Month: February 2023
The “designed for reparability” Nokia G22 is just a normal cheap phone
HMD says it’s “designed for reparability,” but it’s not much different from the G21.
The Nokia G22. You can open it. [credit:
iFixit ]
HMD and its licensed Nokia brand is taking a swing at a repairable smartphone with the Nokia G22. Like Google and Samsung, HMD has struck up a partnership with iFixit to offer official parts and repair guides online. Besides the partnership, HMD goes one step further and claims: “Starting with Nokia G22, we’ll be designing and building smartphones that are easier to repair.” It’s great to see a company tout attempts at a more repairable design, but there isn’t much in the G22 that makes it more repairable than a normal cheap phone.
The phone is a low-end $179 (179 euro) device with a 6.52-inch, 90 Hz, 1200×720 LCD. The SoC is a ‘Unisoc T606’—a 12 nm chip with two Cortex A75 Arm cores, two A55 cores, and an ARM Mali-G57 MP1. It has 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, and a 5050 mAh battery with 20 W charging. The phone has a side fingerprint reader, a headphone jack, MicroSD slot, and, if you get the “TA-1528” model, NFC. The phone comes with Android 12 and has two years of major OS updates and three years of monthly security updates, which are both pretty good for a cheap phone. It’ll be for sale on March 8 in the UK for 149.99 pounds ($179), with sales also happening in Europe and Australia eventually.
As for iFixit’s half of this partnership, there are four parts for sale in the parts store: A screen for $53, a battery for $26, a charge port for $20, and a new plastic back panel for $26. There are also the usual high-quality guides from iFixit that detail every screw and clip you’ll have to deal with to replace those parts, along with a recommended list of tools.
Inside Startup Battlefield: Getting to know the Battlefield 200
Welcome back to Inside Startup Battlefield, the TechCrunch podcast where we take you behind the scenes of one of tech’s top startup competitions. There are 180 companies solving crucial problems that didn’t make it to the Disrupt stage, but that doesn’t mean they’re making any less of an impact. In this episode, TechCrunch writers Devin Coldewey
Inside Startup Battlefield: Getting to know the Battlefield 200 by Maggie Stamets originally published on TechCrunch
Welcome back to Inside Startup Battlefield, the TechCrunch podcast where we take you behind the scenes of one of tech’s top startup competitions. There are 180 companies solving crucial problems that didn’t make it to the Disrupt stage, but that doesn’t mean they’re making any less of an impact. In this episode, TechCrunch writers Devin Coldewey and Harri Weber take us on a walk through the Expo Hall and let us listen in on their conversations with a handful of the most interesting companies in the Battlefield 200.
New episodes of Inside Startup Battlefield drop every Monday. Be sure to check out all of the other podcasts in the TechCrunch Podcast Network: Found, Equity, The TechCrunch Podcast, Chain Reaction and The TechCrunch Live Podcast.
Inside Startup Battlefield: Getting to know the Battlefield 200 by Maggie Stamets originally published on TechCrunch
New sensor promises to bring ‘true colour’ to smartphone photos
In the fiercely contested smartphone market, photography can be a key battleground. Alongside the insatiable desires for better batteries, durability, storage, and processing, camera quality consistently ranks as a key factor when choosing a phone. At CES 2023, Spectricity, a startup based in Belgium, unveiled a new entrant to the competition: the S1 chip. Spectricity claims the S1 is the first truly miniaturised and mass-manufacturable spectral image sensor for mobile devices — and the company is targetting sector dominance. Within two years, Spectricity boldly predicts the sensor will be inside every smartphone. The bullishness derives from a singular focus: measuring…This story continues at The Next Web
In the fiercely contested smartphone market, photography can be a key battleground. Alongside the insatiable desires for better batteries, durability, storage, and processing, camera quality consistently ranks as a key factor when choosing a phone. At CES 2023, Spectricity, a startup based in Belgium, unveiled a new entrant to the competition: the S1 chip. Spectricity claims the S1 is the first truly miniaturised and mass-manufacturable spectral image sensor for mobile devices — and the company is targetting sector dominance. Within two years, Spectricity boldly predicts the sensor will be inside every smartphone. The bullishness derives from a singular focus: measuring…
This story continues at The Next Web
‘I Was an App Store Games Editor – That’s How I Know Apple Doesn’t Care About Games’
Apple has taken billions from game developers but failed to reinvest it, leaving the App Store a confusing mess for mobile gamers, writes Neil Long, former App Store editor. The Guardian: Late last year, the developer of indie hit Vampire Survivors said it had to rush-release a mobile edition to stem the flow of App Store clones and copycats. Recently a fake ChatGPT app made it through app review and quickly climbed the charts before someone noticed and pulled it from sale. It’s not good enough. Apple could have reinvested a greater fraction of the billions it has earned from mobile games to make the App Store a good place to find fun, interesting games to fit your tastes. But it hasn’t, and today the App Store is a confusing mess, recently made even worse with the addition of ad slots in search, on the front page and even on the product pages themselves.
