In a little over a week, Samsung will host its next major Galaxy Unpacked event. The company will launch a host of new products at the event, including the Galaxy Z Fold 3, the Galaxy Z Flip 3, the Galaxy Watch 4 series, and the Galaxy Buds 2. Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a ton of leaks about these devices that have revealed pretty much everything from their design to their specifications. Now, just days ahead of the launch, a retailer has revealed the pricing details for three of the upcoming devices.
As per recent tweets from @_snoopytech_, retail listings for the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the Galaxy Z flip 3 reveal that the devices will be available at a starting price of €2009 and €1029, respectively. At this price, you’ll get the 12GB/256GB variant of the Galaxy Z Fold 3 and the 8GB/128GB variant of the Galaxy Z Flip 3.
The higher-end 12GB/512GB and 8GB/256GB variants will be available at €2099 and €1109, respectively. The retail listing also includes high-resolution renders of both the devices that confirm the design we’ve seen previously.
In addition, a report from WinFuture reveals that the Galaxy Buds 2 will have a recommended retail price (RRP) of €149.99, including VAT. The report also includes high-resolution renders of the TWS earbuds, along with some info about their features. As per the report, the Galaxy Buds 2 will come with AKG Signature sound and ANC support, three microphones, Bluetooth 5.2, and IPX2 splash resistance. The earbuds will offer 20 hours of battery life with ANC turned on, and up to 29 hours without ANC.
It’s worth noting that while previous reports suggested that the upcoming foldables could be up to 20% cheaper than their predecessors, the Galaxy Z Fold 3 seems to be a bit more expensive than the Galaxy Z Fold 2. The older model launched at $1999.99 for the 12GB/256GB variant. The Galaxy Z Flip 3, on the other hand, looks to be a bit cheaper, as its predecessor launched at $1449.
SwirlWalls is a fun animated wallpaper app from Chris Lacy, best known for developing one of the best Android launchers: Action Launcher. Launched in February this year, SwirlWalls is a fresh take on live wallpapers and offers handcrafted spiral live wallpapers to really take your smartphone personalization game to the next level. The developer has just pushed a big update to the app, making it even more fun to use.
SwirlWalls 2.0 brings along a new Tap-to-Spin feature, an ad-supported freemium tier, and adds over 60 new wallpapers, including multilayered wallpapers. The new Tap-to-Spin feature builds upon FlickFx, a feature introduced in SwirlWalls 1.0 that allowed users to spin their wallpaper like a fidget spinner. With Tap-to-Spin, the wallpaper now spins each time you tap the screen. Tapping in quick succession on the wallpaper briefly increases the spinning speed. You can also customize the spin speed and FlickFX sensitivity from the app settings.
The latest update also adds some cool new multi-layered wallpapers such as Fiber Orbit, Hooli Hoops, and Holo HUD. Multilayered wallpapers are more fun and responsive with each style offering 16+ remixes. All wallpapers have a dark variant which gets activated as soon as you turn on the dark mode on your phone.
Another big change with SwirlWalls 2.0 is a new Feature Meter, which lets you unlock wallpapers and other customizations for watching ads. Each time you watch an ad, the battery-like meter inside the app fills up, unlocking new features and walls. All features and wallpapers are fully unlocked once the meter is 100% filled. However, if you stop watching new ads, it starts depleting.
Those who don’t like the free tier can purchase the standalone Swirlwalls Prime license app to permanently unlock all features. Previously, the app required you to pay $4,99 upfront and didn’t offer a free trial. To try out SwirlWalls 2.0 on your phone, hit the download link below.
Apple launched a new MagSafe wireless charger with the launch of the iPhone 12 series last year. The charger made it easy for users to align the charging coil in their phones with the one in the charger, as it magnetically attached to the back of the phone in the correct location. While many Android phones support Qi wireless charging and some work with Apple’s MagSafe charger, we’re yet to see an Android OEM come out with a similar solution. However, that’s set to change soon as Realme is working on a magnetic wireless charger called “MagDart.”
Over the last few weeks, we’ve seen a couple of reports about Realme’s upcoming MagDart wireless charger. The company has secured a trademark for “MagDart” from the EUIPO, and we’ve seen renders of two magnetic wireless chargers with Realme branding. In addition, we’ve learned that the Realme Flash could be the first phone to support the upcoming MagDart chargers. Ahead of the launch, we’ve obtained a charging test video of the upcoming MagDart charger that also showcases the Realme Flash phone.
As you can see in the attached video, Realme’s MagDart charger takes around 3 minutes to charge the Realme Flash from 18-26%. Based on this figure, we speculate that the charger will likely take less than an hour to charge the phone from 0-100% (depending on the battery size).
A separate image showing the charging conditions further reveals that the battery current is 4.4A and the voltage is around 4V. Since the phone likely has a dual-cell battery, this means that the charger delivers about 35W power to the phone. The charger’s actual output voltage is 10V, with 2V being lost to the internal wired connection to each cell. This means that the charger itself outputs 50W of power. That’s quite impressive for such a small wireless charger.
