Technical issues in manufacturing could result in the iPhone 8 missing the usual September launch, according to a report.
Some have imagined what an OLED iPhone 8 (aka iPhone X) could look like, and it sure gets our hopes up.
Apple fans waiting for the rumored 10th-anniversary iPhone 8 may have to wait a bit longer, according to a Chinese report by Economic Daily News (via Digitimes ). The next-generation iPhone could be delayed a month or two beyond its expected September launch.
The iPhone 8 is rumored to see sweeping changes, including an edge-to-edge OLED screen. But swapping out the old LCD displays for shiny new OLED ones may lead to some potential roadblocks. The OLED displays could end up bumping up the phone’s price past $1,000 (roughly £800 or AU$1,300), and they might cause a production delay, according to this report.
Apple’s next phone has the potential to reinvigorate its fan base with a premium model that dramatically redesigns the iPhone’s hardware and software, including migrating from LCD to OLED screen technology.
But, if true, switching screen tech could take time. There have reportedly been technical issues with the lamination process of the OLED display panels, as well as difficulty integrating Apple’s signature 3D Touch into the new displays. Each one could cause Apple’s production schedule to slip.
A report from The Bell claims that all iPhones will feature an OLED screen in 2019, meaning that an OLED iPhone 8 could be just a step toward this goal. Yesterday, Nikkei Asian Review reported that Apple has already purchased 70 million OLED displays this year.
Along with the iPhone 8, Apple is rumored to be releasing an iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus later this year.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment.

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YouTube TV launches a rival slim bundle of live online channels, and it’s betting young viewers prefer real TV on mobile (even if nobody else seems to).
YouTube’s new live TV streaming service has more than 40 channels and unlimited cloud DVR for $35 a month. Let’s take a spin.
With a new live TV service, YouTube is wagering young people are as hooked on their phones for a full TV meal as they are for video snacks.
YouTube TV launches Wednesday, offering a „skinny bundle“ of about 50 live TV networks online for $35 a month, starting in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and the San Francisco. The service includes a 30-day free trial, and the company will throw in a free Google Chromecast streaming device, worth $35, after your first payment (i.e. after the second month).
Just don’t bank on being able to stream it all through the Roku, Amazon Fire TV or Apple TV you already have.
It adds Google’s YouTube to the snowballing market for digital live TV, going up against Dish’s Sling TV , Sony’s PlayStation Vue and AT&T’s DirecTV Now , with Hulu expected to follow suit this spring. That means a lot of options if you’re looking to drop your traditional pay-TV subscription. The launch also puts the internet giant in competition with traditional pay-TV providers like Comcast and Charter.
YouTube TV is focusing on its mobile app foremost, even though most streaming customers gravitate to the biggest screen available.
YouTube TV undercuts a comparable plan from Sling TV, as well as Playstation Vue’s cheapest plan. Both of those are priced at $40. It’s also in line with DirecTV Now’s low-end plan (although DirecTV Now has 10 more channels).
To set itself apart, Google’s YouTube is focusing on two strengths of its massive free video-clip site: Its popularity with younger viewers and its domination of mobile streaming. Yet the emphasis on watching 60-minute shows or a two-hour basketball game on a phone contradicts how people tend to stream traditional TV programming. Customers who are investing a lot of time in a show prefer the biggest screen available.
Netflix, the biggest subscription video service by members, has previously said that about two-thirds of its streaming goes to TVs. Mobile is a small, but growing amount. Hulu says more than 70 percent of its viewing occurs on the living-room big screen, while mobile and tablet watching is about 17 percent.
YouTube TV direct competitor Sling TV says the majority of its viewing hours happen on televisions. „We know that many people want to watch their favorite shows on the biggest screen possible, but also want the option to take their TV with them,“ Sling TV CEO Roger Lynch said.
But from YouTube’s vantage point, millennials — generally defined as people under the age of 35 — „love the programming on television but they don’t love the experience on television,“ Kelly Merryman, YouTube’s vice president of content partnerships, said in an interview. „How we can reimagine the television experience for the new generation?
For YouTube, the answer was a live TV app designed for phones and other mobile devices, with personalization, search and recommendations.
At launch, Chromecast is pretty much the only way to get YouTube TV onto your living room TV screen.
It also meant offering only one way to watch YouTube TV on an actual TV — using a Google Chromecast to fling your mobile viewing onto the big screen. (That free Chromecast makes a lot of sense now, right?)
Even with shorter-form video presented like it’s live, bigger screens dominate, according to Pluto TV, a free live-TV-like service that strings together digital videos into bespoke channels. Its users, which skew young, will watch for more than an hour per session.
„Because our viewers love to lean back for long periods of time, more than half our viewing occurs on big screens like connected TVs and laptops,“ CEO Tom Ryan said.
YouTube TV is also available to watch on laptop and desktop computers, which for many young people equates to the biggest screen in the house.
But at launch, YouTube TV doesn’t have support for other streaming devices like Roku or Amazon Fire TV, even though those products are more popular than Chromecast. According to the most recent data from researcher Parks Associates, Roku was the most-purchased line of streaming media players in the US, with a 30 percent share. Amazon’s devices just beat out Chromecast, with a 22 percent of sales compared with Chromecast’s 21 percent. Apple TV followed at 20 percent.
When CNET asked why YouTube TV is emphasizing mobile even though consumer behavior seems to go the other way, YouTube said that more device support was coming.
„We do believe in the living room,“ Christian Oestlien, YouTube TV’s director of product management said. „We’ll continue to add more device activations. “
In the meantime, YouTube TV will keep hoping that younger viewers can fill up their bellies watching on rectangles six inches long or less.
The channels included on YouTube TV.

