Latest News - Page 821

While it is very true that the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra is probably at least 15 months or so away from being announced, the rumors are already starting to swirl. The Galaxy S24 Ultra won't arrive until January or February of 2024, which means it'll be the same months in 2025 before its replacement debuts. But we're already intrigued about what it will offer once that happens.

That's because Samsung is now reportedly hard at work on camera upgrades that might or might not make their way into the flagship phone of the year. X leaker Revegnus shared details over the weekend, saying that a number of Samsung ISOCELL camera sensors are being mass-produced in the second half of 2024. Those sensors include a new 200-megapixel sensor with 0.6μm pixels as well as a 5-megapixel one with 1.6μm pixels. But the one that's most interesting is the one that's listed as having the name HU1, because it's a 440-megapixel sensor that could absolutely change the way photos are taken on phones.

There are few details about what that sensor will be like or indeed what it will ship in. It's entirely possible that it will never see the light fo day in a camera, but given what the leaker said about another of the three sensors suggests that isn't necessarily the case.

OnePlus is a company that has somehow been around for a long, long time yet also only been around for a really short time, simultaneously. But in reality, OnePlus is getting ready to celebrate its tenth birthday. And it'll announce the OnePlus 12 around the same time. Thankfully, it sounds increasingly likely that the new phone will be every bit the flagship smartphone that the anniversary deserves.

OnePlus is yet to confirm anything about the new phone of course, and that's unlikely to change until we get much nearer the expected December unveiling in China. The phone will then probably only arrive on international shores a couple of months or so later, but we're already taking notice. Because the specs that this thing will have are starting to leak out. And they sure make for some promising reading.

The latest leak comes via X leaker Yogesh Brar who has put together a collection of what they believe will be the key upgrades coming to the OnePlus 12. And who are we to argue? Brar has a solid track record with these things and knows the world of unannounced Android phones better than most.

It's pretty much common knowledge at this point that Apple is going to announce four new iPhones next month, possibly as soon as September 12. We can be pretty sure of when they'll go on sale, and the specs and features are pretty much a given as well - assuming all the leaks and rumors turn out to be on the money, that is. But there's one thing that we can't be sure about just yet - the name.

One name in particular, in fact. The iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, and iPhone 15 Pro are all pretty much locked in right now and you'll notice that the flagship iPhone 15 Pro Max is missing. That isn't because Apple is ditching its best iPhone, of course. Instead, it now appears that Apple has decided that its big-screen wonder deserves a new name. But it's an old name, really. And it's coming back from the dead like a zombie.

That name is of course iPhone 15 Ultra, something that we'd been told to expect almost a year ago by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. After much talk about the name change it just sort of vanished, and everyone went back to calling it the iPhone 15 Pro Max. Now, it sounds like it's back again.

Microsoft has revealed official Xbox Series X console wraps for $45-50 a piece.

It's taken some time, but current-gen consoles now have options to customize their respective unique designs. While PlayStation 5 gamers get to snap-on dedicated console blades, Xbox gamers now have some official first-party customization choices, starting with Starfield's iconic NASA-inspired white design that hearkens back to the golden age of the Space Race.

Unlike the PS5's custom plates, the Series X wraps fold around the console and hug the outside chassis. It's not a traditional skin or a wrap per say--it's not like Dbrands custom thin wraps that adhere to the system's surface like a second skin and is more like a stylish bit of protective armor.

When Apple releases the iPhone 15, iPhone 15 Plus, iPhone 15 Pro, and iPhone 15 Pro Max next month the new models will be the first to ditch the Lightning cable in favor of USB-C. Lightning has been around for a decade at this point, but it's finally being replaced. And that isn't all - new reports claim that the cables that come with those new iPhones will have something else going on, too.

While all of the iPhones that have been sold to date have come with boring white, plastic cables in the box, that's all going to change from next month. At least, that's what new leaks claim. Instead, they'll ship with new braided cables that aren't white at all. Instead, they'll be color-matched to go with the color of the iPhone that they were sold with.

