November 15, 2023

IN THIS ISSUE

☀️ Google's new AI weather forecaster blows the others away

💬 A famous Android phone just got its own iMessage app

👂🏼 Your next noise-canceling earbuds may use Navy sonar tech

📱 I've had the Pixel 8 Pro for a month. Here's why I'm keeping it

UP FIRST

Google's new AI weather forecaster blows the others away

It was trained on four decades of weather data and its creators say it can complement and improve current forecasting methods

A new AI-powered weather forecasting model can do the job with unprecedented accuracy and significantly faster than current technology.

Built by Google DeepMind – the web giant’s AI-focused lab – GraphCast looks set to revolutionize the process of predicting weather.

The AI model can also offer earlier warnings of extreme weather events and predict the movement of cyclones more accurately, giving the authorities and residents more time to prepare for damaging storms, potentially saving lives in the process.

Remarkably, GraphCast takes less than 60 seconds to create a 10-day forecast, making it way faster than the conventional approach used by the gold-standard weather simulation system HRES (High Resolution Forecast), which, according to the team, “can take hours of computation in a supercomputer with hundreds of machines” ...

MESSAGING

A famous Android phone just gots its own iMessage app

The new Nothing Chats app works with the Nothing phone – but only the second version

Nothing is trying to bridge the great blue/green bubble divide for Android users of iMessage. This is not a personal crusade to shatter walls and open windows, as much as Nothing CEO Carl Pei would want you to believe that. Instead, Nothing is piggybacking on tech created by New York-based startup Sunbird.

Technically, the Sunbird app can be installed on any Android phone and it features a blue bubble for all iMessage text exchanges involving an Android phone. But Nothing is adopting the Sunbird tech and bundling it as its very own app under the name Nothing Chats.

However, it'll only work on the Nothing Phone 2 (sorry, Nothing Phone 1 owners), and will initially be available in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and the EU ...

EARBUD TECH

Your next noise-canceling earbuds may use Navy sonar tech

xMEMS hopes to demo its Cypress driver technology at CES 2024

A company that is pioneering the use of earbud speakers that are manufactured like microchips says it has developed a way to convert inaudible, high-power ultrasound into hi-fi stereo sound, using a single driver.

The result is what the company – called xMEMS – says is a micro-electromechanical system (with a convenient MEMS acronym) driver that’s powerful enough to deliver sound as well as active noise cancellation in a set of wireless earbuds.

According to xMEMS, these MEMS drivers possess a number of advantages for buyers and manufacturers of earbuds, like extreme ruggedness, a huge frequency-response range, ultrafast transient response (the ability to quickly shift from one sound to another), and more accurate sound reproduction ...

EXPERIENCE by Joe Maring

I've had the Pixel 8 Pro for a month. Here's why I'm keeping it

'My month with the Pixel 8 Pro has been a night and day difference compared to my time with the Pixel 7 Pro'

I’ll come out and say it right now: The Google Pixel 8 Pro is an outstanding smartphone. Actually, I’ll do you one better. It’s easily the best Pixel phone Google has ever released. Hell – the Pixel 8 Pro just may be my favorite Android phone of 2023.

I gave the Pixel 8 Pro a lot of praise in my review of the phone this past October. I went so far as to call it the “best Pixel I’ve ever used.” A bold claim, for sure.

But is all of that still true after using the Pixel 8 Pro for well over a month? Is it still the Pixel phone I’ve been waiting for, or has my usual bad luck with Pixel bugs tarnished my experience? ...

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