Showing 1 - 10 of 14
Predictions for 2024
Life, James Hein, Published on 03/01/2024
» I hope you all had a great holiday break and are ready to dive into whatever 2024 brings us. Once again I will try and guess what we will see this year. The first one is easy, a bigger focus on artificial intelligence and even more marketing using the term AI. I wonder if we will see Turbo-AI appear. There will be more funds diverted to the growth of AI in many of the major manufacturers. I'm not convinced we will reach General AI this year but it is a possibility.
Tesla Pi gets my motor running
Life, James Hein, Published on 19/01/2022
» I admit it, I'm getting excited about the Tesla Pi phone due out this year. The rumours have been flying fast and furious but there are some seemingly solid predictions. The phone will have a specially designed CPU. It will have a nice screen just under the 7-inch mark, four cameras and be deliberately priced a few hundred dollars under the top-of-the-line Apple phone. There is apparently some bad blood between Elon and Apple so that last one is a deliberate choice. Like the next Samsung range, it may have an under the screen front facing camera. There'll be lots of memory and a bunch of Tesla-like features with apparently a solar charger built into the back so you can always recharge during the day. I'm due for a new phone this year so I'll be holding off on the new Samsung and waiting to see what comes out.
The benefits and risks of neural interfaces
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/02/2021
» This week is dedicated to the brain-computer interface, or BCI. For some time now, sci-fi movies and TV series have presented the idea of a mind-to-computer interface that controls technology, retrieves information and displays it on virtual screens. Meanwhile, in the background, a number of companies have been working on this and the technology is close to realising some of the outcomes only seen in fiction so far.
Users won't flip for Samsung's new phone
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/02/2020
» There is a lot of interest in the new Samsung Galaxy flip phone. It's cheaper than the last model, not a difficult target. As mentioned previously it opens like the old flip phones, not like a book. The hinge is better, as is the dust protection, but with this design you will always be swiping your finger across the fold. It is no larger than a regular smartphone so that wow of a bigger screen is not there anymore. At the price point I just can't see how this is an attractive unit to get.
Diminishing returns
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/06/2019
» The first three months of 2019 saw Apple and Samsung collectively selling 17.5 million fewer smartphones globally compared to last year. As I've previously noted, we have market saturation and a lack of yearly upgrades for many users. I upgrade with roughly every third model, for example. The premium end of the market also continues to move out of the reach of many, meaning fewer people can upgrade as often. The innovation jump in successive models is also diminishing, so they lack the wow factor that drove earlier upgrades. These figures do not include the impact of the latest Samsung S10 range which shipped at the end of the quarter. The top three remain Samsung, Huawei and Apple. This may change with the recent US Huawei bans, or at least reduce any growth. Even after price cuts, Apple's sales fell 17.6% in the quarter leaving Samsung as the one least likely to lose their position in the next few months. Oppo and Viva rounded out the top five in sales with Xiaomi nibbling at their heels.
Human override here to stay
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/04/2019
» Computers are useful tools and they will emotionlessly churn through thousands of operations in the blink of an eye to produce whatever results they were programmed to do. Most of the time the results are welcomed. When it comes to malware the results generate a different reaction, and then there are those spaces in the middle. The situation surrounding the Boeing 737 Max MCAS aircraft and the recent crash is an excellent example. The latest analysis would seem to indicate that the computer engineers made some choices that have had unintended consequences. In this case overriding the wishes of the pilots by assuming the plane was crashing, when it wasn't, and not allowing the human pilots to correct the computer's decisions.
Will fold-out phones start a new revolution?
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/02/2019
» Lower cost Google phones will be arriving this year. There will be mid-range offerings somewhere in the 4,700-22,000 baht range and another below that as a low-range product. The target is emerging markets that are fairly well saturated with other brands, both Korean and Chinese. The Google Pixel is the high-end product and is supposed to have the best camera, for now, but they are not cheap. The new range will round out the lower end of the market.
Protecting your privacy
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/04/2017
» Internet privacy is dead, at least in the US. This will trigger a rush to VPN's, the use of Tor browsers and advanced encryption, for some. In the US, new legislation allows your ISP to collect and store all of your browsing history. This will include length of time spent on sites and pages visited. The information will be at the mercy of the ISP to keep or use it to apply social engineering in terms of recommended sites and marketing. While the point seems to be to allow ISPs to make more money, the scary part for some will be that hackers seem to be able to regularly hack into ISPs and grab stored data.
Let it all go with Pokémon
Life, James Hein, Published on 20/07/2016
» The Pokémon Go game is taking the smartphone world by storm. Like Ingress before it, it is a real world location based game so you physically have to get out of the house to play it. Unlike Ingress, it has a cartoon character so kids love it but mums and dads don't so much because they have to drive their kids around to out of the way places to get the next Pokémon. This is another game by Niantic, a group within Google and the ones who built Ingress. The game was also quite insecure on iOS phones but that was apparently fixed with a patch. There have been no issues reported by Android phone users.
The world may not be enough for FB
Life, James Hein, Published on 27/01/2016
» No more browsing or phone calls. This is the latest Facebook aim for a full social media replacement based, of course, on Messenger. Facebook claims 800 million installations primarily located near the lower end of the marketplace. To meet their goal they will need to not only convince organisations, governments and enterprises big and small to adopt a Messenger-like technology but also give up all of their privacy. They will also need to do this before someone else jumps in with their current technology equivalent. Add in the job of convincing countries like China to adopt US-based technology to replace their equivalents and you have an impossible target.