Amazon and Tencent Back Smartphone Maker Essential:

Essential Products Inc., the smartphone maker founded by the creator of Google’s Android mobile software, confirmed it has a new $300 million war chest as it prepares for the seemingly insurmountable task of taking on Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Inc.

The startup on Wednesday unveiled the large roster of investors taking a chance on it, including Chinese internet company Tencent Holdings Ltd. TCEHY 0.28% and Amazon Inc.’s AMZN -0.69% Alexa Fund. Essential also disclosed that Best Buy Co. stores and Amazon.com Inc. will be its retail launch partners in the U.S.

But the company stopped short of the big reveal: When exactly its $699 titanium-encased smartphone will be available.

Great, Andy Rubin’s company has 300 million dollars. Good for them. They still haven’t shipped their Essential phone.

One more clarification: they aren’t taking on Apple, they’re taking on Samsung. Samsung is the largest manufacturer of Android phones in the world with a 48.7% share. Huawei is a distant 6.4%. They need to tackle Samsung before they tackle Apple.

After reading the features of the Essential Phone, I can’t list any competitive advantages it has. It has top-of-the-line specs (as of 2017) and an edge-to-edge screen (quickly becoming table stakes).

The Essential Phone hardly represents traditional competition, let alone asymmetric competition.

Mazda’s engine breakthrough promises big fuel efficiency gains:

Mazda has made the announcement car manufacturers have been working towards for years: it’s releasing the first commercial compression-ignition gasoline engine. Dubbed SkyActiv-X, the engine will be available in 2019 and promises up to 20-30% more engine efficiency than the current SkyActiv-G, and up to 45% more than Mazda’s 2008 petrol engine.

Current gasoline engines rely on a spark plug to ignite their air-fuel mix. The SkyActiv-X will ignite the air-fuel mix spark-free through compression, like a diesel engine. This, according to the Japanese manufacturer, combines the advantages of petrol and diesel engines to achieve “outstanding” environmental and power performance.

I share my father’s fascination of the perfecting of technologies facing extinction. The basic, underlying design of engines has not changed in over 100 years, but the gains in every aspect — size, speed, weight, efficiency – are incredible.

The truth is technologies rarely get “killed”. Compact discs supposedly “killed” vinyl records and MP3s “killed” compact discs, but neither records nor CDs are dead (yet). In fact, vinyl sales have hit a 25-year high this year.

I’m fairly confident internal combustion engines will eventually be replaced by newer technologies (like electric/battery), but I’d like to think gasoline-powered cars will stick around long enough for me to buy an old muscle car.

Update: Bill Burr brings up a good point on this clip from one of his podcast episodes about why mileage averages haven’t moved much over the last 40 years.

Samsung adds and swiftly removes sexist Bixby descriptor tags:

Samsung’s new voice assistant Bixby has finally arrived, and unfortunately, it was accompanied by sexist descriptions for its male and female voice options.

Under “language and speaking style” in the Bixby menu, as several have pointed out on Twitter, the female voice was accompanied by descriptive tags such as “chipper, clear, and cheerful,” while the male voice was described as “assertive, confident, and clear.” After it was spotted and dissent circulated online, Samsung said it would remove the gendered hashtags, telling Gizmodo it is “working diligently to remove the hashtag descriptions from the Bixby service,” and it is “constantly learning from customer feedback.”

The subtitle to this article is “Why does this keep happening”.

I can’t tell you why this keeps happening but I’ll tell you this: the Korean-American women I know personally refuse to date Korean men from Korea because of their — pick your adjective — outdated, sexist, and/or backwards views on the roles of men and women.

via Daring Fireball

No, No, No.

(Just a reminder that engineers are brilliant but have zero fashion sense.)

Android 7.1+ has a “Panic Detection” Mode that Detects Frantic Back Button Presses:

While many readers of Android-centric websites such as our own are less likely to come across situations where a rogue application compromises their system, the same may not be true for the general population. Nearly every week we hear from various security researchers about new malware targeting Android users. Most of these malicious attacks can be avoided by inspecting permissions or avoiding installing sketchy-looking applications, and while we do recommend our readers take their phone’s security into their own hands, Google is responsible for securing every Android phone. To that end, the company quietly introduced a new security feature in Android 7.1 Nougat called “panic detection” which listens for multiple back button presses in succession then returns the user to their home screen.

I hate all the malware on my iPhone.

Oh yeah, I never have to deal with malware or “panic detection”.

Open always wins, right?

