Technology

Samsung’s future phones will also not come with charging bricks, the company has revealed, but it’s leaving itself some wiggle room. In a Q&A about why it’s no longer including headphones and a charging brick in the box, Samsung says it believes gradually removing the accessories from its phones could help make them more sustainable. This answer implies that, while the next generations of its phones may not come with the included accessories, some may. Samsung has other lines that it brands as Galaxy, from its folding phones to its more budget options, and it’s left itself room to keep including a charger in some of them for a little while longer. Maybe Samsung wants to keep the charger around in cheaper phones so people who aren’t tech enthusiasts will have a higher likelihood of buyi...

A developer going by the name of Patr10tic has created an interactive map using GPS metadata and videos from the app Parler to offer a glimpse of what was happening inside and around the Capitol building during the violent protest on January 6th (via Motherboard). The project is an expansion on similar maps like the one Gizmodo created to illustrate just how many Parler users were part of the mob that occupied the Capitol building, based off an archive created by a researcher known as @donk_enby. Patr10tic’s map (currently named “Y’all Qaeda”) uses the same archive and connects GPS coordinates with actual video, offering a map of red icons placed around the Capitol for each associated video post. Viewing the videos has an unsettling quality, not just because of the intersection of conspira...

Echoing a theme that will be repeated a lot more this year, Samsung has announced a very inexpensive 5G phone. The Galaxy A32 5G is debuting in Europe first, starting at €279 for a 64GB version or €299 for 128GB. There’s no official word yet on whether it will come to the US. The A32 5G offers a 6.5-inch 1600 x 900 display, a 5,000mAh battery, and a side-mounted fingerprint reader. Its rear camera array includes a 48-megapixel main camera, an 8-megapixel ultrawide, a 2-megapixel depth-sensing camera, and the obligatory 5-megapixel macro camera. Around front, it offers a 13-megapixel selfie camera. Samsung doesn’t say what processor the phone is using, only that it’s a 2.0GHz octa-core chipset, but 9to5Google suspects it’s a Dimensity 720. And unlike the flagship phones debuting today, the ...

With six days left in office, the Trump administration has decided to put one more Chinese electronics giant in its sights: Xiaomi, the world’s number three phone manufacturer. The US Department of Defense is now designating Xiaomi as a “Chinese Communist military company,” meaning it’s now vulnerable to Trump’s executive order that bans the US from investing in such companies — and might force US companies and other US investors to divest in Xiaomi on November 11th, 2021, as reported by Reuters. While a Biden administration might overturn the order before then, it’s interesting to see an electronics company like Xiaomi on the list at all. Most of the other companies on the list are more industrially oriented, specializing in aviation, aerospace, shipbuilding, chemicals, telecommunications...

Samsung just revealed the new Galaxy S21 Ultra would be its first Galaxy S phone to support the S Pen stylus, but the company is already saying that S Pen support will come to other devices in the future, according to a statement first given to SamMobile on Thursday. “We are committed to innovating new mobile experiences that flow seamlessly and continuously to make our consumers’ lives easier and better,” Samsung president of mobile TM Roh says in the statement, which the company shared with The Verge. “We’ve made the bold decision to expand the S Pen experience to Galaxy S21 Ultra, and plan to expand the S Pen experience across additional device categories in the future.” “Additional device categories” is vague on its own. But given that S Pen is already compatible with some of Samsung’s...

Back in May 2019, Spotify announced that it would be publicly testing a voice-controlled smart assistant for cars that the company called “Car Thing.” But nearly two years on, we haven’t heard much from the project — though that might change soon. A Car Thing with a totally new design and a bigger screen has appeared in FCC filings. This new version of the Car Thing seems like it will function similarly to the 2019 version — it’s a “voice controlled accessory for phone/Spotify App with supporting display and buttons,” according to a description found in the filings. “Bluetooth enabled for communication with the Car Head Unit. Powered from a 12V outlet,” continues the description, bluntly. The design, though, is radically different. The new Car Thing looks almost like a mini-tablet, with so...

