Google is striking back at Sonos with a pair of lawsuits alleging that the wireless speaker company is infringing on a number of its patents around smart speakers and voice control technology. It’s the latest volley in a back-and-forth battle over wireless speakers that has so far involved multiple lawsuits from Sonos, one lawsuit from Google, and one ruling in favor of Sonos that’s led to features being stripped from Google’s products.
These new lawsuits allege infringement of seven additional patents. One lawsuit focuses on hotword detection and wireless charging, and the other revolves around how a group of speakers determines which one should respond to voice input.
Google spokesperson José Castañeda said the lawsuits are being filed to “defend our technology and challenge Sonos’s clear, continued infringement of our patents.” Castañeda said that Sonos had “started an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products, at the expense of our shared customers.”
Both lawsuits are being filed this morning in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Google plans to file similar lawsuits with the US International Trade Commission in the coming days that will seek to ban imports of any infringing Sonos products, Castañeda told TheVerge.
The legal skirmish started in 2020 when Sonos initially sued Google over multiroom speaker technology. The two companies had partnered years earlier to make Google services work on Sonos speakers, and Sonos claimed that Google went on to steal its speaker tech to build the Google Home and other devices. Google countersued months later, claiming Sonos infringed on a number of its patents, too. Then Sonos sued again. Finally, in January — two years after the first lawsuit was filed — the US International Trade Commission ruled in Sonos’ favor, finding Google in violation of Sonos’ patents.
In response, Google has had to adjust features of some of its products. That included Google removing the ability to adjust the volume of a group of speakers at once — a pretty annoying change for owners of multiple Google speakers. Today’s lawsuits seem to be an attempt by Google to gain leverage on Sonos as the two spar over features.
We are pretty late into the current generation GPU cycle which means both AMD and Nvidia’s next-gen cards are nearly here. For a while now, there have been rumors that Nvidia is purportedly increasing the power consumption of its upcoming RTX 4000 Ada Lovelace GPUs, with some whispers of it reaching up to an insane 900W too. Following that, it looks like AMD too is allegedly increasing the power draw on its upcoming RX 7000 series cards based on the RDNA 3 architecture (Navi 3X).
The report comes via YouTuber RedGamingTech (RGT) who says that the Radeon team is increasing the total graphics power (TGP) of the top end Navi 31 chip from 375W to 405W, which is bump of 8%. Meanwhile, apparently there will also be another more efficient SKU based on this that will feature the 375W TGP.
RGT has also provided purported specification details for the flagship SKU as well as others below it. Apparently it will come with 84 Compute Units (CUs) or 42 Workgroup processors (WGPs). However, the flagship is apparently named the 7950 XT this time around instead of the expected 7900 XT.
Meanwhile, previous rumors have alleged that the top SKUs could have an even higher core count coming in at 60 WGPs or 120 CUs. Regardless though, the performance is expected to be very impressive as Radeon is expected to move from a two SIMD32 per CU up to four with RDNA 3.
Alongside that, the memory subsystem is also expected to get a big overhaul with V-cache coming into the mix allegedly taking the Infinity Cache amount of the top chip up from 128MB to a massive 384MB.
Overall, the performance of the RX 7000 series is expected to be around double that of the RX 6950 XT, which is the current AMD flagship and should put up a good fight against the Nvidia RTX 4090 which is also expected to be a behemoth.
AMD recently confirmed that the RDNA 3 GPUs are launching in the next quarter and the launch of the Nvidia RTX 4000 series is also not too far away.
Arc System Works has announced Guilty Gear Strive Season 2 at Evo 2022, with the first character of the four Season 2 additions was also announced: Bridget, who hasn’t been playable in a Guilty Gear game since 2008’s Guilty Gear XX Accent Core Plus.
Bridget marks the sixth addition to Guilty Gear Strive since its 2020 launch, preceded by Goldlewis Dickinson, Happy Chaos, Jack-O, Baiken, and Testament. They wield a giant yo-yo as a weapon, while also carrying a plush teddy bear that will throw out a few attacks of its own.
Bridget arrives in Guilty Gear Strive’s second season.
Guilty Gear Strive Season 2 was announced during the Evo 2022 Guilty Gear Strive tournament, which led all other games at the event with over 2,100 entrants. The season will include four characters, multiple stages, and more. A season pass will be available for $25 which will give access to all of the content as it releases, beginning with Bridget, two stages, and the second color pack on August 8.
Guilty Gear Strive is a 2D fighting game set in an alternate version of Washington DC, and it concludes the story of series protagonist Sol Badguy. The game was released in June 2021 for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC, and recently reached one million units sold since launch.
