Samsung launches Galaxy Note8 PyeongChang 2018 Limited Edition smartphone

With Samsung being one of the major sponsors of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea, the company saw it fit to provide the athletes as well as the IOC staff with personalized Galaxy Note8 devices. The company gave over 4,000 units and this PyeonChang 2018 Olympic Games Limited Edition model features a shiny white back panel and a golden version of the five-ring Olympics logo at the back along with golden finish for the phone’s rim, buttons, and part of the S Pen. The phone comes preloaded with PyeongChang 2018 themed wallpapers and apps that are meant to “help cultivate the utmost Olympic Games experience.” Paralympians are also getting limited edition Galaxy Note8 but their phones will be coupled with cases that have the Paralympic Games logo.

Source: GSMArena

‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ sequel rumoured to start filming on May 28

The follow-up to the 2017 hit Spider-Man: Homecoming is coming back in 2019 and it seems director Jon Watts and his team will get back to work in a few months. According to unnamed sources closed to the production, filming will start on May 28, which gives this Sony-Marvel production more than a year before its expected July 5, 2019 release date. Its lead stars Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Jacob Batalon are all expected to reprise their roles.

Not much is known about the film’s plot but since this’ll be the first film after Avengers: Infinity War, we can expect it to delve into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and how Peter has to deal with being a junior in high school after fighting off Thanos with the rest of the Avengers. Rumour has it there will be filming taking place in London and Germany with some speculating Gwen Stacy is going to be a foreign exchange student. We’re sure to hear more in the coming months.

Source: ComicBook

Sony will reportedly launch Xperia XZ Pro at MWC 2018

Apparently Sony is not done releasing new smartphones, the Japanese company is set to release its flagship device at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona next month. What’s being dubbed as the Xperia XZ Pro, the phone will supposedly come with a 5.7-inch OLED screen with 4K resolution, slim bezels, and a “tall” aspect ratio (possibly an 18:9 aspect ratio). According to the rumours coming out of China, it’ll have a dual rear camera setup with an 18-megapixel shooter with 1.33μm pixel size paired with a 12-megapixel sensor with 1.38μm pixels. Its front shooter, on the other hand, will feature a 13-megapixel camera.

The phone is expected to run on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845 processor, 6GB of RAM, and up to 128GB of built-in storage. And like its predecessors, the Xperia XZ Pro is expected to be IP68 water and dust resistant, and will employ a 3,420mAh battery. Expected retail price in China is over CNY 6,000, which is close to CA$1,200 at current exchange rates.

Source: GSMArena

Microsoft's new A.I. can read and comprehend documents as accurately as humans

Big news from Microsoft regarding A.I. and Machine Learning. A team at Microsoft Research Asia reached the human parity milestone using the Stanford Question Answering Dataset, known among researchers as SQuAD. It’s a machine reading comprehension dataset that is made up of questions about a set of Wikipedia articles.

According to the SQuAD leaderboard, on Jan. 3, Microsoft submitted a model that reached the score of 82.650 on the exact match portion. The human performance on the same set of questions and answers is 82.304. On Jan. 5, researchers with the Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba submitted a score of 82.440, also about the same as a human.

The two companies are currently tied for first place on the SQuAD “leaderboard,” which lists the results of research organizations’ efforts. 

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