That's a big change but it's one that is yet to be confirmed by Apple. That means that we have to take this with a pinch of salt for now, but there have been three different sources all suggesting that this is happening.

Nintendo shares interesting, if vague, comments about the scope of its new video games hardware.

It's no secret that Nintendo is working on its next gaming hardware iteration. The new system is expected to be a continuation of the best-selling Nintendo Switch, complete with a hybridized design and backward compatible titles. As per usual for Nintendo, nothing has been announced or confirmed so far, and outside of references, match-ups with newer NVIDIA Tegra hardware, and anonymous source info, we really don't know much about the so-called Switch 2 (aka Super Switch).

Whatever Nintendo is working on, we can expect a certain level of consistency when it comes to innovating gaming experiences. Nintendo is always the outlier and has always took risks experimenting with new tech, hitting it big with the DS, the Wii, and more recently the Nintendo Switch. That's something Nintendo wants to continue doing with new hardware.

The co-founder of Adobe has sadly passed away on Saturday surrounded by his family and loved ones, according to a recent Adobe press release.

Dr. John Warnock co-founded Adobe in 1982 with Dr. Charles Geschke, and their very first product as a team and company was Adobe PostScript, which sparked the desktop publishing revolution. The press release also states that Dr. Warnock stepped down from the head of Adobe in 2000, moving to chairman of the board - a position he shared with Dr. Geschke, until 2017. Since then, Dr. Warnock was a member of the company's Board of Directors.

Adobe Chair and CEO Shantanu Narayen wrote an email that was sent to all Adobe employees that Dr. Warnock passed away at the age of 82, and went on to recognize the achievements he made throughout his career. Narayen wrote that Dr. Warnock's ambitions led to incredible creations such as the Illustrator, the ubiquitous PDF file format and Acrobat, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and many more frequently used technologies.

Charles Martinet, the official voice of Mario, will no longer play the iconic plumber.

It's an end of an era: Nintendo has announced that Mario's voice actor Charles Martinet will no longer lend his legendary high-pitched phrases to new games. In a recent announcement, Nintendo says that Martinet is "stepping back from recording character voices of our games."

The announcement makes it clear that Martinet will still portray Mario, just not in new games. Martinet will now be the first-ever Mario ambassador, a role that was created at Nintendo in an effort to continue his legacy even if his voice won't be in any new Mario titles.

NetEase has established its 10th new studio as it continues to expand to the West.

Chinese live service titan NetEase has opened yet another studio in the United States. The new team is called T-Minus Zero Entertainment, and is led by Rich Vogel, a veteran game developer with decades in the industry.

Vogel's career includes multi-year roles at BioWare, Certain Affinity, ans Sony Online Entertainment, and he was a co-founder of BioWare's Austin-based studio, the team that led development of the popular Star Wars: The Old Republic MMORPG. Vogel is also responsible for 3 games that have made $2.5 billion in cumulative revenues, one of which is Star Wars Galaxies.

AMD has pushed out a Ryzen chipset driver update and there's a hint that this might foreshadow something pretty exciting - namely the ability to manually tune X3D chips from the Ryzen 7000 generation for better performance.

Tech Powerup (via Wccftech) caught wind of the release of AMD's version 5.08.02.027 driver, noticing that it arrived with a few new components onboard.

That includes a new Sensor Fusion Hub driver (useful for stuff to do with cameras, for Windows Hello logins, for example), along with a 'Platform Management Framework' driver for Ryzen 7040 processors (laptop chips for thin-and-light portables).

VMware Explore is the flagship event for all things cloud, from enterprise to architecture to infrastructure and more. VMware Explore 2023 is kicking off this week in Las Vegas at the Venetian Convention and Expo Center from August 21 to 24, with the event all about bringing people together to share their expertise in building a cloud-based future.

