Apple has published its financial results for the fiscal Q4 2019, and the company has recorded an all-time high revenue of $12.5 billion.
The post Apple Q4 2019 results: record $12.5 billion revenue, iPhones still slowing appeared first on Pocketnow.
If you're looking to score a pre-Black Friday TV deal, then you've come to the right place. The retail giant Walmart is running an 'Early Access Sale' with massive savings on 4K TVs from top brands like Samsung, LG, Sony, and more. This is an excellent opportunity to snag a TV bargain before the madness of Black Friday and Cyber Monday begins.
Our top Walmart Black Friday TV deal is the Samsung 55-inch QLED 4K TV that's on sale for $697.99. That's a massive $500 discount and the lowest price we've seen for the smart TV.
The Samsung QLED TV has everything and more that you'd want in your dream TV. The 55-inch TV is part of Samsung's QLED lineup, which means you'll experience a cinema-like picture with brilliant colors and sharp contrasts. You can watch movies and TV shows in stunning 4K UHD resolution with ultra-bright colors thanks to the Quantum Dots, which produces over a billion shades. The Samsung TV includes smart capabilities with a universal guide so you can stream from apps like Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon video from the home screen of your TV. The Samsung television also features Ambient Mode, which allows your TV to blend-in seamlessly to your home by displaying art or personal photos.
Shop more of Walmart's best TV deals below that include a range of different sizes and specifications. We don't know how long Walmart will have the TVs on sale, so you should take advantage now before it's too late.
Shop more of the best cheap TV sales and 4K TV deals that are currently going on.
You can also shop for more upcoming offers with our roundup of the best Black Friday TV deals.
Learn more about the November sale event with our guide to Black Friday 2019: the date and early predictions list.
Motorola has managed to keep its rumored foldable Razr fairly quiet so far, with only a few leaks springing, but now we’ve finally seen leaked images that give us a clear look at the likely design.
Shared by Evan Blass (a reputable leaker) and MobielKopen, the images show a phone that looks quite a lot like the ancient Motorola Razr V3, but where the bottom half of that phone had buttons, here it looks to be all screen, with a fold in the middle.
So it’s a clamshell design, with the main screen rumored to be 6.2 inches, making it relatively small compared to the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Fold. There’s also an even smaller screen on the outside, along with a camera bump and what looks to be a button or fingerprint scanner.
The handset when folded looks very compact, fitting easily into a hand, but with a rumored price of €1,500 (about $1,660, £1,375, AU$2,450), this isn’t going to be a cheap option.
While we’d take these images with a pinch of salt, they look reasonably convincing, and with the foldable Motorola Razr (possibly called the Motorola Razr V4) set to be announced on November 13, we’d expect to be seeing accurate leaked images by now.
TechRadar will be reporting live from the launch event, and we’ll also bring you any additional leaks and rumors ahead of then, so stay tuned – now that a few images have leaked the floodgates may well open.
Via The Verge
In the future, the majority of repairs on railway lines in the UK could be carried out by robotic 3D printers, and such a system of more efficient repairs could help trains run on time.
At least that’s the vision of Amey, the infrastructural support provider which holds rail repair (and construction) contracts for Network Rail (across London, the East Midlands, and North West of England).
As 3D Printing Industry reports, the idea would be to combine a robotic arm with 3D printing in a mobile repair carriage that could move along railway lines and deliver repairs where needed, or even replace entire sections of train track.
The plans are still in their early stages, with some concept drawings provided by ABB, a Switzerland-based robotic arm manufacturer – see the image at the top – but Amey believes that over 60% of UK railway lines could eventually be serviced in such a manner.
Initially, the focus would be on track renewals – tackling problems with switches and crossings – and the repair system would be quicker and more efficient than current methods, not to mention safer for the people working on the rails.
As smaller refurbishment jobs could be completed more swiftly, rail routes wouldn’t have to be closed for as long. And with repairs being made more regularly on an ongoing basis throughout the rail network, trains will hopefully be less likely to encounter problems in their daily running.
