Is the $4 Freedom 251 Android phone a scam?

 

 A little-known technology firm in India made news a few weeks ago when it announced an Android smartphone that would sell for less than $4 (Rs. 251). While there was plenty of reason to be skeptical of this claim, the device seemed to exist in a few video demos. After taking reservations for the device over several days, Ringing Bells abruptly stopped, citing high demand. That’s about the time Indian government officials started looking more closely at the company. Now, one Indian MP is calling the phone a “ponzi scam.”

A ponzi scheme is a specific type of financial fraud where new victims are used to fund payouts to older ones. It’s not clear exactly what evidence MP Kirit Somaiya has that points in this direction, but he’s confident enough to take things public. The phone was given an air of legitimacy at the announcement by the presence of another MP, one Murli Manohar Joshi. The specs provided for the phone were low-end enough that you could almost believe the device was going to essentially be given away.

The device was said to feature a 4-inch qHD (960×540) LCD, 1GB of RAM, 8GB of storage, a 1,450mAh battery, and a 1.3GHz quad-core processor. Not exactly the fastest phone on the market, but good enough to run a few apps. Perhaps the most damning piece of evidence to emerge since the phone’s announcement is the branding on the demo device. You might notice there’s a white smudge on the face of the phone in many of the photos. That’s actually whiteout covering the “Adcom” branding.

So what is Adcom? It’s a Chinese smartphone maker that builds very low-cost devices. The Freedom 251 is a good match for the Adcom Ikon 4, which indeed has many of the same specs. This makes the last-minute change of the device renders on the Ringing Bells website all the more suspicious. When contacted about its role in the Freedom 251, Adcom denied it built the phone. That’s definitely the Ikon 4 chassis, though, so what’s going on?

From what I can tell, the Ikon 4 is a particularly sketchy phone that is sold throughout Asia for about Rs. 3600 ($50). Many of the promo photos of this phone simply have an iPod touch UI photoshopped in, which is particularly weird. Basically, Adcom is not a reputable company. They are either being dishonest about building the Freedom 251, or someone in the company sold some components to Ringing Bells that they probably should not have. The latter is actually the less troubling option.

If the Freedom 251 is just the Ikon 4, Ringing Bells would have some explaining to do. The Freedom 251 is supposed to be built mostly in India to reduce costs, according to the company’s president. Whether or not this is a scam in unclear, but it’s at least a very poorly planned launch.

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Microsoft HoloLens up for pre-order today, if you can afford it

 

 

 Over the last few weeks, both the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive have gone up for pre-order. Now, according to a pulled Fortune article, Microsoft’s HoloLens is doing the same. Microsoft is reportedly targeting a March 30 launch date for its Augmented Reality (AR) headset, and the new device will launch with several beta software suites alongside the physical hardware.

When HTC and Oculus announced their hardware, I noted that I couldn’t recommend pre-ordering either solution. I don’t have that problem with Microsoft’s HoloLens, not because I think ordering it is a good idea, but because precious few people will be able to afford the $3,000 price tag. Microsoft will bundle a software suite with the headset, which includes:

HoloStudio: A 3D resource creation suite and teaching tool.

Skype: It’s Skype, but with holograms. No word on whether Robert Picardo will reprise his role as The Doctor to snark you through a phone call.

HoloTour: An application with a 360-degree panoramic view option, meant to create the illusion that the user is actually there. This particular application could have a heavy lift compared to VR, which surrounds more of the user’s visual field and creates a more compelling experience.

I’m a doctor, not a … nevermind.

Windows Central reports that a “mixed reality” application, ActionGram, will debut later this summer and allow people to combine HoloLens displayed material with physical reality.

HoloLens: Next Big Thing, or Kinect 3.0?

Microsoft is clearly launching HoloLens towards professionals and content creators and the headset could be huge in that space. With any luck, Redmond has learned its lesson after Kinect, and won’t try to take a genuinely interesting peripheral with science and research applications and turn it into a mass gaming peripheral.

Demos like this look cool — but most people don’t have empty, stage-sized living rooms.

People have (and continue) to develop interesting uses for both the first and second-generation Kinect peripherals, years after Microsoft killed Kinect bundling in the Xbox One. The one place the system never succeeded was with the Xbox 360, despite shipping tens of millions of units. Microsoft and its various developers were never able to create a compelling reason for gamers to want it, and the company doubled-down on the Kinect hardware for the Xbox One launch. Estimates of the Kinect’s price put it as high as $100 at launch — meaning gamers who bought a $500 Xbox One were paying $100 for a camera they didn’t want or think they needed.

HoloLens is very different from Kinect, but the entertainment uses MS has shown have generally required lots of room and open floor space. It was an interesting peripheral that never fit in the consumer world, but found second life in a variety of business, science, and commercial settings.

Microsoft’s best bet to build a long-term AR project that does have consumer applications is to iterate on a professional version of the hardware and software first. If it does, then AR might one day go head to head with VR for control of your face computer. Doing it that way also helps make sure that when the next-generation of consoles rolls around, Sony and Microsoft won’t be trying to pitch two completely different experiences (VR versus AR) at developers and gamers.

