Month: November 2018

Samsung

Samsung intrigued the world with the announcement last week that it would launch a smartphone with a folding display sometime early next year. Now a report from South Korea's Yonhap News Agency adds a few more details to Samsung's secretive tease.

First is an actual name; according to Yonhap's sources, the phone will be called the "Galaxy F"—presumably that's "F" for "Foldable." The second big claim in the article is a price: $1,770 (₩2,000,000) for Samsung's cutting-edge smartphone. That's a big increase from the ~$1,000 flagships of today, but if this rumor pans out, the Galaxy F wouldn't even be Samsung's most expensive phone. That honor goes to the $2,700 Samsung W2019, which, believe it or not, is a dual-screen flip phone with flagship specs and some ultra-luxury add-ons like a Samsung concierge service.

Enlarge / Coming in 2019 to a Netflix near you. (credit: Netflix)

Two of the main people behind the BBC's modern wave of nature documentary series, including their iconic narrator, have signed on to make their next documentary project with Netflix.

The soothing, British-accented tones of narrator Sir David Attenborough, along with Blue Planet and Planet Earth creator, director, and executive producer Alastair Fothergill, are the headline names for a new project, dubbed Our Planet. Netflix says this eight-part "natural history" documentary series will debut exclusively on its service on April 5, 2019.

The series includes a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund, along with statements from Attenborough about the "beauty and fragility" of our planet and the claim that humanity is "the greatest threat to the health of our home," but this all merely implies that Our Planet will heavily focus on conservation. The series' released teaser trailer instead largely resembles recent BBC docuseries—meaning, dramatic, crystal-clear shots of wildlife in its natural habitat. We'll always take more of those, and Netflix is advertising 4K-ready video content for this one.

Enlarge (credit: Germanborrillo)

It's that time of the year again: time for asset management company Lazard to release its annual Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) study. (We know, you've been waiting all year.) The numbers in the report offer economic insight into how energy choices were made in the previous year and how the energy landscape will likely change in the coming year.

The bottom line? The cost of coal-fired electricity per megawatt-hour hasn't budged a bit from 2017, while wind and solar costs per MWh are still falling. That spells bad news for an American coal revival, especially in places where the cost of building brand-new renewable installations is cheaper than the cost of operating existing coal and gas plants—a situation that Lazard says is happening with increasing frequency (PDF).

Lazard surveys energy buildouts that occurred in the previous year and divides the estimated cost of building and operating the plant, including fuel cost estimates, by the amount of energy a particular plant is expected to produce in its lifetime. This is useful because a nuclear power plant might cost billions to build, but it would have a vastly longer life and higher output than, say, a field of solar panels. By breaking costs down on a per-megawatt-hour basis, it becomes easier to compare sources of electricity.