News archive (1 / 2020)

The United States government and Chinese tech manufacturer Huawei have been arm wrestling for years now. Between both the previous as well as the current government, the U.S. has been worried about Huawei's national security impact.

The problem has become more timely with the introduction of 5G. The newest generation of mobile communication is being built around the world, and the U.S. doesn't want Huawei to be in the position of providing the equipment.

Whether the current administration thinks that the Chinese company and its connections with their respective government would be detrimental to the national security and the privacy of the people, or perhaps they would like to make it a little bit easier for the western competitors, only the people in the administration would know.

Nevertheless, the U.S. has banned Huawei from providing 5G equipment to the network building effort in the country, and even pressured the Europe to follow suit.

However, this hasn't worked out quite in the way that the U.S. officials hoped for. Recently UK determined that it won't be banning Huawei from entering the 5G market, if that is indeed the provider that will be chosen for whatever project.

Samsung has held the spot for the most smartphone shipments by a company for quite a stretch. Occasionally Apple could inch a win in one quarter before losing the lead again.

Now Apple has again managed to beat Samsung in the market share game. According to Counterpoint Research, Apple's 72.9 million iPhones ensured it the first place.

As per usual, Apple's lead was due to strong holiday sales, which has also previously sprung the Cupertino company to the lead.

Samsung, lead by its Galaxy lineup, only managed around 70 million units, which is more than 10% down from previous quarter and around the same amount they sold year earlier.

While Apple managed to get the lead once again at the end of the year, Samsung held the throne rather easily in yearly figures. Samsung shipped 296.5 million smartphones in 2019, Huawei came in second with 238.5 million, and Apple was third with just under 200 million units.

These figures are only estimates by Counterpoint Research, and other analytics firms have slight differences in numbers. IHS Markit for example estimates Apple's sales to be only 67.7 million units and behind Samsung's 70.7 million. Strategy Analytics estimates Apple took the lead in Q4.

The world's leading contract manufacturer, Foxconn, estimates that the spread of new coronavirus is not going to affect production in a significant way. Foxconn, known also as Hon Hai Precision Industry, builds many of the most popular eletronics, such as the iPhone.

The Taiwan-based Foxconn is not worried about production slowdowns due to the outbreak of coronavirus that was first detected at the turn of the year. As of today there has been reported 5,974 cases in China of which 132 have resulted in death.

While the company headquarters are located in Taiwan, most of its factories are in China. Some of them are in cities where coronavirus has taken hold aggressively, including Wuhan and Chengdu.

While coronavirus has been highly publicized lately, the scope of things is still small. There is no pandemic, barely an epidemic yet. A normal year of influenza in the United States can include tens of millions of cases with tens of thousands of deaths.

However, Foxconn is nonetheless taking the threat seriously, as it should. It could be very dangerous and detrimental to the production if coronavirus was allowed to spread to the factory workers. The company is following health official's guidelines in order to keep things in check.

Samsung is preparing a launch of its second-generation foldable smartphone. This time around Samsung is turning the folding display vertically in an attempt to copy the new Razr introduced last year.

Galaxy Z Flip is by far one of the more anticipated phone of 2020 we know of. It's not really a successor to the Fold, although it clearly shares some DNA. The company is still trying to figure out form factors for the folding display technology it has been developing for years and years.

Soon, in fact in less than two weeks, Samsung will unveil their new Galaxy S20 flagship phones in San Francisco. It could be, and perhaps it's even likely, that Samsung will also announce this new foldable there.

Last year at the same event Samsung announced their first folding phone, Galaxy Fold. Although it didn't come out for quite some time, and with recalls and all, Unpacked seems to be the event to unveil "one more thing."

They've already teased us with this concept in a video released couple months ago.

The past couple of years hasn't been easy for Apple, considering the relations with China and U.S. have been under turmoil and iPhone sales has been lacking. However, somehow the Cupertino conglomerate seems to have fight the winds.

Year ago Apple had to resort to a rare sales warning due to the problems mentioned. Now everything seems to be much more to where Tim Cook and the shareholders want it.

Previous quarter ended in a new record-breaking $91.8 billion revenue. Even Apple themselves were expecting a figure between 85.5 and 89.5. Markets were expecting revenue to be closer to the higher end of that spread.