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Raspberry Pi 3 launches with faster 64-bit processor and Wi-Fi for the same $35

 

 Over the past four years, the Raspberry Pi has become known as the world’s most successful and accessible computer platform that anyone can program. It’s the kind of thing that reminds us fondly of the early 8-bit Apple II, Atari, and Commodore days, and with obviously much more capability now. It’s being used in schools across the globe, and a NASA astronaut even took one along to the International Space Station. Today, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has launched the Raspberry Pi 3, an upgraded model that is on sale now for the same $35 price, just a bit more than a year after the Pi 2 landed.

The Pi 3 includes a new Broadcom BCM2837 SoC with a 64-bit processor for the first time — a 1.2GHz quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 CPU that the company claims is roughly 10 times faster than the processor in the original model (at least on SysBench). The 33% bump in clock speed over the Pi 2’s 900MHz should deliver a 50-60% increase in performance in 32-bit mode.

(Image credit: Pi Supply)

The Pi 3 also has 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 4.1, which vastly expands the variety of things you can do with it (or at the very least, means you no longer need an Ethernet cable or a Wi-Fi adapter). Bluetooth makes it ideally suited for IoT-like applications, as now the unit can pick up data from sensors without needing a direct connection. The Pi 3’s form factor remains largely the same, other than that the LEDs are now on the other side of the microSD card socket to make room for the antenna. Speaking of which, that microSD card slot is now just that, and no longer a spring-loaded tray, which should be more reliable in the long run.

(Image credit: Element14)

The board runs from a 5V micro-USB power adapter as before, and the company is recommending you use a 2.5A adapter in order to connect USB devices that require a lot of power.

For now, the company is using the same 32-bit Raspbian userland, and the Pi 3 is fully backwards compatible with the Pi 1 and Pi 2, including for all existing accessories (aside from anything that may obscure the LEDs in the new position). Company founder Eben Upton said on the official blog that they’re currently investigating whether it’s worth it to move to 64-bit mode for the performance improvements.

“The two main things that people do with their Pi are use it as a PC replacement or use it as an embedded computer,” Mr Upton told the BBC. “The Pi 3 is doubling down on both those things rather than going looking for new things to do.”

The Pi3 is available now from Element 14 and Pi Supply. The Pi 1 Model B+, Pi 2 Model B, and original Pi remain on sale for $25, $35, and $20, respectively; Upton said in the post that it intends to build those models for as long as there’s demand.

This past year has seem some competition appear for the Raspberry Pi, including the Arduino-like $55 Snickerdoodle and CHIP, the $9 computer, although the Raspberry Pi is still the only one people are actually buying for now (or are even able to buy). The company also announced that as of the original Raspberry Pi’s fourth birthday (today, another leap year), it has shipped over eight million units, including three million Raspberry Pi 2s.

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Here’s why we don’t have light-based computing just yet

 

 In principle, communicating with light is much, much easier than communicating with electricity. We’ve been doing it for much longer, in technologies ranging from signal fires to fiber-optic networks, because photons have the capacity to move data far more quickly than electrons. Yet light also has many frustrating problems that electrons don’t — problems that have kept light from displacing electricity on the nanometer scales of modern computing. For a long time, the major impediment to a photonic revolution in computing, and an exponential increase in computer speed, has been a sort of zero sum game between three major players: size, power, and heat.

The thing about light is that by atomic standards it’s really very large. In general, the smallest useful wavelength of light for computing has been in the infrared range, around 1000 nm in size, while improvements in silicon transistors have seen them reach and even pass the 10 nm threshold. Lithography has come up with incredibly clever and complex ways of diffracting light to etch silicon wafers with details smaller than the wavelength of the light doing the etching — pretty incredible stuff — but that’s child’s play compared to the sorts of super-fast, super-complex communication that we would require inside a modern computer processor. Existing techniques in bending light waves just won’t do the job.

Optical fiber, in blue and white.

To get around the size problem and make light useful on the scales we require for next-gen computer performance, engineers have turned to something called “surface plasmons.” These are essentially electrons that have been excited so that they dance along the surface of a material, exploiting quantum weirdness to behave and travel more like a photon than an electron. It’s a bit of a halfway point between electricity and light, using many of light’s behaviors, but staying physically confined to a much, much smaller space right at the surface of the wire. If created on a regular copper wire, these surface plasmons can travel much faster than a normal electron in the same medium, and even closely approach the speed of light.

The speed at which we can communicate over a distance matters more when we have more distance over which to communicate, so the first assumed computing application for photonics is in the relatively long-distance communication between processor cores. Right now, copper wire connects these super-fast components to allow them to work together — but the communication between cores is starting to lag further and further behind the speed of any one of those cores individually. So, if we want to utilize all the potential power of, say, a 64-core processor, we’ll need to keep those cores coordinated with something much faster than electrons moving through copper wire — something as fast as light would be good.

