Analyst: Apple's iPhone captures 103.6 % of smartphone profits in wake of Samsung Note fiasco

Analysts at BMO Capital Markets estimate that Apple captured 103.6 % of total smartphone industry profits in the wake of Samsung's monumental product recall for its faulty and now discontinued Galaxy Note 7 flagship. Samsung's profits are at 0.9%. BMO says that Apple also took more than 100 % of profits because a majority of vendores (i.e. LG, HTC) recorded losses on theri smartphone divisions this third quarter.

Samsung tried to steal the thunder from Apple's iPhone 7, they rushed their product to market and even bumped up the name to Note 7 (foregoing the Note 6). This backfired completely when Note 7 devices started exploding and causing fires. This propelled Samsung's brand into notoriety to the extent that no Note 7's were allowed on any airlines and the company recalled the product to the tune of $2 billion loss.

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‘Rogue One: A Star Wars Story’ rumoured to be ditching the iconic title crawl

While Rogue One: A Star Wars Story is completely immersed in the Star Wars world, it seems the film wants to set itself apart from its predecessors. According to Star Wars News Net, an anonymous source claims the new film will have an entirely new opening crawl. They claim it’ll open “in a way ‘different than the classic Star Wars films.’” While we don’t exactly know what that means, we don’t have to wait too long as it debuts in Canada on December 16.

Source: iDigitalTimes

Huawei outs Mate 9 with special edition Porsche Design version

Huawei is refreshing its Mate line of devices with the release of the new Mate 9. The phone, which just launched in Germany, features a massive 5.9-inch Full HD display and runs on Android 7.0 Nougat skinned by EMUI 5.0. It’s powered by a Kirin 960 octa-core processor, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of internal storage with microSD expansion, fingerprint reader, dual-band Wi-Fi connectivity, and 4,000mAh battery. Just like the P9 and P9 Plus, the Mate 9 carries dual rear-facing Leica-branded cameras. One is a 20-megapixel monochrome sensor and another is a 12-megapixel RGB sensor with f/2.2 with optical image stabilization. Its front-facing camera has an 8-megapixel sensor. The phablet will be coming to China and Europe first and retails for €699 (or roughly CA$1,030). There is no word yet if it’ll be coming this way but if it does, it makes for a compelling replacement for spurned Samsung Galaxy Note7 users.

A limited edition Porsche Design version, which retails for €1,395 (or around CA$2,070), was also unveiled. This version is smaller with a 5.5-inch 2K AMOLED display, same processor and OS, 256GB internal storage, 6GB of RAM, same camera setup, and battery capacity. Both phones also have USB Type-C port.

Source: Droid Life

Adobe makes it easier to edit speech with Project VoCo

Adobe’s new experimental project might change the way we look at, or rather listen to, speeches. Introduced at its annual MAX conference in San Diego, Project VoCo allows you to edit speech like you would a word document. And it isn’t just about editing existing recordings, you can even use the same voice model to create completely new recordings. Project VoCo just needs around 20 minutes of voice samples from a particular speaker. It’ll then analyze and break down this speech into phonemes, transcribe this, and create the voice model. According to TechCrunch, if you listen closely now, you’ll be able to hear when a word is changed but we won’t be surprised if there comes a time when you won’t be able to distinguish the actual recording from the edited/fake one.

Adobe didn’t use traditional speech synthesis technology with this but used what they call “voice conversion.” And it requires hardly any manual intervention. You can edit the auto-generated transcript but there is no need to set timestamps. The algorithms will figure this out themselves. While this could raise a lot of questions, especially since it’ll become harder to trust recordings now. It’s still a pretty cool technological advancement. Adobe won’t commit to shipping this technology but who knows if this’ll show up in any of their products? They’ve done a lot of that in the past.