Month: March 2020

The Huawei P40 and Samsung Galaxy S20 series’ are about to get some competition. We’ve seen a few designs and some leaked specs for the OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro, the Chinese smartphone manufacturer’s next generation of flagship phones, but we’ve not heard any official word on the handsets from the OnePlus camp. 

However, that’s all about to change, as OnePlus is gearing up to formally unveil its next handsets, and it’s provided a few tantalising new details on the phones.

OnePlus 8 and OnePlus 8 Pro are set to be announced on Monday, April 14, at 11am EST. For UK smartphone fans, that’s 3pm GMT. The launch event will take place on the OnePlus site and on Youtube, but you’ll also be able to watch it all right here on T3.

OnePlus doesn’t go into too much detail, but it does tell us a 120Hz refresh rate will be introduced to its phones, boasting “an even more fluid and immersive viewing experience” along with “a handful of other new and exciting technologies”.

A 120Hz full-HD AMOLED screen would put the OnePlus 8 in the same category as the Samsung Galaxy S20 series, and above the Huawei P40’s 90Hz capability. We also know the phones will be 5G-capable, but that’s it as far as official confirmation goes. 

Although we’ve had little official information, we do have a leaked list of specs that do look fairly accurate, courtesy of noted Twitter leaker Ishan Agarwal. 

Google is offering price discounts on members of the Pixel family this Easter. The Pixel 3a and 3a XL will be £30 off when purchased from a few retailers including the Google Store, Currys, John Lewis, and Argos. This will knock the price of the smaller Pixel down to £299, and that of the larger Pixel to £369. This deal runs from March 31st through April 21st. If you’d prefer to purchase it on contract, EE will be offering 30GB of data for the price of 10GB. It’ll run from April 1st to April 30th.

Whe reviewing the Pixel 3a XL, we noted:

At $479 the Pixel 3a XL feels like a bit of a bargain. If you’re into smaller phones, the $399 Pixel 3a is even more so. These phones have maintained most of what makes the Pixel 3 series among the most enjoyable phones to use, and in my week-long testing, I’ve noticed none of the performance hiccups that sullied some of that luster.

I miss wireless charging, and the lack of waterproofing is a bit of a bummer, but otherwise the biggest compliment I can give to the Pixel 3a series is that it using it on a day-to-day basis is practically indistinguishable from the Pixel 3. That may be its biggest curse, too, but at under $500 people are likely to be a lot more forgiving.

The comment holds true at a lower price.

Alongside the Pixel 3a family, Google is also offering discounts on some of its home devices. Most notably, this includes the excellent Google Nest Mini, Google’s Nest Hub, and the Google Home Max and others like the Chromecast and Chromecast Ultra.

We already heard murmurings of a Kirin 820 chipset earlier this month, and now Honor has made it official by launching the Kirin 820-powered Honor 30s in China.

The new chipset is a reasonably heavy lifter on the CPU front, delivering four Cortex-A76 cores (one at 2.36Ghz and three at 2.22Ghz) and four Cortex-A55 cores (1.84Ghz). This should translate into better multi-core performance in theory than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 700 series.

HiSilicon’s new processor also sports a Mali-G57 MP6 GPU rather than Mali-G77 graphics as previously rumored. Otherwise, you can also expect an upgraded NPU as well as 5G capabilities.

What else does Honor 30s offer?

5G generally requires more juice than 4G, but the Honor 30s features a 4,000mAh battery that’s not exactly large compared to other 5G phones. Fortunately, 40W wired charging means you can hit 100% capacity in just over an hour, and 70% in 30 minutes (there’s no wireless charging though).

The phone is pretty solid in the camera field though, delivering a 16MP selfie camera in a punch-hole and a quad rear camera arrangement. The quad system consists of a 64MP main camera, 8MP 3x telephoto shooter, 8MP ultra-wide camera, and 2MP macro sensor.

Other notable specs include a 6.5-inch FHD+ LCD screen with an unspecified refresh rate, a side-mounted fingerprint scanner, USB-C, 3.5mm port, and storage expansion (yay!) via NM card (boo!). Don’t expect an IR blaster or NFC though.

The Honor 30s is listed at 2,399 yuan (~$338) for the 8GB/128GB model via Tmall, and 2,699 yuan (~$380) for the 8GB/256GB variant.

To one extent or another artificial intelligence is practically everywhere these days, from games to image upscaling to smartphone “personal assistants.” More than ever, researchers are pouring a ton of time, money, and effort into AI designs. At Google, AI algorithms are even being used to design AI chips.

This is not a complete design of silicon that Google is dealing with, but a subset of chip design known as placement optimization. This is a time-consuming task for humans. As explained by IEEE Spectrum (via LinusTechTips), this involves placing blocks of logic and memory (or clusters of those blocks) in strategic areas to make the most of the available real estate, both for performance and power efficiency.

It might take a team of engineers several weeks to map out the ideal placement because it’s a complex task with a ton of variables. In stark contrast, Google’s neural network can produce a better design for a Tensor processing unit in less than 24 hours. This is similar in concept to the Tensor cores that Nvidia uses in its Turing-based GeForce RTX graphics cards, just with different goals in mind.

That’s interesting in and of itself, but equally so is the type of AI Google is using. Rather than leverage a deep learning model, which requires training AI on a large set of data, Google is using a “reinforcement learning” system. The short explanation is RL models learn by doing.

There is a reward system involved, so RL models proceed in the right direction. In this case, the reward is a combination of power reduction, improvements in performance, and area reduction. I’m simplifying a bit, but basically, the more designs Google’s AI does, the better it becomes at the task at hand (making AI chips).

“We believe that it is AI itself that will provide the means to shorten the chip design cycle, creating a symbiotic relationship between hardware and AI, with each fueling advances in the other,” Google’s researchers explain. If this works out for Google, it seems inevitable AMD, Intel and Nvidia will eventually try the same approach, too.

Users on the web interact with checkboxes, dropdown menus, and other UI elements on a regular basis. Google is now redesigning these HTML form controls in Chrome to improve touch-friendliness and accessibility.

One issue with native form controls, however, is the inconsistency in their styling. Older controls, such as <button> and <select> were styled to match the user’s operating system. Form controls that were added to the platform more recently were designed to match whatever style was popular at the time.

In Chrome, this results in “mismatched and sometimes outdated” controls that force developers to spend additional time and code customizing the defaults. Over the last year, Google worked with the Microsoft Edge team to “retheme and improve the functionality of the built-in form controls on Chromium browsers.”

This results in new UIs that are consistent and “easier to perceive.” Overall, it does away with gradients and leverages modern flat design principles for checkboxes, buttons, text fields, dropdown menus, progress indicators, and sliders.

In terms of accessibility, there is a “more visible” focus ring that helps “people using a keyboard or switch device to identify which element they’re interacting with.” The new design features a thick dark ring with a thin white outline. Another tweak improves color pickers by making them fully accessible with keyboards and switch devices.

Enhanced touch support results in larger tap targets. One example sees date pickers have better flyouts and support for swiping and inertia when scrolling.

These changes are already available on Edge for Windows, and can be enabled on Chrome 81 with the following flag:

chrome://flags/#form-controls-refresh

This controls redesign will roll out to Mac, Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS with version 83 in mid-May. A similar revamp is coming to Android later this year.