Google on Tuesday bucked the soaring smartphone price trend, unveiling a high-performance Pixel handset aimed at the middle of the market as part of a wide-ranging pitch to developers of its new hardware, software and privacy efforts.
The Pixel 3a phone, which includes many of the artificial intelligence (AI) features of its flagship devices, is priced from US$399, executives said as Google opened its annual I/O developers conference near its headquarters in Mountain View, California.
“There has been a troubling trend of high-end phones getting more expensive,” Google head of hardware Rick Osterloh said. “So, we challenged ourselves to deliver a high-end experience in a new Pixel 3a starting at US$399.”
Photo: AFP
The new Pixel is available at Google’s online shop.
Osterloh said that the price is about half that of latest-generation premium smartphones, but is built with camera, digital assistant and other features found in top-end handsets.
“They just redefined what a mid-priced phone can do,” Forrester Research principal analyst Frank Gillett said at the event. “But they didn’t tell us what compromises they made on the hardware.”
Google’s expertise is software, so getting features such as AI to work on less-costly smartphones plays to the Internet giant’s strength, Gillett said.
Enabling AI to handle sophisticated features on a smartphone means that less user data needs to be shared with online data centers to handle tasks, Google chief executive Sundar Pichai said while discussing steps being taken to strengthen privacy and security of users.
“We always want to do more for users, but do it with less data over time,” Pichai said. “We strongly believe that privacy and security are for everyone.”
Google stepped up its hardware ambitions last year with the acquisition of the smartphone division of Taiwan-based HTC Corp (宏達電).
The Pixel 3a device is being introduced as Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co have boosted prices of their newest handsets to more than US$1,000, and with Google’s flagship Pixel 3 selling from about US$800.
Google also introduced a Nest Hub Max device that combines a 25cm display with a camera, microphone, sound system and a digital assistant.
Smarts built into the Max include facial recognition that allows the device to personalize experiences and even alert owners when someone it does not recognize is in a home, executives said.
The Max is to be priced at US$229 when it launches later this year in Australia, Britain and the US.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained