Tech news can feel kind of serious and dystopian sometimes.
So let's lighten it up by heading to Mobile World Congress
in Barcelona and checking out some tech that's so wild and wacky,
it makes me slightly uncomfortable. Lenovo brought a new extra tall boy concept laptop
to MWC called the Thinkbook Flip.
But instead of rolling the display back down to normal size like the Thinkbook Plus shown at CES,
the Flip's 18 inch display folds in half backwards,
making this PC the perfect choice for battleship heads.
There's gotta be some battleship heads out there.
For multiple monitor heads, there's the Lenovo's dual screen concept,
a system that lets you attach extra displays to a laptop
through Lenovo's Magic Bay magnetic connector.
Lenovo went kind of wild with the concepts this year. They also had a yoga concept laptop with a solar panel
so it's powered by the sun. Yeah, everything is indirectly,
but this skips the middleman. There's also a solar powered battery bank
and after wondering what Lenovo's AI stick was
when it recently leaked, today I learned it has an NPU inside
that can connect to a poor disadvantaged regular PC
that was born with no AI processors at all.
Here you go. Go make some slop with your friends. But guys, that's just the beginning.
Chinese company Infinix showed off the Zero Series mini
tri-fold, a concept phone that makes way more sense
than other multi-fold designs because it can go from normal phone size
down to medium phone size and then down again to like a little GoPro type form factor.
Why is this the first time someone's thought of this?
What are we doing? Infinix also showed off a solar powered phone
and charging case that Mashable thinks is cool
because you can charge it by pointing a light at it,
which would be perfect for when I'm trapped in a cave and I don't wanna hold both my flashlight and my phone
so I can just point the flashlight at the phone. And I mean, problem solved at that point.
But to offset the usefulness of those concepts, Infinix also had a phone with a back that changes color
and makes a little drawing of a face to mimic the facial expression of a person
after their picture's taken. I don't know when this would ever be useful or wanted,
but the other stuff was cool. All right, what else? The Xiaomi 15 and 15 Ultra are phones that look and act
like fancy cameras and you can even attach modular lenses.
While the Xiaomi Buds 5 Pro are the first earbuds
with Qualcomm's S7 Pro chip and support for X-Pan.
So they can stream audio over Wi-Fi,
which is not the normal way to do that. That's weird.
Not as weird though as Samsung's flex gaming concept,
a handheld that folds in half.
Okay, that actually makes a lot of sense. I want that. Samsung's other concept, the asymmetric flip,
does not make any sense because it's literally just a Galaxy Z Flip, but worse.
What if we added another fold and kind of curled it?
Why? It's Mobile World Congress.
We're so wacky and different, not like those other tech conferences.
We have SUVs from BYD that can launch drones out of the roof.
So anyone can feel like the bad guys in a chase scene.
I won't let you escape. We're gonna get them, kids.
Yay! Seems like Google has finally blocked UBlock Origin
on Chrome for nearly everyone with journalists and social media users
claiming to have recently encountered this friendly little notice.
Blocking those ads was fun, wasn't it? Well, it's time to stop.
But there are some options available to the block heads.
That's, I didn't mean it like that. There's UBlock Origin Lite,
which is made by the same developer, Raymond Hill, and it's compatible with Google's new
Manifest V3 extension standard, but it's had to sacrifice some of its power to do so.
You could switch to Firefox, which has promised to continue supporting Manifest V2
and V3 extensions, but ooh, wait a second.
Didn't Mozilla change their terms of use to say they can do horrible things
like abduct my pets and eat them? Well, it certainly seemed that way,
but the company has now rewritten the rewritten terms
to clarify that nothing was being changed about how Firefox operates.
The terms were apparently updated, adding that scary sale of data language
to comply with the broad legal definition of sale of data,
as seen in California's Consumer Privacy Act, where doing pretty much anything with data
is referred to as a sale. And I would have loved if that's how things worked
when I had a commission-based job. Just made a sale.
I'm on fire today. Oh man, some of that stuff was way too wacky and wild.
Hey, let's bring it back and enjoy some quick bits. They're more refined, erudite, good word.
Qualcomm is working on its second-gen Snapdragon X series SOCs,
which may feature up to 18 CPU cores,
48 gigabytes of integrated RAM, and support for discrete graphics cards, gaming laptops,
according to reference design seen by German tech site WinFuture.
The chips are reportedly not expected to launch until next year, and one of them may be called
the Snapdragon X2 Ultra Premium,
which should solve one of the main reasons not many people picked up the first gen,
not a long enough name. It's got 33.3 repeating percent more name words, by now.
TSMC announced this morning it will spend an additional $100 billion
to build more chip manufacturing facilities in Arizona.
The move was also announced later in the day by US President Donald Trump.
It's unclear whether TSMC agreed to do this to avoid Trump's favorite thing, tariffs,
or whether the move was already planned, but either way, the US is gonna get more chip manufacturing
so they can fulfill some of their military leaders' dreams of blowing up TSMC if China invades Taiwan.
They'll be good. YouTube is planning to lean more into being a platform
where you can subscribe to other streaming services
like Paramount Plus and Max, according to a report from the information.
YouTube's TV app is being redesigned to display this kind of content on the homepage,
similar to how Amazon Prime and Apple TV Plus
also host content from other services. So when you scroll through and click on something
that you think you can watch because it's listed on the streaming service that you pay for, you actually can't watch it.
You have to subscribe to another streaming service hosted on the first streaming service,
which is just so convenient. That would've probably be cool to see how far down the rabbit hole we could take this.
And Firefly Aerospace has become the first private company
to successfully land a craft on the moon, a feat it proved by posting this photo of,
I mean, I guess it's the moon.
It must be. The landercraft, called Blue Ghost,
was also able to capture this photo of the lunar sunrise,
which could easily have been photoshopped or AI generated by anyone on their phone.
Look, this is really cool. I just, like they took that photo, you know,
but I can make it a photo just like that. I'm just saying, landing on the moon, big whoop.
I'm just saying, listen, hey, look, eyes on me.
Wednesday, more tech news, okay?
Are we cool? Are we good? Huh, you gonna show up here?
I'll have good tech news for you. I'm working hard, okay?
Deal? Deal.