The new phone from the creator of Android didn’t ship when he said it would:

The new phone from Android creator Andy Rubin appears to be delayed.

When he announced the Essential smartphone at Recode’s Code Conference in May, Rubin said it would start shipping within 30 days, The Verge reported. The company also started accepting pre-orders for the $699 device.

But more than 30 days have passed since then, and Essential isn’t shipping the phone yet.

Creating a computer operating system doesn’t mean you have any idea how to design and market a successful phone.

The Essential Phone isn’t as essential as Andy Rubin thinks it is.

Since I’ve taken one jab at Android, I’d like to take this opportunity to remind readers this was Rubin’s vision of Android:

Rubin’s grand vision of Android was barely an evolution of Palm Pilot OS.

Android wasn’t designed for multi-touch which is why it took so long for Android UI to approach the velvet-y smoothness iOS had from the beginning.

Over in the r/apple subreddit, u/Arve highlights an interesting thread in the r/audiophile subreddit concerning what’s under the hood in Apple’s new Siri-enabled HomePod:

There is one comment from that thread I’d like to highlight:

1. They’re using some form of dynamic modeling, and likely also current sensing that allows them to have a p-p excursion of 20 mm in a 4″ driver. This is completely unheard of in the home market. You can read an introduction to the topic here. The practical upshot is that that 4″ driver can go louder than larger drivers, and with significantly less distortion. It’s also stuff you typically find in speakers with five-figure price tags (The Beolab 90 does this, and I also suspect that the Kii Three does). It’s a quantum leap over what a typical passive speaker does, and you don’t really even find it in higher-end powered speakers
2. The speaker uses six integrated beamforming microphones to probe the room dimensions, and alter its output so it sounds its best wherever it is placed in the room. It’ll know how large the room is, and where in the room it is placed.
3. The room correction applied after probing its own position isn’t simplistic DSP of frequency response, as the speaker has seven drivers that are used to create a beamforming speaker array,. so they can direct specific sound in specific directions. The only other speakers that do this is the Beolab 90, and Lexicon SL-1. The Beolab 90 is $85,000/pair, and no price tag is set for the Lexicon, but the expectation in the industry is “astronomical”.

Lots of people online are calling it overpriced because they think Apple just slapped a bunch of speakers in a circular configuration and added Siri, but the engineering behind it is extremely audiophile niche stuff. And it does this all automatically with no acoustical set up or technical know how. And even if you are obsessive about your existing tuned audio set up, just think of how much better enthusiast stuff will become once this kind of technology becomes the accepted mainstream baseline for speakers.

So Apple has included a technology in HomePod only found in $85K speakers.

Details like this make the differences between Apple and Amazon crystal clear.

The fact that both HomePod and Echo both have integrated AI assistants is where the comparisons end. The purpose of the Echo is to make it easier to order more things from Amazon. Apple has nothing analogous to Amazon’s megastore, so it needs to be something more than a “good enough” speaker you can order shit from.

via Twitter

Techmeme

Apple’s AR is closer to reality than Google’s:

Looking at this distance-measuring app, it seems so simple and obvious. Of course your super-powered, multi-core phone should be smart enough to measure out basic distances, and there have indeed been many wonky apps trying to do that in the past. But measuring with AR, as already shown off by Google Tango phones, allows you a much more intuitive method for doing it. Having the phone actually aware of the three-dimensional space in its view allows for precise measurements, which can be represented with a neat hologram of a measuring tape. Apple’s advantage in the contest for doing this best is simple: while Google Tango demands special hardware, ARKit requires only that you have a recent iOS device. At WWDC earlier this month, Craig Federighi described ARKit as “the largest AR platform in the world,” and he was right.

This isn’t just about raw engineering brilliance. Google and Microsoft can easily go toe-to-toe with Apple in that realm. This is about design, and making a sophisticated technology approachable to everyday people. It seems Apple still understands this better than their competitors.

In 2016, Microsoft introduced its approach to augmented reality with their big, fat headset, the HoloLens. They demonstrated how you could play Minecraft in your living room, stacking virtual blocks in real space. This demo reminded me that despite the departure of Steve Ballmer and their new-found love of hardware in their Surface devices, this is the same company that came to multi-touch market with a $10,000 table. Some things never change.

The ARKit demo apps in the story quoted above might look cute or trivial, but as Clay Christiansen said, the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a toy.

Sure, a phone screen isn’t as immersive as an AR headset, but this is just the first step and one with a much lower barrier to entry than a big headset.