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OPPO Watch 3 Series Specifications and Functionality
Next week, OPPO will introduce a variety of wearables products in Smart Life’s new product launch conference scheduled for August 10, 19:00. At the conference, OPPO will introduce 10 new hardware devices including OPPO Smart Band 2, ENCO AIir 2i, new color matching of OPPO Pad Air, and Smart Camera, in addition to OPPO Watch 3 Series.
Among them, OPPO Watch 3 will bring the world’s first equipped with Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 wearable platform. About this new smartwatch, there are already very high-definition pictures online.
OPPO Watch 3 Pro
This time the OPPO Watch 3 Pro will bring two colorways, silver and black, the appearance is very designed sense, the dial and the watch body both use larger curved lines, looks very high class and more integrated, this and OPPO’s current flagship product Find series design some of the same direction.
OPPO Watch 3 Pro
OPPO Watch 3 Pro uses a 1.91-inch AMOLED LTPO square dial/display, 3D micro-arc hyperbolic body, and rotating crown design for ease of operating + a textured leather strap added a more luxurious feel.
OPPO Watch 3 and Watch 3 Pro
OPPO Watch 3 series is equipped with Snapdragon W5 to wear flagship chip and Apollo4 Plus sports flagship chip, standard with ECG, eSIM, NFC, and 5ATM water resistance, with 5 days full smart battery life or 15 days light smart battery life.
With OWW211/212/213 models, it supports eSIM technology with an independent eUICC chip, similar in size to its predecessor, and the ColorOS Watch system will also see an upgrade.
Functionally, there is an always-on display based on the LTPO feature, 20+ functions in the light smart mode, 80+ applications in the full smart mode, and supports Watch VOOC 3.0. Based on strengthening the functions of the previous generation, health detection adds blood vessel monitoring, etc.
The OPPO Band 2 has two colorways, black and silver. Among them, black comes with a black dial and black strap, while silver comes in the silver dial and half blue + half white strap.
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Intel updates the box for Core i9-12900K and i9-10980XE CPUs
Starting from September 4th, Intel will be changing its packaging for two of their premium CPUs from Alder Lake and Cascade Lake series.
Intel published a Product Change Notification (PCN) for two of their CPUs: i9-12900K and i9-10980XE. Both products will now come in the same-sized box. This means that build packaging will be unified and easier to ship in volume cross-generations.
One might have guessed that Core i9-10980XE series are no longer sold, but that’s not entirely true. However, the change to packaging appears just as rumors for next-gen Core-X/Xeon-X series amount.
The i9-12900K and 12900KS series come in a rectangular box with a large plastic wafer inside. This plastic wafer is actually a container for the CPU. It should be noted, however, that PCN was not issued for the KS-series, which will likely remain to be sold as is.
Intel Core i9-12900K packaging, Source: Intel
Such extraordinary design for the premium SKU packaging is nothing new to Intel, each generation gets a new design from hexagonal to rectangular designs, which differ from the mainstream series significantly.
Intel flagship consumer series boxes, Source: Intel
This is not the first time Intel is changing the packaging for its flagship consumer CPU series. The same thing happened with i9-10900K Comet Lake and Rocket Lake series. Interestingly, this change usually occurs 1-2 months ahead of launch, which is an indirect confirmation for Alder Lake being replaced with Raptor Lake. What is hard to understand is why is 10th Gen Core CPU being updated as well. Does this suggest Intel is releasing Sapphire Rapids Xeon Workstation series soon?
ASRock is no longer an exclusive AMD partner. Just a few years after the entering the GPU business and making Radeon cards, the company has now announced its first Intel GPU, also becoming one of the first companies to do so. This card is called Challenger ITX, and it is based on Intel ARC A380 GPU.
The company announced their card is a factory-overclocked model with a GPU clock of 2250 MHz, but as it turns out this clock is actually higher in real world tests. Even in stress test Furmark (often referred to as GPU power virus), the clock speed goes as high as 2300 MHz while it is 2450 MHz in games. One should note that this would be the same frequency as GUNNIR Photon OC model. Both cards are equipped with a single 8-pin power connector, but ASRock is not confirming the TDP for its SKU.
Under full load the fan speed goes up to 1683 RPM and temperature goes up to 85°C. The board power in Furmark is 54.9W, so less than Arc A380 reference TDP of 75W.
The card was demonstrated in synthetic tests and ASRock is providing some figures. It appears that the core is invalid because it was ended prematurely, but the 3DMark software is not listing Intel’s Advanced Performance Optimizations as enabled.
ASRock Arc A380 Challenger ITX in 3DMark, Source: ASRock
ASRock also provided gaming performance for a few titles, including popular AAA titles, and modern games utilizing DirectX12 API which in most cases is well optimized for Arc architecture.
