Autoblog recently went to Japan to drive cars, ride trains, and talk to carmakers about automotive history and the future of mobility. This video is part of a larger in a series of special reports from Japan. YOKOHAMA, Jap…

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The need to use proprietary Lightning cables with your iPhone creates some complications, including for external batteries — you’ll have to carry a separate cable just to top up your power pack. We can’t guarantee that Apple will solve the problem…

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Last month, MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe announced that surge pricing would soon go into effect, charging customers a little extra for movies and showtimes that are especially popular. That added fee, which MoviePass is calling Peak Pricing, starts rolli…

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Trade war begins to bite

Despite signs that Tesla is beginning to turn the corner on production, it faces a new set of woes tomorrow.

Unless China and the USA call the whole trade war off, North American manufacturers Tesla and Ford will face a 40 percent tariff when import restrictions go into effect tomorrow.

China has made it easier for non-US vehicles to be imported, reducing the tariff on those from 25 percent to 15 percent, increasing the pressure on American manufacturers.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Tesla outlets in Shanghai said that stocks “are running low”. The dealerships will have to raise prices on the already pricey vehicles.

The same newspaper said that China and Mexico will exact tariffs on provolone and mozzarella cheeses.

US manufacturers have put their overstocked cheese in refrigerators, hoping the financial temperature will rise above freezing and they can start selling their products to Mexico and China again.

The expected chaos of the continuing trade wars on electronic supply chains – wars initiated by the US president, and including former allies the European Union and Canada, have yet to emerge.

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Qantas passengers who travel through Sydney Airport will be among the first groups of travelers to use facial recognition in automated check-ins, bag drop, lounge access and plane boarding. The system will ultimately allow officials to process travel…

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After fully charging the iRoar as soon as it arrived, we have connected the speaker via USB to our computer, in order to try out the Dashboard but also to check for the latest firmware updates. The software has updated the speaker firmware in about a minute and we were ready to rock! After listening plenty of clips on YouTube, some TV shows and the Death Wish movie with Bruce Willis, we were quite surprised how loud the speaker can get. After enabling Roar mode, everything got boosted, including the bass effects, which is a treat during action scenes. The speaker can deliver when playing games as well, thanks to the multitude of drivers (active (subwoofer driver and the two frontal tweeter drivers) and passive (two radiators on the side)).

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Samsung’s projected operating profit for April to June of 2018 is around $700 million more than its profit from the same period last year. At $13.2 billion, though, it’s still going to be much smaller than the $14 and the $14.4 billion profit it post…

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It’s no secret that we love Fortnite’s 4-player “Playground” mode. Whether you just need a bit of training or want to experiment with the game’s features in creative ways, after a delayed launch it’s there for you — at least for another week. Epic p…

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The AORUS K7 will have to do a great job to set itself apart from the pack, and it does make a good first move. Swaying away from plastic for the top fascia, the K7 offers a metal one which looks and feels quite premium. Things like the highly adjustable feet stands, and on-the-fly controls do also help its push to differentiate itself.

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If you’ve been wanting a life-sized replica of Star Wars’ BB-8, Sideshow Collectibles will soon have you covered. The company just announced its BB-8 Life-Size Figure, a 37-inch tall replica of the adorable droid that appeared in Star Wars: The Force…

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Can open/close the garage door

Thanks to an over-the-air software update, Tesla’s Model 3 finally got the “Summon” feature which was already available on the Model S and the Model X cars.

According to a Tweet from none other than Elon Musk, which came as a response to a Tweet from Tesla’s official Twitter account, Tesla Model 3 will now be able to get in and out of the garage without a driver at the wheel. The feature can also be linked to garage doors, allowing it to open and close as it starts the autonomous parking process.

Note, no one is in the car or controlling remotely. Car is driving entirely by itself.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 5, 2018

Elon Musk was keen to confirm that no one was at the wheel or that the car was controlled remotely.

Tesla had a hard time with Model 3 which cost the company a lot and has only recently reached the goal of making 5000 Model 3 cars in seven days. Those 5000 Model 3s are a big part of Tesla’s milestone of 7000 cars a week.

The Tesla Model 3 Summon update started rolling out last month, together with the WiFi access, as it has previously relied only on LTE for updates.

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NGD Systems has announced its second-generation SSDs that feature compute capabilities. The Catalina 2 drives come in both 2.5-inch/U.2 and add-in-card form-factors, and are aimed at high-density servers for artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and computer vision (CV) server applications. The drives feature 16 TB – 32 TB capacities depending on the form-factor and use 3D TLC NAND memory.

On a high level, NGD’s Catalina 2 drives are NVMe 1.3-compliant SSDs featuring a PCIe 3.0 x4 interface and based on Toshiba’s BICS3 3D TLC NAND memory. It is noteworthy that NGD’s architecture supports any 3D TLC flash and is 3D QLC ready, so the manufacturer can adopt any type of flash and is not dependent on its supplier. In fact, the AIC versions of the drives rely on M.2 modules that can be switched at any time. U.2/2.5-inch Catalina SSDs will be available in 4 TB, 8 TB, and 16 TB configurations, whereas add-on-cards will support maximum capacity of 32 TB. Peak read/write performance of the Catalina 2 drives can be as high as 3.9 GB/s, but this is not the main selling point of these SSDs. As for power consumption, the U.2 is speced for 12 W (which is in-line with requirements of enterprise-grade 2.5-inch storage devices), while AIC consumes up to 13 W.

