Vivo X90 Pro Specifications Leak Ahead of Global Launch: All Details

Vivo X90 Pro is tipped to be powered by a MediaTek Dimensity 9200 SoC.

Vivo X90 Pro specifications have been leaked, ahead of the launch of the upcoming series, which made its debut in China last November with the Vivo X90 and Vivo X90 Pro. The company is tipped to be gearing up for the global launch of the Vivo X90 Pro, and the handset's specifications have now been leaked by a tipster. The flagship smartphone series features a MediaTek Dimensity 9200 SoC with Pro's global variant. The purported image lists out the detailed specifications of the Vivo X90 Pro model smartphone will feature when it launches globally. The poster revealed by the tipster suggests that the Vivo X90 Pro will feature a MediaTek Dimensity 9200 SoC, coupled with Vivo's dedicated V2 image processing chip. The smartphone could also feature a 4002 square mm vapour chamber (VC) liquid cooling setup.

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Samsung Galaxy A14 5G

It's $200! Good performance. Nice screen. Two-day battery life. Solid camera. Includes 64 GB of storage and a microSD card slot, plus a headphone jack and NFC for contactless payments. Runs the latest version of Android and will get two OS upgrades and four years of security updates. Works on all major US networks.

This is easily the best phone you can buy for $200.

THE MOST EXCITING smartphones aren't the $1,200 flagships, with their minute upgrades that only slightly improve the camera from the prior year. No, it's the cheap phones that have had my eyes. It's remarkable seeing what features are trickling down from the high end, and how rapidly these handsets are improving. This is nowhere more evident than with Samsung's Galaxy A14 5G.

This $200 unlocked Android phone is, frankly, phenomenal. For two Benjamins, you can get a smartphone that can handle most day-to-day tasks without acting frustratingly slow, a surprisingly decent camera system, a lengthy software update cycle, plus more than two-day battery life. The crazier thing is that Samsung manages to improve on the flaws of the A14's predecessor—the Galaxy A13 5G—while cutting the price by $50. Consider my mind boggled.

The A14 5G looks a little plain, but it has a textured back that gives it a little more character than most budget phones. It certainly doesn't feel as cheap as it is. The plastic rear design means that's one less glass surface area you have to worry about. The only hardware flaw? This phone doesn't have an IP rating, so it's not dust or water resistant. You'll want to be careful with it in the rain, near a pool, and at the beach.

The 6.6-inch LCD display has a 1080-pixel resolution which is sharper than the prior model, and it looks perfectly fine. I haven't had trouble reading it on sunny days (not that we've had many here in New York recently), and it's plenty sharp for gaming, reading, and watching all the TikToks my partner sends my way.

Speaking of displays, some cheap phones have started introducing high refresh rates into their respective screens—a flagship feature making its way down. Most smartphones used to have a 60-Hz screen, but by increasing the number of times the screen refreshes per second from 60 to 90 or 120, you get a more fluid experience and it makes the phone feel more responsive. Samsung has retained the 90-Hz panel from the A13, which is nice, but it honestly is hard to tell. It doesn't feel as buttery smooth as more powerful devices that can more regularly ratchet up the frames when you're moving through the interface.

Performance is certainly a standout. Compared to a $170 phone I just reviewed, the Galaxy A14 5G is a godsend. I can actually juggle through all my apps without my blood pressure rising. This is thanks to the MediaTek Dimensity 700 5G and 4 GB of RAM inside. In my Geekbench benchmark tests, there's a solid bump in performance over the A13 5G, which is surprising given the A13 5G has the same chipset and RAM. I suspect there's just better optimization here. That's easily reflected throughout my experience. I can play games like Alto's Odyssey, CarX Highway Racing, and Dead Cells without noticing annoying hiccups.

I don't want to oversell it—it's not a flagship phone. Yes, you will still see stutters here and there when you switch between apps. Maybe you'll have to force close an app from time to time. But for the most part, I've had a completely good experience using the A14 5G not only for catching up on Reddit and Twitter, but also to respond to emails on the fly, monitor work tasks, and even make calls.