One of the biggest announcements at CES 2021 seemed to come and go without much fanfare. Overshadowed by Nvidia’s debut of its RTX 3000-series graphics chips for laptops, you might have missed hearing that a growing number of manufacturers are finally building fast-refreshing QHD screens into their portable gaming machines. Standalone QHD (1440p) monitors are a popular choice for discerning gamers who use desktop computers for several reasons. First, the displays are often more affordable and feature-packed than most 4K monitors while looking nearly as good. And importantly, modern high-end graphics cards, like the AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT and Nvidia RTX 3080 (and even some last-gen products), run games very well at QHD. Frustratingly and inexplicably, though, QHD hasn’t been an option if you...

Samsung has confirmed that the Galaxy S21, S21 Plus, and S21 Ultra no longer support the convenient Magnetic Secure Transmission (MST) feature of Samsung Pay. And based on what the company told Android Police, the same will be true for all phones that Samsung releases from here on out. If you’re not familiar, MST is a very cool trick that allows Samsung phones to send out a magnetic pulse that made payment terminals think that you’d swiped a regular credit card. The most beneficial thing about it is that MST can work in scenarios where NFC payments aren’t available. It can send that magnetic signal to pretty much any payment terminal with a traditional card swiper. MST is by no means perfect: getting a payment to go through on the first try can sometimes be a challenge, and it’s worthless ...

During Samsung’s Unpacked event, the company unveiled three new phones as part of the Galaxy S21 lineup — the Galaxy S21, S21 Plus, and the S21 Ultra — which will be available to preorder starting January 14th and will release on January 29th. As a reminder, their prices range from $999.99 to upward of $$1,379.99. We will be reviewing the S21 line soon, but if you are interested in preordering the phone, we’ve compiled a list of retailers that currently have product listings available. See below for how to preorder and any promotions currently available. Where to buy the Samsung Galaxy S21 You can preorder the Samsung Galaxy S21 directly through Samsung’s website, starting at $799.99. If you have a phone to trade-in, you can get up to $700 in credit towards your new Galaxy S21. AT&T ha...

A coalition of health and tech companies, which includes Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle, is working on an initiative that aims to make it easier for people to access their COVID-19 vaccination records digitally. As people are beginning to get vaccinated against COVID-19, they may need to prove that they’re vaccinated so that they can return to work, school, or to travel, and having an easily accessible digital vaccination record could help with that. The coalition is calling itself the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI). “VCI’s vision is to empower individuals to obtain an encrypted digital copy of their immunization credentials to store in a digital wallet of their choice,” according to a press release. If you don’t want to use a smartphone, you could receive papers with QR codes ...

For years, competitive gaming has done its best to mimic professional sports, whether it’s players wearing Nike jerseys, big-name celebrity investors, or ambitious plans for home-and-away games. But Chris Greeley, commissioner of the League of Legends Championship Series — the game’s top professional league in North America — believes that esports has moved beyond mimicking existing sports. “We had this idea in the beginning that, because esports is a sport, and we wanted to be taken seriously, we should look like a sport,” he tells The Verge. “The LCS looked like the NBA on TNT. It was great for validation and for investors and sponsors to look and say ‘Hey, this looks just like a sport, therefore this is an easy translation.’ But we’ve outlived that.” So starting in 2021, the league is m...

It’s official: Samsung is ditching the microSD card on all three of its Galaxy S21 models. We asked Samsung about this, and the company’s rationale seemed to be that it doesn’t think it’s necessary. A spokesperson told us that it only costs $50 to upgrade from 128GB to 256GB and that this is cheaper than what competitors are charging to step up storage. They also noted that cloud storage is an option. That’s all well and good, but it’s still likely that this change will be a bummer for some potential customers. It means the maximum amount of storage you’ll be able to get on the S21 phones (without wrangling up additional cloud storage) is the 512GB configuration of the S21 Ultra. As Samsung’s website advertises, the microSD slot on last year’s S20 lineup gives users access to potentially o...