Daily Authority: A new tablet entrant 🤔

🌄 good morning! I’m going to the mountains this afternoon so Nick Fernandez will be behind you tomorrow. I’ll get you back on Monday. Also, I’ve held back with the iPhone 14’s render / leak messages until … well, something more substantial comes up …

After all the years of OnePlus, Oppo / Realme and Vivo, all brands owned by BBK Electronics, there is finally a tablet from one of the brands on the market.

Realme pad:

• Adding to the Android tablet market is the Realme Pad, a 10.4-inch slate made of aluminum alloy with a 2,000 × 1,200 display.
• It’s a humble entry-level: Realme isn’t looking for top-notch options here, with a MediaTek Helio G80 chip to power the device like you can find in a budget smartphone like the Poco M2 or Realme 7 under $ 200 could.
• The Realme Pad has a healthy 7,100 mAh battery for what appears to be 12 hours of video playback and 65 days of standby time.
• There is an 18W charge as well as reverse charge to power other devices.
• And the Dolby Atmos certification is on board for the four speakers, weighing 440 grams, which is roughly the same as the 9.7-inch iPad Air.
• Prices for a Wi-Fi model with 3GB of RAM and 32GB of storage start at around $ 190, while the top-of-the-line 4G LTE variant with 4GB of RAM / 64GB of storage is around $ 245.
• Both models will be launched in India next week, September 16.

Is it important?

• The more low-cost tablet options for people in developing countries like India, the better. Phones are great and all, but having more screen real estate without investing in a laptop makes sense.
• In the broader market, however, Android tablets are in a classic chicken and egg scenario.
• Apple’s iPads are so good, and have much more extensive tablet support from developers, that Android tablets seem like a distant runner-up.
• But without manufacturers bringing more Android tablets to market, there is no incentive for Android app makers to do more with tablet functionality as the percentage of users on a tablet is relatively small compared to a phone .
• Since neither manufacturers nor developers really come first, the ecosystem is a bit stuck.
• That means it is possible. Samsung put on a big show its efforts to get top app makers to endorse its Fold 3.
• I don’t know if Samsung offered these app makers technical support or maybe financial or marketing or other incentives, but something like that would make sense.
• Android on tablets, unlike Chromebooks and ChromeOS, hasn’t found great Google support either.
• One last point: Android tablet manufacturers’ data protection, security and ongoing software maintenance were at best inadequate, which has led to the fact that the best Android tablets are in fact… Chromebooks.
• The other option is an Amazon-baked experience with something like the Realme Pad equivalent, the Fire 10 HD. But then there are no Google services …

🔜 Pixel 6 Appears in Google Ads, Instagram Promo Notes on Start Date with Clocks for October 19th (Android authority).

📅 Xiaomi is committing to advanced Android updates, which is great, but there is a catch: only for its new phones coming out this month, which isn’t good enough at all considering it’s likely a few hundred Millions of Xiaomi phones are missing long-term Android updates and security fixes (Android authority).

🔎 Android 12 Beta 5 finally brings the promised full device search function (Android authority).

🐭 Razer introduces ultra-sensitive Basilisk V3 mouse with four-way scrolling for wired gaming setups (Android authority).

📸 DJI OM 5 review: a smaller, more powerful gimbal with a balloon price (Android authority).

🔋 Whoop’s new fitness tracker is better thanks to a battery breakthrough with a Silca anode, which is fascinating (The edge).

💼 Google Workspace opens rooms for all users (TechCrunch).

🔓 WhatsApp “end-to-end encrypted” messages are not that private if the recipient reports them to Facebook (Ars-Technica).

❌ No free upgrades: PlayStation CEO finally denies free cross-gen PS5 upgrades …? (Ars-Technica). Anyway, PlayStation is also hosting an event today at 4:00 p.m. ET – you can watch it on YouTube, Twitch, and so on.

🎮 In addition, the new PlayStation 5 with hardware revisions could actually be better than the older one if you dig deeper, according to the test of this German laboratory (Igor’s laboratory).

🛫 Wright is testing its 2 megawatt electric motors for passenger aircraft (TechCrunch).

🦜 Animals change in response to climate change: “I don’t want the statement to be, ‘Oh, animals evolve in response to climate change, that means they’ll be fine’ because that’s just not true ” (CNET).

🔑 A single laser fired through a keyhole can expose anything in a room (Gizmodo).

🌎 The European Space Agency astronaut Thomas Pesquet delivers a breathtaking picture of the earth from the ISS dome (CNET).

Do you remember when Amazon opened its little Amazon Go shop in 2017/18 or so? Then Amazon Go Grocery in Seattle in 2020?

Well, with around 30 stores (27 in the US, three in the UK) active now, Amazon’s cashierless technology is coming to Whole Foods stores:

• Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” technology is coming to Whole Foods in the United States.
• It starts with two new stores in 2022 where people can skip the checkout (and, as you guessed, just walk) at one store in Sherman Oaks, California and one in Washington DC.
• That’s a relatively big deal as Whole Foods has all sorts of options that go beyond random items on the shelves, like fresh orange juice for self-service and salad bars and so on. One of the characteristics of the Amazon Go stores was having fewer than 1,000 items. Larger grocery stores can have 50,000-80,000 items for vision systems.
• Amazon didn’t mention whether the system of overhead cameras, computer vision technology, machine learning, and smartphone geofencing that tracks shoppers and items across the store has changed at all.
• But these are new businesses, not retrofitting old businesses. The design changes that have been made to cameras will be interesting.

How it works:

• Buyers have the option to choose between self-checkout lines or the cashierless option if they have an Amazon account, including palm (pending, non-touching) scans via the Amazon One palm scanning system.
• As for the people who are losing their jobs? Not so, says Amazon, and instead of dealing with people at the checkout, employees can “spend even more time interacting with customers and providing a great shopping experience,” which may or may not be good!
• Final thought: Why does Amazon, which is all about scaling, only have 30 cashierless stores after almost four years of operation?

Likewise

Thank you very much,

Tristan Rayner, Managing Editor.