Month: November 2020

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  The Pixel 5 in black. [credit: Google ]

The first Pixel 5 teardown to hit the Internet is from PBKReviews, which gives us a fun look at the guts of Google's latest flagship smartphone.

There is a lot about the Pixel 5 construction that is pretty different. The first is the screen retention technique, which uses both glue and rectangular clips. You'll need to both heat the phone up and pry out all the little tabs—hopefully without breaking them—in order to get at the inside of the phone. Compared with an iPhone 12, which uses glue and two screws at the bottom of the phone, or a Samsung phone, which is all glue, this is certainly unique. Whatever Google's plan was for holding the screen on, it doesn't seem to be working very well, as there are already reports of uneven gaps forming between the phone's frame and display.

The next Pixel oddity is the lack of a traditional earpiece. Instead, the phone has an under-display speaker toward the top of the display. It serves double-duty as the "stereo" speaker along with the normal speaker on the bottom of the phone. Under-display earpieces vibrate the display to play sound but usually sound pretty tinny.

• 

  The Pixel 5 in black. [credit: Google ]

The first Pixel 5 teardown to hit the Internet is from PBKReviews, which gives us a fun look at the guts of Google's latest flagship smartphone.

There is a lot about the Pixel 5 construction that is pretty different. The first is the screen retention technique, which uses both glue and rectangular clips. You'll need to both heat the phone up and pry out all the little tabs—hopefully without breaking them—in order to get at the inside of the phone. Compared with an iPhone 12, which uses glue and two screws at the bottom of the phone, or a Samsung phone, which is all glue, this is certainly unique. Whatever Google's plan was for holding the screen on, it doesn't seem to be working very well, as there are already reports of uneven gaps forming between the phone's frame and display.

The next Pixel oddity is the lack of a traditional earpiece. Instead, the phone has an under-display speaker toward the top of the display. It serves double-duty as the "stereo" speaker along with the normal speaker on the bottom of the phone. Under-display earpieces vibrate the display to play sound but usually sound pretty tinny.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson / Getty Images)

A federal court in California has tossed out a lawsuit from the voting rights group Rock the Vote. The lawsuit argued that Donald Trump's May executive order attacking social media platforms violated the group's First Amendment rights.

Trump's May executive order was a strange document. Trump was angry about social media companies' treatment of him and other conservatives. But US law doesn't actually give the president much power to directly punish private technology companies. So while the May order included a lot of overheated rhetoric, the order's operative sections were largely toothless.

The order asked the Federal Communications Commission and the Federal Trade Commission to take actions against social media companies. However, these are independent agencies that ultimately make decisions independent of the president. The FTC has signaled it won't take action on Trump's suggestions. The FCC has begun a rulemaking process to rethink Section 230, which provides legal protections for sites that host third-party content. But the FCC is just at the beginning of that process. We're far from any legally binding changes in regulations, and it's not clear if the FCC even has the authority to re-interpret Section 230.

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  The homepage for ThePlateStation.com, as it looked last week.

Last month, Sony revealed in a teardown video that the wavy white faceplates that give the PlayStation 5 so much of its substantial bulk are easily removable by hand, without the use of tools. That caused some to hope for the return of an aftermarket for customizable, Xbox 360-style faceplates to change the look of the system in your personal entertainment center.

Sony, apparently, is not among the hopeful. The company has reportedly threatened legal action against one of the first companies to design and attempt to sell custom PS5 faceplates, first for trademark infringement and then for alleged infringement on intellectual property.

ThePlateStation.com (archived version) was "born out of the single desire to create a Matte Black custom faceplate, simply because we believed it was what the PS5 community deserved," the site read. The site went up last month promising "unofficial third-party accessories" for the PS5, including a number of colorful $39.99 faceplates that it planned to ship within two weeks of the system's November 12 launch.