News archive (3 / 2021)

Back in the day, OnePlus made its mark among tech enthusiasts by bringing high-end phone features to the mid-range price segment. It originally dubbed its phones as "flagship killers" and managed to do exactly that. However, as the competition has intensified, OnePlus has had to push its pricing up each year to maintain its position as a manufacturer with extremely fast Android phones.

This time around, OnePlus's main focus is on camera technology, as it has been widely regarded as the only area where the company's phones haven't been able to properly compete against the big guys like Samsung and Apple. To push its cameras to the next level, OnePlus has partnered with iconic Swedish camera brand, Hasselblad, and has also continued its on-going partnership with Sony to develop a custom imaging sensor for its flagship device.

We got the OnePlus 9 Pro for our review team well before its launch, so we had time to assess whether the company has finally managed to create a phone that is truly superb, in all areas possible.

• Technical specs
• Look and feel
• Display
• Main cameras
• Sample photos
• Selfie camera
• Video recording
• Performance
• Wireless charging
• Battery life and charging
• Oxygen OS / Android 11
• How to improve?
• Summary
• Rating

Tech specs

Dimensions	163,2mm x 73,6mm x 8,7mm
Weight	197 grams
Display	6,7" ; 20.1:9 ; 3216 x 1440px (525 ppi) 120 Hz AMOLED LTPO Gorilla Glass 5
SoC	Qualcomm Snapdragon 888
Memory	8GB / 12GB
Storage	128GB / 256GB
Cameras	Main: 48 MP ; OIS ; EIS ; f/1.8 ; Somy IMX789 Ultra-wide: 50 MP ; f/2.2 ; Sony IMX766 Tele: 8 MP
Selfie camera	16 MP, fixed focus
Battery	4'500 mAh
OS	Android 11
Other	Double-SIM, 5G, 50W wireless charging, 65W wired charging

The Chinese smartphone company has today announced their highly anticipated smartwatch, OnePlus Watch. The company's first smartwatch was accompanied by the release of the new OnePlus 9 Series smarpthones.

Interestingly, OnePlus has decided to not go with Google's smartphone OS, or any other common smartphone platform, instead they've created their own.

This Apple-like move might make it easier for OnePlus to customize the experience but amount and quality of apps is reliant on OnePlus as well.

The smartwatch has a clear focus on health but it's packed with features, like GPS and Warp fast charging. You can charge week's battery life in just 20 minutes.

OnePlus has created the body from stainless steel, although there's also a special cobalt version, and watch face is measured at 46 mm.

While the watch is designed to be used alongside OnePlus 9, you can use it with any Android device or even iPhones, although that is still a work in progress.

OnePlus Watch is IP68 water and dust resistant, has a 15 day battery life, features over 110 workout modes, can measure blood oxygen, and offers 4 gigabytes storage for in-device music

OnePlus Watch starts at $159 with Cobalt special edition coming later.

OnePlus has today announced their new OnePlus 9 Series smartphones. The new OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro aim to impress you with new Hasselblad cameras, better performance, and improved displays.

Let's take the most drastic change first which comes with the cooperation between the Chinese smartphone manufacturer and one of the world's most celebrated camera brands, Hasselblad. OnePlus promises that this has resulted in one of the best cameras on any phone.

The Hasselblad Camera for Mobile platform provides more accurate colors and better allround photo quality, OnePlus says. Behind the tuning of the colors and quality are hundreds of tests provided by Hasselblad ambassadors and professional photographers.

Both models have the largely the same camera specs including a 48 MP default shooter and a 50 MP wide angle camera, but only the OnePlus 9 Pro has a telephoto camera capable of optical zoom.

As the Elon Musk's company, SpaceX expands its Starlink satellite constellation, the need for traffic laws for space has grown significantly. Now, SpaceX and Nasa have agreed to create traffic rules for space.

SpaceX's Starlink satellite network requires unholy amount of small communication satellites, located in Earth's geostationary orbit. Company has applied permissions for a whopping 42'000 Starlink satellites to be deployed. Currently there are over 1'200 Starlink satellites in the orbit already.

Such massive number of satellites poses a potential disaster for other organizations operating in space. Thus, the agreement, dubbed as Joint Spaceflight Safety Agreement, was announced by both, Nasa and SpaceX.

Under the agreement, both parties agree that in case of an inevitable collision, it is SpaceX that will steer away, using the ion thrusters on each hStarlink satellite. Without such agreement in place, a situation could happen where both, Nasa and SpaceX try to avoid collision and direct their instruments to the same direction, causing the collision anyway.

As the world is littered with online streaming services, the habit of sharing streaming service passwords with your friends has become a standard practice for many. This has been the de facto status for Netflix for years now, but company hasn't cared much about it. Not until now, it seems.

Handful of people all across the world have seen lately a message from Netflix asking whether they live with the account owner or not. Message has stated simply:

If you don't live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.

To continue watching after this notification, Netflix has sent a confirmation code via email or SMS to the account owner. Only by entering the confirmation code, could the watching be continued.

Netflix has stated that this is a small-scale test it is conducting. Netflix's official Terms of service clearly states that sharing passwords to those who don't live within the same household is banned. Their ToS states that account is for "personal and non-commercial use only and may not be shared with individuals beyond your household".

The test might hint that company is about to end account sharing among friends somehow in near future. Spotify started cracking down on unauthorized family account sharing back in 2019, so it might be that Netflix has watched Spotify to do the dirty work - and realize that it didn't have any negative impact on Spotify.

Timelapse videos are getting more and more popular: you can see them in social media and in ads all over the world. We wanted to create a guide on how to make your own timelapse videos with free, open source apps, but with ease and with excellent video quality.

Timelapse videos are basically sped up videos, focused on specific object or scenery for the duration of the video. Most typical timelapse videos show a scenery, from dawn until dusk.

For the purpose of this guide, we went through tons of various timelapse apps and eventually found the best suited for our purposes: Open Camera app for Android. It is fully free, open source app that doesn't have any ads or doesn't try to make you buy more features. Furthermore, it allows full control of video quality, speed of the timelapse video and more.

Sure, many phones ship with manufacturer's own camera app that might have some kind of timelapse feature built-in. However, we feel that Open Camera provides much more flexibility than most stock apps we've seen so far.

1. What is needed for creating a timelapse video?
• Spare phone
• Phone stand or tripod
• Enough storage space
• Open Camera app
2. Open Cameran settings
3. Video mode and video settings
• Video speed - What does it mean?
4. Let's do it!
• Tips and tricks
5. Finally, finished video!

In German prison, a novel breach of security happened that mixed the old and new world quite beautifully.

An intern working at German prison shared picture of the prison's master key to his buddies through WhatsApp. After German Brandenburg's state justify ministry found out about the incident, they ordered all the prison's locks to be changed.

According to Brandenburg's justice ministry, a skilled locksmith could be able to reproduce the prison masterkey just from the shared picture, so they couldn't take the risk that such incident would really happen.

The intern now has to pay for up to 50'000 euros (appx. $59'600) what it costs to replace all 600 locks in the prison complex. Also, his internship was terminated immediately.

Source: The Local (paywall)

picture: Wikipedia

Google's parent company, Alphabet, has a "crazy ideas" subsidiary that is simply called as X. Now, rumors say, X is developing something straight out of sci-fi comics.

Dubbed as Wolverine, as a nod to the X-Men character with superhuman senses, thhe device is aimed to enhance human hearing to superhuman levels. Several former Google employees have confirmed the project's existance to Bloomberg.

Wolverine is basically an ear-piece that is connected to extremely sensitive microphones, coupled with sci-fi level of algorithms and pinch of processing power. The aim is to create a device that would allow person to choose one person in a crowded area who they want to listen to. The device would mute out all other background noise and other people's voices, allowing person to listen to selected voice - even from a distance. Imagine a concert where you want to speak to a person standing 10ft apart from you and you might grasp the idea of how useful such device would be.

According to sources, X has worked on the project from 2018 and it has been personally approved by Google co-founder Sergey Brim. X's spokesperson has also hinted about a product related to "future of hearing", which would pretty much confirm the Bloomberg's findings.

Apple Inc has opened all of its 270 US-based stores for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic began.

Over the past year, Apple has been cautious and reactive in the operation of its stores in the United States. In order to curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, the iPhone maker has not had all of its U.S. stores open at any time.

Instead, Apple has relied on local information and public health policies. In some cases, Apple has decided to shut stores even when it is technically permitted to keep them operating under local health policies.

It also took other measures such as its Express format, which allowed it to sell some items outside the store at sales counters protected by plexiglass.

With the recent opening of several stores in Texas, Apple now has all of its stores opened although some may still have limitations, such as a requirement to make appointments for in-store shopping.

