Technology

In the shadow of the iPhone 13, and an aggressive new “Forever Upgrade” plan to sell them, T-Mobile executives are complaining about Samsung’s phones, Fierce Wireless reports. Specifically, the lack of them. “Samsung has really fallen behind the eight ball relative to other OEMs on the global supply chain issue,” T-Mobile chief financial officer and executive vice president Peter Osvaldik said at a BofA Securities investor event on Tuesday. The issue seems to be that a majority of T-Mobile’s customers are “very significant Samsung lovers,” according to Osvaldik, so Samsung “discontinuing” the Galaxy Note — which “customers just loved” — combined with a shorter supply of S-series phones had a negative impact on the carrier. T-Mobile customers apparently love the Galaxy Note Despite what Osv...

Quibi’s zombie may finally be able to rest its weary head. The company’s successor has settled an ongoing feud with eternal thorn-in-its-side Eko. Eko, an interactive video company, and Quibi’s successor QBI Holdings announced today that they’d reached a settlement in the legal battle over Quibi’s perspective-shifting Turnstyle feature, which Eko alleged the streaming service had swiped from its own proprietary video technology. Both companies have agreed to dismiss their legal action against one another, and Quibi will hand over both the video technology and Turnstyle IP to Eko as part of their agreement. “This result will help ensure that Eko remains the undisputed leader in interactive storytelling technology,” Eko boss Yoni Bloch said in a statement. Quibi was founded by Jeffrey ...

Erika Cheung, who took the stand yesterday for her direct testimony, which continued today, is known for being one of John Carreyrou’s sources for his blockbuster article about Theranos. You know, the article that’s part of the reason we are now witnessing US v. Elizabeth Holmes. (Holmes is on trial for several counts of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud.) Cheung is, famously, one of the people who blew the whistle on Holmes. She’s even given a TED talk about it. The other major source for Carreyrou was her friend, Tyler Shultz, who also worked at Theranos and was the grandson of one of the board members. He is expected to testify later in the trial, since he tried to bring problems in the lab to Holmes’ attention. “I don’t feel comfortable running the patient sample.” At Ther...

SpaceX has successfully launched its Inspiration4 mission into space — the world’s first all-civilian human spaceflight into orbit. The company’s Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft left NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Wednesday evening, carrying a crew made entirely out of civilians, including mission commander Jared Isaacman, founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments and described as an “accomplished pilot and adventurer;” medical officer Hayley Arceneaux, a physician assistant at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital; mission specialist Chris Sembroski, an Air Force veteran and aerospace data engineer; and mission pilot Sian Proctor, a geoscientist, entrepreneur and trained pilot. The Dragon spacecraft is the only vessel currently flying that can safely return significant amounts o...

For the past ten years, Tim Cook’s greatest accomplishment as Apple CEO has been vastly more of the same. More iPhones, more iPhone accessories, more apps, and so much more money. While the Mac and iPad have occasionally fallen into disrepair, the company keeps coming back with new reasons to buy its greatest hits every year — and this year’s iPhone 13 event is a near-perfect case study in how far refinement can take you. As my colleague Jon Porter points out, the iPhone 13 is effectively the iPhone 12S, an iterative, incremental update to last year’s phones instead of something that feels brand new. Almost everything got better But oh, what an update. What company wouldn’t dream of being able to say they improved the processing power AND the battery life AND the cameras AND the displays A...

Samsung Display is following through on its promise to ramp up OLED production. The company has begun mass-producing laptop-sized 90Hz OLED panels, which will appear in multiple upcoming 14-inch laptops from Asus. “The demand for laptops is increasing steadily as working from home and remote learning become the new norm,” Asus Vice General Manager Y.C. Chen said in a statement. “OLED displays can meet consumers’ various needs as they’re using laptops for school, virtual meetings, video streaming, gaming, and more.” In a statement, Samsung Display said, “The 90Hz OLED panel offers more options for consumers who are looking to enjoy high-performance content on their laptops. With our innovative OLEDs, we’re further pioneering and leading the market in display technologies that offer superior...

For many who follow tech news closely, Apple’s event on Tuesday had a few big surprises — not because there were completely unexpected announcements, but because we didn’t see things we really thought we’d be getting. Rumors that had enough smoke to be almost a sure-fire thing in previous years ended up falling flat. For example: The Apple Watch was rumored to get a complete redesign, featuring flat edges and a flat screen. We saw this design in renders, reportedly leaked CAD files (which act as a 3D blueprint for products), and even heard that it’d be happening from noted Apple reporter Mark Gurman two days before the event. While the Apple Watch that showed up on stage does have some design tweaks, it looks nothing like what we were expecting. The Series 7 has a refined version of the sa...

SpaceX launched four private citizens to space on Wednesday, kicking off the first-ever crewed mission to orbit without any professional astronauts on board. Dubbed Inspiration4, the mission marks the latest private foray into space as companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX compete to normalize space travel for paying tourists, not just government astronauts. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off on time at 8:02PM ET from the company’s 39A launchpad at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, soaring from Florida’s east coast under clear night skies. Inside the capsule is billionaire entrepreneur Jared Isaacman, a trained pilot and founder of payment-processing firm Shift4 Payments, and three others he picked and paid for to ride with him: Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant and cancer surviv...

The newest list of emojis is out and will be arriving on our devices sometime in the near future. The Unicode Consortium, which sets the bar for text and symbols across the web, released its 2021’s edition of standards, titled Unicode 14.0, on Tuesday. Along with the introduction of up-to-date characters, scripts and symbols, yesterday’s release includes 37 new emojis based on proposals received by the organization, as well as 75 new skin tone variations. Leading the lineup are variations of the classic emoji face that include a face-melting into a puddle and another one that peeks out with one eye covered. Other offerings seem to be designed with current internet slang in mind, such as in the case of a green troll yielding a club. Meanwhile, a hand with the index finger and thumb crossed ...

A NASA astronaut will break the record for the longest American spaceflight, following an extension to his time at the International Space Station that will span until next March. Astronaut Mark Vande Hei has been in space since April 9 on a trip that was originally scheduled to last only six months before NASA announced that it would tack an additional six months onto his stay. The space agency also extended the stay of Russian astronaut Pyotr Dubrov, who arrived alongside Vande Hei and another astronaut named Oleg Novitskiy on the Soyuz MS-18 spacecraft. The change comes as a result of a movie that’s being filmed at the ISS in October. Director Klim Shipenko and actress Yulia Peresild will go to space, accompanied by astronaut Anton Shkaplerov. After two weeks, Shipenko and Peresild...

The refreshed Apple TV 4K hit shelves in April, but the anticipated tvOS 15 update that introduces exciting updates to the Apple TV experience was previously only available in beta. That will change next week: Apple has confirmed tvOS 15 will become widely available to everyone on September 20th. Apple confirmed to The Verge that the tvOS 15 update will go live the same day as its other operating system updates, which include iOS 15, iPadOS 15, and watchOS 8. The tvOS 15 update brings a number of new features to the Apple TV experience. SharePlay is arguably the most exciting addition to the experience and will allow FaceTime users to stream titles together in sync across their Apple devices, including on Apple TV. However, Apple confirmed in August that the feature would be delayed on iOS...