Feature requires subscription even though it doesn’t use connected services.
Enlarge/ Without a subscription, Toyota's RF key fob loses functionality. (credit: George Frey/Bloomberg)
Automakers keep trying to get a piece of that sweet, sweet subscription income. Now, it’s Toyota’s turn.
Nearly every car company offers some sort of subscriptionpackage, and Toyota has one called Remote Connect. The service offers the usual fare, letting owners use an app to remotely lock their doors, for example, or if they own a plug-in vehicle, to precondition the interior. But as some complimentary subscriptions for Remote Connect come to an end, Toyota owners are getting an unexpected surprise—they can no longer use their key fob to remote-start their vehicles.
In terms of technology, this remote-start feature is no different from using the fob to unlock the car. The fobs use a short-range radio transmitter to send the car a signal that is encrypted with rolling codes. The car then decrypts the signal and performs the requested action, whether it's to lock or unlock the doors, beep the horn, or start the engine. RF key fobs have been around since the 1980s, and GM added a factory-installed remote start option in 2004 (no subscription needed).
Before selling most of its phone business to Microsoft in 2014, Nokia was working on a few different products that the company hoped would help it remain relevant in the smartphone space that was already becoming dominated by Android and iOS. But some of those products never saw the light of day… until prototypes surfaced […]
Before selling most of its phone business to Microsoft in 2014, Nokia was working on a few different products that the company hoped would help it remain relevant in the smartphone space that was already becoming dominated by Android and iOS. But some of those products never saw the light of day… until prototypes surfaced on eBay in 2019.
Now Dimitrios Vlachos has posted hands-on pictures and videos giving us a closer look at two never-released Nokia phones, the Nokia Ion Mini 2 and the Nokia Kataya.
The Nokia Ion Mini 2 is a tiny phone with a small display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 processor (1.2 GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A7), and an Android-based operating system called nauOS.
While the operating system was based on Android 4.4 KitKat, it had a customer launcher that arranged apps in the app drawer in a list format rather than a grid. You could also navigate by drawing a letter on the screen with a fingertip to jump to apps with names starting with that letter of the alphabet.
The phone had no physical keys for home, back, or recents on the front and instead relied on gesture navigation.
And the video I promised you. Keep an eye on my account since I am gonna post many cancelled Nokia devices over the next few days; including the legendary Kataya: pic.twitter.com/RHEGAeO0PG
Interestingly, the phone also has a wedge-shaped design. It’s thicker near the top of the phone than the bottom, possibly making it easier to view when placed flat on a table and/or providing a little extra space for the battery.
This prototype has a boxy design with square corners, a single button at the bottom of the screen, and a small display (although it appears to be larger than the Ion Mini 2).
The most interesting thing about Kataya is that it runs a unique operating system and it’s unclear if it’s a fork of Android or the Linux-based “Meltemi” operating system that was allegedly under development for entry-level smartphones or feature phones.
Dimitrios Vlachos / @ileios
Anyway, Vlachos runs through the phone’s settings and some apps in a series of hands-on videos. While it appears to have many of the features of a modern smartphone including a touchscreen display, support for WiFi, mobile data, and accessibility features, the user interface is pretty basic and the list of included apps is pretty short.
There’s a calculator, calendar, and clock app (with support for night mode), plus an email app with support for Exchange and Gmail accounts, a Messages app, and a photo album app. Other features include an on-screen virtual keyboard and a phone dialer. You know, foundational stuff for a modern smartphone with a touchscreen display.
[Thread/Exclusive] Here comes your full tour of the Nokia Kataya. It’s indeed been a very mysterious & polarising device since its leak (back in 06/2019), partly due to the fact that we didn’t know of its existence until then, and partly because it runs an unseen/unknown OS: pic.twitter.com/uH5bfaa1rT
While there’s no way to know whether either of these phones would have been successful if they were actually released, there was a time when Nokia was the biggest mobile phone maker in the world. The company dominated the space from around 1998 through 2008. But as smartphones began to supplant regular cellphones, Nokia struggled to keep up and eventually started to take a try-anything-and-everything approach that involved developing its own Linux-based operating systems and shipping phones powered by Android or Windows.
These days the Nokia name lives on in the mobile space… but only because a startup called HMD that was founded by former Nokia executives eventually acquired the rights to use the Nokia brand name on their Android phones after Microsoft gave up its dream of making Windows phones.
The Nokia Ion Mini 2 and Nokia Kataya prototypes provide a glimpse of what might have happened if Nokia had continued experimenting. While the phones themselves aren’t all that impressive, I can’t help but wonder where these evolutionary paths might have led if they had continued. Maybe Nokia would be launching an Ion 12 with the latest custom version of Android soon, or a Kataya 9 phone with the latest iteration of its custom operating system and a new coat of modern polish.
Das Time Magazin hat den reichsten Menschen der Welt zur Person des Jahres gekürt. Elon Musk sei ein Beispiel für den Wandel unserer Gesellschaft. (Elon Musk, Elektroauto)
Das Time Magazin hat den reichsten Menschen der Welt zur Person des Jahres gekürt. Elon Musk sei ein Beispiel für den Wandel unserer Gesellschaft. (Elon Musk, Elektroauto)
Pigs have a long and illustrious history in North America. According to the University of Mississippi, they were initially introduced to the continent from Europe in the 1500s. In the 1900s, the Eurasian wild boar was also introduced. Over the years, escapee pigs and the introduced boars interbred, creating a nuisance: wild hogs.