These Truckers Work Alongside the Coders Trying to Eliminate Their Jobs:

Economically speaking—that is, in the most brutal terms—truckers are disposable. Almost anyone can become a professional driver with a month or so of training, and most don’t stick around for long; median pay is about $40,000 per year, and the work is often unhealthy, painful, and lonely. Software engineers, on the other hand, are some of the best-paid, hardest-to-hire employees in the modern economy. The variety that Seltz-Axmacher employs—specialists in AI and machine learning—are even better paid and even harder to hire. Google has been known to pay its self-driving car engineers millions or even tens of millions. Starsky’s coders don’t make that much, but the point remains: In its cabs, side by side, are representatives of some of the most and least promising careers in America.

Self-driving tractor trailers are replacing truck drivers, but truck driving is an under-paid, unappealing job. In this respect, it’s a perfect place for AI, but it doesn’t address the 3.5 million Americans who drive trucks for a living and need income.

Samsung has released a preview of their AI assistant ‘Bixby’ to beta testers:

First things first. If you registered to be a beta tester, make sure you’re running the current version of Bixby by going to its “about” screen. Download any updates that appear there. I also had to clear the data and cache for Bixby apps in my S8+’s settings screen before Bixby Voice appeared. Once it does, you’ll get a tutorial that involves teaching you how to trigger the voice feature and then teaching it to recognize your voice.

This already sounds like a great user experience. Clearing cache, tutorials. Bixby sounds even more beta than Siri was went Apple launched it.

Even the essential task of text messaging someone is surprisingly hard to pull off. For one, you’ve got to use Samsung’s Messages app as your default SMS app. And if you don’t word things exactly right, it won’t happen. “Text mom and ask ‘how are you’” sent me to a Google search. “Send a text to mom and ask ‘how are you’” worked — but still necessitated a few taps to fire off the message. What’s the point of voice, then? Google Assistant nailed it with a single attempt.

One more nugget:

Compared directly against Google Assistant, Bixby Voice is in for some embarrassing showdowns. Until things get better, a lot of people will be asking “What’s the point?” I’m not really sure Bixby Voice saves you much in the way of time since it often runs through the same menus and screens you would with your finger when performing tasks.

Haha. Good luck with this, Samsung.

What I love most about this is that Samsung phones run on Android and Google already has Google Assistant which is way more advanced than Bixby, but Samsung wants to differentiate themselves from the sea of other Android phone manufacturers.

I suppose in that respect they’ve accomplished their mission.

NYTimes: New iPad Pro Inches Toward Replacing PC, but Falls Short

Brian X. Chen isn’t sold:

Here’s the problem: The Smart Keyboard is thin and the keys do not click well or feel as satisfying to type on as the keyboards on a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air; after a long period of typing, the Smart Keyboard felt flimsy. The keyboard for the 10.5-inch model is still small and cramped compared with a MacBook keyboard.

So a tablet isn’t a laptop. Shocking.

There’s more:

The other issue is ergonomics. Using the touch screen in combination with the Apple keyboard can be a pain on the wrist.

Say, for example, you are using the keyboard to scroll through an email or website: If you want to open a link, you have to lift your hand away from the keyboard and tap the link. Or say you want to adjust the screen brightness or hit pause on a music track while typing: Both actions require reaching up and touching the screen. These keyboard-to-touch-screen reps get tiring.

My goodness. You have to actually lift your frail, nerdy hand off the keyboard. That has to be exhausting.

This is where we’re at in the modern world. This is what it looks like when your only problem in life is deciding what mobile devices you want to spend $800 of your dollars on.

I acknowledge I am part of this group too (shit, I’m a guy complaining about a guy complaining about a piece of tech) and if you’re reading this post, so are you, but let’s just not forget Mr. Chen was the same dude who erroneously claimed the Japanese hated the iPhone in a 2009 story his editor had to write a lengthy apology and explanation on.

I don’t trust Chen any further than I can throw him.

Words that are also hexadecimal color codes.

It’s nerdy, so they took some nerdy liberties, like using ‘3’ in place of ‘E’ and ‘7’ in place of ‘T’.

via Designer News

Skype’s Snapchat-inspired makeover puts the camera a swipe away, adds stories:

“If social networks have given you the stage on which to perform your life, the new Skype gives you the additional equivalent of the local coffeehouse or corner pub, where you meet people on a daily basis to deepen your relationships,” explains Amritansh Raghav, Corporate Vice President of Skype, about the new design’s focus on enhancing users’ real social connections. “We call that set of interactions your personal network,” he says.

Barf.

The tech world is out of ideas, just aping what the other guys are doing.