Year: 2019

Samsung decided to forgo the Mobile World Congress pomp and circumstance, instead opting to through its own part last week in San Francisco. I’ve been carrying around Galaxy S10 for a few days now, so more on that soon. In this meantime, here’s the device everyone is really interested.

As promised, the Galaxy Fold was on display at the company’s booth this morning, but it was protected by security rope and thick panes of glass, like so many carbonited Han Solos. Not folding and unfolding — just static, playing videos while throngs of reporters elbowed one another, joking for a bit of space.

It’s not a production device just yet. And honestly, it’s not the kind of display that engenders a lot of faith that the product will be coming to market in just under two months. At least it’s a step ahead of where we saw it late last year.

In the meantime, there’s this new video from Samsung. It’s a highly controlled “demo” of the voice, devoid of soundtrack (with some ASMRy sound effects). It shows more of the Fold than we’ve seen so far — which, granted, isn’t a particularly high bar, as far as these things go. You can, however, see folding and unfolding, the same Wireless Power Share feature you’ll find on the S10 and DeX functionality for bringing contact to an event larger screen via USB-C.

You can also catch glimpses of the App Continuity feature, which picks up your workflow where you left off, event as you switch between screens. But again, how that sort of thing plays out in person vs a video shot and edited by Samsung is a different question altogether. The positioning of the product at MWC leave one wondering whether the company has worked through all of the software kinks.

At least we we can the hardware exists in the world. We know there four of the things in the world, each of which was on display behind glass (two with the screen facing out and two with the rear). We also know that, like Huawei’s device, the fold crease is highly visible when the light catches it. How much of an impact that will ultimately have on, say, the movie viewing experience is another one of those open questions.

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But Samsung is a big company with a lot of resources, and it’s got roughly two months to make sure everything is in working order on the device. Given the $1,899 starting price, it no doubt wants to get everything right. The clock is ticking. 

Robotics have long been a bit of a white whale for Qualcomm. The burgeoning field is a pretty logical next step for the chipmaker, which seems to have its foot in every other aspect of electronics, these days.

We’ve seen a few robotics here and there that support the company’s chips — Anki, Sony and iRobot have all utilizes them in products to date. . Today at MWC, however, Qualcomm announced a more aggressive push into the field with the Robotics RB3 Platform.

The SDA/SDM845-based platform builds on past learnings in the fields of robotics and drones to develop a set of hardware and software tools designed specifically to develop future robots. Among the things the system-on-chip offering brings to the table are LTE connectivity (5G robots will have to wait, apparently), Qualcomm’s AI engine and sensor processing for things like mapping and navigation.

“With the Qualcomm Robotics RB3 Platform, we aim to bring our cutting-edge AI,” Qualcomm’s Dev Singh said in a release tied to the news, “edge compute and connectivity technologies into the hands of many more robotics innovators to help spur the fast development and commercialization of a new generation of useful and intelligent robots in agriculture, consumer, delivery, inspection, service, smart manufacturing/Industry 4.0, warehousing and logistics, and other applications.”

Along with Qualcomm’s own software offerings, the system is set to work with Amazon’s recently announced AWS RoboMaker and Ubuntu.

Anki, Misty and JD are among the already-announced early adopters of the platform, which is currently available as a dev kit. Commercial applications are set to arrive later this year.

Qualcomm today announced new 4g and 5g chipsets for connected vehicles. The chip maker sees the advanced communication platforms powering the next wave of in-vehicle experiences and telematics features including advanced automotive safety features and self-driving cars. Qualcomm says vehicles equipped with these chipsets are planned for production in 2021.

The Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive 4G and Qualcomm Snapdragon Automotive 5G Platform feature C-V2X direct communications, high-precision multi-frequency global navigation satellite system (HP-GNSS) and RF Front-End (RFFE) functionalities — basically, the chipsets will give vehicles next level positioning capabilities.
Along with improved positioning, vehicles equipped with these Snapdragon platforms gain vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications.

The Snapdragon Automotive 5G chipset is the first in the industry announced with support for dual SIM dual active — or DSDA, for short.

Qualcomm says it intends to give automakers the ability to test the platforms with a reference design kit in the second half of 2019.

It’s through chipsets like these that vehicles will gain autonomous driving capabilities. Without advanced, reliable connectivity, vehicles will not have access to the data needed to navigate across the ever-evolving urban landscape. While current systems are being used to some level of success, improved connectivity is ultimately needed to make good on the promise of self-driving cars.

Qualcomm wants to create a new device category, XR viewer headsets, that combine the compute power of its current Snapdragon 855 platform with the speed of 5G on a smartphone to provide you with mobile VR and AR experiences — or ‘Extended Reality,’ as Qualcomm likes to call it — with six degrees of freedom tracking. The company announced this new initiative at MWC in Barcelona and noted that it expects OEMs like Pico to launch devices later this year.

The idea here is that the headsets will be tethered to a smartphone via a USB-C connection that drives high-res displays, with a lot of the content being streamed over — ideally – a 5G connection.

The headsets are an extension of the company’s previous XR work which mostly focused on using a phone’s camera’s and displays to power AR experiences. The company did start an accelerator program for head mounted displays (HMD), the aptly named HMD accelerator program, back in 2017. In many ways, today’s announcement is an extension of this work.

“Our HMD Accelerator Program has been a critical catalyst for ecosystem partners ranging from component suppliers and ODMs, to bring quality standalone XR headsets to consumers,” said Hugo Swart, senior director, Product Management, Qualcomm. “Building upon the momentum of this program, we will extend this to XR viewers and compatible smartphones, starting with smartphones enabled by the Snapdragon 855 Mobile Platform.”

Qualcomm has signed up a number of platform and software partners like Arvizio, NetEase-AR, Iconic Engine, NextVR, SenseTime and Wikitude, as well as manufacturers like Acer and Asus.

Oppo VP Brian Shen took to Weibo today to unveil the company’s foldable phone concept. It looks like the same kit used by Huawei and it’s unclear if Oppo will release the device. Shen notes the company doesn’t think a foldable phone improves the user experience, which is why the company is hesitant to move the device into production.

This is a smart move from the Chinese phone company.

Oppo VP Brian Shen says the company is observing the response from consumers before releasing its foldable phone to consumers.

Samsung and Huawei touted their foldable phones as the next great thing while the general response has been tepid at best. Foldable phones, at their core, offer the same features as standard phones and rely on the imagination of the user to create a killer use case. And without a killer use case, foldable phones will never take off.

As the rate of smartphone sales continues to slow down and decline, a software startup called KaiOS — which launched in 2017 from the ashes of Mozilla’s failed Firefox OS mobile project as a provider of an internet-based feature phone OS, feature phone apps, and corresponding HTML5 app store that all work mobile data networks — is betting that there is still a big, lucrative market for cheaper, lower-end feature phones, and it’s announcing a slew of news this week on the road to leading it.

With 85 million phones now shipped in more than 100 markets with handset brands like Nokia and India’s Jio, KaiOS now has an expanded partnership to put more Google services natively into KaiOS phones, specifically deeper integration with Google Assistant and Google Maps, and the debut of a YouTube app — one of the most popular apps of all on smartphones — for KaiOS. For context, KaiOS raised $22 million from Google last year and had already worked to put basic Assistant and Maps functionality on its phones. (We also understand KaiOS is on the cusp of another big round.)

Alongside this, KaiOS is launching several new handsets with feature phone handset makers; deals for KaiOS-powered phones with developing market carriers Ooredoo and Orange; and the launch of several new services: its first advertising SDK, KaiAds; and Life, a suite of services for first-time mobile service users to help them fiure out how to use their phones and provide content and functionality around things like mobile banking and access to health, education and other services.

While the main mobile story in the last 10 years has been about the ineluctable rise of smartphones boosted by Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android, and a huge range of handset makers using the latter to push the boundaries ever more on what it means to have a portable computer in your pocket, KaiOS Sebastien Codeville says that this does not tell the whole story.

In developing markets, it’s about offering something less expensive than smartphones but loading them with all the features that a smartphone affords, a crucial way of bridging the digital divide in places where a phone will be a person’s only way to access the internet.

“Yes, smartphones are quite affordable as the least expensive models are now priced at around $35, but KaiOS is $15-20. It’s still half the price of a smartphone,” he said in an interview. “There are 2G feature phones priced at $7-8 dollars, but they don’t have access to most mobile services. KaiOS is something in between.” It also helps that KaiOS is easy on battery life, with a handset typically able to last five days on one charge.

In more mature markets, it’s about picking off specific categories of users who have not been well addressed by smartphone makers. “Seniors are looking for phones with keyboards because of dexterity issues. The use of a touch panel is not easy for them,” he said. “And manual workers might be looking for more rugged products, and others may just want companion phones that can help them mostly disconnect on the weekend, or can be used for sports. Smartphones are not good solutions for these, either.”

This, in fact, is why a company like Google, whose Android operating system has helped to usher in the existence of the sub-$50 smartphone, is working with KaiOS. “We are a distribution platform to customers that they cannot access,” said Codeville. Nevertheless, he admits that Android is also KaiOS’s biggest competitor, too.

Android may be a rival, but it’s also guiding force for KaiOS. Up to now, the feature phone startup has made small revenues from licensing, said Codeville, but the business model for KaiOS is mostly focused around revenues from its app store, and soon from what it hopes will be a lot of advertising around content and apps that people use through the KaiOS browser, in the form of KaiAds.

Available to developers in the form of an SDK, this is a supply-side platform that will tailor ads to work specifically on KaiOS and other feature phones, a segment that hasn’t really been addressed that well up to now because so many feature phones have smaller screens compared to smartphones, and have not really been designed to work with internet-based services. One of the key features of KaiAds, the company says, is that it renders ads in 200 milliseconds or less.

If advertising is KaiOS’s stick, then its suite of ‘how-to’ content and services, Life, will be the carrot, so to speak. Codeville would not go so far as to say that this is the company’s effort at corporate social responsibility — “We’re just a startup,” he protested — but he did confirm that the service does serve a dual purpose. It’s not just an effort to get people more acquainted with using the services, but in doing so, it will help grease the wheels of KaiOS’s business model.

“If we want to be sustainable and have a long term life of our own, we have to develop the monetization,” he said. Life, he added, will be very localised and will roll out country by country, likely starting with regions in Africa.

It’s only been a few weeks since Google brought the Assistant to Google Maps to help you reply to messages, play music and more. This feature first launched in English and will soon start rolling out to all Assistant phone languages. In addition, Google also today announced that the Assistant will come to Android Messages, the standard text messaging app on Google’s mobile operating system, in the coming months.

If you remember Allo, Google’s last failed messaging app, then a lot of this will sound familiar. For Allo, after all, Assistant support was one of the marquee features. The different, though, is that for the time being, Google is mostly using the Assistant as an additional layer of smarts in Messages while in Allo, you could have full conversations with a special Assistant bot.

In Messages, the Assistant will automatically pop up suggestion chips when you are having conversations with somebody about movies, restaurants and the weather. That’s a pretty limited feature set for now, though Google tells us that it plans to expand it over time.

What’s important here is that the suggestions are generated on your phone (and that may be why the machine learning model is limited, too, since it has to run locally). Google is clearly aware that people don’t want the company to get any information about their private text chats. Once you tap on one of the Assistant suggestions, though, Google obviously knows that you were talking about a specific topic, even though the content of the conversation itself is never sent to Google’s servers. The person you are chatting with will only see the additional information when you push it to them.

At MWC Barcelona, Google today made a few announcements around its Assistant. A lot of these center around support for KaiOS, the operating system for low-end feature phones that Google invested in last year, and additional language support.

While KaiOS, which was born out of Mozilla’s failed FirefoxOS project, may be for the very low end of low-end phones, Google argues that it’s exactly these devices that can profit from have access to a voice-driven assistant, given that they often have smaller screens, too, that make typing a hassle. Google is now bringing the Assistant to these KaiOS devices for users in India, Indonesia, Mexico and Brazil. In addition, it’s also bringing Voice Typing to KaiOS to help user enter text using their voice. With this, KaiOS users can simply speak their queries and use the Assistant as a way to input all kinds of information.

“If you look at the emerging markets, we’ve seen that the number of Assistant users has multiplied by seven,” Google’s Behshad Behzadi said. “The main reason for this is that for the new users which are coming to this technology for the first time, voice is really the easiest and most natural way for them to use their phones. It’s removing a technology barrier for these users.”

With today’s launch, Google is also bringing support for its bilingual Assistant to more languages. This allows you to seamlessly switch between two languages. Until now, this only worked for English, Spanish, German, French, Japanese and Italian. Today, the company is adding Korean, Hindi, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch to this lineup.

