There’s significant news in the Waymo-Uber self-driving tech court battle regarding Travis Kalanick, who just stepped down as CEO of rideshare giant Uber. Legal documents suggest Kalanick knew that ex-Google/Waymo car-tech guy Anthony Levandowski had defected to Uber with hard drives containing Waymo tech secrets before Uber finalized their deal to buy Otto, the self-driving semi-truck company.
Levandowski was eventually fired from Uber after they said he failed to comply with their internal investigation into the whole matter, but the new filing shows that Kalanick knew about the Waymo data drives before they bought up Otto for $300 million last August. Uber had done it’s best to separate themselves from Levandowski’s actions, but if these accusations are true, it could give Waymo – and Google/Alphabet – a huge advantage in the case.
It’s a buck!*****
Hate getting that big cell phone bill each month? We certainly do, so how about if your cell phone bill was, say, a dollar? And that dollar was for a whole year? Too good to be true, right? Well, of course it is, sort of, but that’s exactly what Virgin Mobile is offering customers in order to lure them away from the big carriers. So what’s the catch – or catches? Of course, there are a few: first off, it’s for Apple iPhones only.
Video playback is 480P over the network, so no HD, and once you eat through 23gb of data in a month, expect to get throttled. Also, there’s no family plan, and you have to sign up for auto-pay, because, of course, there are taxes and fees to pay as well. And after your “dollar” year, Virgin is gonna hit you up for $50 a month. However, Virgin does have some interesting perks – it’s a big company, of course – so hit the link for all the fine print and details on Virgin Mobile’s dollar plan.
OnePlus 5 equals $540
Chinese cell maker OnePlus has been making waves as of late, and we’ve just gotten our mitts on the new OnePlus 5, their latest and greatest and what could reasonably be called their flagship phone. Just check out the goods: Snapdragon 835 brains – same as the Samsung Galaxy S8 – but it’s also packing 8 gigs of RAM, more than pretty much anything else out there. There’s also 128gb of memory and the 5.5-inch screen is big, sharp and colorful.
The OnePlus 5 also boasts a dual-lens camera system just like the iPhone 7 Plus, and the phone runs on Android Nougat with OnePlus’ “Oxygen” OS over the top, and it works really well. Best aspect of the OnePlus 5: the price. Just $540, which is way, way less than the top-shelf Android phones from the other guys. Our man Andy Boxall has been playing around with the phone for a while now, so check out his hands-on review video of the OnePlus 5 smartphone.
We’ve got more news on our Facebook page and YouTube channel, and be sure to tune in to this week’s DT podcasts: Close to the Metal (computers and such) on Tuesday, Trends with Benefits (general tech shenanigans) on Thursdays, and Between the Streams (movie and TV topics) every Friday.