Back in July, Samsung confirmed it would hold a big announcement event in the form of a new Galaxy Unpacked livestream in August. Well, August is here now, so that means you need to put this new Unpacked stream on your calendar and figure out how to watch it.
Great news: It’s easy!
Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2022 will take place on Aug. 10 at 9 am ET/6 am PT. You can watch it on:
We don’t know for sure yet what Samsung plans on showing, but all signs indicate at least one new foldable device. A recent leak pointed to the existence of follow-ups to last year’s Galaxy ZFold 3 and Z Flip 3 phones. Additionally, the official marketing text on Samsung’s website in advance of the event reads “A new way to flex is coming.”
Yeah, the hint isn’t subtle.
This event is taking place almost exactly one year to the day since the unpacked event where those two older foldables were unveiled. Samsung also showed off new additions to its galaxy-watch and Galaxy Buds lines at the same stream, so updates to those devices could show up at the new Unpacked, as well.
SEE ALSO:
Samsung’s Galaxy Z Flip 3 is not the future of phones
The only other prediction we can make right now is that, as always with foldables, don’t be surprised if the price tags are pretty hefty.
With the long school summer holiday well under way, you may need a bit of help keeping the kids entertained. From walkie-talkies and cameras to tablets, robot toys and fitness trackers, here are some of the best kid-aimed tech to keep the little (and not-so-little) ones occupied.
robot toys
SpheroMini – about £50
Sphero Mini robotic ball. Photograph: Bryan Rowe/Sphero
Lots of tech toys are fads but my longtime favorite has stood the test of time as a modern update to remote control fun. Sphero is a ball you control using a smartphone or tablet, and has hidden depths, with games and educational elements also available.
The mini Sphero ball is a lot of fun to drive around and small enough that overexuberant indoor excursions won’t result in broken furniture and scuffed-up paintwork. The Sphero Play app has games, while the Sphero Edu app is great at fostering creative learning.
Kids or big kids can learn to program, follow examples, get the robot to do all sorts of things, or go deeper and write some code for it in JavaScript. Higher-end versions such as the £190 BOLT take the educational elements to the next level, too.
tablets
Amazon Fire 7 Kids – about £110
Amazon Fire 7 Kids edition tablet. Photo: Amazon
If you would rather not lend your precious breakable phone or iPad to your little ones, Amazon’s practically indestructible Kids edition tablets could be just the ticket.
The cheapest and smallest Fire 7 has just been updated and is available in a range of bright-coloured cases with a pop-out stand. If your offspring do manage to break it, Amazon will replace it for free under its two-year “worry-free” guarantee.
It does all the standard tablet things such as movies, apps, games, a web browser if you want it, and parental controls to lock it, set time limits and age filters. There’s even an option restricting access to curated child-safe sites and videos but it doesn’t have access to the Google Play store, only Amazon’s app store.
The Kids edition comes with a one-year subscription to Amazon Kids+ (£3 to £7a month afterwards), which is a curated collection of child-friendly text and audio books, movies, TV shows and educational apps.
The larger £140 Fire HD 8 and £200 Fire HD 10 are available in Kids versions, too, if you want something bigger, or Amazon’s new Kids Pro tablets start at £100 with additional features aimed at school-age children.
Alternatives include LeapFrog’s various educational tablets, which are fine for younger children, or hand-me-down or refurbished iPads (from £150) in robust cases, which can be locked down with some parental controls.
cameras
VTech Kidizoom Duo 5.0 – about £39
VTech Kidizoom Duo 5.0 kids’ camera in pink. Photograph: VTech
Before the advent of smartphones, standalone cameras were the way we visually documented our lives, and they still can be a bit of creative fun and inspiration for kids.
The VTech Kidizoom Duo 5.0 is a “my first digital camera” of sorts made of rugged plastic and simple in operation, which VTech reckons is suitable for three- to nine-year-olds. It captures 5MP photos of reasonable quality and can shoot from the back for selfies, too, all viewable on a 2.4in screen.
The optical viewfinder helps them line up the shot, which they can transform with fun filters and effects. It even shoots video, too. The kid-centric nature of it might turn off older children but every award-winning photographer has to start somewhere before the smartphone takes over.
It needs an SD card for storage and takes four AA batteries at a time, and chews through them fast, so buy some rechargeables to help save money and the planet.
For older children, rugged and waterproof action cams could be the way to go, shooting video and photos. Budget no-brand cams cost from about £80 but secondhand or refurbished models from the big boys such as GoPro and DJI go for about £100 and on eBay and elsewhere.
fitness trackers
Garmin Vivofit Jr 3 – from about £55
Garmin Vivofit Jr 3 Star Wars edition. Photograph: Garmin
Your child may not need any encouragement to tear about the place but if you are after a gadget to “gamify” and reward their activity – as well as giving them a smartwatch-esque gadget to play with – the Garmin Vivofit Jr 3 could be a winner for ages four and up.
Its watch-like form comes in various themes and designs, including with various Star Wars, Marvel and Disney characters, with custom watchfaces to choose from. The user-replaceable coin-cell battery lasts a year, so you don’t have to worry about charging it. Water-resistance to 50 meters means swimming should be no problem either.
It tracks steps, activity and sleep with motivational messaging. It has mini games to play once your child has hit their goals, and can all be managed from a parent’s phone or tablet, so you can keep an eye on their data. Parents can even set goals, competitions with their own activity levels, chore reminders and tasks that can earn virtual coins for them to trade for rewards with you.
It is button-operated rather than touchscreen, and the backlight doesn’t stay on long to preserve the battery.
If you are a user of Google’s Fitbit trackers yourself, then the firm’s Ace 3 (£50) means you can compete on activity, but it needs charging every seven or so days. Other cheaper adult-focused fitness trackers such as the Xiaomi Mi Smart Band 6 (about £29) may be better for older children.
Walkie-talkies are a great replacement for phones, allowing kids and big kids to keep in touch without fear of fees or smashed screens.
There are plenty of child-centric options available with various character themes but basic units usually work better. Motorola’s T42 Talkabout comes in various colors and multipacks.
They are simple to set up, with a pairing button and multiple channel selection to find a clear one. Once going, just push to talk, even over long distances. Their quoted 4km range might be a bit ambitious but they should be good for at least 500 meters in urban environments, or much further in the open air.
They take three AAA batteries each, which last about 18 hours of talking or roughly three to four days in active use, so you might need a small army of rechargeable batteries.
They have a belt clip and loop for hooking to a carabiner (metal loop) or similar, and are fairly rugged, too, so should survive being launched across a room or two.
Nestling’s camouflage walkie-talkies (about £26) are also a popular choice but there are lots of choices under £30 available on the high street.
Meta has just released the third version of its AI-powered Chatbots and it’s calling out users to speak to it directly from now.
This was definitely a fresh update that we’re not complaining about for obvious reasons. Remember, we’re sure we along with the rest of the world are tired of hearing of the metaverse, AR, and VR technology, and how the firm plans on altering Instagram’s algorithm further.
The new launch is dubbed BlenderBot3 and it’s a continuation of the previous version of the product.
So, if you happen to be curious about how exactly you can communicate, well, head on over to the blenderbot.ai website and ask any question that your heart desires.
You can best see this as your customized search engine that is available round the clock to help you out by answering any queries that you may be seeking answers to.
If you simply wish to chat with it, well, that’s great. But those willing to ask questions will not only be blessed with answers but also the sources through which those answers were obtained so it’s definitely a win-win situation in that regard.
Hence, if you’re happy with the outcome great but if not, well you can search further with the references provided.
But with all the good comes one negative aspect that we’d like to discuss. And that’s related to who is allowed to talk with Meta’s new chatting bot. For now, the product is restricted to audiences in the US.
Some people have tried to disguise their locations in the United Kingdom with VPNs but have made unsuccessful attempts at using the chatbot. But in case you do find a VPN that manages to bypass the location barrier, then that’s great.
When we look at past records related to AI-driven chatbots, we don’t necessarily see a seamless track history related to its use. Many members of the public who have interacted with them have called it a risky business while others weren’t satisfied with their experiences.
In 2016, Microsoft first made heads turn with the release of its chatbot affiliated with Twitter which was dubbed Tay. Unfortunately, it was hijacked but the whole concept revolves around Tay learning more about users through simple chats.
A lot of the responses that users received were bombarded with negativity, hate, and spam so that wasn’t a great ending. And just 16 hours after the launch, it was turned off. Moreover, the tweets that were generated were all so negative and racist, not to mention homophobic and controversial.
One thing good about Meta’s new release is that there are much fewer chances of it getting hijacked as the product doesn’t repeat comments made by users to it. Instead, the whole focus of its functioning has to do with information fed into its systems by researchers beforehand.
Could this be the next digital assistant to users in today’s fast-paced modern world? Well, we’re not quite sure about that yet as Meta is working on addressing flaws that come its way. But we feel the attempt is a great one.
This is where users are going to come in handy. Meta revealed how the product is designed to help gain feedback for its next release so that any concerns users have can be addressed the right way, providing the best information from the most relatable sources.
If you happen to be a developer, well, you can feel free to glance over its mechanics and underlying codes that the firm has shared through ParlAI.
Read next: Meta’s New Threat Report Highlights Its Great Efforts To Combat Scam Networks, Trolls, And Brigades Around The World
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