produced, so it stands to reason that name recognition is lacking in this space, as opposed to its much larger smartphone presence. On the company's second outing, however, they've managed to out-Pro Apple and dull the shine from Dell's award-winning XPS 13 InfinityEdge display. The appearance of the MateBook X Pro is certainly reminiscent of Apple's MacBook Pro design language (not a complaint), but Huawei is doing a few things I appreciate to move notebooks forward. #1: Those Bezels Huawei Matebook X Pro Credit to Dell for pioneering a nearly edge-to-edge display in the 2015 XPS 13. It turned a lot of heads and reignited the fervor for thin and light notebooks. It also embarrassed Apple's equivalent display offerings (and still does). Dell's newest XPS 13 is still impressive with an 80.7 percent screen-to-body ratio. Huawei somehow managed to crank that ratio up to a phenomenal 91 percent. This means they can house a 13.9-inch, 3000 x 2000 resolution touchscreen display into the body. #2: Smile For The (Pop-Up) Camera Smile for the (pop-up) camera! Designing a screen with bezels that narrow requires a bit of engineering creativity, so Huawei decided to do something completely new with the standard laptop camera: hide it in the keyboard. The top row of function keys now houses a pop-up camera (only 1 megapixel but sufficient for video conferencing) in the center. Simply press it and it clicks open. Besides being a clever solution in the pursuit of edgeless displays, it's also something privacy advocates will appreciate. #3: Quad Speakers, Quad Microphones Huawei Matebook X Pro packs in 4 speakers One of the 2017 MacBook Pro's best features is honestly its speakers. They're clear and they're loud and I'm never hunched toward the screen wishing for more volume. Thought I haven't heard them in person (yet), Huawei's MateBook X Pro is packing an impressive 4 speakers with Dolby Atmos, which the company says contain a mixture of tweeters and woofers that deliver rich bass and crisp sound. If they're as loud as the MBP but deliver deeper more prevalent bass, it'll be a winner in the audio department. Speaking of audio, the MateBook X Pro's microphone setup seems expressly designed for conferences in the office. It contains an impressive 4 microphones which Huawei says pick up sound accurately from up to 13 feet away. #4: The Best Of Both USB Worlds I really do prefer USB-C. It's faster, it's easier, and it will become universal. The XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Pro have relegated standard USB-A connectivity to the graveyard, but the rest of the peripheral world hasn't caught up yet. So why not have the best of both worlds? Maybe it's a trvivial thing, but I appreciate that the MateBook X Pro has a USB-A port for the various external drives and peripherals I already own, and two USB-C connections for the forward-thinking side of things. 1 of them supports ThunderBolt 3 for hooking up an external display. Bonus: Dedicated Nvidia Graphics, Thinner Than MacBook Pro The Huawei Matebook X Pro also features an Nvidia GeForce MX150 discrete GPU At its thickest point the MateBook X Pro is 0.3mm thinner than the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro. At its thinnest point it's a full 2mm thinner, despite having a larger screen. It can also be configured with discrete graphics in the form of Nvidia GeForce MX150. Now, that's not remotely a heavyweight GPU capable of playing everything in full visual glory at 1080p, but it's capable of smoothly playing more lightweight titles at 60+fps, or demanding AAA games on Low at 1080p. This is a thin and light, after all. Still, it can handle GTA V at 1080p Medium and deliver about 30fps there, so that's a decent gauge of its horsepower. US pricing for the Huawei MateBook X Pro hasn't been announced yet and should release in Q2. The high-end config will cost 1899 Euros (about $2330 at time of writing) and core specs include an 8th-Gen Intel Core i7-8550U processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB nVME SSD. It also has a fingerprint sensor on the power button. You can grab more info at Huawei's official site. You guys know my story: I'm a MacBook Pro user (please direct flames to Twitter), and Dell made me increasingly jealous with every iteration of the XPS 13. But now Huawei has pushed that jealousy to new levels. On paper I'm really excited about this one, and hopefully I'll have extensive hands-on time closer to the MateBook X Pro launch. ">When it comes to thin and light notebooks, Huawei isn't exactly a household name in the United States. The Matebook X Pro might change that. With today's reveal of the successor to 2017's MateBook X -- Huawei is proving it means serious business and intends to aggressively carve away market share from giants Dell and Apple. The MateBook X Pro is the second notebook Huawei has ever produced, so it stands to