Tech news in brief

ReMarkable’s first e-ink tablet, launched in 2017, certainly was a remarkable product, but it did have some major flaws, like an unstable system, poor usability and a hefty price tag (USD500). Even so, the tablet did have its niche of aficionados. Today, it’s back, in a new and improved version.

Chinese company Nubia has announced a new phone designed for gamers, the Red Magic 5G, with an internal cooling fan, just like a good old PC! The device has a 6.65-inch 2340×1080 144Hz OLED display (notice the record-breaking frequency). Other specs of this well-endowed phone include a…

Thursday, Microsoft released a fix for a critical security flaw that allows attackers to remotely execute malicious code that can spread from one vulnerable machine to another without user interaction. The flaw, in version 3 of Microsoft’s implementation of the Server Message Block protocol, is…

Corellium is a company that supplies an iOS simulator which is especially used by security researchers. It is in trouble with Apple, which accuses it of copyright infringement. But that hasn’t stopped Corellium from persevering and presenting a new project, Sandcastle, which will run Android on an…

Samsung unveiled a range of productivity monitors for home and office use, with a curvature of 1000R (the curvature of a circle with a radius of 1 meter). Called the T55 series, these new monitors adapt a concept that Samsung applied to gaming monitors earlier this year. They all have a refresh…

After the cancellation of the Mobile World Congress, now the Game Developers Conference, scheduled for March 16 to 20 in San Francisco, is threatened by Coronavirus Disease. Though the organizer maintains that the conference will go on, an increasing number of big industry players are canceling…

Sony unveiled the next version of its Xperia 1 high-end Android phone. Named Xperia 1 II, it is the first Sony device to support 5G connectivity. Like the previous generation, it has a 6.5-inch OLED screen (3840×1644) and its size is almost identical (166×72×7.9mm), but the other essential features…

A team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered a powerful new antibiotic compound using a machine learning algorithm. The computer model, which can screen over one hundred million chemicals in a few days, is designed to spot potential antibiotics. It was trained using…

Engineers love Python, JavaScript, and Java. Employers, on the other hand, shine their light on Go. That’s the takeaway of the Hottest Coding Languages section of job site Hired‘s annual State of Software Engineers report. Engineers experienced with Go received an average of 9.2 interview requests…

When a car’s basic function (i.e. rolling forward) relies on network connectivity, you can end up as roadkill on the information superhighway. This is what happened to the tech reporter at the English daily The Guardian. Kari Paul had planned on spending the weekend in rural California, about three…

Dismal news for the mobile industry: with the ongoing 2019-nCoV epidemic and last week’s announcement by LG that it wouldn’t attend MWC 2020, other companies followed suit: AT&T, Amazon, BT, Ericsson, Deutsche Telekom, Cisco, Intel, Facebook, HMD Global, Nokia, Sprint, Verizon, Sony, MediaTek…

After the Galaxy S10, we assumed we’d be getting the S11. But Samsung’s marketing geniuses had a brainwave: the S20. This new high-end phone comes in three sizes: S20 (6.2 inches), S20+ (6.7 inches) and S20 Ultra (6.92 inches). While display size varies, resolution stays the same, at 3200×1440…

The Mobile World Congress, to be held in Barcelona from February 24 to 27, is the world’s largest mobile technology event. Just about every major builder attends, organizing press conferences to unveil new products. However, some of them are rethinking their attendance due to the new coronavirus…

GeForce Now, the cloud-based gaming service for Windows, macOS and Android, is now open to all after a months-long closed beta. Unlike Google Stadia, this service is based on the BYOGame concept: you can use it to play any game you’ve bought off of various platforms like Steam or Epic Games Store.

Chinese phone-maker TCL tweeted on Monday that it would stop selling BlackBerry phones as of August 31. TCL has been making BlackBerry-branded Android phones with physical keyboards since December 2016, but will not be renewing its brand license — due to a trade dispute? — as it increasingly…

You have to be plucky, and maybe a little insane, to try to imagine a phone outside of the iOS/Android ecosystem, especially when you’re a small enterprise with limited means. Yet that’s exactly what Purism has done: the maker of open-source laptops has developed Librem 5, an open-source…

JetBrains, the software company best known for its integrated development environments, Kotlin language and continuous integration tool TeamCity, has developed a monospace font optimized to reduce developers’ visual fatigue. Since developers spend most of their time writing and reading code, the…

Microsoft announced today that future Office365 Pro Plus installs and updates will include a Chrome extension that forcibly changes the default search engine to Microsoft’s own search engine, Bing. Yes, you read that right. What’s more, it will do so without warning. Sysadmins can’t wait! If your…

Cruise, a subsidiary of General Motors specializing in autonomous vehicles, unveiled Origin, its first car to function without human intervention. The electric vehicle with no steering wheel, pedals or even a dashboard was designed with space and comfort in mind, unlike other autonomous vehicles…

According to The Wall Street Journal, Amazon is considering equipping its bricks-and-mortar stores (Amazon Go, Amazon Books, Amazon 4-star, Whole Foods) with a system to let customer pay for purchases by scanning their palms. Last December, the US Patent and Trademark Office publicly disclosed a…

Microsoft has been carbon neutral since 2012, canceling out its emissions by purchasing renewable energy and carbon offsets. Today, the company committed to becoming carbon negative by 2030, meaning that it plans to draw down more planet-heating carbon dioxide than it emits. It has even said that…

Google is planning to phase out support for third-party cookies in Chrome within two years. The announcement only comes after similar updates by Chrome’s main competitors, but is still a big win for privacy advocates, who have long decried the use of cookies, which allow companies to quietly track…

Microsoft addressed a severe bug (CVE-2020-0601) in Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016/19 reported by the NSA that allows an attacker to spoof the digital signature tied to a specific piece of software. Such a weakness could be abused by attackers to make malware appear to be a benign program that…

Panasonic has unveiled some prototypes of virtual reality glasses that break away from the usual ski goggle design. These very cool steampunk welder’s glasses are also the first to offer HDR (High Dynamic Range) images thanks to ultra-high definition (UHD) micro-OLED panels co-developed by…

SelfieType is a virtual keyboard developed by Samsung’s C-Lab that uses your phone’s front camera in tandem with AI to analyze the movement of your fingers as you type on an imaginary keyboard, and convert the information into QWERTY keyboard entries. The system requires no further hardware, and is…

Typhoon game development studio was founded in Montreal in early 2018 by Ubisoft’s former creative director for Far Cry 4 and two former employees of Warner Brothers Games Montreal who worked on Batman: Arkham. Recently, Typhoon was acquired by Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming division launched last…

Microsoft’s next-generation Xbox Series X will be unveiled ahead of the E3 Expo, which will take place in Los Angeles starting on June 9, 2020. Xbox Series X is the new, official name of the Xbox Scarlett. This powerful console will have a resolution of 4K at 60 fps, ramping up to 8K or 120 fps.

