Technology - Google News |
- Samsung is making three different versions of the Galaxy S10, and now we know about each one
- At Tesla, Elon Musk casts himself as a superhero. But he sweats the details on the factory floor
- I Really Hope HTC Doesn't Go Out Like This
| Samsung is making three different versions of the Galaxy S10, and now we know about each one Posted: 06 Jul 2018 06:41 AM PDT You know how we all expected Samsung to launch two Galaxy S10 models next year featuring new designs? Well, you can scratch part of that rumor. It’s not two, but three different Galaxy S10 versions that are coming early next year, and it’s pretty easy to understand why Samsung is doing it. The phones will offer a bunch of novel new features that have never been seen on a Samsung smartphone before, and now we have some new details about all three upcoming Galaxy S10 models. Korean business news site The Bell has it from multiple unnamed sources that Samsung is developing samples for three Galaxy S10 devices referred to internally as Beyond 0, Beyond 1, and Beyond 2, which are codenames we’ve seen several times before. Beyond 0 is an entry-level model, so it’s probably a “Mini” variant of Samsung’s upcoming new flagship phone. The handset is expected to feature a fingerprint sensor on the right side, where your thumb would rest. Therefore, the phone will not have a Fingerprint On Display (FOD) fingerprint sensor like its bigger siblings. The Bell reiterates what many other rumors have claimed in the past, that the Beyond 1 and Beyond 2 — Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10+, respectively — will have FOD screens. FOD is supposed to be one of the most significant innovations coming to Samsung’s tenth-anniversary Galaxy S phones. The other feature, of course, is the triple-lens camera that will be a Galaxy S10+ exclusive. But with the Beyond 0, Samsung wants to make sure no Galaxy S10 version will have a fingerprint sensor on the back. The FOD module is more expensive to make. Priced at $15, that’s more than seven times the price of a regular rear-facing fingerprint sensor. Qualcomm will be the supplier of optical fingerprint sensors used in Samsung’s new phones, while Chinese camera module maker O-Film will also supply key components. Samsung Display will then attach the FOD module to the OLED screen. The specs of the Galaxy S10 have reportedly not been finalized, with the Beyond 0 having been added to the mix only recently. We’re sure that decision has nothing to do with news that Apple plans to launch three new iPhone models later this summer, including a new entry-level model. |
| At Tesla, Elon Musk casts himself as a superhero. But he sweats the details on the factory floor Posted: 06 Jul 2018 06:24 AM PDT  By Drew Harwell | The Washington Post Tesla’s recent announcement that it had reached its long- delayed goal of making 5,000 Model 3 electric sedans in a week seemed like a triumph for Elon Musk’s intense management style. The chief executive had created a makeshift factory under a tent in the carmaking plant’s parking lot. He torqued bolts on the assembly line and emailed employees about shadowy forces. He slept on the factory floor. But now, the question dogging investors is whether Musk’s self-styled “nano-manager” approach to overseeing Tesla – America’s youngest major carmaker, and worth about as much as General Motors – will prove sustainable. Musk’s bursts of energy have helped make Tesla one of the country’s most prominent and valuable automakers, a Silicon Valley challenger to Detroit that even its rivals contend has shoved American cars into the 21st century. Meeting the Model 3 production goal, Musk told employees in a email Sunday, had pushed Tesla closer to its mission of accelerating clean energy and changing the world – even if they had taken some unconventional steps to get there. “Whatever,” he said. “It worked.” But that same energy has also made Musk one of the most polarizing corporate leaders in America, a brash and demanding captain of industry who risks overshadowing his own creation. As Tesla neared its production target, Musk posted on Instagram what he labeled a “selfie”: an image of the superhero Doctor Strange, who wields mystical powers to change time and reality. “Engineering is magic,” he tweeted to his 22 million followers. “He has achieved a lot by sheer willpower and is one of the most gifted people I’ve ever met,” said Bob Lutz, who has been a senior executive at each of America’s Big Three automakers, including vice chairman of General Motors. “He’s also one of the most flawed.” Lutz described Musk as “a master salesman” and the ownership of Tesla vehicles or shares as “almost a religious cult.” “But he’s getting desperate,” Lutz said. “Like so many of these schemes, I think he’s rapidly running out of other people’s money.” Musk has pitched the Model 3 as a mass-market, battery- powered vehicle that will guide the company into mass production and profitability. But manufacturing delays have turned recent months at the Fremont, California, plant into an all-hands, all-hours flurry of labor that Musk has called “production hell” – a time of factory fires, abrupt shutdowns and internal paranoia that the automaker this week said had been one of the “most difficult in Tesla’s history.” Company