Huawei shows 3rd folding phone
HUAWEI unveiled a 5G folding smartphone with an 8-inch-wide screen on Monday as Chinese smartphone vendors show off their products at the Mobile World Congress Shanghai 2021.
Huawei Technologies Ltd said the Mate X2, its third folding phone, has crisper visuals and better sound for movies and games. It runs on Huawei’s most advanced processor chip, the Kirin 9000.
The phone offers “a truly immersive experience,” the president of Huawei’s consumer unit, Richard Yu, said at a launch event which was broadcast online. The Mate X2 price will start at 17,999 yuan (US$2,785), Yu said.
The high-end model shows Huawei’s ambition to develop its smartphone business despite facing strict US tech bans.
Huawei, China’s first global tech brand, was battered after being put on an export blacklist by then US President Donald Trump in 2019 supposedly because of security risk, an accusation the company denies. Huawei sold its budget-priced Honor smartphone brand in November to focus resources on higher-end models.
Oppo unveiled its 125W flash charger that can fully charge a smartphone battery within 20 minutes. Oppo has teamed up with over 40 firms like NXP and Anker on charging technologies for various industries, including smartphones, consumer electronics, automotive and the Internet of Things. Oppo and chip designer NXP have an agreement on in-vehicle wireless charging services.
Realme, with more than 70 million users globally, sold more than 42.4 million smartphones in 2020 with a 65 percent growth year on year. It is the only major smartphone brand with over 50 percent growth rate in the year of the pandemic. It aims to expand into high-end market with Realme GT product line in 2021.
NASA scientists on Monday unveiled first-of-a-kind home movies of last week’s’ daredevil Mars rover landing, vividly showing its supersonic parachute inflation over the red planet and a rocket-powered hovercraft lowering the science lab on wheels to the surface.
The footage was recorded on Thursday by a series of cameras mounted at different angles of the multi-stage spacecraft as it carried the rover, named Perseverance, through the thin Martian atmosphere to a gentle touchdown inside a vast basin called Jezero Crater.
Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for science, called seeing the footage “the closest you can get to landing on Mars without putting on a pressure suit.”
The video montage was played for reporters tuning in to a news briefing webcast from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles.
NASA also presented a brief audio clip captured by microphones on the rover after its arrival that included the murmur of a light wind gust — the first ever recorded on the fourth planet from the sun.
But it was the three-minute film footage from the spacecraft’s perilous, self-guided ride through Martian skies to touchdown that JPL’s team found particularly striking.
“These videos, and these images are the stuff of our dreams,” Al Chen, head of the descent and landing team, told reporters. JPL Director Mike Watkins said engineers spent much of the weekend “bingewatching” the footage.
The video, filmed in color at 75 frames a second, shows action in fluid, vivid motion from several angles, the first such imagery ever recorded of a spacecraft landing on another planet, Wallace said.
One of the most dramatic moments is of the red-and-white parachute being shot from a canon-like launch device into the sky above the rover as the spacecraft is hurtling toward the ground at nearly two times the speed of sound. The chute springs upward, unfurls and fully inflates in less than two seconds, with no evidence of tangling within its 3.2km of tether lines, Chen said.
A downward-pointing camera shows the heat shield falling away and a sweeping vista of the butterscotch-colored Martian terrain, appearing to shift back and forth as the spacecraft sways under the parachute.
Seconds later, an upwardpointed camera captures the rocket-powered “sky-crane” vehicle, newly jettisoned from the parachute, its thrusters firing but the propellant plumes invisible to the human eye while lowering the rover to a safe landing spot on a harness of tethers.
A separate camera shows the lowering of the six-wheeled rover from the vantage point of the sky crane, looking downward as Perseverance dangles from its cable harness just over the surface with streams of dust billowing around it at touchdown. The sky crane is then seen flying up and away from the landing site after the harness cables are cut.