After a complete teardown, iFixit gave the new Mac Pro a 9 out of 10 for repairability, which is unheard-of from them for an Apple product. Apple’s latest phone got a mediocre 6 out of 10, while its last few laptops did even worse, including a paltry 1 out of 10 for the 16-inch MacBook Pro 2019.

Created by Finnish company Rovio Mobile Oy, the mobile game that went on to take the world by storm was launched for iPhone and iPad on December 11, 2009, 18 months after the debut of the iOS App Store. After selling over 12 million copies on iOS, the game was ported to several other platforms of…

While Apple likes to tout its experience designs and user interfaces, it is not above your odd fail. Take Apple TV’s remote, which is a disaster of usability and intuitiveness. Sure, it’s understatedly elegant (and probably designed by Jonathan Ive), but you can’t tell its head from its tail in a…

At its Snapdragon Tech Summit in Maui, Hawaii, the chip builder Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 7c and 8c, two new processors inaugurating a new line of ARM chips for Windows laptops. The 8c is positioned as the successor to the Snapdragon 850 processor, Qualcomm’s second-generation ARM Windows…

Motorola has unveiled a nice little mid-range phone, the One Hyper. It comes with a camera with a 64Mpx image sensor, a 32Mpx pop-up selfie camera, 4Gb of RAM, 128Gb of storage (1Tb with a microSD chip), and a Qualcomm Snapdragon 675 with an octa-core Kryo 460 2GHz processor. It runs on Android 10.

After the USB-C port problem, the Raspberry Pi 4 is facing a new bug. Users of the mini computer are puzzling over an issue where setting some display resolutions have the side-effect of killing the Wi-Fi connection. The problem was noticed by developer Enrico Zini, who is working on a digital…

Twitter has a problem: new Twitterers are having a hard time finding a username that’s simple and isn’t already taken. To solve this problem and free up hundreds of thousands of names, Twitter decided to purge all inactive accounts, i.e. those whose owners haven’t logged in six months.

“Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace,” said Nixon in 1969. Or is that in 2019? The nightmare scenario we warned against, back in August 2018, has materialized (Putting words in people’s mouths, Supasorn Suwajanakorn, Steven…

The team behind this product had already made macrophotography lenses back in 2016. Now, they’re back, with a more advanced product, the DIPLE, which promises true microscope quality to examine all manner of microorganisms, bacteria, and even all the cooties living on your keyboard. DIPLE provides…

Google has added a useful little feature to its search engine. Just type “How do you pronounce” in the query bar, followed by the word you’ve been wondering about, and Google Search will say it out loud for you, in American or British English (and soon in Spanish!). It can also pronounce…

What is the creator of Linux and Git, Linus Torvalds, doing these days? Well, he’s spending his life responding to email, and the major part of his role as “benevolent dictator for life” consists in saying “no”, he said to Dirk Hohndel, VP of VMware in charge of open source, during a chat at Open…

Though it’s still a month away from launch date (November 19), Google’s new gaming service is already over-successful: the company has announced that it will not be able to honor all preorders. To be one of the lucky first users of the service, you had to purchase the USD130 Founder’s Edition pack…

Researchers at Microsoft are working on new virtual reality technologies that let users stay fully immersed in a virtual world while walking around in the real world. Wearing the DreamWalker, you’ll be able to walk down your street while seeing an entirely different virtual environment; the…

Google launched the fourth generation of its Pixel phones. The latest Pixel is free of surprises, since it has no new, revolutionary features, and the specs were leaked long ago. While the Pixel 4 is a souped-up version of the 3, the price remains unchanged: the basic model starts at CAD1,000, with…

Analogue, already known for its sleek video game consoles compatible with Sega Master System and Super Nintendo, has announced a new, portable product: the Analogue Pocket, basically a luxury clone of the Game Boy. The Pocket is compatible with the Game Boy, Game Boy Color and Game Boy Advance…

Google announced a new Chrome OS laptop, the Pixelbook Go. When open, the device looks a lot like a MacBook, with its large trackpad and a strip of speaker grills flanking either side of the keyboard. The big design difference is on the outside of the device, with a grippy, ribbed pad on the bottom…

Ubuntu’s next version (19.10, “Eoan Ermine”) will support ZFS in its installer, making it the first Linux distribution to offer native support for this first-class file system. But support will be “experimental” at first – i.e. do not install on production systems! The ZFS system provides many…

Despite the flop of its first phone, the PH–1, and massive lay-offs, Essential, founded and led by Andy Rubin, the “father of Android”, unveiled a new phone. The unmistakable Gem is an oddly-shaped device that looks like a remote control. Andy has posted several photos on his Twitter account of…

Probably named after the lovable little fish in Finding Nemo, this little submarine drone is just 20cm wide and carries a F1.6 camera lens and a 1/2.9" CMOS sensor capable of recording at 1080p. It’s field of view is 100°, and a ±45° Tilt-Lock mode allows you to scan the floor of a body of water or…

The time when Tesla reliably missed its production targets seems to be well in the past. Indeed, Elon Musk’s company has set new production and delivery records for the third quarter of 2019, with 96,155 vehicles built and 97,000 delivered (95,200 in Q2). The figures, released last Wednesday, also…

No, we’re not talking about shuffling the Four Seasons on your telephone. We’re talking about the browser named after the great Venetian composer, developed by former Opera employees, with admittedly low market share despite the software’s many qualities. This elegant multiplatform desktop browser…

The Boston Dynamics videos showing their robots performing their latest tricks are like chocolate: we just can’t get enough. So here’s the latest, showing the famous bipedal robot, Atlas, doing his morning calisthenics. Jumps, handstands, spins, somersaults… he puts us to shame. The 80kg robot with…

After a disastrous launch in February, the foldable Samsung phone is back in an improved, more robust and hopefully problem-free version. Indeed, the early buyers and reporters who had gotten their hands on the early devices found the display quickly gave out, sometimes on the first day of use, a…

HTC is releasing its PC-powered Vive Cosmos VR headset next month. Originally unveiled earlier this year at CES, the Cosmos is HTC’s latest bid at a mainstream VR headset. The Cosmos does not require external sensors and uses six video sensors for motion tracking. HTC has also upgraded the LCD…

At Apple’s latest Keynote, new technological developments were to be found in the chips aisle. First, there was the A13, which will grace the new generation of iPhones. This is the second generation of Apple ARM SoCs with the 7-nanometer TSMC process. The A13 has six CPU cores, two “performance”…

IEEE Spectrum has published its sixth annual ranking of the top programming languages. Their methodology combines data for 11 metrics from 8 different sources and then categorizes them by domain, since a language that’s a cornerstone of one programming domain might be utterly irrelevant in another.

Everyone agrees that the worst thing about Android is not getting version updates in a timely manner, or at all, if you don’t have a Google phone. If you don’t own a Pixel but still want to know more about the new, sugar-free Android 10, Ron Amadeo of Ars Technica has produced a digest of all the…

The 8K Association (8KA) was created at the beginning of this year by industry actors like Samsung, TCL, Hisense, Panasonic and Tencent. Its goal is to set specifications for future 8K displays and to stamp 8k-compliant computer or television screens with a distinctive seal. 8KA seeks to avoid a…

Back in the 60s, Bell Labs was collaborating with MIT and General Electric on a “time sharing” project called Multiplexed Information and Computing Service (Multics). Computers at the time were so expensive that it made sense to share a single computer’s resources among multiple users. When, in…

In a post shared on Weibo on August 27, Chinese manufacturer Realme unveiled the Realme XT, a phone with a 64Mpx camera which will probably use Samsung’s new sensor, the Isocell Bright GW1. The Realme XT comes with a 6.4-inch screen (1080x2340), a Snapdragon 712 and 4GB of RAM. The next day, on…

Stephen Cass of IEEE Spectrum did a short interview with Eben Upton, the creator of the popular Raspberry Pi. Upton explained how the design of the mini-computer has evolved to meet the needs of an increasing number of professional developers and engineers who use the Pi for prototyping and…

Wafer Scale Engine (WSE), the chip developed by California startup Cerebras and introduced at Stanford University’s Hot Chips conference, is a mastodon. In fact, it’s the largest ever built, with a surface of 46.22cm2, 400,000 cores and a whopping 18GB of SRAM. This behemoth is intended for AI…

Less than half of Google searches now result in a click, according to a report by Rand Fishkin of digital marketing company SparkToro. And the figure for mobile searches is even worse, with two-thirds of all searches coming up clickless. In the second half of 2019, for mobile and desktop searches…

Microsoft announced the release of Azure Dedicated Host. It gives you the option of leasing a physical server just for yourself to host one or more Azure virtual machines. This means that you don’t share any resources on this server with anyone else and you have full control over what is running on…

Though the market for Android tablets has not been very kind to Samsung, the company perseveres. It has announced a high-end tablet, the US$ 650 Galaxy Tab S6. The device, which has kept the 10.5-inch Super AMOLED display (2,560 × 1,600 pixels), features a Snapdragon 855 2.84 GHz processor, 6GB of…

Drone delivery is not yet fully developed and this raises legitimate questions about safety. For example, Swiss Post suspended its pilot drone-delivery project following a second crash. For nearly a year, Swiss Post and California startup Matternet were working on a drone delivery service in three…

A leaked internal Windows 10 build (18,947) has revealed a brand new Start menu experience that replaces tiles with a more traditional grid of apps on a grey background. This Start menu, which looks like it’s still in the early stages of development, is believed to be the Start menu that Microsoft…

Apple is in the final stages of negotiations to buy the bulk of Intel’s modem chip business, The Wall Street Journal reports. The Journal says the deal, valued at $1 billion or more, could be finalized in the next week. The deal would involve the transfer of talent as well as modem-related patents.

Barsys, the robotic mixologist, is the perfect party host. It can hold 5 bottles of alcohol and has 3 insulated tanks for mixers (soda, carbonated water or fruit juice). You can control it with a phone or a tablet, via Bluetooth. The application (iOS and Android) offers cocktails based on the…

In August 2018, a reporter for The Intercept revealed that Google was working on an Android search engine for the Chinese market. Responding to the demands of the country’s authorities, the application was supposed to block searches on human rights, peaceful protests, political dissent, democracy…

Alan Turing, the mathematician who helped crack the Enigma machine code during World War II and who pioneered computing and artificial intelligence, will appear on the new GBP50 banknote (CAD82, EUR55). The mathematician was chosen from among 989 scientists, in a decision that recognizes both his…

Nintendo unveiled a more affordable version of its Switch gaming console, which has sold more than 35 million units. Called Switch Lite, it’s for mobile use only (it can’t be plugged into a TV) and costs USD100 less than its older sibling. Also, Joy-Con controllers are built-in. Its screen is a…

SimBlock is a blockchain simulator developed by Kazuyuki Shudo, associate professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, which allows users to easily experiment with the functioning of Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dogecoin and soon, Ethereum. It runs on any computer that supports Java and allows users to…

Euro NCAP is the organization that tests the safety of new vehicles sold in Europe. Based on crash tests, it rates vehicles on a scale of zero to five stars. The Tesla Model 3 got a perfect score of 5 stars. The video below shows the crash tests on the Model 3, as well as tests of its active safety…

The 10th version of the Android OS, dubbed “Q”, is expected to release in its definitive form in Q3 of this year. Reporters from Ars Technica sat down at length with Dave Burke, VP of engineering for Android, Iliyan Malchev, principal engineer at Android, and Anwar Ghuloum, senior director of…

Sony is celebrating the 40th birthday of one of its most iconic products, the Walkman: the first portable music player ever. Released on July 1st, 1979, it revolutionized the way we listen to music, even though we don’t use cassettes or CDs anymore. Nearly every mobile device we carry now can play…

At the Mobile World Congress in Shanghai, Chinese builder Oppo unveiled the first-ever phone to have a camera hidden under the screen. Gone is the intrusive notch, thanks to a transparent area on the screen that still has pixels and touch sensitivity. Technologically speaking, Oppo used an…

Walmart has confirmed it is using image recognition and AI technologies in over 1,000 stores to fight shoplifting, and checkout errors. The surveillance program, named “Missed Scan Detection” by Walmart, uses cameras to identify items that clients “forget” to scan at the self-checkout, as well as…

Researchers at the University of Washington have developed software that can create a 3D animation from a single image of a person. The Photo Wake-Up algorithm, which relies on artificial intelligence of course, also works with any drawing depicting a person and even with a cubist representation…

What do you do while waiting for your electric car to recharge? Game, of course! And when you have a large touch-screen in your car, it’s so much better than gaming on your phone. This is the idea behind Tesla Arcade, a suite of games available on the cars’ control screen. This feature appeared…

Lumi is a light-up keyboard with 24 colorful keys that ties into an iPad app to teach you to play the piano, sort of like Guitar Hero. Multiple keyboards can be hooked up together for more octaves, and the unit also functions as a standard MIDI input, which is compatible with all of the usual…

As the trade war between the U.S. and China heats up, Foxconn, the Chinese manufacturer of the iPhone and iPad, says that whatever happens, Apple phones will remain available for the American market. While most of Foxconn’s manufacturing occurs in China, where it operates 12 factories spread across…

At the E3 show in Los Angeles, AMD unveiled the first two RDNA-architected 5700-series graphics cards. Available as of July 7, the 5700XT (USD450) and 5700 (USD380) are upper-mid-range cards intended to tackle the ever-popular Nvidia cards for gamers, the GeForce RTX 2070 (USD500) and the RTX 2060…

Stadia, Google’s new cloud-based gaming service, will be available as of November, just in time for the Holidays. To be among the first users of the service, you’ll need to pay USD130 up-front to purchase the Founder’s Edition gamepack (already available for pre-order on the Google Store), which…

At Amazon’s re:MARS Conference in Las Vegas, the retail and cloud giant unveiled a new drone design, the Prime Air, able to fly up to 25 km and deliver packages weighing up to 2.25 kg in under 30 minutes. The new drone is capable of identifying static and moving objects. To detect static objects…

Chances are, you already know of AMD (Advanced Micro Devices) for its Radeon cards. What you perhaps didn’t know is that its graphics technology is also found in the PS4 and Xbox One consoles, and that it will run Stadia, Google’s future cloud gaming service. And, as of tomorrow, AMD’s technology…

Are you spending less time on Facebook? You’re not alone; in fact, you’re part of a trend. According to a study by eMarketer, daily time spent on Facebook declined by 3 minutes among U.S. users in 2018, from 41 minutes in 2017; and usage is expected to further decline in 2019. Debra Aho Williamson…

Asus, the Taiwanese hardware company that started out as a motherboard maker in 1989, is celebrating its 30th birthday by presenting the Prime Utopia, its vision for the future of desktop PCs. The idea is to throw off the shackles of Intel’s ATX motherboard specification, created back in 1995 and…

Panic is a funny little company. Its creators established themselves thanks to their smart utilities for macOS developers, like the Transmit FTP client and the Coda text editor. Next, they conquered iOS with Prompt, an SSH client. Then, they launched into the realm of gaming – hey, why not? – with…

Autonomous delivery vehicles are nothing new: last August, we wrote about the Nuro delivery service in Arizona. But there was always a missing link – the final stretch from car to doorstep. Now, the Ford motor company has teamed up with Agility Robotics, creators of Cassie, to complement its…

Google’s AR glasses are back, in a enterprise-focused version. The latest Google Glass comes with a larger battery (820mAh, up from 570mAh), a Qualcomm Snapdragon XR1 processor (a VR/AR-specific SoC) instead of the previous generation’s Intel Atom, 3GB of RAM, 32GB of storage and an 8MP camera. As…

Google’s Titan Security Keys come in two versions: the USB version for computers and the Bluetooth LE version for IOS and Android devices. The latter version is the one that has revealed a security flaw that is rather embarrassing for a product that is supposed to bolster security. Due to a…

Razer’s BlackWidow is an excellent keyboard that comes in several different versions, including the Huntsman Elite, at USD200. As of this year, you can get a new, more affordable model: the BlackWidow Lite, for USD90. This keyboard doesn’t have a number pad, nor the RGB lights that gamers love, but…

After years of delays and problems with its 10nm processors, which had originally been announced for 2016 (Cannon Lake), Intel announced at an investor conference in Santa Clara that the Ice Lake processors will be widely available as soon as June for laptops. This new platform will provide 3 times…

At the I/O conference, Google announced the new Pixel 3a and 3a XL phones, the more affordable versions of the Pixel 3 and 3 XL. What does the A mean? No-one knows. But the point is that these phones keep the superb, high-end Pixel cameras (including the Google Night Sight feature). To make them…

The current Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a Microsoft-created emulation that translates Linux kernel APIs to Windows NT kernel APIs. It works pretty well, but has a few shortcomings in terms of compatibility and speed. But this will soon be a thing of the past: the new WSL will run a true…

Samsung has unveiled a rotating 43-inch TV that works vertically, allowing millenials to watch their vertically-filmed videos on the largest surface possible. The screen swings from portrait to landscape on inclined navy-blue stand. The company intends to sell the Sero for 1.89 million won…

Chinese manufacturer Nubia unveiled its Red Magic 3, an Android 9 phone for gamers. The device takes 48-megapixel photos, records 8K-videos, and has a super slow-motion mode of up to 1,920fps! In fact, the device works so hard that it comes with a liquid cooling system as well as an internal fan…

Zipline, the company we spoke of back in 2017, has continued its expansion in Africa, consolidating its success in vast countries with transport infrastructures not always adapted to the emergency delivery of medical products. After Rwanda and Tanzania, Zipline has now started operations in Ghana…

Who doesn’t have an old phone they’re not using, because it’s either obsolete or broken and not worth fixing? Why not turn it into wall art? This is what Reddit user TheIncorporeal has done, patiently taking apart an old iPhone, glueing the parts onto glass and framing it. The result is…

How many SpotMini quadruped robots does it take to pull a 26,000-pound truck across a parking lot? Just 10, shows the video that Boston Dynamics released recently. The company announced that these Spot robots are coming off the production line and will soon be available for all kinds of…

Surface Hub 2S is a Microsoft device that is intended for collaborative work in meetings. It combines several features, including a digital whiteboard and video conferencing, and comes with integrated Teams, Skype and OneNote software. The large 50-inch screen has a definition of 4K (3840 × 2560…

In its annual Theatrical Home Entertainment Market Environment report, the Motion Picture Association of America described an immensely sharp drop-off of physical media sales over the past five years. According to the data, global sales of video disc formats (DVD, Blu-ray, and UltraHD Blu-ray) were…

Close to 90,000 developers from all over the world participated in Stack Overflow’s 2019 survey. Here are the main findings: Python is once again the fastest-growing programming language; it is also the second most loved language, behind Rust. The most popular framework of the year is React.js…

Did you know that you can play Atari games on the dashboard display of a Tesla? This feature appeared last year with version 9 of Tesla’s system software. Back then, the initial list of games included Missile Command, Asteroids, Lunar Lander and Centipede. And since December, you can even connect a…

Between 2009 and 2016, in the United States, Office Depot and OfficeMax stores graciously offered their clients a free computer health check-up, using the PC Health Check software developed by Support.com. Problem is, the software was designed to always detect a virus, whether the computer was…

Chris Capossela, head of Marketing at Microsoft, issued a memo warning employees not to indulge in the traditional April Fool’s pranks on Monday, explaining that this kind of very public practical jokes has very little positive impact on the company’s image, and that they can even trigger bad…

Though fast-food companies often cannibalize each other, for instance when Burger King gobbled up Tim Horton’s in 2014 for 14 billion dollars, it is much rarer to see one scooping up a software development company. The fast-food world was therefore surprised when McDonald’s announced it had bought…

JetPack Aviation is taking advance orders for its flying motorcycle called Speeder, promising delivery next year. The aircraft, equipped with four turbojet engines, a stabilization system and a collision detection system, could reach an altitude of 4,500 m and a top speed of 240 km/h. A…

At the Game Developers Conference, Google introduced not a gaming console but Stadia, an online game service, along with an optional game controller. Stadia, which is based on Project Stream, runs games on Google’s servers and streams video on the Internet. Google promises a resolution of up to 4K…

In Los Angeles, Tesla CEO Elon Musk showed off a prototype version of the Model Y, the fourth mass-produced vehicle that the electric car maker will bring to market. As expected, the vehicle will be a larger SUV take on the Model 3, much like the Model X was the larger, SUV version of the Model S.

Razer is launching three new gaming peripherals: a keyboard, a mouse and a headset, all of which are affordable, compared to the usual prices. The low prices don’t mean low quality, but rather reduced functionality in comparison to more expensive models. The mechanical keyboard is an update of…

Google released a beta version of its upcoming Android operating system. The highlights of this release include new privacy and security controls, support for new foldable phones, a sharing menu that finally really works, and a faster application launch. You can only install this first beta version…

Concerned about pollution, police in Fremont, California, have decided to convert their fleet to zero-emission vehicles, starting with no less than the Tesla Model S! Of course, the Tesla catalog doesn’t feature police cars. The administration purchased a second-hand 2014 model for US$ 61,480 and…

Two Azure data centers were brought online in South Africa--one in Cape Town and the other in Johannesburg. This makes Microsoft the first major cloud service provider to enter the African continent. Despite delays (the centers were to open last year), Microsoft still beat Amazon to the finish…

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is back with a new version of its Cheetah robot, the Mini Cheetah, which is unique in being able to do backflips, a first for a quadruped robot. This 9 kg robot is powerful and robust. It can reach speeds of 2.45 m/s (almost 9 km/h). Mini Cheetah…

You can now get a .dev domain name, no doubt the Holy Grail for developers, thanks to Google, which has just opened this extension to all. You can now reserve your .dev domain name through your registrar for the usual price, typically 12 to 15 USD per year. But that’s not all: Google is offering…

Foldable screens aren’t just for telephones anymore. Other applications are being dreamt up, like Nubia Alpha’s smart watch, unveiled at Barcelona’s Mobile World Congress. The eSIM version could be thought of as an Android phone with a 960 x 192 OLED 4-inch screen that wraps around the wrist. But…

At the 2019 Unpacked event in San Francisco, Samsung’s presentation of its new collapsible phone stole the show, leaving the Galaxy S10 and S10 Plus in the shadows. In shut phone mode, the device has a screen of 4.6 inches (840 x 1,960 pixels). Open in tablet mode, it deploys a 7.3-inch Infinity…

Sphero, known for its ball-shaped educational robots such as the Bolt, has introduced a new robot with a completely different design concept. Called RVR, it is a robust little four-wheeled tank with tracks. Unlike other Sphero robots, the RVR is very expandable: thanks to a universal expansion port…

Based in Seattle, start-up Xnor presented a prototype wireless mini camera that runs entirely on solar energy and can analyze the image captures. The sensor has a resolution of 320 x 320 pixels and is coupled with an FPGA integrated circuit to process images using artificial intelligence…

Ants in temperate climates use pheromone trails to navigate. But pheromones don’t last in arid climates, on hot, sandy ground. Desert ants have therefore learned to navigate using the only signpost available to them: the sun. Researchers have tried to mimic this strategy to help robots navigate on…

Mozilla is in the process of deploying Clever-Commit, a machine-learning tool dedicated to hunting down bugs. This software was developed in Montreal by Ubisoft La Forge, the game developer’s research lab, in partnership with Concordia University. Clever-Commit analyzes code changes as developers…

The Raspberry Pi Foundation opened a boutique in the Grand Arcade shopping center in the heart of Cambridge, home of the world’s most famous nano-computer. You can buy the Raspberry Pi, of course, but also additional modules, accessories, books, magazines, objects and gadgets bearing the raspberry…

Unicode finalized a list of 230 new emojis for 2019. That might sound like a lot, but if we don’t count the new variations of colors, skin tones and gender, it’s actually only 59. But these are really essential emojis! How have we gotten this far without a cute otter, an endearing sloth, a sly…

According to the security company Trend Micro, Google has removed 29 malicious Android applications from its Google Play Store. These are applications that in appearance improve and transform photos, but in fact hide malicious features. Of the 29 applications, 11 were downloaded more than 100,000…

iRobot, the maker of the Roomba vacuum, announced Terra, its first autonomous lawnmower. While most autonomous lawnmowers require buried wires in order to define the boundaries of the area to be mowed, the Terra only requires wireless beacons around the perimeter of the lawn, which is much simpler…

Gadgets and gizmos have gradually worked their way into our homes. When they break down or need upgrading, we discard them. But there are unforeseen hazards to throwing out (or recycling, if you have a green conscience) a connected object such as a light bulb or a camera. Even without an electrical…

Apple News, the mobile news application launched in 2015 with iOS 9, was initially exclusive to customers in the United States. Since then, it has been made available in Great Britain and in Australia with iOS 9.1. Today, Apple announced that News will be offered in Canada with iOS 12.2, in English…

DxOMark is known for rigourously testing the quality of cameras and smartphones, but until now, it had ignored the front-facing cameras, mainly used for selfies. The new DxOMark Selfie listing, which scores the 12 most popular devices (for now), ranks the Google Pixel 3 and the Samsung Galaxy Note…

OLED (Organic light-emitting diode) screens for laptops are coming sooner than expected. Samsung’s Displays division announced that next month, it will start producing a 15.6-inch, 4K OLED display for premium laptops (OLED displays being much more expensive than LCD ones). The screen has a…

A youtuber, publishing under the pseudonym Electronic Grenade, designed an absurd laptop--a conceptual work of art, in fact. It’s a mouse that houses a computer with a keyboard and a screen, and the mouse-house doubles as the mouse for the mini computer. The machine consists of a Raspberry Pi Zero…

Bocco Emo is the new generation of emotive robots by the Tokyo start-up Yukai, the same one that designed Qoobo, the petting robot. This new little robot expresses its empathy through gestures and sounds, in response to the user’s voice or text messages. It can also react to emojis. When it…

With the long awaited ramp-up of its 10nm production, Intel was finally able to present some exciting new features at CES Las Vegas that will come out in 2019. The major announcement was the release of Ice Lake chips based on the new Sunny Cove microarchitecture. Look for laptops with Ice Lake…

Area-51m, unveiled at CES in Las Vegas, is going for the gamers’ hardware dream: a game-oriented laptop that lets them swap out the processor (CPU), the graphics card (GPU), the storage (HDD) and the memory (RAM). In short, a laptop that offers all the flexibility and scalability of a desktop…

To mark the end of the year, Google is offering a little game in the form of a multiple-choice quiz that lets you test your knowledge (or your hunches) about the most popular Internet searches in 2018. Did users google Justin Trudeau or Justin Bieber? Laurel or Yanny? You have 10 seconds to answer…

According to Bloomberg, next year, LG Electronics plans to start selling a 65-inch TV screen that can, at the touch of a button, roll up and disappear into a box. The device uses OLED technology, which makes for screens that are much more flexible than LCDs. LG showed a functional prototype at CES…

Serve is an experimental robot by Postmates, an American courier delivery company. The future of this kind of delivery robot outside of highly protected environments is doubtful, but with its design that is indubitably reminiscent of Wall-E, its big round eyes and its yellow body, it’s fetching.

SplashData analyzed more than 5 million passwords that were leaked on the Internet, and just like the seven previous years the company has reviewed the data, people continue to set predictable, easy-to-guess passwords that rely on strings of letters and numbers that are close to each other on…

Puma is reissuing a limited edition of its RS-Computer running shoe, originally released in 1986. These shoes, which wouldn’t look out of place in an episode of Stranger Things, had a strange protrusion on the heel of the right shoe that housed an electronic pedometer recording the number of steps…

Cryptocurrencies are undoubtedly an idea before its time, but their potential has yet to show its value. These past weeks have been brutal on the stock market and cryptocurrencies are slipping as well. Ethereum network’s currency, ether, fell below USD 100 for the first time since May 2017. Its…

Qualcomm officially unveiled its new Snapdragon 855 SoC. It will ship with the next generation of top-of-the-line Android phones, most likely starting with the Samsung Galaxy S10. As with Apple’s A12, its 7 nanometer process will make the processor more energy efficient compared to the previous 10…

There’s a lot of talk about self-driving cars, but the revolution has also spread to other modes of transport. In Norway, the Folgefonn, an 85-meter ferry belonging to the Norled company, autonomously sailed to three different ports of call. All maneuvers, including the approach and docking, were…

Microsoft has won a $480 million contract to develop a HoloLens-type augmented reality prototype for use in combat and military training for the US Army. According to Bloomberg, the agreement could eventually lead to the purchase of over 100,000 units that would “increase lethality by enhancing the…

If you’ve been following us, you know how much we’re liking SpotMini, Boston Dynamic’s four-legged critter. So we sat up when we heard of the idea to transform it into some creepy centaur. The Italian startup Youbionic came up with a torso and two arms with hands that mount to the back of a…

Nera is an electric motorcycle that is entirely 3D printed. Like the bicycle tire we wrote about in May, this motorcycle is the work of BigRep, a German company that distributes big Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) printers, which can produce objects as large as a cubic meter. Everything but the…

In a post published on his personal blog, Bill Gates admits liking Silicon Valley, the popular HBO series that follows the tribulations of the startup Pied Piper. “The show is a parody, so it exaggerates things, but like all great parodies it captures a lot of truths. Most of the different…

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+, a single-board nanocomputer using an ARM processor. Its goal is to offer something more affordable and less cumbersome than its Pi 3 Model B+. Introduced at US$ 25, it’s 10 bucks less than the Model B+ and its footprint is also…

Just over a month since its initial release, Microsoft is making the Windows 10 October Update (the new name for the old “Fall Creators Update”) once again available, but only for select customers (those skilled users who manually tell their system to check for updates). The update was withdrawn…

Japan’s Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Institute (AIST) has developed a humanoid robot able to take on a variety of tasks typically performed on construction and renovation sites. Called HRP-5P, it can be seen putting up drywall in a video (link below). The work, though slow, seems…

Netgear unveiled its first 802.11ax-compatible routers, the new standard recently renamed Wi-Fi 6. Though the Nighthawk AX8 and Nighthawk AX12 are very high-end routers, we’re not impressed so much with their function as with their form: with their sleek “wings”, they look like they’ve come…

At Microsoft’s Future Decoded conference taking place in London, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that underwater server farms are part of the company's plans for future data centers. He cites the proximity of humans to water: half of the world's population lives within 200 km of a coast. Being…

IBM announced its intent to acquire Linux’s Red Hat for the handsome sum of $34 billion. Red Hat, started in 1994, made a name for itself with its eponymous Linux distribution which was widely used until its phase-out in 2004. With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution, the company focused on…

Following a rough patch caused by CEO Elon Musk’s series of bad PR moves, Tesla finally has some good news: it’s in the black. Last Wednesday, the electric car manufacturer published its quarterly returns, unveiling revenues of close to 6.8 billion dollars, far more than the forecast 6.33 billion.

Just like we do, IEEE Spectrum magazine loves robots. Its team just launched a new web site featuring about 200 robots that aims to be a core reference for robotics enthusiasts. For each robot, you’ll find a description along with photos and even videos. The collection includes Unimate (1961), the…

Apple is paying $300 million in cash for a portion of Dialog, including licensing power-management technologies, assets, and more than 300 employees. The company will advance an additional $300 million cash flow as an upfront for the components it will purchase over the next three years. The…

Since the departure of Steve Ballmer, who was of the opinion that Linux was the pox for anything related to intellectual property, it’s been a veritable honeymoon between Microsoft and Linus Torvald’s brainchild. Latest installment in this new love affair: the Redmond firm announces that it signed…

Though it’s been quiet, Google Plus, the social network launched in 2011 to counter Facebook’s dominance, still exists. But not for much longer. After the Wall Street Journal reported that Google exposed the private details of some 500,000 Google+ users from 2015 to March 2018, Google has decided…

According to a report by Sandvine, 15% of the total volume of data traffic is consumed by Netflix—an indicator of how video dominates the internet. And right behind Netflix’s number-one position worldwide--yet more video services. In second place, with 13% of the bandwidth, is what Sandvine calls…

HP unveiled a new ultra-thin laptop computer, usable as a tablet, with a leather cover on the outside. Integral to the design, the thick leather sheet is not removable. It even has a functional purpose: it attaches the screen to the body, acting as a stiff hinge at its midpoint. This is a striking…

Stanford University students Larry Page and Sergey Brin officially launched their company on September 4, 1998, headquartered in their friend Susan Wojcicki’s garage in Menlo Park, California. Now, on Google’s 20th birthday, you can see the legendary garage on Street View, restored in all its…

The famous Rubik’s cube, invented in 1974 in Hungary by Ernő Rubik, an architect and professor of design, has been sold by the hundreds of millions. Today, it is practically being reinvented: thanks to the ingeniousness of a Japanese engineer, the puzzle now comes equipped with internal actuators…

Using Linux on Windows 10 has never been easier. With the Fall Creators update, the Hyper-V Quick Create function, which offers three-click creation of Virtual Machines, now offers a Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS system image specifically configured for this operating mode and ready to install. This VM builds…

Do you still have money to burn after you’ve purchased the new iPhone X? You now need a case worthy of your new device and we have it all dialed in for you: the Gray brand out of Singapore offers titanium cases with a starting price of CA$1,130 for the grey model, topping out at CA$3,900 for the…

In the upcoming version of Windows 10, set to launch in October, when you try to install Chrome or Firefox, a large window will pop up with the message, “You already have Microsoft Edge – the safer, faster browser for Windows 10.” You’ll then have two choices: the default option, in blue, “Open…

Samsung is releasing a tracker – a tag allowing you to locate the object it is attached to – that’s powered by LTE-M network, unlike other, competing trackers, like Tile Mate, that work with Bluetooth and have a limited range of a couple of hundred feet. LTE-M (or LTE Cat-M1) is a network…

The Scoobe3D is an affordable, handset-sized 3D scanner that is touted to be accurate to an outstanding 0.1mm. This accuracy is delivered through a combination of three technologies: time of flight, photogrammetry and polarized 3D. Scoobe3D can scan objects of up to two cubic yards, including those…

Just one month after Apple, Amazon passed a market value of 1 trillion dollars yesterday. After 24 years of operation, the company is the second in history to reach the symbolic milestone of 1,000 billion dollars (1012). Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos, Amazon was initially an on-line bookstore…