Good news didn't end there as net income rose to new heights as well. Net income for the October-December quarter was $22.2 billion. Only the second time it hit over $20 billion after two years ago setting the record at $20.07 billion.

As one would expect, Apple stock got an immediate boost, although it barely registers in the already very upwards trend of the past six months.

Most of the revenue is from devices with $79.1 billion and most of that is still coming from the iPhone, which posted a $56 billion quarter. The iPhone is still down from the top sales figures of two years ago but Apple managed to make an important comeback to last years $52 billion revenue.

CEO and visionary of Tesla and SpaceX has announced that the last preliminary tests have been performed to ready their first manned flight to space.

Musk says that the first flight with NASA astronauts is likely going to happen sometime in the second quarter, April to June, of this year. The first flight is going to take U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station, where they will be visiting for a few days.

The latest public tests was the in-flight abort test of Crew Dragon capsule, which went without complications.

The cooperation with NASA is an important one for Musk and SpaceX. It pays the bills while the company aims to perfect the reusable spacecraft, which is money intensive for sure.

SpaceX has been paid $3.1 billion to develop the Crew Dragon capsule, and it will collect further $55 million an astronaut after the missions commence.

The United States halted capsule flight in 2011. After that NASA has paid the Russians to carry astronauts to the ISS. The upcoming crewed SpaceX flight will mark a return of such launches to the United States and both NASA and Musk are excited about the prospect.

Elon Musk expressed his excitement on CNBC:

Samsung's Koh Dong-Jin, commonly known as DJ Koh, is leaving his post as CEO of Samsung Telecommunications. Samsung announced yesterday, that he is going to be replaced by Roh Tae-moon (pictured), who's been working for the company since 1997.

DJ Koh is known for his unique presentations at Samsung's Unpacked events, where the CEO unveils the latest and greatest mobile flagships. He's worked as the CEO since 2015, and is now moving to IT & mobile communications division, which oversees both smartphones and networks.

The new smartphone boss is the youngest president in the company, at 51. According to Reuters, Roh has been chosen to fight against the ever-increasing challenge from the Chinese manufacturers.

Roh is considering outsourcing some of the manufacturing to cut costs and be more competitive. This is vital if Samsung is going to come out on top against the Chinese, who are known for their low-cost devices.

Google's Chrome OS has become a leading platform for school kids and in lot of education sector. Affordable Chromebooks are good for more than writing your essay, though, and the operating system is soon going to expand in an important way.

According to the Director of Product Management at Google, Kan Liu, the company is working with Valve to get Steam on Chrome OS. Google boss revealed the plans to Android Police at CES.

As said, Chrome OS is good for many things but gaming hasn't so far been one. That is why many have questioned the highly specced, and pricey, Chromebooks from some of the manufacturers. Until now it hasn't made much sense to pack much of a punch to a computer that is largely just for productivity apps and browser-based computing.

Chromebooks are popular among the younger population, which would make it increasingly important that the platform supports better gaming capabilities. This is perhaps the only category where Chromebooks clearly lose to Windows machines.

Chrome OS is essentially built on Linux, so it would seem natural that the implementation of Steam is a iteration of Steam's Linux client that already exists.

The CEO of Google and its parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, has commented on AI development in an op-ed with Financial Times. According to him there is "no question" AI needs to be regulated.

He notes that it should be clear at this point that artificial intelligence should be regulated, it's just a question how this should be implemented.

Many visionaries, scientists, and AI developers have rang the alarm bells on what could be the most powerful tool ever created. The worst case scenarios by aforementioned critics, or alarmists, range from fairly sinister to world-ending, but Pichai focuses on the positive effects of AI if controlled properly.

Pichai explains how the technology will eventually find its way to nearly every part of our lives, be it transportation, medicine, and agriculture.

Not implementing dearly needed regulation, AI could prove disastrous. One can already see how deep fakes might become a problem, and that is only the tip of the iceberg.

One of the problems is that AI regulations are likely to vary widely between countries and continents, unless there's a regulatory body that would impose worldwide limitations. Internet, of course, isn't very different, except for some notable exceptions.

WhatsApp is currently experiencing a major outage. Sending normal text-based messages works fine, but sending photos or other types of media simply doesn't work - for anyone.

