Month: October 2023

Enlarge / Sony announced the A95K QD-OLED TV in early 2022. (credit: Sony)

Image retention is scary to see on your OLED TV but often easy to eliminate. Many modern OLED TVs subtly work their own magic when you're not watching in order to remove the problem, as RTINGS demonstrated in a video released Friday. However, TV vendors aren't all doing perfect jobs at implementing OLED screens' compensation cycles.

Temporary image retention differs from permanent image retention, aka burn-in, in that it points to a change in the panel's thin-film transistor (TFT) layer, rather than degradation of the OLED layer. Untreated permanent image retention doesn't lead to burn-in, a Sony spokesperson confirmed to me, but anyone looking at a screen suffering from image persistence will want to eradicate the sticky images, fast.

These temporary artifacts can be the result of heat affecting the amount of light emitted by the OLED pixels and can happen within minutes of usage. But letting the TV cool down by turning it off usually fixes this.

Enlarge / Behold, the glorious, flat display. Normal, common-sense phone design is back, finally! (credit: Ron Amadeo)

Google is listening. Reviewing phones means that we usually complain—a lot—about phone designs, about things that could be better, and about decisions that don't make a ton of sense. Usually it feels like talking to a wall; manufacturers ignore us and keep doing whatever they want.

The Pixel 8 is different, though. This phone feels like it's taking some of our long-standing pet peeves into account and is finally doing something about them. Tired of pointless curved screens that distort your image? Fixed. Want an update support timeline that finally rivals iOS? Check. Fixing flaws with the previous model, like face unlock? Double check. Compared to where the Pixel line was just a few years ago, Google Hardware is turning in phones that are polished, practiced, and full of great decisions.

The Pixel design just keeps improving

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  The Pixel 8 Pro display looks great. [credit: Ron Amadeo ]

Google is still making steady improvements to the design that started with the Pixel 6, and the Pixel 8 Pro feels like one of the best hardware designs out there. First up, Google is finally dumping the years-long failed experiment of curved displays. Samsung started the curved display trend back in 2014 when it figured out how to bend OLED displays. Thanks to the huge influence of Samsung's display division, from then on most flagship Android phones had the long edges of their displays curve into the bodies.

Enlarge / After a confusing mess for the last generation, Toyota's stylists have done a decent job with the new Prius. I think it needs a front plate if you're going to have it a light shade like this silver. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Earlier this year, we spent some time with the new Toyota Prius. There was a lot to like about the new car, the fifth to bear its name—sleek looks and minimal fuel consumption are the highlights. Today, it's Prius Prime, the plug-in hybrid variant. Toyota might have been early to hybrids and uncomfortably late to battery electric vehicles, but the Prius Prime straddles the line between the two, offering a battery big enough for most daily driving and a highly efficient gas-burning powertrain for longer journeys.

Much of what I wrote about the not-Prime Prius applies to the plug-in, too. There are the same sleek looks, with a steeply raked windshield and a far more cohesive design than the model it replaced—that one looked like the result of two separate car designs that were later crashed into each other. I'm starting to think that the car needs a front license plate to look right—that little bump out on the fascia where a plate is supposed to attach looks rather obvious in the case of our Virginia-registered tester.

The $39,170 Prius Prime XSE Premium we tested doesn't look quite as racy as the blue car we had in May—mostly, that's down to the different design of alloy wheels. Smaller 17-inch wheels with aerodynamic covers are available with the Prius Prime SE ($32,350), but like the XSE Premium, the mid-range XSE ($35,600) also rides on the bigger 19-inch wheels. I mention this upfront because if you're looking for the most efficient option, the stripped-out base model on small wheels has a lower drag coefficient and runs more economically.

Enlarge / A teaser image for Qualcomm's Snapdragon X SoCs. (credit: Qualcomm)

Qualcomm's annual "Snapdragon Summit" is coming up later this month, and the company appears ready to share more about its long-planned next-generation Arm processor for PCs. The company hasn't shared many specifics yet, but yesterday we finally got a name: "Snapdragon X," which is coming in 2024, and it may finally do for Arm-powered Windows PCs what Apple Silicon chips did for Macs a few years ago (though it's coming a bit later than Qualcomm had initially hoped).

Qualcomm has been making chips for PCs for years, most recently the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 (you might also know it as the Microsoft SQ3, which is what the chip is called in Surface devices). But those chips have never quite been fast enough to challenge Intel's Core or AMD's Ryzen CPUs in mainstream laptops. Any performance deficit is especially noticeable because many people will run at least a few apps designed for the x86 version of Windows, code which needs to be translated on the fly for Arm processors.

So why will Snapdragon X be any different? It's because these will be the first chips borne of Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia in 2021. Nuvia was founded and staffed by quite a few key personnel from Apple's chipmaking operation, the team that had already upended a small corner of the x86 PC market by designing the Apple M1 and its offshoots. Apple had sued Nuvia co-founder and current Qualcomm engineering SVP Gerard Williams for poaching Apple employees, though the company dropped the suit without comment earlier this year.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Dan Kitwood )

Elon Musk's X platform (formerly Twitter) faces penalties under a new European law if it doesn't take action to stop the spread of Israel/Hamas disinformation, an EU official warned Musk yesterday.

"Following the terrorist attacks carried out by Hamas against Israel, we have indications that your platform is being used to disseminate illegal content and disinformation in the EU," European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton wrote in a letter to Musk. "Let me remind you that the Digital Services Act sets very precise obligations regarding content moderation."

The Digital Services Act applies to large online platforms and has requirements on content moderation and transparency. It provides for fines of up to 6 percent of a provider's annual revenue.