Plus: the return of Motorola, the US nixes Intel’s China chip plan, and Alexa knows you're there | Hey Alexa, you sound… different (to British ears) | It's Friday, but not Black Friday – that's next Friday
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Hello! It's been a tough week, and next week is set to be even tougher. Black Friday is rolling into view, and we're starting to see which of those lovely tech products you've got your eyes on are going to be discounted, and attempt to separate the genuinely good deals from the also-rans.
To most of you, this process will hopefully be invisible – we'll be sorting through thousands of deals so that you don't have to put in the legwork, but with that comes pressure. Is that more expensive air purifier the one to recommend over the cheaper one that's had a bigger discount? Will anyone want to buy this $1,000 drone, even if it is nearly half price? And, honestly, why do people love personal water filters so much?
There is still a fair amount of tech news to talk you through though, so let's get back to that, and let the thoughts about deals stay where they should be: running through my head in the middle of the night.
Let's get something out of the way now: I know that Alexa getting the masculine 'Ziggy' voice isn't new to readers in the US. But it's finally arrived in the UK, and our Homes Editor Carrie Skinner managed to bag the exclusive, so I wanted to say well done to her.
But it also highlights the confusing way a trillion-dollar company works. Why can't Amazon roll things out globally, like Netflix does? Of course, it could roll a feature out globally, if it wanted to… so therefore we can assume that in this case it doesn't want to.
Whether it's the time, effort or investment needed to create a truly cohesive global operation, it's hard to tell. But it beggars belief that not only has it taken Amazon this long to bring such an apparently basic feature to devices in the UK, but that British users still aren't able to use the 'Ziggy' wake word – it's still 'Alexa', 'Computer', 'Amazon', or 'Echo' for now.
Being Global Editor in Chief comes with its perks: people equate you to the rapper Pitbull in terms of celebrity status (as he is also known as Mr. Worldwide, another member of the globally-monikered fraternity) and you get to see how people consume articles in different parts of the world.
In the US, few people would not know when Black Friday is, coming as it does the day after Thanksgiving, but in the UK one of the most popular search terms is 'when is Black Friday?' as there's no annual event to center it around.
So in the UK, Black Friday has started a week early, with Amazon launching a whole host of deals in the seven days leading up to 'actual Black Friday', and everyone is already going crazy for deals.
The deals are also arriving earlier in the US this year, with retailers worrying about stock levels – Walmart, for example, is launching its Black Friday deals from Monday.
What does this all mean for you? Simple: shop when you want, and buy what you need – and if you like the price, stop worrying about it.
Excellent mid-range phones like the Motorola Edge Plus have helped put the brand back on the map (Future)
Regular readers of this column will know that I used to be the Phones Editor of TechRadar, and I've been following the mobiles industry for well over a decade. Motorola has been up, down, and all around in that time, and having been bought by Google, then sold by Google to Lenovo, but without all the patents it had created in the early part of the 21st century, in recent years it's re-emerged as a more ‘basic phone’ brand.
That’s how it’s become a top-three manufacturer in the US – a hugely-congested marketplace that most phone manufacturers struggle to grow their share of, let alone quadruple their share in a year, as Motorola has.
This excellent piece on our sister site Android Central highlights how the pandemic has resulted in many of us no longer wanting to spend over a thousand dollars on a phone. Mid-range specs and prices, a big screen and long battery life appear to matter more to many of us these days, and those are all things that Motorola phones offer.
POLL QUESTION:
What's the most important feature on a smartphone?
I was intrigued to see this story do so well on TechRadar – usually, articles covering the more political aspects of the tech industry don't traffic that highly for us.
But it's clear that this one really resonates with readers; the global chip shortage is still a very real thing, and is going to have an impact on this Christmas. Many consumer electronics products are still in plentiful supply, but if you're looking for a games console, a high-end laptop or TV, or even a car, things might not get back to normal until 2023.
So the news that the US Government has reportedly blocked Intel from being able to use a Chinese factory to manufacture more chips, citing national security concerns, is a disappointment. Will there ever really be an end to this shortage? Or will our ever-increasing demand for tech products mean that manufacturers can never catch up?
Returning to Amazon Echos, the company is rolling out a feature that allows its latest-gen Echo devices to use inaudible sonar to know when you're in the room. This isn't the first time the tech has been used – other competitors use similar sensors – but Amazon is using the feature to trigger things like turning on lights or stopping music.
It sounds pretty invasive – and it would be if you had no choice in the matter. Happily, though, you can enable or disable the feature, and it's less invasive than a similar feature on a smartphone would potentially be, as phones have a device ID that could theoretically be tracked.
OLED TVs could soon become more affordable, and even higher-resolution (TCL)
Another thing about me that regular readers may know is that in a previous life I edited a B2B newsletter called OLED News. It was very early on in the development of this technology, at a time dozens of suited businesspeople (and I) would wait in line at industry events to gaze at a postage-stamp-sized screen, and marvel at how thin it was.
One of the key things that was supposed to make OLED a winner in the future was the way the screens were made: in theory, you could print the organic materials used to create the pixels using an inkjet printer, a process that was both precise and efficient, and using only the 'ink' that you really needed, thus minimizing waste.
However, I hadn't heard much about this process being used to mass-produce OLED TVs – until now. TCL has announced that it's building a factory dedicated entirely to inkjet-printing OLED panels. To most people, this is boring news; to me, it's the culmination of years of waiting.
If this does become the predominant way of manufacturing OLED TVs, the price of sets could be radically reduced, and high-definition TVs beyond even 8K would only require the use of a sufficiently precise printer. The future of cheap and amazing TV is almost here… I can feel it.
One of the top stories across our parent company's Knowledge brands this week was the discovery of a never-before-seen mineral, one that can only be forged in the high-pressure conditions found hundreds of miles below the Earth's surface.
The substance could help scientists to learn more about how the mantle is formed – but I was more interested in the name. It's called davemaoite, and my first thought was to chuckle and think "Ha, imagine calling a mineral Dave. That would be weird."
Then I read the next line: "Named davemaoite after prominent geophysicist Ho-kwang (Dave) Mao, the mineral is the first example of a high-pressure calcium silicate perovskite (CaSiO3) found on Earth."
That is weird.
This is from the editor
I'm very tired, and it's still a week until Black Friday. The next week or so is going to be a whole other level of busy, and every year I forget how exhausting it is trying to be across the deals from every major retailer, all of the time, for four days straight.
So I won't spend too long winding up here, but I would like to hear about what you lovely people are looking to buy over the Black Friday period. Can TechRadar help with any recommendations? You, our loyal newsletter readers, deserve some bespoke help, and I (well, my team, who I will call on) are here to deliver it.
Remember to email me, including 'NEWSLETTER' in the subject line, and do subscribe to this newsletter to see whether your questions get highlighted next week.
Have a lovely weekend!
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