reason that name recognition is lacking in this space, as opposed to its much larger smartphone presence. On the company's second outing, however, they've managed to out-Pro Apple and dull the shine from Dell's award-winning XPS 13 InfinityEdge display. The appearance of the MateBook X Pro is certainly reminiscent of Apple's MacBook Pro design language (not a complaint), but Huawei is doing a few things I appreciate to move notebooks forward. #1: Those Bezels Huawei Matebook X Pro Credit to Dell for pioneering a nearly edge-to-edge display in the 2015 XPS 13. It turned a lot of heads and reignited the fervor for thin and light notebooks. It also embarrassed Apple's equivalent display offerings (and still does). Dell's newest XPS 13 is still impressive with an 80.7 percent screen-to-body ratio. Huawei somehow managed to crank that ratio up to a phenomenal 91 percent. This means they can house a 13.9-inch, 3000 x 2000 resolution touchscreen display into the body. #2: Smile For The (Pop-Up) Camera Smile for the (pop-up) camera! Designing a screen with bezels that narrow requires a bit of engineering creativity, so Huawei decided to do something completely new with the standard laptop camera: hide it in the keyboard. The top row of function keys now houses a pop-up camera (only 1 megapixel but sufficient for video conferencing) in the center. Simply press it and it clicks open. Besides being a clever solution in the pursuit of edgeless displays, it's also something privacy advocates will appreciate. #3: Quad Speakers, Quad Microphones Huawei Matebook X Pro packs in 4 speakers One of the 2017 MacBook Pro's best features is honestly its speakers. They're clear and they're loud and I'm never hunched toward the screen wishing for more volume. Thought I haven't heard them in person (yet), Huawei's MateBook X Pro is packing an impressive 4 speakers with Dolby Atmos, which the company says contain a mixture of tweeters and woofers that deliver rich bass and crisp sound. If they're as loud as the MBP but deliver deeper more prevalent bass, it'll be a winner in the audio department. Speaking of audio, the MateBook X Pro's microphone setup seems expressly designed for conferences in the office. It contains an impressive 4 microphones which Huawei says pick up sound accurately from up to 13 feet away. #4: The Best Of Both USB Worlds I really do prefer USB-C. It's faster, it's easier, and it will become universal. The XPS 13 and Apple MacBook Pro have relegated standard USB-A connectivity to the graveyard, but the rest of the peripheral world hasn't caught up yet. So why not have the best of both worlds? Maybe it's a trvivial thing, but I appreciate that the MateBook X Pro has a USB-A port for the various external drives and peripherals I already own, and two USB-C connections for the forward-thinking side of things. 1 of them supports ThunderBolt 3 for hooking up an external display. Bonus: Dedicated Nvidia Graphics, Thinner Than MacBook Pro The Huawei Matebook X Pro also features an Nvidia GeForce MX150 discrete GPU At its thickest point the MateBook X Pro is 0.3mm thinner than the 13-inch Apple MacBook Pro. At its thinnest point it's a full 2mm thinner, despite having a larger screen. It can also be configured with discrete graphics in the form of Nvidia GeForce MX150. Now, that's not remotely a heavyweight GPU capable of playing everything in full visual glory at 1080p, but it's capable of smoothly playing more lightweight titles at 60+fps, or demanding AAA games on Low at 1080p. This is a thin and light, after all. Still, it can handle GTA V at 1080p Medium and deliver about 30fps there, so that's a decent gauge of its horsepower. US pricing for the Huawei MateBook X Pro hasn't been announced yet and should release in Q2. The high-end config will cost 1899 Euros (about $2330 at time of writing) and core specs include an 8th-Gen Intel Core i7-8550U processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 512GB nVME SSD. It also has a fingerprint sensor on the power button. You can grab more info at Huawei's official site. You guys know my story: I'm a MacBook Pro user (please direct flames to Twitter), and Dell made me increasingly jealous with every iteration of the XPS 13. But now Huawei has pushed that jealousy to new levels. On paper I'm really excited about this one, and hopefully I'll have extensive hands-on time closer to the MateBook X Pro launch. |
| Hands On With the LG V30S+ ThinQ Posted: 25 Feb 2018 07:07 AM PST  BARCELONA—The LG V30S ThinQ unveiled at Mobile World Congress is a bunch of cool camera modes disguised as a new phone. The good news is that LG is offering significant software upgrades to existing V30 and V30+ owners, as well as two elegant new colors of its 2017 flagship phone. But those positive steps are clouded a bit by LG's insistence that this is a new phone, and its attempt to make "ThinQ" a thing. New or Not?