That brings me to the battery. My sister lives in India, so we don't get a chance to catch up often. The other day, I spent four hours on a video call and the battery dropped only to 50 percent—I was expecting it to be lower! On that same day, I used the phone's GPS as I drove to a dog park in Manhattan, and snapped lots of photos of my delicious fried chicken sandwich at a local Irish eatery called Bua. By bedtime (which is, er, past midnight for me), the phone was at 11 percent with a fantastic 9 hours of screen-on time. This was an unnaturally busy day. On days when I don't spend hours on video calls, I had 30 percent left after two full days on a single charge. It's lovely not having to recharge every night.

That brings me to the 50-megapixel primary camera. It snaps photos pretty quickly, and there's even a Night mode you can use to take decently bright and sharp images in low light (unlike the Moto G Play). Naturally, your nighttime photos will be a little blurry now and then. There's a little too much processing at times, smoothening out certain features on faces and other details, plus some colors can be exaggerated. Still, I've still been quite happy with most of the results for a $200 phone. That includes selfies I snapped with the 13-megapixel front camera (which also supports Night mode). There's a macro camera if that's your fancy, and it works OK for extreme close-up shots, but only if you have a good amount of light.

A Star Is Born

The only major gripe I have with this phone in day-to-day use is the mono speaker. It just doesn't get too loud, doesn't sound great, and it's easy to block in landscape mode when you're playing video games. The easy solution is to just use headphones—wireless or wired because, yes, there's a headphone jack.

There's even a microSD card slot to expand on the 64 GB of internal storage (which is more than what you'll find on similarly priced peers), plus the ability to make contactless payments with the near-field communication (NFC) sensor so you can leave the wallet at home. I almost exclusively pay with my phone these days when I'm out and about, so this is a huge win for me.

The Galaxy A14 5G also supports … 5G, as the name implies, which is yet another rarity at this price as most sub-$200 phones rely on 4G LTE. It's supported by every major US carrier, from AT&T and T-Mobile to Verizon. Best of all, Samsung is promising two Android OS updates, which means that since it's already running the latest Android 13, it'll still receive Android 15 in 2024. It will also get four years of security updates, which is practically unheard of for a phone so cheap.

It's near-impossible to not marvel at the value of the Galaxy A14. It does almost everything so well for so little, and that's precisely what we should be asking more of from our gadgets.

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LG made an (almost) wireless 97-inch OLED TV

LG’s 2023 TV lineup includes better, brighter G3 and C3 OLEDs plus the Signature OLED M: it’s a 97-inch 4K TV that receives audio and video from a Zero Connect box that can be positioned up to 30 feet away from the screen.

This was made possible through the zero-connect box that can be placed up to 30 feet from the TV and transmits a 4K 120Hz signal to it. Thanks to this technology, the only thing you need to worry about will be the power cable.

The LG M3 Signature OLED TV’s flagship model measures 97 inches, which is more than adequate for home theater use. Its wireless broadcasting technology proved to be robust since there were little to no interruptions to the transmission amid the crowded CES event. The TV features LG’s 3rd-gen OLED panels and META technology

META stands for Micro Lens Array. It embeds a layer made up of a micrometer-sized convex lens that can recover errant light emissions by almost 22%. For a 77-inch OLED TV 4K, there are nearly 5117 microlenses per pixel. They recover light lost due to internal reflections.
Hyeon-woo Lee, Senior Vice President and Head of the Large Display Business Unit at LG Display said:
The successful development of our superior ‘META Technology’ evolves the image quality of OLED TVs to a new, unparalleled. We will continue to lead the OLED TV market by expanding the ultra-premium OLED sector and strengthening our competitiveness with the best picture quality and most diverse lineups ever assembled.

This new technology from LG makes OLED panels almost 30% brighter than the older generation. This is a significant breakthrough by LG, as peak brightness was a problem with OLEDs compared with QLEDs or mini LEDs. The 55-inch, 65-inch, 77-inch, and 88-inch (8K) models of these OLED TVs will come with META technology.

LG’s OLED TVs are able to reach 2,100-nit peak brightness. This is the highest TV display brightness available today. META Technology adds more brightness to OLED’s already stunning picture quality and deep blacks, allowing for a vivid and intense color expression that captures viewers and blurs the line between reality and virtual.

LG is yet to share details about its pricing and availability.

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Google’s new AI turns text into music

The examples the company has shared are music to my ears.