The problem when you switch from light waves to surface plasmons, though, is that plasmons very quickly lose their power — they move real fast, but tend to peter out long before they reach their destination. To get them to maintain enough of their power all the way from source to destination, engineers can “pump” the wire into an active plasmonic component — essentially expend a bit of energy on keeping the wire in a state where the surface plasmons won’t lose a ton of energy as they travel.

But that creates its own problem: heat. Surface plasmons solve the wavelength problem, and active plasmonics solve the surface plasmon power problem, but now we’ve got to keep all these actively pumped components from overheating due to all the excess energy we’re adding. This has been a tough problem to crack, and it’s led to the assumption that any photonic computing system would need to be either cooled with some super-advanced cooling system, or made of some exotic wiring material that’s much better at maintaining surface plasmon signals without significant help.

Both areas of research are well underway, but a recent study from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) has shown that with a good enough regimen of existing cooling technologies, actively pumped copper wire could give us both the plasmon-slipperiness and the heat dissipation we need to realistically run a consumer device. That means that as conventional computer architecture gets more complex and adds more processing cores, we may actually see the associated speed increase we’d want and expect.

This complex system of conventional heat-sinks could help solve one of the biggest impediments to optically enhancing computers.

Of course, the idea of photonic computing goes beyond just maintaining coordination between processing cores made of electronic transistors. Not only is it very time- and energy-inefficient to be switching your signals back and forth between photons and electrons, but so-called optical transistors could have much higher bandwidth than electronic ones. It will require a number of additional breakthroughs, but research is underway — like this recent study looking for an affordable material that could do accurate, thin-film polarization of light signals. Graphene and carbon nanotubes have a ton of possible utility for optical computing, since they could transport surface plasmons and make the advantages of photonics work on the nano-scale.

A real optical computer is much further out than a hybrid, which uses optical tech to coordinate conventional electronic cores. Once created though, a fully optical computer could possibly allow us to restart Moore’s Law. It won’t hold a candle to some future, comprehensive quantum computer, but until we get such a thing an optical computer is one of our best bets to restart exponential growth in computing power.

 

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Far Cry Primal looks great on consoles, but it’s just another Ubisoft sequel

 

 

 The folks over at Ubisoft are well known for finding a formula that works, and then iterating on that idea over and over again until the public is sick to death of their once-loved franchise. Unfortunately, the well-liked Far Cry series is on the receiving end of that process now. Today, Ubisoft released Far Cry Primal for both the PS4 and Xbox One to decent reviews, but it’s abundantly clear that it’s little more than Far Cry 4 dressed up in a new suit of clothes.

As the title implies, we’re not dealing with a modern setting here. In the same way that Blood Dragon took the Far Cry 3 formula, and applied it to a campy 1980s sci-fi theme, this game applies these well-worn concepts to pre-historic man. Instead of guns and jeeps, you get clubs and saber-toothed tigers. This new direction switches things up a little, but the gameplay is just more of the same.

You’re hunting, crafting, and killing people just as you’d expect, and paying a full 60 bucks for it.

Over at our sister site IGN, this release received a score of 7.9/10. That’s certainly nothing to sneeze at, but there’s clearly diminishing returns here. Far Cry 4 received an 8.5/10, the low-priced Blood Dragon got an 8/10, and Far Cry 3 was awarded an impressive 9/10. Over at Metacritic, the aggregated reviews of these releases show pretty much the same pattern. While the original Far Cry and Far Cry 2 were flawed games, they were at least meaningfully different from each other. Ever since the massive success of Far Cry 3, Ubisoft seems unwilling to deviate from the core of that 2012 release.

 Watch Far Cry Primal PS4 Performance Preview

While Digital Foundry hasn’t taken an in-depth look at the retail versions on each platform yet, they did get their hands on a pre-release PS4 build a few weeks ago. Just like Far Cry 4, Primal delivers a near-perfect 30fps at all times. It did drop a few frames here and there, but the built-in adaptive v-sync means that you’ll only see some brief tearing at the top of the image when it does happen. Meanwhile, early reports of the Xbox One version shows a similar level of performance.

The PS4 version runs at a native 1920×1080, but it seems that the Xbox One version is probably using the same scaled 1440×1080 resolution that we saw used on Far Cry 4. It’s not a perfect solution, but we saw with Rise of the Tomb Raider that it can still look surprisingly solid when implemented properly.

While the PC version will most certainly be capable of delivering a solid 60fps on a relatively modern gaming rig, we won’t know for sure until it’s out in the wild on March 1st. The PC version of Far Cry 4 had some stuttering and controller issues back when it first launched in 2014, but hopefully they’ll get most of that nailed down before launch this time.

It’s also worth noting that the recommended specs call for a Core i7-2600K and a GTX 780, while the minimum specs only require a Core i3-550 and GTX 460. If you’re willing to tweak the settings a little bit, this game should theoretically run acceptably on even the most modest of gaming PCs. Even so, it’s worth holding off on making your purchase until we see how it holds up under real world conditions.

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