In addition, the Assistant now speaks eight new Indic languages: Marathi, Bengali, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam and Urdu.

Besides the new languages, Google is also bringing Actions — Google’s version of what Amazon calls skills in the Alex ecosystem — to Android Go and KaiOS. Developers can build these actions in 19 languages across 29 locales now.

Google also quietly launched a few other new Assistant features today. You can now check in to your Lufthansa, Swiss or Austrian Air flights within Europe using your voice, for example. The Assistant on your phone can now also control the Digital Wellbeing settings like your wind-down time and ‘do not disturb’ mode (in English, German and French). And if you speak German or French, then multiple actions — which allow you to tell the Assistant to perform more than one action at a time (“What’s the weather like in Munich and Bordeaux?”) — are now available to you, too. Until now, this feature was only available in English.

Two years ago, aspect ratios were all the rage. These days, it’s 5G and foldable all the way down, making the Xperia 1 a bit of a throwback. These days, the company’s getting even longer, with a 21:9 display on Sony’s new flagship.

The idea is to make things as cinematic as is possible for a 6.5 inch smartphone, keeping the dimensions closer to the way filmmakers shoot. The screen is a 4K HDR OLED that leverages the Master Monitor color reproduction Sony developed for films.

It’s a marked change for Sony, which largely relies on camera innovations to help stand out from the pack. Of course, there’s a bit of that in here too. The handset is capable of shooting video in 4K HDR at 24FPS in the 21:9 formate. Given that it’s not currently a particularly popular aspect ratio for handsets at this point, you can alway switch to something a bit more common.

As for content, Sony says it’s working with a number of providers to customize things, including Netflix, Amazon Prime and YouTube on the video side and Gameloft, 10 Cent and Fortnite developer Epic for games.

The handset will be available in late-Spring. Pricing is still TBD.

Sony also took the opportunity to launch a pair of mid-range phones, the Xperia 10 and Xperia 10 Plus. Both handset sport the 21:9 aspect ratio on 6.0 and 6.5 inch handsets, respectively. Those devices run $359 and $430. They’ll be arriving in the U.S. March 18.

“Roma” took home three Academy Awards tonight — though not Best Picture, which went to “Green Book.”

Alfonso Cuarón did win an Oscar for directing the film — his second victory in the category, following his previous award for “Gravity.” And it marks the fifth time in six years that Best Director has gone to one of the “Three Amigos,” a trio of acclaimed Mexican directors that also includes Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro Iñárritu.

“Roma” is based on Cuarón’s childhood in Mexico City, as told through the eyes of the family’s maid Cleo. It went went into the night with 10 nominations, tying “The Favourite” for the most nods. Ultimately, it won the awards for Best Cinematography, Best Foreign Film and Best Director.

“Being up here doesn’t get old,” Cuarón said as he went up to accept Best Director. He went on to thank the Academy for recognizing “a film centered around an indigenous woman — one of the 70 million domestic workers in the world without work rights, a character that had been historically relegated to the background in cinema.”

Netflix spent an estimated $25 to $30 million to campaign for “Roma” — a particularly impressive sum since the film cost $15 million to make. The company also dropped its previous insistence on simultaneously releasing films on streaming and in theaters. (The exclusive theatrical window of just a few weeks still wasn’t enough to win over the major theater chains.)

Well hold on, these best picture announcements aren’t always 100 percent right

— Mike Ryan (@mikeryan) February 25, 2019

While “Roma” was the big streaming success story for the night, Netflix’s “Period. End of Sentence.” won for Best Documentary (Short Subject). The streamer’s “Ballad of Buster Scruggs” also received three nominations, though it didn’t win in any category.

Meanwhile, Hulu’s “Minding the Gap” was nominated for Best Documentary Feature, but lost to “Free Solo.”

Beyond the streaming news, “Black Panther” was the first superhero movie to be nominated for Best Picture. Ultimately, it took home the awards for Best Costume Design, Best Production Design and Best Original Score. Also on the superhero front: “Spider-Man: Into the Spiderverse” won for Best Animated Feature.

And since I’ve written about “First Man” — hey, it won for Best Visual Effects!

The awards were given out at a ceremony without a host — for only the second time in Oscar history. Instead of a monologue, there was a montage highlighting all kinds of movies from the past year, and then Tina Fey, Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph came out to make a few host-style jokes before presenting the award for Best Supporting Actress.