Tech
Samsung likely replace Galaxy S11 with S20 naming scheme
World’s leading smartphone-maker Samsung is reportedly contemplating to restructure the Galaxy S number scheme in 2020.
The new details come from the renowned tipster Ice universe, who claims that Samsung may ditch the Galaxy S11 and jump straight to the S20 series.
Though there is no proof to validate this rumour, we believe this a good tactical move to match the calendar year 2020 and also connects well with the consumer that it is the latest device from the company.
The report comes months after speculation of Samsung planning to merge Galaxy S and Note series into the single line of phones in early 2020 and bring second-generation flexible phone Galaxy Fold later in the year.
This also looks plausible, as the Galaxy Fold does differentiate from the Galaxy S and the Note series. It deserves to have a separate line of its own to attract niche consumers who prefer top-end phones and want to stand out from others in the industry.
For now, we are hearing just the Galaxy S series and there are no details on the Galaxy Note series. So, it is possible that Samsung may merge S and Note series from 2021. And as for 2020 is concerned, the company would release three different phones under S11 (or S20), Note 11 (or 20) and Fold 2 series with the adequate time interval between the launches.
Samsung Galaxy S11 aka S20: What we know so far
Samsung is expected to bring three variants of the Galaxy S– one S11 Plus (6.9-inch), generic S11 (6.7-inch) and a low-end S11e (6.2-inch).
The first two models are expected to come with Quad HD+ super AMOLED with 120Hz display refresh rate. Whereas the S11e may come with full HD+ super AMOLED with a normal 60Hz display refresh rate.
All the upcoming S11 series phones will have near-zero bezel on right and left sides. While the top and the bottom chin will be significantly slim compared to the predecessor.
Inside, Samsung would use the Snapdragon 865, Qualcomm’s latest and most powerful processor to date and if recently leaked performance benchmarking scores are to believe, it is said to match Apple’s A13 Bionic chipset seen in the iPhone 11 series.
The Samsung phones will be powered by Android 10-based One UI 2 and are expected to house LPDDR5 series RAM, which is said to make the device buttery smooth. It will be 20-percent faster and 30-percent power-efficient over the predecessor, which comes with LPDDR4 series RAM.
In terms of photography hardware, the S11 series, at least the S11 Plus and the standard S11 are expected to come with triple camera module– 108MP primary sensor with ultra-wide and dedicated periscope zoom lens– with LED flash and ToF (Time-of-Flight) sensor for the enhanced bokeh blur effect. It will also come with improved night mode, 5X optical zoom and more.
The S11e may come with 64MP primary sensor instead of 108MP on the back and rest is likely to be the same as the other two models. Front camera details of the Galaxy S11 series are yet to be ascertained.
As far as the battery is concerned, the S11 Plus is expected to have 4,100mAh cell, whereas the S11 and the S11e are tipped come with 3,400mAh and 3,100mAh capacities, respectively.
Microsoft Corp said late Monday a recent change it introduced likely caused a major outage, affecting users’ access to multiple Microsoft 365 services, including Outlook.com and Microsoft Teams.
The developer of Windows and Office software said it did not “observe an increase in successful connections” even after it rolled back the change to mitigate the impact.
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“A moment ago nothing was working, then I went into files in Teams and it was working, now nothing is working. Well I guess now I have an excuse to not do work and watch TV,” one Twitter user tweeted.
“We’re pursuing mitigation steps for this issue. In parallel, we’re rerouting traffic to alternate systems to provide further relief to the affected users,” Microsoft said on its status page, without specifying how many users were affected.
Several other Twitter users complained that the outage meant they could miss their job interviews and deadline for college assignments.
The Xbox maker also said they were working to evaluate other solutions while they investigate the root cause of the outage.
© 2020 Reuters
The Tampa Bay Lightning are the 2020 Stanley Cup champions, hoisting the NHL’s championship trophy Monday in a near-empty Rogers Place to cap off a surreal, bifurcated, bubbled hockey season for the ages.
Brayden Point and Blake Coleman scored the goals and Andrei Vasilevskiy stopped 22 shots for his first career playoff shutout in a 2-0 win, giving Tampa Bay a 4-2 triumph in the best-of-seven series.
The Lightning players exploded off the bench as the seconds ticked to zero, swarming Vasilevskiy, their whoops and hollers echoing off the empty seats and capacious tarps.
No fans have been allowed in to these so-called bubbled playoffs, with players isolated between contests to prevent contracting COVID-19.
NHL commissioner Gary Bettman walked out to centre ice to award the trophy, but this time not accompanied by the lowing boos from fans that had become an unofficial league tradition.
“To win in this place at this time under these circumstances is remarkable and frankly overwhelming,” said Bettman before he handed the silver barrel-and-bowl trophy to Lightning captain Steven Stamkos, who proceeded to lift it with two hands over his head.
In a twist on the usual Cup presentation, the players, coaches and staff gathered around Bettman, instead of standing off to the side as he officially awarded the Cup to Stamkos.
The players cheered, fireworks went off behind the players’ benches and other devices delivered bursts of flames, the heat of which could be felt high up in the arena.
Stamkos did not dress for the game, and played only 2:47 in the entire playoffs due to injury. He came out in his hockey equipment and jersey to accept the award and his first Stanley Cup.
“I’m speechless,” said Stamkos in an on-ice interview.
“I’m so proud of this team and everything that we’ve accomplished.
“It’s one of the greatest feelings, and to be able to celebrate with this group of guys is a dream come true.”
The traditional skate around the ice, hoisting the cup in front of rapturous fans, was altered to the players skating around centre ice, clapping and celebrating as each one in turn took a spin with the mug amid rock music pumped over the loudspeaker.
Fans celebrating in Tampa were shown on all four sides of the video screen that hangs over centre ice.
Tampa defenceman Victor Hedman was voted the winner of the Conn Smythe Trophy as playoff MVP.
It’s the second Stanley Cup in the 28-year history of the franchise. The first was in 2004.
It’s the first Cup for every Lightning player except Pat Maroon. The burly, bearded veteran winger won it all last season with the St. Louis Blues.
It’s also the first Cup win for head coach Jon Cooper, in his seventh full season behind the Lightning bench.
He defeated Dallas interim head coach Rick Bowness. Bowness had been hired by Cooper as a mentor in 2013 and served the next five years with the Lightning as his assistant. This was the first Stanley Cup where an assistant faced his former head coach.
Vasilevskiy was 18-7 of the post-season. The 26-year-old Russian played every minute of every game for the Lightning through 25 games.
Tampa Bay outshot Dallas 29-22.
Point scored on the power play midway through the first period, sailing through the slot untouched and putting his own rebound past Dallas goalie Anton Khudobin. Coleman made it 2-0 by capitalizing on a turnover midway through the second frame, one-timing a cross-ice pass from Cedric Paquette.
Nikita Kucherov assisted on Point’s goal and was the NHL’s top scorer in the playoffs: seven goals and 34 points. Point was second at 14 goals and 33 points.
The Bolts had been knocking on the Cup door in recent years, making the final four in four of the last six seasons. In 2015 they lost to Chicago 4-2 in the Stanley Cup final.
Nine members of the current Tampa roster, including Kucherov, Stamkos, Hedman, Ondrej Palat, Alex Killorn, Vasilevskiy, and Tyler Johnson were on that Cup-losing squad.
It’s a capstone to bizarre season that began as normal in October 2019, but was halted, and ultimately cancelled around the 70-game mark, on March 12, due to COVID-19.
The NHL resumed play at the start of August in a 24-team, two-month tournament, held in hub cities of Toronto and Edmonton, with players and staff isolated and tested regularly to prevent contracting COVID-19. The NHL reported Monday there had been no positive tests in the nine-week bubble.
The conference championships and the Cup final were held at Rogers Place, the players skating, shooting, and scoring to the sounds of canned oohs, ahhs and cheers.
This is the first time the Stanley Cup has been awarded in the Alberta capital since the Edmonton Oilers won it in the spring of 1988.
The Lightning finished fourth in the regular season (43-21-6) and were a model of consistency in the tournament.
They went 18-7, never lost two games in a row, and shut down the top three defensive teams in the league (Boston, Dallas, and Columbus).
The Bolts were overtime warriors, going 7-2 in extra-session games, including a marathon five-overtime win over the Columbus Blue Jackets in the first round.
The Lightning played 221:14 total in overtime, more than any team in playoff history.
Hedman — all six-foot-six of him — was the rock, filling the leadership void when Stamkos went down in late February for core muscle surgery and then was re-injured before the playoffs began anew.
The 29-year-old Swede, in his 11th year in Tampa Bay, scored 10 goals, added 12 assists in the playoffs, ate up 26 minutes a night playing at even strength and on special teams, ignited the offence with seeing-eye tape-to-tape passes, and punished those who crossed his blue-line.
The Bolts were the top scoring team in the regular season (3.47 goals a game) and their best marksmen got the job done in the post season. The top line of Point, Kucherov and Palat delivered eight goals and 21 points against Dallas and accounted for about 40 per cent of all team points in the playoffs.
When the opposition got past the defence, Vasilevskiy was there to shut the door, compiling a .927 save percentage in the playoffs.
The Stars franchise is now 1-4 in Cup play, dating back to its Minnesota roots. The lone championship came in 1999.
Dallas made it all the way to its first final series in two decades due mainly to the storybook play of Khudobin, a career journeyman backup elevated into the starter’s role for almost the entire post-season run after Ben Bishop was injured.
The 34-year-old from Kazakhstan absorbed a shooting gallery of vulcanized rubber: more than 30 shots in 15 games and 40 or more seven times. He was the deciding factor in the third-round series against the Vegas Golden Knights, saving all but nine of 161 shots over five games (.950 save percentage).
The Stars faced Tampa after being outscored 64-62 to that point in the post-season, but were the comeback kids of the playoffs, coming back to win nine times.
They won with stout defence and timely goals by committee, with veteran forwards like Jamie Benn, Joe Pavelski and Corey Perry stepping up when others flagged. First-line centre Tyler Seguin never found his groove, scoring just twice in 26 games.
The defence led the offence. Defenders John Klingberg and Miro Heiskanen combined for 10 goals and 47 points.
Dallas was laid low by injuries to not only Bishop but also defencemen and key depth forwards: Stephen Johns, Taylor Fedun, Radek Faksa, Roope Hintz, and Blake Comeau. The Stars kept having to dip into their pool of Black Aces and ultimately the next man up became one injury too many.
For Tampa, the win will undoubtedly go a long way to washing away the bitter taste of last year’s humiliating playoff debacle. The Lightning won 62 wins in the regular season — tying an NHL record — then lost four straight games in the first round to the Blue Jackets.
Following that loss, Tampa decided its high-flying offence needed more edge, pushback, and just plain nastiness. General manager Julien BriseBois signed Maroon and defenceman Kevin Shattenkirk in the off-season.
At the trade deadline, BriseBois inked defender Zach Bogosian, and traded a top prospect and high draft picks for bruising two-way wingers Coleman and Barclay Goodrow.
They proved to be the difference, with the new-look Lightning able to lock down late-game leads and, to paraphrase Conn Smythe, beat opponents on the ice and in the alley.
It was a year of firsts: the first time two teams from cities that never see snow battled it out in an empty arena on the Canadian prairie in late September for the Stanley Cup.
But in the year of COVID — where the only consistency has been contradiction and people must stay apart if they ever want to get together again — the Lightning fit right in, proving that if you want to polish the Stanley Cup, maybe just add a bit of grit.
© 2020 The Canadian Press
Over the decades Sega has been a company well known for making puzzling decisions with its game franchises. The Yakuza series, which in recent years has spread its wings, albeit unevenly; beyond its PlayStation roots to the Xbox and PC, is still no exception to this.
The House of Sonic reinforced this reputation today when it announced on Twitter that it was moving up Yakuza: Like A Dragon’s North American release from its previous November 13th, 2020 date to November 10th, lining up exactly with the launch day for Microsoft’s next-generation consoles: the Xbox Series X and S. At first glance, the move seems pretty straight forward. After all, Microsoft and Sega have been co-jointly marketing the latest installment in the long running franchise as a console launch-exclusive title since Microsoft’s Games Showcase back in May.
That said, closer observation paints a muddier picture. Since mid-January Yakuza: Like A Dragon has been out for the PlayStation 4 in Japan, so the aforementioned exclusivity pertains only to the game in the West. On the bright side though, Westerners will be treated to a high-quality English dub featuring George Takei of Star Trek fame in addition to the usual Japanese subtitle option. Second, there’s the tiny wrinkle that almost all games launching on the Xbox Series of platforms over the next two years will also be backwards-compatible with the previous-generation Xbox One family of consoles.
This means that Yakuza: Like A Dragon’s Xbox Series X/S launch exclusivity was destined to be nothing more than a formality to begin with—the game is, in truth, a cross-gen title. Today’s announcement however shaves that celebratory slice of Xbox birthday cake even thinner, however. Despite the news that Xbox gamers in the West will be able to start playing Yakuza: Like a Dragon a few days early, Sega also confirmed that PS4 and PC gamers will be playing right alongside them, as the release dates for all previously confirmed platforms have also been moved to November 10th. Bad news if the Xbox Series-exclusivity of the title actually meant anything to you, but good for gamers overall, right?
Yes, unless you are planning to purchase the game first on PS4 and then continue playing it on PS5, that is.
Here’s the full situation. While Sega has yet to officially comment on it, it appears as though a sliver of Microsoft and Sega’s vague exclusivity arrangement for Yakuza: Like A Dragon has survived: The game won’t be launching on PlayStation 5 until March 2nd, 2021.
In two follow up tweets to the original announcement, the game’s developer, Ryu Ga Gotoku Studio explained that customers who have purchased the game for PS4 will be able to download the PS5 version for free starting on the day of Sony’s next-gen console release, allowing them to leapfrog the timed-exclusivity window and start playing the game as early as November 12th. Unfortunately, unlike on Xbox which supports cloud saves via Smart Delivery, PS4 save games will not be compatible with the PS5 version of the game and vice-versa, so PS4 players who purchase and start playing the game on PS4 will be unable to continue their progress on PS5; they’ll have to start a new game.
Considering that Sony Interactive Entertainment CEO Jim Ryan has gone on record the PlayStation 5 will be “99 percent backwards compatible” with PS4 titles and that Sega is offering digital PS4 purchasers access to the next-gen version on PS5 right away (the tweet even features footage from the PS5 version), it’s difficult not to see Yakuza: Like A Dragon’s timed console exclusivity on Xbox as anything other than disingenuous if viewed from the PlayStation side, or completely pointless from the Xbox side. But assuming a financial arrangement was agreed upon between Microsoft and Sega many months ago when the Series S had not yet been revealed, pricing for the next-gen consoles had not yet been set and release dates weren’t finalized, apparently this is the awkward make-good compromise that was reached.
Source: – CGMagazine
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