critics and investment analysts questioned how long Tesla’s victory lap could last. The company said it delivered about 18,000 Model 3 sedans to customers in the second quarter – 10,000 fewer than Wall Street had expected – and had fulfilled less than 7 percent of the more than 400,000 orders on its years-old reservation list. After passing the Model 3 benchmark, Musk upped the goal again, saying the company would hit 6,000 a week by the end of next month. Weary investors this week nevertheless sent the company’s stock plunging nearly 14 percent. In 15 years, the company has never earned an annual profit. Traditional automakers are highly structured, hierarchical organizations, toughened by a high-cost, low-profit-margin business where buyers are fickle and competition is high. Their factories tend to be rigorously efficient, clean and optimized for mass output: The “Toyota Way,” a dogma of “lean manufacturing” governing principles such as respectful management and reducing waste, is often credited with helping turn the small Japanese car company into one of the biggest automakers in the world. At Tesla, there is only what workers call the “Elon Way.” Musk is head engineer, designer, salesman, financier and marketer, with full power over everything from global sales strategy to the look of the retractable door handles. In a companywide email in April ordering the Model 3 be made “24/7,” Musk ordered a review of “every expense worldwide, no matter how small,” banned the use of acronyms, and urged workers to hang up on phone calls “as soon as it is obvious you aren’t adding value.” Tesla’s race to build the Model 3 has made its Fremont factory, an old Toyota and GM plant, one of the most widely watched production facilities in the world, with observers flying drones along the fence and analyzing photos to build theories on daily production. In a striking contrast with other companies’ more clinically organized assembly lines, Tesla also shunted much of its production to what Musk called a “pretty sweet” big-top tent. Branton Phillips, a four-year Tesla worker pushing to unionize the factory, said the open-air tent has fans but is “hotter than hell,” and he worried about the human cost of demanding more from factory-line employees already working 12-hour shifts and some mandatory weekends. “There’s an all-out sense of desperation” among workers here, Phillips said. And “when you push them harder, that’s when dangerous mistakes are made.” California’s workplace-safety watchdog said Thursday that it had opened a third investigation into factory conditions following complaints from employees, one of which involved an equipment accident that left a worker hospitalized with a broken jaw. Tesla said in a statement that “nothing is more important to us than the safety of our employees. Our employees work very hard to help achieve a mission that all of us feel so deeply about, and they absolutely must be kept safe.” Tesla didn’t make Musk available for an interview. The company has no formal organizational chart beyond a list of top leaders that includes only two names besides Musk’s. A third name, senior vice president of engineering Doug Field, was recently removed after the company said Monday he was “moving on” following a weeks-long leave of absence. Field did not respond to requests for comment. A successor has not been named. More than 30 other high-ranking executives have left the company within the last year, including leaders in sales, hardware and engineering, according to a Washington Post estimate of top-level departures. Musk announced last month that the company would also be laying off 9 percent of its workforce – including some of the company’s 10,000 factory employees – as part of a “difficult but necessary” reorganization that he said would “flatten” the company’s management structure even more. “He’s completely obsessed with every small detail, and he does not ever want to sit back and let his managers manage,” said Mike Ramsey, an automotive research director for the advisory firm Gartner. “You do wonder: How is it even possible to add in that many things and keep it all together?” Many boosters have nevertheless seen a once-in-a-generation talent in Musk, whose boisterous curiosity and charisma have made him into a nerd hero and helped recraft the car company into the mold of a sci-fi wonderland. Tesla cars refuel not at gas stations but “Superchargers”; they’re built not in a factory but in a seemingly otherworldly “alien dreadnought”; and they hit the road with driving modes such as “Insane” and “Ludicrous,” named for how fast they accelerate. Musk helped blow up Big Auto sacraments, such as car dealers, and reimagined how cars should work, with dashboard screens, self-updating software and long-range electric motors. In an age of dishwater-dull, battery-powered cars like the Toyota Prius, Tesla’s rebellious electrics drove, looked and felt like sports cars, with instant speed, clean lines and a halo of environmentalist chic. As Piper Jaffray analyst Alex Potter wrote last year, “Tesla engenders optimism, freedom, defiance and a host of other emotions that, in our view, other companies cannot replicate.” Musk always seemed to be promising a new amazement, flitting from space travel (SpaceX) to artificial intelligence (OpenAI) to flamethrowers and underground supertrains (The Boring Co.). But Tesla remained small-batch, producing only two cars, the Model S and X, from a single plant at prices only the wealthy could afford. The Model 3, pitched to launch in 2014, promised to change that: Cheap and sleek, it would help expand Tesla’s sales pitch beyond just being a boutique creator for the automotive elite. The sedan was said to be priced around the average sales price of a new car in the U.S., or about $35,000. After years of delays and a rush of preorders in 2016, the waiting list remains grim: The company has so far delivered about 28,000 Model 3 sedans, and its backlog for customers who already paid a $1,000 deposit could stretch on for another 18 months. Tesla’s focus on churning out pricier premium models has also made the base price Model 3 unattainable; the cheapest versions now sell for around $50,000. Musk’s latest production milestone puts Tesla in line with some of America’s smaller car factories: The nation’s largest, Toyota’s plant in Georgetown, Kentucky, has the capacity to make more than 10,000 vehicles a week. When Musk tweeted “7000 cars, 7 days” alongside emoji hearts for the Tesla team, Ford executive Steven Armstrong – whose company Musk had recently said “looks like a morgue” – jabbed back that his company made that many cars in about four hours. Even as bigger problems loom, Musk has turned his attention to the smaller things, using Twitter to taunt investors betting against the company (“burn of the century comin soon”) and skeptical analysts (“in for a rude awakening :)”). He also has sparred with journalists, anonymous commenters and other critics, including a woman who said he had improperly used her father’s artwork of a farting unicorn. In recent emails, Musk has urged workers to stay “extremely vigilant” against a cabal of “organizations that want Tesla to die.” He also engaged in a tense exchange with a former employee sued by Tesla and accused of stealing trade secrets, calling him a “horrible person.” That former employee, Martin Tripp, says he is a whistleblower and that Tesla’s claims against him are “absurd.” Musk’s obsession with the particulars has made him a target among shareholders seeking to replace him with a more predictable corporate captain. Tesla shareholder CtW Investment Group wrote in a May letter to fellow investors that “Musk’s peripatetic focus” had been “exacerbated, rather than contained,” by an “unduly deferential” company board. Some have called for Musk to step back from leadership and become more of a “spiritual guide,” ceding day-to-day operations to an automotive specialist tasked with keeping the production running on time. As Tesla has struggled with mass production, other carmakers have caught up: A half-dozen stylish, premium-badged, long-range electric vehicles are expected to hit the road over the next 18 months. There's "a lot more serious analysis about whether Tesla should be all about Elon, and Elon alone," said Karl Brauer, the executive publisher of the automotive research firm Kelley Blue Book. "The grandiose is great for headlines and great for the tech industry to continue to watch and be awed. But after a decade and a half, we haven't seen it pay the bills."Yet Musk continues to attract an ardent fan base – including among his own employees. In one email to him in May, a Tesla technician raved about how Musk had come into the company’s battery-making Gigafactory in Nevada and “eliminated 80% of the problems we were having in about 20 minutes.” “To have the head of a multi-billion dollar company working along side with ‘worker bees’ to me is something really extraordinary,” the technician said in an email, which he confirmed to The Post. “After that I have completely full confidence in this company, its leadership, and our workers. … Everyone is working (their) asses off!” |
| I Really Hope HTC Doesn't Go Out Like This Posted: 06 Jul 2018 07:16 AM PDT  After years of declining sales, unloading $1 billion worth of patents and personnel to Google, and just recently slashing 25 percent of its global workforce, when it comes to HTC, I got one big question: So what’s left? Sure, HTC may have been able insulate its promising Vive VR business by spinning that department off into a separate company. But as for HTC itself, if all the company has left in the tank is its upcoming crypto phone and this, the new U12+, things aren’t looking good. Initially, when I heard about the U12+, I was optimistic. HTC’s previous flagship phone was one of the biggest sleepers of 2017 thanks to its unique design, the huge 3930 mAh battery in the larger U11+, and a camera that was just as good, if not sometimes better than those found on Samsung’s and Apple’s handsets. And for 2018, it seemed like HTC was going to lean into its innovative side-mounted pressure sensors so you could control even more features with a simple squeeze of your hand. And it some respects, that focus totally paid off, because now in addition to simply squeezing the phone to summon the Google Assistant or whatever else you want, you can also double tap the sides of the phone to go back, squeeze and hold to call up any app of your choosing, or simply grip the phone to prevent it from dimming or rotating the screen without your