Technology - Google News

Microsoft's Android shock: What this new phone means for the future of Windows - ZDNet
[Update: It’s dead] Watch this robot fold the Samsung Galaxy Fold until it dies - 9to5Google
Here's why the Pixel 4's Neural Core chip could be a photography game-changer - Android Central

Microsoft's Android shock: What this new phone means for the future of Windows - ZDNet

Posted: 04 Oct 2019 05:47 AM PDT

The biggest surprise to come out of Microsoft's hardware event this week was not the new Surface devices -- not even the dual-screen Neo laptop, intriguing though it is. No, the most unexpected arrival was a Microsoft smartphone, running on Android.

The Surface Duo has two 5.6-inch screens, and is due to arrive late next year. Foldable smartphones may be the 'next big thing', but, in contrast to rivals like Samsung and Huawei, Microsoft has gone with two screens linked by a fancy hinge rather than one bendable screen. That's probably a wise move, given the teething troubles Samsung experienced with its Galaxy Fold. Perhaps a dual-screen device of similar size might find favour with a business audience: big enough to work on, small enough to fit in a pocket.

Of course, Microsoft has plenty of history when it comes to smartphones, stretching back to a couple of decades, but it has never really managed to make a breakthrough. Most notably, and expensively, Microsoft bought Nokia's smartphone business in 2013 for €5.44 billion, with the aim of breaking back into the phone market. But the company quickly realised it couldn't win against Android and iOS, and ended up slashing thousands of jobs and writing off more than the total cost of the acquisition just two years later.

The last vestiges of that Windows-based smartphone dream are about to fade away as Windows 10 Mobile goes out of support in December this year.

For a long time it seemed that Microsoft had concluded that smartphones was a two-horse race that it couldn't even join, let alone win. Instead of trying to scale a version of Windows down to the smartphone, it would just provide its apps and services on top of Android and iOS.

But it seems that Microsoft just can't leave smartphones alone. Bill Gates recently said his biggest mistake at Microsoft was not creating a platform like Android (although there are plenty of reasons why that could never have happened).

So what has changed?

The decision to make an Android smartphone more than anything else reflects Microsoft's changing priorities. The Surface brand is a now a success, generating over a billion dollars in revenue per quarter. Perhaps the brand is strong enough that there is now demand for a phone-sized Surface device, even if it doesn't run on Windows like the rest of the line. I'm not entirely convinced that's the case, but there will be some enthusiasts who will want to be Surface users, from handheld device to massive collaboration screen.

The other reason for a Surface phone is the success of Microsoft's app strategy, which has basically ensured that, even if you aren't using a Windows device, you can still get access to a wide range of Windows services. Microsoft, as my colleague Mary Jo Foley points out, already has over 150 apps in the Google Play app store. Having a phone to showcase those apps makes sense and may even encourage more developers to experiment with new versions that take advantage of those dual screens.

Supporting those two strategies is a higher priority than trying to make Windows smartphones happen again. In fact, it might be a higher priority than promoting Windows. Microsoft has come along way since it was 'the Windows company': now it's entirely possible to see it as a cloud computing and productivity apps company too. Perhaps that's why the Duo is being shown off so far ahead of its launch -- to emphasise that Microsoft is trying to take a different approach.

As Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told Wired: "The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us," he says. "What is most important for us is the app model and the experience."

None of that means Windows is going away -- it's still a vast profit machine that ties together all the rest of Microsoft's businesses. But Microsoft's willingness to create an Android phone shows just how far the company has rethought its strategy in the last few years.

Also See

Surface Duo: Microsoft's dual-screen Android phone

Fold fight! Can Surface Duo deliver more productivity than Galaxy Fold?

At Surface event, Microsoft's vision for dual screens, productivity was compelling, but can it execute?

Microsoft's new hardware strategy should worry Apple and Intel

Microsoft launched a phone and made me laugh

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[Update: It’s dead] Watch this robot fold the Samsung Galaxy Fold until it dies - 9to5Google

Posted: 04 Oct 2019 05:48 AM PDT

Samsung's Galaxy Fold is a fragile device thanks to its display, but Samsung takes pride in the strength of its hinge. The company claims it will last 200,000 folds before the hinge breaks. How long will it really last? Let's watch a robot repeatedly fold the Galaxy Fold until it dies in real-time.

Nomad case for Pixel 3

CNET is livestreaming a Galaxy Fold torture test using a robot called "FoldBot," which is built by SquareTrade. The robot quickly folds the phone over and over again — 150 times per minute — to see just how durable it is.

