đť Good morning! A holiday here tomorrow that also combines with Fatherâs Day in Germany. Mostly, people drink a lot of beer, which is only unusual because itâs a workday. Anyway, Jonathan Feist will be with youâŚ
Razr peek
Evan Blass
A week ago we talked about Eric Migicovsky wanting a small flagship Android phone. The latest coming out of Motorola with the Razr may be just that, if you can extend the thinking that a foldable is small, too.
- By the way, smallandroidphone.com now has 32,000 signups; getting close to the 50,000 minimum figure Eric was seeking.
And somewhat on that topic are fresh leaks from Evan Blass (@evleaks), with a real-life look at the Motorola Razr 3 via a little video clip.
- Itâs a small Android phone! And, if the leaks are true, it looks really similar to a Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 3.
- What we see in the clip is what appears to be a very real Motorola Razr 3, with the powered-on device folding in half.
- We can see itâs a massive set of changes to the previous Razr line.
- The outer display is now much bigger, just like the Flip 3. The inner display has both minimal bezels and a minimal crease. The chin on the bottom has all but gone, as we talked about a while back.
- The product redesign also includes a dual-camera module on the back, and thereâs a punch hole for the selfie camera, not a notch.
- Other internals we donât see here but which have been talked about by Motorola officially, without fully confirming everything, is that itâll come with the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chip and âpremiumâ elements over the older models.
- Blass has previously said thereâll be a launch in China in âlate July or early August,â and two colors: Quartz Black and Tranquil Blue.
- Details missing: Hinge mechanism, IP rating, pricing!
- And, perhaps critically: how this will differentiate itself from Samsungâs expected Flip 4, expected sometime around August or September as well.
Roundup
đł Google sells an official Pixel 6 case for $30, and it seems to not be great: owners arenât happy with rapidly yellowing official cases (Android Authority).
đ Appleâs new App Store rule: If you can create an account on an app, the app needs to let you delete the account and data, by June 30 (The Verge).
â Some Dutch guys are working on a gadget called Unpluq for productivity: The new second edition is an actual tag you tap to the back of a phone to allow access to blocked apps, which is an interesting idea. Good luck to them (Indiegogo).
đľď¸ââď¸ âWhat ordinary skill becomes suspicious if youâre good at it?â (r/askreddit). (Fun answer: âBeing able to find almost anything. People start being suspicious that youâre hiding shit on purpose. Iâve found things in other peopleâs houses that Iâve never even BEEN TO by describing the places to look.â)
Weirdness Wednesday
DALL¡E 2 is weird and fun (if you have access) but now Googleâs unveiled its own text-to-image AI, called Imagen, in a carefully curated site (with no demo/open-access/waiting list).
The images are nice and fun. For example, hereâs how the text prompt âa cute corgi lives in a house made out of sushiâ looks:
Google Imagen
The technical wonder is there and it looks like a pretty solid progression how these image generators are going.
- Google says âhuman raters exceedingly prefer Imagen over all other models in both image-text alignment and image fidelity,â but, you know, thatâs the point of all this: unveil its best stuff to show itâs just-as-good-as-everyone-else-thank-you.
- One problem is that Google says the tool doesnât generate human faces well, and didnât show any images with good or bad human faces at all.
- Google spends nearly 500 words explaining why its tool canât yet solve the same ethical challenges as other text-to-image research developments, which remain an open problem.
- For example, even while actively trying to prevent biases, Imagen showed âan overall bias towards generating images of people with lighter skin tones and ⌠portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes,â the team wrote, as it tries to solve the problem.
Cheers,
Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor