Month: April 2017

A large patent-holding company called Unwired Planet reached a settlement with Apple at 1:00am on Monday, just hours before a jury trial was set to start in San Francisco. A jury had already been selected but was dismissed on Monday morning after the parties' lawyers told US District Judge Vincent Chhabria about their settlement.

Unwired Planet is the patent-holding remains of early mobile company Openwave, which acquired several hundred US patents from Ericsson in early 2013, with Ericsson getting 20 percent of any patent settlements. Later that year, Unwired Planet sued Apple.

In 2015, Judge Chhabria ruled that Apple didn't infringe the four patents at issue in the case. Chhabria's ruling was mostly overturned on appeal (PDF) last July, leading to the jury trial that was set to start yesterday.

Earth Day is coming up this weekend, and to celebrate, Google Earth received a major update today to version 9. This version is again designed to run in a Web browser (just Chrome for now), but there's now a standalone home for Google Earth at earth.google.com/web. The Android app has been updated, too (iOS is coming soon).

Version 9 puts a big focus on guided tours via the "Voyager" section, which serves as a jumping off point for YouTube videos, 360° content, Street View, and Google Earth landmarks. The tours are led by scientists and documentarians, with some content produced by well-known groups like the BBC's Planet Earth team. For kids, there's a Sesame Street muppet section. Engadget reports that this curated content section will be continually updated. Currently, there are about 40 stories.

Enlarge (credit: YouTube, Snapchat)

Filters that turn your face into a puppy's face and other silly effects have only been around on Snapchat for about a year. Now Snapchat is expanding those filters by letting users change the world around them. The company launched new World Lenses today, filters that can be applied to the world around you by placing 3D objects you can manipulate in your snaps.

World Lenses live where the existing face filters do in Snapchat. When using the rear camera, you can now tap anywhere on the screen to bring up the World Lenses list at the base of the app, like you would when using the front-facing camera to access face-changing filters. Then you can scroll through a number of world filters that place different 3D objects into your snap frame.

Currently, there's a nature filter that lets you throw seeds into the ground that pop up as flowers, a text filter that places colorful words like "OMG" and "love" into the frame, a shining rainbow you can move and scale, and a spring-themed filter featuring two green bushes you can tap to make bunnies pop out. Most World Lenses can be manipulated by tapping and moving them on the screen, but some can also be picked up and moved if you reach your hand into the camera's field of view.

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AMD has a new range of graphics cards in the form the RX 580, RX 570, RX 560, and RX 550. All, bar the new RX 550, are slightly tweaked versions of the 400-series that debuted with RX 480 in June and feature the company's 14nm Polaris architecture.

The RX 580 and RX 570 launch today at an MSRP of £185 and £165 for a 4GB version (8GB will also be available). The 2GB RX 560 launches in early May for £99, while the 2GB RX 550 launches on April 20 for a wallet-friendly £80.

While some might call the 500-series a rebrand, AMD says an improved 14nm FinFET manufacturing process has helped it push up clock speeds. The reference design RX 580, which features the same core specs as the RX 480 including 36 compute cores and a 256-bit memory interface, is clocked at 1257MHz and boosts to 1340MHz. That's just over 100MHz higher than the RX 480.