Just like in case of the original Catalina drives launched in early 2017, the key features of the Catalina 2 are in-storage processing capabilities (In-Situ Processing), patented Elastic FTL (Flash Translation Layer) algorithm, and a strong LDPC-based ECC (since it is QLC ready, it must feature a strong ECC). The NGD Catalina 2 are based on a recent Xilinx FPGA featuring several general-purpose ARM Cortex-A53 cores along with programmable transistors, and flexible I/O capabilities. The FPGA runs a micro-OS based on Linux to perform in-storage processing along with flash management, and ECC tasks.

Processing data on an SSD enables to perform relatively simple tasks (e.g., search, analyze, etc.) without moving massive amounts of data to host CPU or over a network, which greatly reduces loads on data buses and networks, therefore speeding up processing while reducing overall power consumption of a data center. Because workloads vary greatly, NGD does not like to talk about raw performance numbers of its drives because their value for the end clients does not necessarily depend on it.

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So the big trend recently in mechanical keyboards has been optical switches. You have even seen companies like Razer jumping on just this past week. I’ve had a few in the office testing like the Bloody B975 that I reviewed a few weeks ago. But there is one keyboard that is taking a different approach. Its called the Wooting One. It’s an optical keyboard as ell and its been out for a while. They actually have their Kickstarter live right now for the full sized Wooting Two. Anyhow, I have been testing the TKL sized Wooting One for a while now. It uses Flaretech optical switches and with those, they are able to offer a full analog input experience. What that means is where other keyboard switches are just on or off, these are like a gas pedal and can detect input through the entire range. For most things, you will use them in a normal way, but in some games, you can use them to get a better control. So today I’m going to check out what the whole Wooting experience is all about and see how their keyboard stands out.

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Mistel Keyboards carved out a name for the brand with their MD600 Barocco, a 60% form factor, split keyboard that was built so precisely that it could be easily combined back together to be a single-piece keyboard for all intents and purposes. Today, we take a look at the RGB version of the same that adds even more more on-board functionality and more Cherry MX switch options.

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DrinkBox Studios released the stylized first-person dungeon crawler Severed as a PS Vita exclusive back in April 2016, but the game moved on from Sony’s ailing handheld to iOS by year’s end. Yet two years later, the title is making a triumphant retur…

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The market of USB 3.1 controllers is largely commanded by ASMedia and VIA Labs, who sell the lion’s share of USB 3.1 Gen 2 solutions either as standalone chips or as IP. However times may be changing, as there are two new kids on the block: Cypress with its 7-port USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller, and Zhaoxin with its ZX-200 chipset for its CPUs that supports USB 3.1 Gen 2 as well.

Cypress’s HX3PD USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller is designed primarily for multi-port USB hubs and displays featuring six USB 3.1 Gen 2 downstream ports (one with power delivery). The chip integrates everything necessary to build the aforementioned devices, including PHY, routing logic, dock management controller, USB-C bridge and so on. The product was demonstrated last month, so expect it to hit the market in the coming quarters. The HX3PD will compete against similar solutions and will not necessarily find its way inside PCs.

What will be used inside PCs is Zhaoxin’s ZX-200 chipset for the company’s SMIC KX-5000 and the Kaisheng KH-20000 processors. The core logic supports four PCIe 3.0 lanes, four SATA ports, a GbE controller, RGMII interface, two USB 3.1 Gen 2 connectors, three USB 3.1 Gen 1 headers, and six USB 2.0 ports. Zhaoxin says that its USB 3.1 Gen 2 controller has been developed entirely in-house and that it is the first of such controllers designed in China to get an interoperability certification from the USB Implementers Forum. In fact, the ZX-200 is probably among the most complex chipsets developed in China in general.

Zhaoxin introduced its ZX-200 chipset late last year, so it will likely be available in China shortly.

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Skype is catching up with pretty much every other chat program on the planet by finally adding read receipts. When someone has seen your message, their avatar will pop up below, so you can see at a glance how up to date they are with your conversatio…

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California’s Senate passed its own net neutrality-preserving bill, SB 822, but several amendments added on by the State Assembly’s Communications Committee headed by State Senator Miguel Santiago defanged the legislation. The bill’s author, State Sen…

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ZTE is fulfilling one of the US’ key demands in its attempt to avoid a renewed export ban. Days before a 30-day deadline, the Chinese tech giant has replaced a whole suite of executives, including its CEO. All of the new leaders are company veterans,…

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Open-world action RPG Anthem is finally set to arrive in February on PS4, PC and Xbox One. Bioware is getting gamers pumped by releasing a video of the gameplay demo it showcased at E3, including almost 20 minutes of footage. Better yet, the video is…

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