Month: April 2020

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  The LG Velvet. [credit: LG ]

LG is teasing its new "Velvet" smartphone, and over the weekend it released a video showing off the design and a key spec. LG says this "Velvet" phone is the first of "a new product roadmap" and that the company is "moving away from alphanumerical designations" in its branding. In other words, the LG G series is dead, and this is the phone that would have been the LG G9.

We are mostly here because the rumors were true, and this "flagship" smartphone isn't sporting Qualcomm's most expensive chip, the Snapdragon 865. Instead, it's shipping the Snapdragon 765. If you're worn out from seeing smartphones with sky-high prices, Snapdragon 765 devices should bring smartphones down from the stratosphere while still maintaining flagship-like speed and features. The chip is popular in China and other more competitive smartphone markets, but in the United States, we've yet to see a phone with the 765. The Nokia 8.3 has a Snapdragon 765G and will launch worldwide sometime in summer 2020, and Google's Pixel 5 is rumored to use the chip, too.

The Snapdragon 865 is a two-chip solution, with the usual computer components on the main SoC, while LTE and 5G connectivity live on a separate modem. A two-chip solution is bigger, more expensive, and more power-hungry than the typical-all-in-one setup. Fitting the extra modem and extra mmWave components into devices is pushing OEMs to make bigger devices with bigger batteries to feed the more power-hungry components, and all of that is ballooning the price of smartphones.

Enlarge / Bottles of MMS, the bleach product that Genesis II Church of Health and Healing was ordered to stop selling. (credit: Genesis II Church of Health and Healing)

A federal court has ordered the "Genesis II Church of Health and Healing" to stop distributing a bleach product that Genesis claims is a cure for COVID-19 and many other health problems.

The US government sued Genesis on Thursday, alleging that it violated the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act with labeling for its so-called Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS), also known as Master Mineral Solution. Genesis' website "contains claims that MMS is intended to cure, mitigate, treat, or prevent coronavirus, which includes COVID-19, and links to testimonials claiming that MMS cures a litany of other diseases including, among others, Alzheimer's, autism, brain cancer, HIV/AIDS, and multiple sclerosis," the lawsuit said. Despite its name, the "church" is a "secular entity based in the State of Florida," the government lawsuit said.

"In the midst of a viral pandemic and national emergency like nothing seen for more than a century, the above-captioned defendants are exploiting the crisis by marketing a powerful industrial bleach to consumers as a remedy for coronavirus," the government also said in its lawsuit.

Enlarge / Protestors demonstrate against Washington state's stay-at-home order at the Capitol building in Olympia on April 19, 2020. (credit: Karen Ducey/Getty Images)

Facebook has nixed event pages for planned protests against stay-at-home measures in California, New Jersey, and Nebraska. The actions come at the request of state officials, who say the gatherings would violate state orders.

Facebook event pages for similar protests in other states remain online.

"Unless government prohibits the event during this time, we allow it to be organized on Facebook. For this same reason, events that defy government's guidance on social distancing aren’t allowed on Facebook," a Facebook spokesperson told Politico.

One of the surprise breakout hits on Netflix during the coronavirus shutdown is Code 8, a Canadian science fiction film funded entirely through a crowdfunding campaign. It's set in an alternate timeline in the 1990s, where people with superhuman powers face severe discrimination and economic hardship. But this isn't a cheap rip-off of the X-Men franchise. Code 8 is a smart, gritty, techno-noir thriller that is equal parts X-Men, District 9, and classic heist movies (Ben Affleck's The Town is probably closest in tone and themes).

(Some spoilers below, but no major reveals.)

Directed by Jeff Chan, Code 8 began life as a short teaser film of the same name, produced by cousins Robbie Amell (star of the forthcoming Upload) and Stephen Amell (Arrow) in 2016. They launched an Indiegogo fundraiser that year to make a feature-length version and soon raised $2.4 million. By December of last year, when the film was officially released, they had raised $3.4 million altogether, with the extra funds going to cover promotional and distribution costs, as well as perks for the more than 30,000 individual contributors (many of whom are named in the very long credits sequence). The film grossed only $150,000 in theaters but has found a second life on Netflix, where it currently ranks in the Top Ten in terms of viewership.

Enlarge / Unused mobile phones lie on the floor. (credit: Getty Images)

As many as a billion mobile phone owners around the world will be unable to use the smartphone-based system proposed by Apple and Google to track whether they have come into contact with people infected with the coronavirus, industry researchers estimate.

The figure includes many poorer and older people—who are also among the most vulnerable to COVID-19—demonstrating a “digital divide” within a system that the two tech firms have designed to reach the largest possible number of people while also protecting individuals’ privacy.

Apple’s iPhones and devices running on Google’s Android operating system now account for the vast majority of the 3.5 billion smartphones estimated to be in active use globally today. That provides a huge potential network to track infection, with surveys suggesting widespread public support for the idea.