Simon Grundy, Innovation Manager, Consulting & Rail at Amey, observed: “The 190,000 people working on the UK’s railways go above and beyond to ensure that the network is kept running. However, every second they are on the tracks, they are at risk.”
He further observes: “3D printing will remove our people from harm, as renewals previously done by manually removing track, will now be done automatically, in situ using robotics. Not only will this dramatically reduce accidents, the same staff will be upskilled to operate this new technology, futureproofing our workforce.”
The further financial benefit would be savings which are estimated to the tune of over £40 million per year for the UK rail network.
Grundy notes: “Investment in 3D printing is also an investment in sustainability. Large pieces of track previously scrapped will now be repurposed on site, drastically reducing material waste and lowering our carbon footprint. This allows the rail industry to make a significant contribution towards helping the UK government achieve its net zero target by 2050.”
Jaguar is about to release a brand new sports car that can go 0-60 in only 1.9 seconds. The only catch? It’s a virtual car that will be available for the Gran Turismo 6 video game. Yet, it shows how automakers will help us choose a new car in the near future.
I’m a little surprised this isn't more common. If you walk into a dealership today, expressing interest in a new car, most salespeople will lead you to the physical car. Yet, it makes sense if they let you try out cars in a virtual showroom first. I’ve been a fan of the Forza series for years, and have played many of the Gran Turismo games.
The Jaguar Vision GT is a coupe that borrows heavily from other real-world Jaguar sports cars. It has the typical long front hood and wide stance, with hints of the Jaguar D-Type. The virtual car is an all-electric with 750 kilowatts of power and 885 lb-ft of torque.
It weighs only 1,400kg and has a 50:50 weight distribution. What’s truly amazing is that anyone can drive it. If you own Gran Turismo 6 for PlayStation, it will be a free download next month.
That’s impressive because it gives anyone the experience of driving a high-end car (one that doesn’t exist in the real world) and to get a sense of the driving mechanics, speed, handling, style, and feel of the car. Jaguar says the Vision GT is a hint of where the car company is heading in the future but it’s also helpful for anyone looking for a new vehicle because it can help you decide if you like the feel, the drive, and the features.
Racing sims have improved dramatically in recent years, especially with the Forza series. I’ve tested a physical version of a Corvette that’s sitting in my driveway and then tested the virtual version in the game and it mimics exactly how the real vehicle feels. Forza designers, in particular, use the actual specs from cars modeled in the game so that they brake, handle, and accelerate the same way in the simulation as they do on the road.
In the near future, racing games will switch from a mere entertainment venue to something much more practical. We’ll be able to test the latest model of a Ford or Chevrolet in a simulation and find out how it handles on roads we already know, helping us to understand safety features and choose between different trim levels. Other car companies have released virtual test cars for Gran Turismo as well, including Bugatti, Mercedes-Benz, BMW, and McLaren.
The next step is to make them available either through a browser window or in a showroom when you go shopping and to make it easy to drive multiple vehicles. Imagine a scenario where you can pick from different makes and models that match your driving preferences, then take the real car out on the road as well to see if it matches the virtual experience.
This will also help when cars become more fully automated. We can become the virtual passenger in an autonomous car driving on a road we’re already familiar with as a way to experience what that will be like. That will help with buying decisions but even in the future when we merely rent cars temporarily. It will give us a taste of what to expect when we are no longer in the virtual cockpit and ready for the real experience.
On The Road is TechRadar's regular look at the futuristic tech in today's hottest cars. John Brandon, a journalist who's been writing about cars for 12 years, puts a new car and its cutting-edge tech through the paces every week. One goal: To find out which new technologies will lead us to fully self-driving cars.
On today’s Pocketnow Daily, we talk about the teaser for the next Samsung Galaxy Fold 2, 2020 iPhones coming with 5G in 2020 and more
The post Pocketnow Daily: Samsung Galaxy Fold 2 Teaser is HOT!! (video) appeared first on Pocketnow.
Profits and revenues at BT fell during the first half of 2019 as the company increased its investment in fibre infrastructure and continued its ongoing restructure.
Revenues fell by two per cent to £11.4 billion, with the company attributing the drop to regulatory factors and declines in legacy products, as net profits fell to £1.3 billion.
However the figures were largely in line with expectations and investors’ dividend has been maintained despite speculation it could be cut to fund network expansion.
BT has increased its fibre rollout target to four million properties by 2021 and 15 million by the mid-2020s, with Openreach now connecting a property every 26 seconds. However, capital expenditure increased to £1.9 billion. BT is also investing in its 5G rollout and recently agreed to participate in a £1 billion Shared Rural Network programme to improve rural 4G coverage
CEO Philip Jansen pointed to the investments, and to the launch of new converged network services and customer service initiatives, as evidence that the company is on the right track. He also pointed out that the company’s restructuring had saved £1.1 billion to date – offsetting some of the infrastructure investment costs.
“We’ve accelerated our 5G and FTTP rollouts, introduced an enhanced range of product and service initiatives for both consumer and business segments, and announced price and technology commitments to deliver fair, predictable and competitive pricing for customers,” he said.
Openreach announced a further 29 locations in its build plan to reach 4m premises by March 2021, and we continue to make positive progress with Government and Ofcom on the enablers to stimulate further investment in full fibre.
“We continue to make progress on the BT modernisation agenda, delivering over £1.1bn in annualised cost savings, and announcing locations in our Better Workplace Programme.”
Openreach is pressing ahead with its rollout, connecting a property every 26 seconds, as The government wants BT to go even further, and has pledged £5 billion in public funding to accelerate deployment. Details of how the subsidy will be distributed are unclear and the plans are now subject to the outcome of the 2019 General Election.
EE 5G is now available in 20 major towns and cities, with expansion set to continue next year.
Borderlands 3 is now available to purchase for Mac gamers, although just as with the Windows 10 version, you’ll be buying from the Epic Games Store.
That is, of course, because Epic paid for the exclusive on Borderlands 3, and it won’t be out on Steam until April 2020 – although that has hardly damaged its sales on PC. In fact it has officially become the best-selling PC game in 2K history since its launch back in September.
Anyway, at least those with a Mac who fancy getting sucked into the shooter can now do so.
Currently those who buy Borderlands 3 get a free Fortnite Psycho Bundle Pack comprising of the Psycho Bandit Outfit, Claptrap Pet and Psycho Buzz Axes (which can be claimed the next time you log in to Fortnite post-purchase).
Also, note that the "Bloody Harvest" in-game event is now in full swing, and has been for a week – that could pep up your Halloween for sure (it actually runs through until December 5).
It might be worth springing for the Deluxe Edition of Borderlands 3, seeing as it’s on sale and therefore only $3 or £2 more than the standard version right now. It gives you various extra skins and trinkets, plus other bits and pieces including XP and loot drop boost mods. However, that offer finishes tomorrow, so make your move quickly if you want the discounted Deluxe spin on Mac or indeed Windows.
We found Borderlands 3 to offer a "rollicking good time" in our review, although there are some weak spots such as the vehicle combat, and misfires with the humor.
Via Neowin
We've got a Huawei MatePad Pro render leak, courtesy of Evan Blass. It's basically the MediaPad M7 we've heard about a couple of weeks ago.
The post Huawei MatePad Pro render leaks (aka Huawei MediaPad M7) appeared first on Pocketnow.
This year's Argos Black Friday deals are nearly here, but there's time to take a walk down memory lane before the sales begin.
Argos has published a huge archive of its catalogues from the 1970s onwards, in an collection called 'The Book of Dreams' (a name coined by comedian Bill Bailey). The catalogues, which extend from 1974 onward, feature some classic tech and toys – plus a few real oddities.