"Those engaged in enterprise applications, cloud architecture, infrastructure, end users, networking, and security will be among their peers at VMware Explore as we're inviting all to help build the new multi-cloud world," writes the official VMware Explore description.

And with that, KIOXIA will be on hand to showcase its innovative SSD products for the modern cloud-based data center, including KIOXIA CM6 Series Enterprise NVMe SSDs and KIOXIA PM7 Series 24G Enterprise SAS SSDs.

When Bethesda announced that it was partnering with AMD for the upcoming release of Starfield on PC and Xbox Series X|S, it wasn't the big get that Team Red might have expected - at least in terms of community awareness and response. The immediate fallout centered on the PC version featuring AMD's FSR 2 upscaling method, not NVIDIA DLSS or Intel XeSS.

With review copies of Starfield finally in the hands of the press and influencers, alongside the game being available to preload for Game Pass subscribers and those that pre-ordered, those that have poured through the files have yet to find a reference to DLSS or XeSS.

This means the game will only officially support AMD's FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 - considered the lesser of the big three performance-boosting upscaling technologies. The good news is that modder PureDark has already announced plans to mod both DLSS 2 and DLSS 3 Frame Generation into the game as soon as Early Access becomes available on September 1.

If you're one of them any PC users out there that use WinRAR to handle their compression-related tasks (it's still one of the most popular archive utilities), then you might want to make sure you update to WinRAR version 6.23. Grab it here.

The latest version of the shareware app patches a rather significant security flaw dubbed CVE-2023-40477, allowing hackers to access memory beyond the allocated buffer.

The flaw would give hackers code execution on the target system, though only after opening a malicious RAR file. Still, you're looking at a very serious vulnerability when someone can execute commands on your PC simply because you opened a RAR file, let alone extracted its contents. The fact that it requires the user to open a specific RAR file dropped the security flaw's severity rating to 7.8.

AMD recently launched the Radeon PRO W7600 and Radeon PRO W7500 workstation graphics cards, new budget-friendly entry-level and mainstream professional options. Built using hotel attest RDNA 3 architecture, these single-slot GPUs joined the existing AMD Radeon PRO W7900 and W7800 to fill out AMD's RDNA 3-based workstation line-up.

With the Radeon PRO W7600 out in the market, early reports of black screen issues seem to be related to poorly designed cooling - according to this new in-depth report over at Igor's Lab. Running GPU and gaming-focused benchmarks like Lightwave, Furmark, and Horizon Zero Dawn would cause the display to go black after a few minutes of testing.

Temperature measurements for the GPU, memory, and PCB were well within the normal ranges expected for a card like the Radeon PRO W7600; further investigation found some serious issues with the thermal pads installed by AMD. And the real kicker is that the problem was resolved in "less than 15 minutes."

A former Blizzard developer has posted a screenshot of Starfiel's start screen, roasting Bethesda's developers for either being overworked or having a lack of care for what they have made.

The former Blizzard developer is Mark Kern, who took to his personal X account to share a screenshot of Starfield's start screen, writing that the start screen can reveal a lot about how rushed the game's development team was and how much pride they took in their work. Kern continued and wrote, "Starfield's start screen either shows hasty shipping deadlines by a passionate team overworked, or a team that didn't care."

Kern further explained that start screens are often created "at the very end of development", as the team behind the title is busy constructing the core game. Additionally, Kern wrote, "It's quite common for the start screen to completely change once the game is shipping or on patch 0. Teams that take pride want to put a good face forward and will often redo these just prior to game going live."

NASA and CalTech's director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has commented on the recent UFO hearings and asked if she has seen any spacecraft made from outside of this world.

Laurie Leshin, the director of NASA and CalTech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, has sat down for an interview with a reporter from Fox 10 to answer some questions regarding space travel and the recent events surrounding UFOs. Leshin was asked directly if she had ever seen a spacecraft that was made from outside of this world, to which she replied, "Absolutely not". The reporter followed up by asking if anyone had ever spoken to her about that with her, to which she replied, "No".