At the moment, we have no further details about the Realme Flash or the MagDart Chargers. We expect to learn more at Realme’s Mag for Future launch event tomorrow.
Google Translate is one of the most useful Google apps, allowing you to seamlessly translate text, bilingual conversations, webpages, and more between so many languages. Although the app has continued to gain new tricks such as letting you transcribe real-time speech, it hasn’t seen a major UI refresh in a long while. But that might be changing soon as Google appears to be working on a big redesign for the Android app.
An APK teardown can often predict features that may arrive in a future update of an application, but it is possible that any of the features we mention here may not make it in a future release. This is because these features are currently unimplemented in the live build and may be pulled at any time by the developers in a future build.
Google Translate 6.21 rolled out over the weekend, and it contains a new Activity titled “NewTranslateActivity” that, when launched, brings up an entirely new UI for the app. It’s still a work in progress at this point as when launching the activity directly, lots of things aren’t functional, including the “camera” button, “more” button, star button in the top left, and the account button in the top right. But this nonetheless gives us a sneak peek at the new design that Google is working on regardless.
As you can see in the screenshots below, the new UI puts a clear emphasis on one-handed usability, with the camera, mic, and language switcher buttons all now appearing at the bottom for easier access. The new UI also gets rid of the hamburger menu that currently gives access to Phrasebook, Saved transcripts, Offline translation, and Settings. It appears these options would reside under the “More” tab located in the bottom left corner.
Interestingly, the Manifest entry for this new Activity suggests this redesign is tied to the Pixel 6 series, Google’s upcoming smartphone lineup rumored to launch in October. The label for the Activity refers to a string named “app_name_p21”, where “p21” likely refers to the 2021 Pixel phones. The actual value for the “app_name_p21” string is “P21 Translate”, so it seems this new design may launch on the Pixel 6 running Android 12. The Manifest entry also suggests this design is the “Material You” redesign for the Translate app, with the style labeled as “Translate_MaterialNext” — Material Next is the internal code-name for Material You.
The new UI being exclusive to Pixel phones wouldn’t all be that surprising, as we have seen Google done that on multiple occasions. In any case, the new UI hasn’t rolled out to any existing Pixel phone. We’ll continue to dig into the APK for more info and let you know if we find anything worth sharing.
Enabling dark mode on your phone can increase your phone’s battery life, which is something we’ve heard for a while. According to researchers from Purdue University, though, the battery life increase isn’t as great as you may have thought. Plus, a pure black background doesn’t yield many benefits over the dark gray background found in most apps when dark mode is enabled. The study found that enabling dark mode doesn’t give you any major efficiency gains unless you’re looking at it from specific scenarios. The most fruitful battery life gains were found when switching from light mode at full brightness to dark mode.
In the Purdue study (via Android Authority), researchers looked at dark mode power usage from six different applications. Calculator, Google Calendar, Google Maps, Google News, Google Phone, and YouTube were all tested on a Pixel 2, Moto Z3, Pixel 4, and a Pixel 5 — all phones with OLED screens, of course. The researchers tested the power draw when running each of these apps in dark mode for 60 seconds. The researchers said they built a set of tools to accurately measure power draw in pixels.
“When the industry rushed to adopt dark mode, it didn’t have the tools yet to accurately measure power draw by the pixels,” said Charlie Hu, Purdue’s Michael and Katherine Birck Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “But now we’re able to give developers the tools they need to give users more energy-efficient apps.”
At around 30%-50% brightness, the researchers found that switching from light mode to dark mode only saved between 3% and 9% power on average. However, switching the other way around at 100% brightness can save as much as an average of 47% battery power.
“Tests done in the past to compare the effects of light mode with dark mode on battery life have treated the phone as a black box, lumping in OLED display with the phone’s other gazillion components. Our tool can accurately isolate the portion of battery drain by the OLED display,” said Pranab Dash, a Purdue Ph.D. student who worked with Hu on the study.
There were other interesting findings too, including that using the Google News app in light mode at 20% brightness on the Pixel 5 draws the same amount of power as when the phone is at 50% brightness in dark mode. Therefore, if the bright display bothers you, then you can increase the brightness when using it without using much more power overall.
The study also mentions that Android’s battery consumption details do not take dark mode into account, so the team developed a tool called “Android Battery+” which does. The researchers want to open source their display profiling tool and also add the Android Battery+ feature into AOSP.
Featured image credits: Purdue University photo/John Underwood
Amazon has announced which games are coming to its Luna+ streaming platform in August. Luna is Amazon’s attempt to compete in the growing cloud gaming market that’s currently being cornered by Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming, Google’s Stadia, and NVIDIA’s GeForce Now. The difference between it and other services is that it offers games on different “channels” that users can subscribe to separately, rather than everything being covered under a single subscription price.
Amazon Luna+ is the channel on the Luna streaming platform that Amazon personally curates. Users can subscribe to it for $5.99 a month. It’s one of only two channels available at the moment, the other being the beta Ubisoft+ channel that costs $14.99 a month. Luna+ games can be played on PC, Mac, Fire TV devices, and iOS and Android via web apps.
Amazon has announced which games will be coming to Luna+ in August:
Hokko Life: This community life sim game is set to launch on the platform sometime in August. Set in the village of Hokko, the player must help build the village up while partaking in farming, fishing, and other things that Animal Crossing and Story of Seasons fans will recognize.
Open Country: This open-world hunting game casts the player as The Ranger, a survivalist attempting to escape urban life. Hunt on behalf of your mentor Gary in a remote hunting lodge or rough it on your own. It’s also coming to Luna+ at some unspecified time in August.
Bridge Constructor: The Walking Dead: This spin-off of the original Bridge Constructor is coming to Luna+ on August 5. It’s basically exactly what the title suggests: a bridge-building physics simulator, but with the added twist that you’re attempting to fend off a horde of zombies during construction.
It’s been a relatively quiet week for gaming news, at least in terms of big game reveals or delays. Instead, we’ve been watching the industry’s biggest scandal unfold, as well as a new stream from Annapurna. In better news, there have been several good game launches this week to keep gamers busy.
Activision Blizzard scandal grows as employees speak out
The lawsuit alleges years of harassment, favoritism, and pay disparity https://t.co/Hysz2h7K3N
Following last week’s lawsuit from California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing — in which Activision Blizzard was alleged to have a “frat boy” culture behind the scenes that resulted in many of its employees facing harassment, sexism, and unfair pay — employees of the major game publisher have come forward with their own stories of working for Blizzard, and they are no more pretty than the allegations in the original lawsuit.
Activision’s initial response to the lawsuit was defensive, calling it “distorted” and claiming the company’s culture was nothing like what the lawsuit described. Employees have since staged a walk-out in protest over the company’s policies, demanding change. Activision has since hired WilmerHale, a firm with a reputation for union-busting, to review its policies. Stay tuned as the situation unfolds.
PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S are doing well in sales
This might come as a surprise for those of you who are having trouble finding a next-gen console to buy, but they’re selling by the millions. Within a year of having launched, the PlayStation 5 has already sold 10 million consoles. Microsoft has not released sales figures for the Xbox Series X/S (which isn’t new; they stopped releasing figures shortly after the Xbox One launched) but estimates put the number of consoles sold at around 6-7 million units. Both consoles remain sold out almost everywhere.
If you look at the two consoles as being locked in battle, as the two companies have been since time immemorial, then it looks like the PS5 is winning. However, I wouldn’t count the Series consoles out yet. At the moment, we’ve yet to see the effects of the Bethesda purchase, as exclusive games have not yet been released. But it’s probably more constructive to frame this as a win for the gaming industry as a whole, rather than a competition. By the way, the last reported numbers on Nintendo’s Switch put the number of hardware units sold at 84 million.
Yet more games are delayed… but not all for the same reason
If there’s been one thing that’s a consistent feature about 2020/2021 gaming news, it’s game delays. We’ve gotten many of them this week, some more disappointing than others. Kena: Bridge of Spirits, the upcoming Pixaresque adventure game from Ember Lab, was only delayed a month, from August 23 to September 21. Crimson Desert, the open-world fantasy title from the creators of Black Desert, has been delayed to an unspecified date. In many of these cases, the developers cite the continuing pandemic as part of the issue, as they wish to safeguard their employees’ health.
That’s far from the only reason, however. Splitgate, the breakout indie hit that looks like Halo meets Portal, was delayed to late August due to the current servers not being able to handle the game’s popularity. Other deep cuts include Stray, which was delayed to 2022, and SkateBird, which is being pushed to September. Horizon Forbidden West has not been confirmed to be delayed beyond a doubt, but it’s a rumor that’s looking more and more true as time goes on.
Annapurna holds a perfectly acceptable showcase
Let’s end this week on a positive note: The game publisher Annapurna Interactive, which is best known for titles like What Remains of Edith Finch and The Outer Wilds, held a showcase livestream where it showed off its upcoming games. Several of them are games we’ve seen before, such as Stray, and it was good to finally get more information about them. It was a very nice event, especially considering how turbulent the week has been overall.
Other than the aforementioned Stray, several of the games shown at the showcase are scheduled to be out this year (though, given the number of delays — see above — I wouldn’t necessarily count on all of them making it before the year turns). These include Solar Ash, Neon White, The Artful Escape, and the expansion to The Outer Wilds. Other games that don’t have a definite release date include Storyteller, Skin Deep, and A Memoir Blue.
August’s Free Games Via Subscription Services
For this part of the weekly update, we’ll mention the games that have been added to subscription and streaming gaming services. This usually happens en masse at the beginning of the month. Here are the ones announced this week.
