E-tech Web (2026)

13/04/2023

The iPhone SE 4 isn’t dead – it may even have a release year
Apple's affordable iPhone is back on the agenda

Rumors are a funny thing. Only a few months ago, seasoned Apple analysts reported that Apple had abandoned plans to release a fourth-generation iPhone SE, owing to doubts over the series’ popularity and profitability.

Then, two months later, the same analysts counterclaimed(opens in new tab) that Apple had restarted development on the iPhone SE 4, albeit with the company eyeing a much later release date than initially intended for the pint-sized device.

Now, in April 2023, we’ve got a better idea of when that release date might be, with reliable leaker Jeff Pu predicting that Apple will release its successor to one of the best iPhones in 2025.

The most recent iPhone SE – the iPhone SE (2022) – breathed new life into Apple's classic-but-tired iPhone design, with impressive-for-the-price speeds and 5G connectivity, but the iPhone SE 4 is expected to bring the series in line with modern smartphone standards.

Specifically, Apple is all but certain to ditch the current iPhone SE’s huge bezels and small screen size for a display arrangement akin to either the iPhone X or iPhone 14.

Ross Young – a leaker with a reasonable track record – claims that the iPhone SE 4 will have a 6.1-inch screen and a notch, while analyst Ming-Chi Kuo purports that the device will inherit the OLED display used by Apple’s latest vanilla iPhone (though, in a follow-up tweet(opens in new tab) to the below thread, Kuo has since clarified that this iPhone 14-like iPhone SE 4 may simply be an engineering prototype).

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In either case, the iPhone SE is likely to get Face ID, though it's also possible that Apple could stick with Touch ID and house the sensor in a side button, instead of on the front.

As for the phone’s connectivity, Jeff Pu reports that Apple is developing a custom-designed 5G modem that will be manufactured – using a 4nm process – by the company’s chipmaking partner, TSMC. It’s not yet clear whether this 5G chip will offer any performance or power efficiency improvements over rival modems produced by the likes of Qualcomm, but it’s safe to assume that the iPhone SE 4 will offer top-of-the-range network connectivity.

The iPhone SE (2022) was released in March of last year, while the iPhone SE (2020) came to market two years prior, in April 2020. If indeed Pu’s prediction of a 2025 release year for the iPhone SE 4 is accurate, it stands to reason that we could see the phone released sometime in the spring (that’s between March and May, for our Australian readers).

We’ll be staying abreast of all the latest iPhone SE 4 rumors as and when they surface over the coming months, so stay tuned to TechRadar for the details.

13/04/2023

The first Wi-Fi lossless headphones are here and they're exactly what Sonos didn't do
HED Unity are the world’s first wireless lossless audio headphones

It's been over four years since the rumor mill started churning regarding Sonos' first-ever headphones, but after Sonos' CEO confirmed that the company was focusing on its current product categories in February last year, those rumors promptly, er… stopped.

Despite continued speculation that Sonos' first-ever headphones would come bearing Wi-Fi, we'd all but given up hope of a set of lossless, high-end Wi-Fi enabled over-ear headphones in 2023.

But here they are! And they come with a premium price tag befitting only Sonos too! Thing is, they're not made by Sonos.

They're called HED Unity and they are actually made by a virtually-unknown Swiss audio startup called HED Technologies. At the time of writing, the company's Instagram account(opens in new tab) for the launch boasts just 207 followers. And the craziest part? These cans do something even the best over-ear headphones on the market cannot do – not even the Sony WH-1000XM4 or the Apple Airpods Max.

HED Technologies calls it 'Full-Fidelity' wireless audio, and essentially it means bypassing the lossy and bandwidth-blighted constraints of Bluetooth and leveraging your local Wi-Fi network to deliver high-resolution audio streaming of up to 24bit/96kHz. And these are the first ever headphones capable of doing that.

Before we get too excited, that's not quite the full hi-res ticket, you understand. Apple Music's Hi-Res Lossless offering goes up to a maximum resolution of 24-bit/192 kHz – and for that, you still need wired headphones and one of the best portable DACs (neither of which Apple makes, which is just weird).

But HED Unity will tackle Apple's regular Lossless audio streams which run at 24-bit/48 kHz – and until now, Apple recommends wired earphones to get at those.

Opinion: truly lossless wi-fi headphones have landed – and Sonos and Apple should really be taking notes
HED Unity headphones in profile on white background

(Image credit: HED Technologies)
You'd also be forgiven for thinking you were looking at the hotly-anticipated AirPods Max 2, but again, that's another product that seems woefully far from release. HED Technologies has trounced them all with this particular world-first.

For me, the sculpted earcups, milled from a single block of architectural-grade aluminum around 40mm titanium-coated drivers, with Wi-Fi squirreled under the hood, are simply begging for some Sonos branding, no? But you won't find any.

HED Technologies' HED Unity cans have a frequency response range of 20Hz-22kHz (ie. beyond what the human ear is capable of hearing at the top end), and remember, that lossless audio is delivered thanks to Wi-Fi streaming.

Curiously, when not hooked up to a Wi-Fi network, the cans tote Bluetooth 5.3 but only SBC and AAC codec support is listed – no aptX or aptX Adaptive. Battery life is a claimed 8 hours, whichever way you're streaming.

To get onboard with your Wi-Fi, the headphones boast their own dual-core processor, storage, and memory, as well as a gyroscope and other trackers to deliver head-tracking motion detection for truly immersive three-dimensional surround sound.

Oh, and there's active noise cancelation, helped along by 12 microphones. (Just the 12, then; four to support active noise-canceling and eight for beamforming and background noise nixing).

And as you might expect, they don't come cheap. The price is an eye-watering $2,199(opens in new tab), (which works out at around £1,759 or AU$3,249). Suffice to say, we'd absolutely love to hear what they can do.

11/04/2023

“Where are the robots?” The answer is simple. They’re here. You just need to know where to look. It’s a frustrating answer. I recognize that. Let’s set aside conversations about cars and driver assistance and just focus on things we all tend to agree are robots. For starters, that Amazon delivery isn’t making it to you without robotic assistance.

A more pertinent question would be: Why aren’t there more robots? And more to the point, why aren’t there more robots in my house right now? It’s a complex question with a lot of nuance — much of it coming down to the current state of hardware limitations around the concept of a “general purpose” robot. Roomba is a robot. There are a lot of Roombas in the world, and that’s largely because Roombas do one thing well (an additional decade of R&D has helped advance things from a state of “pretty good”).

It’s not so much that the premise of the question is flawed — it’s more a question of reframing it slightly. “Why aren’t there more robots?” is a perfectly valid question for a nonroboticist to ask. As a longtime hardware person, I usually start my answer there. I’ve had enough conversations over the past decade that I feel fairly confident I could monopolize the entire conversation discussing the many potential points of failure with a robot gripper.

Meta’s take is software-based, and that’s fair enough. Over the past few years, I’ve witnessed an explosion in startups tackling various important categories like robotic learning, deployment/management and no- and low-code solutions. An evergreen shoutout here to the nearly two decades of research and development that’s gone into creating, maintaining and improving ROS. Fittingly, longtime stewards Open Robotics was acquired by Alphabet, which has been doing its own work in the category through the homegrown efforts, Intrinsic and Everyday Robots (which albeit were disproportionately impacted by org-wide resource slashing).

Meta/Facebook no doubt does its own share of skunkworks projects that surface every so often. I’ve seen nothing so far to suggest that they’re on a scale with what Alphabet/Google has explored over the years, but it’s always interesting to see some of these projects peek their heads out. In an announcement I strongly suspect is tied to the proliferation of generative AI discussions, the social media giant has shared what it calls “two major advancements toward general-purpose embodied AI agents capable of performing challenging sensorimotor skills.”

Quoting directly here:

An artificial visual cortex (called VC-1): a single perception model that, for the first time, supports a diverse range of sensorimotor skills, environments, and embodiments. VC-1 is trained on videos of people performing everyday tasks from the groundbreaking Ego4D dataset created by Meta AI and academic partners. And VC-1 matches or outperforms best-known results on 17 different sensorimotor tasks in virtual environments.

A new approach called adaptive (sensorimotor) skill coordination (ASC), which achieves near-perfect performance (98 percent success) on the challenging task of robotic mobile manipulation (navigating to an object, picking it up, navigating to another location, placing the object, repeating) in physical environments.

11/04/2023

Generative AI could transform the way we interact with enterprise software
It's potentially the biggest shift since point-and-click

For the last several months, OpenAI, and ChatGPT in particular, has shown what’s possible with a user interface built on top of a large language model that can answer questions and create code or pictures. While that alone is remarkable, we can also interact with and adjust the byproduct by having a conversation of sorts with the AI. It’s amazing really, but think about how transformative this could be by applying it to the enterprise applications you use on a daily basis.

What if you could build an interface on top of your existing applications, so that instead of pointing and clicking, you could simply ask the computer to do a task for you and it would do it, based on the applications’ underlying model or your company’s internal language model.

That would be a huge leap forward in computing. Before now, the biggest leap happened in 1984, when Apple introduced the graphical user interface that began a slow shift from the command line approach and eventually went mainstream in the early ’90s with the release of Windows 3.1 and later Windows 95.

We’ve had other UX attempts, such as voice interfaces like Siri and Alexa, and while they brought some changes to the consumer side of things, they’re still not exactly the same thing as a computer producing work for us. It’s just finding some answers and in some cases executing simple commands.

It certainly didn’t change the way we work, and that is the true measure of whether a new computing approach is truly transformational. If you could simply type an action like “Help me onboard a new employee” or “Generate a monthly P&L statement” instead of explicitly guiding the systems on what to do, that would be a fundamental leap forward in UX design.

That’s what generative AI has the potential to do, but like anything else, it’s going to require some creativity to design these new interfaces in an elegant way, so it doesn’t feel like it’s bolted on to your old point-and-click interface. It’s also probably going to require more-focused large language models.

08/08/2014

Smart Phone Thermometer

Are you pretty darn sure your little brat is faking sick to get out of a presentation at school? Wonder no longer with the thermometer/lie detector that plugs into your kid's iPhone and cuts right through their lies.

08/08/2014

Apple's chip-maker switcheroo loses Samsung $1bn

Samsung's recent earnings call was pretty grim, and the outlook isn't much better now that it appears Apple's ditched the Korean manufacturer for a different firm to make its chips.

While Android phones are doing phenomenally well globally, Samsung's reports have been shabby even in China where the firm has been historically popular.

It's rumoured that earlier this year a firm called Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing started shipping chips to Apple in place of Samsung, which has taken a bite out of Sammy's revenue.

According to a report by the WSJ, Samsung's micro-chip business is split into two parts - Samsung's own Exynos chips, and supply chips for other companies like Apple, who previously used the chips in its iPhones and iPads.

Although Apple's chips are designed in the UK by ARM, the actual production side of things has typically been Samsung territory.

Referring to statements made by Robert Yi, Samsung's head of investor relations, the WSJ reported: "his comments confirmed, albeit indirectly, how Apple's gradual shift away from Samsung as a customer of microprocessors was eating into its profits."

As a result, Samsung's chip branch is expected to post losses of $851 million dollars this year, down from operating profits of $197 million dollars last year.

Considering the strong rivalry between Apple and Samsung, it's unsurprising that Apple would want to distance itself from the firm and make use of a more neutral manufacturer for its components.

08/08/2014

USB Portable Fan
Its complete name is ARCTIC Breeze Mobile USB-Powered 92mm Portable Fan, Portable Cooling Solution, Quiet Fan- White. It is a slim and light weight USB fan that keeps one cool on hot days. As the fan and the motor are adapted from ARCTIC’s successful case fans, it works silent while offering a high air flow. It simply gets connected to one of the USB port in one’s notebook, flexibly. Its adjustable gooseneck directs the breeze to blow in the exact direction as one desire. It is light weight, portable and so, it is easy to carry anywhere.

08/08/2014

Prism Spectacles
Its complete name is Prism Glasses, Prism Eye Glasses or Bed Prism Spectacles. One can watch TV or read book while lying flat on the bed. Those who have a limited mobility, it is a perfect option for them. It prevents from eye strain or neck cramps. It eliminates the need for head movement.

08/08/2014

7 inch M8 Android 4.2 Phablet with MTK6572 Dual Core 1GHz Bluetooth Dual Cameras

Product description
CPU: MTK6572 Cortex A9 Dual Core 1GHz
OS: Google Android 4.2
RAM: 256MB DDR3 (231.11MB available)
Internal storage capacity: 512MB
External storage: Micro SD card (up to 64GB) - not included
Screen: 7 inch TFT LCD capacitive multi-touch panel 800 x 480 (WVGA)
Front camera: 1.3 Megapixel
Back camera: 2.0 Megapixel
Capacitive (5-point) touch screen
Network frequency: GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz
Dual SIM, Dual standby
Dual cameras
Wireless internet
Gravity sensing system
FM/MP3/MP4/Bluetooth function supported
Flash: Flash 10.1
Support Video Calls Online
Power supply: 2650mAh Lithium battery (built-in) or BP-4C battery (not included)

08/08/2014

Ever wanted to see through walls with your iPhone? No problem. This new case combines thermal images with data from the phone's camera to deliver a sharp image.

08/08/2014

12W High Power Infrared Induction Warm White LED Ceiling Lamp/Down Light (110-260V)

Main Features:
With diameter 13.5cm
12W high power LED light
Standby time: 30s(adjustable)
Infrared induction range: 4~8 meters
Infrared induction angle: 115~125 degree

08/08/2014

Salient Features of iPAD mini 2

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