Twitter has detailed how it will target users for misinformation regarding COVID-19 vaccines.

COVID-19 vaccines are rolling out around the world and central to most government's plans to curb their viral epidemics. With such large numbers of inoculations required to make an impact, it is not surprising there is a lot of confusion and questions about the new vaccines on offer.

Nowadays social media platforms will fill a void with information of varying quality and accuracy. The question of how to balance the rights of users to share information freely and protect against the spread of misinformation has been around long before the COVID-19, but the pandemic has focused attention on the problem.

Social media firms have already punished users for what they deemed to be misinformation regarding the pandemic itself. Since introducing its COVID-19 guidance, Twitter has removed around 8,400 tweets and challenged 11.5 million accounts.

Following Facebook and others, Twitter is now taking aim at COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on its platform. It will target infringing content with labels, strikes, suspensions, and permanent bans.

A tweet that is deemed to be spreading misinformation will be labeled in much the same way Twitter labeled tweets in the aftermath of the 2020 US President Elections. Tweets subjected to the label cannot be re-tweeted by others (but can be quote-tweeted) and will contain a link to authoritative information on vaccines.

One of the dreaded error messages with no apparent logical reason must be the AMD graphics adapters error about problematic signal.

The error message reads exactly like this: System has detected a link failure and cannot set the requested resolution.

We hit the same problem recently and had to investigate the problem bit further. Down the line, it is about DisplayPort connection from PC to monitor that causes this error message. More specifically, error relates to DisplayPort 1.2 connection.

We found out three different ways to debug and possibly solve the problem.

Power off your display completely

In most such cases, thhe right way to solve thhe issue is to unplug your monitor entirely. Remove its DisplayPort cable, its power cable and let it cool down a little bit. Then plug everything back and see if this helped. For most cases, this solved the problem.

Check your monitor cable connections

This is kinda no-brainer, but do it anyways. Check that the monitor cable is connected properly to both, PC and display itself.

Switch off DisplayPort 1.2 support from your display

Some displays allow you to switch off DP 1.2 support from its menu. This downgrades the display to use previous DisplayPort methods, but wont hinder the picture quality at all. Check your monitor's manual if this is possible - and test it.

Several people have complained during the past few weeks about an issue with Android phones and Google Chrome browser about weird hiccup.

The problem is this: When entering an address or a search term to Chrome's address bar, blank page appears, but nothing gets loaded. This might happen once, twice or three times, but after repeated tries, the search results or the page requested finally loads.

We have witnessed this behavious happening with several relatively recent phones, most notably, with two OnePlus Nord models with latest Chrome installed, running with Android 11.

After tweaking with settings, at first, nothing helped. The problem hasn't been related to the network used, as it happened whether we used mobile network or various WiFi networks.

However, we found a way to isolate the problem and to fix it. Here's how:

1. Open Chrome

2. Go to Chrome settings

OnePlus's entry to the mid-priced phones, OnePlus Nord, released back in summer 2020, finally gets its Android 11 update.

The Android 11 update, bundled with OnePlus's own Oxcygen OS 11, started rolling out through OTA update in several countries today. Thhe update brings Android 11 to the first Nord series phone of OnePlus.

The update is a whopping 2910 megabytes in size and should appear through System menu in Settings, if the phone itself hasn't informed about the available update yet.

Updater package also includes Google's latest security patches to Android, released on 1st of February, 2021.

Full changelog:

System

• Update to Android 11 version
• The brand new UI design brings you a more comfortable experience with various optimizations of details
• Optimized the stability of some third-party apps and improved experience

Ambient Display

• Newly added Insight clock style, a joint creation with Parsons School of Design. It will change according to the phone usage data (Go to: Settings – Customization – Clock on ambient display)
• Newly added the Canvas always-on display, which can extract the subject's outline from any photo and display it on your lock screen (Go to: Settings – Customization – Wallpaper – Canvas – Choose photo preview and it can be generated automatically)

Dark Mode

• Added the shortcut key for Dark Mode, pull down the quick setting to enable.
• Now supporting automatically turn on feature & customize time range. (Go to: Settings – Display – Dark Mode – Turn on automatically – Automatically enable from sunset to sunrise / Custom time range)

Shelf

• Brand new shelf UI
• Newly added a weather widget with smarter animation effect

Gallery

• Newly added the Story feature, which can automatically create the weekly stories by using your local photos and videos
• Optimized the loading speed to improve the image preview experience