approval. On top of that, you can even customize what squeezing the phone does contextually within individual apps, so when using the camera app for example, you can squeeze the phone to snap a picture, or squeeze and hold to switch between the phone’s front and rear facing cameras. And because almost all of these functions can be tweaked and adjusted to your liking, the U12+ feels like it has an endless possibilities for customization. It’s a phone tweaker’s dream. Unfortunately, what HTC forgot to do was increase the sensitivity of the U12+’s pressure sensors, because even when set to their lowest level, actually getting the phone to recognize a squeeze is uncomfortable, and if you squeeze the phone a lot, it might even be a little painful. The phone’s metal sides don’t have any give, so in order for the handset to recognize your squeeze, you essentially have to bruise your fingers.  But perhaps the U12+’s biggest offense is what HTC did to the phone’s lock and volume “buttons.” That’s because they aren’t actually buttons at all, they’re little bits of raised metal with even more built-in touch sensors. And unlike the Touch ID home “buttons” found on older iPhones, HTC hasn’t really attempted to use high-quality haptics to fool your fingers into thinking they are real. Sure, the “buttons” vibrate when you press them, but they still feel dead, and like the rest of the phone’s squeeze controls, you have to press them harder than you think you should when you want them to work. I really don’t get it, and when you consider the phone’s curvy, almost fluid-like glass back, I think it’s a tragedy that HTC didn’t go all the way and axe the U12+’s buttons entirely in favor of full on touch controls. In a world where phone makers are already trying to eliminate everything on a phone that’s not a screen or camera, that would actually be a bold step into our inevitable all-touch future. Meanwhile, on the inside, the phone’s Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 chip, 6GB of RAM, 64GB of storage and microSD card slot delivers the kind of performance you’d expect from an $800 phone. However, its battery does not. For some reason, after putting a huge 3,950 mAh battery in the U11+, which featured a screen with the same 6-inch dimensions and 2880 x 1440 resolution as the U12+, HTC curiously opted to go with a smaller 3500 mAh this time instead. That means on our rundown test, the U12+ lasted just 8 hours and 1 minute, the shortest time we’ve seen on any phone in 2018, regardless of price, and between three and four hours (or more) shorter than many of its flagship competitors including the Galaxy S9+(12:27) , the Huawei P20 Pro (11:36), or OnePlus 6 (13:03). However, one of the U12+’s redeeming features is its cameras, which have been doubled to include dual 8-MP cams up the front and dual 12-MP cams in back. That means you can shoot portrait mode photos regardless of which side of the phone you’re using, which is nice, but what’s even more impressive is that once again, HTC has managed to keep pace with its mainstream competitors. In daylight, not only did the U12+ capture a challenging shot of a flower in the fading light of a sunset with more accurate white balance, it also refrained from pushing color saturation and sharpness too far like you see in a comparison pic shot by a Galaxy S9+. And in low-light, while the U12+’s pic does look slightly grainier than the S9+’s pic, it doesn’t have any of the greenish cast on the yellow warning track at the bottom of the shot, there’s better detail on the pavers in the road, and clean, bright colors throughout. The S9+’s only other advantage is very slightly better range as seen by more details in the rafters at the top of the building. So in the end, what we’re left with is an incredibly frustrating phone. Aside from its slick transparent glass back, it looks almost exactly the same as last year’s device, and yet, its cameras are even better. Unfortunately, the U12+ has taken a step back in battery life, and while its enhanced pressure sensors offer even more control and customizability, the performance and execution of HTC’s touch and squeeze functions just isn’t there. But what worries me even more is that with HTC in such trouble financially, it’s possible that the U12+ could be the last flagship phone HTC ever makes. And for a company that’s created a number of all-time great handsets like the T-Mobile G1 (or the HTC Dream as its known outside the U.S.), which was the first phone sold that ran Android, or the legendary HTC One M7, which may have been the best phone of its generation, the death of HTC is a pretty depressing thought. And despite its flaws, the U12+ shows that HTC didn’t sell all of its best ideas to Google. There’s still potential left in what remains of HTC, but if things don’t start improving soon, all of HTC’s greatest hits may remain strictly in the past. README
SPEC DUMPAndroid 8.0 • 6-inch 2880 x 1440 LCD display • Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 processor • 6GB of RAM • 64GB or 128GB of storage • microSD card slot • stereo speakers • dual 8-MP front cameras • dual 12-MP rear cameras • IP-68 water resistance • USB 3.1 Type-C port • no headphone jack • 6.17 x 2.91 x 0.34-inches • 6.63 ounces |
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