👋 Good morning! A calmer week with only two major smartphone launches, including one happening as I send this out this morning… And the OnePlus 10 Pro debuts in the early hours tomorrow…

realme rollout

You’d be forgiven for thinking of realme as a cheaper OPPO sub-brand, but realme is pushing hard, possibly harder than parent-brand OPPO ever has.

• My colleague Hadlee Simons had a chat with realme vice-president and international business head Madhav Sheth, who confirmed:
• The realme GT 2 Pro global release.
• Hinted at more tablets and laptops.
• And at least talked about a US expansion: realme “won’t be bringing smartphones to the US, but confirmed that it’s planning to bring IT and AIoT products to the market in 2022.”

More details: realme GT 2 Pro

• “We’ll be having a global launch very soon for the GT 2 series, and you’ll soon hear from us. So it’s going to be a global launch and it’s going to be in Europe also,” said Sheth.
• Global meaning Europe, but not meaning US.

Tablets and laptops:

• We saw the realme Book emerge in 2021, a seemingly pretty first-generation product from the new entrant to laptops.
• But the next release could tidy things up, and the realme Pad had similar sorts of problems but a low low price.
• And, there’s more to come in 2022: “…I think yes definitely we’ll see a lot of new tablets coming in different other price segments. At the same time, laptops you’ll see coming down (sic),” said Sheth.

Software updates:

• Not great here, with Sheth not able to commit to realme taking things further than two years of OS updates.
• “I think we are still sticking to that particular point that we are going for two years of (OS) updates and the regular security patch updates for three years,” said the exec.
• That is, in 2022, quite poor.

US expansion?

• And finally, realme is working on plans for the US, though they’re not exactly diving in.
• As quoted earlier, Sheth says that realme won’t be bringing smartphones to the US in 2022, but it is possible it will release things like earbuds, smartwatches, robot vacuums, maybe even TVs and streaming sticks, and so on.

What do we make of this?

• realme is becoming a sort of weaponised part of BBK Electronics: taking on Xiaomi/Redmi in multiple areas, including phones, but also the wider ecosystem that Xiaomi does so well.
• Realme’s initial ecosystem expansion was too aggressive and haphazard for its own good, resulting in poor quality control and some sloppy sort of errors along the way.
• In 2022, continue to expect aggressive things. But, hopefully, less of a rush to make more stuff.
• Check out reviews of these products to find out what’s good and what’s not, they’ll be more important than ever.

Roundup:

• 📱 The HONOR Magic V is launching right now via livestream, expect lots of updates on this throughout the day (YouTube).
• 📆 Here’s when the Galaxy S22 series could launch, go on sale: A Samsung Unpacked for February 8? One Korean outlet has a quote: “The Galaxy S22 series is scheduled to start pre-order on the 9th and general sales on the 24th.” (Android Authority).
• 👉 Google calls out Apple for benefiting from iMessage green bubble bullying (Android Authority).
• 🤦‍♂️ Forced by shortages to sell chipless ink cartridges, Canon tells customers how to bypass DRM warnings (BoingBoing).
• 📡 Google launches Ripple, an open standard that could bring tiny radars to Ford cars and more (The Verge).
• 📡 Also in radar, but quantum: Entangled microwave photons may give 500x boost to radar (Ars Technica).
• 💰 Spider-Man: No Way Home destroyed The Matrix: Resurrections at the box office, but that’s a poor indicator of either film’s success thanks to streaming and piracy: “Resurrections was the most-pirated movie in the first week of the new year.” (Wired).
  ⛓ Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin responds to the Signal’s creator’s web3 thoughts: “the properly authenticated decentralized blockchain world is coming”, but is slowed by “limited technical resources and funding.” The original post from Moxie is worth a read (r/ethereum).
• 🔭 Remarkably, NASA and ESA have completed deployment of the Webb space telescope (Ars Technica). Here’s a video of what was going on (YouTube). And more good news: ESA says the launch went so well, there’s enough fuel to at least double its year lifetime (esa.int).
• 🔥 Turkmenistan plans to close its blazing ‘Gateway to Hell’, though that may be easier said than done (Gizmodo).
• 🚚 Here is what those strips hanging off of truck wheels are for (Jalopnik).
• 🕵️‍♀️ “What countries are more underdeveloped than we actually think?” (r/askreddit).

Monday Meme

I couldn’t help but laugh at this one:

Cheers,

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor