Just recently, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk said from now on all the cars coming from his company would have the needed tech to drive themselves into the future… in the near future. To prove his point, Tesla published a video showing a Tesla Model S navigating through Silicon Valley traffic on its own while a pitiful human manned the driver’s seat strictly “for legal reasons.”
And once it safely reached its destination, the driver – excuse me, the passenger – got out, walked away and the car parallel parked itself. Impressive. Welcome to the future, right? Actually, big deal! Because automated trucking outfit Otto, which was recently purchased by Uber, just rolled a whole semi full of Budweiser down 120 miles of freeway from Fort Collins Colorado, through Denver, to Colorado Springs, with, essentially, no one at the wheel.
No, the driver didn’t pull a Homer and doze off only to have a secret automatic driving system take over, although, that’s not very far off from how the system actually works. In truth, the drone ghost beer truck did all its own driving on the open highway while the human driver took over while on city streets. How’d it do it? A lot of sensors, radar, cameras, GPS, and computing power. Otto claims it’s self-driving semi tech is very safe. So far… so good.
The iPhone 8 will need to be very, very special
A lot of people are saying they’re holding off on upgrading to a new iPhone until next year when Apple is expected to reveal a 10-year anniversary model with all sorts of cool new tech including the possibility of an edge-to-edge display. Except one new phone making the rounds with just such a screen isn’t a concept iPhone, it’s a real phone, the Xioami Mi MIX, and it goes on sale in November in China. And there’s more to the phone than just that pretty 6.4-inch screen.
The Mi MIX also features a ceramic body, something that Apple has been rumored to be considering for the next iPhone. The MIX also packs a 16-gigapixel camera, six gigs of ram, up to 256gb of memory, a Snapdragon 821 heartbeat, wireless charging, hi-res audio, and a huge 4,400 milliamp hour battery, which it will probably need. Cost is $600 for the top 256gb model, which is well below the cost of iPhone 7 Plus. But again: only in China. At least for now.
Make a Note: Samsung Galaxy S8 is just around the corner
Hot on the heels of Samsung saying that yes, there actually will be a Galaxy Note 8 despite the somewhat toasty reputation of the Note 7, word now is that the new flagship phone, the Galaxy S8, is on track for a February reveal. Rumors have been all over the place – it was either going to be delayed due to the Note 7 fiasco, or it was going to be released early – also due to the Note 7 fiasco.
But Samsung reportedly told a South Korean news outlet the rollout would take place as planned at Mobile World Congress in February of next year. The S8 is rumored to be packing 6gb of RAM, a 5.5-inch 4K AMOLED display and presumably every other trick in Samsung’s book. It’ll be premium priced, but if you trade in that time bomb Note 7 now, they might give you a substantial discount when the S8 arrives. We recommend you take advantage of that.
