Month: April 2019

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  The Galaxy A80 and its crazy swivel cam. [credit: Samsung ]

Don't ever let anyone tell you smartphone design is boring. We've seen companies come up with various solutions to hide the front-facing camera "notch," from a motorized pop-up section to a fully old-school slider phone, but the latest implementation from Samsung is probably the most complicated. The company made a device with a motorized, pop-up, swivel camera.

The mid-range Galaxy A80 is an all-screen phone with an Oppo FInd X style motorized pop-up section. Samsung is one-upping its Chinese rival with a camera that swivels around when it rises, so the back camera can double as the front camera. There is a lot going on with this swivel camera section, too: there's a 48MP main sensor, an 8MP wide-angle lens, and 3D depth-sensing equipment.

Despite the trick camera setup, this device is positioned firmly behind Samsung's flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S10. The display is a huge 6.7-inches, but the resolution is only 2400×1080. That gives it a DPI of 393, which pales in comparison to the 526 DPI of the Galaxy S10. Samsung is using the brand new Qualcomm Snapdragon 730 chipset, an eight-core chip built on an 8nm process. Since it only launched yesterday, we don't have serious benchmarks for comparison, but the 730 and 730G (that's a gaming-focused variant) slot in after the 845 as Qualcomm's second-fastest mobile SoC.

(credit: Aurich x Getty)

Following an initial announcement last October, Sony has announced that PSN players will finally be able to change their online handles starting sometime Wednesday in the US and Thursday in Europe. But players who do change their online names might face issues ranging from minor to critical when trying to play some legacy PS4 titles.

PlayStation Director of Social Media Sid Shuman writes that all PS4 games published after April 1, 2018 "have been developed to support the online ID change feature." That said, he adds that not all recent releases have been tested, and some may not "fully support the feature."

For PS4 games published before April 1, 2018, Sony has already identified a handful that experience serious problems after users change their PSN names. The following games may run into "critical issues" such as loss of in-game currency and game or trophy progress along with improper functioning of user-generated content and other parts of the game (including paid DLC). Sony recommends you not change your PSN name if you plan on playing any of these titles:

Enlarge / Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), left, discusses a net neutrality bill as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) listens during a news conference in Washington, DC, on Wednesday, March 6, 2019. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

The US House of Representatives today voted to restore Obama-era net neutrality rules, approving a bill that would reverse the Trump-era FCC's repeal of rules that formerly prohibited blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization. The vote was 232-190, with 231 Democrats and one Republican supporting the bill, and 190 Republicans voting against it. Four Democrats and six Republicans did not vote.

The bill isn't likely to become law, though, as it could be either blocked by the Republican-controlled Senate or vetoed by President Trump. White House staff on Monday recommended that Trump veto the bill, claiming that the net neutrality repeal spurred new broadband deployment—even though Federal Communications Commission data doesn't actually support that conclusion.

The Democrats' "Save the Internet Act" doesn't even seem likely to reach Trump, as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) declared it "dead on arrival."

Enlarge / A launch-day photo of Starman leaving Earth's orbit. (credit: SpaceX)

A little more than a year ago, SpaceX launched Elon Musk’s personal Tesla Roadster, complete with a mannequin nicknamed Starman, wearing a SpaceX Dragon spacesuit. About six hours later, the Falcon Heavy rocket's upper stage fired for a final time, sending Starman into an orbit around the Sun, with an aphelion just beyond the orbit of Mars. Since then I, and others, have wondered what the long-term fate of Starman will be.

At first, not much was known about the Tesla's location. The first inkling of its orbital parameters came from an image that Musk tweeted. (Later, this turned out to be inaccurate). The first verified and publicly available location data came from the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC), the US Air Force command tasked with tracking objects in space. But this only covered the time it was in Earth orbit, not Starman's position after the final upper-stage burn. Using those two pieces of information, on February 7, I created a website that allowed a person to see how far away the Tesla was from Earth. But this data was quite limited at first.

The next bit of information came from JPL Horizons, a tool produced by JPL’s Solar System Dynamics organization that is tasked with tracking objects in the Solar System. On February 8, it used data provided directly from SpaceX to allow one with proper knowledge to query the system and determine exactly where Starman was at any given time. This provided useful information for a few months, but beyond that time period, the data simply could not provide enough information.