Samsung claims the Galaxy Fold will last around five years with 200,000 folds, but SquareTrade's test was less than encouraging. After 10,000 folds, SquareTrade found no damage, but after about 18,000 folds there was some minor damage to the display. After hitting 40,000 folds, the device wasn't properly working with its touchscreen, but it recovered after charging overnight. After 120,000 folds, the hinge function started to deteriorate.

Of course, the sheer speed of this machine is probably greatly accelerating issues with the hinge and the display. After all, it's basically impossible for a human being to open and close the device this quickly.

Still, it should be fun to see how the Galaxy Fold will hold up in this test. You can tune in below on YouTube. At the time of writing, we've just passed 12,000 folds. How long do you think it will last?

Update 10/4: While it wasn't on the stream for whatever reason, the Galaxy Fold being tested out here died at roughly 120,000 folds. Just like in SquareTrade's test, the device's hinge started to deteriorate and half of the inner folding display stopped working entirely. As noted earlier, though, this test greatly exaggerates how the average person would use their Galaxy Fold.

119,380 folds in, we've lost half of the screen and the hinge has lots its satisfying snappiness. Keep watching here: https://t.co/VupObDxttw pic.twitter.com/Z627VRfpWR

— CNET (@CNET) October 4, 2019

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Here's why the Pixel 4's Neural Core chip could be a photography game-changer - Android Central

Posted: 04 Oct 2019 05:30 AM PDT

There's a reason why the Pixel 3 has been lauded as the best camera phone. Google uses software algorithms inside its HDR+ package to process pixels, and when combined with a little bit of machine learning, some really spectacular photos can come from a phone that may have standard-issue hardware.

To help process these algorithms, Google used a specialized processor called the Pixel Visual Core, a chip we first saw in 2017 with the Pixel 2. This year, it appears that Google has replaced the Pixel VIsual Core with something called a Pixel Neural Core.

Google may be using neural network techniques to make photos even better on the Pixel 4.

The original Pixel Visual Core was designed to help the algorithms used by Google's HDR+ image processing which makes photos taken with the Pixel 2 and Pixel 3 look so great. It used some machine learning programming and what's called computational photography to intelligently fill in the parts of a photo that weren't quite perfect. The effect was really good; it allows a phone with an off-the-shelf camera sensor to take pictures as good or better than any other phone available.

If the Pixel Neural Core is what we believe it is, the Pixel 4 will once again be in a fight for the top spot when it comes to smartphone photography. Here's why.

Neural Networks

It seems that Google is using a chip modeled after a neural network technique to improve the image processing inside its Pixel phone for 2019. A neural network is something you might have seen mentioned a time or two, but the concept isn't explained very often. Instead, it can seem like some Google-level computer mumbo-jumbo that resembles magic. It's not, and the idea behind a neural network is actually pretty easy to wrap your head around.

Neural networks collect and process information in a way that resembles the human brain.

Neural networks are groups of algorithms modeled after the human brain. Not how a brain looks or even works, but how it processes information. A neural network takes sensory data through what's called machine perception — data collected and transferred through external sensors, like a camera sensor — and recognizes patterns.

These patterns are numbers called vectors. All the outside data from the "real" world, including images, sounds, and text, are translated into a vector and classified and cataloged as data sets. Think of a neural network as an extra layer on top of things stored on a computer or phone and that layer contains data about what it all means — how it looks, what it sounds like, what it says, and when it happened. Once a catalog is built, new data can be classified and compared to it.

A real-world example helps it all make more sense. NVIDIA makes processors that are very good at running neural networks. The company spent a lot of time scanning and copying photos of cats into the network, and once finished the cluster of computers through the neural network could identify a cat in any photo that had one in it. Small cats, big cats, white cats, calico cats, even mountain lions or tigers were cats because the neural network had so much data about what a cat "was".

With that example in mind, it's not difficult to understand why Google would want to harness this power inside a phone. A Neural Core that is able to interface with a large catalog of data would be able to identify what your camera lens is seeing and then decide what to do. Maybe the data about what it sees and what it expects could be passed to an image processing algorithm. Or maybe the same data could be fed to Assistant to identify a sweater or apple. Or maybe you could translate written text even faster and more accurate than Google does it now.

It's not a stretch to think that Google could design a small chip that could interface with a neural network and the image processor inside a phone and it's easy to see why it would want to do it. We're not sure exactly what the Pixel Neural Core is or what it might be used for, but we will certainly know more once we see the phone and the actual details when it's "officially" announced.

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