Furthermore, the reporter asked what Leshin makes of the recent UFO hearings that revealed some key details about purported secret government programs regarding crashed UFOs and backward engineering of alien technology. Leshin recognized that there is clearly a lot of interest in these topics, and that NASA JPL is more so focussed on following the scientific evidence when looking for life elsewhere.

An internal document obtained by Bloomberg has revealed Spotify is looking into banning white noise podcasts, as the music-listening platform is missing out on tens of millions of dollars.

The document read by Bloomberg reveals that a not-so-seemingly popular lane of podcasters is much more popular than one might imagine - white noise podcasts, which are used by people predominately to go to sleep. According to Bloomberg, some creators behind these podcasts are earning up to $18,000 per month through Spotify advertisements, as Spotify's own algorithm was boosting these podcasts.

As of January 2023, white noise and ambient podcasts accounted for 3 million daily consumption hours, and while that is a significant number, it isn't necessarily profitable for Spotify, or at least not as profitable as the company wants it to be. Spotify makes most of its money through paid subscribers, and according to its internal document, if it directed white noise listeners away from what they like, the company could net an additional $38 million in profit.

Recycling a three-year-old Ryzen APU for AI is quite an ingenious move, with a Redditor sharing a clip of them turning the Ryzen 5 4600G into a makeshift 16GB graphics card ready to run a range of AI applications like Stable Diffusion and MiniGPT-4.

The trick to turning the Ryzen 5 4600G into a 16GB graphics card is that an APU like this doesn't have dedicated memory; it shares system memory. The Redditor took their system's 32GB of DDR4 memory and allocated 16GB of that to the Ryzen 5 4600G - with 16GB being the maximum amount of memory you can assign to an iGPU.

The Ryzen 5 4600G first hit the scene in 2020, a Zen 2 APU with a boost clock of 4.2 GHz and a Vega iGPU with seven Compute Units clocked at close to 2 GHz. The newer Ryzen 5 5600 G has since replaced the APU, so the Ryzen 5 4600G currently retails for around USD 95 - making it a budget option for those running memory-intensive AI tasks.

US health authorities have confirmed that five people have died due to a rare, flesh-eating bacteria they contracted.

The reports come from Florida health, which has identified the rare bacteria as Vibrio vulnificus, a type of bacteria that is typically found in warm, brackish seawater that requires salt, according to WFLA. Notably, there have been 25 cases of infection and five deaths since January 2023, with two confirmed deaths in Hillsborough County, one death in Sarasota County, one in Polk County, and one in Pasco County.

By comparison, there were 74 total cases and 17 deaths in 2022, with the majority of the deaths and cases being a result of Hurricane Ian flooding communities. So, how does one become infected with Vibrio vulnificus?

Reports indicate that AMD is prepping to launch a new GRE (Golden Rabbit Edition) graphics card for the Chinese market based on older RDNA 2 architecture. According to sources, the Radeon RX 6750 GRE offers GeForce RTX 4060 Ti-like performance with a price tag matching the GeForce RTX 4060.

So for USD 299 (or RMB 2399), you're looking at similar performance to the more expensive USD 399 (or RMB 3199) RTX 4060 Ti. This makes the AMD Radeon RX 6750 GRE the second surprise Golden Rabbit Edition GPU launch this year, following the AMD Radeon RX 7900 GRE, a cutdown Radeon RX 7900 XT.

The cutdown Radeon RX 7900 GRE has made its way outside of China, where it's available in several markets as part of prebuilt systems - so perhaps it'll be the same for the new Radeon RX 6750 GRE. Unlike the Radeon RX 7900 GRE, the new Radeon RX 6750 GRE will be an upgraded version of the existing Radeon RX 6750 XT.