Users won’t flip for Samsung’s new phone
There is a lot of interest in the new Samsung Galaxy flip phone. It’s cheaper than the last model, not a difficult target. As mentioned previously it opens like the old flip phones, not like a book. The hinge is better, as is the dust protection, but with this design you will always be swiping your finger across the fold. It is no larger than a regular smartphone so that wow of a bigger screen is not there anymore. At the price point I just can’t see how this is an attractive unit to get.
If you want a regular-sized smartphone that fits in half the space then it may be attractive but that market will not be a huge one. There has also been recent testing by users that show the screen is not in fact “glass”, at least not a very protective version. Using a series of low hardness picks, popular YouTuber Zack Nelson attacked the screen leaving it covered with scratches and gashes easily repelled by Corning Gorilla Glass. If you do get one, I recommend you also get a decent, folding screen protector.
In related news, Samsung is better positioned to supply their customers in the near future than Apple, due to spreading their production facilities across Asia instead of concentrated in China. This is yet another impact of the coronavirus still very active in China and increasingly elsewhere. Samsung makes half of their phones in Vietnam, largely unaffected by the current crisis. Not a surprise is that Xiaomi and Huawei have also been affected by their reliance on Chinese manufacturing.
Those that have been reading my articles long enough know that I am a long-time fan of Borland products and in particular Delphi. On the 14th of this month Delphi turned 25. Back then Windows was version 3.11 with 95 in Beta. Microsoft Visual C++ and Borland’s C++ products were available as was Visual Basic 3.0 with their form builder. At this point only VB had some kind of easy form designer but it used interpreted code, needed a runtime and was a bit slow compared to others.
Enter Borland Delphi with a great Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and with compliable Object Pascal behind it. Those that saw it for the first time experienced the wow factor. It seemed to solve the issues with Visual Basic and was stable in version 1.0. Delphi even had access to Windows API, something VB did not have at the time. It required no runtime, compilation was fast and the development process was simplified. It had a few programming quirks I’ve mentioned in the past but they were easy to learn.
Delphi 1-3 were 16-bit, with versions 4-7 32-bit. It lost its way for a while with the .NET version, soon after abandoned. In more modern times Borland Delphi was bought out by Embarcadero now up to version 10.3 Rio, that version now over a year old. Even now the IDE is very similar to version 1.0 and one of the great strengths from the early days was the debugger that allowed programmers to trace through most functionality. Microsoft’s influence was so strong however that Delphi never grew to a huge user base, especially in the corporate world. In the end the .NET platform eroded the advantages of Delphi but it still has a special place in my developer’s heart.
The world continues to leak personal information. Hundreds of thousands of sensitive patient photos and records were exposed by the vendor NextMotion containing profile images of patients involved with plastic surgery. ClearSky claimed it has evidence of years of hacking by Iran breaking into many companies worldwide, accessing unpatched servers. PhotoSquared exposed 100,000 records on a public facing platform. Israel’s Likud party leaked info on over 6 million citizens after a poor update, with names, addresses and other personal info made public. Boston Children’s Hospital was infected with ransomware. Estee Lauder exposed millions of internal documents to the internet including internal middleware information. This is rapidly becoming a typical week as malware attacks continue to rise.
The latest update on self-driving cars remains at the don’t take your eyes off the road stage as accidents still occur and training data sets still contain a large percentage of mistakes. For example, the team at Roboflow recently looked at the Udacity data set and found 33% of the images had errors including missing labels, sizing problems and more. If you trained your new car to run with such an incomplete data set the results could be dangerous. Roboflow fixed the data set and issued their own version. Udacity covered themselves by stating that the data set is for educational purposes and for cars on a closed track. While it may be possible in the future, no current data set is flawless so don’t set your destination and drop off to sleep.