For years, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon chips have powered some of the best smartphones on the market, but now they’re increasingly showing up in other products. PJ Jacobowitz, Qualcomm senior marketing manager, stopped by the Digital Trends booth at CES 2018 in Las Vegas to discuss some of the exciting new devices that the Snapdragon chipset is powering.
One of the more interesting products that Jacobowitz showed us was the one he called his personal favorite, the Light L16 camera, which has 16 lenses built in. Using Snapdragon, the 16 lenses all snap pictures at the same time, which are merged into one DSLR-quality image.
Qualcomm refers to this as “computational photography.” Working together, the lenses create a “depth map,” which lets you use depth-of-field effects like blurring the background similar to a DSLR. This also lets you re-focus the image after you’ve taken it, similar to the cameras in some recent smartphones.
“The way to get amazing, awesome image quality from a big image sensor is to break it into pieces,” Jacobowitz told Digital Trends. “So if you break it into pieces, you get smaller image sensors and smaller lenses that you can fit in a compact design.
Jacobowitz also showed us the Lenovo Miix 630, which was announced late last year and is the first Windows 10 laptop to be powered by a Snapdragon chip. Not only is the Miix 630 thin and light, but is also capable of up to 20 hours of video playback on a single charge. Jacobowitz says that Microsoft’s own testing indicates that a person using the laptop for web browsing and document editing could get up to a week on a single charge. Asus and HP also have Snapdragon-powered laptops in the works.
“I shouldn’t even say this, because you know, I shouldn’t tell the competitors this, but that’s how we get the awesome battery life,” Jacobowitz says. “It’s not just a CPU, it’s not just a GPU, it’s not just a DSP, it’s not just an ISP. We have all of these things, and the idea is that if you can spread all of that processing out to the right type of architecture, then you can get the best battery life for that exact process.”
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.