Month: October 2019

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  The Lexus LF-30 is the brand's concept of a battery EV a decade from now. [credit: Lexus ]

This year's Tokyo auto show just got underway in Japan, and in keeping with the zeitgeist, there's plenty of new electric vehicles at the show. However, like the annual Frankfurt auto show, seeing some of the debuts can be frustrating from a US perspective. For example, Mazda has a cool new battery EV—with suicide doors—but like the cute Honda E there are no plans to bring it to America. But one Japanese brand that will bring us a BEV is Lexus. It plans to bring the as-yet unseen electric car to the US and China in 2020, although everyone has to wait until November to actually see what it looks like.

In the meantime, the company has the LF-30 concept to keep us guessing. Before anyone gets ahead of themselves, this is absolutely not what a production Lexus EV will look like next year. The clue is in the name—"30" refers to the year 2030, so this really is one of those corporate flights of fancy which still requires an enabling technology or two to be perfected first.

The LF-30 uses individual hub motors mounted in each wheel, which it says allows the design to "visually express the energy created by the wheels set at the corners of the vehicle body streaming toward the vehicle cabin and past the driver to directly flow onto the road surface." With no traditional hood upon which to mount its Cylon-shaped grille (officially known as the "spindle"), the spindle shape shows up all over the place—an angle here in the window line, a crease there in an air intake.

Enlarge / Comcast's Flex streaming box and voice remote. (credit: Comcast)

Comcast last month announced that it was giving its Flex streaming device to Internet-only customers for free, but the announcement did not mention one important detail: the "free" device is only given to Comcast broadband customers who spend $13 a month to rent Comcast's xFi Gateway modem/router.

The Verge yesterday published a story that details the problem. The Verge wrote:

After the free offer was announced last month, a Comcast spokesperson told me the rental requirement would be dropped “in the coming weeks” so that all Internet-only customers could get the device for free. But a month later, that requirement is still in place, and Comcast’s checkout interface has even been updated to emphasize that its streaming box, called Flex, is only included when you rent the company’s modem/router combo, the xFi Gateway. The Comcast spokesperson now says the ability to use your own router and avoid the fee is “coming imminently.”

Comcast told Ars the same thing today, that it is lifting the restriction very soon. A Comcast FAQ explains that the Flex box automatically connects to your Comcast Internet service once it's plugged into a power outlet, as long as the Comcast wireless gateway is operating. Comcast told us that a software update coming soon will let the Flex connect to any Wi-Fi network.

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  The hardware you get with the $129.99 Stadia "Founder's Edition."

Google has announced that it won't be able to fulfill all preorders for its Google Stadia streaming service in time for its previously announced November 19 launch date.

The company's carefully worded launch announcement last week technically hinted at that fact, saying that the Founder's Edition preorder hardware bundle would only "start arriving on gamers’ doorsteps on November 19." Only "the first gamers who preordered and have received your Founder’s Editions" were promised the ability to log in to Stadia starting at 9am Pacific Time that day.

Google also says that the Founder's Edition bundle—originally introduced as the only way to play Stadia at launch—has now sold out across all 14 launch countries. Users can still order a substantially similar (and previously announced) Premiere Edition for the same price to "get into Stadia this year."

Enlarge / An artist's concept of a spent upper stage of a rocket. (credit: Nanoracks)

In the 1960s, as it cast about for ideas about what to do after the Apollo Moon program, NASA considered re-using the spent upper stages of its large rockets as space stations. Ultimately, however, the agency dismissed this "wet workshop" concept and modified an upper stage on the ground for its Skylab program.

However, a Houston-based company named Nanoracks has revised the "wet workshop" concept, hoping to convert the spent upper stages of rockets into in-space habitats. "We are keen on bringing the wet lab back as an architecture,"  Adrian Mangiuca, who directs commerce for Nanoracks, said in an interview. "We think it is the future."

To that end, the company announced this week that it aims to perform a demonstration test in the fourth quarter of 2020. It will fly on a rocket—Mangiuca declined to name the launch provider—as as a secondary customer. After the primary mission, and other customers deploy their payloads, Nanoracks will attempt to heat and then cut three samples of metal used in upper stages. It will have about 30 minutes to an hour to perform these tasks with a robotic arm before the upper stage fires its engine to initiate a de-orbit burn.

Enlarge / The Pixel 4.

Update 3:33pm ET: Google gave the following statement to The Verge:

We designed Smooth Display so that users could enjoy the benefits of 90Hz for improved UI interactions and content consumption, while also preserving battery when higher refresh rates are not critical by lowering back down to 60Hz.

In some conditions or situations, however, we set the refresh rate to 60Hz. Some of these situations include: when the user turns on battery saver, certain content such as video (as it's largely shot at 24 or 30fps), and even various brightness or ambient conditions. We constantly assess whether these parameters lead to the best overall user experience. We have previously planned updates that we'll roll out in the coming weeks that include enabling 90hz in more brightness conditions.

So Google's statement seems to indicate that 1) this was on purpose, and 2) Google is going to change it in the future thanks to some "previously planned updates." The "Future Pixel Updates" list now contains this 90Hz display fix, which is due out "in the coming weeks" and the Face Unlock awareness fix, which is due out "in the coming months."

Original post: After trying out the Pixel 4 at Google's hardware show and at home for a bit (review coming eventually) my working description for the new, 90Hz display has been that it's... "inconsistent." Sometimes it seems smooth, and sometimes it doesn't. Now Reddit user Brian Sefcik has discovered why: the display refresh rate is tied to the display brightness.