Author: batteryforpc

Huawei is now the world’s biggest smartphone maker in terms of shipments, according to Canalys data, which suggests the Chinese tech firm surpassed rival Samsung in Q2 2020, albeit mostly due to its domestic sales in China. This is the first time in nine years that a company other than Samsung or Apple has led the market.

Huawei was quick to pounce on the news, particularly given the turbulent 14 months it has endured since the U.S. issued an embargo forcing it to stop using Google’s flavor of Android in its new handsets. But despite Huawei’s glee at surpassing Samsung, its future in the global smartphone arena looks bleak, due in large part to the app restrictions enforced by the U.S. ban. The crux of Huawei’s problem, as most people by now know, is that buyers of its newer phones can’t access many big-name apps without having to jump through gargantuan hoops. In many ways, Huawei’s predicament is similar to that Windows Phone faced a decade ago.

At the time of its launch, Microsoft’s mobile operating system was often packaged with some of the best hardware the market had to offer, and Nokia’s devices in particular offered superb cameras. But Windows Phone just couldn’t ditch the “lack of apps” tag around its neck, though Microsoft did spend considerable resources convincing developers to build for Windows Phone, even holding developer competitions. In the end, Microsoft managed to persuade some companies to build for its platform, but the apps were often not as full-featured as their iOS and Android counterparts, and a fair chunk of them were rarely updated.

Similarly, Huawei devices are widely lauded for features like AI-infused chips and quality cameras. And the company is also trying to incentivize developers to join its platform, recently launching a $1 million contest that builds on its $1 billion Shining Star developer program.

In the year or so since the U.S. embargo came into effect, Huawei has doubled down on its development of Huawei Mobile Services (HMS), its own version of Google Mobile Services (GMS) designed to replace Google’s ecosystem and provide developers with tools to create apps for the Huawei platform. In a press briefing earlier this week, Jaime Gonzalo, VP of Mobile Services Europe for Huawei’s consumer business group, touted progress the company has made in the last year, revealing that it now has 1.6 million developers on board, an increase of 76% year-on-year, and more than 80,000 apps that now use elements of HMS.

But such growth metrics don’t really matter to most people. All they care about is whether they can readily access all the tools and services they want, something Huawei has attempted to address.

“In reality, there are 3 million apps out there, so this [81,000 apps] is less,” Gonzalo said. “[But] the thing is, it’s not about volume of apps, it’s about the pertinence and the services that these provide. So we evaluated our users, how many apps they use on their phones, and we found that no matter which country, the average number of apps is about 80 … what is the point of offering 3 million apps if many of them are clones of one another or bloatware?”

Although Huawei’s case for quality over quantity is valid, the real problem is that a vast chunk of the world’s most popular apps are simply not available through its AppGallery app store.

Delayed problem

In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. embargo, most Huawei phone users saw no difference in their app selection because the restriction only affects newer Huawei and Honor-branded handsets. Huawei has often downplayed the changes during recent product launches.

Without access to Google Play Services, anyone buying a new Huawei or Honor device today cannot easily access WhatsApp, Instagram, Uber, Uber Eats, Airbnb, Facebook, Google Maps, YouTube, Netflix, Twitter, Tinder, Dropbox, Slack, Amazon Prime, Spotify, eBay, Strava, or many others.

In certain cases, it is possible to access some of the aforementioned services through a browser, though often with less functionality. Huawei also recently introduced a new service called Petal Search, which enables users to search for the .APK files of Android apps either through the companies themselves (e.g. Facebook makes its Android apps available to download directly from its own website) or from third-party .APK libraries.

But this solution is unwieldy and deviates wildly from people’s expectations. Moreover, it’s not easy to provide timely, automatic updates when companies refresh their apps — a core function served by Google and Huawei’s respective mobile services.

There aren’t any barriers stopping companies — in the U.S. or otherwise — from adding their apps to Huawei’s AppGallery. Amazon, Microsoft, and Snap have already embraced AppGallery, which points to one of the key differences between the situation Huawei faces today and the one Microsoft faced with Windows Phone. Huawei devices are still based on Android, which makes it much easier for developers to get their apps into its ecosystem.

But Huawei is now racing against the clock. The majority of its devices are currently in the hands of millions of people globally who can still access Google’s Android. Now the company is trying to get its house in order before those consumers begin upgrading to new devices. As people transition from older Huawei or Honor handsets to the fresh crop of devices, many won’t realize they’re buying into a completely different version of Android and will be left bitterly disappointed.