Search is still terrible, too. Game developers search in vain for their own games on launch day, eventually finding them — having searched for the exact title — under a slew of other guff. Mobile games get a bumpy ride from some folks — this esteemed publication included — for lots of reasons. […] However, finding the good stuff is hard. Apple — and indeed Google’s Play store — opened the floodgates to developers without really making sure that what’s out there is up to standard. It’s a wild west. Happily things may be about to change — including that 30% commission on all in-app purchases. After a bruising US court battle between Apple and Epic Games over alleged monopolistic practices, government bodies in the UK, EU, US, Japan and elsewhere are examining Apple and Google’s “effective duopoly” over what we see, do and play on our phones.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple has taken billions from game developers but failed to reinvest it, leaving the App Store a confusing mess for mobile gamers, writes Neil Long, former App Store editor. The Guardian: Late last year, the developer of indie hit Vampire Survivors said it had to rush-release a mobile edition to stem the flow of App Store clones and copycats. Recently a fake ChatGPT app made it through app review and quickly climbed the charts before someone noticed and pulled it from sale. It’s not good enough. Apple could have reinvested a greater fraction of the billions it has earned from mobile games to make the App Store a good place to find fun, interesting games to fit your tastes. But it hasn’t, and today the App Store is a confusing mess, recently made even worse with the addition of ad slots in search, on the front page and even on the product pages themselves.
Search is still terrible, too. Game developers search in vain for their own games on launch day, eventually finding them — having searched for the exact title — under a slew of other guff. Mobile games get a bumpy ride from some folks — this esteemed publication included — for lots of reasons. […] However, finding the good stuff is hard. Apple — and indeed Google’s Play store — opened the floodgates to developers without really making sure that what’s out there is up to standard. It’s a wild west. Happily things may be about to change — including that 30% commission on all in-app purchases. After a bruising US court battle between Apple and Epic Games over alleged monopolistic practices, government bodies in the UK, EU, US, Japan and elsewhere are examining Apple and Google’s “effective duopoly” over what we see, do and play on our phones.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Elon Musk defends racist tirade by Dilbert creator Scott Adams
Twitter’s CEO accused US media of racism after multiple newspapers dropped the popular cartoon.
Twitter’s CEO accused US media of racism after multiple newspapers dropped the popular cartoon.
Teens can proactively block their nude images from Instagram, OnlyFans
Hundreds already using tool, as teen financial sextortion cases are increasing.
Enlarge (credit: Peter Dazeley | The Image Bank)
Over the past few years, the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC) saw worrying trends indicating that teen sextortion is on the rise online and, in extreme cases, leads to suicides. Between 2019 and 2021, the number of sextortion cases reported on NCMEC’s online tipline more than doubled. At the start of 2022, nearly 80 percent of those cases involved teens suffering financial sextortion—pressured to send cash or gift cards or else see their sexualized images spread online.
NCMEC already manages a database that works to stop the spread of child sexual abuse materials (CSAM), but that tool wouldn’t work for confused teens ashamed of struggling with sextortion, because it gathers information with every report that is not anonymized. Teens escaping sextortion needed a different kind of tool, NCMEC realized, one that removed all shame from the reporting process and worked more proactively, allowing minors to anonymously report sextortion before any of their images are ever circulated online.
Today, NCMEC officially launched that tool—Take It Down. Since its soft launch in December, already more than 200 people have used it to block uploads or remove images of minors shared online, NCMEC’s communications and brand vice president, Gavin Portnoy, told Ars.