🛬 Good morning! CES 2020 is getting started as the tech world and mayhem descend on Las Vegas. Fun fact: everyone gets sick at CES for some reason related to winter, colds/flus, and general extreme levels of tiredness.
🔜 Press days start from January 5th, the conference starts from Jan 7th.
OnePlus Concept One adds smart glass
OnePlus has given us an inside look at its OnePlus Concept One smartphone it intends to show off at CES 2020 - and it doesn’t look like it’s a foldable, or dual-display, or a phone without ports that were all part of some Concept One best guesses put forward.
Instead, it’s about the use of electrochromic glass, a kind of smart glass technology.
Smart glass, what now?
- In a video released by OnePlus, along with additional information from CEO Pete Lau’s interview with Wired, we now know OnePlus is going to show off a disappearing rear camera.
- Electrochromic glass will be used in the glass camera housing to shade out the camera lenses you’d normally see, while the camera is not in use.
- Per Wired, the idea came about because Lau was at British automotive manufacturer McLaren factory in Woking, and saw it being used in the sunroof. It allows McLaren to offer a sunroof that can toggle between an opaque look, all the way to fully transparent to let the sun in on those sunny days (as a $9,100 option, by the way).
- The Boeing 787 Dreamliner plane windows also offer this as a “virtual blind” to block the sun, instead of the old up and down shutters, which saves on bulk and weight in planes.
- Anyway, reportedly, what Lau saw led to the OnePlus co-founder exploring how the glass might be used in personal devices.
- Corning has a video here from 2016 when it talked about the glass and shows a demonstration. It's also been discussed in sci-fi, and in Splinter Cell Chaos Theory (from 2005).
Ok yes great, but… why?
- As noted, OnePlus is going to use the glass on its smartphone triple-camera to hide the camera lenses. Once you need to take a photo, the glass goes clear, you grab photo like normal, then it fades to black again, and there’s a tiny bit of magic on show.
- Not that this really makes a lot of sense?
- I like the idea, I like that it’ll be on show, I like OnePlus exploring a concept and no one has to get mad at all.
- But I don’t get how it’s really going to be something useful or an important differentiator for someone buying a new phone.
- I could be wrong!
- But add to the fact that based on my, ahem, Wikipedia research, the glass is normally transparent, with a voltage applied to make it dark.
- Given the normal state for a smartphone would be for it to be set dark, that means some drain on the battery in what is a very intensely managed area of smartphones.
- No one wants to sacrifice any battery life for anything, let alone trick glass on a camera housing.
- We’ll know more from the device on show at CES 2020.
Round Up:
💻 Samsung Galaxy Book Flex Alpha: Who wants a QLED two-in-one for $829? (Android Authority).
🔏 Google disables Xiaomi support after Xiaomi security cam bug shows other homes (Android Authority).
🔋 Graphene batteries: What are they and why are they a big deal? (Android Authority).
📓 Bombshell: ‘I Was Google’s Head of International Relations. Here’s Why I Left’: “To me, no additional evidence was needed that “Don’t be evil” was no longer a true reflection of the company’s values; it was now nothing more than just another corporate marketing tool.” (Medium). Here's a reaction I’m not sure I agree with: Google has little choice to be evil or not in today’s fractured internet (TechCrunch).
🍎 Chipmaker TSMC expected to begin Apple’s A14 5nm chip production in Q2 (macrumors.com).
💻 Dell updates popular XPS 13 laptop with 16:10 screen, IR camera, and shrinks bottom bezel (Ars Technica).
📶 Samsung sold 6.7 million 5G phones in 2019, beating expectations (The Verge).
📈 The combined game industry grew 3% to $120.1 billion in 2019, according to market researcher SuperData in its year-end report: Fortnite battle accounted for $1.8 billion of that amount, down from $2.4B in 2018 (VentureBeat). Mobile games did more than 50% of all gaming revenue.
📺 LG delivers 'Real 8K' in 2020 with eight new OLED and LCD TVs (Engadget). Now you just need 8K content.
🤝 Apple signs former HBO chief to a five-year deal with Apple TV+ (Variety).
⚛ Scientists built a particle accelerator smaller than a human hair on a chip (Vice).
✈ Why you can't sit in first class even when it's empty (Lifehacker).
💰 Results of Sam Altman’s 2015 “Bubble Talk” bet (daniellemorrill.com).
🤔 “What glamorized career path is actually a complete nightmare?” (r/askreddit). Vets, lawyers, and modeling: “too competitive and not enough food.” Ha.
Friday Fun
Almost completely pointless obsession for odd topics is always fun, andthe topic of which emoji scissors close, and therefore can cut things well, is really all about that.
- “Ah, scissors. They’re important enough that we have an emoji for them. On your device, it appears as ✂️. Unlike the real world tool it represents, the emoji’s job is to convey the idea, especially at small sizes. It doesn’t need to be able to swing or cut things.
- “Nevertheless, let’s judge them on that irrelevant criterion.”
Here’s Apple’s emoji attempt at scissors judged on the ability to cut:
- Work to do, Apple, clearly!
Have a great weekend,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.