Month: March 2021

Enlarge / The Fairphone 2 and its many modules. (credit: Fairphone)

Fairphone—the sustainable, modular smartphone company—is still shipping updates to the 5-year-old Fairphone 2. The company won't win any awards for speed, but the phone—which launched in 2015 with Android 5—is now being updated to Android 9.0. The most interesting part of this news is a video from Fairphone detailing the update process the company went through, which offers more transparency than we normally get from a smartphone manufacturer. To hear Fairphone tell the story of Android updates, the biggest barrier to longer-term support is—surprise!—Qualcomm.

Fairphone wants consumers to keep their phones for longer, creating less e-waste and carbon emissions via modular replacement parts that are easily upgradeable and repairable. A big challenge for designing a long-lasting phone like this is software support. Even if Fairphone wanted to support a phone forever, Android software updates do not work that way, and major OS updates normally reply on a relay race of companies that all need to hand-off a build of Android before it reaches your phone.

We've gone over this before, but let's do a quick recap of how Android makes it to your smartphone. First, Google releases builds of AOSP (the Android Open Source Project) to everyone. This doesn't run on a phone yet, though. First, your SoC (System on a Chip) manufacturer (usually Qualcomm) has to get hold of it and customize Android for a particular SoC, adding drivers and other hardware support. Then, that build goes to your phone manufacturer (Fairphone, in this case) which adds support for the rest of the hardware—things like cameras, the display, and any other accessories—along with built-in apps and any custom Android skin work that the company wants to do.

Enlarge / US President Donald Trump, right, listens to Deborah Birx, coronavirus response coordinator, as she speaks during a news conference in the White House in Washington, DC, on Thursday, April 23, 2020. (credit: Getty | Bloomberg)

One of the most indelible moments of Deborah Birx’s controversial time as White House coronavirus response coordinator for the Trump administration came on April 23, 2020. That’s when she sat quietly to the side of the former president while he recklessly suggested that people could rid themselves of the pandemic virus by taking in or injecting themselves with hazardous disinfectants.

Since leaving the administration, Birx has spoken about how “extraordinarily uncomfortable” she was in the moment, telling ABC News recently: “I still think about it every day.”

But, at the same time she was expressing that regret, Birx was also in the process of joining ActivePure—an air-cleaning company that makes products that could lead to people inhaling hazardous disinfectants or byproducts, all in the name of getting rid of the pandemic coronavirus.

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  LG's 2021 OLED lineup. [credit: LG ]

LG has been releasing new information about its 2021 lineup of OLED TVs in bits and pieces ever since the Consumer Electronics Show in January, but all those press releases and presentation left out the basics before now: pricing. Today, we learned the price points of each TV in the lineup, from the new, lower-end A series to the ultrapremium G series.

This year, LG's OLED TVs will range between $1,300 and $6,000, depending on the specific product line and screen size.

At the bottom end is the LG A1, which omits costly, mostly gaming-specific features—like 120Hz panels, variable refresh rate (VRR), and the HDMI 2.1 connection that makes those possible—to get OLEDs more accessible (and more competitive with the cheaper-to-produce LCD TV alternatives) than before. Available in 48-, 55-, 65-, and 77-inch sizes, the A1 will ship with a suggested retail price of $1,300, $1,600, $2,200, or $3,200, respectively.