Daily Authority: 📁 Razr 3 leaks

🍻 Good morning! A holiday here tomorrow that also combines with Father’s Day in Germany. Mostly, people drink a lot of beer, which is only unusual because it’s a workday. Anyway, Jonathan Feist will be with you…

Razr peek

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.

• It’s 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 it’s 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 there’s a punch hole for the selfie camera, not a notch.
• Other internals we don’t see here but which have been talked about by Motorola officially, without fully confirming everything, is that it’ll come with the Snapdragon 8 Plus Gen 1 chip and “premium” elements over the older models.
• Blass has previously said there’ll be a launch in China in “late July or early August,” and two colors: Quartz Black and Tranquil Blue.
• Details missing: Hinge mechanism, IP rating, pricing!
• And, perhaps critically: how this will differentiate itself from Samsung’s expected Flip 4, expected sometime around August or September as well.

Roundup

📳 Google sells an official Pixel 6 case for $30, and it seems to not be great: owners aren’t happy with rapidly yellowing official cases (Android Authority).

👉 Official Nothing Phone 1 design details announced, including transparent case (Android Authority).

📁 Goodbye to two screens? Microsoft files patent for 360-degree foldable display. Hmm! (Android Authority).

⌚ Mi Band 7 goes official with bigger display, new features, same cheap price tag (Android Authority).

🍎 Apple’s 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).

👉 At Build 2022, Microsoft unveiled Snapdragon-powered Project Volterra: A mini-PC that packs AI hardware for developers. No price yet, availability later in the year (TechCrunch). Also: Microsoft launched Power Pages, which takes on Wix and Squarespace for designing business websites with low-code. And, finally: Third-party widgets are coming to Windows 11, which might actually make them useful (Ars Technica).

⛔ 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).

🍳 Dyson has been secretly building robots that can do your household chores (The Verge).

⏩ Back on Jan 31, BOE announced it would make a 500Hz refresh rate LCD panel. Now, ASUS and NVIDIA unveiled the first 500Hz monitor, and tried to sell us on why it matters with a video (Ars Technica).

🚲 Harley-Davidson made an electric mountain bike without front or rear suspension (Engadget).

🔴 Here’s the last selfie from the fading InSight Mars Lander (Gizmodo).

🕵️‍♂️ “What ordinary skill becomes suspicious if you’re good at it?” (r/askreddit). (Fun answer: “Being able to find almost anything. People start being suspicious that you’re hiding shit on purpose. I’ve found things in other people’s houses that I’ve never even BEEN TO by describing the places to look.”)

Weirdness Wednesday

DALL·E 2 is weird and fun (if you have access) but now Google’s 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, here’s how the text prompt “a cute corgi lives in a house made out of sushi” looks:

• Cute!

The technical wonder is there and it looks like a pretty solid progression how these image generators are going.

• Google says “human raters exceedingly prefer Imagen over all other models in both image-text alignment and image fidelity,” but, you know, that’s the point of all this: unveil its best stuff to show it’s just-as-good-as-everyone-else-thank-you.
• One problem is that Google says the tool doesn’t generate human faces well, and didn’t show any images with good or bad human faces at all.
• Google spends nearly 500 words explaining why its tool can’t 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 “an overall bias towards generating images of people with lighter skin tones and … portraying different professions to align with Western gender stereotypes,” the team wrote, as it tries to solve the problem.

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor