Daily Authority: 📅 Pixel 6a pops up

⚽ Good morning! I was pretty surprised by Fifa offering its own streaming platform… more on that in the links below!

Pixel 6a soon

Ok, this is interesting from the Google Pixel team: four Pixel 6a models have landed at the FCC for certification. And that might mean one of Google’s constantly well-priced value phones is:

• a) Coming soon, and;
• b) Coming to more countries than the Pixel 5a.

What’s happened:

• Four unknown models, with model numbers GX7AS, GB17L, G1AZG, and GB62Z, passed through the FCC for testing and certification purposes.
• Why it looks like the Pixel 6a is mostly because of timing. It’s hard to recognize what’s listed in the FCC exactly, but the timing of the FCC filings matches a later release at Google I/O next month on May 12, if you correlate other Google approaches, where last year’s Pixel 5a was filed through the FCC in July, ahead of a launch in August.
• Plus, lots of other clues: Pixel 6a design leaks, and a recent hard-to-confirm benchmark that appears to suggest Google will keep using its own Tensor chip even in its A-series models.
• Otherwise, as pointed out by Droid Life, the GB62Z and GX7AS are listed as the “parent model” of the four models.
• There’s one with 5G mmWave support, the GB62Z, and the other three models have only sub-6Ghz 5G — plus all have NFC and Wi-Fi 6E.
• Other differences between models are the 5G bands.

More countries?

• The thinking is that more model variants means more accommodation for different regional operations.
• Google might again bring its A-series phones to a wider audience than just the US and Japan, as it did with the Pixel 5a, which was just weird, really.
• The $449 Pixel 5a was only sold by Google, not retailers or carriers either. It was strange, but perhaps everything was put into the Pixel 6 series which was finally Google’s real effort at a phone.
• Google’s distribution is still nothing like a global launch, but the usual countries like Australia, Canada, Germany, the UK, France, and Ireland could be in the mix again, though I’d hope to see much wider distribution in an ideal world…

Roundup

🤔 You can now buy an $800 gaming phone in the US via the REDMAGIC 7 Pro’s global launch (Android Authority).

👉 Amazon in India seemed to leak the OnePlus 10R, and the dual texture rear panel ain’t bad? (Android Authority).

🚪 “I’m getting ready to move, and my smart home is getting in the way” (Android Authority).

🍎 Apple has apparently delayed adding a blood pressure monitor to the Apple Watch. This report says 2024 or even 2025, but “accuracy has been a challenge during testing.” Accuracy would be useful (Bloomberg).

🦆 DuckDuckGo’s privacy browser finally lands on Mac desktops (Wired).

🍏 Tim Cook delivers speech railing against “data industrial complex,” sideloading. I’m with him on the first, not the second (Ars Technica).

👍 Porsche has a $1,800 PC monitor, and it may actually be cheap for what you get: 4K, 32-inch, mini-LED, 144Hz (Ars Technica).

👉 Speaking of, did you see John Oliver blackmail Congress with their own digital data? (RollingStone).

📦 Oof: Amazon workers seriously injured at twice the rate of other warehouses, study finds (CNET).

📺 Oh hey: Netflix finally drops Stranger Things season 4 trailer (CNET).

⚽ FIFA Plus has launched and will have as many as 40,000 football/soccer live games annually, not including the World Cup, but apparently including Europe’s topflight leagues and “previously unserved competitions” from men’s, women’s, and youth football, and “every women’s and men’s World Cup match ever recorded.” Huh! Wild. It’s also free, via ads, for now (Variety). And here’s the Fifa Plus direct link, which also has an app on Android and iOS (fifa.com).

🔋 Toyota’s bZ4X all-electric SUV will start at $42,000 (The Verge).

🎈 This is what it looks like inside a giant space balloon for tourists (Engadget).

🤔 “Before the war did you realize Chernobyl was in Ukraine?” (r/nostupidquestions). A lot of people commenting on not understanding how big Ukraine is, and also not quite appreciating how enormous the US is. This might help (MapFlight.xyz)

Weirdness Wednesday

Not like, wildly weird, but here are 12 clever things WD-40 can do (Lifehacker).

• Part of what’s weird is actually clicking through an entire slideshow like we did back in 2011 when the web decided to add pageviews via any method possible.
• But also, I did not know any of these in advance, so here, maybe this will help you too.
• I don’t want to give them all away since someone wrote this and put effort in, but the ones that stand out: repelling insects off your car’s grille, which is genius, softening leather (in small amounts!), and removing gum from your shoe.
• Not bad: the key is the WD part of the name — water displacement.
• And as my dad always said: you don’t use it as you would oil for a lubricant, because it eventually dries things out.
• It’s for displacing the water!

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor