👋 Buenos días from Barcelona! The team has landed and settled in. Of the half dozen of us here, and the devices among us, the ones we keep playing with are: the foldable OPPO Find N (with exclusively Chinese software), the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra, and S22 Plus. Eric Zeman from the team is also working off the Galaxy Tab S8 Plus with the Book Cover keyboard, to see if it can replace using a regular laptop for the mix of on-the-go writing and work.

VR for the car

Here’s something I didn’t expect to see this week: HTCis working with a company called Holoride to essentially add VR/AR/XR to the backseat of a car.

So, shutting the kids up while you drive by giving them a headset?

• Holoride says it “adds thrill to every ride by merging XR content with real-time motion, location and navigational data from the car and its environment, creating hyper-immersive experiences.”
• There’s nothing specific about what that might be: a content world, the Metaverse… some kind of game specific to Holoride or just connecting you to other AR/VR/XR experiences.
• Holoride has somewhat of an interesting backstory, including funding via tokens, ie a crypto play, it has patents, and promises to not give you motion sickness or nausea while traveling, ..“by matching what you see and what you feel with almost no latency, holoride is able to reduce motion sickness.”
• And it’s been trying this for a while: my colleagues remember Holoride and its in-car VR solution as far back as CES 2019, where an Audi did laps on the track, so progress has been a little slow.
• The neat thing is that the VR content adjusts to the movements of the car, rearranging as the driver brakes or goes left or right.

VR is getting warmer:

• So, assuming HTCand Holoride aren’t going to send you green by strapping on a HTCVive in the backseat, I don’t know, maybe this is something? The release period is set for mid-2022.
• There’s obviously interest in making travel more interesting: Qantas, once upon a time, partnered with Samsung to add headsets to flights to make the hours in the sky go by a little faster.
• And on that note, word is Apple’s headset is moving forward, but in addition, Korean media says Samsung is also working on a headset, but one that uses hologram technology instead (Korea IT News).
• Quote: “Samsung will be introducing an AR device, which applied a ‘hologram’ technology. A hologram is a technology that appears as a lively image as if an object really exists, but does not physically exist. Samsung Electronics has been preparing for the commercialization of hologram technology for a long time with Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology.”

Roundup

👉 Samsung Galaxy S22 Plus review: Don’t forget the Plus, an all-rounder Android phone that’s just about as good as it gets if you don’t need a stylus, and with better battery life than the Ultra surprisingly. Also, speaking of, they’re now on sale, no longer just on pre-sale, and Samsung says its trio of S22 devices are the most pre-ordered ever: doubling S21 preorder volume (Android Authority).

📸 Two nifty Galaxy S22 camera features are now coming to older Samsung phones (Android Authority). Also! the Samsung Galaxy S22 phones finally get the cool Expert RAW camera app for those non-automatic-mode shots (Android Authority).

👉 Motorola Edge Plus 2022 launched: An alternative to the Galaxy S22 series. It’s $1,000 but starts at $900 for a short time. Also, it’s known as the Motorola Edge 30 Pro outside of North America for some reason. And it’s called the Moto Edge X30 in China, too. (Android Authority).

⚖ There’s some patent malarky which means Nokia phones are suddenly not on sale in many countries (Android Authority).

🎲 Sony’s answer to Xbox Game Pass on PlayStation looks like it’ll emerge in three tiers: $10/$13/$16 a month, with the highest tier opening up game streaming as well as a library of games (Android Authority).

💵 If you give Tumblr $5 a month, you won’t have to see ads anymore (TechCrunch).

💸 Etsy hits sellers with 30 percent transaction fee increase (The Verge).

👆 All-new touch-friendly taskbar comes to latest Windows 11 preview (Ars Technica).

👉 How the tech industry is responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with companies like Grammarly facing calamity (TechCrunch). Also a Ukraine Army donation service on Patreon, which has existed since May 2020, was just suspended (The Verge).

🤝 More consolidation in gaming: Nintendo is buying its close development ally, SRD, which helped it make Breath of the Wild (Engadget).

✈️ Boom’s quest to make supersonic flights a reality (again) (Wired).

🤔 “Why are so many materials opaque? What’s special about transparent materials like glass that sets them apart?” (r/askscience).

Friday Fun

There’s sort of a lot going on in the *gestures broadly* world.

It’s times like this you need The Onion with its important extremely real news:

• Reportedly, a new iPhone setting reduces eyestrain with black text on identical black background.
• As a quoted spokesperson said: “Simply toggle the setting on, and all wavelengths from the visible spectrum are totally eliminated, providing a far smoother and gentler reading experiencing.”
• None of The Onion’s work will ever top its Apple story on the “Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard” but the team never stops reporting.

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor.