Month: October 2017

Apple facing production delays as it gets closer to the release of the iPhone X

Dan Uff October 12, 2017 0

“‘For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’ These words by Shakespeare could well be applied to Apple Inc.’s iPhone X,” Debby Wu reports for Nikkei Asian Review. “A tech executive familiar with iPhone X production told Nikkei Asian Review on Thursday that manufacturers are still struggling to perfect 3-D sensors and in particular dot projectors in Apple premium handset’s TrueDepth camera system, though the person could not pinpoint exactly the problem.”

“The dot projector makes up part of the transmitting module, dubbed ‘Romeo,’ of iPhone X’s new facial recognition function that allows users to unlock phones and make payments, according to the executive,” Wu reports. “The receiving module is fittingly named ‘Juliet.'”

“The executive’s comments were confirmed by Jeff Pu, an analyst with Taipei-based Yuanta Investment Consulting, who also identified the dot projector as the troublesome component holding back mass production of iPhone X,” Wu reports. “Nonetheless, Pu stuck to his view voiced late September that iPhone X will enter mass production in mid-October and begin to be shipped from China in the third week of this month. He is, however, cutting his forecast of the volume of iPhone X that will be produced this year, from 40 million units to 36 million.”

Read more in the full article here.

Entertainment

DirecTV Now announces online local and Sports Network Lookup Tool

Dan Uff October 11, 2017 0

Early Wednesday, DirecTV Now announced it has an online look up tool where customers can find out what local and Sports Networks they can get in their area.

To see it, click here.

[Correction]: Siri has a long way to go before catching up to Google Assistant

Dan Uff October 11, 2017 1

“Google might have a long way to go before it starts selling iPhone-like numbers of Pixel phones, but there is one important area where it’s firmly in the lead, and it has nothing to do with bezels or beats,” Michael Simon writes for Macworld. “It’s about intelligence.”

“At its recent iPhone X event, Tim Cook pulled out Steve Jobs’s old Wayne Gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going, but there’s only one company that’s thinking forward right now and it’s not Apple—it’s Google,” Simon writes. “New hardware might have been the reason for the event, but machine learning was the strongest undercurrent, and the message Google sent was clear: Our AI is better than your AI.”

“Apple’s first home AI speaker won’t hit shelves until December, but Google already has three of them. When it was announced in June, HomePod appeared to have an advantage over Google Home and Amazon Echo with its high-fidelity, room-sensing smarts, but now Google Home Max has landed, and it might be even better,” Simon writes. “The real difference-maker is Google Assistant… In its first year, Google Assistant has advanced further than Siri has in the past seven. And it’s getting smarter every day.”

Read more in the full article here.