Though this toy is ostensibly for children aged 8 and up, we believe that children of all ages will love it! Created by Mattel, Alpha Training Blue is a robotic velociraptor weighing 4lbs and standing a foot high with its beak turned to the sky. It is controlled with a real joystick with an…

At the IFA show in Berlin, Acer unveiled an impressive gaming armchair called Predator Thronos. It looks like a cockpit equipped with a seat that reclines to 140°, and three 27-inch screens providing a panoramic view that wraps around the player for a fully immersive sensation. A control panel…

Lithium-ion batteries have made headlines for the wrong reason: as a fire hazard. Lithium-ion batteries store much more energy than previous chemistries could manage, making them crucial to the future success of phones, drones, electric cars, etc. The hope is to develop batteries with at least the…

After a year of wild speculation that saw Bitcoin and Ethereum reach new highs, 2018 has been a disaster for cryptocurrencies. The trend was reversed at the beginning of the year and their value started dropping, and never stopped. Today, the market cap of all cryptocurrencies put together is 191…

“Where’s Waldo?” is a series of picture books created by Martin Handford. The idea is to find the main character, Waldo, in an image. The problem is that each image is crammed with hundreds of people and objects, making it tough to quickly find Waldo, and keeping the kids engrossed for hours. Now…

On Wednesday, Anki unveiled its new robot, Vector, which looks a lot like the adorable Cozmo. Just like Cozmo, Anki reminds us of a palm-sized WALL-E, but with far more features. Vector comes with a 1.2GHz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon, a wide-angle HD camera, an infrared laser for mapping and…

To the dismay of those who still believe, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Earth is flat, Google has given up the Mercator projection for its mapping services. If you zoom out on the web version, you’ll find that Earth is now a globe. This has the advantage of avoiding many of the…

Last May, Google removed its long-time unofficial motto, “Don’t be evil”, from the company’s corporate code of conduct. Just wait until you know why. To satisfy the Chinese government’s strict Internet censorship rules, Google has developed a custom, China-only Android search application that…

In the late morning of Thursday, August 2, 2018, Apple made history when its share price hit US$207.05 on Wall Street, becoming the first company to ever be worth one trillion (1012) dollars. Not bad for a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy in the late 1990s, when its founder, Steve Jobs…

This quarter, Facebook had 185 million users in the U.S. and Canada, roughly the same number as in the first quarter. North America is Facebook’s most lucrative market by far, with the average user generating US$25.91 in revenue. This is the fourth consecutive quarter that the number of users stays…

The first smart device running on Android Things is here. The “Smart Display” is a smart speaker with built-in touchscreen, like Amazon’s Echo Show, but using Google Assistant. Android Things is a lite version of the Android system, specifically developed for connected objects. Smart Display is…

Good news for gamers! Thanks to a dampening of speculation activity on cryptocurrencies, the price of graphics cards (which are used massively for mining) is coming back down from its stratospheric levels. The Radeon RX 570, a popular mid-range graphics card, had gone from under US$200 in April…

Behind the CurlicueCal handle is a Doctor in Entomology specialized in ant behaviour. Recently, CurlicueCal posted ratings of various ant emojis on her Tumblr page: Microsoft’s, Apple’s, Facebook’s, Twitter’s and others. From a myrmecological point of view, the worst emoji is Mozilla’s, since it’s…

Tuesday July 17 was World emoji Day, and to celebrate, Apple emojified its entire leadership team. From Tim Cook to Eddy Cue, through Craig Federighi and Jonathan Ive, every last director was replaced by memojis, avatars that can be personalised to turn people into emojis. Memojis came out with iOS…

It looks like Microsoft is out to overtake Slack on the enterprise chatting and messaging market, offering Microsoft Teams for free. Of course, the free version has some limitations, but they are far less restrictive than Slack’s. For example, Microsoft doesn’t limit the number of archived messages…

David Zarrouk, professor at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, unveiled Rising STAR, a robot with amazing locomotion skills that can crawl like a turtle or roll on wheels, as it pleases. The neatest aspect of its locomotion is its variable geometry, with allows it to select a locomotion strategy…

CNBC has produced a story on the world’s largest collection of Apple prototypes. Over the last 10 years, Henry “Hap” Plain collected over 250 prototypes of Apple products, which are rare items by definition. Aside from numerous Macintoshes, there are also Apple IIs, Lisas, Ipods, iPhones, a Newton…

What is old is new again, at least if you ask Amazon. After the demise of the Toys ‘R Us chain, the online retailer is stepping up to try to fill the void. This holiday season, the e retail giant is releasing a massive old-fashioned hard copy toy catalogue, which will be sent to “millions” of its…

Samsung smartphones are no longer spontaneously combusting, but another weird and disturbing quirk has arisen: some users have had their pictures randomly sent to others. According to complaints on Reddit and on official Samsung forums, several Samsung phone users, including those with recent…

After breaking his phone, Philip Frenzel, a 25-year-old student of mechatronics engineering at the University of Aalen, in Germany, invented a “mobile airbag” that automatically deploys when you drop your phone, protecting it from damage. Frenzel wanted a better system than protective cases, which…

Wi-Fi devices have been using the same security protocol for over a decade. But today, that’s about to change: the Wi-Fi Alliance, which oversees the adoption of the Wi-Fi standard, will start certifying products that support WPA3, the successor to the WPA2 security protocol in use since 2004. One…

At the University of Tokyo’s JSK Lab, roboticists have developed a robot called DRAGON. This flying, modular robot can literally transform on the fly, for example stretching out from a square to a snake to pass through a narrow opening, then changing shapes again on the other side. The modules…

To obtain quality slow motion in a 24 fps video, you need to film at a rate of 48 fps. And to capture split-second events like the bursting of a balloon, you will need thousands of frames per second using expensive, specialized equipment. This is why Nvidia created a new, deep learning-based AI…

There’s also good news in Elon Musk’s world: The Boring Company, its tunnel-boring outfit, has won its first contract. On Thursday, the City of Chicago announced that the Mayor’s office had chosen Musk’s company to build an express line from Block 37, downtown, to O’Hare International Airport. The…