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Apple (AAPL) is in "advanced talks" to acquire British chip design company Imagination Technologies (IMG), according to a source with knowledge of the discussions. When Ars sought comment, Imagination Technologies refused to deny any such planned takeover.

Imagination Technologies is primarily known for its PowerVR line of GPUs, which Apple has used in its mobile A-series SoCs since the A4, which powered the iPhone 4 and 4th-gen iPod Touch.

Imagination has tried to diversify into other areas, including specialised ray tracing GPUs, MIPS CPUs, and DIY/IoT stuff, but nothing has really stuck. In February this year, the company announced that long-time CEO Hossein Yassaie would be stepping down and that it would begin the process of restructuring the business. Then last week, in mid-March, the company announced that, as part of the restructuring, it would be axing 350 jobs and focusing on PowerVR.

(credit: Andrew Williams)

With the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and PlayStation VR all due for release before the end of the year, there's no doubt 2016 is the year of virtual reality. And yet, with such a focus on headset hardware, it's easy to forget that there's a whole world of software and content needed to make VR work. Enter Nokia.

Now freed from the cut-throat mobile market, the Finnish company is hoping to kickstart VR content creation with the Ozo, a high-quality VR camera with eight camera sensors and eight microphones spread across a not-quite-sphere. It outputs 360-degree 3D video and surround audio through a single cable, bypassing all the issues faced when trying to get the same effect from a DIY assemblage of GoPro or Red cameras.

Before you get your credit card out, ready to be the first VR YouTuber with 10 million subs, there's one caveat we must point out: the Nokia Ozo costs an eye-watering €55,000 (£43,000, $60,000). This is most definitely a professional tool, not merely something to help with shooting interminable holiday panoramas.

A recent paper co-authored by MIT researchers did the math on how best to allow competing traffic through an intersection. The results, published in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, suggest that once cars can connect to city infrastructure, traffic lights will be a suboptimal way to regulate traffic through city streets.

Instead, the paper suggests, cars should talk to computers at intersections and be allowed through the crossing via a slot-based system, without the need for yellow lights. Better yet, once fully autonomous vehicles hit the road, even greater efficiencies could be realized by having the cars talk to each other to form platoons that move through intersections.

The researchers start by acknowledging the inadequacies of the 150-year-old traffic light—at any given intersection, they say, there are so many variables that any one breakdown in the flow of traffic can be disastrous for the whole intersection. "This explains why traffic can rapidly deteriorate in cities, resulting in widespread congestion and immense societal and environmental costs,” the paper notes.

The Xiaomi Mi 5.

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While Samsung and its Galaxy S7 mostly competes with high-end devices like the iPhone, Xiaomi makes its money attacking the mid- and low-end of the market. The company is all about bang-for-your-buck, often delivering very good specs at low prices. How low? Like most flagships, the Xiaomi Mi 5 sports the new Snapdragon 820 processor and a USB Type-C port, all for the distinctly not-flagship price of RMB 1999 (~$305). You could buy two of these for the price of a Galaxy S7 or LG G5. The catch is that the Mi 5 is currently only available in China.

But the Mi 5 might be the phone that Xiaomi uses to finally break into the Western market. Despite its name, Mobile World Congress generally focuses on phones for Europe and the US, and Xiaomi's first-ever appearance may be a sign of things to come. Xiaomi is also sending review units to a few US press outlets—we didn't import this one. The company opened online stores for products like its earbuds and headsets in the US, UK, France, and Germany, but the stores don't sell smartphones yet.

Design and build quality

The Mi 5 is very much a "budget flagship" phone: it feels and performs like a high-end device, but Xiaomi saves money by trimming features where most customers won't notice. The Mi 5's Snapdragon 820 only runs at 1.8GHz instead of the 2.15GHz you'd get on a Galaxy S7. The Mi 5 skips the crazy smartphone display resolution wars by going with a sensible 5.1-inch 1080p screen. The 428 PPI will lose a spec sheet battle with a 577PPI Galaxy S7, but when you consider an iPhone 6S only has a 326 PPI screen, 428 PPI is just fine. You get "only" 3GB of RAM, a full 1GB less than you'd get on the S7, but that's still plenty. There's no out-of-control spec creep, and you even get some important extras, like a fingerprint reader, NFC, an IR blaster, dual SIM cards, and the USB Type-C port I mentioned earlier.