The stranger highlights include a Casio keyboard from 1980-1981, which features five sounds (including piano and flute), plus 10 preset rhythms (such as bossa nova and rhumba). It all sounds fairly reasonable and par for the course for an electric keyboard from the 80s – but for some reason, Casio chose to build in an electric calculator as well.
It certainly predated the trend for playing tunes on a scientific calculator, and probably sounded better too.
Casio's 'electronic musical instrument and calculator' is an odd mashup of 80s technology
In the days before home security cameras and Ring doorbells, the only tech protecting your home from would-be thieves was a good, old-fashioned burglar alarm. Argos took a rather dramatic approach to advertising these in 1985-1986, illustrating the page with a shadowy, backlit figure pressed menacingly against a pane of retro obscured glass.
You'll notice that Argos wasn't just selling alarms – it also had a safe for your valuables disguised as a mains socket. Not as useful as a Tile tracker if your items are actually stolen, but a cunning idea nonetheless.
Argos took a dramatic approach to marketing home security tech in the 1980s
By 1991-1992, radio cassette players had taken off in a big way, with several pages of the catalogue entirely devoted to them. "Nowadays, there are so many features available on audio equipment that not all of them are readily understood," Argos explained kindly. "Our aim here is to explain some of them."
Sadly the catalogue didn't include a cross-reference to a page featuring the pencils necessary to sort out your tapes when they spilled.
In the 90s, Argos stocked a dizzying array of nearly identical radio cassette players
Argos began stocking video games in the 1980s, with the Mattel Intellivision and Atari Ingersoll, and in the 90s its pages were graced by the Gameboy, NES and Sega Master System, alongside the Commodore C64.
It's interesting to note that a NES game that cost £40 in 1991 would be about £90 in today's money. Gaming has become more affordable since then, and we're expecting to see some great deals on consoles this Black Friday and Cyber Monday – particularly bundled with several games.
Games became a key part of Argos's entertainment offering in the 1990s
The full archive is well worth a browse, though be warned – you might find yourself pining for that Scalextric set or Mr Frosty your parents refused to buy for you at Christmas.
As for Bill Bailey, to thank him for his dedication to the catalogue, this year the "good wardens of Argos" gifted him with his own laminated Book of Dreams to treasure forever.
Now where's a little blue pen when you need one?
For anyone who's been waiting around for the perfect Huawei P30 Pro deal to appear, you can now end your search. Recently, the best contract we've seen for a while on this phone completely sold out but fortunately, it has finally returned.
Coming straight from Three Mobile, you can score yourself a whopping 100GB of data on the Huawei P30 Pro for a price of just £34 a month. That combination of pricing and data earns this contract the position of our favourite offer on this phone.
This contract will be ideal for anyone who finds themselves slightly attached to their apps - Netflix and YouTube especially. With that 100GB of data you're able to stream 20,000 songs online or watch 200 hours of online video in standard definition - in other words, it will easily suffice most people needs!
Even with Black Friday now just around the corner, we can't really see any P30 Pro offer competing with this. But, if you're willing to wait and take a risk, a Black Friday phone deal might come along to beat this.
Before the ban took place, the Huawei P30 Pro was receiving praise as one of the most innovative devices out there, with a lot of that praise aimed at its camera. Sporting an incredible 50x zoom camera, smart AI camera features and an overall impeccable quality, nothing can quite match it.
Backing up the camera is a high quality inifinity display screen, tonnes of power and a massive battery. In other words the Huawei P30 Pro is here battling for the spot of the world's best smartphone – with a few reservations.
Read TechRadar's Huawei P30 Pro review here
Read more:
Xiaomi’s first smartwatch, the Mi watch, will run on a special version of Android called ‘MIUI For Watch.’
Xiaomi has a big event scheduled for November 5 in China, where it will showcase the Mi Watch, the Mi TV 5 series, and the Mi CC9 Pro smartphone. Xiaomi was notably absent from the smartwatch segment till now, leaving Android users to go for Wear OS or Tizen-based wearables. The experience has been far from good in comparison to the Apple Watch. The Mi Watch will aim to bridge that gap.
