Technical Doctorz

LG’s next flagship hasn’t been announced yet, but as ever, the company likes to drip-feed nuggets of information about it in the lead-up to the full reveal. Today, we’ve learned that it will indeed be called the G8 ThinQ, and it’ll include a time-of-flight sensor as part of its front-facing camera array. (That likely explains the recent supposed render that showed two cameras in the phone’s display notch.) ToF sensors work by bouncing infrared light off subjects and can be used for 3D object recognition. This allows for secure face unlock and more accurate background blur in selfie portraits, as well as potentially having various AR applications. The sensor in the G8 ThinQ is Infineon’s REAL3 chip. LG isn’t saying much about how it’ll be used in the G8’s software, but promises to deliver “a new level of front camera capability in a smartphone.” LG isn’t the first company to ship a phone with a ToF sensor, and it’s likely we’ll see several more this year. The Honor View 20 has a r

A very strong holiday season for GoPro’s newest Hero 7 lineup of cameras has helped the camera maker turn its first quarterly profit since the third quarter of 2017, the company announced on Wednesday. GoPro pulled in $377 million in revenue in the fourth quarter of last year, and it walked away with a $32 million profit. This marks the second time GoPro has turned a profit since the third quarter of 2015, back before the company’s ill-fated attempt at entering the drone market. The Hero 7 Black was announced in September of last year. While it hews closely to the design of its two predecessors, the Hero 5 and Hero 6 Black, the company’s newest flagship offered a number of internal improvements and new features. GoPro had previously said that the Hero 7 Black was the company’s fastest-selling camera ever , and that momentum carried through the 2018 holiday season. Overall camera sales were up 20 percent in the fourth quarter of 2018 compared to the year prior. For the whole year, G

Tinder is still unstoppable. Match Group, Tinder’s parent company, announced its fourth quarter earnings today, in which it disclosed that Tinder added 1.2 million subscribers last year alone. That surge led the brand to close the year out with $805 million in revenue. That’s nearly as much as what the rest of Match’s dating brands, which include Match.com and OkCupid, pull in combined at $872 million. Match says most of Tinder’s revenue growth is thanks to Tinder Gold , which gives members certain limited features like more Super Likes per day, the ability to swipe around the world, and insight into who’s already liked them. Tinder has also made it a goal to focus on a younger demographic of 18 to 22-year-olds through Tinder U , the university-oriented portion of the app. The company is expanding outside the US with a focus on Japan, India, and South Korea, as well. Still, Match doesn’t seem content to accept Tinder as its golden goose. The company introduced a new app this year, c

Spotify is about to try to become a podcasting giant with two new acquisitions — and we have some suggestions for that — but first, it’s crossing an important milestone with its music streaming business. Today, for the very first time, the company is reporting that it’s turned a profit. That’s right: some 13 years and 96 million paid subscribers later, Spotify is finally making money. Unless you count that one time a complicated tax situation technically threw it into the black. “[F]or the first time in company history, Operating Income, Net Income, and Free Cash Flow were all positive,” reads a portion of Spotify’s financial announcement this morning . Specifically, the company made an operating profit of €94 million, or about $107 million. It’s possibly a good sign for the entire industry, not just Spotify, because Spotify is arguably leading that industry today. Those 96 million paid subscribers add up to nearly double Apple Music’s 50 million subscribers, and Spotify announc

To drum up hype for Crackdown 3 ’s release on February 15th (and as a consolatory gift for making gamers wait so long), Microsoft is making the original Crackdown free for all Xbox One owners. The game, which originally launched in 2010 on the Xbox 360, is backwards compatible on the Xbox One S and Xbox One X. If Crackdown is your first foray into the series, it’s a good place to start. Though its mission design and NPC dialogue haven’t aged all that well, you’ll still get at least a few hours of entertainment running around its open world, collecting orbs, and quickly scaling buildings with superhuman leaps. Microsoft last offered Crackdown for free during its XO18 fan festival in November 2018 when it announced backwards compatibility support for the title, adding that Crackdown 3 would be coming to Xbox Game Pass at launch. Speaking of Game Pass, Microsoft’s buffet-style subscription service for games, the company recently announced that Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Batman