These hogs have captured the imagination of the US. In 2019, a tweet asking a “[l]egit question for rural Americans” went viral. The question: “How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play[?]” There was even a TV show, called American Hoggers, about hunting these pigs, and it ran for four seasons starting in 2011. One of its stars, Dean Campbell, passed away over the summer. A small industry offering the experience of a lifetime—i.e. shooting hogs from a helicopter—also sprang up. If this seems somewhat macabre, it’s worth noting that feral pigs can cause $1.5 billion in damages in the US each year—though it’s hard to say if this makes using assault weaponry against them any less gruesome.
At any rate, new research suggests that by using temperature and terrain, we can anticipate where these hogs are more likely to trot as they continue expanding across the continent. According to Lindsay Clontz, one of the paper’s authors and a University of Georgia masters’ graduate in forestry and natural resources, this could help the US manage the damage more effectively.
After testing hundreds of games over three weeks, the results are (mostly) fantastic.
Enlarge/ Analogue Pocket, running The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening in its Game Boy Color mode. (credit: Sam Machkovech)
The Analogue Pocket is a dream of a gaming device, and it begins shipping to preorder customers this week. It's the most powerful, beautiful, and feature-rich system to revolve around the original Game Boy—and it has earned its mountain of pre-release hype. The Pocket supports any game cartridge with the words "Game Boy" on the label (including GB Color and GB Advance games), while cartridge adapters allow it to play other companies' portable games. That combination of features makes Analogue's latest product a wholly unique portable retro-gaming option—and for the most part, the manufacturer has nailed its execution.
But the Pocket is also a first-generation gadget. Its makers have never released a portable system before, which means that fans of the company's previous TV-centric retro systems (like the Super Nt and Mega Sg) might wonder what they're in for. Is the Pocket another slam-dunk—or does it have enough issues to merit waiting for an eventual system refresh?
Having now tested the Analogue Pocket for a whopping three weeks, I can say that the answer depends. If you bought during the system's painfully brief preorder window late last year, don't fret: your $199 purchase is an insane value. (For all future orders, the price is now $20 higher at $219.) If you didn't buy yet, you can soften your FOMO with the knowledge that there are a few rough edges—and that an eventual Pocket 2.0 could make a great system even better.
Die Kündigungen aus dem Jahr 2020 sparen Mozilla Geld ein. Die Firefox-Macher setzen parallel auf ein starkes Wachstum neuer Geschäftsfelder. (Mozilla, Firefox)
Die Kündigungen aus dem Jahr 2020 sparen Mozilla Geld ein. Die Firefox-Macher setzen parallel auf ein starkes Wachstum neuer Geschäftsfelder. (Mozilla, Firefox)
Tarmac replaced gravel and grass runoff for safety, but it has a drawback.
Enlarge/ Track-edging red, white, and green painted curbs at the exit of the Variante Della Roggia chicane next to the gravel trap during practice for the 2012 Italian Grand Prix on the Monza Circuit, Italy.
On Sunday, under floodlights in Abu Dhabi, the 2021 Formula 1 season came to an end. The most electrifying championship fight in many years came down to a last-lap pass after a dominant Lewis Hamilton got caught out on old tires after a very late caution let rival Max Verstappen pit for much fresher rubber.
Partially due to Netflix's Drive to Survive show, the sport has reached levels of popularity not seen since the 1980s, even here in America, so many people have opinions about the role that F1's race control officials have had in influencing the title fight.
However, I'm not here today to dissect the confusion of the last five laps. Instead, I have a bee in my bonnet about an incident that could have decided the championship that happened just a third of the way around lap 1.
In November a reddit user shared a disturbing story about how they tried to place a 911 call from a Google Pixel 3 smartphone running Android 11, but not only did the call not go through, but the phone froze. It turns out the problem was caused by an interaction between Android and the Microsoft […]
In November a reddit user shared a disturbing story about how they tried to place a 911 call from a Google Pixel 3 smartphone running Android 11, but not only did the call not go through, but the phone froze.
The issue was a strange one that only affected devices where a user was running Android 10 or later and had installed the Microsoft Teams app, but not actually logged into the app. Google’s short-term suggestions were to either sign into the app or uninstall and reinstall it. Microsoft’s update should remove the need for those actions.
If you’re wondering how a third-party app could cause such a troubling failure of a key feature included in modern smartphones, Mishaal Rahman has an in-depth breakdown. But in a nutshell, third-party apps that can make phone calls register a PhoneAccount instance on Android… and a bug in the Teams app (which has not been patched) caused it to generate a new PhoneAccount instance every time the app was loaded if a user wasn’t signed in.
That alone wouldn’t cause an emergency call to fail, but Rahman explains that this bug interacted with an Android bug that could lock up a device when the OS was looking through the list of PhoneAccounts as you try to place an emergency call.
Google says that it will include a fix with an Android platform update on January 4th, but since many phone makers are slow to apply Google updates, it’s probably for the best that Microsoft has already rolled out its own update patching the Teams app to help keep this from happening to other users in the future. So now if you’ve got the Teams app on your phone, you can probably protect yourself by signing in, removing the app, or just making sure it’s up to date.
Das Time Magazin hat den reichsten Menschen der Welt zur Person des Jahres gekürt. Elon Musk sei ein Beispiel für den Wandel unserer Gesellschaft. (
Die Kündigungen aus dem Jahr 2020 sparen Mozilla Geld ein. Die Firefox-Macher setzen parallel auf ein starkes Wachstum neuer Geschäftsfelder. (
Schwarz und rot kommen im Januar 2022, weitere Farben folgen: Sony hat farbige Cover für die Playstation 5 vorgestellt. (
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