The problem started about an hour ago and according to various services that track uptime for services such as WhatsApp, the problem still persists.

So, if you can't currently send pictures through WhatsApp: it is not your phone's nor your operator's fault. It is the same situation for all WhatsApp users, globally.

World's most popular messaging platform, WhatsApp, has dodged a massive bullet. The owner of the messaging platform, Facebook, has been considering bringing ads to the massively successful messenger.

However, it seems like we won't have to worry about it anymore, at least for now. According to Wall Street Journal, Facebook has decided to back off plans to sell ads on WhatsApp.

Selling ads comes as a natural instinct for Facebook, who've paid nearly $20 billion for WhatsApp and haven't seen return in a way they'd like. Facebook has been already implementing some of its ads selling features behind closed doors, although they haven't found their way to public releases yet.

While we're not going to see advertisement on WhatsApp for now, WSJ says that Facebook has intentions to add them to the Status feature later on.

While one would think Facebook is going to respect privacy, a staple of the platform, of WhatsApp users as it brings in ads, there's a sense that it would certainly change how people view it. Secure and private platform and advertisement don't usually go well together.

After companies like Microsoft started calling their strategy "mobile first, cloud first" roughly six years ago, one could've easily come to a conclusion that personal computing has moved on from desktops and laptops largely to mobile devices.

For years it seemed like it too. Prior to Microsoft's change in strategy three years had gone in a downward trend, and a few more would be gone before there was any hopes of resurgence.

Depending on the measuring tools and who you believe, the change might have happened as early as 2017 but now it seems undeniable that PC is on the upswing. Both Gartner and IDC, two of the most well known analytics companies, have reported increases in sales late last year and 2019 in total.

According to Gartner PC sales grown around 2.3 percent to 70.6 million units in the last quarter of 2019, IDC's figures give PC sales a 4.8 percent growth to 71.8 million units.

Year-to-year growth is still miniscule, as Gartners figures are only 0.6 percent above water (261.2 million units).

We're still far off from the golden years of PC, which seems to date to around 2010-2011 when there was more than 350 million PCs sold each year.

Not much has changed in terms of the players. Lenovo with 17.5 million units sold (Gartner) in Q4 is still leading the pack with HP (16.1 million units) coming in close second. Dell (12.1 million units) is third and Apple (5.3 million units) has managed to retain a fourth spot even though it was the only out of the top-4 to lose marketshare.

During the past 20 years AfterDawn has been hosted on a number of different platforms. From a shared Windows server to a cluster of HP servers running Linux on 100+ cores with half a terabyte of RAM.

Most of the time we've been running of leased, physical servers, that we have sized based on the requirements at the time, and foreseeable future. Having predictable costs with a predefined hardware platform has is pros, but also its cons. Leased servers often come with lengthy, often multi-years contracts, that don't scale well as the needs change over time. Not to mention the difficulty of handling operating system upgrades or hardware issues when running on a handful of servers.

Those times are now behind us, as AfterDawn found its new home with the world's fastest cloud provider, UpCloud. We have migrated from our legacy leased servers with spinning disks and rented switch to private cloud servers backed with blazingly fast MaxIOPS storage, and software-defined network (SDN).

The entire infrastructure is orchestrated with Terraform, and all services are deployed and managed by Ansible.

Samsung announced their upcoming Unpacked press event a week or so ago, and there's still four weeks until the unveiling of their newest flagship phones.

However, thanks to leakers, we have a fairly convincing couple of pictures that reveal what the top-of-the-line Samsung will look in 2020.

Speaking of 2020, the phone isn't going to be called S11 as the Korean company is going to cut the consecutive naming scheme first time ever. The new phone is called Galaxy S20, according to the rumors and leaks.

Now to the pictures themselves. According to XDA-Developers, who've managed to get hold of a picture of the S20+ variant, there's going to be three models: Galaxy S20, S20+, and S20 Ultra.

The middle model pictured, which seems to take place of the "regular" one, has a notchless and nearly bezel-free display with a hole-punch camera in the top middle of the phone.

Looks quite similar to the predecessor. In the back, however, the changes are abundant, specifically in the camera department. As suggested by previous rumors, the Galaxy S20+ will have a large camera hump with no less than four cameras.

