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New emoji, Galaxy 'e' device orphan, Apple's $838m bad day, and more tech news
Your tech digest, by way of the DGiT Daily newsletter, for Thursday, January 30.
1. New emoji incoming
Unicode has agreed on final emoji for the Emoji 13 release: 117 emoji are coming in 2020 (Emojipedia, and credit for the image above, too).
- 62 emoji are new, including smiling face with tear, anatomical heart, fondue, polar bear, pickup truck, boomerang, and more.
- The new pinched fingers emoji is going viral, given its use by Italians everywhere while talking, but also has a range of meanings in all different cultures.
- There’s also lots more gender and skin-tone variants, 55 of them, so the Ninja emoji will have a more complete range of skin tones, for example, and there’s a gender-neutral Santa.
- Just two new facial expressions being included is a little sad, but little sad has an emoji, so maybe there’s enough?
- And emoji are sometimes lost (like the Google blob emojis) or their meanings change through the age – as examined here.
When are they coming?
- There is a bit of a wait involved, Unicode noting “the new emoji typically start showing up on mobile phones in September/October” after processes are followed and the emoji artists have done their work, I guess.
- Before the art can be unleashed, little things still need to be worked out, like exact names of emoji, search keywords for the new emoji in over 80 languages, and the sort order for emoji, will be all finalized by mid-April.
- Emojipedia has a video walkthrough of the new goods (YouTube).
2. Forensics detective says Android phones are now harder to crack than iPhones (Android Authority).
3. A camera under the screen doesn’t look likely any time soon: Xiaomi thinks good under-screen cameras are impossible, for now, because it will impact the quality of displays (Android Authority).
4. With no new Galaxy ‘e’ device on the horizon, will the Samsung Galaxy S10e go down as just a one-off experiment? (Android Authority).
5. Apple has new lower cost iPhone, iPads, MacBook Pro coming this year, predicts analyst (CNET).
6. Apple must pay $838 million for infringing CalTech’s WiFi patents, Apple to appeal (Engadget).
7. Facebook financials were unveiled and it’s showing its slowest growth ever, with costs up 51% costs, notably including staffing. Still making loads of cash, though: $7.4B (TechCrunch). Also, Facebook settles lawsuit over its facial recognition use, for a cool $550 million (Engadget).
8. Microsoft, on the other hand, posted strong results: Office, Surface, and cloud businesses lead Q2 results. Surface hardware is now a $2B business. On the downside, gaming revenue fell, but the Xbox One X should pick that up again in theory (The Verge).
9. More financials: Samsung Electronics is hoping 5G helps it sell more everything, while Tesla had a pretty good quarter (The Verge).
10. Now there’s 240 SpaceX Starlink satellites in space as SpaceX launched 60 more, and stuck the rocket landing at sea (Space.com).
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