☕ Good morning! It’s Tuesday 2/22/22, aka Twosday! A Google search of “2/22/22” will see Google shower you in confetti that reads “Happy Twosday 2 You!,” in case you want to feel something.

MWC 2022 gets warmer

Coming up across today and the week to come: the big Mobile World Congress in Barcelona is set from Monday, February 28, running until Thursday, and there’ll be pre-event launches as well.

• While CES 2022 was hampered by late withdrawals, and there’s still concerns and many restrictions around COVID-19 and MWC 2022, it’s going ahead.

Here’s my list of reveals, based on teasers and announcements, and pre-event releases that are happening as early as right now.

What to expect: Pre-event

• Today: ZTE nubia RedMagic 7 — a high-end gaming smartphone that launched as I’m pressing send on this newsletter, staarting at $629, and will be in North America unlike so many of these other launches we expect to see… but no Pro version yet?
• Feb 24: OPPO Find X5 series launch.
• Feb 24: Motorola Moto Edge event.
• Feb 27: Samsung Galaxy MWC Event 2022, with the Galaxy Book teased.
• Feb 27: Huawei’s “Smart Office” launch.

During MWC:

• Feb 28: HONOR global launch event — titled “The Power of Magic.” (Will we see the Magic V foldable?)
• Feb 28: realme GT 2 series global launch, and a new charging reveal?
• No set date: POCO X4 Pro and POCO M4 Pro 4G launch.
• No set date: OnePlus possibly confirms the OnePlus 10 Pro global launch details?

• Other brands in attendance include TCL and Lenovo, which may announce new devices across their broad portfolios — Lenovo is attending virtually.
• Google’s name is on the attendee list though that doesn’t necessarily mean anything in terms of new devices, but perhaps some announcements.
• Sony is staying home, it announced a while ago.
• And HTC’s Cher Wang is presenting but I wouldn’t exactly expect a flagship HTCphone…. More VR gear?

Possible new tech?

• In a normal year, based on the current tech trends, I’d expect to see at least a few brands offer glimpses of the coming of smartphones: foldable prototypes, or new tech we haven’t seen before, even if it’s only a demonstration and not commercially available.
• That may spread to wearables as well: new ideas, things that might come to your smartwatch one day.

Otherwise:

• Samsung is also unlikely to be the only brand with new laptops, though MWC is all about smartphones (event categories include: “5G Connect,” “CloudNet,” “FinTech,” “IoT,” and more…)
• Carl Pei from Nothing has been hinting at something to come with Qualcomm, which could be a phone or a wearable or…
• We’ll see what else emerges from the show, and I’ll be writing the newsletter daily, on-location!

Roundup

😬 Welp, the OnePlus 10 Pro broke in half in the classic JerryRig durability test. Am I right or wrong that the last phone that snapped was the Lenovo Legion Phone Duel 2? (Android Authority).

📸 Here’s when your Samsung phone will get the Expert RAW camera app: goes back to the S20 Ultra/Z Fold 2, but no earlier phones (Android Authority).

👉 Redmi K50 Pro leaks: What a POCO F4 Pro or Xiaomi 12i could look like? (Android Authority).

🔜 Amazon just spilled the beans on upcoming POCO phone that we’ll see next week, most likely (Android Authority).

😢 It’s official: The BlackBerry revival is dead as Onward Mobility shuts down (Android Authority).

🍎 Apple reportedly completes production tests for AR/VR headset (MacRumors).

📺 In a strategic shift, Roku is seriously planning to make its own TV sets(Ars Technica).

🤔 Microsoft is testing a Windows 11 desktop watermark for unsupported hardware: annoying warning or helpful? (The Verge).

📸 Panasonic’s 25-megapixel GH6 is the highest resolution Micro Four Thirds camera yet (Engadget).

📉 Virgin Hyperloop lays off half of its employees: will shift from passengers to a cargo focus (The Verge).

⛔ You can’t copyright AI-created art, according to US officials (Engadget).

🍩 Sony LinkBuds WF-L900 review: 6/10 (SoundGuys).

🥊 StreetFighter’s logo looks like someone bought it off Adobe as clipart for $80. What’s the real logo?? (Kotaku).

▶ TikTok wants longer videos — whether you like it or not (Wired).

🌞 “Since the sun’s upper atmosphere is hotter than the surface, and we’ve already sent spacecraft through the upper atmosphere — what is stopping us from sending a spacecraft close to the surface of the sun?” (r/askscience). What is hot, anyway?

Chart Tuesday

Supercomputers continue to grow and the gap between the world’s top supercomputer and the rest is pretty enormous:

• The Fugaku has held top spot since it was introduced on June 20, 2020.
• Statista added some pretty incredible stats about the top supercomputer:
• “At the time, Fugaku did not only top the ranking in the number of computations per second — so-called TeraFLOPS — but in all four categories that supercomputers are judged on by the project. 
• “According to the Riken lab, no other computer had achieved this feat so far. Fugaku had the most cores of all computers ranked, the highest theoretical peak performance for computations, and the highest power capacity.
• “In the meantime, the fourth-ranked supercomputer, Chinese Sunway TaihuLight, acquired more cores — 10.6 million compared with Fugaku’s 7.6 million.”
• It was used, among other complex calculations, to see how coronavirus particles move through the air.

Calculating at about 0.001 operations per second,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.