"The overall hardware design is exactly the same; the color is the difference," said Ji Youn Lheem, chief strategic designer at LG's design lab.
But the software is pretty cool—and even cooler, it's coming to existing V30 units, although LG wouldn't tell us exactly when. The major changes are in two new camera modes, Bright mode and AI Cam, both of which we tested for a little while at LG's launch event. Bright mode appears as a button on the screen when you're in a very dark location. It groups together sets of four pixels to reduce the V30's resolution from 16MP to 4MP while significantly brightening photos. Although focus lag was sometimes an issue, it definitely works. We compared the V30S+ with an iPhone X, and found that the V30S's images were significantly brighter and less noisy. That said, both the V30S+ and iPhone's images improved by quite a lot with a little bit of in-phone image editing. After applying some filters, the iPhone's picture had better colors, while the V30S+ picture was less noisy and compressed. Note that this was all on a pre-production unit (so pre-production, it dosen't even have the phone's name on the back), so the software could further improve before launch.
(That image above shows photos on the V30S+ and the iPhone X before we did any retouching or filters.) AI Cam, which comes from third-party vendor EyeEm, tries to ID elements in a visual scene to lock one of eight photo modes, such as food or portrait mode. It's kind of hilarious because when you turn it on, you see the AI churning, in little white subtitles, through guesses about what's on the screen: fish? hand? close-up? before locking into its mode after 5 to 10 seconds. It identified people and food correctly.
"This is done inside the phone, not in the cloud," Ian Hwang, LG's product expert said. A third photo mode, QLens, combines a QR scanner and image search engine for shopping or image identification. We've seen this in a lot of third-party apps and on Samsung and Google phones. It identified several products correctly enough to deliver Amazon links for them. The V30S is also extending LG's existing list of device-specific Google Assistant voice commands to be able to trigger the new camera modes. (LG lists the full set of new voice commands here.) The phone will also have new Google Assistant voice commands to control LG appliances and home entertainment devices, such as "Hey Google, check the time remaining on my washing machine." Because LG is invested in the slightly quixotic idea that the V30S+ ThinQ is indeed a new phone, it didn't spend enough time playing up the fact that AI Cam, Bright Mode, and the new voice features will be back-ported to existing V30 devices. This is great news in an Android world where phones all too often don't get upgraded. What The ThinQ?We have to talk about this ThinQ thing. It's LG's attempt to wrap up and brand its smart home and AI technologies. Apparently, it's pronounced "thin queue," which makes no sense because as an AI brand, it should probably be pronounced "think." The concept is fine, in that it's an attempt to bring together AI features in all of LG's home electronics brands. But the brand itself is just not very good. If there was any new hardware in here to accelerate AI, maybe, just maybe, there would be a faint justification for the branding. But whereas Apple and Huawei are touting their AI hardware components, the AI here doesn't even run on the Hexagon DSP in the Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 processor (which would be Qualcomm's equivalent in terms of AI hardware)—it's just a routine run on the CPU. "We are attaching ThinQ to the end of the name because AI is going to be an important part of our product strategy," Hwang said. That really makes it sound like someone at HQ is tacking the word on because of some perceived corporate initiative, not because of anything specific about this product. LG wouldn't commit to whether or not the V30S+ will be released in the US. It will launch in Korea in "a week or two," LG spokesman Ken Hong said. Check back soon for more details. |
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