🎸 Good morning! Despite all my rage I’m still writing into a slightly broken HTML page… hence the bullet points below in the Roundup. On with the day!

Exynos 2200 no show

Well well, what do we have here? Samsung’s next major mobile chipset, the Exynos 2200, which has been warmly anticipated for its AMD GPU components built from RDNA 2… is nowhere to be found. But Samsung says it’s all ok… hmm?

What’s going on here:

• The story follows that Samsung had a major launch planned for January 11, 2022.
• It announced the event on December 30, 2021, via a (now deleted) tweet from the official @SamsungExynos account complete with

Hold on:

• In the calmer morning light of today, Samsung gently hosed all of this down.
• A Samsung official told Business Korea that the company has simply decided to reveal the new processor at the same time as the Galaxy S22 series.
• “We are planning to unveil the new application processor (AP) at the time of launching a new Samsung smartphone,” the official was quoted as saying. “There are no problems with the AP’s production and performance.”
• The wording here is interesting: “At the time of launching a new Samsung smartphone,” so that could well be the Galaxy S22 or it could be the Fold 4, who knows.
• Anyway, look… I don’t know?
• Of course, Samsung would be saying everything’s completely normal. Very fine and normal, in fact!
• But the whole non-event isn’t business-as-usual stuff. It’s weird.
• It’s not unprecedented to cancel or postpone an event, especially in These Current Times.
• But it is for it to happen with nothing said for half a day.

Roundup

• 👉 Your OnePlus 10 Pro could be quite different from China’s OnePlus 10 Pro: regional variations! (Android Authority).
• 🆕 Sony Xperia 5 III is now available in the US (and comes with a great freebie: WF-1000XM3 true-wireless earbuds worth $200) (Android Authority).
• 🍎 Locket, an app for sharing photos to friends’ iOS homescreens, hits the top of the App Store (TechCrunch).
• 🤔 UltraRAM breakthrough moves us closer to a unified RAM and storage solution: speed of RAM, storage of SSD… though it’ll be years off (Gizmodo).
• 📈 Also, PCIe 6.0 is coming for speedy SSDs and GPUs of the future, doubling bandwidth again (The Verge).
• ⚖ The FTC’s antitrust suit against Facebook/Meta is cleared to move forward (Engadget).
• 🛴 Bugatti’s first EV is not a hypercar, but an electric scooter (Notebookcheck).
• 💡 The Logitech Litra Glow is a great little Zoom/streaming video light, and CNET reckons it beats ring lights for convenience (CNET).
• 🎮 Sony is dealing with the PlayStation 5 shortage …by making more PS4s (Bloomberg).
• 📦 This is fun: A grand unified theory of buying stuff — certain kinds of stuff simply attract more stuff (Wired).
• 🚲 Someone was cycling with a Skydio drone following along… And then it got lost and wandered off into a train station! Check the video where it got lost (YouTube h/t mixx.io).
• 🥛 “What improved your quality of life so much, you wish you did it sooner?” Drinking more water is a surprisingly common one here (r/nostupidquestions).

Weirdness Wednesday

A week ago I mentioned Wordle, the little daily word game. It’s getting hotter than ever: everyone’s playing, it’s all over Twitter, it’s very simple and fun, and still the Wordle guy hasn’t put up a paywall or ads or anything. The Guardian says two million people are playing, and Josh Wardle, the creator, based in Brooklyn, is getting overwhelmed.

• My colleague Rita El Khoury, wrote it up: “Wordle is the perfect game for a non-gamer like me.”
• But! Of course, in the enterprising world of rapid copycats, a bunch of clones of the game were made as apps and put onto the Apple App Store.
• One guy, in particular, bragged (“12K downloads … going to the f–cking moon!”)
• Annnnnd then the copycat apps disappeared (The Verge).
• Oddly, that’s Apple getting directly involved. Google Play Store copycats aren’t quite as obvious.

Cheers!

Tristan Rayner, Senior Editor