Technology

Plenty of details about the Samsung Galaxy S21 have already leaked ahead of its expected January release date. But a new video gives a glimpse of the Galaxy S21 Plus model, showing a flat display with thin bezels around it, and a punch hole selfie camera. The quality of the video from user Random Stuff 2 isn’t the greatest, and it has some sort of distracting music playing under the user’s commentary. It also doesn’t provide a lot of detail about the back of the phone. [embedded content] Three Galaxy S21 models are expected: a standard, a Plus and an Ultra. A series of leaked teaser trailers, showed off redesigned camera bumps, showing what appears to be five cameras on the S21 Ultra and three each on the S21 and S21 Plus. Android Police reported last month that the S21 will have a 6.2-inc...

In 1956, Elvis Presley got a polio vaccination on the Ed Sullivan Show. The shot was newly available and highly effective — but too few teenagers and young adults were getting vaccinated, so the devastating disease was still circulating. Officials turned to Presley to set an example and encourage people to get their shots. Along with other campaigns, the celebrity endorsement helped vaccination rates go up, and eventually, the disease was eliminated from the country. That bit of history raises a very important question: who will be the Elvis Presley of the COVID-19 vaccine? The vaccine won’t help slow the pandemic if people don’t take it, and many people still say they aren’t sure if they will. Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton already said they’ll take the vaccine ...

Tesla will shut down production for its Model S and Model X for 18 days beginning December 24th according to an internal memo, CNBC reported. Why and what the company will do with the two lines during the shutdown wasn’t immediately clear, but workers on those production lines will apparently get a week’s pay, some paid holidays, and will have opportunities to work on other teams within the company. The memo also says the workers can volunteer to help with delivery of vehicles to customers while production is on hold. Auto industry analyst Edward Niedermeyer noted that Tesla asked California for tax exemptions in 2015 for equipment it needed to build 195,000 Model S and Model X vehicles by 2021. The company told the state of California at the time it would expand its production capabilitie...

Workers at an iPhone production plant in India reportedly smashed windows and set fire to vehicles to protest reductions in pay, the Times of India reported. The incidents began Saturday at a facility run by Taiwan manufacturing company Wistron Corporation, where the iPhone SE is assembled. According to the The Indian Express, during a shift change workers who said they had seen their pay reduced damaged the offices, some furniture, and factory equipment before things escalated outside. A local official told the Express that police were investigating the incident. About 2,000 workers were involved in the protest. Apple began assembling iPhones in India in 2017, where it tops the premium smartphone market. However, it only has about a 1 percent share of the total smartphone market in the co...

Google has added 50 new augmented reality animals to Search which can be either cute, or in the case of the giant cat in the photo above, a bit disconcerting. Of course it’s possible that I find the giant kitty menacing because I hate fun (or so I have been told), but I do not think I want that creature to greet me, anywhere, ever, in AR or any other reality. I do, however, want this red panda to play with a pumpkin in my dining room as long as she wants to. Look how cute she is with her little pumpkinKim Lyons/The Verge In addition to the red panda and cat, there’s a giraffe, cow, zebra, pig, and hippo among the new creatures you can welcome virtually into your home (or other space, but we’re all homebound right now). Just search for an animal on Google’s mobile app and tap “view in 3D” a...

Happy Saturday and welcome to the inaugural edition of the Verge Weekender, a short recap of some of the stories we covered this week on The Verge. The big event of the week was Disney’s investor day, where the company announced new Disney Plus series WandaVision, showed trailers for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier and the much-anticipated series Loki; as well as slew of new Star Wars series on Disney Plus, including Rangers of the New Republic, Ahsoka, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Star Wars: Lando. There’s also a new Alien TV series in the works. Check out the full roundup of everything Disney announced at its 2020 Investor Day. Perhaps the biggest news of the week/year/pandemic hit late Friday, as the FDA approved the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use: The vaccine is authorized in the U...

Origin has made a new, limited edition PC that has the guts of a new model but the face of an ancient 1990s machine, complete with a fake floppy drive. In case you want some nostalgia while you wait for Red Dead Redemption to load, perhaps. The RestoMod has a custom Corsair 4000D case, and the standard build has 16GB of memory, a 2.9 GHz Core i5 processor, 250GB of storage, and a 6GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti graphics card, for $2,080. The RetroMod can be customized as desired, Origin says, but they’ve only made 50 of them, so supplies are limited. RestoMod: New but with an old lookOrigin The front face of the machine is where you’ll get the old-school feel, Origin says: By using a custom HD UV print on the steel front panel, the RestoMod PC features a custom design inspired by PCs from t...

It’s a different kind of Cyber week. Cyber Monday is in the past, but the anticipated Cyberpunk 2077 game has finally launched, and it’s almost impossible to avoid seeing buzz about it online. One of this week’s best deals is aimed right at people who don’t have a console or a beastly gaming PC. The game is available on Google Stadia, and until supplies last, Google is offering a complimentary hardware bundle worth $100 to people who buy Cyberpunk 2077 on its cloud game streaming platform. Find details on this and a few more deals below. Get Stadia hardware when you buy Cyberpunk 2077 A few Verge writers found that playing Cyberpunk 2077 is actually a fantastic experience on Stadia, Google’s cloud gaming streaming service that doesn’t require an expensive console or PC — just a controller,...

When researchers at pharmaceutical companies around the world started developing COVID-19 vaccines, experts reminded everyone to temper expectations. Vaccines usually take years. The frontrunners were made using unproven technology, and there were dozens of ways things could go wrong. The Food and Drug Administration said it would be fine with anything over 50 percent effective. Then, last month, Pfizer announced that it had a vaccine, and it was 95 percent effective. Moderna did too. It was better news than anyone dared hope for. Stéphane Bancel, chief executive at Moderna, said he cried when he first heard the data. With the FDA’s blessing, which came in late Friday night, health care workers in the United States could start getting shots next week, less than a year after the first case ...

It looked like Twitter was adding further restrictions to President Trump’s Twitter account on Saturday, as some users noticed the ability to like, retweet or reply to his tweets with “disputed” labels was not working. Copying the URL to one of the disputed tweets also appeared to be disabled, and quote-tweets were not appearing in search results. Some users were able to access and like Trump’s tweets — several Verge staffers confirmed they could engage with “disputed” tweets by clicking through the warning label— but others on Twitter could not. OK Based on my probing, for Trumps election fraud tweets:– like, RT, reply, copy URL actions are disabled– all counts disabled– quote tweets allowed, if you click through warning – maybe most importantly: QTs undiscoverable...

This morning, Richard Branson’s space tourism company Virgin Galactic had to abort its first powered test flight of its spaceplane from the company’s home in New Mexico, bringing the vehicle home before it could reach space. During the flight, the spaceplane’s engine cut out too early and the vehicle’s two pilots had to glide back down to the ground early. The aborted engine ignition was caught live by a Twitch livestream provided by the outlet NASASpaceflight. The video showed the spaceplane, called VSS Unity, dropping away from its carrier aircraft in mid-air as planned. The vehicle then briefly ignited its main engine, according to the video, but the ignition cut out after just a moment. On a typical flight, the spaceplane’s engine will stay ignited for a full minute, propelling the veh...

If you were worried about sending your kids back to school after the pandemic ends (or if you are a kid worrying about going back to school), I’m afraid this Gizmodo article is not going to help. Tom McKay and Dhruv Mehrotra have done a fantastic job reporting about how some US school districts are buying tools designed to break into phones to download texts and photos… even ones that have been deleted. While companies like Cellebrite have partnered with federal and local police for years, that the controversial equipment is also available for school district employees to search students’ personal devices has gone relatively unnoticed—and serves as a frightening reminder of how technology originally developed for use by the military or intelligence services, ranging from blast-armored truc...