Technology

Google has announced that it will be holding an event on October 4th in San Francisco, where it will likely unveil its latest smartphones (which may or  may not be released under the Nexus brand ). The company uploaded a short teaser video to YouTube that shows the date, as well as a smartphone-shaped rectangle, and the Google "G" logo. It also  launched a new site   that refers to the date as well as something "made by" Google. Google has yet to confirm what the phones will be called, but multiple reports have it dropping the Nexus name in favor of its "G" logo on the upcoming devices. A  report  from  Android Police  says we'll be seeing two new smartphones built by HTC — a 5-inch and 5.5-inch model rumored to be called the Pixel X and Pixel XL — and they may even feature an all-metal design. Last year the Nexus 6P was metal, but the 5.2-inch LG 5X was plastic. A  report  from  Android Central  co...

Google today announced Trips, a new app that serves as a trip planner and travel guide for anyone who is exploring a new place. The free app, which is available on  Android  and  iOS , will organize your plane tickets and hotel reservations, offer editorial guides to more than 200 cities, and make personalized recommendations based on your Google history. Best of all, it works offline: you can download everything to your phone before you leave, including maps and walking directions — sparing you from having to use an expensive international data plan. Trips is the culmination of more than two years of work on improving Google’s travel products, said Richard Holden, a vice president of product management at the company, in an interview. In recent months Google introduced  Destinations , a travel-planning feature inside mobile search , and revamped  its hotel and flight search feature s . "WE REALLY NEED TO HELP CONSUMERS WHEN THEY'RE ACTUALLY AT THEIR ...

Here's something that could be a little frustrating come winter: the iPhone 7's home button doesn't seem to work with most gloves. It turns out, Apple's new home button works more like a touchscreen than a button, requiring direct skin contact in order to know that it's being pressed. Relay FM co-founder  Myke  first drew attention to the issue. He suspects it's the Touch ID ring that's responsible for detecting if the button is actually being touched. "No sensor connection, no click," While this could be a bit frustrating, it might not be quite as annoying as it sounds. The iPhone's touchscreen (any modern phone's touchscreen, really) has always required skin contact to work; so being out of luck with normal gloves on is something we should all be pretty used to by now. There does appear to be one hiccup, however: there are some reports that touchscreen-friendly gloves, which have conductive material on their fingertips, a...

The iPhone 7 is out and it’s already gathering some infamy, whether that’s due to the missing headphone jack, the price hike (in the UK) or the lack of design evolution. It’s got plenty going for it too, though. The iPhone 7 is the first water resistant iPhone, the first with a starting capacity of 32GB and the first non-Plus model with Optical Image Stabilisation on the rear camera. Good, good and better. Popping screen and loud speakers One thing that is immediately apparent on the iPhone 7 is that the screen is warmer. Whites aren’t quite as dazzling as on the 6S and I actually prefer the old screen when reading an ebook or websites that have a white background. That all changes when I want to watch a movie or scroll through my photo album. The iPhone 7’s screen is richer than ever before, without looking oversaturated. Apple claims the range of colours it uses are wider. It has the DCI-P3 gamut that 9.7-inch iPad Pro and iMac uses, and that’s a very good thing. It...

It is Apple, not AMD, that threatens Intel’s hegemony In a game of chess, there are occasions when you’ll have almost your entire army of pieces still on the board, but positioned in such a way that their systematic downfall is all but assured. As  The Matrix ’s Agent Smith put it to an overweening police lieutenant, "your men are already dead." We may be experiencing such a moment in the tech industry today, thanks to Apple’s exceptional new A10 Fusion chip, which threatens to devour a big chunk of Intel’s heretofore imperious silicon army. Now, before you accuse me of being high on my own metaphorical supply, I’m not saying that Intel will be crippled or surpassed anytime soon. But I  am  arguing that the chip giant is under a substantial threat, the likes of which it hasn’t faced for a long time, maybe ever. A quick look at the  Geekbench score s  attained by the iPhone 7 quantifies a staggering achievement: the single-core performance of Apple’s ...

iFixit is the hero this industry needs, and it has once again done a beautiful job of   ripping apart a brand-new iPhone   and showing us what's inside. Even better, iFixit does X-rays, too! A couple other things of note: There are only a few tweaks that make the iPhone 7 waterproof. One of them appears to be the glue that holds the phone together, meaning it might be hard to waterproof it again if you get anything repaired or replaced in your phone. Despite the lack of any way to output analog audio other than the (apparently great) built-in stereo speakers, the iPhone still has three CirrusLogic audio chips. Okay fine let's talk about the headphone jack. So, as you may have noticed, the iPhone 7 has speaker grilles on each side of the Lightning plug, but there's still only  a loudspeaker on the right side . What'€™s on the left, where the headphone jack used to be? Well, that's also where the microphone is traditionally, and it'...