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-tv-mobile-phone-streaming-millennials/
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The company says its custom-made AI chips are up to 30 times faster than today’s conventional processors and use much less power, too.
There’s AI in there somewhere.
Is the world ready for Google the chip company?
The tech behemoth boasts that the chips it developed in-house to process AI apps are 15 to 30 times faster than today’s conventional CPUs and GPUs .
Google says its chips — called TPUs, for tensor processing units — are also more energy-efficient, which means they’ll use less power to complete a given task.
Even though Google’s AI chips aren’t in your phone or laptop, they’re important to just about anyone online. The chips already are hard at work in Google’s data centers, delivering search results, identifying your friends in your photos, translating text, drafting Gmail message replies and screening out email spam.
But Google isn’t the only one pursing AI chips. Qualcomm is building AI technology into its mobile chips, which could give machine-learning tasks a boost on your phone when you don’t want to wait for a Google server on the other side of the network. Nvidia already is a major AI player in data centers. And Intel’s Nervana group is working on custom chips that are designed to train artificial intelligence technology faster.
So even if Google has an edge today, the whole industry wants to speed up the world’s electronic brains.

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/google-brags-it-does-ai-better-than-the-other-guys/
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The more cops use bodycams, the better artificial intelligence will get at recognizing faces and arrest footage.
Axon, which changed its name from Taser, is offering every police department free body cameras.
Nearly a half-million body cameras are now ready and waiting for police officers to wear them.
And those cameras won’t just be recording what the cops do. They’ll also be helping artificial intelligence get smarter.
Axon — you used to know it as Taser — announced Wednesday that it’s offering body cameras for free to all police departments in the US for up to one year. If officers opt in for Axon’s data collection, the company will get much-needed data to build its artificial intelligence program.
That’ll be yet another step in the march of progress for AI, which is infiltrating seemingly every job , from insurance agent to bartender. Body camera makers such as Axon and Vievu want to let machines sort through vast amounts of video so police officers can spend less time behind computers. The AI systems would learn to recognize faces, weapons and voices, transforming tedium into an automated process.
How tedious? Axon manages about 6,000 terabytes of video from its offices in Seattle, and the process of storing footage, making clips and redacting faces currently drags on and on — for instance, it can take four hours of work for a police department to release an hour-long video. That would be streamlined through AI’s machine learning capabilities — essentially, the software gets better and better at teaching itself, the more data it works through.
What’s a better data pool than up to 500,000 officers using body cameras on the streets, at traffic stops and making arrests?
„Doing it in scale is really hard and expensive, but we made that investment,“ said Rick Smith, CEO of Axon, which on Wednesday changed its name from Taser to reflect its focus on body camera technology. „We are going all in. If the NYPD wants 35,000 cameras for a year, they can get them. There’s no limit on how much data they can record. “
Police departments would get the body cameras for up to one year, along with software, storage, training and tech support for the equipment. Part of the offer requires that every camera given out has to be used. The data would remain private to the police departments, which would have complete control of the machine learning process.
It would take a year for the company to send out 500,000 body cameras, but Axon said it has been preparing for the rollout since last October.
Body cameras have become essential equipment for police officers, nearly as important as their guns and badges. They’ve protected officers by providing evidence in cases , but also held police accountable in the public eye by showing cases of abuse of power.
Although 95 percent of police and sheriff’s departments in major cities and counties plan on giving officers body cameras , in 2013 only 32 percent of police departments were using them, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics .
The slow adoption pace hasn’t helped Axon’s efforts to improve its body cameras. In February, Axon bought AI startup Dextro to help automate law enforcement footage analysis. It’s still in its early research and development stages.
„The real challenge is that this is a data problem much more than a hardware problem,“ Smith said. „This is a massive amount of information compared to any IT department you would find in a police agency. “
While the body camera’s hardware remains important, software has become the latest race with policing technology. A Department of Justice study found an increasing number of body cameras with facial recognition capabilities , and predicts that will grow. Vievu announced on Tuesday it is partnering with AI company Veritone to improve its algorithms.
Police need to review body camera footage to blur out faces of people in the background, create transcripts and create clips before releasing the material to the public. With machine learning, the body cameras would be capable of facial and object recognition, along with analyzing sentences, Veritone CEO Chad Steelberg said in a statement.
Veritone has already analyzed millions of hours of audio and video data, including from law enforcement agencies, and continues to extract „valuable metadata and intelligence“ from body camera feeds to improve its artificial intelligence.
What are the odds of police departments looking favorably on Axon’s offer? The general trend is in the right direction.
Cops have started warming up to body cameras, with the footage mostly being used to clear their case when people make public complaints, according to Terrence Cunningham, deputy executive director of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. He sees 75 percent of the nation’s police using body cameras by 2027.
„I have seen a shift in the attitude […] where they’re not just embracing the use of the cameras, but requesting their own if the department doesn’t have them,“ Cunningham said.
Axon’s Smith doesn’t expect every police department to accept his company’s offer, but he believes people will change their minds as the technology improves.
„Body cameras to a cop is like a smartphone to everyone else,“ he said. „We didn’t think we needed it until we got one. „

© Source: https://www.cnet.com/news/police-free-body-cameras-artificial-intelligence-taser-axon-vievu/
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What would its founder, Thomas Edison, think?
The lighting division could sell for $500 million by some estimates.
Oh, the irony!
General Electric, a company literally founded by the man who developed the first mass-market incandescent lightbulb — yes, that’s Thomas Edison — may put its consumer lighting business on the auction block, The Wall Street Journal reported , citing unnamed sources.
The rumor comes 10 months after GE sold it appliances division to Haier , which makes us wonder if the company plans to focus solely on its commercial business.
GE would presumably keep making tools for aviation, health care and transportation, as well as products for Current, a spinoff company that makes industrial LED lighting.
GE declined to comment on its plans.

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