From nine-one-OnePlus and Android Wear wah-wah-waaahhh, to proof for porn, a new Glass, Qualcomm vs the world, and Windows 10 turning up the heat, it’s our handy roundup of the week’s top tech news.
7 Days is a weekly roundup of the Editors’ picks of what’s been happening in the world of technology — written with a dash of humor, a hint of exasperation, and an endless supply of (Irish) coffee.
Things often slow down a bit in the tech world over the summer months — but you wouldn’t have guessed it after this week’s excitement! Fear not, though, for 7 Days is here again to make sure you’re up to speed on what’s been happening.
Where better to begin this week’s roundup than with porn? The UK government is preparing to introduce new measures that will require those wishing to access adult material online to verify their age before doing so. The move is meant to protect children, but it’s raised a ton of privacy concerns.
There’s certainly no love lost between Intel and AMD. After the former recently attacked the latter’s EPYC server processor line, referring to the products as «glued-together» and «inconsistent», AMD hit back at Intel’s claims.
Meanwhile, as its long-running legal dispute with Apple rages on, Qualcomm reported a 40% slump in profits last quarter. Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and other tech giants came together to stand with Apple against Qualcomm, denouncing the chip-maker’s «monopoly power».
After WannaCry and Petya, many are worried about the threat of a ‘super-scale’ attack. Lloyd’s of London estimated the cost of a major global cyberattack at around $53 billion — but the consequences of such an incident could be far more serious.
Researchers at Trend Micro detailed a new strain of Android malware that can silently record audio and video, monitor texts and calls, modify files, and worse.
And fresh security concerns were raised for Myspace users, after it emerged that it’s possible to access any account on The Social Network That Everyone Forgot About simply by knowing someone’s birthday .
Fitbit’s CEO shared new details about the company’s upcoming smartwatch, promising that it will be its «best product yet».
The wearable device market is a tough one to crack, as the recent collapse of Jawbone showed. Perhaps it should come as no surprise, then, that Intel has shut down its wearables development division.
In September 2016, Google delayed the release of Android Wear 2.0 to give it more time for development. It seems it didn’t use that time particularly well. It shipped the OS with characters missing from some onscreen keyboards — and despite months of complaints from users, it didn’t acknowledge the issue until this week. Users have also reported problems with recurring reminders, which Google is now looking into.
Months late, Android Wear 2.0 finally began rolling out to the ASUS ZenWatch 2 this week as well.
You may have thought it died years ago, but Alphabet has been quietly working on its Glass headset with over 30 partners since 2015, unveiling a new and improved edition of the device on Tuesday. The Google all-new Glass Enterprise Edition is now aimed directly at businesses.
Google Glass is dead. Long live Alphabet Glass? As the wearable device pivots to a new future targeting enterprise customers, a similar story unfolded for Jide, which has now ditched development of its Android-based Remix OS, to focus on software and hardware for businesses.
Lots of new Android hardware has popped up in recent days. After announcing its Q6 smartphone family last week, LG unveiled the Q8 — a more compact version of its V20 flagship, which it launched last year, including the same distinctive secondary display above the main screen.
Meizu has taken a slightly different approach with its new range-topper. Unlike the LG V20 and Q8, the new Meizu Pro 7 will have a small secondary display on the rear of the device. Quite odd. The Pro 7 will launch on July 26 — and on the same day, Xiaomi will launch the new Mi 5X, which will include its new MIUI 9 software, based on Android 7.0 Nougat.
It seems Lenovo’s US customers will be getting a bit of a raw deal when its new Moto Z2 Force flagship phone goes on sale there. The device will have a Quad HD display and Snapdragon 835 processor, but only 4GB of RAM, compared with 6GB elsewhere.
HTC launched a new low-cost phone, the Desire 555, exclusively on Cricket Wireless in the US, despite saying in February that it was going to stop making budget phones. Meanwhile, outrage spread like wildfire across the web as HTC’s on-screen keyboards began displaying ads to users as they typed — but the company insisted it was a mistake. Of course it was, HTC. We all believe you.
HTC also brought Amazon’s Alexa assistant to its latest U11 flagship, as Samsung finally rolled out its delayed Bixby voice assistant to the Galaxy S8 and S8+ in the US. Samsung sent out invites to its Galaxy Note8 launch next month (we’ll be there!) , before it goes on sale in September.
It’s been accused of ‘cheating’ in benchmark tests. Its newest flagship’s screen is upside-down, and owners are complaining of unpleasant scrolling effects. The device also has audio recording issues. And this week, another issue emerged on the OnePlus 5: some users reported that the device was rebooting when they attempted to call 911. Thankfully, that problem has since been resolved.
Android co-founder Andy Rubin unveiled his new flagship-class Essential Phone in May, with deliveries expected to begin by the end of June. But this week, he said the device won’t start shipping for another «few weeks» — and the company also lost one of its top executives.
There’s trouble at the top of HMD Global too; its CEO, Arto Nummela, suddenly left the company on Wednesday. An image of the company’s new Nokia 8 flagship leaked on Tuesday, and it could be announced next week.
An official Nokia video included a sketch of another device on Friday — and it might just be another flagship phone. HMD also unveiled two new handsets on Monday: the Nokia 105 and 130.
Good news for OneDrive users: Microsoft revealed that it will soon roll out version history support for all file types on its cloud storage platform. That feature is currently exclusive to Office files.
Microsoft has revised the process of upgrading to new versions of Windows 10 in recent preview builds of the OS, giving users more time to work, play, or stare at GIFs of super-cute kittens. The changes will make updates feel faster, despite also appearing to take longer…
Microsoft demonstrated its typical incompetence for naming things when it announced the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update in May. Amazingly, it managed to screw that up even further, when Microsoft sites in several countries suddenly began using the ‘Autumn Creators Update’ name — quite a surprise, given that Microsoft told me two months ago that it wouldn’t do so.
Amazingly, Microsoft then changed all those references back to ‘Fall Creators Update’, and said that the use of ‘Autumn’ was an error that it blamed on a translation issue. From English, to English. Not only does that explanation make no sense, but the use of ‘Fall’ around the world makes no sense either. No-one in the UK, for example, refers to the autumn as ‘fall’ — and in the southern hemisphere, it will be spring when the update is released.
*SIGH*
In happier news, the Creators Update (that’s the one that’s already rolling out) has reached over 50% of Windows 10 PCs. However, Microsoft confirmed that some older PCs won’t be able to install the Creators Update, or any other new version of Windows 10 — our first real glimpse of how support will end for devices in the Windows-as-a-service era.
Aside from PCs and phones, there’s a huge variety of devices out there that run Windows 10. Microsoft is now pushing its OS into the smart home market, introducing a stylish thermostat with a transparent display, running Windows 10 IoT Core with Cortana support.
Microsoft unveiled its stylish Surface Laptop in multiple colors back in May — but it only offers three of those colors on a single Core i5 model.