Technology is filled with all kinds of rumours, real and fabricated. It gives us a look at what might be and will be. All The News You Missed Overnight gathers the whispers all in one place to help you catch up.
Ever since the iPhone 4, Apple’s followed a kind of tick-tock process of updating its money-making iPhone. Tick: Recreate hardware and looks from the ground up. Tock: Tweak, tweak, tweak. After last year’s iPhone 6, 2015 is a tock year. And while there are some things to be excited about, cosmetics is definitely not one of them.
As to no one’s surprise, the upcoming iPhone 6S basically looks like an exact carbon copy of the the iPhone 6 — even down the exact width and thickness. But despite this doppelgänger status, looks aren’t everything. According to 9to5Mac’s Mark Gurman, a redesigned mounting board points to the authenticity of past rumours that the iPhone 6 would be receiving Force Touch (which are supposedly already in production).
In addition to Force Touch, the iPhone 6S will probably see increased LTE speeds with a new Qualcomm chip, effectively doubling the (sluggish by comparison) 150Mbps to a speedy 300Mbps. But don’t go celebrating those speeds quite yet. Individual performance will still depend heavily on your carrier, so… good luck with that. But a bit of genuine good news is a more compact motherboard may mean more room for a bigger battery, which never, ever a bad idea.
As far as the passing customer is concerned, it looks like the iPhone 6S won’t be anything special. But regardless, it will probably represent the very best smartphone Apple has ever made come when it launches this fall. [9to5Mac]
Body Control: A new patent issued by Google wants to turn your entire body into a remote control with a holographic interfaces. Palm of your hand? A dial pad. And so on and so on. It’s like Google Glass 2.0 where your body is the interface. [Quartz]
Freaking Lasers: Mark Zuckerberg gave a brief taste on exactly how Facebook intends to deliver its (problematic) Internet.org to the rest of the word. Answer: Lasers. This joins the worldwide connectivity fight with drones and also satellites as a way to get internet even the most remote parts of the world. [Facebook]
Accidentally Racist: Photo auto-tagging futures found in Flickr’s new app, and also the new Google Photos, are facing a bit of the problem — they’re racist as fuck. Both applications have misidentified black men and women in photos as “apes” and “gorillas”. These programs will, of course, get better and better overtime. Let’s hope they become a little more tolerant as well. [The Guardian]
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