Samsung’s First Look event was yesterday (replay here), and in its lineup were its high-end 2021 TVs, updates, and a bunch of new ideas including fitness tracking.
What we saw — Neo QLEDs:
Smart Trainer:
The Frame gets less frame:
MicroLED tech gets a little more approachable:
Samsung’s MicroLED technology, the next-generation of display that remains hugely expensive and only available in The Wall setup, is getting slightly more mainstream.
(Just to briefly clarify, Mini-LED TVs are using small LEDs as a backlight. MicroLEDs are more like OLEDs, where each pixel can be turned on or off, and emit light. Hence, an “off” pixel is completely black, giving the OLED-style contrast and richness to a display. The problem is that MicroLEDs are still difficult and wildly expensive to manufacture.)
Eco friendlier?:
Samsung actually opened its First Look event by explaining its greener approaches to products, saying it will “seek to systematically decrease its overall carbon footprint in TV manufacturing,” including offsets and offering sustainable packaging.
💻 LG introduces five new Gram 2021 laptops: now with 19.5 hours battery life, Intel 11th-Gen CPUs and 16:10 displays (Android Authority).
📈 Report: Samsung is hedging its bets on the cheaper Galaxy S21 model, with expectations that the base model will be the big seller (Android Authority).
🎧 Bose Sport Open Earbuds are here, offering a different approach from Bose, shifting from its usual noice-cancelling option to a hear-your-surroundings approach for active use (Android Authority).
📺 Sony is going to start selling its Mandalorian-like virtual set displays (The Verge).
⛔ After chaos, Donald Trump has largely been locked out of social media: Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, for between 12 hours on Twitter to an indefinite period on Snapchat. That’s only after those platforms let Trump cheer on rioters before slowly walking back Trump’s posts (Engadget).
🎮 An oral history of the Xbox: 24 people detail how Microsoft developed the original Xbox and reshaped the gaming industry (Bloomberg). Fun detail: Microsoft tried to buy Nintendo — “Steve [Ballmer, ex-Microsoft CEO] made us go meet with Nintendo to see if they would consider being acquired. They just laughed their asses off. Like, imagine an hour of somebody just laughing at you. That was kind of how that meeting went.” Also Microsoft tried to buy EA, Square, and Midway, but nothing worked out.
🌟 Jim Keller, an important chip designer at Apple (early Arm A-processors), AMD (K7 and K8), Tesla (FSD/AI chip), and recently Intel, has joined a startup in Toronto called Tenstorrent, building AI chips. Great detail here (AnandTech)
🛰 NASA reveals how its SPHEREx space telescope will search for big bang clues. Quite the object (Engadget).
🔭 Peer inside the solar system’s largest canyon, about five times deeper than the Grand Canyon (Popular Science).
🤔 ELI5: “Why do some apps stay open when you leave for 5 seconds but others take you back all the way to the starting screen?” (r/explainlikeimfive).
The Nexus One went on sale 11 years ago this week, a January 5 2010 announcement for the first Google phone.
Cheers,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.