Week in Review: If Qualcomm has a Switch rival can we call it the Snap?
Plus: Porsche is upping its e-bike game, and lawmakers aim to stop the scalpers stealing Christmas | A new Nintendo Switch challenger appears | You could soon be rocking a Snapdragon Edition gadget
Created for techradar.com@quicklydone.com | Web Version
Black Friday is behind us, December has begun... it's officially Christmas, right? Welcome to another Week in Review with me, TechRadar's Executive Editor Gerald Lynch. Gareth's taking a well-earned break after several sleep-deprived days of deal-hunting, and so I'll be rounding up the week's most interesting stories from the world of tech, with a soupçon of science.
So what have we got in store for you? Well, there's hope for US folks who are looking to pick up a new console or graphics card in time for Christmas, we get some insight into an important development in the world of e-bikes, and we're excited about Apple's top app of the year. But first up, Nintendo might soon have some competition on the handheld gaming front...
Between the phone in your pocket and the Nintendo Switch docked beneath your TV, the last few years have been the most interesting in the portable gaming space since the heady days of the original Game Boy. Whether you're playing Zelda on a Switch OLED, tapping into the Apple Arcade library on an iPhone, or tinkering with one of the many controller clips for iOS and Android alike, it's easy to play any time and anywhere.
The dedicated handheld space has until now been cornered by Nintendo, but processor giant Qualcomm is looking to shake things up, with a collaboration with Razer that'll see its chipsets powering an array of handheld devices.
The two companies have been showing off the Snapdragon G3x Handheld Developer Kit, a Switch-like device that uses the Snapdragon G3x Gen 1 – a gaming-focused mobile chipset – to power a 6.65-inch Full HD Plus OLED display with 10-bit HDR and a 120Hz refresh rate, which runs Android and has a 5MP 1080p webcam. It's in a controller-like case, with physical buttons, and smart software that can automatically take touchscreen-oriented games and map their controls to the device's hardware buttons.
To be clear, this is as much a reference or concept device as anything else – the Snapdragon G3x Handheld Developer Kit won't be available for consumers to purchase. But the idea is that the kit can find its way to manufacturers as a proof-of-concept, hopefully inspiring them to build their own takes on the device, with Qualcomm cashing in by licensing the chip technology for mass-market products. It'll be exciting to see where this ends up, and we wouldn't be surprised to see the first devices appearing at the CES 2022 trade show in January.
The Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders, which debuted in July of this year (Qualcomm)
Sticking with Qualcomm, here's an exclusive nugget of info from our Phones Editor James Peckham, who's spent the first week of December reporting from the Snapdragon Tech Summit 2021 in Hawaii. I'm not jealous, I swear.
One of Qualcomm's top execs – Don McGuire, Chief Marketing Officer at the company – told TechRadar about the results of its 2021 foray into making smartphones. The Smartphone for Snapdragon Insiders was the company's first attempt at making a device, and it landed in June this year, but McGuire confirmed that Qualcomm never intended to "sell a bunch of phones".
He says the company is considering a new project which could see it brand existing devices from third-party manufacturers as 'Snapdragon Editions', with tweaks from the chipset maker and enhanced Qualcomm branding. McGuire specifically referred to wearables, but he also said the idea could be rolled out to other areas of the business – so it could easily be applied to upcoming smartphones.
It may mean that one day you'll be able to buy a Snapdragon Edition of some of the very best Android phones – although that's likely some way off for now.
It's been something of an ordeal trying to get hold of new gadgets over the last couple of years. If it wasn't scalpers buying up PS5s to sell them on at inflated prices, or GPUs being snapped up for Bitcoin mining farms, it was shipping delays and parts shortages brought on by the pandemic. You'd count yourself lucky if you managed to grab a PS5 or Nvidia 3000-series GPU.
But could the end of the misery be in sight, just in time for Christmas? Maybe… A group of lawmakers in the US has introduced the Stopping Grinch Bots Act, designed to prevent bots from buying up scarce, in-demand products like PlayStation 5 consoles and the latest graphics cards.
If the bill becomes law, the use of bot software that bypasses the security measures of websites to impersonate humans and clear a website of stock would be made illegal. Any scalpers trying to hoover up hard-to-find gadgetry using nefarious means would risk being sued by the FTC.
"Allowing grinch bots to rig prices and squeeze consumers during the holiday season hurts American families, small business owners, product makers, and entrepreneurs," said Representative Paul Tonko, announcing the legislation. "We will not allow this market manipulation to go unchecked."
As mentioned, scalpers are only one element of a larger problem – but they are actively exacerbating the issue, and profiting from doing so. Here's hoping this bill puts the frighteners on them, and that lawmakers around the globe follow suit.
I've always fancied myself as a filmmaker – earning an A-Level in Media Studies (that's a British teenager's qualification, international readers) will do that for you. I had to make a music video, and I loved the process of capturing the shots, stitching them together, and adding effects and overdubs and what-not.
But back then, some 20 years ago, it was tough, and expensive, to break into the movie business. You needed a decent digital video camera, a computer with the horsepower to process your files, and maybe even an editor if you didn't have the time to learn the ins and outs of complex software.
These days, it's all different, as evidenced by Apple's App Store Awards 2021 winners. Taking the top spot in the iPad App of the Year category is a name that will be familiar to readers of our photography coverage: LumaFusion, a powerful but simple-to-use video-editing app that's already the top dog in our own best video editing app round-up.
It puts pro-grade editing controls in your hands for a one-off $29.99 / £25.99 fee, with multi-track editing power that rivals Hollywood-grade editing suites.
It's remarkable how things have improved for video creators in the last few years. With just an iPhone alone, you've not only got a high-resolution video camera (and an even fancier one on the new iPhone 13 Pro models), but enough grunt to edit together an entire film. So maybe set yourself a challenge this Christmas – get yourself LumaFusion, and shoot that short film that until now has only existed in your imagination.
Supercar manufacturer Porsche has been dabbling in electric bikes for a while now, debuting its first pair back in March. The eBike Sport is a premium, pricey road bike that will set you back £9,600 (about $13,000), while the multi-terrain eBike Cross launched at £7,650 (about $10,000). Penny Farthing? More like megabucks mountain bikes.
But Porche's e-bike range may get even more luxurious soon. It's bought a majority share in Greyp, the e-bike arm of Croatian luxury car manufacturer Rimac Automobil. The company is an electric car pioneer, and has also invested heavily in ebike tech, and the two companies are now set to pool their resources.
Greyp's bikes really do throw in all the bells and whistles riders could want. As well as running on high-capacity batteries capable of hitting 70km/h (around the 43mph mark), they come with integrated eSIMs for on-the-trail mapping updates and security tracking, letting you lock down and locate your bike should it be stolen. Some even come with built-in action cameras for recording your death-defying runs.
Greyp's next bike, the eCity, is due for release in 2023 - so don't be surprised if that machine bears some Porche design hallmarks.
An artist's illustration of the newfound exoplanet GJ 367b (SPP 1992 (Patricia Klein))
And if you think this week has flown by, spare a thought for poor GJ 367b, a newly discovered exoplanet (that's a planet outside our own solar system) about 31 light years away.
As reported by our colleagues at Space.com, GJ 367b is one of the smallest exoplanets ever found, and orbits a dim red dwarf star once every 7.7 hours, making its entire year less than a typical workday here on Earth. It's also a very dense, rocky world, similar to Mercury, and is about 70% the size of Earth but 55% more dense, owing to what researchers believe is a large, mostly iron core.
It's also brutally hot, given its proximity to its star. It's likely to be tidally locked like our moon, and GJ 367b's daytime temperature is estimated to be around 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit (1,500 degrees Celsius).
It gets blasted by roughly 500 times as much radiation from its star as we get from our Sun, which almost certainly has stripped it of any atmosphere it once had. The planet was discovered using NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), which launched in 2018.
This is from the editor
Gareth should be back in action next week, rested up and ready for the Christmas rush. Not only will we be helping you track down the perfect connected Christmas gifts, we'll hopefully also be ramping up our pre-event coverage of CES, the world's largest annual tech show, live from Las Vegas.
It's been a quiet show the last couple of years thanks to the complications of the ongoing pandemic, but we're hoping that it'll be a big blow-out in 2022 as the world starts to return to a modicum of normality.
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