A decade ago, many less tech-savvy consumers were similarly impacted when they bought new Windows Phones for the camera only to discover they couldn’t access most of the apps their friends had on Android or iOS.

Online retailers are taking note this time. Some are posting prominent warnings next to new Huawei devices to ward off a backlash from confused consumers who can’t figure out how to install WhatsApp, Instagram, or Uber.

Such websites also provide detailed guides for customers, explaining the various processes they can go through to bridge at least part of this Google-sized gap. But people don’t like workarounds and they don’t like friction, which is where Huawei’s rivals stand to benefit.

Indeed, Huawei may have surpassed Samsung as the top dog in global smartphone shipments, but Samsung could be the big winner when Huawei’s customers look for brands unencumbered by app restrictions. Huawei can probably achieve some success in markets that are less reliant on apps and services from Google and other U.S. companies, like Russia, but the company’s chances of remaining a global powerhouse are slim if it can’t make core apps easily available to its users.

Sure, there will always be some users willing to try alternatives to market-leading apps, but not at any meaningful scale. In the end, it doesn’t matter how good your on-device AI is, or how amazing your camera is. That is the painful lesson Microsoft and Nokia learned with Windows Phone all those years ago.

Seagate Technology has started shipping its hard disk drives featuring a 18TB capacity to select customers, and revealed that HDDs will be more broadly available later this year. But while 18TB drives significantly increase storage capacities of modern datacenters, Seagate has a more important launch set for the next few months, as it also intends to start commercial shipments of its drives based on heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR). 

The importance of HAMR — a technology that has been explored for 66 years now — is fundamental as it is expected to enable hard with capacities of up to 80 TB in the coming years.

“We began shipping 18TB drives as part of our system solution in the March quarter, with shipments to select cloud customers and channel partners starting in the June quarter,” said Dave Mosley, CEO of Seagate. “We expect to begin ramping 18-terabyte drives within the calendar year, which aligns well with market readiness.”

HAMR incoming

As expected, Seagate’s first HAMR-based HDDs will feature a 20TB capacity using heat-assisted conventional magnetic recording without any ‘shingling’ and therefore these drives will offer predictable write performance. 

“We remain on track to begin shipping our first commercially available HAMR drives in late 2020 on 20TB capacities. HAMR technology will be the industry’s path to achieving drive capacities of 30, 40, 50 terabytes and even higher. We plan to offer 20TB HAMR drives to customers on a limited basis and is part of our system solution to collect production and field data.” 

It is noteworthy that Seagate has been shipping 16TB HAMR drives to select customers for a while and to that end it already has quite some information how these HDDs behave in tightly-packed datacenters. As it turns out, the company wants to gather some more data about performance of the technology.

The Canon EOS R5 is about to put professional wildlife photographers out of business. That’s our verdict, after extensively testing the Animal AF function on the new camera, which is nothing short of witchcraft. 

Much has already been said about the Canon EOS R5, and we’ll be saying plenty more in our full review (which we’re currently putting the finishing touches on). However, something that simply can’t be said enough is just how awesome the new animal autofocus is. 

We were expecting to be impressed, but we weren’t prepared to be gobsmacked. The Animal AF is so good, and so accurate, that it is actually unfair. Wildlife photographers have spent years wrestling with twitchy autofocus, learning how to perfect their timing, sucking their teeth at all the shots that were focused on the feet or the tail or the wing instead of the eyes.

With thee Canon EOS R5, you don’t need any of that. It is literally a cheat code for wildlife photography.

We’re not exaggerating. Just select ‘Subject: Animals’ in the AF menu and set continuous autofocus, then just point your camera at an animal and the R5 will find it. No need to move your focus points or even touch the joystick – just aim in the direction of the creature and the camera does the rest for you. 

It automatically finds the face and eyes, and it does so fast. Faster than you could possibly do it yourself. And it reacts quicker, too, when animals make their herky-jerky movements that you didn’t anticipate and couldn’t put your focus points in the right place for – the R5 does it without hesitation. 

Canon only certifies its Animal AF for dogs, cats and birds (including birds in flight – and yes, it does work and yes, it’s equally amazing), but we found that it works with just about any species. Gorillas? Check. Gibbons? Check. Lions? Check. Turtles, iguanas, fish, lemurs, seals? Check, check, check, check and check. 

The whole 4K and 8K overheating thing is a very public sore point for the Canon EOS R5, and we’ll give you our verdict on that in our full review. However, if you were expecting a similar kind of sting in the tail for the Animal AF… there isn’t one. It simply works, and it’s simply awesome. 

And, just like that, Sony is no longer the king of autofocus – Canon now sits proudly on the AF throne, thanks to the R5. 

Last year Sony sold the most full-frame mirrorless cameras in Japan, and while Canon and Nikon attempt to play catch up, today Sony is announcing its latest high-end mirrorless cam – the A7SIII – which looks like it’s about to crush the competition.

Now I fully admit that using “crush” this way is a bit hyperbolic, and because the camera won’t be available in stores until sometime in September, things could change between now and then. But if you look at the A7SIII’s specs and new features, Sony’s latest full-frame mirrorless feels like a shot across the bow of every other high-end camera maker.

The A7SIII starts with a 12-MP backside-illuminated sensor that Sony says was designed to maximise low-light performance and deliver super-fast sensor readout times, which helps reduce the effect of things like rolling shutter. Then Sony paired that 12-MP sensor with its new Bionz XR image processor which the company claims is eight times more powerful than its previous Bionz chip while offering even faster face and eye detection, better colour reproduction, and support for significantly higher data speeds, both when writing to internal memory cards or when sent out over HDMI (via a full-size HDMI Type-A port) or wifi.

The good stuff doesn’t stop there though because the A7SIII has a new 9.44 million-dot OLED electronic viewfinder that boasts almost twice the resolution of its closest competitors like the 5.76 million dot OLED EVF used in the Panasonic S1. Alternatively, for those who prefer framing up shots using a camera’s rear display, the A7SIII also comes with a fully articulating rear touchscreen (another first for any of Sony’s full-frame A-series cams) that can be flipped around a full 180 degrees so you can easily compose shots from in front of the cam. That said, because of the position of the A7SIII’s HDMI port, if you do have an external monitor or recorder attached, you might have to deal with cables partially getting in the way of that display.

As for storage, Sony is even including two new CF Express card readers that support both standard SD cards and new CF Express Type-A cards, with the A7SIII being the first camera designed to take advantage of the new cards. One immediate advantage of the new card reader is that when combined with its speedier image processor, Sony says the A7SIII now features an image buffer of up to 1,000 shots, even when the camera is shooting full out at 10 FPS in RAW + JPEG mode.

This means users coming from older cameras won’t need to buy a new set of cards for storage right away, though if you do want to take advantage of the A7SIII’s advanced video recording formats, you will need to upgrade at some point. Though with CFexpress Type A cards slated to cost $200 (£154) for an 80GB card or $400 (£309) for a 160GB card (UK pricing is TBA), you might need to save up a bit before switching.

And with the A7S line historically being a major go to camera for video, Sony also included support for 4K video recording using the camera’s full pixel readout at up to 120 fps, or up to 240 fps at 1080p. The A7SIII also supports 10-bit 4:2:2 colour, four-channel audio recording, and thanks to improvements in recording speeds and heat dissipation, the A7SIII no longer has a max 30-minute recording time either.

Sony even addressed one of the longest-running gripes about Sony cameras in general by completely redesigning the A7SIII’s menu system so that it’s better organised, works with touch input, and easier to see multiple layers of settings without needing to constantly dig three or four levels deep. And like other A-series cameras, the A7SIII also features in-body image stabilisation (up to 5.5 stops) and compatibility with Sony’s huge lineup of E-mount lenses.

However, unlike the new Canon EOS R5, the A7SIII does not come with support for 8K video recording, which was an intentional choice made by Sony as the company wanted to focus strictly on making the best possible 4K video camera it could. It’s an interesting move by Sony, because while 8K video is sure to become a more important feature in the future, considering the workflows of most filmmakers today, I think Sony made a prudent decision to really concentrate its efforts on 4K.

The Sony A7SIII is expected to go on sale sometime in September for £3,800 (body only). Compared to other full-frame mirrorless competitors, the A7SIII costs £400 less than Canon’s EOS R5 and £200 more than Panasonic’s S1H, but about £1,100 more than a Nikon Z7.