Talking about the Apple Watch, the Mi Watch follows a very similar design with a squircle dial, a digital crown on the right above another button. There will be support for WiFi, GPS, NFC as well as an eSIM. It will be powered by the latest Snapdragon Wear 3100 chipset, which is said to bring the right mix of performance and efficiency. Single-day battery life has plagued Wear OS watches, so we are hopeful for MIUI For Watch to fix that.
Xiaomi has shared a couple of videos of the watch in action, which gives a better look at what the UI will look like, and gives an idea of what to expect from it. It will have its dedicated app store, and teasers suggest that the app library will be pretty expansive at launch with a host of noted Chinese services arriving with it.
The video also shows the Mi Watch to have fitness tracking capabilities, onboard music, and video player, along with third-party apps such as TikTok, AliPay, navigation, instant messaging, radio, etc. Developer support for third-party apps is a big part of a new platform’s experience, and it seems like Xiaomi is going to take care of this aspect.
Along with the Mi Watch, Xiaomi will also unveil the Mi CC9 Pro which will be the world’s first smartphone with a 108MP Penta-camera setup, and the Mi TV 5 which will sport 4K Quantum Dot QLED panels.
Reports anticipate the SoC and modem inside the 5G iPhone: 5nm Apple A14 Bionic and Qualcomm's Snapdragon X55 5G modem chip
The post 5nm Apple A14 Bionic + Snapdragon X55 5G modem = 5G iPhone in 2020 appeared first on Pocketnow.
Internet security is an increasing concern for businesses, and while IT software and applications can be protected by antivirus software and endpoint security software solutions, DNS protection requires a different approach.
The role of foundational technologies like DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (DDI)—when modernised by specialist providers to support cloud and hybrid deployments—is essential in delivering secure and resilient infrastructure, now more than ever.
DNS is often the target of threats to IT infrastructure management and application delivery because attackers aim to take advantage of the central role it plays in orchestrating all Internet and application traffic. By taking down authoritative name servers to deny access to a domain or to manipulate DNS to redirect traffic to malicious destinations, attackers can cause havoc in the enterprise.
If malicious actors take control of DNS infrastructure, an organisation’s applications can disappear from the Internet, or domain names can be hijacked for disruption, manipulation or phishing attempts.
Securing the DNS servers from increasingly sophisticated attacks is essential to protecting revenue, users and brand reputation. Fortunately, a basic, layered approach can dramatically reduce the impact of DNS-related attacks, and better position organisations to withstand the impact of downtime whilst increasing application resiliency.
Here we'll explore some of the DNS security basics:
Attention to DNS can be seriously lacking as organisations embrace next generation computing environments with multiple connected clouds, data centres and CDNs. To avoid cracks in the infrastructure, it is vital that DNS and other security technologies and policies are adapted and upgraded.
Sites that bounce back quickly from cyberattacks are those that have deployed a mission-critical strategy: redundant DNS. Even with anycasting, there is still a single point of failure for technical errors, outages and security events. Managing redundant networks can be challenging for some providers. Just like a multitude of clouds, not all DNS networks easily share information, or have the same levels of security.
DNS is a mission-critical service, which means that administrative access to its management should be tightly controlled. Recommended measures include strong password enforcement, two-factor authentication, role-based access controls, admin session timeouts and forced re-login, Single Sign-on, activity logging and IP address whitelisting (restricting admin access to trusted sources).
In January the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre issued an alert following an emergency directive from the US Department of Homeland Security after tracking a series of attempts to tamper with DNS infrastructure.
Recently, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) echoed these calls for urgent action by domain registrars against significant risks to DNS infrastructure with a checklist of actions that includes the deployment of Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) across all domains to detect unauthorised modification or misdirection of DNS services.
DNSSEC adoption has been slow due to the impact on advanced traffic management features, such as geo-routing and global server load balancing, which organisations use to ensure optimal performance for applications. These technical barriers have also made it impossible to leverage DNS security extensions when using multiple DNS providers (platforms)—a DNS security best practice—which has limited enterprise adoption, leaving organisations unprotected.
New approaches to DNSSEC however, are now emerging, which allow for implementation without compromising performance. A new multi-signer DNSSEC industry standard has recently been developed by NS1, Salesforce and others designed to keep the Internet safer. Multi-signer DNS also enables redundancy and security without sacrificing the key proprietary features that ensure optimal performance.
Software-defined, flexible and intuitive, DDI is effective in bolstering security posture and improving an organisation’s operational velocity, resiliency and performance. DNS logs provide critical insight for security teams in addition to cloud logging services.
By monitoring DNS activity and IDS logs, a company can more easily observe DNS configuration changes and shifting traffic patterns, which can reveal key indicators of compromise. For instance, unexpected and unplanned changes to DNS record configurations or sudden changes in traffic volume can indicate malicious DNS activity.
Additionally, IP Address Management (IPAM) provides network and security teams with a single source of truth regarding devices that have been connected to the network, which is used in investigations. Both can be useful along with analytics software in identifying patterns that can reveal breaches or other network abuse.
We are likely to see pressure from all sides. Consumers and enterprises are growing more concerned about the increasing frequency of attacks against the business applications they use, and this, in turn, compromises both data and trust.
Businesses are equally concerned with delivering highly-performance infrastructure and applications. These two worlds will more frequently collide as IT and security leaders discover the performance and security gains that come from using modern DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management.
Mark Fieldhouse is general manager for EMEA at NS1.
The push for the broader adoption of ray tracing in PC gaming continues with Microsoft announcing a bunch of improvements for its DirectX Raytracing (DXR).
The enhancements to Microsoft’s real-time ray tracing feature are part of a raft of improvements to DX12, which are in preview (in other words, they are now available for testing by developers, before being implemented down the road).
Microsoft is pushing forward with DXR by introducing a new tier 1.1 of support, which comes a number of benefits including support for adding extra shaders to an existing ray tracing PSO, support of ExecuteIndirect for ray tracing, and the introduction of inline ray tracing.
The full descriptions of these enhancements and exactly what they entail is provided by Microsoft in a blog post here, but it’s a pretty demanding read in terms of the technical explanations given.
All you really need to know is that these fresh moves aim to introduce performance and efficiency benefits, and to generally smooth the path of bringing ray tracing to more games, and eventually a wider audience.
Speaking of a wider audience outside of Nvidia GPUs, AMD doesn’t have DXR support in its Radeon drivers right now. However, references to the feature have been spotted in the past, leading some to believe that we might see the official introduction of DXR support with AMD’s new Radeon Software that will emerge in December.
Whether it’s too early to make such a move in terms of the ray tracing experience that will be delivered by current AMD graphics cards is another argument entirely. Realistically, these Navi GPUs likely don’t have the power to make for a palatable experience, and so AMD may wait for its high-end offering supposedly due in the middle of next year.
That is if ray tracing is indeed inbound for Radeon GPUs, but this seems likely and has been rumored for a while now. The PS5 with Navi graphics is getting ray tracing as well, so all signs point to yes, this will happen – it’s just a question of the timeframe.
Microsoft’s improvements to DXR will obviously be good news for AMD in the bigger ray tracing picture, too.
Ray tracing is something of a tough pitch given the sometimes substantial performance hit that can be the trade-off for all these shiny visual effects. Nvidia has struggled on this front even given its dedicated RT cores on-board GeForce RTX graphics cards, although things are getting better, as we’ve just seen with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (although admittedly that game doesn’t have the full range of ray traced goodies).
And indeed Nvidia has plans to push forward with ray tracing in a big way with its next-gen graphics cards, according to the rumor mill (and that would certainly make sense – the company seems very much all-in with the technology at this point).
Other goodies coming to DX12 which were announced by Microsoft include mesh shaders, another impressive trick for boosting performance, which Nvidia already introduced for its GPUs at the tail end of 2018.
Via PC Gamer