This is the year of the new game console generation. Sony has already revealed the PlayStation 5 logo, and we all know Microsoft's Project Scarlett is going to officially go by the name of Xbox Series X.

Traditionally new console generations come with launch titles that show off the capabilities of the new devices the best they can. This might not be so much the case this time around, though.

Perhaps as the game consoles, at least with Sony and Microsoft, inch closer to a gaming PC, there are going to be less and less games that are only available for the specific console.

In fact, now Microsoft Studios' Matt Booty has suggested in an interview that Xbox Series X isn't going to have first-party exclusives.

All Microsoft's games will be released at the start for Xbox One as well, and considering their stake at PC gaming, most of the games will likely also be available on Windows 10. This of course doesn't ban anyone else to release an Xbox Series X exclusive, although Microsoft's strategy might discourage this.

Microsoft calls this strategy Xbox Play Anywhere, which means, as you might expect, that you should be able to play the games no matter what device you have at hand. Microsoft intends to make the compatibility of the games a high priority, and ensure that people can flow easily from the older console generation to the new one.

Apple has announced a new replacement program on their official support pages. This time around customers can get a replacement for a faulty battery case for the iPhone.

More specifically it's the Apple Smart Battery Case, and its variant for iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max, and iPhone XR. According to the company, they've determined some of these products faulty.

Users may have experienced charging issues, in which case one can apply for a replacement. Apple details that the Battery Case might not charge at all or only charge intermittently while powered, or might not charge (or charge only intermittently) an iPhone.

However, there is no safety issue with the devices.

Affected units are said to be manufactured between January 2019 and October 2019.

If yours is among the affected, you can either find an Apple Authorized Service Provider or make an appointment at an Apple Retail Store to have your defective product replaced.

It's been nearly a year since Lenovo first unveiled their first folding ThinkPad. Now at CES 2020, the company has finally released the product to the public.

The device is named ThinkPad X1 Fold and it comes with a 4:3 aspect ratio OLED display that measures at 13.3 inches and features a 2048 x 1536 resolution. As the product name suggests, this display folds in half making it a notebook design.

The display has stylus support in addition to regular touch screen. On the top edge or, if used in a notebook form factor, on the right you'll have a 5 MP webcam.

Firefox has updated their flagship browser with some safety, privacy, and UI improvements. One of the perhaps most requested changes, however, has to do with notification requests that have been bothering people.

Notifications, as you might know, are a good way to increase the frequency users use the app or website. It's essentially advertisement, although can be very useful when done in a non-intrusive manner.

Not every website can sent notifications, and that's where the notification requests come in. Websites request permission to send notifications via the browser, and this might be a burden for some users, especially if this is the first visit and there's other disclaimers to get rid of as it is.

Firefox is offering a new solution to these annoyances with the new feature that hides notification requests. Already you could've blocked all notification requests but the new addition allows you to hide them to the address bar to a small speech bubble in case you want to interact with it.

The bubble jiggles around to inform you that you've received a notification request, as seen below.

Firefox 72 also includes blocking of fingerprinting scripts, picture-in-picture video playback for Linux and Mac, and various security fixes.

Samsung has sent their invitations to the press and partners for the upcoming Unpacked event. Samsung's Unpacked events are the vehicle with which the company unveils its newest mobile products.

This time around we're expecting the new flagship for the Galaxy S lineup of devices. Galaxy S11, or whatever else it might be called, is going to be revealed on Feb 11 in San Francisco where the S10 series was first introduced as well.

There's been a lot of rumors surrounding Samsung's next flagship smartphone, but at this point not much is confirmed. Even the name is under scrutiny according to some leaks. Samsung might go for S20 instead of S11 to commemorate year 2020, which would be the first time ever it decides not to follow their incremental scale that got them to S10.

One of the more impressive new features is said to be the 108 megapixel camera, which might be accompanied by as many as 5 other cameras. Samsung's 108 megapixel sensor has already been outed and even fitted into other devices, but its unclear how the Korean company decides to use it in their flagship.

Besides camera, it is almost certain that the phone will have the latest and greatest Snapdragon 865, making it one of the first on the market with that chip. In some markets you'll have Samsung's new Exynos chip instead, which shouldn't be too far from the Snapdragon in terms of performance.