The week that was (TWTW) takes a look back at the week’s most prominent tech stories from around the world.
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In the week that was August 5th to August 11th, 2018:
- Samsung announce new phone, watch & smart speaker
- Google release Android 9 (for some)
- Magic Leap hands-on disappoints
- Elon Musk in hot water over privatising Tesla
- Alex Jones banned in most places
- Red Dead Redemption 2 gameplay hits
Intro
Hello everyone, my name’s Raj Deut and it’s time to take a look back at the tech news in the week that was:
August 5th to August 11th, 2018.
Stories
Samsung threw a giant party in Brooklyn this week to show off some new products from their mobile division.
The biggest of those was the new Note 9 smart phone. The new phone is largely a series of component updates from its predecessor but did bring a whopping 8GB of RAM and 512GB of internal storage on its high-end model. That’ll set you back nearly $2k Australian which seems beyond ludicrous but apparently someone will buy it when it launches August 24th.
The event also showed off a new version of Samsung’s Galaxy Watch, which now has LTE and better battery life – launching October 4th.
And the curve ball of the show, Samsung’s new Galaxy Home smart speaker. The Speaker will come decked out with Samsung’s Bixby voice assistant and has all the usual bells and whistles you’d expect in a high end smart speaker but has no price or launch date set.
Google let Android 9 out into the wild early this week. Scheduled to release August 20th the new version codenamed “Pie” was launched somewhat exclusively for Google’s own Pixel smartphones only.
The new version has a series of updates and changes but nothing particularly show stopping. Its biggest new feature is the inclusion of Google’s Well Being platform designed to inform you how unhealthy your smartphone addiction already is.
A series of prominent tech outlets were invited to check out Magic Leap’s famed augmented reality system this week.
For the most it seems nearly all of them were as underwhelmed as one another likening the Leap to something perhaps slightly ahead of Microsoft’s Hololens but far from it’s tricked out demo reel that has seen companies like Google invest billions into it’s development.
Elon Musk, who’s rapidly turning into the left-wing Twitter crazed version of Donald Trump, to the platform to make claim he wants to make Tesla private again. The tweet stated that Musk would buy back Tesla stock once it reaches US$420 a share.
Naturally stocks rose off the back of the tweet, up 11% the next morning well on their way to Musk’s target buy price and investors thinking happy days. The US’ SEC take a different opinion on the matter however and are now looking at investigating Musk for what could be deemed as stock manipulation inflating the company’s stock price with his announcement.
And swinging back heavily to the right, Alex Jones, the conspiracy theorist radio host and founder of InfoWars has seen his media banned from Facebook, Apple podcasts and YouTube.
Banned across each platform for different reasons Twitter’s Jack Dorsey found himself tripping over his words trying to rationalise why their platform remains one of the few not to do anything, meanwhile Apple despite removing the podcast continues to allow the InfoWars app to be sold on their store with a roundabout justification.
And finally, to cheer everyone up, Rockstar Games released the first official gameplay footage of the highly anticipated Red Dead Redemption 2 this week. This was the first in a series of videos planned to be released leading up to the game’s release this coming October.
Outro
And that’s it for another week!
Be sure to like, love, and subscribe to the show wherever and however you’re viewing it. And if you feel like jumping over to iTunes or YouTube and leaving us a review, that certainly wouldn’t hurt either.
This week’s been big one on the Reckoner website. We’ve got a review of the very cool indie RTS game “Element” written by the talented Emma Inglis.
There’s also an exclusive video review of a new Brisbane developed tablet & phone mounting device called the NKMOS Premium Magnetic Mount by yours truly.
And going up first thing in the new week is a review of the controversial banned and then unbanned game “We Happy Few” by another very talented new writer Ann Leslie.
Of course we also have our Patreon campaign running where you get access to all of this and more such as our Patreon exclusive podcast “I don’t quite know”. You’ll find all the details about that at reckoner.com.au/patreon
Have a great week and bye for now.
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