Lifeboat Foundation

More earbuds, these from Waverly Labs. They also have the pilot. The Interpreter arrives as a pair of over-the-ear headphones, one for your right ear and one for your friend’s. You download the Ambassador mobile app—where all the translation work gets done—and pair both headphones to your phone using Bluetooth.

Ambassador has three operational modes. Converse mode is a two-way system: You both pick one of the 20 languages and 42 dialects available, and the app translates your language to his and his to yours. (Up to four people at once can talk this way through the app, if you have enough earphones.) Lecture mode is a one-way system that translates your speech and streams it through your smartphone’s speaker in another tongue. Listen mode goes the other way, listening for the language of your choice, translating it into your own language, and piping it into your earpiece.

The Ambassador app-connected earphones translate human speech into multiple tongues, enabling multilingual conversations.

When thinking of the applications of low-loss materials in 5G devices, the first that comes to mind for most is 5G smartphones. After all, low-loss materials are integral in enabling advanced 5G antennas-in-packages (AiP) for smartphones, and high-profile smartphone manufacturers like Apple have gone back and forth about which low-loss material they chose for their 5G antennas in their flagship phones like the iPhone. However, another 5G application for low-loss materials hiding in plain sight will act as an important driver for this US$1.8 billion market as forecast by IDTechEx: 5G customer premises equipment (CPEs).

5G fixed wireless access (5G FWA) and cpes.

This application area is based on the increasing deployment of 5G fixed wireless access (FWA). FWA offers wireless internet access to homes and businesses without requiring the laying of fiber or cables to facilitate connectivity. FWA enables customers to get high-speed internet access with speeds comparable to wired broadband connections in places where fiber or cable installation is too expensive or difficult. While fixed wireless technologies based on 4G/LTE do exist, they cannot match the speeds of wired broadband and are also not economically viable to deploy.

Android manufacturers tend to love big spec sheets, even if those giant numbers won’t do much for day-to-day phone usage. In that vein, we’ve got the new high-water mark for ridiculous amounts of memory in a phone. The new Nubia RedMagic 8S Pro+ is an Android gaming phone with an option for 24GB of RAM.

The base model of the RedMagic 8S Pro+ starts with 16GB of RAM, but GSMArena has pictures and details of the upgraded 24GB SKU, which is the most amount of memory ever in an Android phone. Because we’re all about big numbers, it also comes with 1TB of storage. Keep in mind a 13-inch top-spec M2 MacBook Pro has 24GB of RAM and 2TB of storage, and that’s a desktop OS with real multitasking, so Nubia is really pushing it. This suped-up 24GB version of the phone appears to be a China-exclusive, with the price at CNY 7,499 (about $1,034), which is a lot for a phone in China.

You definitely want an adequate amount of RAM in an Android phone. All these apps are designed around cheap phones, though, and with Android’s aggressive background app management, there’s usually not much of a chance to use a ton of RAM. Theoretically, a phone like this would let you multitask better, since apps could stay in memory longer, and you wouldn’t have to start them back up when switching tasks. Most people aren’t quickly switching through that many apps, though, and some heavy apps, games especially, will just automatically turn off a few seconds once they’re in the background.

Using new palm-sized devices, RIKEN researchers may have finally harnessed the terahertz band of the electromagnetic spectrum to effectively ‘X-ray’ things without using harmful ionizing radiation.

Countless technologies—from smartphones and TVs to infrared instruments on the James Webb Space Telescope.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST or Webb) is an orbiting infrared observatory that will complement and extend the discoveries of the Hubble Space Telescope. It covers longer wavelengths of light, with greatly improved sensitivity, allowing it to see inside dust clouds where stars and planetary systems are forming today as well as looking further back in time to observe the first galaxies that formed in the early universe.

As Meta sets its sight on introducing its virtual reality headsets to the Chinese market, Mark Zuckerberg’s contentious remarks about Beijing in the past may pose a major obstacle to his China dream. According to a recent report by the Wall Street Journal, Meta is preparing to re-enter China by selling the Oculus Quest VR headset in China. If Tesla can sell cars and Apple can sell phones in China, why isn’t Meta present there? Zuckerberg asked in a recent internal meeting.

But some observers are quick to point out that Zuckerberg has a history of criticizing the Chinese government, a stance that will likely be amplified in the current climate of heightened tensions between the U.S. and China.… More.

Apple’s next version of the AirPods Pro equipped with USB-C will ship this fall, a report claims, and it may even help users discover hearing problems too.

Apple is rumored to be working on an updated version of the AirPods Pro that could arrive within months. That model is already believed to be using USB-C for its wireless charging case instead of Lightning, but it is thought that it could finally land this fall.

According to Mark Gurman’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, the AirPods Pro 2 is set to launch in the fall at the same time as the iPhone 15.

One tip that I always give to family members, friends, and passersby when asked, “How can I make my phone faster?” is straightforward yet typically hidden, and that’s adjusting the animation speed. The method of doing so is quick, simple, and absolutely free. And as a bonus, you’ll feel like the “guy behind the computer” from every action movie. Just follow the steps below.

A few taps and a swipe are all it takes to make your Android phone feel like new again.

Continue reading “Change this Android setting to instantly give your phone twice the speed” »

Quantum computing could revolutionize our world. For specific and crucial tasks, it promises to be exponentially faster than the zero-or-one binary technology that underlies today’s machines, from supercomputers in laboratories to smartphones in our pockets. But developing quantum computers hinges on building a stable network of qubits—or quantum bits—to store information, access it and perform computations.

Yet the qubit platforms unveiled to date have a common problem: They tend to be delicate and vulnerable to outside disturbances. Even a stray photon can cause trouble. Developing fault-tolerant qubits—which would be immune to external perturbations—could be the ultimate solution to this challenge.

A team led by scientists and engineers at the University of Washington has announced a significant advancement in this quest. In a pair of papers published June 14 in Nature and June 22 in Science, the researchers report that in experiments with flakes of semiconductor materials—each only a single layer of atoms thick—they detected signatures of “fractional quantum anomalous Hall” (FQAH) states.

Satellite-to-phone connectivity provider Lynk has made its debut in Palau, where the nation’s hundreds of islands make traditional cell coverage difficult to achieve. The company’s “cell towers in space” now cover the entire country — intermittently, but that’s a lot better than nothing, and service will improve as more satellites are added to the constellation.

Lynk is among the first of a new wave of direct satellite-to-phone providers, replacing the bulky, dedicated satphones of yore by connecting ordinary mobile devices to low Earth orbit. It’s difficult to engineer for many reasons, as you can imagine.

Apple’s SOS has the most high-profile use case, with the distinguishing characteristic of having to actually point your phone at an unseen satellite, but Lynk’s service requires no special behavior by the user — it just works like a roving cell tower, connecting when it passes overhead.