Chinese smartphone maker Vivo teases Super FlashCharge tech that can charge a 4,000mAh phone in 13 minutes

Vivo might not be a familiar brand in this part of the world, but it’s one of the Chinese smartphone companies that have been pushing the boundaries in terms of what phones look like and how they perform. You might be more familiar with its sister brand: OnePlus. (Vivo, OnePlus, and OPPO are all owned by Chinese multinational corporation BBK.) But we digress, our focus is on the latest technology Vivo is bringing to the market, which blows what its sister company OPPO has done with the Find X Lamborghini Edition. A Vivo product manager posted on Chinese blogging site Weibo its new Super FlashCharge 120W technology. It promises to fully charge a 4,000mAh phone battery in just 13 minutes. As we mentioned, the special edition Find X, with its Super VOOC charger, can fill up its 3,400mAh battery in 35 minutes.

The video only shows a phone charging from around 10 to 14 percent in 16 seconds, so we can’t say yet how true the claims are. But the company is set to go into detail about this technology at next week’s Mobile World Congress Shanghai, where it’ll also unveil its first 5G device.

Source: The Verge

Netflix Hack Day project brings phone vibrations to action sequences

One of the newest projects that came out of Netflix’s recent Hack Day event lets you feel the action right in the palm of your hands. If you watch shows with a smartphone, that is. Hans van de Bruggen and Ed Barker created Project Rumble Pak, which explores how haptics can be used to enhance the Netflix viewing experience on smartphones. It reminds us a bit of what Sony did with a setting on its phone that caused the device to vibrate while playing games or watching videos. The creators made use of Voltron: Legendary Defender to demonstrate how this feature can work. Using technology from Immersion Corporation, they synchronized the content with haptic effects so that “every explosion, sword clank, and laser blast, you get force feedback to amp up the excitement.”

Hack Days at Netflix are a big thing at the company because it helps bring together employees from its different departments to “explore new ideas and experiment with emerging technologies.”

‘Queer Eye’ is coming back for Season 4 and 5

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In case you missed the news, Netflix has renewed the Emmy-winning unscripted series for two more seasons. The fourth season is coming back pretty soon—July 19^th, to be exact. Meanwhile, the fifth season will start production next week and will be available on the streaming service in 2020. For the fourth season, The Fab Five will be coming back to Kansas City, while the fifth season will see them heading to Philadelphia. The show still stars the charismatic group of makeover experts: Antoni Porowski (Food & Wine), Bobby Berk (Interior Design), Jonathan Van Ness (Grooming), Karamo Brown (Culture), and Tan France (Fashion).

Source: Variety

Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge will get fewer security updates

The Samsung Galaxy S7 and S7 Edge have been taken off the list of phones that will receive quarterly security updates from the company. These two models have been downgraded into the tier that receives “regular” security updates. Samsung currently has three tiers for its security updates. The top level offers “Monthly Security Updates,” which are for the latest Galaxy smartphones until the likes of the Galaxy A8 and S8. The second tier is for “Quarterly Security Updates,” which is mostly for its mid-range devices. And the third tier, which is where the three-year-old S7 and S7 Edge phones have been relegated to, have a lot of the retired products. Strangely enough, the Galaxy S7 Active, which was released around the same time as the S7 and S7 Edge, still get the monthly security updates. As for those who own the other S7 models, you will still get security updates, but expect these to come less frequently.