Microsoft launched Office 2019 late last year , but if the company’s new ad campaign is anything to go by, the company would really prefer if you didn’t buy it. Instead, Microsoft’s latest ads pit sets of identical twins against each other to complete office-themed challenges, with the end result showing that the company feels you’d be much better off with a monthly or yearly subscription to Office 365 instead, as spotted by TechCrunch . The commercials are, put simply, extremely bizarre , with Microsoft intentionally going out of its way to show just how bad and inefficient the one-time payment version of its productivity suite is compared to the constant stream of updates it pushes to the subscription-based version. It’s the style of ad that you’d assume Microsoft would use to show Office’s strengths compared to a competitor like Apple’s iWork suite or Google Drive, right down to the heavily skewed tasks that of course favor a specific side. But it’s dramatically more bafflin

Last year, Flickr announced a new pricing plan: users would have to pay $50 for a Pro membership, or be limited to 1,000 images. Those users who opted not to pay and who were over the limit would have those additional images deleted by February 5th. Those users will have a bit more time: USA Today reports that Flickr is now saying it has extended the deletion deadline until March 12th. Last year, rival site SmugMug acquired Flickr from Yahoo , saying it would leave it as a standalone community, and that it would get a bit more attention than Verizon / Oath gave it. The first big changes came back in November , when Flickr unveiled its new membership model: users would have until January 8th to upgrade to a $50 Pro account, and at that time, would not be permitted to upload any additional images if they had more than 1,000 images on the site. On February 5th, those over-the-limit users who hadn’t upgraded and who hadn’t downloaded their archives would have their photos deleted, st

Spotify announced today that the company plans to spend up to $500 million on podcast-related acquisitions. The first purchases in that journey are Gimlet Media, which makes Reply All and other popular shows, and Anchor, which allows anyone to easily create their own podcasts. This is huge news for the growing podcast industry, as it’s already expected to generate nearly $700 million in revenue by 2020. Spotify made its name as a music app, but now CEO Daniel Ek says the company is interested in not only being a listening platform for any podcast, but also creating its own exclusive releases. Suffice it to say, Spotify wants to be a big player in the podcast space and is heavily investing to fill that role. Before it’s a podcast behemoth, though, the company needs to work on its signature app. Here’s what Spotify needs to do before it can be the greatest place to listen to and possibly create podcasts. Clearer separation of podcasts and music First and most obviously, Spotify ne

A leaked promotional image may have just given us our first look at Samsung’s rumored upcoming true wireless earbuds. In the images posted by WinFuture , the “Galaxy Buds” (as a trademark application and Bluetooth certification suggest they’ll be called) can be seen sitting on the rear of what appears to be a Galaxy S10 handset . This positioning might not be a coincidence. According to an earlier rumor from SamMobile , the unannounced S10 will be able to wirelessly charge other devices using a technology called “PowerShare.” It’s a similar feature to what we saw with the Huawei Mate 20 Pro and its FreeBuds 2 Pro Wireless earphones. Much as the Galaxy Watch wasn’t Samsung’s first smartwatch, the Galaxy Buds won’t be its first true wireless earbuds (hello 2016’s Gear IconX ). Instead, they’re another step toward unifying much of the company’s lineup under the Galaxy brand, and away from the Gear branding of yesteryear. At least the Gear VR isn’t going anywhere … right, guys?

Google’s sister company Verily will open an opioid treatment facility in Ohio. The company plans to work with local hospitals to create a “tech-enabled campus” that collects information and analytics in hopes of improving outcomes for patients. The opioid epidemic is the deadliest drug overdose crisis in American history. Dayton, Ohio — where the new center will open — has been hit especially hard and called the opioid “ overdose capital of the nation .” The new nonprofit, called OneFifteen, will offer both in-patient and out-patient services and will use “a variety of means” to track patient behavior, Danielle Schlosser, senior clinical scientist of behavioral health at Verily, told CNBC . “You could imagine something as simple as people answering a survey or more sophisticated technology to gain insight of who that person is, what they’re encountering in their environment,” Schlosser said. The project is just one of Verily’s many health endeavors, which also include spoons for