Galaxy Watch 4 now expected at MWC next week, and more

Mobile World Congress (MWC) kicks off next Monday, and aside from the personal vs. virtual debacle surrounding the event and company failures, we’re only just beginning to see some of the players move up.

• It won’t be the must-see MWC of the past, but there is some hope.

Those hopes start with Samsung, which has announced a virtual event for Monday June 28th:

• The announcement said Samsung will “introduce its vision for the future of smartwatches at the event with new opportunities for developers and users to enable a new era of smartwatch experiences.”
• New smartwatches make sense here, with expectations of a Galaxy Watch 4 smartwatch launch.
• It is also expected to provide more details on the Google-Samsung partnership with WearOS.
• Samsung will also talk about less interesting areas, such as the “latest security improvements and innovations”.

Expectations for the Galaxy Watch 4:

• It looks like the Galaxy Watch 4, which is expected to come in at least two sizes, has passed FCC certification in the past week or two.
• The rumors again point to a circular design and rotating bezel, although we didn’t see any render leaks or really detailed specs either.
• The health elements are expected to be a pulse oximeter, heart rate monitor, blood pressure monitor, and EKG, as in previous devices, but the potential for additional health monitoring technology is fascinating.
• We heard the first rumors of blood glucose tests in January, but more recent reports have stopped them. What else does Samsung bring with it?
• Pricing and availability are the other big unknowns: Samsung’s Galaxy Watch 3 prices started at $ 399, so that’s a pretty good guide.
• Samsung adding more exclusivity could be a problem. Newer Samsung accessories have some Samsung-exclusive elements or app connections. That has an ecosystem lock-in vibe that can hinder wider adoption when owners of other Android devices (or the very few iPhone owners?)

More MWK:

• Others who will be billed for MWC include Elon Musk for SpaceX on June 29, as well as keynotes from Qualcomm, IBM, and ZTE.
• Chances are something else could show up!

🔥 Amazon Prime Day Deals Continuing: 5 Chromebook and Laptop Deals under $ 500 (Android authority).

🔋 Samsung M32: Samsung’s new budget phone brings a 6,000 mAh battery, quad cameras for ~ $ 200, initially only in India (Android Authority).

📉 OnePlus Nord N200 review: little more than a cheap 5G entry point as a renamed Oppo phone (Android authority).

👉 Also, OnePlus agrees to give Nord N200 better updates than Nord N100, but only barely (Android authority).

⌚ The Redmi K50 series may come before 2022 (Android authority).

🍎 Bloomberg reports that Apple is developing a whole new breed of high-end MacBook Air, with the next-generation M1 chip (M2?) (MacRumors).

🍏 Apple is said to be stopping iPhone 12 Mini production earlier than expected (Android authority).

📰 There’s a great new report in the New York Times, titled, “Sundar Pichai Is Criticized Internally at Google,” suggesting the Google CEO is affable, caring, reserved, and thoughtful – but too risk averse. Instead of saying no, Pichai leaves big decisions undecided and leaves a certain fear of a lack of urge to take new risks. That said, there aren’t many overwhelming revelations in this piece. It just sounds like things are going slowly, but most decisions are, as a source says in the article, “right”. (New York Times).

🥽 The one developer who publicly agreed to try out Facebook’s VR ads is already withdrawing (The edge).

🤔 Even more scary COVID tracking: Google silently rolled the app onto users’ phones at the behest of the government (Ars-Technica).

🎮 Microsoft hired the co-creator of Portal to develop native Xbox games for the cloud (Engage).

🤖 Here’s a surprise: Tesla claims to have the fifth fastest computer in the world for internal autopilot training. The computer called Dojo has 5,760 GPUs with 10 petabytes of NVMe memory (ServeTheHome). However, Tesla didn’t include it in the top 500 supercomputer rankings.

🔋 This guy charged his Tesla by towing it at over 70 mph, and peaking at 65 kW when using regenerative charging (Youtube).

🎈 A kind of mega “space balloon” has completed its first flight with possible space tourism destinations (Interesting technique).

⚛️ “Is there any form of matter that cannot be classified in the periodic table?” (Last!) (R / askscience).