Samsung just unveiled their most powerful phone to date — it’s good and a safe bet!
Hello,
Okay yes. Before starting this issue, I’d like to apologise for not publishing it on time. I was preoccupied and procrastinated just a little too much. I would also like to apologise to Papa for not being ‘consistent’. Yeah, the typical brown dad lecture :) Hehe, my dad bugged me to write this issue and publish it so much that even my sister was nice enough to remind me that I need to push this issue out before he comes home later tonight.
Enough with the non-tech related talk. Last week was good for tech! A couple of new inventions here and there — Samsung launched three flagship phones, Google launched Android 13 beta and Apple is launching contactless payments. All three of them are big changes and really interesting ones. Also, there is some news concerning your privacy if you own an iPhone.
Let’s start with Google and its new operating system — Android 13. Android 13 aka Android Tiramisu made its first appearance and it has some minor changes at the moment. Minor- because this is the first developer preview and it's not even for the public! So, it doesn’t have all the features yet. Well, I found a couple of features that seemed intriguing. The new operating system version has some updated theming options, better privacy features, support for more languages and a ton of back-end updates. Firstly, Android is allowing all the applications on your phone to have a dynamic theming option. In layman’s terms, this means that all applications can have a variable icon to suit your phone’s theme. We all know the Uber icon is black but if your wallpaper is orange, the theming engine in Android 13 will choose a more subtle colour and the icon colour will change! Cool, isn’t it? Google is also rolling out another privacy feature— it's mostly related to photos, and I don’t think it holds much significance but I have to cover it regardless. Apps won’t be able to access your entire photo library unless you give them access to do so. You could give apps access to specific photos only, rather than giving them access to your entire gallery. I mean, yeah, but I don’t see the practical usage of this and I don’t see anyone using it either. Google is also working on rolling updates via the Play Store instead of doing it via the system. So, you could update your system the same way you update an app. It’s going to be a uniform way to update your operating system. This project by Google is known as Project Mainline — I don’t think Mainline will make it to Android 13 but let's wait and watch. I’m just hoping that the update is stable, unlike Android 12.
Well, now that we are talking about Android, let's talk about Samsung. Samsung just unveiled three new phones last week – the S22, S22+ and the S22 Ultra. Okay, let's put it this way. The S22+ is the best phone out of the three. If you like Android phones and want to hold them for 3+ years, the S22 is the safest bet. All of the three phones feature a glass body with a gorgeous 120Hz display. However, all three phones are humongous and really hard to hold. The S22 is 6.1 inches, the S22 plus 6.7 inches and the S22 Ultra won't fit in your hand so you shouldn't really care about its size. The phones feature a new and updated camera system, so the photos are staggering. They just rebranded the term ‘night mode' to ‘Nightography’ and if I am being honest? The display photos they put up in their Keynote look good. The phones also feature decent batteries– nothing compared to the iPhone 13 Pro Max but they are good at this price point. The third phone that Samsung launched, the S22 Ultra is a replacement for the Galaxy Note series and absorbs the whole lineup. This phone features a very large screen with an S-Pen and a boxier design with a whole new and updated chipset like the other phones in the S22 lineup. I would love to go into the details of the whole lineup but that would just bore a lot of people, so here is a good video reviewing the three phones if you are interested.
Moving further to Apple, the change-makers. Apple is going to rollout contactless payments soon. Yeah, well when I first read it I thought this would be the American Paytm. But nope, your iPhone could be used as a POS terminal! Essentially, sellers would not need credit card machines. You could just hold your credit/debit card or digital wallet next to the receiving iPhone and Apple will do the magic. Sounds cool, right? Apple will start rolling this out at the end of this year and will support all iPhone models from XS and up. Well, the only thing that comes to my mind when I think of this is that this technology will be revolutionary and a game-changer for small store owners. Oh also, I forgot to mention – even Google Pay and other wallets would work with this so you don't need to have an Apple Wallet for this to work. Man, Apple is so good. They really always think with their motto, "Think different."
Apple is great, but not flawless. Earlier this week, they admitted to a bug that caused Siri on iPhones to send recordings to Apple even if you opted out of the same. Yeah, the bug is only present on iPhones running iOS 15. The latest iOS update fixed this issue so there is nothing to worry about. Moral of the story: update your devices to be safe. Apple is deleting all the recordings it received from this bug so there is nothing to worry about. And even if Apple had access, I don't think it is a very big deal because only Apple employees have access to these recordings and they are just used for improving Apple's products.
Yeah! That's it for this week's article. I am aware it was a little too long, but I had so many things to cover 🥲 Before I sign off, I need to tell you about this interesting article on NFTs that I just read from The Verge – The Counterfeit NFT problem is only getting worse. I would have covered it but I didn't want to bore you with a 2000 word issue. Well, I hope you liked reading this article and I will catch you next Sunday. Until then, make sure to update your tech!
Adios,
Tejas Tagra
6007 days old