Google researchers have made an AI that can generate minutes-long musical pieces from text prompts, and can even transform a whistled or hummed melody into other instruments, similar to how systems like DALL-E generate images from written prompts. The model is called MusicLM, and while you can’t play around with it for yourself, the company has uploaded a bunch of samples that it produced using the model.

The examples are impressive. There are 30-second snippets of what sound like actual songs created from paragraph-long descriptions that prescribe a genre, vibe, and even specific instruments, as well as five-minute-long pieces generated from one or two words like “melodic techno.” Perhaps my favorite is a demo of “story mode,” where the model is basically given a script to morph between prompts. For example, this prompt:
electronic song played in a videogame (0:00-0:15)
meditation song played next to a river (0:15-0:30)
fire (0:30-0:45)
fireworks (0:45-0:60)

It may not be for everyone, but I could totally see this being composed by a human (I also listened to it on loop dozens of times while writing this article). Also featured on the demo site are examples of what the model produces when asked to generate 10-second clips of instruments like the cello or maracas (the later example is one where the system does a relatively poor job), eight-second clips of a certain genre, music that would fit a prison escape, and even what a beginner piano player would sound like versus an advanced one. It also includes interpretations of phrases like “futuristic club” and “accordion death metal.”

MusicLM can even simulate human vocals, and while it seems to get the tone and overall sound of voices right, there’s a quality to them that’s definitely off. The best way I can describe it is that they sound grainy or staticky. That quality isn’t as clear in the example above, but I think this one illustrates it pretty well.

That, by the way, is the result of asking it to make music that would play at a gym. You may also have noticed that the lyrics are nonsense, but in a way that you may not necessarily catch if you’re not paying attention — kind of like if you were listening to someone singing in Simlish or that one song that’s meant to sound like English but isn’t.

I won’t pretend to know how Google achieved these results, but it’s released a research paper explaining it in detail if you’re the type of person who would understand this figure:

AI-generated music has a long history dating back decades; there are systems that have been credited with composing pop songs, copying Bach better than a human could in the 90s, and accompanying live performances. One recent version uses AI image generation engine StableDiffusion to turn text prompts into spectrograms that are then turned into music. The paper says that MusicLM can outperform other systems in terms of its “quality and adherence to the caption,” as well as the fact that it can take in audio and copy the melody.

That last part is perhaps one of the coolest demos the researchers put out. The site lets you play the input audio, where someone hums or whistles a tune, then lets you hear how the model reproduces it as an electronic synth lead, string quartet, guitar solo, etc. From the examples I listened to, it manages the task very well.

Like with other forays into this type of AI, Google is being significantly more cautious with MusicLM than some of its peers may be with similar tech. “We have no plans to release models at this point,” concludes the paper, citing risks of “potential misappropriation of creative content” (read: plagiarism) and potential cultural appropriation or misrepresentation.

It’s always possible the tech could show up in one of Google’s fun musical experiments at some point, but for now, the only people who will be able to make use of the research are other people building musical AI systems. Google says it’s publicly releasing a dataset with around 5,500 music-text pairs, which could help when training and evaluating other musical AIs

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Mercedes-Benz is the first to bring Level 3 automated driving to the US

The company’s Drive Pilot system is approved for use in Nevada, but only at speeds up to 40 mph. You can play Tetris while cruising down the highway, but make sure your face stays visible to the camera, or the system disengages.

Mercedes-Benz announced that it was the first automaker to receive government approval in the US for a Level 3 driving feature. The company said it had self-certified in Nevada for use of its Drive Pilot feature, in which the car does all the driving but the driver needs to stand by to take control at a moment’s notice.

Mercedes certified that its technology meets Nevada’s “minimal risk condition” requirement that requires Level 3 or higher “fully autonomous” vehicles to be able to stop if there is a malfunction in the system.

“Nevada law allows all automation levels to operate on public streets,” a spokesperson for the state’s DMV said in an email. “Nevada does not issue any permit or license based on an autonomous vehicle’s level of automation.”

Mercedes certified that its technology meets Nevada’s “minimal risk condition” requirement

Mercedes-Benz’s Drive Pilot is similar to “hands-free” highway driving systems like GM’s Super Cruise, Ford’s BlueCruise, and Tesla’s Autopilot, in so far as it allows drivers to take their hands off the steering wheel and feet off the pedals under certain conditions. But unlike Level 2 systems, in which drivers are required to keep their eyes on the road, Mercedes’ Level 3 system has a little more allowances.

According to The Drive, which got to test out the system on a closed course in Germany last year, the driver must keep their face visible to the vehicle’s in-car cameras at all times but can also turn their head to talk to a passenger or play a game on the vehicle’s infotainment screen. (A Mercedes engineer suggested playing Tetris, for example.) But when The Drive reporter brought a camera up to his face to take a picture, the system disengaged

In other words, the system doesn’t allow drivers to take a nap or ride in the vehicle in the backseat. In the past, people have abused the lax driver monitoring controls in Tesla’s Autopilot to do both, which has unnerved regulators and spurred safety advocates to call for more robust monitoring.

Other than that, Drive Pilot acts similarly to many of the Level 2 systems that are available in the US. It accelerates and decelerates, depending on traffic ahead. It can stay centered in the lane and perform automated lane changes and blind spot detection. Interestingly, Mercedes says that Drive Pilot will only operate at speeds up to 40 mph on “suitable freeway sections and where there is high traffic density” — which seems to suggest it will only be available in heavy, stop-and-go traffic.

In addition to cameras and radar, the system relies on data from a lidar sensor to construct a 3D model of its surrounding environment, as well as microphones to detect approaching emergency vehicles.

To be sure, Level 3 systems are not without their risks. Most autonomous vehicle operators, including Waymo and Cruise, have said they think Level 3 is too dangerous, preferring to work exclusively on Level 4 technology. The reason is the need for drivers to stay attentive despite the vehicle performing most of the driving tasks.

There have been studies that show that hand-off between automated system and human driver can be especially fraught. When people have been disconnected from driving for a longer period of time, they may overreact when suddenly taking control in an emergency situation. They may overcorrect steering, brake too hard, or be unable to respond correctly because they hadn’t been paying attention. And those actions can create a domino effect that has the potential to be dangerous — perhaps even fatal.

Mercedes isn’t the only automaker pursuing the technology. In its announcement that it was pivoting away from fully autonomous driving, Ford said it would turn to “internally developed L2+/L3 technology.” Audi, BMW, and Volvo have all said they are working on their own Level 3 systems, with California seen as the next frontier for testing and deployment. Indeed, Mercedes said it hopes to receive approval to begin offering its Level 3 system to drivers in the state later this year.

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GoldenEye 007 is now available on Nintendo Switch and Xbox

After years of rights issues, a remastered version of GoldenEye 007 has finally arrived on Xbox, along with a port of the original for Switch that adds online multiplayer

GoldenEye 007 has finally landed on Xbox and Nintendo Switch in a simultaneous dual-release of two titles with some important differences.

On Xbox, GoldenEye 007 is a remastered version of the legendary Nintendo 64 title that first launched in 1997. The remaster includes 4K resolution, smoother frame rates, and split-screen local multiplayer, similar to a 2008-era bound-for-Xbox 360 version that was canceled amid licensing and rights issues but leaked out in 2021.

Meanwhile, Nintendo has released GoldenEye 007 as part of its Nintendo Switch Online service. N64 games were added to the service in 2021, though you have to splurge on the Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack tier to get access

Online multiplayer modes are exclusive to the Nintendo Switch version of the game, as opposed to Microsoft’s “faithful recreation” that’s available for Xbox One and Xbox Series S / X consoles and included in the Xbox Game Pass subscription.

The classic campaign mode will also be available on Xbox, alongside cheat modes, support for dual analog sticks, and a native 16:9 aspect ratio up to 4K. If you already own a digital copy of Rare Replay on Xbox, then GoldenEye 007 is included and free of charge.

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China's 2022 smartphone shipments the lowest in 10 years

China's smartphone sales fell 13% year-on-year in 2022, the largest plunge for the sector in a decade as consumers spent cautiously, market research firm IDC said on Sunday.

Technology news in English.

SHANGHAI, Jan 29 - China's smartphone sales fell 13% year-on-year in 2022, the largest plunge for the sector in a decade as consumers spent cautiously, market research firm IDC said on Sunday.
The total number of devices shipped was 286 million, down from 329 million in 2022.
That meant total 2022 sales volume was the lowest since 2013 and the first time since then that annual sales have dropped below 300 million, IDC said in a report.

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